Chapter 5 #2
Isabel looked over her shoulder at her granddaughter, and her eyes shone.
The causeway brought them down onto the island, and Darius drove slowly through the small streets toward Bay View Drive.
Hearts Hotel rose in the distance on its slight rise, white clapboard catching the last of the sun, the wide wraparound porches and the tin roof painted gold by the angle of the light. Darius let his eyes drift toward it as he passed and felt, again, that small, unfamiliar tightness in his chest.
The house came into view at last. Set back behind a row of low palms. Modern coastal lines. Floor-to-ceiling glass at the front catches the gold light and throwing it back in long warm rectangles across the gravel drive. The bay glittered behind it, and a few gulls wheeled lazily overhead.
Darius pulled up, parked, and for a long moment, none of them moved.
They all just sat and looked. The bay. The house. The warm wind was coming in through the open windows.
“It’s even better than I remembered,” Emma whispered.
Isabel laughed softly and pressed her hand to her mouth.
“Darius,” Penny said from the back, “this is beautiful.”
“I’m glad you like it,” Darius told them, and meant it more than he could have said out loud.
He got out and rounded the SUV to open Isabel’s door for her.
The front door of the house opened a moment later, and a woman in a neat pale blue dress stepped out onto the porch, smiling as she came down the steps.
The housekeeper that the agency had arranged.
Darius hadn’t met her before, but Penny had vetted her thoroughly, the way Penny vetted everyone.
“Mr. Wayne,” the woman said warmly. “Welcome. I’m Marlene.”
“Marlene,” Darius said, shaking her hand. “Thank you for being here. This is my sister Isabel, my great-niece Emma, and our family friend Penny.”
“Welcome, all of you,” Marlene said. “I’m so glad you’ve arrived safely. The bedrooms are made up, and the linens are fresh, and I’ve put fruit and cold drinks in the kitchen. I do owe you an apology, though, sir.”
“An apology?” Darius asked.
“Supper,” Marlene said, with a small wince.
“The previous family who came through left the kitchen in more of a state than I’d been told to expect.
I’ve been at it most of the afternoon, but I won’t have a proper supper ready for tonight.
I’ll have something good for you all by tomorrow evening, I promise.
Tonight, I’m afraid you’ll need to fend for yourselves. ”
“Don’t worry about it, Marlene,” Darius told her easily. “We’re just happy to be here. I’ll go and collect something for everyone now. What would you recommend?”
“Sweet Bay Pizza on Shell Street,” Marlene said without hesitation. “It’s been there for as long as I’ve lived on Sanibel. The Carlucci family owns it. The pizzas are wonderful, and the sit-down service is just as warm. You can’t go wrong.”
“Sweet Bay Pizza,” Darius repeated. “Thank you.”
Isabel looked tired but content. Emma was already running up the porch steps to peer in through the front windows. Penny was stretching her back with her hands on her hips.
“Go on, Darius,” Isabel told him. “We’ll get settled in. Bring back something good.”
“Pepperoni,” Emma called over her shoulder.
“Pepperoni,” Darius agreed.
“And ice cream, please, Uncle Darius,” Emma turned and grinned. “We need to celebrate the start of our summer vacation.”
“Ice cream it is,” Darius said, with a laugh.
After he finished unloading the trunk, Darius climbed back into the SUV and pulled out of the drive, leaving the women to walk into the house together.
The sun had begun to drop in earnest now, the sky going pink and orange and a deep, tender lavender at the edges.
Darius drove slowly back along Bay View Drive, past Hearts Hotel still glowing on its rise, past the small cluster of shops at the end of Bay View Drive, and turned onto Shell Street.
Sweet Bay Pizza sat about halfway down the small business street, its windows lit warm and yellow against the bluing evening. Darius parked along the curb outside, climbed out of the SUV, and walked up to the door.
He reached for the door handle just as a woman approached from the other direction.
He stopped, took a step back, and pulled the door open for her instead.
