* * *
“I imagine you have questions.”
Mom waited until we were past the part of the boardwalk that ran along the bluff’s edge before she spoke. We’d walked single file, though the boardwalk was more than wide enough to accommodate us both. The drop on the waterside made my stomach hurt.
“I do have questions,” I admitted. “Quite a few.”
“Mm-hmm.” Mom nodded for me to go on.
“How come I’d never heard of Virginia Merrill until you asked me to go to her memorial service?” When Mom invited me to a gathering for a woman who had disappeared off Chipmunk Island five years ago, I’d remembered the accident, though vaguely and without the woman’s name attached. That had been my second season running the Clambake, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone had talked about the woman who’d disappeared—our customers, our employees—but I couldn’t pay much attention.
Mom laughed a small, huffing laugh. “So, your first question is about you?”
“Don’t deflect.”
“Okay.” Mom squared her shoulders. “I asked for it.” She slowed a bit so she could speak easily while we walked. Up to that point she’d been moving so fast, it felt like she was escaping the island, not departing from it. “Ginny and I were best friends in high school. That’s a fair number of years before you came along.” Mom said high school, not prep school, as was her habit after years of blurring her background for my father’s friends and relatives. I’d gone to the same school a couple of decades later and had the same habit. “Ginny and I remained friends when we went off to different colleges,” Mom said, “but it became more of a summer friendship, because we didn’t see each other every day, as we had at school.”
Growing up in a resort town, I was familiar with summer friendships, had them to this day. The thing about them was, if they were close, even after months without contact, you could pick up right where you’d left off.
I waited a moment for Mom to continue. I could see the end of the boardwalk a hundred feet ahead, though I couldn’t yet see our boat in the little marina. “And then?” I prompted when no further explanation came.
“And then, life got more complicated. I married right after college, as you know. And then you came along a few years later. Then your sister two years after that. And then your dad and I were building a very demanding business, a business with a busy season that happened to overlap one hundred percent with the time Ginny was here on Chipmunk. I knew she was here. I knew she was teaching in Portland. I think in those earliest post college years, I expected her to follow me into marriage and motherhood. I thought our relationship would resume when our lives were parallel again. It wasn’t as easy to stay in touch in those days.”
“But she never did marry,” I said.
“No.” Mom’s lips pursed, a sure sign she was pondering.
“And you grew apart.”
“Yes, except for those Christmas cards I mentioned and a few notes and emails. We never could quite give up on the relationship.” She stopped walking and turned to look at me. “When we get back to Windsholme, there’s something I want to show you.”
I heard her but didn’t respond. I was staring ahead at the dock, where a long-legged body I knew all too well heaved a large brown parcel out of an outboard motorboat. Chris Durand, ex-boyfriend, love of my life, here on Chipmunk Island.
Mom saw him, too, and had the presence of mind to wave while smiling broadly. “C’mon,” she said to me. “I’ll tell you the rest later.”
* * *
I’d pulled myself together by the time we reached Chris on the dock. His face showed as much surprise as I was feeling.
“Julia, Jacqueline. How are you? What brings you to Chipmunk?”
I gave him my best smile. “We were here for Virginia Merrill’s memorial service.”
He squinted into the sun. The lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered. “I didn’t know you were friends.”
“I was,” Mom clarified.
His handsome face sobered. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I could ask you the same question,” I said, as lightly as possible. “What are you doing here?”
He laughed. “I’m the superintendent. Been out here since October.”
So that explained it. I had realized sometime around March that I hadn’t seen Chris all winter. Not that I was anxious to, or that he had any obligation to report his movements to me. Anymore. We’d been in love. We’d lived together. I had ended it two years earlier. He was the great love of my life. The only romantic love, if it came down to it. I’d dated a bit in college and grad school and through the time I’d worked in venture capital in New York City, but no relationship had lasted more than weeks. Then I’d returned to Busman’s Harbor, to live and to run my family’s clambake business. I’d remet Chris almost two decades after he’d been the middle school crush who barely knew I was alive. We’d fallen in love. Hard.
Heartbreaking as the end had been, our relationship was firmly in the past. Busman’s Harbor was a small town, and we’d expect to run into each other, yet all last off-season we hadn’t. Now I knew why.
“I needed a winter job.” Chris must have taken my long pause to mean more explanation was necessary. “I thought living out on an island by myself would be good for me.” He shrugged and ducked his head.
I didn’t ask the obvious question—had it been? It was too personal for present circumstances, maybe too personal to ever ask.
The superintendent of Chipmunk Island was essentially the caretaker. The water on the island, piped from the mainland and dispersed to the houses by aboveground pipes, was shut off by mid-October, and all residents—even the few who had wells—had to leave per the Island Association Charter, a document spoken of by the residents with a reverence normally reserved for the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. The superintendent stayed, using a boat to make the short hop into town for supplies when ice and weather permitted. It would be an isolated existence.
“We need to get going,” Mom said.
“Of course, of course.” Chris gave us one of his broad grins, green eyes crinkling. “It was great to see you both.”
“Lovely to see you.” Mom’s voice was warm. It hadn’t started off that way, but they’d been quite fond of each other by the end.
She led the way to the Whaler. Chris helped me with the lines and pushed us off, waving as I steered into the harbor.
CHAPTER THREE
We arrived on Morrow Island during “family meal,” the break between the lunch and dinner seatings, when we fed the Clambake employees. Though many customers teasingly asked the question, our waitstaff, cooks, and Clambake fire crew didn’t eat lobsters every day. Instead, my sister Livvie, who ran our kitchen, made something filling and nutritious, containing the most local ingredients she could find.
Despite our best efforts, we did have leftover, unserved lobsters almost every day. We deliberately cooked a few more than we needed, just in case. And then there were the late cancellations, and children who’d been urged to “just try it” who took one look and pushed their trays away, demanding the hot dog alternative served in its place.