Places by the Sea

by Jean Stone

  “Step-families aren’t new, Addie. Nor are they news.”

  Addie laughed. “You and your ‘news’ instincts. You’re TV royalty now, darling. That makes you entertainment, not ‘news.’ ”

  Images of tabloids sprang to her mind, complete with hordes of paparazzi—the kind that floated around Princes William and Harry and the Kennedy kids. “I don’t know, Addie. Jeff is sixteen. Amy’s fourteen. They’re so impressionable right now.”

  “Look, Jill, for months I’ve been telling you Boston is only the starting gate for your career. I haven’t steered you wrong so far, have I?”

  “But you haven’t involved my kids.”

  “They’re teenagers. They can handle it. Besides, it will give them new distinction at school.”

  “But Amy’s just a child.…”

  Addie’s phone rang again.

  Jill sighed inside, wishing she had a better idea of how to be the right kind of mother—with or without the entertainment spotlight. But she knew she had little to draw from. Her mother had hardly been a mother, at least not one she had ever related to or felt close to, even at the end. When Florence Randall died two months ago, Jill and Christopher were on the road, doing Good Night, Boston live from Moscow. Her mother’s church friends offered to hold the memorial service until Jill returned: Jill suggested they go ahead without her. The ladies had quietly complied.

  Outside the limo, the tile walls of the tunnel rushed by, compressing the air inside, squeezing Jill’s thoughts into a claustrophobic vise—the same kind of vise she’d felt as a child, growing up on the Vineyard. She set the champagne flute into the small holder beside her and tried to remind herself she was Jill McPhearson now—successful, sought-after Jill McPhearson—with no link to Jill Randall, that inferior nobody-child.

  Finally, Addie clicked off. “So, do I call back the editor and tell her it’s a go?”

  “I need to think about it,” Jill replied. “I want to talk to Christopher.”

  “He already agreed. I ran it by him earlier today.”

  She snapped her head around. “You talked to him first? Jeff and Amy are my kids, Addie.”

  “They’re about to be both your kids, darling,” Addie said firmly as the car followed the sign to British Airways. “I’ll need an answer by Monday.”

  The limo pulled to the curb at the international terminal, and Jill slipped on sunglasses. It didn’t matter that the sun had long since set: the twenty-foot illuminated billboard atop the next building displayed her full-color head shot, smiling beside Christopher’s, in an elegant, public-perfect pose that she didn’t feel like living up to right now.

  Stepping from the car and following Addie into the terminal, Jill wished she had someone—a mother, maybe, or even a friend—with whom she could talk about the Lifestyles article. But there was no one. No one but Addie who had everything to gain. Or lose.

  She crossed to the gate from customs and spotted her too-tall-for-sixteen son striding toward her, dressed in his favorite Celtics T-shirt and faded jeans. She raised her hand and waved, then, with her arm in midair, Jill stopped. Walking beside Jeff was a heavily made-up, dark-haired girl she didn’t recognize.

  Then she did.

  She put her hand to her mouth and tried not to gasp.

  Addie grabbed Jill’s elbow. “Well, well,” she remarked, “Amy may have left a fourteen-year-old, but she’s returned twenty-five.”

  Jill could not answer. She stared at the white leather micro-miniskirt that moved toward her, propelled by a haughty strut on four-inch, jelly platform shoes.

  “But Daddy bought me this skirt in SoHo,” Amy whined once they’d arrived home, bid Addie good-bye, and hauled three weeks worth of teenage suitcases into the foyer of the modest Tudor in Cambridge—the house Jill had found when she’d been promoted to her first anchor job.

  “I don’t care if Princess Di bought it for you,” Jill barked, tossing her MCM bag on the sofa and heading to the kitchen for a much-needed glass of wine. “If I ever catch you in it again, you’re grounded.”

  “All the girls wear them, Mother.”

  “All the girls do not have me for a mother.”

  “Lucky for them.”

