Life's a Beach (18 page)

I was trying not to picture all that stuff in my apartment. “Great, Dad.”

“Well, okay, Toots, that’s it for now. We’ll talk to you later. Over and out.”

My phone rang again before I could even put it away. I pushed the green button. “What, do you guys take a number, like at the deli?”

“Is that any way to talk to your mother, Virginia?”

“Oh, Mom, sorry, I thought you were Geri. I haven’t talked to her since this morning. You don’t think she’s sick, do you?”

“Do you know that father of yours is keeping kittens at your place?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I knew you knew. Wait till I get my hands on him.”

“Mom, let’s change the subject, okay? What else is going on up there?”

“Well, I finally gave up waiting for you-know-who to do it, so I got rid of that awful old coffee table in the rumpus room. I talked the paperboy into helping me load it into the car and drove it over to the dump myself.”

“That’s great, Mom. Listen, I’m right in the middle of one of my jewelry books. Can I call you later?”

I WAITED AROUND
outside the special effects trailer while Riley had his bloody stump removed for the day, and then we went over to the electrical trailer to get the drill. Even though it had been a long day, we decided we’d drive into town and walk around before we headed back to the hotel.

We grabbed some bottles of water at the crafts services table for the ride and started across the parking lot toward our rental car. Riley was carrying the drill and a pair of safety goggles, and I was looking through a handful of tiny metal condensers. Some of them had definite possibilities. I looked over my shoulder to make sure Tim Kelly wasn’t following us, but the coast was clear. The gaffer had actually been pretty nice about handing everything over.

“Uh-oh,” Riley said.

It looked like our rental car had had a long day, too. There was a thick brown streak smeared across the windshield of our white Chevy Malibu, and a small mound of the same stuff sat dead center on the hood. “Ohmigod,” I said, “is that what it looks like?”

Riley took a step closer and sniffed. “I think it’s only smushed brownie.”

I stood beside Riley and leaned forward carefully. “I think you’re right.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a tissue, but it seemed woefully inadequate. “Got any good ideas?” I asked.

“How about the windshield wipers?”

“You’re pretty smart for an eight-year-old.” We climbed into the car, and I kept my finger on the windshield fluid button until it seemed safe to turn on the wipers.

Several tries later and we’d created a small window in a sea of chocolate flecks. Now we had a great view of the big pile of brownie on the hood. “I’m not touching that,” I said. “It really looks like dog poop.”

Riley laughed. “I think we should keep it on there.”

“I think we should take a picture and send it to the Marshbury Beautification Commission. They should know what their chairperson’s daughters have been up to.”

19

RILEY SEEMED FINE TO ME, BUT I KNEW IT WAS MY
responsibility to make sure he was taking the brownie poop in stride. “I don’t usually tell this story,” I said once we were on the road, “but when I was in sixth grade I got a big part in a play, and somebody put a dead rat in my locker.”

“Cool,” Riley said. “How’d they kill it?”

There really was a gender difference. In all these years, I’d never once stopped to ponder that question. “I don’t know,” I said. “Machine gun?”

“Nah, that would splatter it.”

We were almost to the harbor, so I rolled down the window and took a whiff of salt air. “Maybe it was dead already. Bubonic plague?”

Riley considered this. “Maybe it was rat poison.”

“Well,” I said. “Better it than me, I guess.” I rolled the window back up to see if I could trap the salt smell inside with us.

We parked the rental car right on Main Street and pretended we didn’t notice the tourists staring at the hood of our car as they walked by. We got out and poured what was left of our bottled water on the main deposit of brownie. Riley picked up a stick and gave it a little poke.

He started to laugh. “I think it turned into a fossil,” he said between squeaks.

“Well, you’re going to have to drive back to the hotel then. I can’t handle looking at it.”

“Deal,” he said.

We found Sand, Sea and Sky right away. As soon as we walked through the door, I was in heaven. It was packed full of everything from vintage jewelry to Nantucket baskets and those Cape Cod bracelets everybody seemed to be wearing. I pointed to one in a case. “What are these called again?” I asked the woman behind the counter.

She looked up from a length of beads she was stringing. “Oddball bracelets,” she said. “Actually, we’re not allowed to call them that. The family who first started making them is trying to get them patented. They even put little tags on theirs that say ‘the only authentic oddball.’ So we’re adding cobalt beads and Swarovski crystals to ours and calling them blueball bracelets.”

“Cute,” I said.

“It’s dog-eat-dog down here,” she said.

“Really?” I’d pictured this wonderful, utopian Cape Cod artists’ community. I looked around to make sure Riley was okay. He was curled up in a chair by the front door, reading his joke book.

The woman put down her beads and adjusted the straps on her tank top. “Not always,” she said. “There are some great people, some great shops. You just have to make sure you don’t step on anybody’s toes.”

I was trying to casually look around for sea glass jewelry. I could see a few pieces, mostly pendants set in heavy sterling silver. “You don’t happen to need any sea glass earrings, do you?” I reached up to touch my ears, but of course I hadn’t remembered to wear any.

“Sure, they sell like crazy here. Bring in some samples. By the way, I’m Marnie. My co-owner, Daria, is in the back working on some lampwork beads. Go introduce yourself before you leave.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m Ginger. I really love your store. You have some amazing things.” I picked up a pin that seemed to be made entirely of old buttons.

“That one speaks to me, too,” she said.

I ran my finger along the edge of the arched mother-of-pearl button in the center. “I’ve never quite thought of it that way,” I said.

She picked up a pink and black ring that had an art deco look. “Oh, jewels are definitely a means of communication, and every single civilization has had them. They speak to us, and we wear them to tell each other who we are.”

There was a tray of beads on top of the case. I reached in and picked up a tiny green bead shaped like a frog.

