* * *
Megan: she said if UR busy too bad
Megan: and not to tell you that she said that
Megan: oops
* * *
He probably shouldn’t foster her dislike for Kim, though to be fair, Kim was as completely self-absorbed now as she had been back when they had dated. But Jackson struggled with calling Megan on any of her behavior. Telling her to be respectful to Kim would take away one of the two flimsy things they had in common. He wasn’t ready yet.
* * *
Jackson: Sounds good. Anything special you want to do while you’re here?
Megan: ignore each other per the usual?
Jackson: I might be too busy ignoring other people to ignore you too.
Megan: hahaha just stock up on frozen pizzas & im good
Jackson: Can I bribe you with sushi?
Megan: maybe. what are you bribing me to do in exchange for sushi
Jackson: One activity outside the house. Your choice.
Megan: i’ll think about it. CU Fri
* * *
Jackson stripped off his shirt, leaving only his board shorts on. It was still too cold in March to swim without a wetsuit, but the shower under the house had hot water. He stepped inside the wooden shower enclosure, relishing in the feel of the hot water on his skin in the cool air.
Megan’s texts seemed slightly warmer, even if she still played it cool in person. She was joking with him, which was a good start. Maybe if he could thaw Megan out, there was hope for Jenna after all.
Chapter Three
Rachel called as Jenna was waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. She was a little concerned about the outcome. She had remembered to buy coffee, but not filters. She was using a paper towel and hoping for the best. It did not bode well. If anyone was to blame, it was Jackson Wells.
After seeing him, Jenna had forgotten the rest of her list and arrived home with half the things she needed and the start of a stress headache. Less than twenty-four hours home and she had already run into the most infuriating man—other than her ex-husband—she’d ever known. Actually, Jackson was more infuriating than Mark, which was a hard feat. Her ex inspired less fury and more a crushing sort of pain. With Jackson, it was pure rage.
The fact that he was even more attractive than the last time she had seen him only made her more furious. “Pretty is as pretty does,” her mother used to say when they were growing up. Jenna wished that the phrase worked literally. If it did, Jackson would be an ugly man. But of course, life wasn’t fair. Jerks could still be overwhelmingly hot.
“How is it? Overwhelmed? Getting lots done?” Rachel always spoke hurriedly if they talked during the day. Her oldest daughter, Ava, was in third grade, but the twins were only three. The sound of Casey and Olivia playing or screaming was a constant soundtrack in the background to their phone calls. “GET OFF THE TABLE, OLIVIA!”
Jenna put it on speakerphone, so she wouldn’t have to have Rachel shouting directly in her ear.
“Are you kidding? I haven’t even started. Is there a blog post somewhere with a checklist on how to clean out your childhood home? Maybe we should just burn it down. Also, did you know that Bohn’s still has that stupid rule about not buying wine before noon?”
There was a pause and Jenna realized her mistake. “Why are you trying to buy wine before noon, Jens? STOP HITTING YOUR SISTER, CASEY. Are you okay? How much are you drinking?”
“Simmer down, sister. Not that much. I don’t even get drunk. Just a glass a night.” Or two. Sometimes three. Jenna flinched.
Maybe wine had become too much of a crutch lately. She hadn’t grown up drinking. Her mom never did, hence the need to buy the corkscrew at Bohn’s. She hadn’t lied about getting drunk, though—she never did. It was more about having something to look forward to at the end of the day. Something that took the edge off. When you lose your marriage and your mom in the same year, you should get a reward for surviving, right? Maybe not being able to buy wine was a good thing. It might be time to think about a different kind of reward. Or to just accept the fact that life was rough and getting through the day was a basic expectation, not an accomplishment. She sighed.
She used to turn to God. Prayer, church, her Bible study. But Jenna had let all that fade away over the past year. She liked to pretend that it just kind of happened: miss a week of church and then another, forget to open her Bible for a few days. If she was being honest with herself, though, she felt angry with God. Abandoned. She didn’t slide away so much as walk away, one step at a time. Now he felt so far.