  A tightness crept across the back of Jill’s neck. She reached up to the wine rack and plucked a bottle of chardonnay. “I want both of you to get upstairs and unpack your dirty laundry,” she called back to the foyer. “Then get your things together for the Vineyard. We’re leaving at eleven o’clock.”

  “In the morning?” Amy sputtered, then mumbled something incoherent, though Jill distinctly thought she heard the word “bitch.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, then opened the bottle instead. If there was only one thing she had learned from her mother, it was that sometimes silence was more effective than words.

  Rubbing her neck, she poured the wine into an elegant Baccarat wineglass, one of a set of twelve, an engagement gift from Thalia’s, the exclusive French restaurant in Back Bay, a sponsor of Good Night, Boston. Hopefully, the vibration of Amy’s feet stomping up the stairs wouldn’t crack the crystal.

  “Mom?” Jeff bellowed as he rounded the corner into the kitchen. “How many phone lines are there at the house on the Vineyard?”

  Jill took a drink. “Why?”

  “Because I can’t be stuck away on some island without being able to get on-line.”

  She stared at her glass, disappointed that the wine had failed to soothe the tension. “I lived there almost eighteen years without going on-line. Without even owning a computer.”

  “Did they have phones back then?”

  Jeff was a great kid, a fun kid. But he needed to work on his timing. “I’ll take care of the phone. Now please, go unpack. I’d like to have the laundry done before midnight.” She dumped the wine down the sink and wondered if her fans ever realized that she, too, had dirty clothes to wash, and if they would assume that the family of the new millennium could survive an entire month under the same roof.

  Chapter 2

  The Friday afternoon sun streamed through the blinds, painting thin yellow stripes across her naked stomach. Rita knew she’d better get moving: there was a house to show at one, and it must be close to that now. She’d have to hurry, but it had been worth it. She knew she’d said that the last time would be the last time, but Rita was glad she’d changed her mind. Joe had kept it up longer than usual today, and damn, he’d made her feel good.

  She rolled onto her side and stared at the gray-haired man beside her. “What time you got, Joe?”

  He moaned a little, then, without opening his eyes, reached beneath the sheets and stroked her thigh. “All the time in the world, honey.”

  Rita laughed at the lie. “All the time until the ferry comes in,” she said as she sat up and pulled the comforter around her age-softened, though still small breasts. She’d hated being short—petite—all her life, until recently, when she’d noticed that other women her age had begun to plump out, their breasts obviously held in place only by the retaining walls of their bras, their hips leaking across chair seats like the waves over the tide line during a storm. “Will she be on the two o’clock?”

  Joe sighed. “It’s the same every week. She arrives on the two o’clock, Fridays, and leaves on the six-fifteen, Sundays.” He coughed and lit a cigarette. “I don’t know how much more of her I can stand.”

  “Surely you’ll stand her until her father dies,” Rita said, though she knew perfectly well Joe would never leave his wife for her, no matter what he said, no matter how much money he claimed he’d save in the divorce once his wife had her inheritance. As much as a small, hopeful part of her wanted to believe him, Rita knew it was just another line. God knew she’d heard enough of them to know. “I’ve got to get going,” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s twenty ’til one now.”

  “Shit,” she said, grabbing the comforter and leaping from the bed. “Why the fuck did you let me fall asleep?”

  “Shit.” He chuckl
ed. “Why the fuck did you let me keep fucking you?”

  Rita tossed the pillow at him as she walked quickly toward the bathroom, fluffing her overdyed hair, the white down comforter dragging behind her. “I won’t have time for a freaking shower.”

  “Tourists like the smell of fish,” he said. “It’s part of why they come here.”

  She closed the door behind her, wishing he hadn’t said that. Just because she was an island woman, just because she liked being in his bed, didn’t mean she liked her men crude. As she slipped into her underwear, Rita wondered if Joe Geissel was that crude with his wife. Probably not. Summer people always felt they could go that extra mile with islanders. As if they thought they didn’t have class. Or feelings.

