Driftwood Point

by Mariah Stewart

  “Even after me telling you that the cottage might not—”

  She put her hand over his mouth and grinned. “I have faith in you. You’re going to figure it out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  So how was your date last night?” Lis asked Owen over coffee the next morning.

  “I didn’t have a date last night,” he replied.

  “Oh. My mistake. I saw you and Cass Logan at the inn yesterday. And since you mentioned she was staying someplace on Dune Drive and the barbecue was for paying guests at the inn plus Sinclair family and friends, I assumed she had come with you. As your date.” Lis stood at the counter, pouring half-and-half into her coffee. She didn’t have to turn around to know what expression was on her brother’s face, but turn around she did, because she couldn’t resist. “Since you qualify as one of the aforementioned Sinclair family and friends . . .”

  “Not that you are entitled to the information, but she is staying at the inn. She was on the waiting list for a long-term room, and when one became available, she checked out of the place she was staying in and moved her things into the inn.” He put his mug of coffee aside and took a container of orange juice from the refrigerator. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know how long term it’s going to be.”

  “What’s she doing in St. Dennis?”

  He seemed to hesitate. “Vacation. Like about five thousand other people who come here in the summer.”

  “If you drink right out of that carton, I’m telling Gigi,” Lis warned.

  Owen laughed and poured juice into a glass. He held the carton out to Lis.

  “No, thanks,” she told him, and he returned the juice to the fridge.

  “So you just ran into Cass when you went over to the inn to drop off Gigi and you decided to stay?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. It was just a coincidence. Speaking of yesterday at the inn, you and Jansen looked pretty cozy, all snuggled up in the shade under that big tree down near the water.”

  “You’re just jealous because no one was snuggling with you. Though you and Cass looked pretty cozy, off by yourselves chatting away. What do you and an architect have to talk about for so long, anyway?”

  “None of your business.”

  Owen took his coffee, and a slice of toast from Lis’s plate, and went out onto the back porch.

  Lis finished her breakfast and washed Owen’s and her dishes before going into the store, where she chatted with a few of the latecomers that morning.

  “Did you sleep in this morning, Mr. Eisner?” she asked the elderly gentleman who leaned on his cane as he waited for a new pot of coffee to brew. Lis looked at the clock over the door. “You’re usually in by seven.”

  “Late night, yes indeed,” he told her. “Damned fireworks kept me up past eleven.”

  “They stopped by ten, if I remember correctly.”

  “Maybe so, but I still heard ’em in my head. Boom! Boom!” He shook his gray head. “All that noise.”

  “Well, it’s only one night out of the year,” she reminded him.

  “One night too many, you ask me.” He continued to grumble after he poured his coffee and snapped on the lid, and even as he paid Ruby at the cash register.

  “Well, now, Fred, you know, you’ll be sleeping long enough, by and by,” Ruby told him. “Time to enjoy what be in this world. Time enough to sleep in the next.”

  He harrumphed and shuffled off to the door, his cane in one hand, his coffee in the other.

  “Lisbeth Jane, you should know better than to put a bee in his bonnet, ’specially so early in the morning,” Ruby chastised her, but there was a hint of a gleam in her eye. “To hear him tell, that man never had a good day in his life.”

  “That’s so sad,” Lis said.

  Ruby nodded. “That’s a fact.”

  A delivery truck pulled into the drive and several large cartons were brought into the store. While Ruby chatted with the delivery man, Lis took Ruby’s box cutter from a drawer near the counter and sliced the tops of the boxes. She shelved the cans of soup and the boxes of tissues and rolls of paper towels, then hauled the empty shipping cartons out onto the porch.

  “Thank you, Lisbeth,” Ruby said when she came back inside. “You be getting real good at that.”

  “Ha,” Lis chuckled. “Anyone can open a box and put the contents onto a shelf.”

  “You be fast. Take me all morning to do what you just did in ten minutes.”

  It was on the tip of Lis’s tongue to remind Ruby that she was a hundred years old, and Lis only thirty-five, but the words stuck in her throat. Any reminder of Ruby’s age only served to make Lis sad and dread the inevitable even more.

  “I’m going to go upstairs to work for a while,” Lis told Ruby.

