“Now that’s what I want to see.”
Parker squinted in her direction, grinning as he pulled off the handle of the winch. She blindly patted her shoulder, wondering if a bathing suit strap had slipped off, but she was wearing a bandeau and everything was in place.
“You sitting there,” he said, “with your long legs stretched out, making me look like the luckiest man in the world.”
She made a soft hitching sound. She planted her tea in the cup holder, then rose to her feet. She wrapped her fingers around the rail ropes that curved around the stern, gripping them so hard that sharp bits of fiberglass dug into her palm. “Hey, Park, how about we go out a little farther today? Maybe into deeper water? We haven’t done that in a while.”
“Who are you,” he laughed, as he tucked the handle back where it belonged, “and what did you do with my fiancée?”
“I’m just in the mood for adventure.”
Deeper water meant gusty wind, bigger swells, and a straining lean to the boat. Deeper water meant she’d have to concentrate on helping Parker sail in order to battle the currents around the tip of the island. Deeper water meant she had more time to avoid the inevitable.
“Well you know, I’m always jonesing for speed.” He gave her an odd look as he made his way back to the wheel. “But I thought you’d want to relax today. You know, just take it easy.”
Yes, she knew she should be enjoying the swift, clean cut of the Livibell through the rippling water, the feel of the sea breeze in her hair, the unscheduled, unstructured afternoon free of fittings and floral appointments, rather than battling a fierce longing for an unfiltered cigarette. “Maybe I just want to fight the boat a little.”
Or just win a fight for a change.
She winced. Part of her itched for the battle. Part of her was royally pissed that Parker didn’t want Birdie at the wedding. But she was determined to be mature about this. She understood the need for diplomacy. She’d been struggling to identify with Parker’s point of view while cultivating an argument strong enough to change his mind.
“Well, it’s true I haven’t had this girl of mine out of the marina for days now.” He eyed the sudden fluttering of the mainsail as he palmed the wheel a bit. His ears seemed perked to notice the changing pitch of the wind through the ropes. “You think she feels a little neglected?”
Wendy thought not. Some of the guys at the club loved horses—bought them, stabled them, raced them, and talked endlessly about them. Other guys loved yachts—the bigger, the more customized, the better. Parker’s passion was more visceral. He liked the way the water felt rushing past the fiberglass hull; he liked the rasp of the ropes in his hand; he liked the way the bulging sails harnessed the power of the wind. She’d often figured that he’d marry this boat, if it were an option.
But stating the truth wouldn’t further her goal. “I think,” Wendy said, “that it’s always dangerous to take a girl for granted.”
“Maybe she’s just jealous that I spent last week at another regatta, feeling up another boat’s rudder.”
“You cheating bastard, you.”
“She has to know,” he said, sidling her a glance, “that for all the time I spend away, she’s my one and only girl.”
Wendy met his dark blue eyes with a prickle of guilt. She knew Parker was true-blue loyal. With the boat and the regattas, there was no room in his life for another lover. Yet into her mind, unwittingly, slipped the image of a sexy Brazilian electrician, an artist with an unforgettable face.
“No, we stay in the sound today,” he said firmly. “I promised I’d give you a relaxing day, and that’s what you’re getting.” His gaze drifted from the sleek upsweep of her hair all the way down to the pale pink polish on her toes. “Gotta keep to the plan.”
“What plan?”
“Lunch.”
Then she looked ahead to where he was directing the boat. She saw a familiar shallow-draft curl in the shoreline. She glanced at him sharply, but he kept his profile toward her. They’d been to this cove often enough that she knew why he’d chosen it. The knowledge brought a wave of irritation.
“Hey, Parker,” she said, struggling to tame her tongue, “just remember you’re cut off.”
His lip did a little pull. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I warned you a long time ago. Three months before the wedding, no more horizontal rumba.”
“I completely respect your opinion.”
“It’s the only way to make the wedding night special.”
“I know you’ve got my best interests at heart.”
“Then why are we heading to the old parking spot?”
“Just lunch. Lobster salad from Brennan’s. Fresh rolls. A bottle of Dom. Strawberries dipped in dark chocolate.”
