Accidental Happiness (32 page)

33

Reese

S
omeone had left a bottle of bourbon in the cottage. Most likely Gina, Reese figured, although the woman’s appetite for alcohol seemed to be waning with the addition of a man and a reliable sex life to her routine. Reese poured herself a bourbon and Coke, then left it on the counter to go check on Angel. She’d looked in on the sleeping child six, maybe seven times, since the girl had gone to bed.

She couldn’t put her finger on anything that was wrong. She felt edgy, more energy than purpose. Something worried her, and the response to all worry was to obsess over her daughter.

She felt a slight panic as she reached for the child’s door, as if this time the bed might, indeed, be empty. It was ridiculous, she knew. Angel was safe, had been safe ever since they’d arrived. Well, except for crazy Gina’s trigger-happy panic when they stepped onto the boat. But even that wasn’t an ever-present danger. Only a freak accident. Then again, a freak accident had killed Benjamin, so there was always that to consider too. But no one had followed them from Boone. And no one here wanted to hurt Angel. She had to keep telling herself. She opened up the door, peeked in. Angel had kicked off her covers, so Reese went in and pulled the light blanket over her again.

Angel had enjoyed her first day at school. Miss Reilly had won her over right away and apparently Angel had made some friends. One girl walked down the sidewalk with her as Angel went to meet her mom. But before the two of them got to the corner, Angel stopped, said something to the girl, and the other child walked away.

“What was that about?” Reese asked.

“She wanted to come over, but I told her not right now.”

“Why?” Reese sensed something she wasn’t saying.

“I’m kind of tired.”

Reese hadn’t pushed. Angel had her own agenda most of the time, but Reese knew her well enough to trust her instincts on things, especially people.

She heard the phone ring in the kitchen, slipped out of Angel’s room to answer it.

“Hey,” Charlie said. Just the sound of his voice caused her to smile. Charlie was about as much fun as she’d ever had. No strings. Great sex.

“What’s up?”

“I rented
The Big Lebowski,
” he told her. “Thought you might like to watch something funny.”

Ever since Charlie had discovered that a DVD player came with the cottage, he’d been bringing over movies every couple of nights. “This is great,” he told her. “I was borrowing Derek’s player all the time and he was starting to get pissed.”

He always arrived after Angel had gone to sleep, and most of the time Reese liked the company. But on this particular evening, she didn’t feel like a movie or the randy romp that followed.

“Why don’t you hold on to it?” she told him. “We’ll watch it tomorrow night.”

She’d left Angel’s door open, peeked in again for good measure, then closed it quietly. She couldn’t shake the lingering worry. Maybe it was a by-product of the illness, a literal case of the nerves. The MS affected her mood sometimes. Who wouldn’t get the jitters, knowing they could wake up the next morning unable to get out of bed? It had happened before. But the meds—which were beginning to run low—seemed to be keeping the worst of it at bay.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Joanna, one of the other waitresses had asked her, during the shift at lunch. She liked the woman, a fortyish bottle blonde who seemed to be lay-down-in-front-of-a-train loyal.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” But she wasn’t. Trouble was, fine wasn’t in the cards, so she had to just deal.

She’d worked the lunch shift after she’d dropped off Angel, then got off in time to pick up her daughter. That schedule was great, but she couldn’t pay the bills just working lunches. Even so, she begged off the dinner shift so she could be with Angel after her first day. Lane had been keeping Angel at her house most nights when Reese worked and Charlie helped out one night when Lane couldn’t, but Angel didn’t like him much, so that wasn’t a good option. She had to get something figured out. Lane was willing, but she couldn’t go on forever expecting the woman to give up her evenings, and Angel needed to be home at night since school had started.

Reese sat on the couch, flipped through a magazine, and tried to sort out her thoughts. Eventually, the nagging feeling and worried thoughts led her to the place she always ended up lately: Gina. She couldn’t help but wonder what Ben’s wife wanted. After the awful rant on the porch at Lane’s that day, Gina had started acting like her best friend; or no, worse yet, like a somewhat patronizing older sister. At any rate, a total one eighty from the angry, suspicious woman, furious that Ben had seen Angel behind her back. She’d started showing up at the cottage all the time. Just checking in, she said. Then she launched into winning Angel’s affection—something else she hadn’t shown the slightest interest in before that day. And the maddening part was that it had worked. Angel lit up when she saw the Volvo come into the driveway.

