A flock of low-flying white gulls flaps in the foreground, dipping and diving, squawking and splashing, circling and swooping. Their wings skim the waves and dash back over land, their shadows chase each other over the dunes. The production is perfectly orchestrated, like something out of central casting. Enter gulls, stage left. Two dolphins race along the water—always a good sign. A dragonfly, drunk on the sun, hovers. A tiny sandpiper tests the waters, tottering on wobbly legs, trying to keep up with its mother. I feel like a fat, lazy lizard sunning myself on a hot rock. The beach is encrusted with uncollected shells.
I find a giant conch shell, partially hidden in the sand. It is misshapen, not smooth or polished—far from perfect. But it speaks to me, whispering its ancient sea secrets while I hold it against my ear.
I know now that I am going to take Manny to the condo. I’m not sure yet whether I will reveal my own ancient secrets. But I want him to see this place. I want us to watch the sunrise together. Sunrises are spectacular at Palm Coast. Sometimes the sun emerges, filtered and bound behind wispy ribbons of clouds. Sometimes it explodes out of a cotton-candy blue ocean against a Pepto-Bismol® sky, sending shimmering flecks of turquoise over the water, putting on a Technicolor dream show. On those mornings, when God moonlights as an Old Master, his deliberate use of light and color achieves dramatic effects. The light kisses the incoming waves as they almost knock each other over, in their rush to shore, giggling like a bunch of naughty, eager schoolgirls. I know Manny will love it here. We will love it here together.
Suddenly, the surf starts to churn as the sea spits foam in advance of the storm, like someone has emptied a giant box of Tide into a vast washing machine. Pieces of white foam collect at the shoreline, whipped by the wind so they skip and scatter and cartwheel across the wet sand, chasing each other like tumbleweeds.
I play in the shallow water a while and frolic in the waves. Yes, frolic, on my private beach (the beach is actually deserted because of the evacuation order) while all the angst, anger, and frustration I have bottled up inside me flows out. This luxury is even worth the risk of ruining my hair. I want to be fresh and clean when I go to Manny. I don’t want to be carrying all my baggage. Actually, Manny comprises most of my baggage. I know I have to let it go and not overthink it. Because if I do, I will wonder, “Is this any way for Natalie and Josh’s mother to behave?” Or, “Is this any way for Matt’s wife to act?” Then I’ll have to turn right around and go back to Atlanta before I experience the one thing I need to make me whole again.
Facing the back of my condo, I squish my brightly painted neon-green toes deep into the wet sand and then wriggle them about. I am free-floating, swinging off the handle of the Big Dipper, dangling fearlessly off Orion’s belt into the edge of space. Usurping Cassiopeia’s throne. I am light and limber, shooting around the solar system. I am practically naked, Botticelli’s goddess in the Birth of Venus.
Out here, I can pretend I’m really not fifty.
The irregular conformation of black rocks creates tiny wading pools on the sand. Lulled by the rhythmic sound of the waves, I focus firmly on my feet planted in my personal place on the planet. Am I really moving? Yes, nature’s force is tugging at me, unwrapping the bonds and boundaries of my universe. As the tide recedes, I slide further, further, further back in the continuum of my life to the first time I ever laid eyes on Manny Gellar and the first time he walked back into my life.
PART TWO: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER
Chapter Six:
Can’t You Read the Signs?
Miami
Manny Gellar walked back into my life the same way he entered it. Through the front door of Goldsmith’s, my family’s jewelry store in the now-shabby Westchester area of Miami. Only this time he came alone and this time I knew he was coming. I hadn’t received any advance warning. But I could read the signs. I was a big believer in signs. Like my Grandmother Rose, I was born without a sense of smell. Nature compensated by gifting me with a sixth sense—a special ability to tap into the future. At the moment, the future was not only tapping, it was doing a pretty good impression of Ringo Starr rocking out on my psyche.
