“Why didn’t you say something? Emma, this is what I do. You should have come to me in the first place!”
This woman was trying to snatch a house away from her daughter; what reasonable person would enlist that woman’s help in planning a party? But clearly, all normal boundaries were gone from her life.
“Okay, well, if you can help, that would be great. I need to get food here somehow and no one will deliver out here last minute. I should have picked up something from Schiavoni’s this morning.”
“Anyone will do anything for the right price. I’ll have lunch here in no time.” And she did. She also delighted the ladies with her appearance at the meeting. Cheryl introduced her as “a living legend” in the art world.
“My parents were big collectors,” Diane said, fawning over her. “I visited your gallery when I was a teenager. What a thrill. I’ll never forget it.”
Seating arrangements. Catering options. Tickets. Bea had opinions about all of it, and the ladies of the auction committee ate them up faster than the remoulade crab cakes and baby kale salad delivered from Cavaniola’s. Watching her in action, Emma saw for the first time the dynamo who had built an art dynasty, not just a crazy old woman battling her over a house. And it dawned on her that surely, Henry Wyatt must have known this woman would not take Penny’s inheritance of his estate lightly. As someone who’d seen Bea Winstead operate for decades, he had probably known she would show up in town.
And Emma wondered, as she had that very first day she learned about the house, what exactly Henry Wyatt had been thinking.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Penny usually loved the Fourth of July, but this year it felt different. Her mother seemed really down—and that wasn’t negative thinking, it was a fact. Still, in an effort to prevent herself from going into a death spiral of worry, she pulled out a pad of hot-pink Post-it notes and tried to think of something for her positivity board.
She came up blank. All she could think about was the conversation she’d had last night with her mother when, just before going to sleep, she finally got up the nerve to ask what was bothering her.
Her mother didn’t seem surprised by the question. She sat on the edge of Penny’s bed and furrowed her brow in the way she did when she was maybe not telling Penny the absolute truth. The way she had years ago when Penny asked why she never saw her grandparents, and Emma explained that the Mapsons were “very busy people.” Penny later figured out this meant that her dad’s parents just weren’t all that interested in seeing her.
So when she saw that expression on her mom’s face. she knew she was in for a nonanswer.
“Your father and I are just trying to work something out,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like…how much time you spend with him.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what she’d expected, but this wasn’t it. “Do you mind that I spend time with him? I mean, he’s not around that much.”
“No, hon. Of course I don’t mind that you spend time with him. It’s just that we’re trying to work out a schedule.”
“So why are you so stressed out?”
Shockingly, her mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m not,” she said.
“Mom!” Penny leaned across the bed and hugged her mother, who sagged against her like a wilting plant.
“I’m just tired,” her mother said. Lie.
“Come on, Mom. For real.”
Her mother lowered her head and rubbed her brow. “Your father thinks maybe you’d be better off living with him more of the time. Maybe all of the time.”
Penny blinked for a few seconds, absorbing this. “Okay, that’s crazy. He doesn’t even live here.”
“Well, maybe he plans to.”
“I don’t want to live with him. I mean, it’s fun to see him and hang out but…”
“I know it’s unreasonable. But that’s what we’re discussing. So if I seem a little tense, it’s because I’m trying to make him understand that it’s not a good idea.”
Her mom was clearly worked up, and Penny had a sudden and terrible thought.
“This is because of the boat accident, isn’t it? He blames you.”
Her mother shook her head. “No, I don’t think it’s because of that.”
But Penny knew that this time, she really was lying.
So, all things considered, it was hard for Penny to be excited about the fireworks. Besides, she was okay with the crutches at home or on the Main Street sidewalk, but on the grass surrounded by crowds of people? She’d be lucky to hobble far enough to find a spot to sit down.
She wondered if any of the other kids would be out this year. She’d spoken to Robin once since the night of the accident, and that was enough for her. Every time she thought about Robin and Mindy, it just brought back all her guilt over lying to her mother and getting into trouble. And now, thinking that all of that might be the cause of the problems between her parents, she was even less interested in those girls.
Her mother knocked on the doorway of her bedroom. She had a stuffed bag over her shoulder, a beach blanket poking out.
“I’m not really in the mood for fireworks,” Penny said.
“Neither am I. But we’re going.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s tradition.”
With everyone at the waterfront for the fireworks, Bea decided to make good use of her precious solitude by doing a little snooping.
The curiosity was just killing her. What was the girl drawing, day in and day out? After a lifetime of sniffing out talent, of homing in on art like a fly drawn to honey, Bea couldn’t very well stop herself from looking now.
She crept down the hall slowly, quietly, even though no one was around to hear her. Can’t be too careful, she told herself.
The bedroom door was open.
Penny was surprisingly neat. What had she expected? Clothes strewn everywhere. Candy wrappers. Who knew? She’d never lived with a child before. But the room looked almost the way it had before the Mapsons moved in. The bed was made, the nightstand had only a few personal items on it—some scattered hairbands, a mini-bottle of hand sanitizer, a tube of lip gloss with a pink cap shaped like a cat’s head, and a laptop computer.
