Page 82 of Summer Longing
“It’s our Mariner’s Mint,” Fern said.
“Sounds delightful,” Amelia said, perusing the display of bracelets for sale at one end of the counter.
“I’ll pour it,” Elise said, opening the refrigerator. She needed something to do with her hands, a place to focus. An excuse to turn her back on Fern while she blinked away tears. Scooping ice into a plastic cup, she tried to pull herself together.
“Fern, we’ve barely had a minute to talk in weeks,” Amelia said. “I’ve seen Elise, but you have been such a busy bee. Come to the house after work for a glass of wine.”
Fern began protesting, but Amelia cut her off with “There’s always time for happy hour. I will not take no for an answer.”
Elise realized that Amelia had not shown up at the shop for a cold beverage; somehow, she knew that things were going off the rails. She was there to help. “We’ll be there,” Elise said, trying to catch Fern’s eye but failing.
“Elise, I’ve barely had a moment with this one here. Surely you can spare your wife if I promise she’ll be home for dinner.”
“Oh, sure. I just thought that—”
“I’m happy to spend some time with you, Amelia,” Fern said. “In fact, we should have dinner.”
Elise poured Amelia’s tea over ice and garnished it with a mint leaf, her hand shaking. The subtext of Fern’s comments could not be more clear:I won’t be in any rush to get home.
Chapter Thirty-Six
An hour into oyster picking, Olivia realized that sitting on an egg crate and leaning forward to dig through cages should have sent her back into spasms but, incredibly, aside from a slight tension just above her waist, she felt fine. Better than fine.
Every so often, she looked up at the blue sky or out at the water surrounding them and felt the unfamiliar sensation of peace. There was nothing else she needed to be doing, nowhere else she needed to be—or wanted to be.
It struck her at one point that if her life had not taken this strange turn, she would at that very moment be sitting in a Manhattan office eating salad out of a plastic takeout container and worrying about the quality of a celebrity’s vacation photo on Instagram. Looking back on it, she had been like the oysters trapped in the cages by her feet.
Beside her, Marco worked silently. They spoke only when she wasn’t sure if an oyster made the cut, but she was increasingly confident about assessing them and so even this minimal conversation was rare.
She kept stealing glances at him. The sunlight shining from above and reflecting off the water around them made him seem even more golden. She tried to be professional, tried to limit how often she set her eyes on his face, but it was impossible to resist. Every time she looked his way, she felt a rush. At one point, her gaze lingered just a little too long and he caught her. Mortified, she tried to think of something to say to make it look like she had turned in his direction to talk.
“So, um, you don’t have any employees that help you out? It’s just you and Jaci?”
“I had a part-timer in the spring, a merchant marine who helps me during his eight weeks off. But I’ve had more employees who’ve stayed for only one day than I can count. People think they are up for it—they romanticize being out on the water and all that—but when they experience the reality, they quit. It’s one of those things; you either love it or hate it. There’s no middle ground.”
“Who wouldn’t like this?” she said, looking pointedly at the natural beauty surrounding them.
“In the interest of full disclosure, this is the easy part of the job. The fun part. In April, I was spending most of my time dealing with a barnacle bloom and knocking mussels off my bags.”
“How do mussels get on the bags?”
“Mussels are predators. Do you eat mussels?”
She shook her head. “I know I already said I don’t eat oysters but I’m not anti-seafood or anything.”
He smiled. “Just anti-shellfish.”
“I eat shrimp.”
“Okay, then. Now I know what to cook if you ever come over for dinner.”
If you ever come over for dinner.Was he simply making a point about her limited seafood palate or was he truly suggesting that there was some scenario in which he would invite her over?
“Mussels are predators,” Marco said again. “There’s a beard on them that you remove when cooking. The beard affixes to the place on the oyster that oysters filter water through. Oysters filter between twenty-five and fifty gallons of water a day. So the beard goes into there and it sits in there, stopping the filtering and killing the oyster. And I’m not talking about a few mussels.” He reached for the cover of the cage he was working in and latched it closed.
“I get that it’s messy and physical work,” she said. “But it’s impressive. You’re doing something real. The idea that these are going to end up on someone’s plate is amazing.” It was hard not to think about her own career by comparison. How much time and energy had she spent staging fake photos to post on someone’s phone to see how many times strangers pressed a heart button? And it had meant so much to her—everything. How absurd it all seemed now.
Marco smiled at her. “Thanks. So what do you do when you’re not out here on vacation?”
