Big Summer(43)

“That’s right.” We spent the next few minutes eating seafood and discussing our jobs and education. Nick, I learned, was a Massachusetts native who’d grown up in a suburb of Boston. He’d gone to the University of Vermont—“I was a big skier, but not much of a student in high school,” he said—and was now back in Boston, working at a program that taught yoga to at-risk elementary school students.

“I know that sounds a little crunchy-granola,” he said, which was exactly what I’d been thinking. “But there’s science that shows that yoga breathing really works, and if you teach kids how to regulate their emotions while they’re young, it helps them achieve as they get older.”

“That’s so interesting!” I said, thinking that it also explained his grace, his ease in his body. He didn’t move like a man with a desk job. “So, do you have your summers off?” My mind supplied me with a picture of Nick, lounging on the sand, tanned and shirtless in his swim trunks, or cross-legged on a paddleboard, hands in prayer pose at his chest.

“I do. Which is why I’m here, on the Cape. The schools can’t pay us a lot, and the businesses up here always need seasonal workers. Plus, it’s where I spent my summers growing up. I’m basically a salmon, swimming back to my natal bed.”

I smiled, appreciating the word “natal,” wondering if he did crossword puzzles.

“I’ve been a lifeguard at the National Seashore beaches in Chatham, and worked at a bicycle shop in Orleans. This summer I’m the mate on a charter fishing boat.”

I resisted the urge to make a dad joke about mates, as my brain adjusted the picture. Instead of Nick lolling on the beach, I was imagining him, still tanned and shirtless, only instead of paddling a paddleboard, he was holding a fishing pole, legs braced and chest muscles bulging as he worked the reel. “I know how that goes. My parents are teachers, too.” I told him how my father worked at the school that Drue and I had attended, and that my mom taught art at any place that would have her, and how we’d all spent summers at a camp in Maine. I waited for him to reciprocate with information about his parents—their jobs, their hobbies, his life growing up. Instead, he swung the conversation back to the bride.

“So did Drue ever grow out of being awful?”

I spooned more horseradish on my last two oysters, stalling. “I’d say that it’s an ongoing effort. You know. Progress, not perfection. One step forward, two steps back.”

Nick nodded toward the groom, currently engaged in a game of touch football with his fraternity brothers. “It seems like she landed a decent guy.”

“I haven’t spent much time with Stuart.” Because the parties I’d attended hadn’t filled in many blanks, my knowledge of the groom was still largely based on what I’d gleaned from TV and from Google. I knew that he was a good-looking guy with a Harvard degree; I knew that the critics had ranked him as among the best of All the Single Ladies’ bachelors, the one most likely to treat the women he was courting like people and not bodies, which was impressive insofar as the producers would put the ladies in bikinis and hot tubs as frequently as the plot could be bent to accommodate swimsuits and bubbling water.

“Ah. You a big Single Ladies fan?” Nick inquired.

“I am,” I said. “I can’t even lie. That and Real Housewives.”

He made a face. “You and my aunt. She swears she doesn’t watch, but when that Countess Whoever came to Provincetown to do her cabaret act, she wanted tickets for both shows.”

This led to a discussion of the Real Housewives, and his aunt, who also watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, and all the drag performers who came to Provincetown in the summer. Nick asked how I liked the big house. When I told him how beautiful it was, and how my room came with a semiprivate hot tub and a private deck, he leaned close. Under the soap and fabric softener, he smelled like beer and sweat, warm skin and sunscreen, the very essence of summer.

“I heard,” he said, his voice low, “that Drue’s folks paid the Weinbergs thirty grand to rent their house for a week.”

I felt my breath catch. “How do you know that?”

He looked down at his beer. “I shouldn’t be gossiping.”

“Oh, please,” I said, “gossip away.”

“How about we get a refill on the oysters first?”

I nodded, squeezing my last lemon wedge onto the flesh of the last oyster on my plate and tipping it down my throat. It was firm and sweet, like eating a mouthful of the ocean. I sighed with pleasure, and Nick smiled. The sun was starting to set, tinting the sky gold and apricot and flamingo pink.

Nick led me back to the raw bar, where I refilled my plate, then we strolled over to one of the bonfires. The sand underneath it had been flattened, then piled up at the rug’s edges to form a kind of couch, and the seaweed had been raked against the dune. I wondered whose job that had been, and again how much this affair was costing the Cavanaughs.

“So tell me how you met Drue. You guys were school friends?” he asked.

I leaned back against the carpeted backrest, spreading the skirt of my dress over my legs, and gave him the abbreviated version of the story—that we’d been friends through high school, then hadn’t seen each other for a while, and had recently reconnected. I wanted to get back to the wedding gossip or, better yet, to learn more about him, but Nick seemed interested in my history, and in life in the city, asking about my job and my life as a babysitter/Instagram influencer.