A Month at the Shore (14 page)

The letters on the white banner were three feet high and painted in different bright colors:
FOUNDERS WEEK SALE
,
May 24-31.

"The finishing touch; it's perfect, Snack," said Laura, genuinely impressed. She'd forgotten how skilled he was with a brush.

But above and beyond the variety of her brother's talents was the unexpected surge in his output. "When did you
sleep
?"
she asked.

He shrugged. "Haven't, yet. I'll grab an hour or two after I hang this across the front of the shop, then come back out and start hitting the compost pile again."

He had the slightly crazed look of someone on too much espresso, and yet he seemed intensely focused. Snack was a man with a plan—possibly the first of his life.

She watched him set a rickety
wood
ladder against the front of the building and wished they could afford an aluminum one. "How long were you out there last night, anyway?" she asked. "I fell asleep and you were still going."

"I packed it in around two—when Officer McCray came and told me to knock it off. He wasn't just passing by either; someone had called and complained. I wonder who,"
he said dryly as he nudged the ladder into a better angle.

"Don't go there, Snack," Laura begged. "Don't. The sale starts the day after tomorrow; it would be
nice
if it weren't to the sound of gunshots. Besides, you know it wasn't Gabe. Someone in town must have seen you and decided to pull your chain."

"It worked." Snack suddenly registered that Laura wasn't wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Acknowledging it with a low whistle from his perch on the third rung, he said, "Steppin' out?"

Laura was wearing the pretty yellow dress she'd bought at T.J. Maxx; she now had the tan to set it off. She was wearing makeup that she'd applied as artfully and subtly as she knew how. She was even wearing lacy underthings instead of her cotton work versions, simply to revel in the delicacy of them. And, most luxurious of all, she was wearing thin strappy sandals which—after weeks of wearing heavy work shoes—made her feel sinfully exposed and feminine.

She felt pretty. She felt good.

She felt guilty for leaving Snack and Corinne toiling in the fields when she herself was not.

"I am not 'steppin' out.' I have a chore to do," she said defensively. "Just so you know, it's strictly business."

"Of course. That's what I assumed," Snack said with a deadpan look. "Let me take a
guess
: business with Kendall Barclay?"

"I'll be back in an hour."

"Uh-huh."

"An hour and a half, tops."

"Uh-huh."

"Cut it out, Snack," she said, annoyed. "It's important to me that I look good for this meeting—for reasons you wouldn't understand."

"Please. I'm a guy; don't insult me."

"I didn't think that was possible."

"Tsk-tsk. That tone definitely doesn't go with that dress."

"This from the resident expert on good taste. Oh, why am I standing here bickering with you?" she said, glancing at her watch. "I'm going to be late!"

"Hey, you can't go now. Someone has to feed the banner up to me while I hang it."

"I'm not that someone," said Laura. She was feeling a surge of tension for no real reason; Triple Oaks was only a five-minute ride from the nursery.

"Hold on, I see Billy. Billy! Over here!" she cried, waving to the heavy-set man just getting out of his car in the stone-topped lot. "We need a favor."

Billy, who was back to making flower deliveries for them after a six-month hiatus, came right over—as always, happy to help.
He was tall, six-foot-three or
-four, the perfect candidate for the job. Snack explained, slowly and clearly, what they were going to do, and Billy picked up the free end of the banner and clutched it in one of his beefy hands while he waited for Snack to pound in the first nail.

"Thanks, Billy," said Laura. "Please tell Corinne to give you something extra when you go in to be paid for today's delivery."

Billy looked confused by that, so Laura took her wallet out of her bag and began fishing for a couple of dollars.

"You look real pretty today," he said, staring at the hem of her dress.
"Real
pretty."

"Thank you, Billy. This is for you," said Laura, handing him the singles.

He stuffed them into his shirt pocket with his free hand.

"Don't forget to see Corinne and get paid after you're done here," she reminded him.

He gave her a disarmingly confused smile. "But you just paid me," he pointed out.

"No, that was for helping Snack. I mean for the delivery."

"Oh
... okay," he said, but it was obvious that things weren't okay.

In desperation to get on with her task, Laura said, "Tell you what. I'll pay you for the delivery myself, how's that?" She got her wallet out again. "And Snack will explain to Corinne what I did."

Billy jammed the ten and the five—twice his usual pay—into his shirt pocket without looking at them. He said, "Should I wait to hang the banner before I see Rinnie about getting paid?"

"But I just—! Yes. All right. That would be good. First the banner. Then Corinne. Thanks, Billy."

She glanced up at her brother, who was waiting on the ladder and shaking his head in resignation. "Billy.
Billy.
Will you hand me the damn
ed
banner?"

Billy whirled toward the ladder, wrapping the banner around his legs like a Roman toga.

"Thanks, Billy," Laura said to the back of his balding head. "See you all later."

She hurried to the pickup, aware that putting Billy back on the payroll was going to eat mightily into their profits, if they didn't lose money outright on his deliveries. It seemed to her that he was slower now, dimmer now, than he used to be when they were all in school together and he worked part-time at the nursery. Or maybe she had just become used to the high-tech overachievers in the rat race back in Portland.

The wonder of it was that Billy was still able to drive. She made a mental note to verify that he actually had a valid license. Their insurance company might frown on a fender bender that involved a subcontractor who did not.

