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Lola had woken up in the arms of many, many men over the years—but she had never woken up like this.
How could she describe the difference?
Tommy’s strong arms spooned her from behind. Through her back, she could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he inhaled, exhaled, still deep in slumber. His musk wrapped around her, thrilling her, and, unconsciously, one of his hands slipped over hers and clung to it—as though, even in dreams, he didn’t want to let her go.
Sunlight drifted in through the living room window, carrying with it a gorgeous green glow since trees surrounded them in all directions. She felt as though they lived in a secret clubhouse, a treehouse with their own rules, their own language.
As much as it killed Lola to do it, she eventually slipped out from the sturdy arms of her love, dressed, and headed to the kitchen. Once there, she brewed a pot of coffee and stared at that still-shut door. The coffee maker popped and bubbled, and all the while, that door seemed akin to the Great Wall of China—something totally impenetrable. When it opened, Lola had zero idea of what would happen next. If Stan’s seeing them at the hospital in early August was any indication, it wouldn’t go well.
Lola had never been Susan or Anna—the kind of woman who oversaw a whole family and prepared big, bountiful breakfasts and ensured everyone got everywhere on time, that sort of thing. Now, with Tommy asleep in one room and Stan Ellis in another, Lola felt this strange urgency. She searched through the fridge and came up with eight eggs, some bacon. The pantry produced sugar and flour, enough ingredients to make pancakes, and it seemed someone—Chuck or Tommy—had even purchased a little thing of maple syrup.
It was like Christine always said. Food brought people together—even people who wouldn’t have been paired together in the first place. It was sustenance; it was nourishing; it was something to talk about; it forced you to look someone in the eye and engage with them in ways that, in other instances, wasn’t possible.
Sure, it was just a simple breakfast. But it was breakfast prepared for two men who hadn’t ever really had anyone but one another and, most important of all, Anna Sheridan.
Anna Sheridan had been their guiding light in the darkness.
And then one day, she’d been gone.
She’d never come back.
And Lola was borderline tired of the endless charade of blame.
Maybe Stan had already paid for what he had done. He’d given himself a kind of life-sentence, a world of solitude, time and time after time, all entrenched in his own horror and guilt.
Lola splayed the fried eggs and bacon on a large blue platter and placed it at the center of the breakfast table. She then poured all coffees, a bit of orange juice, and dotted each and every pancake in a beautiful tower on another orange plate. She blinked down at what she had created—reminiscent of something you might see on TV—and felt totally pleased with herself. Now, all she had to do was wait.
And she didn’t have to wait long.
The door between herself and Stan Ellis creaked open only a minute or two later. Stan appeared in the crack, stooped-over, exhausted, with enormous bags beneath his eyes. His grizzled hair created a halo around his skull, and he looked like he’d lost maybe ten or fifteen pounds from his already thin frame—presumably because of his health problems.
He blinked down at Lola from that crack in the door. Utter shock played over his face. Finally, after a long pause, he said, “Are you trying to kill me?”
Lola, who remained seated at the breakfast table with her hands folded beneath her chin, just shook her head.
Stan placed his elbow on the edge of the doorframe and leaned heavily against his hand. For the next minute or two, they regarded one another. Lola couldn’t help but try to imagine what this man might have become if her mother had actually left Wes for him. Would they have lived a long and happy life together? Would she have loved the wild hair, the big eyes, the cheekbones? Would they have laughed?
And what would she have looked like beside him?
“You know you look exactly like her, don’t you?” Stan said suddenly.
The words were like a knife through the heart. It was one thing to hear them constantly from her sisters, from her father, from others on the Vineyard. It was another to hear the words from her mother’s lover himself.
“I just turned thirty-nine,” Lola returned. “A year older than she ever was.”
Stan dropped his eyes toward the breakfast. He looked exhausted, even more so than he had minutes before. This hadn’t been Lola’s hope. She swept her fingers through her hair and gestured.
