Accidental Happiness (19 page)

It sounded like Reese had gone down for the count anyway, and mercifully,
not
under my roof. Tomorrow would be soon enough to find out the truth about the complicated existence my husband had kept from me. The questions alone seemed unbearable, let alone the answers. A night out with Derek, a good microbrew and an alligator appetizer, should be distracting enough to avoid thinking on either one for too long a stretch.

17

Reese

“W
hat time is it?” Reese asked no one in particular. She was only half awake, but realized that she was in a bed. A nice bed. The sheets smelled like fabric softener and something else. Lavender.

“I can’t tell time on clocks without numbers,” Angel answered, sitting in the bed beside her. She had her pj’s on. “I got up and Lane made breakfast for me. Then I decided to get back in bed until you wanted to get up.”

Reese sat up, looked at the bedside clock: 9:20. She’d gone back to Lane’s after getting called in to finish a shift at Ollie’s. Lane had fed her pasta, but she’d been tired. Too tired to even sit at the table and talk like any normal person. Lane had told her to lie down, and the bed had looked so good. She’d slept all night in her clothes. Damn it to hell. She was a mess and it was getting worse.

“I gotta get up, baby doll,” she told Angel. “I’ve got something to pick up at the Ship’s Store before ten.”

“Can I go?”

Reese looked at her daughter, thought of how she’d been taking Angel for granted the last few days. And the poor kid was injured, at that.

“Get your clothes on,” she told the girl. “Do it fast. I’m going to wash my face, brush my teeth, and then we have to go.”

Angel smiled, ran to a drawer, and began sorting with her good hand through the scarce choices for clothes to put on. As Reese stood up to go to the bathroom, she glanced inside the drawer and saw that Angel’s clothes sat stacked inside, all of them folded and clean.

“Did Lane tell you that you could put your stuff there?”

“Yeah,” Angel said, still selecting and not even looking up as she answered. “She took everything out of it for me and said that even when we move into that other house, I can keep this drawer as mine for when I sleep over.”

“And she washed your clothes?” Reese asked.

“Uh-huh.” Angel stood up, pink shorts and a white shirt in her hand. “They smell good.” She held them up for Reese to smell.

“Lavender,” Reese said. “Like the sheets. She must put something in the dryer.”

She thought again of how she’d let herself get out of touch with Angel. Relying on Lane’s obvious affection for the child, Reese had given in to Lane as a safety net, allowed herself a brief reprieve from responsibility. Not entirely, of course. She’d made sure to follow the doctor’s instructions and change Angel’s bandage each day. She kept the antibiotic salve around the wound just as the nurse had shown her. But had Lane been giving Angel the pills if her arm hurt? She must have; she’d been on top of everything else. One look at Angel’s clean and pressed clothes in the drawer told her that much.

But regardless of who the child had in her life, Angel stayed tight as glue to her. It was natural, but it worried Reese. She wondered if Angel would be able to adjust to all the changes that had to come.

“Go find your hair clips,” Reese said, mainly to give the child another task. Angel hated being at loose ends. “Have Lane brush through your hair and put them in if she isn’t busy.”

“She’s taking a shower,” Angel said. “I hear the water. She has a tooth appointment this morning. But I can do my hair by myself.”

After Angel left, Reese stretched out her arms, her fingers. Tried to get the blood flowing. With any luck, some of it would make it to her brain and she’d be able to think straight. She hoped her package had gotten to the Ship’s Store. She’d paid extra for an overnight delivery and they’d promised it would be there before ten.

Reese went into the bathroom. Clean towels hung on the bar beside the shower, and it was all she could do to resist stepping into the cool spray, washing her hair, her neck, her entire body. A shower like Lane’s could cleanse you of so much, she thought.

“Ready!” Angel came into the bathroom before she’d even begun. She washed her face hurriedly, rinsed her mouth with toothpaste, and found her pocketbook. She still had Gina’s credit card to return. So many things to remember.

“Let’s go, honey,” she said to Angel, but the child was already halfway out the door.

She could hear the shower running in the other bathroom near Lane’s room.

