The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(19)

Sometimes in the later afternoon, when the sun was lower in the sky, she’d walk down to the beach carrying just a towel and go for a swim. If the afternoon was cool, she’d take a walk first, usually down to the stone jetty then back, just so she’d warm up a little, get sweaty enough so she wanted to run into the cold water. It was on a Friday, when Joan and her family had been at Windward for almost a full week, that she came out of the water, and saw that Duane was watching her clamber up the incline of damp sand that led to the ridge where she’d planted her clothes and her towel.

“I saw you out there swimming,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Joan said.

“The water’s pretty cold.” Duane was wearing a T-shirt that said georgetown prep on it.

“It’s not that bad, actually.” Joan stooped to pick her towel up off the beach, snapping it in the wind to get any sand off it before wrapping it around her torso.

“Yeah, I guess,” Duane said, and stared out at the ocean as though he could tell its temperature just by looking at it.

“Hey,” he said, and jerked his head back, as though he were trying to get his dog to heel. “Sorry if things were a little weird the other night.”

Not wanting to talk about it, Joan said, “Whatever.”

“You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“About what? You being a dick?”

“Look, you were the one—”

“Forget it. Whatever. I don’t care.”

Duane nodded, as though he were pondering her words, then said, “Well, if you don’t care then I thought maybe you’d want to come hang out again. At the beach. I’m going to be there tonight with some friends.”

“Yeah, who? You and that creepy busboy?”

“No. There’ll be more kids. Derek’s inviting a couple of his friends. And there are these girls coming. I don’t know their names, but they’re not locals or anything. They’re staying at one of the big rental houses down the other end of the beach.”

“Probably not,” Joan said.

“Hey, whatever. I just thought you might be pretty bored of this place.”

While he’d been standing there, he’d slipped off one of his flip-flops and had dug his foot into the soft sand. She knew he was trying to be nice, that he was remembering the last time they’d hung out, and was pretending it had never happened. She was almost positive he wanted to say something to her like, “Don’t be a baby,” or “What, you don’t drink?” And part of her really wanted to tell him she’d rather read in her room than be out on a dark beach with him and his gross friends, but, instead, she said, “Yeah, okay. Maybe.”

“Cool,” he said.

Joan wanted to dry off, but she didn’t want to do it in front of Duane, so she kept the towel wrapped around her and slid her own sandals back on her feet, trying to ignore the wet sand trapped between her toes.

“I’m going to head back now. I’m cold.”

“Oh, okay,” Duane said. “See you tonight.” He turned awkwardly, and made his way in the direction of the hotel. Joan, happy that he hadn’t waited for her, dried herself off, pulled on her denim shorts, all while watching Duane work his way up the beach pretty slowly. Maybe he was hoping she’d try to catch up with him. She wasn’t planning on it, though, and she wasn’t planning on meeting him and his townie friends at the beach later, either. What she really wanted to do now was to find Richard and report on this interaction. When Duane was far enough ahead of her, she hung her towel over her neck and made her way back to the Windward.



Dinner that night was meatloaf, and the only good news about that was there was also mashed potatoes.

Joan’s father was napping, so it was Joan and her mother and her sister, and halfway through the meal, Denise, Lizzie’s new friend, joined them. She was a senior at NYU and she had a really short haircut, but with one long strand that came down the left side of her head, and that she kept tucking behind her ear, almost like a nervous tic. She wore a tank top and had one of those tattoos all the way around her bicep muscle, a little interlocking pattern, and Joan wondered what it would look like when Denise was old and saggy.

“Have you started to think about college yet?” Denise asked Joan.

She hadn’t, but said, “Maybe somewhere in Boston,” just to have something to say.

“So you think you might want a city school instead of a country school?”

“I guess so.”

Denise then told a long story about the nine different colleges she’d applied to and the ones she’d gotten into and the ones she hadn’t, and Lizzie kept smiling at her and nodding along like it was the most fascinating thing she’d ever heard.

While they were talking, Joan saw Richard, who she’d spotted earlier with his aunt and uncle, go up to the buffet. It was relatively quiet up there, so Joan quickly finished all the potatoes on her plate and told her mom she was going back up for more.

“She’s got a hollow leg,” her mother said, as Joan got up, leaving her dirty plate at the table like you were supposed to.

The buffet had two sides, the trays of food identical on both so it didn’t matter which side you went down. Joan cut into the line on the opposite side from Richard, grabbed some more potatoes, then said, “Hey,” across the sneeze barriers.