Page 6 of A Novel Summer
“No problem,” Colleen said, agreeable as always. “Let’s go. We can pick something up on the way.”
They walked a few minutes up Commercial to the Beach Rose Inn, a three-story, gray-shingled Georgian with a wrap-around veranda, red brick steps, and a mosaic sign out front. On the way in, Shelby dropped off a signed copy ofSecrets of Summerat the front desk for the beloved innkeeper, Amelia Cabral. She’d known Amelia since her college summers. But considering the way the night had gone, she wished she could ship every book back to the warehouse.
Colleen followed her into the guest room, effusing about the cuteness. It was lovely. The queen-size bed had a white bookcase headboard, sea green sheets and a white down comforter topped with a green-and-blue afghan that was clearly hand-knit. A wooden side table had china knobs painted with cornflowers. A decorative piece of driftwood rested against one wall.
“Let’s eat outside,” Shelby said. They had lobster rolls from the Canteen.
Glass-paned double doors opened onto a terrace. Shelby and Colleen got comfortable on two lounge chairs. A foghorn sounded in the distance.
“For the record, I think Hunter overreacted,” Colleen said, uncapping a bottle of water.
Shelby wasn’t so sure. She was second-guessing everything. And she kept replaying the confrontation she’d had with Hunter directly following her outburst during the Q & A. Hunter had stormed out and Shelby had followed her. But Hunter didn’t slow down even though Shelby had called out to her over and over again. Finally, half a block away, Hunter had whirled around to face her.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
Her expression was so cold, Shelby didn’t want to talk to her, either. She wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening.
“Hunter, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s fiction—she’s just a character I made up.”
“Fiction? Imagine the reverse. Imagine I wrote a character who’d never lived in one place for more than two years growing up. The loneliness. The pain of losing friends until she stopped bothering to make them. How she wanted to become famous one day so that wherever she went, people would remember her. Because that’s how empty and insecure she is.”
Okay, that stung a little. Shelby wasn’t perfect, but her writing didn’t come from emptiness or insecurity. Then she realized she was missing the point.
“I’m really, really sorry,” Shelby said.
“That changes absolutely nothing,” Hunter said, and turned to walk away. This time, Shelby let her go. She walked back to the Red Inn and forced a smile on her face as she finished her event. But she was only half there. She mentally combed over her entire novel, thinking about her main character, Ashley.
Yes, Shelby had borrowed some of Hunter’s background. It had started as a creative exercise in grad school: take someone you know and write a thousand words turning them into a fictional character. She’d written about her mother and one of her ex-boyfriends, but the “Hunter” pages were the ones that really came to life. Months later, when she started the novel that would becomeSecrets of Summer, she couldn’t shake the character.
Every writer has heard the expression “write what you know.” But for Shelby, the creative spark came from writing not what she knew, butwhoshe knew. It wasn’t a malicious impulse; if anything, Hunter was just so interesting and had made such an impression on her, the urge to write about her was hard to resist. And Ashley was the heroine of the novel, not the villain. But Shelby could see, looking at it now, how some aspects of Ashley hit too close to home: she’d been born into an old Boston family—tremendous generational wealth—but flouted it to create her own wild-child identity. Which landed her in boarding school, where she acted out by sleeping with a lot of guys. It was just background characterization. Ashley didn’t look like Hunter or share any of her interests. And the character’s big mistake that set the plot in motion was pure fiction. Ashley triumphed in the end. And after two years of writing and rewriting the novel, Ashley had become her own entity. Shelby had all but forgotten the genesis of the character.
She turned to Colleen.
“Did I cross a line with the character Ashley?” She assumed Colleen would have told her.
Like other booksellers across the country, Colleen had read an advanced copy sent out by her publisher.
She waited a beat before answering her. “I recognized some details. And I understand why Hunter might have been a little freaked out seeing them in black-and-white on the page. But anyone reading your book comes away loving the character in the end. I know you didn’t mean to hurt her.”
Shelby nodded. She appreciated Colleen’s understanding. Still, she was relieved to be leaving in the morning for the next stop on her book tour.
Six
Hunter showed up in front of Town Hall at the agreed-upon meeting time, nine in the morning. Excruciatingly early for a Saturday, but at least it gave her a good excuse to ask her unexpected overnight guest, Ezra, to leave. He was as good in bed as he was good-looking, but when he started making noise about seeing her again, she had to shut things down. She didn’t do relationships.
Hunter didn’t particularly want to spend a gorgeous Saturday morning in a town council meeting, but she’d been invited by Duke Nestley—unofficial town historian and civic gatekeeper. He, too, felt burned by Shelby’s novel, and this gave them a connection. Also, he offered her a job at his small press. So she agreed to go.
“Changes are coming to town,” he told her a few days earlier. “I’m worried about our whole way of life getting eroded. Every voice must be heard. Especially young ones like yourself.”
In his midfifties, Duke had lived in Ptown since the 1980s in a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house on the West End, out of which he ran a small press. Very small. When he learned that she’d lost her publishing job in Boston, he told her he could use an editor on staff. It was a low-paying position she could only afford to take because she had family money as a safety net, and this bothered her. No, her job in Boston hadn’t paid a lot, but it was enough to live on modestly. The gig with Duke would be more like an internship. But it would fill the gap on her résumé until she found a new job with a major publisher.
“Good morning,” he said, chipper as always. Duke had white hair that had apparently turned that color when he was still in his thirties. He had a mustache and was a fan of Hawaiian print shirts and pleated shorts. He wore glasses and spoke with the faint remnants of a Boston accent. “Shall we?”
“Let’s do it,” she said, mustering a smile.
Town Hall was a Beaux Arts building in the center of Commercial Street. She’d only been inside once, for a lecture on the environment. That has been boring enough, but the town council meeting? Utter snoozefest. They wanted to raise money to buy a building up for sale on the wharf in order to keep it out of the hands of developers.
The first-floor meeting room had rows of folding chairs and a table in the front where the selectman sat peering out like they were students at a lecture hall. The air was stuffy, an unwelcome contrast to the fresh breeze outside. She looked for an aisle seat.
