Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171) (16 page)

I refrained from pointing out that that's exactly what she did almost every morning when she sent me to Stop & Shop to pick up the stuff she'd forgotten to buy.

“I could go with you,” I offered, realizing I didn't have any plans for my day off either.

Shelby shrugged. “If you want.”

“Can you pick me up at the inn around twelve?”

“Twelve o'clock. Don't be late.”

Four hours later I walked out of the inn with my first paycheck. I knew it wasn't going to be that big—as servers we made the majority of our pay in tips—but I couldn't wait to tear open the envelope and see the check inside. I waited until the screen door shut behind me and then tore open the flap, trying to read the upside-down numbers Wendy had handwritten below the date. And that's why I didn't see Henry sitting on the porch step until I practically fell over him.

“So where were you this morning?” he asked, reaching up to help me catch my balance.

I looked up from the envelope and Henry smiled at me. “Was I that bad of a kisser?”

“Not at all,” I answered, quickly realizing that I actually sounded like I enjoyed the kiss. A lot. “I mean, I wasn't avoiding you. Shelby just had everything she needed this morning, so she didn't have to send me out to the store.”

“I guess that makes me feel better.” Henry grabbed the railing and pulled himself up to face me. “But seriously, Kendra,
I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable or anything last night.”

“I know that.”

“But I did and I'm sorry. It probably wasn't the best thing to do given the situation.”

I didn't know if he meant the Mona situation or that we had been standing next to a haunted house with two pissed-off ghost sisters who enjoyed scaring the crap out of people.

“In any case, I'd hate for things to get all weird between us,” Henry continued. “I had a really good time with you yesterday and I was hoping you'd come fishing with me again sometime.”

“I'd like that,” I told him, and meant it.

“So we can just forget about last night?”

“Sure,” I lied, knowing full well I wouldn't forget about his kiss, his hand lightly brushing my waist when he slipped his finger through my belt loop, or the way the moon lit up his eyes when he reached out, placed his hands on my shoulders, and pulled me toward him. “Consider it forgotten.”

“Hello again.” Izzy looked over her shoulder as I walked into the barn, but then turned to face the canvas propped up on the easel in front of her. “What brings you back here so soon?”

I couldn't tell Izzy the truth, that after Henry's surprise visit I needed to regroup, to remind myself that even though I had no idea where I stood with Mona anymore, or even Henry, at least there was one person who had come back and stayed the same. Izzy.

I walked past the large, half-completed canvases leaning against the walls and stood next to her. “I was on my way
home from work and wanted to see how the painting was coming along.”

She made a few more strokes of her brush before standing up and stepping back from the easel. “Well, what do you think?”

Together we inspected Poppy. His denim shirt was almost complete and Izzy had added a baseball cap to cover his bald spot.

“I like the hat,” I told her.

“Me, too. He loved his Red Sox.” Izzy reached forward and brushed an invisible hair off Poppy's shoulder. “Last August, at the reception, we were dancing and he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘Thanks.' Needless to say, I had no idea what he was talking about, so he just looked at me and said, ‘For marrying someone with season tickets to Fenway.' ”

Izzy and I laughed.

“I could see him doing that,” I said.

“I only wish we'd been able to take him to a game.” Izzy inhaled deeply and then let out a lingering sigh. “In any case, I'm glad you like it.”

“Has Mona or Henry seen any of these?” I gestured to the canvases stacked around the barn.

“No, I guess I never thought they'd be that interested in what I was painting. When we lived here they avoided this place like the plague.”

“There was no heat out here. Besides, whenever they did come out, you'd make them wash your brushes in turpentine and Mona's hands would smell for weeks afterward.”

“They figured that out, huh?” Izzy smiled, and then pointed to a pair of rubber gloves lying across the top of a turpentine can. “Well, at least I've solved that problem. And
I put a space heater in here this winter. It's still not all that warm, but at least I can feel my fingers and toes.”

