Page 21 of Summer Longing
Ruth couldn’t help imagining her daughter seeing the incoming number and pressing a button to exile her to voice mail. But, to be fair, Olivia was probably at work. Ruth left a message; she would just have to wait patiently for a return call.
She was also waiting for a call back from Clifford Henry. Maybe she had not fully conveyed the gravity of the situation with Shell Haven. She would leave another message. Now, what to do with her afternoon?
The beach was an option, but Ruth was already in the middle of town and didn’t want to walk back to the house to get her bathing suit and a towel. Still, the water did beckon to her.
One option was a boat tour of Cape Cod Bay. She knew these excursions launched from Barros Boatyard in the West End, just a short walk from the Canteen.
Ruth passed a small restaurant called Joon. Across the street was Provincia, a gift shop where she’d bought hand-painted Portuguese dishes.
She turned left down an alleyway and passed an aluminum-sided building with arrowed signs readingBOAT RENTAL. She kept walking, the sun-dappled bay now in view. The pavement extended all the way to the water, where an American flag was raised high above a wood dock. To the right, a clapboard shed with anotherBOAT RENTALsign. Two white bikes were parked in front of it.
Ruth stopped in front of the boat-rental office. A couple stood at the window booking an excursion. She turned to look around, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. Behind her was a three-story wood-frame building with a gray-shingled roof. The second and third floors had wraparound decks. To the side of the house, metal rafters held boats in various stages of repair.
When it was her turn at the boat-rental station, a broad-shouldered man perhaps a few years older than herself helped her. He had small dark eyes, and his features were blunt, unrefined, and unremarkable, but he had a thick head of white hair and an air of authority.
“What can I do for you, young lady?” he said.
Ruth knew not to take the “young lady” as anything more than rote, casual flirtation he probably doled out generously to all his female customers. Still, out of habit, she glanced at his left ring finger and saw that it was bare.This is not why you’re out here,she reminded herself. “I’m looking to do a boat tour. Do you have anything leaving soon?”
“We have a shuttle to Long Point leaving in an hour and a seal-watching boat leaving in twenty minutes.”
Seal-watching? She didn’t know the bay had enough seals to merit an entire tour based on their presence. The thought made her uneasy. Where there were seals, there were sharks. Ruth had an intense fear of sharks, like a lot of people of her generation, and this fear had a specific onset date: the summer of 1975. At age fifteen, Ruth had sneaked out to see the movieJaws.It was rated PG, but her parents, having heard from their friends that it was terrifying, had forbidden her to see it. She wished she’d listened to them.
“Do you have any issues with sharks?” Ruth said.
The man gave her a bemused smile. “I guarantee, ma’am, that the captains of all our boats are ready, willing, and able to fight off any shark threat to our passengers.”
Ruth crossed her arms. “I believe it’s a legitimate question.”
“With all due respect, sharks are typically found oceanside. Nothing is impossible, but I’d say you’re pretty dang safe.”
Ruth did not appreciate his tone. “Well, thank you. This has been an enlightening conversation.” She turned and headed back to Commercial Street.
Chapter Ten
In the midst of the baby drama, Elise had forgotten about date night.
They had tickets to a Twenty Summers event. Award-winning novelist Julia Glass and others had founded the arts program to honor the legacy of Provincetown’s arts colony and restore the historic Hawthorne Barn, where that legacy had begun more than a hundred years ago. The organization hosted concerts and readings and art exhibits at the barn, and tonight, Fern and Elise were going to see Isaac Mizrahi in conversation with Alan Cumming. They had been looking forward to it for weeks, but now the evening had arrived and they were barely speaking.
The only positive development was that Amelia offered to watch the baby. When Elise told Amelia how badly the conversation had gone with Fern, Amelia had insisted that Elise spend the night trying to find some middle ground with her wife. It showed Elise that she wasn’t alone in this; she had Amelia’s support. Others would pitch in too. She and Fern would find a way to make it work.
But as they walked silently to the barn, all of this remained unsaid. If Elise didn’t speak up soon, they would sit grimly through the evening and then go to bed angry, something they both tried to avoid at all costs. There were times when Fern had been the one to reach out and bridge the divide. Elise knew that tonight, it was her turn.
And she had no idea how to go about it.
They reached a tree-lined white-gravel path, and the shingled brown barn came into view. Elise stopped walking and said, “Fern, I’m sorry for not doing what you wanted, but I’m not sorry for the choice I made. In my heart, I know this is right.”
Fern looked at her and put her hands on her hips. She glanced up at the building in the distance, as if considering just continuing on without her, but ultimately she turned back to Elise, shaking her head. “Don’t start again with what Amelia said about how things are handled in this town. We’ve been here five years, so it’s easy to exist in a bubble. But this goes beyond that.”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What if someone intended for us to have this baby?”
A small, bubbly group passed them, laughing and quoting one of Alan Cumming’s lines fromCabaret.
Fern moved to the side, closer to the trees. “I don’t want to go around in circles again,” she said. “There’s no way for us to know.”
