The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe

by Mary Simses

  “It’s no trouble,” he said. He smiled and I noticed he had dimples. “I went to school with the guy and I’m sure he’d—”

  “Look,” I said, my hands up in protest, my face flushed. “I really appreciate your help, but maybe it’s best if I just get out here and walk back. It’s not far and I’ve taken up way too much of your time already.”

  The little lines in his forehead looked deeper now. “You’re not walking anywhere,” he said, as we waited for a car to go by. “Didn’t mean to get pushy,” he added. “Just thought you should have that checked.”

  He touched the side of my face, tilting my chin to get a better look at the cut, and I felt a tremor go through me.

  “It’s fine,” I said, sitting bolt upright. “I’m…um…leaving tomorrow,” I sputtered, “and…uh…I’ll see my doctor in Manhattan when I get back.”

  Roy shrugged again. “Suit yourself,” he said as he made a left turn, heading for the Victory Inn.

  I looked through the window, wondering if I should say something about the kiss, tell him I was sorry. After all, I didn’t want him thinking that…I didn’t want him thinking anything.

  “I’m sorry about what happened back there,” I said.

  He glanced at me, surprised. “You don’t have to apologize. Rip currents are dangerous. It’s easy to get into trouble—”

  “No, I didn’t mean the rip current,” I said as he pulled to the side of the road next to the inn. “I meant the other…” I couldn’t say it.

  He moved the gearshift to park, sat back in the seat, and ran his hand around the steering wheel. “Well, don’t worry,” he said with a shrug. “It was only a kiss.”

  If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t. Now I felt insulted, as though it had had no impact on him at all.

  “You know,” I blurted out, “people in Maine should keep their docks in better condition.” I could hear the edge in my voice but I couldn’t stop it. “I might have been seriously injured falling through that thing.”

  Roy looked at me, startled. Finally he said, “I’m glad you weren’t injured—talented swimmer like you. And I’m glad I was there to rescue you.” He flipped down his visor, the late afternoon sun having filled the front seat of the car with a golden hue.

  I thought he had to be making fun of me again, but then I saw that his expression was serious.

  “Of course,” he said, smiling now, “one thing people in Maine can do is read. Now if you’d read the sign…”

  What was he talking about? People in Maine reading? What sign?

  “Of course I can read,” I said, feeling even more defensive now, unable to control my strident tone. “I’ve had four years of college and three years of law school. I’ve done plenty of reading.”

  “Law school.” Roy nodded slowly, as though he had just figured something out.

  “Yes, law school,” I said, staring at the side of his face. He had a five o’clock shadow I might have found attractive in some other circumstance, back in my single days. But right now he was really getting on my nerves.

  He turned to me again. “So you’re a lawyer.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And what kind of law do you…well, do?”

  “I work in commercial real estate.”

  “Aha.” He scratched his chin. “So do you know much about trespassing?”

  Well, of course I knew something about trespassing, but it wasn’t an area of the law I had many dealings with.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting up a little straighter. “I know all about trespassing. I’m the firm’s expert in the law of trespass. I handle all the trespass cases.”

  A Toyota stopped across from us and Roy signaled for the driver to go. “A trespass expert,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Do you have to get an extra degree for that?”

  An extra degree? What a ridiculous question. “No, of course you don’t have to—” I stopped because the glint in his eye told me this time he was definitely teasing me.

  “Okay,” he said. “So with your background, all of your reading, and being a trespass expert and all, why didn’t you read the NO TRESPASSING sign by the dock? Or if you did read it, why did you go out there anyway?”

  What NO TRESPASSING sign was he talking about, and why was he cross-examining me? I felt a little stream of water trickling down my back as I vaguely recalled seeing a sign on the beach near the dock. Did it say NO TRESPASSING? Could it have said that? No, that couldn’t be, I thought. Otherwise I was in big trouble here. He’d have every right to think I was a total idiot.

