Half an hour later, Brayden and Riley opened the door at the bottom of their staircase, which led directly into the café. Anne was singing out loud to the Jack Johnson CD playing through the speakers. She arranged the muffins in the display cabinet; her flapping ponytail and tight T-shirts with various slogans were main-stays of the café. Today she wore a Driftwood Cottage Bookstore T-shirt that stated The Original Laptop . . . Books.
Anne only worked in the store to finance her hobby of crafting pottery angel’s wings. She had an uncanny ability to make delicate wings out of fired clay and then carve a single word between the wings. She chose words like PEACE, SERENITY, FORGIVE. A customer would come in, see her collection in the gift section and then ask Anne to make them their own special angel. Anne would do so without ever asking what angel they wanted—somehow she knew.
Riley returned Anne’s good morning hug—Anne would never let anyone pass without a hug—and then began a checklist in her mind: finish the bookstore newsletter, check on the Harcourt shipment, meet with Anne about stationery reorders for the gift section. . . .
Riley kissed Brayden goodbye, and then the day passed in a flurry of arranging for Mama’s return home, making calls to her sisters and dealing with other details as irritating as the no-see ums that buzzed around the store when the doors were left open. Late afternoon arrived before Ethel leaned through the open office door. “Hey, Riley, the newspaper guy is here.” She pointed her gloved finger toward the entrance.
Riley squinted at the front door; she needed to get her vision checked, but that task was moving further down her to-do list. Lodge Barton, the newspaper editor, walked toward the front desk, dressed in his usual white wrinkled button-down shirt and khaki chinos, his tortoiseshell glasses awry.
Riley ran a hand through her hair. She’d forgotten he was coming. “Tell him I’ll be out in a minute.”
Riley combed her hair loose of its ponytail and stepped into the bookstore. Lodge waved from across the room. She’d known him since elementary school, and felt a comfort level with him that she shared with all those who’d grown up in a summer-resort town.
Riley stood on her tiptoes to hug Lodge. He was tall, had been since fifth grade when he was hit by an early growth spurt. Now at only thirty-one, he sported premature gray in his goatee and at his temples. His glasses had been crooked since her first memory of him, as if his nose just couldn’t hold them straight. He ran the town’s newspaper, had won the trust and devotion of the entire population despite their not always agreeing with him. Riley seated herself in a threadbare upholstered chair, motioned for him to sit next to her in a ladder-back chair with peeling white paint.
“You look great, Riley.”
“You always say that, you goofball.” She placed her hand on his arm.
He shrugged. “Well, it’s always true.”
“Thanks for doing this article,” she said. “I hope it gets picked up by some other local papers and loads of people want to come to the events. I really want this festival of activities to be hugely successful . . . for everyone.”
“No problem,” he said. “Let’s get started. Tell me a quick history of the house and why you’re having a whole week’s worth of events.”
“Let’s see—where should I start?” Riley stared up at the ceiling, the stories, the lives of this house running through her mind like a rapid-sequence slideshow.
“How about starting with how old the house is,” he said.
She smiled. “Two hundred years old this year. Thus the two-hundred-year party.” She poked at Lodge with her elbow.
He grinned with his cute, crooked smile. “Go ahead, smart-ass.”
“This structure was the main home of an early-eighteen-hundreds cotton plantation owner. The house had an unusual floor plan for that time.” Riley spread her arms as if to encompass the main room. “There is this large center area, and then four corner rooms, which we’ve made into offices, storage, the café and the Book Club Corner. Then there is the second story, which is where Brayden and I live. And then the observation tower on top, which once looked over the cotton fields.” She pointed to each corner of the house as she spoke.
“You look like a flight attendant,” Lodge said, writing in his pad. “Here are the emergency exits, and . . .” He laughed.
“Thanks. You’re always so sweet to me.”
He looked up, straightened his glasses. “I try.”
She grinned and shook her head. “Anyway, the outside of the house is made of tabby—a mixture of lime, oyster shells and cement. We’ve had to add some siding through the years. The house was moved from its original location on the riverbank when a development went in forty years ago.”
“How did you all come up with the name Driftwood Cottage Bookstore?”
“When they first moved the house, it looked like a piece of driftwood dropped onto the beach. We just added the word ‘bookstore.’ ”
Lodge tapped his pencil on the side of the chair. “I never knew that.”
“That would be why you’re interviewing me. I do know.”
“Yeah, that’s why.” His laughter was as full and free as it had been as a child, all those years before he lost his wife.
“And maybe you can use this—Norse myth says that the first humans were made from driftwood.”
He nodded. “Isn’t there also a myth about the house?”
“The first owner after the house was moved here said that the cottage offered happy connections to all those who passed through its doors. She was a big E. M. Forster fan and believed in that epigraph from Howards End. You know that one, right?”
“ ‘Only Connect. . . .’ ”
“A man who knows his books.” She smiled.
“So all the families who live here end up happy?”
“It might not look like it at any particular moment because you have to go all the way to the end of the story—you can’t just stay in the middle of it. You have to see where the connections go.”