“That’s Czech glass. It looks like malachite, doesn’t it? I don’t know about the Czechs, but the Chinese consider the frog a symbol of luck.”

It couldn’t hurt. I reached into my shoulder bag for my wallet.

RILEY AND I PUSHED ASIDE
a tie-dyed curtain at the back of the store and introduced ourselves to Daria. She was sitting at a long plywood table and twisting what looked like a sparkler back and forth in the middle of a small propane flame.

“Wow,” I said. “So that’s how you make lampwork beads.”

“It is indeed.” Daria had a young, pretty face and gray hair that coiled around her head like a Brillo pad.

I could just make out a tiny bead at the end of the sparkler. I liked the little torchlike flame. It was so much more civilized than that great big gaping furnace Noah used.

She pulled the sparkler out of the flame and looked at it for a minute. Then she shoved it bead-first into a Crock-Pot.

“Is that a Crock-Pot?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s actually filled with vermiculite. I have a kiln in my studio at home, but this works fine for in here. The annealing process is the most important thing. You have to lower the temperature carefully, or the beads can break.”

Riley pointed to one of the metal things sticking out of the Crock-Pot like an upside-down bouquet. “Is that a sparkler?” he asked.

“Sorry. It’s just a metal rod. It’s called a mandrel.” Daria pointed to the contraption clamped to the table, with rubber hoses leading to the propane tank. “And this is called a minor bench burner.”

Glass rods in all sorts of vibrant colors sat in clear Lucite boxes at one end of the table. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have my own inventory of glass rods, to order the colors I liked and arrange them any way I wanted to, to work in the back of my own little shop.

I had what I thought might be a brilliant idea. “I was just wondering,” I said. “Has anybody ever tried to drizzle bits of colored glass onto sea glass?”

She smiled. “Let’s try it.”

There was no shortage of guinea pigs rolling around in the bottom of my shoulder bag. I let Riley pick out a small aquamarine piece. It had the weathered look of something that had been thrown around by the ocean for years and years.

Daria chose an orange glass rod. She nodded at some pliers. “Pick it up with those and hold it over here and let’s give it a try. Put a pair of those goggles on first, though.”

I held the sea glass in the flame and Daria heated the glass rod above it and then dotted it to the glass. “Okay,” she said. “Take it out and let’s see what we’ve got.”

“How’d that happen?” Riley asked.

My beautiful piece of sea glass had turned into an ordinary piece of glass with orange polka dots.

“Yeah,” Daria said. “Isn’t that amazing? The etching just melts away. I really think the cosmetic people should know about this. Who knows, it might work on wrinkles.”

Riley held his hands up to his cheeks and made a face like the kid in
Home Alone
. “Ouch,” he mouthed.

I was thinking about how much I’d really liked that particular piece of sea glass. “I bet you could spend the rest of your life figuring this stuff out.”

“That’s my plan,” Daria said. She picked up a mandrel. “Glass is really temperamental. Just when you think you know what you’re doing, you get another curveball. But, it’s all worth it because every once in a while you create something that’s so beautiful you don’t even know where it came from.”

IT MUST HAVE BEEN
all that glass, but now I was thinking about Noah again. I wondered if he’d ever done any glass beadwork. I wondered if he even knew I was gone. Riley and I pushed our way back through the tie-dyed curtain. There was a knock at the big display window at the front of the store. When we turned to look, the twins were side by side, pressing their faces against the glass.

“Yikes,” Riley yelled. “Run for your life!”

I saw at least one customer start to run. “Shh,” I whispered to Riley. I tried to catch Marnie’s eye to see if I’d blown my chances of ever selling her any earrings, but she didn’t look up. Maybe she’d missed it.

The twins burst through the front door. Allison Flagg was right on their heels. “I take that back,” I whispered to Riley. “It was actually excellent advice.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Allison Flagg asked.

I’d been around the block enough to know this was a question that never led anywhere good. As further evidence, it sure looked like she was glaring at Riley. The twins each took one of her hands. One of them looked angelically up at her mother while the other crossed her eyes at Riley.

I put my arm around Riley’s shoulders. “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t we step outside? We can all snack on my car or something.”

“Thanks anyway,” Allison Flagg said. “But this isn’t a social visit. I think you should know what your nephew has been saying. It’s not the sort of thing I want my twins exposed to at this age. I’m very concerned. What did you mean by snack on your car?”

I really wanted to punch her out. I hated everything about Allison Flagg, the way she walked, the way she talked, the stupid crisp white preppie blouse she was wearing with those dorky capris with the sailboats on them, or whatever they were.

But I had Riley to think about. As a third child, and with two busy parents, who must have been pretty tired by the time he came along, he probably never had this much individual attention. I was essentially a parent figure, and this time together was a huge opportunity for me to set a good example for him.

I looked Allison Flagg right in her nasty little eyes. “Your daughters vandalized our rental car with brownies, a crime punishable to the full extent of the law. And, we have witnesses.”

The last part was a lie, but it worked great. The twins just hid behind her back and didn’t even try to deny it. Allison Flagg glared some more at Riley. “Well, I’m sure your nephew provoked them.”

I forced myself to smile. “Listen,” I said. “How about if I take Riley and the girls to go buy a bucket and some sponges, and we’ll meet you back at the hotel. The kids can wash the car off together in the parking lot.”

Allison Flagg checked her watch. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind getting a little shopping in before I head back to the hotel.”

“I’ll take that as a thank-you,” I said.

Once we got rid of their evil real mother, I was sure I could help the twins change their nasty ways. First I was a kid, then my sister had kids, so I’d been around kids practically all my life. I knew how they operated, I knew how their minds worked. Sometimes I felt like I was still one of them.