A Safe Place to Land

by Dee Ernst

  I opened my mouth, closed it, and sat up straight. What had Ellis just said? “Sam had a son?”

  Ellis sighed and nodded. “Yes. Craig Ferris, born in New York. Mother was a Kelly Laslow, who died almost twenty years ago. My understanding was that Sam had a relationship with Kelly as a very young man, but did not know of Craig’s existence until her death, at which time he became involved in his son’s life.”

  “But wait…this was when we were still married?”

  “The dates are very close. He may have filed for divorce at the same time he found out about Craig. He was not very forthcoming about that. But he told me that he and Craig had been in pretty much constant contact since then. Craig has been notified. I called him myself yesterday afternoon, and a certified letter has been sent.”

  I heard, quite clearly, the ticking of the grandfather clock that stood in the corner of Ellis’ office. Sam had been one of the most important people in my life. I’d loved him and thought I’d known all there was to know about him. But he’d had a son, and for years he had kept that very important fact from me. How could he do that? But more than that…

  “Ellis, you knew this and you never told me?”

  He sat back, obviously shocked. “Jenna, Sam was my client.”

  “So was I.”

  “This was privileged information.”

  “Ellis Summer, we have known each other our whole lives. I introduced you to your wife, we’ve stood beside each other piling up sandbags to keep the Bay out of Main Street.” I paused just long enough for a deep breath. “We saw each other naked in second grade.”

  He began to sputter. “Jenna, I’m a lawyer, and Sam was very clear about this. He felt very conflicted. He didn’t want you to know, because he didn’t want to hurt you. He knew how much you wanted children of your own, and well…” He waved his arms around. Ellis was short and skinny as a rail, and it was difficult, under the best of circumstances, for him to look like a person of authority. When he tried really hard, like right now, it was downright comical.

  “Ellis, you should be ashamed of yourself, sitting there trying to look all official when you’ve been lying to me for all this time.”

  He stood up and tried to exude authority. “It was Sam that lied to you, Jenna. He kept his lives very separate. Not only did no one around here know about his son, Craig had no idea Sam owned the bar. He knew very little about Sam’s life in Cape Edwards.” He tugged at the lapels of his suit, then sat back down again. “It was not my secret to share, Jenna. It was Sam’s. And he chose not to.”

  I closed my eyes and sank back, feeling angry and betrayed. Sam and I had not just been husband and wife. We’d become the best of friends. Over all those years, he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me about his son, his own flesh and blood. I suddenly felt like I hadn’t known the man at all.

  I opened my eyes slowly. “Well. Yes.” I looked around, picked up my purse from the floor, and glared at Ellis. “Well. Everyone I’ve run into this past weekend told me that I needed to keep Sam’s place open, and that I couldn’t sell. Karen even suggested I quit nursing to run it. And you know what? I thought about it, even decided it was a good idea. I’m tired of twelve-hour shifts and that miserable commute over that damn bridge. I was looking forward to running the bar, fixing the menu, maybe even doing a little redecorating.”

  I stood up, feeling a little head of steam building up. “I was going to be on Main Street, Ellis. Join the Chamber of Commerce, maybe run for the Council. I’d be a person of influence in this town, maybe even the county, Ellis.” I leaned across his desk. “I could have become the governor, Ellis, ever think about that? Governor of the whole Commonwealth. But no…” I shook my finger right up in his face. “No. And ya wanna know why? Because some stupid kid from Chicago is getting Sam’s bar instead of me, that’s why.” I straightened. “At least I don’t have to worry about any of that now, do I? I don’t have to worry about the bar at all. It’s Craig Ferris’ problem now, right? Since he now owns Sam’s on Main?”

  Ellis stood. “Yes. But Jenna—“

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “What Ellis? There can’t be anything else to tell me that’s going to top this.”

  He cleared his throat. “Craig inherits everything, Jenna.”

  It took a minute to sink in, and the bottom fell out of my stomach. “You mean…my house?”

  Ellis cleared his throat again. “Not your house, Jenna. It’s only half your house. The other half belongs to Craig Ferris.”

