Maureen pushed her hair behind her ears and straightened her dress. “Good night, my dear. I’m sorry you saw me like this. You come from such a sweet family, I’ll bet your parents never fight.”
“We’re normal.”
Maureen smiled a crooked smile and touched the side of Ann’s face with her skinny hand. “Normal. Listen to you. Don’t you know that ‘normal’ is so lovely and so sweet?” She wobbled backward. “We’re so lucky we found you. You’ve saved our summer. You and dear Michael.” Maureen’s expression changed, like she’d just remembered something. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Brooks said he saw something peculiar. You and Mich—”
“Brooks loves to make up stories,” Ann said.
Anthony put his arm across Maureen’s shoulders and tried to lead her to their bedroom. He was so wide and strong and solid, while she was tall and thin. “You need to sleep.” He led her down the hallway and she tipped, knocking a framed photo collage of the boys off kilter. Anthony looked over his shoulder at Ann. “Back in a moment,” he said.
“I’ll wait outside.”
Ann felt the shock of leaving the air-conditioned house. Outside was dark, the heat as pressing as it was in the middle of the day only it seemed even hotter now with the humidity. The moisture held the smell of the ocean in the air.
The security lights by the garage lit up as she walked past, revealing a furious cloud of gnats. She walked into the yard, unaware that Michael had set up a timer on the sprinkler by the garden to go off at night. It startled her when it turned on and the water shot out, sounding like a pack of hissing snakes. She screamed in surprise and ran to the paved driveway as fast as she could.
“Cooling off?” Anthony said. He had seen the whole scene from the deck. His eyes settled on the damp shirt clinging to her chest. The eerie outdoor light sharpened his already-sharp features.
She looked down. She could see the tiny heart print of her bra through the fabric.
“I was going to suggest another way to cool down.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.” He pointed at the green Jeep that sat in the driveway. “My wife won’t ride in it because it’s too rough, but you won’t mind a rough ride, will you?” His question wasn’t a question.
“A ride in the Jeep sounds fun,” Ann said.
He was clearly pleased. “Oh, Ann. You are so uncorrupted, so fresh. I love spending time with you.” He ran his hand down her arm. “After the night I had with Mo’s sorority sisters from Smith and their boring husbands, you’re just what I need.”
Ann smiled. It took so little to please him. She just needed to be who she was. He walked over to the passenger side and put his hand over her hip to help her step in. “Up you go.” He let his hand linger even after she was seated. She liked the warmth, and that electric tingle that shot through her.
When he got into the driver’s seat, Ann said, as if to absolve herself of all her forbidden daydreams, “Is Maureen OK?”
“You’re kind to be concerned.”
“She seemed tired.”
“She can’t hold her liquor. She’s not a hearty Midwesterner like you. I’ll bet you can hold your own.” Anthony sat next to her in the driver’s seat and stared at the windshield. He didn’t put the keys in the ignition right away.
Ann decided to take advantage of the pause and the silence. “Are you happy with her?” She felt emboldened by the warmth she could still feel from his hand, and their previous closeness.
He didn’t seem to mind the bluntness of her question. If anything, he seemed to appreciate her directness, her willingness to take him on. “What does it mean to be happy with another person?”
“My parents are happy with each other.” She regretted mentioning her parents. She thought this made her sound like a little kid. But they were happy together, she knew it.
He turned the key in the ignition and the Jeep roared to life. “Good for them.” Anthony’s voice changed. “I mean really, good for them. That’s great. Marriage can be a tricky business.”
He drove through downtown Wellfleet. During the day, the town was bustling with tourists buying ice cream, visiting galleries, and shopping in the little stores that lined the main street, buying their Wellfleet sweatshirts at Abiyoyo. This late, it settled back into a limp quiet. The flag sagged from the flagpole in front of the town hall. Next to it sat the cannon, immortalized with a plaque and surrounded by stones. “You know that cannon?” Ann said. “It was dug out of our neighbors’ yard.” She loved their neighbors, a nice couple who kept busy entertaining their grandchildren.
