The Summer House

by Lauren K. Denton

  She laughed. “That’s good to hear. I bet half of them don’t come back next week, though.” Instead of using the steps, she hoisted herself onto the side of the pool with fluid grace. Her swimsuit, turquoise like her cap, had straps that crisscrossed in the back. Despite her muscled arms and trim figure, age had taken its toll in the form of lumps and sags in the usual places, but the woman exuded a confidence that didn’t have time for embarrassment or shame.

  She turned to Lily and pulled off her swim cap, revealing short gray hair threaded with pink streaks that stood in disarray. “You must be our new village hairdresser.”

  “That’s right. I’m Lily.”

  She nodded. “I’m Cricket. You won’t see me in the salon anytime soon.” She put a hand up to her hair and ruffled it a bit. “Still trying to grow this out.”

  “I like the pink,” Lily said. “I’ve always wanted to try a color in my hair.”

  “You should do it.” She tilted her head. “Purple, though. It’d look good with that copper hair.”

  Cricket looped the towel around her shoulders and waved goodbye before turning away, clad in just her suit and flip-flops for the walk home.

  With no one else around, Lily turned her attention back to the sky and the water. She’d checked Google Maps earlier to orient herself, and she now understood that Safe Harbor Village was situated on the sharpest point of a triangle-shaped island that jutted out into Bon Secour Bay. To the north of the island was the narrow Bon Secour River. To the south was the intracoastal waterway, which ran all the way to Florida. Bon Secour Bay, the wide expanse that spread out before her, was tucked into the eastern edge of Mobile Bay, which in turn flowed out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  From her vantage point on the lounge chair, with nothing between her and the water except the wooden railing of the pool deck and an expanse of scrubby grass, Lily laid her head back against the chair and closed her eyes. Before she’d left the cottage, she tucked her phone into her pocket, and she felt it now, a slight pressure against her thigh. She did her best to ignore it.

  She’d kept busy enough during the week to avoid the temptation of easy online access, but now, with no activity to occupy her mind, the temptation to know what Worth was doing—or at least where he’d disappeared to—grew substantially.

  She’d never been very active on social media, but Worth had been. He had hundreds of friends on Facebook, people he saw regularly and others he hadn’t seen in years. He was always checking and scrolling, laughing at posts, adding his own two cents.

  Lily opened her eyes. She’d checked his page the day he’d disappeared and a couple days after that, but she hadn’t looked at it again. Now the possibility that his page could tell her something about where he’d gone was too much to resist. She retrieved the phone from her pocket and typed “Ainsworth Bishop” into the search box on Facebook, but nothing came up. She tried just using Worth, then added the IV after his name, but still nothing. His page was gone. He’d deleted it.

  On a hunch, she typed in “Delia Park.” When Delia’s page loaded, Lily scrolled and scanned the posted articles and essays, mostly about Delia’s rise to fame as a movie producer in Hollywood, best known for the strong female leads in her movies and for participating in a recent writers’ strike, urging studios to pay their talent fair wages. Lily searched for Worth’s name among the comments from friends and fans on Delia’s page, but she didn’t find anything.

  After taking several long moments to remember her password, she opened Instagram and pulled up Delia’s page. Her stomach dropped when she saw a photo of Delia and Mertha standing together behind a podium, arms around each other’s back. It was dated just three weeks ago. Delia’s caption read, “It’s an honor to be included in Atlanta’s Women Business Leaders’ list of Top Tier Women. Accepting the award from my longtime friend Mertha Bishop made it even more special.”

  Lily inhaled deeply. As she’d told Mertha on the phone, it didn’t matter anymore, but even still, a kernel of anger pushed against the confines of her chest, hard and faintly electric. If she’d never met Worth, she never would have been pulled into the vortex of his family, their business, or their life. And she sure wouldn’t have moved to this remote location at the southern tip of Alabama. Because of him, she was a stranger in a strange place, away from everything that was familiar to her.

  But nothing in Atlanta was familiar either.

