I caught him staring at me, and I looked away, looked back. He was still staring.
“I have never talked to a woman as I talk to you. It’s relaxing, it’s stimulating, funny. I can only compare it to talking to a comedian/sociologist/professor all wrapped up in a blue silk robe. You are one smart lady.”
“I’m glad. I wouldn’t want any competition, Zeus.”
“There is none,” he said in all seriousness. “You have no competition, Chalese. None.”
Later that day, we took my boat out. We watched the water shoot from a whale’s blowhole, Aiden’s face reflecting his awe. We held hands as the sun set, the colors a liquid, moving painting against the outlines of the green islands.
The next day, I showed Aiden more of the island.
When we got back to my yellow house, he stared at my barn, our fingers entwined.
“It needs work,” he said.
“Yes, it does. I’ll get to it.”
He held my hand. “We’ll get to it. I’ll help you rebuild the whole thing.”
And in the silky darkness of the night, I thought to myself, That is the most romantic thing any man has ever said to me.
She screamed, long, guttural, and piercing.
Then she jumped up and down, indulging her temper tantrum. She punched the air, ripped up paper, threw it over her head, and stomped around. She arched her back and screamed again through clenched teeth.
When she lifted up her laptop to throw it across my studio, I made a lunge and grabbed it from her. “Brenda, not the laptop. It’s too expensive.”
“I can’t get rid of my writer’s block.” She fought me for the laptop. “I hate this. I hate screenwriting. I’m going to become a…a…fourth-grade teacher and teach kids about the Revolutionary War and adjectives and how to get a date!” She screamed again.
I wrestled the laptop out of her hands. We ended up in a heap on the floor huffing and puffing.
“Want an orange truffle?” I asked.
She screamed through clenched teeth.
I blame the Annual Whale Island Poker Tournament, a fund-raiser for the local schools, for the extreme kissing that occurred afterward.
Aiden won third place in the tournament. Brenda won second place.
Mrs. Ailene Brooks, age eighty-five years young, won first place. The woman is a genius. She knows how to count cards. When she won, she climbed up on a table and did a break-dance of sorts.
Five tables practically buckled with desserts. At least sixty women had entered the Whale Island Dessert Contest. The prize was a three-day spa package on the mainland. A number of women started mean-spirited dessert gossip when they didn’t win, one repeatedly stabbed her fork into the table, and one stomped out and slammed the door, but hey. Tough break.
On Whale Island, Aiden and I were officially a couple. In fact, each time he won another round, it was announced by Sherilee Rotowsky via the microphone, “The gentleman who is the special friend of Chalese Hamilton has won another round. Let’s see, what’s his name? Ah, yes…” And then his name would be verbally mangled: Aide-on. Or Add-on. Or even Eedon.
Finished by “You know, the man who is dating our Chalese…Doesn’t she make the best jams and jellies you’ve ever tasted? Y’all know that she and Brenda had to go down to the police station again.” Laughter. “This time it was Stephen’s skylight. No one hurt, folks. She never should have dated Stephen in the first place.” That last bit was said under Sherilee’s breath, but everyone heard it. “He wasn’t good enough for her.”
I snuck a glance at the back of the building. Stephen’s face was bright red. The Man-eater crossed her arms and scrunched up her angry face.
“How many times has Chalese said no to marriage proposals?” Sherilee asked everyone as I slouched in my chair. “I can’t remember.”
“It’s nine,” Forrest Lee declared. He’s forty, the town comedian, and owns a pottery shop. “Nine.”
“Nine? That’s not true. Chalese has said no to six men,” Rainwater Nelson said. “I know. I keep track.”
“Is she engaged to Add-on?” yelled Beatrice Wong, principal of the high school.
“That’s a good question,” Sherilee said into the microphone. “Are you engaged to Add-on?”
Before I could say a word, Aiden stood up. He took a second to grin at everyone. “I think I can answer that. Chalese is…” He paused, and everyone leaned forward. “Chalese is not at this time engaged to me.”
