Sand Castles

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  So why was Zack so convinced that she hadn't? Could he simply have been trying to justify giving Zina half of an inheritance that was specifically meant for him? Very possibly; that would be like Zack.

  Or maybe by the time that Aunt Louise changed her will, she wasn't as sharp as she once had been; she might have been fuzzy about everything but her hostility toward her nephew.

  Maybe.

  Maybe she had nurtured old feelings of jealousy because her beloved Ginger had taken such a shine to young Zina.

  Ridiculous.

  Maybe she simply had wanted to substitute one male heir, any male heir, for the other, despised one. But hadn't she been a suffragist?

  Maybe she just hadn't cared.

  Maybe she just hadn't been able to remember Zina's name.

  Maybe there was no inheritance.

  Zina lifted her chin and stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, seeing everything. There was money, but maybe it wasn't from an inheritance. Oh, my God. What were the lawyers' names? Oh, my God. She placed her hand over her pounding heart; she felt as if she'd been shot. Oh, my God.

  Smith, Reston, and Upton.

  Chapter 13

  "Wendy Hodene, you are completely insane if you move back to the old house after this."

  "How can you say that, Char? That house was built by our great-grandparents with their own bare hands. All of our memories are there—yours, mine, everyone's. Someone has to hold on to it," Wendy explained as she opened the windows all the way to the cool sea breeze. "It might as well be me."

  Wendy's older sister, eight months pregnant, was touring the beach house for the first time. Charlotte lived in rural Saunderstown at the southern end of the state. A typical Rhode Islander, she acted as if she lived on the far side of the moon and hadn't been able to make it up to Providence, much less Barrington, until the afternoon of the actual birthday party.

  Like everyone else, she was charmed by the view of the whitecapped bay and by the boats pulled up and tied to the wild rosebushes on the beach. Like everyone else, she thought the house was perfect and her sister was out of her mind.

  "No. I'm sorry," Charlotte said, honestly at a loss. "Why would you go back, even with the extra room, if you can live here instead?"

  Wendy patted her sister's belly as she passed her and said, "Because the old house makes me happy in a more familiar way, that's why. Why can't anyone understand that?"

  She threw a second window all the way open to the warm, salty, southwest flow of air. It really was a perfect day, with the promise of summer a full-blown reality. All of the visitors and guests were present and accounted for, and all of them had easily managed to fit. Spirits were high, partly because everyone's elbows hadn't been in everyone else's faces all day. This was going to work, and Wendy was as amazed as she was pleased. Fantasies rarely turned out to be true.

  "So what's the deal with Mom?" Charlotte asked with a glance at the hall beyond the door of the master bedroom. "Why was she sniffling when we arrived?"

  "Oh, she just got a little weepy when she went into the pantry and saw the sixty-five candles on the sheet cake. You can have the energy of a forty-year-old, and you can look like a fifty-year-old, but you can't really argue with a candle. Plus now I hear it's bugging her that she'll be an official senior citizen more than a year before Dad."

  "Only Mom," said Charlotte, shaking her head. "Does she think Dad's going to run off with some young sixty-four-year-old arm candy?"

  "Who knows? I say, never marry a man younger than you are, even by two minutes, if something like that matters so much."

  "Yeah ... trouble is, you don't realize it's going to matter until later."

  "I disagree," Wendy said, because she'd been thinking about it a lot. "When you look at a guy as husband material, you should walk yourself through a bunch of different scenarios. You should say,'What's the worst thing that can happen? I'll be sixty-five a year before he will. Can I live with that? Yes.' You move on to the next question. 'What's the worst thing that can happen? He'll forget our anniversaries. Can I live with that? Yes.' Next question. 'Will he leave his dirty underwear on the floor?' I mean, it's not all that complicated to figure out what you can stand and what you can't."

  "Gee," Charlotte said in a voice like unbuttered toast, "now you tell me."

  "At least you saw your mistake with Derek and you cut your losses," Wendy said quickly. "And anyway," she added, rubbing a smudge from the white woodwork with a wet finger, "I was only sixteen when you eloped. I hadn't worked out a system yet."