Izzy picked up her brush and went back to work while I walked around. This time I lingered over the canvases, taking in the details I'd missed the first time around. The way Izzy captured the bursts of silver in Mona's eyes, her hand reaching up to touch a lock of hair. Even though Izzy had painted it so that Mona's fingers hadn't quite reached her hair, I knew exactly what Mona was doing. Izzy had captured it perfectly, her fingers poised, ready to begin braiding. It was a habit Mona had had since third grade, when Poppy first taught her to braid the tassels hanging from their kitchen curtains. Back then she couldn't even figure out how to tie her shoelaces without ending up with a knot, but she could create a perfect braid.

Right beside the still-unfinished Mona, Henry's blond hair and deep brown eyes stood in stark contrast. In real life I could never really see the resemblance, but Izzy had managed to capture a similarity between them, as if they shared a secret that nobody else would ever know.

Our freshman year of high school it seemed like everyone's parents were splitting up. There must have been at least four divorces going on in my homeroom during first semester alone, and I knew the same thing was happening all over school. When the morning buses unloaded, it was painfully obvious to all of us which kids were shuttling between two houses, because a few mornings a week some of the kids who were normally on my bus ended up riding different routes.

One morning we watched Alicia Pinkett get off a different bus, a duffel bag tossed over her shoulder, and I figured Mona would finally realize that even if her dad had stuck around
and worked things out with Izzy, it was no guarantee of a happy ending. And I thought that might actually make her feel better. “At least you'll never have to worry about that,” I commented, nodding in Alicia's direction.

“Are you kidding me?” Mona had shot back, making me instantly regret my attempt to show her there were people who had it worse. “At least she still has two parents. At least they know they have a daughter.”

It was my mistake, and I should have known better. There were only a few times I made mistakes like that with Mona. Most often I felt it was my job to make sure she didn't feel like she was missing anything at all, to fill in the empty space left by her dad. Like when our fifth-grade class studied genealogy and we each had to create family trees on large white pieces of oak tag. We had two weeks to research our family history and bring in pictures of our relatives, who we were then supposed to make into leaves on our trees. Mona had drawn her tree slightly lopsided, with large, solid branches sprouting from the Jensen side of the tree, each leaf containing a picture of one of Izzy's relatives. Although she'd tried to twist the branches so they crisscrossed over the tree trunk and obscured the bare branches on the other side, there was no way Mona could hide the empty leaf under her own photograph.

The day our assignments were due, Mona rolled up her family tree into a tube and stuck it in her desk until just before the dismissal bell rang. When she finally placed her tree on Mrs. Colby's desk, the poster board unfurled and exposed the tree to our teacher and the classmates lining up for their buses. And that's when Mona saw what I'd done while she'd been out at recess. Inside the leaf beneath Mona's photograph
there was a drawing of a man who looked just like Mona, right down to the two bright blue eyes I'd dotted with a silver-colored pencil, and the hair I'd filled in with a black pencil. She never said anything to me about it, not then, when Mrs. Colby commented on the interesting way Mona had drawn the branches, or even later when we were alone. But I knew she knew it was me. And that was enough for both of us.

I laid the paintings of Mona and Henry side by side against Poppy's old dusty wheelbarrow and took a seat on the couch against the opposite wall. Izzy had moved the faded green plaid couch into the barn a few years ago, when they replaced the family room furniture with a beige sectional Izzy and Poppy picked out of the Pottery Barn catalog. A sketch pad lay on the floor beside the sofa, and I reached over to pick it up, hoping to get a glimpse of how Izzy's ideas went from a letter-size sketch pad to paintings that stood almost as tall as me.

Inside the pad, on thin, almost transparent sheets of paper, I watched Izzy's paintings take shape. As I flipped from page to page, the rough, suggestive lines began to take form and I watched as an oval and a few lines became someone I recognized in the barn. I found Henry, the entire page consisting solely of his slightly matted hair and left eye. Poppy, without the Red Sox hat. Mona's grandmother.

“Hey, Izzy, how do you do this?” I asked. “How do you take someone you know and start to see them differently?”

