by Roz Bailey
“Look, Gladys, I’d give you the grand tour, but I’m already late for another appointment.”
“Not necessary. I’ve been through the house; your mother mailed me a key. Not so bad inside, but there is damage caused by the roof. And you have pipe problem in the guest house. Very bad. You have lots of work to do.”
“Thanks for sharing that.” Darcy climbed onto the wraparound porch, stepping over roof shingles that had fallen. “So, if you’ve got everything you need, why don’t you go off and make your list and call the repairmen or . . . whatever it is you do.”
“My inventory is only for the listing.” Gladys tapped her clipboard. “It is you who must make repairs.” The ire in her voice made it sound as if she were delivering a sentence.
“I just live here,” Darcy said. “Talk to my mother.”
“Yes, of course!” Gladys reached into the Mercedes again for her cell phone and dialed. “Hello, Mrs. Love? Gladys Kevalian . . .” In a cold, somewhat accusing voice, the realtor implied that Darcy’s mother had misrepresented the sale, lied about the condition of the house.
Picking at the peeling paint on the porch rail, Darcy could almost hear her mother barking on the phone.
“She wants to talk to you,” Gladys said, handing over her slender flip phone.
“Tell me you are going to handle these repairs and get this woman off my case,” Melanie Love said.
Darcy turned away from the realtor. “Mom . . . decorating is your thing.”
“It’s a matter of repairs, and I can hardly ignore the trial proceedings to spend time in the Hamptons. That wouldn’t play well for your father, would it?”
“No. But what snake pit did you pluck this woman from?”
“Gladys comes highly recommended. She’ll get us top dollar. All you have to do is supervise the repairs on the house. It’s all cosmetic, honey, something you should understand.”
Darcy gritted her teeth. She wasn’t the one who’d gotten an eye job last year. “This isn’t my thing.”
“Find some handymen, and probably a licensed plumber. Ask your friends for references. Maybe Mary Grace McCorkle knows someone. The insurance adjustor assessed the damages and they’ll pay us six thousand. If you handle it right, there may be enough left over to get your car fixed.”
Was her mother asking her to pinch pennies? Darcy felt her mouth pucker in disgust. “Why did you spring this on me now? And did you realize what a mess this place is? I haven’t been inside yet, but the yard is littered with roof tiles and everything is just . . . yucky.” Darcy stepped over a torn screen, noticing the chipped paint on the banisters of the wraparound porch and the dirt and dead bugs jamming window tracks. “Can’t you get Nessie out here for a few days?”
“Nessie has another full-time job, and we can’t afford to pay a maid, even for a few days. It’s up to you.”
She turned back, glaring at the nosy real estate agent. “This is so unfair.”
“Ha! Welcome to the real world, honey.”
Darcy considered saying no. She could step around the mess, live in this rattrap for the summer, just to spite everyone. But the possibility of getting her car back loomed before her, a mirage of a lipstick red sports car . . .
“All right, I’ll do it.”
Gladys threw her hands into the air. “Good for you! Now, can I have my phone back? You’re using up my anytime minutes, young girl.”
Darcy waved her off like a fly. “How soon can you get the insurance check?” she asked her mother.
“Two weeks, maybe three. Till then I think our credit is still good out there.”
“I should hope so!” Christ, Mom made it sound as if they were criminals or worse . . . poor!
“Just do the minimum to make the place sell, okay? I gotta go.” Mom clicked off, leaving Darcy alone with Transylvanian Gladys, who quickly snatched her phone away.
“Okay, so now that you got kick in the pants from Mommy, we go out back and I show you where mold might be growing near burst pipes.”
Darcy crossed her arms. “That sounds disgusting. Do we have to?”
“Come. I have very busy schedule.” Gladys snapped her fingers, as if training a poodle.
And much to her dismay, Darcy obeyed the command.
37
Lindsay
“Get me out of here before I wrap my fingers around this realtor’s skinny neck and shake her till she spits out her commission.”
I was glad to get the call from Darcy, but confused. “A realtor? Are you buying something?”
