No Wedding Like Nantucket Page 2

  She could only laugh and shake her head. She might be getting more stubborn these days, but she was no match for her fiancé. Oliver did what Oliver wanted, no matter the time or place. Luckily for her, what he usually wanted was to treat her like a queen and make her laugh. Sure, he got on Eliza’s nerves every now and then, but what kind of couple lived a perfect life around the clock? She was far from perfect, and so was he. But their cracks lined up nicely.

  A ding on the computer drew her attention as Oliver and Winter collapsed onto the living room carpet, giggling. Winter immediately crawled over to the toy bucket in the corner. She picked up her favorite toy—an oversized purple bubble wand—and handed it to Oliver. “Bub-bub!” she cajoled, clapping her hands. “Bub-bub!”

  Oh goodness. As if Eliza’s heart hadn’t melted enough already. She and Oliver might not be perfect, but Winter was an angel sent from the heavens above. Well, most of the time.

  She watched as Oliver pretended to consider Winter’s request. He was going to give in, of course—duh; he was a softie for their little girl—but they both held back laughter as Winter’s eyes got big. She tugged on his wrist and said it again and again—“Bub-bub! Bub-bub!”—until he cracked a huge smile, unscrewed the wand, and started to fill the living room with huge, iridescent bubbles that drifted around in the lazy draft of the fan overhead. Winter stood stock-still in the middle of it all, reaching out one chubby little finger in wonderment. Every time a bubble popped near her, she jumped a little in surprise and giggled.

  Another ding on the computer drew Eliza’s attention. Turning back to the monitor, she saw that an email had come in. Oliver must’ve left his email account open. “Babe, you got an email,” she called over.

  “Check it for me.” He looked occupied with trying to top his personal record for how many bubbles he could get going at once.

  Shrugging, Eliza double-clicked the notification and pulled his email up. She read it, blinked, read it again. “That can’t be right …” she mumbled under her breath.

  “Everything okay?” Oliver asked.

  “Uh, yeah, all good,” she said. “It’s, uh … just check later when you have time.”

  “Sure thing, babe.” Scooping up Winter, he went to scrounge up some snacks in the pantry.

  Eliza sagged back in the chair, brow furrowed. It wasn’t like Oliver to keep secrets from her, but it seemed like she’d accidentally stumbled across just that. The email that had come in was from a job recruiting site. It said, “Your application has been accepted—please select an interview time below.”

  Oliver was looking for a job?

  That was news to Eliza.

  It had been an ongoing topic over the last year. An understandably confusing one. After everything that had happened during their short stint on the Fever Dreams tour the previous summer, Oliver’s music career had taken a strange and unexpected twist. He’d done well while he was performing. Better than he’d ever expected. That didn’t surprise her. Everyone who had ever heard him sing and play the piano, even back in those days when he was just playing for tips at Nantucket bars, knew he was talented. But there’s a difference between “talented” and “making it big.” And it was awfully hard to say which side of that line Oliver fell on. The difference came down to luck. The guys who made it weren’t always better than the guys who didn’t. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

  The question was whether Oliver could keep waiting until he made it. Sooner or later, his lucky break would come. He knew that; she knew that. But what if it didn’t come until a lot later? He had a family now—a fiancée and a little girl. They wanted to build a life together. He couldn’t be in two places at once.

  He had to choose.

  And last year, it seemed like he had chosen them. He’d wavered, sure. He and Eliza had rehashed that plenty in the days and weeks since then. But every time they talked about it, he answered with firm resolve: he chose them. He chose his family. He chose his girls. He might not get fame, but he’d always be able to have them. Night after night, day after day, he reiterated that decision with every kiss, every wink, every game of Rocket Ship.

  That, Eliza was learning, was real love. Waking up each morning and choosing your partner again. That was the hard part, the work of it all. Not a single day could pass without making that choice.

