Folly Cove (43 page)

“Yes! He practically begged me to bring you.” Anne smiled at her. Elly and Ryder wouldn't care how their meeting came about once they saw each other. “Go inside now, before Lucy wakes up and makes Laura mad.”

Elly laughed and leaned over to hug her. “I'll text you when we're finished talking.”

Anne grinned back. “No, you won't. You'll be busy doing other things.”

She was still smiling as she pulled out of the driveway, even as she glanced in the rearview mirror and wished she were going inside Sebastian's house, too.

•   •   •

Ryder opened the door and stepped aside. Elly was careful not to let her shoulder brush against his.

It was a mistake to ever get involved with him, she thought, remembering their easy banter at work. She'd ruined their friendship forever.

“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for coming over.”

“No problem.” Elly deliberately kept her tone light, thinking maybe
that's
what it took for a Bradford woman to make things work out with a man: the willpower to never scratch beneath the surface of relationships. Nothing ruined a good time like commitment, right?

She had lived alone since college and enjoyed it. Yet a part of her had to acknowledge that it would be difficult now to return to her silent apartment in California, to the absence of sounds she'd started to take for granted: voices in the kitchen, muffled footsteps overhead, other people's showers and laughter. The sounds of a family.

“Come sit down,” Ryder said. “I made a fire.”

He led her into the living room. It was furnished with odds and ends, clearly a rental. A laptop staked a claim on a heavy oak desk by the windows. It was the sort of desk that Charles Dickens might have used, with a rolltop open to reveal shelves with tiny compartments. Forestry journals and textbooks created a paper city around the desk chair.

“Sebastian works constantly,” Ryder said, following her gaze. “You must know about his wife. I think he's trying to put himself into a coma.”

“Yes. So sad.” Elly sat on the couch facing the fireplace, a predictably squashy piece of furniture with a tatty floral slipcover.

The room was painted a deep bronze, and the lower half was paneled in a rich dark wood. Ryder pulled the desk chair across the room so he could face her, his back to the fireplace. Between the dark color of the room and the way he was backlit by flames, his face was shadowed, his expression inscrutable. In silhouette, Ryder's strong features appeared to be exaggerated, as if some artist had drawn him here with quick, broad strokes.

She smiled. “You fit right into this old New England house. Nathaniel Hawthorne would be proud.”

“Right,” he said, drawling the word the way he did. “Let me just get my pipe and my Bible.” He leaned closer, resting his elbows on his knees. “Elly, what happened? It's like we were talking and everything was okay with us. Then suddenly it wasn't.”

“I don't really know,” she said. “I wasn't trying to drive you away.” That, at least, was honest.

“Really? Because it sure sounded like that.”

Elly took a deep breath and let it out again. “No. I didn't invite you here. That's true. But once you arrived, I loved being with you. Then I got scared.”

“Scared of me?”

“No. Scared
for
you. Because you were talking about a future with me.”

“Fine. I get it. You don't see a future with me. It's okay. I never meant to push you.” Ryder stood up, went to poke at the fire. “Glad we got that out of the way so we can be friends.” The logs caught and flames rose again, dancing orange and hot.

Elly bit her lip, fighting the urge to go to him, to draw him over to the couch and pull him down on top of her. “I think we're way past friends.”

He returned to the desk chair, but she shook her head. “Come over to the couch, Ryder. Please.”

“I don't think it's a good idea. Not if we aren't going to . . .”

“I just need to see your face when I tell you something else. That's all.”

Ryder complied, slowly moving around to the sofa, using his knee to push the coffee table out of the way. Elly felt her chest constrict when the firelight revealed the deep creases of unhappiness around his mouth and eyes.

“What I'm going to tell you isn't going to be easy for me to say,” she said softly, “and it'll probably be rough for you to hear. But I want you to understand why I panicked the other night.”

She told him then, about Hans, about everything from the heady start of the love affair to his abrupt departure, her diagnosis and surgery, her potential infertility.

Ryder was quiet as she talked, other than an occasional murmur. Once, he reached over and rested his hand on hers for a moment, then drew it away.

“When you were talking about families that night at the wedding reception, I know you were probably speaking in general terms, not about us specifically,” Elly said. “But I also understood that you might want kids, and I probably can't give them to you.”

