Elin Hilderbrand - Nantucket Nights

Kayla wished she didn’t have to do this, but Theo’s odd behavior of the last month or so left her no choice. She meandered through the back streets so that she cruised by the school at ten past four, and sure enough, there was Luke in his green Nantucket Day Camp T-shirt, holding two cupcakes on a paper plate and a purple balloon, squinting against the sun. Her fifty-year-old son trapped in an eight-year-old body. Luke had been an old man since he was born. He liked order, he liked adhering to rules, he liked promptness. Kayla had him on a schedule when he was only three weeks old, and later, he refused to eat unless he was wearing a bib. Kayla had read somewhere that the youngest child in the family was the most likely to be footloose and fancy-free, but not this one. Kayla and Raoul had dubbed Luke the child most likely to develop an ulcer. The inefficiency of the world around him was always letting him down.

Kayla pulled up next to the curb, and Luke opened the door. The plate of cupcakes covered neatly with plastic wrap went on the seat between them, and then he tucked the balloon into the car.

“Theo never showed,” he said, and in his voice was the unmistakable tone: Kids today. You just can’t trust them.

“It’s only ten after,” Kayla said, pulling into a vacant parking spot. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. We’ll wait here five minutes and see if he shows up.”

Luke sighed deeply and fastened his seat belt. There was a faint pink juice stain above his upper lip. He tapped one of his little black soccer shoes against the floor mat,

“So how was the last day of camp? You had a party, I take it.”

Luke nodded, crossed his arms over the front of his T-shirt.

“I’ll bet you’re glad you don’t have to wear that shirt anymore,” Kayla said. “We can use it for a rag.”

Luke plucked the shirt away from his body and sniffed it. “Be sure to wash it first,” he said.

They watched the cars pass on Surfside Road. People were leaving the beach, the tops of their Jeeps down, damp towels wrapped around the roll-bars. Contractors who kept normal hours headed home in their pickups. A few cars honked their horns joyfully; it was, after all, the start of a holiday weekend. The last weekend of summer.

“Mom,” Luke said, staring resolutely out the window. “Theo isn’t coming.”

Kayla turned the key in the ignition. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Predictably, at home, Theo’s Jeep was in the driveway. Luke refrained from saying anything, and Kayla followed suit. They headed inside. Theo sat at the breakfast bar in just his swim trunks, inspecting his toenails. He did not look up when they came in.

“Hello,” Kayla said. She put the groceries in the fridge. Theo stood up and intercepted the cucumber salad; he got a fork and started eating right from the plastic container. Luke glared at him as if to say: Barbarian. Luke wrote his name in block letters on a piece of masking tape and put the tape over the plastic covering his cupcakes.

“These are mine,” Luke said.

“Fuck off,” Theo said.

Luke looked at Kayla as if to say: Are you going to tolerate this?

“Theo,” Kayla said, as nonconfrontationally as possible, “that salad is for all of us.”

“You’re contaminating it,” Luke said. “With your fork.”

Theo stopped, stared at his little brother. “I said, fuck off.”

Kayla ushered Luke out of the kitchen, and he whispered to her, “You forgot to yell at him for not coming to get me.”

“I didn’t forget,” she said. “I’m just picking my moment.”

“I’m telling Dad,” Luke said.

“Me, too,” she said, and this seemed to satisfy him.

The girls were in the living room. Jennifer was watching Oprah, and Cassidy B. was reading the latest Harry Potter book, finishing the bag of Lay’s potato chips.

“I can’t believe you’re eating those,” Jennifer said to her. “You might as well be ingesting poison.”

Cassidy B. shrugged.

“Hi, girls,” Kayla said.

“Theo forgot to pick me up,” Luke announced.

“So?” Jennifer said.

Cassidy B. didn’t look up from her book. Kayla’s girls were like before and after pictures of adolescence. At fourteen, Jennifer was showing all the signs of womanhood: She had breasts, and long, shiny dark hair, her voice was throaty. She worried about her weight and her complexion; she read the nutrition information labels of everything she ate. Cassidy B. was eleven and still a child. She had baby fat and a clear, untroubled look in her eyes. When she had friends over, they read or played with Cassidy’s dollhouse.

Kayla loved her children so much that she kissed the three of them. First she kissed Luke’s juice-stained lips; then she kissed the side of Cassidy B.’s face while she read, and even Jennifer let Kayla kiss her, a quick, dry kiss on top of her sweet-smelling hair.

Theo came into the living room, still eating the cucumber-dill salad. “What the fuck is going on in here?” he said.

Now Kayla had three kids looking at her as if to say: Are you going to tolerate this?

And then the phone rang.

“Kayla?”

It was Antoinette. The woman had the sexiest voice on the planet. It was dark and exotic, like sandalwood, like expensive chocolate.

“Hi.”

“What’s going on?”

“You’re supposed to bring the lobster tails,” Kayla said. She checked the kitchen clock; it was half past four. “Can you swing it? If not, I’ll send Theo to East Coast Fish. He owes me.” Kayla turned around, and there was Theo, staring at her. He was such a handsome kid-brown hair bleached a shade lighter by the sun, golden brown eyes, and an incredible tan-he was his father all over again. Yet the way he looked at her was disturbing. Always, now, these disturbing looks, like he knew something about her that she didn’t know herself.

“I can swing it,” Antoinette said. “I have time.”

“Of course you do,” Kayla said. Antoinette was the freest person Kayla knew, and as if to illustrate the concept, Luke stepped through the sliding glass doors onto the deck, holding his purple balloon, and he let it go. It floated away.

Kayla put her hand over the receiver. “Luke, honey, why did you do that?”

Luke came back inside, glared at Theo, and marched off, stomping his soccer shoes.

“Do you want to borrow a couple of kids?” Kayla asked Antoinette.

“Looks like I might be seeing my own this weekend,” Antoinette said.

“Your own what?”

“My own kid.”

Kayla was silent. Back in the reaches of Antoinette’s past was a daughter whom she’d given up for adoption and never seen again.

“You mean…”

“She called a few days ago. Her name is Lindsey. Lindsey. A white name if ever I heard one.”

“Is… is she white?” Theo was still glaring at Kayla, and she covered the receiver again with her hand. “Do you mind?” she asked.

“No,” he said coldly, his eyes not leaving her face. “I don’t mind.”

Kayla stepped out onto the deck and scanned the horizon for Luke’s balloon, but it was gone already.

“She wasn’t white when I knew her,” Antoinette said. “She wasn’t black or white. She was… well, I remember thinking she was the color of a wine cork. Obviously I’m a woman who drinks too much. This whole thing has hit me sideways. This whole thing is fucking me up.”

“Yeah, I believe it,” Kayla said. “So she’s coming this weekend?”

“Tomorrow. I tried to explain to her that I live in the woods on an island thirty miles out to sea. I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t much of a people person. Didn’t seem to faze her.”