“Oh, honey! Was it something I said?”
“No,” Marin sobbed. She missed Julian so much, the emotional pain was nearly physical. Her entire body ached.
She couldn’t let it end with that last terse phone call. She should have told him the real reason she was in Provincetown. Given him a chance to be her friend again. They didn’t have to figure out the other stuff yet.
“Oh, look what you’ve done, gossip queen!” Kelly admonished Paul, throwing her arm around Marin. “Just ignore him.”
“It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s just…” And the whole story came rushing out: her job, falling for Julian, getting busted at work and fired.
“No fraternization at work? This whole town would shut down,” said Paul.
“Marin, this will sound trite, but trust me—I had a very bumpy start in my relationship with Amelia—”
“Understatement!” chirped Paul.
“Can I finish, please? Hon, you have to just say to yourself that if it’s meant to be, it will be. It sounds like a cliché but clichés are just recycled truths.”
They downed their drinks, and then Kelly ordered another round and headed off to the bathroom.
“I hate to be a lightweight but I really can’t keep up with you two,” Marin said.
“We’re just getting started. Kelly needs to get blitzed, I can tell.”
“Really?”
“Birthdays can do that to you at our age. And she had her own health scare last year. So I think this just dredges up that old ugly beast, fear of mortality.”
She glanced behind her. Kelly was still in the dark, nether regions of the bar.
“Is she okay now?”
“She’s fine. But these things make you think. Carpe diem and all that.”
Marin wanted to say something, but the thought floated away. She was well and truly buzzed. Chris slid the next round across the bar.
“Carpe diem,” Marin said, and they clinked their shot glasses together.
Kelly reappeared and scolded them for not waiting for her.
“You know what we never did?” said Paul. “We never got our tattoos!”
“We never got our tattoos,” Kelly repeated.
“You promised.”
“What tattoos?” said Marin.
“Long story,” said Kelly.
“We should go right now,” said Paul.
“Amelia will kill me. She hates tattoos.”
“Honey, you’re a breast cancer survivor. You’ve earned the right to mark that in some way.”
“That’s true!” said Kelly. “Maybe I’ll get her name. That way she can’t be too angry, don’t you think?”
Marin nodded. At that point, it all sounded perfectly reasonable to her.
Had Marin been flirting with Luke? Rachel couldn’t tell if she was just being jealous and ridiculous or if there was actually a vibe between the two of them. Then again, why would Marin be interested in Luke? Wasn’t she supposedly still hung up on her ex-boyfriend back in New York?
So much for sisterly loyalty.
The poolside was, by that time, populated with guests who had spilled out of the crowded house. Lunch organized itself in a sort of free-form potluck.
“I see my dad in the summers mostly,” Luke told Rachel over paper plates filled with tuna salad and chips. “I alternate Christmases between him and my mom.”
He had grown up in New Jersey. Thomas had been a high-school English teacher, his mother a school administrator. “When I was twelve, my dad basically announced, ‘This isn’t right for me, I need to live my authentic life.’ And that was it.”
“Your poor mother. She must have freaked.”
“You know, not really. She was upset, but not upset with him, because she knew he couldn’t change the way he felt. If he could have made it work with her, he would have. I guess the split was as amicable as it could be under the circumstances.”
Rachel told him about her single-mother upbringing, her father a father only in his genetic contribution. And that she had learned of his death only last week. “Now it’s too late,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Luke said. She immediately regretted complaining. Such a downer!
“No—I mean, it’s fine,” she said. “I’m here, Amelia is amazing. I’m really thankful to meet my grandmother.”
“And your sister.”
Are you thinking about my sister?
More people trickled out to the pool. Everyone wanted to say hi to Luke, all of them full of recollections of the last time they had seen him and anecdotes about what had happened since his visit the previous summer. Rachel started to feel silly just planted by his side, so she reluctantly excused herself.
Inside the house she found Blythe perusing the living-room bookshelves. She stood out, overdressed in a pair of well-tailored gray slacks and a cream-colored summer-weight cashmere cardigan with a scarf knotted around her neck.
“Amelia texted me that you were all here but I don’t see Marin anywhere,” Blythe said.
“Oh, she and Kelly and Paul went to a bar.”
“Really?” Blythe said, incredulous. Not happy.
Rachel nodded. “Apparently the party is dry, and they all went out for a drink.”
“Marin isn’t a big drinker. And certainly not a day drinker.”
Rachel shrugged. “We’re on vacation.”
Over Blythe’s shoulder, she spotted Luke heading toward the front door. Alone. He noticed her and gave a little wave.
“You’re leaving?” she called out, realizing she sounded like a girl upset that the boy she liked was ditching the middle-school dance.
“I need a little breather. I’m going to stop by Herring Cove for a while.”
“Herring Cove?”
“The beach,” he said. Then, after hesitating for a second: “Do you want to come along?”
That would be a definite yes. No use pretending otherwise.
“I’ll see you later, Blythe,” she said, leaving Marin’s mother looking confused, possibly about to protest.
Maybe having an overly involved mother wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Luke opened the passenger door of his Jeep and she climbed in. The sky had grown overcast, and the breeze had turned into wind.
“There’s a sweatshirt or two in that duffel in the backseat if you’re cold,” he said. “It will be even windier at the beach.”
She turned around and unzipped the duffel. It felt strangely intimate to be going through his stuff, but it had been his idea. She pulled out a navy blue University of Rhode Island hoodie and pulled it over her T-shirt.
“Thanks.”
She stole a glance at him in profile and bit her lip. He was ridiculously handsome, clearly intelligent, nice as hell.
She tried not to think of the way he’d looked at Marin. Rachel was not adept at the politics of love and relationships. She’d never had a serious boyfriend—serious meaning lasting more than a few weeks. Which was especially ironic, given that her mother was never without a boyfriend, usually someone inappropriately young and almost always underemployed.
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” Rachel had asked her once.