Shore Lights

by Barbara Bretton

  I like to believe she came for him, that his last moment was one filled with the joy of seeing her again. I can’t prove it. I can’t offer facts or figures or photographic evidence. All I know is what I saw and heard and felt in that room—a sense of deep joy, of something so much greater than anything I had ever known before that I’ll carry that knowledge with me for the rest of my life.

  When I think about my mother, I see her in the kitchen. I grew up in a two-family house in Queens. I was an only child with a vivid imagination and a mother who didn’t fit the June Cleaver mold. She wore Capri pants and ballet flats. She had modeled professionally when I was a baby. She believed the kitchen was truly the heart of the home and her oil painting supplies shared counter space with her spice rack and blender. I thought every little girl in town had to push aside a tube of thalo green when she sat down to her lunch of PBJ and a glass of milk. She taught me that the paintbrush was mightier than the broom and that if given the choice between reading a good book or polishing the furniture, the book won out every time.

  Maybe that’s why she’s always in the kitchen in my dreams.

  She is healthy—always healthy—and smiling and overflowing with life. We don’t hug or touch but I can feel her presence like an embrace.

  I see her at the old range from my childhood, the big one with the grill in the middle, in the apartment where I grew up and it feels so right, it seems so normal, that I am shocked to realize this can’t possibly be. She’s dead. She is gone. I was with her when she left us. She can’t be here. But my eyes can’t deny the proof standing there, glowing with life and love, in front of me. I don’t know what to say to her. She has been someplace I can’t even imagine. I fumble for words. “So,” I say at last, “have you bumped into anyone you know?” And she looks at me and laughs that wonderful laugh and says, “Only our old pets! Isn’t that wonderful?” And if there was any doubt at all that this was my fey and spirited mother, they vanish in that moment.

  She was an instinctive cook who loved cookbooks and recipes but never paid much attention to them. She added pinches and dollops and smidgens and she never tasted while she cooked. Can you imagine! Never once. And yet she turned out delicious meals night after night, year after year.

  Your macaroni and cheese, Ma. Where did you get the idea to toss in chili sauce?

  And the Spanish rice—what’s the secret? Is it the sprinkling of cayenne? Write it down, please, right now before it’s too late.

  I could have asked her for her recipes anytime. Over a cup of tea, maybe, or while chatting on the phone. But I waited too long. Wouldn’t you know it? I waited too long to ask for her secrets. Once the doctors had peered deep into her core, once the pronouncement had been made, I couldn’t do it. Asking her for the secret to the recipes she cooked especially for me, to make my life easier, to fill my freezer, to give me more time to write, was like admitting the doctors might be right, that she was terribly sick and that before too long there would be no more “CARE packages” from her house to ours.

  The day after she died, my father handed me her jewelry box. “It’s yours,” he said, pushing it toward me. “You know she wanted you to have everything.” Your inheritance , she used to call it with a wicked smile on her face. The lovely pieces she came to later on in her life and cherished because now she had something to leave to me when she died.

  But you know what? She was wrong. Those rings and bracelets, pretty as they are, can’t hold a candle to her pots and pans, her slotted spoon and potato masher. I found a box filled with recipes and clippings and scraps of paper and my heart soared! No diamond could make me half as happy.

  Everything I know about making a home a haven I learned from her. Everything I know about loving well I learned from her. Everything I know about the wonder of daily life, the miracle of the every day, I learned from her.

  She also taught me to believe in the world that exists just beyond the reach of our five senses. I believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny (although I’ll admit I had a bit of trouble with the rabbit) for longer than I’m willing to admit, and I knew, like my mother and her grandmother before her, that there is much more to life than we’ll ever know while we’re here living it.

  Maybe that explains our fascination with the samovar that had belonged to her stepmother, Margie. Margie was the second of my grandfather’s five wives and the love of his life. She was a successful decorator in the 1930s—a time when high-flying careers for women were a rarity—a woman who lived in a Fifth Avenue penthouse and rode around in her own limousine, and somehow met and fell in love with one of NYPD’s finest: my grandfather. Of course, that’s another story for another time.

  The samovar held the place of honor on Margie’s credenza and my mother spent many happy hours playing with it while she daydreamed about fairy princesses and a genie who couldn’t wait to grant a few wishes for a deserving little girl.