“I wasn't talking in general terms.” Ryder reached for her hand again.

She let him take it. Wanted him to, although once he was rubbing
his thumb over her palm, she wanted to pull away again. It was as if he were pressing the bruises on her heart.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, then it's good I told you.”

“Yes,” he said. “But none of that changes how I feel about you.”

Ryder moved closer to her on the couch and put an arm around her. His shirt was warm from the fire; his body was even warmer beneath it. She wanted to lean in to him, to inhale wood smoke and that particular Ryder scent, something spicy.

“It should, though,” she said, staring at the fire. “If you think you want a family, you should quit seeing me now, while you're ahead.”

“Wait.” He pulled away to look at her. “Is this the old ‘it's not you, it's me' speech?”

“No!” Elly said. “I just don't want you holding on to any unrealistic expectations about us.”

In the firelight, with his skin tinged gold and the bright streaks in his hair, Ryder looked as though he could have stepped out of the fire, like a man molded out of light. Elly had never wanted to kiss anyone as much as she wanted to kiss him right now. She realized she was holding her breath, and let it out slowly.

One of the logs smoldering on the grate fell suddenly, startling them both. Ryder turned toward her again and took both of her hands in his. “If, by ‘unrealistic expectations,' you mean that we'll make love more often than we fight, take cool vacations even when we're broke, argue about where we want to live, and think about whether we want kids and how to have them, then sure. Yes! I have some damn unrealistic expectations about us. I hope you do, too.”

He leaned forward to kiss her, and then it was like she was made of fire, too.

T
hey spent the next week preparing for their mother's birthday party. With Anne living here now, it was easy for Laura to gather her sisters in her living room to work out the choreography for two of the songs from
An American in Paris
, and it helped take her mind off Jake's absence.

Anne, the most athletic and limber of them, took the Gene Kelly part in “I Got Rhythm.” She was still a surprisingly good tapper—her childhood dance lessons hadn't been forgotten.

Laura agreed to help them sing, but she refused to dance. Elly, though, was still a decent tapper, Laura thought. Elly and Anne choreographed the trickier bits to make them simpler while Laura provided cheerleading from the sidelines.

Somehow Elly and Kennedy had managed to find a white duck-billed cap, linen trousers, and white sweater for Anne to wear in “I Got Rhythm.” Kennedy would be dressed as a French schoolgirl with her hair in braids. They'd even found wide-lapel suit jackets from the 1950s for Kennedy, Elly, and Anne to wear when they sang “'S Wonderful” and some old French posters to use as a background.

Anne had enlisted Kennedy's help in finding the perfect recipe for an Eiffel Tower cake. This involved Anne baking chocolate sheet cakes and cutting them into squares of decreasing sizes that could be layered
on top of one another into a tower shape; the layers would be stacked on top of thin layers of buttercream frosting.

“Since the real Eiffel Tower is gray,” Anne said excitedly, “I'll make a gray fondant with a silvery buttercream to cover the entire cake. We can roll a brick pattern into it. I'll make a cylinder for the top, too.”

Meanwhile, throughout the week they were also taking turns visiting Sarah to make sure she was resting enough and eating well.

“It's weird, but she actually seems happy,” Elly reported to Laura after her turn on Monday. “And Flossie's been over there a lot.”

“Yes, and that guy she's seeing, Gil, seems to be spending time with her, too,” Anne told them all after visiting Sarah on Tuesday afternoon following her shift in the kitchen. “He and Flossie were both having tea with her when I finished in the kitchen. And Flossie had brought Lucy over to see Mom.”

They were seated around Laura's kitchen table for dinner. Only Kennedy was missing; she'd joined the chorus at school, to Laura's delight, and was staying late most nights to rehearse for their holiday concert.

“So maybe Flossie did the right thing, telling us everything,” Laura said, setting a pot of chili on the table. “Mom's been hiding from us, in a way, all these years, and now it's like she's out of the closet. Like Jake,” she added with a laugh that she hoped didn't sound too bitter.

“Or it could be that having a stroke was a little mortality wake-up call,” Ryder interjected. “Your mom is appreciating everything now.”

“Do you think she's ready to talk about a memorial service for Dad?” Anne asked.

