The Sins of the Mother (16 page)

The club was half empty when they got there, and a headwaiter settled them in a private alcove that the captain of the boat had arranged. Within half an hour, the place was swarming with beautiful young women, handsome men, people from the yachts, others who owned houses. There were mostly Italians, though Olivia heard French, English, Spanish, German, and Russian spoken as well. The place was fiercely expensive, so the crowd looked fairly racy. The music was blaring, champagne was flowing, and waiters carrying sparklers threaded through the crowd, as waitresses handed out jewelry that lit up in the dark. There was a mood of celebration all around them, and after a glass of champagne, Alex and his two cousins led Olivia out onto the dance floor, and before she knew it, she was writhing with the rest of the crowd, and having a terrific time.

“Who is that woman out there?” Phillip said to his brother with a broad grin. “That can’t be our mother. I don’t think I ever remember seeing her dance like that.” She looked half her age as she danced with Alex, and her children were impressed by how fast she learned all the right moves, and she managed to look both dignified and sexy in her satin pants and high heels. And a few minutes later, Phillip grabbed his sister and headed onto the dance floor too. He had been drinking straight vodka and was in a great mood. And Sarah and John sat necking at the back of the alcove, like two kids.

The champagne poured freely, and Phillip made it halfway through a bottle of vodka before he switched to beer. He had never danced as much in one night. He had even danced with a woman in a sexy cocktail dress, and then went back to dance with Liz. He had noticed some Italian playboy stalking her and decided she needed rescuing, and she looked disappointed when he did.

“Who was that guy? Do you know him?” Phillip asked her and she shrugged with a guilty grin.

“He says he’s from another boat. He’s from Milan and he just invited me to spend the weekend with him.” Twenty years earlier, he would have been just her cup of tea, and the kind of man she always got in trouble with. Now it was just fun flirting with him, and it was easier staying with her own group. But it was nice having someone pay attention to her. She had never seen her older brother be so expansive, dance so much, or possibly be quite so drunk.

It was three-thirty in the morning, and the party was still going strong when they left the nightclub. Olivia said her feet hurt so much she could hardly walk, but it had been worth it. They had all had a ball. John and Sarah were the only relatively sober ones in the group, and they had had a fair amount of champagne too. It was better than New Year’s Eve, and they were all rowdy and loud when they got back to the boat. The kids put on more music, and kept dancing, but Olivia had finally run out of steam. She sat down on one of the couches and felt like she couldn’t move.

“I haven’t had that much fun in years,” she said with a broad grin. “I may have had a little too much to drink,” she added demurely, and Phillip laughed out loud.

“Join the club, Mother. You’re quite a dancer.” He had suddenly remembered his parents dancing in his youth. He had so few memories of them together.

“So are you.” She smiled at her oldest son.

They all stayed on deck for another hour, and it was almost five in the morning when they finally all went to bed. Phillip said he wanted to go fishing, and his brother convinced him to wait until the next day.

And as Olivia walked slowly to her room, she thought about her husband and wished he could have been there. He would have loved it, but even without him she had had fun dancing with her grandchildren, and drinking a little too much champagne. It had been a wonderful evening, and they had all forgotten that Amanda hadn’t come along, and how lively Phillip could be without her. It was a side of him none of them had seen in years.

It had been an unforgettable night, and they still had more than a week left of the trip. Olivia lay down on her bed, just for a minute. She was going to get up and take off her clothes but never did. She fell sound asleep in her dancing clothes, with her high-heeled sandals in her hand, and a smile on her face. She was going to call and tell her mother all about it in the morning, but first she had to get some sleep.

Chapter 9

T
hey all looked a little shaggy when they met at the breakfast table at noon the next day. Olivia looked surprisingly fresh, but said she could hardly walk. Phillip was wearing dark glasses and asked for a glass of Fernet Branca, which was what he had used for hangovers in his youth.

“I think I may have a brain tumor,” he said, and everyone laughed. Amanda was extremely quiet. She had been on deck alone since nine
A.M.

