From Willa, With Love Read online

  from willa,

  with love

  COLEEN MURTAGH PARATORE

  To everyone who has

  loved a book and given

  that gift to another.

  From Cape Cod,

  With Love,

  Coleen Murtagh Paratore

  The books about Willa Havisham,

  by Coleen Murtagh Paratore:

  The Wedding Planner’s Daughter

  The Cupid Chronicles

  Willa by Heart

  Forget Me Not

  Wish I Might

  From Willa, With Love

  Other books by the author that you also may enjoy:

  Sunny Holiday

  Sweet and Sunny

  A Pearl Among Princes

  The Funeral Director’s Son

  Kip Campbell’s Gift

  Mack McGinn’s Big Win

  26 Big Things Small Hands Do

  Catching the Sun

  How Prudence Proovit Proved the

  Truth About Fairy Tales

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1 Nothing to Worry About

  CHAPTER 2 Something About Books

  CHAPTER 3 Comings and Goings

  CHAPTER 4 Stella Steps It Up

  CHAPTER 5 Not a Date or Anything

  CHAPTER 6 The Hot-Pink Sneakers

  CHAPTER 7 The Good Ones

  CHAPTER 8 Will’s Wild Goose Chase

  CHAPTER 9 A Sea Storm of Emotions

  CHAPTER 10 Maybe You Could Adopt Him!

  CHAPTER 11 Just Like a Family

  CHAPTER 12 From Cape Cod, With Love

  CHAPTER 13 Building Customer Loyalty

  CHAPTER 14 Poppy Marketplace

  CHAPTER 15 The After-Beatles Beach Party

  CHAPTER 16 “You’ve Got a Friend”

  CHAPTER 17 Like a Washing Machine

  CHAPTER 18 Keep It Simple, Please

  CHAPTER 19 Ruby’s Scary News

  CHAPTER 20 Open to the Opportunities

  CHAPTER 21 One Hello, Two Good-byes

  CHAPTER 22 Heart-to-Heart

  CHAPTER 23 The Moonrise

  CHAPTER 24 Lovebirds and Love Hurts

  CHAPTER 25 A Perfect Wedding

  CHAPTER 26 Willa Plants a Garden

  Willa’s Summer Skinny-Punch Pix List #3

  Your Pix List

  A Letter to My Readers

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  Nothing to Worry About

  A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

  — Chinese Proverb

  I came across this quote: “A book is like a garden carried in the pocket,” and it made me think how a good book is a perennial thing; it lives on and on. Certain bits of the books we love sink into us like seeds in soil and mix with all the other seeds, and then who knows what colorful things might one day bloom.

  Recently I read a book called Three Cups of Tea about a man who builds schools in remote mountain villages where children have no books, none. Loving books as much as I do, I cannot imagine a life without reading.

  More and more now as I watch the news or read the morning paper, I am drawn to stories about places in the world ravished by poverty or war or weather disasters, places where people have no food, no home, no books, and I think how fortunate I am to live in this beautiful inn on Cape Cod with a happy family, delicious meals, a huge library, a warm snuggly bed with a stack of books on my nightstand, and I wonder, What can I do?

  I stop writing, set down my pen, close my journal, From the Life of Willa Havisham. I glance at the clock. It’s early yet. Maybe I can still catch the sunrise. There it is again. A walk by the water, the wind on my face, might send an answer … a direction. The sea is like a compass for me. It tells me where to go.

  It’s mouse quiet at the Bramblebriar Inn, which my mother, Stella Havisham, and stepfather, Sam Gracemore, manage here in the town of Bramble, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. All of the rooms in the main building are full, as this is July, our busiest month. I walk softly down the hallway so I do not disturb our guests.

  I smile as I pass the closed door of Room #7, the “Captain Ahab” room, where my newly discovered half brother, Will Havisham, is sleeping. Will is visiting here from England. Mother said he could be our guest for a while; I’m hoping a long, long while.

  Will and I just met for the first time this summer when he came here to Cape Cod in search of our birthfather, Billy Havisham. Will believed our father was still alive and somewhere here on the Cape, and Will hoped that together we could find him.

