Life's a Beach
Authors: Claire Cook
Tags: #Humorous, #Fiction, #Romance, #Humorous fiction, #Massachusetts, #Sisters, #Middle-aged women, #General, #Love Stories
Claire Cook
Contents
Copyright © 2007 Claire Cook
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.
ISBN: 1-4013-8802-7
First eBook Edition: May 2007
ALSO BY
Claire Cook
Multiple Choice
Must Love Dogs
Ready to Fall
To Garet and Kaden
A ZILLION THANKS,
and more, to the incomparable Lisa Bankoff and Tina Wexler, whose support, advice, laughter, and excitement always make me want to write my next novel just so I can hang out with them some more. Josie Freedman and Michael McCarthy have been right there for me working their movie magic, too, and I’m also very grateful to the foreign rights department and to everyone else at ICM.
I would have followed my brilliant editor Pamela Dorman anywhere, but how lucky am I that she decided to team up with Ellen Archer to start Voice. I’m so proud to be one of the first authors to lend my own voice to their new imprint. Many thanks to Pam and Ellen, and to my fabulous associate editor Sarah Landis and wonderful publicist Beth Dickey, for their support and guidance, and a heartfelt and alphabetical thank-you to the rest of the talented Hyperion team—Kathleen Carr, Jane Comins, Michelle Ishay, Maha Khalil, Claire McKean, Karen Minster, Shelly Perron, Sarah Schaffer, Jessica Wiener, and Katie Wainwright. Thanks so very much to Chris Barba and the Hachette sales group, too.
Gary David Goldberg came into my life to turn
Must Love Dogs
into the movie of my dreams and then stepped it up a notch and became something even more important—a great writer buddy. A huge thanks to Gary for faxing both notes and encouragement.
Thanks so much to Elisabeth Weed for bringing Elias John Amber Hansen with her to the Cape Cod Writers’ Center summer conference. Eli was such an original that suddenly a glassblower emerged in the novel I was just beginning to write. Thanks to the many glass artists who answered my questions along the way, especially Don Parkinson of the Sandwich Glass Museum, and also Marj Bates of glassthings.com, who kindly allowed me to crash her workshop. Thanks to Diane Dillon for airline insight and to Charlotte Phinney for support that cuts across the categories. And thanks to Sharon Duran for a funny carwash story that didn’t work on paper but inspired a different kind of carwash scene.
Thanks to everyone on the set of the
Must Love Dogs
movie for letting me hang out. I was so sure I’d get kicked off the set for taking notes, but instead everybody from the producers to the actors to the caterers answered all my questions and even started brainstorming ideas for me. I don’t think any of them found their way into this novel, but I very much appreciate the encouragement. Thanks to Mike “Moishe” Moyer for being inspirational in the gaffer department, to Cathryn Michon for grrl genius insight into child actors, and to Billy Dowd for answering all my casting questions over a long laugh-filled lunch.
Many, many thanks to my fabulous extended family. It’s such a thrill to be discovering more relatives almost every week. And thanks to my wonderful friends, old and new, for cheering me on and talking me up. In fact, so many old friends have come out of the woodwork that I held a random drawing and gave some of you a group cameo in this novel.
A huge thank-you to the booksellers, librarians, and members of the media who have supported me and spread the word. And I’m forever grateful to my wonderful readers, who through the conduit of my website,
www.clairecook.com
, have become a kind of virtual extended family.
And my biggest thanks of all, always, go to my husband, Jake Jacobucci, who has turned into one helluva first reader, to our daughter, Garet, for all things cat, and to our son, Kaden, for encouraging Post-its on an early draft: “Good line, Mom!”
I WAS SQUEAKY CLEAN AND MY HAIR HAD BEEN
conditioned for at least two of the suggested three minutes when the water went cold. I did a quick rinse, then turned the faucet off. The plastic shower curtain moved a few inches, and a clean white towel magically appeared. Noah had already left when I woke up, but maybe he’d only made a breakfast run. Or maybe he just couldn’t stay away. I smiled.
“Here you go,” my mother said from the other side of the curtain.
I screamed. I wrapped myself in the towel and stepped out of my tiny square shower and practically into my mother. “Jesus, Mom, I thought you were . . . someone else.”
“Noah? He left at six-twenty-five this morning. And tell him to watch that pebble business or he’ll break a window.” My mother started dabbing my shoulders with another towel.
“Mom, stop.”
My mother kept dabbing. There were no limits in our family. I could clearly remember sitting in the bathtub with a book one night when I was ten or eleven. My sister, Geri, had already gone off to college, and my parents had company for dinner. Suddenly, the door opened and four adults looked in at me and my bubbles. “Say good night to Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien,” my mother said.
Today, my mother was wearing her
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN
T-shirt, and a couple of tiny beaded braids in her thick gray hair made her look like she’d just come back from the Caribbean. I was kind of wishing she were there now. “Listen,” she said, “your father and I have found the townhouse of our dreams. The Village of Silver Springs. Fitness center with personal trainers, billiards, bingo, indoor boccie ball, salsa lessons. You know how your father loves to dance.”