  Charlotte wasn't buying it. "You talk so rational, but you're the most sentimental one in the family. Oh, hell," she said, interrupting herself. "I have to pee. Again." She went into the master bathroom and left the door open so that they could continue their conversation. "What about Jim? Did you walk through a set of hypotheticals before you married him?"

  Wendy sat on the bed while she waited. "Of course. I said, 'He's hot. Mom hates him. What's the worst she could do to me?'"

  From the bathroom she heard her sister laugh and then say a little ruefully, "And now he's her favorite son-in-law."

  Of only two. Wendy went over to the bathroom doorway so that she could say directly to her sister, "Give it time, Charlotte. She'll come around."

  "I've been married to John for eight years, Wendy. I have a kid, another almost here. No, she won't come around. Not unless Derek gets run over by a bus. That's the only way my present marriage will become legitimate in her eyes. The way it is now, she looks at me as if I'm a ... a bigamist."

  "That's an exaggeration."

  "Just barely."

  "It could be worse. Take Dave—"

  "And do what with him?" asked her brother. He was in the hall and he detoured into the bedroom when he heard his name mentioned.

  Wendy closed the door on Charlotte and said to him, "Is there an age limit for applying to the priesthood? Because Mom's getting a little impatient waiting for you to turn your life around, little brother."

  "Mm. Looks like I should've brought Noreen," he said, looking gravely pensive. "Mom would've taken one look at her tattoos and disowned me. Problem solved."

  "Baloney," Wendy said. "You didn't bring Noreen because you're bored with Noreen. You've been seeing her for, what, two whole months? Oh, yeah. You're bored."

  "No I'm not. This time it's real."

  "Baloney bullshit."

  Dave was ready to change the subject. Winking at Wendy as he walked past, he went up to the bathroom door and began banging on it with both hands. "How long you gonna be in there, for cryin' out loud?" he yelled. "Stop hogging! I'm gonna be late for school and it'll be all your fault! What good is lipstick gonna do, cowface? You'll still be ugly. Hurry up or I'm tellin'!"

  The door opened and Charlotte, the prettiest woman in the house, gave her brother a withering look, just the way she used to do when she was fifteen and Dave was eight.

  "If you tease me, I'll cry," she promised with sweet sarcasm. "My hormones are all fuh—"

  Dave sucked in his breath, scandalized. "I'm tellin'."

  He threw his arm around his older sister and kissed her on her cheek and said, "You're naming him after me, right?"

  "Just what we need: another David. Besides, who says it's going to be a boy?"

  "You know?"

  "I'm not tellin', nyah, nyah," Charlotte said with a snippy smile.

  They walked out together ahead of a happy, grinning Wendy and she thought, I can't ask for more than this. It's all I've ever wanted, to have us all together and getting along.

  Family was everywhere, grown-ups sprinkled liberally with children. The men were being primitive, hovering with their beers around the coals that Jim had fanned into something just short of a bonfire. The women were being—well, domestic, cooing over the delightful fabrics and furnishings, drifting from one thing to another with expressions of surprise and pleasure.

  Because nothing actually belonged to Wendy and Jim, no one was tempted to be jealous
. They could all admire the owners' keen eye without wanting to poke out Wendy's, and she was grateful for that. It added another layer of happiness to a day she knew she would always remember.

  The updated kitchen was still on the small side, crowded with cooks and assemblers. Since Mark's wife, Marianne, was a nutritionist in a hospital, it conferred a halo of authority on her. She commandeered the kitchen, and that was fine with Wendy; she preferred to wander and visit and take it all in. Her brother Frank and his wife hadn't been east for a year; their once-colicky baby was now a not-so-terrible two who liked being around people and noise. Wendy adored her and held her every chance she got.

  The rest of the kids were divided into two broad age groups. The older ones had had their swims and sails and were now all piled into the attic with their video games, while the younger ones, led by Tyler, amused themselves building sand castles, despite the fact that the sand wasn't quite as white and fine as Tyler—an expert from way back—would have liked.