“I don't know,” Elly said. “When I mentioned it to her yesterday, she bit my head off. I think she's afraid of it, truthfully. She might not be emotionally ready yet to say a final good-bye.”

“But why?” Laura said. “What does she care? She has obviously moved on.”

“Maybe she has,” Elly said. “Or maybe she's just pretending. I still wouldn't put anything past her.”

“I'll ask her,” Laura said. “I'm going down there tomorrow.”

She phoned her mother first thing in the morning, as soon as she
was finished turning the horses out and cleaning stalls, to say she was coming.

“Oh, really, that's not necessary,” Sarah said. “I'm sure you have a lot on your plate now, dear, with the separation. I wouldn't want to add to your burden.”

“Mom, it's fine,” Laura argued. “It's not like Jake helped me much around here anyway.”

She nearly added that her life was actually easier and happier without Jake in some ways, especially with her sisters around, but refrained. She still hadn't told her mother the real reason behind their separation and wasn't sure how she'd find the courage to admit to her mother that Jake was gay.

“What about the birthday party?” she asked. “Are you still feeling up for it?”

“Sure,” Sarah said with unexpected nonchalance. “Nothing to worry about there. It will all go fine with you three girls in charge.”

This was strange to hear, Laura thought as she hung up the phone and pulled on her jacket. It wasn't like Sarah to relinquish control of anything. Certainly not of her own birthday party, which, in years past, she'd obsessed about planning for weeks.

There had been a rainstorm the night before. Now the morning glistened clear and bright, but there was wreckage everywhere: tree limbs and leaves, bits of bark. Even a few roof shingles had blown onto the lawn during the storm, Laura noticed. A wonder she didn't hear any of that last night.

The thought of facing the impending winter on her own—clearing snow, keeping the furnace going, having lessons cancel when the roads were impassable—made Laura feel anxious.

But you're not alone,
she reminded herself: Anne would be with her. And Kennedy. Tom, too, maybe.

She passed a stand of phragmites. The reeds were tall and yellow this time of year, with thick tufts at the tops. As children, she and her sisters had called them “lion tails” and had tried bringing them into the inn, to their mother's horror. She smiled and texted a photo of them to Tom at his office.

He'd been so sweet, coming around for lunch twice but respecting her wish not to take their relationship anywhere yet. She wanted to give Kennedy more time to adjust to going between her house and Jake's before introducing her to Tom.

“It's too soon for anything more,” Laura had said as she walked Tom to his car after lunch yesterday. “I'm sorry. I hope you're not disappointed.”

“It's fine,” he said, then grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “I'm happy to wait. Just seeing those photos of you was enough to steam up my glasses and keep me going for years.”

The inn was quiet, but Rhonda stood sentry at the desk in her customary crisp blouse and skirt. “I just wanted to say hi to my mother,” Laura said, tugging her fleece down around her hips and suddenly aware that she smelled strongly of barn.

“She's in her apartment,” Rhonda said. “Don't tire her out before her big party!”

Rhonda, Betty, and the rest of the staff at Folly Cove had rallied around Sarah since her stroke. They were her family, too, Laura thought.

“Thanks for looking after her, Rhonda,” Laura said with a smile.

Her mother's apartment was accessible from inside the inn, but instead of following the long hallway to the north wing, Laura went back outside and around to the apartment's outside door. Her mother always preferred visitors to come in that way.

This end of the inn was shaded by birch trees in summer, a thick grove of them. Now, with the leaves gone, the birches gleamed white against the deep blue sky, like pale arms swimming through space. Laura remembered how she and her sisters had peeled the bark away from the birches, pretending they were Indian maidens as they inked secret messages to each other.

Odd how those fleeting memories of childhood were resurfacing with increasing frequency, now that Anne and Elly were here, as if the physical presence of her sisters gave Laura's mind permission to open doors long closed. Surprisingly, many of those doors opened onto happy times.

Her mother's door was unlocked when she tried it, so Laura called, “It's me, Mom,” and walked into the living room.

Her mother was lying on the couch, her white hair thick and loose
around her shoulders. She wore a gold satin dressing gown and, beneath it, white pajamas and white fur mules. She had the satisfied, sleepy expression of a cat purring in the sun.

