Summer Shadows (25 page)

Abby was silent for a minute, staring at the little wavelets kissing the beach. “I know I’m wrong, Celia, but I’m so upset I could scream.”

“She loves you.”

Abby nodded. “I know. She just doesn’t love wisely. I feel like she’s ripping my life from me. At this rate, I’m going to end up hating her.”

“Whoa, Abby.” Celia glanced back at the house. “It can’t be that bad.” Bad was your mother lying around watching old movies and eating candy all day while you did all her work.

“Do you hafta vacuum right now?” Mom would ask from the sofa where she reclined like Cleopatra, surrounded by true confession magazines and beer. “No. No, you don’t got to do it now.”

When she was thinking instead of feeling desperate and ill-used, Celia used to imagine slaves fanning Mom with palm fronds while others fed her figs and honeyed candies, à la the famous queen of the Nile. Of course Cleopatra was probably more gracious than Mom, but then everyone was more gracious than Mom.

“This is the best part of the movie,” she’d gripe. “The vacuum noise will be too loud for me to hear. Get out of my way! I can’t see. Go do the laundry or something. And don’t forget to change the beds and clean the bathrooms. They ain’t been done for a long time. Oh, and I don’t think there’s any more bread. You got any money?”

Like she had some way to get money.

Bad as being the household drudge was, her mother’s suspicions were worse. She could never figure out a way to fight them.

“I know you’re sleeping with that no-good-for-nothing Eddie,” Mom had screamed after Celia’s third date with him.

Celia felt something shrivel inside. “Not me, Mom. I’m only fifteen. I don’t want to have sex. I’m trying to be a good Christian. We just went to a movie.”

“Christian, my foot. You just want people to think you’re a good girl. That’s why you go to church. Well, I could tell them a thing or two. Don’t think I couldn’t. You’re just as phony as the rest of them.”

“I’m not, Mom.” Why she always tried to convince her mother, she didn’t know. A psychologist would say it must be some deep desire for approval, something she knew she wouldn’t ever get, but something she desperately wanted. She tried to tell herself that it was enough that God loved her. While she didn’t know what she’d do without God’s love, it was so hard to be emotionally orphaned.

“You think I don’t know what the kids of today are like?” Mom stared at her with contempt. “I watch TV. You’re not as pretty as those girls. If they have to put out for a date, you do too.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Who’d have thought I’da raised a tramp?” And she was gone, back to the Fred and Ginger movie, swaying to “I Won’t Dance.”

By the time Celia was seventeen, running away with Eddie seemed the natural, logical thing to do. Anything was better than staying under her mother’s roof.

Talk about out of the frying pan.

C
ELIA WATCHED THE
man with the gray ponytail sticking out the back of his baseball cap. He wore a ratty T-shirt and baggy shorts with a fanny pack about his waist. He was walking slowly down the beach, swinging something back and forth in front of him. “What’s he doing?”

Abby smiled. “Oh, he’s looking for treasure in the sand. That’s a metal detector he’s swinging.”

The children spotted the man too.

“Look, Walker,” yelled Jordan. “Let’s go find out what he’s doing.” He took off at a dead run. “Come on, everybody,” he called back over his shoulder.

Jessica looked at Celia, pleading without words for permission to race after Jordan and Walker.

“Clooney’s okay,” Abby said. “I met him last week when he found a beautiful bracelet in the sand.”

Celia was uncertain. Strange men. Little girls.

“Put your imagination away,” Abby said with a smile. “Besides, we can see everything that goes on.”

“Hold you sister’s hand,” Celia called.

Jess nodded, and she and Karlee followed the boys as fast as Karlee could move.

“Maybe he’ll find them some money,” a deep voice said from behind them, sending that soothing honey feeling flowing along Celia’s nerve endings again.

Celia made a face. She still hadn’t combed her hair or put on makeup, and when she glanced down at herself, the oil spots on her shirt seemed to grow as she looked, covering her whole front.

Ah, well, Lord, I wouldn’t want to impress a beautiful man now, would I?

She looked over her shoulder at Rick. “With my luck, he’ll find them each a penny.”

“You never know,” Abby said. “He wears a diamond stud earring that I’d love to own. He said he found it with his detector.”

