The Summer Everything Changed (11 page)

“Really?” Catherine asked. “Were you really both in love?”

“Absolutely. Even Andrew will still admit that. Which only makes the whole divorce thing that much more depressing, I think.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

There was silence for a long moment, and then Catherine said, with some urgency, “When do you give up? When do you say, okay, it's not in the cards for me to get married? Okay, it's not in the cards for me to have a baby of my own?”

“You could still meet Mr. Right,” Louise pointed out.

“Sure, anything's possible! The world could come to a raging nuclear end tonight. Lady Gaga could decide to enter a convent. Well, actually, I could see that happening . . . Anyway, even if I do meet the right guy we won't be having a baby together, that's for sure. Not the old-fashioned way, at least.”

“You haven't made peace with this yet, have you?”

“Nope,” Catherine said forcefully. “I haven't. And maybe it's about time I did. Bitterness, as we have noted, is not an attractive quality.”

Louise nodded. “It's very bad for the skin.”

“Please pour me more wine. And forgive me for chewing off your ear.”

“You're my friend.”

Catherine took a sip of the Malbec and smiled. “That's your expertise, you know. One of them, anyway. You're a good listener.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really. It's a gift.”

Louise laughed. “Not when Isobel is rambling on about her latest costume jewelry purchase it isn't! Then, it's a liability.”

Isobel closed her laptop. It had been really hard to keep focused on jewelry and funky old clothing when all she really wanted to write about was her upcoming date with Jeff. But CityMouse was not the place for gushing about guys, nor was it the place for anything really personal. CityMouse, the voice, was, after all, a persona, and while she didn't lie about her real self (she did anthropomorphize inanimate objects!), she also didn't reveal too much about that real self—like how she felt about her father.

Or like how she felt about Jeff Otten.

He had stopped by the inn again the day before; she happened to be on the porch at the time. When he got out of the car, all she could see in her mind's eye was how incredibly sexy he had looked the other day at that garage in Wells. She could hardly look at him now without blushing. Maybe she did blush.

He came up the porch steps and sat in the rocker next to the one in which she was sitting. They exchanged what Catherine called “pleasantries.” And then Jeff asked her if she would like to have dinner with him.

Isobel had really, seriously thought she was going to faint dead away. With every bit of her strength she summoned what she hoped were the right, normal words: “Sure. I'd like that.” And then she had had to add, “But I'll have to ask my mother for permission.” She had felt embarrassed and very, very young admitting that, but Jeff had smiled kindly.

“That's cool,” he had said and had given her his cell phone number. “Just call me when you've talked to her.”

So she had talked to her mother. She told her that Jeff had asked her out. And without planning to, she also told her about having met Jeff in town that first time. She kept the fact of the gift of flowers to herself. And the fact of the birthday card, too.

“Why didn't you tell me you'd met him?” her mother had asked, sounding not exactly mad but definitely puzzled. “Especially when I told you he stopped by the inn?”

“I don't know, really,” Isobel said after a moment. “I guess I thought it wasn't important.” That was a bit of a lie, too. Isobel had begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation, but there was no escaping it if she was to get her mother's permission to go out with Jeff.

“It's odd that he didn't mention it that day he stopped by the inn,” her mother went on. “Well, he probably assumed you had told me.”

“I'm sorry, Mom. Really.”

“Well, no harm done.”

And then her mother had admitted she had asked around a bit about Jeff. Catherine, she said, knew nothing about him but had heard the usual and not very interesting facts about Mr. Otten. Flynn had been a bit more helpful; he had served with Jack Otten on various local committees and for a year on the town zoning board. The senior Otten was generally polite if a bit pompous. He gave generously to his church and to local and state representatives of his political party. He had recently funded the construction of a youth center in Yorktide.

About the Ottens' younger son, Jeff, he had nothing to say. “He flies under the radar from what I can tell,” Flynn said.

About the Ottens' older son, Michael, he had much to relate. “The guy was golden from the get-go. Straight-A student, all-around athlete, volunteered at the hospital, kids' cancer ward, when he was old enough to get around on his own. Went to Northeastern and then on to graduate school somewhere in California. Last I heard he was heading up a research division at a big pharma company, headquartered in Basel. Nice kid, too. Always had a pleasant word for people he met, whether on the street or at some hoity-toity party his parents hosted. It's no wonder Jeff is a quiet one. Michael would be a very hard act to follow, even if Jeff should want to.”

