The next days were the best. They flirted around the edges of attraction, touching fingertips while fishing or baiting hooks, looping legs and arms in a wrestling match in the pool—seeking out any reason to touch without appearing to want to do more than roughhouse.
Riley floated through those days with an expectation of love finally fulfilled. Her mother was right; some things were worth waiting for. Mack Logan was one of them. She wasn’t the most beautiful sister—that was Maisy. Yet thankfully, Maisy seemed to irritate Mack: her high voice, her clumsy way at sports.
Well into the third week of summer, Riley waited for Mack on the front porch; they were going to the movie on the lawn, a weekly event in the park where the teenagers congregated without supervision while their parents drank scotch and vodka at the Beach Club. This was the site of first kisses, first tastes of cheap wine and first puffs on cigarettes. Riley had spent more than her usual five minutes getting ready that night, suffering a sudden indecisiveness. Hair in a ponytail, and then down over her shoulders; a tank top, and then a T-shirt; a jeans miniskirt, then shorts. It was simpler when Mack hadn’t noticed her as anything more than a buddy, but still she wouldn’t change the anticipation she’d felt the last few weeks.
Her heart sped; her skin flushed. Everything seemed more possible, as though the world had shifted into the orbit it was always meant to have.
Maisy came out onto the porch, where Riley was leaning against a post watching the sidewalk for Mack. She dropped her tall body into a chair and somehow made the simple gesture look seductive. “Whatcha doing?”
“Waiting for someone.” Riley turned away from her sister’s beauty, not wanting anything to ruin how she felt about herself at that moment.
“Who?” Maisy was sixteen now, and her adolescence had increased her radiance.
“None of your business.” Riley saw Mack turn the corner to Sixth Avenue. “Gotta go.” She ran down the front steps and met Mack on the sidewalk.
He smiled at Riley. “I brought a blanket and a cooler.”
She wanted to bask in this moment, to enjoy his smile for her, his preparation for an evening under a night sky watching a movie, skin touching skin in innocence and promise.
Maisy’s voice shattered the night. “Hey, Mack,” she hollered.
He stopped, looked over his shoulder at Maisy running toward them, then at Riley.
Riley sensed the shift before it actually happened: Mack turning his smile, his focus on Maisy. She felt the desperate desire to rewind time, to undo the act of Maisy running toward them. Even before the change occurred, Riley knew that it would happen eventually, so why not now? Riley was bland gray compared to Maisy’s radiant light.
Riley took a deep breath, sensing the end of something that had barely begun. She looked at Mack. “She’s here to irritate the hell out of me. That’s essentially her life goal.”
“It always has been,” he said, yet his gaze followed the sixteen-year-old girl coming toward them. He laughed, looked at Riley. “You wanna ditch her?”
He’d said these words a hundred times over the years when Maisy had found them at the pier or asked to go out on the sailboat or to join them at the pool—
Let’s ditch her
. It had been easy then. It would be impossible now.
Maisy arrived breathless at their side. “Hey, y’all on your way to the movie on the lawn?”
“Yes,” Riley said. “Why don’t you go find that boyfriend of yours and head that way?” Her words were a dull sword compared to the sharp impact Maisy’s beauty was having on Mack.
The slow turning of his affection wasn’t completed that night, or the next morning, but the beginning of Mack and Maisy’s summer romance began at the exact moment that Mack and Riley’s ended. Of course Riley pretended that it had never begun, that his preoccupation with Maisy was of no concern to her. They’d been friends and always would be. Yet inside, her heart broke in places that remained permanently jagged, places where the most casual graze of memory catches in pain.
Hate for Maisy began to grow inside Riley’s heart, tangling the emotions of love and sisterhood. An ally became an enemy. A friend turned foe. Riley hid these feelings for Maisy as she hid most feelings behind her happy-go-lucky, Riley-loves-everyone persona.
Once Mack noticed Maisy, what was simple became complex and confusing. He’d arrive at the house, and Riley would think it was to fish or boat, and instead he’d take Maisy to the movies or the ice-cream stand. Maisy stepped out of her role as tag-along sister into a new one: competition.
