Chapter Fourteen
Provincetown is in full party mode when Dina and I arrive. Red-white-and-blue banners flutter over the streets. People walk
by with painted faces, wearing necklaces of red-white-and-blue beads, waving miniature flags. There are families with kids
and knots of singles in various stages of drunkenness, and through it all, music floats from some unseen PA system. I can’t
even tell if it’s coming from a club or a DJ setup on the street somewhere.
Dina ditches the 4Runner in front of a small two-story house with blue siding, several blocks away from Commercial Street.
“Dave and Bill’s place,” she tells me as we join the crowds on the sidewalk.
Most people seem to be drifting toward MacMillan Pier, where the ferries to Boston dock, but Dina takes us past the pier and
down onto the sandy strip of beach that spreads out along the coastline. The sun is already going down over the crowded line
of beach houses behind us, the color slowly draining from the sky.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Just up here,” Dina says, pointing. “They shoot the fireworks off in the harbor. Closest view is the pier, but that’s a circus!
Much nicer to watch from the beach.”
Other people clearly have the same idea. Beach chairs and towels pepper the sand in small clusters. Kids with buckets and shovels run between them, splashing in and out of the ocean.
“There we go.” Dina waves, and I see Dave waving back, his bald head glowing in the setting sun. Bill is in the middle of
setting up several low-slung beach chairs, and Yan and Meryl are laying out a couple brightly colored towels.
“Happy Fourth!” Dave booms as we reach them. He pulls me into a sideways hug that crushes the air out of my lungs. “Where’s
Sharon? Figured she’d be with you.”
“She’s closing up Queer Punx,” Dina says. “Should be here any minute.”
“And how are you, darling?” Bill pulls Dina into a hug that seems surprisingly gentle.
Dina pats his back and then waves him off. “I’m just fine. Don’t worry about me. Anybody seen Nathan?”
“Not yet,” Yan says, setting a couple extra cushions on two beach chairs for her and Meryl. “He probably had to close up Cuppa
Cove, no?”
Dina just grunts, frowning, and sits down in a chair.
I take a seltzer from Bill and sit down next to her, fishing my phone out of my pocket and tapping out a text to Nathan one-handed:
I’m on the beach for the fireworks with your aunt. You joining?
I stare at my phone for a few minutes, waiting, but he doesn’t reply.
Sharon arrives a few minutes later, wiping sweat off her forehead. “Please tell me you’ve got a cold beverage,” she says,
collapsing into one of the beach chairs and rubbing her knees. “It is too warm in that store.”
“Pick your seltzer flavor,” Bill says, holding out two cans. “Lime or cranberry orange.”
Sharon sighs and goes for lime. “One of these days, you need to bring a damn Diet Coke. Are we ready to toast?”
“Not quite yet,” Bill says.
I pause, about to flip the tab on my seltzer. “Oh. We’re toasting something?”
“Just a little annual tradition,” Dave says. “But don’t wait! We’ve got plenty more seltzer.”
Sharon mutters something about boring bubbly water and cracks her can open. Dave pretends not to hear her, glancing down the beach.
“Aha!” he says. “There’s our straggler.”
I follow his gaze. Nathan is walking toward us across the beach, jeans rolled up to reveal bony ankles, carrying a pair of
Birkenstocks in one hand and a small paper bag in the other—the kind that is very obviously concealing a bottle of alcohol.
Next to me, Meryl whispers, “Shit.”
Yan gives her a quick frown.
“Sorry I’m late,” Nathan says as he reaches us. “Commercial Street was a circus.”
“And you clearly didn’t come straight here,” Dina says in a sharp voice.
“I stopped to get one beer,” Nathan answers patiently, holding up the bag. “I’m fine, Dina. Did I miss the toast?”
“No, we were waiting for you,” Bill says. He glances worriedly at Dina, and then gestures to the cooler. “We’ve got seltzer,
if you want one.”
Nathan just shakes his head. “Thanks, I’m set. Should we do this?”
Dina gives him a long look, and then she clears her throat and stands up. Everyone else follows suit. I stand too, somewhat
awkwardly holding up my seltzer can, glancing around. The twinkle has vanished from Meryl’s eyes. Yan looks solemn. There’s
a crease between Sharon’s brows.
Dave takes a breath, raising his can of seltzer. The lightness is gone from his face too. The lines seem to sit deeper in
his forehead.
He clears his throat, and then he says, in a voice that’s quiet but still manages to carry to all of us, “To being here, for as long as we can. And to the ones who’ve left—we miss you. We hope it’s a party wherever you are.”
