She kissed her sleeping mama’s forehead and walked into the hall, then reached for her cell phone. She dialed Maisy’s number in California. For the past twelve years Riley had convinced herself that she would never need Maisy again.
She’d been wrong.
TWO
MAISY
Maisy Sheffield ran her fingers over the linen fabric, then held it next to the pale pink paint chip the customer had handed her with instructions to find the perfect match. Maisy pretended to focus intently, picking up swatch after swatch when she knew all along which one she would choose. The customer squinted with a slight smile, as though pleased by the hard work Maisy was putting into the choice.
The fabrics in the Beach Chic store in Laguna Beach were now as familiar to Maisy as her own life. She had studied everything about the store with more diligence than she’d ever applied to schoolwork. Long ago, she’d decided that the harder she worked to establish this California life, the more her existence in Georgia would disappear from her consciousness. So far her strategy had worked well.
After twelve years the memory of the thin sand dollars, white starfish and gray-white shells of coastal Georgia had been replaced with the reality of coarser sand, the sun setting over the water instead of behind it, and light, dry air instead of dense, humid moisture that sent Maisy’s hair into a mass of bronze curls. Here the rhythms of nature sang in softer, subtler songs under sleek palm trees instead of in the chaotic chirp of the cicadas under cluttered live oaks. The beaches here were consistently wide and deep instead of narrow at high tide and low, muddy and exposed at low tide.
Maisy had gone to the opposite side of the continent to create a new life for herself in a completely different world.
Maisy closed one eye and held the trellis rose fabric swatch up to the light. “This one, Mrs. Findle.”
“I knew you’d pick the right one. You have an eye for these things.” Mrs. Findle plucked the swatch from Maisy’s hand.
Maisy tried not to look over at her boss, Sheila, to see if she had heard the compliment, but she couldn’t help it. Sheila nodded at Maisy, her blond bob barely moving, and smiled.
“Let’s go ahead and order the fabric, and then we’ll decide on some other pieces,” Maisy said.
“I don’t need anything else. I just need to cover the lounge chair in my bedroom. I hate the damask on it now.”
“Oh, once this fabric is in your room, you will surely want to think about the lamps and the bedcovers.” Maisy started off toward the back of the store. “The mirrors and chandeliers will need to reflect your new vision for the room. I don’t want y’all to regret that the rest of the decor isn’t as lovely as your new chair.”
Mrs. Findle fingered the chain on her Chanel purse. “Well, maybe just the lamps, because the ones I have are dark wood.”
“Yes, that’s a great place to start.” Maisy walked toward a crystal lamp at the far end of the room, pointing out other accessories that would work well to give Ms. Findle’s room the serene look she desired.
Mrs. Findle stopped next to an oversized ottoman. “Do you think this is too large to go with my chair?”
“I really don’t.”
“You have the most lovely accent. Where are you from? I’ve been meaning to ask,” Mrs. Findle said.
“Georgia. A small coastal town.” Maisy had found that women in southern California had a vision of southern Georgia that was more romantic than real. When she’d first arrived at Beach Chic, she’d tried to hide her Southern roots until she realized it was an asset to be from “the South.” Maisy resumed her Southern accent and allowed the women to believe she’d lived in an antebellum world where life moved at a slower pace and the olden song of Southern hospitality whispered across jasmine-scented nights.
Of course that was an illusion. The small Southern coastal town where Maisy had grown up was mostly deserted except during the weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when the “summer people” arrived and the fun began. Her boring hometown was enough to make her crazy. If anyone asked why she’d moved across the country, she said she needed to shake the dirt-road dust and sandburs off her flip-flops and try something new. Only she knew the biggest reason she had left. Only she and Tucker Morgan.
Sheila hollered across the store. “Maisy, phone call.”
Maisy turned and smiled. “Can I return the call?”
“I don’t think so,” Sheila said. “Sounds . . . like an emergency from home.”
Maisy ran a hand through her hair, now smooth instead of “puffy,” as her mama had once labeled her bad hair. If this call came from Mama, with some faux drama, Maisy would have to tell her not to call the store anymore. Mrs. Findle had the potential to become the best customer she’d had in months.
“I’ll be right back.” Maisy smiled at Mrs. Findle.
“Oh, go on, dear. I’ll just browse for a minute. You’ve got me thinking.”
Maisy accepted the portable phone from Sheila and headed into the back room. She took a long swallow of her cold Starbucks sitting on the counter and then asked, “Okay, what is it?”
“Well, hello to you, too, sis.” Riley’s voice sounded as though it had traveled from the far end of the world, and Maisy wanted to keep it that way. Jealousy, doubt, guilt and other irritating emotions—she could hold them at bay as long as the Georgia she had left twelve years ago seemed as distant as another planet.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m just outrageously busy. Is everything okay?”
“No,” Riley said, then paused. “Mama fell down the main stairs. She’s okay, but . . .”
“Sounds like a bad movie. Mama fell down the stairs? All of them?” Maisy pictured their front curving staircase, the same one she had come down every morning of her life, for school, for dates, for cotillion dances.
“Yes,” Riley answered. “All of them.”