His name flooded my mind, a broken turn signal that wouldn’t stop flashing. The kind of light that annoyed you as your car followed it down the road. Manny Gellar. Manny Gellar. Manny Gellar. Julie Goldsmith Gellar.
The nagging feeling was now so strong I knew with absolute certainty that I was going to cross paths with Manny Gellar, and very soon. I’d been avoiding him for more than four months, since I’d left him to study in Florence, Italy (some would say to stick my head in the sand), my senior year of college.
So I wasn’t surprised, as I was getting ready to leave Goldsmith’s to go on my lunch break later that afternoon, when I was forced to come to grips with my past.
“Of all the jewelry joints, in all the towns, in all the world, I walk into yours,” laughed a man in a familiar, gravelly voice.
Looking up, I found myself face-to-face with Manny Gellar. His dreamy brown eyes lit up the room, and his dazzling smile revealed the biggest, whitest teeth and most engaging dimples on his cheeks and chin. Bounding around the counter, he swept me up into his welcoming arms for a huge hug that literally left me breathless and blushing. It went beyond the camaraderie of an old friend and bordered on the sensual, as his strong lover’s arms wrapped around me, refusing to let go.
I broke out of the embrace to give him a closer look, and my first instinct was to step behind the counter in a defensive move to hide myself from a more thorough perusal. He had hardly changed, and that caught me off balance.
When the man of my dreams walked into Goldsmith’s and back into my life that afternoon, I took the opportunity to study him. As I was trained to do, I appraised what was set before me. In this case, it was Manny, and I gave him the same careful examination I would a jewel of unknown origin that had just come into the shop. Perhaps the man I surveyed seemed a bit more serious and mature than the one I had known before. But the first difference I noticed was his clothes. Black pinstriped suit. White dress shirt with a button-down collar, well starched. Subtly striped Brooks Brothers tie. Black wingtips.
Dressed in his “Mr. Sincere” suit, he was still model-handsome in the conventional sense and by almost any standard. And he seemed slightly taller than I remembered, with a dark complexion, short dark hair, a broad brow, and an angular face, tempered with the dark and dangerous looks and wild Cuban blood from his mother’s side of the family. It was a combination I still found irresistible.
He’d retained the same boyish charm that had caused me to fall deeply and hopelessly in love with him so many years before. Okay, let’s be honest here. I was still in love with him.
Sincerity had never been Manny Gellar’s strong suit. He never took things or people seriously. An enigma, it was difficult to figure out what made him tick. I didn’t always know where I stood with him. That was a big part of the mystery that drew me to him and also a big part of the problem.
With Manny, you never knew how deep the feelings went. You always had to look below the surface to catch an honest glimpse of the man. There were layers, so being with him was slippery, like sinking into quicksand or wading into a murky, man-made lake. One minute you were on solid ground. The next you were in over your head. In a crunch, he could be counted on to toss you a lifeline, but only when you were going down for the third time. And he’d put me down for the count more times than I cared to remember.
I do remember missing his voice—a carnival barker’s voice that still promised delights under the Big Top. He was a natural announcer. His deep, measured, modulated cadence, magnetic and mesmerizing, still had the ability to pull me back, pull me in. I tried to remain cool, but the longer he stood in front of me, the more I succumbed to the dangerous undertow that I knew could drag me into the darkest depths again.
He hadn’t moved an inch after the hug, but his hypnotic influence on me was so powerful
the physical connection between us wrapped me in a stranglehold.
The truth is, I was coming undone. Manny’s presence in my store was unnerving. He was standing much too close. I gaped at him and couldn’t even manage a hello. It took me a minute to recover my composure and catch my breath. I hoped the shock hadn’t registered on my face. But his self-satisfied smile signaled that it had.
“W-what are you d-doing here?” I stammered.
“I live here, remember,” he said, flashing that infuriating, devastating trademark smile. His eyes hadn’t left mine since he walked into the store.
“How’s DoorMatt?” Manny asked pointedly, using his nickname for my old boyfriend because he knew it irritated me.
