Page 46 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

Betsy shrugged. “Home? She said she wasn’t feeling well.”

Virgie pursed her lips, walking home at a clip, hoping that nosy reporter didn’t have the gall to approach her again. Inside the house, she yelled for Louisa, then Aggie. The cuckoo clock in the kitchen ticked. Not here. In the garage, two bikes were missing. Nothing had seemed amiss these last few days, everyone falling back into a steady rhythm since Charlie left. She was thinking the worst because of the flashbulb, the reporter, the mention of her husband on Nantucket. She would have to bring it up to him. Her stomach flip-flopped.

Oak Bluffs. Maybe the girls had ridden to Aggie’s friend’s house? They could be meeting up with boys. They wouldn’t take the ferry to the mainland, would they? She imagined reporting to Charlie that she’d lost two of her children, heat flushing up her neck. Snatching her keys, Virgie rushed into the station wagon.

The streets of Oak Bluffs traveled in unpredictable patterns, like someone had thrown a pile of sticks down and made roads of them. The bikes weren’t outside Aggie’s friend Junie’s house with its freshly painted white porch. She drove up busy Circuit Avenue, creeping along so she could check the thin alleyways. Nothing.

I’m going to kill these girls, she thought, turning into a neighborhood of gingerbread cottages. There was a playground with a seesaw and swings. That’s when she saw the bikes, parked against the chain-link fence lining the baseball dugout. She trained a watchful eye. A few women with kids at the playground. A trash truck emptying a garbage can. A dozen people on a makeshift basketball court. She watched the players a moment, and when a hulking boy jumped up to score, Virgie saw her. Lanky and tall and crouched in a defender stance, there was Aggie, her daughter’s navy shorts riding up her slender thighs, sweatstains rounding in her armpits. She dribbled the ball, then spun away from a guard and passed to another boy. Her tennis shoes screeched as she yelled, “Here, Junie. I’m open.”

Virgie hurried straight for the court, which was nothing more than packed dirt with hoops nailed to a tree at either end. Her daughter’s teammates were all colored girls, and they were playing against colored boys. At least one of the young men towered over her daughter.

Virgie glanced sideways for the reporter.Can you imagine if he shot a picture of this?The wrath she would endure from her husband, who would taunt her for calling him paranoid. She saw red then. Virgie had trusted her daughters. She strode across the grass to the hoop, a white lady in white Keds, and grabbed Aggie by the ear, dragging her away from the game.

“Let go of me, Mom. LET GO.” Aggie’s pupils narrowed to slits, and she broke out of her mother’s grip, her breathing ragged.

“You need to come home. Now.” Virgie exited the court, waiting for her in the grass. She wasn’t sure if she was angry because Aggie had snuck out, because she was playing basketball, or because Charlie had inserted himself into her head a little too much.

Louisa seemed to come from the bushes, carrying a lemonade that dripped down her hand; she was still wearing her Island Books pin on a scallop-sleeve sweater. “I told her not to join the tournament, but Aggie insisted, so I came to watch out for her. I wasn’t sure if she’d be safe…”

Aggie headed to a free throw line they’d marked with a piece of yarn. “Why wouldn’t I be safe? I’m playing with a bunch of Vineyard kids.”

“You don’t even know these kids!” Virgie followed her, very aware that the other teenagers were watching her. She imagined her daughter lying on the court after falling awkwardly and breaking an arm.

Aggie motioned to a friend to toss her the basketball. “You don’t know these kids, but I do. I’ve been playing with them all summer.”

Virgie gripped the metal fence links. “You’ve been sneaking out?” She couldn’t help but look for the reporter.

“I didn’t really lie. We went to Junie’s house, then we’d come here.” Aggie’s hands went to her hips as the kids on the court began to whisper. She walked up to her mother, facing her, and Virgie realized how tall her daughter was; they were nearly the same height now. “You told me to go after my goal. You said that I can’t let people stop me. All that stuff about how women want people to take us seriously, so here I am.” Aggie bounced the ball. “Well, I demanded to be taken seriously, and now you’re angry. So which is it, Mom? Should I listen to all those boys on the court who are telling me I shouldn’t play because I’m a girl, or should I push back? Because it can’t be both.”

“I didn’t mean for you to go do all the things we told you not to do.” And still, her daughter’s point was solid. She was doing exactly what Virgie had told her to.

“And why not? You told us to fight. Well, I’m fighting. I’m fighting to play a game I love.”

Aggie wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. There was an image in Virgie’s head suddenly. Aggie wearing her high heels in grade school, clacking around the house in a too-big tweed dress and pretending to be a hotel concierge. Asking Virgie if she wanted a pot of tea, approaching her sisters and announcing a concert pianist on the “back porch,” meaning she would play “Row Your Boat” on the piano in the living room. It had made Virgie cringe because she didn’t want Aggie to aspire to be at someone else’s beck and call, and now this five-foot-eight woman was asserting herself. She was showing Virgie what being your own womanlookedlike. Rebellion was rarely convenient.

The game picked back up, one of Aggie’s teammates eyeing Virgie as she trudged back to her car. Aggie caught the ball, her eye on the hoop. She shot a free throw. Time slowed as Virgie watched the ball careen straight into the basket, Aggie’s teammates coming to her for high fives. It captivated Virgie, the way her daughter was dribbling the ball aroundthe court, how she slammed her weight into one of the boys to pass the ball to her teammate. For a second, she couldn’t take her eyes off Aggie: running up and down the center, fanning out to the edges, the studious focus in her eyes. Each time a teammate passed her the ball, she was ready to catch it, then dribbled it to the basket. All this time Virgie had been worried the boys would laugh her daughter off the court. But these boys passed to her. They took her seriously as a player.

It was so very surprising.

“She’s right, Mom,” Louisa said as she followed Virgie back to the car by the baseball dugout. “You did tell us to go after our goals.”

Her frustration returned all at once. Virgie slammed her car door shut, keeping up her window, and instead of talking to Louisa, she yelled to the strawberry air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. “That doesn’t mean sneak off to some girl’s house and lie to your mother.”

Louisa was trying to get her mom to open the window, but she bounded out of the spot, peeling out. The worst part about seeing her daughter playing basketball was the realization that she was a really good player. Virgie had seen one boy grin into his hand at one of Aggie’s shots, like he couldn’t believe a girl could play like that.

It had been satisfying to see that, even Virgie had to admit. She turned on the radio to distract herself, then shut it off.

Charlie was wrong in saying Aggie couldn’t spend time with colored children, but maybe Virgie had been wrong about forbidding her daughter to play basketball. The sport gave Agatha power, it gave her might, and maybe the only thing to fear about the sport was her daughter’s pointed free throw.

She chuckled then, remembering the moment when Aggie had pushed right past a taller colored boy with the ball. The look of shock on his face.

Virgie carried in an armload of flowers from the garden, mostly fiery daylilies and delicate Chappaquiddick daisies that grew wild along the exterior walls of the house. It relaxed her to make small bouquets to place on bedroom bureaus and the kitchen table, and after her conversation with Charlie, and the scene that had played out with Aggie earlier, she wanted to stay busy. She’d caught Charlie on the phone at the imposing Russell Senate Office Building before he slipped off to attend a meeting of the Senate Budgetary Committee. He spoke quickly, his tone impatient and clipped, the voices of his staff carrying on in the background.

“I have no idea why this reporter wants to know why I was on Nantucket,” Charlie said, saying something to his staff about finding him the Transportation files. “I did stop on the island on my way home last week—it was a planned meeting to see a donor with a house there. There’s nothing foul to sniff out.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me that?”

“Tell you what? That I was going to Nantucket?”

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