24
Now
Felix is a mess—jittery and uncharacteristically clumsy. In the five minutes before we’re supposed to leave for Tyne Valley, he manages to knock over Christine’s Christmas cactus, shatter a water glass, and misplace his keys.
“He’s always like this on competition day,” Bridget says as we search the living room. “He’s also got these random superstitions, like wearing the hat and the shirt.”
I peer at Felix. He’s lying on his stomach, looking for his keys under the sideboard. When he stands, I see that the gray shirt he’s put on is almost transparent. I can barely make out its faded white lettering, but I’m sure one of the words is OYSTER. His olive green baseball hat also has an ancient- looking patina. It’s mesh-backed, with McINNIS SEAFOOD written across the front. I know from extensive social media creeping that it’s Joy’s family business.
“Wolf wore that hat when he won the junior shucking championship a
million years ago,” Bridget says.
“Eleven years ago,” Felix corrects.
“I think you wear it to make Joy’s father cry,” she says. “The son he always wanted.”
Felix gives her a flat look, and then Zach calls from the kitchen, “Found them.” He holds up the keys. “They were in the cupboard with the glasses.”
Felix stumbles over a corner of a rug on his way to retrieve them.
“You’re even more of a disaster than usual, Wolf,” Bridget says.
“I’d say he’s about the same,” Zach says.
Felix shoots him a half-hearted glare. “It’s important to me.”
“We know,” Bridget says. “It’s your thing. Your only thing.”
“Not true,” Zach says. “He has two things: oysters and books.”
“I have more than two things.”
“Name them,” Bridget says.
“Get lost.” He turns to me, laughing. His gaze is warm—it feels like swimming in paradise. “Anything you want to add?”
“Try not to stab yourself.”
He winks. “No promises.”
• • •
“WHY DON’T I DRIVE?” I SAY TO FELIX WHEN WE HEAD OUT TO THE TRUCK, BUT HE
shakes his head.
“I’m fine.”
He’s not. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel the entire forty-five- minute drive to Tyne Valley. He takes a break every so often to wave hello to an oncoming vehicle, or lift his hat, wiggle it around, and set it back on his head.
There’s a community supper at the fire hall, and we stuff ourselves with fried oysters and potato salad and coleslaw and lemon pie. Well, Bridget, Zach, and I do. Felix mostly pushes his food around.
We walk across the street to the arena, where people are streaming inside.
Felix is so distracted, he trips over his own feet.
“Whoa there, son,” a large man says, holding Felix’s arm to keep him upright.
“Ray,” Felix says, giving him a hug. “Good to see you.”
Ray has an auburn beard sprinkled with white, sun-worn skin, and bourbon eyes. His T-shirt is the same green as Felix’s hat. It takes me a second to see McINNIS SEAFOOD written across its chest, and another to put it
all together. Ray is Joy’s dad.
“Look who’s here,” Felix says.
Ray’s smile grows as he pulls Bridget to him. “It’s been too long, girl.
But you’re too thin,” he says. “They don’t feed you back in Toronto?”
Bridget pats his belly. “Not as good as they do at home.” Ray lets out a deep laugh, as if it comes from the bottom of a well.
“Good to see both young Clarks here. Brings back memories,” Ray says after Felix introduces me. “I’ll never forget the night you took home junior
shucker. You were, what, eighteen?”
“Seventeen,” Felix says.
“Seventeen.” Ray shakes his head. He puts one large hand around Felix’s shoulder. “Watching you win was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
“Mine, too,” Felix says solemnly.
“Well, I better find the wife. She gets antsy before the grading contest.
Good luck tonight, son.”
“Thanks, Ray,” Felix says. “Break a leg.”
“So that was Joy’s dad,” I say to Felix as we head inside the arena behind Bridget and Zach.
“Uh-huh.” He’s preoccupied, his gaze pinging around the crowd.
“And the founding member of your fan club. He really likes you.”
He looks at me then. “Yeah,” Felix says. “Ray’s all right.”
The arena is already half-full when we get inside. Everyone is gathered on the concrete surface where the ice will become winter. There’s a stage at one end, a couple hundred folding chairs arranged in front. Canopied stalls are set up at the back of the space—a bar, an oyster station. Guns N’ Roses plays over the sound system, and volunteers mill about in bright red TYNE VALLEY OYSTER FESTIVAL T-shirts.
I am absurdly overdressed. Most people are in cotton tees and shorts.