“Wow,” Laura said. “You look good, Mom.” She glanced around the room and saw the rumpled bed through the doorway to her mother's bedroom. She quickly looked away again, wondering if her mother had actually entertained Rhonda's uncle here for more than just tea. She suspected the answer was yes.

Sarah's lips twitched at Laura's expression. “I
should
look good. Everyone has been taking such good care of me.”

“I'm glad.” Laura was surprised by the surge of anger traveling up her spine and making it impossible for her to sit down. Where did that spring from? She'd been working so hard to let go of her anger—toward Jake and her father, and toward her mother, too. But it was definitely still there.

She paced the room. “It was scary, seeing you in the hospital like that.” She stopped and looked at her mother. “But not as scary as some of the things Flossie told us.”

Sarah looked up at her, blinking hard. “You sound very angry, Laura.”

“I am! How could I not be?” Laura unclenched her hands when she realized she was holding them in fists at her sides and tried to take a deeper breath. “There's so much you hid from us! You never told us where you were from. Or that you had a sister! And you never told us that you'd been in touch with Dad, even when we asked you where he was. You even let us believe he could be dead!”

“And now he is,” Sarah said quietly, and began weeping, her narrow shoulders folding forward.

“Oh, Mom.” Laura tried to cling to her fury, but the sight of her mother—so frail, hunched like that, her ankles impossibly thin, the knob of her spine clearly visible now with her head bent like that—made her own throat tighten. Her mother was an old woman. An old woman who had done some stupid things.

An old woman who was the only mother she'd ever have.

“Come on, don't cry, Mom,” she said, and sank to the couch then, nudging her mother's feet over so she had room to sit.

“How can you expect me not to cry when you're
yelling
at me like that?” Her mother lifted her face. The mascara trailed down it in black threads.

This was so similar to something Kennedy might say to her that Laura nearly laughed. “I'm sorry, Mom. Come on. Wipe your eyes.”

She reached over and pulled a tissue out of the box on the end table. Maybe this was the way life worked, Laura thought: your mother raised you, and then it was your turn to take care of her. As simple as that.

Her mother took the tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “I'm a sight, I bet.”

“No. You look like you've been crying, that's all. But you're still you.”

“Oh. Great.” Sarah balled up the tissue and stuffed it into her pocket, sniffing.

“So what is it? Were you really crying because I yelled at you? Or were you crying over Dad?”

“Both, I guess, but more over him. We made such a mess of things, he and I. But you know what makes me the maddest?”

Laura shook her head.

“All this time when I thought I was so independent, I was actually waiting for Neil to come home, and I didn't even know it until now.”

“Because you loved him so much?”

Her mother shrugged. “I suppose there was love. But, more than that, I wanted to show him he was wrong, you know? I was waiting for the day your father would walk back into the Folly Cove Inn and say, ‘Wow. She did it. This joint is a palace.' I wanted him to eat his words, all those horrible things he said about how I would fail because the inn was a curse on the Bradfords.”

Laura smiled. “He would have. This place is beautiful. And you did it all yourself.”

“With your help, of course. All you girls. I couldn't have done it without the three of you.”

“It might have been easier without us kids around.”

“Different. But not necessarily easier. Of course, I'm the one who screwed things up, too. I know that. But I still couldn't figure a way out of it all.”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother sighed and finally lifted her gaze from the floor, slowly turning her head toward Laura. It was unnerving, like watching a doll come to life. “It's true what Flossie told you girls. I lied to your father and his family about everything: my own family, my education, my history with men. Do you know that your father actually thought I was a virgin?”

Laura had to laugh. “You're kidding.”

Sarah looked offended. “It wasn't so far-fetched. There were more virgins back in those days. And remember that he thought I was ten years younger. It was plausible. That's the thing I've discovered about lying: you've got to keep the untruths as plausible as the truth.”

“I'll remember that,” Laura said, rolling her eyes.

“That's why Jake fooled us for so long, you know,” Sarah said suddenly, sitting up a little straighter. “He made every lie he told seem possible: the dental school loans, the insurance costs, his office overhead. That's why we never guessed what he was really up to. I should have known he was gay. Such a pretty dresser and all.”

Laura covered her face briefly with one hand. “So you know.”