  She exhaled. Atlanta wasn’t the place she loved and missed. It was Fox Hill. It was her mother. And it was everything her mother did to create a home, a sanctuary, a welcome place for others. But her mother was gone. If Lily wanted a home like that again, it was up to her to coax it to life.

  Maybe she should be thanking Worth instead for forcing her to stand on her own two feet and build the world she needed.

  Well, let’s not get carried away.

  She had an itch to do something impulsive. Jump into the swimming pool fully clothed. Or throw her phone as far as she could into the bay. That one she actually considered. Without it at her fingertips, she’d be less likely to feel the need to check in on Delia again, the woman who had long ago captured her husband’s heart, and who very well may still be the keeper of it.

  In Worth’s absence, she was finding her mind cooler and clearer than ever. Yes, she and Worth had shared an electric handful of months. And yes, a part of her heart had wondered if she’d met “the one.” But the strange thing was, even after being married to him for over a year, she readily accepted that she’d never been the keeper of his heart. She’d never had a real grasp of it. And he’d never held hers.

  As if coming out of a fog, her eyes focused and she realized the sky had transformed, the oranges and pinks deepening to raspberry, magenta, and violet. The sun was just a blur over the horizon now, though still too intense to look at full on. She’d come here for the sunset and she’d almost missed it. Almost.

  A string of seagulls flew in a haphazard line across the highest part of the sky, each one barely flapping its wings, caught up in the breeze. When she lowered her gaze back to the expanse, she noticed a boat approaching the bay from the mouth of the river off to her right. As it drew nearer, Lily could make out the words in swirling cursive along the side—Miss Stella. The white of the hull was bright and crisp against the grass-green stripe stretching down its side. Tall poles protruded from the center, and dark green nets hung from some of them, while others were bare, reaching proudly toward the sky. In the wheelhouse, she could just barely make out the shape of a person standing at the window.

  As the boat passed in front of Safe Harbor Village and turned out toward the bay, it made a striking presence against the backdrop of the fiery sky. Lily kept her eyes on it until the sky darkened to an artist’s palette of purples and blues and the boat was just a smudge on the horizon. The bay was silver, almost velvety, and at the edge down in front of the pool, small waves lapped against the sandy shore in slow licks.

  Lily leaned her head back again, the fabric of the chair sun-roughened against her skin. She closed her eyes, this time letting herself imagine someone sitting next to her, someone to share the beauty before her and the tender places of her heart.

  Twelve

  The day of the party began like it was mad. The bay beat its anger against the shoreline during the early morning hours as clouds lunged, low-slung across the sky. Rose was not accustomed to being awake for the day’s first stirrings. She’d long ago slipped into the luxurious habit of allowing herself to fall back asleep after her 5 a.m. trip to the bathroom, and she regularly slept until at least seven thirty, Coach’s sunrise serenades notwithstanding.

  When she was younger, Rose was an early riser, but it wasn’t by choice. A sickly child, she usually had a thermometer thrust in her mouth in the wee hours or was woken for a dose of cough syrup or a steamy shower to soothe a bout of croup. Because of that, she was usually awake to see the shrimpers pull into the gravel parking lot of Willett Fisheries, lumber from their trucks to the boats, and
prepare the nets for their daily work. She saw her mother dress and take up her station behind the counter, ready to pour hot coffee for the workers and, later in the morning, ring up customers picking up pints or quarts of shrimp or oysters.

  Rose watched her father and Jim, when he was old enough, load their bags for the day on the water. She always wished she could go out on the boats with them, even sometimes packing her own bag and attempting to slip out to the docks without anyone seeing her. But her father would always catch her and lead her away from the docks with a firm grip on her upper arm.

  Leonard Willett was a hard man to grow up with. When he was at home, he was never truly at home, always wishing he were back on the water. That’s where he came truly alive. He was much more comfortable reading the tides and shrimp habits and thunderstorms than the emotional temperature of the Willett home. Especially the female members. Especially his daughter. Life with him was a delicate dance on eggshells.