“Is that so?” Anthony’s smile was distracted, insincere. This disappointed Ann. Nervous, she told him the story about a rivalry that once existed between Wellfleet and South Wellfleet, and how they’d had their own cannons that they shot from their respective hills on the Fourth of July. One of the cannons was destroyed when, as a prank, some locals filled it with wet sand. After that, the young men used to steal the remaining cannon and shoot it off wherever it ended up. This went on for years, until the final cannon disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to it until 1976, when it was unearthed. “There’s supposedly a curse on it,” she’d said.
“Hmmm…” Anthony said, disinterested. He turned onto Route 6 and picked up speed. They passed all the landmarks she knew so well: the Stop & Shop, Brownies Cabins, J.P.’s, the yarn and quilting store on the hill, and the water tower. Before that night she knew this strip of highway the way a kid would, from looking at it from the backseat of a car, watching it go by in a blur. Now, sitting close to Anthony with the warm breeze rushing over her, everything looked different.
Anthony reached over and yanked the ponytail holder out of her hair and left his hand on the back of her neck on the same spot where Michael had put his hand just before she’d pulled away. He said, “That’s more like it. The whole point of a Jeep ride is to get your hair messed up.” All this attention from forbidden men! Between Michael and Anthony, Ann felt desirable in a way she’d never felt before. It was intoxicating, as if she were at the center of the world.
Anthony took a left turn just past the red Citgo sign onto Old County Road South.
“But I live—” She pointed farther down Route 6, toward the General Store, the post office, and the apothecary.
“I told you I was taking you on a little adventure.”
Ann couldn’t have been more pleased. Time with Anthony all to herself? As far as she was concerned, the evening could go on forever.
Old King’s Highway was winding and hilly. Anthony took the curves so fast she had to hold on to the dash to keep from being thrown out of the side of the doorless car. When he descended a hill she felt the sensation of an elevator dropping down the shaft.
Just past the sleeping RVs and tents in Paine’s Campground, he switched off his lights, slowed down, and turned onto the unmarked dirt road. Ann was surprised Anthony knew about Duck Pond, a pristine kettle pond tucked into the National Seashore property. The pond was technically public but there were no signs—the locals made sure of that, removing them as quickly as the town could put them up. To get there meant following a bumpy dirt road for almost a mile, and crossing the sandy telegraph road before heading back into the woods.
Anthony expertly maneuvered over the potholes in the compacted sand. “I love it back here,” he said.
“Me too. We come here all the time.”
“See, that’s your life, and that’s beautiful. Me, I’ve got two lives. A Jaguar life and a Jeep life. A Chequessett Neck Road life and a dirt road life. Don’t get me wrong, the Jaguar life is nothing to complain about, but this? This is real. You make me feel real, Ann.”
Michael was wrong about Anthony, she thought. Here he was, opening himself up to her, revealing how conflicted he felt. He was mysterious. Interesting. Torn. And he thought enough of Ann to share those thoughts with her.
He accelerated into a dip in the road. He smiled at her. “That’s h
ow I feel when I look at you.” He reached across her for the glove compartment.
He pulled out a silver flask and set it on her bare thigh, just below the tattered hem of her jean shorts. He let his hand rest on the seat next to her, his fingertips grazing her skin, setting something off, a feeling so warm and overwhelmingly good and big that she thought she could die from it. Ann loved not knowing what would come next, loved that Anthony was in control, loved the heat and the way her body felt, lean and alive, loved that he didn’t think of her as a kid but as someone worthy of sharing thoughts with about his marriage and his two lives. His marriage. Maureen!
“I should probably go home,” she said.
“I’ll take you, don’t worry. First just have some fun. You’ve been working all summer. You deserve some fun, don’t you?”
She took a gulp.
“Go ahead. Have another. Enjoy it. The scotch is casked. Only two hundred and forty bottles, twenty-five years old. The good stuff. I grew up drinking moonshine. Life’s too short to get drunk on cheap whiskey.”
