“So go home. You’re the boss. You’ve earned a night off. And so have I.”
“I can’t, remember? We’re catering the big party tonight. Wine and appetizers for a hundred and fifty people. Somebody has to take all of it out to the south beach and set up and serve.”
“Nooooo,” Nate groaned.
“I had a couple of the deckhands from the ferry take the tent out to the beach and put it up earlier. Now I need tables delivered and set up, the grills carried down there, and the big coolers with the food and wine and ice dragged down from the parking lot to the tent.”
“I thought that’s why you have staff at the café,” Nate protested. But he knew it was a lost cause. Resistance was always futile where Annie Milas was concerned.
“Those skinny little college girls can’t lift those heavy coolers,” his mother said. “I can trust ’em to pour wine and serve, but somebody has to do the heavy lifting and man the grills.”
“And you think that somebody should be me?”
“Who else?”
* * *
They could hear the steel-drum band warming up when they arrived at the south beach parking lot shortly after eight. Golf carts were lined up nose to nose, with more parked on the sandy shoulder of the road.
Men in colorful tropical-hued shirts and shorts, and women in their finest beach-casual cocktail wear strolled toward the boardwalk over the dunes, coolers and beach chairs in hand. Riley, Ed, and Parrish joined the parade.
Riley paused at the top of the dune and looked out at the spectacle below. Festive white party lights were strung from the corners of a large blue-and-white tent, attached to tall poles planted on the beach. The sky was already turning amethyst, and a breeze stirred the sea oats. Plumes of pork-scented smoke billowed up from a huge grill set at the edge of the tent. A hundred or more people were scattered around the bar and buffet tables. She heard laughter and froze for a moment.
She was already feeling panicky, having second thoughts. She’d promised Parrish she’d come, but that was a mistake. She wasn’t ready yet. As if she could read her thoughts, her best friend tugged at her hand. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”
Riley stepped out of her gold sandals, leaving her shoes with all the footwear left by other partygoers. Her toes sank into the soft sand, still holding on to the last traces of the sun’s warmth.
* * *
He saw her standing alone, at the edge of the dunes, frowning. She wore a long dress of some kind of pale pink gauzy fabric with a hem that fluttered in the breeze. The dress tied around her neck and showed a surprising amount of bare shoulders and cleavage—for Riley Nolan, anyway. Her dark hair was twisted into a braid that hung down her bare back. She looked like the same teenaged girl he’d spotted on this same beach so many years ago—ethereal and unattainable. Then and now.
That first time, she’d been with a group of her girlfriends from Raleigh. Nate knew she was a Nolan, and that her family were the original developers of Belle Isle, where he’d lived his whole life. He’d never noticed her before, but then, up until he’d turned fifteen, he’d never paid any attention to girls.
It was the summer of 1988, and she and her three friends had set up camp not far from this same stretch of sand, their lounge chairs arranged in a circle. They were giggling and drinking Diet Cokes from cans, and they all wore tantalizingly miniscule bikinis, except Riley, who wore a comparatively modest one-piece suit. Even now he could picture those summertime girls, their bodies shimmering with coconut-scented lotion. They had a suitcase-size boom box and they were listening to the huge hit of the summer, Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible,” doing their best to copy the dance moves from the MTV video. He hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask her out until the next summer, and had been astonished when she’d said yes.
After that summer, whenever he heard “Simply Irresistible,” he thought of Riley Nolan.
She used to look good to me, Nate thought, but now I find her simply irresistible.
He held his breath for a moment. He was sure that if Riley spotted him at the party she’d turn around and leave. But she followed her friends onto the beach, stopping occasionally to speak to people, but never lingering. He remembered what she’d said on the ferry, right after Wendell’s death, about not wanting people’s pity. He watched her unfold a beach chair before heading over to the table where the bar was set up.
“Excuse me. Can I get one of those pork sliders?” A balding man with a sunburnt nose pointed toward the grill, and Nate went back to slicing and serving.
* * *
Riley drifted around the party, sipping her wine, making pleasant chitchat. Why was this so hard? Most of the people here she’d known for years. They were her neighbors. She knew their families, and they knew hers. She wasn’t actually mourning Wendell. In fact, her rage at the predicament he’d left her in frightened her at times, it was so intense. So why did she feel so emotionally exposed tonight, her wounds still so raw?
“Are we having fun yet?” Billy approached, sipping a pale green concoction with a paper parasol and a hot-pink hibiscus blossom sticking out of the top of his cup.
“It seems weird, being at a party,” she admitted. “I feel sort of guilty for even thinking about getting on with my life.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Billy said. “Wendell never did, that sorry son of a bitch.” His words slurred together, and his eyes were slightly glassy.
“How many of those umbrella drinks have you had tonight?” she asked.
“Too many, apparently,” Billy said. “Scotty and I had words about it. And then he left. Now I don’t even have a ride home.”
“Scott worries about your drinking,” Riley said. “I wish you’d cut back a little.”
“Pfffft,” he replied. “Hey, you look really pretty tonight, Riles.” He plucked the hibiscus from his drink and tucked it behind her left ear. “I like your hair this way.”
She touched the braid self-consciously. “Maggy taught me how. She’d seen a picture in one of her magazines.”
“Where is the Magpie tonight?” he asked, looking around. “Is she over at Roo’s, watching Animal Planet?”
“She’s spending the night with her friend Annabelle. Against my better judgement. I left a voice mail message with her mom, just to check in, but the woman still hasn’t called me back.”
“Helicopter mom,” Parrish said, walking up with Ed and handing Riley a glass of wine.
“She’ll be fine,” Billy said. “They’re twelve-year-old girls. What kind of trouble could they get into?”
“Lots. When I think back to the kind of stunts we pulled at that age, I realize now why Mama went gray-haired while she was in her thirties,” Riley said.
“Yeah. Remember that time we wanted to go to town to the movies, but we didn’t have enough money for the movie and the ferry ticket?” Parrish asked. “So we rode our bikes over to the marina, then climbed inside one of those big empty Rubbermaid luggage totes and got ourselves loaded onto the boat without paying? What movie was it that we were so desperate to see?”
“It was The Goonies. And I still have nightmares about being locked up in small places like that,” Riley said. “Remember how Captain Joe caught us trying to sneak onto the boat on the way back to the island?”