Love, Louisa

by Barbara Metzger

  Louisa worked at a library, and had Mr. Bradford’s extensive collection at her fingertips. The last thing she needed was to spend her money on books.

  Teddy was going on: “The bakery here gives them all of yesterday’s stuff, and we have to deliver it. It’s fun. You should come.”

  Day-old baked goods and musty library discards? That didn’t sound appealing to Louisa. “I don’t know, Teddy.”

  “I didn’t think it would be cool either at first. But when we went last year, Uncle Dante let me pick out books my mother never would have let me.”

  Louisa didn’t believe in censorship, but Teddy was just a little boy. Dante should have known better. “What kind of books?” she asked, frowning.

  “Scary ones. I didn’t get any nightmares, either. Except maybe a little. They have more books there than our whole library, I bet.”

  Mrs. Terwilliger had a closet full of books, culled from the shelves or donated, that would go out for sale in August. Louisa had already been enlisted to cashier. One book sale a summer was enough.

  “They have a yard sale section,” Teddy added, slyly.

  Louisa almost felt her ears perk up, like Champ’s when he heard the refrigerator door open. She did not want to thrust herself into Dante’s company, though. He already thought she was crazy. Pushy and crazy was too much. “Well, I am still not sure. Maybe your uncle wants to spend the day with you. You know, man to man. I’d be in the way.”

  Teddy’s look was eloquent. “Who are you kidding, Aunt Louisa?” He was young, but he already knew the rules of the road: kids sat in the backseat, always. “I’ll ask him when he comes.”

  When he came, Dante had a shopping bag in his hand. Louisa smiled. “What, we get first pick of the stale muffins?”

  He smiled back, winked at Teddy, but handed her the bag. Louisa looked in and saw her clothes, all dry and neatly folded, her sweatshirt and shorts, her blouse and bra and pink panties on top. Her first thought was: Dante Rivera had handled her underwear. Her second was: Thank goodness no one else had.

  “What is it, Aunt Louisa?” Teddy wanted to know.

  “Just some stuff I left up at Mr. Bradford’s last night,” she replied, hurriedly shoving the bag inside the house and cursing the blush stealing across her cheeks. Embarrassment was a not infrequent occurrence when she was around Mr. Dante Rivera. She supposed she could get used to that too.

  “Thank you,” she said, in as composed tones as her rattled wits would permit. He was grinning now, and that was yet another thing she could not seem to grow accustomed to. The sight of his devilish dimples still stole her breath away.

  Teddy was hopping around, eager to go. “Did they donate any of those fancy cookies this year, the ones with the icing? Are we going to go out for lunch afterward? Can Louisa come?”

  “I was just going to ask her, sport, if you’d be quiet a minute.” He turned to Louisa. “I think you’d enjoy it, a real taste of small-town America at its best. Everyone pitching in, having a grand time for a good cause.”

  “It’s very kind of the bakery here in the Harbor to donate stuff for the next town,” she said. “And you to deliver it.”

  He shrugged that off. “They let Mrs. Terwilliger have anything she wants for our library, after the first rush of sales. Everyone helps everyone else. So will you come? Teddy and I need help carrying, don’t we, sport?”

  How could she refuse? And why should she? Teddy was a great chaperon, and she hadn’t been out to Montauk in years.

  She’d forgotten how different the resort town was from its neighbors. Paumonok was slow and sleepy, like an old spaniel curled up in the sun. East Hampton was like an Afghan hound, busy preening, prancing, and posing for the cover of People magazine. But Montauk was a lolloping black Lab, tongue hanging out, no leash, no rules except being home for supper.

  They drove down the hill on Montauk Highway and there it was, blue blue ocean water so close you could touch it, and yellow motels, red and green kayaks for rent at the gas stations, surf boards on top of half the cars, lines at the miniature golf course, lines at the pancake place, lines at the town office where newcomers were trying to get parking permits. There were people on bikes and skates, pushing baby carriages, dragging beach umbrellas. Montauk was a tourist town, and proud of it. There might be elegant mansions on the hills to rival Mr. Bradford’s, but the downtown was color and crowds and traffic chaos, at least on a July weekend. Louisa supposed Montauk would be as deserted as the other towns come the middle of the winter, but for now it was bustling.

