Beach Town (15 page)

“The hell you say.” Vanessa nearly spat the words. “I'm sick to death of your regressive, antibusiness tactics. You're so terrified of progress coming to this burg, you can't see that the town is dying.” She gestured toward the street outside.

“Look around, Eb. More than half the buildings out there are empty. That casino building is crumbling even as you sit here with that big goofy grin on your face. You just turned down fifty thousand dollars in cold, hard cash. When's the last time anybody made the city an offer like that? You keep talking about preserving our community's heritage. I got news for you, buddy. There's nothing left to save. It's gone. What business in its right mind is going to come in here? Who's going to bring jobs that pay more than minimum wage?”

Eb shook his head impatiently. “Despite what you believe, Vanessa, we're not just sitting around, waiting for the casino to fall into the bay. We've had a feasibility study done, and right now we have three major grant proposals pending with the state and the Feds. That money will let us purchase and restore the casino for a community center that'll be worth ten times the money these film people are offering.”

“Pipe dreams!” Vanessa said, waving a dismissive hand.

“It's not a pipe dream,” he insisted. “We can restore the casino and redevelop the whole pier district, and that will bring in real growth and clean businesses that we can sustain.” He glanced over at Greer. “It's tempting to want to grab the quick buck, but that's happened way too often in Cypress Key. We believed the paper company when they said they were going to be good corporate citizens and do the responsible thing, and where did that leave us? Right where we are today.

“I know what you're up to here, Vanessa. These movie people think you're on their side, but they don't know you like I do. You'll sell this town and that casino out to the highest bidder in a heartbeat, and never look back.”

“You're forgetting one thing, Eb,” Vanessa said heatedly. “I still own the building, and I have no intentions of selling it. Not to the city, anyway.”

Eb took a sip of his beer. “I have two words for you, Vanessa. Think about them.” He held up two fingers of his right hand. “Eminent. Domain.”

Vanessa's eyes bulged. “Fuck you, Eb Thibadeaux!” She shoved her chair back from the table. “You think the city can just condemn my property and take it without a fight? Hell no.”

She tossed the last remaining drops of her martini into the mayor's face and stomped out of the dining room, with every eye in the room following her progress.

Greer handed Eb her linen napkin, and while he mopped his face with it she sighed and took another bite of her baked potato.

Eb eyed her curiously. “What about you? Don't you want to throw something at me? Maybe organize a lynch mob of your cohorts to come after me?”

Greer finished chewing and took another dainty sip of her martini. But it had lost its chill, and therefore its charm.

“Nope.”

“You agree with me?”

“Nope.” Greer reached over and snagged a spear of broccoli from the plate Vanessa had abandoned. “I still think you're dead wrong about the casino. But I can't figure out your motive in all this.”

“You think I have some kind of ulterior motive?” he asked, obviously amused.

“Everybody has an ulterior motive,” Greer said.

“What's yours?”

She chewed and thought, then dabbed her napkin to her lips.

“Me? My motives are pretty transparent. I want to get this movie made. I want
Beach Town
to be such a huge success that I'll never have to look for work again.”

Eb sat back in his chair. “That's all you care about? Work? Getting this movie made, and then the next and the next?”

“You make it sound like I don't have a life,” Greer protested.

“Do you?”

“I love my work, okay? But I have a life. I have friends.”

“What do you do for fun?” Eb asked.

“I make movies. I love what I do. I love films, and despite all the craziness involved, I love making them.”

“Seriously. If you had a day off, right now, today, how would you spend it?”

She shrugged. “Today? I guess I'd go hang out at the beach. I like being on the water. Or I might meet CeeJay for lunch, maybe hit the Rose Bowl Flea Market, if the timing's right. Or I might just catch a movie.”

“CeeJay. Is that your boyfriend?”

“My best friend. Short for Claudia Jean. She's a hair and makeup artist, and she's actually here, working on
Beach Town.
”

“And what do you buy at this flea market?”

