by Jennie Nash
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
MONDAY
TUESDAY
CHRISTMAS EVE
CHRISTMAS DAY
FRIDAY
MONDAY
TUESDAY
FRIDAY
TUESDAY
TUESDAY - Six Months Later
WEDNESDAY
EPILOGUE
FOURTEEN CONVERSATION STARTERS FOR HOME SEEKERS, BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS, SHOE ...
BEHIND-THE-SCENES MOMENT #1: THE SPARK THAT IGNITED THE LAST BEACH BUNGALOW
BEHIND THE SCENES MOMENT #2: A REAL-LIFE CONTEST TO WIN A HOUSE
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2008 by Jennie Nash
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / February 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nash, Jennie, 1964-
The last beach bungalow / Jennie Nash.—Berkley trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-425-21927-0
1. Dwellings—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3614.A73L37 2008
813’.6-dc22
2007024724
http://us.penguingroup.com
Locatedness is not a science of the ground,
but of some quality within us.
—RICHARD FORD
For Rob
Home is where you are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book came to me in a flash on a yellow school bus, and a whole busload of friends and associates have helped me bring it to life. Kristine Breese, my writing soulmate, read every single page of every single draft and made it better each time through her intelligence, spirit and generosity. Lisa Edmondson, friend and guru, guided me at a critical moment to see what the flash on the bus was really all about. Beth Kephart, novelist and pen pal, provided constant and poetic long-distance encouragement. My husband, Rob, gave me a living, breathing model of a loving husband. My children, Carlyn and Emily, talked about my characters at the dinner table as if they were real people, which helped me come to see them that way, too. My sister, Laura, helped me with the music and other truths. My friends Barbara Abercrombie, Danny Brassell, Patti Goldenson, Denise Honaker, Lori Logan, Bridget O’Brian (who has been reading my work with keen insight for more than two decades!), Trisha Rappaport, and Susan Sawyer read and commented on various drafts. Faye Bender, my literary agent, guided me through a seamless genre switch and made an inspired match. Jackie Cantor, my editor, cried in all the right places (and in front of all the right people!), saw more in my work than I ever knew was there, and welcomed me into a hardworking team of professionals that included assistant Carolyn Morrisroe, cover designer Rita Frangie, copyeditor Denise Barricklow, and publicist Catherine Milne. Heartfelt thanks to you all!
WEDNESDAY
There’s something oddly comforting about doctors’ waiting rooms. The art on the walls is always soothing, the receptionist at the desk is always cheerful, people’s voices are hushed and almost reverent, and the air is infused with the promising smell of soap, as if, behind the door, it’s not just people’s bodies that are being healed, but their lives that are being swept clean of anything that smacks of deficiency or decay. I couldn’t in a million years have become a doctor myself, since I lack two essential qualifications—namely a benign attitude toward blood and an ability to drum up compassion for strangers who, more often than not, bring their problems upon themselves. But in a strange way, my chosen field shares some of the same principles with the ancient art of healing. I’m a magazine writer, a freelancer—one of those people who brings you monthly promises of a thin waist, shining hair, fabulous shoes, an effortless vacation and a husband who happily does the dishes. I, too, operate on a faith that just about anything can be made better.
I shuffled through the magazines on the waiting room table and grabbed a two-year-old Metropolitan Home. I recognized it as an issue that contained an article I’d done on the merits of cork flooring, which, I had learned, is actually a renewable resource. It’s made from the bark of trees, so during harvest the trees aren’t damaged. As a floor, cork is warm and forgiving. It also has the unusual property of being mold resistant, which, in the foggy beach cities of Los Angeles, is a definite plus.
I read the words I’d written with a cool satisfaction, then tossed Metropolitan Home back on the pile and picked up the new issue of Town & Country. A flock of subscription and perfume cards fluttered onto my lap. I picked them up and had just started scanning the table of contents when someone called my name.
“April Newton?” a woman sang, with a slight rise at the end of my last name, as if questioning whether I was still there and had not, in fact, given up on getting my turn in the inner sanctum. I smiled to indicate that I was, indeed, April Newton. I stood and kept the magazine with me as I grabbed my purse and followed the woman down the hall.
I followed her past the large tropical fish tank and noticed that she was wearing soft pink scrubs that matched the soft pink walls. We walked down the hallway, which was hung with large black-and-white close-ups of roses and tulips, and into a dressing room with muted lighting. “Everything off but your panties,” the woman said. “Robe opens to the front. Put your clothes in one of the lockers and keep the key in your robe pocket.”
