Just minutes after the three of them stumbled drunk into Coastline Tattoo, a small shop nestled in an alleyway, a text message lured Paul away.
“You suck!” Kelly protested when he said he was going. Marin smiled. She hoped she was like that when she was in her fifties. She was so relaxed, so comfortable in her own skin. There were no other words for it: she was cool.
“Not all of us have the loves of our lives waiting for us at home. Some of us have to take it when it comes. Or when it’s ready to come.”
“Ugh! Go.”
Marin laughed—for the first time in how long?
They flipped through the artists’ books to find designs.
“Are you really getting Amelia’s name?”
“Maybe. I need to find a good font. I’m thinking this kind of cursive.” She pointed out an ornate, swirling treatment of the words Marine Life.
“I might get a flower,” Marin said. “Maybe a little daisy inside my wrist.”
“Is that your birth-month flower?”
“What? No.”
“You should find a design that has personal meaning.”
Marin shrugged. “I’m too drunk. This is a bad idea. I’ll just keep you company.”
“Yeah. If it doesn’t have meaning, don’t do it. That’s the problem today—we’ve lost all sense of the rites of passage. It’s important to mark things, you know?”
“I’m not sure I’d be marking anything today except my life at rock bottom.”
“Well, that’s not a bad place to be.”
“How do you figure?”
“Nowhere to go but up,” said Kelly. And then Marin remembered thinking she was at rock bottom the day that Rachel had called from the Times Square Starbucks. She’d thought, Why not meet her? Things can’t get any worse. And then the truth came out.
But what could possibly get worse now?
Kelly flipped a few pages and then stopped, pointing to an image. “This is the one. If you get it, I’ll get it.”
“Matching tattoos? No offense, but we just met yesterday.”
“And in a week you’ll leave, and maybe our paths will never cross again. Something to remember me by.”
Marin leaned closer to look at the drawing.
“What is it?”
“A beach rose,” said Kelly.
By late afternoon, Thomas Duncan’s house was filled to capacity, and there were more people outside than inside. Amelia held court in the living room; someone was asking her, “How could Kelly sell one of her mosaics to that awful Sandra Crowe?” when she spotted Luke Duncan slipping out the front door with Rachel.
She smiled. He was a handsome young man, and Amelia could remember the first time he’d visited the island, a lanky preteen with big eyes and floppy, boy-band hair. She felt a pang of envy; Thomas had his life with Bart, but he also had his son. She ached for Nadine in that moment. Having Marin and Rachel somehow made Nadine’s absence all the more acute.
Nadine still hadn’t responded to the letter, and now Amelia had to admit that she likely would not be doing so. If Nadine had nothing to say to a letter with such dramatic news, chances were that her daughter would never return. Not for her nieces—probably not even to bury her mother, when that day came. It was time for Amelia to accept that Nadine did not want to be part of a family.
As a teenager and even in college, Nadine always had to have a friend around during times that should have been just for family. Once, Amelia overheard her on the phone calling a friend her buffer. Amelia felt wounded by this but it wasn’t something she could bring up lest she be accused of eavesdropping. Nadine was constantly accusing her of something, ranging from the innocuous and typical “You don’t understand” to the more damning “You’re ruining my life.” During Nadine’s high-school years, Amelia had accepted this as normal. Her more seasoned mom friends told her that all young women needed to reject their mothers in order to establish their own womanhood. Although as much as Amelia wanted to embrace that modern, intellectual explanation for what was happening, she couldn’t remember rejecting her own mother. She had always revered and cherished the woman.
So, no, she didn’t understand Nadine’s attitude toward her. She accepted that she couldn’t necessarily change it, but it never sat well with her.
It had been different with Nick, her firstborn; from the very moment he locked his cloudy dark eyes on her, she’d felt a bolt of electrifying connectedness. That feeling never ebbed, never waned. Not until that last summer.
Every year the Cabrals spent June through August at Amelia’s mother’s house on Commercial Street. When Renata died, in the mid-1970s, she left the house to Amelia, and the Provincetown summers continued. By the time Nick and Nadine were teenagers, the house was filled with an endless rotation of their visiting friends. This continued during the summers after they started Boston University. Nadine, more often than Nick, had a constant stream of friends—the aforementioned buffers. At that point, Amelia welcomed the buffers as well; her three-decade marriage to Otto Cabral was stale. She accepted this as the natural course of things. She doubted her own parents had had a rewarding, passion-filled marriage until the end. (She was certain there was a year or two in which they’d barely spoken to each other.) Yes, when she’d married Otto, she’d been mirroring her parents’ marriage. It’s what she thought she wanted in life. It had made her mother happy, and surely she was just like her mother. But as she got older, Amelia realized she wasn’t so very much like her mother after all, no matter how much she adored her. She was not able to find satisfaction in a marriage that ranged from lukewarm companionship to downright apathy. Yes, she had her children and her cooking, her house and her friends. But it wasn’t enough.
And so the summers were a welcome distraction. Morning walks on the beach, the elaborate meal preparations, late dinners by the bay that started at sunset and didn’t end until the last person crawled off to bed.
That final summer, Nadine’s roommate and new best friend had come along with her, a bright, artistic, high-spirited young woman who brought out a giddiness in Nadine that Amelia had rarely seen. Even Nick, usually annoyed with the cloying adoration of his younger sister’s friends, seemed to go out of his way to spend time with the two of them.
Sometimes Amelia sensed the kids were crowding their guest, who seemed more interested in spending time with Amelia in the kitchen than in going to the beach or chugging margaritas at the Canteen. When Amelia (who enjoyed the company more than she cared to admit) asked the girl about this, she locked her wide green eyes on Amelia and said, “I guess I’m an old soul.” Amelia’s heart lurched, an undeniable free fall that terrified her. Three weeks into the summer, and Amelia was in love with Kelly Hanauer.
It was impossible. It was madness. She would not indulge in such thoughts, in such feelings. But one afternoon, when Otto went off fishing and Nick and Nadine went whale watching, an hour in the kitchen teaching Kelly to bake rosquilhas secas turned into a bottle of wine at the edge of the bay. And the irrepressible redhead kissed her.
“This cannot happen,” said Amelia.
“It already has,” said Kelly.