The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: Colleen Oakley
Book online «The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗». Author Colleen Oakley
—Atlanta magazine
“Readers will want simultaneously to hug Daisy and give her a good shake when she goes off the rails. . . . Highly recommended for laugh-out-loud fans and the tearjerker set.”
—Library Journal
“It’s impossible not to feel Daisy’s pain, confusion, and sadness as she thinks about what life will be like after she’s gone. . . . This emotional novel will make readers laugh through their tears.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Oakley expertly tugs at the heartstrings with well-rounded characters and a liberal dose of gallows humor.”
—Publishers Weekly
Titles by Colleen Oakley
The Invisible Husband of Frick Island
You Were There Too
Close Enough to Touch
Before I Go
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2021 by Colleen Oakley
Readers Guide copyright © 2021 by Colleen Oakley
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BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Oakley, Colleen, author.
Title: The invisible husband of Frick Island / Colleen Oakley.
Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040641 (print) | LCCN 2020040642 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984806482 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781984806499 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3615.A345 I58 2021 (print) | LCC PS3615.A345 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040641
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040642
First Edition: May 2021
Cover art and design by Vi-An Nguyen
Book design by Katy Riegel, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan
Map by Lindsay Champanis
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Henry, Sorella, Olivia, and Everett, the four greatest joys of my life.
And for my grandparents Hugh and Marion, who showed me the world and all the stories it contains.
Contents
Cover
Praise for Colleen Oakley
Titles by Colleen Oakley
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map of Frick Island
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Readers Guide
About the Author
Life seen without illusion is a ghastly affair.
—Virginia Woolf
Chapter 1
The Storm
At first, when Piper scanned the docks and didn’t see the familiar rickety white-pine-and-fir fisherman’s trawler, she thought nothing of it. Tom, like most Chesapeake Bay watermen, tried to beat the sun’s rays onto the water every morning during crab season, squeezing in every minute of the government-allotted eight hours of crabbing per day. That put him back in the harbor just after lunch most afternoons, with plenty of time for his onshore duties—icing his catch, checking his floats, tending to the boat. But inevitably some mornings there was a delay—a net needing mending, the buy boat running late. On those days, Tom’s deadrise would come puffing into the harbor later than the others, when the sun was halfway down the other side of the sky. But whether it was two, three, or four in the afternoon, it didn’t much matter. Time on Frick Island had always been more of a theoretical concept measured in jiffies or awhiles or later ons.
Still, even though there was no telling on any given day when Tom would return, every afternoon when the Blue Point market closed at three, Piper flew through her closing responsibilities moving the packaged deli meats, cheeses, and any unsold fresh crab cakes from the display cooler to the back refrigerator, mopping the cracked linoleum floors, hanging up her apron on the hook in the office, and slipping her card in the punch time clock (even though she had never seen Mr. Garrison so much as look at them)—and rushed over to the docks.
Most days Tom was already there, helping tie off boats or diagnosing an outboard engine problem or simply standing around with other watermen, grumbling about the day’s haul or the sharp drop in the market price of oysters.
And sometimes, on those days, the breath would catch in Piper’s throat. And she’d stop and stare at him for a beat in wide wonder that of all the places in the world, God had found it fitting to put Tom Parrish on the same tiny spit of land that she, too, inhabited. And even more miraculous, that though he could have had his pick of mainland girls at the high school they once ferried over to before the sun woke every weekday, Tom chose her.
Fire. That was what Piper remembered when she thought of those early days on the ferry with Tom. There was a heat to those mornings, even in the dead of winter, when they could see their breath float out into the cold air in great big puffs, as if they were exhaling cigarette smoke. She’d never forget the way the clouds would suddenly blush pink at the first kiss of sunlight and how her face followed suit whenever she caught Tom looking at her. Or the way when Tom, two years her senior, first sat next to her on the boat when there were at least ten other empty spots he could have chosen, and his thigh burned so hot against hers, even through their jeans, that it
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