A Month at the Shore

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  But Ken had tightened his grip on her elbow. They weren't going anywhere.

  A pert hostess with a dimpled smile approached them. Ken said, "Two for dinner, and we'll be ordering takeout."

  "Certainly, Mr. Barclay; this way," she said, and they followed her toward an empty table tucked under one of the side windows in a corner of the room.

  Laura had no idea how to act. She wanted to take her cue from Ken, but he was now behind her. She was on her own.

  Don't let Will get to you; the bastard isn't worth it, she warned herself. But her flushing cheeks were betraying her even as she formed the thought.

  And then she tripped. Somehow, some way, she had managed to stumble on pure, thin air as she drew abreast of the group.

  She recovered, but not before a smiling Will Burton jumped up with infuriating chivalry and said, "Whoa, easy there. Laura Shore ... is it really you?"

  There was a mixture of disbelief and amusement in his deep, grown-up voice—the voice of a radio announcer selling fine used cars.

  "Yes, it's really me," she said, for lack of something catchy.

  "They said you were back in town. To stay?" he asked.

  The slightest smile betrayed the condescension he obviously felt. He made her feel like someone caught sneaking in under the circus tent. She didn't have a ticket. She didn't belong.

  How she hated him just then. She wanted so much to be past all that, but ... how she hated him. She said in as lofty a voice as she could muster, "I haven't made any plans, one way or the other."

  "Yeah? That's not what I hear." Will looked deliberately from her to Ken and back again. He leered and said, "Just call me Cupid, hey? You don't have to thank me."

  She felt Ken behind her make a move for him, but she had the advantage of being in front. She brought up her arm and slapped Will. Hard.

  "That's for then," she muttered. God, it felt good.

  Will was too stunned to do anything, but Dagger jumped up from his chair, ready to rumble.

  Ken shoved him back down by the shoulder. "Sit. Enjoy your food. All of you," he said with a scarily rigid smile.

  Will looked around the room, which had become even more silent, and then said cheerfully, "You always did have a way about you, Laura." In an undertone he added to Ken, "This isn't over."

  "Anytime," Ken murmured back.

  They continued on their way to their table.

  The rattled hostess pulled out Laura's chair for her. Ken took one look at her face and said in a voice clear enough to be heard around the room, "Hey, on second thought, it's a great evening. What do you say we get takeout for us, too, and have a romantic picnic on the beach?"

  She could have kissed him on the spot, but she settled for a relieved smile. "I'm up for it."

  Ken asked the hostess very nicely for the take-out menus and a bottle of wine. They ordered Szechuan shrimp, Szechuan chicken, Szechuan pork, Szechuan noodles, Szechuan baby back ribs, and enough rice to feed mainland China. While they waited for the food, they clinked their stemware and downed a fair portion of the bottle.

  The food arrived in three reinforced shopping bags. Ken hauled two of them, and Laura, biting her lip to suppress her growing merriment, carried the third. By the time they reached the car, she was exploding with the day's pent-up emotion, all of it streaming from her in the form of helpless, inappropriate giggles.

  "Did you see all their faces?" she asked as she collapsed in the front seat.

  "Before you slapped Will, or after?"

  "Either! Both! They were apoplectic!"

  "Ah, they were all just jealous. I had the best-looking woman in the room on my arm."

  "Ken, don't you realize? Your reputation just went up in smoke!" For whatever reason, she found that, too, hysterically funny.

  He grinned at her reaction and said, "You mean that because of you, I've finally made the transition from nerd to bad boy? I'm so impressed with myself."

  He pulled into a nearby parking lot in front of Chepaquit Dry Cleaners. Seeing the sign drew more nervous giggles as Laura remembered Rosie Nedworth, fists on her hips, demanding to know about the bones.

  She said, "Why are we here? To drop off your cleaning?"

  "Wine. Next door."

  "More wine? I'm not sure I can handle ..."

  "We have food on the back seat. You didn't notice?"

  More giggles. "God, right, the food. We have enough to let us hole up for the rest of the year."

  "Promise?"