The woman paused, looked up at him, and a small, surprised smile broke across her face.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
She stepped inside ahead of him.
Darius followed her in. The pizza place was small and warm and family-run in the particular way that only a place that had been there for forty years could be.
Red and white checked tablecloths. A glass case of pizza slices in the front window.
An old man behind the counter in a flour-dusted white apron, talking quietly to a teenage girl at the register who looked enough like him to be his granddaughter.
The woman ahead of Darius walked to the menu board on the back wall and stopped to read it. She had her car keys looped around one finger of her left hand and a small soft leather wallet held against her side with her elbow.
Darius walked up beside her and let his eyes travel up the menu board, too. He read it through twice without really seeing any of it.
She was tired. He could tell that without looking directly at her.
She was tired in a particular way he had noticed before, in women who’d had a long day and were still somehow standing graceful inside it.
There was a small line between her brows that looked like it had been put there earlier in the afternoon and hadn’t quite gone away.
He turned slightly toward her.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Darius said quietly, “but you look like a local. Could I ask you for a recommendation?”
She turned. Her eyes were warm and a soft brown, tired like the rest of her face, but they smiled at him with an immediate, easy kindness that caught him a little off guard.
“Of course,” she said. “Who’s it for?”
“My sister, my great-niece, an old family friend, and myself,” Darius answered. “My sister doesn’t eat much these days. My great-niece is eleven and would eat pizza every meal of every day if we let her. My friend will want something a little more grown-up. I’m easy.”
She laughed gently. The sound of it landed somewhere in his chest in a way he didn’t quite know what to do with.
“All right,” she said. “A few questions. Anchovies or no?”
“No anchovies,” Darius said firmly.
“Good answer,” she said. “Anyone a vegetarian?”
“No.”
“Does your great-niece eat pineapple on pizza?”
“She does not,” Darius said, “and she has strong feelings about people who do.”
The woman laughed again. “She and I would get along famously. All right. Does your friend like spicy?”
“Mild to medium,” Darius said. “She’s adventurous about flavors but not heat.”
The woman nodded, thinking as she looked at the menu.
“Then I’d say a margherita for your sister, simple and gentle.
A classic pepperoni for your great-niece.
And for your friend, the caramelized onion and goat cheese, which is the family’s signature, and which I’d put up against any pizza on the island. ”
“Sold,” Darius said.
“And one for you?” she asked.
“I’ll just take a slice of whatever’s in the window,” Darius said. “I’ll eat in the car on the way back.”
She smiled at him, a slow, amused smile. “Mr. Carlucci does a very good slice of plain cheese.”
“Then a slice of plain cheese it is,” Darius said.
He turned to the counter and placed the order. The old man, Mr. Carlucci, took it with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had been making pizzas for fifty years. He told Darius it would be twenty minutes, and asked if he’d like to wait inside or in his car.
“Inside,” Darius said. “Thank you.”
The woman placed her own order, a large pizza to take home, exchanged a few warm words with Mr. Carlucci that suggested she had known him for a long time, and stepped back to wait near the front beside Darius.
There was a small bench by the window. They sat, leaving a polite gap between them.
“Are you here for the summer?” she asked, after a moment of comfortable quiet.
“I am,” Darius told her. “We arrived an hour ago. We’re staying at Bay View Beach House, at the end of Bay View Drive.”
Her face lit up with recognition.
“Oh, what a lovely place,” she said warmly. “The family who owns it is wonderful. I went to high school with their daughter years ago. I know they started renting it out for the summer, and it’s usually fully booked. You must have been very lucky to get it for the summer.”
Darius opened his mouth to answer.
He hesitated.
He could have told her in that moment. He could have said that he hadn’t rented the house, that he had purchased it, that the family she remembered was no longer the family that owned it.
He could have told her, gently, that the father had passed last year and the daughter had let it go.
He could have done the small, kind thing of being honest with this small, kind woman in the small, warm pizza place.
