Off Season

by Jean Stone

  Running her hand over the small, bump-in-the-road mound that had begun to form in her belly, Rita remembered that Hazel was, always had been, anything but ordinary. Not until her mother had left for Florida had Rita begun to appreciate her for what she’d been—a mother who, no matter what, had always found ways to support her daughter and her illegitimate grandson, ways to protect them from the gossip piranhas, and ways to help her stay just ahead of the wolves at their paint-peeling door.

  The “ways” that Hazel had found may not have been conventional, but they had worked. There had been favors given and taken to and from tourists—male tourists, of course; there had been that infernal bunking with neighbors, a week at a time, enabling them to rent out their house in season for a few extra bucks. Through it all, there had been Hazel. Never-give-up, pain-in-the-butt Hazel, who had helped Rita raise Kyle with open-arms love.

  Rita hadn’t realized those things until Hazel was gone. Gone only to Florida, thank God, not gone as in dead like Jill’s mother.

  All Rita knew now was that if her mother was planning to move back, she had to be told what the future would hold, and she had to be told sooner rather than later.

  Rita hauled herself from the bed and headed for the stairs, about to tell her mother, for the second time in her life, that her daughter had been dumb enough not to keep her legs crossed.

  “It’s Charlie’s, isn’t it?” Hazel asked from over the tops of her reading glasses, her eyes dancing with excitement instead of piercing with anger the way they had the last time, way back when. She dropped the book she’d been reading into the basket next to her chair. It was a collection of Henry Beetle Bough essays. Rita wondered if Hazel was brushing up on the Vineyard past in order to make way for the future. “Rita Mae?” she demanded. “That baby has Charlie Rollins for a father, doesn’t he?” She pointed at Rita’s stomach.

  “I do declare, Mother,” Rita said, “you must be a soothsayer.”

  Hazel let out a loud guffaw. “Some people just have the right biological connections.”

  Hazel, of course, did not know that Rita had “connected,” biologically speaking, with two other men besides Charlie. She briefly wondered if Hazel, too, had experienced an abortion or two back in her tourist-hopping days.

  “Yes, well, whatever you call it, the connection seems to have worked.”

  Hazel stood up and gave her daughter a hug. “Another baby. This is wonderful, Rita Mae. And this time the baby will know its father.”

  Rita stiffened and stepped back from her mother. “Not yet, Hazel,” she said sternly.

  A frown sharpened Hazel’s seventy-eight-year-old forehead. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Charlie, Mother. This is between me and him.” She sucked a small breath through her teeth. “And I don’t know yet what I’m going to tell him.”

  Hazel groaned and sat back down on the chair, the wooden frame creaking. “You’re forty-six years old, Rita Mae. Haven’t you learned anything all these years?”

  “Yes. I’ve learned that I’d be no good at marriage. I’ve told you a thousand times that I’m not like Jill.”

  “And what about Jill? Does she know?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Rita huffed a small huff. “Mother, please. Jill might wish otherwise for me, but I’m sure that even she knows I’m better off on my own. As will be the baby.”

  Plucking at the rollers in her red-rinsed hair, Hazel pursed her matching red lips. “Well, missy, you’re forgetting one thing.”

  Rita put a hand on her hip and waited for the next comment that was surely forming right now in her mother’s quick mind—too quick for her age, too sharp for a senior.

  “You’re forgetting about Mr. Rollins. This is a new century, Rita Mae. Fathers have rights that they didn’t have back when Kyle was born.”

  Florida was definitely a much better place for her mother. Maybe Rita would buy her another mobile home. One with a bigger suit of rooms, where she could live out the rest of her meddlesome days.

  “Well, believe it or not, you don’t know everything, Mother. For instance, you don’t know that Mr. Rollins has himself another woman. I’m sure he is no more interested in marrying me than I am in marrying him.” She spun on her heel and headed toward the kitchen.

  From the living room, she heard Hazel mutter.