  "Sure! Anything. Absolutely! I just had the best time in there. I can't believe it," she said, sitting back, exhilarated. "Why do I feel so great? I should feel mortified."

  "You needed that, slugger. It was long overdue."

  Ken ducked into the package store and came out minutes later with the requisite brown-bagged bottle. Laura felt like a teen on prom night, something she'd never had the chance to experience firsthand.

  "I promise not to get you drunk," he said, sliding into his seat and handing her the bottle.

  "Too late!" she answered gaily. "Knowing you, this probably isn't a screw-cap, though," she said, peeking into the bag.

  "My Swiss Army knife has a corkscrew. We're good to go."

  He drove the few minutes to the nursery and turned in toward the house, then carried two of the shopping bags inside for Snack and Corinne while Laura purposely waited in the car. She knew that she was walking a high wire made from a strand of a spiderweb; that it could break at any moment and send her plunging back to earth. One look at her gloomy brother and worried sister, and down she would plummet. She wanted to hold on to the high.

  Ken came out grinning and with a tablecloth over his shoulder, and Laura felt a rush of relief. He wouldn't look like that if there had been trouble in the house.

  "Billy dropped by five minutes ago to see you," Ken said. "He told your sister he'd be back tomorrow."

  He tossed the cloth on her lap. "From Corinne. She said to tell you that she understands completely."

  What was that supposed to mean? Laura hardly had time to wonder, because Ken was wheeling out of the nursery like a Nascar driver, hugging the turns, shifting constantly, accelerating whenever he could.

  "You drive fast."

  "I drive well. Okay, I admit it: the car is a brand-new toy. I was torn between this and a Volkswagen Bug; the Boxster won out by a hair."

  "I actually have a Bug back in Seattle. A yellow one."

  "Do you?" he said, throwing her an astonished look which was apparently fake. "I'm not going to go making claims about kindred souls or anything—but to me, that is a very big deal," he said gravely.

  "You weren't really considering the Bug."

  "Okay, no," he admitted with an impish smile. "But I've always thought they were cute. That's close enough to karma for me."

  She laughed. He made her feel so good. "Where are we going?"

  "To one of the best and most private stretches of beach on the Cape."

  "That leaves out the town beach, for sure," she said, intrigued by his air of mystery. "And it's not the stretch of beach below Shore Gardens, which we don't own anymore, more's the pity."

  "God, yes. What a bummer that your parents sold it off," he said with feeling. He glanced over at her and said, "Sorry. That was the investor in me speaking. Sometimes he breaks out of his cage."

  "It wouldn't be so bad if they'd sold it for a fair price," she conceded. "But they got so royally snookered by that developer."

  "Yes, they did."

  "Oh, well. It happened before I was born. I don't feel the loss that much."

  "Good. Here we are," he said, suddenly pulling off the road and into the side of a sandy ditch.

  She was uncharacteristically disoriented. The exquisite houses they had passed were newly built, throwing off her sense of geography. "Where are we?"

  "Just an old deer path," he said. "You grab the bottle and the tablecloth and the shopping bag."

  Bemused, she said, "What're you going to carry?"

/>   "You," he said, slamming the door and coming around to her side. "The grass is high," he explained when he opened her door for her. "Ticks."

  "Oh. Right." She was still wearing her lavender dress and sandals, and her limbs were exposed.

  "Alley-oop," he said, and he lifted her out of her seat as easily as if she were a bag of laundry.

  "Holy cats, those years of working out have paid off," Laura said, clutching her wine and tablecloth and somewhat stunned to find herself so easily in his arms.

  "Shhh. Only whispers from now on. We don't want the neighbors coming at us with shotguns," he said in her ear. "You know how proprietary Massachusetts shorefront folk are about their beaches. They act like they own 'em."

  She whispered back, "But they do. Damn it."

  "Shhh."

  He lowered her enough so that she could grab the handles of the paper shopping bag of food, and then they were on their way. The dune grass wasn't the only threat; prickly beach roses—and, at one point, a short, hidden stretch of barbed wire—made the narrow path almost impassable. Ken had some tricky maneuvering to get around and through the obstacles; together, he and Laura weren't nearly as aerodynamic as a white-tailed deer.

