by Amy Pershing
“There was a study done in Britain a few years ago,” I was saying, “where they found that almost a third of primary school children thought cheese was made from plants. . . .”
“Jenny taped me?” I asked. Well, screeched really.
“Shut up and watch,” Krista said.
The camera pulled away from my face, and there was Mr. Logan and me, coffee mugs in hand, laughing and talking about food. It was a video, and I never wanted to see myself on a video again in my life. But it wasn’t so bad. At least at the end I didn’t cut anyone’s finger off.
“So what do you think?” Krista asked. Like you care what I think. “Jenny brought it by earlier, after she’d edited it a little.”
What I thought was I didn’t like where this was going. I didn’t like it at all. My face may have reflected my thoughts. It usually does. Krista was looking just a teeny, tiny bit uncertain.
“Jenny thought maybe I might want to run it as a sidebar video to the story in the online edition,” Krista said. That’s right, pin it on Jenny.
“Absolutely not,” I said. Or maybe screeched. “I will never, ever, ever again be a part of an online video in any way, shape, or form.” Tell us how you really feel, Sam.
“I get it,” Krista said. “Once burned, twice shy. But this isn’t YouTube. It’s not going out into the big, bad interwebs. It’s nothing controversial. In fact, it’s really good. Short, funny, informative. You’ve got to admit, Jenny’s good, right?”
Still playing the Jenny card. But it was working. I nodded reluctantly.
“I called Mr. Logan,” Krista said. “He liked the idea, gave me permission to run it. Said we’d be doing him a great favor.”
Oh, jeez, now play the Mr. Logan card why don’t you?
“And you look terrific,” Krista lied. “Those cheekbones, those sparkly eyes. And those great earrings. They could be your trademark.” Cheekbones? Sparkly eyes? Trademark? “Anybody who sees this is going to see the real you—charming, knowledgeable, an expert in her field. Also strikingly attractive, what with being so tall and all, like a model.”
My mother once told me that if you want someone on your side, compliment them. Extravagantly. “In my experience,” she had said, “you cannot flatter people too much.”
I knew this, and yet I fell for it. “An expert in her field.” Not a woman without a job. “Tall like a model.” Not oversized like a giraffe.
“And think what it would do for Jenny’s self-confidence . . .”
Again. Unfair. What was I supposed to say to that?
I nodded slowly.
This was all the okay Krista needed. “Great,” she said. “We’ll run the story and the video clip as the first in the series.”
I should have known there would be more.
“What series?” I asked dully.
“‘The Cape Cod Foodie’ series,” Krista explained patiently, like I should have known. “A twice-monthly feature article and accompanying video on food, where it comes from, new trends—that kind of thing. Starring you.”
“Oh, that series,” I said with a heavy sarcasm that Krista chose not to hear.
“You can maybe do Miles’s farm next. He’s great talking about all that organic crap.”
Krista existed on a diet of microwave popcorn and black-and-white cookies from the Sunoco Ready Mart. She couldn’t care less about organic. But she knew a good story when she saw one.
And I have to admit, I was hooked. There is nothing in the world I like more than talking about food. Where it’s grown. How it’s grown. How it’s used and how it’s misused. What’s real food and what isn’t. How it’s cooked, and how it should be cooked. Food encompasses all the really important things—family, community, creativity, health, politics, the environment, even sex. (Yes, sex. Case in point, the famous scene in the movie Tom Jones, where Tom and Mrs. Waters go through five courses of what can only be called foreplay. Never has eating a pear been so hot.)
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll give it a try.”
Somehow, I’d completely forgotten about my job offer from Plum and Pear.
TWENTY-TWO
Thursday morning dawned clear and brisk. Even Grumpy was happy and started up at the first try. I was still a little pissed off at Jason. I was looking forward to meeting Trey for breakfast at Nellie’s Kitchen. I thought it would be nice if someone started treating me like the charming, terrific-looking, tall-like-a-model eye candy I apparently was.