“Do you need anything from the Ship’s Store?” she called in from the door.

“No, thanks!” Lane called back.

She moved fast to catch up with Angel, and it occurred to her that it had become harder and harder to keep up. Maybe that would change, but maybe it wouldn’t. She had to make her decisions sooner than she’d hoped.

“Come on!” Angel yelled from the door to the store.

“Hold on,” she called back.

Hold on. Hold on, Reese, she thought. But everything seemed to be slipping out of her grasp.

As she went into the store, she saw two welcomed sights. The FedEx box on the counter behind the cash register, and Charlie, smiling at her in a way that made her feel younger after all.

18

Gina

D
erek’s studio apartment above the marina had the look and feel of a permanent living space, not at all the storage-room-with-a-cot existence that I’d imagined. Copies of
Atlantic Monthly
and the
Oxford American
lay wrinkled and read on a maple coffee table that sat in front of a sage green futon. A wrought-iron bed sat in one corner, and across the room, in the kitchen, a grind-and-brew coffeemaker shared counter space with a bread machine. Nice prints, a jazz festival and a black-and-white sailing shot, hung on the walls. Not bad for a guy just out of graduate school, working as a night security guard.

In the full light of morning I could see the entire apartment from the bed. Beside me, Derek slept on his back, in the position of an animal that rests secure from danger. His arm splayed out above his head, legs sprawled. It either meant that he trusted me or that he was simply used to sleeping alone.

We’d ended up at his place after dinner. Not right away. He’d taken me home first. I’d followed him around on his security rounds. Georgie tagged along and it passed for the evening walk she’d missed. Then we’d gone back to my boat for a beer. By two
A.M.
it became clear that we were stalling our good-bye.

“I need to get back up to my place,” he said. “I can see the front gate from there, and I get up to check out the marina several times a night. It’s easy work, but they
do
pay me to do it.”

“I don’t want anything to happen with us tonight,” I told him as we were discussing our options. “I took things with you really casually before, but now . . .”

“I think a lot’s happened already.” He seemed amazed, and he was right. The kind of night we’d had was the last thing I’d expected from such a terrible day. “I’m guessing that you’re talking about sex, and I suppose I agree. There seems to be more at stake than there used to be.” Then he added, “Unless you change your mind. Then all bets are off.” He smiled. The off-kilter features of his face, all the angles of his nose and chin, looked impossibly beautiful to me.

“Yeah,” I offered. “I’m sure.”
Jesus, Gina.
A uniquely inarticulate response from someone whose stock-in-trade involved words.

“Listen, don’t take this wrong, but I’d like to wake up with you,” he said. We sat in the main salon of my boat. Light movement of the night air caused the water to lap gently against the hull. “We might as well see the night through. I mean, at this point, waking up is only a few hours away.”

“Right,” I teased. “Just a slumber party. I heard about that course in college.”

“Which one?” A smile played at the edges of his mouth.

“The one that teaches guys how to tell a date anything to keep the options in play.”

“I never actually got into that course. It was booked up solid every semester.”

The boat shifted with a small, steady movement of the water. I thought of night sails I’d taken with Ben, occasionally dropping anchor long after dark had set in. The breeze made the boat seem restless, eager to go, and the memory took on a quality of longing. Maybe Derek would be game to just take off, set sail. But then I remembered that he was working. His time between eleven
P.M.
and daylight belonged to the marina.

“Seriously,” he said. “How about coming up to my place?”

I shot him a sideways glance.

“I’m not trying to pull anything. That’s God’s honest truth,” he said, his face earnest. “I just don’t want to leave you now. Gina, you’ve been through a lot today. Don’t shut me out of it.” Then he added, “I know all of this has something to do with Reese.”

“What do you mean?”

“All this business about Benjamin, and the necklace. Listen, Gina. I know that she was his ex-wife. I didn’t say anything—not to anybody—because I know you haven’t made a point of introducing her that way, but—”

“Who told you?” I couldn’t imagine Lane talking with him about it, and the police report and the newspaper had been generous enough to identify her as a relative. One of the perks of living in a small place was that people actually showed compassion from time to time.

