Keepsake

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Sorry to interrupt," Laura said, yanking her sister out of her monologue. "Rinnie, Miss Widdich just stopped by to see you. She was behaving a little oddly, and—"

  She saw the visitor barely suppress a smile; obviously he, too, was familiar with the odd Miss Widdich. Who the hell was he? She marched up to him and, over Corinne's belated effort, began to introduce herself. "I'm Corinne's sister—"

  "Laura. Of course. I'd know you anywhere," he said, his smile broadening.

  When she looked blank, the visitor added quickly, "Ken. Ken Barclay? We went to the same grade school?"

  Laura was speechless. She blinked and stared and finally said, "Kendall?"

  "One and the same. How are you?"

  Skinny, geeky, brainy, rich, and haughty Kendall?

  "You're him?"

  He laughed and said, "Last time I looked at my driver's license, anyway."

  She wanted to see that license. The man standing in front of her was six-foot-something, solidly built, and knockdown, drag-out sexy. Not to mention devoid of braces and a bumpy forehead. Those fierce blue eyes: something about them looked vaguely the same, but even there ....

  Kendall Barclay.

  The effect he had on her was dizzying, almost violent. Laura's cheeks went hot with the recollection of their fateful encounter. Suddenly she was thirteen and ill-dressed, with dirt under her fingernails and surrounded by a group of cruel, taunting boys grabbing and pawing and tearing her shirt.

  No wonder he'd been able to recognize her so easily. Damn it, she still looked the same!

  Her cheeks fired up even hotter with embarrassment when he extended his hand and she was forced to extend her own, with its bloody, bruised knuckles and dirty fingernails. She kept the handshake firm, though, as she explained, "I'm working the greenhouse detail today."

  "So I see. Nice to have you back. Corinne tells me that you're working like gangbusters on the West Coast as a computer consultant?"

  It was that question mark, coupled with a furtive glance at her clown-sized pants and her belt of rope, that instantly got under Laura's skin. It was so obvious that he found the idea of her success a hard one to swallow.

  "Well, you know what they say about the self-employed," she said, recovering enough to give him a very dry smile. She gestured with both hands toward her pants. "Every day is casual Friday."

  He followed her gesture, looking blank for a second. "Oh. You mean—" He dipped his head in a nod at her getup. "I never even noticed."

  "Well, thank you for that."

  Even worse. To someone like Kendall Barclay, she would always be one of the Shore urchins, beneath notice. It didn't help that his neck was turning red. Clearly he felt that she was putting him on the spot, taking everything to a personal level.

  Which she was. For God's sake, she hadn't actually talked to him in, what, twenty years? Surely she could handle a chance encounter better than this!

  But she couldn't. All she could see was a blurry circle of boys around her, taking turns grabbing at her breasts and at her crotch.

  "Laura? What, um, was it that you were saying about Miss Widdich?" Corinne's voice was faint with fear, as if she were watching her sister standing in a pit with a cobra and poking it with a stick. You are messing with the man who holds the key to our survival.

  Maybe yes, maybe no. In an almost wrenching act of self-control, Laura swept away the memory of the circle of cruel boys and said to Corinne, "I think Miss Widdich would like to talk to you whenever you have time, Rinnie."

  And then, still feeling fierce about the cruel note she'd got from Kendall all those years ago, she said in a fiercely pleasant voice, "Miss Widdich brought us a huge casserole for lunch. Cheese and noodles. You're welcome to join us in our peasant fare."

  He backpedaled from the invitation as fast as politeness allowed. Shooting an arm through the sleeve of his jacket, he glanced at his watch. "Ah-h, thanks very much, but I have another appointment. I'm running a little late as it is, so I'd better get going."

  With a friendly smile to Corinne, he said, "I'll see you on Wednesday, then."

  When he shifted his attention back to Laura, his manner changed. He cleared his throat. Compressed his lips in a tight smile. Gazed doggedly at her chin. "Well. Good seeing you again after all—"

  He had to clear his throat again. "These years."

  It was obvious to Laura: he remembered. He remembered, and he was embarrassed about it. He should be, damn it. If she had not been a Shore, would he have been so arrogant and unfeeling in his note back to her?

