Chapter 6
Chapter Six
L ucas’s weathered shingle cottage by the sea was like something from an Ernest Hemingway novel. He parked his Chevy on the oak-lined driveway and got out as a cool dust fell into a mist along the Nantucket shoreline. Once inside, he made himself a cup of tea and sat at his desk in the living room, where he had a generous view of the water, towering birch trees, and rocks sanded down during centuries of the Atlantic’s thrashing.
The cottage was Lucas’s —something he’d purchased five years ago. It had everything a man like him needed: a gas stove, an oven, a little bedroom with enough space for the old-world wardrobe his mother had passed down to him last year, and a bathroom with a clawfoot tub. Sometimes he liked to take baths in the winter and listen to history podcasts for hours at a time. He’d just refill the bath with hot water when it cooled. His mother told him he’d also done that as a kid. He’d loved being in the water so much that he’d joined the swim team as a teenager, and he’d even gotten good enough to go to the Massachusetts State Championships during his senior year. He didn’t swim races any longer, but he liked to see how far out from shore he could go before he got too frightened and had to swim back. Monica had hated when he did that. What if I can’t see you? What if I don’t know if you’re safe?
Lucas sat down with Moby Dick, of all things, and laughed at himself. Just today, he’d promised Rhonda he’d put on a street festival for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Now look at him. “Life always has a theme,” he said to himself because he hated how quiet it got in his cottage sometimes.
But just then, he received a text from Stella.
STELLA: My friend is in! She’s recruited another Salt Sister for the Nantucket Historical Society street festival. June 17th, here we come!
Lucas shook his head and smiled.
LUCAS: Your Salt Sisters always come through, don’t they?
STELLA: The magic of female friendship is limitless.
It was past eight thirty, which meant it was probably too late to contact Rhonda and tell her that the street festival was a definite go, so he wrote Jefferson instead. Jefferson sent back several emoji, some of which Lucas couldn’t fully understand. Lucas sighed and returned his attention to his book. But after three pages, he was daydreaming again.
Like always, he imagined conversations with Monica and his mother.
In his mind, they were relaxing at the Surfside Beach on the island's south side, eating a picnic. He was telling them about the Nantucket Whaling Museum and Rhonda’s street festival, and Monica was giving him ideas for it—a mustache competition, a pie-eating contest. He was laughing, and his mother was wrapped up in it, telling him she’d bake one hundred pies for the contest. Apple, banana, chocolate. I’ll pick a thousand blueberries, she said.
On and on, he went with this fantasy.
It wasn’t for another five minutes that Lucas reminded himself that this wasn’t a memory. It was just his imagination. A therapist he’d talked to once told him it was only natural to create stories with the people you loved, even when they weren’t around. It was a way of coping with the impossible.
Stella had asked him only once if he would ever consider dating again. He hadn’t known what to say.
The truth was that he felt startlingly empty. He wasn’t sure he had anything to offer anyone.
Lucas met Monica when they were both nineteen-year-old students at Yale University. Monica was set to become a social justice lawyer, and Lucas was studying history. The first time he saw her on campus near the historic gates, he had a physical reaction. A shiver ran up his spine, and he’d thought, this is it. But she’d breezed right past him in her miniskirt on her way to someplace else. Lucas’s heart had thudded all the way through his lecture about the French Revolution. He’d searched for her the rest of the week, hoping to run into her. But it didn’t happen for another horrible six weeks later, when he finally spotted her at a college party in a sophomore’s apartment. She was doing Jell-O shots and talking about food insecurity in rural areas. He strode right up to her. When he couldn’t think of what to say, she handed him a Jell-O shot, and he ate it, or drank it, or whatever it was you did with a Jell-O shot. He hated it to his bones. But he got her number after that. When he first asked her out for burgers, she said, “Okay, but not as a date. Just as friends.”
Lucas leaned far back in his chair and glanced around the living room. The only decoration he had up was a painting Stella had gifted him. A Nantucket artist had made it. It was an abstract image of something Lucas couldn’t quite make out. Stella had explained the image was of a man and a tree at the edge of an enormous body of water, but all Lucas could see was blue squiggles and violent black gashes. Stella had said, “Maybe if you look at it long enough, you’ll understand modern art.” But Lucas hadn’t gotten any closer to understanding. He’d gotten pretty close to throwing it in the fire.