“You know, that's a great question, Kennie. I wish I could say it was as easy as squinting one eye and turning your head some special way, but if it was that easy these paintings would be finished, right?”

“I guess.”

I continued turning the pages, watching the images take shape, until my fingers stopped on a page with someone I didn't recognize. One by one I turned the sheets in the pad until the face became more familiar, the eyes sketched with lines that came together to form diamonds folding into one another; even in pencil, they reminded me of a kaleidoscope. With each sheet I recognized Mona's features taking shape, only on the fifth page the sketch started to change. The focus of the eyes shifted so the subject was looking away. I continued turning the pages until I came to the finished sketch, to the boy set against the reflection of the blue ocean.

My breath caught in my chest and I went back and flipped through the pages faster, then faster, until the sketch pad became like one of those animated flip books, the drawings coming together to create a moving picture. Only what I saw wasn't a moving picture, it was a transformation. And that's when I knew the subject on that canvas wasn't just a boy. It was Mona's father.

“I think I'm ready to call it a day,” Izzy announced, and then stood up and stretched her hands out toward the roof of the barn.

“I should really get going, too.” I placed the sketch pad back on the floor and got up from the sofa.

“I can give you a ride if you wait a few minutes so I can clean these brushes.”

It was almost six o'clock and I didn't really feel like walking back to the bus stop. I met Izzy over by the turpentine can and bent down to help her, wondering how it must've felt to remember what Mona and Henry's father looked like and not know his name. “That would be great, thanks.”

“So where were you today?” Lexi wanted to know when I got home from the barn. She was sitting at the kitchen table, rubbing her bare foot in much the same way Shelby kneaded dough, only instead of flour Lexi used peppermint foot balm.

I was only vaguely confused. “At work?”

“You promised you'd stop by when you were done,” she reminded me.

“Things ran late, I'm sorry. Where is everyone?”

“Mom and Dad are upstairs lying down and Bart's in the shower.” Lexi kicked off her other sneaker and started kneading her left foot. “It would have been nice if you at least pretended to care about the deli. We could have used the help.”

I was supposed to
care
about the deli? I was expected to have feelings for a storefront? Lexi was severely overreacting, but I knew her well enough to know that if I didn't make nice she wouldn't let it drop.

“So it went well?” I pulled out a chair and sat down across from her, my interest a sort of peace offering. “Tell me all about it from the beginning.”

Lexi attempted to hold out on me, my punishment for not showing up. But she only managed to stay quiet for all of three seconds before she gave in, which I knew she would.

I sat forward and rested my elbows on the table. This was going to take a while.

“So we got to the deli around six fifteen,” Lexi began, taking me all the way back to the beginning, which she literally took to mean twelve hours ago.

For the next forty minutes I got the lowdown on everything from the first customer (arrived at 9:01, ordered a ham and Swiss on rye and two tuna salads on bulky rolls), to the first problem (they couldn't hear the front door open, and a few customers stood there for several minutes before Lexi came out from the back room), to how they resolved it (my dad went out and bought a bell and tied it to the front door). I knew how many cans of soda they sold (128) and the most popular choice of condiment (red pepper mayonnaise, Lexi's own concoction).

“So it was a success?” I asked when Lexi finally took a breath and even she had run out of things to say.

“We weren't exactly where I'd hoped to be, but it was just the first day. Once word gets out, things should pick up.”

“So was it fun?”

“Yeah.” Lexi grinned at me, as if just remembering the smell of imported salami was enough to make her day. “It was fun. Hard work, but fun.”

“Anybody we know show up for opening day?”

Lexi rattled off a bunch of names I knew, some of my dad's old coworkers, some of Bart's friends, her old history teacher, who was also my history teacher last year. I waited for her to say Mona's name, but before she could finish Bart walked into
the room, his hair still wet. Which meant his bottle of Selsun Blue was uncapped in the shower, waiting for me to get in and spill dandruff shampoo down my legs.