by Vicki Grant
“So are your parents here?” I wanted to know about the man with the missing leg. I had a feeling it would be the type of story I’d like.
“They split up when I was six. Mum lives in Toronto now. I’ve got a half sister I see as much as I can. Stacy. Ten. Really cute. That’s where I was coming from when I saw you at the station.”
“And your dad? He’s here?”
“When he’s sober.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-oh. Pity alert!” He made a sound like an air-raid siren.
“Stop,” I said, my hands over my ears.
“Okay, then you stop with the sad eyes. I don’t get to drive a Caddy—or wear kitten heels—but I got nothing to complain about. Dad had a bad war. He’s not a bad guy.” He shrugged, took a gulp. “You’d like him. Everyone does. Even my mother, despite everything.”
I stared at the foam on my cocoa. A bad war. The coat. A moment of panic, then…no. Couldn’t be. Caretakers aren’t cashmere types.
“What about your family?” he said.
“Oh, well…” I scratched at a loose thread on one of the badges.
“I sense a reluctance to discuss.”
“Nothing much to discuss.” My biggest lie yet.
“Okay. Let me guess. Based on what I know—good-looking mother, good-looking car—I’m thinking your father is what? A doctor?”
He brought his head down low and turned his face up to mine so I couldn’t avoid him. “Lawyer? Businessman?”
“Something like that,” I said. My father had a cashmere coat and a sterling silver spoon with a crest on it. Not an unreasonable assumption.
“Hmm. Just vague enough to be intriguing. Any brothers?”
“No.” I couldn’t even fake that one. Ninety percent of what I knew about boys I’d learned from Eddie.
“Sisters?”
“Yup.”
“How many?”
He wouldn’t believe me. “A lot.”
“Man, you’re a tough interview. One mother, one father who may or may not be a businessman—leading me, of course, to assume he’s a gangster of some type—no brothers (you’re quite adamant about that, which for some reason I find suspicious too) and an indeterminate number of sisters. There’s a story here, I’m sure of it.”
I was giggling into my neck again and hating myself for it.
“I’m right, aren’t I? Oh, wait.” Eddie hopped up and disappeared into the kitchen. Turned up the radio. Ran back in. “I love this song. C’mon. Let’s dance.”
He took the cocoa out of my hand, put it on the table, pulled me up.
“No.” I’d stopped giggling. I’d only ever danced with Sara.
“C’mon. You shy? No one’s going to see. I’ll close my eyes.” He did, and then he moved my hands back and forth to the music, singing loudly, off-key, “I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and. I wanna hold your hand. C’mon! How can you not dance to the Beatles?”
“I can’t.”
“Anyone can dance. Even my dad—and he’s a one-legged drunk. C’mon. The song’s almost over.”
“I can’t. These—these shorts are too big.”
I sat down. He let go of my hand.
“That’s your problem?”
“Yes.” No.
“Well, I can fix that.” He rummaged through his pockets. “Coming from your side of the tracks, you may not be aware of this, but there are certain things the lowly handyman always has upon his person. A jackknife, a dog biscuit, in case Rover doesn’t remember him from the last time he unclogged the drains, and…ah, here it is…the ever-popular all-purpose piece of string.”
He took a little bundle of twine out of his pocket. He pulled me up, took my hands and held them out at my sides like I was going to perform a swan dive.
“This won’t hurt a bit.” He threaded the twine through my belt loops. He leaned his head over my shoulder to do the back ones, and his shirt touched one side of my face and then the other side as he followed it around. When he finished, he pulled the ends of the string back and forth until they were even. It made my hips wiggle.
“Well, look at that,” he said. “Didn’t know you could do the Twist. And what’s this now?” He pulled the string from side to side. “Looks like the rumba to me. Who said you can’t dance?”
The song ended, and he gave me a fake scowl. “You made me miss the whole thing.” He pulled the string tight and tied it in a bow.
