Holding Hands (3 page)

“
I just wanted to tell you,
Charlie said he’d love to meet you. I was thinking maybe you could
come over next weekend. This weekend is no good—we’re going on a
trip to the casino down in Connecticut on Saturday, and Sunday is
Evelyn’s eightieth birthday party. I told you her kids are planning
a big thing, catered and everything, right? I bought her this cute
little vase. She loves dust-collectors. Don’t ask me why, but she
does.”

“
That’s nice, Mom, and I’d
like to meet Charlie, too. But next weekend is no good for me.
Scott and I are going away.” She eyed Scott as she said this. He
shot her a lethal look, then shook his head and resumed eating. “I
really can’t talk,” she said again. “I’ll call you back later,
okay?”

“
Okay. Do you think I did
the right thing getting that vase for Evelyn? It’s pretty, but
maybe she’s already got enough dust-collectors.”

“
I’ll call you back,”
Meredith said firmly, then hung up. She moved back to the table,
slumped in her chair and stared at Scott. “Do you really not want
to go away with me?” she asked, unable to disguise the quiver in
her voice. Suddenly she was not just worried about the state of her
marriage. She was scared. Maybe he
was
having an affair with Caitlin. Or
some other student. Or a whole bunch of them. Why else would he be
so angry about this trip?

“
It’s not that I don’t want
to go away with you,” he said, his tone thick with forced patience.
“But you made this plan without even asking me. The start of the
term is a crazy time. I’m teaching three classes and an independent
study this semester, I’m working on the new book, I’m supposed to
present a paper at the APSA conference, I’ve got a shitload of
proposals to review for the governor, and you go and book a weekend
getaway. You should have checked with me first.”

“
If I had, you would have
said no.”

His gaze met hers. She remembered the first
night she’d met him, at that noisy, crowded frat party. She
remembered the thumping music, the floor sticky with spilled beer,
the throngs dancing and shrieking and drinking...and the tall,
dark-haired boy who’d magically materialized in front of her and
smiled. His eyes had riveted her then, and they riveted her now,
even thought they were shimmering with anger.

“
I would have said no,” he
agreed.

So much for spontaneity. “Well, I’ve already
paid for the cabin,” she informed him. “If you don’t want to go
with me, I’ll take Skippy.” Or she’d pass the reservation along to
her mother and Charlie. They could spend the weekend in a cozy,
romantic cabin, holding hands. Or whatever.

She dropped her gaze to her own plate,
regarding the eclectic array of food and realizing that swallowing
would be impossible when she had a lump of tears the size of a
tennis ball lodged in her throat. Silently, she nudged her plate
away, pushed back her chair and walked to the mudroom to fetch
Skippy’s leash. Unaware of the tension simmering between her and
Scott, Skippy bounded into the kitchen, panting in near
ecstasy.

Without a word, she clipped the leash onto
his collar and left the house. She needed to walk. She needed to
weep. And she needed to get away from Scott.

Chapter
Three

HE DIDN’T GET HOME until after five. She’d
worked only a half-day herself, come home, packed her bag—including
the frothy lace teddy she’d bought to wear that night—and delivered
Skippy, his leash, his food and water bowls and a ten-pound bag of
kibble to her neighbor across the street. Then she’d paced, Googled
the directions to Cindy’s inn in West Dennis and paced some more,
waiting for Scott and wondering whether this excursion would save
her marriage.

At least he’d agreed to make the trip with
her. Begrudgingly, resentfully, but she would not be going alone.
“I’m bringing my laptop with me,” he’d warned. “I really don’t have
time for this stupid trip. I’ve got too much work to do.”

Fine. He could work all day if he wanted. At
night, she’d don the teddy. Maybe he would finally notice that
there was thirty-four pounds less of her than there had been two
years ago. Maybe he’d take one look at her in that skimpy little
garment and forget about all the work he had to do. Maybe he’d
remember why he’d fallen in love with her.

Maybe she’d remember why she’d fallen in love
with him, too. Because ever since he’d reacted so negatively to
this surprise trip, she’d been questioning whether her marriage was
truly worth saving.

