Sleeping Alone

by Bretton, Barbara

Truth was, Mike didn’t much care what happened at the marina. Sea Gate’s economy didn’t revolve around the marina any longer—hell, most people said Sea Gate didn’t even have an economy. Fifteen years ago Gallagher’s had done turn-away business with everyone from locals who depended on the sea for their living, to weekenders in their plush cabin cruisers, to charter boats ferrying sportsmen out for some deep-sea fishing.

  Bed-and-breakfast inns popped up on both sides of Ocean Avenue, and before long they were booked a year in advance. Travel guides lauded Sea Gate as a contender for the Cape May crowd, the perfect place for everyone from honeymooners to senior citizens. Far enough away from New York and Philadelphia to be quaint, yet close enough to Atlantic City to be glamorous, Sea Gate enjoyed a boom that even the most jaded townies believed would never end.

  A monster nor’easter took care of that. A full moon, high tide, and fifty-mile-per-hour winds had destroyed the beach and most of the businesses. Now, almost eight years later, the town was still reeling from its effects. Half the shopkeepers had closed their doors permanently and moved to sunnier climes. One family after another said good-bye and followed the jobs to Somerset and Monmouth. Pollution took its toll on the fishing industry during the bleak summers of the late 1980s. The weekend crowd abandoned Sea Gate for Cape May, and sometimes John wondered if it would have been better if the damn storm had just leveled the town.

  The weathered boards of the dock glistened with sea spray, making the surface slick as a skating rink. Eddie had a tough time keeping his footing. His bare feet shot out from under him, and twice John just managed to grab him before his butt hit the ground.

  He yanked off his Nikes and pushed them toward his father. “Put these on,” he said. “I don’t feel-like carting your sorry ass to the emergency room when you break your leg.”

  His father grumbled loudly, but he put on the shoes. “Where’s the car?” he asked as they crossed the parking lot.

  “Home.”

  “What the hell’s it doing there?”

  “It was easier to look for you on foot.”

  “Look for me?” Eddie sounded puzzled. “Why were you looking for me? I wasn’t lost.”

  “You took off in your pajamas at four in the morning, Pop. What was I supposed to think?”

  “A man’s got the right to go wherever the hell he wants whenever he wants.”

  “Not in your pajamas,” John said, trying to hang on to what remained of his self-control. “Next time you feel like going out, try getting dressed first.”

  Eddie made a gesture of disgust, then stalked off ahead of John. What’s wrong, Pop? What the hell’s got you so bent out of shape? Eddie’s temper was erratic, his judgment dubious at best. The strong father figure of John’s youth was being replaced by an increasingly frail old man, and it was all happening faster than it should.

  Eddie kept up a brisk pace as they walked to the diner. John could have caught up with him in a few strides, but he hung back, letting his father lead the way. He wasn’t much in the mood for conversation and he doubted if Eddie was either. He’d seen the look of fear in his father’s eyes. Eddie suspected something was wrong, same as John, but both Gallagher men were pros when it came to avoiding the truth.

  His old man had claimed a counter seat by the time John caught up with him. He refused to make eye contact with his son. The Gallagher men also knew how to hold a grudge.

  Dee peeked out from the kitchen. Her long dark red hair was pulled back in a ponytail that was already beginning to droop. She didn’t look old enough to be the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy. “You guys are early today. The grill’s not even hot yet.”

  “You got coffee?” John asked as he sat down two stools away from his father.

  “We’ve always got coffee,” Dee said, looking from John to Eddie. Her eyes lingered on the pajamas. “Everything okay?”

  Eddie cocked a thumb in John’s direction. “He’s a horse’s ass.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” She disappeared into the kitchen to get their coffee.

  “Now that,” said Eddie, “is what we used to call a good woman.” He sounded like his old opinionated self.

  “You won’t get an argument from me.”

  “Your damn stupid brother should’ve married her when he had the chance.”