  “I didn’t see any NO TRESPASSING sign,” I told him. “There wasn’t one. I would have noticed.”

  Roy picked a piece of seaweed off of the leg of his jeans and tossed it out the window. “Well, maybe you didn’t notice it,” he said, “but there is a sign there. There’s a new house being built. In fact, I’m working on it. And the dock and the house are on the same property. The sign was put up so people would stay off the property.” He glanced at me. “Especially the dock.”

  I looked down again at my sandy feet and the puddle of water surrounding them as I attempted to put the pieces together. I tried to picture the dock again and the beach. Yes, I could see the sign. White with black lettering. What did it say? Oh, God, I think it did say NO TRESPASSING. I began to feel queasy. I must not have been paying attention at all. How could I have just walked right past the sign onto the dock? Now I was mortified. As a swimmer, I shouldn’t have been caught in a riptide, and as a lawyer I shouldn’t have been trespassing. I unlocked my seat belt with a loud click. I wasn’t going to tell him. I could never admit what I’d done.

  “You know what?” I said, conscious that my voice was wavering and that it had jumped a full octave at this point. “You should tell the owner to keep the property in better condition.” I could feel my throat tighten as I thought about crashing through the dock. “They’re lucky I didn’t get hurt.” I paused. “Or killed.” I waved a finger at Roy. “Somebody could get sued over that dock. It ought to be torn down.”

  There, that’s telling him, I thought, just as a clump of sand dislodged itself from my hair and plopped onto my lap.

  Roy’s expression barely changed, but there was something in his eyes again and on the edge of his mouth that told me he thought this was all very funny. I scooped the sand off my shorts and flicked it onto his floor.

  He glanced at the floor, then looked back at me. “The dock is going to be torn down. That’s why there’s a gate.”

  “Well, the gate’s not locked,” I said, my chin starting to really burn from the cut.

  “It’s supposed to be.”

  “Yes, well, it wasn’t. Otherwise how would I have gotten out there?”

  He looked like he was about to say something, but I barreled on. “And another thing. Maybe you should tell the owner to put that NO TRESPASSING sign right on the dock and not in the middle of the sand.” Great point, I thought. They ought to put it where it really makes sense.

  He turned to me and this time there was no mistaking it. He was smiling—a wry little smile that made me feel I’d become the mouse to his cat. “Oh,” he said. “So you did see the sign.”

  Oh, my God. I’d let myself fall right into my own trap! The man was obnoxious, detestable, insufferable. I felt the heat behind my eyes and I knew I was about to cry. I wasn’t going to let him see that. I opened the car door and jumped out, leaving the seat oozing water.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, trying to sound tough so I wouldn’t cry. I slammed the door and started up the front walk to the inn. Then I heard Roy calling me.

  “Ellen. Hey, Ellen.” He was leaning out the passenger window. His voice sounded serious and his eyes were solemn. There was no trace of that glint I saw when he was teasing me. All right, I thought. Let him say what he wants to say. I started to walk toward the car.

  “Just thought you might be interested,” he said. “They’re having a sale at Bennett Marine Supply
.” Now the smile appeared and I saw his eyes light up. “Life jackets are thirty percent off.”

  Chapter 2

  The Letter

  Wet, exhausted, and humiliated, I marched up the steps to the Victory Inn. Then I cracked open the door and peeked into the lobby. Paula Victory, the owner, was sitting at her desk behind the high wooden counter, her back to me. She was humming. All I wanted to do was run up to my room, get under a steaming hot shower, and forget about the dock, the ocean, and Roy. What I didn’t want to do was let Paula see me.

  The woman could be a little nosy, even bordering on rude. Earlier in the day, when I checked in, I had caught her staring at my engagement ring. Then she had the nerve to ask me if it was real. Now she’d probably want to know why I wasn’t wearing it. Because an hour after coming to your town my fingers swelled up like hot dogs, I would tell her. I could just imagine her expression then. Thank God for the room safe, I thought as I rubbed the bare spot on my finger and pictured my Van Cleef & Arpels ring safe and sound.

