A Month at the Shore (4 page)

"I'm not saying I'm not grateful. I'm just saying—" He frowned again and rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture of frustration that he had inherited from his father. "What happens if we do manage to turn the business around?
I'm
not staying on, and neither are you. Once Rinnie has to pay for help to replace us, that's it: back down the toilet goes
Shore
Gardens
."

"That's Rinnie's problem, isn't it? We're just agreeing to grant her the favor she's asked, that's all. One month."

"Dammit, Laura! Where're you coming from, all of a sudden?"

All evening long, it had been the two of them against Corinne. But sweet Corin
n
e had stood up to their pounding, and an admiring Laura had just decided to switch sides. Snack had every right to feel double-crossed.

Laura pulled at one of the thin gold loops hooked through her earlobes. She said to her brother, "A month, Snack. How about it?"

His face flushed. He thre
w a longing glance at the worn-
down stairs that led to his old room and his lumpy bed. He
was tired and crabby and ready to pass out; Laura recognized the signs from their youth.

"Oh, all right," he snapped. "One fricking month. That's
it."

Corinne leapt from her chair and threw her arms around her brother in an enthusiastic hug. He grimaced and caught her wrists from behind his neck, breaking the circle of her embrace. "Now can I go to fricking sleep?"

"Yes, yes, anything, yes," said his overjoyed sister. She watched him go, virtually hopping up and down in place, and then she called out after him, "Snack!"

He turned around, sagging visibly. "Now what?"

"Win
or
lose, I'm making you and Laura co-owners."

"
Of—?"

"Everything. The business, the buildings, the land. Everything; just the way it should be. If I can't turn the business around and I'm forced to sell, then you get a third, and so does Laura."

"What!
Corinne!"
cried Laura, stunned by what she was hearing.

Bleary-eyed, Snack asked, "You serious?"

"Yessir!"

"Well
...
.
" He looked uncharacteristically at a loss. "Whatever," he muttered awkwardly, and he turned and began ascending the stairs. "G'night."

As soon as Snack was out of earshot, Laura said to Corinne, "Are you crazy? Why did you say something like that?"

"Because it's true. I'd always planned on reinstating the two of you. It's only fair."

"Not me. Uh-uh, Rin. Count me out. I don't want any part of this. Do not write me back into
anything.
I refuse to accept. Helping you out for a month is one thing, but I've made my own way, and it would feel like—I don't know—wrong. That's all. Wrong. You're the one who stayed."

"Don't be silly. This will work, trust me. I've thought about it for a long time," Corinne said. She began gathering the empty beer cans for rinsing and recycling.

"Thought about it? You haven't thought about it at all!" Laura said, tagging after her. "For one thing, if you tell Snack he's going to get a third of
Shore
Gardens
whether it succeeds or not, do you really think he's going to try to make it work? Get real, will you? You'll be lucky if he doesn't hold an open house for interested developers every Sunday from one to three."

Laughing, Corinne said, "Bring me those dirty plates, would you? This
will
work," she
insisted. 
"Snack will rise to the occasion. You'll see."

"Corinne. You are so naive." Feeling churlish for slamming her brother, Laura dropped the subject altogether for the moment. She had other concerns. "One month," she warned. "I can't do more. You have to realize that this is going to be very hard on—"

My career.
God, it sounded so mean-spirited, given Corinne's almost saintly generosity. Laura settled for saying, "I can do a month. I had planned to take a couple of weeks off anyway. The only thing is," she muttered as an afterthought, "I thought I was taking them off in
Hawaii
."

"With Max. I know," Corinne said, looking up from her soapsuds with a tragically sympathetic look.

"Oh, Corinne
... stop," Laura said, flushing with annoyance. "I will board that plane tomorrow if you're going to be wringing your hands over Max and me every time I turn around. It's over, and obviously it was no great loss."

"I know. It's just that you sounded so
... happy."

"Well, I was wrong. I just
thought
I was happy."

"Love is blind," Corinne agreed.

"Love is stupid! It has nothing to do with anything. The only thing that matters in life is what you make of yourself, not what someone else makes of you. And on that note, let's get back to your dream. You missed two payments, no more than that, right?" she asked her sister.

"Yes," Corinne said firmly. "I paid this month right on time. So I don't understand why I got a threatening notice yesterday."

"Don't worry; we'll take care of it. I'll write a check for the missing payments tomorrow."

"I'm so embarrassed about this, Laur. But you know you'll get the money back, don't you?"

"Never mind; it's not today's problem." Laura was back in business mode now, and on firmer terrain. Facts and figures, that's what she could count on. Everything else was just fluff. "When did Dad take out this loan from—who's the outfit?
Great
River
?"

"
Great
River
Finance.
" Corinne shrugged her strong shoulders as she dried her
hands on a ratty old dishtowel.
"I haven't looked at the books close enough to figure that out, yet. They're all just mishmash to me, anyway, especially the way Dad kept them."

"Yeah. I remember. Everything in shoeboxes."

"All I know is that there's a book of payment coupons from Great River Finance for this year. I'm not that worried, though, because Ken Barclay did say something about how if I found myself over my head, I shouldn't panic."

"Kendall Barclay! When did you talk to
him
about this?"