  “You finding it a good place to work, that front room?”

  “It’s a great place to work. The light is perfect and the view can’t be beat.”

  “You be okay there, then, if the cottage don’t work out?”

  “I could paint here, yes, I could. Would I rather be at the point? Sure. But I’m good here, Gigi. Thanks for asking.”

  Ruby nodded with apparent satisfaction.

  “If you need anything, just call me.” Lis turned toward the steps.

  “I got Owen here today, for a while, anyway,” Ruby told her. “Though there be no telling what that boy . . .” She walked to the window and looked out. “What is that boy up to?”

  “Looks like he’s searching for something in the shed.” Lis stood next to Ruby at the window. On impulse, she put her arm around Ruby’s waist. Who knew how many more opportunities she’d have to tell her without words how much the older woman meant to her?

  “Now, now, Lisbeth.” Ruby patted the arm that encircled her. “Don’t be thinking such thoughts. It be what it be. No need to worry now.”

  Lis didn’t bother to ask how Ruby knew what she was thinking. It just seemed that more and more, Ruby knew. It was as much a part of her as her arthritic hands and the narrow folds of wrinkles that lined her face.

  “That boy messes up my shed, there be the devil to pay.” Ruby opened the door and went outside. “Owen, you put it all back where you found it, every piece, hear?”

  Lis smiled. Ruby still ruled. It settled Lis’s heart.

  Once in her makeshift studio, Lis moved the easel to better catch the light from the side window, and opened her palette. Soon she was lost in her own world, where color and form blended into sky and sea. Sometimes it almost seemed as if she were seeing the island as it was before anyone inhabited it, before any of the cabins had been built and no boats stood on pilings looking out at the bay. She painted what she saw, and what she did not see. She worked until the light began to fade and shadows lengthened across the floor.

  “Hey, you still alive here?” Owen stood in the doorway.

  “Yep. I’m good,” Lis replied without looking up from the paper on which she worked her watercolor magic.

  “Wow, that’s . . .” Owen paused. “That’s really good. Beautiful, even. What made you think to do that, to take out all the cabins and everything?” He inspected the painting closely. “There’s no road,” he said. “Did you forget to put in the road? And no store. Though I guess if you’re painting from the perspective of the store, there wouldn’t be . . .”

  Lis glanced up at him and smiled. “It’s just the way I saw it today. I don’t know why.” She stood back and seemed to study her work as if she hadn’t seen it before.

  “Well, wrap it up. Gigi wants to have dinner early, the three of us, and she’s ready. Now.”

  “Gigi cooked?” Lis frowned. She had taken over most of the cooking chores since she arrived.

  “I cooked.”

  “You . . . ?”

  Owen nodded. “And I’ll thank you to keep your comments to yourself. I just figured Gigi’s coo
ked enough meals for other people over the years. It’s her turn to have someone cook for her.”

  “I agree.” Lis began to clean her brushes. “Am I allowed to ask what you made?”

  “Gazpacho.”

  “Seriously? Does Gigi know?”

  “It was her idea.” Owen turned to go downstairs and over his shoulder added, “And she asked for extra spicy.”

  “GIGI, WHAT DO you know about the people who built this store?” Lis, Ruby, and Owen sat on the back porch at dusk, Lis’s old tape recorder between them on the table.

  “That be my great-great grandfather Sam and my great-great-grandmother Edna. They be the ones who made the crossing, May of 1813.” Ruby sat in her rocking chair, her arms resting along the chair’s arms, and stared into the streaks of color shed by the setting sun as it spread across the water.

  “Why’d they side with the British and not the Americans?” Owen asked.

  Ruby shrugged. “Best I recall hearing about all that, Sam’s brother—I believe he was Edwin—was in the British navy. A captain or such. Sam wasn’t about to go against his own flesh and blood.”

  “But they were Americans by then.”

  “Plenty of folks on the Eastern Shore thought it best to be loyal to the king.” She began to rock slowly. “Not be my place to say they be right or they be wrong. Didn’t walk in their shoes. Would I go against my own kin?”

  “But it had to be something more than who in St. Dennis sided with who,” Lis pointed out.