I started to sit down—relieved—but then “Let It Be Me” by Betty Everett came on. Eddie grabbed my hand again, and then I was up and his arm was around my back. No eighteen inches of safe space between us this time. It was a slow dance. He danced me around the coffee table and into the middle of the room. My legs were like logs, my hands sticky as raw pork chops.
“Oh. Um. Look.” I bent away from him. “The rain’s stopped. I better go.”
He leaned in to look at me, to figure out what I was saying and why. I slipped my hand out of his. He was smiling but not really.
“I’ll get my stuff,” I said.
He took me home.
Eight
EDDIEEDDIEEDDIEEddieEddieEddieEddieEddieEddie.
The sewing machine was driving me crazy. It kept chugging out his name, and I didn’t want to be reminded of him or the way he drove the boat or crinkled his eyes when he laughed or did that thing with his face when I said I wanted to go. I didn’t want to be reminded of how I’d made a fool of myself. I just wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened.
The phone rang. Mrs. Smees picked it up, huffed, sighed, slammed it back down.
“Dot. I need you to take these up to the reading room. Now.”
She shoved a stack of linen at me. “Tell Mr. Oliphant next time he decides to host a ladies’ tea at the last goldarn minute to get his own girls to pick up the tablecloths. You’ve got better things to do than to be running around for him.”
I had no idea where the reading room was. Somewhere upstairs, I figured. The man at the front desk would know.
I went to the main floor and started down the hall toward the foyer. Just as I got to the kitchen, a waitress—the redhead I’d seen the day I arrived—came around the corner from the other direction. Her face was turned away. She was talking to someone behind her.
“You’re terrible!” Voice sliding up and down like a kazoo.
I dove behind a big metal dish cart and saw Eddie take her arm, whisper something in her ear. Her eyes went big, then small, and then she stepped into the kitchen, shaking her head and laughing.
“I’m not kidding, Janice!” But he clearly was. He waited until the door swung shut behind her before turning and heading into the dining room, still chuckling.
I couldn’t help myself. I followed him in.
It was almost two o’clock. Only a few people were still there, sipping their tea, picking at their desserts. Eddie had his back to me. I didn’t know where I was going or what I’d do when I got there, but I kept inching toward him, a puppy tailing its first squirrel.
He stopped to talk to a guest, and I hustled over to the buffet table like I had business there. I turned back just in time to see him step out the patio door. I waited for a count of five, then walked over to the window to see where he was going.
He was halfway down the stairs, shoulders in shadow, hair lit up like a proceed-with-caution light. He looked back as if someone had just called his name. I stepped away before he could see me and bumped into something.
A man howled. Chairs scraped. A dish clattered to the floor. People craned to look. I ticked around, slowly, slowly, teeth clenched, not wanting to find out what disaster I’d caused.
A man was standing behind me. His hands were out to his sides, and his mouth was wide open as if he’d just hit the final note of his opening number, but his eyes were nuts. Wisps of steam rose off his chest. His white shirt was drenched in coffee. We took each other in for a few seconds, then he went, “You. Why. You.”
I couldn’t move. A waitress raced over with
a handful of napkins and blotted the man’s shirt. Another man—tall, dark hair, blue-black shadow where his whiskers would be—was suddenly there too, patting his shoulder, telling him to calm down, telling the waitress everything was fine.
“What? Did you see her? Look!” the first man said, but the second one just shrugged.
“It’s only coffee, Len. These things happen.”
Mr. Oliphant bustled up, snapping his fingers at his staff. Someone appeared with a mop, and he huddled with the two men, whispering apologies about the new girl, not a waitress at all but a seamstress—didn’t know why she was even here. He’d see that appropriate measures were taken to ensure this type of thing didn’t occur again. He managed to say all that and still find time to shoot me a look over his shoulder that said, Go somewhere and die.
I scuttled away with the bundle of tablecloths in my arms and devastation on my face. The red-haired waitress was there now and doing her best to deal with both.