Bea sat on the bed. Behind her, on the wall, was some sort of collage, a rainbow of Post-its scrawled with notes like Made progress on the novel! Mom brought home BuddhaBerry!
Oh, Bea hated being old. But fourteen—well, that hadn’t been a picnic either. The whole world was almost open to you. How dazzling the possibilities; how frustrating the limitations! She would never forget the feeling on the casino lawn the night of the Newport Jazz Festival. She had been just shy of Penny’s age when she’d decided she wanted to move to New York City someday. Funny, Penny expressed the same intense desire to get out of her hometown. Maybe that’s why Bea felt a grudging affinity with the girl. That and, of course, the drawing.
Bea sighed and leaned against the pile of throw pillows. Under the small of her back, she felt something poking her, and she reached behind to find a graphite pencil. Well, the girl wasn’t so meticulous after all. How could she leave a pencil in her white bedding? Very careless.
She walked the pencil over to the Lucite desk in the corner, where she found an open box of Faber-Castells. She slipped the offending object inside, then picked up a spiral drawing pad. Underneath, she found a pile of loose sketches.
The first was a detailed and rather flawlessly rendered black-and-white drawing of Windsong. She wasn’t surprised to find a picture of the house; Windsong would inspire even a fledgling artist. But she didn’t know quite what to make of the words on the top of the page written in bold strokes: Queen Bea.
She moved it aside for the next page, the drawings divided into panels. The top left corner featured another sketch of Windsong along with some text: First came the house. Then came Bea. Next, a cartoonish but undeniably accurate rendering of Penny and her mother sitting on a bed in an unfamiliar room. The drawi
ng of Emma included a dialogue bubble: Sometimes, good things do happen. Another drawing of Windsong followed, the house as seen through a car window.
The bottom of the page featured the interior of the house. Penny, Emma, and Bea stood in the dining room, the infinity pool visible outside the window. Bea shook her head at Penny’s depiction of her, the exaggerated pouf of her hair, her pin-striped pantsuit, and her pearls rendered absurdly large. In the drawing, Bea’s arms were crossed, a stern expression on her lined face. Her bubble of dialogue read Interlopers!
Bea pored through the sketches, more than twenty of them, that pieced together the drama of the past few weeks. No one was spared Penny’s savage pen; there was Kyle, Angus, her father, and a woman named Dr. Wang.
I’ll be damned. How many times had newspapers and magazines asked Bea to explain how she knew when an artist had “it”? She always gave the same response: The hairs on my arms stand on end. Well, they were standing.
The doorbell sounded.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Can I not have one moment of peace in this house?” So much for quiet country living. This place was like Grand Central Station! She put the pages back the way she’d found them and then went down the hall to deal with the disturbance.
When she saw that the disturbance was Angus, she felt slightly less irritated for some reason. “Well, hello there. You’re about an hour late. Emma and Penny already left.”
“I should have figured. I usually take Penny to the fireworks because Emma’s working. I guess she didn’t need me this year.” His disappointment was palpable.
How thoughtless of Emma. Truly, the woman had no consideration for others. “In that case, I think you should be thankful you’re off the hook. There are far more civilized ways to spend an evening. I have reservations at a delightful restaurant in town and I insist you join me. Dinner is on me.”
“I appreciate the offer but—”
“It’s the least I can do to thank you for educating me about the town.”
“Hmm,” he said. “And you don’t consider this consorting with the enemy?”
“You know what they say,” Bea said with a teasing smile. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Marine Park was alight with fireflies. Emma pointed them out to Penny, who sat next to her on a beach blanket.
“Yeah, Mom, I see,” Penny said, shifting around and trying to get comfortable with her leg extended. “I hate this cast.”
“Well, think about that the next time a kid asks you to get into a boat. Or a car, for that matter,” she said. A few feet away, Penny’s third-grade teacher waved at them. “Look, Penny—Ms. Lowen is over there.”
The entire town had turned out and there was something about sitting next to her daughter, surrounded by people she’d known all her life, that comforted her. Nights like this gave her a sense of continuity. As much as things changed, some things never did.
She’d considered inviting Angus along or even Kyle when she spotted him working on his boat earlier. It had been steadying to have him by her side at the lawyer’s office. But in the end, she decided to make it just a mother-daughter holiday.
“Mom?” Penny said. “I was thinking about our conversation last night.”
Emma bit her lip. This was the last thing she wanted to talk about. But she also didn’t want to shut down the lines of communication. If Penny wanted to talk about the situation with her father, so be it. “Oh? What are your thoughts?”
“Maybe he just wants me to visit him more. Like in New York or LA or any of those cool places. That could work, right?”
Emma felt like Penny had slapped her. “I thought you said that you didn’t want to live with him!”
