The Hot Pink Farmhouse

by Unknown

  “Not to mention a dead ringer for my Uncle Heshie,” said Jeff as they resumed walking. “I wonder if he cheats at cards, too.” Jeff was an odd little puppy of a guy in his late 30s who had a habit of sucking in his cheeks like a fish whenever he was upset, which was pretty much all of the time lately—he was in the middle of a rather ugly divorce. Jeff had moppety red hair, crooked, geeky black-framed glasses and freckly, undeniably web-like hands. He also happened to walk like a duck. Jeff possessed even less fashion sense than Mitch. Right now he had on a short-sleeved dress shirt of yellow polyester, madras shorts and Teva sandals with dark brown socks.

  “Raccoon poop at nine o’clock,” Dodge warned them so they wouldn’t step in the fresh, seed-speckled clump on the edge of the path.

  The path cut down through the bluffs toward the beach now, and they started plowing their way out to the end of the Point’s narrow, mile-long ribbon of sand. It was a very special ribbon of sand. At its farthest tip was one of the few sanctuaries in all of New England where the endangered piping plovers came to lay their eggs every summer. There were two chicks this season. The Nature Conservancy had erected a wire cage to protect them from predators. Also a warning fence to keep walkers and their dogs out. One of the walking group’s assignments every morning was to make sure that the fence hadn’t been messed with in the night. Kids liked to have beer parties and bonfires out there and sometimes got rowdy.

  “You know what I was thinking about this morning?” Dodge said, waving to an early morning kayaker who was working his way along close to shore. “I’ve traveled all over the world, and yet I would never want to live anywhere but here. Why is that?”

  “Open up your eyes, Dodger,” Jeff said. No one else in the group called him Dodger—so far as Mitch knew, no one else in the world did. “It’s awful damned pretty here.”

  “If you ask me,” said Will, “it’s Sheffield Wiggins.”

  “Old Sheff Wiggins? My god, I haven’t thought of him in ages.” To Mitch and Jeff Dodge said, “He used to live in that big saltbox across from the Congregational Church.”

  “You mean the cream-colored one?” asked Jeff.

  “That’s not called cream, my friend. That’s called Dorset Yellow.”

  “I’ve seen that same color all over New England. What do they call it if you’re in, say, Brattleboro?”

  “They call it Dorset Yellow.”

  “Okay, I think we’re drifting off of the subject,” Will said.

  “You mean this wasn’t a story about paint?” Mitch said.

  “Yes, what about Sheff? He’s been dead for an honest twenty years.”

  A faint smile crossed Will’s lean face. He was a good-looking guy with a strong jaw and clear, wide-set blue eyes. Yet he seemed totally unaware of his looks. He was very modest and soft-spoken. “Sheff’s sister, Harriet, called my mom about a week after he died. This was in January and the ground was frozen, so they had to wait until spring before they could bury him. My dad used to dig the graves over at the cemetery, see.” Will was a full-blooded swamp yankee whose late father had done a variety of jobs around Dorset, including serving as Dodge’s gardener and handyman. Will was only a kid when he died. Dodge gave Will odd jobs after that and became like a second father to him. The two remained very close. “Anyway, Harriet called my mom to tell her that Rudy, Sheff’s parakeet, had died . . .”

  “Honest to God, Will,” Jeff interjected. “I can’t imagine where this story is going.”

  “She wanted to know if my mom would keep Rudy in our freezer until the spring so that he and Sheff could be buried together.”

  “You mean in the same casket?” asked Mitch, his eyes widening.

  “I do.”

  “And did your mom . . .?”

  “She did. And, yes, they are. Buried together, that is.”

  “How old were you, Will?” Jeff asked.

  “Ten, maybe.”

  Jeff shuddered. “God, having that parakeet in my freezer all winter would have given me nightmares. What color was it? Wait, don’t even tell me.”

  “My point,” Will said, “is that Harriet Wiggins thought nothing of calling up my mom to ask her. And my mom didn’t bat an eyelash. That’s Dorset.”

  “In other words, everyone in town is totally crazy?” asked Jeff.

