Secrets in Summer(3)

“Thanks,” she said to Darcy. She carefully wiped her hands and face and a few strands of sticky hair. “I’m not drunk,” she announced. “I’m pregnant.”

“And I’m a librarian,” Darcy told her.

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m so sorry I barfed in your garden.”

“Better than if you’d barfed on the books,” Darcy said wryly.

The other woman managed a weak chuckle.

They sat on the bench for an hour, talking. For more than an hour, actually; Darcy went fifteen minutes over her lunch break, but she often came in early, so she figured she was allowed. She learned that Jordan was newly married to Lyle Morris, an island guy she’d known and adored all her life. They’d started kissing and making out when they were fourteen. They lost their virginity to each other when they were both sixteen, but it had been so quick and weird and they’d been so guilt ridden and afraid she’d gotten pregnant—she hadn’t—that they never dated after that. After high school, Lyle went into the army. Jordan had worked at her parents’ liquor store and tried going out with other guys, but it never worked. She missed Lyle. She started writing Lyle, cheerful, sex-free, letters. Four years later, when Lyle got out of the army, he walked into her parents’ store on Main Street, picked Jordan up in his powerful arms, carried her to his car, and drove to his apartment out on Surfside Road.

“I know how to do it right this time,” he’d told her.

And he did.

They’d married a few months later. They’d been married a year and they were going to have a baby.

Darcy gave Jordan a capsule summary of her life and promised a more detailed account when she wasn’t working. That night, Jordan came to her house and drank milk while Darcy drank wine and told her about her fruitcake parents, her darling grandmother, her weird marriage, her divorce. By the end of the evening, they were both hoarse from talking fast and laughing hysterically. Their friendship grew strong and fast from that evening, and when Darcy joined Jordan and Lyle at the beach with their friends one Sunday, she slipped into the group as easily as a fish into water. She’d found her tribe.

Now Jordan answered her cell. “This is your neighborhood help line. I’m sorry, but you may not park your car in my driveway.”

Jordan and her family lived in town, like Darcy did, and their big old house was surrounded by rental houses, just like Darcy’s. Jordan’s husband was a contractor, so he was responsible for some of the nouveau mansions built on the outskirts of town, with ocean views to die for, but Lyle and Jordan chose to live in town. They had a daughter, Kiks. They planned on having at least one more, and they wanted their children to be able to walk to the library, the pharmacy, the post office. They wanted to have that small-town feeling—and they did, until one by one the houses around them were sold off to people who used them as their third or fourth or fifth home or for rental income. Nice in-town houses could rent for a good five grand a week in the summer.

Most first timers to the island were shocked by how close the houses in town were built to one another. Some were only five feet apart. Probably the sensible builders of the nineteenth century intended these walls of houses along the main streets of the village to block the wind that howled over the water. Certainly the houses served this purpose. Maybe the forefathers and especially the foremothers, often alone while their husbands were out at sea, liked having neighbors nearby on this isolated island. The streets in town were narrow. Many were one-way. Few had garages; even fewer had driveways. Parking could be an issue—kind of like city parking—but no one expected problems here in paradise.

“What have you got?” Darcy asked, sitting down on the white bench in the back hall to take off her gardening clogs.

“Family with twin babies!” Jordan laughed. “Three months old. They’ll scream even more than Kiks!” Kathryn—Kat—Kiks was Jordan’s two-year-old daughter. She was a champion screamer.

As they talked, Darcy padded barefoot into the kitchen. She filled a glass with cool water and took a long drink. Nantucket had the purest, sweetest water in the world.

From her kitchen window, she could see right into her backyard, and over the hedges, some of the yard behind it.

“What about you?” Jordan asked.

“Boyz and his family are at this very moment carrying their luggage into the house behind me.”

Jordan went quiet. After a moment, she said in her best GPS bitch voice, “Recalibrating.”

“I know. Never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine this. His wife, the luscious Autumn, is hauling in some grocery bags, and her daughter, Willow, who must be about fourteen now, is wearily schlepping in her duffel bag right behind Boyz, who’s got three heavy suitcases.”