“Apparently we have to sell the Love Mansion before the courts take it away, and Mom has hired Cruella von Whippenstein to make the deal. I’ll explain later, just get over here.”
Promising to head out as soon as I could politely escape the party, I turned to Elle and hung up the kitchen phone.
“Where the hell is she?” Elle asked, having realized it was Darcy on the phone.
I explained the situation, then sent Elle to find Milo. “I’ll go get Tara to cut the cake. Hey! Are you sure you don’t want to be included with us? You graduated, too.”
Elle shook her head emphatically. “No, and promise me you’ll never, ever put my face on a cake. That’s just scary.”
I smiled. “Scary is completing two years’ worth of course work in just nine months.” Elle had torn into Yale with her usual nonconformist zeal, reading twenty classics and devouring her junior and senior workload in one big bite. “Okay, so if we cut the cake and do a toast, maybe we can duck out without too much attention.”
Shaking her head, Elle backed out of the phone nook, a small little booth off the kitchen paneled in cherrywood. “I don’t know what you’re worried about. With all the McCorkles around here, it’s pretty darned hard to get attention.”
“Hey, I resemble that remark!” Paul, my dentist brother from Poughkeepsie, pushed his worn Yankees cap back on his head and pointed toward the dining room.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Elle told him. “I’m actually jealous. I wish I had ninety brothers and sisters.”
“Don’t forget the nieces and nephews, who are crying for cake.” Paul put his hands on my shoulders and guided me toward the dining room. “Would you get in there and cut the cake already? Another ten minutes and those munchkins will have their fingerprints all over it.”
“We’ll have to bring in crime scene to dust for prints,” added Timothy, my oldest brother, who’d been an NYPD detective for years.
“I’ll cut it already, before it melts like me.” I lifted my hair, twisted it up, and fanned the back of my neck. It was too hot to be inside, but maybe if I cut the cake and schmoozed a few more family friends I could cut out of here with my friends and locate Darcy. I ducked inside, finding Tara, her parents, and a handful of others paying homage to the blessed cake.
“Look at this lovely masterpiece!” Mary Grace McCorkle framed the sheet cake with her hands. “Hilda did it, the bakery on Main Street. Did you get a picture? It’s almost a shame to cut into it. Lindsay, love, you and Tara squeeze in behind the cake so we can get a picture. Our two graduates.”
Tara cocked an eyebrow, then followed me behind the table, where we bent down, our faces inches from the sea of buttercream. I could feel the fat molecules wafting into my pores, heading straight for my butt.
“Just what I spent the past eight months starving myself for,” I muttered as cameras flashed. “My face emblazoned on a sheet of frosting.”
“Yeah, and now it’ll find its place in the family photo album, along with all the other cakes,” Tara said. “The one with the purple roses that turned out black, and the Jurassic Park dinosaurs . . .”
“Remember the confetti cake that we made ourselves? And when we squirted chocolate syrup onto the vanilla icing and it looked like a murder scene?”
“The Psycho cake.” Tara pretended to hack away in a stabbing motion.
“You can laugh,” I said. “I’ve got all of them in Kodak moments, like the archi
ve of McCorkle cake history. And the worst part is, I didn’t even want a cake today. I asked for those little cheesecake tarts Ma makes, but does my opinion matter?”
It had been Hilda the baker’s idea to imprint the faces of the graduates on the cake. I was only glad this bit of baking technology had not been available when my sisters were passing around birth photos.
“Who wants cake?” Mary Grace asked, shooing the girls away from the table. “Got to have a piece of cake if you want to wish the graduates good luck.”
“Is that right?” Tara’s father, looking cool and crisp in his smooth black silk shirt, approached the table. “In that case, I’d better take two.”
“That’s a wedding superstition, Ma,” said my older sister Kathleen. “Nobody ever heard of a graduate cake.”
Mary Grace sawed through the cake with a knife. “That’s the beauty of superstitions; you make them up as you go along.” She deftly doled half a dozen squares of cake onto paper plates, then paused to smile down at the cake. “Here’s a superstition for you. I say anyone who takes a taste of this cake tonight will appear in my daughter’s first novel.” She turned to Tara’s mother, Serena Washington. “Did you know our Lindsay is a writer?”
