Summer Friends (19 page)

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Authors: Holly Chamberlin

BOOK: Summer Friends
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31
Delphine came into the house from the office around two o'clock Monday afternoon to help her mother assemble and price items for a tag sale at her church. The sale would, hopefully, pay for new prayer books. The ones in current use were old and falling apart; some were even being held together by rubber bands. Delphine brought with her a child's purple cotton sweater and three wool scarves, one in the “potato chip” stitch, her donation to the cause.
The two women set to work in the living room at a rarely used formal dining table Patrice had inherited from an aunt. On the table were some of the items to be sold. There was a package of doilies made by one of the older churchgoers; a handmade rag doll with buttons for eyes; two wood birdhouses painted in red and yellow; and a variety of other items Delphine couldn't imagine anyone wanting, let alone paying money for. But there was no accounting for a person's taste. She was sure Maggie was reminded of that every time she looked at Delphine's clothing.
“Where's Kitty?” Delphine asked her mother.
“Out in the barn with Jackie and Lori,” Patrice said. “She wanted to see the new kittens. Their eyes have just opened.”
“Did she have lunch?”
“Of course. Though she didn't eat very much.”
“How does she seem to you?” Delphine asked.
Patrice frowned. “I don't like to interfere with a parent's child-rearing decisions.”
“What do you mean?”
But Patrice just shrugged.
“She has a big bruise on her leg,” Delphine said. “What's that from?”
“I saw it. But I don't know how she got it. Neither does she. I asked. Kitty's not usually clumsy. So, how long is Maggie going to be in town?”
“I don't know,” Delphine said. “She hasn't been specific. I know she's accumulated a lot of vacation time.”
Patrice folded a crocheted quilt contributed to the sale by a Mrs. O'Connell. “I think that woman has some figuring out to do.”
Delphine laughed. “Don't we all?”
After a moment, Patrice said, “Some more than others.”
Delphine didn't respond. She wondered if her mother was implying that her younger daughter needed to fix her life in some way.
“There's something lost about Maggie,” Patrice went on, “for all her fancy clothes and sophistication.”
“How do you mean ‘lost'?” Delphine asked.
“Every summer, she was glued to you from the moment her family got here until the moment they left.”
“Yeah, but wasn't I glued to her, too?”
Patrice shook her head. “It wasn't the same. There was something almost desperate about her need for your friendship. Sometimes, it made me worried. Like she wasn't getting any attention at home or that something was missing. I don't know. You know I don't like to interfere.”
Delphine reached for a pile of dish towels a local woman named Mrs. Bubier had sewn for the sale and began to fold them. For all the years of their friendship she had seen Maggie as the more assured, the more self-sufficient, of the two. Maybe she had been wrong. Or maybe something had changed. Maybe loneliness was what was behind Maggie's pursuit of their old friendship. She had talked a bit about loneliness, hadn't she? Loneliness, and feeling restless and confused.
“Why haven't you introduced her to Harry?” Patrice asked, interrupting Delphine's thoughts.
“No reason.”
“Delphine, there's no point in lying to me and you know that.”
“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “I just don't think they have anything in common.”
“Why should that matter? I think you're afraid Maggie will find that Harry doesn't measure up. Well, sure, his manners are a bit rough at times, but he's a good man, not very exciting, but that sort of thing doesn't matter in the end.”
Delphine bristled. Didn't she deserve someone exciting, someone with good manners, someone who “measured up”?
I guess not,
she thought.
At least, according to my mother.
Delphine had never talked with her mother, or her father, about Harry's marital situation. They knew, of course, about Ellen; everyone in town did. But if either of her parents had a problem with Delphine's being with Harry, they weren't saying. Now, for the first time, Delphine wondered if her mother really cared about her happiness. She wondered if her mother, and her father, really valued her properly. How could they, Delphine thought angrily, if they weren't bothered by the fact that their daughter was dating a married man?
If she and Harry were actually dating, because “dating” implied a journey leading to an end—to a breakup or to a committed union. Delphine had realized long ago that their relationship was stagnant—it wasn't progressing and it wasn't regressing. It just was. Which might be okay if the big circumstances were satisfying, but they weren't. Not anymore, not for her.
