Folly Cove (31 page)

Flossie pulled away again and nodded, her cheeks flushed, her gray hair crested high. “Look, I need to speak with you and your sisters all together,” she said. “Can the three of you come see me the day after tomorrow? I need to tell you something important.”

“Can't you tell me now?”

“I'm afraid not.” Flossie pulled on her black woolen cap. “We need to have a family meeting. I've already spoken with Laura and Elly. They said they can come midmorning, maybe ten o'clock. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes, I think so. That should give me enough time to feed and dress the little beast.” Anne kissed her aunt's soft cheek again and noticed she was trembling. Yet the cottage was warm and Flossie had on her jacket.

“Can't you at least give me a hint?” Anne asked, a stone of worry heavy in her chest.

“No, dear, I'm afraid not. Now, good night. Sleep well.”

To her shock, Flossie turned away abruptly, but not fast enough to hide the tears sliding down her cheeks before closing the door behind her.

“T
ry to eat. A little nosh, at least. You need to keep up your strength,” Gil said. “Grief burns a lot of calories. I should know.”

“Stop bullying me.” Sarah put down her fork. “I said I don't have an appetite. Yet you insisted on going out to lunch. You and Rhonda. Impossible, both of you.” She balled up her napkin and set it on top of her plate so the waiter would have no choice but to remove it.

Gil only laughed. “Oy vey. You could singe a fellow's scalp with that glare.” He patted the top of his balding head between the ring of graying curls. “Seriously. Is it on fire?”

She refused to be amused. Sarah smoothed her skirt and looked away.

It had been six days since she'd received the letter from Neil's attorney. Flossie hadn't told the girls yet, but she was threatening to do it tomorrow if Sarah didn't.

“I said I'd give you a week to keep this news to yourself,” Flossie said when they ran into each other by chance in the dining room this morning. “Time's almost up. I've invited the girls to my house tomorrow at ten o'clock. I will break the news to them then, if you haven't, and I'll deliver their father's ashes. There ought to be a memorial service. The girls need closure.”

“They've forgotten all about him,” Sarah had argued in a furious whisper. “Why dredge up all that old stuff and break their hearts? And
if anyone has a memorial service, it should be me! I was Neil's wife! That's the proper thing.”

“Then take the ashes,” Flossie said, adding firmly, “Before tomorrow, you need to tell the girls about Neil, and about everything else, too. I can't keep this to myself any longer, and your children deserve to know.” Then she walked away, the little tyrant.

A few minutes later, Rhonda had brought Gil into Sarah's office. She'd told him about Neil, of course, and Gil had arrived carrying a bouquet of lilies and his condolences. He had invited Sarah to “step out for a little while and forget your sorrows.” She'd been so rattled by Flossie's threat that she'd consented.

But there was no escape from her memories. Just now, for instance, as Sarah turned determinedly away from Gil and looked outside, she could see the sea heaving itself relentlessly against the rocks below the window. He'd brought her to a restaurant on Rocky Neck. On the opposite side of the cove was the city of Gloucester, its skyline a mix of steeples, old brick mills, boxy warehouses, and Victorians: every shape imaginable and all in bright colors, like a child's jigsaw puzzle.

Rocky Neck was home to one of the country's oldest working artists' colonies. Sarah often sent tourists here so they could shop in the galleries but seldom came here herself. When did she ever have time to play tourist?

Families walked along the shore below them, scurrying like crabs among the rocks as they filled their plastic buckets like every generation before them. An endless stream of humanity had been arriving in New England from Europe to hunt for sea treasures since the fifteenth century, and the indigenous people were here doing the same hundreds of years before that. Yet who remembered any of the ordinary people, their joys and struggles? Who would remember her or her daughters?

Sarah watched a group of small children in bright jackets poking around in the tide pools with sticks, and thought about how, when her own girls were small, it was always Flossie who took them to the beach after Neil left, so Sarah could work.

“I've been a terrible mother,” she said.