  Like mother, like daughter, I guess. That same samovar held the place of honor on our credenza when I was growing up in Queens years later and I can’t begin to count the hours I spent waiting for that reluctant genie to finally make his appearance and whisk me off to Disneyland so I could set up housekeeping with Spin and Marty.

  I’m looking at that samovar right now as I write this. It sits on a glass tabletop not ten feet away from where I’m sitting. The samovar must be well over one hundred years old by now and it’s beginning to show its age. I don’t have a daughter of my own to inherit Margie’s magic lamp, but one of the best parts of being a writer is that words make all things possible. After years of waiting for the samovar to pop out a genie, it popped out a story instead. One about mothers and daughters, about love and sorrow and the unexpected blessings that sometimes come our way when we need them most.

  Some books practically write themselves. Others come kicking and screaming into the world. I began Shore Lights in sorrow and ended it in joy. We’ve all heard that famous bit of advice given to writers from the beginning of time: Write what you know. Well, this time I listened and wrote about the most puzzling and beautiful and mysterious topic of them all. Shore Lights is a love story, but it’s one that begins the moment a woman hears those magic words, “You’re going to have a baby.”

  Somewhere I think my mother is smiling.

  And now, a special preview of Barbara Bretton’s

  GIRLS OF SUMMER

  Available from Berkley Books in November 2003!

  ELLEN O’BRIEN MARKOWITZ believed God had better things to do than tap into the prayers of thirty-something single doctors, but she was hoping the Almighty would be willing to make an exception and help her out just this once.

  Please, she prayed silently. Please let it all be a bad dream.

  She opened one eye and peered across the rumpled expanse of bed. He was still there. She hadn’t imagined him, hadn’t conjured him up from a combination of too much champagne and two years’ worth of dreaming. Hall Talbot, Shelter Rock Cove’s most-beloved OB-GYN, her good friend and colleague, was snoring softly not two feet away from her, sprawled across her extra-firm mattress like he belonged there. Even in postcoital repose he managed to look like your average middle-aged Adonis.

  His silvery-blond hair shimmered against her pale blue sheets. His muscular torso loomed gorgeous in the gathering light. She remembered how he had looked last night when she slid his white shirt off his fine tanned shoulders and—

  She stifled a groan and buried her face in her pillow.

  In the grand scheme of things, it really wasn’t such a terrible mistake. People slept with the wrong people every day of the week and somehow Earth managed to keep on turning. She and Hall had been good friends before last night and there was no reason to think their friendship couldn’t survive a night of passion.

  Even if he had called her by another woman’s name at a very inopportune moment.

  And this came as a surprise, Markowitz? The first two things she had learned when she moved to Maine were h
er phone number and the fact that Annie Galloway Butler was the love of his life.

  He blamed it on the champagne and went out of his way to make it up to her in some amazing ways but the damage had been done. There were three of them in that bed and Ellen already had too much experience being second best. Everyone in Shelter Rock Cove knew that Hall Talbot had carried a torch for the former widow Galloway for more years, and through more failed marriages, than anyone cared to acknowledge. Not even Annie’s marriage to Sam Butler had dimmed Hall’s devotion. It had taken the birth of a perfect baby girl to force him to acknowledge the fact that he had lost Annie before she had a chance to find him.

  Hall and Ellen had attended Sarah Joy Butler’s christening yesterday as honorary members of the family and the sight of that beautiful baby, that miracle of love and fate, had turned Ellen’s heart inside out. She could only imagine what it had done to Hall. The Galloway and Butler clans descended on Shelter Rock Cove en masse, filling Sam and Annie’s little house with food and music and laughter and enough love to make you believe in happy endings.

  The only time Ellen had ever felt more like an outsider was at one of her father’s infrequent family gatherings where she needed a name tag in order to be recognized as part of the clan. Family always did that to her. All of those shared genes and stories were like a private club, the kind that didn’t want her as a member. When Hall suggested they split early, she was almost pathetically grateful.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Starving.”

  He avoided Cappy’s where they were bound to run into someone who would ask them about the christening and drove over to the Spruce Goose, a small inn on one of the back roads between Shelter Rock Cove and Bar Harbor. Good food, better lighting, the kind of place where you could pretend to be someone you’re not and maybe get away with it for a little while.

  Loneliness had a way of playing tricks on even the smartest women and apparently she was no exception. Hall had needed someone last night and she had needed to be needed by him.

  It should have been enough but it wasn’t. Not even close.