  Rita snapped on the tap and filled a glass of water.

  “I said,” came her mother’s raised voice, “when is the blessed event?”

  Rita took a big gulp then closed her eyes. “April,” she answered quietly. “The end of April.”

  As Jill drove along Beach Road toward Oak Bluffs, she wondered how soon they’d know when the trial would be. She needed to decide if she should tell Ben before or after they found out—before she told Addie or after they’d lined up an attorney, a John Grisham hero who would get to the bottom of this and know what to do to vindicate Ben.

  Before or after. Either way, he was going to be angry.

  She set her jaw squarely and fixed her eyes on the narrow road. She told herself it didn’t matter how angry Ben was. They could not pretend that this was not happening. They could not pretend that everything was fine. Pretending was the worst way to live life, Jill had long ago learned, because sooner or later it caught up with you. The pretending stopped, the game was over, and usually the pain was worse.

  She wondered how long Ben would stay at the tavern.

  She wondered if this was going to ruin her marriage.

  Then she wondered how intense the anxiety level would be back on the anchor desk with Christopher, and how she would survive it. And if she was selling her soul to save the man she loved.

  Her gaze drifted off to the right, then to the left. The afternoon sky was clear and blue and uninterrupted by the summer colors of parasails, tourist blankets, and striped beach umbrellas, and the air unpolluted by assault sounds from boom boxes, car horns, and the scrape of skateboards on pavement.

  Instead, the beach was sandy white, protected by the bike trail on one side and by the small, grassy dunes on the other, and all was autumn-peaceful. Yet everything she saw and everything she felt was muted by the sorrow that veiled her heart. She blinked and fat tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Ben was in his old workshop behind the house in Oak Bluffs, guiding a buzz saw through a sturdy two-by-four, determined to replace the old window frame that he’d been meaning to replace for six years.

  Now was as good a time as any. He could not go to Menemsha. He could not risk running into Ashenbach or going to the museum that was too close to Mindy, too close to trust himself to not bang on their door and say, “Tell them the truth, kid. Tell them what really happened.”

  It did not matter that the museum was his business, his potential means of half-assed support, the real half, of course, coming from his wife, to whom he could not go, either.

  He rammed the saw through another board and supposed he should be grateful that this had happened off season, after the bulk of museum visitors had oohed and ahhed and returned to the mainland and their day-to-day lives. He supposed he should be grateful. But right now gratitude wasn’t an easy emotion to muster.

  Part of the board broke free and dropped to the unfinished floor. As Ben bent to retrieve it, the workshop door opened. From where he was crouched, he saw a pair of feet in classy, smooth leather shoes.

  “Oh, shit,” he said aloud.

  Then his wife stooped beside him, took his face in her hands, and wiped his tears first, then her own.

  “I love you so much,” she whispered there in the small, dark, sawdust-smelling room.

  He put his arms around her and pulled her toward him, burying his face in her soft, silky hair, releasing himself to the warmth of her thin but strong arms. “Oh, God, Jill, I’m so sorry about all this. What are we going to do?”

  Without answering, Jill pulled away from him. She unbuttoned her shirt and slipped off her bra. With her s
mall fingers, she cupped her breasts, holding them as if they were meant just for him, as if she were offering her love in her hands.

  Slowly he leaned into her. Slowly he began sucking one of her dark nipples, until it grew moist from his mouth and firm from his tongue. Gently he touched his teeth to it; she let out a soft cry.

  From under the workbench he pulled out an old tarp and laid it across the floor. And there, amid canvas and sawdust, he took her as his, his lover, his love, his wife.

  Chapter 8

  “In a few days you’re going to give a deposition,” Dr. Reynolds said to Mindy.

  Almost a whole week had passed since Grandpa had found Mindy in her room, since he had gone to the police and the whole world had changed, and this woman with the plain hair and pink lipstick was now here almost every day, trying to act like she was her mother, though she looked nothing like her mother, more like the school nurse.

