Folly Cove (30 page)

“Oh God, Jake.” Laura covered her face in her hands, breathing into her palms as if they were a paper bag because she felt dizzy and sick. “How long have you known?”

“A while now.”

“How long?” she demanded, dropping her hands.

He sighed. “In college I thought I was bisexual. You know. I experimented a little. Then I met you and fell in love. I wanted to spend my life with you. I still love you. I still want that!”

“Don't,” she said, her voice hoarse with the effort of holding in tears. “Please don't.”

“But it's true!” he said. “I love your warmth, your kindness, your ability to solve problems, your family.
You
, Laura! I love you and our life with Kennedy. I've stayed in our marriage because I never wanted to hurt either of you. You're everything to me. You're my family!”

“Why tell me all this now? What big revelation have you had?” She stared at him, noting the blue shadow of his beard coming in, the fatigue in his eyes. “You've met someone.”

To her horror, he nodded.

“When?”

“It doesn't matter when.”

“It does to me!”

“Three years ago. I met him at that conference in Las Vegas,” he said, and told the story of Anthony.

And then, because Laura insisted on asking for details she'd regret knowing later, Jake told her how he'd been finding time to spend with Anthony in the last few years, about their house in Medford. About their son.

Their
son
! Laura really did think she might be sick then. Jake sank cross-legged onto the floor in front of her, clasping his hands. In this position, she could be sick all over him. Good.

“Anthony picks up most of the expenses, but he's still in college, trying to finish his degree,” Jake said. “So money . . .”

She interrupted him. “I don't want to hear about money. What about Anne?”

He shrugged. “There was never anything between Anne and me.”

“Are you saying she was telling the truth all this time? That you made me mistrust my sister
for no reason
? I chose sides, Jake. And I chose
you
!”

“I'm sorry. I hate myself for that. But yes. Anne was telling the truth.”

Laura clenched her hands into fists and imagined pummeling her husband's chest. Boxing his ears, whatever that meant. Doing permanent damage to his handsome betrayer's face. She imagined setting fire to him and rolling him into the rug, saving his life, but only after he was howling in pain, the way she was silently howling now.

She thought of something else then and shuddered. “Have you been tested?”

“Yes. You're fine.
We're
fine. And he and I have always used protection.”

“Oh God,” she moaned, leaning far enough forward to bite the
edge of the pillow in her lap. Otherwise, she might have gone after her husband, biting and scratching until there was blood. “How could you do this, Jake?
How?
”

“I couldn't
not
,” he said. “It's who I am, Laura.”

And there it was: Jake was finally telling her the truth, the complete truth, for perhaps the first time in their lives, ruining everything.

•   •   •

Working with Rodrigo in the kitchen was surprisingly natural. Anne felt at home amid the rapid staccato of chopping blades and spoons ringing on metal pots, the steam rising, the shelves of spices and bins of freshly trimmed herbs.

Maybe she was at ease because she'd been playing here since she was a child. If Flossie couldn't watch her, Sarah sometimes handed her off to Rodrigo. “Here,” she'd say, “help sift the flour,” or “Stand on this stool and stir the gravy. Tell Rodrigo when it thickens.”

Anne might arrange the salads, too, or she garnished the plates and soups. The inn served three meals a day, seven days a week. Breakfast was typically a buffet with an omelet station, but for lunch and dinner, there were choices of two chowders and two soups, several salads, at least a half dozen standard entrées, and the specials.

On one side of the dining room's swinging doors was the kitchen, with its frenzied dance of preparations. On the other side was the tranquil dining room, with a fire lit for chilly days and nights and fresh flowers on the tables in every season. Only china plates and sterling-silver place settings were used, and the glasses were of such thin crystal that to Anne, as a child, they'd seemed to be made of rounded sheets of ice.

At the start of every meal, Rodrigo would watch the customers anxiously, waiting for some sign that his dishes were going to be enjoyed, not just experienced. Anne did that, too: while she was cooking in Puerto Rico, she realized she could read her customers' microexpressions even before they'd finished tasting something.