“It sounds like you all had a good time,” she said primly. But it had been her choice not to go.

“Grandma danced her ass off,” Alex volunteered, and everybody laughed again.

“I had a very, very good time,” Olivia confirmed, “except for the blisters on my feet.”

“I think I agreed to spend the weekend with some Italian guy from Milan,” Liz said with a dazed look. She had brought a bottle of aspirin to the table, and they all passed it around. They were a sorry group, but none of them regretted it for a minute. The headaches they had that morning had been worth it. “I think if I go swimming today, I’ll drown,” Liz said, wondering how many glasses of champagne she had had the night before. She had lost count. Carole, Alex, and Sophie had had fun too, and they had drunk less than the adults.

In the end, they decided to take the boat out and have lunch at anchor. They took turns having massages, and by three o’clock they all started to feel better, and went swimming after that. They took it easy and laughed a lot about the night before, what they remembered of it. Even Olivia admitted that she had had far too much champagne, and she called and told Maribelle all about it, as they went back to port in the late afternoon.

Maribelle surprised her when she said that Cass had come to see her the day before. She was in New York with one of her clients, and had gone to visit her grandmother. Hearing about it made Olivia wish she was there, but she knew Cass would never join them. But it was a relief to know that she was happy and well.

“You never know,” Maribelle said, when Olivia said she wished Cass would come on the boat. She didn’t have three children, she had four. Cassie was her lost child, the one that had slipped through her fingers and she couldn’t recapture. It always felt like a terrible loss to her, even if they saw each other once in a while. But there was so much damage and distance between them now, it seemed beyond repair. “Things happen. People change. Life has a way of working things out,” Maribelle said philosophically with the vantage point of age. But it didn’t seem likely to Olivia. Her mother laughed when she told her about the night before.

“You sound like a bunch of shameless drunks,” she said as Olivia described the scene to her. The only thing more shocking than how much they drank had been the bill. But she had been anesthetized enough not to care.

“We certainly were last night, but it was fun. Your great-grandchildren had me dancing all night.” Olivia only wished that she had done more of that when she was young, but she had hardly ever had the time. Sometimes it was easier doing things like that when you were old.

The others all talked to Maribelle for a few minutes, and told her they missed her, and they promised to call her again in a few days.

They ate on board that night, and after dinner they left the port and headed back toward Corsica. They were going to sail through the night, and Liz dreaded going through the Strait of Bonifacio again, but the weather reports were good, and the captain said he was expecting a smooth crossing. And then as though out of nowhere, halfway to Corsica, a mistral wind came up. It was sudden and strong, the sea grew frighteningly choppy, and the boat shuddered and rode the deep swells. The kids had been in the movie theater and the adults had gone to their cabins. Liz was the first to knock on her mother’s door as the boat groaned under their feet.

“Are we sinking?” She looked panicked.

“No.” Olivia smiled reassuringly, but there was no denying the pitching and tossing was unpleasant, and the boat slammed hard with a frightening sound each time they fell into a deep trough after a swell. “I guess it’s just an unexpected windstorm,” her mother reassured her, but it had unnerved her a little too, although she didn’t get seasick. Liz was green.

“Should I put my life jacket on?” Liz asked with wide eyes.

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said calmly as Phillip walked into her cabin, looking concerned.

“Amanda’s feeling pretty sick. Do you think we should go back?” They were in the middle of open water halfway from Sardinia to Corsica, and that didn’t sound like a solution to Olivia, but there was no denying it was getting worse. The heavy boat was rolling like crazy.

“I’ll go talk to the captain,” Olivia said, trying not to look worried. Sarah and John appeared, and then all the kids found their way to Olivia’s suite as well. Crew members were walking through the halls, taking fragile objects off tables, and putting anything that might break on the floor. They looked busy, but not worried, which was reassuring.

“Shit, we’re sinking,” Liz said, as she grabbed her mother’s arm.

“We are?” Carole and Sophie looked at each other, and Carole started to cry.

