Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2)

by Barbara Bretton

  She leaned across the counter and gave her sister’s hand a quick squeeze. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Kung Pao always makes me sentimental.”

  “You always did have a soft spot for hard-luck cases.”

  “I wouldn’t call you a hard-luck case.”

  “Which proves my point,” Deirdre said. “Mary Pat didn’t have any trouble turning me away.”

  “Mary Pat turned Stanley away,” she pointed out. “Not you.”

  Deirdre shrugged. “Love me, love my dog.”

  “You have to admit Stanley is a pretty big surprise to spring on someone.”

  “You let him stay.”

  “We’ve already established that I’m a sucker for hard-luck cases.”

  “No,” said Deirdre, “it’s more than that. You’re a better person than I am. I’m not sure what I would have done if you and Stanley had shown up at my place one morning.”

  “That’s something we’ll never know,” she said, “since you don’t have a place.”

  “Trust me,” Deirdre said. “I’m not that nice. I probably would have made up some excuse and turned you away.”

  “I think you would have done the right thing.”

  “The right thing for me,” she said. “I always have. It’s the O’Brien way.”

  Ellen began to gather up the dirty dishes. “You make being an O’Brien sound terrible.”

  “Isn’t it?” Deirdre shot back. “You’re one, too, and I don’t see you embroidering the name on your bed linens.”

  “I don’t think you can compare our situations. You grew up knowing Billy was your father. I was handed over to him like”—she glanced down at the half-empty cartons in front of her—“leftover Chinese take-out.”

  “But you worked it out with Cy. He’s still your family. I mean, he put you through med school.”

  “That’s ancient history.” She carried the dirty dishes over to the sink. Some wounds never really healed, you simply learned how to live around them. “Let’s talk about something interesting, like your gig in Bar Harbor.”

  “You should drive up for a weekend,” Deirdre said as she closed the tops of the take-out containers and put them in the fridge. If the change of topic surprised her, she didn’t let on. “The Crooked Isle is gorgeous, lots of atmosphere. You could even bring Hall with you.”

  Ellen’s cell phone rang and she glanced around the kitchen to see where she had hidden it this time.

  “On the windowsill,” Deirdre said. “And don’t think I’m going to let you change the subject again this easily.”

  “Speak of the devil,” she said after Hall’s hello. “We were just talking about you.”

  Deirdre threw back her head and laughed. She couldn’t hold back a grin of her own.

  “I got your message. Hope I’m not calling too late.”

  “We just finished some Kung Pao shrimp,” she said. “If you’d called earlier, you could have joined us.”

  “Any leftovers?”

  “Lots. Want me to save some for you?”

  “Not a bad idea.”

  Deirdre tapped her on the shoulder. “I think there’s someone at the door.”

  “At this hour?”

  “Go answer it,” Hall said. “I’ll wait.”

  She whistled for Stanley, who came bounding down the stairs. “Time to earn your kibble,” she told him as they approached the door. “I want you to pretend you’re a vicious guard dog.”

  “He doesn’t need to growl,” Hall said. “All he has to do is stand there.”

  “If you hear me scream, hang up and call 911,” she said into the phone as she opened the door, then yelped.

  Hall was standing on the other side of the screen, cell phone to his ear, big smile on his handsome face. Her heart did another one of those strange flip-flops inside her chest. If it kept doing things like that, she was going to need a good cardiologist.

  “Very funny,” she said, unlatching the screen. “Come on in.”

  He brought the night air in with him, the scent of pine mingled with the wet salty smell of the beach.

  Stanley, the world’s worst guard dog, did the canine equivalent of a cartwheel when Hall scratched him behind the ears. I know exactly how you feel, Stan. I did a few cartwheels myself the other night.

  “I should’ve called first,” he said.

  “You did call.”

  “I’m not sure from the driveway counts.” He reached out and touched her cheek with the tip of his finger. “I felt like a stalker.”

  Oh, God, what was the matter with her? Was she so starved for affection that a gentle touch could turn her inside out?

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said, bringing all of his considerable powers of persuasion to bear. “We’ll make sure Cy gets the best help available.”

  “Not Cy,” she said. “Billy.”

  He looked blank for a second, then nodded. “Sorry. I’m still adjusting to the sister.”

  “Sisters,” she corrected him again. “There’s another one down in Cambridge.”

  “This is all going to make sense to me one day, isn’t it?”

  She laughed softly. “I’m not sure it makes sense to me.”

  He draped a companionable arm across her shoulders. “First the food, then the story.”

  “You haven’t had dinner yet?”

  “The meeting ran long.”

  “Very long,” she said, noting the time. “Problems with the gala?”

  “Problems with the gala, the museum, the banquet menu, the size of the typeface on the invitations, overweening egos—”

  “You must be talking about Lucinda.”

  “I was being a gentleman.”

  “Don’t bother on my account. I served on the Memorial Day Parade committee with Lucinda last year, and I still haven’t recovered.”

  “She can be formidable.”

  “You really are a gentleman,” she said, starting to laugh as they entered the kitchen.

