Okay? he thinks. When they separate, he studies her face. She’s pretty, smiling, and he does vaguely remember her from the other night. Vaguely.
Apple is at the picnic with her husband, Hugo, and their twin boys, Caleb and Lucas, who are going to be seniors at the high school, and a bunch of other people whose names Coop tries to retain but loses after ten seconds. He knows he doesn’t have to worry about Jake; the guy raises money for a living and can talk to anyone about anything.
Coop throws their case of beer into the tub of ice and cracks one open for him and one for Jake.
This is the life, he thinks. “Upside Down,” by Jack Johnson, is playing on the portable speaker, the grills are smoking, and there’s a table laden with food, including a blueberry pie with a lattice crust. Apple holds out a platter of oysters sitting in rapidly melting crushed ice.
“Hugo just shucked these,” she says. “Please, have one.”
“Then you two come play some bocce,” Hugo says. “Jake, you’re on my team.”
“No wonder my sister loved it here so much,” Coop says to Apple.
“You know something funny I remember about Mallory?” Apple says. “She never once came to our Labor Day picnic. She always claimed she was busy. Every year.”
“Oh, she was busy all right,” Coop says.
“Bocce,” Jake says.
Coop hopes that he will be as impressive at bocce as he was at golf that morning—but he’s the weak link, probably because he’s distracted by Brooke, who is waving her drink around, chanting his name, “Coo-per! Coo-per!” He wonders how much she’s had to drink and then reminds himself not to judge. She’s a teacher, this is her last full day of freedom, she’s allowed to be enthusiastic.
The tenth-grade history teacher whose name Cooper thinks is Nancy comes around with a tray of pink cocktails in plastic cups.
“Madaket Mysteries,” she says. “A Labor Day tradition.”
Coop tastes one—it’s strong and goes down way too easily. The Spanish teacher, Jill, comes by with Buffalo chicken dip and Fritos, and Cooper is a sucker for Fritos. Then the ribs and jumbo shrimp come off the grill. This is the best day he’s had in a long time—even though he loses, badly, at bocce.
“Want to go for a walk, handsome?” Brooke asks. She has pulled on a diaphanous white cover-up and she hands him another Madaket Mystery.
“Sure,” he says. He checks on Jake, who is deep in conversation with the biology teacher over by the deviled eggs. He catches Jake’s eye, waves, and points to Brooke.
They head down the beach, walking past kids building sandcastles and collecting shells and a teenager on a skim board who looks at Brooke and says, “What’s up, Ms. Schuster?”
Without missing a beat, she says, “See you Tuesday, Liam.”
“I love it,” Cooper says. “You see your students at the beach.”
“I see my students everywhere,” Brooke says. “It’s a small island.”
She then tells Coop her basic story: She’s forty-eight years old and has two kids, a son who’s a sophomore at UMass and a daughter who will be a senior at the high school, in the same class as Caleb and Lucas. She lives on the island year-round in a rental that she fears the owners will someday sell out from under her, but she doesn’t make enough on her teacher’s salary to buy her own home. “I always wondered how Mallory did it,” she says. “She was a single mom too, right?”
“She was,” Coop says. “She inherited the cottage from our aunt when we were in our twenties. It’s on the beach but it’s simple and pretty small. When my parents died, she had the money to finally renovate.”
“Well, sadly, I don’t have a rich aunt to leave me a beachfront cottage,” Brooke says. She goes on to tell Coop that all of her family is in New Hampshire, which was where she lived before she got divorced from the children’s father and decided she needed a change. She sighs. “So, what do you like to read?”
Coop scrambles for one of the titles on Mallory’s bookshelves, but he draws a blank. He was always the kid in English who skimmed the CliffsNotes five minutes before class. “I don’t read for pleasure because I do so much policy analysis at work.” This answer is lame and to distract Brooke, he reaches for her hand. It works—maybe too well. Brooke pulls him into the water. He manages to shuck off his shirt but she goes in with her cover-up still on, which strikes him as a bit odd. Brooke paddles out then turns to splash him right in the face and when he sputters, she says, “Oh, I’m sorry, baby,” and while Coop is thinking, Baby?—he hardly knows this woman, he wasn’t even sure it was her when they pulled onto the beach, and he never would have recognized her on the street—she swims into his arms and starts kissing him.
Whoa, he thinks. That was fast.
“We should probably get back,” he says.
She splashes him again, right in the face. “You’re no fun.”
As they’re walking back, she says, “So how do I convince you to move into your sister’s cottage and stay on Nantucket year-round?”
Coop laughs, even though he is now officially uncomfortable. “Hopefully in a few years when I retire, I’ll be able to spend more time here.”
“A few years?” Brooke says. “I’ll be off the market by then.”
At a loss for how to respond, Coop quickens his pace. He’s relieved when they get back to the party and Jake says, “Leland called, we have to go.”
“Did something happen?” Coop asks.
“She didn’t say. She just told me we were needed at home.”
Coop and Jake say their goodbyes and Coop gives Brooke a hug and a quick kiss goodbye. “I have your number,” he says. “And you have mine if you ever get to Washington.”
Brooke waves like crazy until the Jeep is up over the dunes.
“You like her?” Jake says.
“Perfectly nice woman,” Coop says. “And attractive. But we had exactly nothing in common and I’m not unhappy to be leaving.”
“That’s good to hear,” Jake says. “You two were gone so long I was afraid you’d proposed.”
As they head down the no-name road, Coop wonders if he should be concerned. Fray and Leland both seemed giddy about their reunion—but all Coop can think now is that they had an argument (this would be par for the course with them) and Fray lost his temper and is threatening to leave. It would be sort of like what happened thirty years ago.
But when they pull up to the cottage, Coop hears laughter and conversation coming from inside. He hears a woman who is not Leland. It sounds like…
Coop throws open the screen door and steps inside. Fray and Leland are sitting at the narrow harvest table with Stacey.
Stacey?
She stands up and smiles at him. She’s wearing a flowing white strapless dress and a pair of barely-there sandals. She’s every bit as captivating to Cooper as she was the first time he saw her in the basement of the Phi Gamma Delta house.
“Stace?” he says. “What are you doing here?”