Rachel interrupted her thoughts. “You know I’m going to keep asking you about this. You’ve had to deal with more than anyone should this past year. I don’t want to see you spiraling into some kind of place where I have to stage an intervention.”
“I’m fine. And will continue to be, if for no other reason than to avoid an intervention.”
“Good. Speaking of wine, you should ask Bohn’s for wine boxes. I left some in the house last time I was there, but there aren’t nearly enough. That’s where you start packing. Free boxes from Bohn’s. Jackson will give you some. Oh, and Jackson’s company can help with sales! Wells Development. They have a residential real estate arm. You can ask him when you ask for boxes. See? I helped.”
Hearing Jackson’s name made her stomach sour. This was one of the reasons she had been so eager to move Off Island and not return. Sandover was too small a town. She couldn’t avoid even the things—or people—she most wanted to, and it seemed like little changed. Other than all the development on the island.
Because of its location—just north of the popular Outer Banks—and the single toll bridge, Sandover had remained somewhat unknown for years. Until Southern Living ran a feature on it about fifteen years ago, calling it an “undiscovered gem.” Now the old, historic beach cottages were all-too-quickly being replaced by beach mansions like the one she’d seen the other night by the beach access. The one with the creeper who waved at her the night before.
Jenna had her real estate license but didn’t want to sell the house herself. She wasn’t objective enough. In her emotional state, she might really lose it hearing people talk about the pink tile in the bathroom—even if it was hideous—or the worn carpets and dark wood paneling. The word she feared most was teardown. Their neighborhood was a mile from the beach, but backed up to the wildlife refuge, with the Sound just on the other side. Realistically, it might be worth more for the property than the 1970s-style home.
“Let’s not talk about Jackson Wells. Please. I already saw him this morning. Before I had coffee, even. It was horrible. Did you know that he still works—”
“NO SNACKS. WE ARE HAVING NO SNACKS. NONE. I SAID OFF THE—” The sound of wailing came from the phone. Double wailing. “Jenna, I’ve got to go. Sorry. I’ll try to call again tonight. Or at nap time. But either way, I’ll be there this weekend. Party time! Give Jackson a break, though. He’s really—OLIVIA, NO!”
Rachel hung up before Jenna could respond. Jackson was really what? She stared at the phone. How could Rachel defend Jackson? She was the one who suffered through the fallout from the rumors he had probably started. If anyone should still be mad, it was Rachel.
No, Jenna was not going to give him a break or ask him for boxes or for help selling the house. In fact, Jenna should start shopping at Harris Teeter just to avoid his smug smile and those amazing eyes.
Amazing? Ugh.
She could not think about the fact that he was attractive. It was all on the outside. Like a poison dart frog. She didn’t know why she was thinking about frogs, but it was the perfect comparison to Jackson. Beautiful on the outside, drawing you in, but toxic.
Why couldn’t she stop thinking about Jackson? For as much as she hated him, he consumed her mind. She knew what that usually meant, at least in movies or romance novels. Even in Shakespeare. If the lady doth protest too much … but no. She did not harbor secret feelings for Jackson. He simply infuriated her and
happened to be attractive. That’s it.
Jenna opened the junk drawer. She needed paper and pen to make a to-do list. As she had hoped, Rachel hadn’t cleaned this out. Something about its contents shook loose her emotions. She stared down at rubber bands, paperclips, cherry lip balm, fingernail clippers, takeout menus, a black plastic comb, keys to something, stamps, pencils with no points, and a spool of thread. Her mother didn’t even sew.
She clutched the sides of the drawer, her breathing fast and shallow. This was a drawer of the living. This drawer—it was the real stuff. It was the slap in the face to remind her that her mother was gone.
When she felt like she could move again, Jenna plucked out a piece of amazingly blank paper from the middle of a stack of Chinese takeout menus and closed the drawer. She sat down at the kitchen table with her coffee—which was surprisingly passable. She wrote down an order that made sense to her: dining room and the formal living room first, since they were used less and had fewer items. Then the TV room, bathroom, and her old bedroom.