  Quickly dressing in the mint-green cotton skirt, white shirt, and matching green-and-white-striped blazer with the navy “SurfSide Realty” logo embroidered on the pocket, Rita checked her makeup in madam’s oval mirror and resisted the temptation to leave a telltale sign: a mascara wand, perhaps, or a few strands of her short, curly red hair. Ha, she thought to herself. That would teach him. Then she sighed and wiped the counter clean, flushing away the tissue and the evidence. Teaching Joe’s wife that another woman had graced her chamber would accomplish nothing, and could end up screwing Rita out of a golden chance to save her financial neck.

  She clasped three gold chains around the deep “V” of her open shirt, pushed the matching wide bracelets onto her wrists, and decided she’d better forget it.

  “See you next week?” Joe called from the bed as she crossed the bedroom and retrieved her briefcase.

  “Sure. I’ll call you.” She poked long dangle earrings into her ears and raced down the wide, winding staircase of the old beachfront estate that, though in need of repair, would probably bring two million five, maybe six, on today’s market because of its prime location in prestigious West Chop.

  As Rita groaned her way toward Oak Bluffs, her eyes flicked back and forth from the road of stalled tourists to the red digital clock on the dashboard of her seven-year-old Toyota. Hopefully, the Martins were slowed by traffic, too. Joe Geissel or not, Rita couldn’t afford to miss a potential sale. It was already August and prime time for sales was quickly waning. Once Labor Day passed, Rita knew the only action she’d get would be a few buyers looking to steal property, and a roster of new listings from people wanting to sell before winter. Real estate on the island, like all other action, ceased to exist beyond Labor Day.

  She turned onto County Road and wondered if Joe would ever list the house. He’d mentioned the possibility when she’d met him at the tavern last month—hell, it was the only reason she’d agreed to sleep with him in the first place. That, and the fact he was on his fourth marriage, so it wasn’t as though she was intruding on marital bliss. Besides, Rita knew that as she got older, the men became scarcer. Thankfully, the world was adapting to suit her needs. Roles were reversed now: men who used to work in the city and come out only on weekends to where their wives and children were safely ensconced for the summer now often stayed here, while the wives did the city-shuttle. Men like Joe, a semiretired financial consultant, did what little work they felt like from their phone/fax/e-mail setups in one of the musty rooms of the treasured summer homes, while their wives held down respectable jobs in the city. It was a demographic trend for which Rita was supremely grateful.

  The Martins were waiting when she arrived. Rita started to apologize when she noticed the looks of disdain on their faces. No one had to tell her they hated the house. She pasted on her agent-of-the-month smile and got out of her car.

  “Too small,” Mrs. Martin whined.

  “Too expensive,” her husband snorted.

  “Too far from the beach,” the missus added.

  Rita wanted to tell them to go screw themselves, that they’d known before looking that there were only four bedrooms and that the price was a million eight firm. And even though it was a hike to the beach, the property was in the freaking historic district, had an unheard-of full-acre lot, and overlooked Vineyard Sound.

  She wanted to tell them. Then she remembered the mountain of unpaid bills on her desk.

  “I’m sorry you don’t care for this one,” she said, adjusting the too hastily snapped belt of her skirt. “But I think there will be another place more to your liking which is coming on the market any day.”

  Mrs. Martin raised an overtweezed eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “Yes.” She averted her gaze from the woman’s straw tote bag with the multicolored yarn flowers splattered across the front, and wondered if Mrs. Martin had a house filled with Vineyard souvenirs in her most likely sprawling estate back in Brookline. “I’m afraid it will sell fast, though. It’s in an A-one location. A waterfront property.” The words spilled as her thoughts raced. “However,” she added, “it might be out of your price range.”

  “Where is it?” the mister asked.

  Rita cautiously crossed her fingers. “West Chop.”

  Mrs. Martin stuck her elbow into Mr. Martin’s thick side. “Can we see it before the papers are drawn up?”

  Looking for the deal. Always looking for the deal. Rita had learned long ago that the most important key to real estate success was to make the client think they had found the deal of the century. “Well, I’m not sure …” She stammered a little—rule number two—in order to heighten their interest. “The owners haven’t made a firm decision to sell.”

