With no energy to argue, I did as he asked. I directed him to the Outrigger Lounge, the only white-tablecloth place in Sweet Bay. The tablecloths were white vinyl, but in Sweet Bay, that counted. We sat at a table on the patio overlooking the bay. Allyn ordered white wine for both of us, along with fried pickles and a plate of Oysters Bienville.
“What?” he asked when I looked at him over the top of my menu. “If you’re going to stay here, I need to make sure the food is up to par.”
“Stay here? Did you not hear me tell you everything about Sammy?”
“I heard you. Tell me about Crawford.”
“Crawford is wonderful. Almost too wonderful, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Even if I had considered staying in Sweet Bay—which I haven’t—I might not even be able to. If the house falls through, I wouldn’t have the option of staying.”
“Of course you have the option. You’re a big girl—you can do whatever you want. More than that, I’d say he gives you a pretty good reason to stay.”
A reason to stay—was that what I was looking for?
“But what am I supposed to do—go buy a house? I have the shop and clients and the Broussards’ house coming up. It’s not like I could just forget all that and move to Sweet Bay.”
“You’re overthinking this. We don’t know how it all will play out.”
I dipped a fried pickle in ranch dressing, then dropped it and leaned back in my chair.
“What?” he asked.
“I haven’t been back home that long, but Sweet Bay was starting to feel—I don’t know what it was feeling like, just something different than it did when I was younger. I think I was starting to like it.”
“Did you hear what you said? You just called Sweet Bay home.” “I did?”
Allyn nodded.
“Hmm. Maybe it’s that it feels like life here could be different a second time around. But you know how much I love the shop. And you. And New Orleans.”
“Of course I do. But you’ve opened the door to a whole other part of your life. The house, your memories of Mags, those crazy old people living in the house now. Crawford,” he said, tilting his head. “This isn’t small stuff. And it’s okay to feel pulled in two different directions.”
“Sounds like my therapist just jumped in the conversation.”
He waved the thought away. “That’s why you pay me the big bucks. But you never finished telling me about Mags’s things you found in the house.”
I pieced everything together as best I could—Mags’s privileged life and marriage to Robert, Robert leaving to be with another woman, and Mags moving to The Hideaway and meeting William.
“For reasons that made sense to him at the time, and I think due in part to Mags’s parents, William left. He planned to come back for her, but it never happened. And he never knew she was pregnant.”
“So little Mags had some secrets.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that,” I said. “By the time she was my age, she was a widow and in love with a man she’d never see again. But despite all that, she was content. Or she seemed so. She loved her friends and her old house, gave the neighbors something to talk about, and never cared about how ‘a woman of her age’ should live her life. She was brave.”
“Sounds like it,” Allyn said.
“Maybe she worried I would have thought badly of her if I’d known all this.”
“Would you have?”
“No, just the opposite. It would have shown me there was a reason for her oddness, that she was more than just the strange old lady I always thought.”
“You think she was strange because of what happened with William? I don’t get it.”
“Not William, but Robert. And maybe even her parents too. From what I’m gathering, Mags was raised to be proper and ladylike, to always do the right thing, even to marry the right man. I’m thinking maybe she got to Sweet Bay and ditched all that. Maybe she went in the total opposite direction from what her parents and Robert represented.”
I thought of her crazy hats and bright yellow ponchos that made me want to crawl under the nearest rock when I was a teenager. What if all that quirkiness had just been her way of pushing back against a lifestyle and culture that had crushed her dreams? “It all makes perfect sense now.”
I flagged the waitress and ordered another glass of wine. The sun was setting. Long, thin clouds, now dark purple against the orange sky, draped across the sky like streamers.
“I drove by my old house last week,” I said. “My parents’ old house.” We’d started on our entrées—blackened Gulf snapper for Allyn, grilled mahi wrap for me.
“How did that feel?” Allyn asked.
“Strange, I guess. I hadn’t seen it in a really long time. Ten years, at least. It’s white now—it used to be light blue. But my old wooden swing was still hanging from the oak in the front yard. Two kids were playing on it. My mom always hated that swing. I busted my forehead on it when I was little.” I pointed to a spot above my right eyebrow. “Had to get four stitches right here.”
Allyn smiled. “You’ve never told me much about your parents. Your mom. What was she like?”
I sat back and readjusted the clip in my hair. “She was kind. Soft-spoken. It was like she was put on earth to do exactly what she was doing—being my mom, Ed Jenkins’s wife, owner of the side-of-the-road diner. And she was always good at accepting people and situations for who and what they were. Like with Mags. She had to have known her own mother led an unconventional life, but she took her for who she was without being bothered by any of it.”
“Or maybe she was bothered and you just never knew. You were still young when she died, right?”
I nodded.
“Maybe she kept that part from you.”
“Maybe.” I remembered Mom’s calm demeanor, her contentment with her life and everything around her. With me beating a trail out of Sweet Bay as soon as I could, maybe I was as unlike Mom as I was Mags.
“You’re the same way, you know,” Allyn said after a pause. “Or at least you were with me. I walked into your shop with green hair and a ring in my nose and you didn’t even flinch.”
