Off Season

by Jean Stone

  Still staring out the window, Ben felt his shoulders quiver. He leaned against the glass, looking out at the town center, out where no one who walked under the red and gold leaves of those safe tree-lined streets would guess that an accused child molester was standing upstairs, looking out into a world to which he felt he no longer belonged.

  Mindy looked out the window and wished her grandfather had never insisted on tracking down her mother from the “itinerary” she’d scribbled and sent them and that he’d kept in the drawer by the refrigerator as if they might ever need to know—or care—where she was. But Grandpa said this was something her mother needed to be told, and he’d found her on an island in the West Indies, wherever that was.

  She called early that morning before Mindy went to school.

  “Do you like Dr. Reynolds?” her mother asked now, her voice crackly through the wires.

  “She’s okay.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  Mindy shifted on one foot. She hated that her mother always seemed to think that if someone was pretty, that meant they were smarter or better than those who were not.

  “She’s okay.”

  There was a long pause over the Caribbean and up the Atlantic.

  “I’d be there if I could, Mindy. But the people who own the boat are very demanding. You understand, don’t you, pumpkin?”

  Oh, sure, of course. Mindy gripped the phone cord more tightly. “It’s okay, Mom.”

  “Your grandfather said he’s taking care of everything.”

  “I guess that’s why he’s my legal guardian,” she said. And not you, she did not add.

  The static grew stronger. “Yes. It’s been a good thing that I left you with him. With your father dead and my work taking me so far away …”

  There were so many things Mindy could ask. Starting with why don’t you get a damn job as a waitress or something? Or why don’t you come back here and take care of me like you’re supposed to?

  Outside she could see Grandpa brush the rain from his hat and lay a fresh tarp across the bed of his pickup truck. Next he’d come in and eat the oatmeal that she’d set out last night before going to bed. Then he’d drink his coffee and take the pills for his heart and be gone for the day while she went to school. It was kind of a dumb life that they had together, but it was predictable and it didn’t hurt much.

  Until now.

  Until Ben had done what he’d done, and she’d done what she’d done, and now, worst of all, she had to talk to her mother—mother? Ha, ha, that was a laugh.

  “Pumpkin?” her mother asked. “Ben Niles is still rich, isn’t he?”

  Mindy frowned. Next to being pretty, the one thing that mattered to her mother was money, which, Mindy supposed, had to do with her being ne’er do well. “How would I know?” she replied. “His car’s pretty old.”

  Her grandfather came in the back door then, stomping wet leaves from his boots. Then Mindy remembered he wouldn’t go fishing today, because he had an appointment with the district attorney. That rumbly feeling returned to her belly: she rubbed it a little, but it didn’t leave.

  “I have to go,” Mindy said.

  “Well, be a good girl. I’ll send you something from Antigua.”

  Don’t bother, she wanted to say, but said good-bye and hung up quickly instead, wishing that her mother had died along with her father and that she could go over to Menemsha House and help Ben for a while.

  But right now one dream was as impossible as the other.

  “Are you planning to live in one of those big houses you and your friends are building?” Hazel Blair asked Rita as Rita finished reading the prospectus and sales brochure just back from the printer. Until now she’d not minded having her office in her home. After Kyle died, she’d moved her files into his old bedroom so she could feel closer to him. Unfortunately, before Kyle the room had been Hazel’s. Hell, the whole house—what there was of it, with two slant-roof bedrooms and the office upstairs, and the kitchen, living room, and small den down below—had been Hazel’s, who apparently now felt she had the right to come and go as she pleased.

  “This house is perfectly fine,” Rita replied. “Besides, what would I do with four thousand square feet? Hold a ball every other Saturday night?” She had not yet told her mother that there would soon be an unexpected addition to their family—she had hoped Hazel would return to Florida before it was obvious, and then maybe Rita would never, ever have to mention it. Denial, she’d found, was often a much happier place to dwell.

