Cure for the Common Breakup

by Beth Kendrick

  “Yoo-hoo! Mayor Jansen?” The doorbell rang. “Dora Post’s beach chairs are on my fence again.”

  Summer pulled back a fraction of an inch and whispered, “Do you need to get that?”

  Dutch undid her top button. “No.”

  “I know you’re in there.” Mrs. Bucciol was sounding less neighborly by the second. “Your car is right outside. Open the door!”

  Summer let herself tumble sideways onto the couch cushions. “You really need to reconsider your career choices.”

  Dutch tossed his shirt on the floor. “We’re locking the door and going upstairs.”

  Summer slid her hands along his shoulders and pressed her cheek against his back. “Don’t you get tired of bossing everyone around all day? Making all those decisions? Solving all those problems?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I thought so. That’s why I’ll be calling the shots tonight. First, I’m going to—” Her sultry-voiced promise was cut short by the doorbell ringing five times in succession.

  “Wait your turn!” Mrs. Bucciol cried. “I was here first!”

  “I wouldn’t have to be here at all if you weren’t such a fussbudget!” hissed a new female voice. “I’m supposed to be on vacation!”

  “Let me guess,” Summer said. “Dora Post?”

  The porch sounded like it might collapse as the two women jostled each other and yelled, “Mayor Jansen!”

  Dutch set his jaw and yanked his shirt back on. “To be continued.”

  “Promises, promises.” Summer buttoned up and saw herself out the side door.

  After she got into her little red convertible, she glanced up at the house and saw Dutch pacing around the living room, brokering a peace agreement over lawn chairs like it was the Treaty of Versailles.

  She was sorry she had to leave—and not just because she was missing out on what promised to be some truly great sex.

  She was missing out on his company. Yes, she liked making out with him, but she actually wanted to talk to him, too. He made her laugh. He made her think. He made her want to stay.

  Oh no.

  She sat in the driver’s seat, belted in, hands positioned at ten and two, perfectly safe and immobile. But when she closed her eyes, she was back in the jump seat while the plane plummeted through the dark—her mind blank with terror, her lungs burning, her heart opening up at exactly the wrong moment.

  Never again. She’d sworn to herself she’d never allow herself to endure another free fall. She’d retreated, she’d refused to fly, but here she was all over again.

  Bracing for impact.

  chapter 20

  “This isn’t going to end well,” Summer told her best friend the next day. “Mark my words, Em.”

  “I don’t know—sounds pretty juicy to me.” Static crackled on Emily’s side of the phone connection.

  “Which is why all my rational logic is useless.” Summer stacked her bare feet on Hattie Huntington’s desk. The Purple Palace had a designated office outfitted with antique furniture and cutting-edge computer equipment, but since Hattie never stepped foot in the room, Summer had appropriated it for her own use. “Okay, you know how I love dark, handsome alpha males?”

  “You love arrogant assholes with more looks than brains,” Emily decreed. “Not that I’m judging.”

  Summer didn’t bother refuting the truth. “Well, Dutch is the opposite of that. He’s restrained and well-mannered. But there’s something else underneath all that. He has this, like, raw, masculine, commanding . . .”

  Emily laughed. “You sound like you’re reading the back of a bodice ripper.”

  “I don’t know what it is about him.” Summer realized her forehead was dotted with perspiration, despite the arctic air-conditioning. “After all these years of guitar players and soccer stars, I’m suddenly drooling over gray flannel and cuff links. Cuff links, Em.”

  “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  “And I burned all of my fancy black European lingerie—another story for another time—and replaced it with lavender.”

  This got Emily’s full attention. “You’re wearing lavender again? Voluntarily?”

  “I can’t get enough of it! And neither can he! Madness, I tell you!” Summer swung her feet down to the Tibetan rug and sat up straight. “He and I made a pact. We had an agreement, and it did not include hanging out in broad daylight and meeting each other’s friends and families. But now I’m teaching his sister to drive, and it was his idea!”

