The Shark Club

She had a funny habit of scooping up small bits of fish left behind after she d bitten and gulped them down, as if she couldn t stand for anything to go to waste. Her frugality not only amused me, it endeared her to me. I liked the way she rested on the bottom after the other lemons swam off, claiming a little extra lounge time for herself. Lazy girl. I could usually identify her before I found the scar on her second dorsal, shaped like an upside-down checkmark. She had often swum closer to me than was comfortable, though I knew that theoretically lemons were generally nonaggressive, and it was probably my imagination and not my science that gave me the odd feeling she recognized me as well.

You two are simpatico, Nicholas had once remarked. He was only half joking.

It was June 12, 2006, my thirtieth birthday. I should have been back in my small room packing or cooking one of those god-awful cake mixes in the communal kitchen to pass around to the other scientists after dinner to at least acknowledge the occasion, but I hadn t wanted to leave Bimini without a farewell dive. Tomorrow morning, Nicholas and I would be on a short, chartered flight to Miami. From there, he would head to Sarasota and his stingrays. Originally from Twickenham, England, he d come to the United States as a student fifteen years ago and, after a stint in London, ended up in Sarasota at the prestigious Southwest Florida Aquarium. He d recently become their youngest director of Ray Research at thirty-five. He d been here at the Field Lab for a ten-month sabbatical longer than any of us; I could only imagine how eager the aquarium would be to have him back. Me, I would go back to the Gulf Marine Conservancy on Palermo and to my grandmother Perri s hotel, perched beside the Gulf of Mexico.

The Hotel of the Muses, where I d grown up and where I still lived, was not your typical hotel on Palermo. While the rest of them were predictably nautical seascapes over the beds, captain s wheels in the restaurants, aquariums in the lobbies my grandmother s highbrow resort was overrun with books. Her hotel held readings and book talks in the lobby and had its own lending-library system with a trolley that went room to room along with the housekeeping cart. Every one of the eighty-two rooms was dedicated to an author whose work Perri admired Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavio Paz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Henry David

our lives.  
Kirkus Reviews

With humor and surprises, The Shark Club moves along briskly as Maeve struggles
to forgive, let go of past love, and navigate happiness on her own terms.
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