Gil chewed quietly—by the looks of him, he wasn't the sort of man to give up on a meal—waiting for evidence of this. When she didn't provide any, he said, “Yet somehow your daughters grew up and made lives of their own.”

“You don't know anything about them.”

“You forget I have a mole at the inn.”

“Rhonda?”

He nodded. “Rhonda has told me all about your daughters. From what I hear, they don't seem to be raving mad. At least not outwardly.” Gil had finished everything on his plate—broiled salmon with vegetables and salad, the meal of a man who had been told by his doctor to watch his blood sugar—and put down his fork. “If I'm remembering correctly, your girls also aren't homeless or drug addicts or even car thieves. All three work and live independently. In my book, they're wildly successful. So that makes you a good mother by default.”

“No,” Sarah said. “It only means they thrived despite my neglect. After Neil left, all I did was work.”

“You provided a roof over their heads and put clothes on their backs,” Gil said. “So you were never a balabosta—so what? Stop beating yourself up. You taught your girls to work for a living.
Mazel tov!
That's more important these days than knowing how to clean a house.” He removed the napkin from her plate and gestured at the food. “Three bites. That's all I ask.”

Sarah made a dismissive noise, but somehow his words had calmed her. She obediently forked three bites of salad into her mouth and then more, too, as Gil told her about his own brother, who had killed himself at the age of twenty. “Bipolar,” Gil said, “back in the days when the doctors didn't know about such things.”

Sarah eyed him suspiciously. Was there any way this man could have heard about her own problems all those years ago?

“I'm very sorry,” she said. “That must have been terrible.”

Gil waved a hand. “It was. Still, every day I'm grateful my own sons didn't inherit whatever genes drove my brother to his grave.”

And that mention of his own sons, of course, compelled Sarah to
ask about Gil's children, which led her to eat the rest of her salad and a dinner roll, too, while he told her that one was an engineer in Providence while the other boy was earning a master's degree in biochemistry at Boston University.

He'd seen more of them after their mother died, Gil said, “Probably because they're afraid I'll off myself and don't want to live with the guilt. But I think I've convinced them now that I'm okay.”

“And are you really?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

Sarah smiled, and Gil smiled back, though his dark eyes were solemn and his mouth turned down a little at the corners, like an actor forced to perform a part he hadn't perfected yet. “I'm not okay, either,” she said, “but I can't figure out why. You deserve to mourn your wife. You lived with her, took care of her. I haven't even seen Neil for thirty years. What do I have to be sad about?”

“You're sad because somebody who was dear to you, a man who knew you back when you were young and beautiful and probably hopeful, too, is no longer among us,” Gil said at once, then added, “Though you're still beautiful.”

Sarah laughed. “Just when I was starting to think I could trust you, you say something ridiculous,” she said, but she was unreasonably flattered. She couldn't remember the last time a man had said anything about her appearance. “I think you're right, that I miss knowing Neil was in the world more than his presence. I'm sad about him being gone because he was a good man, really, and because I know this news will hit my daughters hard,” she said. “But I'm angry, too, because Neil never came back to apologize, or to let me apologize even, or to see what I'd done at the inn. In a way, I'd taken a dare. My husband left partly because he didn't think the Folly Cove Inn would succeed.”

“More's the pity that he didn't return, then,” Gil said. “You've done a wonderful job.”

“Yes, but somehow it seems less of an achievement because Neil never saw me prove him wrong,” Sarah said, and then her throat tightened up and she felt as if all the salad she'd just consumed was knotted in her stomach, a ball of green fiber pressing against her diaphragm.

“Excuse me,” she said, and hurriedly stood up and went to the ladies' room, where she held her wrists under cold water and couldn't look at herself in the mirror, knowing what she'd see: an old woman hunched with grief.

When she emerged again, Gil was waiting in the hallway outside the restrooms, her coat and purse over one arm. He helped her into the coat but insisted on carrying her purse to the car, where he opened the door for her and waited for her to sit and do up her seat belt. Then he took a blanket from the backseat and laid it over her legs, tucking it in tenderly around her thighs.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“I will be. I think I'm still in shock.”