  It wasn’t easy. Eliza knew that the cost of his choice still weighed on him, no matter how strong his conviction. He loved Eliza and Winter, yes, but he’d loved music first. He’d loved music since he was a little boy looking for somewhere to belong, and he’d wandered into the music room after school. Eliza adored that story. Every time Oliver told it, she closed her eyes and pictured a miniature Oliver—hair flopping over his face, shrunk down to four foot nothing, but with those green eyes shining exactly the same as they did now—stepping up warily to a piano, pressing a single key and hearing it ring out into the silence. In her mind’s eye, she saw his face light up. This is what I want, he’d say. This is the thing for me.

  She never, ever wanted to change him. But the fact remained that opening one door meant closing another. He wrestled with that nightly. And every time another email or call came in from a record label A&R scout asking what he was working on these days and if he wanted to maybe do a show or two, she saw that it pained her fiancé to say no. To say, “I’m a family man now.”

  “Whoa!” came a sudden cry from the kitchen. “‘Liza, get in here!”

  The shock interruption of her thoughts sent her heart leaping into her throat. Her brain immediately went to dark places. Winter fell and got hurt. Oliver sliced his finger off chopping potatoes. There’s a gas leak in the house; it’s about to explode. She raced into the kitchen, ready for the sight of blood and gore.

  But it was just Oliver bent over the kitchen counter with the newspaper spread out in front of him. Winter was playing contentedly at his feet, babbling to herself. He glanced up at her as she came skidding in. His eyes were wide in surprise. He waved her over urgently.

  “You scared me!” she snapped. “Don’t do that!”

  He chuckled and whistled low in surprise. “Trust me, babe. You’re gonna want to see this.”

  Frowning, she walked around and looked over his shoulder to see the article in the business section he was pointing at.

  Prominent Goldman Sachs VP Arrested, read the headline.

  She gasped. “No way.”

  Clay Reeves, the Executive Vice President for Customer Relations of the Goldman Sachs Leveraged Finance Capital Markets group, was arrested today in a joint FBI-SEC sting on charges of embezzlement, wire fraud, and possession of Schedule I narcotics, the article began. Sources say Reeves acted alone in appropriating several million dollars’ worth of firm revenue into private offshore accounts. These illicit gains funded a lavish lifestyle, including the purchase and distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine, according to court documents obtained by investigators.

  Eliza couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The article went into further detail describing Clay’s crimes. But the gist of it was that her ex-fiancé was almost certainly going to jail for a very, very long time.

  She looked up to Oliver, eyes wide. He whistled again. “That puts an end to that mess,” he said quietly.

  She knew exactly what he meant. “That mess” referred to the ugly underbelly of the last year—Clay’s intermittent attempts to seize custody of her daughter. He’d had a lawyer send a nasty, threatening letter demanding visitation and a co-parenting arrangement in which Winter would spend time with both Eliza and her biological father. Eliza, with the help of her brother-in-law Pete, who was a lawyer, had fought off the advances as best as she could. Fortunately, Clay didn’t seem to be too consistent with his threats, because he’d follow up one aggressive demand with months of radio silence before resurfacing.

  Now, though, that disturbing saga was over. Clay was in jail. That meant no more threatening letters. No more custody battle.

>   It was over.

  She put her arms around Oliver and her head against his chest. She fingered her engagement ring behind her back as she just breathed and relaxed in his embrace.

  Things were going to be good from here on out. She just knew it. Her wedding was in seven days. Her soon-to-be-husband loved her and wanted to provide for her and their daughter. Her ex was no longer in the picture.

  It was going to be a very good week indeed.

  Who cared if wedding planning was hard? Who cared if motherhood was hard? This—this hug, this smell, this warm and beautiful moment—this would always be easy.

  3

  Brent

  Monday morning.

  Six days until Eliza’s wedding.

  Brent Benson drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and sang along to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” on the truck radio. It used to be one of his dad’s favorite songs. Back in the day, whenever it came on, his dad would crank the volume and sing at the top of his lungs in what had to be one of the worst singing voices ever forced upon the world. It was god-awful. Cringeworthy. Nails on a chalkboard.