“Matt and I are not seeing each other any more, not that you ever really cared, even though he was your fraternity brother,” I replied.
“I’m not into brotherly love these days,” said Manny sarcastically. “I heard he asked you to marry him.”
“Then I guess you also heard I turned him down.”
“Good news travels fast. What I want to know is, did it have anything to do with me?”
“You would think that.” I wanted to slug him. I almost wished I had accepted Matt’s proposal just to wipe that arrogant look off his face.
“Why would it have anything to do with you?” I managed. “You and I haven’t seen each other in more than four months.” Talking about my breakup with Matt was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Your mother told my mother you’d been thinking about relocating the shop.”
“My mother talks too much. Is there anything you don’t know about my business?”
“Not much.” He laughed.
I didn’t find his latest intrusion into my life the least bit humorous.
“Maybe I can help you sell the shop and find a new location,” he offered. “Have you forgotten I’m in the real estate business, big time?”
“I heard,” I said, continuing to size him up and reconcile the image of the boy I knew with his new reputation as “Realtor to the Stars.” From where I stood, he was still the same self-centered Manny I remembered. Always playing an angle—always looking out for his best interests while trying to convince me he was only looking out for mine.
“I’m not exactly your typical client—I’m not a famous rock star,” I pointed out.
“I’ll make an exception in your case.”
“So why are you really here?” I asked suspiciously, trying to get control of the situation and my emotions.
“I’m here to see you,” he said simply, and he looked like he meant it. Suddenly, he started firing off questions and accusations rat-a-tat-tat, in staccato bursts, with the fury and speed of a submachine gun.
“You knew I’d come looking for you. Did you think you could hide out from me forever? Didn’t you get my letters? Why didn’t you ever answer them? And why did you go to Italy in the first place?”
He looked hurt, and, always sensitive to other people’s pain, my first instinct was to apologize. But as usual around him, I could hardly get a word in edgewise.
“Jewels, you look great,” he said, changing the subject and the tone of the conversation, as he continued to rest his gaze on me, assessing me unreservedly. He still used his pet name for me. I had to admit I took satisfaction from that, and it triggered another memory, actually my first memory of Manny Gellar, from when we were in grade school.
I had dropped by Goldsmith’s Jewelers on my way home from elementary school, eager to be around the sparkling stones in my parents’ store. Goldsmith’s was my home away from home. I loved the play of lights against the polished glass surfaces that revealed the treasures displayed within. I could walk blindfolded the well-worn path in the carpet that led to the engagement ring cases. My mother’s smile was etched into my consciousness as she beckoned customers to browse and cajoled them to buy. Graceful, cool, elegant, and refined, Sylvia Goldsmith’s movie-star looks were as classic as the merchandise offered in her shop.
The jewelry business had been in my blood for as long as I could remember. It was in my grandmother’s jewelry shop on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach that my father first met my mother. I never tired of hearing my parents tell the story.
Sylvia thought that tall, slim Tech Sergeant Sidney Goldsmith, stationed at Morrison Field in West Palm Beach during World War II, was the most handsome man in uniform she had ever seen, on or off the movie screen. My father’s brown cracked leather flying jacket, adorned with medals, was still encased in plastic in the back of his closet, looking as smart and stiff as it had when he had taken it to be cleaned right after the war.
“Here I was, a poor kid, in the middle of all this Palm Beach splendor,” said my father. “As fate would have it, I walked into your grandmother’s jewelry shop to have a ten-dollar watch fixed, and that’s when I first met and fell in love with her daughter, your mother.”
“Of course, there was no charge for the watch repair,” my mother explained. “The people of Palm Beach thought the men in uniforms were our saviors, protecting us from patrolling German submarines we were convinced were lurking off the coast.”