Hooting and hollering followed. Not at this time?
I stood up on legs that held all the strength of those green noodles that are supposed to be healthy for you. “I am not engaged to Aiden. I am not even ‘not at this time’ engaged to Aiden. And to keep the official record straight, I’ve said no four times.” I held up my hand, four fingers up. “Four. Cuatro. Quatre.”
Rainwater yelled, “So don’t ask her, Add-on. Kidnap her, throw her over your shoulder, and haul her into the church. I’ll drive the getaway Porsche.” He had three.
“I can come to you,” Reverend Tinner said helpfully. “We’ll sneak up on her, Add-on.”
“For someone who wants to live a quiet, anonymous life, you sure aren’t anonymous, Chalese,” Aiden drawled to me as we stepped into the cool night two hours later.
“Shut up, Add-on,” I said.
And that’s where some serious kissing took place, right in the field next to the poker tournament. At the end of it, when I could barely breathe, he swung me around under a shimmering moon as if I were some skinny little thing.
“I have to go back to Seattle.”
Aiden’s words sunk straight into my heart as we stood at the front of the ferryboat, passing the emerald green islands surrounding Whale Island.
I really didn’t have time to do this island tour, but I could no more have refused Aiden’s invitation than I could have invited a boa constrictor to give my neck a good squeeze.
In fact, I hadn’t said no a single time as we’d laughed, talked, and danced our way through the last four days. Plus, I was beginning to think about using paintbrushes as weaponry, so I knew I needed a break.
“I’m going back to Seattle tomorrow. I’ve been here much longer than I intended so I could hang out with you and your smile. I’m going to write the story, Chalese, it’s going to print, and then I’m coming back. We’ll work through the fallout together, and I’ll be here to hold your hand. I promise.”
I had two raging emotions battling for space in my head. One: dead panic. And two: liquid, swirling, joyous joy. Aiden wanted to come back and see me!
“I don’t want to invade your life.” He threaded his fingers through mine. “I don’t want to pressure you. I haven’t asked you to marry me, so there’s no need for you to feel suffocated, but you’re too good of a fisherwoman for me to let you go.” He winked at me. So intimate, so sweet.
The wind whipped our hair back as I giggled. We’d gone fishing two days ago and ended up kissing in a rowboat I borrowed from Gina. The rowboat capsized. It was one of the funniest things that had ever happened to me. The fish we caught had been lost.
“I can’t be anything but honest here. The first time I saw you, scratched up from the skylight adventure, dressed in leather, grouchy, I felt this…I don’t even know how to say it. It was as if I was seeing my future. You are the most unique woman I’ve ever met. You live your life so fully, with courage and caring. You’re independent and talented and a heckuva lot of fun.”
“Even when I’m struggling back onto a rowboat?”
“Especially then. You walk your dogs at odd hours, you have a thing for your pajamas, you dance well in the sand, you laugh from your heart, and you’re dedicated to four-legged creatures.”
He wrapped our linked hands behind my back.
“And you’re sexier than hell. Every bit of you.”
I thought of my burgeoning bottom and my hot flashes.
Oh, well. If he thought they were sexy, who was I to argue? “So when we went biking throu
gh the mud and I crashed into you, that didn’t appear to be a warning that I wasn’t the right one?”
He laughed. “No, not at all.”
“And when we hiked to Constitution Point and it started to pour down rain and I suggested we do a waltz, that also wasn’t a bad sign?”
“Not at all. Kissing you in the rain was one of the best things that has happened to me in years.”
“They were wet kisses,” I commented.
“True. I’m going to come back, and I want to see you again for more wet kisses. Many times. Please, Chalese. Say yes.”
For an answer, I leaned in, stood on tiptoe, and kissed his neck. Once, twice, three times. “Whatever you say, Reporter Man.” Pain rippled through my body. I hoped that this would not be the last time I would kiss this man.