I fought the urge to interrogate this woman the way I might if I had been sent to interview her on a piece about the new customer-service features of breast care facilities around the country. How many times, I would ask, do you estimate you’ve given those instru
ctions? Do you ever just know, by their eyes or the way they hold their shoulders, that some women already know what to do? That they have, in fact, heard those instructions so many times that it sounds to them now like a poem or the lyrics to an old song? That they would rather dispense with the robe altogether, knowing that what they’ve come here to do is bare their bodies and their souls?
“Thank you,” I said, in response to her speech about clothing protocol.
I went to unzip my jeans and noticed that the zipper was already halfway down. This had been happening with some frequency lately and more than anything else, it surprised me. I had become thick around the middle. After so many years paying so much attention to my body—to how fit it was, how healthy, how resilient, how balanced—I had become thick around the middle without even realizing that it had happened. I took off my pants, pulled off my sweater, unhooked my bra— which had turned a kind of murky gray, speckled with little balls of pilled elastic—wrapped myself in a thick terry cloth robe and took the Town & Country into the inner waiting room.
It was a lounge like a spa. There was a pitcher of ice water and lemon on the side table, along with fresh brewed tea and a tray of shortbread cookies. Norah Jones was being piped in through speakers in the ceiling. I took a seat in a plush armchair. There was only one other woman in the waiting room with me, a woman about my age with hair even more red than mine and what appeared to be an immunity to the charms of women’s magazines. She sat in her own armchair on the other side of the low coffee table, with her arms crossed primly in her lap. My guess was that she’d never had a mammogram, and for a split second, I thought about breezily making such a guess. “First time?” I might say, as if coming to an appointment whose sole purpose was to determine whether or not you had cancer was something you could get used to.
I opened the Town & Country again. It was a magazine I’d never written for, which presented a kind of puzzle for me to solve. What was their style? How did they structure their pages? I turned to the wedding section and read the names of a couple who frolicked in the water off Martha’s Vineyard and another who posed on a wide swath of grass in Ireland, a long-haired setter sitting steadfastly by the groom. I flipped again to a section in the feature well that was entirely about sex. Town & Country sex.
The main feature was a long his-and-hers article by a couple who had gone on a $6,000 sex therapy retreat at the Miraval Resort & Spa in Arizona. I immediately wondered how the piece had been assigned. How had the editors known that the writer and her spouse would be game for such an intimate outing? Or had the writers decided to go to the spa, then pitched the piece and gotten their weeklong romp in the desert covered as a business expense? I scanned the wife’s section. She quoted one of the sex therapists, who explained that their retreat was designed for couples who were in love, but who had, due to time and the pressures of modern life, lost intimacy. In his section, the man talked mostly about the concept of homework. Sex homework. And he was talking about how much fun it was to be told to do—or not to do—various things in bed with his wife. “For homework the first night,” he wrote, “we were told that if we had intercourse, we would get an F.”
For the past nine months, Rick and I had been sleeping in a small double bed in a rented efficiency apartment while workers tore the roof off our ranch house, ripped out the walls, leveled the beams, and then poured a foundation so they could build it all back again— bigger, better, more sleek and modern. Our fifteen-year-old daughter, Jackie, slept three feet from us on the other side of a paper-thin wall, and most nights she didn’t go to sleep until two or three hours after I did. I could count on one hand the number of times Rick and I had had sex in those nine months, and all of those times were soon after we moved. We had come to some sort of tacit agreement that our kisses would be chaste, our hands would not roam from the cool zones on our bodies and our eyes would not lock with meaning. It was amazing how much room there could be in a double bed. There was room to roll over, room to spread out, room enough to read and sleep and not once do anything that might be construed as an invitation to intimacy.
I read the words in the article again: “For homework the first night, we were told that if we had intercourse, we would get an F. My naked wife was to sit in my lap and gaze into my eyes, but there was to be no intercourse. The idea was to connect on a deeper level—to feel the sacredness of sharing our bodies.”
I looked up, flushed. The woman with red hair was staring at her hands. At any moment, someone could step in the doorway and call my name. I would have to leave the magazine on the table and wouldn’t know what happened to the couple in Arizona. I wouldn’t know if they had succeeded at their homework assignment and drawn closer in body and soul, or if they had failed miserably and fallen on each other like hungry animals. I could go to the bookstore and buy this issue of Town & Country. Within ten minutes of our apartment, there was both a Borders and a Barnes & Noble, each featuring hundreds of magazine titles just inside their front doors. I knew my way around the aisles as well as if I had stocked them myself, placing stacks of magazines on the rack every week and every month, breathing in their glossy dust, their glittering promise. I could put my hands on that Town & Country issue within seconds. But I knew I wouldn’t make a special trip to find out what happened to the couple in Arizona. It would be just one more thing I didn’t have time to do.
