The Love Season Read Free Page A

yesterday. He looked so much like himself that she could almost taste the ancient desire on her scarred tongue. His blue eyes, his bushy eyebrows, white now.
    “Hi,” she said. She tried to sound calm, serene, as if all these years she’d been away at some Buddhist retreat, centering herself. Ha! Hardly.
    “ ‘Hi’?” Dusty said. “You disappear for damn near fifteen years and that’s all you have to say?”
    “I’m sorry.” It was silly, but she feared she might cry. She didn’t know what to say. Did she have to go all the way back and explain everything? Did she have to tell him what she’d done to herself and why? She had been out of the public eye for so long, she didn’t remember how to relate to people. Dusty must have sensed this, because he backed off.
    “I won’t ask you anything, Margo; I promise,” he said. He paused, shaking his head, taking her in. “Except what you’d like.”
    “Mussels,” she said. She stared at the word on her list, to avoid his eyes. “I came for mussels. Enough to get two people off to a good start.”
    “Two people?” he said.
    She blinked.
    “You’re in luck,” he said. “I got some in from Point Judith this morning.” He filled a bag with green-black shells the shape of teardrops. “How are you going to prepare these, Margo?”
    Marguerite poised her pen above her checkbook and looked at Dusty over the top of her bifocals. “I thought you weren’t going to ask me any questions.”
    “I said that, didn’t I?”
    “You promised.”
    He twisted the bag and tied it. Waved away the checkbook. He wasn’t going to let her pay. Even with real estate prices where they were,two pounds of mussels cost only about seven dollars. Still, she didn’t want to feel like she owed him anything—but the way he was looking at her now, she could tell he wanted an explanation. He expected her to wave away his offer of no questions the way he waved away her checkbook. Tell me what really happened. You clearly didn’t cut your tongue out, like some people were saying. And you don’t look crazy, you don’t sound crazy, so why have you kept yourself away from us for so long? A week or two after Marguerite was sprung from the psychiatric hospital, Dusty had stopped by her house with daffodils. He’d knocked. She’d watched him from the upstairs window, but her wounds—the physical and the emotional wounds—were too new. She didn’t want him to see.
    “I could ask you a few questions, too,” Marguerite said, figuring her best defense was an offense. “How’s your son?”
    “Married. Living in Cohasset, working in the city. He has a little girl of his own.”
    “You have a granddaughter?”
    Dusty handed a snapshot over the refrigerator case. A little girl with brown corkscrew curls sitting on Dusty’s lap eating corn on the cob. “Violet, her name is. Violet Augusta Tyler.”
    “Adorable,” Marguerite said, handing the picture back. “You’re lucky.”
    Dusty looked at the picture and grinned before sliding it back into his wallet. “Lucky to have her, I guess. Everything else is much as it’s always been.”
    He said this as if Marguerite was supposed to understand, and she did. He ran his shop; he stopped at Le Languedoc or the Angler’s Club for a drink or two or three on the way home; he took his boat to Tuckernuck on the weekends. He was as alone as Marguerite, but it was worse for him because he wanted company. The granddaughter, though. Wonderful.
    “Wonderful,” Marguerite said, taking the mussels.
    “Who is it, Margo?”
    “I’d rather not say.”
    “Not the professor?”
    “No. God, no.”
    “Good. I never liked that guy. He treated you like shit.”
    Even after all that had happened, Marguerite didn’t care to hear Porter spoken about this way. “He did the best he could. We both did.”
    “What was his name? Parker?”
    “Porter.”
    Dusty shook his head. “I would have treated you better.”
    Marguerite flashed back to that night,