  In the fading light, Laura caught glimpses of houses through the thickets of scrub that grew on either side of the roses. She saw weathered shingles to their right, a small patch of white clapboard on their left. They were snaking between two obviously high-end estates.

  Ken managed to get them through the path without her getting a scratch, although she couldn't be as sure about him. They emerged onto a narrow strip of pure white beach that seemed to go on forever in either direction.

  "Voilà," he said, lowering her to the sand. "You okay?"

  "Of course," she whispered. "I rode a magic carpet."

  "Here's our magic carpet," he said, taking the tablecloth from her.

  She asked in a whisper, "Why aren't you whispering?"

  "No need, anymore." He took the tablecloth from her and let it float down over the sand, then anchored two of the corners with the wine and the shopping bag.

  "No need? Why not?" she asked, watching him pull off his deck shoes to anchor the third corner. He looked awfully at ease, which was more than she was feeling.

  He grinned and jerked his head back over his shoulder.

  "I know the owner." Peeling off his socks, he stuffed them into his shoes.

  Laura tiptoed a little way to the left for a clearer look at the house he was indicating. "That's your house!"

  "Yup."

  "So tell me why we went the thorny way around?"

  He shrugged and said, "Besides the obvious excuse to have you in my arms? To pull my neighbor's chain, I guess. He's such an uptight SOB about people using the deer path to 'trespass' on 'his' beach."

  "The barbed wire is his work?" she guessed.

  "Yeah. Remind me to take a bolt cutters to it, by the way. Tom strings the stuff up; I cut it down. It's a game we play. Neither of us has ever acknowledged knowing a thing about it. We're so immature," he said. "Really; it's embarrassing."

  He dropped down to the tablecloth, crossed his legs Indian style, then began lining up a row of white cartons in front of him. "Woo-ee, this smells good."

  She was watching him, utterly bemused. "Sneaking onto your own beach to have a picnic of Chinese food. Well ... it's just a little on the bizarre side, if you ask me."

  "Hungry?" he asked, looking up at her.

  "Starved."

  He said softly, "So take off your sandals and stay a while."

  "I think I will," she said, dropping lightly into place on the other side of the line of cartons.

  She unbuckled her sandals while he opened each container in turn. There was food enough for them and for SOB neighbor Tom and for any and all trespassers, past, present, and future. And plastic utensils, for which Laura was grateful; she'd never mastered the use of chopsticks.

  He said, "I'll open the—ah, nuts, I forgot about glasses. Now what? Let's think ..."

  "You could always break into that nice-looking house over there," she said in a deadpan attempt to be helpful. "I'm willing to bet that the owner's not home."

  "Nope, nope. I draw the line at breaking and entering," he said with an equally straight face. "Wait. I know." He got to his feet and went to the edge of the dune grass behind them and came back with a child's sand pail, brightly decorated with starfish and shells.

  "I noticed this the other evening when I was sitting on the beach—alone and pensive, I might add," he said as he passed her on his way to the water's edge. "My nieces must have left the pail out on their last visit. I liked seeing it there because it reminded me of their visit, so I left it where it was. Now I'm glad."

  He rolled up his pants and waded in a few feet to give the bucket a saltwater rinse. "Hoo! Still cold," he said on his way back out.

  "Not compared to Portland," she boasted.

  "So why are you there and not here?"

  "I told you. To get away."

  "Not from your father, anymore." He dropped back down on the tablecloth and shook the pail dry. "Why not come back?"

  "I have a job—"

  "You can consult anywhere."

  "And a house."

  "We have houses here."

  "I have ... unfinished business."

  "So finish it and move back East. What's so hard about that?"

  She laughed softly and said, "You're very persistent."

  "Wait till you see how much." He poured wine into the bucket and handed it to her, then touched his bottle to her pail. "A toast: to new beginnings. I know it's a cliché, but humor me."