“I don’t. I said visit. Like, so I can get out of town sometimes. I’m bored, Mom.” She looked around. “I’m not like you. I don’t belong here. I don’t even have any friends at this point.”
The first fireworks burst overhead, ending the conversation. The crowd reacted with a collective, delighted gasp. Penny, completely oblivious about how much she had just rattled Emma, stared up at the sky, her face rapt.
Let it go, Emma told herself. She closed her eyes, choosing a memory over the kaleidoscope of lights in the sky. She thought about fireworks of long ago, a night when she sat on her father’s shoulders in that very park, has big hands anchoring her while she looked up, up, up. Her mother had probably been by their side, but all she saw in her mind’s eye was her dad. A few months later, he was gone.
It was a Sunday morning when she found out her father had died. She could still hear the hollow sound of her mother’s voice calling her into her bedroom. Even at eight years old, Emma had the intuition to know something was terribly wrong. The words her mother used at the time felt vague and inadequate: Sudden death. Painless. He didn’t suffer. Later, when she was older, the technical term brain aneurysm filled some of the gaps. But even now, as a grown woman—a parent herself—it was hard to understand how it could have happened, how she could have lost him in an instant. She hadn’t felt a true sense of security since.
Pop!
She opened her eyes, willing herself to feel joy instead of sadness, to look at the lights instead of dwelling in the dark. Next to her, Penny had her eyes fixed on the sky, a big smile on her face. And Emma reminded herself that while the universe took, it also gave.
“Em!”
The voice came from somewhere a row or two back in the crowd. She looked around and spotted Sean and Alexis and…Kyle? When she saw him, something inside of her did a little flip. She ignored it. That was not why she’d thought about inviting him along. She’d felt bad about the idea of him spending the holiday alone. Apparently, she hadn’t needed to; she should have guessed that Sean would invite him. The boat people were such a club.
“I texted you an hour ago,” Alexis said, looking relaxed and beachy in an orange sundress and matching flip-flops. “So glad we found you!”
They squeezed in around her. Sean’s dog, Melville, jumped on Penny and licked her face. Penny inched sideways, moving closer to Alexis and away from her mother. Here Emma was, going out of her way to arrange a fun mother-daughter night, and the whole time Penny couldn’t care less.
Kyle moved near her, so near their shoulders touched. She kept her eyes on the sky but was intensely aware of him.
“How’s it going?” he said. She just smiled and nodded. There was enough noise from the fireworks that she didn’t need to make real conversation. Still, she felt his eyes on her when he should have been looking at the sky.
She kept her gaze fixed overhead, even when it all started to feel too bright.
Chapter Forty
The Dockside Bar and Grill was housed in the American Legion building on Bay Street just across from the marina. Bea had reserved an outdoor table, although she had failed to realize she would be subjected to a full view of the fireworks.
“I didn’t expect to get to see the fireworks after all,” Angus said.
“Well, I have to admit, that is an unintended consequence of this location. I’m not a fan of loud noises and bright lights.”
He shook his head. “Try to be positive for a few minutes.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She ordered a bottle of white wine and the Peconic Bay oysters to start, along with steamed artichokes. For her main course she chose the herb-crusted cod with lemon beurre blanc. Angus ordered the pulled-pork dish that was served with cheddar and black beans.
“You realize you found the only unhealthy thing on the entire menu,” Bea said drily.
He nodded. “My wife used to keep me on track with my diet. She passed five years ago, and I’m afraid it’s been a steady slide into bad habits ever since.”
“I’m sorry you lost your wife.”
“It seems to be that time in life. Were you ever married?”
“No, I was not.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” Angus said. “May I ask why not?”
“I suppose
I’m married to my work.”
“That sounds lonely.”
Bea shrugged and took a sip of her wine. A child from the table next to theirs ran to the lawn in front of the dining patio. Bea had a view of a large and eclectic assortment of buoys hanging from the shingled siding of a house.
“That’s Billy Joel’s house,” Angus said, following her gaze.
“Is it really? How interesting that he would want to be in the middle of all this. I much prefer privacy.”
“There’s a fine line between privacy and isolation, wouldn’t you say?”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
“I think the whole point of being in a town like this is for the community. My family left Brooklyn to spend summers here starting back in the 1940s and they got more than just a house on the beach. We had dirt roads and didn’t even see streetlights go up until the eighties. I don’t remember a single television set. It was all about parties and seafood picnics and us kids running around the private beach, in and out of everyone’s house. I don’t think the houses even had locks on the doors. If they did, they certainly weren’t ever used.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“It was,” he said wistfully. “It really was.”
Their main courses arrived on brightly colored plates, the food artfully arranged.
They ate in companionable silence. There was something to be said for being with someone your own age at your own stage in life. Certain things were just unspoken. Even though the two of them had no shared history, there was the illusion of it. Spending eight or so decades on earth was a bit of a club. So was loss. And, though she wouldn’t admit it, so was loneliness.
“So how is your treasure hunt going?” Angus asked. “Are you finding what you’re looking for?”
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