“Good point. I’m quoting.” He scribbled on his pad, and then glanced up at her over the top of his glasses. “You have done that thing with your hair since I’ve known you.”
“What?”
“Where you brush it off your shoulder. Right before you say something, you do that.”
“I do not.”
“Okay,” he said, leaned back in the chair. “Now give me a story, make this a human interest piece.”
Yes, she thought, Mama might be dying and this is her last hurrah. The morbid and unbidden thought caused her to shiver. She was quite sure Mama would not want Lodge to include in his article her fall down the stairs, her cancer.
Riley forced her hand to stay in her lap when she felt it lifting to brush her hair away from her face. “Well, coincidentally the anniversary year coincides with Mama’s seventieth birthday, so we are combining the celebrations. Mama started the store twelve years ago, and it has offered a home not only to my son and me, but also to the town. This is where we meet friends and discuss our lives as well as books. This is where we catch up on the town news. This is where we bring our children for art classes. It’s become a community-gathering place, one of those sacred places for a fragmented world. A refuge. That’s what I think this place has always been.”
“Refuge,” he said. “Okay, who’s invited to the festivities?”
“Anyone. Everyone. Most of the town, and we did send invitations to all the previous owners of the house, and to all of the former summer people we could track down.”
“Previous owners? How many do you know about?”
“At least three families, then it gets iffy. Mack and Sheppard Logan are coming. . . .”
“Mack Logan,” Lodge said, wrote down the name, then looked up and smiled. “Old boyfriend . . .”
“Not mine. . . . That was Maisy.”
“Oh.” Lodge stared off toward the window, then back. “Well, I remember you and Mack being inseparable.”
“Childhood friends,” Riley sai
d.
“Of course. Thanks for all the info.” Lodge stood, held his hand out to pull Riley upright. “Hey, is Brayden fishing today?”
“I’m sure he is. It’s the last day of school. He’ll probably be at the pier before the bell stops ringing.”
“Well, tell him I’ll be down there if he wants to . . . fish today.”
“Brayden would fish every day, all day if he could.”
Lodge touched Riley’s arm, ran his finger down to a place on her right wrist where a fishhook had left a curled, comma-shaped scar. “I once knew a girl who would fish all day, every day, also.”
“It’s amazing,” Riley said, “what we pass on to our kids without meaning to.”
“When’s the last time you went to the pier?” Logan shoved his notebook into a worn leather portfolio.
“I go almost every day,” she said.
“I mean to do more than pick up your son.”
Riley had no intention of answering that question. She smiled. “Thanks so much for writing this article. Let me know if you think of something you forgot to ask.”
Logan nodded. “Got it.”
He walked out the front door, waved over his shoulder without turning around. Riley exhaled and returned to her office, to her work. Constant reminders of who you were as a child was one of the distinct disadvantages of living in your hometown. Her sisters didn’t have such worries. They’d been able to start over elsewhere, become someone new and move on. Sometimes, like right at that moment, Riley felt a twinge of cowardice; the farthest she’d gone from home was two blocks. The separate life she’d built rested within shouting distance of her childhood.
The Driftwood Cottage Bookstore’s plaster walls, wide-plank hardwood floors, cedar crossbeams and crooked back steps were as much a part of her life now as the Sheffield bones and blood that formed her. Each family that had passed through the rooms of this cottage had its own story to tell—of grief and joy, disaster and triumph. Riley had always thought it fitting that a place that had contributed to so much of the town’s story now held volumes of stories from floor to ceiling.
It was, she’d found, only in her favorite books that the world worked out exactly as it should. Family and Brayden filled the lonely places. Work helped, and books healed.
FOUR
RILEY
Riley watched Brayden burst through the kitchen door with the grin of a child just released from school for the summer. Riley hugged him. “Come on, punk. I’ll walk you to the pier. Then I have to go see Gamma in the hospital.”
“Let me change. . . .” Brayden ran for his room and reappeared in record time, wearing a baseball hat, ragged T-shirt and bathing suit, his uniform for the next three months. “Poor Gamma,” he said, opening the door to the crooked stairs that led to the bookstore below.
“Yes,” Riley said. “Poor Gamma.” She followed him down the stairs.
The only way out of their apartment was down the stairs and through the bookstore. When Brayden was a toddler, these crooked and creaking stairs were a nightmare. Riley had been constantly afraid he would tumble down them, break his tiny neck. She remembered the days when she had sat curled and alone in this staircase during those terrible first weeks of being a single mother, exhausted and overwhelmed with the new life she had borne. In the darkness she had allowed herself to weep. In the light, in her life, in her apartment above the bookstore she never, not once, wept over the creation of Brayden Collins Sheffield.
Brayden pushed open the bottom door with his foot and they stepped into the bookstore. Anne stood behind the coffee counter, a smudge of orange glaze on her nose, and placed a steaming cup of skinny latte—Riley’s afternoon habit—onto the counter. “Hey, Riley.”
Riley picked up the coffee, took a long swallow. “You’ve got angel glaze on your nose.”
“Ah, I made an Angel of Truth for my friend whose husband seems to tell everything but . . .”
