Well, they had that in common.
He pulled the recliner’s lever and stretched out. “So yeah, I’m doin’ fine. Why’nt you bring Savannah over Sunday; we’ll have dinner in this establishment’s fine dining room. They just put in one of them self-serve ice cream machines, you know what I’m talking about? Toppings, too. Y’oughta see the old farts elbowing each other to get there first! If I’d known this place was so entertaining, I’d’ve moved Mom here. This would be her kind of place, don’t you think? Lots of biddies around to cackle with.”
“Sure, she would’ve liked it a lot,” Meg said. The farm had overwhelmed her mother perpetually, even after Brian and his father—officially Hamilton Savings and Loan—forgave her parents’ mortgage as promised. In the years afterward, Meg liked to take her mother out to lunch for a break and a treat; she offered her spending money (as she secretly did her sisters too), but the reply was always, “Oh, heavens no, Meggie. You’ve done so much as it is. Besides, you know your father.”
She did. Though cursed with a black thumb for profits, he was too proud to let her put cash in their hands. He hadn’t been too proud, though, to let her—to encourage her—to take Brian’s offer. That was different; no money changed hands. Meg hadn’t had to give up anything—Carson didn’t count. It was her choice anyway, that’s what he always said.
“Hey—why’nt you bring our girl over here for dinner Sunday?” He said this as if the idea had just occurred to him.
She stood next to his chair, noting how his invitation didn’t include Brian—intentionally? “I’ll do that,” she said. “Right now I need to get going.”
“Okay, fine, go on, Miss Hectic Schedule. I know, you got things to do. Y’oughta enjoy the ride a little more, though. Now that you can. Don’t you think? I’m fine here, everything’s settled. I don’t know why you don’t just get on with your life.”
Now that she could? What was he talking about?
He continued, “You’re not happy. I’ve known that for a long time. Move forward, Meggie, while you’re still young.”
She looked at him quizzically—he didn’t always make sense, but he hated having it pointed out—and kissed him without pursuing it. “I’m fine, Dad,” she said. “It’s just been a long day.”
Two
“THE NORTHEAST SIDE’S WHERE THE BEST WAVES ARE,” YELLED VALERIE Haas, over the sputtering whine of the motorbikes she and Carson McKay had rented for their excursion on St. Martin. The West Indies isle, known for its split Dutch and French identity, was one of three islands they were considering for their wedding location, as well as the site of a vacation home. “And the nude beaches are there, too!”
“Where’s a good bar?” Carson yelled back, ready to be done with the noise and the hot wind and the vibration in his crotch, nude beaches or not.
He preferred riding horses to motorcycles by far, and was riding this souped-up scooter only in deference to Val. She would’ve had him on something much more powerful if it had been available to them—something worthy of a motocross track—and had been disappointed to have to settle for only 100 cc’s. She wouldn’t even consider the little Suzuki SUVs, insisting that the best views were accessible only with the bikes. He had to admit she was right; the roads up the low mountains deteriorated as they got farther from the small coastal towns, and a few times they’d taken mere trails to different points of interest. Val had wanted to locate a home rumored to have belonged to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston several years back. Though they were told the house wasn’t officially on the market, she thought it might be fun to buy it if possible—a surefire conversation starter, she’d called it, as if their lives weren’t already full of those. They found the house this morning, tucked into the hills of the island’s French side, but he wasn’t wild about its rocky landscape and lack of large shade trees. Val, raised in Malibu, would have gone for it anyway. Carson thought of the lushness of central Florida, the oaks and cedars and palms and twining, flowering vines, and declared that notoriety wasn’t enough to persuade him.
Now he pointed to the side of the gravel road, indicating that he was pulling over.
“You’re not done already?” Val said when she came to a stop next to him.
The sun pressed heavy on his forehead, forcing sweat down the sides of his neck. He wiped it away. “’Fraid so,” he said.
“We aren’t even close to finishing the tour.”
