A Nantucket Wedding(59)

She packed Thursday night and took her luggage to the office with her on Friday. During lunch, she went to Zabar’s and bought caviar, bagels, imported olives, mustard, chocolates, dried apricots, cinnamon rugelach, cheese sticks, and gourmet nuts. She left work one hour early and headed for the flight to Nantucket.

    To her great disappointment, her sister and family weren’t coming to Nantucket until next weekend, but Poppy and her family were there, one happy family. Jane felt unmoored. Unwanted. The outsider.



* * *



—

This weekend Alison was uninterested in Jane or the fact that Scott had gone to Wales alone. Jane’s mother was focusing all her charm and time on Poppy and her kids. Jane could understand this. Poppy was a difficult person to please, and in the service of happy families, Alison was showing Poppy and David how much Alison enjoyed Poppy, how she was including her in everything they did.

So why didn’t David spend time with Jane? Of course, Jane knew, David was beyond enthralled by his grandchildren. He played games with them, swam with them, built sand castles with them, tickled and hugged them, and truly, Hunter and Daphne were beautiful, adorable children. Who wouldn’t be in love with them?

Poppy and Patrick were certainly all about their children. Poppy hardly spoke to Jane. It was as if Poppy didn’t even see her. Poppy was so busy with her father and husband and children, and being pregnant with her third child, she didn’t have time for anyone outside the family. Poppy was also a princess, doted on by her father. Jane wished her stepfather were still alive, to dote on her. But of course, if Mark were still alive, Jane’s mother wouldn’t be engaged to David, and none of this Nantucket world would have existed. And of course, Jane’s own birth father was somewhere in the world, not that he ever contacted Jane, and usually she didn’t mind, but now as she sat like an orphan outcast by a happy family, she missed him. Missed what she’d never had.

Really, Jane knew, it was the silence from Scott that hurt. When they had to travel for work, they phoned each other at least every two days just to check in. It had been a week, and Scott had texted only once. No phone call, no email. She could be the one to contact him, but their last argument the day he’d left had been brutal. She could understand his reluctance to have children because of his own childhood, and she was sad for him, it pierced her heart. But hadn’t their marriage shown him how life could be? They had been happy together! Of course they’d squabbled and conflicted, the way any two people would do over years of living together. But they had always known their love was steadfast. They had always trusted one another.

    And now they didn’t. She didn’t even know if they would stay married.

So there she was, as ripe as Eve’s apple, hanging by a thread to the bough of her life, ready for trouble, for romance, for someone to choose her.

Ethan.

During the past two weeks, while Jane was plugging away at work and Ethan was running his farm, they hadn’t communicated, and really, why should they? But today, as they played with Daphne and Hunter, a kind of bond wove its way around them, invisible but powerful. Ethan was a champion at playing, Jane realized that. During water Frisbee with Daphne and Hunter, Ethan was a goofball, jumping backward to make a catch and falling deep down into the waves, disappearing for what seemed like hours, and suddenly popping up with a grin, water streaming down his face. When they walked along the shore with the kids, and they all stopped to bend down and study a shell or rock, Ethan’s arm had brushed hers, and something unseen but completely real zapped a streak of lust through Jane’s body. Later, they played an underwater game of passing a carrot from mouth to mouth, no hands allowed, and somehow Jane had taken the carrot from Hunter’s mouth without bumping into his face, but when she’d given it to Ethan, their lips met in a brief, clandestine kiss.

In the early evening, Jane was still in her bikini as she moved around the kitchen, helping her mother make a cold pasta salad to go with the roast chicken they were having for dinner, when Ethan stomped in from the deck, a towel over his shoulders, his hair slick with water and standing up in cowlicks.

    “Jane!” On the deck behind him, Hunter was chasing his sister with a dead horseshoe crab. “Whadda ya say we blow this joint? Let’s get cleaned up and go into town and have some adult time.”

Jane paused. His suggestion was provoking so many different responses, she couldn’t speak. She glanced over at Alison.

“Go, Jane.” Alison was preoccupied, washing broccoli. “It will be fun for you to see the town at night.”

“Well…okay, all right, yeah,” Jane said. “I’ll take a shower and change.”

“Me, too,” Ethan replied. “See you back down here in twenty.”

They took Jane’s car because it was a convertible and because it was a beautiful night.

“The stars are so bright on this island,” Jane said as she slid behind the steering wheel.

Ethan laughed. “I agree, and thank you very much, but that’s all the nature I can tolerate right now. Please let’s go barhopping.”

Surprised, Jane said, “I don’t know where the bars are.”

“I do. Just head into town and take the first parking place you can find.”

As she turned out of the drive, she clicked on the radio to a good rock station. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to change, to shed her good daughter identity for something new, because she certainly wasn’t going to be the good wife. Or even, for that matter, the good lawyer, concerned with what was wrong and what was right. She was wearing a low-cut violet halter dress that made her tan glow. She was going to let the night take her where it wanted.