It Takes Two

by Judith Arnold

  It took more than a single slab of granite. It took Will. But she wasn’t ready to share that information with Michael. She wasn’t even sure how reliable the information was. Will wasn’t going to be around much longer—and she sure as hell wasn’t going to be chipper once he left for Seattle.

  “I want to bounce an idea off you,” she told Michael as they dug into their sandwiches. “Rollie is conning Brogan’s Point with his phony cost estimate on his Town Hall proposal. I can’t confront him directly, because no one would believe me. They’d think I was just questioning his numbers because I wanted the commission.”

  “Which is true,” Michael pointed out.

  She conceded with a nod. “I was thinking, instead of attacking him, I could go positive. I could write something on the town’s Facebook page. A post about historical buildings in Brogan’s Point, their beauty and significance. The town has a lot of old buildings, some of which must be historically important. I visited this inn yesterday—the main building was probably close to a hundred years old. And there’s a restaurant, a kind of grungy-looking old warehouse on a wharf that’s been repurposed into a delicious seafood place with cheap prices. I had a lobster roll there that was fantastic. There are probably other buildings I could write about, too. Towns like Brogan’s Point always have lots of historical buildings.”

  “Okay—but what’s the point of your writing this post?”

  “To give voters something to think about when they’re standing in the voting booth, deciding whether to support my Town Hall renovation or vote for Rollie’s post-modern design. Thinking about all the beautiful historical buildings in town might make them more inclined to vote to save the Town Hall building, which is beautiful and historical.”

  “Are you allowed to post on the town’s page?” Michael asked.

  “It’s moderated, but I could submit something. If it’s upbeat and not political, I think they’d approve.”

  Contemplating the idea, Michael chewed his sandwich. Once he’d swallowed, he shrugged. “It’s worth a try. Do you have any photos of some of the other old buildings? Facebook loves pictures.”

  “Not yet. I was thinking I’d drive through town and snap some shots this afternoon.

  Michael nodded in approval. “What are you waiting for? Get to work.”

  She grinned. “As soon as I finish my lunch.”

  Once she’d polished off her sandwich, she donned her jacket, retrieved her digital camera from a desk drawer, and headed off to take photographs of old buildings in Brogan’s Point. She could take pictures with her phone, but the camera boasted a higher quality lens.

  Her first stop was the inn she’d visited with Will yesterday. The main building exuded charm, with its clapboard siding and wooden shutters, its peaked roof, and its broad front porch adorned with hanging plants and furnished with all those Adirondack chairs and rockers. She snapped several photos, then entered the building. She didn’t recognize the clerk behind the desk, but the woman appeared too old to have been a classmate of Will’s. “I’m wondering if I could ask someone a few questions about this building,” she said to the clerk. “I’m an architect interested in older buildings.”

  “Ask me about booking a reservation, and I could help you with that,” the clerk said amiably. “The building? All I can tell you is, it’s old enough to need constant repairs.”

  “Old enough to be beautiful,” Brianna pointed out. She didn’t know if the desk clerk lived in Brogan’s Point and would be voting on the Town Hall project. But if she was the sort of person who was exasperated by the maintenance older buildings required, she probably wouldn’t vote for Brianna’s proposal.

  She did agree with Brianna’s assessment of the building’s beauty, however. “I hope I’m as beautiful when I’m old,” she said with a grin. “Let me see if Monica is available. She’s the general manager, and her family owns the inn.”

  The woman punched a few buttons on her desk phone and spoke softly into it. After a minute, a pretty, dark-haired woman emerged from a back office and greeted Brianna with a smile. She appeared to be around thirty, but Brianna asked, anyway: “You wouldn’t by any chance be a former classmate of Will Naukonen’s, would you?”

  “Did he send you here?” Monica’s smile grew warmer. “Yes, he and I went to high school together. We were in the same American history class. He’d make funny faces and cause me to laugh, and then I’d wind up in trouble.” She chuckled at the memory. “What can I do for you?”