  “No argument about that either.” Except for the fact that Eddie was sitting there in his pajamas, it was your regular morning at the Starlight. The tight ball of tension inside his gut began to unravel. Maybe Dr. Benino was right, and this was all just some weird sleepwalking thing his father was going through. Scary as that might be, it wasn’t half as scary as some of the alternatives John had been dwelling on lately.

  “You ever think about maybe giving her a call?”

  John shot his father a look. “Dee’s a friend. You don’t date friends.”

  “You don’t date at all.”

  “Don’t go there, Pop. It’s none of your business.”

  “You can’t mourn Libby and the kids forever, Johnny. Sooner or later you’ve got to get on with your life.”

  Wrong again, Pop. He could mourn forever. Libby and his sons had been everything to him, the reason he got up in the morning, the reason he had set out each day, looking to conquer the world. People said men didn’t give a damn about family, that you could plug in a new wife and kid where the old wife and kid had been, and the bastards wouldn’t know the difference, but they were wrong. Three years had passed, and the ache inside his heart was as strong as ever. He hoped it never left him, because that ache was all he had left of his family.

  * * *

  Alexandra pulled into the diner’s parking lot at 6:33 a.m. Except for a blue Chevy parked around back, there wasn’t another car in sight. She angled to a stop in front of a line of newspaper vending machines and breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t too late. The “Help Wanted” sign was still in the window. Now all she had to do was walk in there and convince the owner that she was the answer to the Starlight’s prayers.

  You can do it, she told herself. Just walk up the steps, open the door, and make your case. She’d made endless lists of why actual waitressing experience wasn’t the most important qualification for the job. A few times she’d almost convinced herself that it might be a detriment. She had her arguments all worked out, and she’d even practiced confident smiles in her bathroom mirror.

  She squared her shoulders, then started up the half-dozen stone steps to the front door. She was about to march inside when she noticed two men seated at the counter, and every ounce of Dutch courage she’d managed to muster up vanished. She turned and fled.

  Maybe moving to Sea Gate hadn’t been such a clever idea after all, she thought as she backed out of the lot and drove away as fast as her twenty-year-old VW wagon could manage. The car was the first thing she’d bought after coming back home to the States. The salesman had tried his best to steer her toward something with a little less mileage, but she’d stuck to her guns. The VW was battered and bruised, but it was a survivor. And, as she was discovering, so was she.

  The day she left Griffin she’d headed straight for Gatwick, and ten hours later she was seated in the back of a yellow cab while a hostile New York City taxi driver explained how foreigners were ruining the country for real Americans. When she’d explained that she wasn’t English but a native New Yorker herself, he’d shifted the direction of his venom to encompass liberal lawyers, Supreme Court judges, and O. J. Simpson.

  For one terrible moment she’d wondered if she’d made the worst mistake of her life, but then she caught sight of her bruised and swollen face in the rearview mirror, and her backbone stiffened with resolve. If she was going to make a success of her new life, she would have to learn how to cope, and that was as good a time as any to start.

  From there on, it was as if a guardian angel guided her every move. She found a clean room in a mid-priced hotel on the West Side, then set out for Sotheby’s. Three days later she had managed to se
ll all of her jewelry, save for one diamond bracelet and matching earrings that she withheld as a savings account against the probable tough times ahead.

  The only thing she was sure of was that she wanted a home she could call her own—four walls and a roof that nobody could take away from her, no matter what life had in store. She had no intention of staying in New York City; the cost of living was exorbitant, and ii would be the first place Griffin looked for her. Assuming he looked for her at all, which was doubtful.

  She went to a huge bookstore near Columbus Circle and gathered up as many out-of-state newspapers as she could find, then sat down with a cup of good old American coffee and began studying the real estate ads. A giddy sense of excitement had filled her as she considered the merits of Iowa versus Oregon, South Carolina versus Maine. The more she read, the more confused she got. Places that had been nothing more than names on a map suddenly became real as she closed her eyes and tried to imagine living her life in Albuquerque or Atlanta, El Cajon or Effingham.

