Accidental Happiness (16 page)

“Angel’s having a birthday soon,” I chirped. The tone of my remark landed in the room as a glaring off-key note amid the taut exchanges, but I decided to press on. “We’re going to have a picnic party for her.”

“How old will you be, Angel?” Maxine asked. I thought I heard a slight softening in her voice, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Eight,” Angel told her.

The climate in the room changed; the sound of the air conditioner seemed to grow louder. Sitting close to Maxine, I heard her breathe. The air caught in her throat, skipping rather than flowing into her lungs, but her face maintained composure. Then she looked at Reese, her forehead wrinkled as if a question would follow, but she didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure she could. Instead, I heard Lane coming onto the boat; she gave a small knock, then lifted the canvas that covered the companionway.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” she said. “But I did want to see Maxine before she took off somewhere.”

Lane squatted in the entryway above us, and Maxine, looking relieved to have the diversion, got up and greeted her with a hug. Maxine was pure Junior League next to Lane’s Sierra Club, but they had always gotten along,
enjoyed
each other, as Maxine put it. As different as they were, they both possessed an edge, an irreverence that most women of their generation lacked—although Lane’s existed in more subtle zones.

“How are you?” Maxine asked Lane.

“Busy,” Lane said, smiling. “I’d forgotten how exciting it is to have a child around.”

I couldn’t tell if the remark represented some attempt on Lane’s part to lobby for acceptance of Angel, or if it was a polite, throwaway observation. Either way, the issue of Angel had to be dealt with somehow. Whatever Reese’s motive for arranging the awkward encounter, I wanted her to get to the point so that I could reclaim my home to some small degree.

“I won’t distract you from your introductions here,” Lane said, following my thoughts with perfect timing. “I just wanted to say hello.”

Maxine turned to sit back down, but the small wake of a passing boat rocked the cabin and she grabbed the edge of the navigation table to steady herself.

“Damn!” she muttered it under her breath, but we all heard it. Things weren’t going well. She sat down, looked irritated at best. Angel cut her eyes over to Maxine as if to size her up. I couldn’t tell if the girl was intimidated or simply confused about why her mother was dressed in funny clothes, acting perfectly proper for a change.

“Could I go with Lane?” Angel spoke up before Lane stepped off the boat. Reese didn’t even try to mask her frustration, but she nodded her consent anyway.

“Go on,” she said, forcing a smile.

Angel climbed back into the cockpit, and Lane took the child’s good hand.

“Maybe I should go too,” I said. “Let you two talk.”

“If you don’t mind,” Reese said a little too urgently, “I’d like for you to stay.” I couldn’t help but wonder what alien entity had taken hold of the woman’s likeness. “I’ll get to the point now,” she added.

“Well, thank God,” Maxine responded. “I thought there might be an entire Mother Ginger cast of characters paraded through here before we got to the meat of things.”

“Maxine, please stop,” I heard myself say. Enough was enough. Maxine was acting the bully and my instinct to protect the underdog kicked in. “This is difficult for everyone. Reese wouldn’t be putting herself through this if she didn’t have a reason. I know this is hard, but let’s do the best we can.”

Maxine sat back down, let out a long sigh. It was as much of a concession as she was willing to offer.

I began eyeing a bottle of merlot on the counter just behind where Reese stood. We could all stand to take it down a notch, but it was still early afternoon. I didn’t think I’d have any takers if I offered.

“Angel and I need a place to live,” Reese said without any preface. She sat opposite us. Her expression suggested that the words themselves held a bitter taste. “I’ve called you here for help. For a favor.”

Maxine inclined her head slightly to one side. She waited, but when Reese didn’t continue, she managed to ask, “You want to live with me?” She sounded too astonished to even ridicule the idea.

