Summer Beach Reads

by Thayer, Nancy

  “What do his teachers say?”

  “They’re working with us. They’re good. He’s got Anna Jane Krebs this year, and she’s dynamite with boys.” Maud crossed to her refrigerator and took out a bottle of juice. “Cranberry okay?”

  “Fine.”

  Maud giggled. “I have to drink it since Toby. It helps prevent urinary tract infections.”

  “Are you having those?”

  “Um, I didn’t use to, back when I never had sex.”

  “Get out. Sex causes urinary tract infections?”

  “It does in me. At least too much of it does.”

  “Too much sex?” Carley held up her hand. “Never mind. Don’t tell me, please. Too much information.”

  “Poor baby,” Maud cooed. “You’ll have sex again someday, I’m sure.”

  Carley opened her mouth, then clamped it shut. Not until after Thanksgiving, she reminded herself.

  They sat in the living room, talking about the children: Cisco and her newfound love of riding, Margaret and first grade, Percy and first grade, and at length about Spenser and his trouble at school.

  Carley asked, “Does it help to be living with a pediatrician?”

  “Not for this. This is emotional, we’re pretty sure. I mean, we’ve had his eyes checked, and his hearing. He’s not sick. The therapist thinks he’s depressed and angry because it’s really hitting home that his real father left and a substitute father has moved in.”

  “How does Percy get along with Toby?”

  “He adores him. Loves playing with him, roughhousing with him, wants Toby to read him his nighttime story and tuck him in at night. But Percy never really knew his birth father.”

  “Families,” Carley groaned. “They’re like daily triathlons.” Her eye fell on a captivating crystal statue of a child reading. It was placed in the center of the coffee table and had writing on it. She leaned forward. “Maud, what’s this?”

  “Oh, it’s an award I won.” Maud ducked her head shyly. “From the National Children’s Library Association for best illustrated and written children’s book.”

  “When did you receive it?”

  “In August.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You were busy, I was busy …”

  “You are such a dork! You should have told me! Congratulations! We need to celebrate. We need to have some champagne!” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, you probably already celebrated with Toby.”

  Maud shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. Reaching out, she stroked the crystal statue, with affection, as if for courage. “Of course I did. I wasn’t sure you’d even want to celebrate with me. Because of Vanessa, I mean. Would you have wanted to come over and celebrate with me and Toby …” She let her voice trail off.

  Carley sighed, “I’d have to think about that. It’s going to feel awkward seeing you and Toby together socially, but I guess I’ll get used to it.”

  “You’ll have to. We’re getting married next summer. We’ve booked the church.” Maud stood up and paced around the room. “It will be a small wedding, a large one wouldn’t be appropriate, but I would love for you to be my matron of honor, except how can you be, when you’re Vanessa’s friend, too?” Before Carley could answer, Maud asked, “How is Vanessa? Tell me everything.”

  Carley caught her breath. On the drive over, she’d contemplated how much she should share with Maud about what Vanessa had told her. “Vanessa’s good,” she slowly confided. “She’s pregnant. She’s happy.” She paused. “She’s going to stay on the island. She realized when she was in Boston that she loves it here, and she has a community here, and friends.”

  “Do you think she’ll ever forgive me? Do you think she’ll ever let me be her friend again?”

  “That’s asking an awful lot of her, don’t you think, Maud?”

  “Yeah, I guess, but Carley, I miss her!” Tears shot into Maud’s big blue eyes. “I miss us, Las Tres Enchiladas! We had such fun.”

  “Instead,” Carley reminded her, “you have Toby.”

  Maud chewed a fingernail. “Carley, who’s the father of Vanessa’s baby?”

  “I don’t know. Not Toby.”

  “Please. I can count.”

  “Whoever the father is, he won’t be involved.”

  “She’ll need friends,” Maud mused. “And think about this. When Vanessa has her baby, who’s going to be her pediatrician? Toby’s the only one on the island.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Well, then, once she has her baby, Maud, she’ll be so happy, her life will be completely turned around, the way it is when you have your first child. She’ll probably be ready to forgive you by then.”

  “Especially,” Maud grinned, “if she has a boy. I know all about boys, and you don’t.”

  33

  • • • • •

  Carley woke to the sound of rain spattering against her window. An autumnal chill had crept in overnight, and a wicked early October breeze batted bushes against the side of the house. Today would be a good day to bake cookies in addition to her breakfast sweet rolls. All three rooms had guests who very well might want to stay in the living room, reading, playing board games, and munching. She’d light a fire in the fireplace, too.

  With cookies and muffins in the oven, she pulled on her raincoat and slipped outside. She’d set pots of geraniums and begonias around the edge of the garden to add bits of color. It was almost time to bring them in. On a gray day like this, the bright blaze of scarlet and coral would be welcome in the house.

  She took shelter on her porch and stood for a moment, looking across the rain-drenched lawn to the waters of Nantucket Sound expanding into what seemed infinity, but which she knew ended at Cape Cod. She had always been reassured by that certainty, that even though she looked out at an endless horizon, a limitless ocean, there in fact waited for her the reliable southern shore of the Cape and the solid mass of the continent, a harbor, a shelter, a place with restaurants, libraries, hospitals, shops, and thousands of other people going on with their lives.

