At Wave's End: A Novel

by Patricia Perry Donovan

  “It will. But Maeve’s cut from pretty strong cloth. She’ll handle it all right.” Connie started the aging dishwasher and raised her voice over the din. “It wouldn’t be right to close the doors without letting her say good-bye.”

  “Hold that thought, Mom. I just got an alert from the fundraising site. Maeve just might get another chance.” Faith set down her phone and retrieved the laptop from the dining room, carting it back to the kitchen and opening it to the Save The Mermaid’s Purse page. “Come look at this. Remember the ‘Memories’ page on the website? That woman in the red bathing suit? Mary somebody-or-other.” Faith clicked and scrolled frantically until she located the photo. “There she is. Mary Alice Tilden.”

  “The one who wrote about bringing her family here year after year,” recalled Connie, looking over her daughter’s shoulder.

  “Yes, exactly. Anyway, her son Charley, that boy in the picture with her, is all grown up now. He has loads of happy memories of staying here, too. He’d like to come and talk to us. He says he wants to help us save The Mermaid’s Purse!”

  79

  The soonest their would-be benefactor Charley Tilden could come and discuss his interest in The Mermaid’s Purse was the day of the inn’s farewell party, Faith reported later that day.

  “We can’t change the date of the party,” Connie said. “The invitations already went out. And not long after that, we’ll have to leave.”

  “If we have to leave,” said Ellie. “Maybe this is our Christmas miracle.”

  “Tell the man to come to the party. With his checkbook,” Connie announced.

  Listening to the two women, Faith had to smile at their fantasy of a philanthropic angel swooping down to rescue the inn from financial destruction. For her part, she resolved not to get her hopes up, continuing her more pragmatic approach of cleaning out the inn while preparing for the party. After much discussion with David, and having unearthed boxes of namesake memorabilia gifted to the inn over the years, Faith agreed the party would feature a mermaid theme.

  In the meantime, they still needed to meet the day-to-day needs of their boarders, planning, preparing and clearing away of meals, and the laundry, housekeeping and errands that kept the inn going. If nothing else, she now had a broad array of experiences to add to her resume once she left The Mermaid’s Purse, Faith thought, kicking off her shoes to relax on the salon sofa one evening. A few pages into one of Maeve’s outdated magazines, Faith dozed off, only to wake disoriented sometime after ten, magazine on the floor beside her.

  Remembering she hadn’t defrosted anything for the next day, she padded to the kitchen barefooted to survey her freezer inventory, only to halt at the sight of Roxanne and Connie huddled at the kitchen table, their backs to Faith and a box of tissues between them.

  Not wanting to intrude, Faith took a step back, watching and listening from the shadows of the dining room.

  “I swore I’d never let him do this to me again,” Roxanne whimpered.

  Mitch. Did Gage’s father ever quit? How had he antagonized Roxanne now? Faith wondered. Perhaps it was the girlfriend again, or money issues. But when Roxanne turned toward Connie, Faith spotted the angry purple bruise on her cheek and covered her mouth, realizing how volatile relations between the estranged couple had become. She hung back, holding her breath as Roxanne accepted an ice pack from Connie and pressed it to her face with a wince.

  “You can’t let Mitch get away with this,” said Connie.

  “I thought the separation would protect me. How stupid could I have been?”

  “You’re not stupid.”

  “Oh, yes, I am. As stupid as I was to think that if I made the right dinner, dressed the way he liked, made sure Gage did well in school, everything would be okay.”

  “It’s part of the madness. You made the right choice, leaving him.”

  “Everything seemed fine today at the coffee shop until we started talking about this place possibly closing. Mitch got it into his head we should move back in with him. We started fighting about it in front of Gage, which made it worse, because my son would probably want us to live together again as a family more than anything in the world, besides finding Tucker.”

  As Roxanne wadded a tissue to her nose, a guilty Faith decided to make her presence known. But before she could move, Roxanne spoke again. “Anyway, when I refused, Mitch asked me where we planned to live after. I told him I didn’t know yet, which is the truth. You all know how difficult this housing search has been for me.”

