Barefoot Beach (7 page)

She gave me a wan smile. Then her eyes lit. “Come to dinner. Pete's grilling salmon and, believe it or not, veggie kebabs.” Evidence on a skewer.

Under the circumstances, I couldn't imagine a less attractive invitation. “Sounds wonderful,” I fibbed, “but it's my first full day here, and you know what? I just want to let the beach seep in. Plus, Jack brought two bags of dirty laundry back from Durham so I thought I'd do a few loads and surprise him with some clean clothes.”

“Jack. Damn, that reminds me. Pete sent Jack a new team T-shirt he wants him to wear Sunday.” The softball game on the lawn of their summer house was a highlight of the Manolises' annual cookout. “I left the freaking shirt in the car. Walk with me and I'll hand it over.”

I was leaving anyway. And I felt she needed me. She hadn't since her crisis back in New York, and she'd been there for me more recently, more times. Now it was my turn.

Margo kept up rare-for-her nervous chatter all the way to her car, a pious Prius, though there was a Mercedes in the garage and Pete's red Porsche convertible, which we'd thought
was
his midlife crisis.

“Listen,” I interrupted, as she beeped her door remote, “you know Pete's a good man. And he was so contrite the last time. The marriage counseling worked. It held for eighteen years. I suggest that before you go running off—”

“Don't you dare say half-cocked,” Margo shot back. But she'd made herself giggle.

At that moment, her iPhone rang. The tent people. She leaned against
one of the old beech trees that cast pools of cool shade on King Charles Street. To pass the time, I picked up a copy of the morning's
Coast Post
that someone had tossed toward the trash bin and missed. While Margo talked, I unfolded the paper to get a second look at the We Got Rhythm ad with the five-year-old photo of me. My girlfriend peered over my shoulder, mouthed, “Neck,” and fluttered the back of her hand under my chin like an evil moth. “Dr. Marx,” she formed with her plumped lips.

I inched away against the smooth bark before turning back a few pages, but Margo's antennae were out and quivering and she spotted the two-column photo.

“Scott Goddard,” she mouthed, her nostrils flaring an exclamation.

That had her speeding through the rest of her conversation. After she clicked off, she swiped the newspaper from me, stared, and let out a long whistle followed by, “Wow! I haven't heard about him since the Goddards took your ballroom class. The wounded warrior leading the parade. Your heart goes out. He's a good guy.”

“Yup,” was all I said. Maybe that would end the conversation. As if.

“But the wife, ugh,” Margo powered on. “Bunnicula. Now, there's a woman who can suck the life out of a room. How did he wind up with her? Okay, I suppose she's pretty in a clichéd kind of way. Yeah, I can see him falling for her back in high school before her prom queen looks faded. Voted girl most likely to give a blow job in the backseat. Every teenage boy's dream. But imagine thirty years of living with that witch with a capital
B
. Scott Goddard deserves better.”

That's how I felt, but I averted my eyes. Margo knew me much too well.

After she slid behind the wheel and handed over the Blue Herons T-shirt for Jack, Margo said, “Do me a favor, will you? At the party, play private eye with Pete. You love the big cheater so you're an impartial witness. Watch his moves and tell me if I'm being paranoid about the girl-on-the-side thing. Oh God, I want to be paranoid.”

She took off and I began walking in the opposite direction, the T-shirt crammed into my Vera Bradley bag. I wasn't looking forward to the combination of Jack and Father's Day. The holiday hadn't been easy for him over the last eight years. This one, with #1659 hovering on the horizon, was extra complicated. Then there was Pete texting in closets. And afternoon thunderstorms predicted.

Right, Sunday was going to be fun.

Friday had been hot. Saturday was steaming. It was one of those days you wanted to camp in with the air-conditioning turned up high, but at the Surf Avenue house we were awake and out early. We both had errands to do. Jack left for his first dog walk of the day, whistling, still high on the possibility that #1659 was out there somewhere jumping for joy over the possibility of connecting with his bio boy. For Jack's sake, I hoped Dr. Who was doing just that. For my sake, well, I wasn't so sure.

By nine, I was looking over the produce at the farmers' market, trying to stay cool under a wide-brimmed straw hat with every curl tucked in. My auburn hair was a legacy from my father's gene pool. These days my copper tone was helped out by a colorist. But the sun was hell on dyed red and I'd be damned if I'd let my hundred-buck investment go orange.

“Well, I do declare, Miss Scarlett, all you need is the parasol,” drawled Peg Lanahan, after we'd hugged hello. Peg operated Farmer Joe's produce stand. I'd known Peg and Joe since my first summer in Tuckahoe. They were good, solid people.