  “The hell it does,” I roared.

  Ellis actually staggered back, putting his arms out to balance himself. “No, really Jenna. He inherits Sam’s half of the house.” He cleared his throat. “You and Sam split everything, from the taxes to the new generator. Now, if you had taken over the fiscal responsibility of the property, then, well, maybe you’d have a case for taking the whole thing, but as it stands…”

  I closed my eyes, remembering the conversations Sam and I had about the house. He’d bought it outright and there had never been a mortgage. When we divorced, we split it fifty-fifty. As we had gotten older, I offered to buy him out, offered to pay all the taxes and insurance, and tried to wave off his payments to keep up the property. I thought he was being kind and generous.

  “That snake,” I growled. Ellis turned pale. “That miserable son of a bitch. It’s a good thing he’s dead, ‘cause I swear, if I saw him right now, I’d strangle him with my bare hands.”

  Ellis sighed. “I’m sorry, Jenna.”

  “And I suppose you’re on the side of this Craig person?”

  “As executor, Jenna, I have to do all I can to carry out the terms of the will. It’s my job, Jenna.”

  “Yeah? Well, well…you’re a snake too, Ellis Summer.”

  I turned on my heels and stomped off, and my exit would have been quite impressive if not for the fact that the door was locked, and I had to fiddle with the damn thing for at least twenty seconds before opening it and slamming it, quite loudly, behind me.

  The house that Sam Ferris and I shared hadn’t changed much over the years. It had been brand new when we bought it, a typical eighties-style ranch with a huge fireplace in the living room, an expansive kitchen with enough room in the bay window for a long dining table, and what was called a split floorpan, the master suite on one side of the house, and three more bedrooms with two more baths on the other side. Sam and I had wanted children, and he was planning for the future. But in five years of pretty much nonstop sex, I’d never become pregnant.

  Over the years, I’d rented the extra bedrooms out to various friends and newcomers to Cape Edwards. In the past few years they had remained empty, and I’d been thinking about them as potential Airbnb spaces. But I hadn’t gotten around to the painting that was needed, and the bathrooms hadn’t been spruced up since 2010. I lived quite comfortably in one half of the house, and for years it was more than enough. Now I saw the whole house as mine, and I wasn’t about to let some idiot kid from Chicago come and take it away from me, not one square inch.

  I pulled up by the front door, turned off the engine of the Grand Cherokee, and stared. The water surrounded me on three sides. Logan’s Creek came in on the westernmost part of the property, spilling into the bay, which spread out before me so vast and blue it could have been an ocean. This was mine—the raised garden along the seawall, the trails going back into the woods, the enclosure along the drive where my six goats gamboled.

  Mine.

  I got out of the Jeep and slammed the door so hard that the dogs started barking. I stomped to the front door, threw it open wide, and stood back as they streamed out: Finn, a spry terror mix, Chloe, an aging Belgium shepherd, and Bit, a scrap of fluff so unidentifiable even my vet hadn’t a clue what she actually was. They jumped around me in their usual style, as though I’d been gone three weeks instead of an hour, then ran off, sniffing.

  I went into the house, stood in the center of the living room, and took several deep breaths. First things
first. I needed a lawyer. I’d only used Ellis or his father for the whole of my life, and since Eaton was dead… I sat down and called Marie.

  Her secretary put me through right away. “Hey, it’s Jenna. So, Sam had a son that I never knew about. No one knew about him, I guess, except Ellis. This son has inherited everything, including Sam’s half of the house. I need to know what I can do.”

  Marie whistled. “He had a son?”

  “I know, right? I can’t friggin’ believe it. I don’t know what he’ll do with the bar, and I don’t care. But what about my house?”

  “Calm down, Jenna. It’s easy. I’ll get in touch with Ellis, get this person’s address, and we’ll make him a nice, reasonable offer. You have some savings, yes?”

  I did. Working as a nurse hadn’t meant a lot of money when I’d started, but after fifteen years, I made more than just a comfortable salary. And since my living expenses were low, I’d stashed quite a bit away in various bank accounts, stock funds, and bonds.

