Chapter 13
Muriel had no idea what she was thinking, but there she was waiting for a guy to come and pick her up. She wasn’t just waiting for a guy. She had been staring out the window wondering how she could cancel the whole thing. What was she thinking? She’d told her sister how strange it would be to hang out with an Abbott, and here she was hanging out with an Abbott.
But it wasn’t like it was a date. He wasn’t asking her out. He asked her if she wanted to go hiking, not marry him. Geez, what was her problem? She was always overthinking everything. He probably still felt sorry for the whole broken arm thing. He’d taken her surfing, and she broke her arm.
“I think it’s nice you’ve met a friend,” Meredith said, but Muriel knew her mother was fishing.
“He’s taking me on a hike,” Muriel said to her. “Nothing more.”
“Well, I think it’s great.” Meredith walked into the piano room. One thing that hadn’t changed since childhood—her mother’s piano.
“Do you think you’ll get remarried?” Muriel asked.
“Married again?” Meredith laughed. “I’m in no rush to get married.”
“Really?” Muriel was surprised by this. “But you spend all your time together. Why not?”
“Because I want to spend time on myself first,” Meredith said. “I spent so much time being Mrs. Phil Smith or your mom that I kind of forgot about myself.”
Muriel wished she had spent more time on herself. Maybe she wouldn’t be so lost. “I think I need to do something like that.”
Meredith trilled the top keys. “It’s never too late to start.”
Muriel wondered what that would look like besides writing a bucket list? “What do you do to spend time for yourself?”
“Well…” Meredith looked up from her music sheet. “I used to play the piano as a kid for enjoyment, and I’ve gone back to playing like that. Not trying to master anything, just enjoying the moment of the song, of hearing the notes played and being able to do it. Then there are things I want to learn more about, like beekeeping and blueberries.”
“Can’t you do that being married to Quinn?” Muriel didn’t know why she kept going back to marriage. What would life be like if she never got married? Would she still find happiness?
“Yes, but right now, I’m happy with the way things are,” Meredith said.
Muriel thought about what she imagined her life to be like at twenty-five. Meredith had been married with two children by her age. Was that what Muriel wanted or just what she expected for her life? Had she been chasing the ring just because that was what the people around her did?
“Do you know much about the Abbotts?” Muriel asked her mother as she put on her readers and studied the sheet music in front of her.
“I don’t know more than you probably,” Meredith said. “But I have been invited to the house by the grandfather. He was once a senator and is now a philanthropist, and a big donor to the Queen Bees’ festival.”
Her mother’s gardening club took their festival very seriously since the earnings all went to local charity groups like the food pantry and heating costs for the struggling residents of Blueberry Bay. “That’s really nice.”
“It is.” Meredith looked at Muriel. “Do you think you like this young man?”
Muriel shook her head. “Cora is in love with his brother.”
“That shouldn’t make a difference,” Meredith said. “Oliver seems like a nice guy.”
“Yes…he is.” She thought for a second to get the right words. She couldn’t stop thinking about the hike with Oliver. Was it a date? And if it was, should she remind him how they met and that getting out of a five-year relationship had done some damage that still needed repairing? Then the idea of jumping into something so fast seemed wrong since she’d had a conniption when she’d seen Zack out with that other woman.
“I don’t want to be defined through a relationship anymore,” Muriel felt a heaviness lift from her chest with the words. She could finally express why she had been spinning. “I want to be Muriel first and figure out what that means for me, and only me. And when that happens, I’ll hopefully find a nice guy, too.”
It felt good to say it out loud. She needed to figure out who she was, what she wanted. Not just her goals but who she was as a person—her beliefs, her hopes, her dreams. So much of who she was had been defined by Zack’s hopes and dreams.
“I should cancel hiking,” she said to her mother.
“Why?” Meredith frowned. “I bet it’ll be an adventure for you.”
Muriel thought about it. Oliver hadn’t said it was anything other than a hike, but she was pretty sure with the way he’d been looking at her, he might feel a little something. Or she was thinking too much about everything again?
“It’s too late now,” Meredith said, pointing out the window.
A black SUV pulled up to the house. Meredith reached the front door just as Oliver walked up the steps.
“Good morning, Oliver,” Meredith said, swinging open the door. “Nice to see you.”