Bill squeezes Dina’s hand as everyone raises their seltzer cans in silence. I glance at Nathan, and feel like someone has
kicked the air out of my lungs. There’s no hint of his quarter smile now. His expression is empty and hollow and deeply sad.
We all take a drink, and the moment breaks. Yan coughs and turns back to her chair. Dave digs out a bag of chips to pass around.
I notice Dina glance at Nathan with a vague frown, and then she turns to Sharon and starts asking her about how much foot
traffic Queer Punx got today.
I open my mouth, because there’s still sadness written all over Nathan’s face, but before I can decide what to say, a cheer
rises into the air from the direction of MacMillan Pier. A brass band strikes up in the distance, launching into a bright,
snappy Sousa march.
Meryl claps her hands. “All right, let’s get this show going!”
Yan leans forward in her chair, waving at one of the tote bags. “Bill, pull out those cupcakes I packed, would you?”
Next to me, Nathan jerks, like he’s come back from somewhere far away, and drops his Birkenstocks on one of the beach towels,
patting his pockets. He pulls out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and wanders away, toward the water that’s slowly receding
from the beach, leaving lines of seaweed on the sand.
I go after him. “Hey, are you okay?”
He jerks again and turns around, blinking at me like he completely forgot I was here. “Oh. Hey. Yeah, I’m . . . I’m fine.”
He pulls a cigarette from the pack, awkwardly tucks the bottle in the bag under one arm, and puts the cigarette between his
lips, lighting it.
I suddenly realize I’ve never seen him smoke before. There was the faint hint of cigarette smoke when he leaned close to me at Dina’s cookout, both of us staring at the photographs around the turntable, but I haven’t noticed it since then.
I shove my hands in my pockets. The sand close to the water is colder under my bare feet. “What’s the story with that toast?
Who’s it for?”
Nathan takes the cigarette from his lips, blowing a thin trail of smoke, squinting out at the ocean. The waves are mere ripples
here, the water even calmer than it is near the cottages, like wavy antique glass, almost black in the dark. The hulking shape
of a ferry boat, squatting at the end of the pier, has turned to a dark blotch against the twilight sky, and out in the harbor,
sailboats sway gently at their buoys, masts waving like lone blades of grass in a breeze.
“Just . . . people they’ve lost,” Nathan finally says, waving the hand holding the cigarette vaguely behind him.
It’s not really much of an answer, but he doesn’t seem to want to say more, so I don’t press. Instead, I tip my head back,
looking up at the darkening sky. It’s clear, the first stars just beginning to poke out. Even here, with the lights of Provincetown
and the pier behind us, it’s so much easier to see them than it would be in Boston.
“Have you ever seen shooting stars out here?” I ask. “You know, like a meteor shower?”
Nathan taps his cigarette and follows my gaze up to the sky. “I saw one a few years ago, maybe. I don’t remember which one
it was supposed to be, and I never saw more than a few shooting stars.” He takes a slow sip from the bottle concealed in the
paper bag. And then he says, “You can see the Milky Way sometimes, if it’s dark enough and you’re not in the middle of P-town.”
His voice is a little stronger now. He doesn’t feel quite so far away.
“Yeah, I saw that once in Vermont.” I hunch up my shoulders against a breath of wind. It’s refreshing—finally washing some of the mugginess out of the air. “My ex and I were camping. He was—is—an astronomer, and he brought this little telescope, and we sat outside and looked at the Milky Way.”
It was the first time Jackson told me he loved me, sitting outside our tent, covered in bug spray. It was the first time I
said it back.
“Sounds nice,” Nathan says.
“I can’t really remember,” I say. “I mean, I’m sure it was, I just . . .” I look down at the seltzer can I’m still holding
and swirl it slowly. “You ever feel like when you look back at something you know happened to you, it feels sort of like it
happened to someone else? Or like you’re watching a movie? Like you can’t recognize that version of you anymore?”
He glances at me, the distant lights from the pier reflecting in his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “All the time.”
“That’s how I feel about that camping trip. And actually . . . a lot of stuff about my ex. He was always so focused, and knew
exactly what he wanted, and he’d talk about these articles he wanted to write or journals he wanted to publish in, and honestly . . .
he’s going to do all of it. He works at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory now and he’ll probably wind up teaching
at, like, Harvard or Princeton someday. And when we were together, he kept telling me I could be like that too. And I just . . .
I tried. He made it seem so appealing. And now when I think about everything back then, it’s like I’m looking at someone else.”
Nathan fiddles with the cigarette in his fingers. “Did you love him?”
He asks it simply—a genuine, honest question—but it catches me off guard. I get that feeling in my stomach again, like I’ve