  “You could have a suite of rooms for your mother.” Hazel pronounced suite like “suit” and not “sweet,” which, under other circumstances, would have bugged Rita. But she was too stunned by the content of her mother’s words to be bothered by the syntax.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes turning halfway back to the brochure to help mask her shock.

  Even with her head half-turned, Rita could see Hazel’s lips curl up and her false teeth gleam a wide plastic smile. “Well, you may find this hard to believe,” Hazel said, “but I’m not getting any younger. It’s time for me to settle down, and I’m not talking about getting married again.”

  Rita suddenly felt nauseous. “You are settled, Mother,” she said, without looking up. “You have a nice mobile home in Coral Gables, remember?”

  “Ah!” Hazel exclaimed, flopping onto the daybed where Kyle had once slept. “Everyone in Coral Gables is an old fart. I saw more action in the dead of any winter on the Vineyard than any of them dreamed about seeing in their combined lifetimes.”

  “Mother,” Rita said, closing the brochure, “you are too old to be getting any action. And too old to think about moving back to the island. You’ve always hated the snow.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it ever since Kyle died. My grandson. And I only saw him six times after he turned eighteen.”

  Hazel had been busy chasing—and unbelievably, catching—a husband, her first, at age sixty-eight. “Well, it’s too late now, Mother. Coming back to the Vineyard isn’t going to change that.” She had not meant to sound sarcastic, really she hadn’t. But the tight lines that set around the corners of her mother’s Love That Red mouth told her she had been.

  “It’s not too late for me to spend time with my daughter, Rita Mae. I only gave you this house so you could pass it on to Kyle. Now that he’s gone, well, I don’t want to take it back, but I was hoping you’d at least let me live here.”

  At this stage of her life, Rita had not planned on a roommate of the maternal persuasion, especially Hazel. Then again, she also hadn’t needed to consider the advantages of a built-in baby-sitter.

  Hazel nodded vigorously. “Year round,” she confirmed. “I want to come home, Rita Mae. I want to live with you again. We’ll have a blast. Just like old times.”

  Thankfully, old times would not include having to rent out the house during the summer and bunk in with various neighbors for a week here and there. Hopefully, they would not include hearing her mother’s lovemaking noises echo through the century-old walls. But there would be companionship, and there would be a baby. Just like old times.

  • • •

  Jill would give anything to go back in time, to last summer, to their wonderful wedding on the walkway that encircled the top of the Gay Head lighthouse, to the way the ribbons in her hair drifted in the breeze off the cliffs as she professed her love publicly to Ben Niles, as if anyone in attendance hadn’t known about it already.

  But as she looked out the widow’s walk on the rooftop of her house, at the half-naked treetops and the slate-colored sky, she was quickly reminded that this was not Gay Head and this was not summer.

  She leaned back in the Jacuzzi and tried to decide what to do.

  She could get out of the tub, get dressed, and go find her husband.

  She could stay here until she became prunelike and limp, dwelling on what might have or should have or could have been.

  Or she could pick up the cell phone and dial the numbe
r she knew so well, the one that belonged to Addie Becker.

  She eyed that phone, which in and of itself was a haunting reminder of Addie-the-agent: chaotic and crazy and always on.

  With a deep, lonely sigh, Jill rested her head against the vinyl pillow and tried to concentrate on the warm water seeping into her pores. She loved this tub: she missed it when she was on the road. It was one more of the lovely things Ben had brought into her life.

  “This would make a great hot tub room,” he’d said that first day she’d met him when he came to the house. It had been Addie who’d hired Ben to renovate the house so Jill could put it on the market and get on with her life.

  It had been years—twenty-five exactly—since Jill had left that house and run from the Vineyard, escaping her mother. In that time, she’d seen her only a handful of times, the last of which had been a few years before, at her father’s funeral.

  She once liked to think that her absence had not been completely intentional, but deep down, she had known otherwise. When her mother died, she decided to settle the estate and be done with the island once and for all.

