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“I think I’m going to go with the Key lime mahi-mahi,” Olive says, closing her menu. “And a glass of rosé.”
“Sounds delicious.” Sunday sets her menu on the edge of the table. “I’ll do the same.”
Olive digs through her purse for a pair of sunglasses and then puts them on. It’s late in the afternoon—not quite dinnertime—but they slept in, skipped lunch, and there’s no question that the two women will stay up late watching movies and snacking on popcorn and chocolate on Sunday’s couch together, so eating lunch or dinner or whatever meal this is at a random time means nothing to them.
The waitress comes by, takes their order, and whisks their menus away.
“Mom?”
Sunday is resting her chin in her hands as she watches a boat moving across the water out toward the horizon. “Mmhmm?”
“Are you okay?” Olive asks, sounding far younger than she is.
Sunday’s turns her head so that she’s looking at her youngest daughter instead of at the water. “Honey, yes. Of course. Why? Do I not seem okay?”
Olive shrugs her narrow shoulders. “You just packed up and moved down here so fast, and now that you’re here, you seem like…well, you don’t seem like Sunday Bond anymore.”
This makes Sunday laugh. “Oh?” She watches Olive’s face. “Who do I seem like?”
“I mean, you, obviously, but you’re just so laid-back here. I’ve never once in my life seen you go out in a pair of Birkenstocks and a baseball cap.” Olive frowns as she looks at her mom’s hat, made of a sun-bleached blue denim material with “Oregon Coast” embroidered across the front.
“Well, babe,” Sunday says, leaning her elbows on the table and then pausing as the waitress drops off two glasses of rosé. “The new me is really the old me, you just never met the old me before.”
“Okayyyy.” Olive sips her wine, looking mildly concerned about her mother’s well-being.
“No, really,” Sunday assures her as they clink their wine glasses together. “I married your father when I was twenty-two, but before that, I was Sunday Bellows. I grew up on one of the least glamorous islands you’ll ever see—“
“I know, I know,” Olive says, holding her wine glass by its stem. “Tangier Island. So close, and yet so far.”
“You have no idea, babe,” Sunday says, leveling a serious gaze at her daughter. “It might sound quaint to you, hearing about some tiny island off the coast of Virginia where people still speak with a British accent like we’re living in Colonial times, but it’s desolate. Your grandfather was a tough, weathered, old fisherman with a mean streak, and your grandmother was just trying to survive and raise her children. When my brother died, my mom disappeared into herself entirely. Your aunt Minnie and I were left to our own devices.” Sunday shivers, remembering how cold her house and her life had felt after Jensen drowned when his fishing boat capsized in the freezing Atlantic. To this day, when she’s asked about her siblings, she still says she has “a brother and a sister,” though it’s been about forty years since she last laid eyes on her brother.
“Okay, but Cammy and I were left to our own devices a lot, too,” Olive counters, leaning back as the waitress sets their main dishes on the table. “Thank you,” she says, smiling at the waitress before turning back to her mom. “You and dad werereallybusy when we were kids. We had nannies for most of our childhoods.”
Sunday picks up her knife and fork and shakes her head. “Ollie, being looked after by nannies in a gorgeous home in Washington D.C. while attending private school isnothinglike looking after yourself in a remote fishing village where your family has no money and most kids don’t have a particularly bright future. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could—and I did. For a lot of different reasons.”
Olive chews her first bite of mahi-mahi as she looks out at the water just over the railing. Once she’s swallowed and washed it down with a sip of rosé, she looks back at Sunday. “So then you ran away from Tangier Island to live a big life in Washington D.C., only to run away from your big life there to live on a tiny island again?”
Sunday takes a big, long swig of her wine and then rubs her lips together as she savors the taste.“Hell yes, baby.” She sets her glass on the table with a clink. “I went from a small island to a big city and then back to a small island again. And that right there is what we call ‘coming full circle.’”
Ruby
After six months on Shipwreck Key, Ruby Hudson has found her groove. Marooned With a Book, the little shop she’s opened on Seadog Lane, brings her the kind of happiness she could have only dreamed of during her years as the faithful First Lady to the late President Jack Hudson. She’s got her gorgeous,Architectural Digest-worthy house on the beach, her two wonderful daughters living there with her, and the bookstore she wakes up every morning excited to walk into.
Given the fact that her husband had died unexpectedly at the end of his first term in office, that he’d had a mistress and a twelve-year-old son tucked away in France, and that Ruby had been forced to wait a full year after his death to find out that he’d actually taken his own life in order to avoid a painful and rapid deterioration to his health due to a rare neurological disease, she’s really doing quite well. Adding to the stress of all that is the horrifying bar shooting that her youngest daughter was caught up in, and the heartbreak her older daughter had gone through at the hands of a man she’d really liked. When you consider everything, Ruby’s had quite a year so far. And this is only September.
“We need more books on serial killers,” Tilly Byer says, walking through Marooned With a Book wearing a pair of red tartan plaid pants festooned with silver chains that dangle from one belt loop to the next. Her black hair is twisted into little knots all over her head, and she’s wearing red lipstick speckled with shiny glitter. Tilly, the granddaughter of the owner of the bar across the street from the bookshop, is a dyed-in-the-wool goth. She’s tough, unflinching, cool, and fully committed to the lifestyle, though Ruby knows enough about teenage girls to know that at least some of Tilly’s swagger is just bark with no bite to back it up.
Ruby frowns. “We don’t get a lot of requests for true crime novels or books on serial killers,” she counters, pulling hardcover copies of the latest Emily Giffin novel from a box on the front counter. She needs to scan them all into the system and set up a display, and Tilly is her sidekick for the day. “But if there’s something in particular you want to order and then use your employee discount to buy, you know I’m okay with that, Til.”
“I’m thinking of going by 'Matilda' now,” Tilly says, segueing into this new topic without preamble. “Tilly sounds too much like a girl who would listen to Coldplay and cry over some boy who won't text her back.”
Ruby lifts an eyebrow and adds five more hardcovers to her growing stack. She knows that anything new by an extremely popular author will fly off the shelves. “Oh? Is Coldplay out?”
Tilly snorts. “They’re elevator music now. The kind of stuff you hear at the grocery store. Hard pass.”
“Mmm,” Ruby says, focusing on the task at hand.
“So, is Dexter North coming to the island again soon?” Tilly leans her elbows on the front counter and her studded bracelets clink against the wood. “He’s cute. You two should hook up.”
