Folly Cove (8 page)

“Sometimes.”

“Why did you decide to stay at Folly Cove, and not any of the other places you'd been singing?” He'd polished off the vegetables and moved on to his potatoes.

Sarah poked at her lunch, still mostly untouched. “I met my husband. Neil saw me sing and booked the band for the rest of the summer. I didn't know until later that he did it without consulting his parents.” She laughed. “All I cared about was that he paid the band up front for the next six weeks and gave us a place to stay.”

Gil smiled. “The guy must have been head over heels.”

“I was, too.” Sarah smiled and took another sip of wine. “He was the nicest, most glamorous man I'd ever met.”

She fell silent and pretended to focus on her food, not wanting to share the rest. She and Neil couldn't have been more opposite in background and temperament. Sarah was ten years older than he was when they met, but she didn't dare tell Neil. That wouldn't be such a scandal now, but back then it would have been unthinkable.

She was careful, so careful, with Neil. She refused to sleep with him right away. Didn't even let him kiss her until their third date. Flossie was still in France, so Mrs. Bradford had put the band up in
what was now Flossie's house—a house they used to rent out by the week—while Sarah stayed in the dreadful caretaker's cottage. The Houseboat.

But, oh, how romantic the Houseboat was, when Neil began coming to her in the evenings. This man—with his energy for life and his passion for her—made Sarah feel, finally, as though happiness wasn't meant only for other people.

She knew she had to tread carefully if she was going to keep Neil interested in her and be accepted by his family. She offered various elements of her life story, some real, some not. Her goal was to demonstrate pathos without inspiring pity.

She told Neil that her mother was an alcoholic (true) and that she had grown up an only child in a Back Bay brownstone (false). She said her father traveled for work and she didn't see him much. (True. He was a milkman, back in the days when that was a thing, and had left the family when Sarah was a baby.)

Not that it mattered. Neil only ever half listened to her; he had graduated from Harvard that spring and was floundering, he told her, until he heard Sarah sing. “You've given me a direction in life,” he pronounced. “You're like a Siren, daughter of the river god Achelous. I'm hopelessly drawn to you. You could lead me anywhere.”

Neil wanted to travel with the band. Rupert rolled his eyes at this. “That boy's got about as much sense as a string bean,” he grumbled. “Your fancy man would last about ten minutes on the road, grand as he is.”

Rupert helped Sarah weigh her options. They agreed that her best choice was to become the wife of sweet, lovely, cultured, idealistic Neil Bradford. Neil was an optimist and an enthusiastic dreamer. He was darkly handsome and boyish, always ready to dash down to Folly Cove and throw himself into the numbing sea, to ride a bicycle with no hands, to entertain people with card tricks and limericks.

Neil hadn't yet grown into a man, but Sarah could see the potential there. She could make something of him, she told Rupert.

The Sweet Tones were never going to make it big, Rupert assured her. “You're doing the right thing.” There wasn't going to be any recording contract. Rupert, a longtime smoker, was having breathing
problems, and Tony, their drummer, was planning to quit after the summer season to work in his brother's garage.

“Tony needs a regular paycheck, I need a rest, and you need a husband,” Rupert said. “This guy's so sweet on you, I expect you'll manage him all right.”

Sarah had every reason to believe this was true. Neil was in her thrall, and she was in thrall of everything that the Bradford family represented: a grand hotel, a family with historic ties, breeding, and money.

Too bad all of that was nearly as much of an illusion as the story Sarah had spun for Neil.

“How long were you married?” Gil asked after a silence that had lingered too long to be polite.

Sarah finished her wine and set the glass down gently, smiling at him. “We still are,” she said. “I'm afraid Rhonda may have misled you. My husband, Neil, has left the family, but he still writes to me now and then. We're not divorced. I don't expect we ever will be.”

“Because that's what you want, or because it's easy?” Gil signaled to the waitress.

Good. He'd gotten the message that Sarah wasn't available. They could get the check and leave.

“I beg your pardon,” Sarah said. “I am not, nor have I ever been, the sort of woman who takes the easy way out. I am married simply because I do not believe in divorce.”