  The plan had seemed sensible. She had not counted on finding her mother’s diary right there in the widow’s walk; she had not counted on learning the reasons she had been so … unmotherly. She had not counted on finding forgiveness for her mother and for herself, and she had definitely not counted on falling in love with Ben Niles, the uncommon laborer with the penetrating gray eyes.

  Ben—the man who, last night, had selfishly chosen to sleep in a room over a tavern rather than in the same bed as his wife.

  He was not the first man in her life who’d turned out to be self-centered. There had, of course, been Christopher, narcissistic celebrity baseball star turned TV anchor. Before him had been Richard—Jeff and Amy’s father—who had preferred a revolving audience of one, preferably a woman other than his wife. Once, she’d selected men the same way she chose dresses: quickly, hardly trying them on, just wanting to get it over with and get on with the dance.

  Ben had been different.

  Ben was different, she reminded herself. He cared about life and people and kindness and honesty. He did not do anything unless he did it well. And he did not deserve this kind of treatment, not from a ten-year-old girl he’d been trying to help, not from an idiot of a vindictive fisherman, and not from the police, who knew Ben better than that.

  She could be angry with Ben, but he didn’t deserve that, either.

  What he did deserve was the best legal defense that could be begged, borrowed, or bought. And to buy it, one needed not only connections but very big money. The kind she could hope to amass only by working for the network.

  Jill reached across the deck and picked up the phone. Before she could change her mind, she dialed the number she knew so well.

  “Becker,” came the voice on the other end of the line. Addie always seemed too busy to extend a pleasant hello. Apparently, some things hadn’t changed.

  Jill sucked in a small breath. She moved partway up from the water, exposing the tops of her breasts to the autumn-chilled air. “Addie,” she said, “this is Jill.”

  In the silence her pulse quickened. She knew it wasn’t from the heat in the tub.

  “Jill,” the agent replied matter-of-factly. Not “How are you?” or “What have you been doing the last three years?” or “I’m sorry I blackballed you.” Simply “Jill.”

  “I’ve been thinking about your offer.” Jill closed one arm across herself, shielding her naked vulnerability from the woman who had cost her so much. “Maybe it’s not a bad idea. For me to fill in for Lizette.”

  Again silence loomed—silence, dead air, the unnerving stalled space that was one of Addie’s tactics in subtle manipulation. It was a tactic Jill detested.

  “Would it be for the whole month of February?”

  “Plus a week in December for preshow publicity. And, yes, of course, the whole month of February.”

  February was prime time in the ratings wars of TV land, the critical time when midseason replacements were administered as booster shots, when season specials and heavy hitters were pulled out of the darkness in order to position each station for the almighty advertising dollar.

  “When do you need a definite answer?”

  Addie sighed loudly. “Well, I can’t wait forever. This is network, not local.”

  Yes, she knew that. It was a RueCom show, produced by Maurice Fischer, the ratings wizard, and aired on those stations that had not given her stories from Vineyard Productions the time of day, night, late night, or fringe.

  “If you don’t want it, I need to find someone else,” Addie continued in a voice that suddenly sounded close to sincere. “I was only trying to do you a favor.”

  A favor. Yes, Jill wanted one, too, but one that involved a link to a powerhouse attorney. She closed her eyes and swallowed a small, shallow swallow. She pictured herself on the set beside Christopher, a fake smile on her face, an ache in her stomach.

  All for the sake of sweeping the sweeps. Or so they would think.

  Jill McPhearson on the set with Christopher Edwards would be one hell of a way to sweep.

  So they needed her.

  But she needed them—maybe more.

  “Send me a contract,” she replied, then said a quick good-bye without second-guessing why she had done it or how long she could keep it from Ben.

  Chapter 7

  Thanks to Jimmy O’Neill the audio master, Jill got a shooter to work with them on Cranberry Day, a pro out of Albany with whom he’d once traveled.