  They once again sat in her bedroom with the door closed to “insure privacy,” the doctor had said.

  “What’s a deposition?” Mindy asked because she did not know what one was and wasn’t sure if she had one to give.

  Dr. Laura Reynolds smiled. “It’s like being in a video. The lawyer will ask you questions about what happened with Mr. Niles. A camera will record what you say and do.”

  “What do I have to do? Play with dolls or something?” She remembered one of those movies in school where they used dolls to show what parts of who were okay to touch and what parts were not. She’d been about six at the time and had already figured out the parts on her own, not because of some dumb movie, but because she and Derrick Smith, who had since moved off-island, had looked at each other’s “parts” quite closely on several occasions.

  “You’ll only have to answer questions about that afternoon. The trial is a long time from now, and they want to know everything before you forget.”

  Mindy looked out the window, wishing she could go outside and play, ride her bike to the beach maybe and look for lucky stones.

  “Will they ask me about sex?”

  “Maybe. Does that bother you?”

  Mindy shrugged. “Will they ask me about Ben?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s what this is for. To prove what Mr. Niles did so he will never do it to any other little girl again.”

  “Oh,” Mindy replied.

  Jill said she wanted to tell Carol Ann and Amy. “You could use some family support,” she had argued to Ben, then added that no matter what Amy and Carol Ann thought, it was better that they knew. Before they heard it some other island-rumor-mill way.

  “I called Carol Ann,” she told him now, as they sat in the music room of the old sea captain’s house, the place that was home. “The only night this week she and John can make it for dinner is the night after Cranberry Day.”

  Ben wondered if family “support” entailed having things swirl around him and in spite of him like the way he felt he was being manipulated into telling the girls.

  “The freelancer will be here then, and I’ll be working with him and Jimmy,” Jill continued, oblivious to his nonreaction, “so it will be a little tight, but I can work it out. Oh, and don’t forget, while we’re at it, we need to remind Carol Ann that she and John said we can take the kids to Sturbridge. It will be fun, Ben. You need to absorb yourself in something fun.”

  He looked over at the oval-framed picture of Jill’s somber-faced grandmother. How much fun had she had in her short Yankee lifetime? Would she think that anything that could happen between now and the trial could be absorbing enough to be classified as fun?

  The truth was, he’d almost forgotten he’d promised to go to Sturbridge with Jill for her next story—something about Thanksgiving stuff in the seventeenth-century reenactment village. But she was right about one thing: he had looked forward to taking his grandkids. He had also looked forward to getting fresh ideas like building lobster traps—ideas he could adapt for Menemsha House.

  If he ever opened Menemsha House again.

  He stood up from the chair and went to the window. He rubbed his lower back: he hated the way he ached sometimes these days, as if the intrusions of the world around him had violated his spine as well as his psyche.

  Outside, Edgartown slept its post-tourist sleep.

  “I’m still not convinced we should tell them,” he said, because his voice seemed to need to give it one more try. Intellectually, of course, it made sense.

  Tell them before they learn some other way.

  Running from something only makes you look guilty.

  These people love you. Of course they’ll believe you.

  Those were the “intellectual” things he’d say if this had happened to a friend, Charlie Rollins, for instance. But it hadn’t happened to Charlie. It had happened to him.

  “We’re a family now, Ben,” Jill said firmly. “Let’s act like one.”

  The thought that she might be right finally won out.

  He closed his eyes and wondered how he would survive until the day after Cranberry Day, and how he was going to tell the girls without breaking down.

  • • •

  Jill Randall McPhearson Niles became someone else when a camera was pointed at her face, someone Rita hardly recognized, someone like Diane Sawyer or Lesley Stahl or one of those TV women who always seemed so much smarter than she was.

  It was true Jill was smart, way smarter than Rita. Hell, she’d always been, always would be. But right now, as Jill interviewed the tribal medicine man about traditions of the cranberry harvest, she also came across as the perfect, all-together woman that Rita would never be. And that had nothing to do with smarts.