Anthony drove over another bump. Half the contents went into her mouth, while the rest spilled down her chin and all over her already-damp shirt. The alcohol burned her throat and shot up her sinuses. She coughed.
Anthony laughed. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh. She liked the mellow sound of his voice, and the way his eye squinted at the corner. The moonlight picked up the stray silver hairs in his beard. He seemed so grown-up. So manly.
“That’s about thirty bucks’ worth you just spilled all over yourself.”
“Sorry,” she said again, still coughing.
“You may as well finish it off.” She did. The liquid landed like a burning torch in her gut.
He stopped the Jeep. “Now, how am I going to take you home to your parents smelling like a distillery?”
Ann didn’t want to think about her parents, didn’t want him to mention them. She wanted to keep Anthony and her parents separate.
“It’s a perfect night to look at the moonlight on the water with a beautiful young woman. Let’s walk down to the pond.”
Ann pulled off her sandals and tucked them under her seat. She always left her sandals in the car when she came here with her family.
The path was sandy, the only danger the tree roots.
He led the way down the long, sandy footpath. His shoulders were broad, his calves firm. There was a butterfly-shaped sweat stain showing through the back of his linen shirt.
It was impossibly strange for her to be in this place with Anthony. Because the pond was walking distance from their house, she’d been there a thousand times, mostly with Poppy. It was their favorite escape when their parents were napping or bird-watching and didn’t want to drive them anywhere. This is where they collected pinecones and ate the wild blueberries and beach plums. She and Poppy looked for tadpoles in the shallows and chased the sounds of the giant bullfrogs. If a childhood could be defined by a place, this was where Ann’s resided.
When they got to the small beach she looked around to see if any campers from the campsite were there, or a hobo, or an insomniac. The shoreline was miraculously empty. There was no wind. The water was as still as a Jell-O mold. Warm yellow lights lit up the windows in the single house on the far shore, like a pair of eyes watching them. That was Ann’s favorite house in the world. She’d always envied the people who owned it. When she and Poppy swam across the pond (it was their ritual to swim across all the Wellfleet ponds each visit, yet this strange summer they’d only made it across Gull and Great Pond), they felt funny getting close to the property. They’d squeal when they touched their wooden raft, and sprint back to the opposite, public shore, feeling as if they’d invaded a foreign territory. The house, tucked into the National Seashore, seemed to have dropped out of the sky. Ann and Poppy had tried without success to find the driveway on the fire roads. She wondered if it was even real, or part of a dream.
Anthony led Ann away from the public beach, walking barefoot through the crystal-clear water to a smaller beach tucked behind scrub pine and oak trees on an inlet a few hundred feet away. He reached down and splashed some on his face. “God, this feels good on a hot night,” he said. “I sweated all through that miserable dinner.”
He seemed more relaxed than she’d ever seen him. She noticed little things about him: the way his hair curled behind his ears in the humidity, the droplets of water that got stuck in his beard, that the skin on his face seemed soft while the rest of him was so solid and hard.
“The water is perfect.” He splashed her and smiled a mischievous smile. She could imagine him as a naughty little boy, full of sneakiness and tricks.
She smiled back and took a step into the water, then another. “Did you know there’s a tile medallion of a mermaid somewhere on the bottom of this pond? My parents said that people from the campground set it on the bottom. My sister and I, we try to find it every time we come here. Poppy swears she’s seen it, but I don’t believe her.”
“What about you? Have you seen it?”
“I feel like I have. Like I can picture it in my mind’s eye.”
“You can only see it on magic nights like this, in the moonlight. Someone put a spell on it, just for people like us, a couple of fools who still want to believe.” Anthony walked closer to her. “Can I kiss you, Ann? Just once, before summer is over?”
Once sounded safe. Fun. Interesting. Just enough. And she’d wanted him to kiss her all summer even though—no. She tried to convince herself that nothing else was real but that moment. “Sure, I guess.”