  “I been thinking back to what I heard from the old folks, since you asked before. Seems I heard tell that some boys from St. Dennis were taken and put on a ship and told they be sailing for the king. Their kin wanted their boys back, didn’t take kindly to anyone telling them that the king be the king and can do what he please. Said anyone who wouldn’t fight to have them boys be brought back home got no business in St. Dennis, and if they wouldn’t move out, they’d be moved. That be when folk be sent over the bridge to the island and not be left back.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” Lis asked.

  “Can’t change what was. No point in holding a grudge against people who had no hand in it. Seems silly to me, but like I say, I never walked in any shoes but my own.”

  “If they couldn’t take anything with them, how were they able to build the store?” Owen leaned forward in his chair.

  Ruby told him about Sam’s brother bringing supplies up from Cambridge.

  “They had money, some say. Some say there were things smuggled over by some who lived in the town and didn’t like that their neighbors or friends or kin be run out.”

  “That makes sense,” Lis noted. She’d been making notes along with recording their conversation. “Have you given any more thought to how your family ended up owning so much of the land? The point, the store, that lot over on the western side of the island where Poppa built that cabin?”

  Ruby shrugged. “If I knew, I’ve forgotten. Maybe it be written down somewhere, but I don’t know.”

  “What do you know about the three chapels?” Owen asked.

  Ruby chuckled. “They be built by three pastors, men of God who couldn’t get along with anyone,” she said sarcastically. “The first one built the chapel that looks over toward Sunset Beach. Jeremiah Sharpe, he was. Someone in the congregation didn’t like him, started his own chapel—that be Reverend Moore. Same thing happened to him. Chapel number three be built on the opposite side of the island. Reverend Patterson.” Ruby shook her head. “Foolish men with foolish thoughts.”

  “Did you ever attend any of them?” Lis wondered.

  “We went to Reverend Smith when I be small. He preached in Reverend Sharpe’s old church. Then he died, and Reverend Pace came to the island, stayed a long time. When he died, Reverend Bristow came, but after him, there be no one. The chapel be boarded up, last I saw.”

  “It still is,” Lis told her. “I wonder what the future holds for them. It’s sort of weird, three houses of worship standing empty like that.”

  “Maybe there be some use for them,” Ruby told her. “Not my place to say.”

  Owen asked Ruby what it was like for her growing up on the island, and Ruby replied, “Growing up like anyplace, I suppose.” Ruby and Owen fell into a conversation about her childhood, but Lis was so tired she couldn’t keep up. She rubbed her eyes, made sure the recorder was still on, and said her good nights. Tomorrow she’d play back whatever was on the recorder, but tonight she wanted nothing more than to close her eyes and sleep.

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, Lis was totally engrossed in painting and barely heard the ping of her phone. She finished the section she was working on and checked the text.

  Friends getting married this weekend. Be my date?

  She replied, Day? Time? Attire?

  Friday. 7 p.m. Dress you wore to gallery, he responded.

  Lis laughed. There was no way she was going to wear the same dress twice. She sent back a short text, Sure. Thanks. Then set aside her brushes and went into the bathroom to wash the paint off her hands and the smear on the side of her face. She changed from her old ratty shorts, which were almost threadbare from having been worn and washed so many times, and put on a knit tank dress.

  “Gigi, if you don’t need me for anything, I’m going into town,” Lis told her after she’d gone downstairs. She found Ruby at her table, reading the newspaper.

  “Owen be here if I need help. Which I won’t. You go on.” Ruby had glanced up at Lis, then back to whatever article she’d been reading.

  “I won’t be long.” Lis headed toward the door.

  “Take your time,” Ruby said. “You be sure to get something nice. But nothing that be showing your business all over St. Dennis.”

  Lis paused in the doorway, then shook her head. There was no point in asking Ruby how she knew where she was going.

  Okay, could be that she figured if I changed into something nicer than shorts, that I was going into town. And if I’m going into town, I might be stopping at Bling. And if I’m going to Bling, I might be looking for a dress. If I’m looking for a dress, it shouldn’t be too revealing lest I scandalize the entire town.

  Yes, Lis nodded to herself as she started her car. That had to be it.