“Good morning, Meredith.” Oliver stood in shorts and a T-shirt. Not dressed for a date. “Will you be joining us on our hike?”
Muriel smiled at the invitation. This was just a hike.
“No, not today,” Meredith said. “I heard you have a secret trail.”
Oliver nodded. “Well, you might know someone who can tell you how to get there.”
“Sounds great!” Meredith said, waving at them. “Have fun.”
“After you?” Oliver stepped back, allowing Muriel to leave the house and go down the porch steps first.
He walked behind her as they headed toward the truck, then he jogged ahead to grab the door for her. He tilted his head as she climbed inside.
“What?” she asked.
“You looked different.”
She scrunched her eyebrows. “Different?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Happier?”
She laughed at that.
“Happier?” Then the image of her crying on the street as she stared at a wedding store flashed through her head. “You must’ve thought I was so miserable that night in Concord.”
“Sad,” he said quickly, looking at her. “Just sad.” Then he added, “I was sad that night too, so I think that’s why I got it.”
She wondered if he got it because of the beautiful Natasha or the mysterious person in Concord.
Oliver patted the door. “You buckled?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
And for a split moment, his eyes held hers in a stare. What was that beautiful mind thinking?
Muriel almost forgot she had just made herself a new promise. Figure out herself first.
“Let’s go hiking,” she said, breaking the stare and looking out the windshield ahead.
He closed the door and went around the truck to the driver’s side before getting in. “You mind a boat ride?”
“A boat ride?” She lifted an eyebrow at him. “What kind of boat?”
“You’ll see,” Oliver said.
He pulled out of her mother’s driveway and swung a right toward town. “Where is this hiking trail?”
“The lighthouse,” he said, pointing out the window.
“What?” Muriel followed his finger. Then covered her mouth with her hands. “Seriously?”
A huge pearly white smile grew across his face. “Seriously.”
“I’ve been wanting to go there since I first came here.” She giggled at the idea.
He hung his arm out the open window and drove with the smile on his face to town. Muriel couldn’t believe he was taking her to the lighthouse. Had he read her whole list? No, she had added the lighthouse to her list last night after the hiking invitation.
“I can’t believe you’re taking me there,” she said with another laugh. She was going to the lighthouse.
The first time she’d seen the lighthouse on its own little island in the middle of the bay, she had promised herself she’d get to it someday. Who knew she would finally see it today?
Something about it had always called out to her.
After the breakup, it was like her beacon at night when she couldn’t sleep. It reminded her that life would keep going, that storms come and go, but she could be like that lighthouse and continue to shine.
“Here we are,” he said, pulling up to the docks.
“You have a boat?” she asked.
He nodded. “I have my own little Boston Whaler.”
She didn’t know what that meant, but she followed him down the docks, bouncing up and down with the waves. As he stopped, he stepped down onto a boat. She had expected to see a little dinghy, but there in a slip was a decent-sized boat, at least sixteen feet or more.
“Wow,” she said, watching Oliver get into the boat.
He held out his hand to help her down.
“Thank you,” she said, carefully climbing down. “This is really nice.”
Muriel didn’t know much about boats, but she hadn’t met too many teachers who could afford something like that.
“My father bought it for me,” he said, as if reading her mind. “For getting into medical school.”
Muriel was impressed. “What made you switch to teaching middle school?”
He shrugged. “There were a lot of things I didn’t like about being in medicine, but what I did like was working with the patients and teaching them about their health issues.”
“But middle school?” She laughed at the idea that middle school would be better than medicine. She would stick with elementary. “That’s like asking for punishment.”
“I don’t know, they’re pretty cool most of the time.” Oliver turned the key to the engine, and it rumbled in the water. “Besides, it was a way to stay in Blueberry Bay.”
That surprised her. She didn’t know many people who’d taken a job to teach just to stay in a certain place. The people she taught along with were just like her—teaching was their passion. She had wanted to be a teacher as long as she had been in school. “How long have you lived here?”
“About a year now,” he said. “I used to live in Boston.”
She wondered back to the night with Jules and the mysterious woman who lived in Concord. “What brought you to Concord that night?”
“Hold on.” Oliver smiled as he began to pull the boat out of its slip.