“Relax,” she said. “That’s Leonard Peters. He goes bananas all the time,” and I didn’t hate her quite so much for laughing with Eddie. She even promised to take the tablecloths to the reading room for me.
I went back downstairs and stood outside the housekeeper’s office. I was going to lose my job. That’s what Mr. Oliphant meant by appropriate measures. I could hear Mrs. Smees laughing inside. This was exactly the type of thing that would make her day.
I said a short prayer and pushed open the door. Eddie was sitting on a filing cabinet, folding a napkin into a swan and grinning.
“Dot. We’ve had a request for your services.” Mrs. Smees almost smiled at me. “Miss Cameron has a sewing problem and asked to borrow you for the afternoon. Edward, here, promises to return you in the same condition I’m lending you in.”
Eddie jumped off the filing cabinet and grabbed my arm. “Hurry,” he said, “before the spell wears off,” and Mrs. Smees actually laughed at that too.
Nine
WE CUT ACROSS the beach and behind some cabins, then turned onto Cameron Lane.
I waited for Eddie to make some comment about the dining room incident, but he didn’t. He didn’t mention Sunday either, so maybe (maybe, maybe, please, maybe) it wasn’t that bad. He was his normal, cheery self.
“So who’s this Miss Cameron?” I said, trying my best to sound normal too.
“Cameron Farm Equipment?”
I shook my head.
“You really aren’t from around here, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Well, here’s everything you need to know about Buckminster. We’ve got lots of fancy guests who come for the summer, but there are only four families from town who count. The Camerons, who own the factory. The Adairs, who own the resort. The Andersons, who own the newspaper. And the McGuires.”
“What do they own?”
“The still. They’re the bootleggers.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Those are our VIPs. Anyone else who lives in Buckminster is just a townie. Even Muriel accepts that. So when Miss Cameron needs mending done—or when the guy who looks after her property and takes her to the Arms for lunch twice a week thinks she needs mending done—Muriel is more than happy to make paid staff available.”
“What does she need me to do?”
“I’m sure we’ll find something.”
Miss Cameron’s cottage was called Birchdale, and looked like it would be full of ghosts or vampires or at least the type of butler who’d sprinkle arsenic on your crumpets if you weren’t careful. It was a big brown wooden building three stories high, with a turret, stained-glass windows and a covered verandah. Some cottage.
I expected Miss Cameron to be one of those pretty young women I saw around the resort, who wore pearls even when they played tennis, but I was way off. Miss Cameron was the old lady in the turban I’d seen Eddie helping up the stairs the other day.
She was sitting in a wicker chair on the porch, a cat in her lap, an easel in front of her. I was close enough to see the brushstrokes on the picture she was painting before she noticed us.
“Eddie!” she said, or maybe crowed is a better word. Her voice was rough and cracked, but she smiled like a girl when she saw him. “What a marvelous surprise!”
I’d never seen anyone wear so much makeup. She looked like Cleopatra at eighty.
“You’re painting roses?” he said.
She gave an elaborate shrug. “I know. Like an old lady. Can’t get around anymore. I’m stuck painting whatever’s at hand. Next thing I’ll be doing portraits of the plumbing fixtures. Which, come to think of it, might not be a bad idea.”
Eddie kissed her cheek and scratched her cat before introducing me. “I brought my friend Dot to see about that torn slipcover in the pink bedroom.”
“Which pink bedroom?”
“Third floor? Toward the front?”
“That’s pink now?” She slapped the side of her face. The sapphire in her ring was the size of a small potato. “Anything above the main floor is a foreign country to me these days. Well, why, sure. Go take a look. When you come back, though, mind getting me some”—she fiddled with an earring—“tea? Should be a bottle in the dining room if Frieda hasn’t gone and hidden it again.”
Miss Cameron raised her eyebrows. Eddie wagged his finger. She pouted. He sighed, then nodded. She smiled at me. “Isn’t he adorable?”