“Truth . . .” Riley said, and then did her quick and every-afternoon inventory of the store, making sure everything was in its place. The stationery section was orderly and appealing with handmade cards, journals and small gifts for customers on their way to a baby shower, birthday party or wedding. Anne wrapped these trinkets in the finest hand-blocked paper, and whenever someone received a gift in the Driftwood Cottage Bookstore’s signature brown-and-blue paper, they knew they’d received a high-quality or handmade gift.
When Riley finished her bookstore routine, she walked Brayden to the pier, where a group of boys waved him to the end of the long wooden structure. She knew better than to kiss him goodbye, watched him run to his friends and then stood for a moment taking in the scene. Humidity had moved in for the season, but the summer people hadn’t arrived quite yet and the beach was largely deserted, the tide high. Riley relished this time before the summer rush, when traffic was light and the sounds of the sea more audible.
Soon enough the two-lane main road would be jammed with the returning crowds. She and her sisters used to love waiting for their summer friends. Every year she’d stood at the end of this very pier, waiting for the arrival of the Logan family, for Mack to sneak up behind her while she fished and slap her on the back, half trying to knock her off her feet. One time, two weeks into summer, he’d found her in the dark on the edge of the pier. . . .
The day had ended as most days did that summer for twelve-year-old Riley—nightfall arriving without her noticing until she was the only one left on the dock. Low clouds pregnant with rain covered the moon and hid the stars.
Then Mack joined her. They lay back on the dock, life seeming simple in its small graces: an evening crafted from the sound of slapping waves, the cooling comfort of shaved ice amidst a heat wave, a mist from unshed rain, a foghorn sounding far off.
They’d stared into the darkness. Their arms and legs touched, sticky with salt sweat, without any self-consciousness. Mack’s knobby elbow poked against the soft inside of Riley’s arm; she felt his rough scab from last week’s skateboard fall. His legs were moist against hers, his left foot underneath her right. His upper arm rested against hers. Suddenly it was as if they had become one body; she couldn’t feel where hers stopped and his began. Fear prickled the edge of her thoughts—what if she became lost in feeling him and never felt like her separate self again?
Despite this fear, she couldn’t move, the tangle of arms and legs more important than the loss her own being.
He spoke first. “It’s so dark.”
“I know,” she said, her whisper all at once that of someone older.
“It feels like there’s only one of us,” he said.
She didn’t speak again, knowing that this was what she wanted—this oneness—but not able to understand how or why. Time dissolved, and she didn’t know how long they stayed that way, only that she didn’t speak until he did.
“I’m sorry I punched Candler today,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, beginning to feel her own toes, her own skin. Relieved, yet noting the loss, too.
They didn’t move for moments longer.
“I know he’s a friend of yours from school and all, but damn, he’s not allowed to pick on you like that.”
“He’s done that since he moved here a few years ago—I just think he hates that I beat him at everything.”
“He still can’t . . . do that. He hit you, Riley. No one is ever allowed to hit you.”
“I know, but I would have punched him back.”
He moved imperceptibly, a tiny movement that might not have been a movement at all, but then she felt her body: her toes, then her legs, her arms and then her rapid heartbeat. They were separate now and he stood, held his hand out to pull her up.
Their words faded into the darkness as if they were spoken and unspoken at the same time; as if they were important and yet not at all, as if they were two people talking or maybe just one. Darkness, she understood later, easily confused the meaning of words, of skin touching skin.
In th
eir remaining summers together she tried to find that oneness again. When it was all over, when youth ended and he chose Maisy, she understood the lesson from the dock that night: she could never again call her feelings of intimacy and oneness love. Nor would she be fooled again into believing that her love was returned, that a boy felt more for her than friendship.
Riley looked down the length of Pearson’s Pier and watched her son bait his hook, reminded herself to live in the moment while remembering the lessons of the past.
The walk to the hospital ran north along the beach, then west at Sixth Avenue for five blocks inland. As she went through the front doors of the hospital, she shoved away the memory of her daddy’s last days here with lung cancer, his lucidity returning only briefly before agony followed when one morphine shot wore off and the next hadn’t yet arrived. She had rushed her words during those brief respites, in a hurry to tell him how much she loved him, how much he’d meant to her, how she cherished him, all the while wondering why she hadn’t said these words all her life.
Kitsy Sheffield’s hospital room was on the fourth floor. Riley kissed her sleeping mama on the cheek, and grabbed the chart hanging off the bottom of the bed to read the night’s statistics— temperature, blood pressure and urine output. She’d learned the lingo during Daddy’s illness.
Kitsy opened her eyes. “Where have you been?”
“Right here.” Riley took her mama’s hand and smiled. “And you?”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Kitsy fashioned her eyes into narrow slits through which Riley had no idea how she could see.
“Unfortunately, yes. That was supposed to be funny. I was working, and then I waited for Brayden to come home after his last day of school.”
“I was here alone all night, and then for most of today. What if they’d given me the wrong medication, or . . . forgotten about me?”
“Mama, I can’t sleep here—I have Brayden. And I can’t imagine who could ever, ever forget about you.”
“Where are your sisters?”
Driftwood Summer Page 4