I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I couldn’t have dreamed up a better scenario. Ned sat far to the left of the driver’s seat, and I squeezed in next to him. My body was inescapably pressed against his. My legs were crammed into the passenger side along with Bruno’s and Lucy’s, but I was very comfortable.
Ned drove slowly so the bikes wouldn’t bounce around, and I wished we’d had farther to go.
“How’s that gorgeous older sister of yours?” Bruno asked me as we turned onto Shore Boulevard.
Why don’t you ask Ned? I wanted to say, but figured that wouldn’t be appreciated. Every time I saw Bruno at the beach, he said something to me about Izzy. He had a thing for her, that was clear, and I wondered if Ned had figured it out.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“She’s fine, all right.” Bruno laughed, holding his hands in front of his chest—as best he could with Lucy on his lap—and I realized he was alluding to Isabel’s breasts.
“Knock it off,” Ned said to him. Then he spoke to me. “Hey, Jules, I have something for you to give her.”
I wasn’t surprised when he reached down to the floor of the car and came up with the toy giraffe. He handed it to me, and I cradled it on my lap.
“What’s that?” Lucy asked. She reached for the giraffe with her uninjured arm, but I held the toy away from her.
“It’s for Isabel,” I said, and she withdrew her hand.
“Izzy and I appreciate your tight lips, Jules,” Ned said.
I twisted my neck to try to get a look at his face. The sun was a bright star in each lens of his sunglasses. I thought I would treasure that moment forever.
We pulled into the Chapmans’ driveway. I saw our car in our own driveway and knew that my mother and Isabel were home.
“You know,” I said to Ned, putting on the most grown-up voice I could manage. “If Bruno went with you, I think my mother would allow Isabel to go in your boat. Safety in numbers and all of that.” I’d heard my father use that term when he talked about Isabel going out with a crowd.
“Oh, yeah?” Ned exchanged a look with Bruno. Lucy walked across the yard, sliding her feet through the sand, holding her arm, already working up the tears she would show our mother.
I nodded. “Want me to ask?” I asked him.
“Would you?” he said. “If she can, you can send her over. Otherwise, come tell me yourself, okay?”
I nodded and tried not to look like a jerk as I walked carefully between the holly leaves that littered his yard.
In our living room, I found Isabel folding the clean laundry while my mother and grandmother clucked around Lucy and her arm. They painted it with Mercurochrome, which I knew had to sting like the devil, but to Lucy’s credit, she held her arm still and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Izzy,” I said, handing her the giraffe, which she quickly buried in the pile of clothes in the laundry basket. “Ned wants to know if you could go for a boat ride with him and Bruno.”
Isabel gave me a sharp warning look before turning back to the laundry.
“Bruno’s going, too,” I repeated.
My mother unwound a long piece of gauze from a box in the first-aid kit. She snipped it from the box with scissors, then looked over at us.
“I suppose that would be all right, Isabel,” she said. “Just a short ride, though. After you finish the laundry.”
“I can fold the laundry,” I said.
Isabel looked at me in astonishment. I had somehow, miraculously, won her a ride in the boat with Ned and was offering to take over her task, as well. I knew she wondered what I was up to, but she was so happy at the turn of events that she didn’t bother to ask me.
“Thanks,” she said, either to me or my mother, I was not sure which. Surreptitiously, she took the giraffe from the laundry basket and walked toward the porch. I knew once she was outside, she would break into a run.
I folded the laundry, burying my face in its clean smell as I tried to imagine what was happening in Ned’s yard. Izzy and Bruno and Ned would climb into his boat, and maybe something would change on that ride. Maybe she would notice Bruno’s handsomeness. He had certainly noticed her beauty. Maybe she’d realize that, compared to Bruno, Ned was a little dull.