"Originally? A few months ago. I ran into him when I was in the drugstore, getting something for an awful cold I had. I was depr
essed and really out of it, and
to tell the truth
I didn't register half of what he said."

Kendall Barclay
.

Laura could picture the name so clearly, written in her
own
flowery handwriting on an envelope of thick pink paper, the very best she could find in the Chepaquit Pharmacy.

Dear
Kendall
, Thank you, thank you, thank you,
it began
. You're my knight in shining armor. You saved me, and
I'll never forget you for that.
 

She had rewritten the note at least three times, phrasing her gratitude more effusively each time. Kendall Barclay had been too skinny to look like a knight, and he'd ridden into the woods on a bike and not on a horse—but no one could deny the courage that he'd shown.

Laura still couldn't
believe that she had
ever
been dumb enough to
think
that the son of Dr. Burton could have had a crush on someone like her. But that's what she had believed. When Will Burton asked her to go with him for a walk in the woods, she had pictured nothing
more daring than a romantic kiss and an embrace.

How naive. How dumb. How arrogant.

After the doctor's son and his buddies had assaulted her and beat up
Kendall
and then had fled like the bullying cowards they were, Laura had dropped to her knees beside her fallen hero: blood was trickling from his mouth, and one of his eyes was bruised and swelling. Tearing off a scrap of her already torn blouse, she had wiped away the blood from his chin.

"Are you all right,
Kendall
?" she'd asked stupidly.

How could he possibly have been all right?

But he had answered with a dazed, "Y-yuh, I'm all right."

And she had taken him at his word.

"Don't look at me," he had mumbled, averting his face. "Go home. Go
home,'"
he had repeated more fiercely. "They won't come back now."

He was the pampered son of a town scion; the other kids knew that, and the other kids despised him for it. He was picked on almost as much as the dirt-poor Shore kids, but for the opposite reason: because he was so rich.

Laura, probably more than anyone else, had understood the humiliation
Kendall
was feeling as he lay on the ground. She had wanted to respect his wishes, whatever they happened to be, so she'd stood up abruptly and run through the woods and made her way home. She'd been able to sneak past her father and change her shirt before he came in for supper and yelled at her for being late.

And the very next day, she had biked to the Chepaquit Pharmacy and had bought the heavy pink stationery.

And very shortly after that, Kendall Barclay had basically spit in her face.

Kendall Barclay
.

It must have been twenty years since she'd seen him.

She murmured to Corinne, "So tell me what he said in the drugstore that you do remember."

"Well
... he apologized for not being able to come to the funeral, I remember that. Wasn't that nice of him? Bankers don't have to do that. And he said we could talk anytime. That I should just phone and ask for him personally, and we would set up a time."

"A time to do what?"

"I guess, to talk about if I need a loan? I'm not really sure. But he knows what's in our account—nothing—so maybe he thought I'd be looking for another loan soon. Needless to say, I've been so busy that I never did get around to arranging an appointment. But when I ran into him in town at Sam's Market last week, he was just the same."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I. But then he called yesterday and left a message on the machine! He asked if there was
anything
he could do. He sounded very kind, very concerned. I haven't had a chance to call him back yet."

"He's got an agenda," Laura said firmly. "It's obvious."

Corinne blinked. "I thought he was trying to be nice."

"You would. Don't you see what his game is? As you say, he knows you're broke. Now that Dad's gone, he sees his chance. He'll give you a loan, wait for you to default on it, and then put this place up for auction. Guess who'll buy it back? His bank. Well, don't lose a second's worth of sleep over him, Rinnie. I'll take care of Kendall Barclay."

"I haven't lost any sleep over him," Corinne said as she gathered table crumbs into the palm of her hand. "Why do you dislike him so much?" she added. "You've been this way about him ever since I can remember."

"He's a jerk. A ric
h, privileged, arrogant, money-
sucking jerk."

"Laura. Just because his family was rich and ours wasn't, that doesn't make him arrogant. Or money-sucking. Or a jerk. He couldn't help who his parents were."

"But he could help who
he
was. What kind of person
he
was."

"When did you even see him last? High school?"

"I
... don't remember," Laura said, sliding the chairs back under the table.

"Well, he turned out very nice."

"There you go again! Don't you get it? You may as well stick his business card in the box with the ones from those developers who keep coming around here. Because that's what he's after, you dope: your land."

"Why would he want our land? He has his own land."

"Why does
anyone
want land, especially with sweeping views? Because they're not making any more of it. Don't you remember the time that Dad told us
Kendall
seemed to be hinting that he'd like to buy us out? You own a nice little piece of the
Cape
, Rinnie. You're just minutes from
Chatham
, but with a heck of a lot less danger of being washed into the ocean. Do the math. Kendall Barclay wants your land. Period."

Corinne tossed the paper-towel napkins into the rusted, grimy garbage can that w
as snugged up against the gold-
tone stove. "I thought he was just trying to be nice."

****

Tired as she was, Laura felt too uneasy and too melancholy to sleep. Disregarding the cold spring fog that had rolled in so predictably after the warm day, she propped her bedroom window open with a stick and pulled a chair up close so that she could better hear the plaintive moan of the whistle buoy offshore. She leaned her forearms on the sill and allowed herself to drift.