Embers (90 page)

She loved what she was doing, loved the way she was connecting in some mystical way with the generations before her who had used and loved and worn out the workaday set of drawers. She would have loved it even without being paid; but her folk art was in wild demand, and that continued to amaze her.

Holly had filled in a few brushstrokes of sky when her mother's white Volvo
pulled up in front of the red-
shingled barn that was serving so well as a summer studio. Good
. A
ll signs pointed to a quiet dinner with her parents at the Black Dog this year, with maybe some cake and hopefully no telegram.

"Hi, Mom," she called over her shoulder through the clutter of broken furniture, handmade birdhouses, and charming whirligigs that filled the ground floor of the building. She laid down another stroke of impossible blue. "Come see my latest."

The hum of her creativity was so strong that it drowned out the sound of her mother's silence. It took a moment for Holly to emerge from her trance and turn around.

"He's having an affair with
Eden
," said Charlotte Anderson, skipping right past any birthday greeting. Her lip began to quiver. Tears welled but did not fall.

"Who is?"

"Who do you
think!"
Outrage boiled, not quite over.

"I'm sorry," said Holly, forcing herself to abandon her work. "I wasn't paying attention. Who's having an affair with
Eden
?" She began wiping her paint-stained fingers on a soft cloth. Her mother could have been talking about almost any male on the island.
Eden
was gorgeous, twenty-nine, not shy.
Eden
was an enchantress.

Charlotte Anderson closed her eyes and bit her lip, then gave up the struggle. Her face contorted with pain, and then she broke down. "Your fathe
r
... your father
... your
father,
damn him to hell," she moaned between racking sobs.

Holly simply stared. "Are you crazy?
Da
d!
Are you crazy?"

"My God—would I make it up?" her mother cried. Suddenly she turned all of her pain and fury on Holly. "Take
his
side, why don't you!" she said, and she staggered, newly wounded, to a rickety
Windsor
chair that was awaiting glue and a folk art treatment.

"Not that one, Mom; it won't hold you," Holly warned. She rushed to get another.

Her mother said mordantly, "Now I'm
fat
besides being old?" More tears, bitt
er streams of them, from sixty-
year-old-and-no-longer-thin Charlotte Anderson.

"Mom! You
know
I didn't mean it that way."

Holly tried to embrace her hysterical mother, but she was shrugged off violently.

"Mom, you're wrong, you're just wrong," she insisted through her mother's sobs, trying to soothe, though she was reeling herself. "This is a bizarre mistake. Someone misinterpreted. It's so easy to do that with
Eden
. You know how she is."

"Yes—thanks to you! You
had
to sublet to the woman, didn't you,"
Charlotte
said, casting a hateful look at the ceiling above them.

"That's not fair!
Eden
worked at the gallery and she needed a place to stay. She was a big fan of my work; I couldn't let her sleep on the beach. Even you admitted early on that she was the perfect tenant: cheerful, conscientious, hardly ever around to disturb m—
oh."

"Exactly."

"But, Mom
...
Eden
.
Think about it: she's half Dad's age!"

"Which makes her half
my
age. Oh, God
... I can't bear this. I really can't,"
Charlotte
moaned. She slumped into a nearby rocker instead of Holly's armchair and wrapped her arms around her stomach as she rocked disconsolately; and, yes, the years did show.

"What will our family say?" she wailed in misery.

"Your brother, your sister? This will tear us apart. This will destroy us. How could he do this to me? How could he? Oh, God
... how
could
he?" she kept repeating, sobbing throughout the mantra of her despair.

Still shocked, Holly said, "Mom, Mom
... how can you not trust Dad? Why are you so convinced he did anything?"

Charlotte Anderson lifted her head. Her face was puffy, her hair a mess. The light had gone out completely from her gentle and trusting gaze. In a flat, dull voice she said, "Because he told me so. Because he's gone off on the boat with her. Because he wants a divorce."

Holly had seen the two-by-four coming, but she was way too stupefied to duck. She gasped from the shock of the blow and fell back into the armchair she'd dragged over.

"When did he tell you this?"

"This morning."

"That's what he said? He wants a divorce?"

"Not for his sake. For mine," her mother said, trying for a trenchant smile but failing. "He says he doesn't want to put me through the prolonged agony of his affair."

"I can't believe this. We may as well be talking about two different men. Dad hasn't had an unfaithful thought in his life!"

"You're so sure of that," her mother said through her sniffles as she searched her bag for something to blow her nose on.

"Well, has he?" Holly demanded. She held out a box of Kleenex. "Before this, has he ever had an unfaithful thought that you know of?"

Her mother's grudging lift of a shoulder told Holly that as far as she knew, Eric Anderson had not.

"I mean, really. The man is sixty-two years old. He's quiet, reserved, you could say prudish. His work is his life. He doesn't get risqué jokes; I've seen the blank look on his face when someone tells one. He's
... he's a probate lawyer, for Pete's sake, not a rock star or a politician. It doesn't get any less charismatic than a sixty-two-year old Scandinavian probate lawyer. Good grief. Who would want him?"

Charlotte
's face crumpled in another wave of misery. "Me-e-e," she said in the forlorn wail of an abandoned child, and she began to cry again.

