"Hot date, Angie?" Cass had been standing apart from the group, looking out the back windows at the ocean, one knee up on the window seat. She turned now and looked at Angie, her voice flat.
For a minute, Angie didn't answer. When she spoke, her words were measured and neutral. "Don't worry, Cass. I won't eat him. Pete's a good guy."
Before Cass could answer, the back door opened and Pete Halloran's tall, lanky body filled the doorway. He stepped inside and pushed the door closed against the force of the wind. "Hi, ladies," he said, looking around the room. "You, too, Cass."
Cass made a face at her younger brother.
"What are you doing here, Pete? Taking up knitting?" Izzy asked.
"I hear it has its rewards." Pete eyed the food on the sideboard.
"Not until you learn how to knit and purl, Peter." Birdie looked up from the delicate dewdrop stitch she was working into her scarf. "It's becoming quite popular with men, you know. They're finally catching on. They will never be as accomplished, but they can certainly try."
"It'd be damn near worth it," Pete said, still eyeing the fettuccine.
"Not tonight, sweet Pete." Angie came up behind him and looped one arm through his.
At Angie's touch, Pete's face turned the color of her hair. He turned toward her with a slow smile creasing his tan skin.
He's crazy about her,
Nell thought. And they certainly made a striking couple. Pete so tall and sandy-haired, and Angie just a few inches shorter, her cascade of red waves brushing against his shoulder.
Nell had seen Pete outside the Sea Harbor Historical Museum a few days before. He was sitting on a bench in the square, just across the brick road from the library where Angie worked, tossing pieces of a sandwich to the gulls. But his mind was clearly not on birds, and Nell had wondered why he wasn't out checking lobster traps with Cass, helping her with the day's catch.
Pete hadn't noticed Nell, though she had waved as she walked past him on her way to a board meeting. Then Angie appeared, walking down the library steps in pencil-thin jeans and a bright green sweater, her hair flying in the breeze, her head held high. She still had on the earphones that she wore in the library sometimes-- bright orange earphones that looked liked daisies and amused the older volunteers.
The look on Pete's face when he spotted Angie told Nell exactly why he was there.
Seeing Pete sitting on the bench, Angie had slipped the earphones down around her neck, then walked across the street, her eyes holding Pete's. She'd squeezed down beside him on the park bench, one hand reaching in his sack for a sandwich with a familiarity that spoke of more than a casual acquaintance.
"Opposites attract," Ben had said when she repeated the scene at supper that night. "Angie needs a nice guy like Pete in her life."
Nell had nodded, but she wondered if Angie could ever be in anyone's life in the way that nice guys needed.
Cass walked back to the sideboard, burying her nose in one of Nell's thick sacks. Cass didn't like conflict. And she didn't like Angie. But she loved Nell's cooking.
And she fiercely loved her brother, Pete.
Cass pulled the remaining Tupperware containers from the sack, lining them up on the countertop and immersing herself in the sensory experience of the food. Angie was instantly forgotten, replaced by spices and buttery hunks of lobster and scallops and big globs of sweet baked garlic.
"Sorry we can't stay," Pete said. He looked longingly at the food. But one squeeze to his arm from Angie, and the roomful of women sensed that even Nell's cooking could be upstaged if the hormones were lined up right.
"Watch out for the weather," Nell said. She bit back a warning to leave the cashmere sweater in Pete's car if even one drop threatened to fall from the sky.
Angie smiled at Nell, then glanced at Cass and hooked her arm through Pete's. "Pete will keep me warm."
Cass kept her back to the couple, blocking out Angie's words.
Nell watched the two young people walk through the door and into the night. The look on Angie's face earlier reminded Nell of a young Angie, upset with the world, determined to right its wrongs. Her shoulders held more than a skimpy blouse, a deep tan--a luxurious cashmere sweater.
Chapter 2
Two hours later, after Cass and Birdie had helped stash the left-overs in the refrigerator and gone on home, Nell and Izzy locked up the shop and walked out into the night.
"What would we do without these Thursday nights?" Izzy mused.
"Cass might starve to death," Nell said. "And Birdie's wine and wisdom would go to waste."