Sid returned to pick up his watch and sneak another peek at the girl who had waited on him. Sylvia took Sid’s breath away. He thought she looked like an angel or a movie star—Veronica Lake—with dark, smooth, shiny, waist-length hair that fell seductively over one eye as she smiled shyly and inclined her head in my father’s direction. She was only fifteen and Sid was almost twenty-one, but he found her irresistible and fell in love with her on the spot. And, he found out later, when he returned from the war, she was in love with him, too.
It was the most romantic story I’d ever heard, and that was exactly the way true love happened to me.
Manny Gellar walked into Goldsmith’s with his mother, Elena, and his twin sister, Estrellita. The Gellars had just moved into my neighborhood from Key West, and I had very definitely noticed “the new boy” in Mrs. Commodore’s second-grade class.
Elena clutched a sturdy navy canvas beach bag tightly to her chest, guarding it as closely as if it contained the crown jewels. Manny’s hand was latched protectively around his mother’s elbow.
My mother introduced herself, then added, “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Julie.”
Elena’s hands never left her bag. Estrellita stood shyly off to the side without saying a word.
“Julie,” Manny said, seriously mulling over my name. Then his dimples appeared, that first time I saw him flash his smile. “Julie. It sounds like jewelry.” That’s when he first started calling me Jewels.
“Make attention, children,” Elena began in broken English, as she announced she had brought some jewelry in to be appraised. “You are going to be surprised really very much.”
“That’s pay attention, Mom.” Manny leaned over to whisper in his mother’s ear. He looked uncomfortable doing it. At the time I thought it rude of him to correct his mother in front of total strangers. Later, he told me his mother had specifically asked him to correct her whenever he thought her English could be improved. And, since we didn’t know his mother, he didn’t want us to think less of her. When his father was not around, it was Manny’s job to protect his mother and his sister, a responsibility he took very seriously.
What came out of the common cloth bag that Elena carried was so unusual and so unexpected it left both me, normally a chatterbox, and the unflappable, unshockable Sylvia Goldsmith speechless.
There were dazzling, richly decorated necklaces of enameled gold and jewels, encrusted with alternating diamonds and rubies. I was captivated by the long strands of rare, natural black, pink, and white pearls—unblemished, iridescent, large and perfectly shaped. There were cross pendants and other faith-based symbols, as well as emblems such as the fleur-de-lis, along with hearts and other representations of love. Our visitor had enough merchandise in that one bag to open her own jewelry shop or stock an auction at Christie’s.
My mouth fell open a
nd my mother’s eyebrows lifted when Elena set a spectacular collection of precious stones on the counter—oversized rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds—set in round or rosette-shaped pendants that could be worn on heavy braided gold and silver chains around the neck. It was the emerald medallion, which had belonged to Elena’s sister, that drew my attention. I was already partial to emeralds, even at an early age, since they were my birthstone.
Elena explained that jewels such as the emerald, worn during the time of Queen Isabella, were crafted mostly for royalty and the court society of Spain. Each precious piece had a story and the collection was almost too much to process in the space of one afternoon.
“You take it, the bag,” Elena prompted as she gingerly handed it to my mother for safekeeping. But I could tell she didn’t really want to give it up. It was her history, her heritage. I watched my mother expertly catalogue the pieces and proffer a receipt, agreeing to store them in the Goldsmith’s vault for Elena and promising to arrange for the valuables to be properly insured and cared for.
We later learned that Elena Zareta Gellar came from a wealthy, aristocratic Cuban family of Spanish descent. Her ancestor, a court jeweler for Queen Isabella in fifteenth-century Spain, had ultimately settled in Cuba. The Zaretas lived like kings in the island country. The jewels, which had been in Elena’s family for centuries, were solid evidence of that.
The Gellars could have sold these heirloom pieces at auction and become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, but Elena would never consider that. She refused to part with these only reminders of the family that had been tragically murdered in Cuba over a political misunderstanding. Sensing trouble brewing, Elena’s mother had sent one of her daughters to safety with her cousins in Key West, weighted down with money and the jewels sewn into the bodice and hem of her dress. Elena’s twin, Estrella, had stayed behind to be with her fiancé.
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