  “Wait. You ran down his rose garden, and he’s letting you give driving lessons?” Emily whistled. “This guy has more twists and turns than a bagful of weasels.”

  Summer braced her elbow on the desk and let her head drop into her palm. “I have to leave before someone gets hurt.”

  “You don’t have to leave.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. Perpetual motion is not the answer to all of life’s problems.” Emily took a deep breath. “You don’t always have to walk it off, or whatever your mother used to say.”

  Summer still associated those words with her mother, Nicola, though Nicola had never once uttered the phrase. An amateur painter who grew up in privilege, Nicola had been a big believer in fate.

  Love was a calling, not an obligation.

  Summer had been five years old when her beautiful blond mother had hired an afternoon babysitter to care for Summer while Jules taught and wrote on campus.

  “Have fun, darling.” Nicola would give Summer a hug as she prepared to depart for her new studio—a mysterious loft that Summer never visited. The leasing of the studio coincided with other changes in her mother; Nicola seemed distracted and smelled of a new floral perfume. “Mama’s going to go work for a few hours.”

  Kristi, a jocular, ruddy-cheeked softball player, was the kind of babysitter Summer wished could be her older sister. She took Summer to the park to ride her bike and climb the jungle gym. When Summer fell down, her lower lip trembling as blood appeared on a scrape on her knee, Kristi would clap her hands and cry, “Walk it off! Walk it off!”

  And Summer did. She learned that cuts stopped bleeding if you ignored them. Pain lessened if you kept pedaling.

  One evening, while Jules gave a poetry reading, Nicola buckled Summer into the car and drove across town to a fancy restaurant Summer had never been to. An unsmiling, handsome man was waiting at a table.

  “Summer, I want you to meet someone.” Nicola’s voice sounded lilting, supplicating, and Summer knew that her mother was nervous.

  When Summer looked at the man, she could tell from the way he looked back that he didn’t like children. He didn’t like her. But her mother wanted him to like her, and so she tried. She sat still and said “please” and “thank you” and put her napkin on her lap. She was careful, oh so careful, but when she reached for the bread basket, she spilled her orange soda all over the table.

  The man’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes did. And Summer knew, as the icy wetness seeped into her dress, that she had ruined everything.

  Her mother left two weeks later. Summer came home from a trip to the pumpkin patch with Kristi sporting a fresh Band-Aid on her shin, anxious to show off her new battle scar, to tell her mom that she had walked it off.

  Nicola had smiled and nodded, but Summer could tell she wasn’t really listening. “I’m going to be away for a few days.” Nicola’s hands had twisted together. “Just a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” Summer asked. “Can I come?”

  “I’ll be back soon, but I want you to be good while I’m gone.” Nicola gave Summer a kiss on each cheek. “I love you, I love you, I love you, my baby girl.”

  Summer pulled away, frightened by the panic in her mother’s voice and the tears glistening in her eyes. “Why are you crying?”

  “
I’m in love.” Nicola had looked miserable about this, but she still left, stacking her suitcases in the trunk of her car and driving away before Jules got home.

  Over the next few weeks, when Summer asked or cried for her mother, her father stormed into his study and locked the door, so she stopped crying. She stopped asking.

  Her grandmother came to stay through the holidays and predicted, with grim satisfaction, “She’ll be back. Wait and see. She’ll come crawling back.”

  But Nicola never came back. She sent postcards and paintings, she called every night at first, but then her contact tapered off. For years, Summer remained convinced that she’d lost her mother because she’d spilled a soda.

  Later, of course, she realized that life wasn’t that simple. Her parents had unknowable pasts and inner lives she would never be privy to. Fate trumped commitment. Love lasted until you fell in love again.

  And Summer had been walking that off, across six continents, for almost three decades.

  “Hello?” Emily sounded a little panicked. “Are you still there?”

  Summer snapped back to the here and now. “I’m still here.”