She considered him. “Old stuff. I like midcentury California art pottery. CeeJay buys girly stuff like compacts and sterling silver hair brushes.”

“So you actually go to the movies—even though you're in the business?”

The question took her by surprise. “Of course. Why else would I be in the business, if I didn't love movies? You ask a lot of questions, don't you?”

“I'm interested in you,” Eb said.

“Why? I'm not that fascinating.”

“Sure you are. You're cute, you're smart, you have an interesting job. And you don't back down easily. I don't meet a lot of women like that around here.”

“You do realize I can't be charmed out of doing my job, right? And my job is locking down the casino for the film, so that we can blow it up in a few weeks.”

Greer took another sip of the martini, then pushed it away and grimaced.

He noticed. “You want something else to drink?” He turned and waved the waitress over.

“I'll have another beer. You like red wine?” he asked, looking over at her nearly empty plate. “Burgundy? Merlot? I'm a little hesitant ordering wine for a California girl. What would you like?”

“I'm no wine snob,” Greer assured him. “Maybe just a glass of ros
é
? I actually shouldn't have anything else to drink. We've got an early call.”

When the waitress returned with their drinks, Greer decided to turn the tables on him.

“Okay, I told you my motives. Now you tell me yours. You're obviously an educated guy. You've got some business savvy, owning a motel and the grocery store and that boatyard. I know you're the mayor and this is your hometown and all, but what the hell are you doing here in the middle of nowhere?”

He threw his head back and laughed that laugh again. It was a good laugh. Not phony. Not ironic. Nothing held back. You didn't hear a lot of laughs like that in her line of work.

“You don't beat around the bush, do you? Not exactly a very Southern way to phrase a question,” Ebb said.

‘I'm not Southern.”

“I'm here because … I want to be, I guess,” Eb said soberly. “Fifteen years ago, if you'd told me I'd be living in Cypress Key again, doing what I'm doing, I would have laughed my ass off.”

“So … this is all an accident?” she asked.

“Not really. I did move away after college. I went to engineering school on a scholarship from the paper company, got an MBA for lack of a better idea, then kicked around the country for a while. I worked in Texas, California, the Cayman Islands. I spent the longest winter of my life in Buffalo.” He shivered.

“And then you ended up right back where you started,” Greer said. “Why?”

“One of my early mentors at the paper company called and offered me too much money to ignore. I was freezing my ass off in Buffalo, and Florida sounded pretty good right then.”

“Even if it was Cypress Key, Florida?”

“Jared had just gotten arrested,” he said quietly. “My father hadn't been diagnosed with Alzheimer's at that point, but it was pretty obvious to my mom that he was slipping. So I came home.”

He spun the beer bottle on the tabletop. “The company gave me all kinds of vague descriptions of what my job would entail, but when I'd been back here for three months they let me in on what I was really hired to do.”

“Which was?”

“Get the plant ready to close down. I was supposed to quietly start making arrangements to sell off the equipment, slow down production from three shifts to one, get rid of the most expensive employees—anybody over the age of forty-five, women, like that.”

“That must have been brutal.”

“I'm a coward,” Eb said. “I couldn't do it. I quit.”

“I wouldn't call that cowardly,” Greer said. “You did stay around to help your family, right?”

“As much as I could. I'd always lived pretty lean, so I bought out my dad's interest in the Silver Sands, thinking I could help Ginny make a go of it.”

“You haven't mentioned a wife or a girlfriend in any of this,” Greer said flippantly. “What happened? Did she get fed up and split?”

“Not exactly. She died.”

Greer clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh my God. I didn't know. I'm so sorry.…”

“Not your fault,” Eb said. “It was a long time ago.” He looked down at his watch. “Come to think of it, in August it will be ten years.”

“Wow. She must have been so young.…” Greer's voice trailed off.

“She was only twenty-seven. Breast cancer. Sarah was diagnosed right after we got back from our honeymoon. It was already stage two. She had surgery, chemo, radiation. Drug trials. We were up and down. Three years after she found the lump, she was gone.”

