Bex waved good-bye. The door jingled shut behind her. Mark was still talking. “Tell you what,” Peggy jumped in. “I’ll have Bex call you.” She hung up.
Padma was wandering among the displays, dabbing herself with essential oil. “Who was that?”
“A sales rep. If you get one of those calls, give it to Bex. She’s the only one who can rein them in.” Peggy wished Bex had stayed a little longer; she would have liked to hear the rest of what Dr. Kaplan had said. She decided to stop over at Bex’s place after work.
“Got it.” Padma reached her arm up and over to scratch her own back. There was a small tattoo on the side of her neck that said “IH.” Padma had explained this was so she got a friendly message when she looked in the mirror: HI. “Can I run out for coffee? I was up till, like, four.”
“Get me a cup, too, and I’ll treat.” Peggy took a twenty from the register.
Padma dashed for the door. “Someone dropped off an envelope for you guys yesterday,” she called over her shoulder.
The envelope was from Empire Property Management.
The new lease would be inside. Peggy wasn’t ready to open it without Bex around for moral support, although if Bex did get pregnant, Peggy would have to shoulder more of these burdens on her own. When Bex got pregnant, Peggy corrected herself. She wished she could figure out a way to solve the coming rent crisis on her own.
She put away the unopened envelope and returned to the Gaia Apothecary purchase order, then gave up and studied her pre-engagement ring. All right—a vague promise wasn’t what she’d hoped was in that Tiffany box. What she’d really wanted to do last night was shake Brock and yell, Just get on with it! Everyone’s already having babies! How long would it be before Bex, too, abandoned Peggy for her new role and new friends—mommy friends with whom she’d have everything in common?
No, Peggy decided. Better to think positive: A real proposal couldn’t be far off. She tested phrases in her head: Mrs. Patricia Adams Clovis. Brock and Peggy Clovis. Mr. and Mrs. Brock Clovis. She could use this waiting time to at long last get Bex to see Brock’s good side, to think of him as a friend in his own right, the way Peggy loved Bex’s lawyer husband, Josh. Bex could certainly stand to be more tolerant of Brock’s marriage fears, since Bex had her own odd notions about relationships. She’d been with Josh eight years, ever since he’d moved in down the hall from the apartment Bex and Peggy had shared and had come over with a letter for Bex that had accidentally ended up in his mailbox. But after five happy years of marriage, Bex and Josh still lived in their separate apartments. Bex called it the best of both worlds—she and Josh could be together when they wanted and alone when they needed. But once, Josh had confided in Peggy, “I think she likes to believe she has an escape route.”
The bells tinkled, and in a flash the room was overflowing with the orthodontic smiles and tossing hair and high-pitched shrieking of a horde of teenage girls cutting class. One was preoccupied with a text message on her pink phone and nearly upended a table of organic soaps. “Watch out, Courtney!” a second girl screeched from behind her Chanel sunglasses.
“Stop it!” squealed a third.
“Devon, cut it out!” yelled a fourth.
Peggy was thinking she’d have to say something, but just then the bells heralded the return of Padma, who stepped briskly into the maelstrom. “Hold this.” She handed a teen a coffee cup. The girl took it, surprised. Padma held a patchouli-passion-fruit candle high above her head, a retail Statue of Liberty. “Get this. A couple of nights ago I lit one of these just before a guy came to my apartment to study, and now he’s, like, my boyfriend. The wax melts into massage oil!”
“No way!” The girls started to grab for candles.
Padma caught Peggy’s eye and grinned, just as the phone began to ring. Peggy nodded—Don’t stop doing what you’re doing—and reached for the handset.
“I’m looking for Peggy Adams,” said the man on the line.
The teenager Courtney placed her candle on the counter. Peggy clutched the phone in one hand and started to ring up the purchase. “This is Peggy,” she spoke into the receiver.
“This is Luke.”
Another sales rep. Peggy held the receiver against her shoulder. “Enjoy your candle.” She gave the girl her receipt.
“Are you there?” the man asked.
The girl with the Chanel sunglasses put three candles on the counter.