  “Sorry if that was out of bounds. I just—”

  “It’s fine.” Summer paused. “But I do have to leave.” She paused again. “We have an agreement.”

  “Well, I say enjoy the cuff links while you can. And the bodice-ripper sex.”

  Summer said good-bye as Miss Huntington walked into the room. “Gotta go. Cruella calls.”

  Hattie never left her bedroom looking anything less than impeccable, and this morning, she was decked out in a simple black blouse, coral pedal pushers, and matching coral loafers. Her snow-white hair was pulled back into a silver clip at the nape of her neck. She made no mention of the fact that Summer was still in pajamas, but her expression conveyed her displeasure. “Miss Benson, may I ask why you’re lounging around my personal office?”

  “You never use it,” Summer pointed out. “Somebody should. Do you have any idea how fast your Internet connection is? It’s like military-grade.”

  Hattie narrowed her eyes and studied Summer’s face. “You look tired.”

  “I’m fine.” Summer fought back a yawn.

  “You’re tired.” Hattie thinned her lips. “And when you are tired, you are of no use to me on the tennis court or the putting green.”

  “I’m of no use to you, anyway,” Summer pointed out. “Yesterday, you said my serve looked like a chimpanzee hitting a melon with a baseball bat.”

  “I don’t want you coming home so late. I like to think of myself as a fair-minded and generous employer—”

  Summer laughed out loud.

  “When I’m not in need of your companionship, you’re free to come and go as you please. But I expect you to exercise good judgment and self-control, and if you won’t, I will. Henceforth, your curfew is ten o’clock.”

  Summer’s jaw dropped. “P.m.?”

  “Of course, p.m. You need to be well rested for our morning outings.”

  “I’m thirty-two,” Summer pointed out. “You can’t give me a curfew.”

  “I’m your boss,” Hattie shot back. “I can do whatever I please.”

  Summer put her bare feet back on the desk, enjoying a little stab of satisfaction as Hattie winced. “I know you refuse to fire me, but can I quit?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so. You accompany me at my pleasure.”

  “I demand a union rep.”

  Hattie shrugged. “You’re free to leave whenever you choose. Just as I’m free to pursue my lawsuit with the wine bar. Now put your shoes back on and get your feet off my furniture.”

  Summer eyed the stack of mail on the corner of the desk. “Do you even know how to turn this computer on?”

  “No. And I have no intention of learning.”

  “It’d make your life much easier.” Summer powered up the system and marveled at the crisp, clear resolution on the monitor. “I can teach you how to pay bills and manage your money online—”

  “I have people for that.”

  “How to check the weather and surf conditions.”

  “I have people for that.”

  “How to organize all your correspondence and thank-you notes.”

  “Miss Benson, a well-brought-up lady would sooner die than send a thank-you by electronic mail.”

  “E-mail,” Summer corrected. “That’s what the kids are calling it these days. And I’m not saying you should send the actual notes by e-mail. I’m saying you could keep all the addresses and contact information in a nice, orderly spreadsheet.” She opened the Web browser and clicked through the highlights of cyberspace. “You could post pictures of your chauffeured Rolls-Royce and your fancy-schmancy pool on Facebook.”

  Hattie sniffed. “Facebook is a bastion of vulgarity.”

  “You could Google-stalk all the people you hate and laugh at their misfortunes.” At this, Summer detected a spark of interest in Hattie’s eyes. “You have no idea what you’re missing.”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  Summer brightened. “There’s this newfangled thing called ‘online dating.’”

  Hattie couldn’t have looked more stricken if Summer had physically punched her. “Never.”

  “Yes! You’ll stay out past curfew, I’ll stay out past curfew—everybody wins.” Summer pulled up a dating site. “A few nights out with some silver fox would do wonders for your disposition. Give you something to look forward to besides frivolous lawsuits. Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself.”

  Hattie took a step back toward the door. “I don’t want to enjoy myself.”