  She wanted to live by the water, so that eliminated the Midwest. She loved each of the four seasons, so that eliminated the South and California. Deserts did nothing for her, which meant the Southwest wasn’t a good bet. That left the Northeast. She flipped open a copy of the Star Ledger to the real estate section. People snickered about New Jersey, but one of her few happy memories of her parents had to do with the much-maligned Garden State.

  Her father had rented himself a yacht the summer she turned sixteen. He’d decided they would sail from Maine down to the Chesapeake Bay, stopping wherever they felt like stopping, staying however long they felt like staying. Of course, Dan Curry had used the vacation trip more as a way to do business with the yacht-and-country-club types than to spend time with his daughter, but Alex remembered it as a golden time. A time when she’d felt part of a family, not an encumbrance to be packed off to boarding school.

  In early August, sailing up from the Chesapeake, her father had run into problems with the boat, and he docked at a marina on the Jersey Shore for repairs. They stayed in a tiny B&B on Ocean Avenue. Alex pretended they lived there, that those streets were her streets, that the teenagers scarfing pizza at Lou’s Subs were her friends.

  She ran her index finger down the listing of houses for sale in New Jersey, looking for the name of the town she remembered. Beach Haven. Brigantine. Sea Bright. Sea Gate. Sea-Girt—wait a minute. Sea Gate.

  NEW LISTING!

  COTTAGE FOR SALE.

  FOUR ROOMS. AS IS CONDITION.

  FULLY FURNISHED. 1/4 ACRE.

  Best of all, she could afford it. She drove down the Shore the next day, looked at the cottage, and fell in love. Five weeks after she left her husband’s house for the last time, she moved into a home of her own.

  She had done all of that with no help from anybody. She’d found strength when she needed it and taken control of her life. So what was she doing now, running away from the diner like some kind of coward? Great waitress she’d make—put a customer in the place, and she fell apart. The second she saw the two men sitting at the counter, her knees had begun to knock and her resolve vanished.

  She’d noticed the “Help Wanted” sign in the window yesterday when she stopped at the grocery store for supplies. It was the only “Help Wanted” sign in a town littered with “Going Out of Business” and “For Sale” notices. She remembered Sea Gate as a quaint seaside village where working fishermen added a Springsteen-esque atmosphere to a postcard-pretty place. Of course, she’d been sixteen then, a sheltered sixteen easily impressed by the sight of broad-shouldered young men working shirtless on the dock.

  She wasn’t sixteen anymore, and Sea Gate was no longer quaint, both of which suited her fine. The town’s bad luck had been her good fortune. Sagging property values had made it possible for her to buy the Winslow house with cash. No matter what happened, the house belonged to her.

  My house. The words sent a thrill of excitement up her spine. My home.

  She parked around the corner from the diner and drummed the steering wheel with her thumbs. Light rain splashed against the windows and danced across the hood. She debated turning off her windshield wipers but she wasn’t entirely convinced she’d be able to turn them back on if she did. The VW had more than its share of quirks, but that was okay. She’d learn how to deal with them, same as she’d learned how to deal with everything else. It seemed as if she’d done one impossible thing after another in the past month—asking for a job should be a piece of cake.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if she had a choice in the matter. Last night she’d sat down at the kitchen table and taken a good look at her finances. She’d prepaid a year’s worth of property taxes, but there were utility bills to worry about and food and gas and God knows what else. She had one thousand eight hundred seventy-three dollars and sixty-seven cents, a pair of diamond earrings, and a platinum-and-diamond bracelet that would have to last the rest of her life unless she found a source of income fast.

  She took a deep breath, then looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Maybe there had been something to all of those ridiculous lessons in charm and deportment they’d foisted on her at boarding school. Her expression was cool and untroubled, her brow unfurrowed by lines of worry or stress. Her panic didn’t show.

  Now, if she could just figure out what to say. “Hi. I’m Alexandra Curry. I’m here about the job.” Too boring. “Hi, I’m Alex. Your search is over.” Too obnoxious. “I’m Alex Curry and I’ve never worked a day in my life.” Too honest. The truth made her sound like a twenty-eight-year-old deadbeat. Other women her age had degrees from fancy universities and resumes they could be proud of. Alex had an indentation where her wedding ring used to be and the determination that she would never depend on anyone else again as long as she lived.