He didn’t.
“It’s a beautiful house,” Darius said instead. “I’m grateful to be there.”
The lie of omission caught somewhere in his throat as he said it. He covered it with a small, polite smile.
She didn’t notice. She had no reason to. She just nodded warmly, the way kind strangers nodded, and turned slightly on the bench to look at him a little more directly.
“Have you and your family been to Sanibel before?” she asked.
“A few times,” Darius told her. “I haven’t been here in a couple of years. This is the first proper vacation I’ve taken in a long time.”
“Good for you,” she said softly. “Sweet Blossom Bay has a way of being good for people who need it.”
Her name was called from the counter then. Her pizza was ready. Linda. It was only then that he realized she hadn’t introduced herself to him.
She rose. Darius rose too, in a polite, gentlemanly gesture. She picked up the warm box from the counter, tucked her wallet under her arm, and turned to him with another of those warm smiles that for some reason made his pulse jump.
“Enjoy your stay,” she told him. “And welcome to Sweet Blossom Bay for the summer.”
The line landed in his chest like a hand laid gently on his shoulder.
“Thank you,” Darius said quietly.
She walked to the door. He watched her go. He didn’t know why he was watching her. He was a man with three pizzas on order and a family settling into a house at the end of Bay View Drive. But he watched her anyway. The door swung closed behind her with a small bell-tinkle.
Darius turned back toward the counter.
A small dark sedan rolled past the front window. He glanced up. He saw her, profile turned away from him, hair lifted slightly by the open window. She didn’t see him. The car turned at the corner and disappeared.
Darius stood for a moment with the warm yellow light of the pizza place around him and the smell of yeast and tomato in the air, and he didn’t know what had just happened to him.
The woman had looked familiar in some way he couldn’t place.
The smile she had given him at the door had done something to him he hadn’t been prepared for.
The welcome she had offered, simple and warm and freely given, had landed somewhere inside him that he hadn’t known was waiting for it.
Darius gave himself a mental shake. He’d been driving for hours. He was tired. He was a man with two properties to acquire, a sister to settle and a great-niece to mind. He was not a man who noticed women in pizza places.
The old man called him forward. Darius collected the warm boxes and the small slice of plain cheese in its own little paper plate, paid the bill, and thanked Mr. Carlucci warmly. The old man wished him a pleasant evening and told him to come back soon.
Darius walked out into the soft blue-gold evening with the stack of pizza boxes warming his arm.
The streetlights had begun to come on along Shell Street.
The warm air had the bay smell he remembered from when he was a boy.
Somewhere a dog barked in the distance, and somewhere else a screen door slammed cheerfully.
The day was settling into evening, and the small community at the edge of Sanibel Island seemed to wrap itself around him in a welcoming embrace that almost felt like he’d just returned home from years of absence.
He stood for a moment beside the SUV, the boxes warm against his arm, and let himself feel the strange, small disquiet that had settled in him in the last twenty minutes.
Linda flashed into his mind. He didn’t know who she was. But the smile she had given him at the door had done something to him.
And the welcome she’d offered, “welcome to Sweet Blossom Bay for the summer,” she had said, had made him feel like he’d just been accepted here.
He shook his head at himself. Darius couldn’t believe how fanciful he was being. He took a deep breath in. Boy, he really did need some time off.
Darius opened the back door of the SUV, set the pizzas carefully on the seat, and climbed in behind the wheel.
He turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb.
He drove slowly back along Bay View Drive in the soft blue-gold dusk, with the gulf darkening to indigo on his right and the lights of Hearts Hotel coming on softly in the distance ahead of him.
The pizzas warmed the seat behind him. The bay smell came in through the open window.
The first stars were beginning to show above the water.
Darius gripped the wheel a little tighter than he needed to.
He had the small, undeniable, unfamiliar feeling that this was going to be a summer to remember. He didn’t yet know how much he was going to mean that.