  “We can help you with that,” offered Connie.

  Roxanne readjusted the ice pack. “Then Mitch called me a liar. He accused me of keeping that information from him so he couldn’t see Gage. I don’t know where he gets these things. But I wasn’t hiding anything. I swear.”

  “I know,” Connie murmured.

  “Thank you for not judging me. I always feel so much better after I talk to you.”

  How often did the two talk? Faith wondered from her hidden vantage point.

  “I knew it was coming,” Roxanne continued. “Even though Mitch promised again it was the last time. I can always tell, you know? His eyes . . . they change. It’s like a switch. It’s my fault, though. You’d think I’d recognize the warning signs.”

  “It’s not your fault. These men mess with your head, making you feel like you did something wrong . . . like you’re nothing.” Connie bit off her last words. “It takes a long time to get out from under their thumbs. But you have to. And the first step is to stop blaming yourself.”

  “I know. I need to work on that.” Roxanne stood and set the ice pack on the table. “I’m so sorry I unloaded on you. You’ve done so much for us already, opening this place to me and my son.”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop apologizing. Women like us develop a terrible habit of saying sorry way, way too much.”

  Women like us? What sorority included both Roxanne and her mother? Faith wondered. The day Faith found her birth certificate, Connie had admitted to her husband’s drinking and gambling issues, to their constant fighting. But physical abuse? Her mother never mentioned that. Perhaps the revelation had been there, implicit, and Faith had chosen to ignore it, refusing to believe that the man who had helped to bring Audrey Hennessey into this world could be capable of physical violence.

  “I don’t want Gage to grow up with that kind of insanity,” said Roxanne. “That’s why I finally left Mitch. I tried to hide this from my son. But Gage sees it now. I know he does. And that . . . that devastates me, to the point where I can’t cope with anything else.”

  As Faith grasped the depth of Roxanne’s raw pain, she realized why even the thought of making a few phone calls paralyzed Roxanne to the point of inaction.

  “I felt the same way with my daughter,” said Connie.

  Faith held her breath, hovering in the doorway, ashamed of eavesdropping for so long but terrified that if she revealed herself now, her mother might stop speaking so candidly.

  “The sad part is, the children do see,” continued Connie. “From a very young age. Faith was barely four the day she found me.”

  Found you where? Lightheaded, Faith leaned against the doorjamb for support.

  “I saw the fear in her eyes that night,” Connie said. “He had already done his damage, and started with his usual excuses and empty apologies. But when he heard Faith’s bedroom door open, the coward ran out. I tried to clean myself up before she found me, but I didn’t have enough time. I’ll never forget that look on Faith’s face as long as I live. That’s when I went to the sheriff and asked for the order of protection.”

  Order of protection? Was this the same incident her mother had described to her? Faith longed to wipe her damp forehead with her sleeve, but didn’t dare move a muscle.

  “Did he give it to you?” Roxanne asked.

  “Yes, he did.” Connie’s voice faded, then came back stronger. “And then the sheriff said something that just . . . well, i
t set something off inside me.”

  Faith relaxed slightly, knowing what was to come.

  “What was that?” Roxanne whispered.

  “He said . . . that an order of protection wasn’t a bulletproof vest.”

  Bulletproof vest? Jerking to attention, Faith lurched into the kitchen. “Mom,” she cried, the greeting lodging in her throat.

  “Goodness, Faith. You scared me.” Connie got to her feet so abruptly she had to grab her chair to keep it from falling. “I thought you’d gone to bed. I was just giving Roxanne some . . . some life advice,” she stammered.

  Meanwhile, Roxanne lowered her head, pulling her hair over her swollen cheek.

  “Your ex did that to you?” Faith asked, placing her hand on Roxanne’s shoulder.

  Slowly, Roxanne nodded, her head still bent.

  “Nobody deserves that. I’m so sorry, Roxanne. And Mom, what you just said . . . Why didn’t we ever talk about what I saw that night?”