  Once the camera was off, Rita hoped Jill could take a few minutes for her—to congratulate her for deciding not to have an abortion and for telling Hazel the news. Then she admitted to herself that maybe what she really wanted from her famous friend Jill was some advice about Charlie, now that it was clear another woman was in his life.

  Rita moseyed through the scant crowd over to the recreation of an ages-old encampment on the north side of Aquinnah. She poked around the food tents where quahogs, chowder, and venison simmered in a blend of island aromas. Then she strolled from the crowd to the edge of the cranberry bogs, their bright red now reaped, their fertile fruit passed.

  She thought about how lucky she was to be having another chance, if that’s what this was. She thought about Kyle … Would he watch over this baby, his brother or sister? Yes, he would. Of course he would.

  Blinking back a mist that had come to her eyes, Rita looked back toward the festivities to see if Jill was finished. But before she saw Jill, she saw Charlie himself, wandering through the people, headed—oh, God, he was headed her way.

  Rita tugged at the edges of her big flannel shirt, trying to conceal her not-quite-plump tummy.

  “Hey, lovely Rita,” he said, which she could have taken as a compliment, but he—and many others—had called her that ever since they were kids, after an old Beatles song.

  “Hey, Charlie,” she said with a nonchalant toss of her red curls that were hinting of gray, thanks to Doc Hastings, who’d told her that pregnant women were warned not to use hair dye—one of the hundred or so new terror-inducing directives that had sprung up sometime between when she’d had Kyle and now. She had not hesitated to tell the doctor that she had smoked and drank and done God-only-knew-what and Kyle had turned out just fine. But the doctor had merely shaken his head as if to say things were different today, as if she didn’t know.

  She leveled her gaze on the unknowing father. “Looking for some old cranberry stories to tell at the tavern?” Though she looked straight at him, she was acutely aware of the right and the left of him. He was alone.

  “Actually,” he said, “I was looking for you.”

  If her heart leaped through her shirt, she wondered if he’d notice. Or was he drunkenly in love with Marge’s sweet mainland ass? “Is Amy okay?” She’d not seen Amy for a few days, having decided to back
off work at the tavern until she had the courage to tell Charlie her news. Perhaps she would never work there again.

  “She’s fine. She’s busy planning the Halloween party. Doing a great job, too.” He stepped closer to her than she would have preferred. “What about you? How are you doin’? I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  Rita shrugged. “Tourists are gone.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Enough. Besides, I stay on the island. These days you seem to prefer land.”

  Charlie’s laugh was gentle and warm. Kyle had had Charlie’s laugh. She touched her stomach and wondered if this baby would, too.

  “I wanted to ask you a favor,” he said. “I’m thinking of renting my apartment.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “My apartment. I’m going to take off for the winter. Florida, maybe.”

  She didn’t allow herself even the tiniest gulp. “Florida? I thought that was for whitehairs. Are you getting old, Charlie?” There would be plenty of time for gulping much later, like all winter or the rest of her life.

  “Maybe you could trade with my mother,” she added. “She has a nice trailer in Coral Gables. And if she stayed in your apartment, she’d be out of my house.” Her words sounded oddly as if she were happy he was going, as if there wasn’t a pain growing bigger in her stomach or an ache swelling in her throat.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his well-worn jeans. “It was just a thought,” he said. “I’ll close up the tavern for the season after Halloween as usual. But if I’m gone, I hate to think there would be no one upstairs. Watching out for the ghosts, or for vagrants or … whatever.”

  Rita remembered more than one time when “vagrants” had appeared—like when Kyle had been conceived in the secret room, or when Amy and Kyle had been caught there in a similar private act. “Do you want me to list the apartment?” she asked, putting her hands in her pockets, mimicking Charlie’s action but unable to stop.

  “Sure,” he said. Then he looked at her sort of queerly, at her cheeks, then her nose, then her mouth. “Rita,” he began, and she felt herself back away.