  “That’s your problem right there. We’re totally signing you up for eHarmony. Or maybe you’re more of a Match.com girl? Screw it, we’ll sign you up for both. You can afford it.” Summer started clicking away with the mouse. “Give me back my phone and we’ll get started. First, you take some selfies in your bathroom mirror—pink tube top optional—and then you—”

  “I don’t comprehend a single syllable you just said.”

  Summer rolled her eyes. “Fine. You can take your selfies in the mirror over the mantel at the country club. And you can wear a St. John jacket instead of a tube top. Then we’ll write up a profile and you can specify what you want in a guy.”

  “I don’t want a guy.” Hattie practically spit the word out.

  “My bad. You can specify what you prefer in a gentleman. I’m thinking we’re targeting the Ebenezer Scrooge crowd—am I right? Introvert? Pessimist? Lots of disposable income?”

  “Miss Benson, your impertinence is breathtaking.”

  “Thanks; I get that a lot.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she started compiling a list.

  “Cease and desist,” Hattie snapped.

  “Is that a legally binding order?” Summer asked. “Should I be expecting a strongly worded letter from your attorney?”

  “I have no interest in sifting through the chaff of humanity in some bizarre and impersonal imitation of courtship.” Hattie turned toward the bay window and stared off toward the ocean. “There’s no other man who will ever do.”

  Summer pushed back from the desk. “I knew it! So there was a man?”

  Hattie ignored her.

  “What happened? Was it tragic?”

  “It’s none of your affair.”

  “One of the Jansens, right? Is that why you have it out for Dutch?”

  “I’d drop the subject, Miss Benson, unless you want me to book a seven a.m. tee time tomorrow. Eighteen holes.”

  Summer ceased and desisted. “Fine. Let’s set you up with some live-streaming music, at least.” She browsed through the music offerings. “Maybe they have an all-jitterbug channel.”

  Hattie’s nostrils flared. “Exactly how old d
o you think I am?”

  “Beats me. A lady never reveals her age or her weight, right?”

  “Seven o’clock tee time it is. I suggest you retire early tonight.”

  —

  Miss Huntington skipped afternoon tea and sent word through Turner that she’d be “dining out” for supper, so Summer changed into a navy sundress, hopped in the red convertible, and headed over to the Jansen house to see if Ingrid wanted to try driving again.

  When she parked on the white gravel driveway, she noted that the wooden trellis had been repaired and the run-over rosebushes had been replaced with tiny, sparse brown seedlings. No one answered the doorbell, but she heard rustling from the other side of the house, so she followed the wraparound porch to the backyard, which sloped down to the beach.

  The last time she’d been over here, she’d been too busy making out with Dutch on the couch to notice the view. What had probably once been the perfect lawn for hosting barbecues and parties was now a huge rectangular rose garden framed by white paving stones. A sea of blossoms stretched out from the porch to the edge of the ocean. The roses were arranged by color—stripes of red, yellow, pink, and white against a blue background of sky and water—and the visual effect was breathtaking. Summer braced herself for an overpowering olfactory assault, yet there was only a trace of floral perfume mingling with the salty sea breeze and the tang of pine.

  And in the middle of all those blooms and thorns and earth and sky, Dutch was hard at work.

  He had his back to her, and for a moment, she leaned against the side of the house and watched him.

  Over the last few weeks, she’d gotten used to seeing him in collared shirts and ties. Spotless shoes and shiny watches. Close shaves and combed hair and always, always, the right words on the tip of his tongue.

  But now, he looked the way he had the day she first met him: jeans, a sweat-soaked gray T-shirt, and calfskin gloves. His forearms were tan and his brown hair glinted bronze in the fading sunlight. As he changed position, she could see the muscles shifting in his back. He was in his element here, kneeling in the dirt with the cool breeze blowing in from the ocean and the sun-drenched earth radiating warmth. She could tell, even without seeing his face, that he was happy.