The ferry captain tooted the horn, a long, low screech. I jumped out of Aiden’s arms at the noise. Up in the captain’s booth, my friend Jonathan Solberg waved.
I kissed Aiden again, right on the mouth, and he kissed me back, taking control of that kiss, which was sexier than all get-out.
I would remember that kiss, I knew it. When I was old and gray and leaning on a walker, that windy kiss on the ferryboat would make me smile.
I worked until three o’clock in the morning.
I drew my strutting rooster and my busy-body chickens. I drew the blue ocean in back of them. I drew Gordon, the anxiety-ridden horse. I drew my barn. And I wrote the dialogue between the animals as they figured out who would be president of the farm.
Goose couldn’t simply take over because she wanted to, and Fox couldn’t be president, because he was threatening to eat the chickens unless they voted for him. Donkey couldn’t be president, because he had been bribing the other animals, telling the pigs he would bring them donuts if they voted for him.
Next I wrote the speech that presidential candidate Cassy Cat gave to her fellow animals. Cassy Cat is a smart, calm cat who wants everyone to have a voice in her government, even the old horses, the weird new goat from a farm with a name no one can pronounce, and the duck with the green feathers who is different from all the other ducks.
I drew and wrote until I couldn’t see straight.
I turned off the light, but dancing before my eyes was Aiden Bridger, with his full lips, knowing green eyes, fishing pole in hand. Next to him was a giant newspaper article, my real name all over it next to my books, along with all the old photos, the old scandal, and my latest arrest for the skylight-busting incident.
I trusted Aiden. But after this, he would probably never trust me.
I conked my head on my table.
For the next five days, I worked fiendishly. Hardly moved except to go and help Christie, who was crying because she didn’t know why she was crying. I made her pancakes with applesauce and crushed potato chips, as she requested, then put her to bed, as she was the size of a house. She smelled like baby powder and roses, as always.
“Mommy has some big, fat babies in her tummy,” Wendi Jo, her daughter, whispered.
“Yeah. I felt the babies in there,” Jeremiah said. He’s four. “One kick my hand. He wearing soccer cleats. I felt ’em.”
“How they gonna come out?” Rosie Mae asked, three years old. “She got a zipper in her tummy?”
Chapter Eight
“You lied.”
I sank into my Adirondack chair on my front porch as Aiden stalked up the steps after slamming the door of his truck. He was not happy. “You lied, Chalese. You lied by omission.”
My lifeless fingers dropped my coffee cup which smashed on the porch. I stood up, my anger rising. I did not exactly appreciate being called a liar. “I was not required to tell you the full truth about myself, Aiden, or my past, when you were writing a story about me for a huge newspaper, one I didn’t want written in the first place. Why should I make your job easier? Why should I provide information that I didn’t want out there? Because you kissed me? Sorry, Aiden, I’m not that easy.”
“You had to know that I would find out.” He put his palms up in the air, exasperated. “You knew it.”
“Yeah, Aiden, I thought there was a pretty good probability that you would find out. But I was hoping, hoping against hope, that you wouldn’t dig that deep, and if you did, that you’d let it go.”
His glare about seared me in half. “Maybe you thought if I was turned upside down by my feelings about you I wouldn’t do my job? I’d let it slide, let details slide, not do the research I always do?” His green eyes flashed with all his pent-up anger, the betrayal I knew he felt.
“Maybe. I hoped.” He stood two feet from me. I could smell him—island air, mint, aftershave, and him. If he wasn’t mad at me, I’d want to kiss that man until my lips fell off. He was drop-dead sexy when he was ticked.
“I know you aren’t who you say you are. I know your real name is Jennifer Piermont, your father is Richard Piermont III, your mother is Rebecca Piermont, and your sister Christie is actually Holly Piermont.”
I swallowed real hard. Hearing his name made me feel like I was eating rocks.
“You’re from New York City. Your father, a private investor, was arrested when you were fourteen for defrauding his clients of millions and millions of dollars. It was a huge scandal at the time because of who he was—a pillar of New York society, on all the right boards, went to all the right parties, belonged to the right country club. All those people trusted him with their last dime. He took all their dimes, their quarters, everything.”