  “I like to think of it as totally sane,” said Dodge as they trudged their way out to the point, the sun getting higher, the air warmer. The tide was going out. Dozens of semipalmated plovers were feeding at the water’s edge on spindly little legs. “Martine was talking about you last night, Mitch.”

  “She was?”

  “They desperately need tutors over at the Youth Services Bureau. All sorts of subjects—history, English, math.”

  For weeks, Dodge had been trying to convince Mitch to join up with some local organization or another. Already, Mitch had turned down a chance to become recording secretary of the Shellfish Commission. Not the sort of thing he could see himself doing. It seemed so Ozzie Nelson. But Mitch was coming to understand that getting involved was part of the deal when you lived in a small town. Will Durslag served on the volunteer fire department. Jeff was a literacy volunteer.

  “We have a bunch of really talented kids in this town, but they’re just not motivated. Would lighting a fire under one of them be your kind of deal?”

  “Maybe. I mean, sure.”

  “Great. I’ll get you an application.”

  This man was relentless. Still, Mitch greatly admired his commitment. Mitch could hear a helicopter zooming its way toward them now across the Sound, moving low and fast. A news chopper from New York. All part of the Esme-Robbie circus. Another day, another breathless new inquiry. Here was yesterday’s: Did she or didn’t she just have a boob job? Inquiring, very small minds wanted to know.

  Mitch sped up so as to pull alongside of Dodge, the other two falling in behind them. “I wanted to give you a head’s up,” he told him, puffing. “My review of Tito’s new movie is in this morning’s paper. I panned it. I hope that won’t be awkward for you.”

  “Don’t worry about Tito. He’s much more level-headed than people give him credit for. Besides, I’m sure you were your usual tactful self.”

  “Tactful is not exactly the word I’d use.”

  Tito’s movie, Dark Star, was in fact Hollywood’s hugest, loudest clunker of the summer, an ill-conceived $200-million outer-space epic that the studio had held back from its Fourth of July weekend opening because preview audiences were laughing out loud in all the wrong places. It was so disastrously awful that Mitch had called it, “The most unintentionally hilarious major studio bomb since Exorcist II: The Heretic.” He went on to say, “Tito Molina has such a pained expression on his face throughout the film that it’s hard to tell whether he wants to shoot the aliens or himself.”

  “I really like this kid,” Dodge said. “I didn’t expect to, not after everything I’d read about him. But I do. And I don’t just say this because he’s my son-in-law. He has a broken wing is all. Can’t fly straight to save his life. That doesn’t make him a bad person. You’d like him, Mitch. I sure wish you’d reconsider my invitation.”

  Dodge wanted him to join them for dinner one evening. Mitch didn’t think that socializing with performers was a good idea for someone in his position. “I’d love to, Dodge, but it wouldn’t be appropriate.”

  “Sure, I understand. I just think you’d enjoy his company. He’s one of the most intuitively brilliant young men I’ve ever met.”

  This in spite of Tito’s famously troubled childhood in Bakersfield, California. Tito’s father, a Mexican migrant worker, was killed in a bar fight when Tito was seven. His Anglo mother, a schizophrenic, was in and out of state mental hospitals until she committed suicide when he was thirteen. He took to living on his own after that, often in abandoned cars, and survived by dealing drugs. His big break came when a Britney Spears video was being shot at the Bakersfield high school that he’d recently dropped out of. A girl he
was dating auditioned for a bit role. He tagged along with her. The video’s director was looking for a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks to play the bare-chested object of Britney’s sweaty affections. One look at Tito’s intense, smoldering good looks and he got the part. The video was such a hit on MTV that Tito shot straight to teen-dream stardom, acting in a succession of edgy teen-angst dramas—most notably the highly successful re-make of the greatest teen-angst drama of them all, Rebel Without a Cause, in which he stepped into James Dean’s almost mythic shoes and, somehow, made them his own. It was Esme who was cast in the Natalie Wood role. They fell in love on the set, fueling the picture’s on-screen heat, and married shortly thereafter.