“No, no.” Reese shook her head. She looked so tired. “I was hoping to rent your beach house. I can’t afford what you would normally get, but it’s coming up on off-season and I thought—”

“Is she Benjamin’s child?” Maxine blurted it out, interrupting whatever well-thought-out speech Reese had composed. My mother-in-law had full tears in her eyes as she spoke. “Is she his? Is that what this is about?” This last came out with such effort that I felt myself crying too. Reese looked stunned, unable to respond.

“Reese?” I said, hoping to elicit some response.

She looked at me. Her breathing had quickened, and I realized again how much had gone into this request, how much pride she had to hold at bay. I waited, wondered if she would lie.

“I don’t know,” she said. She kept her eyes direct, never looked away from Maxine.

The muscles in my neck and my arms relaxed. I was relieved at the honesty if nothing else; but Maxine’s face changed, held the beginnings of disdain.

“I know that statement alone confirms everything that you think of me,” Reese continued. “And the God’s honest truth is, I don’t care what you think. I won’t make apologies or offer explanations beyond saying that it was a confusing time when my marriage to Benjamin ended. When I found out I was pregnant, so much had happened already—”

“And now you want my house.” Maxine cut her short.

“I want to rent it.” Reese kept stone features, masklike in their evenness.

“It’s already rented through the end of this month. Besides, I can’t just hand it out to you because some child you parade in here may or may not be my grandchild.” Maxine’s voice was breaking.

Grandchild.
The word brought Benjamin so near. If Angel
was
his, that would bind everyone in the room, as well as the man I loved, together by blood. Everyone except me. For the first time I realized how much I
didn’t
want Angel to belong to Benjamin. It was a selfish, terrible recognition on my part, and the guilt alone, I believe, spurred me to petition further on Reese’s behalf.

“Maxine, take a couple of minutes to breathe before you go on with this.”

I fought to think beyond that. Reese looked defeated, ready to give up. The effort had been too much already, it seemed, and she’d gained no ground that I could see. She looked unsteady on her feet; pale, as if she might pass out.

“Sit down, Reese.”

She didn’t argue. She sat opposite Maxine, reached to take the water I offered her, but her fingers wouldn’t move into a solid grip. I watched her try to clasp the glass. She looked at me, helpless, before she lowered her hand.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m just a little shaky. I may have a stomach bug.”

I put the glass down, sat beside her. “Are you okay?” She nodded, offered a weak smile.

“This is ridiculous,” Maxine said. She seemed at a loss for how to go forward.

“What are your biggest problems with this?” I asked Maxine. I still sat at Reese’s side, hoped this wouldn’t put Maxine on the defensive. I asked it as an earnest question, hoping to get the idea in play again.

“What am I
not
worried about, Gina? And why are you defending this woman? She damaged Benjamin in ways you can’t imagine—and that was
before
she left him.”

“Please stop, Maxine,” I said again. Why did I feel the need to argue for Reese? I should want her to leave, to take the child with her. But for reasons that were beyond me, I needed for Maxine to say yes. My feelings remained jumbled, so I simply flew by gut instinct. “I know this is all overwhelming, but let’s try to look at it as clearly as we can.”

If Reese had thought it out more, she might have arranged a lunch with Maxine, somewhere neutral. In town, maybe. She would have worked up to the subject of Angel, laid the groundwork for the idea before she confronted the older woman with a flesh-and-bones child. But she hadn’t.

“There is not an ounce of love lost between me and Reese,” Maxine began, “and that house, along with the property it sits on, are just about all that I got out of my marriage to Benjamin’s father—except a wonderful son, and now, even my son is gone.” She’d given up on fighting her tears, they spilled quietly down her cheeks, but her words held composure. “There are emotional issues I won’t go into . . . all the things I had planned the house would be for us when you and Benjamin had children.”

Reese glanced over at me, and my cheeks went warm. Had Ben told her? What else had he shared with his ex-wife?

“I looked forward to grandchildren in that house, Reese,” Maxine continued, not noticing the exchange between me and her former daughter-in-law. “But not like this, and certainly not involving you. I’m not trying to be horrible, but you understand all too well my reasons for that.” Her voice went hard when she addressed Reese directly.