  I took a breath and crouched down. Then I crept by the counter, water droplets falling from my clothes, and I made it to the other side of the lobby. Thank God, I thought, pulling a piece of seaweed off my leg. I could just imagine Paula wanting to know why I was soaking wet and whose car door she heard slam outside and just what this visiting New Yorker was doing here in Beacon, anyway.

  As I stepped from the reception area into the hall, I heard her voice behind me. “Forget your bathing suit, Miss Branford?”

  I didn’t stop and I didn’t say a word. I just took the stairs two at a time to the third floor, wishing I was on my way home. I wanted to go back to New York and be with Hayden, curl up next to him on the sofa, and watch Sleepless in Seattle. I wanted to run my hand through his shock of thick hair and trace my fingers across his freshly shaved face. We could be drinking a bottle of Pétrus and eating takeout from San Tropez, that little bistro we like on East 60th. And instead, I was wet and cold and here.

  Hayden was right. I should never have come. I should have put Gran’s letter in the mail instead of driving all the way up here to deliver it. Or I should have waited a while longer for my head to clear before making the trip. It had only been a week since my grandmother’s death. We had been so close and I was still in a state of shock. Maybe that was why I hadn’t paid attention to the NO TRESPASSING sign.

  From the pocket of my shorts I pulled a soggy braided ribbon with the room key attached. I unlocked the door and put the leather jacket over the chair in the corner. Then I peeled off my wet clothes and wrapped myself in a towel. I looked at my watch—six fifteen. I picked up my cell phone from the bedside table and, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I dialed Hayden. His phone rang twice and then I heard a click.

  “Ellen?”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Hayden.”

  “I’ve been trying to get you,” he said. “Everything okay?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could so I wouldn’t cry. I wanted him to hold me. I wanted to feel his arms around me. “Everything’s fine,” I said, but I could hear the tremble in my voice.

  “Where were you this afternoon? I tried to call you a couple of times.”

  I thought about the splintered dock and the Nikon at the bottom of the ocean, the current tugging it along the sand. I thought about Roy and the tired swimmer’s carry. I could not think about the kiss. “I went out for a walk,” I said, my heart aching.

  “Oh, that’s good. You probably needed it after that long drive. So how’s your first trip to Maine? What’s Beacon like?”

  What’s Beacon like? I’m not sure you really want to know, I thought. You and Mom were right. It was a bad idea for me to come. Look what had happened already. Maybe it was just an unlucky place. Maybe that’s why Gran left here as soon as she was old enough to go.

  “Beacon?” I said. “I guess it’s like a lot of other small towns.” I took a deep breath. “Hayden, I was thinking…you were probably right about this whole thing. I mean, there’s no harm in just putting the letter in the mail. And then I could drive back to New York tonight. If I leave by—”

  “What?” He sounded shocked. “Ellen, you just got there. Why would you do that?”

  “But when I left this morning you said—”

  “I know what I said, honey, but I was just being…you know, practical. And I was worried because you were driving up by yourself. I thought you’d get lonely. It’s way too late to leave now.”

  Way too late. I wanted to cry. I looked at the round hooked rug on the bathroom floor—bright blue, red, and gold yarns had been gathered together to create a compass. “I wish you were here.”

  “You know I would have come,” he said, “if I didn’t have that Peterson meeting tomorrow.”

  I knew all about the Peterson meeting. Not only were Hayden and I engaged but we were also partners in the same firm, although he worked in the litigation department. “Listen to me,” he went on. “You said yourself that your grandmother wouldn’t have asked you to do this unless it was really important.”

  I glanced at a framed print above the towel rack—a sailboat approaching a harbor at dusk. “I know, but my mother might have had a point when she said Gran probably didn’t even know what she was talking about at the end. Maybe she was delirious. Maybe she thought Chet Cummings lived down the street. Who knows?”