  It broke my heart to have to tell Will that our father was indeed dead, drowned in a hot-air balloon accident nearly fifteen years ago.

  After being an only child my whole life, let me say, it was quite a shock to discover that I have a brother. Will is seventeen, three years older than me, but we share the same blue eyes, same brown hair, and, although we got off to a rocky start, he is proving himself to be quite a decent “chum,” as Will would say.

  It will be especially nice having Will around for the summer since my boyfriend, JFK—his name is Joseph Frances Kennelly and everyone calls him Joey, but I call him JFK in my head because he reminds me of President JFK, who loved Cape Cod—is in Florida staying with his grandparents for six weeks while he’s doing some baseball internship his father arranged for him. My new best friend, Mariel Sanchez, is also off Cape for the summer, visiting her mother, who’s starring in a Broadway show in Manhattan. I’m happy for Mare because she hasn’t spent time with her mother in a long, long time, but still, that leaves me without my best friend.

  Down the wide staircase, across the thick carpet, past the grandfather clock just now chiming five A.M., I smile at the sleeping golden polar bear blocking my exit out the front door. Salty Dog. My and Will’s dog.

  Salty followed me home from the beach earlier this summer. Mariel insisted he was a gift to me from the mermaids. She sees the world that way. When no one claimed Salty at the town shelter and after begging and begging my mother to let me adopt him, I discovered that Salty was Will’s dog who had jumped ship when they anchored on Popponesset Beach. I was heartbroken having to give Salty up, but now that Will is staying here for a time, Salty can still be mine.

  I kneel down and run my hand gently over his furry head, sniffing in his signature salty-seaweed smell. One big brown eye cocks open, then the other. He yawns, stands, shakes off doggy dreamland, and barks me a happy stinky-breath hello.

  “Morning, Salty. Up for a walk? Let’s go catch the sun.”

  I take my bike. Salty runs beside me.

  In a few minutes we’re at the shore.

  “Ah, too late, we just missed it, Salty.” I rest my bike against a rock and bend to breathe in the sweet cinnamon scent of the rugosa beach roses that grow wild all over the Cape. Hmmm, nice.

  Standing at the top of the old gray beach stairs, I look out at the horizon.

  The sun, a tiny orange ball of fire, is already too brilliant to look at.

  Another new day has begun.

  I close my eyes. Thank you.

  What will this one bring?

  Salty barks. I turn. There’s someone back by the road, just now walking across the parking lot toward us and the beach.

  “But we got here first, didn’t we, Salty?”

  He barks, “Yep, that’s right!”

  I laugh. “Good, come on, then. Let’s make the first prints of the day.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Something About Books

  Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle
of one’s own self.

  — Franz Kafka

  If you want to catch the sun, you have to get to the shore early, before the sun rises out of the sea. Then, right at the very moment the sun first appears, when it’s just a tiny diamond on the horizon, stare straight at it for a second and quickly close your eyes. At first there will just be white swirls in the darkness and then when they clear, you will see that tiny diamond in your mind. You caught the sun! Try it some time. It’s amazing.

  Salty and I were too late to catch the sun this morning, but the new dawn is still a wondrous thing to experience. I take a deep breath of good fresh air, looking up and down the beach, taking it all in, the sand, the sky, the water, the birds…. “So beautiful, Salty, huh?”

  Salty barks, but he’s distracted. He’s trying to make friends with a seagull.

  Just days ago I thought I might have seen a mermaid here in these waters. There was a young tourist girl who was adamant she had seen one. She drew quite a crowd of hopeful spectators and television crews even, she was so insistent, and I think my imagination began playing tricks on me.

  Salty barks. The gull flaps its wings. Salty barks. The gull caws. Salty barks. The gull flies off. I laugh. “Sorry, buddy. Come on, let’s walk.”

