“Jared is hovering over her like he’s afraid someone’s going to run up and snatch her away. Now he’s pointing at the house and talking. I hope he’s not boring her with words like ‘crossbeams’ and ‘angles’ and … and whatever else he goes on and on about.”
“Alix is a student of architecture so maybe she likes that,” Toby said as she put her homemade sliced pickles on the sandwiches. She didn’t really know what either of them liked to eat so she put some of all of it on the bread.
“I’d feel better if he were telling her about her eyes,” Lexie said.
“That they’re like liquid pools of moonlight?” Toby suggested.
“Perfect!” Lexie said. “Uh-oh. She’s frowning. Please, I hope he’s not telling her about those little beetles that eat the wood. That’s a death knell to romance.”
Toby put the plated sandwiches on the dining table. “Why are you so determined to match Jared up with this young woman?”
“He needs someone,” Lexie said. “Jared has had too many deaths around him. Aunt Addy was the only constant he had left, and now she’s gone.”
“There’s you and all his other relatives, and he’s friends with most of the island,” Toby said.
Lexie let the curtain fall back into place. “But he’s split in half. Part of him lives in America and part of him is here. Did I ever tell you that I met one of his girlfriends in New York?”
“No,” Toby said. “What was she like?”
“Tall, thin, beautiful, intelligent.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“I couldn’t see her on a Nantucket fishing boat and I certainly couldn’t imagine her in an old house with that green stove. What would she do if Jared Kingsley slapped down twenty striped bass and told her to clean them?”
Toby sighed. “Fall in love with an elegant Montgomery and find yourself married to a sea-salt Kingsley. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them.”
“And then there’s Jared’s work habits. I can’t tell you how many times Ken or Aunt Addy sent me upstairs to wake him up and I found him in bed surrounded by a dozen rolled-up drawings.”
“Rather like Alix on the couch?” Toby asked.
“Exactly like that.” The two women smiled at each other. “What I want to know,” Lexie said as she walked to the front door, “is how Alix feels about him.”
“Let’s see if we can find out,” Toby said.
Lexie opened the front door.
Alix took the seat that Lexie pointed to at the beautiful old dining table. Jared was next to her while the two young women sat across from them.
When Lexie and Jared started talking about things Alix had never heard of, she looked at her sandwich. It had Swiss cheese on it, something she’d never liked. Dry old stuff. And when she tasted a bit of turkey, it was smoked, another thing she didn’t like.
While Lexie, Toby, and Jared talked, Alix pulled his plate next to hers and fixed the two sandwiches. She gave him the cheese and the smoked turkey, which she knew he loved, and she took his pickles and cheddar cheese. She took the olives off his plate and gave him her chips.
When the sandwich fillings and condiments were properly distributed, she cut each one diagonally and gave him back his plate. She switched drinks so she had the lemonade and he had the iced tea.
When Alix looked up, both Toby and Lexie were staring at her in silence.
“Sorry,” she said. “I missed what you were saying.”
“Nothing of interest,” Jared said as he looked at Toby. “You have any hot mustard? Alix likes that.”
“We do.” Toby got up to retrieve it from the kitchen.
Lexie was looking at Alix with great intensity. The resemblance between Jared and his cousin was evident: the strong jawline, the eyes that seemed to see through a person. Alix decided she wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of Lexie’s temper—something she was sure the woman had.
As for Toby, she wasn’t at all as Alix had imagined. From what Jared had said, Alix had envisioned some hippie earth mother in handwoven cotton and sandals made out of old tires. But Toby was quietly elegant, very pretty but in an old-fashioned way, rather like a medieval painting of a Madonna. She wore a lovely dress that Alix thought might have come from the same store where Izzy had shopped.
“Zero Main?” Alix asked, naming the shop.