He grabbed her chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted her head up. He wasn’t much taller than she was. He leaned forward and she felt a strange tickle from the softness of his beard, followed by his lips pressing against hers. She thought of Michael, the perfection of that kiss, how it had sounded like an accusation when she asked if he loved her, when she meant it as a question. If she hadn’t been so surprised, and if he hadn’t run away, she might have told him that she loved him, too. Why was she thinking about Michael when Anthony’s tongue darted into her mouth, thrusting and urgent—too much. She pulled away.
“You have no goddamn idea how beautiful you are.” He shook his head and started unbuttoning his shirt. “You’re ripe.”
Ann soaked up his flattery, every word, even though she’d always known she was pretty. The boys at school asked her out, but they were just boys. She’d fool around with them sometimes when she was drunk. She was curious about sex, but she never went too far.
Anthony began to unbutton his shirt. “Swim with me.”
“I don’t have a suit.”
He shrugged. “You have the one you were born in. Besides, you’re already soaked.”
Ann laughed for no reason. She was nervous, and at the nervous edge of desire.
Anthony stripped his shirt off. His chest was covered in a mat of thick, black hair. His body wasn’t perfect the way she’d imagined it would be. He looked older without his shirt on, more like a middle-aged dad. Even in the dark she could see the dim outline of the farmer’s tan on his thick forearms. His stomach bulged a little over the waist of his shorts.
He smiled as though he was proud of what he had to show her, proud to be in this situation in the first place. He threw his shirt on the sandy area next to a tree a few feet away. Then he unbuckled his belt, his eyes trained on her. She could have sworn that the metallic ripping sound his zipper made when he unzipped it could be heard for miles around, as loud as an airplane crossing in the sky.
“Well,” he said. “I guess it’s my turn to be looked at.”
Ann felt suddenly shy, unable to bring herself to watch him continue to undress. It was strange, how her desire could come and go so quickly. She looked at the water gently lapping the shoreline behind him and thought about home. Were her parents starting to wonder where she was? Did Poppy go out with her new friends again? Her mother had complained she’d hardly seen either of her girls.
> “You know, I’ve often thought about that afternoon in our bedroom.” The word “our” unsettled Ann, the way it invoked Maureen. She’d been trying hard not to think about her. “That was so damn erotic. I’d had such a hard day at work and there you were, it was like finding the mermaid medallion. The last thing I expected. Glorious.”
Ann could feel the whiskey kicking in, dulling her nerves. Her thoughts were starting to bump into each other. She tried hard to be clearheaded.
“Besides, you need to rinse the smell of whiskey off your clothes before I take you home,” he said. “Come on.”
“But then I’ll have to explain why my clothes are wet.”
“They were wet when you walked into the sprinklers. What do you think your parents are going to do, hire a detective? I can’t take you home to your father smelling like whiskey.”
Her father. She could just picture him on a public beach right next to where she stood, reading the mystery novels he only read on vacation, his floppy hat on his head, one hairy leg crossed over the other, his Birkenstock hanging off his callused foot.
“Let’s find that medallion,” Anthony said. He dashed into the water. She saw his bare ass in the moonlight. It was round but muscular, a shocking flash of vulnerable white.
Alone on the beach, Ann drunkenly weighed what to do next. She wanted to swim. She loved swimming more than anything, even running, and it was still so hot. She decided that Anthony was right about needing to get the smell out of her clothes. She took off her shirt and dragged it around in the water, then hung it on a branch to dry. She saw Anthony’s head about twenty feet away, far enough to feel he couldn’t see her too clearly. The alcohol mellowed her nerves, and so did his admiration. She liked being watched.
Why not? She slipped off her shorts and rinsed them off, too. When she turned to look for Anthony she saw that he was gone, already halfway across the pond. When Anthony’s head slipped back under the liquid black water, she took off her underwear and ran in, completely naked.
Never had the cool liquid thickness of the kettle pond felt so erotic, like she was swimming through silk scarves. The heat and her nakedness made the water seem thicker, like it embraced her. She went deep and felt the temperature grow colder, then warmer again as she surfaced. Her hair fanned out around her shoulders.
The Second Home Page 10