  A lot, as it turned out. Brianna asked her a few questions about the building, and Monica answered them. Brogan’s Point had been a fishing village from the days of its initial settling, back in the 17th century, she told Brianna, but at the turn of the twentieth century, it evolved into a resort community, home to the oceanfront retreats of wealthy Bostonians. The inn had been built in 1905. Monica told Brianna about the renovations that had taken place since then—a new wing, a new kitchen, the complete overhaul of the dining room, including the addition of broad windows to afford diners a water view. The roof had been replaced multiple times throughout the years, the elevator added in the 1930’s, the tennis courts and swimming pool in the ’50’s, and the private cottages in the ’60’s. “The wine cellar is part of the original building,” she concluded. “Of course, we updated the climate control system there, but it’s the original stone structure. Would you like to see it?”

  Brianna eagerly accepted the invitation. She and Monica descended the stairs and strolled down a well-lit hallway until Monica stopped in front of a door and unlocked it. They stepped into a chilly room walled in rough-hewn stones and filled with racks of wine. Brianna snapped a dozen photos.

  After thanking Monica, she drove to the town’s main fish market, multiple rows of stalls lining one of the town’s wharfs. The buildings were old and shabby and damp, filled with tables, most of them empty. “The ships come in around five a.m.,” a brawny worker in a thick canvas apron explained as he hosed down his table. “The chefs and restaurant guys are usually waiting for us, and they buy all the best stuff. By noon, everything’s gone.” The fish market, she learned, had been existence for at least a hundred and fifty years, although none of the stalls were that old.

  It didn’t matter to Brianna. What was important was that the institution itself had existed for so long. It represented tradition. It would be perfect for her Facebook post.

  She visited several other antiquated buildings in town, including the restaurant where she and Will had feasted on lobster rolls the evening they’d met. She took pictures, took notes, asked questions. The last building she visited was the Town Hall. Although she had plenty of photos of the building, she snapped a few more.

  Steering down Atlantic Avenue, weary yet pleased that she’d come up with a strategy to battle Rollie and, she hoped, win support for her proposal, she spotted a familiar narrow road up ahead. Faulk Street. She wondered how old the tavern was. The building didn’t strike her as one that might predate World War II, but it did have that classic jukebox. Surely any town that venerated a jukebox like that ought to venerate its equally classic Town Hall building.

  She found a parking space on Atlantic Avenue and ambled up the side street to the tavern’s entrance. She didn’t really expect to see Will working there—it was four in the afternoon and the place was nearly empty. But his mother was behind the bar, slicing lemons. Since she owned the place, she was the person Brianna ought to talk to about the building’s historical significance, if any.

  She crossed the empty dance floor and smiled as she approached the bar. “Chardonnay?” Will’s mother asked.

  Brianna was impressed that she could remember what Brianna had ordered two nights ago. Then again, maybe that kind of memory was a skill good bartenders required.

  She wondered what his mother would say if she knew Brianna had spent last night in her house, sleeping with Will in his narrow childhood bed. The memory made her cheeks grow warm. “No wine, thanks,”
she said, relieved that her voice emerged smoothly. “I just wanted to ask you about this building.”

  Will’s mother resumed slicing lemons, her knife clicking gently against the wooden cutting board. “What about it?”

  “Do you know how old it is?”

  “No idea. My husband bought the business about thirty-five years ago, but it had been around for a while before then. I honestly don’t know.”

  “The jukebox is pretty old.”

  Will’s mother paused her knife and glanced across the room at the jukebox. “Forties or fifties, somewhere around there. We tell people the jukebox was here and they built the bar around it. But that’s just a joke.”

  “People in town love the jukebox, though, don’t they?”

  “The folks who don’t get caught in its spell do,” she confirmed, then thought some more. “Maybe the folks who do get caught in its spell do, too. I don’t know.” She gave Brianna a hard stare. “What do you think?”

  Was she aware that Brianna had gotten caught in its spell? That hearing “It Takes Two” while Will was standing behind the bar had drawn them together in some inexplicable way?

