By the Bay (27 page)

Jillian didn’t know why she wasn’t more glad to be home.  Kansas and Aunt Dorothea’s family had been good to her, but Port Isabel was where she’d lived all her life and most of the time she’d been gone she’d suffered from a vague sense of homesickness.

She’d had a good job and a nice young man was courting her, but this urgent summons home had not been entirely unwelcome. A dependable job wasn’t always available here, but she could always work as a waitress for Uncle
Owen
and Aunt
Florence
if she had to. And as for Stanley, her boyfriend in Kansas, he was pushing for a more serious commitment and though everybody in the family thought she should get married and have a family, she wasn’t so sure.

A little break from Stanley and Kansas was just what she needed to think things through.

She’d been glad to see Mother, Auntie and
Owen
, her closest family, but now that Auntie and
Owen
had gone back to their apartment and Mom was in bed, she was glad to have a little time to herself.

She crept carefully down to the bay, conscious that with a war on, watchers were all around her. The coast guard station was looking out for any possibilities o
f
saboteurs
sneaking on land or subs waiting out in the Gulf for prey.

She wasn’t really afraid. She figured they were too insignificant here to draw much attention from foreign enemies and anyway, war was a distant and unreal thing to her. It was only something she read about in the history books she studied in order to enhance her teaching skills.

The night was dark with a bare sliver of a moon and she breathed in familiar, tropical air and relaxed a little. This was where she was from. This was where she belonged. And she had reason to be grateful that Mom wasn't
sick as she’d feared.
Aunt
Florence
was downright annoyed, in fact, that a neighbor, concerned about Christine Blake’s state of health, had summoned her home.

But then Auntie, who was more like a second mother than an aunt, always worried about Jillian. She said she never had a chance to live her own life because of her mother’s health problems. She pushed Jillian to get out into the larger world and meet exciting men.

Jillian allowed a slight smile to cross her lips at the thought. Maybe she was just too picky. Aunt Dorothea in Kansas said she was lucky to have a fine young man like Stanley interested in her. And it was an extra perk that Stanley was exempt from service as the only man in his family able to keep their substantial farms operating. And America badly needed the Kansas wheat.

She didn’t know what was
wrong
with her. She wasn’t happy there in Kansas, nor was she happy back home here in Texas. Maybe she was just doomed to discontent.

But she looked out now over the darkened bay and felt the most awful sense of loss. She had a hole in her heart and didn’t even know why. She longed for something that would give life meaning and didn’t know what that could be.

She missed someone she’d never met. Everything within her reached out for something that wasn’t there.

How ridiculous! What was
wrong
with her that she couldn’t be content with those things that made others happy? Why did she have to wish for the moon, forever beyond her reach.

She turned away from the dark water that seemed to beckon her to an unknown possibility, and headed back toward the cottage and a good night’s sleep.

Chapter Thirty
Eight

Philippe sat quietly, sipping his drink and listening to his friends argue. Jean and Pierre, enraged, were determined to leave the New Orleans area and find a new port for the privateers, taking their booty and their famil
ies
with them.

Philippe couldn’t blame them. After playing a vital part in defeating the British,
Lafitte
and his followers had been treated somewhat cavalierly by the Americans. Apparently a buccaneer was all right when you desperately needed his help, but not really necessary as a neighbor, or deserving of fair treatment when it came to settling up matters of wealth.

Jean’s idea of fair and that of the American leaders was not in agreement. Now he was talking of sailing off for some other port on the coast to make their home.

Philippe didn’t much care. He wasn’t certain what he wanted to do anyway. Somehow in the last few months he’d developed a
strong
distaste for the trade in slaves that was such a p
rofitable part of the privateer
s
’
business. Strangely enough, he’d begun to see things from the slave’s point of view
since he’d been tended by
Randolph
at the prison camp
and that was a most
un
comfortable
way to look at things.

From now on he would conduct his business differently, would  follow his own path wherever it might lead him. Much as his past had been anchored to the
Lafitte
s, now his future beckoned open and inviting
before him.

When they asked his opinion, he refused to give it, saying each man must choose his own way. Pierre asked anxiously if he was sick. Those had been bad wounds he’d sustained during the battle. Jean’s handsome face displayed a grin as he asked if Philippe was lovelorn.

Somehow that question struck a chord that danced along his bones. That was how he felt, as though he’d lost at love. But there had been no special woman in his life and he was not romantic. He liked women, but they came and went in his privateer’s existence, leaving little in the way of memory for him to fret over.

After the others had gone on to other entertainments, he went about the business of seeing that Belle Fleur was provisioned for a long voyage and, individually and in groups, talking to his men about his change in plans. Those who did not wish to join him would no doubt be welcomed on other ships.

Within two days, he left behind the Louisiana coast with its beauties and dangers and headed out for unknown adventures, the flag of Categ
ena
flying bravely overhead.

For once the beginning of a new voyage did not stir his blood, he felt lonely and empty. Perhaps there would never be more to his life than this. Something was missing and he didn’t know what it was.

