Nantucket Red (Nantucket Blue) by Leila Howland Read Free Book Online

his father drank her wages.”
    Jim raised a hand to stop her. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t get some help along the way. I did. And now I’d like to offer you some help and teach you a little about self-reliance.”
    “Okay.” I was as ready to hear a plan as I’d ever been.
    “If you make eight thousand dollars this summer, I’ll match it,” Jim said.
    “Wow,” I said. “That’s so generous. Thank you.”
    “What do you think?” Rosemary asked. “Can you do it?”
    “Of course,” I said. “Absolutely.”
    “It has to be at least eight,” Jim said.
    “Got it,” I said. “Eight.”
    “Then we’ve got a deal,” Jim said. He stood up and shook my hand.
    “You can use those sheets after all,” Rosemary said as she kissed my cheek.
    I watched in a stupor as they climbed into their Volvo and drove off, as if they went around changing lives on a daily basis. The amazement shifted to panic as I walked home. How was I going to do this? Eight thousand dollars in two months? Okay, two and almost a half, but still, it wasn’t going to happen at Leo’s for nine bucks an hour. Providence was hardly a summer destination. The restaurants were dead when the students were away. I mean, unless I aced an audition for the Legs & Eggs shift at the Foxy Lady. For a second I thought I could do it in secret and write a blog about it, but a second later I knew that was ridiculous. So, where was I going to get all that money?
    When I got back home and saw Nina’s picture propped up on my dresser, the answer came to me in a vision, the same way I imagine it does for religious people when they say they see the face of the Virgin Mary in a vegetable or a taco or whatever. Only it wasn’t a holy figure that appeared before me, but a crescent-shaped island thirty miles out to sea. A place where money rolled in as thick as fog, where bills slipped through fingers like sand, where people’s pockets were as deep and open as the ocean itself.
    Nantucket.
    Shit.

Eleven
    THOUGH STARTING TOTALLY FRESH in a new place might’ve been a good thing if I had had more time, with just a little over nine weeks I needed to go where I knew the lay of the land and had a few local references. This seemed especially true once Liz, my British friend, with whom I’d been a chambermaid at the Cranberry Inn last year, offered to let me stay with her for a little bit. She was running the place now because our old boss, Gavin, was off in Bali doing yoga. She said I could crash in the manager’s apartment with her, but only for a week. After that, her boyfriend Shane was moving in. “Waitressing is where the money is,” she’d told me. “Mark my words.”
    Over the next few days, I applied for ten waitressing jobs through The Inquirer and Mirror Web site, picking the ones that came with housing. I’d even had a phone interview at a restaurant called Breezes, but I had failed the wine test. It was the first thing I had ever failed in my entire life. My lowest grade to date had been a seventy-eight. Clearly, if I was going to get a waitressing job, I needed to expand my wine knowledge beyond Mom’s chardonnay with the kangaroo on the label, so I bought a book called Wine Made Simple and studied it every day with the same dedication I had once applied to SAT vocabulary words.
    At the end of the week, Mom drove me to the Steamship Authority in Hyannis where I’d catch the ferry to Nantucket.
    “You got everything?” Mom asked. People were sporting their brightest clothes and monogrammed canvas bags as they filed aboard The Eagle with their luggage, bikes, kids, and dogs. A man directed a line of Range Rovers, Jeeps, and Volvos onto the boat. It was chilly, windy, and spitting rain.
    “I guess,” I said, my mouth dry with anxiety.
    “Here you go,” Mom said and lifted my carry-on roller bag from the trunk. It was stuffed to the gills, mostly with shorts and T-shirts, but also with my running shoes and a comfortable pair of sneakers