  Before she could answer, a door behind the bar swung open and Will emerged. “Hey!” he shouted, his face brightening when he spotted Brianna. Ignoring his mother, he raced down the bar until he was standing directly across from her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Work, believe it or not,” she said. “How about you?”

  “Overhauling my mother’s inventory software.” He slung an arm around his mother. “That software you were using is an antique, Mom. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  “Lots of stuff here is antique,” she retorted, then flashed a smile at Brianna. “Like the jukebox, right?”

  “But not like you, Mom,” Will assured her. “You’re still young.”

  She flapped a dismissive hand at him and walked away with her bowl of sliced lemons.

  Will leaned across the bar, his face so close to Brianna’s that they could almost kiss—if his mother weren’t storing the lemon slices in a mini-fridge just a few feet from them. “Are you done for the day?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Brianna told him. She had an essay to write, and photographs to download. She added, with a sly smile, “I stopped by here only because I wanted to discuss something with your mother.”

  Will’s eyebrows shot up. He glanced at his mother, who shrugged. “She wanted to know the age of this building.”

  “Well, you’re here. Do you want something to drink? You could set up at a table and work here. It’s pretty quiet right now.” When she surveyed the nearly empty bar room and its array of available tables, he added, “We’ve got soft drinks, or coffee, or tea.”

  “Or Chardonnay,” Will’s mother reminded Brianna.

  “And we need to stock more non-oaky Chardonnays,” Will noted. “I’ve heard complaints.”

  “Really?” His mother arched her eyebrows, and Brianna couldn’t help noticing the resemblance between them. Not just their tall, athletic builds but their sharp jaws, their straight noses, their hazel eyes, and their nicely shaped eyebrows, but also their gestures, their facial expressions, the movements of those nicely shaped eyebrows.

  She didn’t want to intrude on their discussion of Chardonnays. Instead, she wandered over to the table where she’d sat the night she’d made her presentation at the town meeting, close to the jukebox, and pulled her tablet and camera from her tote. Digging deeper, she located her adapter and connected the two so she could download her photos. She opened the tablet on its keyboard folio and got to work.

  She wasn’t going to lie. Deception was Rollie’s forte, not hers. Better to be upfront with the citizens of Brogan’s Point, so they’d know they could trust her specs and numbers. I proposed renovating Brogan’s Point’s old Town Hall building, rather than building something new, she typed, because I was so taken by the esthetics of the building. Brogan’s Point is blessed with quite a few historical buildings that add so much character to the town. Did you know, for instance, that the fish market just off Atlantic Avenue is a hundred-fifty years old?

  Her fingers flew on the compact keyboard. She barely noticed when Will delivered a cup of herbal tea to her table, although she did notice when he gave her shoulder a private squeeze. They exchanged a quick, private smile before he hurried back to the bar to help his mother. The tavern began to fill up; a group of fishermen took up residence at one of the larger tables on the far side of the dance floor. Fortunately, they were too old to be rowdy. So were the silver-haired couple who wandered in and settled themselves in a booth halfway between her table and the bar.

  No one ventured over to the jukebox. Brianna could work while listening to music—to be sure, she’d relied on Bach concertos for background music when she’d created many of her designs in architecture school. But loud rock-and-roll would distract her, especially if it was some special song, one that cast a spell. Like “It Takes Two.”

  Her essay flowed easily. She always enjoyed thinking about buildings, what made them work, what gave them their appeal. When she finished, she emailed it, photos and all, to Michael and texted him to alert him that it was in his inbox and she would appreciate his opinion. While she waited for his response, she sipped her tea and watched Will.

  He moved gracefully behind the bar, pausing to talk to his mother and to the stocky younger man who seemed to do most of the heavy lifting—cartons containing bottles of liquor, trays containing glassware. Will pointed things out to them, laughed with them, filled two pitchers with beer for the fishermen and then mixed a drink in a shaker and poured it into a martini glass, a shimmering beverage the color of a sapphire, which he presented to his mother for a taste. She took a sip and did that eyebrow-raising thing.