“Look, Mom,” she said. “Harry hasn't even asked me when he's going to meet Maggie. I don't even think he cares. Which is fine. She'll be gone in a few weeks, anyway.”
“Who will be gone?” It was Kitty, come in from the barn through the kitchen. Her cheeks were flushed. Delphine recognized her T-shirt as one she had given her, pink, with a picture of a glittery fairy on the front.
“My friend Maggie,” Delphine explained. “She's in Ogunquit visiting. She lives in Massachusetts.”
“Oh. Is she staying at your house?”
“No. She's staying in a hotel.”
“Why, if she's your friend? Why isn't she staying with you, like a sleepover?”
Delphine thought
, Because I didn't want her to visit me. I didn't ask her to come.
“It's just better this way,” she said lamely. “Hey, guess what? I have a big surprise for you.”
“What is it?” Kitty grabbed her hand. “Tell me, tell me!”
“You and I are going to a Sea Dogs game!”
“Yeah!” she cried. “When?”
“In three weeks. You think you can wait that long?”
“Mm-hmm. I'm a good waiter. Grandma, can I have a glass of water? I'm really hot.”
Patrice casually brushed her hand across her granddaughter's forehead. She didn't let Kitty see her frown. “Of course you can. Here, let me go with you. Maybe you'll want a nice nap soon, too.”
“Grandma! I'm not a little kid anymore!”
Patrice and Kitty went off to the kitchen. Delphine continued to fold Mrs. Bubier's dish towels. She had bought only two tickets to the ball game. She wasn't quite sure what she would say to Maggie if she asked about the tickets. Of course, the best thing to do would be to tell her the truth, that she wanted a special day alone with her niece. But Maggie could be so sensitive. She thought again about her mother's opinion of Maggie as lost or lonely but was interrupted by Kitty and her grandmother coming back into the living room. Kitty was clutching a glass of water.
“Can I get a souvenir?” she asked Delphine. “I have two dollars in my piggy bank.”
Patrice frowned. “You don't need a souvenir, Kitty. You don't want to be wasting your money.”
“Oh, Mom, come on.” Delphine smiled at her niece. “Don't worry; we'll get a souvenir.”
“Yeah!” Kitty yawned hugely. “I'm gonna sit on the porch with my book,” she said, and tramped out through the front door.
Patrice frowned. “You spoil her.”
“Not badly. Besides, everyone deserves to be spoiled a little.”
Patrice gave her daughter a close, questioning look. “Do you really believe that?”
Delphine wasn't sure. She had spoken without thinking. Robert had been good to her, but he hadn't spoiled her. She wasn't sure she would have let him if he'd tried. Her parents certainly hadn't spoiled her, far from it. The one person in her life who had come closest to really spoiling her, to being indulgent, to giving her above and beyond what was strictly necessary for contentment, was Maggie.
“I don't know what I believe,” she said, bothered by this thought. “Let's finish up here. I have to get back to the office.”
32
Maggie looked at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art with appreciation. It was a long, low, attractive white building set on a cliff overlooking the ocean. There was a charming garden out back and on the lawn in front of the museum there was a well-groomed pond surrounded by reeds, and several large wood sculptures of animals, created by the artist Bernard Langlais. Maggie remembered going to the museum as a child and being frustrated by the fact that her mother wouldn't let her touch—let alone climb on—the animals.
Maggie and Delphine had come this Monday evening for an event to benefit a small, privately run art program for high school kids with talent. Maggie was wearing a form-fitting sleeveless lilac-colored linen dress that came just below her knee. Her sling-back heels and clutch were black. Delphine wondered just how many suitcases Maggie had brought with her. She hadn't seen Maggie wear the same outfit twice since she arrived.
