Page 21 of Summer on Lilac Island

Even after all these years, the Lilac Festival still entranced Alice Klein—or Nonni, as her granddaughters called her.

Queen. David, visiting from downstate, watched. “Every man on the island was drooling,” he would say, retelling the story.

“But I was the only one stupid enough to think I might stand a chance with her.” He’d found her line dancing and asked if

she’d be his partner for the next song. “All right,” she’d said, taken with his confidence, his all-American features. “Let’s

see what you’ve got.”

They’d kept dancing their whole lives. Whether in the ballroom or the kitchen, they never ceased keeping a beat.

After the cancer got him, people remarked how lucky Alice was to miss someone as much as she missed David. To have experienced

that kind of marriage. Alice knew she had been lucky once but didn’t feel that way after she lost him. It was incredible she

didn’t have a limp, so lopsided did she feel without her husband of fifty-one years.

Then there was the gnawing guilt that this was her fault, that it had been her infidelity that had poisoned David, not the

fumes from the construction sites like the doctors said. The shame was too searing to be shared. Eloise would never look at

her the same if she knew. Neither would Alice’s granddaughters.

For a long time after David’s death, Alice didn’t go anywhere, except outside to the generator, just behind the garage.

David had said that if he was able to communicate from the other side, he would meet her at the generator at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesdays when it ran its weekly test. He’d been like that—romantic but in a practical, Midwest way.

So every Wednesday, rain, snow, or sleet, Alice had huddled by the generator, ears and eyes perked for a noise, a vapor, any sign at all.

She never found anything. Stray seagulls and monarchs didn’t count. It was supposed to be clearer.

Ultimately it was the Lilac Festival that rescued Alice, that first year without David. She hadn’t wanted to go, but Eloise

and Rebecca were set on it. Alice decided she could muster the strength to leave the house for a couple of hours, even if

it was only in her track suit and tennis shoes, her stringy hair hidden beneath a baseball cap.

She watched the crowning of the Lilac Festival Queen, for old times’ sake. That was when the pennies appeared. Three of them,

right at her feet, all facing heads-up. She and David had a habit of scooping up spare change and adding it to the piggy bank

in their bedroom. “ We’ll buy a boat one day, ” David would say each time they plunked the coins in. It always made Alice laugh with the wooziness of what might be , especially during the early years, when buying fresh fruit rather than frozen was a once-a-month luxury.

Of the three pennies Alice found, the first was dated from David’s birth year. The second from her own. The third from their

wedding anniversary.

It was enough for Alice. Here it was, proof that David was looking out for her from beyond. There must be a constraint on

the generator, or perhaps this was one of his jokes. But the point was that he loved her, he forgave her (because heaven had

no secrets; surely he knew everything by now), and he wanted her to keep going. She hurried home, fluffed her hair, and reentered

the world of the living.

Even now, seven years later, Alice still looked for pennies and kept finding them. In the garden, the church, the pickleball court. She didn’t tell anyone about her obsession. She liked keeping it between her and David. Something that was just theirs.

She no longer stood beside the generator on Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. But she still listened to its hum and peeked through the

window, just in case.

***

Alice pulled up to Thistle Dew in her golf cart. David’s golf cart, really, but she drove it now.

Golf carts were allowed on Mackinac, though frowned upon except for the injured or elderly. Alice was happy to use her age

to her advantage. There was no room for pride on an island this size.

“Nature’s perfume,” Alice said, taking a whiff of lilacs as Georgiana emerged onto the porch. She was dressed in itty-bitty

shorts and a tank top with perilously thin straps, her lovely face hidden beneath a droopy bucket hat and bug-eyed sunglasses.

“Can’t complain about the smell of the island now.”

“The mix of flowers and excrement is almost worse,” Georgiana said. “Like spraying cheap perfume in a bathroom after getting

the wrong end of a baked-bean casserole.”

“There’s nothing cheap about these lilacs,” Alice cut in. She thought about the lilac flower crown she’d been wearing the

day she met David. She wished she’d kept it, preserved it.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Nonni,” Georgiana said quickly. “Just the island.”

Georgiana had been such a sweet child, always over at their house, pushing her tiny toy mower alongside David’s big one, aglow at the thought that she was helping.

But her teens and twenties had been hard.