She felt a frisson of something—excitement?
anxiety? dread?—when she heard the rumble of his motorized garage
door opening, signaling his arrival home. He shouted a quick hello
as he sprinted through the kitchen, heading for the stairs. “Gotta
pack,” he shouted over his shoulder.

Excitement, she decided. Late as he was, he
was willing to rush through whatever he had to do to speed their
departure. She followed him upstairs and watched as he tossed a
pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt and sneakers into his
overnight bag, added his toiletries and zipped the bag shut.
Fortunately, he could dress casually for work. She didn’t have to
wait for him to change from a suit into more comfortable clothes.
His khakis, oxford shirt and mocs were fine for traveling. “We’re
eating dinner when we get there, right?” he asked as they hurried
down the stairs.

“
The drive shouldn’t take
more than an hour and a half,” she estimated. “There isn’t going to
be much beach traffic this time of year. But if you want to bring
along a snack—”

“
Nah.” He grabbed his
lap-top bag from the kitchen table, where he’d tossed it before
racing upstairs. “You’ll have to drive. I want to get a little work
done on the way.”

“
No problem.” Bags stashed
in the trunk, they settled into her car and she backed out of the
garage, feeling hopeful about this trip for the first time since
she’d suggested it.

Her hope sprang a tiny leak when the first
fat raindrops struck the windshield about a half hour into the
drive. Scott hadn’t spoken much during that first half hour; other
than blaming a tedious department meeting that afternoon for
delaying him. “If you miss a department meeting, you wind up
getting named to a committee or volunteered for some other
obligation. No way could I skip it,” he said. “When it was finally
over, I returned to my office to lock up and there was a student
waiting for me there. She needed to discuss her midterm
project.”

Caitlin?
Meredith wondered, though she didn’t dare to ask. To mention
Caitlin’s name would be to admit she’d read Scott’s email. Besides,
Caitlin was likely only one of many pretty undergraduate girls
who
really
needed
to see him and were willing to come whenever he wanted them
to.

Don’t think about it,
Meredith cautioned herself.

Less than a minute later, the glowering sky
burst open, a deluge of rain slowing the traffic, and she couldn’t
think of anything but inching along the clogged highway, which
quickly wound up submerged beneath an inch of water. Raindrops
pounded the car’s roof, producing a hectic drumbeat, and she
switched her windshield wipers to high-speed.

The clamor of the rain prompted Scott to
glance up from his laptop screen. “Where did all this traffic come
from?” he muttered.

“
The rain is slowing things
down.”

“
Yeah, but all these cars?
Why isn’t everyone driving to the mountains to look at the
leaves?”

Maybe they’d all had the same idea as
Meredith. Maybe each car held a couple whose marriage was at risk
of unraveling, and they were all cruising to Cape Cod to mend the
fraying fabric of their love.

“
This is why I hate the
Cape,” Scott continued, gesturing at the stream of red brake-lights
glowing ahead of them. “The back-ups are always a
nightmare.”

“
You don’t hate the Cape.
You just hate the traffic,” Meredith argued. “And I’m driving.
Relax.”

He sighed. “At this rate, we’ll be eating
dinner at midnight.”

“
We’ll survive.”

He turned his attention back to his computer.
The tapping of his fingers against the keys was drowned out by the
percussion of the rain splashing against the car and bubbling into
the puddles and rivulets washing the highway. The traffic crept.
The sky darkened from dismal to apocalyptic. After a while,
Meredith spotted the lights illuminating bridge that crossed the
Cape Cod Canal, a looming silhouette of steel girders in the
distance, black against the stormy purple sky. She opened her mouth
to point out to Scott that they were making progress, but when she
glanced at him he was scowling at his laptop screen, engrossed in
his work. She remained silent.

It took another forty-five minutes to travel
from where she’d first seen the bridge until her car finally rolled
onto it.

More rain on the other side. Harder,
wind-whipped rain. The weather forecast on last night’s local news
had predicted a storm out in the ocean that might nip the eastern
end of the cape. Evidently the meteorologist had tracked it wrong.
It had engulfed the entire cape, and it was no mere nip. It was a
huge, gluttonous chomp.

The dashboard clock read 8:30.

