“You’re my best friend. You obviously didn’t meet this guy yesterday. What’s going on?”
“It hasn’t been that long. A month. Maybe even a little less.” Heat rises to my face. “I just…felt…didn’t want to…Mom’s always so down on the Garretts…I just got in the habit of keeping it a secret.”
“Your mom’s down on everyone. That never stopped you from telling me about Charley and Michael. Why is this any different? Wait…the Garretts? You mean the they-multiply-like-rabbits family next door?” When I nod, she says, “Wow. How’d you finally meet one of them?”
So I tell Nan the story. All about Jase, this summer, nearly getting grounded and him climbing up to my room. And all the stars.
“He climbs up to your window?” Nan puts her fingers over her mouth. “Your mother would have a cow over this! You do know that, don’t you? She’d have a herd of buffalo if she knew this was going on.” Now she sounds less angry, more admiring.
“She would,” I say as the bells over the door jangle, heralding the arrival of a woman in a fuchsia beach tunic with a very large straw hat and a determined expression.
“When I was here the other day,” she says in those slightly-too-loud tones some people use when speaking to salespeople, “there were some darling T-shirts. I’ve come back for them.”
Nan straightens, schooling her face to blankness. “We have many lovely T-shirts.”
“These had sayings,” the woman tells her challengingly.
“We have a lot of those,” Nan rejoins, straightening her shoulders.
“Stony Bay…not just another sailing town,” the woman quotes. “But in place of the ‘not’ there was a—”
“Drawing of a rope knot,” Nan interjects. “Those are over in the corner near the window seat.” She jerks her thumb in that direction and turns more toward me. The woman pauses, then makes her way to the stack of shirts.
“How big is this relationship I know nothing about, Samantha? He looks—I don’t know—older than us. Like he knows what he’s doing. Have you and he…?”
“No! No, I would have told you that,” I say. Would I?
“Is there a discount if I buy one for each crew member on our cruiser?” calls the woman.
“No,” Nan says tersely. She leans in closer to me. “Daniel and I are talking about it. A lot lately.”
I have to admit this surprises me. Daniel’s so controlled, it’s hard to remember he’s also an eighteen-year-old boy. Of course he and Nan are discussing having sex after all this time. I get a flash of Daniel in his school uniform leading the debate team at Hodges, calling out in his measured way, “Cons go first, then the pros will have an equal amount of time.”
“Tim thinks I’m an idiot.” Nan presses her index finger into the wax of a candle shaped like Stony Bay Lighthouse. “He says Daniel’s a putz and will suck in bed anyway.”
Tim! “What happened with him? Did your parents catch on?”
Nan shakes her head. “No. He got lucky. Or rather, he survived to mess up another day thanks to your surprise boyfriend and his scary sister. Mommy and Daddy didn’t hear a thing. I went down to the basement before I left and dumped the bucket o’ vomit out. I just told Mommy he’d stayed up late and was tired.”
“Nans, Alice may be right about not pretending about this now. Last night was—”
She nods, a quick inhale of breath, nibbling on her thumbnail. “I know. I know. A disaster. But packing him off to some boot camp? I don’t see how that’s going to help him.”
The woman has come up to the register, her arms full of shirts, all pink.
Nan turns to her with a bright, professional smile. “I can ring those up for you. Would you like to put them directly on your club tab, or pay separately?”
I hover nearby until the clock tells me I’ve got to report for duty. Nan doesn’t say anything else, though, until I’m getting ready to leave, when she pauses in changing the paper for the cash register to say, “Samantha. You have what every girl wants.”
“You have Daniel,” I say.
“Sure. But you have everything. How do you always do that?” Her voice is ever so slightly bitter. I think of the Nan who just has to do the optional extra credit work for every school project. Who has to point out to me whenever I have a minus next to my grade while she has a plus. Who has to comment that pants that fit me would be “way too big” for her. I’ve never wanted to compete with her, only be her friend, the one person she doesn’t have to best. But sometimes—like now—I wonder if, for Nan, there’s any such thing.