  "Sure. I'll drink to that," she said. She lifted the plastic bucket to her lips and tried to take a sip. Instead, she ended up spilling a wave of Chablis down her dress.

  It came as a shock, but a laughable one in which Ken joined in. "Swear to God, I thought I was giving you the daintier vessel. I swear," he said, coming up with a clean, folded handkerchief. He began frantically patting her chin, her dress, the folds in her lap.

  "Stop, stop, it's okay," she insisted, laughing. "Here, you take the bucket. It's too lethal for me. We'll try again."

  They switched, and she tapped the bottle to his pail.

  "New beginnings," she said, and he added to that, "Take two."

  She sipped from the bottle as he lifted the sand pail to his mouth—and ended up pouring an even bigger wave over himself.

  He swore good-naturedly while she shrieked with laughter. "We're hopeless!" she said.

  "Can you just picture us on Survivor?" he said, flapping his shirt back and forth against his chest.

  "Or in a commercial for Carnival Cruise Lines?"

  "We reek."

  "We do," she agreed.

  "Okay, I give. Let's retreat to the house and clean up. I'm sure the owner, who I understand is a first-class dork, won't mind," he said dryly.

  "I think the owner is a first-class charmer," she countered. She was still grinning, still happy, still thoroughly diverted from the hideous situation at Shore Gardens. "I pronounce the evening a wild success so far."

  "Talk about an easy date," he quipped, tossing the unopened paper cartons back into the shopping bag.

  "I suppose your mother warned you about girls like me?" she asked, not without irony.

  He looked up from his packing to say, "Oh, darlin'. My mother instinctively knew right where to put you: in a league of your own."

  Was it the look in his blue eyes; the tone of his voice? Who could say? All Laura knew was that suddenly she was having a harder time breathing, because her heart seemed to be stuck in her throat. "What ... do I do with our bucket of wine?"

  "Offer it to the sea," he said easily. "In thanks."

  She waded in ankle deep and poured the wine, with some ceremony, into the lazy, sliding sea.

  Her prayer was simple: Please, whatever happens, let it be the right thing, the true thing. No more false steps.

  She returne
d the pail to where he'd found it in the dune grass.

  "Did you make a wish?" he asked.

  "Oh, yes."

  "Then I hope it comes true."

  Chapter 19

  They shook out the tablecloth, grabbed their shoes, and walked barefoot up a sandy path toward the house. It was dusk now, that long, languid moment when the day has wound down but the night hasn't yet asserted itself, a moment when anything could happen, or nothing at all.

  They entered through the set of French doors that led into the bedroom. "I never lock them," Ken explained, which was par for the course in Chepaquit.

  "Us, too," said Laura. "Of course, in fairness, we've never had anything to steal."

  He flipped on a light inside, and they wiped the sand from their feet on a rug of silky, shaggy flokati. Laura couldn't help observing that the bed was unmade. Ken saw her looking at it and said, "The housekeeper only comes once a week. You were here on her day, last time."

  Embarrassed to have been caught fixating on the state of his linen, Laura said, "At least you're not compulsive about that kind of thing."

  "But I am. For example, I hate leaving dishes in the sink," he said, opening a set of doors that led to a softly lit closet and dressing area.

  "Me, too!"

  "So I leave them stacked alongside on the counter."

  She laughed. "You don't have a dishwasher?"

  "I'd rather do them by hand. It lets me think. The view over the sink's not so bad: straight out to sea."

  She pictured him at the sink, doing dishes alone. Sitting on the beach and watching the sun go down. Alone. Doing all of the things that people do every day, but doing them alone. It didn't seem right. It didn't even seem possible.

  "What?" he said, glancing over his shoulder and seeing the look on her face.

  "You must know what I'm thinking," she confessed.

  "That nothing in here is going to fit you or even be the right gender?"

  That you're too good-looking, too successful, too charming—too damn rich—to be wandering around feeling either pensive or alone.

  "Why aren't you taken?" she blurted before she could stop herself.

  He shrugged and said, "I guess no one's used a big enough club. Why aren't you?"