Page 14 of Summer Longing
“I don’t like this, Elise. Not one bit.”
“Just one night,” Elise said. “We can deal with it in the morning. Please.”
Fern, who deep down, despite her efficient, practical, and sometimes even unyielding nature, was a softy at heart, looked down at the sleeping baby, then up at her wife’s tear-filled eyes.
“We can’t take this baby to the tea shop. People will see us. If the baby cries in the morning, customers will hear it. All we need is someone like Bianca to walk in—”
“So we stay here.”
“We can’t stay here. This isn’t our house this summer.”
“Ruth is fine with it,” Elise lied. “We can stay in the guest room. And of course, there’s the spare room down the hall.” The room they’d intended to turn into a nursery.
They exchanged a look, and in that look was three years’ worth of shared pain.
“One night,” Fern said. “But that’s it, Elise. Tomorrow we deal with this.”
Napi’s Restaurant felt like a secret hideout. It was tucked away on Freeman Street between Commercial and Bradford. If it weren’t for the large sign lit with a string of Christmas lights and featuring a giant red arrow to direct people, Ruth might have missed it.
Inside, it was dimly lit and cozy. The dining room had a wood-beam ceiling, brick walls, and a long bar festooned with more Christmas lights and backed by large panels of stained glass. The walls were filled with hundreds of paintings collected by the restaurant’s owner, eighty-seven-year-old Napi Van Dereck.
“All by local artists,” Clifford told Ruth.
The place was clearly an institution; Napi had been in business since 1975, Clifford told her. He was a walking trivia machine. “Norman Mailer once tried to film a movie here,” he said.
A waiter greeted Ruth, Clifford, and Santiago, lit votive candles on the table, and handed out menus. Clifford ordered a bottle of wine.
“It’s such a romantic space,” Ruth said. “I feel a bit like a third wheel.”
“Not at all!” Santiago said. “The more the merrier.”
“But just out of curiosity,” Clifford said, “is there no Mr. Cooperman?”
She told them she was long divorced.
“You’re divorced, not dead, sweetheart. I hate to break it to you, but there isn’t exactly a surplus of straight single men in this town.”
Ruth reached for her water glass. It was true. On some level, this had to be something that had factored into her decision to move to the town.
Her last serious relationship, with a restaurateur she’d met on a JetBlue flight to LA, had ended in disappointment. She’d dated regularly since her divorce, with varying degrees of success. With the restaurateur, she’d thought maybe she had a chance to settle down with someone again, to have something real and lasting. To replace what she’d left behind. In the end, it was another failure.
Sitting in that cozy restaurant across from the happy couple, she realized she had given up on ever again finding romantic love.
“So how’s the house working out?” Clifford said.
The house. As tempting as it was to vent to Clifford about the disruption, she remembered Elise’s plea that she not mention it to anyone. “The house is great,” she said.
“It really is fabulous. Santiago built the patio extension.”
“Oh? Well, it’s lovely,” Ruth said.
“Santiago does a lot of the work on additions around here. And I’ll tell you something, Ruth—I’ve never seen houses rent as quickly as they did this season. If you hadn’t come to me in February, you’d be living in Truro right now.”
The waiter arrived with their bottle of wine. When it was uncorked and poured, Clifford raised his glass. “To summer.”
“To summer,” Ruth and Santiago repeated.
She took a sip of the red wine. It was earthy and delicious. She downed the glass, and Clifford refilled it.
