“Well, there’s a woman on your porch. She’s been out there a long time. I didn’t know if you’d, you know, lost somebody . . . again?”
Grace closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Thanks, Bev. I’ll take care of it.”
“I hated to disturb you, but Dad saw her when he was out walking the dogs. I told him . . .”
“No, it’s okay. Talk to you later,” Grace said, hanging up the phone. She was still dressed from the first time she’d been up this morning. She got up off the bed and tiptoed into the guest bedroom. Elizabeth was asleep in the crib, and Lisa and Allison both were sleeping on Josh’s bed.
She pulled the door closed and went downstairs.
“Oh, great,” she said under her breath when she peeped out the window. Sandra Kay was on the swing again, either asleep or drunk or both.
Grace stepped outside. Sandra Kay heard her and immediately sat up.
“Just tell me what you want,” Grace said. “I know you want something, so what is it? Money? Elizabeth?”
“I . . . want to make amends. No, that’s not quite right. I don’t want to make amends. I have to make amends.”
“Have to? Why?”
“It’s part of my twelve step program. I need to tell the people I’ve hurt I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? For . . . falsifying the birth certificate?”
“Not exactly. For showing the birth certificate.”
“Showing it?”
“To Trent.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I showed it to Trent.”
Grace stared at her. “When? Why? Why would you do that?”
“Because I wanted the beach house back. My beach house. You took everything else. I wasn’t going to let you have that, too.”
“Everything else? What are you talking about? What did I take?”
“You took my mother, Grace. You were right in there. Perfect little Grace. Goody Two-Shoes. It was all you, all the time. Then you used Trent to wheel and deal for the beach house when you knew I was desperate—”
“How could I possibly know that?”
“Because I was always desperate, thanks to you. You beat me out of a mother and my inheritance, so I went to see him. I don’t know when it was—not too long before he died. I used to have blackouts, lose days now and then, so I’m not really sure.
“Anyway, I was living—if you can call it that—in Orlando and I drove all the way up here. I don’t really remember doing it, but I did. I went to his office downtown, but he wouldn’t even talk to me about it. The place meant so much to you, he said. I’d been drinking that day. I had the birth certificate in my purse and I just . . .”
“You carried it around with you?”
“It was . . . all I had.”
Grace looked at her in disbelief.
“He wouldn’t even talk to me about the beach house,” Sandra Kay said again, biting off each word as the emotional memory of the encounter resurfaced. “I was furious, like Angie. Out of control, the only way a drunk knows how to be mad. I told him his precious Grace wasn’t as precious as he thought she was. I said you’d been lying to him your whole married life—and then, I . . . showed him the birth certificate. I said the baby’s father was the one you really loved, not him. He didn’t believe it at first, but then he did. I didn’t have to work to convince him. You can’t really argue with official paperwork even if it is screwed up. I’m so sorry, Grace. I know I hurt you—and Trent. But I can’t say I’m sorry to him.”
“Hurt me? Do you have any idea what you did? Oh, God.”
“I said I’m sorry,” Sandra Kay said again, coming closer. She reached out to put her hand on Grace’s arm, and Grace jerked away.
“All that time,” Grace said, her voice trembling. “I didn’t know what was wrong between us—and it was you!”
“Take it easy—”
“Take it easy? Did you ever think for one minute what would happen?”
“I . . . didn’t really worry about it. I figured he’d give you a hard time for a while, but I knew he’d forgive you sooner or later. He was that kind of guy. A baby before you ever even knew him wouldn’t—”
“I can’t begin to imagine what he thought. That I didn’t love him enough to tell him I had another child? That it was just some small detail that didn’t really matter to me? That I was like you? All that time . . . He must have . . .” Grace stopped, trying not to cry. The last thing she wanted was to cry. “If he had asked me about it, I couldn’t have explained it. I didn’t understand anything about it until I saw the picture of you Josh had in his wallet. If it wasn’t for that, you’d have gotten away with it—”
“Grace, where are you going?”
“Don’t!” Grace said when Sandra Kay tried to take her arm again. She went down the porch steps and then ran back inside the house to get her car keys and her wallet. It wasn’t safe to leave a wallet where Sandra Kay Williams could get at it. Then she all but ran to the car.
“Grace!” Sandra Kay cried, following after her. “I’m sorry!”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Grace got into the car and sat for a moment behind the wheel before she started the engine. She abruptly locked the doors, ignoring Sandra Kay’s tapping on the window with her long polished fingernails.
“Grace! Wait! Where are you going? We need to talk about this. I’m sorry!”
Grace lowered the window slightly. “Tell my daughters to take care of Elizabeth until I get back.” She rolled the window up.
“I should have asked him what was wrong,” she said out loud, wiping her eyes as she backed out of the driveway. “I should have asked, and I should have made him tell me!”
I was afraid. I was always afraid!