I squinted an eye and held up my thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. “Maybe just a little.”
He laughed and nudged my chair with his foot. For a moment, we ate in comfortable silence. From a table across the deck, laughter came in bursts. A flock of pelicans coasted overhead.
“You’re not really going to leave, are you?” Allyn asked. We’d finished our meal and were waiting to pay our bill. I traced my finger along the top of my empty wineglass—my third, two more than I usually drank. “It seems like you have a lot of unfinished business here,” he continued. “You’ve only just met William, you have a hot romance of your own to deal with, and you need to look further into this emergent domain thing.”
“Eminent domain.”
“Whatever. See if it’s a done deal.”
I sighed. “I told you, Mr. Bains has already figured it out. It would take a change of heart for Sammy to give up the property, and that’s not going to happen.”
“Maybe. It’s just a shame to lose such a fabulous house. I wish we could relocate it to New Orleans. It could be our hideaway when we need to escape annoying customers.”
It was an attempt to lighten the mood, but I didn’t feel light. My head throbbed and I was exhausted. He looked across the table and saw it.
“Let’s get you home.” He pulled me to my feet.
At the house, Allyn dropped our helmets in the yellow room, the one he had picked out during our earlier tour of the house. The painters hadn’t yet reached the bedrooms, so they still boasted those original lovely color schemes.
He helped me to the blue room, and I curled up on the bed while he tugged off my shoes. Just before he turned the light off, my cell phone rang. He fished it out of my purse and looked at the screen.
“Crawford,” he said.
�
�Not now. I’ll call him in the morning.”
He sighed. “Does he know about the house?”
I nodded, my eyes already closing. “I told him last night.”
“You’re going to involve him in all this, right? If this thing between the two of you is as meaningful as you say it is, you can’t just ditch him and slip out of Sweet Bay. That would be the easy road, and you can’t take the easy one this time.”
“This time?” I opened my eyes. My brain was foggy, but his words cut through the muck.
“Something has changed in you since you’ve been here, and it’s more than just Mags. I think Crawford is part of it. Don’t cut him out yet.”
“But what did you mean about ‘this time’?”
He shook his head and stood up from the bed. “Look, you left Sweet Bay a long time ago when things were hard. Believe me, I’m glad you did, but you do have a tendency to skip out on the rough parts. It’ll be messy if Sammy goes through with his plan and you have to figure out what to do with everything you’ve started here. But don’t cut and run.”
I pulled the sheets up tighter under my chin, fending off his words. It annoyed me to admit it, but he was right, as usual.
“One more thing,” he said from the end of the bed. “You shut your heart down too much, which is infuriating, but when you do open up, all of us—me, Crawford, Glory, and her gang down-stairs—we can’t help but love you. You’re magnetic in your own twisted little way, and I think you got that from Mags. These people attached themselves to her and her house, and all these years later, they’re still here because they still love her. Listen to Mags—to who she really was—before you make any decisions about the house. And about your life.”
He patted my feet under the blankets, then clicked the light off and closed the door behind him.
35
MAGS
AUGUST 1970
We rented cabins at the state park in Gulf Shores after Hurricane Lorraine blew through. Lorraine didn’t hit us dead-on; she rolled ashore in Biloxi—close enough to call for evacuation notices in our area (which we ignored, as usual) and to take down much of the electricity in Sweet Bay, but far enough away that the beaches were back to normal after a few weeks. We were all exhausted after the cleanup efforts in Sweet Bay, what with all the downed trees and closed businesses. When we got our heads above water, I suggested the vacation.
There were seven of us—Jenny and me; Dot and Bert; Major and Glory Gregg, who checked in for an extended stay not long after Robert died; and Eugene Norman, the potter-turned-glassblower. Starla, Gary, and Daisy had long since moved on. After a quick call to secure the cabins, we packed a few things and piled into the Greggs’ orange van to drive the half hour it took to get to the sugar-white sand of Gulf Shores. It was late August, the last weekend before Jenny started third grade.
Jenny and I sat in the back row of the van with Glory. Dot and Eugene sat in the row in front of us, with Bert and Major in charge of getting us to the beach in one piece. Jenny had just finished telling us a long story of how she and her friend from school, Doreen, had slipped an earthworm into the school bully’s desk during recess. Jenny laughed out loud and looked back and forth at Glory and me until we laughed too. It was hard to be around Jenny and not feel lighter.
Glory took Jenny’s soft face in her hands and smoothed her hair back. “Child, you are a beautiful creature, but I must say, you look nothing like your mother.” Glory looked at me. “She must have her father’s look. Was he as blond and fair as this?”
Dot turned sideways in her seat so she could make eye contact with me. She raised an eyebrow and waited for my answer.
“Mama? Was he?” Jenny asked.
The first time Jenny asked about her father, I couldn’t have forced the right words out even if I’d wanted to—which I didn’t, because she was too young. I gave her the same easy answer I gave everyone—that he died from a heart attack when Jenny was only three. I’d tell her the truth one day, when she could handle it. Or maybe when I could handle speaking of it.
