Driftwood Point Read Online Free Page B

Gigi never let anyone talk her into anything she didn’t want to do, so she must have been thinking about it before Alec showed up. But how had that come about? Alec was a townie, a St. Dennis boy. How likely was it that he had just shown up one day with a sketch for Gigi’s new first floor? Would a one-hundred-year-old woman know what such a renovation should cost? With no one there tolook after her interests, how would she know if she was being ripped off?
    Lis sat on the edge of the bed, towel-drying her dark brown hair, biting a nail, pondering the possibility that her great-grandmother was being taken advantage of. Alec Jansen had always been a smart guy with a smart mouth, but she’d never known him to be dishonest. Still, people had been known to change, and this was Gigi, and any responsible great-grandchild would look into the situation. She couldn’t be too overt, however. Ruby wouldn’t take kindly to anyone questioning her judgment, whether of the work itself or of her choice of contractor.
    Lis finished drying her hair, then changed into a nightshirt and climbed into the big soft bed that always seemed to welcome her with a comforting hug. She turned off the light and lay in the darkness, savoring the feeling of being in this place where love and warmth had always been hers for the taking, where the sheets and blankets smelled of Ruby’s laundry soap and the bit of lavender she always tucked under the pillow. From below, she heard the sound of a door closing as Gigi, too, prepared to sleep, and from the open window, she could hear the faint lap of the waves against the beach. A late spring breeze brought the once-familiar scent of the salt marsh on the western side of the island. There was no other place on earth like Cannonball Island, with its history and its traditions, its storied way of life, even its own odd speech patterns, which still prevailed through the centuries among the older residents like Ruby. It was music to Lis’s ears.
    Of course, every year there remained fewer and fewer who spoke in that distinct fashion. The thought gave Lis pause. She tried to recall how many islanders remained who were in their eighties and nineties, whose speech reflected Ruby’s. Surely there was no one older than a hundred left on the island. Lis’s heart saddened at the thought that islandspeak would be gone from memory within the next twenty years or so. With the older residents would go not only their speech but their stories. As far as Lis knew, there was no written record of the island’s unique history of having been settled by residents of St. Dennis who’d been driven from the town for supporting the British during the War of 1812. She’d heard the tales of near famine and the iron-willed islanders who refused to be defeated by the poor soil that supported little more than scrub pines and hackberry trees.
    The stories needed to be written down while there was still time, she realized, preserved for future generations. For her own children, should she have any.
    It occurred to her then that there was a good chance that her children could be born into a world from which Ruby had already passed. The thought brought tears to her eyes.
    Lis always did have trouble falling asleep after driving for more than a few hours, but now she willed her racing mind to turn it all off. Her worries about Gigi, the island and the stories she’d been raised on, the changes to the old general store, which had her mind settling on Gigi’s contractor—all swirled around in her head.
    Lis hadn’t meant to share her frustration andanxiety over her sudden inability to paint, but somehow Ruby always knew when something wasn’t right, and she knew how to draw it out with barely a word. She made you want to bring things into the open, to talk things over whether you felt ready to or not.
    Lis had decided to save the story of her breakup with Ted, her fiancé, for another