Toward that end, I was wearing a floaty dress—a very short floaty dress—platform espadrilles and eye makeup. I hadn’t applied eye makeup since my marriage went down the toilet. That my mascara hadn’t dried up in the tube I took as a sign. A sign that I should flirt with Trey Gorman.
With admirable foresight, I remembered to remove my ratty fleece jacket before I pushed open the door to Nellie’s Kitchen. I could have sworn Trey gulped when he saw me come into the diner dressed more for cocktails than pancakes. He had been sitting at the Formica counter drinking a cup of black coffee and looking at some official-looking papers but stood up abruptly at my entrance, shoving the materials into his brown accordion file.
“Wow, you look great!”
I looked down at my outfit as if to say “What this old thing?” “Thanks,” I said breezily, batting my mascara at him. “You look great, too.”
Which was true. He was wearing a pair of pretty darn tight jeans and a crisp white cotton shirt casually rolled up at the cuffs. My eyes somehow got snagged on the golden hair on his forearms, and I had to pull them away like reluctant toddlers in front of an ice cream store.
“I’m starving,” I announced, plopping myself down on the red pleather seat of the stool next to his.
“I’m starving, too,” Trey said meaningfully. It was a good line. The problem was I’d never much gone for guys with good lines. Uh-oh. What had I gotten myself into?
I ordered a nice big stack of banana and walnut pancakes with bacon on the side. Trey ordered an egg white omelet.
“That’s what you eat when you’re starving?” I asked, dabbing at the melted butter and maple syrup dripping down my chin with a paper napkin manifestly inadequate for the job.
“I don’t know if you remember,” he said, smiling that charming smile of his, “but I was a fat little boy.”
“No,” I protested. “Not fat. Plump, maybe.”
“Whatever,” he said. “When I started boarding school, I was teased like crazy. So I decided I’d never be called Porky again. Without my mother force-feeding me, it was pretty easy. Skip the carbs, stick to lean protein and vegetables. And I started working out. By the end of sophomore year, I’d lost twenty pounds and had a six-pack.”
Do not think about his six-pack, Sam. “And that’s still your routine? Just lean protein and veggies?”
He nodded. “No red meat, no dairy, no carbs, no sugar.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to someone for whom food was the enemy. Food was my friend. What do you turn to when you can’t turn to a grilled cheese sandwich?
“Well, good,” I said finally. “That leaves more for me.”
He laughed, and I was struck again by how white his teeth were against the golden tan of his face. To distract myself, I turned back to the bacon that had been playing second fiddle to the pancakes. When I’d finished tucking into every food group that Trey couldn’t or wouldn’t eat and when he’d finished his teeny tiny bites of what I didn’t even consider sustenance, we looked at each other solemnly.
“Jack Sprat and his wife,” he said, shaking his head in mock sadness. “Surely we can think of something we both like.” Another line. I tugged down the hem of my very short skirt, which Trey was looking at suggestively. I had changed my mind about the whole flirting thing.
“We both like sailing,” I reminded him. Sailing was a nice, neutral topic.
“T
rue,” he said. “The best hours of my childhood were spent on the Milagro, my grandmother’s Wianno Senior.” For once there was no doubting his sincerity. And I totally got it. There is no boat more lovely than a Wianno, with its graceful lines and old-school, gaff-rigged sail. For goodness, sake, John F. Kennedy had sailed a Wianno Senior.
“Does she still have it?”
“Well, in a way,” he said. “She wanted to give it up a few years ago, but I bought it from her, had it completely reno’d—all new paint, new sails, the brightwork stripped and revarnished, the works.” Okay, so he hadn’t done the work himself, which was a strike against him. But he loved the boat, which made up for a lot.
And I was frankly jealous. My parents had sold their modest eighteen-foot Baybird (named the Nellie Bly in honor of the first woman investigative journalist) when they’d defected to the Sunshine State, so I was landlocked. And Trey had a twenty-five-foot classic wooden boat that he could use whenever he wanted.