  The library sale was on the village green in the center of town, and Teddy was right. It was huge, and mobbed.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Dante warned, almost reading her mind and the dollar signs in her eyes. “Paumonok Harbor could never pull this off. We don’t have half the volunteers—there must be over a hundred in those blue shirts—and we don’t have the tourists, either. Montauk has a ton of motels while we have mostly second-home owners or renters.”

  After they each carried a box of pastries over to the baked goods tables, Dante told Louisa and Teddy to start shopping while he made another trip or two from the truck. He pointed Louisa in the direction of the white elephant section and the book compound, which was so filled with cartons that they overflowed the tables and ranged against the fence on the ground.

  So many books, so little time. That’s what a T-shirt had printed on it, so Louisa bought it for Mr. Bradford while she got her bearings. He mightn’t wear it, but he’d appreciate the saying, and the fact that she bought it for him. Then she went to the yard sale area and bought a teakettle painted to look like a cow, just because it made her smile, a blue candle holder with only a tiny chip, a wicker waste basket to match her porch rocker, a set of dish towels with fish on them, and a bird feeder that needed a couple of nails. Before she could worry about where to put the stuff so she could look at the books, Dante was there, taking the bags from her to put in the truck.

  “Will they be safe in the back?” she asked.

  He looked at the beat-up bird feeder. “I don’t think you have to worry about anyone stealing this cr—this stuff. And this is Montauk, remember, not Manhattan.”

  Teddy had won a cardboard airplane and a stuffed bear, and he’d bought a seedling butterfly bush to bring home to his grandmother.

  “They have plants?” Louisa went there next, and then had to wait for Dante to find her, to carry all the pots and planters. He grumbled that all the good books would be sold by the time he got to look at them, but gathered her nursery stock for another trip to the truck.

  Louisa and Teddy went into the book section, where they were given plastic bags. “They weigh the books, like they do the fish down at the docks,” Teddy explained, pointing to the hanging scales.

  How could Louisa resist? She found a bird identification guide—how could she feed the birds if she didn’t know their names? And a couple of cookbooks for beginners, a crossword puzzle dictionary, a guide to houseplants since her yard was getting too crowded, and a book on how to arrange flowers, for when she got enough to need arranging. She added a writing guide, a dictionary, and two grammar books, for when she worked at home. Someone handed her another bag so she moved on to the fiction, and filled that one with mysteries and old best-sellers and romance novels.

  Dante came back and groaned about his poor aching back, but he was smiling, and she was too busy filling another bag to care. “This way I won’t have to worry about getting sand in the library books,” she told him, “or bending down the corners.”

  He looked at the top books in the bag and raised an eye brow. “You read this?”

  She’d thought twice about that cover, with the girl’s skirt hiked halfway up her thigh, and the guy’s hand pushing it higher, but, hey, the price was so cheap… She threw Moby Dick and The Once and Future King on top of it. “They’re fun, and they make me happy.”

  “What more can you ask?” he said, filling a bag of his own with a couple
of science fiction books, with the green alien’s hand halfway up the space woman’s thigh. Then he went off to find a book on wooden boats, one with architectural house plans, a chronology of the Civil War, and Computers for Dummies.

  “I thought you were some hotshot tech wizard,” Louisa said, wandering back toward the reference section to see if there was a thesaurus.

  “This is for Aunt Vinnie. I’m trying to drag her into the twenty-first century, but she doesn’t want to learn.”

  “Show her the solitaire games. Trust me, she’ll figure out how to use the mouse fast enough.”

  Teddy did not have much in his bag. All the good scary books were gone, and mostly picture books were left. Louisa took him over to the nature section and found James Herriot and some other animal stories, and then they found an easy art book on drawing cartoons, and a Yankees yearbook that was only one year old. He started reading statistics that made her wonder if it was written in Greek, which reminded her she wanted a Spanish-English dictionary for Marta.