  You shouldn't be writing to me.

  Don't do it again.

  And don't ever try to see me.

  Laura was a big girl now, but those scribbled words still cut like razorblades across the thin surface of her self-esteem.

  "Good to see you, too—after all these years. But I'm sure I'll be seeing you again," she said coolly.

  Not only that, but she was already planning what she'd be wearing when she did.

  ****

  As he walked back to his car, Ken pulled irritatedly at his tie: he felt too buttoned up by half. The way his blood was pumping, he was ready to burst a blood vessel.

  And it wasn't because of the heat of the day. Seeing Laura so unexpectedly had set his pulse roaring along, trying to keep up with his libido. Even now, he was at a loss why: she had just done everything but cross her forearms at him.

  Maybe he shouldn't have been surprised. Maybe he should have been willing to let old ghosts lie. But he wasn't. Damn it, he was not willing. One look into her gray eyes—as dark and as threatening as a squall in July—and he was ready to take her on. There were issues here, issues between them that were unresolved.

  One way or another, he planned to resolve them.

  A Month at the Shore, available for your Nook April 2012.

  Safe Harbor Sample Chapter 1

  Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Complex … fast-moving …humorous … tender"

  --Publishers Weekly

  SAFE HARBOR. That's what Martha's Vineyard has always been for Holly Anderson, folk artist, dreamer and eternal optimist. If she could just afford to buy the house and barn she's renting, fall in love, marry the guy and then have children as sweet as her nieces, life would be pretty much perfect.

  Poor Holly. She has so much to learn.

  Chapter 1

  Holly Anderson's birthday surprise turned out to be a two-by-four over the head.

  She had been expecting, oh, a cake and candles in her studio; maybe a singing telegram; possibly to be dragged out to dinner at one of the island's fancier restaurants. She had not expected to spend the last half of the first day of her thirty-first year at the bottom, emotionally speaking, of a ditch.

  Her summer birthday had begun routinely enough, with Holly devoting the morning to cleaning and sanding the wide drawerfronts of a sweet old pine dresser that she'd snatched up at a yard sale on the Vineyard just two days earlier. Then came the fun part, sketching a whimsical farmstead across the faces of the three drawers. After erasing a cow and two geese and adding more chickens, Holly was ready to mix her paints and make folk art magic.

  She loved what she was doing, loved the way she was connecting in some mystical way with the generations before her who had used and loved and worn out the workaday set of drawers. She would have loved it even without being paid; but her folk art was in wild demand, and that continued to amaze her.

  Holly had filled in a few brushstrokes of sky when her mother's white Volvo pulled up in front of the red-shingled barn that was serving so well as a summer studio. Good. All signs pointed to a quiet dinner with her parents at the Black Dog this year, with maybe some cake and hopefully no telegram.

  "Hi, Mom," she called over her shoulder through the clutter of broken furniture, handmade birdhouses, and charming whirligigs that filled the ground floor of the building. She laid down another stroke of impossible blue. "Come see my latest."

  The hum of her creativit
y was so strong that it drowned out the sound of her mother's silence. It took a moment for Holly to emerge from her trance and turn around.

  "He's having an affair with Eden," said Charlotte Anderson, skipping right past any birthday greeting. Her lip began to quiver. Tears welled but did not fall.

  "Who is?"

  "Who do you think!" Outrage boiled, not quite over.

  "I'm sorry," said Holly, forcing herself to abandon her work. "I wasn't paying attention. Who's having an affair with Eden?" She began wiping her paint-stained fingers on a soft cloth. Her mother could have been talking about almost any male on the island. Eden was gorgeous, twenty-nine, not shy. Eden was an enchantress.

  Charlotte Anderson closed her eyes and bit her lip, then gave up the struggle. Her face contorted with pain, and then she broke down. "Your father ... your father ... your father, damn him to hell," she moaned between racking sobs.

  Holly simply stared. "Are you crazy? Dad! Are you crazy?"