“Huh,” Gil said. “The old-fashioned type, eh?” He smiled but narrowed his eyes in a way that suggested he was assessing her statement, determining just how seriously to take it.

Clearly, she'd sparked his attention. Gil saw her as a challenge and, like most men, probably longed to conquer it.

A part of Sarah was thrilled to see Gil look at her with undisguised interest. It had been a long time since any man had demonstrated an interest in her.

She was about to protest the idea of herself being old-fashioned—wasn't she an independent businesswoman?—when the waitress appeared at their table. Gil surprised Sarah by asking for two more drinks instead of the check.

Gil went on after the waitress had gone again. “I admire loyalty,” he said. “It's a fine trait. I was loyal to my wife. Faithful, and not because I didn't have opportunities.” When Sarah laughed at this, he held up a hand. “I'm not blowing my own horn. Just telling you like it is. I was married forty years to the same woman. We had our ups and downs, but we kept our promises to each other. I always knew I'd wake up and find her smiling at me in the morning, no matter how bad things got. I consider that one of the biggest blessings of my life. We all have opportunities to sneak around. But some of us actually manage to stay the course after we're married. If we do, our lives are richer for it.”

“I can think of some exceptions to that,” Sarah said, wondering how she and Neil would have gotten along if he'd stuck around. “But, in general, I agree. Congratulations to you and your wife.”

“Yeah, well. It was all her doing,” Gils said. “The woman was a saint, the way she put up with me.” He waited until the waitress, who had appeared again with their second round of drinks, disappeared again. “There are too many liars and cheaters in the world. I'm happy to meet you, Sarah.” He raised his glass. “Here's to you, for knowing your own mind and living by your principles.”

Sarah raised her glass, but didn't touch it to Gil's, because that would be like telling one more lie.

•   •   •

Anne shook the cocktail shaker hard, trying to block out the too-cheerful wedding band DJ and the babble of guests hopped up on hope. She couldn't believe she was back at the inn, tending bar the way she had every summer since her twenty-first birthday, until the summer things went so wrong with Laura.

The pub room looked exactly the same. This was one of the inn's main attractions and her mother had never redecorated it. “We can't improve on perfection,” Sarah always told guests who were seeing the pub for the first time.

Anne thought she was probably right. She loved the pub. The wooden ceiling had heavy beams, and the ornate silver-lined mirrors hung on the linen walls were imported from Spain. The wainscoting, too, was from Spain, hand-carved mahogany panels beneath a gold chair rail. Shreve,
Crump & Low had crafted the original light fixtures, which were inlaid with semiprecious stone. The bar was a narrow but elegant slab of Italian marble that encouraged customers to order cold martinis or hot whiskey.

Sarah had phoned late this afternoon in a panic because the bartender originally scheduled to work tonight called in sick at the last minute. The guy who would otherwise fill in was away at his father's funeral.

“Anne, please. I need you to help me tonight,” Sarah had said. “I'll ask one of the maids to look after the baby. And I'll pay you twice the usual rate. It's a wedding reception for one of the Martinson girls. The youngest, Paige. You know her, don't you? We can't let down the family. They've been so loyal to the inn!”

Paige, two years ahead of Anne at school, had been one of Elly's best friends and less hateful than most of that crowd of leggy ponytailed jocks. Still, Anne had toyed with the idea of refusing her mother in retaliation for the way Sarah had relegated her to a third-floor room. Her back still ached from carrying Lucy up and down those stairs seemingly countless times before moving to the Houseboat.

But Anne needed money, and Aunt Flossie said she'd be delighted to look after Lucy. She'd left the baby and two feedings' worth of frozen breast milk with her aunt, then hiked up to the pub.

As she mixed a cosmopolitan for one of the bridesmaids—a woman in her thirties with a rodent's small dark eyes and a stocky body encased in a pink taffeta bridesmaid dress—Anne noticed a man standing by the far corner of the bar. He was nursing a beer; he must have brought the bottle into the pub from the dining room, because she hadn't served him.