  Dante carried the bags away to the scales while she and Teddy kept scavenging.

  “This is heaven!” she said, joining him on the check-out line when neither she nor Teddy could carry one more book. “Thank you so much for bringing me.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, and meant it. Seeing Louisa so happy made him feel like a king himself—no, like a wizard. He’d brought that glow to her cheeks and that sparkle to her green eyes, and that simple joy in the day. For once she wasn’t worried about her house or her dog or her pride or where their relationship was going. They were here, and that was enough for now. It was enough for him, too.

  He refused to let her pay for the books. “You’re our guest, remember? Besides, this is one cheap date. A hot dog and bunch of books.”

  Louisa wiped mustard off her chin. “This is a date?”

  He didn’t answer, but pointed to the quilt the library ladies were raffling off. Louisa took only one chance, because it would look lovely on her bed, but too lovely to let Champ sleep on. Dante took three whole books of tickets. “They work hard.”

  Teddy declared he was far too old to have his face painted, but when Dante insisted, Louisa let a giggling teenager paint a butterfly on her cheek. It itched like crazy, but his smile made her feel that she could fly too. She knew she was grinning like an idiot and didn’t care.

  If there was music she would have danced, she was so happy.

  Afterward, they drove out to see the lighthouse, mandatory, Dante swore, for anyone visiting the Point. Teddy told her that he was tall enough to climb to the very top of the light now, but Louisa did not think she needed to see Connecticut from such a height, or the narrow stairs to get there. Seeing the landmark was enough.

  Acting as tour guide, Teddy told her all about the cattle ranch they passed, and how they used to have buffalo there, but the bull trampled someone, so they got rid of them. Dante pointed out the handsome library that would benefit from the day’s profits, and the smallest airport she’d ever seen. He took them to the harbor area next, for an ice cream cone. They sat on a dock built right on the water, watching boats coming in and out of the jetties, and watching people toss french fries to the seagulls.

  On the way out of Montauk, Dante pulled onto a sand path, put the truck into four-wheel drive, and drove straight onto the beach. Other than a few tire tracks and some fishermen, they had the beach to themselves, with the sun and the surf and the dunes in the distance. Teddy stayed in the truck with his new Yankees book, but Dante and Louisa kicked off their shoes and walked along the water’s edge. Holding hands just seemed the natural thing to do.

  “This might be the nicest day of my life,” Louisa said when they finally headed back, just before they reached her street.

  Dante’s too. She wasn’t leaving.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “How do you know he asked me to stay?” Louisa got out of the truck before Dante could come around to open her door, after they’d dropped Teddy off at his house. She was definitely not going to invite Dante inside. She had not been intending to, claiming she had to get ready for the evening, whatever the function was, figuring that was safer. Why ruin a lovely day with what might be a disaster? Now she was certainly not going to, not when he and the whole town were gossiping about her again. She started gathering her bags and boxes and plants from the back of the truck. When he came to help, she said, “This town is like an old party line telephone, where everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

  “Not everyone. Mr. Bradford told me he asked you to stay on when the book is done.”

  “And I said no, but he asked me to think about it, saying September was too far away to make decisions now.”

  That sly old fox, Dante thought to himself, letting him believe it was a done deal. “Have you been thinking about it?”

  “Yes, and I haven’t changed my mind yet, although not much time has gone by. Mr. Bradford is a pleasure to work with, once you get his morning coffee into him. He is generous and fun, with the most brilliant mind I have ever encountered. He can talk about anything, and every day is a new experience.”

  “But?”

  “But not everyone wants new experiences all the time. Sometimes the familiar is lovely too. Roots, knowing where you belong, that kind of thing. You have to understand, because you are planted here.”

  Dante was not sure if she meant that as a criticism or a compliment. He carried another pile of her magpie’s hoard to the front door, where she was letting the dog out. “I travel too, you know. I am not some turnip stuck in one place.”