Her mother’s door was shut. Jenna knew she couldn’t open it without Rachel there. Both because she didn’t think she could handle it alone and because it felt like something they should do together.
Rachel had already emptied out her own bedroom, just as she had with the kitchen. When Jenna looked into Rachel’s room that morning, it looked bare and lacked all Rachel’s vibrant personality. It hurt to look at it. For the first time Jenna really realized what it meant to sell their childhood home.
Before she arrived, Jenna had considered what it might be like to move back in permanently. At the moment she was basically floating through life. Though the divorce had been finalized just before her mother’s stroke, she and Mark had been over for years. Well, if breaking your wedding vows by having affairs counted toward a marriage ending, then technically, their marriage had been over from the start. Too bad she hadn’t gotten the memo until she went to see her OB and found out that she had contracted an STD.
Nothing could have prepared Jenna for sitting in a crinkly paper gown with no panties on as her doctor explained that she had Chlamydia. Which meant that Mark had Chlamydia, which also meant that Mark had been unfaithful. She had waited until their wedding night—they both had, she thought. And there she was, humiliated and heartbroken, finding out from her OB that her marriage was a sham.
The conversation with Mark after the doctor visit had been as shocking as the diagnosis. “What happened to the man I married? Where’s that guy?” she had half sobbed, half shouted.
“I’m sorry, Bug,” Mark had said, using his pet name for her. She had always hated it anyway. “This is me. I’m just not hiding it anymore.”
He moved out by the morning, taking very little. Apparently, he already had an apartment where he was doing all the affair-ing. Jenna had thought he was on business trips or working late. Such a cliché. She had felt so utterly foolish in the truest sense of the word.
For the past year she had lived in their condo, every day seeing the plates they picked out for their registry and the couch they bought together. The only things Mark took from the house were some clothes and a few personal things. He must have already furnished the apartment. Jenna wanted to leave but didn’t know where to go. It took her six months to even call a lawyer about a divorce. Not that she’d had any hope of wanting to reconcile, but Jenna simply hadn’t been ready. She didn’t even want anything from him. Not the condo, not anything they’d purchased together, not her ring, not one thing. After they sold the condo, she lived in an Extended Stay for a few months until she felt ready to come back to Sandover and deal with the house.
Now everything she owned was in the car sitting in the driveway. She owned less now than she had when she graduated college, which seemed shameful somehow. Even then she had an overstuffed arm chair she had purchased at a thrift store her sophomore year. Mark had insisted they get rid of it after they got married. He was too fancy for thrift store finds. That should have been a warning sign.
Could she move in here? Take over the master bedroom, paint, and redecorate?
The house felt too much like her childhood and Jenna felt childish in it. As though the moment she stepped over the threshold, she had reverted to her teenaged self. In a way Jenna wished that she could go back, to have her whole life stretching open before her again. Only, she would take the wisdom she had now and use it to keep her out of relationships with guys like Mark. Steve should have been a lesson enough in high school.
The thought of Steve reminded her of something else she had left in the car: a Fiddle-Leaf Fig plant she had brought down to give to Steve’s parents, who still lived in the house next door. The plant rode shotgun on her drive and she had named him Fred the Fig. She had talked to him on the drive.
“Terrible traffic, eh Fred?”
“This is my favorite song, Fred.”
“Come here often, Fred?”
He had looked a little worse for wear that morning when she’d gone to Bohn’s. She should have gotten him out the night before. It was too cold for Fred in the car. Now he looked even worse, but maybe Ethel could bring Fred back. “Sorry Fred,” she said as she crossed the lawn, carrying the big pot.
Gifting a house plant to your high school ex’s parents should have been a weird thing to do. But before she and Steve had started dating, they were best friends. His parents, Ethel and Bob, had been like her second parents. For years, even after the big break-up, Jenna always made time to stop over for coffee. She realized suddenly that she may have had more of these talks with Ethel perhaps than her mom. She and her mother had been close, but there was an ease with Ethel, perhaps because she didn’t have to do all the work of raising Jenna, so their relationship lacked the normal mother-daughter conflict. Regret, sharp and sudden, flared in her chest.