  And yet, Brent would’ve given everything he had to hear his dad singing just one more time.

  That was life, though. Brent had learned—albeit very, very slowly—over the last two years how to just sit with his hurt, with his grief, instead of letting it take him over. He remained a work in progress, to be sure. But it was better than it once was.

  That was Rose’s doing, no doubt. She knew all the telltale signs of an incoming rain cloud in Brent’s heart. She was so good at breaking up the patterns. She’d touch him gently on the wrist and look him in the face with those honey-gold eyes. “Brent,” she’d say in a voice that was somehow soft and piercing at the same time. “Breathe.”

  He pulled into the parking lot and hopped out of his truck. As he strode towards the front doors of Nantucket Elementary School, he was still humming along to the Springsteen song. He had a sudden flashback to years and years ago, when he was just a little boy.

  “Dad,” he’d asked, “how does the radio work?”

  His dad had explained about invisible radio waves surging through the air . He said the radio had a special ear, a very sensitive one, that could hear those invisible waves. And then the radio would sing along to those waves so that normal people could hear what they were saying.

  Brent smiled at the memory. That was just like his father. A little bit right, a little bit wrong, but absolutely unforgettable. He himself would be twenty-five years old in just a few months, and he certainly knew more about the world than he had when his father was explaining the secrets of the radio. Yet there was still a part of his heart that believed the radio with its special ear was singing out loud so everybody could have a chance to hear it. What a nice little machine.

  He chuckled under his breath. This, it turned out, was an awfully funny part of growing up: realizing that not everything worked in quite the way his father had explained it to him. Why, Dad had once told him that potato chips were so crunchy because they had little bits of cockroach in them! Young Brent had squealed in horror and sworn off potato chips for almost ten years before he realized that Dad was just messing with him. That memory made him laugh, too.

  He was still laughing as he stepped inside into the air-conditioned coolness of the building. “Good morning, Vivian,” he said politely to the secretary behind the desk at the school’s entrance. “Think you could wrangle me a visitor’s badge? I’m just popping in for a quick visit.”

  Vivian smiled. She was a nice woman in her early forties with cherry-red hair and cornflower blue eyes. Brent always swore that she looked like the Wendy’s logo.

  He couldn’t wait to see the look on Rose’s face when he surprised her in just a minute. He’d finished up today’s tasks at his current work site faster than expected this morning. So, with a couple of hours to kill, he’d decided to come by her kindergarten classroom. He’d stopped by the florist on the way over and picked up a bouquet of roses. Roses for Rose. A little trite, maybe, but you couldn’t fault the gesture.

  Brent smiled to himself as he collected the visitor’s badge from Vivian and thanked her. Rose was really bringing out the cheeseball in him these days. They’d gone to the freaking pumpkin patch last fall, for crying out loud! Him, her, and her adorable little girl, Susanna, all decked out in matching plaid shirts, doing hay rides and a pumpkin carving contest and all manner of autumn activities. And he’d loved every second of it.

  Oh, how things had changed.

  He rounded the corner at the end of the hallway and saw the door to Rose’s classroom. It was festooned with ribbons and stickers in bright summer colors. The school year would be over at the end of this week, so he’d figured that now was as good a time as any to drop by unannounced. The door was slightly ajar. Flowers in hand, he nudged it open and stuck his head in.

  He held his breath for a second while he took in the scene. Rose was seated at the front of the classroom on a small stool, reading to the students, who were gathered in a tight-knit semicircle around her. Every single one of the kids was listening with bated breath to a story about a lost little elephant and his friend, the mischievous monkey.

  Brent felt his heart pick up a beat. Maybe “cheeseball” wasn’t even doing him justice anymore. He was a level beyond that, even.

  “Knock knock,” he said playfully when Rose paused to turn the page. Her eyes shot up from the book. When she saw who it was at her door, a huge grin broke out across her face.