“It’s not just a townhouse, it’s a lifestyle,” a strange voice said.
I peeked behind my mother to see two women wearing red hats. They were measuring what I liked to think of as my carriage house with a bright yellow tape measure. My cat watched silently from the rumpled sheets of my still-pulled-out sleeper sofa.
On my best days, I could convince myself that, with me at the far end of my parents’ driveway, and my sister and her family about a mile away, we had our own little Kennedy compound. On my worst days, I had to admit that I lived in an apartment over my parents’ garage.
The women waved. I hiked my towel up a little higher. “Mom,” I whispered, “get them out of here. Now.”
My mother reached down and scratched my cat under his chin. She said, “Hi, handsome,” and he purred his acknowledgment. She nudged yesterday’s bra, which had somehow ended up in the middle of the floor, with her toe. “You’re going to have to start keeping things a little bit neater around here, honey.”
One of the women, the one wearing a jeweled red visor, didn’t seem to be the least bit bothered by the fact that I was dripping all over the apartment she was trying to help my mother sell right out from under me. In fact, she acted like I wasn’t even there. “A FROG is a nice bonus feature,” she said. “Everybody loves a FROG.”
“Excuse me,” I said, not that it was any of her business. “But, actually, it’s not a Finished Room Over the Garage. It has a bath and a kitchen, which makes it technically more of a carriage house.”
Everybody ignored me. “If you bury a statue of St. Joseph in the ground,” the visor woman said, “the house will get scooped up right away. Guaranteed.”
“Mom,” I said with every bit of outrage I could muster without dropping my towel. I wondered if telling these women this wasn’t a legal rental unit would make them lose interest, or if it would only get me in trouble with my mother.
“You have to be careful how you bury it,” the other woman said. Her hat had a frothy drape of red netting that covered her eyes, so maybe I really was invisible to her. “My cousin said she faced hers away from the house when she buried it, and the house across the street sold instead.”
“Upside down and facing the house is the way to go,” the other woman said. “If he’s upside down, that way St. Joseph will work extra hard to get out of the ground and onto the mantel of your new townhouse.”
My mother was actually nodding, as if these two trespassing red-hatted women were not completely and certifiably insane. “Well,” I said loudly, “I don’t want to keep you. Sounds like you’d better get over to the mall fast before they run out of statues.”
Now they were all nodding, so I started inching my mother toward the door, hoping the other two would follow. They did, though the first woman had unfortunately mastered the art of walking and talking at the same time. “But,” she said, “for St. Joseph to be fully effective, you also have to do all the necessary fix-ups, price the house to reflect the current market, and of course, properly stage the home. Cut flowers, cookies baking in the oven, some pine-scent potpourri.
Then
you add the statue.”
We were almost there. My mother leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, and I reached past her to open the door. “Sorry we have to run,” she said.
“Not a problem,” I said as I hiked my towel up again.
“We’ll catch up later, honey.”
“You bet we will,” I said.
When I slammed the door behind them, I just missed the backside of one red-hatted Realtor.
THE DOWNSIDE OF LIVING
in a carriage house over your parents’ garage is that you’re easy to find. “Your mother,” my father said when I answered his knock on my door about three minutes later, “wants to sell the house.”
“Gee, Dad, thanks for the warning.”
I was dressed now, but steam was still coming out of my ears. I’d just put down the phone after leaving an angry message for my mother. I’d been going over and over the piece of my mind I was going to give her when she finally came home long enough to call me back. She was probably still off saint shopping with her red hat friends. They were a seriously bad influence on her, in my opinion.
My father didn’t look so hot. He was wearing shorts with a yellowed cotton tank-style undershirt, and one brown sock and one reddish one. He was color-blind, and from the time I was six or so I knew that whenever his socks didn’t match, it was a sure sign he was fighting with my mother.
“Don’t worry,” I said, thinking a little levity might help us both. “You can move in here with me.”
Not even a giggle. My father looked at me from under his hooded blue eyes. The hair that was no longer on his head seemed to have traveled to his bushy white eyebrows, I noticed.
He looked over his shoulder. “Open the door,” he said. “Fast.”
I did, and he pushed past me, carrying a big black trash bag. “Gee, thanks, Dad,” I said. “But you shouldn’t have.”
“Hey, Toots, where can we stash this to keep it safe?” He’d clearly been watching too much television since he retired.
Though technically larger than a FROG, it was a very small apartment, with a dollhouse-size bathroom and an illegally added kitchenette. I stalled for time. “Do you mean
we
in the royal sense, or are you suggesting your daughter join you in a life of crime?”
My cat jumped off the couch and circled my father and his garbage bag. Then he pounced. “Down, Boy,” my father and I said in one voice. He dug in his claws anyway and teetered on top of the bag, so my father waltzed the bag back to the couch. My father had always been a good dancer.