Coast Road (14 page)

"No need for you to do that, " Jack said now. Ben Wolfe was too tepid for Rachel. He would never challenge her spirit, would never want to wallow in sweat and sex and oils. He was too neat, too pale. Nothing he did in bed would match what Jack had done.

Feeling dominant, he said, "I'll take a look. Got a business card? " Minutes later, he had one in his hand. "I'll let you know what I find.

" WHAT JACK found were photographs. He came across them that evening�after cleaning up the remnants of pizza, calling Hope's teacher to beg for help with the picnic, spending two hours at his laptop and another grappling with design problems faxed to him from Boca�when, too tired to face Rachel's studio, he settled for searching her drawers.

Cindy Winston had suggested that she might be more comfortable in familiar clothes, certainly the girls would be more comfortable seeing her in them. Given the obstacle of the cast, a nightgown made sense.

Propriety wasn't an issue. Rachel's nightgowns were prim affairs. She had always been into warm flannel things, claiming that San Francisco nights were too damp to go without when she was alone in a too-big bed.

Her double bed in Big Sur was small compared to the king they had shared, and it was covered by the kind of thick goosedown comforter that he had never allowed her to buy lest he roast, and even then, her drawer was filled with neck-to-ankle gowns.

He had to hand it to her, though. They were vivid. He chose a purple one, a turquoise one, and a chartreuse one, and was debating about one that was poppy red, pushing it aside to see what was left, when he found the frames. They were facedown, seven frames covering the entire bottom of the drawer, familiar to him even after all this time, even from behind.

He turned over the largest first. It was in the kind of elaborate gold frame that only Rachel's mother would buy and that Rachel had always kept to remind her of that. Inside, extravagantly double-matted, was the formal picture taken at their wedding, of bride and groom standing dead center, flanked by two sets of happy parents. Jack and Rachel had both hated this picture. They had seen it as the perpetuation of a myth�bride and groom looking all done up and unlike themselves, with smiling parents who rarely smiled in real life.

Their engagement picture was better, but what a fight they'd had over that. It was totally casual, totally them�and totally unlike what Rachel's mother had wanted for the newspapers, but they had held out.

He touched it now, the simple wood frame onto which Rachel had shellacked bright foils and decorative paper. Seventeen years younger, their faces were vibrant, defiant, happy as only the innocent could be.

Rachel hadn't changed much, he decided. When he had seen her six weeks before, she had looked every bit as vibrant, defiant, and freckled.

And he? Not much change in height, weight. His hair �pecan, as in the nut, Rachel used to say�had gone from tan to weathered, and he had crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes. The face he saw in the mirror each morning was broader, more mature, with a distinct worry line between the brows, an occupational hazard.

And the other pictures? Saving the smallest for last, he turned over four of him, taken by Rachel at various times, in various places. He had been happy. That showed in each print. He assumed she had kept these four for the sole purpose of leaving them lying facedown, buried deep.

But there was one more. It was his favorite. Feeling a catch deep inside, he turned it up. He hadn't missed it at first, had been so consumed by anger after Rachel's departure that he had only wanted things around him that were new. In time he went searching through the cartons in his attic. So. She'd had it all along. } Framed in a rustic stone frame, the photo was one that Rachel had snapped a year before the divorce. It showed the girls and him tumbling together in the tiny yard behind their Pacific Heights home, with Rachel behind the lens but so clearly involved in the scene that she might have been its subject. A tangle of arms and legs there might be, but three pairs of eyes, three smiles, three laughing faces were looking straight at Rachel with varying amounts of daring and love.

Jack had always treasured that picture. In the days that followed Rachel's taking it, when he felt increasingly distanced from her, it had said that�bottom line�things were all right.

Then Rachel had left, and the whole thing had seemed even more a myth than the pomp and circumstance of their wedding.

Setting the little stone frame carefully back in the drawer, he followed it with the four pictures of him and the engagement picture, but when it came to putting the wedding picture in place, he couldn't.

That one didn't fit. It was the bad apple in the bunch. He couldn't help but think it contaminated the others.

Bent on burying it alone and as far from the others as possible, he opened the very bottom drawer�and felt a hard knocking in his chest.

After a long minute, he moved his hand over a collage of fine lace, silk, cotton damask, even gingham, and was suddenly back in time to early evening in a warm Tucson apartment more than sixteen years before.

The apartment was larger than his old place. Since he had his degree and a new job, they could afford it. They had moved in the week before.

Jack returned from work to find Rachel in the spare bedroom that was supposed to have been a studio. With the wedding barely a week oflf, it had become a repository for daily deliveries. The latest gifts, still boxed, were nearly lost in a sea of empty cartons, torn paper, and discarded ribbon.

Rachel was a golden figure sitting at a long table in the midst of the mess. Her hair was in a thick ponytail, her freckles were bright, her face, arms, and throat were tanned amber above a lemon yellow tank top.

She was working at a sewing machine, so intent with the whirring start and stop, the shift of levers and turn of fabric, that she didn't see him at first. The surface of the table was covered with pieces of fabric, predominantly whites and ivories, a few pale green or blue.

He couldn't imagine what she was doing. Victoria had refused to let her make her wedding gown, and she had already made curtains for the rest of the apartment. Curious, he came closer.

She looked up and broke into a smile, then held up her arms and tipped her head back for a kiss when he came over her from behind.

"What are you making? " he asked, thinking that she was adorable upside down.

"A shower quilt."

"For rainy days? " "Not rain showers. Wedding showers." He took a better look at the fabrics then, from what was in the machine to what was already sewn to the pieces in line. "Oh my God.

Isn't that lace from the tablecloth your mom's Irish connection sent?