  "My God—would I make it up?" her mother cried. Suddenly she turned all of her pain and fury on Holly. "Take his side, why don't you!" she said, and she staggered, newly wounded, to a rickety Windsor chair that was awaiting glue and a folk art treatment.

  "Not that one, Mom; it won't hold you," Holly warned. She rushed to get another.

  Her mother said mordantly, "Now I'm fat besides being old?" More tears, bitter streams of them, from sixty-year-old-and-no-longer-thin Charlotte Anderson.

  "Mom! You know I didn't mean it that way."

  Holly tried to embrace her hysterical mother, but she was shrugged off violently.

  "Mom, you're wrong, you're just wrong," she insisted through her mother's sobs, trying to soothe, though she was reeling herself. "This is a bizarre mistake. Someone misinterpreted. It's so easy to do that with Eden. You know how she is."

  "Yes—thanks to you! You had to sublet to the woman, didn't you," Charlotte said, casting a hateful look at the ceiling above them.

  "That's not fair! Eden worked at the gallery and she needed a place to stay. She was a big fan of my work; I couldn't let her sleep on the beach. Even you admitted early on that she was the perfect tenant: cheerful, conscientious, hardly ever around to disturb m— oh."

  "Exactly."

  "But, Mom ... Eden. Think about it: she's half Dad's age!"

  "Which makes her half my age. Oh, God ... I can't bear this. I really can't," Charlotte moaned. She slumped into a nearby rocker instead of Holly's armchair and wrapped her arms around her stomach as she rocked disconsolately; and, yes, the years did show.

  "What will our family say?" she wailed in misery.

  "Your brother, your sister? This will tear us apart. This will destroy us. How could he do this to me? How could he? Oh, God ... how could he?" she kept repeating, sobbing throughout the mantra of her despair.

  Still shocked, Holly said, "Mom, Mom ... how can you not trust Dad? Why are you so convinced he did anything?"

  Charlotte Anderson lifted her head. Her face was puffy, her hair a mess. The light had gone out completely from her gentle and trusting gaze. In a flat, dull voice she said, "Because he told me so. Because he's gone off on the boat with her. Because he wants a divorce."

  Holly had seen the two-by-four coming, but she was way too stupefied to duck. She gasped from the shock of the blow and fell back into the armchair she'd dragged over.

  "When did he tell you this?"

  "This morning."

  "That's what he said? He wants a divorce?"

  "Not for his sake. For mine," her mother said, trying for a trenchant smile but failing. "He says he doesn't want to put me through the prolonged agony of his affair."

  "I can't believe this. We may as well be talking about two different men. Dad hasn't had an unfaithful thought in his life!"

  "You're so sure of that," her mother said through her sniffles as she searched her bag for something to blow her nose on.

  "Well, has he?" Holly demanded. She held out a box of Kleenex. "Before this, has he ever had an unfaithful thought that you know of?"

  Her mother's grudging lift of a shoulder told Holly that as far as she knew, Eric Anderson had not.

  "I mean, really. The man is sixty-two years old. He's quiet, reserved, you could say prudish. His work is his life. He doesn't get risqué jokes; I've seen the blank look on his face when someone tells one. He's ... he's a probate lawyer, for Pete's sake, not a rock star or a politician. It doesn't get any less charismatic than a sixty-two-year old Scandinavian probate lawyer. Good grief. Who would want him?"

  Charlotte's face crumpled in another wave of misery. "Me-e-e," she said in the forlorn wail of an abandoned child, and she began to cry again.

  Holly felt more wretched than outraged; it broke her heart to see such pain. Soothing and coaxing, she managed to get her mother out of the rocker and onto her feet. "Come to the house," she murmured. "We'll have tea."

  They walked in miserable silence across a path that meandered through a thicket of trees between the barn and the back door of Holly's rented Cape. Small, cozy and peeling, The Cape was the house of her dreams. She hoped to buy it by the end of her lease and lavish both love and paint on it and make it all better. It was her way.

  Holly avoided glances at her mother as she filled the copper teapot from the old cast-iron sink, but her mind was racing. Probably it was foolish to bring it up, but: "Are you sure they've sailed off the island?" she asked.