  The wind swept the water into rippling waves. October would be busy for the B&B, but November would be quiet, except for a little rush around Thanksgiving, and another around New Year’s Eve, and no one for all of January, February, or March. Many innkeepers took this time for their own vacations, fleeing to Florida or the Caribbean for the sunshine. She had made no plans for a vacation for herself and the girls except to take them down to her parents for Christmas. She didn’t have the money for anything extravagant, although she could take them to Boston for a few days of museums and movies on the big screen.

  Carrying the plants into the house, she set them on the sink, hung up her raincoat, and dried off the containers. Such clever things people created: these pots looked like blue-and-white Delft china but in fact were plastic, or vinyl, lightweight and durable. She spent a while deciding just where to place them in the living room.

  She woke Cisco and Margaret and got them organized for the school bus. She drank a cup of fresh coffee while watching her girls eat breakfast. Now that Cisco was riding, she ate well and looked healthy. Carley not only promised her daughters to save some cookies for them for after school, she took the first batch off the sheet and tucked them into their old beehive cookie jar to prove it. She walked them down the drive to the school bus.

  By the time she got back to the house, her first guests were up. They were a young couple, serious birders, completely prepared for the rain with all sorts of waterproof gear. From the Midwest, they were excited about seeing shore birds, especially the oystercatchers with their cute carrot-orange bills, legs, and feet. They talked about terns, eider ducks, various gulls, including the delicate black-hooded Bonaparte’s gulls that Carley had never heard of and suddenly longed to see. It was fascinating to be around people who were on this island not because of the sandy beaches and sparkling seas but because of the bird population, and she felt so enlightened by listening to them that she packed up thermoses of cof
fee and bags of warm cookies for them to take out into the rainy day.

  The birders left. Four other guests came chattering into the kitchen. They were all women, friends from college who’d decided to get away from it all for a few days. They were in their early fifties, Carley thought, good-looking, educated, active women.

  As Carley served them breakfast, they discussed their plans for the day. One woman, obviously the leader of the pack, consulted her iPhone for hourly weather predictions, times the museums were open, and menus at different restaurants. As Carley set her fruit bowl in front of her, she looked up at Carley and announced, “What you’ve got at your table is a perfect cross section of middle-aged American women.”

  “Really. Wow.” Carley leaned against the kitchen counter, crossed her arms, and asked, “How so?”

  “Four women.” The leader, with silver hair cut short and chic, pointed to each woman at the table as she spoke. “Divorced. Widowed. Happily married. Unhappily married.”

  Carley burst out laughing at the final category.

  “You left out a category,” noted the plump, creamy-skinned blonde who was divorced.

  “Oh? What?”

  “Never married.” She had her own little instrument in her hand and held it up triumphantly. “Twenty-eight point nine percent of all women in Massachusetts have never been married.”

  “Yes,” Silver Chic argued, “but many of them are young and will get married.”

  The gray-haired woman with adorable dimples waved her hand at Carley. “Do you have a moment? Sit down. Join us. What are you?”

  Carley pulled out a chair. “What am I?”

  “Divorced, happily married …”

  “Oh. Widowed.”

  Dimples’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry.”

  All four women made regretful noises.

  “It’s okay. It was almost a year ago. And I have two wonderful daughters.”

  “You are so young,” Creamy Skin said. “And gorgeous. I’m sure you’ll get married again.”

  “Well, she could,” Silver Chic cut in, “but should she?”

  “Statistics show that the happiest people are married men and unmarried women.” This was from the brunette with a true hourglass figure.

  “General statistics have nothing to do with an individual life,” Creamy Skin insisted.

  Carley agreed. “I have a friend whose husband left her. She’d always wanted children so she went off and got pregnant. She’s very happy.”

  “My point precisely!” Creamy Skin nodded. “Women never get over the Cinderella myth. Marry the prince equals the happy ending. But that myth is outdated. In the modern world, women make their own money, own their own property, and have their own children.”

  “But perhaps that’s too hard on the children,” Dimples argued.

  It seemed that everyone talked at once. Carley joined in, enjoying the frank debate, the give-and-take, and especially the way the other women offered statistics and information from books they’d been reading. She found herself wishing Vanessa was there. And Maud, too.

  “Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “Do you all live in the same town?”

  “Heavens no,” Hourglass replied. “We all live in different states. We get together once a year for a sanity break. Of course we talk on the phone all the time, but this is different. This is special.”

  “And we always choose a part of the country we’ve never been in before,” Silver Chic added. “So we learn something new while we’re together. And by the way, if we’re going to see anything of Nantucket, we’d better get our asses in gear.”

  They asked Carley if she wanted to join them. She thanked them but declined, saying she had so much work to do. Really, she knew they didn’t want her with them. Later, after they’d cleaned up and gathered their things, they went chirping off down the driveway in their bright autumn sweaters, full of plans, bossiness, suggestions, and laughter.

  It cheered Carley to watch them. She missed her own little group, Las Tres Enchiladas. The mysterious chemistry that bonded friendship was not much different from that bonding lovers, she thought. It worked only with certain elements, certain people. Would she, Vanessa, and Maud ever get together again?