“Does he want to?” Louise had asked.

“No idea,” Flynn had admitted with a shrug. “Like I said, under the radar.”

Jim and James knew nothing about the male Ottens and only a little about Mrs. Otten, and their source, they freely admitted, a well-known local boozehound, was unreliable at best. Still, what they knew was harmless. Sally Otten made monthly overnight trips to Boston to shop and have dinner with old friends (she had gone to Boston College), and she patronized the bar at MC Perkins Cove with some frequency, often alone. “One martini and she's gone,” James said. “Never drunk, always polite, and she's a generous tipper.”

“Did you talk to Quentin and Gwen, too?” Isobel had asked her mother. She wasn't sure how she felt about—well, about her mother's interrogation of the community!

“No,” her mom said. “Honestly, I thought it might embarrass you if I did.”

But I'm already embarrassed,
Isobel realized. But all she said was, “Oh.”

“Anyway,” her mother went on, “the point is that everyone I talked to had something good to say about Jeff or his parents. So I guess it's okay for you to go out with him.”

Isobel managed a sincere smile. “Thanks, Mom,” she said.

Her mother gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and left the kitchen in search of Quentin.

When her mother had gone, Isobel wondered, Why had she been withholding information from her mom? And she had downright lied to her that day they spotted Jeff in town and Louise had pointed him out and Isobel had pretended she had never seen him before . . . But that little fact seemed to have slipped past her mother, or else for some weird reason she had decided not to bring it up. Either way Isobel was relieved.

And why had her mother been seeking information about Jeff and his family like a private investigator?

Isobel sighed. Like it or not, their relationship was changing. That was inevitable, of course; all relationships changed over time. People got closer and then more distant and then maybe closer again. Stasis wasn't something that applied for any length of time to human beings and their behavior.

Besides, she thought, all that mattered right at that moment was that her mother had given her permission to go on a real date with Jeff Otten! And she had survived the call to Jeff.

It had been her first call to a guy other than her father, and she was inordinately pleased to find that her voice was steady. She even, she remembered later, cracked a little joke. At least, she thought that she had. Some of the conversation was a bit of a blur. She hoped he didn't think she was one of those ditzy types . . .

Well, it was too late to do anything about the call now. They had a date. Jeff would realize soon enough that she was an awesome gal and that you could be interested in appearances—style and fashion—and at the same time just as interested in what informed those appearances—personal choices, cultural preferences, varying ideologies! If she did say so herself, she was one smart cookie!

Louise was in the kitchen, attempting to concentrate on the inventory she was reviewing—Bella had compiled (by hand) an impressive and detailed list of every baking and cooking supply on hand. Her thoughts kept dashing away to the fact of Isobel's first date.

She had hoped it would come later—say, when Isobel was eighteen, or maybe even twenty-two (well, she was kidding about that). At the same time, she didn't think there had been much to gain by refusing to allow Isobel to go to dinner with Jeff Otten.

She had always envisioned both she and Andrew greeting the lucky young man at the door, Andrew grilling him (politely) about his intentions, while she stood off a bit to the side, smiling enigmatically—just enough to unnerve the kid. But Isobel's father was not part of this momentous event. So be it.

Louise could barely recall her own first date. She had been fifteen, or maybe fourteen. She did not remember the boy's name. They had gone to a local place for pizza and a soda. He had tried to take her hand on the walk home, but she had snatched it away. He had not asked for a second date.

Four cans of condensed milk. What did Bella need with condensed milk? Louise wondered. Three boxes of raisins. That made sense. Three boxes of baking soda.

Thank God, Louise thought now, that Isobel was far savvier than she herself had been at sixteen. Louise, unlike her daughter, had lived a very sheltered existence. The family had not traveled farther than Cape Cod from their home in Wakefield, and that only once a summer. They did not make it a habit to go into Boston. Mr. and Mrs. Jones were friends with only two other couples, one of whom had no children, the other of whom had a much older son and daughter. What Louise knew of boys was gleaned from the few television shows she was allowed to watch and from observing the boys at school.

