The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗

“Pearl,” Tom’s cousin Steve said with a steady, patient voice, only slightly tinged with anger. “I’ve told you a hundred times that cell towers do not increase the risk of cancer. I even showed you the research from the American Cancer Society about the non-ionizing radiation, remember?”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel safe?” Pearl shot back. “Your fancy name for radiation? Radiation is radiation.”

“But you thought I was Mormon!” Anders said. “You didn’t even know who I was.”

“Well, I didn’t know what you looked like when I emailed you.”

Harold stood up. “OK, I think we’ve gotten a little off course here.”

Pearl glared at her infernally patient, sensible husband. He swallowed. “Look. If Piper thinks this developer has some good ideas, then I think we owe it to her—and Tom—to listen to what they’ve got to say. The truth is, people are coming here whether we like it or not, thanks to Anders’s podcast.” He nodded toward Anders and caught his eye, but Anders found no malice in his expression. The crowd began murmuring again and Harold held up his hand. “Now, we could turn them all away. Shut down the island. Cut off our nose to spite our face. Or we could come up with a plan. Together.”

—

Three hours later, after a lot more squabbling and shouting, the town had voted 64 to 27 to accept Anders’s money and voted on a five-member committee to spearhead what to do with the funds, with the caveat that selling alcohol at the restaurant and/or general store was still strictly off the table. When the meeting was adjourned, people got up and started congregating in groups of three or four, then slowly filing out. Nobody approached Anders, and in all his time on Frick Island, he had never so strongly felt like the odd man out. Like the Come Here that he was.

Still, as he snuck out a side door into the dark night, he was unable to keep the grin off his face. Maybe he wouldn’t ever be fully forgiven—maybe he didn’t deserve it—but at least he was able to carve some good out of his colossal mistake.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

Anders paused, and turned to see Piper standing behind him on the road. Then he considered her question and frowned, a pit forming in his stomach. “I don’t actually know,” he said. He didn’t think BobDan was going to give him a ride back over to the mainland this late, nor did he expect Mrs. Olecki to offer up a room. “I think I’m stranded.”

“Serves you right.”

He dipped his head. “It probably does.”

They stood facing each other in silence, Anders regretting once again how sorely he’d messed everything up. And then he saw the tears well up in her eyes, and he felt even worse.

“I think Tom would have been really happy with tonight,” she said when she spoke again, her voice cracking but not breaking.

Anders nodded.

“I really miss him.”

“I know,” he said.

She bit her lip and looked up. “But what’s even worse is that I missed you, too.”

Anders didn’t think that was worse at all. He thought it was the best thing he’d heard in a very long time.

Piper’s eyes overflowed and Anders dug in his pocket for the handkerchief he’d remembered to stuff in there just for this purpose. He handed it to her, and his chest puffed up a bit, wishing Mrs. Olecki could see him now.

“I forgot to thank you for the Girl Scout cookies,” she said, dabbing at her eye with the cloth.

He raised his eyebrows. He had begun to assume that she hadn’t opened the packages he’d sent.

“And the Taylor Swift record.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

She sniffed again. “And the video.”

“Did you watch it? I didn’t know if you had a VCR.”

“Jeffrey has one. We watched it together.” She dabbed the handkerchief at her eyes, her nose. “You are a spectacularly bad dancer.”

“I know.”

“You would have been a terrible stripper.”

He grinned. “Yes.”

She sighed and slipped her arm through the crook of Anders’s elbow. “Come on. I guess you can stay at my house tonight. Since you’re stranded.”

“Really?”

“On the couch,” she said, eyeing him purposefully.

“Next to the bugs?”

She smiled and Anders’s entire heart filled. He stared at her beaming face, wishing with everything in him that he could kiss the smile right off of it. But he knew for now he’d just have to imagine it. Something he learned could be almost as good as the real thing.

Almost.

Chapter 31

Nearly Six Months Later

August

Pearl Olecki stood in her lemon-dotted apron, mixing the yellow batter with her rubber spatula and holding the bowl slightly away from her so her rapt audience of fifty people or so on the green space in front of the church could see the proper consistency. She spoke into the tiny microphone clipped onto her apron strap.

“You don’t want to overmix it. That’ll take the air right out of it and then your layers won’t rise properly.” That wasn’t true, of course. With Frick Island cake you didn’t want the layers to rise too much, because then they wouldn’t stack right. But she wasn’t about to give away all her secrets.

She glanced over at Lady Judy, who was under the white tent next to hers, hawking her new line of Frick Island Bay Breeze candles, along with the only officially licensed What the Frick? merchandise: T-shirts, hats, key chains, tote bags, baby bibs, and coffee mugs.

Pearl looked back at the crowd gathered round her, including the Barretts, a new family that had just moved to the island, buying the abandoned house next to Lady Judy, along with four others. The wife had been a general contractor on the mainland and spent her days renovating the homes, with the intent to sell them when she was done, and the husband was a stay-at-home dad to