Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online

won’t violate your privacy. Or yours, Maggie.”
    “Thank you,” Maggie whispers. She’d like to throw her arms around Thaddeus in a grateful hug, but she’s still a little intimidated by him.
    “You’re most welcome,” Thaddeus tells her, and his smile is as warm as a hug.
    Some winter nights the power goes out all over the island for hours at a time. Then Thaddeus builds a roaring fire in the living room, and Frances lights lots of candles, and they shut the door to the cooling air in the hall and settle on the floor around a board game. Ben loves Scrabble. Maggie prefers Clue.
    While the dog snores on the sofa and the cat drowses in the wing chairs, Thaddeus teaches them to play poker. Maggie finds it very satisfactory, somehow, the people on the floor, the animals on the furniture. She becomes even more fond of Thaddeus because of this, and because of the way he makes her mom smile.
    Thaddeus is changing Ben, too. He picks Ben up after school and takes him along on jobs, and when he’s not working somewhere else, he’s got Ben out at one of the barns with him, pounding nails or sawing wood.
    By summer, Ben doesn’t look like a boy anymore. He’s shot up tall, and so gawky and lean that his leather work belt, crammed with hammers and pliers and screwdrivers, is always sliding down his hips. His black hair is pulled back into a short ponytail, his zits have disappeared, and his jaw is peppered with bristles. Beneath his black velvet eyelashes, his eyes are a dark flashing blue, a blue jay’s wing.
    And he’s nicer. He smiles at Maggie. He thanks his mom when she hands him a basket of freshly laundered clothes and praises her cooking. His grades and teachers’ comments couldn’t be better.
    Maggie’s glad, of course, and yet she feels oddly abandoned. Ben is suddenly so much older. His voice is deep, his muscles hard, his eyes inscrutable.
    Maggie’s changing, too. She’s twelve, only months away from being a teenager. She’s eager for that, but also frightened.

Part Two

    Nantucket Glossy

CHAPTER FIVE
    Six Years Later
    By the time Maggie turns eighteen, Thaddeus’s farm is her home and the sanctuary of her dreams. She dutifully does her household chores, keeps up with her homework, and babysits at every opportunity, even though the islanders never tip like the summer people. Otherwise, every free moment, she’s outside, irresistibly drawn to explore the twenty-five acres stretching from the Polpis Road to the harbor.
    When it’s breezy, Maggie pulls on a fleece cap and an ancient sagging cardigan she wouldn’t be caught dead in anywhere else, and sets out, striding briskly over the Ramsdale land, stuffing her pockets with pebbles and arrowheads, each incline and hillock mapping itself into her memory through foot, leg, heart, brain. The sandy soil’s freckled with heather and bayberry, with bearberry and blueberry, with blue-eyed grass, thistles, daisies, and vetch. Small groves oftupelo, oak, wild cherry, and pine grow hemmed around with brambles. She returns to the house after the sun sets, navigating her way through the dark as if she has eyes in her feet, each rock and tuft a star for her internal compass.
    On warm days, she tucks herself away among bushes, only her darting eyes betraying her presence. Rabbits and deer, snakes, voles, wild mice, and wild cats claimed this land as home long before Thaddeus’s family. Spiders spin webs of geometric complexity among the leaves of the beach plum, and beneath the surface, insects of all kinds go about their lives. She’s fascinated by their movements, content to watch any of them, no matter how small.
    Tilting her head back, and if the weather’s mild enough, stretching out on the warm bed of the ground, she looks up to gaze at the soaring hawks, squawking gulls, and the sparrows, robins, and wrens who nest in the trees and swoop through the air. The landed birds are here as well: quail, pheasant, and guinea hens who eat ticks and bustle out in