Twenty-six
HURRICANE KAYLA HAD A DATE with Nantucket on Friday. Everyone awaited her arrival like she was a gorgeous, petulant diva. Whether I was serving coffee at the inn, buying sunscreen at the pharmacy, or picking up a ham-and-cheese croissant for George at the Even Keel Café, Kayla’s name was uttered again and again under the gray restless sky.
The shops on the harbor boarded up their windows in preparation for the destructive winds. Surfers, who I could pick out by their wet-suit tans and I’m not a preppy or tourist snarls, looked more purposeful and had a gleeful spark in their eyes. Many guests canceled their trips or went home early, hurrying to get tickets on the last ferries and planes, leaving the inn less than half full in the height of the season. Those who stayed played the board games that’d been around for decades and read books by the fire in the library. They ate slices of Gavin’s blueberry and peach pie and sipped tea or red wine, feet curled under them, peeking out the windows, analyzing clouds, reveling in coziness and anticipation. They wanted a hurricane story. I did too.
But Kayla stood us up, swirled her windy skirts, moved out to sea, and cooled her temper over the deep impartial ocean, leaving us with three days of rain. Fat, ceaseless drops filled the sidewalk cracks, overflowed puddles, and sent little streams twisting down Main Street. The grass in the backyard was rain drunk, so green it was practically humming.
The deluge gave George new drive and power. He was like the water wheel in the Industrial Revolution–era mill we’d toured for social studies in the seventh grade, cranking out chapters ahead of schedule, appearing in the kitchen for pie and dances of glee, and then disappearing back into the annex for another round of Coke Zero–fueled productivity.
With so few guests and such a light cleaning schedule, Liz and I finished early and went to the one movie theater on Nantucket. It doesn’t look like a theater from the outside. It’s just a regular-sized gray-shingled Nantucket building that’s also a restaurant and bar. I’m not sure if it’s because people were in a hurricane mindset where normal rules didn’t apply, but the ticket taker didn’t card us and he let us bring drinks into the theater.
We drank Irish coffees with whipped cream as we watched a romantic comedy. It was about this girl who works in a New York City flower shop and falls in love with a corporate lawyer who wants to build a megamall next door. It was dumb, but I still loved it, because in the dark, in the glow of someone else’s story, I was free to think about Zack—how he tasted like mint and salt, how his hands left little swirls of energy where he’d touched me.
It had been over a week, and Zack and I hadn’t texted, talked, or seen each other. My guilt had started to subside, heading out to sea with Kayla. I watched the lawyer kiss the florist girl, the city sparkling behind them. As a spare, sweet folk song filled the theater and the girl on screen gave in to the lawyer’s lips, loosened his tie, and staggered to pull off her funky cowboy boots, my cell vibrated with a text. It was Zack:
I’m breaking our rule. Join me?
Nantucket Blue
Leila Howland's books
- A Brand New Ending
- A Cast of Killers
- A Change of Heart
- A Christmas Bride
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked
- A Delicate Truth A Novel
- A Different Blue
- A Firing Offense
- A Killing in China Basin
- A Killing in the Hills
- A Matter of Trust
- A Murder at Rosamund's Gate
- A Nearly Perfect Copy
- A Novel Way to Die
- A Perfect Christmas
- A Perfect Square
- A Pound of Flesh
- A Red Sun Also Rises
- A Rural Affair
- A Spear of Summer Grass
- A Story of God and All of Us
- A Summer to Remember
- A Thousand Pardons
- A Time to Heal
- A Toast to the Good Times
- A Touch Mortal
- A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
- A Vision of Loveliness
- A Whisper of Peace
- A Winter Dream
- Abdication A Novel
- Abigail's New Hope
- Above World
- Accidents Happen A Novel
- Ad Nauseam
- Adrenaline
- Aerogrammes and Other Stories
- Aftershock
- Against the Edge (The Raines of Wind Can)
- All in Good Time (The Gilded Legacy)
- All the Things You Never Knew
- All You Could Ask For A Novel
- Almost Never A Novel
- Already Gone
- American Elsewhere
- American Tropic
- An Order of Coffee and Tears
- Ancient Echoes
- Angels at the Table_ A Shirley, Goodness
- Alien Cradle
- All That Is
- Angora Alibi A Seaside Knitters Mystery
- Arcadia's Gift
- Are You Mine
- Armageddon
- As Sweet as Honey
- As the Pig Turns
- Ascendants of Ancients Sovereign
- Ash Return of the Beast
- Away
- $200 and a Cadillac
- Back to Blood
- Back To U
- Bad Games
- Balancing Act
- Bare It All
- Beach Lane
- Because of You
- Before I Met You
- Before the Scarlet Dawn
- Before You Go
- Being Henry David
- Bella Summer Takes a Chance
- Beneath a Midnight Moon
- Beside Two Rivers
- Best Kept Secret
- Betrayal of the Dove
- Betrayed
- Between Friends
- Between the Land and the Sea
- Binding Agreement
- Bite Me, Your Grace
- Black Flagged Apex
- Black Flagged Redux
- Black Oil, Red Blood
- Blackberry Winter
- Blackjack
- Blackmail Earth
- Blackmailed by the Italian Billionaire
- Blackout
- Blind Man's Bluff
- Blindside
- Blood & Beauty The Borgias
- Blood Gorgons
- Blood of the Assassin
- Blood Prophecy
- Blood Twist (The Erris Coven Series)
- Blood, Ash, and Bone
- Bolted (Promise Harbor Wedding)