Page 44 of The Holiday

Whenever I needed to remind myself that there's more to life than the decrepit crawl towards death, I would first think of Molly's "take no prisoners" approach to living, and then I would visit someone younger than me. Someone who still had miles of road ahead of them and years left to trick themselves into thinking that life was rosy and bright. In fact, as I write this book, I think it's time to do just that: check in with some of my younger friends. Find out what they have to say, what words of wisdom they might share, and--selfishly, always selfishly--dig for some stories about Ruby.

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Improbably, Tilly Byer was on Shipwreck Key for a long weekend. I say "improbably," because if you'd known Tilly as a teenager, you would have pictured her living in Los Angeles in her thirties, covered in tattoos, possibly working as a bartender in a dive bar with sticky floors, and maybe embroiled in some dramatic, torturous love affair with a woman who drank too much.

But if you'd pictured that as Tilly's future, you'd have been dead wrong. I cannot stress enough how wildly off-base that guess would have been.

Tilly, the granddaughter Bev Byer had raised single-handedly on Shipwreck Key, had started working at Marooned with a Book as an eighteen-year-old goth. She had inky-black hair cut in a sharp bob, severe eyeliner, black nails, and blood-red lips. Her fashion tended towards tartan plaid that had been shredded and was magically held together by safety pins, or all black even in the dead of a Florida summer. Tilly was dark and twisty, her sense of humor and manner of speaking as dry as a bone, and no part of her felt that she belonged on a sunny island with a bunch of happy-go-lucky middle aged and elderly people.

"What's up, Dex?" she asked, sitting across from me at a table outside of The Scuttlebutt.

The place was under new ownership after Molly had sold it and decamped to Tokyo, and the couple who ran it were nice, if a bit on the dull side. They'd done an admirable job of keeping the place up, but rather than getting up at three o'clock in the morning to bake scones and get the coffee going for the islanders, they opened at eight, and featured pre-packaged pastries shipped from a bakery in Destin.

"I ordered us iced coffees," I said, smiling at her from behind my sunglasses. "I hope that was okay."

"Is coffee okay?" She made a disbelieving face, still sounding like the impertinent teenager I'd once known. "Hell yeah, it's okay.”

“You look good, Tilly,” I said, watching her as she frowned at a teenage boy trying to scale a lamppost on Seadog Lane. “You look happy.”

Her sharp eyes flitted back to my face. “How does a person look happy, Dex?”

I took off my sunglasses and scanned her features closely. “A person looks happy when they’re being their true, authentic self, and I feel like you are.”

Tilly huffed, but a smile cracked her face. The new owner of The Scuttlebutt set our coffees down on the table.

“Thanks, Jen,” I said to her. I looked back at Tilly. “You turned out differently than I would have imagined.”

“Well, people change, don’t they?” Tilly frowned across the street at The Frog’s Grog, which had been taken over by a younger man and his brother after Bev Byer died. They’d renamed the place Island Brews (we all hated that it had no pirate theme to match the rest of Shipwreck Key), and they did a brisk business in microbrews and low-level sports betting.

“Yes, they do. And time marches on.” We shared a moment of silence for the people and things we’d known, then Tilly looked right at me.

“I’m occasionally sorry that I ever left.”

This was news to me. “Oh?”

“Yeah. If I’d stayed, I could have helped my grandpa with the bar, and I’d be running it now instead of those frat bros,” she said, lifting her chin at one of the guys as he came outside with a chalk-covered sandwich board sign that he set up on the sidewalk. “But I like to think we all end up where we’re supposed to end up.”

“Me too,” I agreed neutrally. “And I’d like to know more about your life, if you don’t mind sharing.”

Tilly smiled at me, and it softened her features. She’d stopped dying her hair that intense blue-black that she’d used as a teenager, and it had grown in—surprisingly—strawberry blonde.

“The hair, huh? That’s what you’re looking at?” She lifted a wavy strand of it and then let it go; the humidity had turned it frizzy.

“Not just that,” I said. She’d also ditched the dark eyeliner, red lips, and black nail polish, instead keeping things simple with what appeared to be just chapstick and maybe a light coat of mascara. “You look so much more open now. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you were a charming and hilarious teenager, but a bit unapproachable—probably intentionally, right?”

She lifted one shoulder and then took a drink of her iced coffee. “I think most teenagers are pretty unapproachable. Intentionally,” she added.

“True. But you had a hard shell. What happened when you got to Tampa?”

Tilly had left the island just before her twentieth birthday to attend a tattoo school in Tampa, and after that, we’d gotten updates from Bev here and there, but hadn’t seen much of her.

She blew out a long breath and her shoulders hunched until she looked like a deflated balloon.

“Okay. Huh. Well, I got to Tampa and I started classes. Got my first tattoo.” She pushed up the sleeve of her white t-shirt and revealed a blooming red rose. “Hated it. It ended up being my last.” Her face collapsed in a laugh, which I don’t remember ever seeing it do when she was younger. “Decided I didn’t want to be covered in ink. I was rooming with a girl named Sara—we dated, obviously.” Tilly rolled her eyes at this. “Things ended badly, but she took me home to Georgia with her, and I went to church with her family.”

My eyebrow lifted involuntarily, but I put the straw of my coffee to my lips to stop myself from saying anything.

“I think something about the feeling of being there, of the light streaming through the windows and God watching over me…it just felt right.”

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