Summer by the Sea

by Susan Wiggs

  “I have no idea who leaked the story, Alex,” she said quietly, “but it wasn’t me. I would never want the death of your mother to hurt you and your family any worse than it already has.”

  He flexed and unflexed his hand as though he had a cramped muscle. Then he heaved a sigh. “It would be so much simpler if I could blame you. It’s so nice and neat. You knew, and you have a grudge against me—simple.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Yes, damn it, I know that.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “Because if you’d blabbed to the press, I’d have someone to be pissed at.”

  “Why do you need to be pissed at someone?”

  “Because it’s easier than being pissed at myself.”

  The stark honesty that rang in his words reverberated in the air between them. In that moment, she saw him as someone who had lost his mother in a terrible way. Rage was common in relatives of suicide victims. So was guilt. She wondered how he was dealing with it all. He’d led a charmed life that probably did little to prepare him for shock and tragedy.

  “How did you know I’d be at the club?”

  She stifled a snort of amusement. Summer people had always flocked to places reserved for members only. It was almost instinctual, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn. “Call it a hunch.”

  She felt for him now. She hadn’t forgiven him, not by a long shot, but she felt for him. “Do you think we could go somewhere else?” she asked. “Your friends have had their share of live entertainment today.”

  “Don’t mind them. Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  She let out the breath she’d been painfully holding in. “All right.”

  He headed for a flight of exterior stairs that led down to the dock. She could feel his friends glaring holes in her back. They didn’t need a reason to dislike her; they simply did. It had always been that way, and her friends had always reciprocated, disliking Alex on principle.

  She stole a glance at him, not knowing what she’d see next, but she’d lost the ability to read his mood.

  Still, the silence between them was charged. She pretended she hadn’t noticed—for a while, at least. They didn’t touch but walked side by side along a pebble-strewn path that was probably as old as the more famous walkway along Bailey’s Beach.

  In the wrack line of washed-up debris that lay along the beach, Rosa didn’t see any treasures, just the occasional tangle of translucent fishing line and shimmering heap of brown kelp. Alex used to be good at finding things on the beach—a bit of sea glass or a rare shell.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him. Spoken aloud, it was a strangely intimate question, though she didn’t mean it that way.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. Just looking at the way the sand blows up against the fence.”

  “In the winter, it goes in the opposite direction.”

  “I’ve never been here in winter.”

  “I know.”

  More silence, only the sounds of the sea around them: the muffled boom of the rollers, the hiss of rocks being thrown up on the shore and then rattling down as they were drawn back into the depths. The wind was light, a balmy caress, tousling their hair.

  “My father wasn’t sure whether or not to send something,” she blurted out. “You know, flowers or—”

  “There’s no need.”

  “It’s not a question of need,” she said. “He took care of the property for years, so I guess he—”

  “Just drop it, okay?”

  The edge in his voice made her frown. It was probably the trauma of the sudden tragic loss, she thought, making him short-tempered. At one time, she would’ve known. She used to be able to read his face as easily as her own, and he could do the same for her. Those days seemed so long ago.

  She felt him checking her out, and she deepened her scowl. “Do I have something on my face?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “On my face. The way you’re staring at me, I thought maybe I had something on my face.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “You didn’t,” she said quickly.

  Silence again. She felt something pressing from the inside, straining to get out. She tried to deny that she felt anything, but she did. Here she was with the man who had once broken her heart, and she was consumed with curiosity about him. She couldn’t indulge it, not now. He wasn’t ready to answer questions. He’d just lost his mother and the world knew it was a suicide.

  “Now you’re too quiet,” he pointed out. “That makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what to say to you. I’m trying to decide if there’s anything I can possibly say.” She felt an almost overwhelming urge to touch him, and even lifted her hand toward his arm. Then, feeling a shimmer of heat, she dropped her hand, instantly regretting the impulse. “When I lost my mother, I was in a different place than you are. But there are some losses that are always going to be devastating, and this is one of them.” She bit her lip and wondered how it might have made her feel to know her mother had wanted to die, had done so by her own hand. It would be all the more horrible to have the world find out, to be the object of gossip and speculation.

  She stopped walking. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you have any other theories about who leaked the story?”

  “Maybe it was someone from the medical examiner’s office. I’m sure we’ll have it checked out.”

  “We?”

  “My father and I.”

  “But if the paper quoted an anonymous source, they won’t divulge anyone’s name.”

  “We’ll see.”

  His certainty intrigued her. She didn’t want this. Didn’t want to be fascinated by him. “Alex, how much does it matter?”

  “What, that my mother killed herself, or that the story’s in the papers?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “Personally, I don’t give a shit whether the way she died stays private or it’s broadcast on the evening news, but my father’s bugged by it. My sister, too. She’s going to have to explain it to her kids. That’s the part I hate the most.”