  “Yes, you vacation whenever you wish. I’d like to also, some, someday. That’s the point. If I accepted Mr. Bradford’s offer and went with him after the summer, I would be living his life, not mine. I’d be following him, not leading, not even walking at his side. If he decided to do a book signing in Toronto or Timbuktu, I’d have to go along. That would be my job, and my responsibility, to make the trip pleasant for him. I wouldn’t mind seeing to the hotel reservations and the limousine from the airport, calling to be sure his books arrived on time, but what if I’d rather be in Paris or Peru, or right here, watching my daffodils come up? I find I love having a place of my own, somewhere to putter around, at my own whims, my own speed.”

  “You’ve just been in apartments too long. Trust me, houses can be anchors tied to your neck, too.”

  “But I have to find that out for myself. We moved into an apartment after my father died. Then I lived in one set of rooms after another through college and later, until I moved in with Howard. It is time for me to put down my own roots.”

  “In Paumonok Harbor?” he asked, doubt in his voice.

  “Maybe. Maybe I’ll hate it when Mr. Bradford is gone and I have no social life and no income, but maybe I won’t. Maybe it will be as bleak and barren as everyone tells me. But maybe it will be peaceful and inspiring, with awesome scenery and wild stormy seas. I’ll have the companion dog thing, if I can afford to volunteer, and bird-watching.”

  He laughed. “You don’t know a goldfinch from a grunion.”

  She patted the book on top of one bag. “But I can learn, can’t I?”

  “You can do anything, I guess.” He put another box down on her front stoop, waiting to see if she asked him in. She didn’t, but he was reluctant to go. “What will you do for a job?”

  She shrugged. “I find I like writing, so maybe I’ll ask at the local newspaper or magazines. There’s still the possibility of finding a van Gogh at one of the yard sales and making a killing at the online auctions. And I can do a lot of Mr. Bradford’s work on the Internet too, so maybe he’ll keep me as a long-distance associate.”

  “He’d keep you as a lot more.”

  She pushed a box of plants out of the sun, until she could water them or get them in the ground. With her back to him, so he could not see the hurt on her face, Louisa said, “I will not become his mistress, no matter how much he offers. He did not ask.”

 
“I didn’t mean you should become a kept woman for the money. I meant he might have married you. Wives can’t up and quit, you know.”

  “Marriage? To Mr. Bradford?” Louisa almost dropped the bird feeder he handed her.

  “That’s not so far-fetched. He really likes you.”

  “And I really like him, in a respectful kind of way. He’s older than my father would have been, and I look on him almost like that.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say he’s a paternal figure,” Dante said. “It’ll ruin his self-image.”

  “What? He thinks he’s a young stud on the town?” She made a derisive sound. “No, he knows he’s a distinguished older gentleman, not about to embarrass himself with a wife maître d’s mistake for his granddaughter. Besides, he’s already had a trophy bride. His second wife was that actress, remember? He needed two chapters of his book to describe the three years they spent together. I made him cut it down from four. He’d never make that mistake twice.”

  Dante wasn’t so sure. A woman like Louisa could turn a man’s head around and inside out. Look at him, hanging around rearranging her piles of books on the porch, hoping she’d invite him inside. “He wants you with him.”

  Louisa followed Champ toward the backyard, looking for a good tree to hang the feeder where she could see it from her office. Dante followed her.

  “What about what I want?” she asked. “I don’t even know what that is, so how can he? If I ever do decide to get married again, that is, if I ever decide to get engaged again, I would want more than to be my husband’s shadow, his helper. I’d want to be his friend and his…his inamorata.”

  Dante jerked his thumb back toward the porch and the books. “You really shouldn’t read that crap.”

  “Why, because it gives me ideas of how a man could love a woman selflessly, devotedly, eternally? If I ever got married, that’s what I’d want, not some tepid affection built on familiarity or even respect. I’d want the ground to shake and the world to spin whenever we were together, for both of us. Yes, there should be heaving bosoms and heated loins, but not just good sex. I know lust fades, but real passion, for each other, and no one else, that lasts. I’d want to be wanted for me, not for what I could do for someone else. Do you understand? That’s what I’d want. In a nice house. With flowers. Forever.”