  Inevitably, critics were labeling Tito as his generation’s James Dean. Mitch was not one of them. He believed that labels were for soup cans, not artists. He only knew that when Tito Molina appeared on screen he could not take his eyes off of him. Tito had an untamed animal quality about him, an edge of danger, and yet at the same time he was so vulnerable that he seemed to have his skin on inside out. Plus he had remarkable courage. Mitch was completely won over after he saw him conquer Broadway as Biff Loman to John Malkovich’s Willy in an electrifying new production of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman. As far as Mitch was concerned, Tito Molina was simply the most gifted and daring actor of his generation.

  “He and Esme are like a pair of special, golden children,” Dodge said. “When I see them together, hand in hand, I think of Hansel and Gretel on their way through the woods to grandmother’s house. They absolutely adore each other, and she’s been able to help him some with his rage. And their publicist, Chrissie, really does try to put a smile on his public face. But it’s a challenge. He’s just such an intensely unhappy person.”

  “He’s an actor,” Mitch said.

  “So is Esme, and she’s not like that. She’s a sweet, bighearted girl. A total innocent. I just . . . I hope he doesn’t hurt her. He isn’t faithful to her, you see.”

  “How do you know this?” Mitch asked, glancing at him.

  “I just do. You can always tell—like with Martine,” Dodge said, lowering his voice confidentially. “She’s not faithful to me. She has a lover.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dodge,” Mitch said, taken aback.

  “These things happen over the course of a marriage,” Dodge said, his jaw set with grim determination. “I sure wish I knew what to do about it. But the unvarnished truth is that I don’t.”

  “Well, have you spoken to Martine about it?”

  “Hell, no. What good would that do?”

  “Communication is a positive thing, Dodge.”

  “No, it’s not. As a matter of fact, it’s highly overrated.”

  They were nearing the tip of Peck Point now. The osprey stands that the Nature Conservancy had erected out in the tidal marshes were no longer occupied. The ospreys had nested and gone for the season. Mitch did spot two blue herons out there. And the two rare, precious dun-colored piping-plover chicks were still in residence in their protective enclosure, tiny as field mice and nearly invisible against the sand.

  He and Dodge inspected the cage and warning fence as Jeff and Will caught up with them. A fence stake had worked its way out in the night. Dodge pounded it back down with a rock as Mitch swabbed his face and neck with a bandanna, wondering why Dodge had chosen him to confide in about Martine. Why not Will? The two of them were so much closer.

  Mitch opened his knapsack and got out the mugs and plastic milk bottle, his stomach growling with anticipation. From his own knapsack Will produced a Thermos of his finest fresh-brewed Blue Mountain coffee and a bag of croissants he’d baked before dawn. Will was up every morning at four to oversee his extensive baking operation. The beach constituted his only break from the punishing 14-hour shifts he worked.

  There were two driftwood logs with plenty of seating room for four. Jeff filled the tin mugs from the Thermos. He and Will took their coffee black, Mitch and Dodge used milk. Dodge passed around the croissants. Then they all sat there munching and watching the killdeer and willets poke at the water’s edge for their own breakfast.

  Mitch chewed slowly, savoring each and every rich, flaky bite. His diet restricted him to one croissant, and he wanted to make the most of it. “Honestly, Will, you’re a true artist. What’s your secret, anyway?”

  “Nothing to it,” Will said off-handedly. “I’ve been making these ever since I was working in Nag’s Head. My partner in those days gave me the recipe.”

  “You two owned a place together there?”

  “No, not really,” he replied.

  Which Mitch had learned was typical of Will, who was perfectly friendly and polite but could be rather vague when it came to career details. Mitch knew he’d attended the Culinary Institute of America and had led the Have Knives, Will Travel life of an itinerant chef up and down the East coast before he hooked up with Donna, who was working in the kitchen of the same Boston seafood place at the time. Donna was from Duxbury. After they married, Will brought her home to Dorset and they’d moved into the old farmhouse on Kelton City Road that he’d inherited from his mom. This spring they had pooled their considerable skills to open The Works, a gourmet food emporium that was housed in Dorset’s abandoned piano works. The food hall was the biggest piece of an ambitious conversion of the old riverfront factory that included shops, offices and luxury water-view condominiums. Dodge had helped finance the venture, and it was proving to be a huge success. Already it had attracted Jeff’s Book Schnook.