“Of course you are. And I have to say the aftershocks will keep coming,” Gil said. “My wife has been gone for a year, but I keep being reminded whenever it's the first time I do something without her that we used to do together.”

Sarah stared at his hands fussing around her lap—brown as wood, veined, yet somehow still strong and capable, with their broad palms and sturdy fingers—and had the oddly comforting sensation that she'd been here before with him, doing exactly this, as if she'd come home to him after a long journey.

Then Sarah inhaled sharply and shook her head. She was an old woman with an old woman's delusions. “Thank you for understanding,” she said. “Please, let's go back to my apartment.”

“As you wish,” he said, and drove slowly back to the inn, talking amiably about nothing.

Gil insisted on walking her into the apartment, still carrying her purse over one arm and yet somehow looking like a man who could hold his own in a bar brawl, with his stocky build and slightly bowed legs.

“Coffee or tea?” he said, moving straight to the kitchen as if he were coming home, too.

Sarah dropped onto the couch and pulled off her boots, curled her feet beneath her. “Tea,” she said, and rested her head against the back of the sofa.

When she felt his weight on the couch beside her, she opened her
eyes and saw that Gil had made two mugs of tea and put them on a tray with cream, sugar, and a packet of graham crackers, her guilty pleasure since she was a child and it was all her mother could ever get for the food stamps at the corner market.

“My girls don't know about their father,” she said.

Gil picked up one of the mugs and blew on its surface, then said, “What don't they know? That he's dead?”

“Yes. Or that we were still in touch occasionally. I wanted them to forget him because I didn't want them wishing for a father they couldn't have.”

“It sounds like you were protecting them.”

“You have a way of putting things that makes me sound nearly saintly.” Sarah considered the other mug, then picked it up. Not to drink the tea, but to hold something warm in her hands.

“My therapist calls it ‘reframing.' Are you planning to tell them he's gone?” Gil asked. There was no judgment in his voice.

“I don't want to. I'm afraid they'll take it hard. My girls are so emotional. So full of love and longing. Strange, when I'm the opposite.”

“Really? Are you?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “I figured out a long time ago how to compartmentalize my emotions and stop longing for anything. It was easier. My childhood was difficult, though my daughters don't know that about me, either.”

She stopped talking then because she'd sloshed some of the tea onto her wrist. She winced, but welcomed the heat as a sharp reminder that she was telling this man things she'd kept for decades from her own family.

“I apologize,” she said. “I'm not usually one for confessions. Something about you must bring it out in me.”

“Then I'm honored,” Gil said. “And for the record? I happen to think it's not always such a good thing for our children to know everything about us. Parents deserve privacy, too.”

“That sounds like a bumper sticker.”

“Good idea. I'll have to patent it.” He reached for a graham cracker
and crunched it shamelessly between his teeth, spilling crumbs down the front of his blue sweater. “So will you tell them?”

“If I don't, my husband's sister, Flossie—she lives in that house on the beach below the inn—intends to do it for me. She'll tell them everything, she says.”

“Everything? You mean about you, too?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn't seem right.” Gil sounded indignant.

“No. But there's not much I can do about it.” Sarah leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes again. She had started to shiver. Perhaps she was coming down with something.

“You're cold,” Gil said. “Let me get you a blanket.”

“I think I'm just exhausted from worrying about what my daughters will think when they find out I'm an impostor. Half the things I've told them have been lies. They're going to hate me.”

“You should lie down if you're exhausted,
bubbeleh
.”

“That would be the logical thing,” she agreed, but Sarah was too exhausted to move.

After a few minutes, she felt Gil stand up and remove the tea things as he said, “You know, we're all impostors in our own lives, if only because we walk around on two legs like we're not animals,” he said. “Your daughters might hate you for a while. So what? It's the privilege of the young to hate the mistakes of the old. Then they get old and find out what's what.”