Holly felt more wretched than outraged; it broke her heart to see such pain. Soothing and coaxing, she managed to get her mother out of the ro
ck
er and onto her feet. "Come to the house," she murmured. "We'll have tea."

They walked in miserable silence across a path that meandered through a thicket of trees between the barn and the back door of Holly's rented
Cape
. Small, cozy and peeling, The
Cape
was the house of her dreams. She hoped to buy it by the end of her lease and lavish both love and paint on it and make it all better. It was her way.

Holly avoided glances at her mother as she filled the copper teapot from the old cast-iron sink, but her mind was racing. Probably it was foolish to bring it up, but: "Are you sure they've sailed off the island?" she asked.

Her mother was blowing her nose into a wad of fresh Kleenex. "Does it matter?"

"He could have had second thoughts."

"Second thoughts? What kind of second thoughts?"
Charlotte
asked, looking up from her tissues.

There was such hopefulness in her face that Holly immediately back-pedalled and changed the subject. "Nuts, I left my brand-new brush out," she said, making a dash for the kitchen door. "I'll just go dump it in some turp. Be right back."

Holly wasn't merely being cowardly; she wanted to see for herself if
Eden
had gone. Safely out of her mother's view, she headed for the stairs that climbed alongside the barn and led to the apartment that once had been a hayloft.

The last tenant there had been an antiques dealer who had planned to sell his treasures from the wide-planked barn beneath. But the business had folded by November, and the dealer had moved back to the mainland. His desperate landlord offered Holly both the house and the barn on a long-term lease; she snapped it up even before subletting her own condo and studio in
Providence
.

Holly had always wanted a place on
Martha's Vineyard
, close—but not too close—to her parents' summer home in Vineyard Haven. Now she had it, and she would someday marry a quiet, faithful, honest man like her father, and she would have children and run them over often to her parents to babysit, because that's what doting grandparents loved to do.

She slid her key into the door of
Eden
's apartment and swung it wide. Immediately her hopes, all of her hopes, were crushed.
Eden
had flown. The small closet that yawned at Holly held nothing but a few bare hangers. The drawers that she had lined with rose-patterned giftwrap were ajar and empty. The sink was clean, the bed was made, the newspapers were stacked neatly in a pile. Holly was impressed;
Eden
was quite the tidy fugitive.

The little shit.

Holly went back reluctantly to the kitchen, where her mother sat shivering in the warm July sun and warming her hands on her mug of tea as she sifted through the emotional wreckage of her life.

"It's because of the boat,"
Charlotte
said numbly. "You know how he loves the
Vixen."

"So?"

Charlotte
sighed and shrugged. "I get seasick.
Eden
doesn't. Remember ho
w much fun she had on that day-
sail we all took to
Nantucket
?
I
spent the whole time belowdecks, sick to my stomach as usual."

"And you think that's why Dad's left? For someone with a stronger stomach?"

"Essentially, yes."

"If I weren't so depressed I'd laugh out loud," Holly said, managing a smile. "I'm amazed at how your mind works."

Her mother's look was almost pitying. "You truly don't get it, do you? But then, you're young; you take youth for granted. How can I explain this in terms you can understand?"

Her gaze became unfocussed, and Holly knew that she was replaying something awful in the videoscreen of her mind, trying to come to terms with it. Groping for words, her mother finally said, "The day that Eden first stepped aboard the
Vixen:
it was as if your father had been sunning on a rock like some sleepy toad, and a beautiful fairy princess had come up to him, and, completely unexpectedly, leaned down and kissed him on the cheek."

"Oh, Mom, don't," Holly begged. "Don't do this to yourself."

"Your father was a frog, and now he's not," her mother said in a quavering voice. She bowed her head and broke down again in soft, pitiable sobs. "And there's nothing
... absolutely nothing
... anyone can do about it."

****

The hell there isn't,
thought Holly, and she dialed her sister's number.

She had given her mother plenty of time to call Ivy with the devastating news, and she was surprised that Ivy hadn't called the instant she'd gotten off the phone. Since Ivy was having work done on the house, it was possible that she had been off with the kids for the day.

So, fine. I'll be the one to tell.

Because time was of the essence. If their mother was right and their father was under a spell, then it was up to his family to knock some sense into him before it was too late.

"And how, precisely, do you suggest we do that?" Ivy wanted to know after having been brought up to date on the mind-boggling event. "Brass knuckles? Baseball bat?"

"Why
are
you sounding so resigned to this?" asked Holly, dismayed by her older sister's cynicism. "What's the matter with you? I was counting on you to lead the charge."

Her sister's voice was calm to the point of sounding grim. "Holly, you are so clueless. How could you not see this coming? Dad's done raising his kids. His career has peaked. He's tired. He's bored. He obviously feels taken for granted—"

"
I
don't take him for granted."

"Oh? When's the last time you paid him a compliment?"

"The last time I saw him. I said
I
liked his tie."

"Whereas
Eden
probably looked into his blue eyes later that night and murmured something about still waters running deep. Men love to think they're deep."

"That's ridiculous! Dad's not deep. He's just
... Dad."

"Cloooo-lesss."

Annoyed, Holly said, "Just because I'm not married doesn't mean I don't understand men. I know when a man is being dishonest, and Dad is too honest to be
dishonest. I'm telling you: he's under a spell."