“Why can’t I stay on Gina’s boat when you’re at work sometimes?” Angel had asked more than once.

Reese couldn’t say exactly what bothered her about Gina. She’d wanted her to come around, to accept Angel. But now she was convinced that Gina wanted something. She couldn’t help but wonder what it would cost her if Ben’s widow got whatever it was she was after.

34

Gina

T
he cell phone rang, and I woke up, disoriented, feeling that the day had begun off-kilter. Derek was stirring on his side of the bed, and I looked at the clock: 12:45. Jesus! It was already afternoon.

By the time I came fully awake, voice mail had kicked in and I decided to get the message when I felt more functional.

“Hey,” Derek said, barely opening his eyes. He glanced over at the clock and smiled. “Who’d be calling you this early?”

“I’ll make the coffee,” I said, shuffling toward the kitchen. “Then I’ll check.”

We’d stayed late on the beach the night before, watched the moon shift its angle over the water. Derek had called it a moon dial.

We’d packed up, sandy and satisfied, and driven back to an oyster shack on an inlet just off the island. I went on late rounds with Derek around the marina and then we stayed up talking until well after three. I felt as if we’d reentered the timeless existence of college where all-night studying—or occasionally, socializing—had cut into morning classes; made noon seem like the crack of dawn.

“We’re grown-ups now,” I said, handing him a cup of coffee. “We can’t stay up all night just for the hell of it.”

“I work as a night watchman, and you freelance. Not exactly conventional hours. Besides, let’s wait till we’re old to get boring.”

It felt like a dig, somehow. The age reference. I decided I was being too sensitive.

I sat on the edge of the bed beside him and he put his coffee on the nightstand and pulled me down next to him.

“Stop it,” he said.

“What?” I had no clue.

“Trying to analyze us. Save that for your stories.”

He was right. I did run our relationship through my head over and over. Sometimes it seemed too easy with Derek, so void of effort. Could something that simple really be love? With Ben, there was always a feeling of challenge, of meeting his energy and his expectation. That was part of loving him. It wasn’t a hurdle to be with Derek, and it had been going on for all of five minutes in the great scheme of things. I wondered if it would be harder to keep it than to let it happen in the first place.

“You’re doing it,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Picking it apart. Why did he say that and do I feel the same way? Stop it.”

“You’re right.” I sat up on top of him, straddled his waist with my legs like the conquering bully. Only he was laughing. He wasn’t scared of me.

“Just let it be,” he said. “For the near future, anyway. You’ve been handed a heavy life lately. Don’t make me into more baggage.”

“Okay, Mr. Metaphor. Does breakfast service come with all this advice?’

“Yes, ma’am.” He pushed me to the side on the bed and got up. “It’s called Denny’s.”

I watched him walk away toward the kitchen, registered a kind of happiness, and let it stand without further thought.

The voice mail was from Lane. I listened to it in the truck on our way to get food.

“Hi, Gina.” She sounded funny, something off about her voice. “My crown’s come off. Hurts like hell and I’m heading into Charleston to the dentist to get it fixed. I’m supposed to get Angel at school this afternoon and look after her through Reese’s dinner shift.

“I hate to ask on short notice, but could you ride over there and get her for me and then stay at the cottage with her until I can pick her up? Call my cell and let me know. You’ll want to get there a little early, meet her at the classroom so you can find her more easily. I’ve already left a note with your name at the school. They’ll check your ID when you get there—even if the kid knows you they have all these rules—but there shouldn’t be any problem. Please call me. Just leave a message if Mengele already has me in the chair.”

I looked at my watch. One-fifteen. I’d have plenty of time to eat, but I had something I had to drop off at a leisure activities magazine in Charleston midafternoon. Artwork for my article had been sent to me by mistake. I wouldn’t have enough time to turn it in before heading out to the school by three.