The man seemed to be alone, unlike most of the people who entered the pub room in knots of partygoers, and he was attractive in the dark, aloof, slightly worn way of a famous actor down on his luck. Tall and lean, a long nose with a slight bump keeping it from being perfect, thick black brows. His hair was the color of an old penny and curled around the collar of his tux. He must be in the wedding party.

It wasn't until she'd finished carving a lemon peel for the bridesmaid's drink—making the woman shriek, “Oh my God, so pretty! Like a flower!”—and walked the length of the bar to serve another
patron close to the man that she recognized him: Sebastian Martinson. The bride's older brother. Sebastian looked more like his father now than the boy she remembered.

Her face flamed as she thought about the last time she'd seen him. She and Sebastian had hooked up at his sister Paige's high school graduation party twenty years ago. That night, Anne had gotten drunk and declared to Hattie that it was time to lose her virginity. “I can't have sex hanging over my head going into senior year.”

“You're one sick chick,” Hattie said admiringly. She'd had the same boyfriend since freshman year, and had lost her virginity that summer. “You should wait for L-O-V-E!”

“Love is like unicorns: we can fantasize about owning one, but in the end it's just a horse with a fake horn,” Anne replied, making Hattie snort vodka through her nose.

Hattie helped her scout the party for likely candidates. Somebody from out of town would be optimal, they agreed.

Sebastian would be a safe bet, Anne decided after surveying the crowd. He had come solo to his sister's party and was home for only a week before leaving on some South American college mission trip. Plus, Sebastian was four years older, a classmate of her sister Laura at the same private school they all attended. Twenty years old! Definitely had to be experienced.

When Sebastian left the graduation party, Anne followed him down the long driveway to the street. She couldn't remember now what she'd said by way of introduction, but she'd pretty much accosted the guy while he was unlocking his car. She'd pushed him against the hood of his Volvo and kissed him when he turned around in surprise at her greeting.

So reckless. And rude! She'd used him, plain and simple. At sixteen, Anne had believed she was invincible. In charge of her own destiny. How naive could you get?

Even worse, Laura saw them together. Her sister had mistakenly opened the car door, thinking it was someone else's Volvo, and caught Anne lying beneath Sebastian on the backseat. She'd teased Anne
mercilessly the next day, saying, “You are
such
a slut! No wonder Mom's in despair about you.”

Anne's shameful reverie was interrupted by one of the waitresses, Clarkie, who set her tray down on the bar near Anne and glanced at Sebastian. He was sitting straight up on his barstool with his eyes closed. Anne couldn't tell if he was unconscious or rapturously listening to the music.

“Ooh, look at the lone wolf,” Clarkie said. “I'd like to make that one howl.”

“What do you need?” Anne said, hoping Sebastian hadn't heard.

“Two more martinis for a couple of guys who think they're dancing but look like they're having seizures.” Clarkie glanced at Sebastian again. “Wait. That's what's-his-name. The bride's brother, right? I heard he's got a serious screw loose.”

“What do you mean?” Anne focused on mixing the drinks.

Clarkie shrugged her doughy shoulders. “He went batshit crazy after his wife drove herself off a cliff or something.” She circled her temple with one forefinger.

Anne stared at her in horror. “God. That's awful.”

“Yeah, well. We live in a world of hurt, baby.” Clarkie left the bar, balancing the silver drinks tray on her fingers above the crowd.

By the time Anne looked at Sebastian again, he had disappeared. Maybe he'd gone back to the wedding. Or fallen off his stool. Fine. If he wanted to pass out on the floor, she'd leave him in peace until closing time.

Thankfully, the crowd was beginning to thin out. Anne's back ached and her breasts were too full. Her mother had been right about the tips, though, so that was something. A few pub shifts like these might give her enough to put down a deposit on a studio apartment.

She was polishing the glasses that had come out of the dishwasher when Jake appeared in the doorway and started scanning the room. She had to fight her first impulse to hide behind the bar.

“Go the hell away,” Anne muttered under her breath, turning her back to the room and hoping Jake wouldn't recognize her.

“I'm sorry?”

Anne whipped her body around. Sebastian Martinson was back at the bar, in front of her this time. His face looked haggard even in this dim light, but the recognition in his eyes was immediate.