  “Hey, Doc!” Deirdre bent down to pour fresh water into Stanley’s bowl. “We have plenty of leftovers if you feel like a midnight snack.”

  He grinned. “Why do you think I’m here?”

  Ellen pulled a microwave-safe plate from the carton on the floor and ran it quickly under the faucet while Hall and Deirdre exchanged minor pleasantries about the wonders of Shelter Rock Cove cuisine.

  “Do we have any soup left?” she asked Deirdre during a lull in the conversation.

  “No soup but we have some shrimp and a fair amount of string beans in garlic sauce.”

  She turned to Hall. “How does that sound?”

  “Like I picked the right night to drop by.”

  Deirdre’s throaty laugh filled the room. “I have the feeling every night is the right night for you.”

  Ellen wanted to crawl under the counter and stay there, but Hall, bless his easygoing heart, threw back his head and laughed along with her big-mouthed sister.

  “There’s beer in the fridge,” she said to Hall, shooting a look Deirdre’s way. “I’ll zap the food and we can take it out onto the deck.”

  “Why didn’t we take ours onto the deck?” Deirdre asked.

  “Because we ate so fast we never made it out of the kitchen.”

  “You have a point.” Deirdre grabbed a bottle of springwater from the case near the fridge. “It was good seeing you,” she said to Hall as she made for the doorway.

  “Stay,” Ellen said. “We have lots to talk about.”

  “And I have lots to do before I leave tomorrow.”

  “Hall’s going to help us find a good doctor for Billy.”

  “Terrific,” Deirdre said with a big smile. “He couldn’t be in better hands.”

  “We could use your input.”

  “I trust you.” Deirdre waggled her fingers at them, then left the room.

  Hall pulled a bottle of beer from the fridge and lea
ned against the counter while Ellen arranged the leftovers on a plate, then nuked them.

  “The deck,” she said when the timer sounded.

  He nodded and followed her outside.

  “Are you going to tell me,” he said once they had settled down in their lawn chairs, “or do I have to ask?”

  She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She heard the sounds of the ocean, crickets, and Hall’s fork scooping up string beans in garlic sauce. “What do you want: full family history, family history with the extraneous matter edited out, or my guess on why Deirdre didn’t hang around?”

  “Family history, edited version.”

  “Good choice,” she said, “because I don’t know enough about my family’s history to give you the full version, and I sure as hell don’t know enough about my sister to explain why she does anything.”

  “You could start by telling me about your father.”

  “Which one?” she asked with maybe a bit more of an edge than she had intended. “Up until I was fourteen, I thought Cy Markowitz was my father. I thought his parents were my grandparents. I thought his sisters were my aunts. I thought I had his smile and his ambition and when I grew up I was going to be a doctor just like him so I could make him proud of me.”

  “And you did.”

  She opened her eyes and glanced in his direction. “I became a doctor. I’m not sure about the rest of it.”

  “What happened when you were fourteen?”

  “That was the year my mother died,” she said. “She was pregnant with Cy’s first child, although I didn’t know it at the time.” After almost fourteen barren years of marriage Cy and Sharon were finally going to have a baby. Sharon had just started her second trimester when the taxi she was riding in was hit by a bus near the Park. Both she and the baby she was carrying died on the way to the hospital.

  “It was like our world went crazy. Cy completely fell apart. He wouldn’t come out of his study for three days, and when he did he couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me. He was my father—my daddy, for God’s sake—and he wouldn’t let me near him!” Her mother was dead, her unborn brother was dead, and her father was treating her as if he wished he could trade her for the ones he’d lost. “His sisters were sitting shiva at the apartment, and I was crying for my mother and, to be honest, for myself when I heard my aunts in the kitchen, speculating about what was going to happen to me.”

  The sound of Deirdre’s harp floated through the open door and mingled with the hushed roar of the ocean. He put his plate of food down on the deck and focused his full attention on her. From the day they met he’d had the unnerving ability to listen to her words and somehow hear her heart.

  “I asked them what they were talking about and they got angry and defensive. Cy came into the kitchen—I can still see him in a sweatshirt and robe. He hadn’t shaved for days and his beard was coming in gray. I couldn’t stop staring at the thick gray stubble on his cheeks and along his jawline. He wanted to know what was going on, and they started arguing. I think they forgot I was there, because the next thing I knew one of his sisters called me ‘that Irishman’s bastard’ and everything kind of went dark.”

  She hadn’t eaten for days and she passed out on the kitchen floor. When she came to on the living room sofa, they were all fussing around her, but the stench of guilt hung heavy in the air, and she knew she hadn’t been dreaming.

  “It was like it all started to make sense at that moment. I think I had spent my entire life knowing but not knowing that something was wrong.”

  “Is that hindsight speaking?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. Kids usually have an intuitive sense of their place in the family structure, and I could never figure out where mine was.”

  “You grew up as an only child. Your place should have been secure.”

  “But it wasn’t. That’s what was so odd. Cy was friendly and kind, but we never really connected. My mother always blamed it on the demands of his practice, but I wasn’t buying it. I saw the way he came to life every time she walked into the room. He knew how to love. He just didn’t happen to love me.”