“You’re calling from where?” Peggy understood the man on the phone was just doing his job, but really, there were too many reps asking for their money. There was a new chain of stores in the Midwest, Bath, that was having success by showcasing hundreds of bath-and-body lines in huge, airy spaces, but Peggy and Bex had to make do with keeping their shop small and praying the rent stayed low enough to keep them in business.
“I’m from New Nineveh. But we—”
“The thing is, we already carry a biblical line that’s doing well for us.”
The Chanel girl waved an American Express card from chipped-burgundy-polished fingertips. “I’d like each of these candles gift-wrapped individually.”
Courtney clutched the girl’s arm. “They’re presents? For who?”
“For me. I like opening presents.”
“I want mine wrapped!” Courtney shrilled.
“I think it would be best if you called back and spoke with my partner,” Peggy said into the phone.
“This is important,” the man said. “You and I, we met in Las Vegas. You passed out in my room.”
Peggy felt her heart stop beating.
The Chanel girl drummed her fingers. “Hello, gift-wrap?”
“Why are you calling?” Peggy was untethered, careening between disbelief and alarm; anxiety wrapped itself around her chest.
“I live in Connecticut. We should meet.”
“You live in Connecticut?” This was a practical joke. Or a mistake. Or a scam. It had to be. How could a person she’d met nearly all the way across the country possibly end up residing one state away? She didn’t bother hiding the disbelief in her voice. “Then what were you doing in Vegas? Isn’t that a little far from home?”
His voice was aggravatingly calm. “I could ask the same of you.”
“It was my first time there. I’m not a Vegas person, believe me.”
“Rest assured, neither am I. Now, can you meet me? For coffee, maybe.”
“I can’t meet you. I’m…” She ducked her head and whispered, “Involved with someone.”
“It didn’t seem that way Saturday night.”
This couldn’t be happening. “I’m engaged. To be engaged. I’ll be getting married probably in a year or two.” Nor was she sure why she felt the need to explain herself, especially with a trumped-up story. Brock had put no time frame on their pre-betrothal. “I have a promise ring,” she finished lamely. “I can’t have coffee with you.”
“You can’t get married,” the caller said.
“Oh, really?” She didn’t need this. Not from Bex and not from some stranger she’d…No, don’t think about it. She turned to face the wall, away from the prying eyes of her customers and Padma. “Brock and I love each other, and when people love each other, they get married. I can get married, and I will get married.”
“I’m afraid you’re wrong,” he answered. “You’re already married. To me.”
THREE
Luke!” Abigail was calling. “Luke!”
Luke Sedgwick awoke with a start at the unexpected noise. He must have dozed off. The events of the weekend, topped off by this morning’s uncomfortable phone call, had left him with a deep weariness a good night’s sleep would go a long way toward curing. Now sleep wasn’t in the cards tonight, either.
“Luke!”
He consulted his watch: It was Monday, one twenty-two in the afternoon. He’d been unconscious only a few minutes. He slid his glasses onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. If only he had been asleep for the past fifty-two hours. There would have been no trip to
Las Vegas, no Family Asset Management Conference, no unfortunate dalliance.
He tried again to recall what had happened Saturday night—after the point where he’d drunk so many Scotches that he’d forgotten he was Luke Silas Sedgwick IV of the Connecticut Sedgwicks. The Connecticut Sedgwicks who, with the possible exception of Luke’s black-sheep uncle Bink, would never have gotten into such a mess. Luke thought back and came up with the same unsatisfactory snippets: An intoxicating fragrance. A black dress. An attraction so intense, it had seemed preordained. A piercing disappointment at finding himself alone in the morning. Beyond that, impenetrable nothingness.
He shouldn’t have let Tom Ver Planck talk him into attending that conference. “It’s an opportunity. Don’t waste it,” his friend had said. Ver Planck, whose name and business reputation garnered him a hundred such unsolicited invitations a year, had been offered an all-expenses-paid trip by the conference organizers. “If anyone asks, just pretend you’re one of my associates.” Ver Planck had practically shoved the first-class plane ticket into Luke’s hand. “And have some fun. You and Nicki called it quits, right? You’re a free agent.”