“I’ve got to pick Angel up this afternoon,” I told Derek.

“Want me to come?”

“No, but I was wondering if you could drop some artwork by
Low-Country Leisure
this afternoon.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ve got to pick up some marine parts in town anyway so I can make one trip.”

We pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Several elderly couples were just coming out after finishing their meal.

“By the time we reach retirement age,” Derek said, “we’ll already be used to the elderly lifestyle. Sleeping in. Lunch at Denny’s.”

I had to admit, getting old was looking better every day.

“Ms. Melrose?” The woman at the front desk in the office repeated my name. I’d arrived early, as Lane suggested. “I’m sorry,” she said, appearing somewhat suspicious. “I thought I met you when you signed Angel up, but you don’t look familiar.”

“I’m not Angel’s mother. She’s Melrose too, but—”

“Oh, here’s the note,” she said, looking relieved. “Yes. Gina. If you could just let me check your driver’s license.”

Schools were getting worse than airports. Then again, abductions weren’t a joke, and if I were a parent, I imagined that I’d be reassured by the extensive gatekeeping.

“Good,” she said, handing me back my license. “The bell’s about to ring. It might be easiest if you went to her classroom and waited outside the door. It can get a little hectic finding a child when they’re running helter-skelter after the bell. The second-grade hall is down there.” She pointed toward nothing I could discern. “You’ll see the sign.”

After locating the hall, I matched up the room number, could see Angel’s class through the porthole-sized window in the door. Angel sat in the middle of the room. With the rest of the M’s, I imagined. Growing up with the last name Arthur not only made me the brunt of bad Camelot puns, but put me at the front right corner of every class, first through eighth grade. You’d think one teacher, just one, would have made seat assignments out in reverse alphabetical order.

The bell was located near the ceiling, just across the hall. I didn’t realize this until the painful sound was searing into my eardrum.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, eliciting a nasty glance from the teacher positioned in the hall to monitor the mass exodus. “Sorry,” I offered.

Angel came out near the end of the pack. She seemed to be in no hurry to leave. Miss Reilly, I guessed from the name on the door, came out just behind her. She was barely taller than Angel, with short hair to match her stature. She seemed young for a teacher, but then, the older I got, the younger people in their twenties looked.

“Where’s Lane?” Angel said. She didn’t appear to be disappointed, which cheered me some.

“The same tooth the dentist worked on the other week cracked or something. Fell out, I think. She’s back at the dentist now.” My explanation only underscored the horrors of age; not only to a clearly disturbed Angel, but, judging from her expression, the young Miss Reilly too. “She’s fine. It’s just a crown. They’ll fix it up for her.”

No one seemed terribly convinced.

“You want to see my me-apron?”

“Your
me-apron
?”

It sounded like an Irish possessive.

“The children made life-sized cutouts of themselves,” Ms. Reilly explained. “We put an apron pocket on each ‘child’ and the kids drew pictures of things that would tell something about themselves to go in the apron. We have free time when the kids can go explore each other’s pockets. Find out about each other.”

Exploring each other’s pockets.
A dozen jokes ran through my mind, none appropriate for a grade-school visit. But I liked the concept. The boy students had aprons that looked like the canvas tool holders that builders wear. Girls had the kitchen variety. Guess gender-typing would never completely disappear, especially in the South. But the cutouts all had smiles drawn on the distorted little faces. Angel’s looked particularly ragged. “That’s great,” I said.

“It’s not very good,” she said without any particular emotion. “But it was hard to do with my hurt arm.”

I felt like hell thinking about her struggling to cut paper and draw pictures, but she didn’t seem bothered at all.

“So what did you draw to put in your apron?” I asked.

She reached in. Her movements were awkward. No longer in a sling, her shoulder was wrapped in a large Ace bandage around her chest to keep it immobile. The night it happened seemed as if it had come from another lifetime. She pulled out a stack of small laminated pictures. A house, a watch, an attempt at drawing a doll of Barbie proportions . . . I knew the items, knew their history. It seemed, from her perspective, that life had begun the night she arrived on my boat.

