Beach Town

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “I’m here because … I want to be, I guess,” Eb said soberly. “Fifteen years ago, if you’d told me I’d be living in Cypress Key again, doing what I’m doing, I would have laughed my ass off.”

  “So … this is all an accident?” she asked.

  “Not really. I did move away after college. I went to engineering school on a scholarship from the paper company, got an MBA for lack of a better idea, then kicked around the country for a while. I worked in Texas, California, the Cayman Islands. I spent the longest winter of my life in Buffalo.” He shivered.

  “And then you ended up right back where you started,” Greer said. “Why?”

  “One of my early mentors at the paper company called and offered me too much money to ignore. I was freezing my ass off in Buffalo, and Florida sounded pretty good right then.”

  “Even if it was Cypress Key, Florida?”

  “Jared had just gotten arrested,” he said quietly. “My father hadn’t been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at that point, but it was pretty obvious to my mom that he was slipping. So I came home.”

  He spun the beer bottle on the tabletop. “The company gave me all kinds of vague descriptions of what my job would entail, but when I’d been back here for three months they let me in on what I was really hired to do.”

  “Which was?”

  “Get the plant ready to close down. I was supposed to quietly start making arrangements to sell off the equipment, slow down production from three shifts to one, get rid of the most expensive employees—anybody over the age of forty-five, women, like that.”

  “That must have been brutal.”

  “I’m a coward,” Eb said. “I couldn’t do it. I quit.”

  “I wouldn’t call that cowardly,” Greer said. “You did stay around to help your family, right?”

  “As much as I could. I’d always lived pretty lean, so I bought out my dad’s interest in the Silver Sands, thinking I could help Ginny make a go of it.”

  “You haven’t mentioned a wife or a girlfriend in any of this,” Greer said flippantly. “What happened? Did she get fed up and split?”

  “Not exactly. She died.”

  Greer clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh my God. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.…”

  “Not your fault,” Eb said. “It was a long time ago.” He looked down at his watch. “Come to think of it, in August it will be ten years.”

  “Wow. She must have been so young.…” Greer’s voice trailed off.

  “She was only twenty-seven. Breast cancer. Sarah was diagnosed right after we got back from our honeymoon. It was already stage two. She had surgery, chemo, radiation. Drug trials. We were up and down. Three years after she found the lump, she was gone.”

  “My mom died of breast cancer, two months ago,” Greer said quietly. “I guess, in a way, she was lucky. By the time they discovered it, the cancer had metastasized. It was too late for chemo or radiation, or any of it.” Greer blinked back unexpected tears for a woman she’d never met, and for Lise, who’d been so alive. Until, suddenly, she wasn’t. “That is just so…”

  “Tragic,” Eb said. He took another drink of beer. “Really, really tragic. And sucky. For Sarah. And your mom.”

  He gazed at her over the rim of the beer bottle. “What about you? No time for men in your life?”

  “Not currently,” Greer said.

  “Currently? That implies there was somebody, recently?”

  “Why do I feel like I’m being interrogated here?” Greer asked.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Eb reminded her.

  “I was in a … relationship. But that’s been over for a while now. It’s not easy to date in my line of work. I travel all the time, and most of the men I meet are in the business. It’s easy to hook up with somebody when you’re all working so intensely on a film. You’re thrown together for what feels like twenty-four hours a day. And then the movie wraps and everybody moves on to the next show. I’ll admit, I did that, back when I was a newbie. But I found out fast it’s not for me.”

  Greer stared down into her wineglass. “Lise used to say my relationships were always doomed because I saw too many movies. Like, real-life men could never measure up to the heroes in movies.”

  “No Prince Charming, huh?”

  “I’m not looking for a prince. Actually, I’m not looking, period.”

  “Your last ‘relationship,’” he said, making finger quotes. “Was the guy in the movies?”

  Greer shook her head. “You just don’t give up, do you? Okay, he was a lawyer. We met through work. He was older, and he seemed more mature than most of the men I’ve dated, which was refreshing.”

  “But it’s not refreshing anymore?”