  Anytime she’d try to slip onto the boat unnoticed, he’d tell her the water was no place for a girl, but that was all she wanted—to work with Jim and the other men, to prove she was strong, that she could do big things, that she could be useful. But he never relented, always choosing to see her as the sick young child she’d been, always disappointed the Lord had seen fit to give him a daughter rather than another son to help with the family business.

  Whether he meant all little girls or just her, she wasn’t sure. All Rose knew was that her family’s work—the work that left them in both plenty and want, that brought them both joy and misery—never seemed to stretch enough to include her in its net. When she was young, that exclusion was a dark bruise she wore, each “no” a firm press on her tender flesh. Once she was a teenager, she’d pushed her affection for the water, the boats, the shrimping lifestyle, and the men who ruled it far out of arm’s reach. She made herself give it up. Never getting to experience what a life on the water could be like saddened her, but she told herself to get over it. She began sleeping long enough to miss the early morning buzz of activity, the hopeful expectation of a good haul and a full cash drawer.

  Years later when she married Terry, Rose was happy to discover he was a late sleeper too. As a commercial developer, he found no reason to get an early jump on the day, explaining that he never liked to disturb potential clients before their second cup of coffee. As an adult, whether she lived near the water or miles from it, Rose preferred to sleep right through those pastel-brushed morning hours until close to eight, when the boats were gone and the day was already awake.

  Yet here she was at five forty-five, lying in her bed, as awake as she’d been when her eyes opened an hour ago, mind racing. The same thing had happened several times in the past week or so, as if something had wormed its way into her brain, causing her synapses to misfire and wake her at the wrong times. She felt expectant, like she was on a moving conveyor belt that was taking her somewhere specific, but she had no way to control where she was going. And Rose didn’t like giving up control.

  She didn’t even know what she was expecting. She never had visitors, wasn’t awaiting any packages in the mail beyond her regular mail-order blood pressure medicine, and her birthday wasn’t for another seven months. Everything was status quo.

  Except it wasn’t. She’d received an offer to give up everything she knew here at the village. To hand over her responsibilities and choose for herself what the rest of her days would look like. And her mind had swung between yes and no so many times it nearly made her light-headed.

  And in the middle of all this indecision, Lily Bishop had broken into Rose’s world, upending it with her fresh beauty, her dogged determination, and her mysterious absent husband.

  A nugget of discontent had lodged itself deep down in Rose’s innermost being, and Rose guessed this, more than anything, was what was waking her up. Something wasn’t cooperating, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep insisting everything was just fine.

  * * *

  By late morning, the angry sky had cooled its heels and settled into sunshine and a light breeze. A perfect day for a party, though Rose was always suspicious of seemingly perfect days. Something was usually apt to go wrong when she least expected it.

  Rawlins was coming at noon to set up the folding tables and tents and the wooden planks that would serve as a dance floor. A few of the men would come out to help him later in the day, while most of the women would be at home whipping up cheese balls, pigs in a blanket, and barbecue cocktail weenies, and filling pitchers with sweet tea and lemonade. Walking out to check her mailbox, Rose could already smell the sweet, spicy scent of Coach’s ribs cooking out in the Big Green Egg behind his cottage on Anchor Lane. He slow-roasted them all day, and by 6 p.m., they were fall-off-the-bone tender. She hated to admit they were the best barbecue ribs she’d ever tasted.

  She was placing her sugars, flour, and baking powder back in the cabinet, a coffee cake baking in the oven, when her doorbell rang, followed by the creak of the front door.

  “Aunt Rosie!” a little girl’s voice squealed.

  Amid a pounding of small feet and a blur of red curls, Hazel Willett burst into the kitchen like a summer lightning storm. She pulled out the step stool Rose kept tucked into the crevice beside the fridge and propped it open next to the counter where Rose was working.

  “Whatcha making?” she asked, promptly sticking her finger in the bowl of excess crumbled topping.