“Please, sit. I heard you had surgery. I only wanted to help,” she said.
Stan crept toward the chair across from her and sat slowly. He blinked down at the eggs, the bacon, and said, “It looks better than anything I’ve had in years, Lola. Is it okay to call you that?”
She nodded and gave him a small smile. Lola was frankly surprised that he had known which one of the Sheridan sisters she was. Of course, she also had to imagine that Stan knew a great deal more about her and her sisters than she wanted to give him credit for. The pictures of them in his head were probably twenty-some years old, sure—but not so much had changed, personality-wise.
Lola helped Stan pile up his breakfast plate, grateful to have something to do with her hands. When she sat back down, she realized her hands were shaking from the sheer anxiety of the awkward situation.
Lola had thought maybe, given this time alone with Stan; she might want to pepper him with questions about her mother. She thought she might demand answers about that night: why the hell had he turned off the lights, or why he’d lived and the others hadn’t! Why!
But instead, she hung in the silence, marveling at the time and space the two of them had had to live without her.
That moment, Tommy appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the living area, where she and Tommy had slept. He scrubbed at his dark curls and nodded toward Stan, clearly confused.
“You made breakfast?”
“Sure did,” Lola affirmed. “Sit down. Eat with us.”
“We were worried you’d never get up,” Stan said. “Lazybones.”
“Hey!” Tommy said.
Lola laughed so hard that her stomach shook. She placed a napkin over her lips and watched as Tommy and Stan shared a furtive look. If she had read it properly, it had said something like: I don’t know why she’s here, why she isn’t mad, why this is working. But just go along with it, okay?
Tommy informed Stan about the events of the previous evening: the wild car chase, the arrest of Chuck Frampton. Stan’s eyes bulged out in shock.
“You’re telling me that while I slept in that little room, a real-live criminal tried to break in here?” he asked.
“I guess technically it is his place,” Tommy said, shrugging.
“Still! And then, you just went off after him! Like that!” Stan snapped his fingers like a cartoon character.
Lola hadn’t envisioned him to be so peppy, so whimsical. She imagined her mother’s laugh ringing out from the bed they’d surely shared back at his little cabin. She imagined her mother’s heart feeling free in ways it never could have with Wes Sheridan.
“I only met Chuck a handful of times,” Stan said. “A few times at the bar down in Edgartown. He was never a very polite guy. I saw him berate Rita, the bartender. She didn’t take a liking to that. Last I heard, he wasn’t allowed back.”
“I guess he’s not technically allowed anywhere right now,” Lola said.
“It’s just a sad thing when people on this island turn on one another,” Stan said. “I’m not a Vineyard-born like you. I came when I was thirty. But back then, I was captivated by the level of camaraderie on the island. It felt as though, no matter who someone was or what they thought about you, they would go out of their way to help. It got addicting, really. By the time I thought it might have been appropriate for me to leave, I couldn’t think of another single place on the planet to go. Not like you, girls. You all had such promise. So much to give the world. And you went out and you got what you needed. Now? Do you plan to stay?”
Lola’s lips parted. She glanced back toward Tommy, whose dark ones burned back. There was so much she didn’t know about whatever had just happened between them; there was so much she wanted to demand of Tommy—in the style of, can we be together? Can we be all I’ve ever really dreamed of? Are you actually the one I’ve been looking for all this time?
“I get it. It’s too much of a personal question,” Stan admitted. “And it’s never good to have such serious discussions at the breakfast table.”
Stan grabbed his knife and lifted the butter. As he tried to scrape the knife over the creamy yellow, his hand began to quake so violently that he actually had to put the butter container down. He balked at himself, then tried to make a joke.
“I guess it’s time to put new batteries in these hands,” he said.
“That’s all right, Dad. I got it,” Tommy said.
