Ruth walked along Commercial, simmering with frustration. She’d thought it was too good to be true that a house as perfect as Shell Haven was available for the summer, and now it was clear she’d been right. The owners had a lot of baggage. Or maybe it would be like this with any place in town. The plus side of Provincetown was that it was quirky and unconventional and people welcomed you with open arms and loose boundaries. The downside of Provincetown was that it was quirky and unconventional and people welcomed you with open arms and loose boundaries. “Sure, I’ll just take a walk while you figure out whose baby got dropped on your doorstep,” Ruth muttered to herself.
She crossed the street and headed to the bookstore. Commercial Street was three miles long and had two bookstores; as far as Ruth was concerned, that was all you needed to know about this area. Provincetown Bookshop, right in the center of the village, had been around since 1932. Ruth had shopped in the store as a teenager, and a bookseller there had introduced her to Mary Heaton Vorse’s Provincetown classic Time and the Town. More recently, East End Books had opened its doors, and thanks to the passionate efforts of its book- and film-loving owner, it offered a year-round calendar of author events. During her last trip to town, she had seen Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Cunningham doing a reading. Ruth made a mental note to attend more book events; she hadn’t moved to a lively, artistic town to be a shut-in.
“Ruth! Ruth Cooperman!”
She looked across the street to see her real estate agent, Clifford Henry, waving at her.
“There she is!” he said. “The house huntress.”
Clifford was dressed in a pink button-down and white slacks. Beside him was a handsome, slightly younger man with dark olive skin wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. Clifford motioned her over.
“How fun to spot you out in the wild like this,” Clifford said with a wink. “Ruth, this is my husband, Santiago.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ruth said, shaking the man’s hand.
“What are you up to? A little shopping? Late brunch?”
“Oh, I’m just…” Displaced from my house. Again. “Getting some fresh air.”
“You know Liv Cosmetics?” Clifford said to Santiago. “That’s Ruth’s company. She started it.”
“Well, it’s not mine anymore,” Ruth said.
Still, Santiago looked impressed.
“Have lunch with us,” Clifford said. “We’re going to Napi’s. We did a two-hour bike ride so we’re starving.”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“I won’t take no for an answer. We want to hear all your glamorous stories about the beauty industry.”
Well, why not? Ruth thought. All she had left were stories.
For Elise, time had stopped.
The baby, calm after a bottle and a successful burping, nestled in the crook of her arm. Her eyes, open and surprisingly alert, were gray and seemed to fix on Elise.
“Who are you, little one?” Elise whispered, dipping her head low, inhaling the sweet, unmistakable milky scent particular to babies.
She wished she could stay like this forever. Just holding the baby, not thinking about the reality beyond the walls of Shell Haven. But her phone had been ringing on and off for a while, and she knew she couldn’t ignore it much longer. Fern had to be wondering where she’d run off to.
But this baby.
Elise had been imagining the possibilities since the moment Ruth Cooperman called the shop and uttered the magical sentence Someone left a baby on your front porch.
The first scenario was that someone had intended Fern or Elise to find the baby—someone who didn’t know they had moved out for the summer. The second was that it was a mistake, that someone had left the infant at the wrong house. But who left a baby unattended on a porch no matter whose home it was? So if it was the right house, or even just a random house, the baby had been left on purpose by someone who couldn’t care for her. But who? And if that was the case, why not leave her at the firehouse or the police station? Those were safe-haven locations—no questions would be asked. But then the baby would become a ward of the state. Maybe whoever left this child on their porch didn’t want that to happen. Which brought Elise back to the idea that whoever had left the baby at Shell Haven had not done it by mistake—she had been left specifically for Elise and Fern.
The only clue to her origins was a beaded elastic bracelet Elise had discovered around the baby’s right ankle. The beads were all pink except for four white beads with black print that read MAY 6. Her birth date? Elise slipped the anklet off the baby and placed it in the diaper bag with the rest of her things. She knew the baby couldn’t reach down and pull it off herself, that it wasn’t truly a choking hazard, and yet it made her nervous.
Her phone rang again. Elise stood slowly, cradling the baby and keeping her eyes on her, smiling, even as she crossed the room for her handbag. She knelt down and rooted around for her phone. Four missed calls, and Fern was calling now.
“Hello?” she said, bracing herself for Fern’s irritation.
“Where are you?”
Elise had left the shop after saying she had to run a quick errand. That had been hours ago. “Shell Haven. Ruth called and needed help with something.”
She heard Fern sigh. “I’ve been calling and calling you. When are you coming back to the shop?”
“Actually, I need you to come to the house.”
“Is something wrong?”
Elise hesitated. “No. Not exactly. I’m sorry to be cryptic, but I’d rather talk in person.”
On the other end of the phone, Fern was silent. Elise knew Fern wanted to ask her if this could wait until later, maybe tell her to just come back to work. Their typical yin and yang—Elise the flighty one, Fern the practical one.
“I’ll be right there,” Fern finally said.
Their relationship dynamic had, in some ways, been set from the moment they met. It was fate that had brought them together, but it had also been a classic example of Elise being careless and Fern being a caretaker.
