“What are you doing here?” Bess asks.
Shouldn’t he be working? Or trying to feel up some broad beneath her hoodie at a picnic lunch? Granted, the weather has worsened today. Perhaps they canceled their meal.
“You said you needed help.” Evan steps through the doorway. “I’m the help. Also, I brought you coffee and lunch. Sandwiches. Chips. Sea salt and vinegar, to be exact. Your favorite, right?”
Bess ogles the bag.
“Let me guess,” she says. “Leftover salami?”
“Why? Did you want salami?”
“Not particularly, no.”
Evan’s face tenses, like he’s smelled something rotten.
“Well, okay,” he says. “Then it’s good I brought turkey and roast beef. You can have either. Or both. I’ve already eaten.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“Is everything okay, Bess?”
“Yes.” She jiggles her shoulders. “Sorry. I’m a little … not myself. Really. It’s sweet of you to come. I am hungry. Starving, as a matter of fact. But shouldn’t you be somewhere?”
“You mean work? Nah. We had to cut out early because of the rain. It’s not a problem though as we’re way ahead of schedule. Please reserve your shock. Anyway, you need more help here than my guys do over there.”
“That is clearly true.”
Bess glances down. She does need assistance, in myriad ways, including the fact that she’s back at it with the Boston College sweatpants and free-hanging boobs. She makes Ball Cap Lady look like Nantucket’s foremost leader in fashion.
“But really,” she says. “I can’t subject you to this mayhem. It wouldn’t be polite.”
“You’re turning down free labor?” Evan says, and cocks a brow. “That’s not smart. Especially considering.” He looks around. “This house is not even minimally packed.”
“True story. But going through someone else’s mess? What a nightmare.”
“Better than going through your own mess,” Evan says with a wink. “I won’t take no for an answer. Wow, this old house…”
Evan walks farther into the home, focus shifting from floor to ceiling as he goes. Every couple feet he knocks on a wall or runs his hand along a molding, admiring the work.
“It’s so beautiful,” he says. “And so much … the same.”
“You mean the decor? Yeah, well, Cissy’s too busy raising hell to bother with renovations or keeping up with trends.”
“Lucky house,” Evan says, and stops beneath the three-hundred-pound black iron lantern hanging thirty feet above.
They are in the center hall, the heart of the home. Whereas everything else in the place is beginning to look tired, a little shabby, definitely worn, this room steals the show. Aside from the dark wood floors, it’s entirely white, the paint and wainscoting exquisitely kept. The hall is six-sided, two-storied, and has a staircase running in a spiral around its walls. Though the chandelier is daunting and grand, not to mention handcrafted in her great-grandfather’s factory, it’s the thirty transom windows and the Atlantic blue that illuminate the room.
“I can see why you guys refuse to move,” Evan says, and meets eyes with Bess.
“Oh, I want to move…”
“No you don’t.”
Evan hooks right toward the kitchen, but not before tapping the stair above the room’s entrance.
“The kitchen is different,” he notes, once inside.
“Yeah, well, everyone updates their kitchen. Even Cissy.”
“It looks great.” Evan shakes his head. “This is such a stunning old home.”
He sets down the bag, and then the tray of coffee. Bess counts three cups.
“Where should we start?” Evan asks.
He picks up his coffee, and takes a sip. Then he nods toward the other two cups.
“Help yourself. I don’t think we drank coffee back in high school but I got you black. Figured it was your style.”
“So you view me plain and dark?” Bess says with a small laugh.
“Strong and unaffected.”
Bess blushes. Already her tenderness toward him is returning. No use punishing the poor guy. He’s done precisely nothing wrong.
“So which is mine?” Bess asks. “By the way, if the other one’s for Cissy, you’ve wasted your money. She’s been gone since daybreak. Where? Who knows. Trying to write up a proposal for some sort of geotube plot, I’d assume. They’re holding an emergency meeting tonight.”
“Yeah I’ve heard. Repeatedly and with many curse words involved. Alas, both coffees are for you.”
“Both?” Bess says. “Wow, the bags under my eyes must be getting worse.”
“No, the two cups represent two options.”
Evan points to one.
“French roast from Claudette’s…” He gestures to the other. “Or decaf, if you’d rather.”
“Oh brother.” Bess rolls her eyes. “Does this relate to my, uh, revelation?”
“It does,” he says with a grin.
“You’re really trying to get me to commit to a decision, aren’t you?”
“You’ve already made a decision. I only want to know what it is.”
Wobbly-stomached about why, exactly, Evan might want to know, Bess reaches for the decaf but then changes her mind and grabs the French roast. She takes a sip of neither.
“I want to show you something,” Bess says, and jams the French roast back into its cardboard. “Follow me.”
She leads Evan into the butler’s pantry.
“Ah. Your famous escape route,” Evan says.
He taps on these walls, too.
“Yep. Also.”
Bess gestures to a stack of yearbooks on the left-side counter. Some are Clay’s, some are Lala’s, but most are Bess’s.
“My Nantucket High yearbooks,” she says, then immediately pictures the woman’s hoodie.
Was she familiar? She didn’t seem familiar. Bess shakes her head.
“Isn’t it wild that I still have them?” she says.
“Lizzy C., the whole reason people purchase yearbooks is for keeping.”
“We bought them? I thought they were forced upon us.”
Bess flips open the front cover of Nantucket High School: 1996–1997. Acting as if she doesn’t know its precise location, Bess ticks through a few pages until she lands on Evan’s varsity baseball team photo. He’s in the back row, center. Royal-blue cap. White grin.
“Look at that guy,” she says, tapping the photograph with an unexpectedly shaky finger. “He must’ve had all the babes after him.”
“Not as far as I know. Only the babe who mattered.”
Face hot, Bess claps the yearbook shut and stretches toward one of Grandma Ruby’s photo albums.
“Check this out,” Bess says, changing the subject if not with deftness at least with speed. She pushes the album in Evan’s direction. “It’s so bizarre. My grandmother saved dozens of articles written by some friend of hers and I can’t figure out why this person was so important. Her name is in the book but Grandma Ruby never mentioned her at all.”
Evan shrugs.
“She was probably a friend from school. Nostalgia will get you every time.”
“Yes it will.” Bess skims a few more pages and then closes the book with a sigh. “It’s like Ruby was stalking her.”
Stalking and nostalgia: Both run in the family, it seems.