  She cleaned the kitchen and put a load of towels into the wash. Cisco had transitioned between friends naturally, she thought. She was still friendly with Delphine from ballet, but they seldom if ever got together. She seldom saw Polo except at school, for which Carley gave thanks. Carley had seen the boy Polo was dating, a senior with a car and a reputation for getting drunk. Polo’s crowd was what Carley’s own mother would call “fast.” Cisco’s current obsession was with horses, so she saw all ages out at Lauren’s. But recently she’d been spending some time with Jewel, the daughter of the man Lexi was dating. Carley was pleased about that. Jewel was a darling girl, well-liked, much-admired, smart, and for some reason, she preferred to be alone much of the time. But she seemed to enjoy Cisco’s company, perhaps because Cisco liked to read, too.

  Margaret’s best friend was still Molly from down the street. Since preschool, the two little girls had been inseparable. Carley had tried to bond with Molly’s mother, Millie, but while Millie was nice, she was staggeringly boring. She could talk for hours about which detergent or toilet paper to use; the first time they’d gotten together, Carley had almost believed Millie was pulling her leg.

  It was different, finding a “best friend” as an adult, Carley thought. Life changes were so dramatic, some purely geographical—she’d lost touch with her best friend from high school back in East Laurence. Her sister, Sarah, would always, in a way, be her best friend, even though their lives were so very different, because Sarah had seen Carley grow up. She’d seen Carley at her most spoiled, tantrum-throwing, thumb-sucking, worst, and never had there been a moment when Sarah wouldn’t put her arms around her and hug her tight. She rejoiced for Carley’s happiness, too; she adored Cisco and Margaret. She was proud of Carley’s persistence with the B&B.

  Once, Maud and Vanessa had been as close to Carley as Sarah. Alone, Carley felt muddled in her thoughts. During past evenings with Maud and Vanessa, when they all tossed out their problems and brainstormed solutions, Carley had believed she was one of a trio of wise women. Back in the days of Las Tres Enchiladas, there had been no problem she couldn’t solve or at least cope with.

  Lexi was certainly becoming a close friend and their bond was strengthened by Cisco’s friendship with Jewel. But it took time to learn to trust someone.

  Carley sat at the kitchen table eating dinner with her daughters and feeling unpleasantly gloomy. Perhaps it was the chili and cornbread she’d made that was darkening her mood as much as the early twilight and the shorter, colder days.

  In the past, she and Gus held a Halloween evening party for children and adults. Their huge old house was made for just such an event. They started off with chili, cornbread, hot apple cider, and pumpkin cake, served in rooms decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and ghosts. Each year, the party became more elaborate. The girls dreamed up all kinds of creatures to add to the atmosphere. They made spiders in cobwebs and bats with fangs to hang from the ceiling. They instituted a best adult costume and best child costume prize. Friends and relatives gave them creepy store-bought ghouls, monsters, and battery-operated demons with low maniacal laughs.

  Carley wasn’t sure she had the energy to organize such a party this year. But would it hurt her daughters if she didn’t have it? Or would it seem disrespectful to Gus if they did have it?

  She decided to ask them. “Girls, I have a question. Should we have our Halloween party this year?”

  Cisco and Margaret exchanged glances.

  Delicately, Cisco inquired, as if Carley were a little child, “Would you like to hold it?”

  It was sweet of Cisco to be protective of her, Carley thought, and a little sad.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure.” She toyed with her napkin, thinking aloud. “Daddy’s been gone for
almost a year, and I don’t think it would be wrong for us to have the party. I believe Daddy would want us to be happy, to enjoy life. Daddy always loved the party.”

  Cisco began to tear at a fingernail. Margaret bit her lip and rocked sideways.

  “It used to be, not long ago,” Carley told her girls, “that societies had strict rules for mourning. That’s what we’re doing, you know. We’re mourning Daddy. Missing him. Being sad. A hundred years ago, we might have had to wear black clothes, and only black clothes, for an entire year.”

  “Ick!” Margaret exclaimed.

  “There were other rules, like no laughing or running in public, that sort of thing. The mourning family had to be decorous, that means very dignified, Margaret.”

  “Why?” Margaret asked.

  “I suppose to prove to the world that you were honoring the person who had died. That you were suffering his loss.”

  Cisco spoke up. “My counselor says that some groups don’t get all weepy when someone dies. They have a party, they sing. They dance. They celebrate the life of the person who died. They give thanks because that person lived.”

  “That’s true,” Carley agreed. “I like that way of honoring the person who died.” She was silent for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “Still, Halloween is such a strange kind of time.”

  “It’s when the dead can cross through the curtain between death and life,” Cisco offered. “We studied that in school.”

  Margaret’s eyes went wide. “Will Daddy come see us?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Cisco snorted.

  “Those are silly ghost stories,” Carley reassured Margaret, who was too young for a talk about All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day. She didn’t want her younger daughter confusing thoughts of her father’s death with creepy skeletons, ghosts, and things that went bump in the night. For that matter, Cisco, for all her sophistication at thirteen, was just as impressionable.