Page 1 of An Island Summer
PROLOGUE
“Listen,” Pappy said to Meghan as he stilled his fishing pole, the two of them rocking gently in the old two-seater skiff out on the Pamlico Sound. The haze that draped the water had begun to burn off, stirring the seagulls above. One of them landed on a tuft of seagrass nearby, flapping its white angelic wings.
Pappy’s wise attention moved to the sunrise on the horizon and the stripes of shimmering gold and pink that it had painted on the surface of the water. The boat bobbed in its place, anchored between two patches of marsh. The tall vegetation leaned over in unison with the push of the early morning breeze.
Fifteen-year-old Meghan Gray tucked a wayward strand of her dark chestnut hair behind her ear and sharpened her hearing, honing in on the squawk of another seagull in the distance and the rhythmic lapping of the water against the side of the boat. “What do you hear, Pappy?” she asked her grandfather.
His gaze found her, and he looked at her with a strange sort of awe; something bigger was on his mind. He smiled, his tanned, weathered face creasing along the sides and at the edges of his eyes. “That’s calm we hear,” he said, his voice breathy like the coastal wind. “It’s what we all long for, even if we don’t know it.”
She closed her eyes, following her grandfather’s lead, and breathed in the briny air, noting the thick salt in the wind and the light mist on her skin from the fog that was burning off as the sun climbed higher in the sky.
“If you ever feel like you don’t have it,” he said, bringing her out of the moment, “come back here and find it.” He took in a long, slow breath and let it out. “I can’t say that I lived my life perfectly, or that I have all the answers—God knows I’ve bungled some pretty big things…” He looked up at the heavens, an ache she’d never seen before on his face. “But if I do one thing right, it’s to teach you that whatever’s going on in your life, calm is within you. Sometimes, you just have to wade through the deep waters to find it.”
That moment with just the two of them, in the mist of dawn, had been perfect. So perfect that recalling it would bring her to tears, even ten years later.
ONE
With a determined huff, Meghan dumped her red-and-yellow waitress uniform into the trash bin outside her apartment with force, and reached around the trailer full of her things to shut the hatch on the old Honda. Her chocolate Labrador Charlie paced around excitedly beside her, his tail thumping against the side of the packed car whenever she came near.
“I’ve finally had it,” she said to her best friend Tess Fuller, while she wrestled one last bag into the back seat. She ran her hands down her tank top and cut-offs to wipe the perspiration off them, the heat wrapping around her like a fiery serpent.
“I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did,” Tess said.
Meghan pulled her hair through the back of her baseball cap to get it off her neck and eyed Tess, her confidante since childhood. Tess, wearing one of her signature sundresses the color of a ballet slipper, and white sneakers, sipped on the watered-down iced latte that she’d been holding when she’d shown up by taxi. Her friend, who’d sold her car for cash and sublet her own apartment, had arrived at Meghan’s with two coffees and a small pile of her own bags, all packed for the summer.
“I needed the money,” Meghan said.
She and Tess had both worked at Zagos, a prestigious restaurant in New York City. Starting as a hostess and barely scraping by on her meager salary, Meghan had dreams of getting a glimpse of culinary art from the best of the best, climbing the ladder, and finally finding her own place as a famous chef. She wanted to express herself artistically, creating dishes for the rich and famous.
But the last five years had been nothing but frustration and doors slammed in her face. She’d worked her fingers to the bone, waiting tables for an awful boss named Vinnie Russo who’d never once noticed her strengths, barely surviving on the income and not getting anywhere professionally.
“Are you sure you want to go back to your pappy’s house?” Tess asked.
On one fateful night when Meghan was only fifteen, her parents had died in a car crash, hit by a drunk driver on their way home from a movie, and she’d gone to live with Pappy. Meghan hadn’t let her mind wander to the vacant house where she’d spent those grief-stricken days or to her pappy’s worn skiff, the small boat that sat empty on the bank by the shed out back. The old fishing cottage had been willed to her when Pappy had left this earth. For the last ten years, she’d hung on to it like a distant memory, not wanting to disturb a single thing.Come back here and find your calm, she could almost hear him say.
“I can do it,” she replied with resolve, a lump already forming in her throat and uncertainty slithering through her. No longer able to pay her rent after quitting, that house was all she had left, her only option.
“Do you have the keys and everything?” Tess asked, as she moved from the narrow city sidewalk around to the passenger side and dumped her things in her seat. A car drove by, barely squeezing between the open door and the parked cars on the other side of the street. The driver threw up his hands in annoyance.
“Yeah,” she replied, eyeing the manila envelope sitting on the dashboard of the used car she’d just bought for five hundred dollars to make the trip back to the Outer Banks. She prayed the worn vehicle would get them there.
Meghan put her hands on her hips to shake off her heartache, taking in the full-to-the-brim car on the busy city side street in front of her. “Well, that’s that,” she said to Tess, before turning to have one last look up at her empty apartment. The old building blended into the others beside it, offering nothing to catch the eye of passers-by—just an enormous rectangular brick box with rows of windows as far as she could see.
“You gonna be all right?” Tess asked, stepping back up beside her and draping a protective arm around Meghan’s shoulders.
Meghan produced a smile for her friend’s benefit. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s roll.”
Tess tossed her empty latte into the trash before sliding on a pair of bright pink sunglasses, her wild auburn curls drawn into a ponytail. “Looks like we’re headed to the coast.” Her eyebrows bounced up and down excitedly from behind her glasses as she climbed into Meghan’s car.
Meghan opened the back door for Charlie, the dog jumping up into his spot. Without a single look in her rearview, she started the engine and pulled away from her old life, headed for her new one.
The late summer sun came in at a slant through Meghan’s open window as they made their way along the edge of the North Carolina countryside, finishing up the second leg of their nine-hour drive, having spent last night at a midway spot. As they entered the thin strip of barrier islands nestled quietly between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pamlico Sound, the rural landscape was now dotted with a mixture of old bungalows and beach mansions. Uncertainty ebbed and flowed through Meghan’s mind as she drove toward her destination: the one place she could definitively say had taught her what she needed to survive in life.
Growing up, Pappy had taught Meghan how to cook. Even though he’d spent his life outside, working on the docks as a local fisherman, there was a finesse to his weathered hands when he was in the kitchen, and he could cook a meal worthy of any five-star restaurant. He had a vegetable garden out back, fruit trees in the yard, and all the seafood she could think of—everything they needed for those fantastic dinners they would cook together. Meghan’s fondest memories were of her days in the kitchen with Pappy, cooking her favorites like Hatteras clam chowder and orange-glazed mahi mahi.
When Zagos’s head chef quit unexpectedly and her frazzled boss had decided to completely revamp their menu to combat sluggish sales, Meghan had had the opening of a lifetime. Tess and the others rallied behind her, suggesting that she immediately offer to fill in. She’d proposed that Vinnie include offerings from her grandfather’s own recipes, and one night she’d spent more money than she had, buying the ingredients, and producing dishes like her pan-seared foie gras and her pappy’s famous chartreuse hollandaise sauce that her coworkers had all adored. But Vinnie had ignored her dishes, letting them sit untouched until they were inedible.
“You’re not a chef,” he’d finally told her, when she questioned him. “I need someone who’s been in the industry, someone who knows what they’re doing.”