  That Ruby was able to cut to the chase so quickly was still a mystery, but at least Lis had come up with what sounded like a logical explanation.

  She parked on Cherry Street and walked around the corner to Bling. Vanessa waved from the counter as she rang up a customer and had several more in line. Lis went straight to the rack where the dresses were separated by color, not size, and began to search through them. She found several contenders and caught Vanessa’s eye to let her know she was headed for the dressing room. Three try-ons later, Lis returned two dresses to the rack and went to the counter.

  “Found something?” Vanessa’s eyes lit when she saw the dress in Lis’s hands. “Oh, I love that one. I wish I’d seen it on you. I bet it looked fabulous.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t sure about the style.” Lis held up the dress with the V-neck and halter straps that tied around her neck.

  “The fabric’s so pretty,” Vanessa went on. “And I love the colors. The shoes you bought last week will be perfect. Any particular occasion?”

  “Something came up for the weekend.” Lis hadn’t wanted to say she was going to a wedding but had no idea who was getting married. Vanessa would have asked whose and she’d have had to admit she didn’t know. Or maybe she did and didn’t realize their wedding was the one Alec had invited her to. Chances were that if the wedding was in St. Dennis, Vanessa would be there, too.

  Lis drove back to the island, singing along with the radio. George Michael’s “Father Figure.” She belted out the chorus as she pulled into the driveway.

  “Whoa, kiddo.” Owen came down the steps. “If you’re going to sing like that—and that
loud—roll up your windows.”

  Lis laughed. “Some oldies just beg to be sung along to. That’s one of them.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “I went to Bling.” She rolled up the windows and got out of the car, then reached into the backseat for the dress bag.

  “New dress?”

  She nodded and went past him on the steps.

  “Didn’t you buy a new dress last week?”

  “Yes, I did.” She went into the store and straight up the steps.

  Lis couldn’t remember the last time she’d shopped for dressy clothes two weeks in a row; wasn’t sure she ever had. She hadn’t had that many places to go to before. Gallery openings, yes, but all in New York, where black is practically mandatory. Weddings? Once, in a restaurant, and it had been very casual. Even the bride had worn pants. And that had been the extent of her social life, other than going out for lunch or dinner or drinks with friends or with Ted, sometimes with her friends and Ted. At one of those get-togethers, Ted must have decided that Pam’s voice didn’t bother him so much after all, and Pam must have found that maybe he wasn’t as much of a bore as she’d first thought.

  Lis shook her head as if to clear it. What had she seen in him that she couldn’t see now?

  Love certainly can be blind.

  She hung the new dress over the door in her bedroom and admired the colors. If the dress she’d worn to the showing at the gallery had been sky and sea, this one was sunset. Pinks and lavenders and golds. Once again the contrast between the colors of the new dress and the singular black of the old one was apparent. It was the difference between the way her life felt now and the way it felt when she looked back on her life before she returned to the island.

  Funny, how things go. She sat on the stool in front of the front window and looked out on a beautiful day. She’d come back to the island to kill two birds with one stone—since she had to return for the showing of her work, it made sense to come early and spend some time with Ruby. Now, after just a few weeks here, she couldn’t remember why she’d stayed away so long, and was seriously considering moving back permanently. She thought about keeping a condo in Hoboken, just someplace to hang her hat when she had business in New York, but even that lacked appeal. She felt more and more that this was where she belonged, and the prospect of leaving and living somewhere else, even for a short time, seemed less desirable. Yes, of course, her relationship with Ruby was part of that, but her brother was now back and planning to stay, at least for a while, and despite their occasional squabbles, she loved Owen and knew he loved her, too. Life had taken them in different directions for years, but now they were both here, where they’d grown up, and finally had the chance to reconnect as adults. Their mother was so wrapped up in her own life—her new marriage and her stepchildren and their children—that she had little time for Lis or Owen and had no intention of ever setting foot on Cannonball Island again. In a way, Lis couldn’t blame her. Kathleen may have had a great childhood, but her marriage to Jack had sapped away every bit of love she’d had for this place. But for Lis—and possibly for Owen—the island was offering new beginnings and new challenges and new opportunities. She felt invigorated here, and creative in ways she hadn’t felt in a long time.