Page 10 of The White Oak Lodge

When Amos returned to his cabin, he dropped the toolbox on the front porch and went inside to find his black lab, Monty, huffing and licking his lips. Amos remembered with a jolt that when he’d left to put a light bulb in the bathroom of Nancy’s rental cabin, he’d thought he’d be gone twenty minutes tops. Monty was hungry and lonely. Amos put his hand on Monty’s head, scratching behind his glossy black ears as he puttered around the kitchen, opening a can and tipping it so that the sludge meat spread into a bowl. When he put it in front of Monty, he ate it in two decadent bites and spent the next ten minutes licking the bowl. Amos laughed and sat in the armchair with a glass of water, his head whirring. To Monty, he announced, “I had a glass of wine with a woman tonight.” Monty seemed uninterested. Amos didn’t blame him. Amos’s human-based relationships had little bearing on Monty’s life, at least so far. Amos’s loneliness and general desire to spendas much of his time by himself as he could had resulted in his getting Monty from the pound in the first place. Someone to keep me company at night. Someone to talk to. With a final lick, the bowl went flying across the kitchen tiles, and Monty hurried from the kitchen to the living room to leap onto Amos’s lap. He weighed eighty pounds, and Amos cried out. But the pain dissipated soon enough, leaving Amos with the sensation of belonging, of being needed. He loved this stupid dog.

Burning with curiosity, Amos used his phone to research all he could about Nina. He typed into the search bar: Nina - professor - Princeton.

It didn’t take long to find her.

Aloud to Monty, Amos read, “Nina Plymouth is a professor of anthropology. Her writing and research are grounded in South American history and myths. Her first book,What’s Lost Between Us, written with her husband, anthropology Professor Daniel Plymouth, delves into the cultural and language divides between tribes in Chile and how those divides are reflected in modern-day South America.”

Amos whistled long and low. “She’s a genius,” he said. “She’s a genius who’s married, apparently, to another genius. Daniel Plymouth?”

Amos searched through the Princeton website to find Daniel Plymouth: a handsome guy in his early forties, maybe, with too-white teeth and a crew cut who specialized in similar fields as Nina and who, it seemed, had written far fewer books. But it didn’t take Amos long to realize something. It seemed that both Daniel and Nina had become professors of anthropology at Princeton in the same year—2017. But at that time, only one of them had secured tenure: Daniel.

Amos remembered again that Nina hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring. She’d made no mention of a husband, either. Perhaps they were on the outs. Perhaps Nina was here toregroup, to figure out what she wanted from life in the wake of a divorce or separation. Maybe she was angry that after writing far more books than Daniel and (from Amos’s perspective) being the far more impressive (and good-looking!) of the two, Daniel had been awarded tenure while Nina still fought for it.

Of course, having never gone to college himself nor hardly spent much time off the island, Amos knew very little about the academic world. He could only guess.But something about Daniel is off, he thought. Something he didn’t like that had nothing to do with how attractive and interesting he found Nina. He pulled up sample pages ofWhat’s Lost Between Usand read until his eyes glazed over. It was way over his head. He turned on the television and tried to quiet his mind.

The following morning, Amos was up by six, brewing coffee and rubbing sleep from his eyes as Monty barreled from one end of the kitchen to the other, demanding still more food. After Amos fed him, he opened the door to let Monty out and watched from the porch as Monty sniffed along the tree line and lurched to the edge of the water, lining his nose with sea froth. What did he think he was hunting? Amos was grateful he never had to put Monty on a leash nor chase him. He always came when Amos called.

By seven thirty, Amos was out the door and down the road, tending to a plumbing issue at one of Nancy’s rental cottages. It was just a couple of weeks till full-blown summer tourism shuddered through the quaint island, and he knew Nancy relied on Google reviews that wouldn’t take kindly to faulty plumbing or bad electrical. When he was finished, he realized he’d missed a call from Nancy and listened to a voicemail informing him that there had been a last-minute reservation for the old cabin on stilts not far from his place. He wrote back: Roger that. He didn’t mention he’d already barged in on the woman currently living there. He didn’t want Nancy’s wrath.

