The Family Beach House (4 page)

Tilda suddenly realized that she was almost at the Wells town line. Ogunquit Beach—or Main Beach, as it was also known—ran about one and half miles to Wells, where the temperature of the air changed dramatically. Her father's old friend Bobby, who had been born and raised in Ogunquit, as had his father before him, had explained the phenomenon to her once a long time ago, but Tilda, who didn't have much of a head for science, could not now remember much of what he had said.

She did, however, keep close watch of the tide chart, though it was her habit to go to the beach each morning no matter how high or menacing the tide. The beach had a different beauty and interest every day of the year. It was the one place where Tilda could not imagine anyone ever being bored. In fall came the welcome return to the beach of dogs (and their people), banned from April until October. In the winter came weird drifts and patterns of snow and ice on the sand.

She had walked the length of the beach in all types of weather—in snow and in fog, in rain and in sunshine. Frank had thought she was crazy to go out in subzero weather, even though she was properly dressed against the cold in layers upon layers of fleece and wool. “You're not a mail carrier, Tilda,” he would say. “You're under no obligation to leave the house no matter the weather.”

But the beach called to her. To walk on Ogunquit Beach was a necessary part of her well-being. It was often inspiring and always interesting. The saddest thing she had ever seen on the beach was a dead dolphin. Tears had come spontaneously to her eyes and she had quickly looked away. The oddest thing she had ever seen on the beach was a roasting pan. A large roasting pan, washed perhaps from some wreck of a pleasure boat. Or maybe an irate wife had thrown it overboard when her ungrateful husband had criticized the meal she had made for him. But who would roast a piece of beef or a chicken out at sea, other than, maybe, a chef on a large ocean liner? And unless he was Gordon Ramsay, why would he toss his kitchen equipment overboard?

A more common site after a storm was the scattering of broken lobster traps. It was illegal, of course, to make off with one to use as decoration for your lawn or screened-in porch, but Tilda had seen people do just that, pick up the tumbled, sandy traps and carry them off to their cars.

Once she had approached an opportunist in the beach parking lot, someone she had watched haul a washed-up trap from the beach to her car. It was a woman who looked to be in her sixties, wearing a pair of skin-tight hot pink shorts and a T-shirt that proclaimed she was a “FOXY GRANDMA.” She was definitely not a local, probably not even a Mainer. Politely, Tilda had told the woman that taking a lobsterman's trap was illegal, something she suspected the woman already knew. For a moment the woman had simply stared at Tilda through her spangled designer sunglasses, and then she had shrugged. “Finders keepers,” she had said, and put the battered trap in the trunk of her car.

Tilda could have reported her to the police; maybe she should have, but she had not. She had felt bad about that for a long time. After all, Bobby, her surrogate uncle, made his living as a lobsterman. Tilda knew how tough a life he led. She knew he couldn't easily afford the loss—or theft—of his equipment. She had put her silence down to basic cowardice, to an innate distaste for making trouble, even when trouble was just what was called for. Confrontation in any form was not something Tilda ever sought and when she sensed it coming, she turned tail and ran. It wasn't one of her more stellar moral traits, emotional cowardice.

Worse, Tilda had a sneaking suspicion that this cowardice was what was holding her back now, preventing her from really embracing her life without Frank.

At the Wells town line, Tilda stopped and scanned the blue morning sky. No eagle. She turned and began the long walk back to her car. Then she returned to the easy comfort of Larchmere and the good, strong coffee that would be brewing in its kitchen.

Adam McQueen, fifty years old, new fiancée and his two children in tow, arrived at the house around eleven o'clock. He swept through the front door with the air of the lord of the manor returning from a successful foray into the larger world. All he needed was a chained, defeated dragon trailing behind and a big bag of booty slung over his shoulder. At least, that was how Tilda saw his entrance.

“Everybody,” he announced by way of greeting, “this is my fiancée, Kat Daly.”

Ruth, Tilda, and Hannah were left to introduce themselves. Bill was out, no one knew where. Susan had taken a work-related call in her bedroom. Percy, not a fan of greetings and departures, especially those involving children, was absent.