  I toss my sneakers by my bike and set off down the stairs. At the bottom there’s a green pail and shovel left behind by a castle builder. There is also a book. I pick it up. The cover is wet from the tide. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. Inside the cover, there’s a girl’s name printed neatly: Raylea Jones, 4B, School 16, Atlanta. Wow, that’s far away. She must be visiting here; “4B” was probably her section of fourth grade. I wipe off the wet sand and set the book up on a high step to dry. Hopefully, Raylea will return for it. Or, if she’s already back over the Bourne Bridge and gone home, perhaps another beachcomber will spot this treasure and happily start reading. How cool to find a book on the beach! I know I would have loved that in fourth grade, any grade actually.

  Salty bounds along beside me, always ready for an adventure, and then he speeds off ahead. “Stay away from stinky stuff,” I shout to him, knowing he’ll do as he pleases.

  Salty loves the sea so much, splash-running happily in and out of the water, he always smells like seaweed and fish, not exactly a pleasant perfume. Sometimes when Salty and I get back from our beach walks, my mother threatens to spray him with cologne or, worse, send him next door to the Sivlers’ new poshy-posh pet spa, No Mutts About It, for a “top-to-tail makeover treatment.” So far I have been able to spare Salty from that particular disgrace. Salty Dog is a sea dog, not a spa dog.

  The water is placid this morning, just a soft ooooofffff-wooshhhhh as the waves roll in and out. The sand is cool beneath my bare feet. I spot a tiny piece of beach glass, a “mermaid tear” blue, my favorite, and stick it in my pocket for my rainbow jar at home. I collect beach glass: blue, white, green, and brown, and jingle shells, the orange ones (I think they are the prettiest). When the light streams through the glass jar on my window, it makes tiny rainbows all around my room.

  A duck-plane makes a smooth landing on the water. Small black fish gallop after one another just offshore, flipping up and down in a school-straight line. Something splashes loudly back behind me and I turn to look.

  Nothing.

  Just last week I heard strange laughter, a light singsongy giggling, saw something splash, felt an unexplained spray of water here and there … and wondered … could there be a mermaid? Was that tourist girl correct? Anything is possible, right? But no, I never saw a mermaid.

  Too bad Mariel isn’t here this summer. She would see the mermaid, for sure.

  Salty bolts off way up the beach ahead of me, then stops, already finding a tasty treasure. He noses in and then he’s eating. Salty Dog is the only dog I know who likes fish. I think Salty Dog was Salty Cat in a former life.

  When I reach my dog, I see he’s found some bloody fresh sushi for breakfast, which looks like a striped bass that met with a fishing hook or some larger fish with sharper teeth. I look at the fish’s beautiful eye.

  “No, Salty. Come on.” I pull on his collar to drag him away. “We’ll get breakfast at home.”

  I walk on, thinking about JFK so far away in Florida, wondering how his internship with that baseball team is going. I hope he’s having a good time. I also hope that girl named Lorna who called to ask me what kind of cake to get JFK for his birthday last week has gone home to wherever girls named Lorna Doone live.

  JFK said she was just the granddaughter of one of his grandparents’ country club friends and they thought it would be nice for him to meet some kids his own age.

  Nice? No. Not nice at all. Nice is dinner at your grandparents’ club. Nice is a movie with your grandparents after. Nice is not a girl who gets you a cake for your birthday when you’ve only just met her and when you have a perfectly nice girlfriend back home on Cape Cod who is planning a surprise party for you when you return next month.

  His grandparents meant no harm, JFK tried to reassure me. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Willa.”

  Nothing to worry about. Are you kidding? This is me, Willa the worrier. I am the world’s all-time undefeated worrying champ. I have won Olympic gold medals and Academy Awards and Heisman Trophies for my excellence in worrying. I have never been in a situation or met a person, place, or thing I couldn’t find something to worry about. “It’s an Irish thing,” my nana, Violet Clancy, says. Nana runs Sweet Bramble Books, the book and candy shop on Main Street. An Irish thing, maybe—I’m half English, too, and all-American—but worrying is most definitely a Willa thing.

  I won’t stop worrying until JFK is back home here in Bramble.

  What kind of name is Lorna Doone anyway? Cookie girl.