  “I prayed you’d forgotten.”

  “Still, you could have told me the other day, when I found my birth certificate.”

  Connie led Faith to sit at the table. “And remind you of the horror I exposed you to the first few years of your life?”

  “Knowing might have helped me to understand some things.”

  “What things? My failure as a mother? My serial attraction to the wrong men? I think they’re both pretty clear.”

  “No, neither of those. But it might have explained why I have a hard time . . . I don’t know . . . trusting people? It’s so difficult for me to . . . to let my guard down. Let people get close. Especially guys.” Until I came to Wave’s End.

  “And you think that comes from the way your father treated me?” Connie asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows how that affects a kid? Maybe living those first couple of years as someone else left some scars. Maybe somehow deep down I always knew what really happened that night, and it made me more guarded.”

  “I’m sorry, Faith. You did deserve to know. To have things out in the open. Stupidly, I convinced myself I was protecting you all these years. But now I see how it must have hurt you.”

  “I get why you would do that. But tonight, hearing Roxanne—” Grabbing a tissue, Faith glanced at Roxanne, who continued to listen quietly. “I’m sorry, Roxanne, but after hearing your story, I get what my mother went through. It fills in the blanks somehow.” Hearing the truth earlier might have cast a different light on her mother, enabling Faith to comfort her occasionally, instead of always criticizing her, always judging.

  How much Faith had judged, and how wrongly.

  “Still, I regret it,” said Connie. “The way I regret a lot of things. It’s taken me too long to own up to this, even to my own daughter. But in spite of everything, taking you away that night is the thing I’m most proud of having done in my life.”

  Roxanne looked up. “I don’t know if I can be as brave as you, Connie. I’m so . . . so tired.”

  “You can. For Gage.” Connie smoothed Roxanne’s hair. “And we’ll help you, won’t we, Faith?”

  Faith nodded. “Of course. You’re going to be okay.”

  “I promise you I’m right. Moon and stars,” Connie said, with a vaguely defiant glance at Faith. “Faith hates when I say that; I suppose I’ve given her plenty of reason to. But when the two of us were on the run, that’s the only thing that helped me focus: knowing at the end of every day, even when my life was falling apart, I could look up at the sky and count on the moon and the stars being there. Even on cloudy nights when I couldn’t quite make them out. Because I knew the clouds eventually would clear, and I’d see the moon and stars shining brightly again, as though someone had set them there just for Faith and me.”

  Long after Roxanne had gone upstairs with a fresh ice pack, and Faith and her mother crawled into bed, Faith lay beside Connie, thinking about everything she had learned that night and wishing she had known the deeper symbolism of moon and stars. Had she grasped its profound significance, so much more to her mother than a cheap, gold-plated necklace, she might have thought to grasp Connie’s hand under the arid desert sky. Instead, Faith’s life had been dogged by a nagging unease fed by her mother’s habitual searching—the yearning that drove Connie to enter contests, one sweepstakes after another, her eye on pie-in-the-sky prizes that might never materialize, never satisfy.

  Except that this prize had satisfied, Faith realized, turning onto her side in the trundle bed. This hundred-twenty-five-dollar chance, for which her mother had sacrificed everything, had paid off in the most unlikely, extraordinary ways. Despite its dated décor and peeling shutters, The Mermaid’s Purse provided the sort of shelter and sustenance for mother and daughter that had been missing their entire lives.

  Elementally, the inn had done the same for their boarders. And though it could be too much to hope for, there might be additional riches deep within The Mermaid’s Purse, theirs for the taking.

  Maybe Charley Tilden’s sudden attraction to the inn meant that their luck had turned.

  Faith whispered into the night. “Mom, are you awake?”

  Connie sighed. “Barely.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “How did you come up with our new names?”

  PART 6: RECONSTRUCTION

  80

  “Seriously?” Faith sat up and switched on her bedside lamp. “You named us for a moving company?”

