Big Summer(42)

“That raw bar is insane. They’ve got crab legs. They flew them in from Florida.” He shook his head. “Clams and mussels and oysters right here in the bay. I could wade into the water and come out with a bucket of littlenecks.”

“Well, you know Drue! Only the best.” That was my sneaky way of attempting to learn whether he did, in fact, know Drue; whether he was on the bride’s side of the guest list or the groom’s. My guess was that he was one of Stuart’s buddies, maybe even a groomsman. He had the look: the broad-shouldered body of a rugby player, the worn but high-quality clothes, the easy, almost negligent manner that said My family has been rich forever.

But I was wrong. “Drue’s an old family friend,” Nick said. “But I haven’t seen her in years. We were summer neighbors. My family used to have a place in Truro. Drue and I went to sailing camp together in Provincetown.”

“Fancy,” I said, imagining kids in Izod shirts, khaki shorts, belts embroidered with tiny whales, and Topsiders standing on the sleek wooden decks.

Nick smiled again, shaking his head. “It’s the opposite of fancy. The fancy place is the Cape Cod Sea Camp in Brewster.” His accent rendered the town’s name as Brewstah. I smiled, charmed, as he kept talking. “The place we went is called the Provincetown Yacht Club. It’s this hole-in-the-wall on Commercial Street, with a bunch of beat-up Beetle Cats and Sunfishes. They charge fifty bucks for the summer, and they teach you how to sail. The camp’s mostly for townies. Or the rich families that have been here for a million years and know about it. They send their kids there.”

Nobody loves a bargain like rich people, I thought. “Fifty bucks for the whole summer?” I asked, certain that I’d misheard.

He nodded. “You show up at nine in the morning, and you spend the day learning to sail. You get a free hour for lunch, and if it’s high tide you ride your bike to the center of town and spend the hour jumping off the dock into the water, or you get a slice from Spiritus Pizza.” His expression became dreamy. “It was great. I remember riding my bike around P-town, feeling like I was the king of the world.”

“And that’s where you met Drue?”

“Yup.” He raised his beer to his mouth and tipped his head back as he drank. I watched the column of his throat shift under his smooth, tanned skin as he swallowed. When he finished, he wiped his lips and said, “She locked me in the supply closet.”

“She what?”

Looking shamefaced, Nick said, “Drue had this gang of girls, and every few weeks they’d pick someone new to razz. When it was my turn, they’d send me to the store to get a half-dozen snipes, or they’d put hermit crabs in my shoes, or they’d make up names for points of sail so I’d fail my skipper’s test.” He smiled, remembering. “Beam reach, broad reach, beachward, landward, Squidward…”

I nodded, trying to look like I had any idea what points of sail might be.

“And one day, they sent me to get a life jacket, and they locked me in the supply closet.” He shook his head, remembering. “Lots of spiders.”

“Ugh. Sounds par for the course with Drue.”

“So you’re a friend?” He settled his arm on top of the cocktail table and leaned toward me.

“From sixth grade.”

“Are you in the wedding party?”

“I’m a bridesmaid,” I said. “I’ll be right up front tomorrow. You won’t be able to miss me.” Especially since I’m twice the size of the rest of the bridesmaids, my traitorous mind whispered. I told my traitorous mind to shut up and concentrate on the cute guy across the table, on his arm, covered in curling brown hair, resting just inches from my own.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “The oysters look good.”

I had no idea what made an oyster look good, but I’d already decided to follow this guy wherever he wanted to take me. “Lead on, Macduff,” I said.

He smiled at me as we strolled toward the raw bar. His smile was a little crooked, lifting the right side of his mouth higher than the left, and he was graceful as he walked across the sand. When we got to the buffet, he handed me a plate and picked up a pair of tongs. “Oysters?”

“Yes, please.” I heard Nana’s voice in my head, telling me that oysters were pure protein, low in calories and practically fat-free. I shooed that voice away, too, as Nick put a few oysters on the plate, shells clinking against the porcelain. He picked up a small silver cup of cocktail sauce and raised his eyebrows. I nodded and added clams, shrimp, a wedge of lemon, and a scoop of horseradish to my plate. Nick filled a plate for himself and led me to an empty cocktail table by the farthest bonfire. I squeezed lemon onto my first oyster, added a dollop of cocktail sauce, tipped it into my mouth, and gulped it down, humming in pleasure at its sweet, briny taste. Nick looked at me with approval.

“That’s probably the freshest oyster you’ll ever taste.”

“It’s amazing,” I said, and ate another one. I wondered, briefly, if he was one of those guys whose fetish was feeding fat women, or watching them eat, but he hadn’t seemed to be staring inappropriately, and he had turned his attention to his own plate instead of mine. He took his oysters with just a squeeze of lemon, I saw.

“So you’re from New York?” he asked. “First time on the Cape?”