  Brianna’s phone clicked and she checked her messages. “Nice,” Michael texted. “Good luck getting it on the FB page.” Michael was one of the least effusive people she knew. If he said “nice,” the essay must be really good.

  She texted back a thank-you, then opened Facebook on her tablet and found the Brogan’s Point page. She uploaded the essay, knowing it would have to be moderated before it went live—assuming it did go live. Another wait.

  She caught Will’s eye and pointed to her now-empty mug. He waltzed over to her table with a pot of hot water and a tea bag. “Does your mother usually enjoy a cocktail while she’s working?” she asked as he filled her cup with steaming water.

  “Never,” he said.

  “But you fixed her that blue drink.”

  “You’re spying on me,” he teased, then grew serious. “I’m trying to get her to expand her offerings. Non-oaky Chardonnay is the least of it. That was a deep blue sea martini. Blue curacao, vodka, pineapple juice. This is an ocean-front community. We should be serving deep blue sea martinis, don’t you think?”

  We, she noted. “Did your mother like it?”

  “She hated to admit it, but yeah, she did.” He seemed pleased, and a little smug. Deservedly so, Brianna decided. “She liked it better than the Dark-and-Stormy I fixed for her. The pineapple juice in the deep blue sea martini gives it a nice touch of sweetness.”

  “People in an ocean-front community would probably prefer to think about the deep blue sea than about dark storms.”

  “True.” He gave her shoulder another surreptitious squeeze. “Things are picking up here, but once the servers arrive, I should be able to escape and we can have dinner. What are you in the mood for?”

  She’d thought the dinner he prepared for her last night was delicious. But after fixing his mother’s software and filling in behind the bar, he might not be in the mood to cook. She would like to make dinner for him, although she suspected he was a better cook than she was, if his spaghetti and clam sauce was anything to judge by.

  “Anything is fine,” she said, and realized she meant it. As long as she was with him, the cuisine didn’t matter.

 
Chapter Fourteen

  Her write-up appeared on the Brogan’s Point Facebook page the next day. Will would have been surprised if he’d stumbled onto it accidentally—on the rare occasions he visited Facebook, he didn’t make a habit of checking out the Brogan’s Point page. But Brianna had texted him from her office around noon and told him to check it out.

  It cheered him, not so much because he cared about the history of the fish market or the Ocean Bluff Inn, but because he cared about Brianna. This was terrific publicity for her Town Hall proposal. That she was too classy to fight dirty with Davenport was just one more reason Will admired her.

  He’d needed cheering up. He’d received a dispiriting email from Craig that morning—probably sent last night, since Craig was with Gaurav at Pacific Dynamic out in Seattle, three hours behind the East Coast. But last night Will had been too busy making love with Brianna to bother to check his email. After she’d left his mother’s house—much too early again, but that seemed to be her habit—he’d caught up on his emails while he ate breakfast.

  He didn’t think Craig intended to bum him out. To be sure, Craig sounded as if he was trying to be enthusiastic about the project Pacific Dynamic had assigned him and Gaurav to oversee. It was that Pacific Dynamic had assigned them that Will found…well, not quite depressing, but close.

  When Will, Craig, and Gaurav had started out, they’d been three naïve, fearless friends with the ink still wet on their college diplomas. No one had assigned them anything. They’d had an idea, a workable concept, a product they’d believed in. They’d scrimped and scrounged and scraped by. They’d toiled through the weekends and pulled all-nighters. They’d had faith in what they were creating. It was theirs.

  Their faith hadn’t been misplaced. Pacific Dynamic had paid a hell of a lot of money to purchase their patents and their talent. The venture capital firm had been thrilled. Will and his partners had been even more thrilled. No more sleeping on lumpy futons and buying half-price bread a week past its sell-by date. No more sixteen-hour work days and hand-outs from their parents. They were rich.