Bodies and Souls (59 page)

“I could turn it into a beautiful guest room for you,” he had said. “You pick out the paper, Mom, and I’ll paint the ceiling and woodwork and paper the walls. Of course, I’ll have to do some sanding and wallboard compounding on the wall where I nailed so many posters and models and junk. I was checking it this morning, there are some bad holes in the plaster that could become a problem if they aren’t taken care of.”

“Why, that would be lovely, Michael,” Patricia had said. “How nice of you.” But her eyes met Peter’s across the table and she telegraphed him a silent message:
guest
room. Our son wants to turn his bedroom into a
guest
room.

As if sensing this, Michael had said, “Well, then Mandy and I could come up and stay with you a lot. ’Course, you’d have to get another bed. You could buy a bed with the money you’d be saving on having me do the work. I wouldn’t want you to pay me.”

All these calculations, Peter thought. All this energy, all these plans. Short-range plans; Michael still did not intend to go to college, and he had even refused Lars’s offer to become a junior partner in the business, because he wanted to try his hand at other things. He still thought he might like to be a landscape contractor. He was not doing any of the things Peter had hoped his first son might do, yet Peter had to admit he was growing proud of the boy. Michael had become competent, and certainly more sensitive—a year ago he never would have noticed that his mother was hiding a sadness
behind her smile. Much of this was probably Mandy’s doing, or at least the consequence of living with Mandy for a year. Peter liked Mandy; in fact, he thought Michael was a lucky man.

Now Michael stood before him, his thick black hair brushed till it shone, his powerful body nearly bursting from the seams of his rented tux. The processional had started, the ushers were bringing the bridesmaids down the aisle, and the young people all looked lovely, but Peter could not keep his eyes off his first son, who seemed to be the handsomest person he’d ever seen. The church was packed with people, for not only did most of the Londonton friends come for the wedding, but so did an entire contingent of Northampton friends—men and women who called Michael “Mike.”

Peter’s daughter Lucy came down the aisle now, scattering yellow rose petals for the bride to walk on. Small breasts budded under the yellow lace of her dress. Even his little girl was growing up. Lucy was smiling, embarrassed and pleased to have so many people watching her, and then she looked right at Peter and flashed a grin.
My children
, Peter thought, and a knowledge clenched inside him, taking his breath away. Patricia and I gave these children life, Peter thought, we did our best to keep them safe, to encourage them in their growing, and we have loved them. In turn, they survived this love and the knowledge of our fierce expectations. He did not suppose that this relationship was very much different from the one between God and man.

Mandy came down the aisle now on her father’s arm; yellow roses were twined in her hair. She looked beautiful. As she passed each pew, little joyous exclamations rose into the air like bright balloons: “Ah!” people said, seeing her pass. Then she stood before Peter, and smiled up into Michael’s eyes. For one brief moment, Peter felt bouyant with optimism, drunk with sunshine, Mendelssohn, and hope. Then the organ music stopped and the church was quiet. Mandy and Michael looked at him, trusting him to know, for these few moments at least, just what to do. He smiled back at them, as a father, as a minister, as a fellow human being who loved them in their young beauty. He said:

“Dearly Beloved, We are gathered here today in the sight of God and man.”

For Joshua and Jessica

With special thanks to Kate Medina, Bob Buckwalter, and Bill Peck

By Nancy Thayer
Nantucket Sisters
A Nantucket Christmas
Island Girls
Summer Breeze
Heat Wave
Beachcombers
Summer House
Moon Shell Beach
The Hot Flash Club Chills Out
Hot Flash Holidays
The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again
The Hot Flash Club
Custody
Between Husbands and Friends
An Act of Love
Family Secrets
Everlasting
My Dearest Friend
Spirit Lost
Morning
Nell
Bodies and Souls
Three Women at the Water’s Edge
Stepping

Nancy Thayer
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Island Girls, Summer Breeze, Heat Wave, Beachcombers, Summer House, Moon Shell Beach
, and
The Hot Flash Club
. She lives in Nantucket.

nancythayer.com
Facebook.com/NancyThayerAuthor

Read on for an excerpt from Nancy Thayer’s

Nantucket Sisters

Published by Ballantine Books

It’s like a morning in Heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze.

The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings you can lean against, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach.

Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East 86th in New York City.

Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons.

Nantucket begins today.

Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she’s waited for all winter is to run down the street into the small village of ’Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she’ll knock on Maggie’s door.

First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses.

She flies along past the old town water pump, past the Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette’s Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie’s house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes.

Before she can knock, the door flies open.

“Emily!” Maggie’s hair’s been cut into an elf’s cap and she’s taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks.

Behind Maggie stands Maggie’s mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily’s never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots of pockets. It makes Maggie’s mother look like someone from a book.

“You’re here!” Maggie squeals.