She knew, in his own guy way, this was Parker’s method of apologizing. He’d brought along her favorite food from a roadside seafood deli at a marina twelve miles up the road. And he’d made the trip to the farmers’ market downtown for the dipped strawberries. But it annoyed her that he would fall back on food and sex while a quarrel still lingered between them.
“Hey, hey.” Parker laid his hand on her arm, sensing, perhaps, that he’d gone too far. “Listen, it’s just lunch.”
“Right.”
“Not that I’ll say no to any dessert you offer.”
“Parker.”
“I’m only human, Wendy. And that bikini is killing me.”
“I shouldn’t have come out today.”
“Yes, you should have. You need to relax. You’re not yourself. It’s like when I’m with you, you’re not even here.”
She imagined, fleetingly, a pair of tilted brown eyes, wistful with regret.
“Cove first,” he added, “and rough water later, if that’s what you really want. Today, I’ll grant you any wish.”
“Then let me have Birdie at our wedding.”
The words cut through the screeching of the gulls and the flapping of the mainsail. They fell into a strange pool of silence, and hung there.
And Wendy remembered a moment at last year’s annual charity gala, as Wendy watched her mother talk with a generous donor about some new acquisition for the museum. Mid-sentence, the donor made some rude joke about the ethnicity of one of the museum’s employees. Her mother stiffened, frozen for a moment of uncomfortable silence, then discreetly changed the subject.
By the sight of Parker’s suddenly blank face, there was no way to discreetly ignore what Wendy had just blurted aloud. She didn’t want to ignore it. She was tired of pretending that the issue hadn’t been churning in her stomach ever since their truncated discussion at the country club.
Parker gripped the wheel against a windy gust shooting around the headland of the cove. “So that’s what this is about.”
“You know it is.”
“We resolved that issue at the club.”
“We didn’t resolve the issue.” She remembered the looks they’d received as they’d discussed the issue in low tones outside the yellow parlor. “We just stopped talking about it.”
“Your own mother doesn’t want Birdie at the wedding.”
“God forbid there’s any unpleasantness.”
“She’s not wrong.” Parker reached for his beer, took a good long swallow, and then squinted out at the curving coastline. “You told me the seating arrangements have been finalized.”
“There’s nothing so written in stone that it can’t be adjusted for one or two more guests.”
“So you expect me to just forget the dinner we had with Birdie last year.”
Wendy suppressed a wince. It had been the first time the three of them had gone out in public. Birdie had misbehaved. She’d made a terrible scene in the restaurant. Birdie hadn’t meant to…she was just overexcited, uncomfortable, and unsure of Parker.
“Birdie,” Wendy said with conviction, “will behave at our wedding.”
The breeze tossed Parker’s hair wildly. “Wendy, for God’s sake, you know you can’t guarant
ee that.”
No, she couldn’t. Birdie was chaos, Birdie was blessedly unpredictable. Wendy remembered a day in her teens when she and Birdie ran out to the little shed where a towering drift of snow from a storm nearly met the roof. Wendy had called her friends—Miss Porter’s girls—to join her in sledding, but they had refused. They were too old for that, they said, as they headed out to Vermont for the weekend. But Birdie wasn’t too old for sledding. They’d pulled out their toboggans, climbed the roof, and sailed off it down the long, sloping hill to the frozen pond.
Birdie was never too old for fun.
“Does it really matter if she behaves badly?” She thought of Dhara’s engagement party, where one of the uncles had tried to break-dance to Usher. “Aren’t weddings supposed to be filled with family drama? Birdie is our own homegrown family drama. Why leave her out?”
“Because people will stare.”
“We’ve invited lots of ignorant guests to our wedding.”
“People will walk wide circles to avoid her.”
“Birdie doesn’t care about that.”
“Why would you do this to her?”
“Really, Parker? You’re asking me why I’d invite my only sister to our wedding?”
“You’ll embarrass her in front of everyone we know. Do you think James won’t make mocking imitations—”
“Parker. She’ll laugh along with him. She won’t care.” Wendy fixed him with her gaze. “Or is it you who will be embarrassed, to have at our wedding an adult with Down syndrome?”