He snorted. They’d been out since seven-thirty, and it was closing in on two o’clock. Lunch had been fried plantains and some fizzy fruit soda at a roadside stand. “Feel free to go on, but I’m heading back to the villas.” There was a terrific bar there, and, should he happen to consume a drink or two more than made it safe to ride, he’d already be “home.”
Val pushed her sunglasses up onto her shaggy white-blond hair and squinted at him. “Okay, I’ll go back with you—if you make it worth my while,” she said, grinning that same provocative grin she’d used on him the night they’d met, in L.A. at the launch party for his latest CD. He’d seen thousands of come-hither smiles over the years, but hers was different. Confident—but not threatening, the way some women’s were. Some women were so aggressive they scared him. Val, who at twenty-two was already world famous in her own right, had enticed him with a smile that made him feel like he could reciprocate without remorse. He’d had his share of remorse over the years, and a few extra portions for good measure.
He shook his head, admiring her brilliant hair, the long, lean muscles in her thighs and arms that were products of uncountable hours of surfing and training. She’d won her first junior championship at fifteen, had her first endorsement contract a year later. “You’re awfully easy on me, you know.”
“I know,” she agreed.
“It’s a real character flaw.”
“I never said I was perfect.” She pushed her sunglasses down and turned her motorbike back toward their resort, a collection of luxury villas on Nettle Bay. “Catch me if you can!”
Three
MEG LEFT HER FATHER’S APARTMENT AND STOPPED TO ADMIRE HOW THE setting sun glowed through the moss-draped branches of live oak trees. Spring was in full force, honeysuckle snaking its fragrant way into the trees, azaleas of fuchsia and pink and white and lavender lining the sidewalks and underlining windows. Spring was Meg’s favorite season, but Brian, with his allergies, hated spring. Messy pollen and drifting seeds, messy flower petals. He’d had their home builder clear a fifty-foot perimeter around their house when it was built. Without trees to shade the house, their electric bill was outrageous. He didn’t care; “That’s what money’s for,” he’d say.
In the parking lot, as Meg dug out her keys, she noticed a strange weakness in her right arm. She struggled to raise the arm, to aim the remote at her six-year-old Volvo, feeling as though her arm had become weighted with sand. Bizarre.
A very long day, she thought, walking the remaining twenty feet to the car. That awkward twins delivery just before lunch must have strained her arm—and those damn speculums she was trying out, some new model that was supposed to work easily with one hand but was failing to live up to the product rep’s promises. Three of them had jammed open this afternoon, causing her patients discomfort and embarrassing her—and, she’d noticed at the time, making her hand ache in the effort to get them to close.
She squeezed her hand around the remote, then tried the button again. Her thumb cooperated, and the odd feeling in her arm began to pass. Once inside the car, she sat back with a heavy sigh and directed the vents so that cold air blew directly onto her face. The prospect of a shower was as enticing as diamonds. No, more enticing; diamonds had little practical value on their own, and almost no value to anyone unable to see them. A shower, though, offered universal appeal: wash away your cares, your sins, the evidence, the damage, the residue—whatever it was you needed; she would choose a well-timed shower over a diamond any day.
As she flexed her hand, she looked at the bag of notebooks where she’d set
them on the seat beside her. Opening the bag, she saw maybe a dozen blue composition books, a neat stack tied up tightly with the same all-purpose twine she’d seen, and used, everywhere on their farm when she was a kid. Twine was almost as good as duct tape for making what were meant to be temporary repairs, but which inevitably became permanent.
The notebooks looked almost new. Likely her father had found them in a recently unpacked box—leftover office supplies, unneeded in his retirement. As if he was the one who’d kept the business records to begin with.