Peg tipped a quart basket of strawberries toward me and tumbled a few of the plumpest into my palm. “These beauties were picked this morning.”

I savored them and nodded, confirming sweet and juicy.

“I'll take two baskets. How are your blueberries today?”

“Good, maybe not as sweet as later in the season, but cooked with sugar for your Father's Day cobbler, they'll be fine.”

She knew the destiny of the fruit I was buying, the reason I was out in this heat. I needed the best of her berries for the one tradition I was sure Jack would never scoff at. On birthdays, Mother's Day, and Father's Day, the honoree had the privilege of choosing dessert. Lon's rice pudding, his mother's recipe, which he cooked slowly on top of the range, was what I'd always asked for. Jack chose packaged Berger cookies, a Baltimore specialty, with swirls of chocolate frosting half an inch tall. Lon had wanted my summer fruit cobbler in June and then again for his August birthday, with the addition of peaches at the luscious height of their season. When the Manolises began holding their Father's Day cookout in the afternoon, so that we all came home too late and stuffed for dinner, we moved the cobbler to the night before.

I thought Jack might find it creepy to keep up the Father's Day ritual without his dad, but he'd been good with it. “Hey, any excuse for pie” was his motto. So I'd bake the dessert this afternoon and he could have some when he finished his shift at Coneheads. Last year, when I got to the kitchen the following morning, I'd seen that he'd scooped up nearly half the cobbler before heading to bed.

Peg said, “The cucumbers are in. And the Swiss chard and most of the greens. The lettuce is pretty.”

“Cucumbers,” I said. “Two, please.”

“How's life treating you?” she asked as she sorted through the produce.

“Happy to be back here. We had a snowy winter in Baltimore. You?”

“Record cold here. My nephew, the four-year-old, got the bronchitis that went around in December. But the doctor gave him some new medicine and he bounced back in a snap. Amazing what science can do these days. They've got a little girl who had a heart transplant at the organ-donor booth this year. She's going great guns.”

The farmers' market gave free space to all kinds of nonprofits and charities. You could register as an organ donor at the Red Cross tent, drink green tea at Hug the Trees, and pick up samples of crab seasoning at the Save the Bay Foundation station.

Peg was focused on her calculator so she could avert her eyes when she asked, too casually, “And you? How's your bounce?”

“Just the standard speed bumps. I love my work.”

I was hoping to sidestep questions about my nonexistent love life.

A few years before, Peg had fixed me up with her cousin. Don lived in a condo near my Charles Village house, and we had a lot in common, she'd promised. He liked sushi; I liked sushi. His wife had walked out on him. My husband had left me. Not voluntarily, of course, but wasn't the fallout almost the same?

I'd tried. Don and I had gone out twice. It wasn't awful and he wasn't awful, just ordinary, which sounds horribly condescending, but the poor man had an impossible act to follow.

“Jack's good?” Peg asked.

“Great. He made dean's list. He's back at Coneheads and doing his dog walking.”

Enough information for our kind of friendship.

“Have you seen the corn?” Peg asked. “We had a lot of rain this spring and the first crop is in early.”

She pointed to a bin at the very end of her awning. I wandered over to a pile of Sunglow. Their fragrance was sugary, their husks a healthy green, their tassels palest yellow.

I'd just begun stripping them halfway down, looking for kernels in soldier rows, when a dog's bark, sharp and loud, raised my head. Big dog, I thought, before I saw a massive German Shepherd prowling five aisles up.

“Sarge,” a voice commanded. The leash tightened and I followed the taut trail of the strap. The funny thing was, I knew who was at the other end before I saw his face. I don't think the voice gave him away. The last
time I'd heard it had been two years before, and never snapping an order. What I remembered were his frustrated groans when he took a beat or two to catch up with the music. And his triumphant laugh when he'd conquered a new boundary, like mastering a running turn in the meringue.

Scott Goddard had put on a little weight and grown out his buzz cut so his dark hair, salted with gray, was fuller. But if I'd had any doubts as to his identity, which I didn't, he was wearing camo pants and an “Army Proud” T-shirt. I felt my heart accelerate slightly, absurdly. I sucked in a breath of heavy, humid air. Exiting, it vibrated. Idiot! If I were any more the teenager, I would have broken out in acne on the spot. It was just the shock of seeing him after so long, I told myself.

Still, against my will, I stared at the man as if he were something juicy in season. Which he was definitely not. Though I did notice that Bunnicula—Bunny, I guiltily self-corrected—was not at his side.