The eyes he turned on her were harsh. Wendy felt an urge for a cigarette—as bitingly keen as when she’d first quit, years and years ago. Her accusation wasn’t completely fair, and she knew it. Parker had dutifully trudged up to Birdie’s assisted living facility with Wendy many a long Sunday. It wasn’t completely his fault that Birdie didn’t warm to him. Wendy shared a special relationship with her sister, cultivated in the bubble of their childhood, insular and fierce. Parker, awkward in Birdie’s presence, couldn’t help but be viewed as an intruder.
That stung nonetheless. Birdie didn’t act that way around anyone else. Dhara had met Birdie when Wendy wanted a second opinion on the situation with Birdie’s heart defect, and the two of them had gotten along fine. Kelly had spent a Thanksgiving with the Wainwrights during one college year, when Birdie still came home for the holiday and Trey was abroad, and Birdie still asked after her. It was actually through the eyes of her college friends that Wendy came to understand how disruptive Birdie’s presence could be, how unusual were Birdie’s unpredictable moods and awkward social inhibitions. Birdie lived at the physically and mentally more challenging end of the spectrum. Birdie simply wasn’t the TV-ready version of Down syndrome.
But Wendy had grown up with her. The rollicking chaos of Birdie was what she adored the most.
“She’s my sister,” Wendy said, mustering up all the well-practiced arguments. “She’s my only sister, Parker. The girl I shared my childhood with, the woman who is among my best of friends—”
“Then have her at the wedding.” Parker put his shoulders into steering the boat around the headland winds, his muscles straining against the salt-and-wind-faded Princeton crew team tank. “Okay? Just arrange for her to be there, Wendy, if that’s what you really want.”
Wendy wove a little, unbalanced by Parker’s sudden capitulation. She felt like she’d just swung a fist through thin air.
She said, “You’ll support me when I tell my mother.”
“Yes.”
“Even though she’ll fight this.”
“Yes.”
“But you think it’s a terrible idea.”
“Yes.”
Wendy grasped the stern ropes. She thought of all the compromises she’d made for Parker’s sake. She’d allowed their honeymoon to coincide with a Greek regatta, where Parker would be spending a full day sailing around the isles without her. She’d agreed when he’d asked her to cross two names off the guest list, artists from her Soho days. (For God’s sake, Wendy, you think that crazy Ukrainian is going to remove his ball gag? And what if your Lebanese friend decides to make naked performance art out of the Viennese Waltz?) She’d compromised with him, in a hundred little ways, thinking that was how happy marriages were made.
“I’ll agree to have Birdie there,” Parker said, as he let the jib go slack and he steered the boat to a good mooring, “because you want it so badly. Isn’t that why you’ve been pulling away from me these past weeks?”
Wendy felt the ghostly shadow of a paint-flecked hand against her palm. She saw, in her mind’s eye, a shock of crisp, dark hair. And around her, the salt-sea breeze smelled oddly of turpentine.
“Yes.” She spoke quickly, roughly. “Yes.”
“Then by all means, bring Birdie to our wedding.”
She slid down onto the port bench as Parker set the wheel and abandoned the back deck to work on the sails. She took a shaky sip of her ice tea as Parker climbed over the deck, set out the anchor, and tied ropes with the quick hands of a man who raced boats regularly.
She’d won the skirmish.
The victory shouldn’t feel so hollow.
Moments later, a shadow fell across her face. Wendy looked up to find Parker leaning over her.
“Listen,” he said, his voice conciliatory. “I don’t want to make a big deal of this. In three months, this wedding will be over. Your mother’s meddling, this whole thing with Birdie, it’ll all be in the past.”
She dropped her gaze to the sailor’s knot necklace she’d given him for their fifth anniversary, swaying from his neck.
“And you and I,” he continued, “we’ll be drifting on a yacht in the Aegean Sea. We’ll be sipping ouzo and basking in the Mediterranean sun. We’ll be island-hopping, eating moussaka, and growing fat on baklava.”