  Cy remarried the year she turned twenty-one, and his young wife Nancy gave birth to their only child, a boy named David, eight months later. He was her father by virtue of shared history and sense of responsibility, but the deep bonds of emotion were no longer there. She now understood that they had never really been there at all, at least not for him. He had loved her mother deeply and had never managed to capture her heart the way she had captured his. Ellen’s existence was daily proof of that fact.

  “He never formally adopted me,” she went on, “but I didn’t know that until I was putting the paperwork together to join that practice in Manhattan. You should have heard the uproar when I tried to explain the story to some bureaucrat behind a big desk.” She had ended up changing her name legally to the name she had grown up believing was hers.

  “That must have hurt like hell,” Hall said.

  She didn’t deny it, even though for years she had done exactly that.

  Her mother had believed a child would finally pry Billy away from his wife. His wife had believed a new baby would keep her wandering minstrel husband home where he belonged. Ellen and Deirdre were born six months and three hundred miles apart, and when all was said and done, Billy said goodbye to the woman he loved and stayed with the woman he had married.

  But nothing in life was ever that simple. Sharon married Cy Markowitz six weeks after Ellen’s birth and cut Billy from her life as if he had never existed. No photos of the baby. No updates on her progress. For the first two years he showered her with impassioned love letters that she hid away in a box at the back of her closet. The letters finally stopped, but Billy could never manage to break the connection between them. Every year on her birthday he sent her a card, a silly sentimental Hallmark with roses and kittens on the outside. He never signed the card. He didn’t have to. At the bottom, beneath the hearts-and-flowers sentiments, each year he scrawled the same two lines from Yeats:

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

  She stood up and walked over to the railing. The wood was slick with mist beneath her elbows as she looked out into the darkness. She heard Hall’s chair scrape against the deck, and moments later he joined her at the railing.

  “I’ll bet this sounds like a bad soap opera to you,” she said, trying hard not to lean into his warmth. “Families behaving badly.”

  “My parents weren’t Ozzie and Harriet,” he said. “Some day I’ll tell you about it.”

  She glanced over at him. “Now’s a good time.”

  “Nice try,” he said, “but this is your story.”

  They were quiet for a few moments, listening to the sweetly evocative music drifting toward them from the house.

  “Cy found the cards about six months after my mother died. We had all been pretending that everything was normal, that I didn’t know the truth, and we were still one big happy family, but the cards changed everything. The next thing I knew Cy was telling me that it was time I met my birth father and learned something about my heritage and that I’d be spending the summer with Billy and my two half sisters getting to know one another.”

  She told him about the day Cy put her on a plane to Boston, where she met Billy O’Brien, the love of her mother’s life. He introduced her to Mary Pat and Deirdre, who seemed every bit as unhappy as she was.

  Billy tried. She had to give him that. He brought Ellen into his life over his wife’s objections and took his three daughters to East Hampton with him for the summer.

  “It was a disaster,” she said. “We hated one another. We hated being there. We hated Billy for ruining our lives.”

  Yet despite it all Deirdre and Ellen were drawn to each other. Anyone who saw them together would know instantly that they were sisters. They both had blue eyes, curly auburn hair, and a quick sense of humor that invar
iably drove Mary Pat screaming from the room.

  She began to look forward to those summers with her sisters, even after Mary Pat married and settled down. Deirdre was wild and spontaneous while Ellen was cautious and deliberate. Every decision Ellen made she made with her future in mind.

  “My goal was to graduate at the top of my class, get into a great school with a good premed curriculum, and make Cy proud of me.”

  “And Deirdre’s goal?”

  “To snag a fake ID so she could go out drinking on prom night.”

  His laughter rang out and she smiled with him.

  “I adored her,” she said, remembering early mornings on the Cape as they raced each other down to the beach. “She was everything I wasn’t and wished I could be.”

  “Past tense,” he noted. “What happened?”

  “Who knows? Everything, I guess. Billy seemed to lose interest in these summer reunions. Mary Pat was busy with her own family. Deirdre was thinking about hiking across Europe, and I resented anything that took me away from my studies.”

  “Sounds like a normal American family to me.”

  “As long as you didn’t look too closely.”

  “You stayed connected.”

  “Maybe we didn’t know how to let go.”

  “Maybe you didn’t want to.”

  “If you’d said that to me this time last week I would have laughed, but now—” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’d forgotten how much I love her. I know she only came to see me because she needed a place to board Stanley, but I’m going to miss her when she leaves tomorrow. Talk about being a soft touch...”

  “You have a soft heart,” he corrected her. “Why do you think I brought you into the practice?”

  She poked him softly in the bicep. “For my skills as a doctor.”

  “I spoke to a lot of highly skilled doctors before you came along, Markowitz. If that was all I was looking for, I could have taken any one of them on board.”

  “So why me?” she asked, praying he wasn’t about to blow their three-year association with an appallingly sexist remark.

  “Because you had the skills and the heart to go with them. It’s a rare combination.”

  A burst of pleasure flooded her chest. “It shouldn’t be.”