Summer Harbor by Susan Wilson Page B

note of this lone woman in the place, it had made no mark on their communal consciousness. These were men tired from a long day of physical labor; the invisible Covers, surfacing only to mend a sail, repair an engine, or help move a boat out of storage. Men in oil-weathered jeans and rubber boots who belonged to a different Hawke’s Cove from the one she knew. These were the men from whom Grainger had sprung.
    Her parents hadn’t approved of her friendship with Grainger. “He’s a townie. You should be nice, but you don’t want to encourage him.” The implication being, “he’s not our kind.” Even Grainger’s accepted place with the MacKenzies failed to temper their opinion. The MacKenzies were “saints” for taking him in, but the boy was beneath regard.
    Kiley wondered if Lydia’s late-in-life fear of being robbed had actually been foreshadowed by her rejection of Grainger’s annual offer to help unload the car. “Scurry along, we can manage.” Kiley could still hear her mother’s imperious rebuff; as if he would make off with the silver. And she’d been left to struggle with the over-heavy bags.
    Then Grainger got the job teaching the young ones to sail the club’s Dyer Dinks. Her mother’s open disapproval changed into political correctness amongst her bridge partners, whose children “loved” him. But he still didn’t attend the Friday night dances. Kiley wasn’t able to avoid that enforced clubbiness, but as soon as she could, she always slipped out through the back hallway emergency exit, where Mack and Grainger would be standing under the lone streetlight in the club’s dirt-and-crushed-clamshell parking lot, waiting for her to make her escape.
    When Mack’s parents finally joined the Yacht Club, both the MacKenzie boys, and Grainger as their guest, began to come to the dances. It was so hard to get either Mack or Grainger to dance with her. The pair preferred leaning against the wall with cans of soda in hand. Sometimes Mack’s older brother, Conor, fresh from college, would take her out on the floor in a deliberate tease to his brother and Grainger. Then he’d pay her a courtly bow and rejoin his own social circle, leaving Kiley to catch her hammering breath.
    Grainger always wore tan chinos and the same blue polo shirt with the collar turned up, as current fashion dictated. Kiley suspected that Mrs. MacKenzie had given him those clothes, probably castoffs from Conor, since Grainger owned only faded jeans and unremarkable T-shirts.
    Once Kiley gave up the struggle to get the boys to dance, the trio would duck out through the back hallway and down to the empty beach. They’d scamper down to the club’s private beach and shed their clothes, swimsuits underneath. Laughing, they’d plunge into the warm evening water. In the darkness that surrounded them, they’d tread water and stare at the Yacht Club lights reflected in the water in runny streaks of yellow, and think themselves rebellious. The music blared from the speakers—Pointer Sisters, Don Henley, or Donna Summer. Phosphorescence glittered greenish on the edges of the gently rolling waves tonguing the sand. Under cover of darkness, their intimacy was pure, eternal. They would always be friends.
    Blind to each other in the darkness, their hands, gently stroking the surface of the water, would sometimes bump. Once a hand touched her breast and in the embarrassed silence, she assumed that whoever had touched her was as shocked as she had been. Her nipples had been prominent as the slight breeze over the water chilled her skin.
    It was the first time that Kiley considered that their triangular friendship would be endangered if any one of them tampered with it. She dived beneath the dark water. Impossible. Nothing between them could ever change.
     
    Kiley slowly became aware that she was looking at each nearby face, as if looking for one familiar to her. She dropped her eyes to the table’s slightly sticky oilcloth cover. What were