Tommy grabbed the butter container and the knife and began to smear across the toast, whistling as he did it. Lola was completely overwhelmed with this act of generosity. Number one: Tommy had called Stan “Dad,” which totally blew her over. But number two: she’d never envisioned Tommy Gasbarro to be the kind of guy to pause to help someone put butter on their toast.
It was a morning of impossibilities. This was how she would think about it in the future. The conversation popped and fluttered; she laughed outrageously at both Stan and Tommy’s jokes, especially when they tried to one-up each other. She brewed another pot of coffee for all of them and stewed in her own full-feeling, a wide smile stretched between her cheeks.
Slowly, Stan rose from the breakfast table and hobbled back toward the bedroom. At the doorframe, he paused again and turned back.
“Thank you for breakfast, Lola,” he said.
“You’re very welcome, Stan.”
“I know there’s still a lot to say,” Stan declared. “Stuff I can’t go over at this moment, since I can barely get my mind straight. But I want to invite you and Christine and Susan over to my house soon when I’m well enough to cook. Do you think you could convince them to come along with you?”
Lola nodded and gave him a soft, genuine smile. “I will certainly try.”
“Good,” Stan said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve waited for this for a very long time.”
When the door clicked closed between them, Lola placed her hands over her eyes and burst into tears. Her father had always said she was the crier of the family, and here she was, at it again. Tommy, now accustomed to her quick shifts in mood, placed a hand on her shoulder and guided her body into his. She placed her cheek against his chest and shuddered, her tears both happy and sad, the most confusing of all.
“Come on. Let’s go outside,” Tommy murmured.
“We have to clean up.”
“I’ll do that later,” Tommy said. “Grab your jacket.”
It was the tail-end of the first week of September. Lola pulled her jacket on and stepped into the early light of the morning. All the skin on the back of her neck tightened with a chill. Tommy guided her toward the line of trees and leaned her heavily against one of the trunks and drew a line down her cheek with his finger. His gaze was powerful, an affirmation of his growing affection for her.
“I wanted to kiss you every day on that sailboat trip,” he told her.
“Why didn’t you?” Lola murmured.
“I was afraid of what would happen, I guess,” Tommy said. “And I worried about our connection to Stan. I worried that you could never forgive him for what he did. And know that I don’t take it lightly.”
“I know you don’t,” Lola said.
“Good,” he said.
To clear their heads, Lola and Tommy walked through the woods quietly together. Early-autumn birds flickered through the tip-tops of the trees; some of the leaves had begun to anticipate the later months, lining themselves with red and orange. Lola and Tommy fell into an easy rhythm with one another. Surprisingly, they spoke very little about the car chase or about Stan, and instead focused on one another, the important things they wanted to reveal to one another as middle-aged people, on the verge of some kind of love story.
Slowly, they made their way back toward the water. Once there, Tommy lifted a perfect, flat stone from the sand and skipped it over the water.
“Three times? Not bad,” Lola said. She collected her own stone and cast it out—skipping it no fewer than five times.
Tommy whistled. “I should have known that I couldn’t compete with an island girl.”
“That’s right. We were born with magic in our fingers,” Lola replied with a slight grin.
Later that morning, Lola said, “I don’t know how I’m going to convince Christine and Susan to go to Stan’s house. It took a lot of pulling for Susan to get Christine and I to return to the island in the first place. Seriously, I almost didn’t come.”
“Really? What were you so busy with?”
“My life in Boston. Partying, since Audrey had been away and I had this whole other life. Trying to figure out who I was, now that she’s gone. That kind of thing,” Lola said. “When I came out after Susan’s request, I told myself it would only be a few weeks. But something about that first month sparked a fire in me. I was back almost instantly after I had left. The same was true for Christine.”
“It’s intoxicating,” Tommy agreed.
“But we’ve all done a lot of forgiving this summer,” Lola continued. “We had to find a way to forgive our father, for one. And we had to forgive one another, after so many years apart. I don’t know if forgiving Stan is in the cards for us. It might be a single step too far. Of course, there’s no reason we shouldn’t try.”