Regina smiled warmly. “Come have some wine while F o r g o t t e n s e a 259
they get through the big reunion scene. They’l come up to the house when they’re ready.”
Grateful for direction, for a distraction, Lara fol owed Regina into the large, surprisingly modern kitchen. The sleek refrigerator was covered in children’s artwork. Pots steamed on the massive stove. Lara recognized the brusque restaurant cook cutting watermelon at the kitchen table.
The dark-eyed busboy stood beside a teenage girl with a halo of soft black curls, slicing bread on the counter.
“My mother, Antonia,” Regina introduced them. “My son, Nick. And the pretty girl with the knife is Elizabeth and Morgan’s daughter Emily.”
Antonia nodded at Lara. “We met,” she said in a smoker’s rasp, low and surprisingly sexy. “Welcome to chaos.”
“You run the restaurant,” Lara said.
“The restaurant and the town. Ma’s the mayor,” Regina explained.
A pair of dark-haired children burst through the screened back door, heading for the refrigerator.
“Hold on,” Regina ordered.
The little girl—seven? eight?—turned on her with black, beseeching eyes. “But, Mom, Calder’s starving.”
“Good. It’s almost time to eat.” Regina handed her a platter of deviled eggs and gave a tray of delicately browned crab cakes to the boy. “Take these outside. You can come back in to tel me when the coals are ready.”
The children thumped outside.
“Have a glass of wine,” Regina said. “Or a beer.”
“I’m fine,” Lara said. Out of place and slightly out of sorts in the midst of this cheerful family whirlpool, but otherwise al right.
“I’l have a beer,” Nick said.
His mother narrowed her eyes. “In your dreams, pal.”
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V i r g i n i a K a n t r a
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Lara asked.
She didn’t cook. But she wanted to fit in.
Regina poured her a large glass of white wine. “Relax.
Enjoy.”
Lara sipped, but she couldn’t relax.
The teenager, Emily, glanced over her shoulder. She was slim and dark-skinned and very, very pretty. “You could give me a hand with the crostini,” she said kindly.
Lara smiled. “I can if you tel me what to do.”
Under Emily’s careful supervision, she assembled appetizers, spreading little rounds of bread with something black that smel ed delicious. Focused on her task, she only gradual y registered the conversation around her.
“No big deal if I can’t take algebra,” Nick was saying.
“I’m not a brain like Em.”
“You’re no dummy either,” his grandmother said.
“But it’s first period,” Nick protested. “When winter comes, I’l miss half the classes anyway.”
Lara knew most teens were too sleep-deprived to concentrate first thing in the morning. But . . .
“Why when winter comes?” she wanted to know.
“We take the ferry to school on the mainland,” Emily explained. “When the ice is bad, we can’t get across until later in the day.”
“It’s not safe for the boats to travel in the dark,” Regina said.
Lara frowned. “You don’t have your own school?”
“K through nine. No high school,” Antonia said.
“We’ve got the numbers. Almost thirty now,” said Regina.
“The budget the way it is, the state’s consolidating schools,”
Antonia said. “They don’t want to open another way out here.”
“A lot of kids board off the island during the school year,”
said Emily.
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“Or drop out.” Nick shrugged. “I can make more money lobstering over the summer than a teacher makes in a year.”
“If that’s what you want to do al your life,” his mother said.
“What if you developed a high school magnet pro-gram?”