  She had her hair pulled back in a bun, with crisscrossed pencils piercing through it. Brent loved it. He always teased her, asking if they taught teachers how to do that on day one of job orientation. That usually earned him a swat on the shoulder and a roll of the eyes. She was wearing a long green sun dress and her feet were bare. She looked like a summer princess, a fairy, something out of a dream, something too good to be true. Too good to be his.

  And yet, she was.

  “Boys and girls,” she announced, “can you all say hello to Mr. B?”

  Twenty pairs of eyes swiveled over to him. “Hello, Mr. B!” they all chorused in unison.

  “I brought flowers,” he said, brandishing the bouquet.

  Rose’s eyes lit up. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

  Brent turned to the class. “Do you guys think I should give these to Miss Bowman?”

  “Yes!” screeched the girls, at the same time all the boys yelled, “Ew, no!”

  He laughed. Rose accepted the flowers with a modest little curtsy. “I’m going to go put these in some water so they stay nice and strong,” she said. “Mr. B, would you mind taking over?” She handed him the book.

  “With pleasure, Miss Bowman.” He settled onto the stool that Rose had just vacated. “Now, where were we …”

  He picked up the story where she’d left off. He gave the elephant a special voice—slow, thoughtful, calm—and the same for the monkey, who was a little more of a chatterbox, at least in Brent’s version of things. The kids stayed clustered around him. They giggled and gasped at all the right moments.

  The time wound by slowly as Brent read the rest of the story. When he was all done, with a big, dramatic, “And they all lived happily ever after. The End!”, he closed the book with a snap. Rose had taken up a seat on the carpet in the back, her legs swept over to one side as she gazed up at him with stars in her eyes.

  “Class, can we give Mr. B a round of applause to thank him for reading to us?” she asked. The kids all clapped politely. Brent gave a modest bow as Rose took to her feet and circled around to the front. “Excellent manners, thank you. All right, time for activity rotations! Green group, please stand up.” About a quarter of the kids took to their feet. “You all can start this afternoon at the book station.” A few of the kids jumped up and down excitedly, then they all took off towards one corner of the classroom, where bins full of colorful books awaited them. Rose dismissed the rest of the groups one at a time to
the different areas—seat work, arts and crafts, and toys. When they were all happily occupied, she turned back to Brent.

  “Who invited you, mister?” she murmured playfully with a little jab in his chest.

  He grinned. “Just thought I’d surprise my favorite teacher, that’s all.”

  “I’d better be your favorite.”

  “It was close between you and Mrs. Greenfield. She’s cuter, but you cook me dinner sometimes, so I gave it to you in the tiebreaker round.”

  Rose had to muffle a laugh at that. Mrs. Greenfield was as nice as could be, but she was as old as could be, too. “The Dinosaur of Nantucket Elementary,” went the teasing nickname. She’d be the first one to fire off a self-deprecating joke, though, so it wasn’t like Brent was being cruel or anything.

  “Speaking of dinner,” Brent continued, “what’s on the menu tonight?”

  “Again, very presumptuous, sir,” Rose poked back. “You keep showing up places you aren’t invited.”

  “You wound me, madam,” he said, holding a hand over his heart like it was broken. “But tell me it’s lasagna, and all will be well in the world again.”

  Rose smiled, her eyes sparkling. “It might be. And there might be apple pie afterwards, if you play your cards right.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Mrs. Bowman!” one of the kids called from the corner. “Can you help me?”

  “Duty calls,” Rose said to Brent regretfully.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’ve still got an hour or so before I gotta be anywhere. Mind if I stick around and play?”

  Rose tilted her head to the side and looked at him with a soft smile playing at the corner of her lips. “I’d like that.”

  Rolling up his sleeves, Brent went off to rescue the student in the arts-and-crafts corner from the perilous glue-stick trap they were ensnared in, smiling broadly all the while. He spent the rest of the afternoon rotating around with the kids, sounding out tough words, practicing math, building block towers.