Page 69 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“Did you ever tell Vera? Does she know who her father is?” Betsy wiped at the corners of her eyes. She needed to know if this young woman knew she had three half sisters.

“She does. I told her after his plane went down.”

It was then that Melody told them the story.

Virgie Whiting had been Melody’s closest friend in Washington. They’d met at Barnard when they were freshmen and they’d connected from the start, both ambitious, modern, and committed to their futures. When the two of them moved to the Capitol—Virgie when Charlie was elected and Melody when she got a job as a press person for a New York congressman—they’d get together for lunch and gripe about how dull and gray Washington was compared to colorful Manhattan. How they longed for pastrami at Barney Greengrass or cosmos at the Rainbow Room. Still, they each had a knack for politics.

“Your mother was always trying to set me up on dates.” Melody hadn’t smiled since she started talking, but she did now, with distance. “She’d hunt cocktail parties for handsome single men and force us into conversation.”

Melody ran into Charlie one afternoon in the hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building, and he’d seemed flustered in his navy woolen suit. His press secretary had walked out on him, there was a big setback on the budgetary legislation, and his overworked legislative assistants were answering the phones. Virgie would come with the children toddling about and try to help, but Charlie asked Melody if she would do him a favor: call in sick to her job and work for his congressional office for the day. She leaned forward, her eyes watery andglimmering. “I’d barely been there twenty minutes when he offered me the job of press secretary, with a modest increase in salary.”

It was a big promotion, since she would be the only woman press secretary in Congress that year. At first, Virgie would visit her and Charlie at lunch, sometimes bringing baby Louisa and eating ham sandwiches at the formal desks of the offices smelling of paper and old curtains. Then Charlie began working through lunch and sometimes dinner, and Melody would type up press releases or take journalists’ phone calls late into the night. One dusky evening, she and Charlie were working on a speech that he needed to give the next day, when he kissed her out of the blue. “I was flattered—I looked up to your father just like most of his staff did, and if I’m being honest, I had developed feelings for him.”

One thing led to another, Melody said, pushing up her sleeves as she tried to rush through this part. “Soon after, I realized I was pregnant,” she said. From there, the outcome was rather textbook: one of them wanted the child (her), the other didn’t (him), and both agreed that if Virgie found out about the two of them it would destroy her—and it would threaten Charlie’s political career. To protect her friend, whom she’d hurt in ways she hated herself for, Melody moved to Boston for a year, then home to Nantucket to be closer to her brother, a fisherman, and her parents, who owned the movie house in town.

Virgie wrote her letters, but Melody didn’t answer them, trying to distance herself from her old friend.

Melody wrapped her bare arms around herself. “I’d always wanted children, and I’d been so jealous of your mother, who already had two. I named my daughter Vera because it means ‘faith,’ and I’d never been so scared in my life.”

There was a loud thump, and Betsy thought it was her head doing a flip-flop, until she realized that Louisa had chucked one of the coasters from the coffee table, the glass thudding against the wall. Betsy grabbed the remaining coasters off the table and traveled to the piano, whereshe gripped the glossy top. There was a row of photographs of Vera at various stages: a newborn with eyes pressed shut and bundled tight, a toddler in pigtails and saddle shoes on a tricycle. Nothing about the child’s face felt familiar until she morphed into her double digits. Then there were her father’s eyes, his nose, and smile. Betsy swallowed hard.

“But why did he keep coming back?”

Melody hesitated. “I suppose I offered something different from what your mother did—I’d like to think it was a softness—and great men need that kind of comfort. Maybe he needed it more than most.”

Betsy’s anger shot out of her like an arrow, ricocheting and hitting her dead center in the chest. This woman! Talking about her father like this.

“I’m a bit in shock.” Betsy tried to still the tremble in her voice, breathing in, then out. “But can you help me understand how you ended up with this house?”

“He didn’t want to be a part of her life, but when Vera was little, he showed up on the island, finding me at my parents’ house. He said he had this empty cottage here on the water and told me I could stay here as long as I didn’t tell anyone about Vera. He added the parcel next door in sixty-five. I didn’t hear from him very often after that, even after I saw him in Washington, until recently.”

“You think we’re going to take pity on you?” Louisa slammed her hand onto the coffee table, making Betsy flinch once more. “You destroyed my relationship with my father.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not at fault for whatever your father did and didn’t do.”

The gall of this woman, a peasantlike pointedness in the features that Betsy had mischaracterized as austere. Betsy was afraid that Louisa might slap Melody, and she grabbed her sister’s clenched hand and yanked her up. Betsy’s voice dropped like a bomb.

“We fully expect you to leave the premises in three days’ time. Please take all your belongings. You are living here illegally, and weplan to sell. As far as we’re concerned, this is Whiting property, and the Whiting family is here to reclaim it.”

Betsy felt Louisa squeeze her hand, and it made her feel closer to her sister than perhaps she ever had in her life. Louisa couldn’t find the words, but Betsy had.

Melody folded her hands in her lap. “I’ve kept this secret for years. This is my home.”

A single mother. A child without a father. Sleepless nights walking a house with nothing but ghosts. She felt a sharp pain in her chest. This was what her life would look like if she had the baby, only no one was giving Betsy a house to raise the child in. Even as a complete and utter jerk, her father had displayed more empathy than Andy had. She gave him that.

The sisters hurried to the front door, whipping it open and following the path to James’s truck. He put down his book, his friendly smile vanishing in an instant. Betsy wanted to fall into his embrace, to feel the calming strokes of his hand against her cheek. Instead, she pressed backward into the back seat, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. When James asked if she was okay, she turned her head to look out the window and didn’t say a word.

“You look like her, Betsy,” Melody called out from the slate walkway. “My daughter, Vera.”

Louisa wiped at her wet cheeks as the engine roared to life over the sound of crashing waves. Betsy must have bit down hard on her lip, because she tasted metal. All she wanted to do was go home.

James drove them straight to Madaket Beach and parked in the sandy lot. He didn’t ask any questions. From the back seat, Betsy stared at the back of Louisa’s head, still and fixed. It made her sick that this little girl grew up feeling rejected by her father, and it made her sick to think that her father had known the child. Betsy wished he was alive just soshe could pound on her father’s chest with her fists and call him what he was: selfish, a hypocrite and a liar.

“I wish I never found that stupid letter,” Betsy said. She pushed out of the back seat and broke into a sprint, her throat feeling like it was closing in on her, and she ran harder, working for air. She was halfway to the ocean when she heard James calling her name. She spun on her feet, screaming back at him: “Leave me alone. All I want is for you to go away.”

Out of breath, his chest heaving, she expected all six feet of his frame to shrivel. Instead, he edged closer. “Since my mother died, I’ve been all by myself, Betsy, and it’s terrible, and you—you have all these people. All these people who want to be close to you, and you don’t even see it.”

“You don’t know anything about me anymore.” She marched down the beach, the pads of her feet slamming hard into the soft sand. She cupped her hand against her belly. “Nobody does.”

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