  “That’s just your mother being your mother, Ellen. I know how much you loved your grandmother and I know that delivering this letter is important to you. And I’m proud of you for doing it.”

  Sitting on the edge of the tub in my towel, I thought about Gran on the last day of her life. Only a week ago we were together in her living room in Pine Point, the Connecticut town where she had lived for years and where my mother still lived. I could see Gran looking so elegant, sitting on the pale blue sofa, her silver hair pulled back and pinned above her neck in the chignon she always wore. She was scratching answers onto the Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle with a fountain pen.

  “Ellen, what’s a five-letter word for ‘sufficient’?” she asked me.

  I thought for a moment, sliding back against my chair, biting into a McIntosh apple. Through the bay window I could see the edge of the slate patio behind the house, ringed by the rose garden, and the swath of green that stretched down the hill to the iron gates at the far end of the driveway. Lawn mowers hummed in the distance like lazy bees.

  “Plenty?” I said, ticking the letters off in my head. “No, that’s six.”

  A breeze floated through the open window, trailing with it the smell of freshly cut grass and rose petals.

  My grandmother muttered something and then turned the newspaper around for me to see. On the page opposite the puzzle, an ad featured a waif of a model wearing a black, boxy-looking dress made out of shiny, crinkly fabric.

  “Looks like a rubbish bag,” Gran said. “Whatever happened to the kind of clothes Jackie Kennedy used to wear? Now, there was an icon.”

  “Jackie Onassis,” I said, correcting her.

  She waved a hand at me. “She’ll always be Jackie Kennedy. No one accepted that man as her husband.”

  “Well, I think she did, Gran.”

  “Nonsense,” my grandmother said. “What could she have seen in him? Of course, he was wealthy, but he wasn’t even attractive. Not like her.”

  I got up from my chair and sat down on the sofa next to my grandmother. “Well, maybe he was attractive in his own way,” I said. “She probably felt safe with him. Kind of like a father figure. After all, she’d come through a horrible experience with the assassination.”

  “That’s not a reason to get married,” she said, shaking her head and bearing down on me with her green eyes.

  My grandmother began to write something on the crossword puzzle. “Aha,” she said. “The word is ample,” and she started to spell it, but when she got to the letter p she stopped. Her body tensed and her head dropped back against the sofa. Her eyes were closed
, but there were deep wrinkles by the sides, as though she were squinting, and her mouth was rigid. I knew she was in pain.

  “Gran?” I took her hand. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” My heart was pounding.

  She tensed again and it looked as though everything in her body had seized up. Then her head flopped down on her chest.

  “Gran!” I screamed, terrified. I clutched her hand tighter. The room seemed to be tilting, everything moving away from me. “Gran, please,” I said. “Tell me you’re okay.” I felt sick to my stomach.

  Then she said my name, her voice faint and breathy.

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’m here, Gran.” Her skin was cold. I could feel the fragile bones beneath the surface. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

  “Ellen,” she whispered again. Her face was white, her eyes were still closed.

  “Don’t talk,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.” I don’t know whom I was trying to convince more—Gran or myself.

  I picked up the phone and pressed the keys for 911. I had to push hard because my fingers felt like jelly. They made me spell the name of the street twice, even though it’s simple. Hill Pond Lane. I must have been talking way too fast. After that I ran to the kitchen and yelled down to Lucy, my grandmother’s housekeeper, asking her to find my mother at the Doverside Yacht Club and then to go to the end of the driveway and flag down the ambulance when she saw it.

  I ran back to my grandmother. Her eyes were half open now but they weren’t moving. She stared at me. Then, grabbing my wrist with a strength I found surprising, she pulled me close. My ear was near her cheek and I could smell her lavender perfume. “Please,” she said, the word hardly more than a puff of air. “There’s a letter…I’ve written. The bedroom.” Her grip tightened again. “You…take it to him…Ellen.”

  “Gran, I—”

  “Take him the letter. Just…promise.”