The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank [11]
He lost that first game, and she went up to the net.
He said, "What?"
She said, "We switch sides."
"Okay," he said.
As they passed each other, he tapped her butt with his racket, just softly, but it didn't seem affectionate.
He'd never learned to hold two balls at once, and he put one behind him, at his feet. He had a hilarious serve—he bent his knees and swung his racket back at the same time. But the serve was strong, and Julia had trouble returning it.
He won that game and walked up to the net, without collecting the balls for her.
"We don't switch sides," she said.
"I thought you just said we did."
"On odd games," she said.
The rules weren't new to Henry, and I stared at him. I didn't know what he was doing, but I didn't want to watch.
I said, "You guys look good out there."
Julia asked if I wanted to take her place, but I thanked her anyway, and got on my bike.
At home, my father was reading a book she had given him.
"Is that good?" I asked.
He said, "Very good."
He asked how tennis was, and I told him that Julia was a beautiful player.
"How'd Henry do?"
I imitated Henry's serve, and my dad laughed.
Then, I said, "Something's wrong between them."
"That happens," he said. He wasn't dismissing me; he was saying that their problems didn't belong to us.
I looked across the lagoon at the new house. It was almost finished. It had gone up incredibly fast—with spit and Scotch tape, my father said—and it was huge and reminded me of a Walt Disney cartoon of a rich person's house, with columns and an elaborate roof that swooped like a water slide. I called it the Splash Palace.
It made me sad to look at it, and I said to my father, "Do you think we'll ever go back to Nantucket as a family?"
"I don't know, love," he said.
Then he asked what I missed about Nantucket. It was different from how he usually talked to me; if I had a problem, he would try to help me solve it. But I remembered our last Nantucket debate, and I wasn't sure it was safe to say how I really felt.
Even so, I tried to tell him. I felt things I couldn't say—they had to do with the sunlight filtering through the big old leafy trees and the mist on the cobblestones at night—and named the things I could: the band concerts we'd go to on Straight Wharf, the silent movies at the church, the whaling museum on rainy days. As I spoke, though, I realized that we hadn't done those things the last summer we'd been there. I worried that maybe what I missed most I'd never have again, on Nantucket or anywhere.
"What else?" he said, and his voice was so nice I felt like crying, and then I was. He handed me his handkerchief, which smelled of the pipe tobacco he kept in a pouch in his back pocket. "What else?" he said again.
I told him I missed looking at the stars from the Maria Mitchell Observatory and fishing at Hummock Pond.
When I said, "Swimming lessons at Children's Beach," he laughed because I'd complained about them so bitterly. To acknowledge my fortitude, he'd taken me out to dinner at the end of each summer, just the two of us. He asked if I remembered our first dinner, at Vincent's, and I nodded. He said that I'd brought the card certifying me as an advanced beginner and shown it to the waiter.
I gave his handkerchief back to him.
Then he said, "Want to go out to lunch with me now?" And we went.
—•—
So, I didn't get to say good-bye to Julia. On the mail table, I found a package she'd sent to my mother. The card was a watercolor of a sailboat. Although the note began "Dear Louise," I read it to to see if there was anything about Henry. Or me. But she'd just written about sailing and the beach, and how much she'd enjoyed getting to know us—until the P.S.: "The enclosed is for Jane." It was wrapped like a present—way too small for the sweater I'd hoped for—but I was thrilled. She'd given me a copy of The Great Gatsby and written