  “We’d like to see it, anyway,” Mrs. Martin said.

  Rita smiled again. “I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you call my office … say … next Tuesday? I should know something more definite by then.”

  The Martins nodded and climbed into their Mercedes. Rita waved as they drove off, then got into her own car and said a quick prayer that she could get a commitment from Joe on Monday, after his wife had returned to the city and Rita had a chance to tell him that selling now was the smartest thing he could do.

  As she turned over the engine, she wished she’d stayed in bed a little longer with Joe, but figured what the hell, she might as well drive home to Edgartown and pick up the mail. Maybe there was a letter from her mother who had moved to Florida a year ago and remained steadfast in her Yankee conservativeness to write—and not phone—except on special occasions and during off-peak times. Tonight she should pick up some good tips at the tavern, and tomorrow was Saturday and there were houses to clean, and hopefully another house or two to show.

  God, Rita thought as she headed toward Vineyard Haven Road, how I hate summers.

  The post office was crowded. Rita moved her way to the mailboxes, cursing herself for not having home delivery. Just because Vineyard Haven had yet to succumb to mailmen didn’t mean Edgartown hadn’t.

  “Hey, Rita,” a voice called to her.

  She thumbed through a stack of mail and turned to Jesse Parker who stood behind the counter. He was unshaven and looked like he’d just come off another bender.

  “Afternoon, Jesse. How’s your mother?”

  “She hates the nursing home. Other than that, about the same.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by and bring her some fudge. Does she still like penuche?”

  “Yours is the best. I still haven’t made a decision about her house.”

  “Take your time, Jesse. There’s no reason to upset her.” As much as she could use the listing, her commission on Mrs. Parker’s small Cape wouldn’t exactly change Rita’s life. Besides, hustling tourists was one thing; islanders were different. They were family. She moved to the counter, glancing at her mail.

  “Hey,” he continued, “did you hear the news?”

  There was no letter from Rita’s mother. Only a few bills, an ad for a septic system, and a long white envelope from the Internal Revenue Service. She frowned, then looked up at him. “What news?”

  “Your old friend’s coming back to town.”

  “What old friend?” She walked to the trash bin and tossed in the ad, silently wishing she could throw the rest
there, too.

  “Jill Randall.”

  She clutched the envelopes and stared at Jesse.

  “What’s her name now? McPhearson? Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, she’s coming back today.”

  Rita’s spine stiffened. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows.”

  “You probably do, Jesse. You know everything.”

  He scratched his stubble. “Not sure. Maybe she and that fellow she’s going to marry—you know, that baseball star, what’s his name, Edwards or something?”

  Rita shifted on one foot. If anyone in town said they hadn’t followed Jill’s life, they were lying. Her picture was plastered often enough on the front page of the Boston papers, a constant reminder of her success, screaming from news racks all over the island. “Christopher Edwards,” she said dryly.

  “Yeah. That’s it. They’re reopening her folks’ old house. The one on Water Street.”

  The fact that the Randall house was on Water Street was no news to Rita. North Water Street. In the better part of town.

  “Maybe they’re going to be summer people.”

  She tucked the envelopes into her briefcase. “I doubt it. Jill hated it here. Couldn’t wait to get away.”

  “People change.”

  As she snapped her briefcase shut, Rita noticed that her hand was trembling. “Well,” she said coolly, “guess I’ll have to pay them a visit.”

  She turned and quickly went out the door, knowing full well that she did not, or never would, have any intention of paying a visit to her old childhood friend. Jill had achieved everything she’d once wanted, according to anyone who ever said anything. Fine, Rita thought. But she damn well wasn’t going to come back here and gloat and make Rita feel like a piece of worthless shit all over again. Rita Blair, the one who was never quite as good or as smart or as pretty. The last thing she wanted was to have Jill learn that she’d turned out exactly as Jill had probably expected: struggling to make a living the way her mother had done—waiting on tables and cleaning other people’s shit.

  And the last thing she wanted was for Jill to learn the reason why she had disappeared from the island twenty-six years ago.