During her childhood, Rodrigo was a noisy, temperamental young man who could be boundlessly entertaining, with his stories of his vast, extended Brazilian family, or he could cut you with a look. Now he was
probably in his midsixties, portly and quiet, a dignified man whose dark hair was threaded with silver. Put him in a suit and he could be an attorney.

Despite his Brazilian background, Rodrigo turned out classic New England meals—lobster, rack of lamb, prime rib—as well as certain recipes unique to the Folly Cove Inn, like a creamy Alfredo pasta dish with chicken, spinach, and artichokes.

As executive chef, Rodrigo supervised those cooking beneath him. The staff included Doris, a wiry, bird-beaked woman in her forties. She'd recently been promoted to sous chef after the last guy left to cook at a hotel in Danvers, she told Anne as she showed her around.

“Rodrigo is extremely invested in the smallest details of what we do,” Doris warned her, “like the quality of parsley used as a garnish on the potatoes and whether someone's lamb is medium rare as requested. So if you see something out of whack, speak up.”

Anne thought she'd start out as a prep cook, maybe chopping things for salads, but instead Rodrigo talked to her about what she'd been doing in Puerto Rico, then made her a line cook. The pace and duties suited her, especially since she was working alongside both the vegetable cook and the pastry chef.

The other Folly Cove cooks were men younger than she was, probably in their late twenties. They had met at the local vocational school, and Rodrigo had asked them to come in on Monday with Anne so they could work the kinks out of a few new recipes.

Anne's shift was from eleven to eight, with a long enough break in midafternoon that she could walk back to the cottage and nurse Lucy. Flossie pronounced the baby “good as gold” when Anne returned at eight o'clock Monday night and nursed Lucy once more before putting her down for the night.

Flossie seemed to be in no hurry to leave. She shared the dinner of mashed potatoes, roast chicken, and squash that Anne had brought back, and they opened a bottle of chardonnay.

“I can't thank you enough for watching Lucy,” Anne said as the wine warmed her throat and loosened her shoulders. She massaged her neck. “I'll find a sitter by the weekend.”

Flossie waved a hand. “No need. Let me watch the brat. Lucy's welcome in my drumming classes, and I'm only teaching one yoga class this weekend. My students won't mind if Lucy joins us. I can set her playpen up in the studio.” She grinned. “I'll have that baby doing her downward dogs and chanting ‘om' before you know it.”

They talked about Rodrigo and the kitchen staff then. Anne could hear the sea sighing below the cottage and imagined it, black and sparking beneath the full moon, frothing white along the shore.

She remembered another moonlit autumn night when she was sixteen and brokenhearted over some boy. Bereft, too, because Elly had recently left for college. She'd come here to Flossie for comfort, as she usually did.

Flossie had encouraged Anne to talk about the boy, even to cry a little. Then she'd led Anne down to the beach. They'd stood barefoot in the cold damp sand of Folly Cove, gazing out at the angry-looking charcoal water and the gleaming white path cast across it by the moon.

Suddenly, a trio of humpback whales crested directly below the moon, making Anne gasp. “Did you see that, Aunt Flossie? Did you?” She'd hopped up and down on the sand, her broken heart forgotten.

Flossie had laughed and told Anne she often saw whales feeding off Jeffrey's Ledge. She began sharing facts about whales then, some of which Anne still remembered: how the blue whale was bigger than any dinosaur, its heart the size of a car and loud enough to be heard two miles away. How beluga whales could imitate human speech, and humpback whales learned songs from one another.

“What I want you to remember, Anne,” Flossie had said as they'd walked back to the cottage that night, “is that you are but one small creature in an infinite universe of wonders. Open your eyes to the marvels around you, and you will always keep the small things in perspective. Even love is a small thing, compared to what's all around us.”

Now, watching Flossie get up from the stool and wash her plate, then stand it carefully in the dish drainer next to the sink, Anne felt a rush of love for her. She suddenly wanted to buy her a gift.

“When's your birthday?” she asked as Flossie picked up her coat, preparing to leave.