  Rosa noticed he hadn’t addressed the first part of her question. And she was a little shocked to feel a deep sense of resentment on his behalf. In general, she regarded the press as her ally, helping her publicize the restaurant. Thanks to syndicated articles by travel writers from all over, her place had been mentioned in papers as far-flung as Miami, London, L.A. Still, she knew how destructive bad press could be.

  “I hate it, too,” she said. “I’m sorry, Alex.” She felt so cautious around him, so awkward. He was just a guy, she kept telling herself. Just a guy she used to know. She tried to remember that he wasn’t special.

  Even so, she kept sneaking glances at him, wishing he didn’t seem so...sexy. She couldn’t deny that he captivated her. She could picture him as a boy, and then a teenager. He had excelled at sports—tennis, rowing, cycling, sailing. Having been deprived of anything resembling a life when he was very young, he’d made up for lost time after his health improved. At thirty, he was tall and athletic, with that square-jawed all-American look which he wore as naturally as the sun on his hair.

  “Tell me about your life, Rosa,” he said out of the blue.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know what you’ve been up to.”

  Getting over you, she thought. Even after all this time, I’m still working on it. “There’s nothing to tell. After Pop’s accident, I stayed in Winslow. There was no way I’d leave him, not in the shape he was in.”

  “Rosa. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t say it. I know you felt bad for me.” But not bad enough to stick aroun
d.

  She wondered how much he knew about the situation. An anonymous party, through a blind trust administered by the Newport law firm Claggett, Banks, Saunders & Lefkowitz, had paid for her father’s long-term care and rehabilitation, which had taken nearly two years. She assumed the angel was one of Pop’s loyal clients. And every night, she thanked God for the favor.

  “So after your father got better,” Alex said, “then what? What about the cop?”

  “He’s the county—”

  “—sheriff now. So you said. That’s not what I’m asking, and you know it.”

  She decided to ignore the question. “And then...I got a raise at Mario’s.”

  “The pizza joint that used to be where your restaurant is.”

  “Good memory.” She tried not to feel defensive. “I moved up to general manager. And Mario was looking to get out of the business. It was tricky, though. The building is the last one standing on the protected waterfront. The property’s small, its footprint can never be expanded and the parking lot can never be paved. Still, I wanted it. I wanted to start a restaurant, a really good one. I leased the place from Mario, and five years ago, I launched Celesta’s-by-the-Sea.” She folded her arms across her chest. “So if I’d gone off to college, I never would have started the restaurant.”

  Rosa suspected she sounded quite different from the dreamy teenager he had once known. That girl had glowed with shining ideals and high-minded convictions. She was going to be a philosopher, a diplomat, a rocket scientist. She would have scoffed at the idea of running a restaurant. Since then, she’d learned a few things about life and work.

  His stare made her wonder what he was thinking. And the accelerated beating of her heart made her question her own motives for coming here.

  “Come back to the club with me,” he said. “I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “God, you are clueless. Do you know how excruciating that would be for me?”

  “Okay, wrong move. Let’s get lunch at Aunt Carrie’s.”

  She looked away, trying to hide her vivid memories of the outdoor café. She and Alex had gone there as kids, sunburnt, their hair stiff with salt and their feet bare, to eat clam cakes and blueberry pie.

  “What do you say?” He didn’t touch her, but she felt his gaze like a caress.

  “I say this conversation is over.”

  “Rosa,” he added, “we’re not finished.”

  She burst out laughing, then tossed back her hair and looked him in the eye. “Yes,” she said, “we are. You made sure of that a long time ago.”

  “I made a mistake a long time ago.”

  It was rare to hear a man admit he was wrong. To hear a Montgomery man admit it was...astounding. “And this just came to you,” she said.

  “No. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years.” His frankness disarmed her.

  “It’s too late,” she said in a low, rough voice. “We can’t just go back to...we can’t.”

  “True,” he agreed. “We can do better.”

  “Alex, for Pete’s sake, I don’t know what you think I’ve been doing—waiting, pining away? We had a summer romance. I made the mistake of taking it too seriously. Girls generally do. After you left, I regained my perspective, and I assume you did, too.” She felt herself getting overheated and took a deep breath. In spite of everything, she felt vulnerable to him, to his searching blue eyes and his gentle smile, and to her own tender memories of how she’d once felt with him, safe and adored. Along with her yearning and nostalgia came another sensation—fear. She was afraid. She hated that about herself. She wished she could play this for laughs, maybe have some fun with him and then walk away, like Linda said she should do. That was what Rosa usually did with men she dated. But with Alex, it would be impossible.

  She said, “Listen. I feel horrible about your mother, and even worse now that it’s in the papers. That’s why I came looking for you, not to have lunch and reminisce about the past, which is completely pointless since it’s over, and...” She forced herself to stop babbling. “I’m going. I have to be at the restaurant. Okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay. Damn it, Rosa. It’s just lunch.”

  “And it’s not going to happen.”

  As she walked away, she heard him give an ironic laugh. “Chicken,” he said softly.