“I understand, Maxine,” Reese said calmly. “I know what a shock this is. You have to know that, with all that’s gone between us, I would never have come to you if I had any other options. You held far more against me than Benjamin ever did.”

“He never knew enough to hold all of this against you,” Maxine countered, her words back to venom.

I saw Angel again at the cemetery, eyes full of tears. I faced the reality that he
had
known. Could Angel’s revelations have any other explanation? I could barely bring myself to imagine how he might have felt about Angel. But even as the questions formed in my head, I knew the answers. Daughter or not, Ben would have adored the child. But if he’d spent time with her, why didn’t he tell me?

“I’m asking this for my daughter,” Reese continued, ignoring everything but the question at hand. “I need to get her in a good school. I’m going to be working, but I won’t make enough to afford the kind of neighborhood I want for her. Your cottage would solve that problem. I’m asking you. I’ll pay you what I can and I’ll make other arrangements as soon as I’m able to sort them out. But school starts soon, and I need to get things settled for her. Just tell me yes or no.”

Maxine sat unmoving, then finally spoke. “There are a lot of things to consider. This isn’t like asking to borrow my car. There’s rental income, the proper upkeep of the place. You haven’t proven to be what anyone would call trustworthy, Reese. This situation does nothing to change that fact. All the emotional issues aside, if something were to happen to the house—”

“The lawyers who helped with the estate.” I acted again on reflex, barely thinking the words before they were spoken. “They could set up an agreement. Something binding to protect you, Maxine.”

“But she can’t—” Maxine began.

“I’ll guarantee money for any damages,” I said. I had no time to think, to analyze why I wanted to do this. But I needed to. I knew that I had to be involved. If nothing else, it brought me into the equation, in some crazy way. “Maxine, we can make it work.”

“Gina, this isn’t your problem to solve. This woman . . .”

I felt the tide pushing us backward.

“You’re right, Maxine. She hurt Benjamin. But I know how he talked about her, cared how she was. He would have helped if she was in trouble.”

Reese stood back, an object of discussion with no valid voice in her own defense. This had come down to my mother-in-law and me. That fact alone gave me some sense of leverage, of strength. Maybe that’s why I wanted to help. Some weird power trip on my part.

“And the girl, Maxine,” I finished, with the biggest part of Reese’s case. “She may
not
be Benjamin’s child. But there’s a good chance she is. She might be your granddaughter.”

Maxine dropped her head, rubbed her temples with her fingers as if to physically manipulate the thoughts jumbled in her head. Her long-standing dislike for Reese played against the possibility of a grandchild. I didn’t envy her.

“It won’t be free until the beginning of September,” she said finally. She spoke in a near monotone. “I’ll need the usual deposit. I’ll work out a cut-rate off-season deal with the realty company.” She looked up at Reese. “You’ll deal with the realty company with any problems. We’ll have no need to talk about anything.”

“What about Angel?” Reese asked. “Do you want to see her again?”

Maxine sat unmoving. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them, there were tears again.

“For now,” she said, “I’d rather not. I don’t think I can.”

Reese nodded. “I’ll go over to Lane’s, let you two visit.” Then, as she was climbing up into the cockpit, she turned back to Maxine. “Thank you,” she said. Then, before she moved out of sight, she mouthed the same to me. Before Maxine could choose to respond or not, Reese left the two of us there, and, oddly enough, the room seemed nearly empty without her.

13

Reese

R
eese stood on the dock, steadied herself on a wooden post. She wasn’t sure if it was shaky nerves or something worse, although she suspected the latter. Confining clothes didn’t help. She needed to find a willing pharmacist. All she knew for sure was that she didn’t feel right. Things had been a little better since she left Boone. All the adrenaline, most likely. But her luck seemed to be failing. She decided to walk around before she went in to check on Angel. Moving around, finding distraction, sometimes made things better.