The clock on the dash read seven forty, and Meg’s empty stomach growled in response. She would stop by KFC on her way to get her daughter from the library, where Savannah and her best friend Rachel were hanging out. Supposedly. Supposedly they had a biology project to research, but she doubted this. They could research almost anything from the computer at home. Knowing Rachel—a bubbly girl whose existence disproved the theory that blondes were the airheads—there were boys involved, and the library was just a staging ground that the girls imagined would fool their parents.
Who might the boys be? Savannah revealed so little about her life these days. Somewhere between getting her first period and her first cell phone, Savannah had morphed from a curious, somewhat needy, somewhat nerdy little girl, into an introverted cipher. She was nothing like Meg had been as a teen, which was a good thing. Savannah was just as reliable, but not as caught up in all that boy-girl business. Not grafted onto the heart of a young man who would later hate her for betraying him. Not, Meg hoped, destined to live with her own heart cleaved in two.
Razor sharp, some memories were.
She pushed the past away and sat another minute in the air-conditioning, stealing just a little more time for herself before moving on to her next work shift. Food. Kid. Reports. Case studies. Thirty minutes on the Bowflex, if she could dredge up the energy—or maybe she’d just spare her arm, let it have another night off. And now that it was feeling nearly normal again, she put the car in gear and headed for the library.
Four
CARSON WATCHED THE SUN EASING ITSELF CLOSER TO THE LOW MOUNTAINS, a glass of sangria in front of him on the thatch-covered outdoor bar. Val had gone to work out with Wade, her trainer, leaving him alone with his musings. He was accustomed to being alone with his musings, had produced some of his best work this way. But this afternoon, the musings were neither creative nor as positive as a man who’d just made love with a vibrant younger woman ought to be having.
Though the bar was shaded, he kept his sunglasses on, along with his ball cap—the ineffective disguise of celebrities everywhere. St. Martin wasn’t as rife with fans as most stateside locales, but he’d been approached for autographs seven times already in the two days they’d been there. This, however, wasn’t the reason for his moodiness; in fact, he was having a tough time identifying what the reason was. He had no reason to be moody whatsoever: in addition to having just had sex, he’d recently won two Grammy awards, his Seattle condo was under contract for more than the asking price, his healthy parents were about to celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary, and he would soon marry a woman who didn’t hold his unseemly past against him—a woman who’d done two Sports Illustrated features, who could have pretty much any man she wanted. Maybe it was this last part that was hanging him up.
“I know doing this is a cliché,” he said to the bartender, a short-haired buxom brunette, “but let me get your opinion about something.”
“Of course.” She smiled, her white teeth artificially bright and even. She set a towel aside and leaned onto the bar in front of him, her V-neck blouse straining.
He sat back a little. “Why would a woman—young, beautiful, appealing—like yourself—what would make a woman like you want to marry a worn-out guy like me?”
“You are the rock star, no?”
Rock star. That had been his tag for a dozen years now, and still it sounded strange to him, and wrong. He was a songwriter, a singer, front-man for a band that sold out most of its venues—all of that was true. And yes, the music was rock music—though broader in scope than most, modeled after Queen and the socially conscious, always-fresh music of Sting, whom he’d met for the first time last year. Still, he didn’t see himself as a rock star, though he recognized that he lived the life of one. It was a strange disconnection, one he’d been aware of peripherally for a long time, but which had only in the last year or two come into focus. Probably the awareness was a result of his age—that midlife business his manager, Gene Delaney, said stalked men more relentlessly than band sluts. Gene had a way with words. Whatever it was, Carson felt increasingly dissatisfied with the rock-star label: It sounded shallow, two-dimensional at best. He wanted to be thicker than that. He wanted to be substantial in life, had once believed his deeply felt music would make him that way.
“Right,” he told the bartender. “I’m the rock star. Are you saying that explains it?”
“Non,” she said. “It is good, yes, mais non pas tout—it is not everything. You have a handsome face, and very good…qu’est-ce que c’est?” She gestured to indicate his body. “And you are not so much an American asshole.”
He raised his eyebrows, and the bartender clarified, “Not to hit his woman, or make a woman service him. You are generoux, non?”