“An old guy who works on boats at the yard here. He knew Benjamin from way back,” he explained. “He’d seen her before.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not a big secret,” I said. “It’s just something I’d rather not explain over and over if I don’t have to.”

“I know. But I figured she’s the person you were talking about with the necklace and—”

“It wasn’t for her,” I interrupted him. “Ben bought it for Angel. Her daughter.”

Derek’s face took on a skeptical expression. “That doesn’t seem like such a big deal. I don’t mean to trivialize it, but I don’t think that’s any reason to be as upset as you were.”

I listened to the halyards again, wondered why I was opening up about everything to someone I’d considered an overgrown boy just hours before. But my picture of Derek was changing. I was changing.

“Angel might be Ben’s daughter.” I sounded tired, even to myself. “He didn’t know. I mean, for a long time, he didn’t know. But he’d found out about it somehow. Recently, I think. Reese must have decided to tell him for some reason. He’d spent time with Angel and he kept it from me. And where Angel goes, Reese goes, so I don’t know what the story is. He never told me about any of it. And the necklace . . . The necklace is clearly a child’s, and it’s Angel’s birthstone.”

“Jesus . . .” Derek sat with his mouth partly open, shook his head.

“Like I said, I don’t know exactly how Reese plays into all this.” I looked over at him. In the small confines of my cabin, he seemed larger. Capable, perhaps, of holding some of the weight I’d been carrying. “It’s possible he was sleeping with her again. I can’t believe he would do that—not the Ben I knew—but why would he lie to me about Angel?”

Derek didn’t try to respond, not with words. He simply leaned in and held me. It came as unexpected comfort at an hour when sleep should have been necessary but would have been hard to come by. It occurred to me that staying with him might lend me enough peace to actually get some rest, and suddenly it felt like the most reasonable decision in the world. I pulled away from him, sat up, and took in a full breath to try to avoid a new round of tears.

“Let me get my toothbrush,” I told him. “I’ll go back to your place with you.”

Moments later I was putting the splashboards on the cabin door. I decided to leave the lock off in case Reese came back before I did. Georgie looked confused as I peeked in and said good night. Derek and I walked the short path and took the outside stairs up to his apartment. At two
A.M.
, no one but a prowling tomcat made note of our presence.

Derek had stayed true to his offer, expected nothing more than slight conversation followed by blessed sleep. The latter was more than I could have hoped for. In the brighter light of morning as he still slept, it occurred to me that I’d done something for entirely the right reasons for a change. By the time he had opened his eyes, I was rooting around his kitchen looking for cinnamon to add to the pancake batter that I’d mixed in preparation for a home-cooked breakfast. And trying not to feel guilty about making the dog wait for her first walk of the day.

“What are you looking for?” he asked, standing up and arching backward in a morning stretch. He wore boxers, blue with Japanese cartoon characters on them. My earlier assessment of him as a grown man began to wane.

“Cinnamon,” I told him. “You can’t make pancakes without cinnamon.”

“Who says?” he asked.

“My great-aunt Lett. She was a lousy aunt, but a great cook.”

“Well, I don’t have cinnamon,” he said, coming into the kitchen. He stuck his finger in the batter and licked it.

“There are raw eggs in there,” I said.

“I’ll take my chances.” He hugged me. Even in one short night, his sleep smell had become familiar to me, something akin to candles and pie on the comfort scale. When he started to pull back, I leaned in a little harder and he held me longer. He held me until I let go.

Still wearing my clothes from the previous day, I took the indoor stairs down to the Ship’s Store to look for cinnamon. The emotional roller coaster I was on had only topped the first hill. I sensed there were a fair number of highs and lows to go before the ride settled. And the scariest part was, there was no real way off until it stopped.

“Where did you come from?” Charlie stood at the hardware shelf, straightening up cans and bottles of deck cleaner and spider spray.

“I stayed up at Derek’s place last night,” I said. Charlie’s broad grin held a dozen or so remarks that he blessedly kept to himself. But there was no need to be secretive. This one wasn’t going to be in the bag for long anyway. “I thought Randall worked days in here.”