****

Triple Oaks was named after three huge white oaks that once dominated the front lawn of the Barclay estate. In 1991, Hurricane Bob roared
through and took out the east-
most tree. Now there were only two, both on the west side of the entry, and they gave the house an unbalanced, lopsided look.

Item number one: replace the missing oak.

Laura sat in the pickup, parked at the far end of the drive, and took notes as she took in the-view. She saw nothing growing under the two remaining oaks except for the occasional, pitiful blade of grass; the rest was dirt, with scattered remnants of a layer of mulch.

Item number two: ground cover. Pachysandra, if nothing else. Even dull ivy would do.
 
No, not ivy;
without care,
it would run up the trees.

At the head of the drive stood the house itself, a stately piece of architecture in the Greek Revival
style,
painted white, with many windows, a low-pitched roof, and a triangular pediment on the front and side gables. But virtually every one of its extra-long ground-floor windows was completely hidden behind overgrown rhododendrons.

Item number three: whack back the rhodies, and let the sun shine in.

Item number four: replace some of the rhodies altogether with Japanese andromeda for variety and also for fragrance when the windows were open.

But the andromeda would need to be mature from the get-go in order to compete with their muscular cousins. Where could she get her hands on some? Corinne would know. Yes.

Laura sat with her yellow pad, jotting down ideas at a furious pace. The one thing she did not want was to show up on Kendall Barclay's doorstep without a thought in her head. That impression went a little too well with dirty fingernails and a smudgy face.

So engrossed was she in recording her suggestions that when she next looked up, it was to see the lord of the manor himself with a bemused smile on his face as he strolled down the brick drive to her rusted pickup.

Laura tucked her clipboard under her arm and scrambled down from the truck. She had no intention of accepting any money from Kendall Barclay III, but she had every intention of handing him a list of landscaping ideas that would blow his argyle socks off.

****

It amazed Ken, simply amazed him, how the mere sight of Laura Shore reduced him to a fourteen-year-old kid again. The raging hormones, the hungry looks, the crushing desire to see her naked—that was him, all right, then and now.

She had avoided him every chance she got back then, and in retrospect, he couldn't blame her. In school he was Skinnykenny Barclay, local rich geek, spurned by every kid in class for trying to be one of them.

Well, he wasn't one of them. Never had been, never would be; he'd had too much money behind him for that. Ken had understood, even if his old-fashioned father had not, that it was false to pretend to be less than you were—as false as pretending to be more than you were. He never should have tried to act as
if he were just another middle-
class Chepaquit kid; it had only got him more reviled. For better or for worse, Ken was what he was, a privileged townie.

Laura Shore had lived a life devoid of privilege, and yet look at her now: smart, sassy, and sexy as all hell. The soft bounce of her breasts beneath her dress as she walked gave him a sustained rush of pure pleasure. He couldn't think of a single woman he'd ever been with who'd affected him quite so viscerally.

This, despite the fact that she was waving a clipboard in greeting, which reminded him that she was there on business.

Ostensibly. The fact was, he had been on the verge of asking her out when she'd snorted in disbelief. Taken aback, he'd punted and come up with Plan B: an offer to pay her for some landscaping advice. Not too imaginative, but
... here she was.

"Mr. Barclay, how are you this fine evening?" she asked with light formality.

She was being ironic again. She liked to do that, and he didn't know why. To put more distance between them? It was maddening, when he was trying to put less.

"I'm pretty well, thanks." He gestured around him. "Well, what do you think? Have I overplayed the disaster aspect?"

She sighed and said, "No, I think you got it just about right."

"The shade from the trees is too deep," he said, oddly driven to defend himself. "Nothing will grow."

"Yes it will. We can fix that."

"And on that side, the grass won't grow at all where the tree used to be, even with sun."

"Because you didn't take out the stump completely. We can fix that too."

"And, I don't know—everything doesn't look right. I can't put my finger on it, but it all looks ignored, somehow. I don't like that look."

"Really?" she asked, angling her head at him.

"I take it personally. I don't tend to ignore things."

He didn't have a clue what he meant by that. He was finding that when he was around her, his mind occasionally turned into a potato.

They were walking slowly toward the house, and she was saying something about groundcover, and something else about the overgrowth in front of the windows, and he realized that he would be perfectly content to walk with her across the country and back again.

Actually, that wasn't quite true. He liked the sound of her voice, true enough, but it was the accidental brush of her bare arm against his that had him resolved to find some reason, any reason, for her to hang around. This was new, this instant, electric response; he was curious to see where it went.

"You know what your problem is?" she finally said, snapping his reverie in two.

"No. What?" He wasn't aware that he had a problem, but if anything,
she
was the damn problem.

"It's this: you have a very formal-looking house, but it's in a woodland setting. In my mind, you have two choices: knock off the third story and turn the house into a cute little Cape, or formalize your landscaping a little."

"Hmm. Why do I think the second option would be more doable?"

She laughed—actually laughed!—and said, "You think so? Wait till you see what it costs to dig out a stump."

She was so pretty; her smile lit up her face in a way that made him think of Christmas morning, waterskiing, and a
double
-overtime basketball game: you just never wanted to let it go.

"So
... there's hope?" he asked, bemused. God only knew what he meant by that.

"Sure there's hope. I'm not talking about creating an eighteenth-century maze or anything," she said, still trying to reassure. "Just some selective pruning and planting."