“He would have taken their shirts if he could have, Aiden. Ripped them right off.”
“When the scandal broke, there were cameras and reporters stalking you and your family. During the trial, one of the disgruntled clients tried to shoot your father in open court. He missed and was tackled by a guard. Luckily you and your mother and Christie were already gone by then. Your father went to jail for ten years.”
He put his hands on his hips, pushing his leather jacket back. “Your mother arranged to have everything sold, your apartment in New York, the house in Connecticut, the house in the Bahamas, the art, the furniture, and signed it all off to a fund set up to reimburse her husband’s clients. She made no claim to anything in the divorce, and in fact left home with you girls and nothing else. You later drove West and came to Whale Island, a place she had vacationed with her own family several times as a teenager.”
There went my world.
It had imploded.
Was the article being printed as we spoke? Was it already online?
“You all changed your names.”
“Yes, we did. We spent much of our time in the car thinking up new names, and when we arrived my mother legally changed our names. A new identity, a new life.” Why hide anything now? “We covered up our old lives. My mother told everyone we were from the East Coast, she was divorced, and she was a housekeeper. She got jobs as a housekeeper and maid. On the side, she started her own small business.”
“And you disappeared.”
“Yes, from all those furious people, people who had a right to be furious, but not a right to take out their fury on me and my sister.”
He groaned. “Want to hear what else I’ve learned? Something that makes me feel like pummeling your father?”
I knew what was coming, and I braced myself for a nauseous cascade of black, annihilating memories.
“Police were called to your apartment on Fifth Avenue three times for domestic abuse. Your mother went to the hospital on a number of occasions.”
“Well, aren’t you the sleuth.” I felt hot tears swim to my eyes. “Want to know a tad more, Skyscraper? My mother told me later that when she went to the hospital for her injuries, my father told the doctors there she was mentally ill and had done it to herself. I doubt the doctors believed him, I’m sure my mother denied it, but it put my already unstable mother in an emotional tailspin.”
“I can’t believe this.” He was furious, but I could tell it had shifted somewhat from me to my father. “I c
an’t believe you lived through that.”
“Me, either.” When I remember that time, I don’t know how I survived it—except that my dad was gone a lot on business. “Once, when my mother got up enough courage and left with us when we were very young, he called a private investigator, then hired these huge, scary thugs to bring us back. We left again another time, a year later, same thing. Both times he physically took his anger out on my mother. She was beaten to a pulp.”
“Oh God,” Aiden breathed.
“My father convinced my mother that no judge would ever let her have me and Christie since she was mentally ill. What a threat to hang over an emotionally devastated woman’s head! At that time there was nowhere for an abused mother to run, certainly nowhere that she knew of. They hardly talked about that then. She had been an only child, and her parents were in poor health and living in a facility. She was trapped.”
“And to you, Chalese?” he said, his voice low, pained. “What did he do to you?”
I tilted my chin up. “You mean besides the neglect, his hatred for me, the constant fear he evoked? My father always told me I was fat. He said my skin was a dirty color, not pretty compared to Christie’s super-white skin and blond hair. He said I waddled, identical to a penguin, and he would make these penguin calls at me when I walked by. He always said Christie was the smart one and I had a brain born in a freezer. He’d tell my crying mother to give me whale or seal meat for dinner. ‘She’ll gobble it right up, you’ll see,’ he told her.
“He would turn off the heating vent in my bedroom and tell me since I was a penguin I was used to the cold and I’d be fine. So here we were, living on Fifth Avenue, and I had no heat. And that’s just the start.”
Aiden was pale, his face tightly drawn. “Chalese, come here, honey, come here.” He pulled me into his arms, hugging me close, then swung me up, into my home and onto my couch. One sad story followed another, as if they’d all lined up in my heart and were now pushing each other to get out.
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