“My mom died of breast cancer, two months ago,” Greer said quietly. “I guess, in a way, she was lucky. By the time they discovered it, the cancer had metastasized. It was too late for chemo or radiation, or any of it.” Greer blinked back unexpected tears for a woman she'd never met, and for Lise, who'd been so alive. Until, suddenly, she wasn't. “That is just so…”

“Tragic,” Eb said. He took another drink of beer. “Really, really tragic. And sucky. For Sarah. And your mom.”

He gazed at her over the rim of the beer bottle. “What about you? No time for men in your life?”

“Not currently,” Greer said.

“Currently? That implies there was somebody, recently?”

“Why do I feel like I'm being interrogated here?” Greer asked.

“You haven't answered my question,” Eb reminded her.

“I was in a … relationship. But that's been over for a while now. It's not easy to date in my line of work. I travel all the time, and most of the men I meet are in the business. It's easy to hook up with somebody when you're all working so intensely on a film. You're thrown together for what feels like twenty-four hours a day. And then the movie wraps and everybody moves on to the next show. I'll admit, I did that, back when I was a newbie. But I found out fast it's not for me.”

Greer stared down into her wineglass. “Lise used to say my relationships were always doomed because I saw too many movies. Like, real-life men could never measure up to the heroes in movies.”

“No Prince Charming, huh?”

“I'm not looking for a prince. Actually, I'm not looking, period.”

“Your last ‘relationship,'” he said, making finger quotes. “Was the guy in the movies?”

Greer shook her head. “You just don't give up, do you? Okay, he was a lawyer. We met through work. He was older, and he seemed more mature than most of the men I've dated, which was refreshing.”

“But it's not refreshing anymore?”

“No,” she said succinctly. “Look, it's getting late, and I have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at four a.m.” She looked around the room and motioned for the waitress to bring her check.

Eb waited while she settled her tab. “Can I walk you back to the hotel?”

“Four blocks? Sure.”

*   *   *

They stood in the restaurant's doorway, looking down the street. Rain pelted the roof of the tin awning, and the wind whipped the palm trees lining Pine Street. The temperature had dropped dramatically, too. Greer folded her bare arms across her chest and shivered.

“You didn't happen to bring an umbrella, did you?” Eb asked.

“The storm had let up by the time I walked over to city hall.” She shifted her stance and a stream of rainwater ran down her neck.

“Dammit,” she muttered, stepping sideways.

“I can borrow an umbrella from the restaurant,” he offered.

“It's not that. If this weather keeps up, we won't be able to shoot in the morning. We've got all the beach scenes to do, and we can't do that in a storm.”

“I can't do anything about the weather, but we could go back to my place to wait out the rain if you want.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Your place? You don't live at the motel, like Ginny?”

“Nope. Got my own pied-
à
-terre, just two doors down.” He jerked his thumb toward the right. Toward the Hometown Market.

“You live at the grocery store? For real? What department? Frozen foods?”

“I live above the store, on the second floor.” He turned around and took a few paces, walking backwards. “Don't you want to see?”

 

17

Greer stood in the Inn's doorway, watching Eb Thibadeaux go splashing down the covered sidewalk, momentarily paralyzed by indecision. It was after ten, and she had to be back at work in five hours. But the idea of being closed up in her dank motel room, with the wheezy air conditioner, alone again on a rainy night like this, was just too depressing to contemplate.

“Hey, wait up,” she called. Eb turned around, and as he stood under the streetlight she saw his broad, easy smile. He was beaming.

Totally beaming. Ear to ear. Had any man ever smiled at her like that before?

*   *   *

Eb had the grocery store door unlocked by time she caught up to him. He flipped a switch and the overhead fluorescents lit up the market.

“Right this way,” he said, directing her toward the back of the store, down the cereal aisle, and around the seafood cooler. She stepped around a long, stainless steel worktable and dodged a stack of waxed cardboard boxes, nearly slipping on the damp tile floor.