Read Online How We Started by Luanne Rice - Free Book Online

Dar had loved that her mother tried teaching him to relax.
    The McCarthy family lived between two worlds. Getting off the ferry, they’d leave one life behind and enter another one. Throughout the school year in their small house in Noank, Connecticut, Dar would watch her mother pretending not to have grown up rich and trying to get used to balancing the checkbook and packing her husband’s and children’s lunches every day. But when summer came and they returned to the big house on the salt pond, the wide porch, and cocktails at sunset, she again inhabited her realm. Dar and her sisters joyfully joined in, and their father had his own reasons.
    Dar, her sisters, and their best friends would ride their bikes twenty miles into Edgartown. They’d spend the day sailing, and if it got too late, their mother would pick them and their bikes up in the station wagon. They would ride to Menemsha, talk to the guys on their fishing boats, eat lobster rolls on the dock. Rainy days, they would huddle under the porch roof and learn how to make and mend sails, using waxed thread and vintage leather sailmaker’s palms, talking nonstop.
    Community Center dances were sweet, wild, and romantic. A local band would play, and everyone would dance. Dar remembered her racing heart, the intensity of slow dances, usually with Andy, pressing their bodies together, hardly able to breathe, never wanting it to stop. But it always did—the dance would end, and it would be time to go home. Dar always wished for happiness to last, for all love and good things to stay the same, but she had received early proof that they never did.
    The year she was twelve, Dar’s life as she knew it ended. Her body kept moving, but her spirit had flown away, after her father. Her parents separated that winter, and that summer he sailed to Ireland on a boat he’d built. He made one call home from a port in Kerry, but then he disappeared somewhere off the craggy, razor-sharp rock coast between Dunmore Head and county Cork.
    Dar alone had watched her father sail away, in the clear light after a rainstorm, and as if she’d been his keeper, for a long time she’d felt it was her fault he didn’t return.
    Rocking her in her arms one of the worst nights, Dar’s mother had tried to soothe her. She explained what Dar already knew: that her father had come to the Vineyard as a young man, looking for a tract of land his Irish grandfather claimed was his birthright. He’d fallen in love and married her mother, had children, spent years building boats, but he’d never forgotten his initial reason for coming to the Vineyard.
    â€œSweetheart,” her mother said, “your father was driven by something inside. Do you know what that means?”
    Dar listened, not wanting to let on that she did.
    â€œA feeling so strong, it began to matter to him more than anything else in the world.”
    â€œDid he go back to Ireland to get away from us?” Dar asked.
    â€œNo,” her mother answered. “The opposite. He had this idea that if he went, and brought back proof about his land, that we would value him better, love him more.”
    â€œI could never love him more,” Dar said, but her mother didn’t reply. Maybe their love had already been tested too much; his resentment and determination had pushed her away. Only twelve, Dar had observed and taken in the way her parents’ closeness had swirled and dissipated, like a beach being eaten away by winter storms, over that last year.
    Dar had seen what “driven” meant. She remembered her father walking this property belonging to his wife’s mother. She’d gone with him so many times, exploring all fifteen acres, from the gorse hedge at the land’s eastern end to the yellow shack, known as the Hideaway, at the westernmost. They’d walked from South Road to the edge of the salt pond, searching for surveyors’ markings and