“Welcome back, Emily.” Frances smiles. “Come in. I’ve made gingerbread.”

The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily’s ever seen. The living room’s in the kitchen; the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily’s parents aren’t crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl.

But Maggie and Emily have been best friends since they met on the beach when they were five years old. With Maggie, Emily is her true self. Maggie understands Emily in a way her parents never could. Now that the girls are growing up, Emily senses change in the air—but not yet. Not yet. There is still this summer ahead.

And summer lasts forever.

“I’d love some gingerbread, thank you, Mrs. McIntyre,” Emily says politely.

“Oh, holy moly, call her Frances.” Maggie tugs on Emily’s hand and pulls her into the house.

Maggie acts blasé and bossy around Emily, but the truth is, she’s always kind of astounded at the friendship she and Emily have created. Emily Porter is rich, the big fat New York/Nantucket rich.

In comparison, Maggie’s family is just plain poor. The McIntyres live on Nantucket year-round but are considered off-islanders, “wash-ashores,” because they weren’t born on the island. They came from Boston, where Frances grew up, met and married Billy McIntyre, and had two children with him. Soon after, they divorced, and he disappeared from their lives. When Maggie was a year old, Frances moved them all to the island, because she’d heard the island needed a good seamstress. She’s made a decent living for them—some women call Frances “a treasure.”

Still, it’s hard. It isn’t that kids made fun of Maggie at school. Lots of kids don’t
have fathers, or have fathers who live in different houses or states. It’s a personal thing. The sight of a television show, even a television ad, with a little girl running to greet her father when he returns from work at the end of the day, or a bride in her white wedding gown being twirled on the dance floor by her beaming, loving father, can make a sadness stab through her all the way down into her stomach.

Plus, her life is so cramped by their lack of money.

When a friend asks her to go to a movie in the summer at the Dreamland Theater, Maggie always says no, thanks. She can’t ask her mom for the money. In the winter, when friends take a plane off island to Hyannis where they stay in a motel and swim in the heated pools and see movies on huge screens and shop at the mall, they ask Maggie along, but she never can go. She
hates
the things her mom makes for her out of leftover material saved from dresses she’s sewn for grown women. Frances always tries to make the clothes look like those bought in stores, but they aren’t bought in stores, and Maggie, and everyone else, knows it.

Frances
never
makes her brother Ben wear homemade stuff. Ben always gets store-bought clothes—and nice ones, ones that all the other guys wear. Their mom knows Ben would walk stark naked into the school before he’d wear a single shirt stitched up by his mother. Ben’s two years older than Maggie, and bright, perhaps brilliant—that’s what his teachers say. Everything about him’s excessive, his tangle of curly black hair, the thick dark lashes, his deep blue eyes, his energy, his temperament.

During good weather, he’s outside, his legs furiously pumping the pedals of his bike as he tears through the streets of ’Sconset, or scaling a tree like a monkey, hiding in the highest branches, tossing bits of bark on the heads of puzzled pedestrians. He’s a genius at sports and never notices when he skids the skin of both knees and elbows into tatters, as long as he makes first base or tackles his opponent.

During bad weather, Ben becomes the torment of Maggie’s life. When the wind howls against the windows, she’ll be curled up with a book, assuming he is, too, for he does like to read—then she’ll discover that while he was so quiet, he’d been removing her dolls’ eyeballs in an unsuccessful attempt to give all the dolls one blue eye and one brown. One rainy summer day, he scraped the flakes of his sunburned skin into her hairbrush. Another time he put glue between the pages of her treasured books.

From day to day and often minute to minute, Maggie never knows whether she loves or hates Ben more.

Emily says she’d give anything for a brother or sister. Maggie tells her she can have Ben any time.

Emily is only on the island for three months in the summer, so Maggie doesn’t understand why, during the school year, she misses Emily so much. It’s not like she doesn’t have friends. She has lots of friends.

Alisha is fun, but she’s pure jock. Alisha’s perfect day is going to the beach, running into the water, shrieking and jumping until a wave knocks her down. She comes up laughing, knees scratched from the sand, and runs back into the waves, over and over again. If Maggie suggests a game of make-believe, Alisha looks at her like bugs are coming out her ears.

Delphine loves horses. Her parents have a farm. They sell veggies and plants in the summer and Christmas trees in the winter. When Maggie goes to Delphine’s house, she spends all day on horseback, or helps Delphine curry the horses or muck out the stalls. Delphine doesn’t like to come to Maggie’s house—no horses there.

Kerrie reads and sometimes plays pretend, but Kerrie has an entrepreneurial mind. She started a summer newspaper for children that she writes, illustrates, and sells from a little newsstand she built out of crates and set up on the corner of Orange and Main. When she isn’t selling her newspaper, she’s selling lemonade and cookies she bakes herself.