Brick Three
He left the advisor’s office and the long corridor of the high school and walked out into the bright sunny day.
And right there on the back parking lot of the school, he froze.
Did he want to go to MIT?
A breeze carrying the sting of the ocean’s salt made the halyard on the school’s flagpole clink, reminding him just where he was at that very moment.
He was on Nantucket, and he knew that the state health system classified the island as rural, and he had friends who couldn’t wait to go to the “real” world.
He’d traveled a bit, down to Washington, D.C.
, and to Boston on a school trip and to France with a group last July and to Costa Rica with friends, and that had been fun, but he’d never longed to return.
His heart was in Nantucket, although he’d never say that aloud to anyone.
He knew he was in line to work at his father’s insurance company and eventually run the company.
He knew he’d live on the island forever, and that was the life he wanted and had always wanted.
Did that mean he was lazy? Did that mean he wasn’t “working to his best ability”?
As Brick Three stood indecisively in the parking lot of the high school, a mailman, Dennis Carson, went down the street on his bicycle, his mail bag resting on the back, and a live duck sitting on top of the bag.
Everyone knew Dennis and his duck, Doris.
Brick Three smiled. What could be better than this as a place to live?
He decided to apply to UMass Amherst, and he forgot to mention his advisor’s advice to his parents.
Maybe he wasn’t thinking of the future.
But maybe he kind of was.
Jane Coffin, who was also a Nantucket native and in his class at Nantucket High, had just agreed to go with him to the Whalers’ football game against Martha’s Vineyard.
For Brick Three, this was huge. He’d known Jane forever.
He’d played endless games of hide-and-seek and baseball with her when they were young, he’d been in her house, he’d even seen her bedroom.
But this summer, the summer between his junior and senior years of high school, he’d been lifeguarding at Surfside Beach when he really saw her.
It wasn’t just because she was pretty. Maybe it was the confidence in her stride, which reminded him how smart she was, how she was in his trigonometry class and doing even better than he was, and he was doing well.
He was sitting up high on the lifeguard’s stand, his eyes locked in on her, and just then she seemed to sense his gaze. She looked up at him with her hand over her eyes, and she’d met his glance and given him the most amazing smile.
He hadn’t wanted just to have sex with her, although he absolutely wanted that, too, but first he simply wanted to sit next to her on the long, striped beach towel, watching the surging ocean waves in the unstoppable swell and lift of the sea.
He called her that night. They sat on a bench by the library and talked until the town bell rang eleven, her curfew. She got accepted at UMass Amherst. He got accepted at UMass Amherst. He traveled with her from Nantucket to the middle of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
They talked and talked on the trips in his car from Hyannis to Amherst. They met up in the hallways at school and got together for an occasional movie or concert.
They became a solid couple, his Jack to her Jill, and they didn’t even have sex until the summer after their freshman year of college.
When he and Jane finally agreed to be together that way at the beginning of the summer, they were more than a couple.
They were one. They made love every moment they could find, and it was no surprise in the middle of their sophomore year that Jane got pregnant, and that made them so completely, incredibly over-the-moon happy.
They finished their sophomore year, dropped out of college, got married, and moved back to Nantucket, where they belonged.
So, Brick Three wondered now as he sat at the head of the long dining room table, should he stop arguing about his son’s personal wishes and support him in his choice of profession?
Or, because he was a father and had more experience of the world, should he try to convince Lucas not to vary from the Parsonses’ course?
Sometimes it was hard being a father.