Due to the storm, the traffic continued to
ooze along, slower than sludge. She sat unmoving for fifteen
minutes while the vehicles in front of her eased around a small
scrub pine that the wind had knocked over and deposited onto the
road. Through it all, Scott’s attention remained on his laptop, his
face barely illuminated by the glow from the monitor.

She was tired. Driving in such wretched
weather wore her out, and the rhythmic clicking of the windshield
wipers was giving her a headache. But she wouldn’t complain. This
getaway had been her idea, after all.

Scott probably didn’t even think their
marriage was in trouble. If he did, he probably didn’t care. But
she cared, and that was why they were here right now, crawling
along the flooded Mid-Cape Highway, heading toward their marriage’s
salvation or doom.

It was well past nine when she finally exited
the highway. Rain continued to descend from the sky at a rate that
made her think about building an ark and rounding up some animals.
She hydroplaned a few times on the route south, slowed her speed,
veered around fallen branches. Given the storm’s intensity, she
assured herself, it would likely blow out to sea soon. Tomorrow
would be a better day.

On Route 28, she cleared her throat. “It’s
nearly ten o’clock,” she told Scott. “Do you want me to stop at a
McDonald’s?”

He squinted at the dashboard clock and
sighed. “It’s too late for a real meal,” he agreed.

No familiar golden arches loomed ahead on the
road. She passed a couple of seafood restaurants, several bars and
a forlorn pizzeria, its parking lot empty. “Pizza,” Scott said.

Meredith hadn’t eaten a slice of pizza since
she’d decided to lose weight. She didn’t dare eat a slice of pizza
now. She and Scott dashed through the rain to the door of the
eatery and inside. The smell of hot oil and melted cheese did
nothing to stir her appetite.

“
Who orders a take-out salad
at a pizza place?” Scott asked fifteen minutes later, when they
were back in the car, a box containing a few slices of pizza and a
plastic tub of limp greens and cherry tomatoes perched on his
lap.

Women who are trying to keep
from regaining the weight they lost,
she
almost retorted. She was weary, aching with fatigue. And she still
had to find Cindy’s inn.

What stupidity had led her to think this was
a good idea? Driving through a cloudburst toward a deeply uncertain
destiny. Trying to rejuvenate her marriage to a man who thought she
was foolish for eating salads instead of pizza, when she was doing
so in order to look sexy for him. A marriage to a man who’d rather
be home, working. Or at the university, meeting with students.
Anywhere but here, with anyone but Meredith.

The car’s GPS steered her off the main road
onto a narrow lane as dark as midnight. She could barely make out
the shadowed shapes of cottages lining the road on both sides, the
gnarled dwarf pines, the spiky grass and scruffy shrubs. The
buildings were all dark. If the road was lined with street lamps,
they were dark, too. She edged the car cautiously along, hunched
forward, her fingers wrapped tight around the steering wheel.
“Looks like they’ve had a power outage,” she said, stating the
obvious.

Scott’s comment was a succinct curse.

If not for the GPS, Meredith would have
driven right past Cindy’s inn. She steered up the unpaved driveway,
bumping over twigs and pine cones, splashing dark water as the
driver’s side tires dipped into a rut. Eventually she reached a
looming, shingled building. Through one of the windows she noticed
a small, moving light. A flashlight, she guessed.

“
If you want to wait in the
car, I’ll see what’s going on,” she offered.

“
If you’re getting wet, I’ll
get wet, too,” Scott said. His chivalry failed to reassure
her.

The front door swung open before they reached
it, and the flashlight bearer filled the doorway. As best Meredith
could tell through the wind-spun rain and the relentless dark, the
woman was petite, dressed in a rain slicker, holding the flashlight
in one hand and a narrow object in the other.

A second flashlight. “Meredith? Hi, I’m
Cindy,” she said, sounding far more cheerful than the situation
warranted. “I guess this rain slowed you down. I was expecting you
folks much earlier. Well, as you can see, we’ve got no electricity
at the moment, but I can walk you to your cabin. We’ll check you in
officially tomorrow. No sense doing it in the dark. A tree went
down one block over, took all the wires down with it. Gotta love a
good nor’easter...” and on and on she went, handing Scott the
second flashlight and popping open an umbrella which arced over her
and about half of Scott.