“Really?” Rick looked interested. “Maybe I should take up metal detection instead of my current job. Walking on the beach all day sounds pretty good about now.”

Celia heard the wistfulness in his voice. “Don’t you like your job?”

He shrugged. “It’s okay. There are just times when the people are more than I want to deal with.”

She nodded as Aunt Bernice flashed across her mind. And Eddie. And Mom. She knew all about people who were hard to deal with. “What do you do for a living?”

Rick was quiet for a minute, and she realized that he and she were walking slowly down the beach toward the metal detector and the kids without Abby.

She glanced back and saw Abby staring out to sea. Marsh was walking toward her. Celia smiled. Abby’d be all right with him to watch out for her. The sparks those two shot off in the presence of each other were like nothing she’d ever seen. Lethal. Lovely. Too bad neither of them seemed to realize what was happening.

She glanced up at the house. Mrs. MacDonald stood at the rail, watching her daughter. Celia had a flash of insight. The woman didn’t like Marsh. That was why she stayed. Or maybe it was a matter of liking Sean better.

Celia had no doubts which man Abby liked better.

“Public relations,” Rick said.

“What?” Celia looked at him blankly.

“Public relations,” he repeated. “It’s what I do for a living.”

“Oh. You don’t like it very much?” An adventurous wave surged up the beach and broke over Celia’s feet. She laughed and jumped away, bumping into Rick. He put his hand to the small of her back to steady her. When he dropped his hand, she felt its
absence as strongly as she’d felt its momentary presence.

He shrugged. “On certain days I don’t like it. Other times I do. How about you? Do you like what you do?”

“I do, in spite of the oil stains, the long hours, and the baby-sitting worries. I feel like I’m helping people.”

“Marsh says you’re a massage therapist.”

She nodded. “At Seaside Spa.”

He grinned that devastating grin. “And are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Helping people?”

Celia kicked at a clump of sand. It exploded and thousands of tiny sand granules floated in the air. “There’s this guy who’s fifty-seven and hasn’t done a lick of exercise in years except maybe push his self-propelled lawn mower. He used to vacation here in Seaside with his parents when he was a teenager. He’s back with his own family for the first time in thirty-something years. He remembers surfing at seventeen and decided it was like riding a bike: You never forgot how. So he bought himself a board and went.”

“Got creamed by a wave, did he?”

“Most of the time the waves around here aren’t the creaming sort, but he still got worked over pretty well. After two days of climbing on and falling off the board, he could hardly move. Add to that the waves twisting him all around.” She turned to frown at Rick. “What is it with men and sports?”

“You mean Sports Syndrome, the disease that makes us all see ourselves as NFL or NBA caliber no matter our age?”

“That’s the one.”

“Strange. I’ve always thought of it as an unparalleled opportunity for women to develop their particular illness, what I call the Callous Condition.”

“The one that makes us say, ‘It’s all your fault, you idiot’?”

“That’s the one.”

Celia nodded. “There’s definitely a correlation between the two conditions with my would-be surfer. His wife kept growling that he was ruining everyone’s vacation with his moaning about his aches and pains. When he couldn’t stand her griping anymore—or maybe it was his pain he couldn’t stand—he came to see me.”

Rick grinned at her. “And your healing hands cured him.”

She looked at her hands. “It’s not quite that simple. He needs several more weeks before he’s back to anywhere near normal, but at least he’s walking enough to make it to the beach and the boardwalk—if he doesn’t feel compelled to go on the roller coaster or one of those rides that whips you around.”

“Does the boardwalk have many rides?”

She nodded. “It’s a nice boardwalk.”

“What’s your favorite?”

She looked wistfully out at the ocean. “We haven’t gone on any of the rides yet.”

Rick raised his eyebrows. “How long have you lived here?”

“Two months.”

“In all that time you haven’t taken the girls to the boardwalk? Scandalous.”

There spoke someone who didn’t have to worry about how expensive such an evening would be. “We’ve gone to the boardwalk, but it was a while ago, and the rides weren’t open for the season yet.” As she’d known they wouldn’t be.

“Then you need to take them back now that they’re open.”