“We’re switching today,” he said. “Didn’t Reese talk to you?” The bells on the front door announced customers coming in. A couple of kids making a beeline for the ice-cream freezer. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

“I haven’t seen her yet,” I told him. The mention of Reese’s name left a stain on my thoughts. The morning had been better than it had any right to be. I didn’t want to let it go. “Do you have any cinnamon?”

“Yeah, two aisles over,” he said. “Listen, she was going to talk to you about the four of us going out tonight. I thought you’d be the hard sell, but . . .” He glanced over toward the back stairs to Derek’s apartment. “I’m guessin’ now that maybe you won’t.” His exaggerated Southern inflection implied even more than his words. He raised his eyebrows and smiled.

“So you want to go out with Reese?” The thought of a double date with Ben’s ex seemed too bizarre.

“Yeah, she’ll talk to you,” he said, back working with his shelves. “She was in here a little bit ago. She picked up your package for you.”

“What package?”

“Some FedEx that came this morning. She said she’d give it to you. I guess she didn’t know you were upstairs.” He grinned again, shook his head. “So how about tonight? You guys up for it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering what package would have come. “I’ll have Derek talk to you about it.”

“All right,” he said as I made my way back to the stairs. “Think about it. We could all have a blast.”

I nearly fled back up to Derek’s place, and it wasn’t until I got to the door that I realized I had taken off without even paying for the small container of ground cinnamon I was holding.

“Hell, he knows where to find me,” I mumbled to myself as I went back inside.

Before I could begin to sort out my conversation with Charlie, Derek added another twist to my morning.

“Your cell phone rang,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s like mine and I just picked it up out of habit and answered.”

“Who was it?”

“Some woman. Maxine? She said to call her back.”

“Shit.” My mother-in-law would have been on the bottom of the disclosure list when it came to my night with Derek. What the hell. The coaster was heading back down and I had to hang on for the drop.

“Who was she?” he winced as he asked.

“Ben’s mom.”

“Shit.” He echoed my sentiments.

We set about making pancakes together without any more talking.

“Hi, Maxine,” I said after hearing my mother-in-law’s cheerful hello. “Derek said you called.”

I’d gotten back on the boat. Reese had come and gone and there was no package to be found.

“Hey, darlin’,” Maxine said. God bless her, she didn’t sound weird about the Derek thing. Maxine was about the best person I knew. “I’ve got a few things to talk to you about.”

“Okay, what’s up?”

“Well, the first is that my realtor over on Sullivan’s Island called. The Bensons, who always finish out the season with us, cancelled. They have a family illness. She didn’t say, but Herb’s had problems with his heart, so I’m thinking that’s probably it. Anyway, that frees up the house right away.”

“Do you need any money up front?” I asked. “I’m going to cover things until she gets a paycheck.”

“Don’t worry about it. It can wait until things settle out with her job. I’m not charging her much anyway, mainly enough to cover utilities. The realtor I work with was horrified.” She didn’t try to explain herself, but I knew she was pretty soft inside that hard shell. “So go ahead and tell what’s-her-name that she can move in.”

What’s-her-name
was beginning to dominate every conversation I had.

“I’ll tell her when I see her,” I said, settling down with a Diet Coke. “I’ve heard rumors of Reese sightings all morning, but I haven’t talked to her today.”

“Aren’t you the lucky one?” she said. “Listen, Gina. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Narrow that question down a little and I’ll do my best.”

“Well, for starters,” she said, her voice getting lower, more serious, “my neighbor brought me the Charleston paper from last week. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I should have known Maxine would see the paper, should have told her about the shooting when I was standing in front of her. It wasn’t the kind of thing to talk about on a cell phone.

“I’m sorry, Maxine.” A weak start, but what else? Why the hell hadn’t I told her? “I was embarrassed, I guess, and I didn’t want to get into it. Angel was fine and there didn’t seem to be any point . . . Then Reese skirted around it . . . Honestly, I wasn’t trying to keep it from you. I just didn’t feel like telling it again.”