  As I walk I think to myself, I want to be Willa the Warrior, not Willa the Worrier. I want to keep finding ways to make a difference in the world, do good things … pay my “community rent” as my stepfather, Sam, calls it.

  And so back to my earlier journal question … What can I do?

  I think of the book I just found on the beach. Something about books. That would make sense.

  My friend Sulamina Mum (who was the minister at BUC, Bramble United Community, our nondenominational church here in town, before she got married and moved to South Carolina) would always say that when you are looking for a way to serve, find something that you really care about.

  I really care about books.

  I miss Mum. She was my first real friend when Mother and I moved here to Bramble. Mum’s nephew Rob, a freshman at Boston College, is here on Cape for the summer. My friend, former best friend, Tina, and her new best friend, my nemesis, Ruby Sivler, whose family owns the pet spa, have major crushes on Rob and also on my brother, Will. Those girls are totally boy crazy. How can you like two boys at once?

  I miss Mariel. We have a lot more in common, like walking on the beach and reading good books, for example.

  The sun is moving up higher now. It casts a basket of diamonds across the blue waves. “Here, Willa, catch!” The diamonds come closer and closer until they reach my feet. I scoop them up in my hands. I’m a millionaire.

  Now … What can I do?

  It’s only July. School doesn’t start until September; I’ll be a sophomore at Bramble Academy. JFK is away. Mariel is away. Tina and Ruby are totally focused on Rob and Will and the photography “book” they are making about the hottest lifeguards on Cape Cod. I only have to work four hours a day at the inn. That leaves lots and lots of free time. And so, What can I do?

  There will be books and candy, of course, my two favorite things. Earlier this month, I set a goal of reading one book a day for the month of July—”skinny-punch books” I call them, books that only take a short time to read but pack a heavy punch that stays with you. Yesterday I reread Roald Dahl’s The BFG, a favorite since fourth grade. I think briefly of Raylea Jones, the girl who left James and the Giant Peach on the beach. Has she read The BFG? I love how the gia
nt collects dreams in jars.

  When we reach the tip of the Spit, where the strong ocean current swirl-collides with the gentler bay, Salty and I turn and head back along the other side of this narrow strip of sandy land. Soon we come upon the little scallop-shaped spot where JFK and I had our first picnic. Closing my eyes, I smile, remembering how romantic it was. How we held hands and kissed.

  There’s chirping and a whoosh of wings, and a band of merry piping plover birds lands up ahead of me. As I near them, they swoop up and off again, afraid of me, the approaching giant. Silly little endangered birds.

  I wish JFK were here. I touch the silver heart-shaped locket he gave me that Valentine’s night in the barn. The night we first kissed and danced together. I open the locket, his face on the left, mine on the right. When I close it, we are kissing. I kick a rock. I miss him. Six whole weeks. More than half the summer, ruined. Stupid baseball.

  I look up the beach, back toward the bluff where my bike is. There’s someone standing there, too far away for me to tell if it’s someone I know. And now where has Salty gone off to? Nowhere in sight. I climb up over the dune to the ocean side.

  Sure enough, there’s my dog, feasting on sushi again. When I call him he looks up, then lobs down and rolls around in the fish bones, giving himself a nice smelly sand bath for a lasting memory. On second thought, maybe Salty wasn’t a cat in another life. Cats are always cleaning themselves. Salty seems to revel in smell.

  I slap my thigh. “Come on, Salty. Let’s go. Let’s get you home for a bath.”

  My mother isn’t a “dog person,” as she says. I’m still amazed she let Salty stay. “Our guests don’t want to smell dog when they enter the Bramblebriar Inn, Willa,” she said. “Fresh flowers, yes, cookies baking, yes, lemon furniture polish, yes…. Dog? No!”

  Almost as if Salty knows the trouble he’ll cause me, he gallops into the water, swims out a bit, then turns and swims back in. He’ll still smell like seaweed, but at least it won’t be so fishy. “I’ll race you, buddy!” I shout, and set off running. Salty sprints along beside me, spraying water all over my legs.