  However. I was living in a four-bedroom house with eight acres of land, right on the Chesapeake Bay. Although I didn’t know much about the real estate market, I had a feeling that waterfront property was going to have a hefty price tag.

  “I have savings, Marie, but not enough to buy his half outright.”

  “So, you’ll get a mortgage, Jenna. Do you want the house or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll get an appraiser out there, and we’ll make an offer, and figure out the rest from there. He had a son?”

  Bit came racing through the open front door and leapt on my lap. I scratched her ears. “Apparently this happened before he even moved down here the first time. The kid is now in Chicago.”

  “Well, that explains all those mysterious trips Sam used to take,” Marie said.

  I sat back. We all had joked about that for years. Every few months, Sam would take off for a long weekend, leaving Charlie in charge of the bar, and would return without so much as a word of explanation. At one point, Kenny Malcom had accused Sam of having a secret family down in Mexico, and Sam had run with it, telling wild stories of his common law wife and six kids who all lived in a shack on the beach in Baja. But the truth hadn’t been that far off. He’d been visiting his son.

  “God, you’re right, Marie. I just can’t believe he hid this from me for all these years. I mean, he used to talk to me about everything.”

  I heard her sigh. “We all have secrets, Jenna.”

  She was right. As much as I loved my girlfriends, and shared with them pretty much everything that happened to me, they would never know about the three years I’d spent sleeping with a married surgeon. And they never knew everything about Sam and I.

  “I’ll call Ellis right now, Jenna. Not to worry. You won’t have to share your house with anyone, I promise.”

  I believed her. She wasn’t just my friend. She drove a Mercedes and lived alone in a big, beautiful place right on the Seaside of the peninsula. A person didn’t make that kind of money being a crappy lawyer.

  I looked around my house. It needed really a good cleaning. For living alone, I was constantly amazed by how much crap I accumulated, and how big the dust bunnies grew. Having three dogs and a cat didn’t help, but I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that the predominant accessory in my home would be pet hair.

  I looked outside. Gray. Typical for early May. I could work in the garden. I had already put in a bunch of seeds: beans and beets, three different lettuces, melon, corn, squash… I’d been checking their progress religiously and watching the weather for a late frost, and I’d spent most of yesterday futzing around out there.

  That left cleaning. I stood up, made a cup of tea, pulled an old Nora Roberts hardcover off of my bookshelf and settled in to read, Bit once again on my lap, Chloe and Finn at my feet.

  I heard the pet door open and close, and Ghost, my gray cat jumped up to stretch out behind me on back of the couch.

  It took a few minutes, but I finally relaxed enough to even get in a bit of a nap.

  Chapter Two

  My usual shift ran from seven in the morning until seven at night. The dogs had their doggy-door, the goats were fed and watered, as well as milked, by my neighbor, Dave. In exchange, he used the milk to make his own brand of cheese that sold quite well in local markets. The garden had an automatic watering system. Being away from my house for more than half a day was no big deal, and although I was usually exhausted at the end of my working day, I was never to tired for DeeDee and Jack’s, especially on Tuesdays, which was A Buck A Beer night. DeeDee and Jack’s was a long gray building across from the Methodist Church, and it was right at the turn off the state highway on the way to my house. I passed it all the time. I didn’t stop in every time, but some weeks, it was close.

  It was the kind of place the locals knew, and the summer people drove right past. We shared lots of information with the tourists. After all, they brought in lots of money, and we who lived in the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula appreciated every penny. But we didn’t talk to them about DeeDee and Jacks. Some things we just kept to ourselves.

  When I pulled in that Tuesday night, still in my scrubs and feeling stretched too tight from a hard day in the ER and my life in general, the parking lot was full. Well, not the parking lot, exactly, as that was a rather vague term when applied to DeeDee and Jack’s. Parking area? Parking field? Whatever—I parked at the church and walked over. After all, I had the church’s sticker on my back window, and I could just as easily have been the church itself, praying.