He'd been bagging string beans, but now he rested the bag on the wooden bin and looked at me.

I smiled. It was just a hi to someone you'd only walk over to if he smiled in return and waved beckoningly at you. Scott smiled and nodded, but there was not even a twitch of beckoning. No come-hither wave or head bob to signal he was eager for a let's-catch-up-we-haven't-seen-each-other-in-two-years conversation. He went back to picking through string beans.

Odd, but not off-the-charts strange if Bunny was around. She hadn't liked me. I'd rubbed her the wrong way with my demos of fancy steps that she couldn't and (she'd literally dug in her heels) wouldn't follow. So maybe Scott was acting like an ass to keep the peace with his wife.

I scanned the shoulder of the road, where she might have skulked off for a cigarette. Ran a quick check of the nearby stalls. Nope, no sign of the evil Bunny. When I turned back, there was Scott walking toward me, the German Shepherd trotting by his side. It had been a while since I'd
last seen the man, and the air was rippling with heat and so it could have been a mirage. But the lurch of my heart told me it was the real thing. That and the dog's gruff bark.

“It
is
you,” Scott said as they pulled up next to me. “For a moment there, I didn't recognize you with your hair all—what would you call it?—tucked in. I'm used to you with your hair down. The reddish color.”

Typical man-speak. Reddish.

I swept off the straw hat so vigorously that its pink satin ribbon whipped me in the face.

He laughed. “You okay?” I nodded yes and shook out my hair. Copper curls tumbled over my shoulders. Okay, so I was hair-proud. It was my best feature.

“That's better. Now I know you.”

A few uncomfortable beats went by. The colonel had been a marksman in Iraq and he was staring, eyes narrowed. In the shimmering sun, I shivered, feeling he had me in his sights.

Finally, he said, “You look good, Nora.”

“Thanks, you too. And you too, whatever your name is, fella. He is a fella, right?” I bent down to the dog, which was nuzzling my knees.

“He is definitely a he. Of course, you haven't been formally introduced. Nora, Sarge. Sarge, Nora.”

“Nice to meet you, Sarge.” I offered the dog the back of my hand. Sarge sniffed, licked, and rubbed his ear against my arm.

“I think you just found yourself a new friend. He likes you and he's got great instincts. He hasn't steered me wrong yet, and we've been through some tough times together.”

Speaking of tough times, I was about to ask after Bunny and her mother when his cell phone rang. He slipped it from his pocket and eyed the screen. “Sorry. Have to take this.” He said, “Goddard,” while Sarge, now that we were pals, allowed me to scratch his ruff and thanked me
with a low growl of pleasure. Thirty seconds later, Scott signed off with, “On my way.”

He tugged the leash and gave me an apologetic half smile. “Duty calls. They need me at the VFW booth. Someone's asking questions the old guy covering can't answer.” He rested a hand just above my wrist, raising fresh goose bumps. “Hey, Nora, I'm really glad we ran into each other. It was good seeing you. Two years. Time . . . Actually, I was going to say time flies, but sometimes it doesn't—you know what I mean?”

I did and thought,
But now it's whizzing by too fast.
I managed, “Good seeing you too. Maybe . . .” We both blurted “maybe” at the same time. His hand flew off my wrist.

When I flourished a “You first,” he laughed.

“Right. I was going to say, it's a small town and a long summer, so maybe we'll catch up again. I know Sarge would like that.”

Sarge
would. I gave my canine fan a final pat on the head. “Sure,” I said. “Well, send my best to Bunny.”

That seemed to give the colonel a jolt, snap him to attention. “Right, I'll send it.” And then, in a display of more Tuckahoe magic—beach woo-woo, Margo would have called it—Scott Goddard and his huge German Shepherd disappeared. Vanished. Into thick air.

That night I baked the fruit cobbler. Not for Lon. I wasn't that delusional, although a truly sane person might have wondered if I'd conjured up Colonel Goddard and his string beans, given how he'd evaporated so thoroughly, so inexplicably, after we'd exchanged good-byes. Totally irrational, I'd gone looking for him, not having the slightest idea what I'd do if I found him. I passed the VFW tent twice, checking out a couple of eighty-somethings holding down the fort. I walked the entire market, telling myself I was searching for the perfect blackberries, though I'd never used them in the cobbler.

In fact, the events of the day had dulled my taste for dessert. I left the cobbler, still warm, crust intact, on the kitchen counter with a serving spoon propped against the baking pan for Jack.

When I got down to the kitchen Sunday morning, it was exactly where it had been the night before, untouched.