  She took the call in the garden shed and was grateful that it was from Jimmy: Jill had nearly forgotten the job was imminent, she’d been so immersed in chopping back hydrangea and painting the back porch and blasting her way through other physical busywork chores. Anything to try and forget about the rest of her life. Anything to try and forget that soon she was going to ask Addie about an attorney, and that she’d done something certain to make Ben more angry at her than he already was.

  Anything to forget she’d be doing Good Night, USA, as if she were picking up her life where she’d left off, which she was most definitely not doing.

  She told Jimmy she’d book the videographer—Devon Pike was his name—at the Beach Plum Bed & Breakfast. Then she hung up the phone, wiped the moisture of fine-misting rain from her brow, and sighed, just as Amy appeared at the doorway of the toolshed.

  “I saw Ben at the tavern,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  Jill leaned against the wooden workbench and pulled off her gloves. She wasn’t sure if Amy meant what was going on overall, why was Ben at the tavern at ten in the morning, or why had he not slept at home last night. Most probably her daughter wasn’t interested in Jill’s progress disassembling the dried-up gardens of summer.

  “Did I tell you I’m doing a segment on Cranberry Day? It should be unique. Maybe more cable programming will want it.” She turned to the workbench and cleaned off the trowel and old hand clippers.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Amy replied. “Ben stayed at the tavern last night. Why?”

  Jill kept cleaning tools. It was easier than looking her daughter in the eye because, unlike her son, Amy adored Ben. “The coolest stepfather you could have found,” she’d said to Jill the night they’d told the kids they’d decided to marry. But what would Amy think if she knew about … this? Would she defend her cool stepfather? Or would she look at him differently, wonder what the truth was, no longer want to be in his presence?

  She wanted to tell Amy and yet …

  Still, she could not lie. “Ben and I had an argument.”

  “Jesus, Mom,” Amy said, an accusatory tone springing forth, a tone that reminded Jill of Amy’s early teenage years when her daughter had believed that anything, everything that went wrong or merely awry, had to, in some way, have been Jill’s fault.

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Jill responded with quick defensiveness. She dropped the tools in a pea
ch basket and pulled off her rubber boots. “It’s nothing we won’t resolve.” She still was not looking at her daughter. “Marriage is no easier than dating, Amy.”

  Immediately she was sorry she’d said that. Amy often complained that there were no decent boys on the island, which Jill suspected was simply an excuse not to date anyone seriously, something that, as beautiful and intelligent as her daughter was, Amy had not done. Ever. It was as if her experience with Kyle had left her frightened of men or of getting involved. Which seemed so out of sync for such a beautiful girl with so much style and so much, well, pizazz.

  “Well, what are you going to do, Mom? You can’t leave him down there.”

  “I did not leave Ben anywhere, Amy. He went of his own volition. In fact, it was his idea. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get cleaned up. I want to go over to the studio and take care of some things.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “Did Ben say where he was going?” she asked.

  Amy shrugged. “Menemsha, I guess.”

  The very name of the place that had once made Jill joyous about Ben’s dream now curdled her insides. She turned around. “Don’t worry, honey, it was nothing. Just a small argument.”

  “It was big enough for him to leave home.”

  Jill forced herself to look into her daughter’s eyes. “We’ll be fine, honey.” She hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt. “It takes more than a lovers’ quarrel to break up true love.”

  Rita smiled. “Mom, I’m pregnant.” She stood alone before the full-length mirror in her bedroom, studying her face as she practiced breaking the news to Hazel.

  The smile was not right. It was too smartass.

  She frowned.

  “Mother, I’m pregnant.” No, too serious.

  She lifted her chin. “I’m going to give you another grandchild, Hazel.” No, too stupid.

  Rita sighed and dropped onto the bed. This would be so much easier if she didn’t feel like a scared seventeen-year-old again, or that she’d be labeled the town pump again—loosey-goosey, easy-make, slut. This would be so much easier if her mother had just stayed in Florida like most ordinary women her age.