She didn’t really have a plan, but she drove until she reached the cemetery on the other side of town. The sun was up. The birds were singing. An old man knelt on some newspapers at a nearby grave and clipped the grass the groundskeepers had missed. A pile of dead flowers lay on another newspaper spread out beside him. She walked quickly by him to the place where Trent was buried. There was no one else around, and she stood staring at the headstone a long time.
“I should have . . .” She gave a shuddering breath and turned away. Too late. There was no comfort here. It was done. Over. Irrevocable.
“Nice morning,” the old man said as she passed by again.
Grace barely answered him. She got into the car and drove again, this time to the beach. She found a place to park and began walking toward the pier. When she reached it, she stood for a moment, then continued down it until she saw Kinlaw in his usual spot.
She didn’t say anything to him when she reached him. He glanced in her direction, clearly surprised to see her.
“I don’t want to talk,” she said, looking out over the water. “I just want to stand here. With you.”
“Okay,” he said.
She made herself look at him. “I . . . need a wingman.”
“Okay,” he said again, and he went back to fishing. He didn’t try to steer her away from whatever she was feeling, the way he had with Chuck Dodge. He simply gave her what she asked for—a little company while she stood in abject misery at the pier railing.
The wind was strong, whipping at her hair, hiding her face. The tears were very close to the surface, but she couldn’t let go. She focused on the wide expanse of water, a fishing boat paralleling the shoreline, the cry of the gulls, a radio nearby playing commercials instead of music.
Bermuda is somewhere that way.
Sandra Kay showed Trent the birth certificate.
He thought I had a child some place, one not worth mentioning.
And he didn’t suffer fools gladly.
She watched the boat until it
finally disappeared in the distance. After a time, Kinlaw’s cell phone rang. It took him a while to answer it.
“Fishing,” she heard him say to whoever had called.
She looked out over the water again and stopped listening. All her mental chaos swirled down to only one thing.
I could have fixed it. I could have fixed it!
No. She couldn’t have. How can you argue with something as official as a birth certificate? She knew it had been faked, but Josh and everyone else had to take her word that she hadn’t had a baby boy twenty-five years ago. Allison and Lisa hadn’t believed her, and there was a good chance Trent wouldn’t have either.
She was aware that the tears were running down her cheeks after all, but she didn’t acknowledge them by trying to wipe them away.
At some point, Kinlaw tugged on the sleeve of her jacket.
“Take this,” he said, shoving the fishing rod he was holding into her hands. “I said you were fishing.”
“I’m not fishing.”
“You’re standing here with a line in the water. What else are you going to call it? And you’ve got bandits at three o’clock,” he said, nodding down the pier. “Allison called my cell.”
She looked in that direction, at Allison, who was carrying Elizabeth, and Lisa walking toward them. And, some distance behind them, she could see Sandra Kay trailing along in her backless high heels.
Grace looked down at the fishing rod he’d insisted she take. “You said I was fishing?”
“Correct. Nothing is ever a lie when you’re a wingman, Mrs. James. You were upset. So was she, and she has a serious tendency to take matters into her own hands. I didn’t know how much you wanted her to know about . . . whatever it is, so I improvised.”
“You could have handed me the phone, you know.”
“I repeat, you were upset and I was trying to give you a little more time. That fishing rod has got a lot of sentimental value, by the way. I’d appreciate it if you hang on to it with both hands. If you get a bite, don’t do the ‘Aunt Bea’ thing and toss it in the ocean, okay? That goes for jumping ugly with Sandra Kay, too.”
“I’m not going to jump ugly,” she said because she’d already done that.
But there was practically no guarantee that she wouldn’t do it again. She turned away for a moment and wiped her face on her jacket sleeve without letting go of the fishing rod.
“Mom!” Allison cried, hurrying down the pier. “Mom, are you . . .”
“Not now, Allison. We’ll talk later. When I get home.”
“Well, are you coming back soon?” She kept looking from Grace to the fishing rod to Kinlaw and back again.
“Yes.”
“When?” she asked so earnestly it brought Grace close to tears again.
“Tell you what. Why don’t you all go to the beach house? Or is Angie there again?” she asked Kinlaw.
“No,” he said.
“Go to the beach house, then,” she said. “I just . . . need a little more time to think about some things and make some decisions. You and Lisa can take care of Elizabeth until I get there, right?”
“Yes, but . . .”
Grace looked past her. Sandra Kay had stopped some distance away.
“Mom, Sandra Kay wouldn’t say why you left.”
“Allison, I don’t want to talk about any of this now. You can ask all the questions you want later. But not now.”
“Mom?” Lisa said.
“What?”
“Can we just go back to our house? I’d rather go home. You don’t have to worry about us or Elizabeth. We’ll just go there and wait for you,” she said, looking at her sister hard.
Allison sighed.
“Okay,” Grace said, surprised by her older daughter’s unexpected display of maturity.
“‘Bye-bye,” Elizabeth said as they turned to leave, waving her little baby girl wave.
Grace would have waved in return but for the warning noise Kinlaw made to remind her to protect his sentimental fishing rod. She managed to smile instead—briefly. Sandra Kay, still on the sidelines, stood for a moment, then followed the girls to the car.