The children, eight-year-old Cordelia and six-year-old Cody, were slightly cranky, maybe from the traffic-choked ride up from Boston, maybe from boredom, though Tilda had recently learned that her brother's family car, a Range Rover Sport, was equipped with a DVD player so Cordelia and Cody could watch movies from the backseat. Cordelia was tall for her age, and like her father, slim. She liked clothes and was already a bit of a fashionista. Cody closely resembled his mother but his eyes were the same changeable hue as Adam's and Tilda's were. Now, when the children were told they were to sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms, apart from Adam and Kat, Cody looked like he was going to cry. Cordelia put her arm around her little brother and the gesture almost made Tilda cry. Her own two children were close, too. They were lucky.

“Have you heard the big news, Adam?” Hannah was saying.

“What big news? You're moving to Vegas to be a show-girl?”

“Screamingly funny. No, it's more earth shattering than that. Dad's got a girlfriend.”

“He what?” Adam looked both outraged and disbelieving. “What right does he have at his age…? I'll have a talk with him.”

Hannah turned to her sister and muttered, “Oh, that'll solve everything.”

“Will you people stop,” Ruth said. “There is no problem to be solved. Enough.”

Adam McQueen was a male version of his mother, Charlotte—handsome, tall, with a slim, muscular build. He had a dashing quality about him that, in his sisters' views, was dampened by a generally annoyed, harried expression. His hair was dark brown and expertly, expensively cut; his eyes were hazel or green, depending on the light, like Tilda's. Adam was known to spend a lot of money on his wardrobe (too much, according to his ex-wife) and his taste in cars was clearly meant to impress the sort of person susceptible to obvious displays of wealth. Currently, in addition to the Range Rover Sport, he owned a Ferrari 460 Spider. At the moment he was wearing a conspicuously designer polo shirt tucked in to crisply creased cotton-blend slacks. On his left wrist he wore a Rolex. It was real; he had made it a point of letting his family know that. Tilda wore a ten-year-old Timex. Hannah wore a Swatch. Craig didn't own a watch and probably wouldn't wear it if he did.

Adam was obviously self-obsessed but entirely self-deluding and unaware. In this way he was also like his deceased mother, which, of course, was not an observation he was capable of making. This similarity did not go unnoticed, however, by his siblings, though Tilda was loath to think or say anything negative or critical about their mother.

Hannah watched her brother not so subtly checking his image in the hall mirror. He seemed like such a caricature. She wondered if he had always been so one-dimensional, or if he had flattened out somewhere along the line, morphed from a three-dimensional person to a cartoon of a being. Hannah didn't know. She realized that she had never paid much attention to Adam when they were kids. Maybe it was the age difference. Six years could be a big divide when you were young.

Once she had asked Tilda about her memories of Adam as a child; they were only three years apart. Tilda had hesitated before saying, “Adam was an indifferent older brother, at best.” It hadn't exactly answered Hannah's question but it had revealed something about her sister's feelings regarding him. Still, Hannah found Adam amusing in spite of his being a bit of an ass. Or maybe, she found him amusing because of it.

His fiancée, a woman named Kat Daly, was very attractive in a blond ingenue sort of way. Certainly, she knew how to dress to emphasize her enviable figure. She was wearing tight, white, low-rise jeans, a hot pink halter type top, high, skimpy, silver sandals, and perched on her sleek, shiny head was a pair of designer sunglasses. Her eyes were a suspiciously bright blue (colored contacts, Hannah wondered?) and her nails sported a French manicure. In fact, Hannah thought, she had a bit of a Jessica Simpson thing going on, but she seemed not half as ditzy. Maybe she was a good actress. Whatever the case, it was no surprise that Adam would find her a suitable replacement for his middle-aged wife with her crinkly middle-aged neck. Who cared if she could cook or clean house? Kat looked good on his arm and, as Adam was loudly pointing out to Tilda, she made a good income as a junior account executive in a small but thriving marketing firm in a Boston suburb.
Huh,
Hannah thought.
So Kat has brains and beauty.
Maybe she had underestimated her brother. It was doubtful but stranger things had been known to happen.