  Connie shrugged. “I didn’t have that much time to think about it. The sheriff needed our new names by the next day to complete the legal paperwork.”

  “So you just picked them out of thin air.”

  “You could say that. That night in the back of the pickup truck, you slept, and I watched the traffic on the highway,” she said, sitting up and stuffing pillows behind her back. “There were mostly trucks at that hour, but then a moving van went by. Sterling Van Lines. And I thought to myself, What a good, strong name, with weight to it. I picked Connie for Constance Ford. You probably don’t remember her, but she played a spunky mother on my soap opera.”

  “I don’t, but Connie suits you. And I suppose as family names go, Sterling’s not terrible.” Faith hugged her knees. “And my first name? How did you come up with that?”

  “Faith? That was easy. I remember feeling terrified and conflicted that night, wondering if I had made the right choice to leave, or if running away would only make the situation worse.”

  “It doesn’t sound like things could have gotten any worse.”

  “I know that now. But that night, I wasn’t so sure I could do it on my own. Do you realize, Faith: I was younger than you are now, and already a mother?” Connie folded an arm behind her head. “Anyway, I had no money, and no contacts where we were headed. So I prayed for strength. And for faith in myself. Then I looked down at you sleeping next to me, and it came to me. I would name you Faith. So your face would remind me every day to believe in myself.”

  “Aw, really?” Faith leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  “Really. And you did, Faith.” Connie patted Faith’s knee. “You do. Although I could have named you Esmeralda and you still would have inspired me. That’s why whatever happens with this place”—she stretched her arms over her head—“whether this Charley Tilden turns out to be the Mermaid’s Purse’s savior or we get our bottoms kicked to the curb, this whole experience will have been worth it, because I lived it with you.”

  “Don’t you mean, ‘for you’?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Faith slipped out of bed and rummaged through her belongings until she found the pants she was looking for. “This,” she said, taking out a paper from the pocket and unfolding it on the bed.

  “Where did you get that?” Connie asked.

  “Maeve gave it to me at the nursing home. And I must say, you have quite a way with words.”

  “It was from my heart. And I never expected you
to see that essay, by the way.”

  “Well, I did. And I understand why Maeve picked you. She said you got to the essence of it.” Faith picked up the paper and read aloud:

  “‘While I may not be your most experienced applicant, I can promise I am your most dedicated. In trying to provide a home for my daughter all these years, I’ve worked many, many jobs. Some worked out, and some didn’t, but I learned something from every one. I’ve never been too proud to do an honest day’s hard work if it would keep a roof over her head. My daughter has become a success in the hospitality industry in her own right, and I would like to follow her example. If you permit me to carry on the Mermaid’s Purse tradition, I will work tirelessly, dedicating that effort to my daughter, who has been my shining star for my entire life, teaching me the value of hard work and perseverance.’

  “Maeve told me that all the other essays went on and on about the beach and the ocean,” explained Faith. “But she said when it really comes down to it, innkeeping is about the behind-the-scenes work that makes running the place look easy, makes the guests feel welcome.”

  Smiling, Faith folded the letter. “Congratulations on winning The Mermaid’s Purse, Mom. I don’t think I ever said that.”

  “Careful, Mom. You’re getting crumbs in the bed,” Faith said with a laugh.

  “I don’t care. These are so delicious. Why haven’t you made them before?” Connie took another bite of the scone Faith had retrieved from the kitchen.

  “Because I didn’t have Maeve’s recipe until now. Or her mother’s recipe, I should say.”

  “Did she give the recipe to you along with my essay?”

  “No, but she told me where to find it. It’s been in the drawer of her mother’s kitchen table all along.”

  “Isn’t that funny. You’ll have to show me how to make them. For after.”

  “Let’s not think about that right now.” Faith finished the last of her scone. “Anyway, they’re easy. Just remember two things: First, soak the currants in boiling water beforehand to soften them up. And second, add just a pinch of salt to the dough. Any more, and they’ll be tough. And use table salt, not sea salt.”