Eventually, all the girls fell in love with Lonnie Haynes.
He arrived each summer from New York - tall, blond, tousled and good looking - a guitar case and a dozen cartons of American cigarettes in tow. He stayed with his mother's sisters and did odd jobs, everything from painting to carpentry and assorted small home repairs. He worked mostly outside and mostly shirtless and within a week had become tanned and trim. He was what my grandmother called a heartthrob, educated, articulate, charming, irresistible and utterly wicked, a womanizer with no morals, a snake oil salesman with no conscience. He had his pick of every girl on the island and the summer he was seventeen, he chose Violet, the banker's daughter.
She was an only child, a pretty, petite brunette with a passion for music and books. They became inseparable - each day she would pack him a basket lunch and deliver it to him when the noon whistle blew and they would picnic in the side yard. They went to the weekly movie and stayed for the dance, waltzing around the old sawdust covered floor and necking in the corner of the dance hall. Sundays they walked to church together hand in hand and afterward they went swimming in the cove. Violet collected all manner of shells and Lonnie picked through the driftwood, searching for pieces he could carve into small creations - pipes, bookends, picture frames. At sunset, they gathered their things and he walked her home along the Old Road.
He arrived each summer from New York - tall, blond, tousled and good looking - a guitar case and a dozen cartons of American cigarettes in tow. He stayed with his mother's sisters and did odd jobs, everything from painting to carpentry and assorted small home repairs. He worked mostly outside and mostly shirtless and within a week had become tanned and trim. He was what my grandmother called a heartthrob, educated, articulate, charming, irresistible and utterly wicked, a womanizer with no morals, a snake oil salesman with no conscience. He had his pick of every girl on the island and the summer he was seventeen, he chose Violet, the banker's daughter.
She was an only child, a pretty, petite brunette with a passion for music and books. They became inseparable - each day she would pack him a basket lunch and deliver it to him when the noon whistle blew and they would picnic in the side yard. They went to the weekly movie and stayed for the dance, waltzing around the old sawdust covered floor and necking in the corner of the dance hall. Sundays they walked to church together hand in hand and afterward they went swimming in the cove. Violet collected all manner of shells and Lonnie picked through the driftwood, searching for pieces he could carve into small creations - pipes, bookends, picture frames. At sunset, they gathered their things and he walked her home along the Old Road.
Only a matter of time, the village said, before Lonnie returned to New York and Violet would be left to face a cold winter, alone and heartbroken. But no one had the heart to intervene and risk her romance, even her banker father kept his tightlipped silence about the inevitable pain everyone was predicting for his child. Only when Labor Day came, Lonnie didn't leave. He stayed all September and all October and it was mid-November before he packed his guitar and early one gray morning caught the ferry to the mainland. He had proposed, he told Mac, offered to stay on the island or take her back to New York, whatever she wanted, and she had said no. She had offered no explantion, no apology, just kissed him and said no.
Who had really picked who, the island wondered.
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