“Aspiring,” I corrected, “but that’s just a hobby. I majored in psych, which is very different.”
“She wants to fix people’s brains.” Mary Grace rolled her eyes. “If it were only possible, I’d have had mine overhauled years ago.”
“Actually, I’d need a medical degree to mess with your brain,” I said, searching for plastic forks.
“But writing is your talent. Call it a mother’s pride, but I do enjoy reading Lindsay’s work. What’s Tara doing this summer?”
I ducked away from the table, eager to grab a slice of cake and get out of the dining room before Ma asked me to recite the poem that had won the Knights of Columbus award in second grade.
“Tara’s working in the New York offices of Senator Wentworth,” Mrs. Washington responded, her posture so regal, shoulders back, neck elongated. Tara’s parents didn’t step out in the Hamptons too often, and I was pleased that they’d attended the graduation party.
Cake in hand, I clamped onto Tara’s arm and pulled her out through the kitchen to the screened back porch, fending off friends and family along the way with: “Can’t talk now!” “No, you can’t have her.” “We’ll have to get back to you on that.”
Out on the porch, I cleared a few empty beer bottles off the glider but remained on my feet, feeling too hopped up to sit. “Darcy called. She’s freaking about the hurricane damage on the house, but I think it’s really about being there without any staff to fix it up and the fact that her mother is putting it on the market. Elle is getting Milo and we’re going to head over there.”
“I was getting worried.” Tara sat beside me, poking at a section of the photo frosting with a plastic fork. “I called her cell three times and got her voice mail.”
“I don’t think she could show her face at this party. I mean, considering . . .”
“That she didn’t graduate?”
“Yeah, that, and the charges against her father, and her mother freaking over finances. Did you hear the one about Bud Love hiding cash in coffee cans? Someone thinks he buried a stash somewhere on the grounds of the Hamptons estate, just before the feds came to arrest him. One of the housekeepers saw him digging.”
“Sounds like the stuff Hamptons legends are made of.” Tara scraped at some frosting with her fork. “Do you think that would work? I mean, would a coffee can protect money? And what would happen if Bud Love turned up at the Hamptons Diner in, like, ten years with a mildewed thousand dollar bill?”
With a laugh, I sampled the cake. “Ooh, sugar rush. The cake part is okay, but the frosting . . . gag.” It clumped on my tongue like a pat of butter, and I’d learned not to bother indulging unless there was a delicious payoff. I put the plate aside. “I’m done. Let’s get Milo and Elle and head outta here.”
Tara stood up. “Do you think it’s a good idea for all four of us to descend on Darcy? I mean, she’s got all that baggage with Elle, and she’s barely met Milo.”
“What, you think we might overwhelm her? Darcy Love?”
“You’re right.” Tara gathered up a few discarded plates and headed toward the kitchen. “So we’ll go and pretend that none of it really matters and we’re just hanging out. And she’ll pretend that she doesn’t care that we’re even there. And we’ll just have one big I’m-too-cool-to-care fest.”
I held the screen door open for her. “Exactly.”
38
Elle
“Is this the scene where I’m supposed to fall to my knees, grab a handful of dirt from the rose garden, and vow that we’ll never go hungry again?” Darcy let the front door slam behind her and crossed the porch, demurely stepping around wads of leaves and mud and roof tiles.
Apparently Darcy hadn’t lost her edge over the winter. Elle climbed out of the car and stared up at the majestic old mansion. Though the storm had taken its toll, the structure gave a strong impression of permanence, a quality Elle had always loved about old buildings.
“It’s good to see you, too!” Lindsay laughed, jogging up the stairs to give Darcy a hug. Elle was glad to see that Lindsay had lost that college weight; it had dragged her down and poked holes in her self-esteem.
After a quick air-kiss, Darcy pushed past Lindsay and headed down the steps. “Get me out of this dump. Where are we headed? Coney’s? Bahama Jack’s? The Mad Hatter?”
