Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Natalie returned with brown paper bags from the market. She unloaded the supplies on the Formica: sharp cheddar, slick Kalamata
olives, salted roasted almonds, lavash bread, Brie, and green grapes, followed by two bottles of sweating Sancerre. I flipped
on the sole overhead light. The bulb inside was one of those remodernized Edison-style ones, its filament like the trail my
sparklers used to make at night. I hiked myself onto the counter to hand a rattling group of fish-shaped ceramic plates to
a shirtless Wells, whose hair was damp from his outdoor shower. A beach towel clung to his hips, the cleave I used to kiss
just barely visible above it. Beneath a white ring of skin on his hairline where his hat must’ve covered, his face was sun-kissed,
pink.
“You didn’t wear sunscreen,” I said.
He looped his hand around my hips, helped me down. “Living dangerously,” he joked. I winced.
We’d be at my parents’ house in two hours, but we still heaped our tiny plates with snacks. Natalie and I sat at the two-seater
round table beside the rainy-day cabinet; Caleb took my spot on the counter. Wells vanished to get dressed. When he returned,
he stood behind my chair, clutching a green bottle of beer. “The ceiling fan in our room makes a clicky sound,” he said.
And even though I knew it would destroy me in the middle of the night—even though I knew Wells thought he was looking out for me—something about this information irritated me. “I’ll grab another fan from my parents’. They have extras.”
An olive fell from Caleb’s plate, fat and plump; it rolled an oily path across the floor. He slid from his perch to clean
it.
Olives. Olivia means olive tree, peace. My parents’ olive branch.
Caleb tossed the olive into the trash. A metaphor for no one, like the egg on the street outside the hotel that first day.
“Cheers,” Natalie said, holding her glass midair.
A List of Topics We Discussed
The weather
The increase of great white sharks on Cape Cod in the last decade
Which games we played on family vacations as kids
The possible weather
The store markup during vacation weeks, and whether or not things are worth buying anyway
When the weather will turn to fall/how it’s shifted since we were kids
A List of Topics We Did Not Discuss
Soulmail
Weddings
From Yes to I Do
My new job
The article depicting Wells and me
My special airing in three and a half hours
Despite the raging anxiety coursing through my veins, I fidgeted with excitement the entire traffic-laden drive to my parents’, and my heart split when they greeted us at the door.
Dad wore a button-down shirt I was sure was a recent purchase from either Marshalls or T.J.
Maxx. Mom was in the off-white linen jumpsuit that I’d bought for her when she’d come to the city for wedding dress shopping, the one she’d reportedly been wearing all spring and summer.
Growing up, we always had two things, even when we had almost nothing: seafood and stories. We had been dealt a brutal family
hand, and being able to latch on to certain truths about the world allowed me to prepare how I could feel about it. Facts,
narratives, informed consents, educated hypotheses—what they all shared was the currency of information. My father always
said that on long days with empty lines, they might have had no control over the ocean, but that gave them no right to be
bored. He and Petey competed to out-entertain each other with stories. I didn’t understand who Dad really was until I was
a little older and I went out on the boat with him, and he morphed into the equivalent of a fishing stand-up comedian. The
things he could control, he did: the amount of line he cast, where to drop the anchor, the length of time we spent on the
boat. Boating facts.
Back then, my belly had always been almost full enough, my body usually warm enough. Those two needs met, I’d been able to
ignore the fact that never once had the four Adlers been on a plane together. We never went out to dinner unless it was a
special occasion, and even then, the plates were paper, and we knew the waitress—always a waitress—by name. In the last five
years, I’d asked them often about what their retirement portfolios looked like, and they’d brushed me off every time until
it dawned on me: they didn’t have them.
I had thought every family celebrated Meatless May. I had thought wrong. Behind the scenes, Dad counted down until June first
each year, when the season opened. By that fifth month of the year, we were down to the bare bones: last summer’s canned tomatoes,
preserved fruit jams, Mom’s sourdough breads baked from the solemn mother starter in her glass jar.
The two times Sabrina had gone out fishing with him, she returned with green skin, hair tacky with puke. But I had loved the still-dark mornings, the hooded sweatshirts, the fine trickle of salt on my face and on the skin of my lips.
