Page 17 of A Novel Summer
He was a few minutes late, and everyone was already at the dining room table. He planted himself in one of the craftsman chairs, opposite his father. The long table was covered with food from end to end. His mother served linguini in a bowl hand-painted with roosters—Portuguese pottery that had been part of their meals for as long as he could remember. The crusty garlic bread in a basket was his sister’s contribution, the only thing she ever “cooked.” His father was busy decanting the red wine. Two big platters of chicken parmesan rested between his parents, and he knew his mother would send him home with leftovers to freeze.
“Sorry I’m late. Work was busy.”
“Mia mentioned. All those fish! Is it a red tide situation?” his mother said. She had initially been disappointed when he said he didn’t want to take over the family business, but she respected his choice in vocation. She understood the value in the work he was doing. It was impossible to live on the Cape and not experience the fallout from water pollution, climate change, overfishing, and countless other threats to their beloved home.
Justin shook his head. “We don’t think so. Not this time.”
Mia, busy eating, offered a distracted wave. He wondered if she’d told their parents about Shelby Archer’s return, and decided no, she wouldn’t. Why give them another reason to push back on her bookstore job? They’d argued for weeks about her decision not to work at the restaurant.
He wasn’t surprised that Colleen needed help managing the store. When Doug confided in him that Colleen was pregnant and said “nothing will change,” Justin thought he was being naive. He still had a vague memory of being ten years old and the arrival of his baby sister—how it turned their family of three into something exponentially different. But what did surprise him was that a) the person she had asked for help was Shelby and b) Shelby had actually come back to Provincetown. She’d made it clear when she left three years ago that she didn’t plan to be back, and certainly didn’t want any obligation to be. That was what their relationship had been reduced to in the end: an obligation she couldn’t meet.
He’d never understand why she moved to New York without even trying to make it work. It made him wonder if it had been a one-sided relationship all along. But he had to hand it to her—she’d done it. She was a published novelist.
For a while after Shelby, he couldn’t get emotionally invested in anyone. But he’d come to realize that timing was everything in life. That was why he was optimistic about the way things were going with Kate. They’d met through a shared interest, a passion project. They were geographically compatible—especially now that she was opening a store in Ptown. And they wanted the same things out of life: meaningful work. Life on the Cape. Someday, a family of their own.
He never imagined he’d be thinking of the future in such permanent terms at just twenty-eight years old. But the way Doug and Colleen had escalated things so quickly, it changed his perspective. No, he couldn’t say for sure that Kate wasthe one. But he did hope to someday have a marriage like his parents’. Carmen and Bert had met in their twenties while vacationing separately in Sicily. They’d grown up an hour away from one another in Boston, but it took a trip across the ocean for them to cross paths. They’d been together ever since. They married, had Justin, and opened their first pizza place on the Boston waterfront, all by the time they were thirty. Could Justin fill in so many blanks in his personal and professional life within the next three years? Did he want to?
“I had a beer with Bill Hockney last night,” his father said. “He was fishing over in Yarmouth, had a striper on the line, and a seal snatched it right off.”
“I’m not surprised,” Justin said.Halichoerus grypus, gray seals, were the most common species of seal found in Cape Cod waters during the summer. The males could grow larger than ten feet long and weigh over eight hundred pounds.
“Well, we didn’t have this problem thirty years ago. Now folks like your boss are passing all these laws that do more harm than good.”
“Dad, look at what the Marine Mammals Protections Act did for whales and manatees. I don’t hear you complaining we have too many ofthem.”
“Well, they’re not the ones attracting sharks.”
His dad had a point there: the increase in white sharks was a problem. Justin was working in a program that captured sharks and tagged them with accelerometers to track their movement. They’d logged hundreds of miles so far.
“Nature is a delicate balance,” Justin said. Another reason why he’d chosen to work in Ptown was that he understood the balance there innately, almost instinctively. He felt it was his life’s purpose to be its steward. And it wasn’t just about marine life; the change in climate was affecting every aspect of their lives on the peninsula, with more and more damaging storms that were hurting businesses and threatening their way of life.
But he wasn’t in the mood to debate that tonight. The news about Shelby was bothering him more than he wanted to admit. “Mia’s workday was actually more eventful than mine,” he said. She set down her fork down and shook her head.
“Oh?” his mother said, turning to Mia, who shrugged.
“Shelby Archer is working at Land’s End for the summer,” Justin said, trying to sound nonchalant. But it felt wrong to say her name aloud, as if he were welcoming her back into his thoughts. And the last thing he wanted was to think about Shelby. So he brought it up to get the news out of the way.
“That one’sback?” his father said. Ever since Shelby left, he’d referred to her only as “That one.” His parents had taken the breakup almost as hard as he did. They’d adored her. But while his father dealt with it by never mentioning her again, his mother took the opposite tack. “It’s hard when you’re young,” she’d said at the time. And then continued to ask about her for months until she finally gave up.
“Well, that settles it, Mia,” Bert said. “No more wasting time at the bookstore. We’re short-staffed and you can earn more money with tips.”
“The bookstore job will look better on my college applications,” Mia said.
“She’s right,” Justin said. “But Mia, if you want to work at a bookstore, work at the new one.”
“What new one?” Carmen said. His mother had selective memory.
“I told you, Ma: Kate is opening up a Hendrik’s here for the summer. And hopefully, longer.” He wasn’t surprised his mother had conveniently forgot the news. She didn’t seem to like Kate. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t her fault she had a gluten allergy and couldn’t eat pasta.
“Work for a competing bookstore? I would never do Colleen dirty like that,” Mia said. “And I can’t believe Doug isn’t totally pissed at you.”
“Mia, you know I don’t like that expression,” Carmen said.
“Why would Doug care?” The truth was, Justin only considered the new bookstore as competition for Colleen’s business after the fact. He hadn’t considered it until Duke brought up the issue at the board meeting. But the way Justin saw it, Land’s End was an institution. Hendrik’s was just a little summer bonus catering to the massive wave of visitors. There was so much summertime foot traffic, he was sure both bookstores could successfully coexist.
He wasn’t so sure about himself and Shelby Archer. It had taken him a long time to get over her, and the one thing that helped was the fact that they lived three hundred miles apart.
His father muttered something he didn’t catch, and his mother laughed. The big belly laugh that made everyone around her smile, too. Shelby laughed like that. He had a memory of Shelby and his mother leaning in towards one another, shaking with laughter at that very table.