  Jeff could not have been more different from Will—every detail of his life was fair game for discussion, whether the others wanted to get in on it or not. The little man was a walking, talking ganglion of complaints. Inevitably, these complaints centered around his estranged wife, Abby Kaminsky, the pretty little blond who happened to be hottest author of children’s fiction in the country—America’s own answer to J. K. Rowling. Abby’s first two Carleton Carp books, The Codfather and Return of the Codfather, had actually rivaled the Harry Potter book in sales. Her just-released third installment, The Codfather of Sole—in which Carleton saves the gill world from the clutches of the evil Sturgeon General—was even threatening to outsell Harry.

  Unfortunately for Jeff, Abby had dumped him for the man who’d served as her escort on her last book tour. Devastated, Jeff had moved to Dorset to start a new life, but an ugly and very public divorce settlement was looming on his personal horizon. At issue was Abby’s half-boy, half-fish hero. There was a lot about Carleton that struck people who knew Jeff as familiar. Such as Carleton’s moppety red hair, his crooked, geeky black-framed glasses, his freckly, undeniably web-like hands, the way he sucked his cheeks in and out when he was upset. Not to mention his constant use of the word, “ab-so-toot-ly.” Though Abby vehemently denied it, it was obvious that Carleton was Jeff. As part of their divorce settlement, Jeff was insisting she compensate him for the contribution he’d made to her great success. Abby was flatly refusing, despite what was sure to be a punishing public-relations disaster if their divorce went to court. To handle the publicity fallout, Abby had hired Chrissie Huberman, the very same New York publicist who was handling Esme and Tito. As for Jeff, he was so bitter that he refused to carry Abby’s books in his store, even though she outsold every single author in America who wasn’t named John Grisham.

  “Hey, I got a shipment of your paperbacks in, Mitch,” Jeff spoke up, chewing on his croissant. Mitch was the author of three highly authoritative and entertaining reference volumes on horror, crime and western films—It Came From Beneath the Sink, Shoot My Wife, Please and They Went Thataway. “Would you mind signing them for me—you being a local author and all?”

  “Be happy to, Jeff. I can stop by around lunchtime if you’ll be there.”

  Jeff let out a snort. “Where else would I be? That damned bookshop is my whole life. I’m there twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I even sleep right over the store in a cramped little—”

  �
��Two-bedroom luxury condo with river views,” Will said, his eyes twinkling at Mitch with amusement.

  “Plus I have to drive a rusty old egg-beater of a car, so the locals won’t think I’m getting rich off of them,” Jeff whined.

  “Which, correct me if I’m wrong, you’re not,” Mitch pointed out, grinning at Will.

  “Damned straight I’m not,” Jeff said indignantly. “Listen to this, I had to give an old woman her money back yesterday. It seems I recommended a thriller to her and she hated it. Oh, she read every single word of it all right, but she pronounced it garbage. Stood there yelling at me in my own store until I paid her back. It was either that or she’d tell all of her friends that I’m a no-good bum. Barnes and Noble can afford to be so generous. Me, I’m barely hanging on. I don’t know what I’ll do if things don’t pick up.”

  “But they will pick up,” Dodge told him. “You’re already building customer loyalty and good word of mouth. Start-up pains are perfectly normal. The Works felt them, too, and now it’s doing great, right, Will?”

  After a brief hesitation Will responded, “You bet.”

  Which Mitch immediately found intriguing, because if there was one thing he’d learned about Dorset it was this: Often, the truth wasn’t in the words, it was in the pauses.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even in the book business at all,” Jeff grumbled. “I’m in the people business. I have to be pleasant to strangers all day long. Yikes, it’s hard enough being pleasant around you guys.”

  “Wait, who said you were pleasant?” asked Mitch.

  “By the way, Dodger, Martine did me a real solid—she’s so popular with the other ladies that as soon as she joined my Monday evening reading group they all wanted in. I may even add a Tuesday reading group, thanks to her. Best thing that’s happened to me in weeks. You’d think with all of these media people in town I’d be selling books like crazy, but I’m not.” Jeff drained his coffee, staring down into the empty mug. “Did I tell you they’re trying to buy me off?”