“Yeah, well, sometime.” She promised herself that she’d take Jess and Karlee when Karlee was better, no matter how much it cost. The girls deserved it.

They walked for a few minutes, watching Clooney and the children. Even Jordan grew still and stared when Clooney pulled out a red beach spade and dug a hole. When he reached down and pulled out something, the children clustered around. One by one they reached out a forefinger, touching whatever it was. Then Clooney straightened, putting the treasure in the pack around his waist.

“Go to the boardwalk with me tomorrow night.”

Celia stopped dead and stared at Rick. A sudden gust of ocean breeze blew her hair across her mouth. She spit it out, pushing it behind her ear. “What?”

He stood with his hands in his pockets and his feet spread. “You heard me.”

She swallowed against the sudden rapid beat of her heart. “I guess I did, but it’s been so long since a man asked me to go anywhere that I thought I heard wrong.”

“They should be standing in line to take you out.”

She blinked. Feeling shy all of a sudden, she dropped her eyes and stared at a piece of broken clamshell beside her foot. “Um.”

“It’ll be fun,” he said. “Come on.”

She frowned at the clamshell and the clump of seaweed lying next to it. “I’d have to bring the girls.” She knew she’d just rung the death knell to her first date possibility in longer than she could remember. No man wanted two little girls he didn’t know tagging along, but a baby-sitter was unacceptable for several reasons, most of them green with denominations noted in the corners. “They’re at a baby-sitter’s all day. I can’t leave them all evening too, especially Karlee.”

“Of course you can’t,” he said without missing a beat. “I expected them to come with us.”

Celia forced her gaze upward, studying his face. If he was unhappy about the presence of the two little chaperones, he was a very good actor. She saw no signs of distress or unhappiness. “Thank you.” She flushed. “We’d like to go.”

She cleared her throat. She’d just agreed to her first date in over seven years. Panic made her pulse pound. Did she even remember how to act? “It’ll be fun,” she managed. It’ll be nerve wracking. “The girls will be delighted.” At least that was true.

Rick looked at her thoughtfully. “He was an idiot, you know.”

“Who?”

This time it was Rick who reached out to pull the hair from her mouth and put it behind her ear. “Whoever he was who left you. An absolute idiot.”

T
HE PAGE THAT
called him from Abby’s dinner table had been for a patient who had a severe reaction to some medication. The boy was fine now, his hives gone, his breathing normal, and the prescription changed. Doubtless he was back in his own narrow bed with its
Monsters, Inc
. sheets, already in dreamland. The only ones to lose sleep over the crisis would be the parents.

He turned the key in his cycle, then revved the engine. He flipped back the kickstand and pulled out of the hospital lot. All his emergencies should be as easy to deal with.

Of course he loved the challenge of even such a straightforward puzzle—which was one reason he liked medicine so. The dilemmas, the dramas, shifted daily, hourly, teasing and testing his abilities, his intellect. He always had liked to tackle tough issues, no matter what they were. That characteristic was one of the reasons he was able to get out of the Pines. Once he looked at his escape as a maze he must traverse, a quest that he as the hero must win, he was able to formulate plans. McCoy had struck out blindly at anyone in his way, fueled by hate and despair instead of cool reason. Sean shook his head. That way lay emotional disintegration.

The challenge of Abby Patterson was one he savored, like a chef delighting in the fine tastes he created.
He brought his fingers to his lips and kissed them like an Italian chef might.

Thus far he had won every battle life presented him. He would win this one too. He ran his plan through his mind once again, then grinned. Its simplicity didn’t take away from the satisfaction it gave him. Any other person would struggle for days, weeks, to come up with such a clever idea. McCoy could have thought for the rest of his life and never imagined anything of such subtlety.

He almost felt bad that he had to ruin her. She was, in her own Goody Two-shoes way, an interesting person. Despite her fragile physical appearance, she had steel in her spine, though he wasn’t certain whether it was tempered enough to withstand the hurricane that was her mother. At dinner he had gotten an intense charge over the animosity between the two women even as he made believe he was unaware. He wasn’t certain of the cause for the friction. In spite of his considerable and well-developed ego, he didn’t think he was what they were arguing over. Then again, the mother was pushing him down Abby’s pretty throat, and he didn’t think she wanted to swallow.