“Drunk?”
Riley’s silence was the only reply.
“Was she drunk, Riley?” Maisy repeated.
“Probably. But that isn’t the point.”
“What is?”
“She broke her left femur, and two ribs, and sprained her right wrist.”
“I thought you said she was okay.” Out of the dark corner of her mind, Maisy felt something move toward her sight, some vague and dark inevitability from which she wanted to run as fast and as far as possible.
“When I said she was okay, I meant she wasn’t . . .”
“Dead,” Maisy said.
“You are so crass. She’s going to be home, but laid up. . . .”
“No way.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say yet.”
Maisy closed her eyes. “Yes, I do. You’re gonna say I have to come earlier. Stay longer.”
“Yes, you have to come home.”
“No.” Maisy opened her eyes, picked up a wrinkled swatch of fabric and folded it into a neat square. “I’ll help you if I can from here, but I can’t stay longer than the weekend. I have a job . . . friends, a life.”
“Your family needs you. You know the store won’t make it if this week’s events don’t bring in enough . . . money. It will all be gone. You know that.”
“Don’t pull the family card on me. I don’t remember anyone coming out here to help me. I don’t see any Sheffields in Laguna Beach with Maisy.”
“You left.”
“Yes, I did. And I’m staying. What can I do to help?”
“Take an early plane. Leave your return ticket open-ended.” Riley’s voice cracked with the strain of rare tears. “Please.”
“No,” Maisy said again, realizing her answer sounded like a watered-down version of her no of only five seconds ago. She knew how this would go—the negative response would become so weak and insipid that soon it would turn into a maybe, then a yes. She had to hang up before that happened.
Riley’s voice strengthened. “I need . . . We need you.”
“I was only gonna fly in for the part
y, fly out. The end. I swear, no one but Mama could have figured out how to coincide her seventieth birthday with the anniversary of a two-hundred-year-old house. And now this.”
“Stop it.”
“Can’t you call Adalee and get her to help?”
“I will as soon as I hang up with you.”
Static silence on the line sounded like the incoming tide, the filling of the marsh, the cicadas on the back porch, and the rising song of the seagull on a summer night. “No,” Maisy repeated. “I can’t.” She shoved aside her ingrained good manners and hung up on her sister.
Sheila poked her head in the back room. “Everything okay?”
“Just a little Southern family drama.”
Sheila laughed. “Don’t go thinkin’ that drama is only reserved for the South.” Her fake Southern accent made Maisy laugh.
“My drunk mama fell down the stairs, broke her leg and other assorted bones. My uptight sister wants me to come home now and help her.”
Sheila’s smile dropped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost my mother two years ago. You do know you have to go, right?”
“Not you, too.”
Sheila smiled. “We can do without you—but not for very long.”
Maisy sank into a down-cushioned chair and dropped her face into her hands. She exhaled into the truth: she had to go home to Georgia.
THREE
RILEY
Riley leaned against her desk with the cell phone pressed to her ear. Night settled around the closed bookstore, blending the shadows into darkness. Adalee had ignored Riley’s last four phone calls; finally she answered.
“Hey, sis. What’s up?” Loud voices echoed in the background.
“I’ve been trying to call you all evening,” Riley said in a light voice, attempting to hide her frustration.
“I know. I’ve been . . . busy.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at my boyfriend Chad’s house. A party. Is this important?”
“Yes. I’m hoping you can come home a little earlier than you planned because—”
“No way,” Adalee interrupted.
“Let me finish,” Riley said.
“Well, then let me go outside.” Adalee hollered something to Chad, and Riley heard the slam of a door. “Go ahead. What is it?”
Riley repeated everything she’d told Maisy about Mama, and then took a deep breath. “Adalee, can you come home as soon as you finish your last exam? Isn’t that tomorrow?”
“I was gonna go to Florida with some friends to celebrate the end of the semester. But if Mama is hurt, I’ll come now.”
“What about your exam tomorrow?”
“I sorta already failed the class. And a couple others.”
“Oh, God, Adalee. Does Mama know?”
“Yes. She’s already lectured me. Yelled at me. Told me the implications of laziness. I don’t need a lecture from you, too.”
“None planned. Just come home tomorrow. We’ll work together—me, you and Maisy.”
“Maisy’s coming?”
Riley fought a rising jealousy—Adalee had always looked at Maisy with awe, the cool sister who lived in California. “Yes.”
“I’ll leave first thing in the morning, but I’m not working at the store, right? I mean, this is my summer, my time off.”
“Yes, Adalee, you’ll be working at the store.”
“Ah, no, I won’t.”
“Yes.” Riley slumped into her desk chair.
“We’ll see. . . .” Adalee’s voice faded into laughter, and then the click of disconnection.
Riley sat in her dark office and fought tears of frustration. This she would not do: give in and cry. She stood and stretched, walked through the dim bookstore toward the back staircase leading to her apartment. Her thoughts were scattered and unquiet; she wasn’t prepared, in any way, to deal with the possibility of giving up the store while taking care of Mama and now working with her sisters, too. Yet through the years, she had learned that life never waited until she was ready before it threw the next change at her.