  “Hang on, hang on, there’s butter in there,” Rose managed before Hazel stuck a piece in her mouth.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Rawlins entered the kitchen with two duffel bags slung over his shoulder—one pink, one purple.

  “Nothing bad about butter, except maybe a plain chunk of it in your mouth.” She grimaced as Hazel ate another piece.

  “Okay, little miss. That’s enough.” Rawlins grabbed a paper towel from the counter and wiped Hazel’s greasy fingers. Rose did the same thing to her own hands with a dish towel.

  “What brings you two here?” Rose asked, eyebrows raised over Hazel’s head so she wouldn’t see.

  “Tara got a new job,” he said, raising his eyebrows back. He lifted the cap on his head and resettled it. “She’s working in Destin now, so Hazel and I will be seeing a lot more of each other.” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head and picked her up. “Starting with this weekend.”

  “Daddy’s going to let me swim in the pool after he sets up for the party.”

  “Oh, is he now?”

  “Uh-huh. And I’m jumping off the diving board. I brought my bathing suit.” She wiggled out of his arms and pulled the pink bag off his shoulder. “I want to put it on.” When she finally got the bag free, she ran with it into the bathroom.

  While Hazel was gone, singing softly to herself as she changed clothes, Rose set her bowls and measuring cups in the dishwasher, then checked her kitchen timer. “So Tara has a new job? Again?” Twelve more minutes on the cake.

  “Yeah,” Rawlins said with a sigh. He dropped the purple bag to the floor and sat on a kitchen stool. “She has a friend who says she makes two hundred dollars a night in tips at this new restaurant on 30A. She’s going to give it a shot.”

  “Hmph.” Rose pulled a dozen eggs from the fridge and filled a big pot of water. “That girl’s going to give herself whiplash with how quickly she runs from one thing to the next.” Setting the pot on the stove, she carefully added the eggs to the water and turned up the heat.

  “She loves Hazel.” His voice was quiet. “She just . . . I don’t know.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “But you’re right. She’s always running.”

  “Maybe all the running around is her way of trying to replace the good thing she had with you.”

  “What we had wasn’t good. It was young and impulsive and . . . reckless.” He released a puff of air from his nose. “The only good that came from those two years is about to pop out of that door in a bathing suit.”

  As if summoned by their
conversation, Hazel burst from the bathroom and ran to the center of the den, hands on her hips, Wonder Woman–style, little round belly pushing against a yellow-and-white polka-dotted bathing suit. “I’m ready to swim.”

  “I’m surprised your suit isn’t pink, Miss Hazel,” Rose said. “Just about everything else you own is.”

  “My goggles are pink and very sparkly. But I left them at the pool the last time we were here.” Her brow furrowed, just a slight dimple in the soft skin between her eyes. “I hope they’re still there.”

  “I haven’t seen anyone walking around wearing sparkly swim goggles, so I’d say they’re probably right where you left them.”

  She squealed and jumped up and down a couple times. “Can I go see the roses?” Without waiting for an answer, she darted to the door, threw it open, and raced down the steps.

  “Stay away from the road,” Rawlins called after her.

  “So you’ll be keeping Hazel more often now, you say?”

  Rawlins nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets. “Tara’s taking on as many shifts as she can here at the beginning. I think she’s hoping to move up to manager or something. Putting her best foot forward and all that.”

  “I see.” Rose put the lid on the pot of boiling water and turned off the heat, setting another timer for ten minutes. “And how will you manage that with the season just about to kick into high gear? A boat’s no place for a little girl.” She swallowed hard to dislodge the memories of the last time she’d heard those words.

  Rawlins paused, then reached up and scratched the back of his neck. He peered at her.

  “Oh no. Don’t look at me.” She leaned against the counter behind her and crossed her arms. “I don’t know the first thing about taking care of kids.”

  “Sure you do. Hazel loves you. She loves coming here to see you.”

  “You’re always around when she’s here. I usually don’t keep her for longer than a couple of hours without you.”