No Beach Like Nantucket by Grace Palmer

Author:Grace Palmer [Palmer, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grace Palmer
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

Brent

Rose hadn’t seen him yet. She was unloading groceries from the trunk of her car. He recognized that beat-up old VW Beetle, painted the most hideous yellow he’d ever seen in his life. He’d teased her about it on the night of their first date, over eight months ago.

“It’s cute,” she had said defensively back then. She stuck out her bottom lip like she was offended.

“It looks like it’s warning people away from a nuclear disaster,” was his response. She had laughed and punched him playfully in the shoulder. Right now, standing transfixed in the doorway of Frank’s house, he reached up and rubbed the spot where she’d hit him. He swore he could still feel the faintest ghost of an ache there.

He felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. Just like he had when Ally first called him the night of their fishing trip, he pinched himself hard. It hurt just as bad as it did the first time. He cursed and dropped his tool bag. It landed on his foot, claw end of the hammer first, which hurt, too. He cursed again, louder. When he bent down to grab his throbbing big toe, he rammed the top of his head on the wall of Frank’s house. That hurt most of all. He cursed a third time.

Only then did Rose look up and see him.

He felt like the idiot Coyote in those old Roadrunner cartoons. Forever hurting himself, looking like a fool. He certainly looked like a fool now. He could see Rose through his watery eyes. She was narrowing her gaze at him. The last of the sun was hitting her in the face at just the right angle so that she had to hold her hand over her forehead and squint to make out the source of the noise.

When she saw it was Brent, she blanched.

He could actually see the color drain from her face, though she was still two dozen yards or so away from him. “Brent?” she said softly. He knew that she didn’t believe what she was seeing, either.

The pain in his head and foot subsided gradually. He straightened up, wincing, and picked up his tool bag again. “Rose,” he mumbled by way of greeting. So much for being smooth and confident. He felt exactly the way he did when they first met on the beach all those weeks and months ago: like a bumbling dummy. Thick-lipped and slow-witted.

“Are you all right?” she asked, clearly concerned.

“Yeah. Fine. Dandy. Living the dream.”

“Ah.” She pursed her lips. Not in a mean way, just in a Rose way. “What are you doing here?” she blurted. “I mean, shoot, that was really rude. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, uh …”

“I was doing some work on your neighbor’s house,” Brent cut in to explain. “Don’t worry, I didn’t stalk you or anything.”

“I didn’t think you did,” she said, crossing her arms. “I wasn’t accusing you of that.”

“Felt like you might be.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

They stood

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