  * * *

  “Hey, Murray!” John bellowed. “Where’s the damn coffee?”

  The swinging door opened, and Dee appeared, carrying two outsized white cups and a plate of toasted bagels. She deposited everything on the counter in front of John and Eddie, then fixed them with a look. “So how do you want your eggs?”

  “Over easy,” said Eddie.

  “In the shell,” said John. “I don’t want eggs.”

  “No eggs?” Dee asked.

  “No eggs.”

  “You’ve got to eat,” she observed, her brown eyes soft with affection. “How about a short stack?”

  His stomach growled in response. “You convinced me.”

  “Hate to tell you this, Johnny, but you’re easy.”

  Eddie snorted with laughter as Dee hustled back into the kitchen to relay the order to Will, the Starlight’s cook. A blast of cold air accompanied the squeak of the front door as Dave O’Hurley and Rich Ippolito stepped inside.

  “Gonna be a cold mother of a winter,” Dave said, brushing droplets of rain from his graying hair. “If it’s this cold before Thanksgiving, what the hell is it gonna be by Christmas?”

  “You worry too much,” Rich said, hanging his plaid lumber jacket on a hook by the door. “Save your worrying for something you can change.”

  The two old-timers bickered their way over to the counter, where Eddie joined the fray. John hunkered down over his cup of coffee and let the conversation ebb and flow around him as the other regulars began to file in. Marty Crosswell, Vince Troisi, Jake Amundson, Sally Whitton—it seemed as though half the population of Sea Gate had crowded into the Starlight by the time John’s short stack of pancakes was ready.

  “You need help,” Vince said as Dee took their orders. “When’s Nick gonna spring for another waitress? That sign’s been in the window so long I started to think the name of the place was ‘Help Wanted,’”

  “Don’t look at me,” Sally, owner of the local bait shop, said. “I like my worms on a hook, not trying to wiggle out of leaving a tip.”

  The diner erupted in raucous laughter.

  “Anyone tried that, you’d tackle him before he made it to the door,” Ja
ke Amundson said.

  “Damn right I would,” said Sally, “and don’t any of you deadbeats forget it.” The fact that Sally was eighty-five if she was a day didn’t fool anyone. She was as tough as they came and twice as feisty.

  Eddie looked up from his eggs. “That sign’s been in the window since the Fourth of July. If you ask me, people today are scared shitless of real work.”

  “Damn straight,” said Vince, nodding his head. “Rather sit on their fat asses and let the government work for them.”

  “Big talkers,” Dee said, wiping down the counter in front of John. “Why don’t one of you hotshots apply for the job? You’re here all day anyway. Might as well get paid for it.”

  “Don’t want to work as hard as you do, Dee Dee.” Eddie’s voice was warm with affection. “We’d rather sit here and watch you do it.”

  “What’s so hard about coffee and eggs?” Vince asked. “Now, when I was on the docks, we...”

  Vince was off and running. It was familiar territory and good for at least twenty minutes. John hunkered down lower over his pancakes. Let the old guys reminisce about sixty-hour workweeks and unions more powerful than God—he’d rather listen to them debate the job situation than his lack of a social life any day.

  He polished off his stack and was draining his third cup of coffee when Sally dropped the bombshell. “Did you hear the news? Somebody bought the Winslow place.”

  “That dump?” Jake tilted the sugar canister over his coffee cup. “I didn’t know Marge’s kids had put it up for sale.”

  “Some woman saw an ad in the Star-Ledger the first day they ran the listing and bought it, cash price.”

  “Cash price?” John looked up from the remains of his pancakes. “Who the hell pays cash for a house?”

  “Nobody from around here, that’s for damn sure.” Eddie motioned for a refill on his coffee.

  “Carol at Gold Key Realty says she’s foreign,” Sally informed them.

  “Who’s foreign?” Dee asked.

  “The woman who bought the Winslow place.”

  Dee’s mouth opened. “Somebody bought the Winslow place? I didn’t even know it was on the market.”