Flossie smiled. In the dim light of the cottage, the smile made her look like a druid who could happily dwell in a tree trunk. “I don't believe in birthdays,” she said. “No point in celebrating the day you were born. Time is an artificial human construct. Every day should be a celebration of life.”

“Oh, come on,” Anne said. “Just tell me.”

“No.” Flossie put on her jacket, still smiling.

“Why not?”

“Because if I tell you, you'll do something silly, like throw me a party. Nobody needs to make a fuss over me. Save your energy to fete your mother.”

Anne looked at her curiously, still remembering that night on the beach when she was sixteen. “Were you ever in love?” she asked.

“Of course. We all fall in love.”

“Were you in love with lots of people? Or just once?”

“I've been in love many times. I expect I'll fall in love again while I'm still on the green side of the sod.” Flossie adjusted her jacket collar.

“Okay, but who was your first true love?”

“You don't want to hear all that nonsense,” Flossie said.

“I do!”

Flossie sighed and came back over to the couch. “All right. I'll humor you.” She sat down and unbuttoned her coat. “He was British. I met him in France, where we were both studying at the same monastery. France has a great tradition of training Westerners in Tibetan Buddhism,” she added, “largely due to the influence of Alexandra David-Néel.”

“Who?”

Flossie gave her a pitying look. “You really ought to read more, dear,” she said mildly. “David-Néel was a French explorer, a feminist and spiritualist who visited Tibet when it was still closed to foreigners. She wrote about thirty books and greatly influenced beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg. You've heard of them, presumably?”

Anne made a face. “I did graduate from college.”

“Yes, well, see that your education doesn't stop there.”

Again, Flossie's rebuke was mild, but Anne knew she meant it. “Fine. Back to the love of your life,” she said. “What was his name?”

“Clark.” Flossie said his name softly. “He was older than I was and had already been married and divorced. He'd traveled all over the world working odd jobs. A bit of a gypsy.” She smiled. “A devilishly handsome man, especially attractive to a plain girl like me.”

“You've never been plain!” Anne protested.

“Yes, well, I've never been beautiful, either. Not like your mother or you girls,” Flossie said. “At any rate, I thought I'd met my soul mate. We studied together at the monastery, and for a while we traveled together. We went to Thailand, where I taught English, and to Nepal and Bali. In between, we'd return to the monastery, where Clark was eventually put in charge of the gardens as the monastery expanded and accepted more religious scholars. Not all of them wanted to be monks or nuns, of course. Some were simply studying Buddhism to practice it in their own lives. I helped teach some of the beginning classes and worked in the kitchen.” She smiled. “Imagine! Me in a kitchen! A wonder I didn't poison anyone.”

“Flossie, what happened with Clark?” Anne pressed, eager to hear the rest of the story.

“He was trying to decide whether to stay at the monastery full-time right around the time I got the call from Neil, begging me to come home for his wedding.” Flossie spread her hands and studied them, as if her own journey might be revealed there, mapped across her calloused palms. “Of course I came home. I wasn't about to miss my own brother's wedding.” She swallowed hard, not lifting her eyes from her hands. “Shortly after I returned to France, Clark had made up his mind.”

Anne put her hand over one of Flossie's. “He became a monk?”

Flossie looked up and nodded. “I didn't blame him, of course. It was the right path. Clark never belonged in the real world.”

“Don't you ever wonder what would have happened if you'd stayed in France?”

“Water under the bridge,” Flossie said, waving that thought away. “I left the monastery soon after that, traveled on my own for a while, teaching English here and there and trying to find where I belonged. I came back to Folly Cove to help when Elly was born, and then you came along. You girls were my reward. I've been lucky enough to fall
in love a few times since returning. Nothing serious, but enough to keep me entertained. I have a good life.” She grinned, then squeezed Anne's hand and stood up, buttoning her coat again.

Anne walked her to the door, where Flossie kissed her cheek good night, and then, to Anne's surprise, embraced her. “Are you okay?” Anne said, rubbing her aunt's narrow back.