“Luke!” his great-aunt continued to call.
Still, Ver Planck had been right; Luke had picked up some useful investing advice. And despite his weariness, he had actually written a little today. A small miracle.
He contemplated a jagged sheet of plaster about to fall from the ceiling of his third-floor study, then reread the paper in front of him:
They’re all so frail, these sunveined southern winds
vanishing the day dark northern chill begins;
Bright leaves imitate flowers, but soon descend
to frost-barbed, tattered ruin…
These were the first lines he’d composed in ages, arriving out of nowhere this morning as soon as he’d hung up the phone, and not that bad, though “imitate” was all wrong and threw off the meter. “Bright leaves suggest flowers” worked better.
Luke returned to his computer screen, where columns of numbers taunted him. He thought he should turn on a light; the day was already fading. Summer was over, and any of its lingering pleasures—a long afternoon, a last, unexpected blackberry from the bush by the south fence—were understood by Luke, as by all native New Englanders, to be temporal.
Another thing Luke knew was that it was hard to be alone in a two-hundred-plus-year-old New England house, even with only one other person living in it. It wasn’t the presence of ghosts—though Abigail insisted there were many—it was that the musty old mausoleum couldn’t keep quiet. Luke tracked the progress of Abigail Agatha Sarah Sedgwick as she ascended the front staircase: a sharp creak from the third step from the bottom, which had been making that same noise for as far back as he could remember. Then a rhythmic trembling as the staircase strained to support all five feet and ninety pounds of its owner. Luke was nearly twice Abby’s weight and over a foot taller, and when he walked, the house would vibrate with each footstep, its six-on-six paned windows rattling in their rotting casements. The Silas Sedgwick House—erected twenty years after the Revolutionary War by Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick, farmer, merchant, and patriot, and built grander and larger by his descendants; for over two centuries the pride of New Nineveh, Connecticut—threatened to come crashing down around the only two remaining Sedgwicks: Abigail and Luke, Silas’s great-great-great-grandson.
Any day now, Luke thought. When he was having a particularly bad time in the market, which so far in his new career of Sedgwick family financial manager was the rule rather than the exception, he would cheer himself with fantasies of the house’s demise. In his current favorite, Abigail’s beloved black cat, Quibble, in a rare daytime foray out from under Abby’s bed, leaped onto the mantel in the grand parlor, setting off a chain of events ending with the cat still perched calmly on the intact fireplace surrounded by three stories of rubble.
“Luke!” The scratched crystal doorknob rasped, the double doors squeaked open, and his great-aunt stepped into what had once been the Sedgwick ballroom and was now Luke’s study. Abigail’s faded brown eyes were fierce. Her white hair stood out from her scalp. “It’s that Riga woman.” She stomped one foot. “Come with me.”
“What’s she done now?” Luke decided to interpret Abigail’s appearance as a sign that it was time to quit for the afternoon. He closed out his positions and shut down the computer. He stretched his legs, which felt easily as old as the house.
Abigail led him down the new staircase—as the family still called the back steps, rebuilt after the fire of 1827—to the first floor. She skirted the grand parlor and led him down another hallway, past the east addition, circa 1850 and now closed off and cobwebby, and onto one of the Sedgwick House’s three porches: the screened-in one called Charity’s Porch, after the long-deceased ancestor for whom it had been built. Charity’s Porch faced out onto the garden, which extended back three acres to Market Road. It was toward that far end of the garden that Abigail pointed a spindly finger.
“There. Plain as day.”
Luke squinted toward the road at the new structure that had sprung up. It appeared to be a small, covered, open-sided farm stand. Its yellow, virgin wood had not yet been battered by one of New Nineveh’s legendary nor’easters. “Go get your sweater and we’ll have a look,” he said, thinking of Abby’s bark-colored gardening sweater, which hung on a hook in the mudroom, its pockets always filled with crumpled Kleenex, and was older than he was.
“I don’t need a sweater.”