" I "Not sent, " Rachel said, clearly delighted. "Brought. To my shower." The shower had been in New York the month before. Knowing how lavish it would be, Rachel had attended only under duress. Her greatest joy was in returning home empty-handed after instructing her mother to keep the gifts for herself. Not only had Victoria sent every last one to Tucson, but, to add insult to injury, Jack and Rachel had then had to move the whole lot of them from their old apartment to this one.

A shower quilt. Jack's eye returned to the pieces of fabric with greater insight. Among them, he saw now, were bits from peignoir sets, satin sheets, table linen, aprons.

"She insisted I needed them, " Rachel said, still looking up at him backward. "Do I ever wear silk nighties? No! Do I use fancy tablecloths?

No! Do I want to sleep on sheets that have to be ironed? No, no, no.

A quilt is far more practical."

"Do you know how expensive these things are? " Jack asked, but distractedly. Even all these years later, what he remembered first about that moment was the view into Rachel's tank top.

"I know exactly how expensive they are. Mom told me. That's why I'm so pleased to have put them to good use rather than let it all sit in boxes and drawers unused." When Jack tore his eyes from her breasts long enough to look again at what she'd done, he had to agree. There was skilled hand stitching as well as machine stitching, in the kind of creative arrangement of fabric that only someone with Rachel's eye could achieve�and several different levels of poetic justice. Not only was there the sheer cost of the materials, and the fact that Rachel wouldn't be using these things as Victoria wanted, but there was the fact that Victoria hated it when Rachel sewed. She had taught Rachel to sew, herself, but she believed that they had outgrown the need to make their own clothes when Rachel's father came into his first money, a decade before.

"She'll die when she sees this, " he warned.

Rachel shook her head, more serious now. "She won't ever see it.

She's not coming out here, Jack. This isn't where she wants me to be living, so she'll ignore the fact that I live here."

"And that hurts.

" "Not as much as it used to." The smile returned. "Not since I found you." She often said things like that, little things that made him feel loved, and she was right. It did help ease the hurt. He kissed her long and deep, and might have gone on forever if he hadn't worried about her neck, bent back this way. Ending the kiss, he framed her head for support. "For that, I'll help with shower thank-you notes."

"No need. They're all done." Her smile grew wry. "My conscience drew the line. I couldn't take a scissors to these things until I'd done that." She raised both brows. "But you can do some of the notes from my wedding list."

"I already am, " he protested.

Their initial deal had been for each to write notes for gifts coming from his or her own side. Then Keats gifts began outnumbering McGill gifts twelve to one, and he had taken pity on her. Spotting several unopened cartons, stacked and rising from the maelstrom, he sighed.

"More today. Are you sure you know what's where? " She lowered her arms and looked around. "Exactly. These are in piles."

"I don't see any piles."

"You're not looking at them the right way. Everything here"� her hand slashed the center of the room and swung left�"is duly acknowledged.

Everything here"�her hand went the other way� "needs notes. And among these on the right"�she started pointing clockwise�"we have silver, gold, glass, fabric, and unclassified, as in disgusting." Jack saw something emerging from the disgusting pile and agreed. It was either an ornate lamp, a humongous candlestick, or something he had yet to make acquaintance with.

Rachel's arms came up again. She tipped his head forward to meet hers tipping back. Her throat was delicate and sleek, he thought. Stroking it, he felt her voice.

"Invite half the world, " she said, "half the world sends gifts. Does half the world care what we want? No. We registered for plenty of stuff that we wanted, but half the world knows better. Do we want these things, Jack? No. Are they us? No! So not only do we write gracious thank-you notes to half the world, but we have to find a place to put this stuff." Jack wasn't putting it anywhere. "Make that, find a place to dump this stuff."

"I wanted it all done before we left. I wanted this to be ourplace when we got back. So, why am I sewing a quilt instead of attacking this mess? " He knew precisely why she was doing it.

"The answer, " she said, grinning, "is that since we're leaving for New York the day after tomorrow and I don't have a chance in hell of getting everything acknowledged and cleaned up and put away or dumped, I might as well have some fun." At the slightest urging of her fingers, he lowered his head and kissed her again.

Her voice was more mellow when he let her up for air. "Whose wedding is this, Jack? " "Ours. Ours. We agreed on that. What happens on the outside isn't what we'll be thinking and feeling on the inside.

You love me, don't you? " "I do, I do."

"Madly and passionately."

"Quite."

"Then look at it this way. We're doing our own thing about where and how we live, so we can cut your mother some slack here. But this does it. Evens the score. Our good deed is done. No more compromise. No more guilt."

"No more guilt."

"No more guilt."

"Okay." HAD IT BEEN Up to Rachel, they would have eloped. Looking back now, Jack wondered if it would have made a difference, perhaps gotten them off on a better foot.

But Victoria Keats had had her heart set on giving her only child the dream wedding she had never had herself, and Eunice McGill, of a no-name town a forlorn hour's drive from Eugene, Oregon, in her delight to be able to throw one son's success in her stern husband's face with impunity, had gone right along.

Both women were widows now. Eunice never called Jack. She waited for Jack to call her, then criticized him for not calling sooner. Victoria did call from time to time under the guise of being worried about Rachel, but if she was, it was one small, back-burner worry in a corporate executive's life. What she wanted was a reconciliation.

Marriages didn't fall apart in her family. Her friends could be on their second or third, but her daughter's marriage was sound. Jack had a feeling she hadn't told any of those friends about the divorce.

Corporate headquarters were in Manhattan. Victoria wouldn't have them anywhere else. Nor would she think of living anywhere but on the Upper East Side. She loved the ambiance, the glitz, the cost. Jack didn't know her number offhand, but he knew it would be in Rachel's book.