The Beach House (5 page)

The voice of the caller rose up between them. “Hello? Hello?”

The girl reached out her hand, palm up, and wiggled her fingers.

Cara narrowed her eyes and handed over the phone. The girl deliberately turned her back to Cara in a snub and began speaking to the woman on the phone, confirming the address and giving instructions with the confidence of someone who had done this many times before.

Why, the little punk, Cara thought to herself, affronted. Then fatigue got the best of her. “Whatever,” she muttered, turning and heading back down the hall. At least the girl, whoever she was, knew what to do with the pesty phone call. En route she noticed that the door to her brother’s old room was open. Peeking in, she caught a glimpse of the rumpled unmade bed and on top of it, a pink, frilly nightgown.

Cara’s heart fell as the mystery was solved. The girl was a houseguest, she realized. So much for plans of a private mother-child reunion. The cottage was barely large enough for the two of them, but with three, it would be crowded. There would be no escaping the recalcitrant teen-mother who appeared equally thrilled to see her. If she’d known there’d be guests…

Grabbing her pillow from the floor where it had landed, she tossed it back onto the bed, then slumped against the pillows. What was she expecting, anyway? Her mother had always put others in front of her—her brother, her father and the guests who always seemed to fill the Charleston house.

But the beach house had always been different. She’d hoped that here…

Cara’s mouth pinched and she thought herself a fool. She’d learned long before her teens to take care of herself and not to expect anything. In the piercing morning light her room no longer appeared as charming. The colors in her old quilt were sun-bleached and the paint had yellowed on the walls. Although a gentle breeze still fluttered the thread-bare curtains, without air-conditioning, the humidity would be brutal by midday. Cara began to regret her hasty decision to return home.

The beginning of a headache from too many days of stress and too little sleep nagged. Lying back, she punched her pillow a few times, then relinquished her troubled thoughts to a deep, brooding sleep.

Toy Sooner stood at the kitchen sink rinsing out the coffeepot, tapping her foot in agitation. She carefully spooned out six tablespoons of coffee grinds into the filter, then pushed the start button. She knew Lovie enjoyed a fresh cup of coffee when she returned from her turtle watch. Toy had gone to the Red and White to purchase a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There wasn’t much she could afford to do to show Miss Lovie how grateful she was, and Lovie had said a hundred times or more that she didn’t expect any thanks. Things like that just made Toy want to thank her all the more.

Toy wasn’t used to people giving her something without expecting something in return. To live here with Miss Lovie was like a dream come true. This was the nicest place she’d ever lived and she had a room all her own, too. Best of all, there wasn’t any fighting or hollering at her all the time. She didn’t know before living with Miss Lovie that mealtime could be so nice, with a clean tablecloth and napkins and a knife, fork and a spoon—for every meal!

And they had meals regularly. Not an open can of soup in front of the TV or McDonald’s out of the bag, but real dinners with vegetables. Lovie talked to her, too, like she was someone worth talking to and listening to. Not just some worthless, ungrateful kid who was dumb enough to get her self pregnant, like her parents said. They’d stood at the door of the trailer and wouldn’t even let her in when she tried to come back home. “If you was grown up enough to up and move in with Darryl then you’re grown up enough to take care of his kid,” is what they told her. Now what kind of parents is that? They wouldn’t even help when she told them about Darryl hitting her. “You made your bed, now go lie in it.” That’s all they had to say. That and how she ought to go to church, too, and pray hard for the Lord’s forgiveness for being such a sinner.

But Lovie told her again and again that love was never a sin.
Not
loving, now that was the very worst kind of sin, she said. Miss Lovie was the saintliest person Toy had ever met, and if she said so, then Toy believed it. She always had a way of making Toy feel better about herself instead of making her feel like nothing…worse than nothing. Something to be discarded, which is what her own mother made her feel like.

That’s why it made her so mad to think that Miss Lovie’s own daughter didn’t appreciate how lucky she was to have someone like her for a mother. Just let Cara spend a day with my mother and see how she feels, Toy thought with resentment.