Flip-flops or sneakers. I, on the other hand, have put on a silk smoking dress covered in oversize poppies, which I’d tucked into my suitcase on the unlikely chance Bridget wanted to go into Charlottetown for a night out. I did a cat eye.
“Why didn’t you tell me this was a casual event?” I say to Bridget as we pass a young woman wearing a tiara and a sash that reads MISS OYSTER PEARL
—even she’s wearing denim cutoffs and a tank top. Bridget has on something similar, but I thought that was just Bridget being Bridget.
“What about an oyster-shucking event in a community arena suggested not-casual?” She scrunches her face. “Why do you care? You look the way you always do when you go out.”
It’s true. I’ve been the dressiest person in the room many times in my life.
It’s kind of my thing, and it’s never bothered me before.
“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t care.” But I think maybe I do. This is Felix’s world, and part of me is wondering if I could ever fit into it.
Felix is pulled aside by one person, then another. A man a bit younger than his father claps him on the back and asks about his grandparents. A guy our age asks him why he hasn’t seen him at the gym this week. A couple— who by their matching ISLAND SPUDS hats I assume must own a potato farm— invite Felix to their home for dinner next week. Many of those who stop him are women. Many of them beautiful. I watch a brunette put her hand on his chest, over his heart. My belly pinches strangely. Which is silly. I have no claim on Felix.
The emcee is already onstage—bearded, ball-capped, and wearing a shirt that reads LET’S GET SHUCKED—going over the rules.
“After the juniors shuck, it’s the grading contest,” Bridget explains. Felix has vanished into the crowd. “And then the national shucking championship is after that. We have a couple hours before Wolf competes.”
“What do we do until then?” I ask as Felix reappears, clutching three cans
of beer.
He passes one to each of us. “Drink.”
“What about you?”
“No alcohol before I shuck,” he says. “Then . . . a lot of it.”
“I’ll drive us home,” Zach says. “I won’t drink anything after this.”
I see her over Felix’s shoulder just before she gives it a tap. Her hair is such a pale shade of red, it’s almost blond. It extends to her mid-back, and her bangs are immaculate. Joy is even more stunning than when I met her three years ago.
I watch Felix hug his ex, holding my breath. I’ve never seen Joy and Felix in the same room, and it’s staggering how easy they are together. After they embrace, Bridget holds her arms open and proceeds . . . to . . . hug . . . Joy?
“Joy! I’m so glad you’re here.” She nods at the stopwatch around Joy’s neck. “Wolf didn’t tell us you were volunteering.” It’s like I’ve entered an alternate dimension, one where my best friend wouldn’t be the primary suspect if Joy were found murdered in her sleep.
“Surprise,” Felix says, giving Joy a grin and a dimple.
“You’re looking at one of the official timers for this year’s Canadian Oyster-Shucking Championship,” Joy says, puffing out her chest in jest.
“You should be shucking yourself,” Felix says, his voice fond.
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, Dad.”
I’m mostly at peace with my curves, but Joy is so toned, she makes me feel like a moose in a maxidress. Her hair is in a high ponytail, and she’s in a red volunteer shirt and bike shorts that treat her thighs with the adulation they deserve.
“Hi, Lucy.” She leans in to embrace me. And ugh, she smells amazing, too. Like a butterscotch sundae. But an elevated one. One that would cost twenty dollars in Toronto. “It’s so nice to see you again.”
“You too,” I tell her, though frankly, I would have preferred not being reminded how perfect and genuinely nice the woman Felix wanted to marry is. Or seeing how relaxed they are with each other.
She nods at the stage. “I gotta get up there. Lucy, I have a question for you about peonies later, if you have a sec? Mine are unhappy.”
Blech, she’s wonderful.
“Uh, sure.”
She turns to Felix. “Mrs. Stewart is looking for you. She wants to set you up with her granddaughter in Borden-Carleton.”
He looks at Joy, disturbed, and she laughs.
“I’m just warning you,” she says.
Felix winces. “Thanks.”
I watch them with a feeling not unlike dread. Or maybe it’s a form of jealousy. It’s not about the prospect of Felix being set up. Or even about Joy.
It’s realizing that he has a reason to fear Mrs. Stewart’s granddaughter, and I don’t know what it is. But Joy does. Because Joy knows Felix. He has friends who understand him and exes who he bumps into on occasion. He has people who see him year-round, not just when the weather’s warm, who see him at the gym and know when he’s off his routine, people who can invite him for dinner on a random Wednesday evening.
“Well, I gotta get back to it,” Joy says. And then off she goes, ponytail swishing.