  Gracie Ferro's generation was there in quiet force. Wendy's mother had invited three of her dearest friends (all of them older than sixty-five, which may or may not have been coincidence), and they sat in Adirondack chairs on the patio like the grandes dames they were, with a steady stream of attendants appearing to ask whether they'd like their drinks refreshed, or a bit more dip.

  Wendy's father sought her out. "This is nice. This is very nice, Wenda," he said, using her birth name as he always did when he was pleased with her performance. "The food so far is very, very good. Good snacks. And I'm glad you're making steamers."

  "Dad! How could I not?" Wendy asked. "No clams? You wouldn't have come!"

  "You know that's not true," he said, looking vaguely shocked. Unlike his wife, Charlie Ferro had no sense of irony at all, which made him all the more irresistible a target to his kids.

  "You're right, Dad. I know that's not true," Wendy assured him gravely.

  "But listen. Next time—don't plan to grill the lobsters," he said with a discreet warning shake of his head. "They dry out. You leave them on two minutes too long, you got cardboard. Next time, just boil 'em, honey. It's the only way. Believe me."

  "You want us to boil yours, Dad? It's no trouble."

  "No, no, no," he said, aghast at the suggestion. "How would that look, a special order for me? Just—next time. Okay?"

  In the year before he met Gracie O'Byrne, Charlie Ferro had bought himself a skiff and a bullrake, and he'd spent the spring, summer, and fall on Narragansett Bay, harvesting the oversized clams that Rhode Islanders alone called quahogs, and selling them to a fish market in old, unrestored downtown Providence. It had been backbreaking, heartbreaking work, and by the end of the year, not surprisingly, he was broke. And in love with Gracie O'Byrne.

  So he sold the rig and went back to work in a chrome-plating shop half a mile inland. Nevertheless, his year on the water had been the most profoundly satisfying of his life. All of his kids knew it, because he went back to it over and over in his reminiscences about the good old days. He had loved being in his own boat and plying a trade on the bay. It was as simple as that.

  When he married Gracie and went to work in the fume-filled plating shop, he gave up a lot more than the joy of harvesting the sea: during the quarter century that he had worked with the toxins, his kidneys had taken a beating, and his health was no longer robust. His early retirement had been proof of the fact.

  "Well, Dad, you're the family expert on seafood, and that's all there is to it," Wendy said, and this time she wasn't being ironic but affectionate. Humbled and grateful that her father had done what it took to stay married to Gracie O'Byrne and raise their five kids, Wendy hugged him lightly and said, "You're a good man, Charlie Ferro. What can I get you to eat?"

  ****

  By the time she worked through the detour from the closed-off exit on Gano Street, Zina was a nervous wreck; she'd never driven on such harrowing highways in her life. She'd nearly been sideswiped by a merging car, and then when she'd slammed on the brakes to let him squeeze in ahead of her, she'd nearly been rear-ended. Before she drove back to Worcester, she was going to have to revisit the map for a back-road route.

  It wasn't just the state of the crowded, curving highway that was making her drive so badly; it was the state of her mind. She was upset and angry, disappointed and shocked, and very likely she shouldn't even have been behind a wheel. But there wasn't any other way to find out exactly who Jim Hodene was. Or wasn't. Her brother certainly wasn't going to tell her. Zack couldn't be trusted at all. First her parents, then Jimmy, and now Zack. It didn't seem possible.

  How could he do that—lie to her about Aunt Louise? It took Zina's breath away that he had been able to look her straight in the eye and say that Aunt Louise had just died and had left him an inheritance. Louise Odette had died years ago, Zina now knew, and if she retained any lawyers to disperse her money, their names were not Smith, Reston, and Upton: there was no such firm in Omaha. No, if Zack had inherited anything, he would have heard about it long before now.

  So where had Zack gotten the money? He hadn't robbed a bank; Zina would have heard it on the news. And he hadn't made that kind of fortune making reproductions of antique furniture, no matter how respected he was at his craft.

  So where had he gotten the money?

  How about a lottery?

  It didn't take a degree in math to figure out that a lottery winner would have lots of money to throw around. A lottery winner might not even miss a few hundred thousand dollars. So the next question was, why would a lottery winner have thrown so much money at Zack?

