Among the towering firs and windswept beaches of a Pacific Northwest island, a woman’s long-ago first love unexpectedly returns, teaching her the damaging power of secrets and the liberating lessons of love.
Widow Phoebe Allen has single-handedly raised a wonderful daughter and established a successful business supplying nets to fisherman and now enjoys the amorous attentions of a longtime friend. When she learns that her old boyfriend, Whitney Traynor, has purchased a house nearby, she must confront long-suppressed feelings for her charismatic first love, now a high-profile film director. For years, Phoebe has concealed truths from her daughter and may now be forced to divulge them. As the past rushes forth like an inevitable tide, Phoebe discovers the life-transforming benefits of opening one’s heart.
Release date:
June 13, 2006
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Print pages:
368
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Obsessive love is always about rejection—always, always, always.
Phoebe Allen was old enough, experienced enough, and rejected enough to know this as fact. But before the night of her annual barbecue, she did not consider it a fact with much bearing on her present life, her present self. Self-employed, self-sufficient, self-assured—all those good, sturdy “self” words shoring up her place in the world, working like a charm, keeping her safe.
Phoebe always scheduled her barbecue for the second Sunday in August. Today, as she set out the last raspberry pie to cool, everything seemed under control. Through a kitchen window, she could see her neighbor Ivan clamping chinook salmon into wire racks, readying them for the coals. Another neighbor, Amelia, was in the garden, cutting cosmos, dahlias, delphiniums, and zinnias for buffet-table vases on the deck. With days of preparation nearly complete, not a finger had blistered or bled, nothing had burned or broken, Phoebe hadn’t forgotten a single crucial ingredient for any of her recipes. Not one provoking incident had occurred to augur how troubled she soon would be. Or that she would look back on this year’s barbecue as marking when everything began to change. Not only for her, but for nearly everyone living on Owl Island. Still, it would be easier getting a consensus about what caused the change than it was finding agreement on the topic of why the road they all lived on bore the name it did: Spit in the Wind.
Summer took its time coming here. Sandals and shorts were seldom seen in June. Fourth of July firecrackers had to be lit under cupped hands before being launched into wet, chilly air. August was the blessed month. In August it was warm enough in the afternoons to splash in the shallows of Little Pritchard Bay and cool enough in the evenings to wear a sweater while you sat outside cracking fresh-caught crab for dinner. Schools of spawning humpies—pink salmon best suited for canning—crossed the bay. Fledgling bald eagles swooped down from their aeries, learning to fish. Sunsets behind snowy westward mountain slopes occurred so late at night only the youngest of children surrendered to sleep before ten o’clock. Mornings brought the scent of blackberries warming in the sun, mingled with saltwater tang and alder smoke from woodstove fires. When a brief shower of rain hit, it reminded everyone they still lived in the Pacific Northwest, and nature required payment to sustain so many different shades of green in the landscape.
Not one of Phoebe’s barbecues had ever been cancelled or moved indoors on account of weather. And by now she couldn’t keep them all straight without looking at snapshots. Then she’d recall each event’s details. When Ivan brought that frizzy-haired photographer who broke his heart, when Amelia made a pit for throwing horseshoes on the beach, when Laurienne, Phoebe’s daughter, was caked pink with calamine for nettle stings. As the pictures revealed, these parties of hers were hardly exclusive affairs. The only requirement for invitation was residence along Spit in the Wind Road; the only purposes, good food and fellowship. Everyone regarded Phoebe’s barbecues as their own equivalent of the Indian salmon feasts once held on these shores, occasions to celebrate the season’s sumptuousness.
Although many years had passed since any Indians lived on Owl Island, the island still belonged to a local Salish tribe. In the thick of the Great Depression, the tribe’s chief hired a Seattle surveyor to map the island, and it was the surveyor who gave Spit in the Wind Road its name. The chief’s minions grumbled. If they didn’t want to live on craggy Owl without plumbing or electricity, or dock their boats in Little Pritchard Bay, a body of water that drained to mud flats at low tide, why would anyone else? But just as the chief foresaw, plenty of white people felt otherwise—especially after a bridge got built linking Owl to Port Pritchard, allowing easy access to the mainland and the docks of Big Pritchard Bay. Power lines came, eventually. So did gas and water lines and telephone cables. But the rock-ridden, plow-resistant hills and moody waters were there to stay.
When Phoebe had first moved to Spit in the Wind, she’d asked Ivan about their address. Just what did the surveyor have in mind, giving this road the name he did? Ivan’s only answer was another question: “What do you think?” Voiced in a curious, genial tone, as if the road were a poem open to interpretation, or a prediction that could only be borne out by the passage of time.
Standing on a hillside overlooking the bay, Phoebe’s house was so solid and snug a structure, so replete with modern comforts, it hardly seemed possible that it had started out as the surveyor’s rustic summer place. Willing as she’d been to alter the cabin—most notably with a new deck and second story—Phoebe led the resistance when more recent arrivals lobbied for a statelier address in keeping with their year-round homes. Like, say, Shoreline Drive. Or, even worse, Mountain View Way. “If that’s what you want,” Phoebe would say, “why not move to the suburbs?”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with people from the suburbs.” This usually from some diplomat who had just fled them, and Phoebe would be obliged to respond.
“Hell no, it’s sidewalks and cul de sacs I hate.”
Phoebe had grown up sleeping beneath a large map of the Land of Make-Believe, a narrow island shaped much like Owl, and she preserved all the rips and frays acquired over the years by framing the map under glass. To her fairy–tale-tuned ear, “Spit in the Wind Road” sounded as if it would fit right in next to Breadcrumb Lane, Troll Alley, or Castaway Avenue. So, for that matter, did the name of her business—Westerly Webs. At community meetings, though, she sounded every inch the historian’s daughter that she in fact was, defending her preference in the name of character, culture, continuity.
That was about as heated as arguments on Owl Island got, and a good thing, too, considering the differences that divided it. Except for Phoebe’s barbecues, Spit in the Wind gatherings generally developed along geographical lines. On the north side, where the homes of Phoebe, Ivan, and Amelia sat strung out on cliffs among dozens of others, were those who tended to build their own dwellings and often bartered for the plumbing and wiring necessary to bring them up to code. They lived well but frugally, a collection of craftspeople, artists, and fishermen whose social affairs featured salsa, chips, and whatever jug wine was on sale in Port Pritchard at the Pioneer Market. On the south side people hired architects to design fancier places. More of a crowd that entertained with recipes out of gourmet magazines and bought wines that needed to breathe.
How the word “wind” got into the name of the road they all lived on was obvious; Owl Island’s firs and cedars grew at a slight tilt, shaped by southwesterly gusts, and could snap under the pressure of freak gales from the north. Some of Phoebe’s neighbors contended the surveyor was punning with the word “spit,” using it to mean not saliva but a point of land surrounded by water. Others believed “spit” referred to the gentle rains that in the wet months fell more frequently than major downpours, with drops so scattered it seemed possible to walk between them. Still others cited the old expression “Spit in the wind and it’ll come back to you” as evidence the surveyor was dispensing cautionary advice, a karmic warning.
After tonight, Phoebe would be inclined to endorse this last definition, placing herself at the center of the causative chain.
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