Delphine had been understandably nervous about her own clothing for the evening. She knew through the Burton brothers that the people who went to these events at the museum, particularly the older ones, dressed in their finest summer clothes. The men wore jackets and ties, no matter the heat. The majority of women wore dresses or skirts, many of them with panty hose. Briefly, Delphine had thought about asking Maggie to come over to the house and help her put together something suitable, but the thought of Maggie sorting through her closet seemed too . . . intimate. Too much like those college days when Maggie had helped her dress for a job interview or dates with Robert. They weren't in college now. Their friendship was something very different from what it had been, back when they had undressed in front of each other and held back each other's hair when they were sick.
In the end Delphine had gone to Jackie's house and together they had assembled what they hoped might pass for respectability, if not for sophistication. Jackie was a little bigger than Delphine, but two safety pins helped solve the problem of the coral-colored crinkly cotton skirt. She wore a T-shirt of her own, one of the newer ones, and over that one of her own hand-knit cotton sweaters in a deep green. That had been Jackie's idea. “It'll be great self-promotion,” she'd said. “Plus, it looks good.” On Delphine's feet she wore a pair of Jackie's nicer sandals. She had even allowed her sister to apply a coat of pale polish to her toenails. “Really,” Jackie had scolded. “You could put a little effort into your appearance. Take a cue from Maggie.”
“I asked for your help tonight, didn't I?” Delphine had replied.
Jackie had eyed her sister critically. “Well, it's a start.”
“How did you get these tickets?” Delphine asked now, as she and Maggie entered the museum. “I don't think you mentioned. If you did, I forgot.”
Maggie explained that a guest at Gorges Grant, an older man, had given her the tickets. His wife wasn't feeling well, he'd said, and they wouldn't be able to use them.
“He wouldn't accept money for them,” Maggie went on. “I'll make sure I do something nice for them in return before they leave.”
“Not everyone needs a favor to be returned.”
“Of course not. But I'd feel bad if I didn't reciprocate. And how could buying them a dinner hurt?”
Delphine didn't believe that kindness needed to be rewarded, but maybe, she thought, it should be rewarded, at least, sometimes.
“Why don't you have a membership?” Maggie asked when they had walked down the short flight of steps into the main room. Ahead of them they could see the vast Atlantic through the glass doors leading onto a patio and sculpture garden. “This is such a wonderful museum. And it's very well respected.”
“It wouldn't be worth it. I don't come all that often, usually just once or twice a season.”
“But what about a family membership? There are a lot of you Crandalls. Maybe there's a membership for extended families.”
“No one else in my family is into art,” she admitted. “Honestly, I'm not sure either of my parents has ever been to a museum. The only literature my father's ever read are the poems of Longfellow. I'm not criticizing them. It's just the way they are.”
Maggie heard the tension in Delphine's voice and imagined how lonely she must be. She was like an exotic bird among a flock of dull grey pigeons. Harry was the biggest of those pigeons. “Let's get a glass of wine,” Maggie suggested.
They joined the lengthy drinks line on the back patio. “That's Tilda McQueen over there by the rosebushes,” Delphine said. “She's the tall, slim woman wearing the yellow skirt. I told you about her family and their house, Larchmere.”
“She's another great reader.”
“Yes. She was widowed some time ago and when she got remarried she reverted to her maiden name. Oh, and over there, to her right. That's her sister, Hannah, the one with the red hair, and her wife, Susan.”
“The ones who run Larchmere as a bed-and-breakfast.”
“With Hannah's brother, yes. And there, the little man in the seersucker suit, that's Alan Horutz. He's very nice. He owns a fun little shop you might like to check out while you're in town, quirky stuff, crafts, antiques—anything that catches his fancy.”
“You really do know everyone, don't you?” Maggie said.
“Life in a small town is not a life of privacy. I'll bet someone who lives in a big apartment building in New York or Boston has more privacy than we do.”
“Privacy of a different sort,” Maggie said. “It doesn't feel so private when you're crammed into a subway car with hundreds of strangers.”
“None of whom know anything more about you than what you happen to be wearing at that moment.”
“Point taken.”
Drinks in hand they reentered the museum. Almost immediately, Maggie noticed a woman across the room staring quizzically at them. She looked to be in her early forties and, Maggie thought, very well preserved. She was wearing a pair of fitted very low-rise beige cuffed pants and a shrunken black blazer over a tiny white T-shirt. Her pointy-toed stilettos were black. Her small clutch was a supple white leather. Maggie recognized her shoulder-length hair as high-quality salon blond. Her jewelry was simple, gold, and expensive. And she was making her way determinedly toward them.
