He leads her past the cute cottages of Old North Wharf, past the famed Wharf Rat Club, past Provisions and the Straight Wharf restaurant on the right—where are they going?—and out a rickety dock over the water. Lizbet watches where she puts her feet on the old, uneven boards, thinking in her emotionally heightened state that she could easily topple into the harbor, where her wedges would anchor her right to the bottom.
The dock leads out to a lone cottage, and Lizbet looks around. How in fifteen years has she never realized this little place was here, floating on pillars in the middle of the harbor? To the left are the grand homes of Easton Street and Brant Point Light and to the right she can see and hear the people eating on the porch at Straight Wharf.
Mario opens the door and they step back in time. The cottage feels like something out of what Lizbet vaguely thinks of as “the good old days,” that era in the 1950s and 1960s when properties were both loved and neglected, when summer homes were passed down through families and not purchased online for eight figures thanks to the dazzling 360-degree photo gallery. The cottage features a boxy, wood-paneled room that smells of the sea. There’s a gray tweed sofa and two upright armchairs, a braided rug, a dinged-up dining-room table with mismatched chairs, a kitchen with brown cabinets, Formica countertops, a four-burner electric stove and a white icebox with a long pull-handle. There are some truly atrocious oil paintings hanging on the walls. Lizbet squints—they’re landscapes of Nantucket, no doubt the efforts of one of the former owners who took a summer’s interest in rendering the island en plein air. She can tell without checking that in the cabinets she will find Junior League and Congregational church cookbooks stained with cranberry sauce and clam juice, as well as a speckled black lobster pot and a box of frilled toothpicks purchased sometime during the Kennedy administration.
Off to the left is a door that leads to a bedroom （low bed, covered with a patchwork quilt） and another door that leads to a bathroom tiled in iridescent pink （it must have been renovated in the seventies）。 “This is fabulous,” Lizbet says.
Mario sheds his blazer and kicks off his flip-flops. “I’m glad you like it. Some people wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t…get it.” He has brought Lizbet’s cooler bag from the truck and he pulls out the bottle of Krug. “Let me show you the best part.” He grabs two jelly jars from the cabinet, hands them to Lizbet （they’re painted with cartoon scenes from Tom and Jerry）， and opens a door that leads out to his—well, Lizbet supposes it’s his front porch. It’s a covered deck that overlooks Nantucket harbor; water laps up against the pilings beneath their feet. A ladder hangs off the railing.
“How,” she says, “did you get this?”
“Xavier,” Mario says. “I was on the fence about working at the bar, but then he dangled this place and I caved.” He expertly takes the cage off the Krug and gently pulls the cork. He pours the champagne into the jelly jars, then he and Lizbet face each other and touch glasses. “This is more like it,” Mario says. “Here’s to you, Heartbreaker.”
By their second glass, they’re sitting next to each other on a wicker love seat on the deck, bare feet up on a wrought-iron table, gazing out at the darkening sky. The red beacon of Brant Point Light glows, then dims.
“How did you get to Nantucket from Minnesota?” Mario says. “I don’t think you’ve told me.”
“Well,” Lizbet says. “When I was at the University of Minnesota, there was a girl in my dorm who showed up to school a week late. All we knew about her was that her name was Elyse Perryvale and she was from out east. None of us could understand why anyone would miss the first week of freshman year.” Lizbet sips her champagne. “She was tan and had this sun-bleached hair, and she was wearing faded jean shorts and boat shoes that looked like they’d been repeatedly run over by a vintage Jeep Wagoneer. And she said, ‘Sorry I’m late. My parents wanted to eke out one more week at our house on Nantucket.’”
“Did you hate her?” Mario asks.
“I worshipped her,” Lizbet says. “I thought that was the most seductive sentence I’d ever heard. We were from Minnesota—summertime for us was going to our lake cabins and waiting in line for Sweet Martha’s at the state fair. And here was this…mermaid among us. I asked her all about Nantucket and she lent me a Nancy Thayer novel, which I devoured. The summer after I graduated, I moved out here and got a job waiting tables at the Deck, which was brand-new that year. I started dating JJ and fifteen years passed.”