Osprey Island

mess.” He got the smoke lighted and inhaled deeply.

“Could I bum one?” Brigid asked.

“My pleasure, baby.” He handed her the pack and the lighter. As she extracted one and got it lit he was saying, “Tell me something— anything. Tell me some dumb normal thing. Like you’d of told me last week. Some stupid thing about noth—hey,” he remembered, “how’s that boy? That college boy—how’s things with the fucking college boy?” He was extraordinarily pleased with himself for the retention of that small memory outside his own circumstance and pounced on it. “How the fuck goes it with the college boy?” He smiled so wide, it was ghoulish.

“To tell you the truth,” Brigid said on an exhale of smoke, “he’s a shitty bastard and I should have known it from the outset.”

“Oh, no,” Lance cooed, enjoying himself now. “What’d he do to hurt you, baby?”

Brigid brushed hair from her face with calculated nonchalance. “Just found himself another girl to take up with entirely.”

Lance let his mouth drop open. Then his face contorted in disbelief. “Who?” he said, so vehemently it sounded like a dare: You just try and name someone hotter than you on this island.

“The one from the beauty salon . . . ?”

Lance nearly tipped over in his chair. His eyes bulged with laughter. “Reesa?!” he cried incredulously.

“No, not her,” Brigid said, “the younger one . . . Janna, is it?” Brigid now knew precisely what her name was, but the fact that she gave a fuck was no one’s business but her own.

Lance’s disbelief abated only slightly. “That fuckhead’s going to take Janna Winger over you? He’s out of his fucking mind, baby! Baby, anyone who’s going slumming with Janna Winger instead of the hottest little girl to hit this shithole in a hell of a time—he’s not in his right mind, baby. That boy’s fucking nuts!”

Brigid drank her beer eagerly. She didn’t know what to say.

Lance drank too, marveling at the insanity of the world. “Fucking nutcase. What a dumb stupid fuck.”

When Brigid had finished her beer, she set it down on the railing and stood to go. “I’ve got to have a shower . . . these chemicals . . .”

Lance’s eyes lit up. “Oooohhh-ooh! Can I come?”

And if the look she wanted to give him was the look she’d practiced for Gavin—the What the fuck is your problem, asshole? look—she managed somehow not to. Somehow she managed just to laugh —a hearty, heady, Ha ha ha ha, we’re all so bloody funny, aren’t we? laugh that at least got her down the porch steps and headed toward home.

SUZY STOPPED INTO the beauty salon when she’d finished in the maid’s room for the day. Reesa, too, was about to close up and head home, and Suzy helped her and Janna tidy the place a bit as they chatted. Reesa had trained a few of the local girls herself—Janna, and Cybelle Schwartz too. They were just past eighteen, and Reesa had invested a great deal of time and energy in trying to persuade both of them to get off Osprey Island and go live in the world before they wound up married or pregnant.

When she was younger, everyone thought Reesa would be the kid discovered by some movie director spending a weekend on Osprey, plucked out and whisked away to turn her all-American good looks into someone’s pretty penny. No one thought she’d be on Osprey past her sixteenth birthday. But sixteen, eighteen, twenty, all came and went, and there was Reesa, lovely as ever, waiting tables at the Island Grill or Tubby’s Fishhouse. She’d gone with Abel Delamico since before anyone could remember, and they’d married just after high school. Abel’s fishing business did well, and they had a nice house out near the point at Scallopshell Cove. Four beautiful kids. There was nothing in Reesa Delamico’s life to indicate that she was anything but content. She was the pride of Osprey: she could’ve flown away at any time, but never had.

Instead, she made sure that others took the sort of opportunities she hadn’t. Jasper, Reesa’s oldest, was eighteen and gone already, off to college a year early. She missed the hell out of him, and that was exactly the way she wanted it. Reesa wanted Jasper to have choices. She wanted him to do whatever he did because he’d chosen it, not because he’d never known enough to see a choice. If, after college, Jasper chose to come back home to Osprey, it’d be because Osprey was where he wanted to be, not because he didn’t know how to get to anywhere else.

It was just past five o’clock when Gavin appeared outside the salon’s glass door. Janna took off her smock, checked her face in the styling station mirror, checked it again in the next styling station mirror, said “ ’Bye,” and dashed out to meet him. They paused self-consciously on the deck to kiss, and Reesa and Suzy just watched, too interested to feign otherwise. If you’d looked in through the glass door at those two old friends inside the beauty shop, you’d have thought they were watching two entirely different scenes. Reesa beamed with pride— pride mixed with nostalgia. Janna was something of a second daughter to her, and she feared the girl might never muster the incentive to leave Osprey. But now—a boy from California! Even if it didn’t work out in the long run, he might at least induce Janna to see something of the world.

Suzy, on the other hand, might as well have been watching some graphic nature documentary, staring in horror as though a cannibalistic mating ritual were being enacted on the deck of the Osprey Lodge.

And then, in a flurry of twenty-four-hour-old love, Gavin and Janna were down the stairs and disappearing up the beach. It was Reesa who spoke first, wagging her head in marvel. “How about that?” she said. “I introduced them at Art and Penny’s yesterday . . . who’d’ve thought? I’ve never seen her like this—she’s usually harder, you know? Harder to crack. What?” Reesa noticed the look on Suzy’s face. “What? Suze? What’s the . . . ?”

Suzy shuddered off the feeling that had overcome her. “I just . . . I was just hearing . . . I mean, do you know him?”

“He’s the one . . . Gavin, the Stanford one . . . Heather’s . . .”

“No, I know that,” Suzy said. “I was just hearing about him, from Brigid.”

Reesa shook her head; the name meant nothing to her.

Suzy’s dislike of this Gavin kid surged. “The girl after Heather and before