The light changes and traffic rolls forward.
“In Grams’s defense,” Mickey says, “I think every bride must get emotional at some point.”
Mickey waits for her mother to weigh in on her theory, but Hedy just glances in her rearview and accelerates. Her mother speaks so rarely of her marriage to Mickey’s father, Grant—a union that Mickey knows was made official sooner than planned when Hedy got pregnant, and lasted barely long enough for Mickey to be born before it was dissolved.
Her mother snaps on her blinker and swings them around the station wagon. “We were all disappointed Wes couldn’t join you. But I understand. That’s how it is when it’s your own business and things are hot. You don’t dare let them cool.”
Mickey shifts in her seat, desperate to change the subject. “Do you like him?”
“I wouldn’t know. You refuse to let me meet him.”
She rolls her head toward her mother. “I was talking about Max, Mom,” she says dryly. “But duly noted.”
A satisfied smile tugs at the corners of her mother’s mouth.
“So do you?” Mickey asks.
Hedy’s shoulders rise and fall. “Max is hard not to like.” Her mother says it as if she’s actually tried.
They near a sedan going at least ten miles slower, Mickey bets, based on the speed with which her mother gains on the car’s bumper. Hedy pumps the brakes but continues to keep a close pursuit. Since when is her mother a tailgater?
Mickey leans back. “Is Max an islander?”
“I really don’t know that much about him. Just that he’s been on the Vineyard off and on for as long as your grandmother has.”
“So Grams has known him a while then?”
“They didn’t travel in the same circles—it wasn’t like that.”
Of course not. Even when she was young, Mickey understood the social order of the island, what it took to be part of the club. And not just the one that sat on the edge of the bluff surrounded by tennis courts and golf links.
“Apparently he was the one who redid the kitchen,” Hedy says.
Mickey twists in her seat, this news almost as shattering as the news of Cora’s engagement. “Max built the island?”
Everything Mickey learned about cooking at Beech House, she learned standing—first on a step stool, then on her own feet—at that island. More than just a work station, the island was the beating heart of Beech House’s kitchen. Customized with special drawers and shelves, it was her grandmother’s pride and joy, and as central to the home’s operations as the captain’s bridge on a ship.
A thought sparks. “Then you must have met him at some point growing up,” Mickey says.
Without signaling, Hedy passes the sedan, cutting it close enough that the car in the oncoming lane blares an angry horn before her mother can swerve them back into the lane.
Mickey looks over at her. “Someone’s in a hurry.”
“You know I don’t like being on the road at this hour. All the deer.”
“So did you?”
Her mother drums her fingers on the wheel. “Did I what?”
“Ever meet Max when you were younger?”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
Mickey wants to press for more information but lets the subject fall away as Hedy steers them around a baby-blue VW bug. There will be time later. For now she just wants to sink into the warm bath of the view and let the comforting embrace of memories take hold. They pass the Vineyard Basket, the grocery store that Mickey used to bike to for last-minute ingredients. The market is shuttered this late, the parking lot empty, but in her mind, Mickey can still see the interior clearly: the baking aisle that always smelled deliciously smoky, where she used to memorize all the herbs in their glass jars; the teeming baskets of freshly baked bread, rounds of sourdough and boules, narrow baguettes standing like swords.
The round sign for Oyster Point glistens in the path of the car’s headlights, and her mother pumps the brakes to turn them onto the rutted dirt, the Point’s gatehouse appearing in the cone of light, the squat shingled building set in the wedge where the road splits into two drives. More dirt drives disappear into the trees, their shingled cottages hidden behind the thick curtains of pines, and Mickey feels a flush of anticipation when the even purr of the dirt road turns into the crackle of crushed oyster shells under the tires. As they come down the driveway, the silhouette of the carriage house is the first structure Mickey sees in the milky dark, then, briefly, the giant leafy dome of the home’s namesake weeping beech in the distance.
When her mother pulls in and cuts the engine, Mickey is struck by the silence. She remembers all the summers they would arrive to a flurry of sound and activity—screen doors and car trunks banged shut, calls for dibs on bedrooms or a race down to the water. Only at night, when the glorious universe of day-chaos finally sank into the hush of darkness and the house slept, could the whoosh of the curling surf below the bluff be heard.
Now Mickey detects the deep breathing of the sea so clearly, it startles her.
“God,” she whispers. “It’s so quiet.”
Stepping out, she feels a flutter of nerves, stranger and more unfamiliar than any silence. When has she ever been nervous about walking into Beech House?
“Enjoy it while you can,” her mother says, exiting too. “In a few days, there’ll be so many people here you won’t be able to hear yourself think.” She swings an arm around Mickey’s waist and steers them into the cone of floodlights. “You know Beech House can never stay quiet for long.”
* * *
Which is exactly what Mickey always loved about it. The noise. The motion. The constant clap of a screen door—someone coming, someone going—the promise of a surprise guest, an impromptu bonfire on the beach, the arrival of greasy take-out bags from Chowder’s, heavy with clam strips and onion rings so big that Mickey would slide her hand through them and stack them over her wrists like bracelets, jangling them to make her grandmother laugh.
The formal entrance is at the center of the house’s facade, down a winding brick path, but instead, Mickey heads for the dented screen door and the familiar rectangle of amber light behind it, as she always did growing up, choosing the side door because it was the one that would get her to the kitchen fastest.
Stepping inside, Mickey sees the row of hooks where baseball caps and rain slickers dangled and catches the faint, familiar smell of the warm, damp, and peppery old wood of the entry. Where once a tower of shoes—discarded sandals and laceless sneakers—covered the sand-soaked straw mats, only a few pairs occupy the straw mats now, matched and tidy, and Mickey feels irrationally giddy when she toes off her sandals and adds them to the collection. On the bench are a stack of wrapped packages and a few glittering gift bags, bursting with tissue and tendrils of curling ribbon.
Through the mudroom and at the kitchen’s threshold, Mickey’s feet finally slow, as if her body wants to give her raw heart a minute to catch up, or maybe even a head start, but it’s too late.
Cora is already there waiting, arms outstretched. “Hello, darling girl.”
Her grandmother’s hazel eyes flicker with affection first, then her lips, stained with the faintest blush of pink, stretch into a tender smile. Her enviably high cheekbones—which Hedy inherited but apparently skipped every third generation, Mickey was crushed to learn—are even more pronounced with old age. Her long, frizzy hair, once as copper as Mickey’s mother’s, is threaded with equal parts silver and red and sits in a whirl atop her head, tied off at the very top with a tiny knot, a hairstyle that Mickey has always and fondly thought resembles a steamed bun.