From the moment she heard that Caretta Rutledge was coming home, Toy knew it would be bad news for her. First of all, she heard from Miss Lovie that Cara was some big shot ad executive in Chicago. That figured. Toy knew the type. It wasn’t just that they grew up on the right side of Broad and went to the best schools. Or that they had nice clothes and fancy houses. It was like, deep inside, girls like Cara knew they were better. They didn’t have nothing to prove.

That’s how the rich stayed rich, she figured. It was like some club and they had some secret code that only they knew and that girls like her couldn’t ever clue into. As if she wanted to…She could tell just by the way Cara looked at her pregnant belly that it was a royal put-down. Toy had lots of experience with being looked down on, but it hurt feeling cheap in this house where she’d finally been so happy.

She wiped up the coffee grinds with a sponge. She loved that everything was just so in this house and she actually enjoyed keeping things clean. Growing up, everything was always a mess, with clothes and papers lying all over the place, the laundry never done. She couldn’t ever remember having folded towels in the linen closet or flowers on the table. Living here was like another world. Opening the cabinet, she still got a shiver of pleasure just seeing the neatly stacked sets of matching china.

She’d hate to leave. Lovie wanted Cara to stay the whole summer, but Toy didn’t think Cara could last that long. For Lovie’s sake, she didn’t want to screw things up between them. She didn’t know why, but this time with her daughter was real important to Miss Lovie and Toy would do just about anything for Lovie Rutledge.

The scent of fresh brewed coffee filled the kitchen. She’d just laid out the doughnuts on a pretty plate when she heard steps on the front porch. She quickly wiped the sugar from her hands and hurried to greet Lovie at the door.

“Hey, Miss Lovie!” she called out, grabbing the red bucket from her arm. “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to stay out there all morning.”

“It’s not that late, is it?” Lovie replied, pausing to catch her breath.

Toy’s brows gathered as she monitored Lovie’s level of exhaustion. “Why don’t you sit down for a spell? I’ll get you some water and a nice fresh cup of coffee.”

“My, that sounds nice,” Lovie replied breathlessly as she lowered herself into a chair at the small wood table just outside the kitchen.

With her eye trained on Lovie’s pale face, Toy brought a tray from the kitchen and set it before Lovie. “Did you find anything today?”

Lovie’s face immediately brightened. “Our third nest! Emmi and I probed and on only the third try the probe sunk right in. You should’ve seen Emmi’s face! One hundred and fifty-four eggs. Isn’t that wonderful? Unfortunately, the mother laid them directly in the middle of the beach access path. That big wide one on 17th Avenue.”

“That wasn’t too smart of her.”

“I’m sure the poor old girl had no idea it was a beach path. So we had to move the nest. The dunes are quite high between 16th and 17th Avenue so after Emmi and I checked around a bit, we found a nice place for the nest. All in all, a good day.”

“But a long one for you,” she amended with a serious look.

“Oh, I’m fine, really. A little out of breath, but not the least bit fagged out.”

“No pain?”

“None at all.”

“And you got that message from the volunteer about 6th Avenue?” she asked, bringing a small bowl filled with pills to Lovie.

“I did, thank you. Flo passed it on to me.” She looked down at the pills and wrinkled her nose.

“Come on, Miss Lovie, you know you got to. See? I bought you a doughnut to help with the swallowing. ‘A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,’ just like the song says. Now, come on, don’t put it off.”

Lovie grimaced as she faced the mound of pills but Toy remained at her side, arms resolutely crossed over her chest as she waited. She hated to play the heavy but the doctor hadn’t been fooling around when he’d taken Toy aside and told her it was her job to make sure that Lovie swallowed each and every one of the pills. She tried to keep the conversation about turtles going to take Lovie’s mind off the swallowing.

“So, did that call about 6th Avenue turn out to be a nest?”

After a noisy swallow Lovie set the glass down and shook her head. “A false crawl. She came up the beach quite far, then wandered around a bit before turning back. We searched carefully but didn’t find a nest. I suspect she’s the same mother who laid the eggs a little farther down on 17th. The tracks were similar.” She stared at the remaining pills with dejection.

“Come on, now, just a few more,” Toy prodded. She watched as Lovie took a deep breath, grabbed the two final pink pills, then swallowed them with a shiver of disgust.

“There, that’s done.”

“Horrid things. I don’t know why I still bother.”

“Don’t say that. You know why. We want you around for a long time.”