I knew it was wrong to pray for small things, but I couldn’t help the prayer that ran through my head. Let Isabel forget about Ned and fall in love with Bruno. If that happened, then maybe Ned would realize what a wonderful girl I was. I knew he saw me as a kid and that if he were free, he would probably find some other girl his own age to date, but my fantasies ran rampant. I couldn’t bear that Isabel had him when I wanted him. He wasn’t perfect. He smoked cigarettes and I had the feeling he drank a bit too much when he was out with his friends, but maybe the love of a good woman—even if she was only twelve—could change him.
CHAPTER 31
Julie
There was not a single solitary sexual thought in my mind as I sat at my kitchen table stuffing giant pasta shells for the dinner I would serve Ethan. What had happened to my lusty yearning from the other day? It was gone. A fleeting hormonal aberration. I not only lacked desire, I didn’t care that I lacked it. It was almost a relief. I wouldn’t have to worry how I looked nude. My hips were bigger than they should be from too many days in front of the computer. My breasts seemed to hang a little lower every time I looked in the mirror. I didn’t have to worry about all that if I didn’t care about sex. But I was worried that I might have given Ethan the wrong idea during our last, faintly suggestive phone conversation.
An hour later, though, when I opened the front door to find Ethan standing on my porch, a bunch of flowers in his hand, the blue of his eyes matching the color of the sky behind him and his soft voice telling me how beautiful my neighborhood was, my body suddenly reacted as if it belonged to a twenty-year-old. I wasn’t sure how I would make it through dinner without dragging him upstairs to my bedroom.
I gave him a hug, and the press of his body against mine only intensified my feelings. I let go of him with a smile.
“I am really happy to see you,” I said.
“Me, too.” He leaned over to kiss me gently on the lips. “Do you have a vase I can put these in?” He held the flowers out to me.
I found a vase for the flowers and set them on the table on the porch. It would be cool enough to eat out there this evening.
In the kitchen, he looked at Shannon’s framed senior picture resting on the windowsill.
“This has to be your daughter,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, as I opened the oven door to peek at the pasta shells.
“I see your family in her,” he said. “That exotic beauty.”
I glanced at him as I closed the oven door. “She looks a lot like Isabel,” I said.
“I don’t remember Isabel well enough,” he said, grinning at me. “I only had eyes for her little sister.”
I smiled, handing him a knife and pointing him toward the cutting board. “Would you slice the tomatoes, please?”
We worked together easily in the kitchen. He seemed as comfortable in my house as he had been in his own. His selfconfidence was sexy to me. The way he touched my arm when I walked past him was sexy. Everything about him was sexy to me tonight.
We didn’t talk about anything heavy over dinner. I wanted to know about his father’s interview with the police, but that could wait. I didn’t want anything to break the mood, and he seemed to feel the same way. We sat at the table on the screened porch, eating in the fading light. I talked about what it was like growing up in Westfield, and he talked about learning carpentry as a teenager. Listening to him talk, I felt relaxed for the first time in weeks. I wanted to stand up, lean across the table and kiss him. I wanted to unbutton the buttons on his blue plaid shirt.
I made it through dinner and was carrying plates to the sink when Ethan came up behind me, put his arms around me and kissed my neck. My insides melted and I barely managed to set the dishes on the counter without dropping t
hem.
“I’m so glad you’re back in my life,” he said, his lips against my ear.
I briefly remembered my mother’s words entreating me to disregard his “overtures.” Sorry, Mom, I thought, as I leaned back against him. I lifted his hand to my lips, letting his forearm brush against my breast.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.
We made love for what seemed like hours. I’d had no lover other than Glen for the past thirty years, and although the newness of being with Ethan was alluring, so was the familiarity I felt with him, the sense of having known him for a very long time. It wasn’t until afterward, when we lay comfortably in each other’s arms, that we finally broached the topics that weighed heavily on each of us.
“So,” I said, smoothing my hand across his chest, “tell me about your father’s talk with the police.”