"And Ben would be huge if he were the only outlet for your cooking. And me? I'd be absolutely lost without you three."
"My sentiments exactly," Nell said, giving Izzy a quick hug.
The summer sky was dark, with only a star or two breaking the heavy black clouds, and a gusty wind tossed loose scraps of paper along the windy road and rumpled the awnings over shop windows.
Nell smoothed down her hair with the flat of her hand, pressing it against her head. At sixty-one, her dark hair was streaked with silver, but rather than clouding her hair, the wavy lines ran through it like carefully placed highlights.
"Wikkid tiger stripes," Ben called them, and he'd smooth them out with the blunt tip of his finger.
"Are you going home, Izzy?" Nell asked, looking up at the sky. "The rain will be here before too long."
Izzy looked up at the sky. "Good. Rain is good for business. Perfect weather for sitting on the front porch with a ball of soft wool." Izzy hooked her arm through Nell's. "I'm meeting some friends over at the Ocean's Edge for a drink before I head home, but I'll walk you to your car first."
Harbor Road--called Seaside Village by the town brochures, and just plain "the village" by locals--was the hub of Sea Harbor. The narrow, curvy roads were lined with shops and small cafes, a couple of taverns, and a coffeehouse, all shoulder to shoulder and each unique as new generations of owners fixed up the buildings and made them new again. At midpoint, the shops gave way to an open area where Pelican Pier jutted out into the harbor. The long dock housed whale watching and pleasure boats and small commercial fishing vessels, all mixed together because a town the size of Sea Harbor was too small to segregate commercial from private vessels. On the shore, the Ocean's Edge Restaurant and Lounge, lit up like a carousel, offered music, drinks, and late-night meals.
"It looks like Archie still has customers," Nell said as they paused in front of the Harbor Road bookstore, admiring a new display of local-author books in the window. The door was still propped open, and a stiff breeze ruffled the blinds on the door.
Archie Brandley had store hours posted on the glass door of his bookstore just like the rest of the Sea Harbor merchants, but he never asked anyone to leave, no matter what the hour. Instead, Archie or his wife, Harriet, would balance the register receipts or shelve new books until the last guest, as Harriet called their customers, pried himself from a cracked leather chair and shuffled out the door. Sometimes the late-night guests didn't buy books, but it didn't bother Archie or Harriet. Reading was all that mattered, they'd say.
The blustery wind whipped Izzy's hair from the back of her neck. She made a face at her reflection in the bookstore window, the mass of thick wavy hair tangled and flying about her face. "The wicked witch of the north," she said. She grabbed a fistful of hair and slipped an elastic band from her wrist to the bunched hair, fastening it at the base of her neck.
Nell watched Izzy's face in the window and remembered the gangly, pigtailed child with the scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks that had characterized a young Izzy Chambers. Izzy had thought more about horses on her family's Kansas ranch than how she looked back then. But she'd finally shed her pigtails, and she'd grown tall and graceful, heading back east to college, where people came to remember Isabel Chambers long after meeting her. They might not remember her name, but they remembered the enormous brown eyes that filled her face, the dimples that punctuated a wide smile in her fine-boned face, and the slender figure of a woman whose slightly irregular features fit together in an intriguing way.
"Look, Nell." Izzy pointed beyond her reflection to the small loft above the sales counter. Several chairs and crowded bookshelves filled the cozy space. "I'd know those boots anywhere."
Angie Archer sat on one of the chairs, her face partially hidden in shadow. The cashmere sweater was still around her neck, with one saffron edge draped over the arm of the chair.
Standing above her, his eyes focused intently on Angie's carefully made-up face, was a man. His stance was angry.
"Somehow I hadn't expected Angie and Pete to end up here," Nell said.
Izzy leaned closer to the window, shielding the glare of the lamplights behind her by cupping her hands to the glass and peering through them. "Cass said they were going to have a quick drink at the Gull, then head over to Passports in Gloucester." Her breath painted a circle on the window, and she backed away, turning to Nell. "I wonder what they're doing here, Nell? Pete was so happy earlier--he looked like he'd died and gone to heaven. That's not a happy stance."