They’d met eight years earlier. Elise had been in her twenties and waitressing at a restaurant by the Boston Seaport. It was not a great time. Her mother was pushing and pushing her to “figure out” her life. Translation: Meet a man and get married. Elise had not yet found the nerve to tell her conservative parents that she had no interest in men. That there would be no husband, no country-club wedding, and maybe—though she hoped this wouldn’t be the case—no grandchildren.
Losing patience, her mother had quietly begun tapping her friends for introductions to sons and friends of sons. Elise made every excuse she could to get out of the setups, usually claiming work.
“Waiting tables is not a priority,” her father said one night. “If money’s an issue, we’ll help you out. But your mother is right—you need to think about the future. Don’t you want a family someday?”
Hoping to placate them for a while, Elise agreed to have dinner with the son of one of her father’s law partners one spring evening. He took her to Eastern Standard, and the fact that he was attractive and nice and a good conversationalist made Elise feel that much worse. She spent most of the appetizer course wishing she were someone else, wishing she could be the person her parents wanted or believed her to be. She was so rattled that when their main course was served, she sliced her finger with her steak knife.
She covered it with a cloth napkin and, cheeks burning with embarrassment, hurried to the ladies’ room to deal with the bleeding. Standing at the sink, holding her finger under running water, she silently cursed herself for being stupid enough to agree to the date.
“You should wrap something around that,” a woman said from the sink next to hers. “Keep pressure on it.”
Elise glanced over, and for a minute, her disastrous date, her failure as a daughter, her throbbing bloody finger—all of it receded. The woman looked at her with concerned, beautiful brown eyes. Her face was defined by prominent cheekbones; her long hair was in thin braids.
“Let me take a look at that,” the woman said, her voice like velvet. She reached for Elise’s hand. “I used to be a paramedic.”
“Are you a doctor now?”
“No,” the woman said. She smelled like vanilla and honey. “I’m an investment banker. But I have a good memory. And I can tell you, hon, you need stitches.”
Elise realized in that moment that her father was right; she did, in fact, need to get her priorities straight.
“Can you give me a ride to the emergency room?” Elise said.
Two months later, she admitted to her parents that she was in love with a woman, an investment banker two years her senior named Fern Douglas. Her parents did not take the news well, and their attitude plummeted further when they found out Fern was Jamaican.
Elise had not spoken to her parents in a few years now.
Being part of a lesbian, biracial couple brought with it a lot of baggage. There had been many external conflicts, but none from within. Not until last year. Still, it seemed, finally, they had gotten back on track, partly thanks to the tea shop, and partly thanks to Elise letting go of the idea of having a baby.
And now this.
The baby squirmed in her arms. Elise stood up and paced the room, rocking her gently. She did not want Fern to walk in to a crying baby. She wanted Fern to experience the baby as she had—like walking into a dream. Like something that had fallen from heaven.
“I need you to work with me here,” Elise said, kissing her forehead. “Shhh.”
The tiny eyelids fluttered and then closed. Elise considered trying to place her back in the car seat but she didn’t dare disturb the moment of calm.
“Hello?” Fern called from the kitchen.
Elise took a deep breath as she walked briskly from the living room to meet her. Fern had a navy-blue and white Tea by the Sea canvas bag over her shoulder—they’d ordered a few dozen of them to give away and sell at the shop—and a plastic cup filled with iced tea in one hand. It dripped with condensation, and Fern put it down and started wiping the floor as Elise walked into the room.
“Hey,” Elise said.
Fern glanced up, tossed the paper towel in the garbage, and said, “Is Ruth here?”
“No,” Elise said. “She’s out.”
Fern was looking at her but not really seeing her. It took a few moments before the baby registered. Elise knew the second it happened, because Fern’s lips formed a silent O.
“Whose baby is that?” she said, standing up.
“I don’t know.”
Fern crossed her arms. “Elise, I’m in no mood for games. Does Ruth Cooperman have family in town?”
“This is not Ruth Cooperman’s baby. Ruth called the shop to tell me someone had left this baby on the porch. I ran over here to see what was going on.”
Fern stepped closer, peered down at the baby. “It’s a newborn.”
“A few weeks old, yeah.”
“Someone left this baby on the porch? Hours ago?”
“That’s right,” said Elise.
“Did you call the police?”
Elise swallowed hard. “No.”
Fern opened her bag and pulled out her phone.
“Please—don’t,” Elise said. “Someone could get in trouble. Someone we know.”
Fern put down the phone. “What are you talking about?”
“Think about it,” Elise said. “It’s a small town. Chances are, whoever left the baby here knows us and left her here for a reason. We need to at least consider that. It was maybe an impulsive act. The mother might come back for her. We should wait—at least for one night.”
Fern seemed to consider this. “We don’t know anyone who was about to have a baby. It doesn’t make sense.”
Elise’s mouth felt dry. Of course it didn’t make sense. All she knew was that she didn’t want to hand over the baby. Not yet. “Well, you’ve spent the past week interviewing a dozen young women, some barely out of their teens. One of them might have just had a baby, thought you seemed kind…”
Fern shook her head. “I don’t know. Even if that’s the case, we need to let the authorities know.”
“The authorities? What kind of talk is that? This isn’t an ‘authorities’ type of place. We need to honor that. People in this town take care of one another.”
“But you just said yourself it’s probably not even someone from this town.”
“Well, that person is here now.”
“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.