“Is she in the water now?” I asked, not even bothering to hide the longing in my voice.
“She is,” he said, his eyes dancing. “You want to take her out for a spin?”
“What, now?”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, I’m not dressed for it.”
“So, how long will it take you to dress for it?”
I stopped to think about this. Not how long it would take me to dress for a sail (about five minutes to scrub my face clean and put on an old pair of jeans and a flannel shirt), but whether this was actually a good idea. I really hadn’t enjoyed flirting with Trey. He was a little too self-absorbed and finicky for my taste. I knew enough of his history not to blame him for it. We all carry family baggage. I’d been lucky that mine was lighter than most. But maybe we could be friends. And besides, I hadn’t been sailing in years. I yearned for the feel of a boat leaning into the wind, the sight of a taut, white sail against a blue sky.
“About five minutes,” I finally said.
“Great,” Trey said, “I’ll meet you at the yacht club in fifteen.”
* * *
* * *
There is not a lot of time for flirtatiousness when sailing a rather large boat on a rather windy day on some rather tricky waters. I was glad about that. Which isn’t to say that the sail wasn’t fun. It was delirious fun. The Milagro was perfection—she seemed as happy to be slicing through the water, sails flying, as we were. Trey took the tiller, and I was kept busy trimming the unfamiliar mainsail and jib. The brisk breeze meant a lot of hiking out, that is, leaning back over the water on the side of the boat that the wind was coming over to hold the boat on a fairly even keel.
So we didn’t talk a lot, but there were moments, skimming along like a bird, the wind in our faces, when we just looked at each other and laughed in common delight.
“That was great, Trey,” I said as we made the Milagro shipshape again back at her mooring. “I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.” Actually, you had fun on Tuesday, a little voice in my head said. With Jason. I ignored it and continued coiling the mainsheet neatly. “I really owe you.”
I swear I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean I actually owed him anything. I believe absolutely that when a man asks a woman out on a date (or for a sail), she owes him nothing more than the pleasure of her company. And if the man assumes otherwise, she owes him not even that.
But Trey assumed otherwise.
“That’s easy to repay,” he said, leaning toward me.
This was not what I wanted.
“Hey, whoa, fella,” I said, trying to keep things light while at the same time backing up a few inches. But there is not a whole lot of backing-up room on a sailboat. I’m not sure what would have transpired next, if the wake from a motorboat speeding by hadn’t violently rocked the Milagro. Trey and I tumbled onto the floor of the cockpit in an awkward tangle of arms and legs.
As I scrambled to my feet, I muttered, “This is a no-wake zone, moron,” and looked to see who the moron was. And as the Harbor Patrol Grady-White roared by, Jason Captiva looked back, and he and I locked gazes. It was just for a moment, though it felt like an eternity. And then he turned away and was gone.
Trey hoisted himself up and gave me a rueful smile. “Sorry about that,” he said. “You just looked so fine.”
You just looked so fine. Is there a woman in the world who doesn’t like to hear that? But I could still see the Grady-White over Trey’s shoulder. Time to change the subject again.
“Can I help with that?” I asked and without waiting grabbed the sail bag holding the jib that Trey had decided was a little threadbare and needed to be replaced. “You have enough to carry.”
This was true. Trey had also lumbered himself with the boat’s cabin cushions, which he said smelled moldy and needed to be aired. They’d smelled fine to me. I was beginning to wonder if he spent his entire life with his father’s voice in his head telling him that nothing he did or had was good enough.
We tossed the cushions and the sail bag into the pram and rowed back to the yacht club’s dock. In front of us loomed the clubhouse—if you can call a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion built by the first governor of Massachusetts a clubhouse. A silver-haired gentleman was standing on the bluestone terrace waving at Trey to come over. Trey looked torn.