He cupped her face in his hands, drawing her gaze back. She searched his dear, dark blue eyes for some sense of understanding. She was torn between the urge to push him away and an equally insistent urge to pull him closer. These past years, he’d been the partner in a tux dutifully beside her at every club function, smiling as she nattered on about art. He’d been the sweet lover accommodating her silence about her Soho past. He’d been the solid man at her side, snickering at her snarky jokes. She was glad he’d compromised about Birdie, but she wanted more.
She wanted him to love Birdie too.
“And then,” he continued, “when our honeymoon is over, we’ll be back here. We’ll be playing tennis at the club, knocking that damn arrogant new couple off the leader board. And, eventually, we’ll look for a little house up in Armonk, or Larchmont, or wherever you want to live—”
“As long,” she interrupted in a whisper, “as it’s close to the marina.”
“Yes.” He smiled, slowly shifting onto his knees, clearly pleased that she’d picked up the familiar narrative. “Yes. A five-bedroom, close to the marina. And before you know it, you and I, we’ll be settled in that fine house, starting a fine family.”
A ripple of emotion trembled through her, an emotion she was too frightened to name. She didn’t need to hear Parker spell out her future. She saw it clearly. It was a life as unruffled as the surface of an upstate lake. It was a life bathed in shades of golden afternoons.
“We’ll vacation in Vail with Audrey and James,” he continued. “We’ll spend weeks in Newport for the regatta—”
“Stop talking, Parker.”
“—and everything will be just as we dreamed, Wendy. Just as we always wanted.”
She dug her fingers into his forearms. She stopped him the only way she could—with a kiss, a hard kiss, a kiss on his cold, salty lips that gave him no more reason to speak.
chapter nine
Will you please stop complaining, Mother?” Marta slung her tote over her shoulder and leaned toward the curb, searching far down the street for the red awning of the café. “We’re only a few blocks away from the street fair.”
“Loco, Marta. This is
just crazy.” Her mother’s gently padded thighs labored as she tried to keep up. “I mean, look at you, with those ridiculous sunglasses, dragging me down the back streets of Brooklyn on some scheme. I thought my daughter was a lawyer. Yet here you are, acting like some sneaky actress in a Colombian telenovela.”
“I’ll have you know these are designer shades,” Marta said, lifting her sunglasses high enough to give her mother an arch look. “And I am not being sneaky. You and I are just making a little detour from the Bedford Street fair because I suddenly remembered a great bakery nearby. A little Italian café that I happen to know because of Tito.”
“One that Tito still goes to,” her mother retorted, “every Saturday morning at ten o’clock.”
“Information that you yourself dragged out of Uncle Pedro.” Marta slipped into Manhattan walking speed. “Come on, Mom, didn’t you think I was eventually going to act on it?”
“Marta, mi hija, my darling little girl, just think for a moment.” With short-nailed hands that could deftly fold the banana leaf of a pastele, her mother gestured to the expanse of the quiet side street. “Do you really think Tito is going to believe that you—a big-shot junior partner—just happened to be wandering around this neighborhood at nine thirty in the morning?”
“The biggest fair in Williamsburg is six blocks from here. Lots of people are here. How is this weird?”
“For starters, you haven’t taken a Saturday off in seven years.”
She flinched. “He doesn’t know that.”
“And why would he think that you’ve changed from when he last knew you?”
“Because now that I’m a junior partner, I can take a day off now and again. And so, we just happened to be so close to this café, and I remember it had killer cappuccinos, and there we go—a perfectly viable excuse—”
“For hunting down an old boyfriend.”
Marta tried very hard not to sigh. She wasn’t really hunting. She was just engineering a casual meeting. Gauging the situation. Seeing if there might still be a spark with the man she now knew she should never have let go. She would have much preferred to have Wendy or Dhara or Kelly along on this adventure, but that was a no-go. If they even suspected she was contacting Tito, they’d plant her butt on the hot seat of an intervention. And with reason. She was clearly breaking at least two major rules: initiating a relationship before six months had passed and committing the same romantic mistake twice.
One Good Friend Deserves Another Page 11