Page 2 of Must Have Been Love

“Put your car in park and shut off the engine,” he shouts over the thunder of the rain. He brings his gaze up to my face. “You come to work at the hotel?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“I hope you’re not a visitor. You picked a bad day for it.”

He’s telling me. But I kind of like the way he’s chatty despite the weather. “My dad used to own the bar on the island,” I tell him. “The Salty Dog.” And now I own it, thanks to his will.

“You’re Wayne’s kid?”

Of course he’d know my dad. The island isn’t exactly huge. There are only a few hundred full time residents, though it’s a tourist haven during the warmer months, when the population surges by the thousands on a daily basis. Most come for the day, though there are guest houses in the town center along with the stupidly expensive hotel that opened late last year. I checked out the prices before realizing I could barely afford one night there.

“That’s right,” I shout back at him and he blinks, opening his mouth then closing it, like he’s thought better of what he was about to say. Instead he shouts out to a second man dressed in a yellow rain slicker. “Hey Jesse!”

The man who turns around is younger than me. “Yep?”

“This is Wayne’s daughter, the one who inherited The Dog.” The older man grins. “That’s Jesse,” he says to me as though I should know who he’s talking about.

Jesse walks over, leaning down until his face is next to the other guy’s. “Hey.” He gives me the biggest smile.

“Hi.” I smile back, trying to be friendly, but he seems disappointed by my response for some reason.

“I’m going to lock up the gate,” he tells the older man. “We’re ready to go.”

“Okay.” The man frowns again, then looks at me. “Once we get to Liberty, the bar is on the right as you drive up. It’s been empty a while.”

I take a deep breath, trying to ignore the guilt that washes over me. I’d had no idea my dad was sick. I hadn’t heard from him for years. Didn’t even know he’d gone back to the little island off the Atlantic Coast to run a bar.

He and my mom separated when I was a baby and Lee was five. I barely remember him, save for the occasional visit when he was sober enough to remember he had kids and for Mom to let him into our nice house in Hollywood Hills. Lee remembers a bit more – the visit to Liberty before I was born, the way he and mom would throw things at each other during every fight.

Theirs was a passion that burned hot and fast. Looking back, their relationship was so alien to the way I see my mom now. She’s the ultimate responsible parent, and he was a free spirit, never willing to settle down.

She says I take after him in that way, and I know it exasperates her. I just don’t know any other way to be. I’ve lived in dozens of different places and had a lot of different jobs. It’s not the life she hoped I’d have.

“Thank you,” I tell the older man. I’m feeling nervous about seeing the bar for the first time. There’s something portentous about it, especially with this rain streaming down.

He nods, still giving me that strange look, then tells me to roll the window back up. Not that it matters, my face and neck are already soaked.

“Who was that?”

Lee’s voice comes as a shock. I’d forgotten we hadn’t hung up our call.

“The ferry captain and Jesse, his assistant, I think.”

She laughs. “You’ll know everybody’s name within a week. There are no secrets in small towns.”

And yet it feels like the opposite. We didn’t even know my dad was here for the last few years. He’d inherited the bar from his own mother, and had been running it for the last five years before he became ill. But he hadn’t bothered to let us know.

That had hurt more than anything. The fact he’d finally settled down for a few years. Enough to have a little business he could leave to his daughter.

“As part of the bequest he would like for you to stay on the island for a period of six months,” the lawyer told me as he read me the contents of the will. Apparently – according to my mom, who’s a paralegal – that clause is easily contestable.

But I’m not sure I want to contest it. I’m not sure of anything really. I have nowhere better to be and I need to see the island my dad grew up on, the island that everybody in my family can remember except me.

And then I’ll make some decisions.

It takes twenty minutes for the ferry to cross the little channel of the Atlantic Ocean between the mainland and Liberty Island, and for the entire journey I can see nothing but rain. The only indicator we’ve actually reached land is the way the boat slows down and the crew starts to rush around, preparing for us to dock.

The ramp groans as they let it hit the concrete of Liberty’s jetty, then the van at the front starts to pull away.

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