“We’re
not
sinking, and if this were an emergency, the captain would have told us,” Olivia said above their voices as the boat continued to head into the troughs, hit hard, and shudder. “I’ll talk to the captain,” Olivia said firmly, and the entire group followed her to the wheelhouse, where the captain was watching the radar screens and adjusting several dials. He looked up apologetically as they entered.

“I’m sorry. It’s a mistral. I thought we would avoid it, but it came up earlier than expected.” The winds were fifty knots, and the boat was at the mercy of them now.

“Are we in danger?” Liz managed to croak out.

“Not at all. We’ll be in the shelter of land in two hours, and then it will be much better, although we will have strong winds for the next two days, but better seas.”

“Like this?” Sarah asked with a worried look, standing next to John.

“No, it will be calmer than this. It is just particularly bad here in the strait.”

“Should we go back to Porto Cervo?” Phillip inquired, thinking of Amanda sheet white and sick in their cabin.

“It would be the same. It will take us two hours to go back, or longer. We’ll be better off if we just move ahead. In two hours, you’ll feel better,” he assured them, and a few minutes later, Olivia led her troops to a sitting area on the same deck as her suite. The purser and two stewardesses offered them food and drink and all declined, and a few minutes later Liz disappeared and returned with her life jacket on.

“Just in case,” she said, and the others laughed, but it was no fun being on the stormy seas. The kids looked nervous and John and Sarah were worried. Only Phillip and Olivia seemed calm.

They sat together in the salon for two hours, and it was three hours before they benefited from the shelter of the Corsican coast. The sea was still rough but the winds died down a little, and finally they all went to their cabins to get some rest. The boat was pitching and rolling, but less. Liz asked her mother if she could sleep in her cabin, and she lay on Olivia’s bed, holding her hand, with her life jacket on.

It was morning before the winds calmed enough for the boat to stop rolling as violently. It had been quite a night! Those who could sleep woke up feeling better in Corsica the next day. The winds were strong, but the boat was much steadier than it had been the night before. They had set aside a day for swimming and fishing off Corsica, before night cruising again back to France, where they planned to spend the rest of the trip. They had been on board for a week by then and covered a lot of ground. They decided not to swim in the still turbulent sea. They spent a quiet day on board, and sailed away from Corsica that night. The others went to their cabins, tired from the night before, Alex and Carole went to watch a movie, and Sophie stayed on deck with her grandmother to chat. There was something Olivia had been wanting to talk to her about, and this seemed like a good time.

“How would you like to come and work for me after you get your master’s degree? We’ve talked about it before, but I wanted to let you know that I’m serious about it. I think you would be a wonderful addition. And after a year or two, maybe you’d like to run one of the stores abroad.” Sophie’s eyes lit up as soon as Olivia mentioned it. It had been her dream for years. She wanted to work for her grandmother, and become the third generation to enter the business. And she loved the idea of running one of the stores on her own. It was her grandmother’s way of teaching her the business from the ground up.

“How soon can I start?”

“The day you graduate,” which was only six months away. “I wanted to make you an offer, before you took a job with someone else,” Olivia said with a smile.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do, Grandma.” She could hardly wait. “And I think Carole is going to move to L.A. when we go home. She wants to work for her dad and his wife. She’s been talking about it for a long time.”

“I know she has. I think it might be good for her. I think she needs to get that out of her system. She’s been dreaming about being with him for a long time, although that might be hard for your mom.”

“She already told her, and Mom’s okay with it. I think she’d been kind of drifting in New York, and the art scene is hard to get into. I think L.A. might be the right thing for her, although I’m going to miss her,” Sophie said wistfully.

“So am I,” Olivia said, but she was excited about Sophie coming to work for her. The next generation had finally arrived. And maybe one day Alex would join them too. Olivia had high hopes for him as well. And Sophie was a star. Once she honed her skills and learned the business, Olivia sensed she would go far. She had a terrific head for business, and she’d been interested in The Factory since she was a child, just as Olivia had when she worked at the original hardware store when she was twelve. She thought it was the most exciting place on earth, and she still did. And she knew Sophie thought so too.