A storm pressed in from the south. The sun, still hot on the marina, would soon be overtaken by the moving wall of gray.

“Hey there.” Charlie, the young guy from the Ship’s Store, spoke as she walked by. He knelt on the dock near the shore, wearing board shorts and no shirt. His dirty blond hair, shorter in back with longer bangs in front, fell over his eyes as he pulled up a boxy, metal cage—a crab pot—filled with a half-dozen clanking, defiant crustaceans.

“They look meaner than fleas,” Reese said, staring at the wagging claws.

“Pinch the shit out of you, that’s for sure,” he said, keeping to his task. Wearing a heavy leather glove, he lifted the fierce creatures into a plastic bucket. He stood taller than Reese, but still managed a taut presence. When he was done, he tied several chicken necks to the inside of the trap, closed the door, and wiped his hands on a towel.

“Smells terrible,” she told him.

“That’s the chicken,” he said as he stood up, squinted at the high afternoon sun. “The older the meat, the more crabs go for it.”

“You eat these yourself?” she asked. “That’s a lot of crab.”

She stood behind him, watched the muscles of his back tighten as he picked up the trap, lowered the contraption back into the water.

“No, ma’am,” he said, turning toward her, balancing on one knee, “I don’t even like crab all that much. But I take the little bastards home. Steam ’em, then ice them. After that, I set up shop with a cooler out by the side of River Road. They go quick during tourist season, no matter what you charge.”

“You can skip the ‘ma’am’ next time. I’m not that much older than you.”

“Sorry,” he grinned. “Just a habit.”

“No problem.”

Reese knelt down to look inside the bucket. The crabs, all about the size of a man’s hand, went at one another with fierce intent. She’d gone crabbing as a girl. Her young uncles, her mother’s baby brothers, had taken her whenever they went out in their boat through the shallow marsh creeks. The two were identical twins, looked like mirrored images as they checked their pots, traded jokes and stories while they worked. As she got older, she realized they simply felt sorry for her, wanted to make up for her mother’s lousy disappearing act when she was still so little.

“Reese?” Charlie was saying. His smooth features looked puzzled, questioning, and she realized she’d missed something he’d said.

“I’m sorry,” Reese said. “What was that?”

“Well for starters, do you mind me calling you Reese?” he asked. “When somebody’s not a ‘ma’am,’ I usually call them by a first name.”

“Reese is fine.”

He smiled, eyes level with hers. The smell of the salty shore eased the tight urgency in her temples. Growing up, her memories outside, mostly alone and near the water, had been better ones than any of the others. Even the musty smell of dark mud and damp sea grass brought pleasing associations.

“Well,” Charlie went on, “I was trying to say that we ought to get together sometime.”

She looked at him, too surprised to speak. She’d gone out with younger guys before, but they never initiated it. This guy had a pretty solid opinion of himself.

“Nothing fancy.” He filled in the silence. “Just beer and seafood, maybe. I know Derek’s been working to get your sister to go out. Maybe the four of us could get together.”

“My what?” Sisters. She and Gina. That’s what he thought. It made more sense than the truth, she supposed. Though she assumed Derek would have told him otherwise.

“We’re not sisters,” she said finally. “But that’s a long story,” she added when he looked as if he might ask. “Let me think about it. It might be fun to go out. You know I’ve got a few years on you, right? How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven,” he said.

Older than she thought, and just shy of a ten-year spread. She could live with that.

“I’m game,” she told him. “As for Gina, I don’t know. After everything she’s been through, I don’t know if she’s thinking much about men right now.”

Charlie got an amused look on his face. He raised his eyebrows and smiled like a kid who’d found the Christmas closet full in mid-December.

“I think that ship sailed with her and Derek on it a week or two ago,” he said. “Not to talk out of turn, but Derek’s got it pretty bad for her, and she keeps going hot and cold.”