  Don’t stop, she told herself. Don’t look back.

  fourteen

  Rosa did a great job not thinking of Alex for whole minutes at a time. A few days after their encounter, she managed to convince herself that she’d only imagined the sincerity in his eyes when he’d asked her to come to lunch with him.

  Her heart was not so easily fooled, and she felt an odd stumble in her chest at unexpected moments. She had often hoped to feel that half sick, half delicious lurch with regard to other men, but it never worked. Over the years, she’d dated almost too enthusiastically, only to be disappointed, or to disappoint.

  Her best defense was to keep busy. Fortunately for her, she had plenty to do. The restaurant consumed half the day and most of the night, and her friends and father filled in the rest. Linda’s wedding plans were moving ahead at warp speed, and Rosa found herself delightfully swept away by all the fuss.

  After stopping at Linda’s to drop off some sample menus for the reception, she went to her father’s house, blinking the hall lights to announce her presence.

  “In here,” yelled Pop.

  She followed the sound of his voice to the den off the kitchen, where Pop sat in front of the computer monitor. Behind him, the TV was on, closed-captioning words flickering across the screen of a Red Sox-Cardinals game. The TV was turned up too loud, which didn’t bother Pop in the least.

  The den, like the rest of the house, was cluttered with old mail, lottery ticket stubs, expired coupons and things her father never bothered to throw away. A stack of newspapers filled the plastic recycling bin nearly to the top. Pop had always been an obsessive news junkie. Online, his browser was bookmarked with a dozen news sites—the International Herald Tribune, Rome’s il Mondo, the Washington Post.

  Rosa found the TV remote control wedged between the couch cushions and hit the mute button.

  “Hey, Pop.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You left the front door unlocked. I could have been an intruder.”

  “An intruder wouldn’t flash the lights.”

  “Pop—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, waving his arms to fend her off. “I’ll be more careful.”

  Sure he would. She didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Checking your email?”

  “I got news from Rob and Gloria.” He steepled his fingers together and leaned back in his chair. He had blunt hands, strong and callused from years of hard work, ill-suited to typing at a keyboard. Yet he was remarkably adept at it, and because of his hearing loss, he had embraced the technology of communicating by text message, email and instant messages.

  To Rosa, it was a godsend. She could text message his vibrating cell phone or zap him a quick IM to see if he was online, and stay in touch as closely as other people did with their hearing parents.

  “So what’s up with Rob?” she asked.

  “Your brother and his wife are both gonna be deployed to Diego Garcia over the summer. Joey’s coming to stay with me.”

  Rosa was surprised. Normally Rob and Gloria, both career NCOs, alternated deployments and shore duty so one or the other would be at home. They had four kids, though they weren’t kids anymore. Their eldest had enlisted in the navy and was stationed in Bremerton, Washington. The twins, Mary-Celesta and Teresa-Celesta, were spending the summer in Costa Rica in a program sponsored by Youth International. The youngest, Joey, would be fourteen now. She hadn’t seen him in more than two years, since the whole family had been stationed in Guam.

  “I wonder how they both manage
d to get sea duty at the same time,” she said.

  “They’re patriots, serving their country.”

  “I bet our country doesn’t really need Joey’s mother and father at the same time.”

  “Look at the world we live in.” He gestured at the newspapers spread a week thick across the coffee table. “The least we can do is take care of their boy.”

  It didn’t escape her that he said we. “Is that all right with you, Pop?” she asked. “Keeping Joey for the summer?”

  “Sure, it’s okay. He’s my own flesh and blood.”

  “In the past, Gloria’s folks have always kept the kids,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah. Well, they couldn’t. They got some kind of conflict,” said Pop.

  Some kind of conflict, thought Rosa, like not wanting to look after a teenage boy all summer.

  “Gloria’s mother had to have female surgery,” said Pop. “I didn’t ask for details.”

  She instantly felt guilty for the thought. The Espositos were perfectly fine people as far as she could tell. They lived in Chicago and she didn’t know them very well.

  “When’s he coming?” she asked her father.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  Way to give us advance notice, Rob, she thought. “I’ll go with you to pick him up at the airport.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Pop. I’m going.” She had learned not to argue with him. It saved time to simply dictate.

  He had learned to save time, too. He turned his hands palms up and looked at the ceiling. “You’re a bossy girl. Just like your mother, you are.”

  Rosa loved being likened to her mother, which Pop knew very well. “I’ll have the restaurant’s cleaning service help you get the house ready.”

  “What, ready? He’s fourteen. He’s a guy. He doesn’t care what the place looks like.”

  “I care.” Rosa shook her head. “Fourteen...and he was just eleven the last time we saw him.” She remembered an apple-cheeked boy with chocolate-brown eyes and a shy smile, nervous and excited about moving overseas. It would be fun to have him here for the summer, she decided. Still, she didn’t know if her father was up to having a half-grown boy living with him. On the other hand, it might be good for them both.