I nodded at the cushions and sail bag and said, “I’ll take this stuff to your car. You go see what he wants.”
“Thanks. I really should go say hello. He’s an old friend of my father’s.” He lifted his shoulders helplessly. “And a prospective investor in Skaket Acres.”
“Go,” I said. “I can throw these in your car before I leave. Just give me your keys and I’ll drop them at the club desk when I’m done.”
For a moment, Trey looked conflicted. What did he think, I was going to untidy his precious car? But his future investor was beginning to look just a little impatient and finally Trey seemed to come to a decision. He shrugged and tossed the car keys to me. Which I missed, of course. Why do men do that?
“Thanks,” he said as I bent to pick up the keys off the dock. “It’s the black Lexus SUV. Just toss it all in the back.”
I wouldn’t know a Lexus if it bit me. As far as I am concerned, cars are just boxes on wheels. Except for red ones, of course. But I found the SUV easily enough. In a sea of shiny cars, Trey’s was the shiniest. I knew enough about Trey now not to “just toss” anything of his into anything of his. I beeped open the back hatch and carefully wedged the cushions and sail bag in next to a clear plastic box containing neat stacks of brochures and blueprints for Skaket Acres.
Which was kind of surprising. If Trey had all these promotional materials, why had he taken away the brochures he’d shared with Krista, saying he didn’t have extras?
I shook my head. None of your business, Sam. But as I was beginning to close the hatchback, I spotted something else. On top of the plastic box was the brown accordion file folder that Trey had brought with him to Aunt Ida’s and that he had been looking through at Nellie’s Kitchen. It was the old-fashioned kind that you close by winding a string around a cardboard button on the front. I might not have noticed it except that it had a few papers and notebooks spilling out haphazardly, which wasn’t like Trey. Apparently he had been too startled by my appearance at the lunch counter to close it properly. I leaned back in to tidy up the papers and notebooks and close the file properly.
No, not notebooks. A notebook. I picked it up. And not just any notebook. My mother’s reporter’s notebook.
TWENTY-THREE
Let me get this straight,” Krista said, speaking slowly and carefully, as if to a child, and pointing to the steno pad lying open on the desk between us. “You stole this from Trey Gorman’s car.”
“No,” I said slowly and carefully, as if to a child. “I did not steal it from Trey Gorman’s car. Trey Gorman stole it from my house.�
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We were sitting in Krista’s office. I’d taken the notebook, given Trey’s keys to the club receptionist and then driven Grumpy straight to the Clarion. I wasn’t ready to talk to Trey about what I’d found. I needed some time to think, someone to help me figure out what was going on. My mind was awhirl.
“Or,” Krista said, “he accidentally picked it up when he was gathering up his materials.”
“But he had it with him when I met him at Nellie’s Kitchen. Why didn’t he tell me then, give it back then?”
“Maybe because you were coming on to him and he was a little distracted?”
I gave her a little “okay maybe” sideways nod. I wished I hadn’t told her that part.
“But why did he even take those materials back from you?” I countered. “He has literally dozens of brochures and plans in his car. I saw them. He took the blueprint and the brochure to hide the fact that he was taking the notebook, too.”
“But why?” Krista asked wearily. “Why take the notebook?”
“He could see the dates on the front. He wanted to know what was in it.”
Krista didn’t say anything, just gave me a long, considering look.
I didn’t blame her for not understanding why I was so worked up. So Trey had had my mother’s notebook? So what? So he had forgotten to tell me about it, was that so surprising? Not really.
But here’s the thing. I knew for certain that I had shut the notebook before setting it down on the table when Trey had arrived at my door. What was surprising was that when I found it in Trey’s car, the pages had been flipped back open to a page of notes my mother had scribbled down a few weeks before my father’s heart attack.
I handed Krista the notebook.
“When I found it in Trey’s car, it was opened to this entry,” I said, pointing to the page in front of her. “Read that.”
The entry read:
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