I must be wearing my feelings on my face because Felix gives me a questioning look. I smile, ignoring it, and turn to Bridget. “I never thought I’d see the two of you so chummy. Care to explain?”
“She reached out to me a while ago.”
“Really? That’s great. Why didn’t you tell me?” It’s another thing gone unshared between us.
“It’s no big deal, Bee. We’ve just been texting a bit.”
I make myself smile. “I’m going to need to read the entire exchange later.
This is a very big deal.”
We take our seats as the first heat of teenage shuckers are called onstage —two boys and one girl. There are three timers standing behind them, including Joy, one per shucker. Felix’s leg bounces up and down when they
start, fingers tapping on his knee.
“Cut it out,” Bridget says.
“Makes me edgy to watch,” he says.
“Take a walk. Bee, go with him. You’re not good at sitting still, either.”
We can’t move three feet without someone saying hello to Felix. He’s shaking hands and making small talk like a politician. The conversations are brief, but each is a reminder: Felix Clark does not cease to exist when I leave the island. I knew that, of course, but it’s been easier to imagine him tucked safely away in his cabin in the woods—busy with work the way In Bloom consumes my days in Toronto. But Felix has a whole life I know nothing about.
“Well, aren’t you the prom king,” I say after we finish chatting with friends of his parents’.
We’re studying a table of wooden oyster crate dioramas that have been decorated by children—an octopus’s garden, a bubblegum pink hair salon, a trio of baby sharks dressed for school. There’s a fiddler onstage now—the juniors have finished, and their oysters are being scored by the judges.
Felix smirks. “I was.”
“Of course you were.” Joy and Felix, the perfect couple. “Although you don’t strike me as someone who loves the spotlight.”
“I’m not. But community matters to me.”
“That’s why you do this?”
“Yeah.” He offers me a dimple. “Ego might have something to do with it,
too.”
“But you love it.”
“I love it.” He looks around the arena. “Even though I sometimes feel like I’m seventeen when I’m here.”
“And that’s bad? I seem to recall you were a seventeen-year-old shucking champion.”
His laugh is soft. “I was a seventeen-year-old jackass.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” I nudge him with my elbow. “Ray said watching you win was one of the proudest moments of his life.”
“Yeah. Did you know that I used to work for him?”
Felix and I haven’t really talked about his history with Joy and her family.
“I don’t think so.”
“Ray taught me everything I know about oysters, including how to shuck them. He was my boss, but he was a mentor to me, too. There were years when I spent more time with the McInnis family than my own.” He shrugs.
“When I won, I competed on behalf of their family business. It meant a lot to
him.”
“How long did you work for him?”
Felix adjusts his hat. “Pretty much the entire time Joy and I dated, so almost seven years—part-time during high school and full-time after. When Joy was away at university, I saw her parents more than I did her.”
“Wow.” It seems unfair that he lost his fiancée and his job in one day.
“Did you ever consider staying on?”
Felix shakes his head. “It would have been too hard, and I needed to put that part of my life behind me.”
I nod. “It’s impressive that you and Joy are friends.”
“We agreed to make an effort and be civil. We know all the same people.”
He steps closer, holding my gaze with an intention that has me shifting.
“And I thought life would be easier if we could be in a room together.”
Before I can reply, someone else taps him on the shoulder.
We find our seats when the grading contest begins—apparently watching people sort a pile of oysters by size doesn’t give Felix heart palpitations. My eyes keep wandering to Joy onstage, and I don’t miss that hers travel to Felix and me between rounds. They would make sense as a couple. There’s a history there. I know their families used to be close. They’re more than just civil—they’re friends. And they live in the same province. Move in the same circles. Joy is part of the community Felix loves.
Zach and Bridget are cheering on Joy’s mom, a petite blonde who’s putting her fellow graders to shame. I whisper to Felix, “Have you ever considered giving it another shot with Joy?”
Narrowed eyes move around my face, like he’s trying to read an upside- down map. His gaze clears, as if he’s tracked down the truth from the labyrinth of my mind. He moves toward my ear so no one else can listen and says, “Are you jealous, Lucy?”
My chest heats, and Felix pulls back. I stare into his eyes, trying to read what they’re saying, but then Bridget leans over my lap.
“I think it’s time for you to go do your thing, Wolf,” she says. “The shuckers are gathering over there.” She points to where a large group is assembling at the back of the space.
Felix gives me one last look, like he knows every single dream and doubt and dangerous thought that lies beneath my skin. And then he’s gone.