  DD&J’s was one long, narrow room, with an equally long, narrow bar, and behind that, a kitchen. No one knew what the kitchen looked like, which was just as well. When you consider that the linoleum-covered tables dated back to the sixties, and the recent hole in the floor had been repaired with a large sheet of reinforced steel just bolted into place, the condition of the kitchen was best left to the imagination. If the Health Department of the Commonwealth of Virginia thought it was good enough, well, the rest of us weren’t going to argue.

  The crowd on Tuesdays was always a little rough, but in one corner were familiar faces, and they waved me over as I came in.

  Terri Coburn was there. Terri was our postmistress. At fifty, she had worked almost thirty years at the post office and had started to talk about retiring, but we all knew better. Terri lived for gossip, most of which she gathered at work, and she wasn’t about to relinquish her advantage just because she was getting older. She scooted down the bench, making room for me to sit.

  “Charlie says there’s gonna be a new owner of Sam’s on Main,” she said. “What the heck is going on, Jenna?”

  Charlie had worked for Sam since the bar had reopened years ago, and was Sam’s bar manager. It was natural that Ellis would have told him what to expect.

  DeeDee bustled over, set down my beer, and folded her arms under her bosom. “You know what’s goin’ on Jenna? ‘Cause we here are all stumped. Who would Sam have given the bar to?”

  I took a gulp of my beer, and it tasted just about perfect. “His son.”

  Silence fell. Seriously. The entire bar stopped talking.

  I looked around. “And no, I didn’t know a thing about it. Ellis could have knocked me over with a feather when he told me. Sam had a son. Craig Ferris, of Chicago. That’s all I got.”

  Everyone started talking at once, and two beers and a burger later, I’d heard so many theories I could have written an entire book on the Secret Life of Sam Ferris.

  I got up to go to the bathroom, one of the few spaces at DD&J’s to have been rehabbed in the past twenty years, and as I was walking past the bar, Kenny Malcom reached out, grabbed me around the waist, and pulled me in close.

  Now, Ken Malcom was a fairly attractive man, over six feet tall, broad shouldered and had a head of hair that would make Patrick Dempsey envious. Right after Sam left, and before Ken started dating his wife, Kate, he and I had gotten too drunk, flirted too much, and ended up in the gazeb
o right on the entrance to the beach, where we had such crazy sex that we both ended up with splinters in places too private to mention. It had never been repeated, but I’d thought about it. So, apparently, had he.

  “Jenna, you are looking as sexy as ever,” he murmured into my hair.

  He was lying. I’d never been sexy. I was tall enough, but skinny as a rail. My most visible curve was the arch of my foot. No boobs, no butt and no hips made Jenna a very boring girl. My pale skin was covered with freckles. I’d admit that my hair was pretty spectacular, the exact color of slightly burnished copper, but it was hard to appreciate when it was pulled up on top of my head in a messy bun pretty much all the time.

  I looked up at him. “Kenny, you and Kate having problems again?” Their marital spats were legendary, and rumor had it that Kenny spent half of his nights sleeping in the office of his funeral parlor.

  “Now, Jenna, can’t a man admire a beautiful woman without her thinking he’s got an ulterior motive?”

  “No,” I said, and the guys standing at the bar all laughed. I pushed Kenny away and went back to sit beside Terri.

  “Now, Jenna,” she scolded. “Don’t be mean to poor Kenny. You know Kate is a bitch.”

  “Then why did he marry her?” I grumbled, a question I’d been asking myself ever since he proposed to her.

  Stella, at the end of the table, waggled her finger at me. “You’re getting cranky in your old age, Jenna. You better watch out, or you’ll end up a curmudgeon.”

  I made a noise. “Is that some big fancy word for a woman who don’t take shit?”

  The table laughed, but underneath, I cringed a little. I had noticed that my tolerance for anything even slightly less than perfect had waned. My life, I knew, had become smaller. With that came a smaller worldview. I didn’t like that very much about myself but wasn’t sure how to fix it. That was why the idea of owning Sam’s on Main had struck such a chord. If I needed a place to restart my life, it would have been perfect.