What I didn’t love was tuna-spearing. The twelve-foot aluminum harpoon dart was connected to a long wire that ran through
the shaft, back to the ship. There was something sad, poetic, about shooting that dart: the jolt it gave my father, the uncomfortable
knowledge that it speared a living thing beneath the ocean and sent an electric current through its cells to stun them, the
indisputable fact that this action would feed my family, heat our home, in the months to come.
Once they could afford to co-hire a spotter pilot twice a week—a company Caleb’s father lucked into, which vaulted the Mariners
into a new socioeconomic stratosphere—spotters flew hundreds of feet above the sea, searching for tuna. He told no stories
those days. The other days were spent with him sitting up high, searching for flashes of white just below the surface.
Right now, here at my familiar, comfortable childhood home, I wasn’t sure if it was my father or the memories of those darting
fish, but one thing was certain: the promise of the night brought a current down my spine. My insides burned with something
smoky and exciting—a firework, a spark, a campfire.
“I can’t believe there are no stains on this,” I teased, brushing my mother’s neckline.
Mom’s face broke into a grin. “Hey! I’m not that bad.”
“Sally and Harold!” Wells said. He rocked up on the balls of his feet. “So great to see you. Thanks for having us. What a
treat. A real treat.”
I shot him a look. A real treat?
“Anyone who brings Olivia home is fine by me,” Mom said. Ever the diplomat.
“Mmm-hmm,” Dad said, waiting an extra beat to take Wells’s hand.
I’d prewarned my parents about Wells’s return into my life, but their greeting was so painfully perfunctory no one even tried to pretend it was warm.
At least it was over. “Natalie and Caleb are here!” I said.
I was reaching back through time, as eager to smooth things over for my parents as I always have been.
They both hugged Natalie, then turned their attention to Caleb.
“Caleb Mariner. As I live and breathe!” Mom exclaimed.
“Welcome,” Dad said. “Always knew you’d come back around.”
“This is way better than going home,” Caleb said. “Brought you a box of those fancy Chatham candies.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Mom said. “Remember when you two ate a whole box, and you both got sick?”
“We watched Maury Povich on the couch together,” I said, grinning. “Totally worth it.”
“Don’t be too excited. I swiped them from my parents’ counter.” His return smile was impish.
Inside, the same-smell of home washed over me. I was convinced that the memory portal lived in the scent of my living room:
laundry, light charcoal, the lemony-peppermint cleaner Mom made with vinegar. “You rearranged?” I ran a hand along the back
of the couch.
A smile flashed across my mother’s face. She tucked a strand of hair into her ponytail. “Oh, it’s temporary,” she said. “Viewing
party for your special later. I hope everyone gets an okay seat.”
My stomach hollowed. “Great idea.”
My parents led everyone out back, but I detoured into the kitchen, where I checked the cupboards for snacks, the fridge for
its stock, same as I always did. The refrigerator held giant glass pitchers of filtered water. Mom drank more water than any
other human on earth. I was always trying to keep up with her. I fingered the scuff on the overhead cabinet from the time
Dad scraped it with a fishing rod. Same, same, same. I wanted to pull it over me like a warm coat.
“Mom,” I called on my way out back. “What happened to replacing that cab—” I froze when I took in the scene before me.
My parents had gone all out. Red-and-white tablecloths covered the picnic tables on the screened-in porch. The fire pit Dad
had dug twenty years ago smoldered and steamed; orange glowed around the edges of a specialty tarp. Beneath it, I knew, were
large rocks, wood burning on top, plus a thick layer of rinsed seaweed.
“You didn’t,” I breathed. My fingers pulsed to grab my phone, but I dismissed the idea of going for it. I didn’t want to share
this. It was mine.
Dad gave me his genuine smile.
I grabbed Caleb’s forearm. He’d gotten a couple new freckles from our walk earlier.
“Yes,” Caleb said. Slowly, he pumped his fist.
“What is it?” Natalie asked.
“Clambake,” I answered. “Oh, my god. I’ve never been more excited in my life.”
“I’d forgotten you do this.” Wells rubbed his hands together and hesitated. “Anything I can do to help?” he asked my mom.
“I can, um. Shuck? Or clean up something?”
“It’s all prepped,” Dad said.
“Oh,” Wells said. His shoulders slumped a fraction of an inch, and he straightened them. “If that changes, I’m your guy.”
My chest contracted. This was my soulmate. He’d done me so wrong. Both of those facts were true.