Goodness knows they needed help at the café with all the extra  people in town at the coast guard station, but
Florence
couldn’t be happy to see her niece working as a waitress again the way she had all through her high school and college years. She’d been eager and ambitious back then, expecting that great things lay ahead. Now she’d come back from her two years in Kansas drained and almost sick-looking. It was as though she’d experienced some great loss and
Florence
suspected a failed love affair, but when she talked to her sister in Kansas, she got no such report. She said several young man had tried to court Jillian and she’d seemed to really like one of them, a promising young farmer. And she’d been a well-
respected
and successful teacher. Then when she got the call from a Port Isabel friend that her mother wasn’t doing well, she’d simply dumped everything and headed home.

She couldn’t help feeling that Christine’s demands on the girl were unhealthy for both of them. She simply had to let go and allow Jillian to build her own life.

They’d given
Owen
a rare day off and he
was
out with
R
amon
while
Florence
did the cooking and Jillian and another waitress served customers.

When the lunch crowd cleared out and only a table of coffee drinkers was left in the dining room, she ordered Jillian to take a break and joined her at the table in back that was reserved for staff and family.

She poured coffee for both of them and then sank wearily into her chair. “I’m getting too old for this.”

Jillian smiled. “You’re not old, Auntie.”

“Guess not, but I’m not young either.”

Jillian stirred cream into her coffee and then added sugar. Usually she drank it black and
Florence
wondered if she was just killing time. “I hear you left a beau back there?”

Jillian looked startled, her blue eyes wide. She blinked, seeming to try to take something in. “I can almost remember his name,” she whispered.

“Stanley,”
Florence
interjected hurriedly. “That’s what Dorothea said.” She couldn’t help being alarmed at the way her niece was acting. She didn’t want her going down the same road her mother had traveled, a once sound and healthy girl turning into such a troubled woman.

“Oh, Stanley,” Jillian dismissed him with a laugh. “A nice boy, but only a boy, but there was this man . . .” a voice died away and she seemed lost in thought.

“A man?” Nervously
Florence
tried to jar her back into reality. “There is someone else.”

Dreamily Jillian stirred her coffee. “Not really. It must have been a d
r
eam, something I almost remember.” She looked up at her aunt. “Do you ever have dreams like that where it seems to linger in the back of your mind and you can’t quite catch it. It’s like when you get a song stuck in your head and go around humming it all day without intending to.

“You dreamed about a man?”

A smile drifted across Jillian’s face, fading slowly. Her eyes were half closed and the hand stirring her coffee stilled.
“He’s so different from anyone I ever met and he makes me feel so . . .so. . .”

Her words broke off and she looked up into her aunt’s face and her fair skin blushed a deep red.

“One of those kinds of dreams, eh?”
Florence
said knowingly.

“It’s made me feel like there’s something I want so badly
that I
can’t quite reach or remember.” Finally she sipped her coffee and made a face.
Florence
got up, dumped the coffee in the sink, and came back to pour a fresh cup from the pot.

“Auntie,” she said, “when you were young, did you feel like this, so all mixed up and strange?”

Florence
grinned at her. “Honey, I still feel all mixed up and strange. It’s not so different after all. Oh, I don’t go running around leading the wild life I did back then. You should have seen me, I was a flapper and the cutest thing you’ve seen, if I do say so myself. I can still dance the jitterbug, though my bones ache the next day.”

“I’ve seen pictures. You had quite a flair. I’ll bet the guys were all crazy for you. Did you love him?”

This time
Florence
was the one to look down at her own coffee cup. “Who do you mean?”

“Your husband, of course.”

“I cared for somebody else and he was killed. Guess I was trying to fill the gap he left and married too soon afterwards. For us, the marriage didn’t stand up to the test when the going got hard.” This was the closest she could come to talking about the tragedy of her life. “But over the years, my definition of love has changed some.”

Jillian stared at her. “You mean
Owen
? But he’s so much older, so much . . .”

“It’s what’s inside that counts, honey, and its more than sex that makes it last.”

Jillian was her mother’s daughter and sometimes Christine could be really mealy-mouthed.
Florence
guessed from the look on her face that she wasn’t used to anybody
of her mother’s generation
talking about sex.

Jillian closed her eyes. “I can almost remember,” she whispered. She got up and went back to work and
Florence
, shaken by the conversation, waited until
Owen
came back to join her in the kitchen where they both worked and went into his arms.

“
Owen
,” she whispered against his shirt. “We are so lucky that we found each other.”

Jillian missed going down to the bay near the cottage, but now she walked in the other direction, exploring the town and she hardly ever went out after dark. Reports of sub sightings, legitimate or imaginary, were too frequent to be casually dismissed.

She was also kept away by the knowledge of the coast guard watchers. Even when she couldn’t see them, she knew they were there and that every step she took was observed.

Her school friends who occasionally came into the café were much caught up in talk of the war. Several of them were married now and even had small children and their husbands were away fighting. They tried to act brave, but she sensed the fear underneath that any day bad news would come. Hard as their lives were, she almost envied them. At least they had someone to care about and she was lonely, so lonely.

Mother seemed better these days and Jillian almost dared to hope that day after day she was getting well. After years of hope continually dashed as Christine’s grip on reality went out and came in, much like the tide
lapping
in on the Gulf side of the island, she was afraid to be too optimistic. And yet it was good to see some peaceful days in her life.