“Why be out on that dirt road in the middle of the night? It was reckless. It was asking for something bad to happen.” Nadine reached for another cigarette and then stopped herself.
“Nadine, listen to me: You did a good thing inviting him out there. And that night, he was just a young man on vacation. He made a stupid mistake. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t your fault. You need to let go of all your anger.”
Nadine leaned over the table, rested her head in the crook of her arm. Amelia touched her back. “Sweetheart, life doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it. There have been tough times. I’m partially to blame for that. But you ran away, and pushed me away, and that made it impossible to fix. Nothing is perfect—no one, no family. But look, in the end, we’re here together. This is what we have.”
Amelia wiped away Nadine’s tears, a gesture she had not been able to make since Nadine was a little girl.
“I’m sorry,” Nadine said. And then: “It’s good to be home.”
Rachel sat on the front porch with the food and waited. It felt like the town should be quiet that night, everyone indoors mourning the loss of Kelly Cabral. But at nine o’clock, Commercial Street was loud with merriment, all the boys on their way to the clubs, couples strolling to and from dinner or headed for drinks on the waterfront. After midnight, the same tide would roll in drunken boisterousness to Spiritus Pizza. She hoped that by then she would be asleep, able to put the long day behind her. For the first time, she understood the expression bone tired.
But the food. There simply wasn’t enough space in the refrigerator to store all of it. She called Bart, asked if she could bring the overflow to their house.
“I can’t even carry it all. Do you have a sec to run over here and help me? It’s, like, four trays.”
“Reinforcements on the way,” Bart said.
She waited until she saw someone turn off the street to the house. She stood and waved. But it wasn’t Bart.
“Hey. I heard you were in need of some manpower.”
Luke.
“I thought Bart was coming.” She clutched a tray like he’d arrived to steal it.
“I offered to come instead.”
She shook her head in annoyance. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I think you’re being a little hard on me.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
He took the heavy tray from her hands and set it on the ground. “Yeah. I do.”
“I might be young but I’m not stupid,” she said, instantly regretting the comment. It had a playground quality to it and made her sound, in fact, both young and stupid.
“I never said you were stupid. Not even when I was busy finding the colossal strength to resist your charms.”
She refused to let him be cute. “Stupid, naive—whatever I’d have to be to believe your so-called ex-girlfriend just showed up here after two months, uninvited. Without a word.”
“Can we sit down for a second? Please?”
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Rachel, she and I had been together for a long time. Of course we were still in touch occasionally. And for the first month or so, I held out hope that she might change her mind about spending the summer here. But by the time you and I got together, I hadn’t texted or spoken to her in a few weeks. I’d accepted it was over. I had no idea that in her mind, she was moving toward trying to work things out.”
It made sense; of course it did. But an alarm had been switched on inside of her, and she didn’t know how to turn it off. She’d spent so much energy figuring out how to get him, she hadn’t given any thought to the emotional risk she’d be taking if it finally happened.
Hookups were easy; relationships were hard. That’s why she never had them. She realized, in the depth of her exhaustion and sadness, that after a lifetime of being let down by her mother, she never wanted to give anyone else a chance to hurt her. And then she’d met Luke, and for some odd reason—maybe it was chemistry or that people dropped their defenses when they were on vacation—she wanted him in a way she’d never wanted anyone before.
“So what are you saying? Now it’s really over?”
He nodded. “Yes. We talked, and it’s over. She was at the house barely an hour. If you don’t believe me, your mother can back me up.”
“Yeah. My mother is a big fan.” He didn’t say anything, just focused those aqua-blue eyes on her. They had the same effect as that first day by the pool. She was defenseless. She bowed her head, and he tucked a lock of her hair behind one ear.
“Can this really work?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I want to try. Do you?”
Rachel looked away, up at the sky. It seemed every star was visible. She wondered if Kelly was somewhere out there, watching over the house.
If she was, Rachel knew what she’d tell her to do.
Chapter Forty-Eight
The lettuce leaflings, a few inches tall, were ready for transplanting to the garden. And not a moment too soon; Marin was leaving that afternoon, and Kip was eager to get on the road as well.
Blythe had planned to start the process much earlier, teaching Amelia and Rachel all they needed to know to keep the garden going long enough to harvest in the fall. And the better they understood things now, the easier it would be for them to replant in the spring. But Kelly’s death put all that on hold. Now, Labor Day weekend, it was gardening go-time.
With Amelia next to her, Blythe soaked the ground, then dug a two-inch-deep hole with her finger, looking up to make sure Amelia was watching. She added some extra compost to help the soil retain moisture and gestured for the tray packed with leaflings.
Amelia brought it and knelt beside her with the rows of lettuce in their square plastic beds. Blythe set the tray on the ground between them, and inched the first leafling free from its temporary nest.
“Want to do the honors?” she said, holding it out to Amelia.
“I don’t want to set it wrong,” she said, cradling the leafling as if it were a baby bird.
“It won’t break—just place it in here and then bury it up to its leaves.”
Amelia gingerly did as instructed. Blythe leaned close and followed her work with her own hands, pressing the soil down firmly, pinching it to make sure it was tight around the plant.
“I’m so excited about this, I can’t even tell you,” Amelia said, sitting back on her heels. Blythe felt a swell of satisfaction; she was returning to Philadelphia in the morning, but she was leaving something behind for Amelia, something green and alive and nourishing. After all, Amelia had given her so much that summer. By taking them all in and keeping them under one roof, Amelia had given Blythe the chance to heal her relationship with Marin. And in confronting Blythe with her long-held, albeit mistaken, beliefs about what had happened to Nick in Italy, Amelia had literally forced the issue out of the back of Blythe’s closet, and now the decades-long chasm between Blythe and Kip was closed. Amelia had, in a sense, helped sow the seeds for the next season of Blythe’s marriage.