“Don’t feel obliged to respond,” Eddie said. “Unless, of course, you can’t help yourself.”
The house was dark and full of old-fashioned furniture, but the walls were plastered with paintings. Some you’d expect in a place like this—pictures of bouquets and sailboats and cranky-looking old men with beards like cartoon explosions—but the others? Portraits with noses where foreheads should be, raggedy drawings of animal skeletons, great big pictures that looked like someone had splashed the paint on with a mop. I’d never seen anything like them.
“Wow,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Wow.”
“She did all these?”
“Most of them—except the old guys in the gold frames and some paintings by her students.”
I stopped on the landing and looked at a portrait of a young girl who glared back as if she’d just caught me stealing.
“Guess who that is,” Eddie said.
“Haven’t a clue.”
“Ida.”
“Ida? From the cafeteria? Why would she paint Ida?”
“Miss Cameron used to give art lessons to local girls. Ida must have posed for her while she was here.”
“Is Ida a good artist?”
He lowered his chin and looked at me. “You’ve had her meatloaf. What do you think the chances are?”
The paintings trailed off the higher up we went. By the third floor, the walls were almost bare. Eddie opened the door to a room in the turret and ushered me inside.
“I thought you said it was the pink bedroom.”
He shrugged. “Close enough.”
The room was definitely blue. Once upon a time, a little girl must have slept here. The bedspread was flounced, the wallpaper covered in lilies. A china doll sat straight-legged and blank-eyed on the dresser.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Eddie sat on the bed and patted the coverlet like sit down.
I went red. He popped off the bed. “Oops. Sorry. Shouldn’t have done that.” Now he was red too. “The whole reason I brought you here was to say sorry. About yesterday. I didn’t mean to scare you off.”
I opened my mouth as if I might actually have a response.
“You don’t have to say anything. I just wasn’t sure you’d want to see me again, given, you know, the way things ended. I thought if Muriel ordered you to go and you had a chance to witness how nice I am to old people and animals, you’d, like…”
He tilted his head.
“I’d, like, what?”
“I don’t know. Realize how perfectly respectable I can be when I’m on my best behavior.”
I willed my
self not to chew on my lip.
“You did notice how I was nice to old people and animals, didn’t you?”
I shook my head, laughed a little.
“Oh, come on! I patted the cat. Kissed Miss Cameron. And as soon as we’re done here, I intend to smuggle her bottle of rye past the World’s Meanest Nurse.”
“That’s nice?”
“Sure is. You’d want a drink too if you had to live with the Hyena. She makes Muriel look like Tinker Bell.” He was leaning against a little yellow dressing table, back in his element. “You don’t believe me.”
“Yeah, well, you thought I looked like Catwoman.”
“I just calls ’em as I sees ’em.”
“And a toad.”
“I said you had toad-like qualities. There’s a big difference. I also said how much I like toads. You just don’t know a compliment when you hear one.”
I walked over to the window, looked down on the big green yard and tried to give the impression I’d flirted with lots of guys. My heart thumped away like a crazy person hurling himself at a locked door.
“Okay then.” Eddie clapped his hands. “So, what could you fix around here? Wouldn’t want Muriel thinking I lured you away under false pretenses.”
“Even though you did.”
“’Specially because I did. And no doubt will again, given the opportunity.”
I wandered around the room, picking up this and that, trying not to sweat out loud. “Nothing needs fixing that I can see.” I flipped over a cushion. “The trim’s a bit loose here, but not much I can do about that at the moment. I didn’t bring my sewing stuff.”
“I, however, am always prepared.” He pulled a little sewing kit out of his pocket. “As you know, I’m a Scout.”
He took my hand.
“And a perfect gentleman.” He leaned down and kissed it, his lips dry, a little scratchy. “Or, at least, will make every attempt to be.”
He picked a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit off the bookshelf and settled into the side chair. “Now I’m going to catch up on my reading while you get your work done.”