What Glory said was true—my child looked nothing like me. She was the spitting image of her father. She had William’s fair coloring, wheat-colored hair, and full eyelashes. She also had my daddy’s tall forehead and Mother’s strong nose. She deserved to know the truth about her father and her family, but not at the tender age of nine.
“He sure was, sugar.” I patted Jenny’s hand, my eyes turned out the window, looking at nothing in particular.
We arrived at the park to discover there had been a mix-up, and only one cabin was available for rent. Several had been damaged in the storm, and it seemed lots of other people had the same idea we did—it was the weekend before Labor Day, after all.
“It’s a fine cabin,” the woman at the front desk told me. “It’s one of our larger units, so you won’t feel too cramped.” She eyed our ragtag group as if she didn’t believe the words she was saying.
“Cramped? Seven people in a two-room cabin will be more than cramped.”
“Major, don’t make a scene,” Eugene said. “We drove all the way here. We can’t turn around and go home now.”
“Home is thirty minutes away. We’d be back before Columbo starts.”
Before Major and Eugene could continue arguing—or worse, compare the merits of Columbo with those of Hawaii Five-O, a favorite pastime at The Hideaway—I spoke up.
“Enough. We already live together, so what’s the problem with sharing tighter quarters for a few days? We won’t be in the cabin much anyway. Mark it down,” I said to the clerk. “We’re staying.”
Once the decision was made, everyone got into the spirit of the vacation. Bert emptied the coolers of food supplies he’d brought for the weekend and set out ingredients for a feast, Glory retrieved her suitcase of board games and beach toys, and everyone relaxed enough to enjoy the last real weekend of summer.
At some point during our stay, I took a notebook and a plastic lounge chair to the edge of the shoreline. I nestled the chair down in the sand, pushed my toes under the thin layer of seashells, and started to write. A little later—fifteen minutes or an hour, I couldn’t be sure—Dot appeared and sat in a chair next to me. Baby oil glistened on her shins and she smelled like a coconut. She’d bought her bathing suit—a perfect yellow polka-dot bikini—especially for this trip, and she’d hardly taken it off since we’d arrived. She felt good in it, and it showed.
“Does that have anything to do with Jenny?” she asked.
I looked at her. “It’s a letter. How’d you know?”
“I knew that conversation in the van got to you. Then here you are writing away in your little notebook—I just put two and two together. When are you going to give it to her?”
I shrugged. “One day. When the time is right.” I could feel her stare, but I kept my eyes on the water. “She’s the best part of us. He would have loved her so much.”
“You sure about that? Why hasn’t he come back?”
“I don’t know, but he must have a good reason.” Dot didn’t believe me—I could see the pity in her eyes despite the oversize sunglasses. I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“What if he met—?”
I cut her off quick. “Don’t say it. You didn’t know him. You didn’t know us.”
“Okay, fair enough.” She took a breath as if to speak but paused. “What if he’s dead?”
“He can’t be. I’d feel it.”
Dot held her hands up in surrender. “I’m just trying to help you figure this out. You say the two of you were in love, but I still see a man who abandoned you for no good reason.”
I sighed. “And I still say it wasn’t totally his fault.”
“Right, your parents and all that. Then where is he?”
Who knows? I shrugged again.
“Do you regret loving him?”
“No.” My voice was firm. “The only thing I regret is that I never actually told him I loved him. I never said those words. If
I had, maybe he would have stayed and fought for me.”
That was the truest thing I’d said about William since he left, and the admission left me sore in my chest and a little angry.
“Regardless, it’s been more than ten years.” I slapped my notebook closed. “Whatever the reason, he hasn’t come back and I have no way of knowing if or when he’ll return. I have to make sure Jenny doesn’t go through her whole life thinking her dad was a fine chap who just happened to die of a heart attack.”
“Are you going to tell her about AnnaBelle?”
“No, there’s no reason. Robert’s actions don’t affect her—he wasn’t her dad, and at this point, she hardly remembers anything about him. Her real father was—is—kind and good. That’s what she needs to know. He never would’ve wanted to do anything to hurt his family.”
But he did. He hurt me.
I pushed that thought away, just out of arm’s reach.
The water lapped farther and farther up our ankles each time it rolled in. To our left, a cluster of gray-and-white sandpipers nibbled at tiny clams as they burrowed into the soft, wet sand. The sun had inched down in the sky while I’d been writing, and only a few brightly colored umbrellas dotted the beach. Dot leaned her head back on the chair and stretched out her legs. She was long and lean and brown as a berry.
“So when are you going to let Bert get you pregnant?”
Dot let out a half laugh, half snort. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“Sounds like someone else I know.” I flicked a few grains of sand at her with my fingers. “Anyway, it’s about time. You’ve been married a while, and we could use some more little ones running around the house again.”
“What? And ruin my figure?” Dot wiggled her hips. Grains of sand stuck to the baby oil shimmering on her skin. I laughed and handed her a towel.
“What about you?” She brushed sand off her legs and repositioned herself on the chair. “You could quit with those crazy hats and outfits and men would line up out the door for you. You know they would.”
The Hideaway Page 21