Luke tried to argue that it was getting cool outside. Abigail insisted she wasn’t cold, and inevitably won, and it wasn’t until some time later that the two were walking over the uneven stone path, Luke moving aside overgrown bushes of crispy brown roses, until they reached the structure and went around to the front, which faced the traffic on Market. A neatly hand-lettered sign read: “Fall Color, $1.50 Per Branch.” The stand was otherwise empty; the autumn leaves wouldn’t be at their peak until at least Columbus Day.
“It’s the spitting image of our flower stand,” Abigail said. “If I weren’t a Sedgwick, I’d march right over to Lowie’s office. If I had stolen Ernestine Riga’s idea, instead of the other way around, she would prosecute to the full extent of the law.”
“Now, now…” Luke put his hand on her arm.
“Don’t you ‘now, now’ me, young man.”
“It’s called capitalism, Abby.” And I’m hardly young, he added silently, though currently he wasn’t convinced he’d learned anything in his forty-one years. He, unlike Abigail, did need to talk to Lowell Mayhew, and right away. He wanted this mess over with. The sooner the better. Thankfully, it seemed Peggy Adams did as well, though if Luke were the sort to let his emotions rule him, he might have admitted to the smallest pang of disappointment that she’d been so quick to agree.
Abby turned her back on the flower stand. “In that case, I’ll beat Ernestine at her own game. Anyone can see the quality of our trees. Before Bink sold off the pumpkin patch, we had the most marvelous pumpkins, too. Perhaps we should grow pumpkins on our twenty acres, Luke.”
Pumpkins. That would cover the property tax for sure. “I’m off, Abigail. I’ve got to run to Seymour’s and do some errands and tie up some loose ends. I’ll be home tonight, but very late.”
“Loose ends, my foot.”
You have no idea, he wanted to say.
“Seeing that Pappas girl is more like it. Why are you still courting her when you should be out finding a wife? A wife with proper manners and a proper name?”
Luke felt slightly ill at the word wife.
“There’s nothing wrong with ‘Nicole.’ It’s a perfectly fine name.” He was aware this wasn’t the half of his currently off-again (but no doubt after tonight, if history was a reliable predictor, on-again) girlfriend’s name to which his great-aunt was referring. Abigail wanted Luke to pair off with a nice girl from a nice old New England family with a nice old New England pedigree; a woman worthy of providing an h
eir to the obsolete Sedgwick legacy and the no-longer-existent Sedgwick fortune. Luke had never pointed out that Abby’s plans for him ran counter to her own youthful romantic past. He knew how she would respond: that he was the last Sedgwick, and a man. That he had a duty to the family.
Nicki was neither wholesome nor pedigreed, precisely what he found most appealing about her. That, and her aversion to marriage, which matched, if not surpassed, his own. You don’t need to worry about Nicki. She doesn’t believe in marriage any more than I do, he generally told Abigail. And in case you hadn’t noticed, nice old New England families are virtually extinct.
Both statements were true. Yet here Luke was in a position he’d never considered: not only married, but married to a stranger.
“I’m not seeing Nicole tonight; I’m playing poker,” he lied, not in the mood to be scolded. “You’ll be okay. Don’t forget to leave on the hall light in case you get up in the night. And put your cell phone near your bed. If you can’t reach me, call the Fiorentinos, and Annette or Angelo will help you.”
Abigail drew her mouth into a frown. “Leaving lights on wastes money. And if I need to talk, I’ll talk to Quibble. I don’t like that cellular geegaw. I don’t trust a phone without a cord.”
Though he wouldn’t admit it to Abigail, Luke shared her innate suspicion of any technology not around since he was a child. He tolerated his computer and cell phone only because he couldn’t do his job without them. “I put Annette’s number on your nightstand. It’s right there, so you can’t miss it.”
She wore the same keen expression she had when he was sixteen and home from school for the summer and Ernestine Riga had told her a nighttime vandal had been running amok through town, knocking over flower boxes and throwing eggs at shop windows. Abigail had repeated the story to Luke after his parents had sent him to mow her lawn. “I sure will be sorry for the culprit’s family once Officer Wharton catches him. They’ll be terribly ashamed,” she’d said mildly, and pinned Luke with that look. The vandal never struck again.
Mating Rituals of the North American WASP Page 3