Oliver focused on driving the boat out of the docks and into the bay, and Muriel noticed he didn’t answer the question; instead. She sat in the passenger seat across from Oliver. The small boat floated through the resting lobster boats and picked up speed once outside the wake.
“We have to go on the other side of the island to dock,” Oliver shouted over the engine.
Muriel sat back, letting the wind blow her hair around. She closed her eyes for a second as the air whipped across her face as the sun warmed it. The sky was the color of baby robin eggshell and couldn’t have been more perfect. Oliver pulled around the island slowly and pointed to the shoreline.
“Do you see the deer?” He slowed down and quieted the engine’s rumble.
Off in the distance, on her mother’s land, a pack of deer stood in the marshes. “That’s incredible!”
Muriel had never seen anything like it. Standing together, the deer chewed on the blueberry bushes.
“They’re eating all your blueberries,” he said. “It looks like a couple does and some fawns.”
“They deserve a little treat,” she said, watching the deer munch away on the bushes.
“Have you seen moose yet?” Oliver asked.
She shook her head. “No, but I want to.” She should add that to her list.
“I was running down Main Street one time and heard hoofs behind me,” Oliver said. “Then I turned around and a moose was just running behind me.” He began to laugh. “I got so scared, I ran to the police station!”
Muriel let out a giggle at the thought of Oliver running to the police station over a moose.
She looked up and noticed a bird swooping in the air. “Is that an eagle?”
Oliver shook his head. “No, just a hawk.”
She watched it glide in the sky over the pine trees. She looked back at Blueberry Bay as Oliver drove around the island. The village looked like a postcard from this view. Gray and white clapboard storefronts faced the bay. A white church steeple stood above it all. Brightly colored hulls of lobster boats dotted the water. Along the shoreline, sandy beaches outlined tall granite cliffs.
“You were right,” she said.
“About what?” he asked.
“This is the best view,” she said, looking at the town of Blueberry Bay. She could see her mother’s house, the market, and even her aunt’s house if she squinted her eyes.
“Oh, you just wait,” he said, turning the wheel. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Slowly, he pulled the boat up to a dock that looked older than the town and began tying up the boat. He climbed out first, then offered his hand to Muriel.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it and getting out of the boat. She looked up and there in the middle of the island was the red-and-white lighthouse. So tall she had to tilt her head all the way back to see the top. “Tell me we can go up inside.”
Oliver shook his head. “We can’t go inside.”
“Aw, shucks. Do we at least get to see it up close?”
“Don’t worry, there’s just as good a view where we’re going.” Oliver gave her a smile, and Muriel could feel something stir in her belly.
Looking out, she saw a rocky path leading to the lighthouse. “Is that how to get to the lighthouse?”
He nodded. “But there’s a better way.”
He waved his hand toward another path, which she hadn’t seen. “After you.”
Muriel walked ahead and followed the path that went away from the lighthouse and down along the water. As the path wound down and around, Muriel noticed the blueberries growing wild on the island.
She climbed up the rocks as the path curved around and up a stone wall. She kept climbing up and up. She looked back, catching how high up they had climbed. “Does it keep going?”
Oliver gave a nod. “We’re almost there.”
She turned back around and began climbing again, all the way until she reached the top.
And what a sight it was.
“Oh my…” She couldn’t find her words. Before her was what looked like all of Maine, the granite shoreline, the small village squeezed in, the houses scattered among pines, and the mountains towering in the background. “It’s amazing.”
And in that moment, everything seemed so trivial. Her problems, so small. She watched as a group of seagulls floated through the air, lifting up in unison and flying back down to the water. Had she ever been in unison with anything in her life?
Not her family. Before the divorce, she might have, but not now.
Not Zack. They never seemed to be on the same page.
Not her career. She worked in Concord but had used it as a placeholder for her next best job. She never expected to stay there.
Now not even herself. Hence the broken arm and broken heart all in one.
But right then, right at that spot, with every breath, Muriel felt in unison with the earth. As the wind blew against her face, her breath came naturally and fully. The gentle lapping of the waves was in sync with the beat of her heart. In. Out. In. Out.
After a long time, in complete bliss, Muriel turned to Oliver and asked, “How do I get a boat?”