“Rough morning, I guess,” Kinlaw said, taking the fishing rod out of her hands.
“Yes.”
“More than Josh leaving.” It was a question . . . if she wanted it to be.
“Yes.” She sighed and looked at him.
“You want to talk about it?”
“No, I want to throw things and bawl my head off,” she said truthfully. “You know what’s wrong with me? I don’t have any emotional props, no vices to fall back on. I don’t drink or smoke or gamble or . . . get into bar fights. As wild as I’ve ever been in my whole life is delivering fish on a motorcycle with you.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“What!” she said in exasperation.
“Nothing,” he assured her, as if she was actually making sense.
“I don’t even . . .” She stopped and looked toward the ocean.
“Don’t even what?”
“I was going to say I don’t even know why I’m here. But it’s not true. I know exactly why I’m here.”
“Which is?”
“I want to go to bed with you.”
Her declaration caused him to look, she suspected, very much the way he would have if she’d tossed his beloved fishing rod into the Atlantic.
“Okay,” he said after a moment.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“You do understand I’m not looking for anything . . . extra. No . . .” She gestured with her hands. “ . . . anything.”
When he didn’t challenge that condition, she gave a quiet sigh. “I’m going to the cottage. I’ll be there for a little while if you . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to actually say what she had in mind.
“What, now?”
“Pay attention, Kinlaw. I’ve got three children and a complete disaster named Sandra Kay to deal with. This is the only window of opportunity I have and it’s shrinking fast.” She didn’t wait for his response to that. She turned and walked away without looking back. She drove to the cottage, parked and sat in the car, letting what she’d just done sink in.
“What is wrong with me?” she said aloud. She didn’t do things like this. There must be something genetic on her mother’s side of the family. Allison was casing bars for the family love child; Lisa was dating a boy on probation. And Goody Two-Shoes, full of trepidation or not, was busting out again.
Grace didn’t know anything about planning trysts, except that ambushing some unsuspecting man in the middle of his morning fishing probably wasn’t the wisest approach. And who was she fooling? She didn’t just want to run wild. She wanted to run wild with Joseph Kinlaw.
She got out of the car and let herself into the cottage, expecting . . . she didn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t what she saw. The place was spotless—Muley’s doing, she supposed. She couldn’t see Angie cleaning house for the woman who now had legal guardianship of her daughter, even if she’d been sober.
I’m so sorry, Grace.
Grace could still hear the words in Sandra Kay’s whiskey voice.
Sorry.
What kind of therapy made taking down the better-left-ignorant bystanders part of the recovery process?
Grace stood in the middle of the small kitchen, still looking for some chore to fill up the minimal amount of time she would wait for Kinlaw to get here. The best she could do was to open the front and back doors so that there would be a cross-breeze through the house. Her thoughts suddenly went to that rainy afternoon in the kitchen after Chuck Dodge’s funeral. She knew where that would have led if the girls hadn’t come home.
<
br /> She couldn’t hear any traffic outside, but she looked out the window at the empty street anyway.
Of course, he wouldn’t come to the cottage. And it would be better for them both if he didn’t. Then she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about him, too.
She walked into the larger bedroom. The bed had been made, the bedding tight, the corners mitered. Very military and hardly romantic. She looked around sharply as the back screen door squeaked opened.
She found Kinlaw in the kitchen, latching the screen door behind him and looking very much the way she herself felt—on the verge of something they both knew was insane.
“Grace, what are we doing?”
“I’m . . . trying hard to feel guilty. About Trent. And being here with you. And it’s not working. It’s not working at all. The best I can do is feel guilty because I don’t feel guilty.”
He started to say something.
“I still don’t want to talk,” she said, cutting him off. “About anything. This is just . . . it’s . . . you’re going to have to be my vice and that’s all there is to it.”
With considerable effort, she stopped babbling.
“Okay?” she asked, looking into his eyes as if she wasn’t scared of what she was inviting to happen.
He smiled. “Okay,” he said.
She stepped into his arms and rested her head against his chest as she had once before. She didn’t need conversation. All she needed was to forget that there was anything else in the world except her anticipated pleasure. If she had learned nothing else from recent events, it was not to postpone something just because it was outside her comfort zone.
“Grace?” he said against her ear, and she leaned back and pressed her fingertips against his lips. She meant what she said. There was a chance that she could talk herself out of this, and she wasn’t going to risk it.
She rested her hands on his shoulders and kissed his mouth softly, and then again, loving his taste and his salt and ocean air smell. She liked this man. She liked him so much.
He was unwilling to stay passive, and the kiss deepened. His hands moved over her body until she wanted more. The clock was ticking; foreplay was walking into the bedroom, shedding clothes, turning back a tightly tucked sheet and blanket, opening a condom pack. She had no time to be shy. She let him look at her and touch her without shame.
The Marine (Semper Fi; Marine) Page 18