The latter experience told her that a lot of boys liked to play sports. A fair amount of boys were good in math and science. A few were natural-born cutups. One or two were troublemakers. In short, she had learned nothing useful. By the time she got to high school, Louise still knew next to nothing about the opposite sex.

It would be a long time before she realized that boys and the men they grew into were just like girls and the women they became—flawed and vulnerable, awful and lovable. In short, that boys and men were human beings. If you cut them, they bled, and most times they complained loudly about it. If you were nice to them, they smiled and were mostly nice back. If you challenged them, they rose to the challenge or they scuttled away like frightened mice. If you betrayed them, they cried and got angry and acted out like any woman scorned. Men weren't all that different from women. That's what a lot of women and some men most needed to understand.

“One small bottle of cream of tartar.” Louise frowned down at Bella's inventory. Whatever that was, it didn't sound appetizing. “One can crushed pineapple.”
Who,
Louise wondered,
had bought that and why?

By the time Louise had gone away to college (a huge concession from her parents, who had not been able to turn down the scholarship money the college had offered their daughter), she was no longer a virgin but she was still woefully naïve about men, and she stayed that way—at least until the start of her junior year of college, when she had fallen so hard and so completely for Ted Dunbar.

He was a good-looking guy. His hair was dark and wavy; his eyes were almost black. If he had a tendency toward a little fat around the middle, well, it was only a tendency. His smile was broad and came easily. In fact, in the first weeks of their relationship, Louise couldn't remember him ever frowning, not even when his favorite football team lost an important game, not even when she had forgotten to pick up a six-pack on the way home from classes.

Ted had dropped out of college in his freshman year (school just wasn't his “thing,” he explained), and for the past two years had been working at a garage—when he was working, which, as Louise came to learn, wasn't all that much. Still, things were fine at first. Ted was often charming, and he was a decent enough lover—when he wasn't drunk. Still, he made up for routinely passing out on her couch by making dinner (his repertoire was limited, but he didn't burn the hamburgers or serve the spaghetti mushy) or by doing the laundry (his, not hers). He didn't talk much about his family. One night, after four or five beers, he mentioned a brother who had left home at sixteen and hadn't been heard from since. And there was a sister. She had gotten pregnant at fifteen; the baby had been adopted at birth; the sister was now eighteen and living at home with the parents.

Ted, in short, seemed like a sweet but harmless ne'er-dowell. But Louise had gotten in way over her head. Over time, Ted went from borrowing money from her, swearing he would pay it back, to stealing from her wallet while she was asleep, to announcing that he was going to take whatever money she had on her for his own needs—like spending hours at a dive bar with his buddies. Over time, Ted went from yelling at her when he was mad to pushing her, to hitting her.

But the abuse escalated so artfully, and was so skillfully executed that for a long time Louise hadn't been at all sure what was happening. It was tempting to blame her parents, at least partly, for having ill-prepared her for evil in human form. Tempting, but unfair.

How could a woman like her mother, afraid of her own shadow, so wrapped up in her own convictions of personal disaster, have had the acuteness, the sensitivity, to detect real danger to others?

Her father, too, had been useless. He was a typical man of his generation and the ones before it, emotionally obtuse, seeing only what was before his face. She had no doubt he loved her, but he was entirely incapable of showing or proving that love in any way other than paying for food, shelter, and what he could afford of an education.

If you said you felt fine, he believed you.

If you said you felt sick or sad, he sent you to your mother.

He wasn't a bad man, just a limited one. Other people's motives were as hidden and unknown to him as his own motives were hidden and unknown to himself. When Louise was in the hospital after the fall, he was entirely inarticulate, with grief or shame or anger, Louise never knew. He probably didn't know, either.

At her college graduation her father had shaken her hand, his expression one Louise thought of as slight puzzlement. At her wedding he had danced with her once, as was expected, but he hadn't said a word as he held her, stiffly and at a distance.

“Two dozen eggs. Four pounds of coffee beans. Three boxes of tea bags; one, decaf.”