The months passed until the bonfire on that last night in celebration of the end of summer. All the teens in Palmetto Beach were frenetic with the need to take in and consume this last night before they all returned home. The music was loud, the voices high-pitched, the laughter almost hysterical.
Riley would leave for college in a week. The blazing bonfire, and the burning hole in her gut from the lemonade-vodka surprise she’d drunk with Lodge Barton behind the lifeguard station allowed the bitterness toward her sister to grow, as the fire did with each log added.
This last night—this night of the fire—Maisy had gone home. She was sixteen years old and her curfew was an hour ago. Daddy was strict about this in a way he wasn’t about other things. Freedom reigned in almost all other aspects of their lives, as though someone had told him you get to pick one rule to enforce in your daughters’ lives, and he’d said, “Fine, curfew it is.”
Mack stood on the other side of the bonfire, laughing with his brother, Joe, his head back and the fire lighting his chin. He caught Riley’s gaze across the flames and smiled, motioned for her to join them.
Maybe, she’d thought, just maybe this would be the night he’d really see her. She’d once believed in this kind of equilibrium: in a single moment in which the world turned right, in which things worked out for the best, in perfect destiny. In the balanced world in which she’d lived—where the tide breathed in and then exhaled back out twice a day every day, where wild-winged ospreys returned to the same nests every year, where the rising moon mirrored the setting sun over the marsh—it was utterly impossible for someone to love another person as much as she loved Mack Logan and not feel that love returned.
Logs had been arranged to form a perimeter separating fire from sand, and she walked around it to Mack, to happy endings and new beginnings. Lodge stopped her, offered her another swig of his alcoholic concoction. She shook her head no.
Then the world became off-kilter somehow, tilted and backward. Mack’s arm was draped around a girl. Riley stumbled in the sand, moved forward.
Maisy.
Mack was holding her and they were moving toward the lifeguard station, laughing. Riley caught Joe staring at her; he shrugged and Riley ran. Her rushed steps took her home without her own full understanding of what she was doing or why. The Sheffield house was only one block down and one block back from the beach. “Second row,” the summer people called these homes.
Riley burst through the front door. Mama and Daddy were sitting in their usual chairs, Mama cross-stitching a dining room chair cover for the Historical Foundation, Daddy reading a novel.
“Maisy is at the bonfire,” Riley said, her calm tone belying her inner panic and anger, her bitterness.
Daddy’s face turned the purple shade that Riley often imagined he used when yelling at the cadets at the flight academy. A military man, he was not one for discussion or debate, only action. His novel fell to the ground as he bolted from the room without asking any questions.
Mama shook her head. “Now was that necessary, Riley?”
“Yes, it was.” Riley ran to her room, imagining the scene at the bonfire until she could no longer stay herself. She bolted down the back stairs, returned to the beach. Her toes sank into the sand and she felt something shift, something now unalterable in the Sheffield family.
She reached the beach again, easing her way back to the party. She slid into the group around the bonfire. “Ooh,” Betsy Miller, from Connecticut, said, “you missed it big-time. Your daddy came in here and dragged your sister home. She was totally freaking out.”
“Oh?” Riley raised her eyebrows, scanned the crowd for Mack. Where was he?
She spun in a circle.
There.
He stood alone, his face blank and full of flame’s shadows. For the first time in memory, she could not feel his emotions. She tucked her hair behind her ear and walked toward him, slow, steady. He looked up at her across the night, across their years as best friends. He held her gaze for only a moment as she begged, in her mind, for him not to turn away.
But he did.
She called his name. His steps were deliberate as he moved away from the fire and into the night.
Away from her.
Away from Palmetto Beach.
Despair overcame her. She stood below lifeguard station number seven. Footsteps fell behind her, and she turned to face Sheldon Rutledge.
She’d known Sheldon since her summer memories had begun. An only child of older parents who doted on him, he was often the host of the parties, oyster roasts, sailing races, and he possessed a wit that kept them all laughing. He was good-looking in the casual way of a boy who doesn’t care, yet draws girls to his side: his dark hair always falling into his eyes, his laughter heard across the water.