  “No,” she said succinctly. “Look, it’s getting late, and I have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at four a.m.” She looked around the room and motioned for the waitress to bring her check.

  Eb waited while she settled her tab. “Can I walk you back to the hotel?”

  “Four blocks? Sure.”

  * * *

  They stood in the restaurant’s doorway, looking down the street. Rain pelted the roof of the tin awning, and the wind whipped the palm trees lining Pine Street. The temperature had dropped dramatically, too. Greer folded her bare arms across her chest and shivered.

  “You didn’t happen to bring an umbrella, did you?” Eb asked.

  “The storm had let up by the time I walked over to city hall.” She shifted her stance and a stream of rainwater ran down her neck.

  “Dammit,” she muttered, stepping sideways.

  “I can borrow an umbrella from the restaurant,” he offered.

  “It’s not that. If this weather keeps up, we won’t be able to shoot in the morning. We’ve got all the beach scenes to do, and we can’t do that in a storm.”

  “I can’t do anything about the weather, but we could go back to my place to wait out the rain if you want.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “Your place? You don’t live at the motel, like Ginny?”

  “Nope. Got my own pied-à-terre, just two doors down.” He jerked his thumb toward the right. Toward the Hometown Market.

  “You live at the grocery store? For real? What department? Frozen foods?”

  “I live above the store, on the second floor.” He turned around and took a few paces, walking backwards. “Don’t you want to see?”

  17

  Greer stood in the Inn’s doorway, watching Eb Thibadeaux go splashing down the covered sidewalk, momentarily paralyzed by indecision. It was after ten, and she had to be back at work in five hours. But the idea of being closed up in her dank motel room, with the wheezy air conditioner, alone again on a rainy night like this, was just too depressing to contemplate.

  “Hey, wait up,” she called. Eb turned around, and as he stood under the streetlight she saw his broad, easy smile. He was beaming.

  Totally beaming. Ear to ear. Had any man ever smiled at her like that before?

  * * *

  Eb had the grocery store door unlocked by time she caught up to him. He flipped a switch and the overhead fluorescents lit up the market.

  “Right this way,” he said, directing her toward the back of the store, down the cereal aisle, and around the seafood cooler. She stepped around a long, stainless steel worktable and dodged a stack of waxed cardboard boxes, nearly slipping on the damp tile floor.

  He fit a key into a door recessed into the wall behind the counter and flipped another switch, which illuminated a wide stairway.

  The landing at the top of the stairs faced a tall set of heavy wooden barn-type sliding doors. Eb yanked a metal handle and the door rolled back. He flipped another switch and gestured inside.

  “My crib.”

  She was looking at a long, wide, open space. If they’d been in Greenwich Village she’d have called it a loft. But here, in Cypress Key, it was just the space above the Hometown Market.

  The walls were of exposed, whitewashed br
ick with plaster still clinging to some portions. The floors were of wide dark pine planks, and were gouged and scratched and grease stained in spots.

  Stuff was everywhere. The walls held at least a dozen worn and rusted metal trade signs. A huge, billboard-sized yellow and red SUNBEAM bread sign was tacked to the wall just inside the door. She spotted a four-foot-diameter COKE button sign, a neon-scripted advertisement for Salem cigarettes, and a large wooden cutout of an ice-cream cone, listing eight different flavors.

  Greer turned to Eb. “I’m speechless.”

  He shrugged. “I guess you could say I’m a pack rat.”

  She walked around the room, pausing to take it all in. In front of a black potbellied stove, a pair of tufted black leather Chesterfield sofas faced each other across an Oriental rug so worn you could see patches of floor in some places. The coffee table was a stack of wooden pallets topped with a thick slab of irregularly shaped marble. Lamp tables were made of what looked like upended wooden produce crates.

  “Where?” Greer asked. “Where did you get all this amazing stuff? You’ve got an entire movie prop house, just in this living room.”

