Free The Surfing Lesson (Digital Original) by Elin Hilderbrand

If anything was going to change Margot’s mind about divorcing her husband, Drum, it was the presence of Hadley Axelram ahead of them in line at the Juice Bar on the third night of their Nantucket vacation. The day had been hot and sunny, with a high of 89 degrees, the second hottest August 18 on record. There were forty-five or fifty people packed into the front of the shop and snaking down Broad Street, creating a traffic hazard for the Jeeps and SUVs streaming off the late ferry. Margot’s attention was consumed with making sure her three children didn’t get hit by an overly excited driver, and so it was surprising that she even noticed Hadley Axelram, although for the past ten years Margot had experienced a personal barometric drop whenever the woman was nearby.
    Storm approaching.
    Hadley Axelram had dated Drum off and on for the three years before Margot met him. Hadley Axelram had a certain look—to Margot, it was the look of a twelve-year-old Thai boy—which Drum and certain other men found themselves powerless to resist. Hadley was five foot two and weighed ninety pounds. She had no chest and no ass; back in the days when Margot used to see her in a bikini, she had been startled by the sharp protruding bones of Hadley’s hips and rib cage. Hadley wore her dark hair in a pixie cut, which made her brown eyes look enormous and sad, like the eyes of an extraterrestrial stranded billions of miles from home. Hadley always wore a choker. Years ago it had been a black suede cord wrapped around a jade green stone that nestled in the hollow of Hadley’s neck. But now, the choker was caramel-colored leather embellished with recognizable gold hardware—Hermès. When Hadley reached up to idly finger her choker, Margot noticed that her nails—longer than anyone would expect on a person so obviously striving for androgyny—were painted the purplish-blue of Concord grapes.
    Drum had spent much of those three on-again, off-again years competing for Hadley’s affection with his best friend, Colin O’Mara, who had been the second finest surfer on Nantucket, after Drum. Drum was as graceful and elegant as a person could be on a board. “Like watching fucking Baryshnikov,” Margot had once overheard a spectator on the beach say. Colin’s surfing, on the other hand, was all about brute strength and the relentless desire to outdo Drum.
    The same dynamic had been true in their pursuit of Hadley Axelram.
    “Look,” Margot said, nudging Drum and pointing ahead in the line with her chin. “There’s Hadley.”
    Drum nodded once but said nothing, which meant he had already seen her.
    Over the past ten years, Margot had pieced together the following facts: Hadley, who was not Thai but, rather, Indonesian—her grandparents were some kind of royalty in Jakarta—had spent the summer of 1999 drinking nightly at the Lobster Trap, where Drum worked as a bartender, until Drum asked her out. They fell in love—Hadley first, but Drum harder. That September, Hadley left Nantucket for graduate art-history studies in Florence. Her departure had stunned Drum and everyone else who assumed that Hadley was little more than a Lobster Trap brat and a surfing groupie. Drum felt like he had been shot in the chest (his words), but he put up an unaffected front.
Ciao,
he said to Hadley when he dropped her at the airport with her steamer trunk.
Arrivederci.
When Hadley returned to Nantucket the following summer and appeared at Drum’s cottage unannounced, Drum administered what he called a “hate fuck” and then showed her the door. And this was when Colin O’Mara stepped in. Supposedly with Drum’s “blessing,” Colin dated Hadley all summer, going so far as to let Hadley drive his beloved CJ5 all over the island and letting her live with him rent-free in his parents’ enormous summer home on Shawkemo Hills Road.
    The line moved forward a bit. Margot and Drum and the kids crossed the threshold off the sidewalk into the actual ice cream