A rough, scaly exterior had formed. By the time she was in high school, Georgiana had stopped popping by to see David and Alice after school, stopped coming over for Sunday brunch, stopped sharing much at all about her life.

And then of course there had been the terrible way she’d absconded from the island, exposing the family to such emotional and reputational damage.

One would have thought that leaving for college might have been a good enough ticket off the island. But not for Georgiana.

It was forever a tangled web with her. Not like the clean lines of her little sister. Though Rebecca had nuance too, more

than Eloise often wanted to admit.

Alice had remained very close to Rebecca over the years and was privately glad that Rebecca had moved off the island. It was

time for her to come into her own as a woman. Perspective was important, though she herself had lived her whole life on Mackinac.

Eloise had never gotten quite enough perspective, as far as Alice was concerned. Though Alice was partially to blame for that.

She and David had schemed to keep Eloise and Gus from leaving. They’d even given Gus a good job working for David, thereby

eliminating any reason to look elsewhere. It had been selfish, Alice could see now.

Georgiana, on the other hand, had gotten too much perspective, trying on places like purses, hardly deigning to keep in touch

with the plebeians back home. She was always warm to Alice but hadn’t exactly gone out of her way in recent years. When David

died, she came back for the funeral and flew out again the next day. She seemed to think she was above the island, above the

people who lived here.

Though maybe that observation wasn’t entirely fair. Alice didn’t feel she knew her granddaughter well enough for an accurate

characterization. She spoke on the phone with Georgiana very rarely and saw her once a year at Christmas. She’d even stooped

to googling pictures of California—that liberal inferno!—so she might know a little more about her granddaughter’s life.

The way Georgiana treated Eloise was particularly difficult to watch.

She rebelled against her mother because she didn’t feel secure enough to rebel against her father.

Or at least that was how it looked to Alice.

Eloise wasn’t going anywhere, and Georgiana knew that and exploited it.

The lack of gratitude, the endless sarcasm, the cold-shoulder treatment.

It was one thing for an adolescent, but now that Georgiana was in her late twenties, Alice felt time was running out for a

true course correction.

This summer offered the chance for a reset.

Perhaps this might be when Gigi came back to them, not as the little girl she’d been, but as a woman who was softer and less

combative, easier to love.

“You sure I can’t tempt you to play, Georgiana?” Alice asked, thinking it might be a nice way for them to bond, hacking balls

at other people’s faces. “I’d be happy to replace Mr. Townsend. An upgrade, I’m sure.”

Alice had never been an athlete growing up—what girl was in her generation?—but she’d been bitten by the pickleball bug a

few years ago. She was the strongest she’d ever felt, physically at least. Having Liam Townsend as her partner didn’t hurt,

she supposed.

“Can’t,” Georgiana said. “Mother is having me do her dirty work for her. Play cornhole with Clyde so she doesn’t have to,

though she’s clearly dying to see him again.”

Alice did find it sweet that Georgiana was so invested in Eloise’s budding “acquaintanceship,” as Eloise called it. She’d

expected Georgiana to be resistant, given how loyal she was to Gus, but perhaps she’d misjudged.

“Ah, the proxy strategy.” Alice nodded. “She did that with your father in the beginning. Convinced me to tutor him in math

at our house, then spied the whole time.”

“You’re a couple of conspiracy theorists,” Eloise said, coming out onto the porch. “I’m needed at the jewelry workshop, I

told you.”

Alice hadn’t seen Eloise this worked up over a man since Gus. “You act like I didn’t raise you,” Alice said. “Georgiana, what’s

the latest with you and the doctor?”

“No update,” Georgiana said. “We got lunch, that’s all. But my mom now has to go on a second date with Clyde. That’s how the rules work.”

“You hate rules,” Eloise said. “And I’m not going to be pressured into another date just to go tit for tat with you. You agreed

to see Dr. Kentwood again by your own volition. I didn’t force you.”

“You guilted me,” Georgiana said. “But Lillian was there third-wheeling our date. She and James are clearly into each other.”

“He’ll be bored by Lillian,” Alice said, hoping this would perk up her granddaughter.

“Well, he’d be infuriated with me. What’s worse—being bored or angry?”

“Bored,” Alice said, meaning it. “At least anger has real emotion in it. Flip it around, rearrange it, and it just might become

love.”