Louise's mother had drunk only decaffeinated tea and coffee. Her father had consumed nothing stronger than ginger ale.

When Mr. and Mrs. Jones, that repressed and fearful couple, had died close to a decade back, within a year of each other, each taken by an aggressive cancer, Louise had felt sorrow but not violent loss. She had been sad but not undone. In retrospect, it had been shockingly easy to get past their deaths.

A noise at the back door startled Louise from her thoughts.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Bessire.”

No matter how often or how strenuously Louise had begged Bella Frank to call her by her first name, she would not comply, so Louise had given up the fight.

“Good afternoon, Bella. What brings you by?” she asked. “I'm afraid I haven't finished reviewing the inventory yet . . .”

“I picked up these blueberries at that little farm stand we like. Don't know how Fred can afford to sell them so cheap, but he can and I'm grateful for it.”

“So are the guests. And so am I! What are you planning for the morning? Muffins? Scones? Pancakes?”

“All that and a nice pound cake, too.”

Louise paid Bella for the berries, which really were ridiculously inexpensive, and stored them in the fridge.

“Do you have a moment?” she asked Bella, as the other woman headed for the door. “Or do you need to run off?”

Bella looked down at her considerable girth. “I'm long past my running days, my dear. What's on your mind?”

“Oh, I was just wondering if you knew the Otten family. I'm not looking for dirt, really,” she hurried to assure Bella. “It's just that Jeff Otten has asked Isobel for a date. He seems like a very nice young man, but . . .”

“Sure, I know them somewhat. It's been years now, but I used to work for them serving at their fancy parties.” Bella smiled. “I have such fond memories of Michael! I guess just about everyone who ever knew him does. He was about ten or eleven, I guess, back when I worked for the family. Charming boy, always polite, very smart.”

“What about Jeff?” Louise asked.

Bella shook her head. “I don't recall much about Jeff. He was very young then, an adorable little boy if ever there was one. He looked like one of those little blond cherubs you see in those old-time paintings. But neither boy was allowed to spend much time hanging around while an adult party was going on so . . .”

Yes, Louise thought. Young children underfoot at a party was a disaster waiting to happen. “What about Sally Otten?” Louise asked then.

“A lovely woman from what I could tell. Soft-spoken. Kind. She always paid us in cash and sent us home with the leftover food. I guess these society types don't actually eat all that much, always on their diets and whatever.”

Louise smiled and recalled the dainty eating habits of some of the society women she had known from her volunteer days back in Massachusetts. Lunchtime with those women had been a real trial. All Louise had wanted to do was chow down and refuel for the long afternoon ahead. All the society women had wanted to do was talk about how fat they were and nibble a small side salad. Dainty habits—or middle-aged-onset anorexia.

“There was one funny thing I noticed one time . . .”

Bella's words caught Louise's attention. “Oh?” she said.

“Well, I was passing through the hall between the kitchen and the dining room when I came across Mr. and Mrs. Otten. He seemed really angry. I mean, he was talking in a hushed voice but I could tell he was upset. She was, too.” Bella shrugged. “But it could have been he was angry at one of us or maybe the brand of gin he liked had run out. Or did he drink vodka? Anyway, my point is, he could have been angry about anything. Or nothing. Not necessarily his wife.”

“True,” Louise said. “And we both know that husbands and wives fight over the most inane things.”

Bella laughed. “Yes, we do. In my house, most times it means that one of us is hungry. Well, maybe I said too much. People shouldn't look for trouble and hidden meanings. There's enough trouble right out in the open to occupy everyone's time.”

Bella left then, off, she said, to do her own grocery shopping. When she had gone, Louise thought about what Bella had told her. Overall she felt reassured by her assessment of the Otten household. And really, how many times during a dinner or cocktail party at the Bessire house had she and Andrew shared a tense or slightly angry moment? Many times, when, as Bella had surmised, the alcohol had unexpectedly run low or the hors d'oeuvres had gotten burnt or one of the guests was being drunkenly belligerent.

Louise sighed and sat down at the table with Bella's inventory. It was high time she focused on the moment at hand.

Jeff was not Ted. Isobel was not Louise.

She had to believe that everything would be all right.