He shrugged. He supposed he was generous—he always tipped well above what was expected, news he assumed had spread to all the staff quickly. He donated to several charities, worked with Habitat for Humanity twice a year—some people might call that generous. To him it all seemed like the least he could do when he had so much money that it seemed to replicate itself.
Money management, now that was a job in itself, and he didn’t have time for it. He left that to his mom, who liked to tease him that a wife and half a dozen kids would help him put the money to use. She thought it was a shame that Val had so much money of her own. “She’ll be too independent, Carson, mark me on that.” When his parents came to Seattle to meet Val at New Year’s, his mom told her about a seven-bedroom Ocala estate she’d heard was for sale: “Plenty of space for you two and all the kids,” she said, not even attempting to be subtle. “Kids?” Val said. “Ocala?”
Carson told the bartender, “My fiancée is seventeen years younger than me—not that I mind, but shouldn’t she?”
The woman reached over and laid one manicured finger on his arm. “Must be your motor is good, eh?”
“For now.”
“Mais oui. What else is there?”
Five
WHEN MEG DROVE INTO THE PARKING LOT OF OCALA’S MAIN LIBRARY, HER headlights swept over and past her daughter sitting alone, earbuds in, on a bench near the entrance. Savannah stood, lifting her patch-covered book bag from the bench and swinging it onto her shoulder as Meg pulled to the curb.
“Hi, honey,” Meg said when Savannah climbed in, loudly enough to be heard over whatever was playing on the iPod. “Take those out, will you?”
Savannah pulled out the earbuds and hung the cord around her neck. “Is that better?” She turned and shoved her bag and the notebooks into the backseat, then grabbed the plastic bag with the fried chicken from the floor near her feet.
“It is,” Meg said, making herself not react to Savannah’s rudeness. She knew it wasn’t intentional, knew from past arguments that the “tone battle” wasn’t a battle worth fighting. “What are you listening to?” she asked instead.
“Nobody you’ve heard of.” Savannah began to rifle through the bag.
“Why don’t you wait—I thought it’d be nice to eat together with Dad, at home.” For a change. She couldn’t recall, right off, the last time they’d done this.
“I’m hungry now,” Savannah said, opening the box inside and taking out a wing. “You’re late.”
Meg pulled away from the curb, ignoring the weakness that remained in her arm and ignoring Savannah’s accusatory tone. Ignore whatever doesn’t suit: a strategy she’d learned at her father’s knee. She asked, “Where’s Rachel?
”
“Her mom picked her up at eight.” It was now seven minutes past.
Meg sighed. A parenting book she’d read advised fighting only the truly important battles. The challenge was in how to determine, while her buttons were being pushed, just which battles were important. Yesterday morning, both of them tired after the security alarm had gone haywire and awakened them all at two AM, they’d fought over whether the milk was beginning to sour.
Savannah added, “Thanks for the chicken. It’s good.”
There was hope. “You’re welcome. Why don’t you hand me a piece? A leg—and a napkin.” They could eat together in the car; Brian probably wasn’t home yet anyway.
Savannah rummaged in the box and found a leg. “Here,” she said, holding it out. Meg intended to reach for it, started to move her hand off the steering wheel, but her arm felt sluggish again. Something wasn’t right. She thought back to her anatomy courses, considered the networks and pathways of nerves and signals; something must be pinched, torqued out of place by the difficult entrance of that second twin this morning. Janey, the labor nurse, had been rooting for a C-section, but in Meg’s view, C-sections were overdone, riskier sometimes than just patiently working with nature. Besides, Corinne, the mother, wanted to do it all naturally as long as the babies weren’t at risk. Meg had been very satisfied, as Corinne had, when little Corey and Casey came through unscathed. The only price for taking the harder route, Meg thought, was this nuisance with her arm—which could probably be fixed with a short visit to Brian’s orthopedist.
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