  “Most of it’s just junk,” Eb said. “Lots of times, when I sell a house, the owners just give me stuff they don’t want to take with them. Or people leave stuff in rental houses when they move. That rug there, I found rolled up underneath an abandoned house. The signs, most of them were behind the market, in a storage shed, when I bought the place. The COKE sign was downstairs in the market, but people kept bugging me to sell it, so I finally brought it up here.”

  Greer set her hand lightly on a vintage milk glass Sinclair gas pump with the original green dinosaur logo. “How on earth did you get this up here?”

  He pointed to another doorway she hadn’t even noticed, at the back of the room. “That’s the old freight elevator. Comes in handy.”

  She ran her fingers across the buttery leather of a sofa. “You didn’t find this in a shed.”

  “No,” he said ruefully. “I had to buy it. Aside from my mattress, I think that’s the only new furniture up here.”

  Adjacent to the living room was a rectangular oak table, its top deeply scarred and marred with cigarette burns and carved graffiti. Arranged around the table were five high-backed rolling stools.

  “There must be a story behind this,” Greer said.

  “The library was getting ready to throw out the table, so I took it. I bought the chemistry lab stools for five bucks apiece right before they tore down the old high school.”

  Greer sat on one of the stools and swirled around on it until it faced the kitchen. There were no real cabinets in the space. An industrial stainless steel counter contained an integrated sink, and above it, Eb’s thick white dishes were arrayed on simple wooden shelves. There was a commercial glass-front refrigerator, and a hulking fifties-vintage white porcelain stove with double ovens, six burners, and gleaming chrome knobs. An old wooden ladder was suspended by chains from the ceiling, and a battered assortment of pots and pans hung from it.

  “Did you build all this?” she asked.

  “Nah,” Eb said. “I mean, I dragged the boards up here from the boatyard and nailed them to cleats on the wall for shelves, yeah.”

  “And everything else?” Greer asked.

  “I got the sink and counter and refrigerator from the plant cafeteria, when the paper company shut down. I think I paid a hundred bucks for all of it.”

  “Tell me about this stove.” Greer bent over to read the chrome nameplate. “Wedgewood? They made stoves?”

  “I found that at the dump when I was hauling off some ruined wall-to-wall carpet from a rental house. Took me a week to get all the grease and rust off of it. It cleaned up all right.”

  “It’s amazing,” Greer said. “I’ve seen stoves like this at the Rose Bowl, fully restored, for like two thousand dollars. Does this one work?”

  “Oh yeah,” Eb said. He walked over and turned a knob, and a blue flame sputtered to life. “It runs on propane.” He held up a copper teakettle. “How about a cup of tea?”

  * * *

  While they waited for the kettle to boil, Greer stood in front of a bank of steel-frame windows that looked out on an alley. The rain pounded on the roof and lightning crackled in the navy blue sky.

  She heard the clicking of nails and looked down. A plump black and tan dachshund with a graying muzzle waddled across the floor, stood at her feet, and barked furiously.

  “Who’s this?” Greer called to her host.

  Eb peered out from the kitchen partition. “Oh, that’s Gunter. He’s nearly deaf, but I guess the lightning woke him up. Just ignore him, okay?”

  Greer bent down, extended her hand, palm forward, and the dog sniffed suspiciously. She scratched his ears, and when he wagged his tail his whole body followed suit.

  She walked into the kitchen with Gunter sniffing at her ankles. Eb had two thick white mugs on the counter and was digging around in a large glass Planters peanuts jar for tea bags. He plunked a bag in each mug.

  “Funny. You don’t strike me as a dachshund kind of guy.”

  “Gunter’s cool. And he’s low maintenance. Mostly he eats and sleeps and farts. He’ll take a walk every day, if I really insist.”

  The dog sat down on Greer’s shoe-top, looked up at her, and whined.

  Eb sighed and flipped him a dog biscuit, which the dog greedily inhaled.

  “Just how old is he?” Greer asked.

  “Maybe nine or ten?”

  “You don’t know how old your own dog is? What kind of dachshund guy are you?”

  “Not a very good one. Gunter’s kind of a rescue. I found him last winter, rooting around in the trash behind the store. I tried to find his owner, or give him away, but he had mange and some other unpleasant issues, which makes for a lousy adoption candidate. You want some cookies or something? I could go downstairs and grab something. One of the perks of living above the store.”