When a magazine is perfect-bound, like a book, you can rip out pages without a single tear. The trick is to make sure you grab a whole folio—the little bundle of pages that are bound together. When the woman with red hair turned to look at the photographs on the wall, I paged through the sex feature, grasped the pages near the spine of the magazine and ripped them out as quickly and as quietly as I could. The sound shattered the silence of the waiting room like thunder. The woman snapped her head back and gaped at me, but I pretended as if tearing pages from waiting room magazines was a perfectly acceptable practice. I slipped the pages into my robe pocket and reached for a glass of lemon water.
The red-haired woman cleared her throat. “Those magazines are here for everyone’s pleasure,” she said, not unkindly. I imagined that she was a fourth-grade teacher. She probably said words, or words like these, several dozen times a day to fourth-grade hooligans in the library.
I smiled at her, as if I was pleased that she had appointed herself citizen-watchdog of the doctor’s waiting room. “Oh,” I said coolly, “it was a subscription ad. I’m going to subscribe. It’s a great magazine, Town & Country. I don’t normally think of it as a magazine of much substance, but there’s some solid stuff in there.”
She narrowed her brows slightly. They were red, just like her hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t my place to say anything. It’s just that the reason I’m here is a magazine article.”
“Breast self-exam?” I asked. I’d written a dozen such articles myself—about how you should mark your calendar, set aside a full ten minutes, be absolutely methodical in your circular motions around the breast. I never did any of those things myself and, in fact, my doctor told me that only a tiny percentage of women discover cancer in that way.
“No, actually,” she said. “It was an article on dating. On how you should look for a man the same way you look for a job. I made a list of attributes I was searching for, and good health was at the top of the list.”
“How did that lead you here?” I asked.
“The magazine said that if I wanted to attract someone who made his health a priority, I should make my health a priority, too.”
“Smart,” I said, although the idea of project management for intimate relationships seemed pretty creepy to me. I had met Rick when I was helping to build a playground at the school where I was teaching. He had designed it, and presumably it was his fault that there was a number ten nail lying in the dirt when I climbed off the scaffolding. The nail went through the sole of my shoe, and before I could even scream, he had pulled the nail out, slapped on antiseptic, bandaged my foot and se
nt me with one of the other teachers for a tetanus shot.
“We’ll see,” the red-haired woman said. “I’ve actually never had a mammogram. I’m a little nervous.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Have you?”
A pink-clad assistant appeared in the doorway. “April Newton?” she asked.
I got up and went to the doorway. As I passed the red-haired woman, I leaned toward her and gave her my answer. “I’ve had a few,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
I followed the assistant into the room with the machine. “The technician will be with you shortly,” she said, setting my file down on the counter near the sink.
The moment the door closed, I took out the juicy sex article and carefully read the husband’s part of the story. When I was done, I bit my lip. I looked out the window, where I could see the tops of three palm trees swaying in the wind and five black birds perched on an electrical wire. I sniffed, thinking I could stop the tears from forming, but my throat was already itching; I had no chance. A teardrop splashed on Town & Country.
There was a knock on the door, which flung open as a third woman in soft pink scrubs came blazing into the room. “How are you today?” she called out cheerfully, then took one look at my tear-stained face and picked up my chart. She quickly scanned it. She lowered her voice and said, “Five years is always the hardest.”
I shoved the article back into my robe pocket and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “No, no,” I said, and shook my head. How could I tell this person that it wasn’t cancer, exactly, that had me crying? It wasn’t the fact that I was moments away from reaching the coveted five-year cancer-free milestone, which, as any good reader of women’s magazines knows, is the point at which you revert to having the same risk as any other female of the species. It was the fact that my husband and I would get an A if we were given a homework assignment that had to do with refraining from intercourse. We would be brought up to the front of the class and held up as a model of restraint. Yet just five years before, when our lives had been filled with pathology reports and blood counts, the lurching rhythms of chemotherapy and the endless waiting for test results, Rick and I had been closer than we’d ever been in our lives. We couldn’t pass each other without hugging, we couldn’t look at each other without meaning. We held hands in the car, we sat thigh-to-thigh whenever we went to a restaurant. It was blasphemous to even form the thought, but I missed those days.