Elle leaned back against Lindsay’s wagon, squinting up at the damaged roof in the setting sun. “Actually, we wanted to check the place out. Milo’s father is a carpenter back in Queens, and he might know some people who could get your work done for a fair price.”
Milo stepped forward and reached toward Darcy. “Hey.”
“You remember Milo?” Lindsay prompted. “My friend from Seton Hall?”
There was no recognition in Darcy’s eyes, but she shook Milo’s hand and forced a smile. “Maybe your father can come out another time.” She swung her purse onto her shoulder—a leather log, shaped like a baguette. “I’m ready to party.”
“Just hold on a second,” Elle said, walking down the driveway to get a better look at the damaged roof peak. Not that she was an expert, but she’d had some construction experience when her mother was in the Doctors Without Borders program in Russia and again when she and her father spent one autumn in northern Georgia building houses for Habitat for Humanity. As a result, Elle loved the sharp smell of freshly milled lumber. She could spend hours going through bins of screws and nails, nuts and bolts and cabinet handles in a hardware store.
Milo and Tara followed, shielding their eyes against the orange sun blazing toward the horizon. Darcy marched to Lindsay’s car and took the passenger seat, underscoring her desire to leave. Lindsay talked to her through the open window, ever the mediator.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” Milo said, “though getting to it is half the battle.”
“There’s some damage inside, too, in the attic room,” Tara said. “Charlie and I tried to cover things with tarps and batten down the hatches, but I’m sure some water got in.”
“Interior work is easy,” Elle said as images of smoothing creamy plaster over nail holes soothed her.
“No one will ever find a ladder that goes that high,” Darcy shouted from the car. “It’s three and a half stories. We’ll have to get a goddamned crane out here.”
Milo shrugged. “A scaffold and some safety harnesses would work.”
“I just want someone to get up there and nail on those shingles,” Darcy called.
“But make sure they replace the wood base,” he said. “You don’t want to tack shingles onto a rotting roof.”
“I don’t want to tack anything, except maybe a sailboat,” Darcy shouted impatiently, then pulled herself back into the car.
Milo bent over and picked up a roof tile. “Slate shingles? I love
a slate roof, but no one’s going to be tacking these down.”
“Expensive,” Elle said.
Milo ran his fingers over the thin slab of slate. “You can reuse a lot of the shingles that fell, though it requires a special process. Hot tar, I think.”
“Sounds gooey!” Elle squinted, trying to gauge Milo’s thoughts. She didn’t know him well at all, but from his careful examination of the tile, his awe of the roof, she sensed that he shared her excitement.
“I never did a slate roof before,” he said, adjusting his glasses. Designer eyeware, with frames in various shades of orange, red, and yellow. Elle figured that no straight guy would be caught dead in such elegant eyeware, but she didn’t know Milo that well.
Elle giggled. “Me, neither.”
“What are you two saying?” Tara crossed her arms. “You think you can fix that roof yourselves? You want to climb up there and monkey around nearly forty feet off the ground?”
“We’d use a scaffold and safety harness,” Milo answered without looking up from the slate. “It’s probably safer than taking a bath in your own tub.”
“But . . . but there are other repairs,” Tara said breathlessly. “The drywall inside.”
Elle raised her hand. “Been there, done that.”
“And some pipes burst in the guest house. There’s water damage. I haven’t seen it, but—”
“I’m handy with a wrench,” Elle said. She giggled again when Milo looked up, his wide lips curving in a smile. “Wrench, I said. Not wench.”
“We might need a plumber,” he said.
She shrugged. “Maybe, but we could see how far we get first.”
“Are you serious?” he asked. “You’d try this with me?”
“As long as you don’t try anything with me,” she teased.
He let out a crisp laugh. “I can safely say that isn’t going to happen.”
“Good.” Elle liked to know where she stood with a guy, and since her incident with Kevin McGowan she’d steered clear of sex and relationships, concerned over the power of sex to harm and dissuade people from their true goals. “So, when can you start?”
