Our Place on the Island by Erika Montgomery

Author:Erika Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

18

1999

It takes a great many things to make a successful clambake. By the time guests circle around the teeming bowls of steamed seafood and vegetables, paper plates trembling in their hands from anticipation, no less than eight hours of effort have delivered them their bounty. There’s corn to de-silk. Potatoes to scrub. Cheesecloth to cut. Rockweed to collect from the beach. The pit alone can take hours to dig out of the sand and line with rocks, the fire another several to set up and then burn hot enough to cook. Start to finish, a clambake can take a full day, which means the thing that a clambake requires most of all is patience.

Mickey had that once, she thinks as she rolls over, sending out a chorus of groans and creaks from the twin’s old springs. She grew up around clambakes, both as guest and cook. She knows how much time it takes to do it right. Yet where was all that patience when she was growing her restaurant? It was no different than cooking, heating up a pan slowly to avoid burning your food when you added it. Tiffany was the one who’d made that comparison. Her oldest friend, who could have run a restaurant in her sleep.

Mickey turns onto her back and sighs. She looks up at the slanted ceiling, at the same configuration of water stains meeting at the seam of the pine boards where the eave connects, the dot-to-dot puzzle she solved a hundred times every summer, when she lost sleep over a broken heart or some other disappointment that seemed so crushing, so life-ending at the time. The memory of her phone call with Wes throbs like a hangover headache. Before bed, she called him at home but got the machine and proceeded to ramble on, hoping he would put her out of her misery and pick up, but he never did. She slept fitfully, too warm despite the fan beside her bed, and woke every few hours, sure she heard phantom rings from downstairs: Wes finally calling back to say he could forgive her, that they could move on from this together. But the darkness was always silent when Mickey opened her eyes.

Down on the lawn, muffled voices sail through the screen beside her bed. The slamming of car doors, then the rumble of an engine. Sitting up, Mickey pulls back the sheers to look down on the driveway in time to see a black sports car disappear around the trees.

Normally she’d be looking forward to a Beech House clambake, up before everyone else, and the first in the kitchen to start prepping, but this morning the prospect of the big party makes her want to pull the covers over herself and hide. What will she say when people want to talk to her about Piquant? The firepit is not even lit, and already knots of worry are tightening in her stomach. Here she is, back on the Vineyard, her dream of owning her

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