“Really?” Reese thought of Gina. She was hard to read, but anything was possible.

“Maybe you could talk to her—about going out, I mean.” He wasn’t giving up. “Like I said, we don’t have to make it a big deal. Just do something fun.”

He had an open way about him. Any one of his features, when isolated, ranked less than perfect. His mouth was too wide, his eyes just a hair small. But together his face looked adorable.

“I’ll mention it,” she told him.

He nodded. They’d run out of logical topics, and still kneeling on the dock, Reese felt a numb sensation settling into her ankles.

“I better go,” she said. “I’ll see you later up at the store. Are you working tonight?”

“I go in at five.” He stood up, lifting his bucket by the handle. The scratch and clatter of the crabs inside resumed with his movement.

“Well, if you’re working nights,” she teased, “it’ll be hard to find time for a date.”

“I’m switching shifts with Randall the rest of the week, working the morning slot instead,” he said as he walked. “Just think about it,” he called out, not turning to look at her again.

She offered a slight nod in response all the same. He was cute all right. But cute had gotten her in trouble before. She walked along the dock in the opposite direction with no clear idea where she wanted to go. Still, the thought of Charlie’s interest cheered her.

Something else worked on the periphery of her thoughts too, something that lifted her spirits in spite of her growing concerns. She ran through the events of the last days when she hit on what it was. She was out, walking by herself, and she wasn’t worried about Angel. Lane was looking out for the child and she was safe—absolutely safe—with the older woman. The liberation of leaving her daughter with someone she trusted made her feel nearly happy. She’d become so accustomed to worry, the absence of nagging concern seemed a miracle.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t trusted Janet, her friend in the mountains. After the . . . episode, Reese had landed in the hospital for the better part of a week. She’d had to leave Angel with someone. Janet had done her best, but her own life wasn’t safe. That boyfriend of hers. Janet had told Reese all about him and his shady buddies, had warned her to stay clear of them. Turns out they were into something bad. Drugs, she figured, though Janet never said for sure. She hadn’t put it together until Angel’s call. Reese didn’t hold it against Janet. As a mother, she knew she should have had sharper instincts, should have known better. And, in the end, Angel was fine. Reese still wondered if Janet fared so well.

But Reese would never forgive herself for what Angel had gone through. She’d never forgive herself for not letting Ben do it his way when she had the chance. Everything would be different if . . . She had to let it go. None of that mattered now. She would play the hand she’d been dealt. But the whole thing with Janet’s boyfriend had been a wake-up call. All kinds of problems could come crashing down on them if she didn’t get things planned out right. She’d thought nothing could be worse than if Ben decided to take Angel away completely. Well, then she
saw
what worse could mean and went running back to Ben—too late.

She couldn’t get stuck in the past. More urgent problems demanded action. The small trembling sensations dogged her. Then sometimes she had the opposite, stretches of time when the fingers on her right hand went completely numb. The elevated feeling, even that could be part of it, part of what she sensed coming on. Sometimes, her moods went haywire. That’s when she needed the pills.

She needed to find a pharmacist who would bend the rules a bit, help her out. Problem was, she didn’t have the money to make that happen. She didn’t even have the money to pay the people she already owed. Jesus, what a mess!

Over in the parking lot, she saw Gina standing with Maxine beside that tank Maxine drove. She looked over at the sailboat, knew Gina’s purse would be on the counter where she’d dropped it when she came in. The women looked deep into their discussion, probably about her. For unexplained reasons, Gina had been on her side, had convinced Maxine to let her use the cottage. It made what she was considering just that much harder to justify. But she couldn’t hesitate. Besides, she’d done worse to people who had treated her better. Benjamin, for starters.

She doubled back and headed for the boat. After she got the credit card from Gina’s wallet, she would drive into town and figure the rest out on the way. Whatever she did, she’d have to do it fast. Time was running out on several fronts, and the one who stood to lose the most was Angel.