by Jane Heller
He nodded, chuckling.
I asked him what was so funny. He said people often mistake poison ivy for less benign plants.
“Poison ivy?” I yelped. I’d had it twice after weekend jaunts to the country with Dan and had wanted to kill myself both times. Never had I itched so much. Never had my skin turned the color of raspberries with the bumpy texture to match. Never had I been forced to wear only a bedsheet for an entire week until the rash began to dry up and I could tolerate having clothes touch it. Never had I gone through a vat of calamine lotion.
I told Chuck I couldn’t possibly have poison ivy. Not now, of all times. He said he was sorry but that he would stake his thirty years as a doctor on it.
“Try not to scratch,” he cautioned. “Oh, and stay out of the sun, don’t bathe or shower, and avoid physical contact with others. It’ll make it spread.”
After his diagnosis sunk in, I considered smashing the window next to me and leaping out of the plane. I mean, this guy had basically just taken away any expectation I had of being at my best for Evan, who had seen enough of me at my worst. Never mind that I also felt guilty about Weezie; since I’d dragged her along on my spy mission, she must have gotten The Crud too.
But, of course, I didn’t smash the window or leap out of the plane. Instead, I spent several minutes in quiet contemplation, remembering not only what Weezie had said about love (that it doesn’t waver) but what Evan had said about love (that it was about accepting weaknesses as well as strengths), and I decided to go for another kind of flying leap.
When you get right down to it, what is a leap of faith if not appearing at your beloved’s doorstep, not only uninvited but letting him see you for who you really are?
My arms started to itch in earnest then, driving me insane. It was as if the rash, having now been identified by a professional, was free to run rampant.
As I battled the urge to rip my skin to shreds, a question suddenly popped into my head and ended up steering this story right back to its beginning.
“Just curious,” I said to Chuck, who’d retreated into his book. “Do men and women come down with poison ivy with the same frequency?”
“Now that you mention it, I have seen a rise in the number of women who come down with it,” he said, looking up. “It’s probably because you’re doing your own yard work now, along with hiking and hunting and fishing—activities that used to be considered ‘male.’ ” He chuckled. “Hey, you women wanted sexual equality? You’ve got it.”
Yes, I thought, as he went back to his reading. We have it and we’re better for it. But it does have its occasional drawbacks.
When I landed in Fort Lauderdale, I stopped at an airport sundries shop during the layover and bought some cortisone cream and some Benadryl. Then I went to the ladies’ room, took the pill, and applied the cream, which, unlike the pink calamine lotion, was a pasty white. As I peered at myself in the mirror over the sink, I noticed that the poison ivy had surfaced on my face; there was one patch on my chin and another on my left cheek and a third on the tip of my nose, so I put the cream there too. Are you getting this? I looked like a monster. Or like those people who paint their faces to support their teams at sporting events.
Two hours later, I made it through the turboprop flight and its attendant turbulence with relative ease. Thanks to the Benadryl, I was pretty much knocked out from takeoff to landing, and the only bumps I felt were on my skin.
But it was on the fifteen-minute ferry ride that I really began to loosen up. It suddenly dawned on me that I was in paradise. I mean, like utopia. I’d been to the Caribbean and I’d been to Bermuda and I’d been to Hawaii, and they were each stunningly beautiful in their own way, but the Abacos had a more quiet, less showy allure. No giant hotels. No giant fast-food restaurants. No giant tourists with video cameras. (Okay, there were a few, but they stayed in Treasure Cay to play golf.)
As the boat carried me along to Green Turtle, I sat and watched nature go by: the water, which was the sort of turquoise/aqua/teal you only see in either movie swimming pools or your dreams; the soft sandy beaches that make you want to bury your toes in them; the lush, tropical landscape with its swaying palms and trees laden with coconuts, grapefruits, and berries; the afternoon sky, which was blue but dotted with big, puffy clouds that felt low enough to touch. And I listened, both to the excited chatter of visitors like me and to the natives, whose melodious voices were singing to one another about their workday.
“Excuse me. Is there a city on Green Turtle?” I said to one of the locals. I asked this, not because I was hankering for a city. God, no. I just wondered if civilization had encroached on all this beauty.