“Delphine?” she said from a few feet away. “Delphine Crandall?”
“Yes.” Delphine glanced to Maggie and then back to the woman. “I'm sorry . . .”
The woman held her left hand to her chest as if to prove identification. Maggie estimated the central diamond in her engagement ring to be about three carats. “Lauren Jenkins,” she said. “Remember me?” She turned then to Maggie. “And don't tell me you're Maggie Weldon!”
Maggie smiled. “Oh, of course, I remember now.” She turned to Delphine. “When we were kids, remember? Lauren used to hang out with us sometimes.”
Lauren laughed. “Tag along with you is more like the truth. It was good of you, really, to let a little kid follow you around.”
“I haven't seen you in ages,” Delphine said. “Didn't you move away after high school?”
Lauren nodded. “My parents were not pleased about that, let me tell you. But I just had to get out. So I went to Boston and took what jobs I could get and lived in crappy little apartments in bad neighborhoods and survived on ramen noodles and had an awful lot of fun doing it.”
“Have you been living in Boston all this time?” Maggie asked. “You know that Delphine and I went to Bartley College there.”
“Really?” Lauren said. “No, I didn't know. But no, long story short, I started taking computer classes and eventually I started to get better jobs and working my way up and then I met my husband at one of the law firms I worked at as an administrative assistant. He's older than me; he was already a partner, well, a junior one at the time. After we got married I was able to a get a degree and we've had a pretty good life since. We lived in California for a while, and now we're back in Ogunquit. Well, partially. We still have a condo in the South End and Jason's going to work part-time from our home here, part-time at his office. Plus, the condo is a place for me to stay in Boston when I just have to go on a shopping spree!”
Delphine smiled lamely.
Maggie said, “That's great, Lauren, really. It sounds like things worked out really well for you.”
Lauren turned her brilliant smile—very good veneers, Maggie thought—to Maggie. “So, what are you doing here in Ogunquit?”
“I'm visiting Delphine. I live in Lexington.”
“How nice, that you've stayed friends all this time. That's really special.” Lauren looked back to Delphine. “So, does your family still have the farm and the diner?”
Delphine nodded.
Lauren brushed her hair back from her face with a manicured hand. “I feel I appreciate this place so much more for having been away for all those years, you know? And I really feel like I've been welcomed back. Frankly, I was a bit nervous about getting a cold reception after having been gone for so long, but I guess once a native always a native.”
Delphine still said nothing. She remembered her own homecoming. It was as if nothing had changed. It was as if she had never left. She was back in her old bedroom, expected to show up at the table on time for dinner and at the diner on time for her shift. People in town greeted her as if she had never been away. No one but the current librarian ever asked her about her years in Boston. If she had something to show for her college education, no one wanted to know what it was.
“I never would have met my husband,” Lauren was saying now, “or gone to China or even lived on the West Coast for that matter if I'd stayed here in Ogunquit after high school. I know I would always have felt that I was missing something if I'd stayed on.” Lauren laughed. “And I would have been missing something—my life!”
From across the room an older woman Delphine recognized as one of the major patrons of the museum was waving Lauren over to her side. With a good-bye and a wave of her own, Lauren hurried off to join her.
“Imagine running into her after all these years,” Maggie said. “Did you know she was back in town?”
Delphine shook her head. “No. This must be her big debut, this party.”
“Yes. She certainly was . . . exuberant. I don't remember her as being so . . . exuberant.”
“She's happy,” Delphine said, fingering her borrowed skirt. “She's made it.”
Maggie shrugged. “She's just one version of ‘making it.' There are lots of other versions. Like your version and like mine. Hey, let's look at the art while we're here. It seems a shame to come to a museum just to chat with a self-obsessed airhead.”
“Sure,” Delphine said. She felt a surge of gratitude toward her old friend. “I'll show you my favorite painting on permanent display.”

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