But Darcy knew she wouldn’t be able to relax in the garden until she was certain that the man on the other side of the hedge was not Boyz Szweda. Even though it was impossible that it was Boyz, this was a pretty desperate case of seeing is believing.
She stood, picked up her book and her water bottle, and slowly, humming, she strolled through the garden to her house. Boyz wouldn’t recognize her from the back, after all, especially since she’d grown out her once-chic asymmetrically cut hair so long it fell in dark waves below her shoulders. She didn’t hurry. She even paused to check her Knock Out rosebush before climbing the steps to the back porch and stepping inside.
She shut the door gently, quietly. She put her gardening tools in their rack. She leaned against the door and drew in a few deep breaths.
This was ridiculous. This was so not her kind of behavior. She was no longer a divorced and lonely female sniveling herself to sleep at night. She held an important position in the town’s library. She had friends—she had a boyfriend, a carpenter, big and handsome and very good with his hands.
She should have Nash over for dinner tonight! She could throw something on the grill and they could open some beer and eat outdoors. She could change out of her gardening clothes and slip into a pretty sundress….
Really? Were these thoughts really coming from her own mind? Clearly, she wasn’t plotting to seduce Nash. All she had to do was open the front door to seduce Nash. Obviously, she wanted to show off for Boyz who might not even be there.
Maddening. Here she was, an accomplished woman thinking like a love-scorned teenager.
The important thing was that Darcy was only thinking that way. Not acting that way. Yet.
She needed a distraction. She needed to get out of the house and away from this mood buzzing around her like a swarm of wasps.
So: Where was her cellphone? On the kitchen counter. Good. She hit Jordan’s number. Darcy had known Jordan for only three years, but with some people a friendship fit perfectly and immediately, like the rare times when the first dress you tried on was instant magic. She had first met Jordan at the library—always a good omen. Darcy had taken her bag lunch out to the garden to eat on a bench by the crab apple trees, and she’d heard the unmistakable sound of retching. Expecting to find some inexperienced drunken teenager, she discovered a pretty blond woman on her knees near the tulips.
“Are you okay?” Darcy asked. “How can I help you?”
Without looking up, the woman croaked, “My tote’s over there. I’ve got some saltines in a plastic bag and a can of 7Up. If you could bring it to me…”
“Of course. And I’ll get you some wet paper towels from the bathroom, so you can wipe your hands and face.”
“Oh, thank you. But please don’t tell the librarians that I barfed in their garden.”
“We’ll shovel some dirt over it. No one will know.”
By the time Darcy returned with the paper towels, the other woman had managed to move to a bench, where she sat very slowly chewing a tiny corner of a saltine.
“Thanks,” she said to Darcy. She carefully wiped her hands and face and a few strands of sticky hair. “I’m not drunk,” she announced. “I’m pregnant.”
“And I’m a librarian,” Darcy told her.
“Oh, no!”
“Oh, yes.”
“I’m so sorry I barfed in your garden.”
“Better than if you’d barfed on the books,” Darcy said wryly.
The other woman managed a weak chuckle.
They sat on the bench for an hour, talking. For more than an hour, actually; Darcy went fifteen minutes over her lunch break, but she often came in early, so she figured she was allowed. She learned that Jordan was newly married to Lyle Morris, an island guy she’d known and adored all her life. They’d started kissing and making out when they were fourteen. They lost their virginity to each other when they were both sixteen, but it had been so quick and weird and they’d been so guilt ridden and afraid she’d gotten pregnant—she hadn’t—that they never dated after that. After high school, Lyle went into the army. Jordan had worked at her parents’ liquor store and tried going out with other guys, but it never worked. She missed Lyle. She started writing Lyle, cheerful, sex-free, letters. Four years later, when Lyle got out of the army, he walked into her parents’ store on Main Street, picked Jordan up in his powerful arms, carried her to his car, and drove to his apartment out on Surfside Road.
“I know how to do it right this time,” he’d told her.
And he did.
They’d married a few months later. They’d been married a year and they were going to have a baby.
Darcy gave Jordan a capsule summary of her life and promised a more detailed account when she wasn’t working. That night, Jordan came to her house and drank milk while Darcy drank wine and told her about her fruitcake parents, her darling grandmother, her weird marriage, her divorce. By the end of the evening, they were both hoarse from talking fast and laughing hysterically. Their friendship grew strong and fast from that evening, and when Darcy joined Jordan and Lyle at the beach with their friends one Sunday, she slipped into the group as easily as a fish into water. She’d found her tribe.
Now Jordan answered her cell. “This is your neighborhood help line. I’m sorry, but you may not park your car in my driveway.”
Jordan and her family lived in town, like Darcy did, and their big old house was surrounded by rental houses, just like Darcy’s. Jordan’s husband was a contractor, so he was responsible for some of the nouveau mansions built on the outskirts of town, with ocean views to die for, but Lyle and Jordan chose to live in town. They had a daughter, Kiks. They planned on having at least one more, and they wanted their children to be able to walk to the library, the pharmacy, the post office. They wanted to have that small-town feeling—and they did, until one by one the houses around them were sold off to people who used them as their third or fourth or fifth home or for rental income. Nice in-town houses could rent for a good five grand a week in the summer.
Most first timers to the island were shocked by how close the houses in town were built to one another. Some were only five feet apart. Probably the sensible builders of the nineteenth century intended these walls of houses along the main streets of the village to block the wind that howled over the water. Certainly the houses served this purpose. Maybe the forefathers and especially the foremothers, often alone while their husbands were out at sea, liked having neighbors nearby on this isolated island. The streets in town were narrow. Many were one-way. Few had garages; even fewer had driveways. Parking could be an issue—kind of like city parking—but no one expected problems here in paradise.
“What have you got?” Darcy asked, sitting down on the white bench in the back hall to take off her gardening clogs.