“Because men are for fun, and marriage is work,” her mother said.
And so, on some basic level, Rachel didn’t get the point of relationships. She’d never seen one work out. She’d also never yet experienced that all-consuming rush of infatuation that seemed to drive everyone else in the human population.
Luke turned on the radio, and an old Kings of Leon song filled the car. Rachel felt a surge of energy, a high-powered adrenaline rush that took her breath away. He drove northwest onto Bradford and she closed her eyes, the wind whipping through the open-topped Jeep. Minutes later, he pulled around a bend and into a nearly empty parking lot. Luke jumped out and came over to open her door.
“This is the beach?” she said.
“Yeah. Past these dunes.”
The hills of sand were threaded with plants and a smattering of deep pink flowers. Rachel took off her sneakers.
“We don’t have flowers growing on the beaches in California,” she said.
“They call them beach roses,” he said.
Rachel followed him down a path to a wide patch of wet sand. The ocean was gray and foamy, and not many people were around.
“This isn’t how I imagined the beach. Where is everyone?”
“It’s late in the day and cloudy…the tide is high. If you were here midday in July, you’d barely have room to walk.”
He picked up a stone and, with a twist of his wrist, threw it into the water, where it skipped three times before disappearing.
“Impressive,” she said, half joking, half serious.
“I’m rusty. I used to get at least two more skips out of it.”
Rachel picked up a smooth white rock. With a twist of her wrist, she tossed it into the sea, but it promptly sank.
Luke scooped another few rocks out of the sand and handed one to her. “You have to hold it kind of loosely, like this.” He positioned her fingers around the rock. His nearness was dizzying. “And then move your wrist like a hinge—just launch it.” He held her hand in his to give her a sense of the motion. The stone sailed from her fingers but still disappeared without skimming the surface of the water.
“I suck at this,” she said.
“It just takes practice. How long are you in town?”
“Until Saturday.”
“That’s plenty of time. You’ll master it.”
“I accept the challenge.” She was shocked at her own flirtatiousness.
They stood facing each other, total eye-lock. Somewhere in the distance, a foghorn sounded. It felt like the roar of her heart.
“We should get back to the party,” he said.
No, no, no—she felt a door closing. A door to what, she didn’t quite know.
But she had to find out.
Chapter Nineteen
Just minutes after the three of them stumbled drunk into Coastline Tattoo, a small shop nestled in an alleyway, a text message lured Paul away.
“You suck!” Kelly protested when he said he was going. Marin smiled. She hoped she was like that when she was in her fifties. She was so relaxed, so comfortable in her own skin. There were no other words for it: she was cool.
“Not all of us have the loves of our lives waiting for us at home. Some of us have to take it when it comes. Or when it’s ready to come.”
“Ugh! Go.”
Marin laughed—for the first time in how long?
They flipped through the artists’ books to find designs.
“Are you really getting Amelia’s name?”
“Maybe. I need to find a good font. I’m thinking this kind of cursive.” She pointed out an ornate, swirling treatment of the words Marine Life.
“I might get a flower,” Marin said. “Maybe a little daisy inside my wrist.”
“Is that your birth-month flower?”
“What? No.”
“You should find a design that has personal meaning.”
Marin shrugged. “I’m too drunk. This is a bad idea. I’ll just keep you company.”
“Yeah. If it doesn’t have meaning, don’t do it. That’s the problem today—we’ve lost all sense of the rites of passage. It’s important to mark things, you know?”
“I’m not sure I’d be marking anything today except my life at rock bottom.”
“Well, that’s not a bad place to be.”
“How do you figure?”
“Nowhere to go but up,” said Kelly. And then Marin remembered thinking she was at rock bottom the day that Rachel had called from the Times Square Starbucks. She’d thought, Why not meet her? Things can’t get any worse. And then the truth came out.
But what could possibly get worse now?
Kelly flipped a few pages and then stopped, pointing to an image. “This is the one. If you get it, I’ll get it.”
“Matching tattoos? No offense, but we just met yesterday.”
“And in a week you’ll leave, and maybe our paths will never cross again. Something to remember me by.”
Marin leaned closer to look at the drawing.
“What is it?”
“A beach rose,” said Kelly.
By late afternoon, Thomas Duncan’s house was filled to capacity, and there were more people outside than inside. Amelia held court in the living room; someone was asking her, “How could Kelly sell one of her mosaics to that awful Sandra Crowe?” when she spotted Luke Duncan slipping out the front door with Rachel.
She smiled. He was a handsome young man, and Amelia could remember the first time he’d visited the island, a lanky preteen with big eyes and floppy, boy-band hair. She felt a pang of envy; Thomas had his life with Bart, but he also had his son. She ached for Nadine in that moment. Having Marin and Rachel somehow made Nadine’s absence all the more acute.
Nadine still hadn’t responded to the letter, and now Amelia had to admit that she likely would not be doing so. If Nadine had nothing to say to a letter with such dramatic news, chances were that her daughter would never return. Not for her nieces—probably not even to bury her mother, when that day came. It was time for Amelia to accept that Nadine did not want to be part of a family.
As a teenager and even in college, Nadine always had to have a friend around during times that should have been just for family. Once, Amelia overheard her on the phone calling a friend her buffer. Amelia felt wounded by this but it wasn’t something she could bring up lest she be accused of eavesdropping. Nadine was constantly accusing her of something, ranging from the innocuous and typical “You don’t understand” to the more damning “You’re ruining my life.” During Nadine’s high-school years, Amelia had accepted this as normal. Her more seasoned mom friends told her that all young women needed to reject their mothers in order to establish their own womanhood. Although as much as Amelia wanted to embrace that modern, intellectual explanation for what was happening, she couldn’t remember rejecting her own mother. She had always revered and cherished the woman.