Lovie’s face softened and she looked at Toy with a sad expression. “At least for the summer.”

“Oh, much longer than that. I’m already shopping for your Christmas present. But, yeah, summer is best. You’ve been so happy since the turtles came.”

“And now, my own Caretta is back.”

Toy’s smile fell.

Lovie tilted her head and gazed at Toy speculatively. “You’ve met?”

The legs of the chair scraped the pine wood floors as Toy joined Lovie at the table. She sat in a clumsy flop, leaving room for her growing belly.

“Sort of. She answered that phone call about the tracks and I walked in from the store while she was talking. I think we kinda surprised each other.”

“She fell asleep early last night. I thought we’d all have a chance to meet after you came home from the movies. As it turned out, I didn’t have a chance to tell her about you.”

“I figured that. She looked at me like…Well, let’s just say she wasn’t glad to see me.”

“Cara can be quite formidable.”

Toy snorted. “I swear, Lovie, I can’t believe that she’s your daughter. I never seen two women cut from such different pieces of cloth.”

Lovie chuckled, then said ruefully, “I’m sure she’d agree with you.”

Toy twisted her mouth and began picking at her nail. “I was thinking. Maybe I should go someplace else, just for this week or so while she’s here. Give you two a little time alone.”

“Where would you go?”

“I guess I could go back to Darryl’s for a week.”

“That’s out of the question.”

Lovie’s sharp tone brought Toy’s gaze to her face. Lovie had straightened in the chair and her eyes were shining.

“It’d just be for a week. I know he wants me back.”

“We won’t even discuss the possibility of you returning to that man.”

“He loves me.”

They sat across from each other in a long silence. Lovie reached out and put her hand over Toy’s. “When I invited you to live here, I wanted you to feel that this was your home. I think we’ve managed quite nicely for ourselves here, don’t you?” When Toy nodded she continued. “So what made you think you’d be suddenly booted out when a guest arrived?”

“We’re not talking about some guest. Cara’s your daughter.”

“And you have become as a daughter to me, too.”

Toy lowered her head and fixed her gaze on the small hand over hers. It was a mother’s hand. Though the skin was pale, almost translucent, with blue veins protruding over bones as fragile as a sparrow’s, Toy saw in it so much love and strength she felt her eyes water with emotion.

Lovie said softly, “Tell me you’ll stay? That you’ll try to make this work?”

Toy nodded sharply, embarrassed for her tears.

Glancing at the clock Cara saw through bleary eyes that it was nearly noon. Her head felt groggy, as though she could sleep another twelve hours. But she couldn’t spend the entire day in bed, could she? The thought that yes, she could, was disquieting. Her mouth felt as if it were filled with cotton and a faint thrumming still pulsed in her skull. Swinging her legs off from the bed, she slipped into a pair of boxer shorts and padded down the hall toward the kitchen.

She felt out of place in her childhood summer home, as if she didn’t belong. The beach house even looked different. Her mother had gutted and redesigned the small rooms of the old cottage to create one main, airy room in the center of the house that opened up at the front and back to large, covered verandas. To the left of the house was a small hall that led to the two small children’s bedrooms and a shared bath. To the right was the master bedroom, bathroom and a tiny kitchen. The clunky old kitchen she remembered was a far cry from the sleek galley kitchen with modern appliances she stepped into now.

The only thing she recognized was the dish cabinet. Through the glass-fronted doors she saw the remainders of china sets that had been handed down through generations. Choosing a blue-and-white Meissen cup, she was comforted by something at once familiar on an out-of-sorts morning. The coffee was still blessedly hot in a thermos and someone had thoughtfully laid out a small plate of doughnuts.

Moving at a slow pace, she carried her cup and pastry to the screened porch and slumped into a large wooden rocking chair facing the ocean. Straight ahead, across the empty lot of low-humped dunes and wild, gnarled greenery, the ocean placidly rolled, distant and unwelcoming.

“Well, there you are!”

Jerking her head around, she spied her mother rounding the corner of the house. She looked sporty in khaki shorts, a sage T-shirt with a turtle emblazoned across the chest and a red baseball cap with the state’s palm tree and crescent moon logo on the front. Cara lazily returned a wave.