Riley watched the sunrise from the Driftwood Cottage observation tower, just as she did every morning. Before the cottage was moved from its original location on a river plantation, this same tower had overseen a cotton field. Riley’s quiet soul belonged to the dawn of each day. Her flashlight was in one hand, a copy of The Screwtape Letters in the other. She sat in the sole wicker chair and opened to where the leather bookmark indicated; she was almost finished. She stared out over the dark void of sea and turned the flashlight onto her page. She did her best to read all the books the book clubs had chosen, but today instead of reading, she recalled the conversations she’d had with Maisy and Adalee. How had her relationship with her sisters, especially Maisy, turned so wrong, so inside out for so long?
Often in these moments before the sun climbed into view, and with a book in her hand, a deep longing would rise inside Riley’s heart. Normally the practical realities of life consumed her. Taking care of Brayden and the bookstore, her mama, and when she thought of it, herself, filled her days. Her to-do list was a fortress against loneliness; busy-ness was a balm.
When she thought of losing Driftwood Cottage Bookstore, of possibly having to walk away from the slanted floors and crooked bookshelves, of leaving behind the back porch or inviting café, her insides dropped in a rapid freefall. She shook her head—she would not think about that. Not now. But ignoring the possible loss was like trying to ignore a shrill siren. She climbed down from the observation deck, the sun now fully risen, and stood in the middle of the kitchen, unsure of which task to attend to first. Her thoughts and emotions were as scattered as though someone had blown them like dandelion seed on a windy day.
Mama was sick . . . and for all her idiosyncrasies, Kitsy Sheffield was the backbone of the bookstore.
Kitsy had bought Driftwood Cottage from the Logan family twelve years ago. She had seen the opportunity not only to buy her favorite cottage on the beach and open a bookstore, but also to present her pregnant, unwed daughter with a chance to live her own life. During the first days after the news of Riley’s pregnancy had settled into the marrow of the Sheffield home, the long and tearful conversations at the kitchen table had ended in Kitsy’s offering her personal dream of owning a small coastal bookstore. Kitsy’s aspiration became Riley’s refuge.
A few months after Brayden’s birth, the transformation from Logan family home to fully equipped bookstore had been completed. Driftwood Cottage Bookstore had opened its doors to the town of Palmetto Beach.
Riley and her baby had moved into the upstairs apartment. She and her mother struck a deal in which Kitsy paid for the renovations and the down payment, but Riley must rely on income from the store to pay the mortgage and her own living expenses. In her worst moments, Riley wondered if the arrangement reflected her manipulative mother’s bizarre attempt to keep control over her eldest daughter.
Kitsy came to the store every day before noon, dressed as though she were arriving at the luncheon of the year. She flitted from customer to customer, checking on book club picks and reviewing book orders. Her favorite customers—the woman who only read books with blue covers; the man who only read nonfiction with dogs in the story; the mother who read only books without curse words—were the customers who waited for Kitsy. They didn’t take advice from Riley or Ethel.
The only nonnegotiable demand Kitsy made was that she must be present when the sales reps from each publishing house made their pitches for the next season’s books. Riley had bristled and fought this request until she realized that her mama had a gift for knowing and understanding the needs and wants of her customers. Mama would find an obscure book in the Penguin catalog, know her clientele would like it, and a hundred copies would be sold within the first month of the book’s release.
Yet Kitsy wasn’t around when it came time to pay the bills. Through the years, they had added up, and each month brought an exacting of blood from Riley’s heart—fear tha
t this would be the month when she could no longer pay enough bills to keep afloat, and her mama would sell the store. They both hoped the week of anniversary festivities would bring in enough revenue to tide them over for at least the next year. Now Riley had a new and more urgent reason to make this week a success—Mama’s ill health.
Riley leaned down next to the stairs, which led to the bookstore below, and straightened a stack of fallen books she had meant to take back downstairs. After she yanked her long, unruly hair into a ponytail, she opened her son’s bedroom door and stared at his sleeping form. He had kicked off his covers and was curled in a ball with his T-shirt and gym shorts scrunched around his body. When Gamma had given him tractor jammies for Christmas this past year, he’d informed Riley “no more jammies.”
His alarm clock screeched, yet he didn’t stir. This boy knew how to sleep hard and long, and Riley imagined that he grew with every passing hour, even while unconscious. She turned off his alarm clock, kissed his warm cheek. “Time to get up, buddy. Only one day left of school . . . You can do it.”
He groaned without opening his eyes. The shadowed forms of baseball trophies, schoolbooks and fishing poles seemed to capture his boyhood. Riley’s heart filled with gratitude.
“Mom, call me in sick.”
“No way. Get up.” She shook the bed and resisted the urge to kiss him one more time. She flicked on his overhead and bedside lights. “Now.”
“I hate school.”
“Oh, well. Last day.” She headed to the kitchen to make his favorite: scrambled eggs and bacon on a bagel. The sounds of Anne McComus opening the café downstairs joined the smell of the gourmet coffee she brewed. The bookstore would soon come to life.
Driftwood Summer Page 3