Ethan pressed his lips to the top of my head, and I pulled closer to him. I loved the feeling of being cradled in his arms.
“He didn’t seem all that upset, actually,” he said. “I was relieved. But you know, he’s an amazing guy. He can still turn this switch and get back in his old judge-and-lawyer mode to handle a situation. He said he’s sure he satisfied their doubts about Ned’s alibi.”
“That’s good,” I said. I would not mar the moment with my own thoughts about Ned’s guilt. What mattered most to me right then was that Ethan no longer seemed worried about his father.
“I think they went easy on him,” he said. “And they would probably go even easier on your—” He stopped talking, lifting his head from the pillow. “Did you hear something?” he asked. I raised my own head to listen. There might have been some movement in the hallway outside my room, but I wasn’t sure.
“Mom?”
I was up in an instant. “Oh, shit!” I whispered, using a word that rarely passed through my lips. “It’s Shannon,” I said, uncertain whether to reach for my jeans or run to my closet for my robe. I opted for the jeans, balancing on one foot as I pulled them on.
“Mom?” Shannon knocked on my door.
“Just a minute, Shannon,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”
Ethan was up and dressing, too.
“Stay here, please,” I whispered to him as I pulled my T-shirt over my head. I opened the door and walked, braless, into the hallway.
I found Shannon in her own room sorting through her bookshelves, putting some of the books into a cardboard box on her bed.
She looked over at me. “Were you asleep?” she asked. “Your hair’s a mess.”
“Yes, I took a little nap.” I combed my fingers through my hair. I felt winded as I sat down on the corner of her bed. “It’s good to see you,” I said.
“Did you have friends over for dinner?” she asked. “I smell tomato sauce.”
“Yes,” I said. “I made stuffed shells and there’s plenty left if you want to take some with you.”
“Maybe I will, thanks,” she said. She looked at the hardcover book in her hand. “I came over to start packing,” she said.
“Packing?”
“For my move.” She didn’t look at me as she returned her attention to the bookshelf. “It’s still a few weeks away, but I thought I should start going through my stuff.” She pulled out a book, looked at the title and slipped it back onto the shelf again. Her belly seemed to have grown enormously in the past few days.
“Shannon,” I said, “have you really thought this move through?”
“It’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past few months, Mother.” I hated it when she called me Mother.
“Please don’t go, honey,” I pleaded. “Please. At least stay here until after you’ve had the baby.” I was not going to let this happen. I wondered if there was something I could do legally to keep her here.
“I want to be with my baby’s father, Mom,” she said, pulling out a book and dropping it into the box. “That’s the way it should be.”
“When can I meet him?” I asked. Maybe I could reason more easily with him than I could with my daughter.
“I was thinking about that,” she said. “It might be better if you didn’t meet him right now, since you’re so—”
There was a slight thud from the direction of my bedroom, as if Ethan had bumped his knee on the dresser in the darkness.
“Daddy?” Shannon looked up, her eyes suddenly those of a hopeful child. She started for the hallway and I quickly grabbed her arm.
“Daddy’s not here,” I said, shocked that she might think that was a possibility.
“Then who’s in your bedroom?”
I thought of lying, of pretending she had imagined the sound, but I knew that was not going to work.
“Mother,” she said. “Who is in your bedroom?”
“I have company,” I said awkwardly. “Ethan Chapman.”
I thought she was going to hit me. The look she gave me was nothing short of murderous.
“How could you do that?” she asked. “I leave and you start screwing around? You and Dad haven’t even been apart that long. You’re not giving getting back together a chance!”
“There is no chance of us getting back together, Shannon,” I said. I felt terrible that she’d been nursing that fantasy for the past two years and I hadn’t known. “Ethan is an old friend, someone I feel very close—”
“Shut up!” She put her hands over her ears. “Just shut up.”
She pushed past me and ran down the hall. I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall as I listened to her race down the stairs and out of the house, and I only jumped a little bit when the front door slammed shut behind her.