“The cottage and my doll.” She laid the pictures down on a desk as she went through them. “My watch.” Then she came to a picture of people. Four people together, one clearly Angel herself, and another person kind of off to the side. “Here’s me, Mom, Lane, and you,” she said.

“And is that Ben over to that side?” The standoffish figure looked something like a man, although his hair was nearly as long as the others.

“No,” she said. “That’s Derek. Here’s Ben.” She handed me the last picture. I’m not sure most people would have recognized it, but I saw it clearly, green grass with the darker green mound of Ben’s grave. Above the headstoneless plot hovered a figure. Short hair, but wearing some sort of dress.

“Is that Ben?” I asked, wondering why she envisioned him a cross-dresser.

“That’s angel Ben,” she said. “Not Angel, like my name, but a real one. Lane says he’s watching over us, so that’s what I meant.”

I felt surprised by the tears that came to me so quickly, but even more surprised that they weren’t the painful tears I’d become so accustomed to over the last months.

I looked at Angel and she seemed to be waiting for something. My approval maybe.

“He’d love that, Angel. Lane’s right. He is looking out for us.”

I made a mental note to tell Maxine. All of a sudden I realized there needed to be another woman in her family picture. Another grandmother. I’d have to work on that one.

Back at the cottage, I scrounged through kitchen cabinets and the fridge to find after-school snacks.

“What do you usually have?” I asked.

“Well, it depends.” She put on her mock adult voice when she used this phrase but it was unsustainable, melted quickly back to kid. “Mom gives me peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes Fluffernutters. Lane wants me to eat fruit and stuff. She gave me tuna fish once, but I didn’t eat it.”

“I’m with your mom on this one,” I said, joining in her scrunched-up tuna fish face. “I like tuna for dinner, but snacks ought to be . . .”

“Fun,” she finished for me.

I found the whipped marshmallow and peanut butter, put them on bread, and gave the sandwich to her. Then I made one for myself. I hadn’t been to the cottage in a few days, I realized. Only once since her birthday. Part of it was the time I was spending with Derek, part of it the weird vibe I’d started getting from Reese. But I had liked being there. With Maxine. With Angel. Something about the normalcy of it made me feel more like myself. Less widowed. It’s what I’d tried to find for myself by moving to the boat, but more and more I realized that the boat was just another part of life with Ben. Derek’s apartment, the cottage . . . they were places I could define for myself. And then there was Angel. I’d only just begun to figure out the tangle of feelings she brought to the table.

“You put more marshmallow on than Mom,” she said, a white smear from her sandwich slashed across her cheek.

“Sorry.”

“It’s good.” She grinned.

“Close your mouth,” I said, looking away. “Half-chewed Fluffernutters ain’t pretty.”

We finished our sandwiches, watched the one cartoon she was allowed before homework. God, she was an honest child. Her boundaries seemed almost sacred to her.

Lane called several hours after we’d come in, offering to drive out and take over with Angel. But she sounded like hell, almost as bad as the time before, so I told her to stay put, I’d get dinner together for the two of us, and wait on Reese before I left. Within five minutes of mentioning dinner, the phone rang.

“How about hamburgers?” Derek asked.

“Lane called you,” I said. “She couldn’t stand shirking her responsibility, could she?”

“She couldn’t stand subjecting Angel to your cooking, was the way I heard it.”

“Fuck you,” I said, then caught myself, looked around to see if Angel was in earshot. She was. I mouthed
sorry,
and she just shook her head as if the grown-up/child roles had been entirely switched like in one of those ubiquitous Disney movies.

“I’ll be out in about half an hour,” Derek was saying. “I know about you. How does Angel like her burgers?”

“Pickles and mayo,” I said, remembering her preference from her birthday cookout.

“Gross.” He sounded twelve.

“She’s eight,” I said. “Cut her some slack.”

Angel had set the table with the seriousness of a State dinner. She even had water glasses and regular drink glasses. I had to stop her from putting out two forks.