  “No thanks.” Greer wiggled her toes, and gently bumped the elderly dog off her sandal. She looked around the loft. “So. You rescue motels and old stoves and dogs. And casinos. Very noble.”

  Gunter whined again, thumped his tail on the floor, and looked up hopefully at Greer with large, sincere brown eyes.

  “No more,” Eb said sternly. “You’re supposed to be on a diet.”

  The dog stood up, gave three short barks, and ran a couple of slow, sloppy circles around Greer’s ankles, yipping and barking as he went.

  “Ignore him,” Eb said.

  “Aww. Why would I do that? He’s adorable.” She picked up the dog and cradled him in her arms.

  Suddenly she felt something wet and warm on her shirt.

  “Oh no!” she cried, looking down at the yellow puddle on the floor.

  Eb gently took the dog from her, set him on the floor, and fetched a roll of paper towels.

  “Gunter also has what the vet calls situational incontinency. Which means, when he gets excited, he piddles. Sorry about that.”

  He took a paper towel and dabbed gingerly at the growing damp spot on her chest. But when his hand brushed her right nipple, he blushed beet red and jerked his hand back as though he’d touched a hot stove.

  “Christ! Sorry. I swear, that was an accident.”

  Greer narrowed her eyes. “That’s what they all say.” And then she burst into a fit of uncontrollable giggles. Gunter sat back on his haunches, looked up, and gave a sharp bark of disapproval, which made her laugh that much harder. Eb started to laugh, too, which somehow tickled her even more. He threw his head back and straight-on guffawed. Gunter was not amused. He barked furiously and began running circles around them, peeing as he went.

  Greer laughed until tears streamed down her face. She laughed until her sides ached, and she stumbled toward one of the lab stools, but when she went to sit down, the chair went spinning out from under her and she fell flat on the floor.

  “I can’t…” she sputtered, fighting to catch her br
eath, “stop…”

  Before she knew it, Eb sprawled down on the floor beside her, gathered her into his arms, and kissed her hard. His lips were warm. Greer was so surprised she stopped laughing and kissed him back.

  She felt a little dizzy. Martinis did that to her. Or maybe it was just having Eb Thibadeaux kissing her stupid. Greer decided she didn’t care which it was, because it felt so damned good.

  She wound her arms around his neck, and he gently pushed her backwards until she was flat on the floor. He stretched out beside her, kissing her again, working his tongue into her mouth and his knee between her legs. At some point she heard a thud, as he kicked off his loafers.

  Greer ran her hands beneath his shirt, sliding them from his narrow waist to his shoulders, feeling the muscles flex as he turned toward her. His lips wandered away from hers as he nuzzled her ear, then dropped lower, feathering kisses on her neck, her shoulder, her collarbone.

  “You smell nice,” he whispered in her ear, running one hand beneath her damp top.

  “Motel soap,” she whispered back. “Courtesy of the Silver Sands.”

  His thumb brushed her nipple, came back, brushed again, and she arched her back in pleasure, so he did it again.

  “That was no accident.”

  “Definitely not.” He pushed the lace of her bra aside, found her nipple, and teased it with his tongue. “Neither is this.”

  She sucked in her breath, let it out slowly.

  “Allie.”

  “Hmm?” He raised his head and gave her a quizzical look.

  “Your niece. What about Allie?”

  Eb kissed the tip of her nose. “Relax. She lives with Ginny. We’ve got all night.” He returned to what he’d been doing earlier.

  Greer dug her fingers into his shoulders. He slid one hand down her belly and expertly unzipped her capris. He worked the waistband of her panties slowly downward, touched her tentatively, and then again, stroking inside her, as she gasped from the ripples of pleasure.

  “Wait.” She pushed herself away from him, hurriedly unbuttoning his shirt, sliding the sleeves from his shoulders. She kicked off her shoes, while she was at it.

  When she turned back she found that Gunter had wedged himself between them. He licked her arm.