CHAPTER 32
Lucy
I was playing the violin in the turret room of my apartment, trying to learn a piece the ZydaChicks hoped to perform next season, when I heard thumping on the stairs. Except for my violin practice, the house I lived in was always quiet. My neighbors were not the type to have friends who would clomp up the stairs, so I stopped playing and listened, knowing that if the thumping continued to the third story, it was someone coming to see me. Sure enough, I heard the footsteps reach my landing, and I pulled the door open before my visitor even had a chance to knock.
Shannon burst into the room, her face red with bottled-up tears that exploded as soon as she threw herself onto my couch. I was frightened by her demeanor. I thought something was wrong with the baby, or that Tanner had broken up with her, or that Julie had been hurt in an accident. I knew that sort of thinking was more like Julie’s than mine, but I couldn’t help myself. Something traumatic had happened, and Shannon was sobbing so violently that she couldn’t get the words out.
“Tell me,” I said, sitting down next to her, grasping her hand. “What happened?”
She shook her head, nearly hyperventilating, tears flying from her cheeks. I thought I was going to start crying myself. Anything that could hurt my niece that badly was bound to hurt me, too.
Finally she caught her breath long enough to speak.
“I went home,” she said, “to Mom’s…to start packing and I heard this noise coming from her bedroom and I thought maybe Dad had come over and they were…” She shut her eyes. “You know, having sex. But it wasn’t Dad.” She looked at me. “It was that Ethan Chapman guy.”
Relief washed over me, followed quickly by a joy I did not allow to show on my face. All right, Julie! I thought. You go, girl!
“And that’s what has you so upset?” I asked.
“I’m angry.” She pulled her hand from mine to punch it into my sofa cushion. “I’m furious at her. She was a shitty wife to Dad and then she makes this like, totally major dinner for someone else and then actually has sex with him. She never appreciated Daddy, and it pisses me off to see her treating some other man like he’s a god or something. Ethan Chapman, Ethan Chapman. She hasn’t shut up about him since she saw that letter.”
I hurt for Shannon. I knew the divorce had been hard on her—harder, I thought now, than any of us had realized. She loved both h
er parents—her hardworking, worrywart of a mother and her reserved and gentle father—and as much as the end of the marriage had been a surprise to Julie, it had been a far greater shock to Shannon. She’d cried for a month when Glen moved out, and I knew she’d blamed Julie then, just as she was blaming her now. Julie took on that blame rather than say anything that might tarnish Shannon’s feelings about Glen. I was not feeling quite that noble.
“What has your father told you about why he and your mother got divorced?” I asked.
Shannon leaned back against the couch with a groan, looking at the ceiling.
“Not this again,” she said. “I’m sick of talking about it, and it doesn’t matter. He said he still loves her, but she was too wrapped up in her work. Mom never got it…that her marriage was more important than her stupid Granny Fran. If she’d figure that out, they could get back together.“
“Your dad said that?”
“Not exactly, but I think it’s obvious,” she said. “He never dates. I think he’s just waiting for Mom to get her priorities straight and put her stupid career second instead of first all the time.”
I was starting to get angry myself and had to work to keep my voice level. “Her stupid career bought you your car, your cello lessons, your summers at music camp, and is going to pay for your college,” I said. “Or at least, it was going to pay for your college.”
She rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling again. She’d figured out whose side I was on.
“Listen to me, Shannon,” I said. “I understand how much you love your parents and want them to get back together, but that’s little-girl kind of wishful thinking. It’s not going to happen. And although your mother may have spent more time working than was healthy for her marriage, that divorce was in no way her fault. Your mother loved your dad. Try to remember the things she did do for him. The surprise trip to France, because she knew how much he loves it there? How she canceled part of her book tour to nurse him through pneumonia that last year? How she stuck little love notes to him all over the house? And who did the cooking, even though she was working all day just like he was?”
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