“Riley, what’s up?”
Without a real answer, she shook her head.
Sheldon placed his hands on her shoulders. “Last night of the summer. Then college,” he said.
She nodded.
“So I am going to do something I’ve promised myself I’d do since I was ten years old.”
Riley laughed, expecting him to do something funny and relieve her suffering. “I, Sheldon Rutledge, am going to kiss you, Riley Sheffield. Right now.”
And he did. In a slow, gorgeous way that made Riley forget, if only for a brief respite, the pain of despair. In the dark night, they whispered about their future—about Sheldon’s plans to enter the Air Force right out of college and live a life of freedom and flying; of her dreams of college and a master’s in English literature. She allowed herself to float into this relief, to become part of something that didn’t have anything to do with Mack Logan or Maisy Sheffield. Nothing to do with love at all, really.
Sheldon asked, “Now what?”
She answered, “I go to college; you go live your dreams.” He cuddled close to her and agreed. His next kiss was deeper; she immersed herself in the comfort and hunger of a boy she’d known and adored.
Later she would be haunted by the shame that her first and last time with a man was a search for relief and from heartbreak, and not an act of love.
Late that night, Riley knocked on Maisy’s bedroom door, wanting to say something, anything to reverse the night of betrayal on both their parts.
Maisy called from inside, “Go away. I hate you and I always will.”
Riley opened her sister’s door anyway, stepped into her room. Maisy lay on the bed sobbing, her face red and blotchy. She looked up. “You did that on purpose because you love Mack. You’ve faked all summer that you didn’t care, but you do. You love him, and you can’t stand for me to be happy with him.”
Riley answered in anger and stunned pain. “You’re the one who stole my best friend.”
Maisy sat up in bed, pointed at Riley. “You are a mean, ugly sister. He never would have loved you. Just because you took him away from me tonight doesn’t mean you can take him away from me forever. He only liked you because you knew how to do boy things. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they love you back. He’ll never want you the way he wants me. Never.”
Something in these words sounded to Riley like the truth and made them more painful than any lie Maisy could have uttered. Riley tripped on a pair of flip-flops as she backed out of the room, her gut clenched, her heart hollowed out. She’d lost her best friend’s adoration. She’d lost her sister’s love. She’d lost her innocence.
A week later, she left for college, and then halfway through her first semester discovered she was pregnant. She dropped out of school and retreated home. Nine months passed, and Brayden Collins Sheffield entered the world. Riley started Driftwood Cottage Bookstore with her mama—a major detour in her life’s plans after one impetuous act.
Since that night thirteen years ago, Riley had spoken to her sister only when necessary. The gulf in their relationship was easy to blame on Maisy—after all, she’d been the one to leave Palmetto Beach and move to California, then refuse to come visit. But Riley understood that mere physical distance was not what kept them apart; their bitterness and anger did.
SEVEN
MAISY
Maisy was always most comfortable when men noticed her in bars. She felt in her element, like an animal in its natural habitat. Bud’s was the main gathering place in Palmetto Beach—combination restaurant, bar, pool hall, teen hangout on the outdoor patio. Peanut shells covered the floor of the bar area and shellac lay an inch thick on the tables. Maisy spotted an old boyfriend, Billy-Joe Caulfield; she waved at him across the room, remembered the night he’d begged her to leave with him when his former girlfriend, Candy, had sat two tables over on the patio. Maisy had once heard he’d eventually married Candy, even had a couple kids.
His eyebrows lifted in recognition, and he rose from his table and made his way toward where Maisy and Adalee were sitting at the far end of the bar. Maisy maintained eye contact with him until he reached her.
“Well, well, Maisy Sheffield is back to join us in little ol’ Palmetto Beach, Georgia. What brings you from the far coast?”
Maisy stood and threw her arms around Billy-Joe, maybe a little too close, a little too tight for a married man. She expected him to hug her back, but he didn’t. He kept his arms at his sides while she clung to his neck. Embarrassed and slightly annoyed, Maisy stepped aside, almost knocked her barstool over.