Now it was too late. These words were like a repeated line in the song of her life, flashing through her mind whenever she had a realization of a new layer to her loss. She tried to swallow down the thoughts. She and her mother had an okay relationship. Even if she never worked up the nerve to tell her that she and Mark were over. She died not knowing.
Did that mean she knew now? If she knew, did she care? Jenna had read a lot about heaven in the Bible, but some things just weren’t clear. It made her desperately sad to think about heaven, which made no sense. Her mother would be there and be happy. Not there and feeling sad at the state of her eldest daughter’s life. That, by definition, would not be heaven.
Ethel answered the door after Jenna’s third knock, wearing a pair of khaki pants, a red cardigan, and pearls. It had been her uniform for as long as Jenna could remember. Different colored cardigans, but always khakis or a skirt.
“Hey, Mrs. Taylor,” Jenna said. In her head, she was always Ethel. In real life, manners dictated that she was Mrs. Taylor.
Ethel grabbed her in a fierce hug. Jenna did her best not to drop Fred the Fig, who was pressed between them.
“So good to see one of my daughters back home,” Ethel said. “Come in, come in! Bob! Jenna’s here!”
“How’s my girl?” Bob said. He did not get up from his recliner, which she suspected he slept in at night as well.
Jenna took his hand, warm and dry, and gave it a squeeze. “Hi, Mr. Taylor.”
He seemed to have grown heavier since Jenna had seen him a few months before. He wasn’t moving well then, leaning on the metal arms of a walker, the kind with tennis balls on two of the legs. It now sat next to his recliner and a small side table filled with a mix of cough drops and candy wrappers, a glass of water, and the television remote.
“Tell your mother that I let the police know about those kids that were parking down at the cul-de-sac. Shouldn’t be a problem anymore, I bet.”
Jenna swallowed and gently pulled her hand away. “I’ll tell her.”
Ethel met her eyes, then motioned her to the formal living room. “Sit. I’ll bring the coffee.”
As Jenna sat down in one of the matchi
ng upholstered chairs, she noticed a framed photograph on the end table. She picked it up, feeling all the moisture from her mouth dry up as though it had been sucked away somehow. It was a picture of Steve and Anna.
It should get easier to see them together after all these years. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly. At least, Jenna didn’t want to be with Steve. She had dodged a bullet—another cheater. But just as her anger with Jackson lingered, so did her feelings of betrayal. They had been best friends, then together for a few years, talking about marriage and long-term life plans. Before Anna.
She looked almost unchanged from high school, when she had stolen Steve away. Stylish haircut, but same high cheeks, big brown eyes, and a wide white smile. This was a woman who got a man and kept him. She didn’t worry about getting Chlamydia from her husband. In another picture on the table, Jenna saw their two little girls, who looked like mini-Annas.
She had always wanted children. She and Mark got married in their late twenties and had the same argument about having kids again and again. She wanted them. He didn’t. Now it made so much more sense. And made her feel even more like she had wasted so many important years of her life in a colossal way. Her eggs might be stale by now. What was the likelihood she could meet a man she could trust, fall in love, get married, and get pregnant in the tiny window she had left? It was probably a dream best to give up on. Let the Annas and Steves of the world repopulate with beautiful babies.
“Here we go,” Ethel said, setting down china cups with saucers.
Jenna replaced the photograph. Ethel didn’t mention it. That was their unspoken rule to keep this relationship working: Don’t talk about Steve. “Thank you.”
Ethel never remembered that Jenna didn’t take sugar, but she never complained. She took a few sips, trying to gather her thoughts. Normally the talk came easily, but today Jenna didn’t know where to start. She didn’t want to talk about her mother or her failed marriage and they couldn’t talk about Steve. Not that she wanted to.
Sandover Beach Memories Page 3