  Her mother was blowing her nose into a wad of fresh Kleenex. "Does it matter?"

  "He could have had second thoughts."

  "Second thoughts? What kind of second thoughts?" Charlotte asked, looking up from her tissues.

  There was such hopefulness in her face that Holly immediately back-pedalled and changed the subject. "Nuts, I left my brand-new brush out," she said, making a dash for the kitchen door. "I'll just go dump it in some turp. Be right back."

  Holly wasn't merely being cowardly; she wanted to see for herself if Eden had gone. Safely out of her mother's view, she headed for the stairs that climbed alongside the barn and led to the apartment that once had been a hayloft.

  The last tenant there had been an antiques dealer who had planned to sell his treasures from the wide-planked barn beneath. But the business had folded by November, and the dealer had moved back to the mainland. His desperate landlord offered Holly both the house and the barn on a long-term lease; she snapped it up even before subletting her own condo and studio in Providence.

  Holly had always wanted a place on Martha's Vineyard, close—but not too close—to her parents' summer home in Vineyard Haven. Now she had it, and she would someday marry a quiet, faithful, honest man like her father, and she would have children and run them over often to her parents to babysit, because that's what doting grandparents loved to do.

  She slid her key into the door of Eden's apartment and swung it wide. Immediately her hopes, all of her hopes, were crushed. Eden had flown. The small closet that yawned at Holly held nothing but a few bare hangers. The drawers that she had lined with rose-patterned giftwrap were ajar and empty. The sink was clean, the bed was made, the newspapers were stacked neatly in a pile. Holly was impressed; Eden was quite the tidy fugitive.

  The little shit.

  Holly went back reluctantly to the kitchen, where her mother sat shivering in the warm July sun and warming her hands on her mug of tea as she sifted through the emotional wreckage of her life.

  "It's because of the boat," Charlotte said numbly. "You know how he loves the Vixen."

  "So?"

  Charlotte sighed and shrugged. "I get seasick. Eden doesn't. Remember how much fun she had on that day-sail we all took to Nantucket? I spent the whole time belowdecks, sick to my stomach as usual."

  "And you think that's why Dad's left? For someone with a stronger stomach?"

  "Essentially, yes."

  "If I weren't so depressed I'd laugh out loud," Holly said, managing a smile. "I'm amazed at how your mind works."

  Her mother's
look was almost pitying. "You truly don't get it, do you? But then, you're young; you take youth for granted. How can I explain this in terms you can understand?"

  Her gaze became unfocussed, and Holly knew that she was replaying something awful in the videoscreen of her mind, trying to come to terms with it. Groping for words, her mother finally said, "The day that Eden first stepped aboard the Vixen: it was as if your father had been sunning on a rock like some sleepy toad, and a beautiful fairy princess had come up to him, and, completely unexpectedly, leaned down and kissed him on the cheek."

  "Oh, Mom, don't," Holly begged. "Don't do this to yourself."

  "Your father was a frog, and now he's not," her mother said in a quavering voice. She bowed her head and broke down again in soft, pitiable sobs. "And there's nothing ... absolutely nothing ... anyone can do about it."

  ****

  The hell there isn't, thought Holly, and she dialed her sister's number.

  She had given her mother plenty of time to call Ivy with the devastating news, and she was surprised that Ivy hadn't called the instant she'd gotten off the phone. Since Ivy was having work done on the house, it was possible that she had been off with the kids for the day.

  So, fine. I'll be the one to tell.

  Because time was of the essence. If their mother was right and their father was under a spell, then it was up to his family to knock some sense into him before it was too late.

  "And how, precisely, do you suggest we do that?" Ivy wanted to know after having been brought up to date on the mind-boggling event. "Brass knuckles? Baseball bat?"

  "Why are you sounding so resigned to this?" asked Holly, dismayed by her older sister's cynicism. "What's the matter with you? I was counting on you to lead the charge."

  Her sister's voice was calm to the point of sounding grim. "Holly, you are so clueless. How could you not see this coming? Dad's done raising his kids. His career has peaked. He's tired. He's bored. He obviously feels taken for granted—"