Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
A couple of hours later, Gale stood in contemplative silence and watched Lucas walk through the aisles of the gas station. They were an hour south of Hyannis Port, headed straight for Florida, and the energy between them was exhilarating, funny, and alive. Gale was reminded of when she’d gone to college and realized that there were other people like her; other people got her jokes and wanted to stay up all night talking about films, books, and art. Things that meant something. It meant that not everyone in the world was formidable and surly like her mother. Not everyone was an island .
Speaking of Evelyn, Gale had texted her mother before she’d left for Florida.
GALE: I’m going out of town for a little while. I’ll be back. I hope we can talk then.
To this, Evelyn had responded.
EVELYN: I knew you wouldn’t stay long. I hope you’re going back to Peter.
This had felt like a punch to the gut—especially now that Gale knew about Johnny. Would Evelyn have returned to Johnny if that had been an option? Would she have run back into his arms if he hadn’t gone to Florida with Bethany Cicero?
Gale shook thoughts of her mother out of her mind and returned her attention to the topic at hand: snacks for the road.
Lucas had poked fun at her snacks, and she’d challenged him to pick his own—the snacks he felt best suited for an epic drive. But Lucas had just confessed that he hadn’t left Nantucket in many years. What did he know about long drives? What did he know about self-soothing?
Then again, I don’t know anything about him at all. And he knows so much about me.
“You’re pretty slow,” Gale teased him. “Are you second-guessing yourself?”
“Never,” Lucas said. “I’m just making sure my selection is perfect. And perfection takes time.”
Gale chuckled and slipped into the bathroom, where she fixed her hair and checked her phone to find nothing but a meme from Anna and a photograph of a gorgeous pastry from Piper, one she’d made herself at the pastry shop in Providence. She felt too distracted around Lucas to do much more than stare at him, and she realized she hadn’t told her daughters she was heading out. But she didn’t want to worry them. She’d tell them everything when she got back.
Maybe she’d invite them to the Whaling Museum Festival. Maybe it would be the perfect time to come together.
What if Lilian comes with us? The thought sparkled in her mind. She imagined Lilian in the front seat with her and Lucas in the back, trying to convince them to eat one of his weird snacks. She imagined herself and Lilian saying, “Ew! Lucas! You’re crazy!” and laughing until they howled. Because that was what sisters did together: laugh. Exchange secrets. Carry one another through. Especially twins.
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
Gale left the bathroom to find Lucas’s arms piled high with snacks she’d never tried before in her life. She put her hands on her hips. “Okay. Tell me. When on earth did you fall in love with these snacks?”
Lucas tossed his perfect brunette curls and smiled. “I had to study for hundreds upon hundreds of hours at Yale. These were my studying snacks of choice.”
“Yale, huh?” Gale cocked her head. He hadn’t mentioned that before. It wasn’t hard to imagine him in a Yale library, up to his ears in history textbooks, his eyes wide and focused.
Gale said, “Come on, Yale. Let’s get these weird snacks to the car.”
Gale paid for the snacks and a tank of gas, telling him it was the least she could do. “You’re helping me track down my evil twin,” she quipped.
Once in the car, Gale started the engine and ordered Lucas to open the first bag of snacks. They were piled high with marzipan and hard, salty pretzels and chocolate. Gale popped one in her mouth and pretended to grimace, even as the marzipan softened and the chocolate oozed. She glanced at Lucas to see his eyes closed after his first bite. He was falling into himself. Into the flavor. Into his memories.
“Okay,” Gale sighed. “This one isn’t too bad.”
Lucas laughed. “Everyone falls in love with them when I show them off. I don’t know why they never took off in the States.”
“Where are they from?”
“Denmark,” he explained.
“I’m guessing they have a fascinating history?”
“How did you know?” Lucas grinned. “Whenever I told my girlfriend about their history—and their involvement with the queen of Denmark—she told me that the story made her not want to eat them anymore.”
Gale shifted her hands on the steering wheel. This was the first time he’d said “girlfriend” since she’d met him, which probably meant this was an ex-girlfriend. Probably. Speaking to him was similar to peeling an onion. She wondered what the next layer would bring.
“Girlfriend?” Gale decided to probe.
“Back at Yale. This was a long time ago.”
Lucas’s cheeks were pink. Gale pretended not to notice.
“Was she another history nerd like you?”
“No. She went on to be a lawyer. Social justice was her game. She was all forward-thinking.”
“And you were stuck in the past?”
“Something like that. But I liked that about our dynamic,” Lucas explained. “Yin and yang.”
Gale bowed her head, imagining a handsome yet gawky twentysomething Lucas with his passionate social justice-lawyer girlfriend. A shiver of jealousy went through her.
“It’s strange,” she said. “I don’t know anything about you, and you know so much about me.” Except you know that I just left my husband. Except you know I can just leave Nantucket at the drop of a hat because I have nothing that belongs to me and nowhere to be.
“That’s not true,” Lucas said. “I know the basic outline of your mother’s life back in the seventies and eighties. I know about your grandparents and about your father saving seven people offshore of a Nantucket beach. But I don’t know about you, Gale Dobbs. I just know you have pretty good taste in music and terrible taste in snacks.”
Gale snorted, then gestured for the bag of Twizzlers. “I’m going to need a few trash snacks. I can’t eat all of your Denmark candies.”
“There’s enough to go around,” Lucas promised, reaching for three pieces of red candy—plus an additional one for himself. Gale couldn’t help but notice how quickly he ate it, chasing it down.
“We have plenty of time to get to know each other,” Gale said with the tilt of her head. “Plenty of time to learn to hate each other, too.”
Lucas seemed unable to stop smiling. “Did you ever watch When Harry Met Sally ?”
Gale’s heart thudded. She’d been thinking about Harry and Sally, too. About their dramatic drive from Chicago to New York City, during which they’d decided to hate each other and never see one another again. In pure Nora Ephron fashion, they’d fallen in love over many years. They hadn’t known what to do without the other.
“Nora was my hero when I went into screenwriting,” Gale admitted. “It was my dream to be just like her.”
Lucas snapped his fingers. “And I think you managed it.”
“Come on. I’m not like the great Nora.”
“You have your own unique style. You’re not her. You’re yourself,” Lucas said.
Gale narrowed her eyes. He was insinuating that he’d watched some of her films. But she didn’t want to dig deeper into this topic. She didn’t want to talk about writing at all—not after so many weeks of not typing out a single word or scribbling a single idea into her journal.
“Your ex-girlfriend was crazy,” Gale said, trying to lighten the mood as she took more marzipan chocolates. “These are sensational. I can’t imagine I’d stop eating them if you told me their history.”
Lucas looked mischievous.
“All right,” Gale said with a sigh. “Try me.”
It was true that she regretted it later, but only slightly. Listening to Lucas talk about his favorite historical topics was fast becoming one of the best pastimes she’d ever known. They sped down an American highway, listening to the blues, Bob Dylan, and the Bee Gees. And they crawled deeper into the evening, swapping from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat and back again depending on their mood and their fatigue levels. They decided it was time to stop when they hit North Carolina that night. It had been a sensational first day. But how would they handle the night?