Nell stepped closer to the window. Just then, the man turned and walked away from Angie, heading down the loft stairs. "And that's not Pete, Izzy. That's Tony Framingham."
A shadow appeared from the back of the store. Archie stopped at the foot of the stairs, his friendly smile gone and his expression stern. "What's going on up there, Tony?" His voice was low but traveled through the open door, out to the sidewalk.
Rather than walk past the open entryway, Nell and Izzy took a step back, their faces obscured by the display of books. Archie's voice grew louder.
"You're welcome in my store, Tony, just like anyone else. But you're an adult now, and you don't cause problems here like you did when you were a snot-nosed kid. You don't curse and threaten a lady in my bookstore, no matter who you are. You were brought up better than that."
"Lady?" Tony said, but Archie stopped him with the palm of his large hand held up between them.
Tony turned, lowered his head, and headed for the door.
Before Izzy and Nell could move away from the window, he walked out, his brows knit together and his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. A gust of wind pushed a patch of dark hair flat against his forehead, and he brushed it back with his hand. It wasn't until Tony pulled out his car keys from his pocket that he raised his head and spotted Nell and Izzy.
For a minute Tony looked startled--and then, with the ease of one used to difficult situations, he forced a half smile across his face. " 'Evening," he said, nodding his head slightly. He glanced over Nell's shoulder and through the store window, his eyes scanning the store as if to gauge what Nell and Izzy had seen, then focused back on the women standing in front of him.
"I haven't seen you much since I've been back in town, Nell," he said. "Are you and Ben doing all right?"
"We're fine, Tony," Nell said, trying to ease the awkward moment. "It's nice of you to ask."
Tony looked over at Izzy, and his preoccupied expression began to clear. "And Izzy Chambers. I hear nice things about your shop on Harbor Road. Kind of a surprise, I must say. But my mother thinks it's the best thing to hit Sea Harbor since the quarries closed."
Izzy laughed. "Your mom is my best customer, Tony. I think she has more yarn in her house than I have on my shelves."
Tony Framingham had been Izzy's first summer love. They'd spent long evenings walking hand in hand along Pelican Pier or over at the yacht club beach, spinning dreams of where they'd be in ten or fifteen years. Izzy was going to live in Italy and paint, though even back then Tony Framingham didn't buy it. A lawyer, he had predicted. "A female Atticus Finch--you can argue with the best of them, Iz, and you'll make the world a better place."
Tony, they'd both agreed, would have a house on the Riviera and travel the world, managing stocks and bonds, buying and selling businesses. And they'd meet each other now and then in magical places, the world at their beck and call.
"We had some dreams back then, didn't we, Tony?" Izzy said.
"And from what I hear, I was right about the lawyer bit. Boston's Elliot & Pagett, no less."
"For a while," Izzy said. "I didn't fit too well, Tony."
Tony nodded. Like everyone else in Sea Harbor, he had heard about Izzy's short-lived law career. "And here we both are, Izzy, back in Sea Harbor. Who would have thunk it?" His laugh was deep and traveled on the night air.
"So you've moved back, Tony?" Nell asked.
"I don't know, Nell. I have things going on in New York and Boston. But I came up to help my mother. Since Dad died, she's tried to handle everything by herself--that house, and my dad's business, too. It's too much for her--she thinks she's still forty."
"Tony, don't ever underestimate your mother. There isn't much Margarethe Framingham can't handle. She's been an amazing force in this town." And Margarethe had always handled her husband's business dealings, Nell knew, long before Sylvester Framingham Jr. died. She did it as easily as she knit up sweaters and jackets. And she'd probably saved the family fortune once or twice.
"Well, she needs to slow down, sell that damn mansion. Not worry so much about things."
"I don't think she thinks of it that way." Nell held back from telling Tony it might not be his decision to determine what his mother did or didn't do. The Framingham house was certainly huge--and a little ostentatious, in Nell's opinion. Parisian curtains and marble hallways seemed a little out of place in Sea Harbor. But Margarethe loved her home, and she was exceedingly generous in sharing it. It had been in the Framingham family since they began mining the stone quarries on outcroppings of their land. And if that was how she chose to live--and decorate--that might not be anyone's decision but her own.