  Damn you, Jimmy. Damn you, Zack.

  Tears began to flow again; she was incapable of stopping them any longer and just let them roll. Street signs blurred in front of her until she wiped her eyes, and then she saw that some of them said, "Fox Point," so she had to be in the right neighborhood. It hadn't been very hard to find at all, even in her distracted state.

  Why had she ever let Zack do her legwork for her? If it was to save her some heartbreak, then the mission was a failure. Her heart wasn't just broken now, it was shattered, and she was faint from the pain of feeling each of its million splinters.

  She drove slowly past the houses on Sheldon Street, reading the numbers, aware that one of the houses coming up was under construction. Pausing in front of that one, she saw that the numbers matched the address that she'd found in the white pages of her library's old Providence directory. The six was upside down and hanging by one screw, but, yes, the numbers did match. She parked her yellow Civic behind a delivery truck in front of the house and got out.

  She approached it like a zombie, half convinced that someone else, someone fierce and determined and with nothing to lose, was inhabiting her body. She watched herself go up to two young guys who were helping a deliveryman unload stacks of wood shingles from the lumberyard truck. She listened to herself ask them, "Do you know where I can find Jim Hodene?"

  She was amazed at how clear, how calm, how pleasant she sounded. It was someone else speaking, not her.

  One of the guys, bare-chested and stripped down to his baggy shorts, said, "He just moved out last weekend."

  "Oh," she said, crushed. "Far?"

  The bare-chested guy shrugged and answered, "If you call a ten-minute drive far."

  She found herself smiling at him and trying to charm. "Could you give me directions?"

  He shrugged again and said, "Nope. All I know is he's renting a place on the beach in Barrington."

  The other guy said to him, "How could you not know the street? Pete must've mentioned it six times: Starboard Lane, for crissake."

  "Who listens to Pete?" said the first guy, looking embarrassed.

  Zina didn't know who Pete was, and she didn't dare ask.

  Instead she said shyly, "Do you think that Jim—Mr. Hodene would be home now?"

  "Well, he's not working at a job, that's for sure," the second guy said with a snicker.

  "You wouldn't happen
to have a street number, would you?" Zina asked. She had no idea how many houses were on Starboard Lane, although it didn't sound long.

  "Just look for a blue Expedition."

  The guy in the tank top seemed to regret having spoken and began warning off the other one. "What're you, a friggin' tour guide?" he snapped.

  His co-worker became defensive. "What's the big deal? Everybody around here knows where he moved." But he seemed to back off after that, and the two of them went back to unloading the shingles.

  Zina thanked them—someone thanked them, anyway; the voice was coming out of her body—and then she got back in her car and reached for the street map that was opened on the front seat.

  Barrington really wasn't all that far, and Zina was back on the hellish highway in minutes.

  She found Barrington, and she found Starboard Lane. Now all she had to do was find her husband.

  It was a beautiful evening, and the gardeners of the neighborhood were out in force; Zina felt anything but anonymous, driving past them in a yellow Civic while trying not to look lost.

  There was only one Ford Expedition on the street, and she was dismayed to see that it wasn't alone: it was parked in a driveway that was filled with cars. There were cars parked up and down the street in front of the house as well, and red helium balloons shaped like hearts and flowers were tied to a lattice arch that was weighed down with red roses: Jim Hodene was apparently having a housewarming party.

  In some odd way, seeing the balloons gave Zina hope.

  No one would tie red balloons to a house if he'd once run away from his pregnant wife. This man, this Jim Hodene, couldn't be her Jimmy Hayward. If she could just see him, she'd know. If this Jim weren't her Jimmy, then Zack was telling the truth and she was being a suspicious fool and everything would be fine.

  Except for the fake inheritance.

  It was that fake inheritance that made her slam on the brakes and squeeze her Civic between two cars parked out in the lane. It was that fake inheritance that made her get out of her car and approach the house with a fake bounce in her step, as if she were the fake guest of honor and all the balloons, not fake, were really for her.