Midmorning, Amos stopped by the diner on the outskirts of the Historic District, where a guy named Calvin he’d known back at Nantucket High operated the griddle, and his wife Stacy took orders. Stacy poured the coffee as soon as Amos poked his head through the glass door, and Calvin called out, “The usual?” before Amos sat down. Amos nodded and made pleasant small talk, sipping his coffee without fully realizing why he’d come in there in the first place. It was after about five minutes that he reckoned with it. He wanted to tell someone from the past about Nina, the anthropologist. He wanted someone to look at him and sayyou look different. Because he felt different, and it terrified him to think that the rest of the world couldn’t see that.

But Stacy and Calvin were hard at work on a redesign of their house and eager to show Amos their mid-work photographs, one of Calvin on a stepladder and Stacy covered in white paint. Amos crunched his bacon and laughed at their stories and wondered, with an ache in the deepest part of his belly, if he’d ever have stories like this of his own one day.

When Stacy ran off to greet another customer, Calvin hung back, pocketing his phone and looking Amos in the eye for the first time. “You good, man?”

Amos’s heartbeat quickened. He took a bite of bacon and swallowed it, half expecting Calvin to leave. When he didn’t, he said, “Do you know anything about anthropology?”

Calvin laughed, eyes widening with surprise. “You going academic on us, Amos? You running off to college or something?”

Amos tried to join his old friend’s cackles, but they dimmed out too soon.

“That so strange?” Amos asked.

Calvin put his hands on his hips. “Anthropology. It sounds like the study of something. Insects?”

“Close. It’s apparently the study of humans.”

Calvin snapped his fingers. “Close indeed. What’s there to study about us? Everything we do seems random.”

“According to the internet, everything we humans do is not random,” Amos parroted. “Like we all live in patterns.”

“You’re telling me that opening this diner was part of a greater pattern?” Calvin asked in disbelief. “You’re telling me that because I used Tabasco instead of Sriracha this morning, I’m fitting into some kind of pattern?”

Now that Amos had gotten to the end of what he remembered of anthropology, about its purpose and meaning in the wider world, Amos was out of his depth. He drank his coffee and raised his shoulders.

Calvin sat down across from him and folded his hands. His eyes swirled with worry, and it touched Amos to remember that he still had friends who cared about him, who recognized something different in him and wanted to take the time to cure it. “You know, they have all kinds of online courses these days,” Calvin said. “You could just take a few classes on, um, anthropological science or whatever and see if you like it enough to keep going.”

Amos opened his lips to protest, but Calvin wasn’t done. He lowered his voice and spoke rapidly, “Listen, what went down when we were teenagers wasn’t cool or fair. It forced us to make a lot of decisions very quickly, and I don’t know if all of those decisions were right. I don’t have any regrets, not really. But Stacy and I are doing okay, and the diner always picks up like crazy in the summer. If I didn’t have Stacy, I don’t know what I’d do. Maybe I’d leave the island to go back to school.”

Amos’s throat felt tight. Implied in what Calvin was saying was that he felt sort of sorry for Amos because Amos didn’t have someone to spend his time with, to attack the perils of life with. Both of them had been involved in what had gone down whenthey were teenagers, and Amos knew they both did what they could to forget about it.

That was when Amos spotted a familiar face out the window. Nina Plymouth: dropping out of the driver’s side of a little Chevy and buzzing down the sidewalk. She was wearing a jean jacket and a cute red dress with a pair of flats, and her black hair shone. Amos felt as though he were floating.

Across from him, Calvin kept talking, “Maybe you should come over for dinner this week? Stacy is the real cook of the family. All I can do is eggs and grilled cheese sandwiches and the odd bacon slice or two. We’ll make something tasty and hearty for you. And you know what else? We can download one of those dating apps together. Or!” Here, Calvin smashed the table with his hand, “We can sign up for one of these ammapology thingies together. I need to learn a few things here and there, too. We’re only, what? Forty-five? We aren’t dead yet. Not by a long shot.”

Nina shot down the road, glancing to the left and right as though she didn’t want to be followed. A second later, she paused in front of the Nantucket Historical Society and adjusted her purse over her shoulder. To Amos, it looked as though she were about to take on a monster. But she was just a fine-boned anthropology professor who was probably struggling through the early and terrorizing steps of a divorce. She’d also come back to Nantucket for a reason—one that probably had to do with her academic pursuits. Maybe she was heading into the archives to conduct research. Maybe she was going to write about the whaling years, the history of the Underground Railroad or the historical lighthouses in the area. Maybe she was studying the way Nantucket’s accent had changed over the years. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Calvin was still talking, and it endeared him to Amos all the more.

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