The Bahamian woman, who was with her three young children, smiled and said, “New Plymouth, you mean?”
“I guess so,” I said, picturing paved roads, traffic congestion, and everything else I’d left behind.
“This is our settlement,” she said, gesturing past the dock where our ferry was about to tie up.
Her settlement. I looked around and sighed with relief. Along with secluded inlets and gently sloping hills and green forests, there was, at this southern tip of the cay, a little village with the flavor of an eighteenth-century New England harbor. Clapboard houses with gingerbread trim lined its narrow streets, which weren’t clogged with honking cars but were quiet and pristine, except for a couple of clucking hens. No wonder they call the Abacos the “out islands,” I thought. And no wonder Evan loves them.
“New Plymouth is very small,” said the woman almost apologetically, mistaking my expression for disappointment. “Only about four hundred people live here.”
About half the population of Minco, I thought, remembering how afraid I’d been of small places, of not being able to succeed in small places. No more.
As we disembarked from the ferry, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of paper with Evan’s address on it. “Excuse me again,” I said to the woman. “I’m sorry to bother you, but could you tell me how to get to this address?” I showed her the paper.
She laughed. Laughed! Not knowing that people in the Abacos are generally happier than people anywhere else in the world and that they laugh simply because they’re happy, I was convinced that she was laughing at me.
“Don’t tell me,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ve gotten off at the wrong island or something.” I sighed. “I’ve been so preoccupied with my poison ivy and my boyfriend—well, he’s not my boyfriend yet. Not until I find him and tell him I’m ready to be with him. I was so excited about seeing him that maybe I wasn’t as careful as I should have been when I made the reservations yesterday. I kind of rushed—”
I stopped when she started shaking her head at me.
“No,” she said, continuing to laugh. What a jolly person! What a jolly country! “I was trying to explain that the place you’re going to is just up the street—a two-minute walk.”
“Really?” I said. “I didn’t screw up?”
She grinned the widest grin I’d ever seen. “Not at all,” she said. “You’re right where you want to be.”
So, there you have it. I was right where I wanted to be. What I hoped—well, “hope” is an understatement—was that Evan would be there waiting for me; to accept me, welts and all.
Acknowledgments
I sought the advice of several people well before I began writing this novel and would probably not have written it if not for them. So thanks to Rhonda Friedman for the inspiration, Amy L. Reiss, Esq., for the legal expertise, and Kathy Sulkes for putting me in touch with Amy. Thanks to Bruce Gelfand for the hours of brainstorming on the phone, and to Brad Schreiber and Ciji Ware for the ideas and encouragement they contributed. A huge thanks to my editor, Carrie Feron, whose astute notes on the first draft made the finished book much stronger, and thanks to her capable assistant, Selina McLemore, for getting all the details right. As always, my deepest thanks and love to Ellen Levine, agent extraordinaire, and her team at Trident Media Group.
Thanks to Am
y Schiffman at Gersh for continuing to fight the good fight in Hollywood with her customary caring and decency. Thanks to Kristen Powers for keeping my website up and running, even though she’s a Red Sox fan and I’m a Yankees fan and we can’t bear to speak to each other while our teams are going at it. Thanks to the Santa Clara Valley chapter of the Brandeis University National Women’s Committee for inviting me to participate in their contest—and to good sport Lynda Fox, who won a walk-on part in this book at their fund-raiser luncheon. And finally, thanks to my husband, Michael Forester, who, despite his own challenges while I was writing the book, never wavered in his moral support for me.
About the Author
JANE HELLER is the national bestselling author of eleven previous novels. A former publicist who promoted dozens of bestselling authors before becoming one herself, she lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is hard at work on her next book. Visit her at www.janeheller.com.
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Credits
Jacket design by Amy King
Jacket photographs: woman © Bananastock/Robertstock.com, man © Ray Lego, dog © Tim Davis/CORBIS
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
AN EX TO GRIND. Copyright © 2005 by Jane Heller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2005 ISBN: 9780061860492
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heller, Jane.
An ex to grind / Jane Heller.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-059925-1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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