Kat and Adam went upstairs to get settled. The children trailed after them, dragging backpacks almost bigger than they were. (That was another thing that puzzled Hannah. Since when had kids needed to lug around so much stuff? They would all be having back surgery before their twenty-first birthdays.)

“What kind of stepmother is she going to be, I wonder?” Tilda was at her sister's side, asking her question softly.

Hannah whispered back, “As long as she can open a juice box, she'll do for his kids. Adam doesn't want another maternal presence in his life. He wants a trophy.”

“I wonder if Sarah has met her yet.”

“I don't know. Poor Sarah. On second thought, she knows she's well rid of Adam. She'll probably feel sorry for the kid.”

“She does seem nice,” Tilda said. “She shook my hand.”

“Dogs shake hands. Let's wait and see what this girl's really like.”

Tilda shrugged. Her sister was right. Only time would tell.

 

The McQueens, Bill included, regrouped for dinner. Ruth had made pasta with red sauce and clams, which she served with a Caesar salad—Kat picked out her anchovies and lined them around the edge of her plate—and fresh bread from Borealis Breads. For dessert there were Maine blueberries with vanilla ice cream. Neither Adam nor Kat had ice cream. Hannah had a second helping. Bill was the only one to have coffee with dessert. Ruth gave Percy, at his usual perch on the credenza, a small bowl of melted ice cream, which he lapped up immediately, much to Adam's obvious disgust. (Like his mother, Adam was adamantly anti-pet.)

The kids—who had been fed, predictably, gourmet macaroni and cheese that Adam had brought from home, and who had eaten at the bar in the kitchen, which they had declared very fun—had been put to bed with little fuss before the adults' dinner. Tilda couldn't help but think that they welcomed the chance to get away from their father's shiny new girlfriend, who, Tilda had noticed, was awkward with them, though nice enough. Maybe they welcomed the chance to get away from their easily distracted father, too. Tilda felt momentarily guilty for thinking this. Adam was probably a good father, though his parenting style was not half as warm and fuzzy as Frank's had been. Well, Adam and Frank had been entirely different in all respects, opposites really, and though they had never fought (that Tilda knew of) they also had never had more than a completely neutral conversation with each other. “How about those Red Sox last night?” and “Did you see what the market did today?”

Susan said, “I wonder if Craig will show for the memorial.”

“He'll show up if it benefits him,” Adam said scornfully. “If there's free room and board, he'll be there.”

“That's not fair, Adam,” Tilda protested. “Craig always pulls his weight when he stays with us. Last time he visited he mowed the lawn and trimmed the front hedge and he fixed the dishwasher. If he hadn't been able to fix it I would have had to call in a repair service. He saved me a few hundred dollars.”

“And how much money did you spend feeding him? He's really got you fooled, hasn't he? Poor Tilda. Always a soft touch.”

Tilda couldn't deny the assessment. She did have a soft spot for Craig, her wayward brother. She was aware that their mother had largely ignored him and in some ways Tilda was still trying to make up for that lack of maternal care. When someone criticized Craig, which was often, her stock but heart-felt answer was: “He's my brother and my friend. I don't go looking for his defects. I know they're there. I just don't feel the need to fixate on them.”

“Whatever,” she said now. “I'm looking forward to seeing him.”

Hannah loved her younger brother, but cautiously. She could never quite decide if he was a decent person or a bum. Still, he did make her laugh and really, he had always been on her side. Hannah remembered when not long after her coming out, Craig had stood up to a kid in his high school who said something derogatory about her. Though a lot smaller than the jerk, Craig took a swing at him in his sister's defense, and wound up with a black eye for his pains. Hannah had to thank him for that. He had been suspended from the wrestling team for a month, even missed an important match, but had not once complained.

The puzzling thing to Hannah was that while Craig liked to pretend that he was all free-floating and not to be tied down, he consistently returned to his family, and if that didn't show a talent for loyalty then what did? But if Craig ever felt nostalgia for his childhood at Larchmere, he didn't let on. At least, not to Hannah he didn't.

“I just wish that boy would settle down,” Bill said now. “Get a steady job, learn how to pay some bills. He has no sense of responsibility.”

“He's not a boy, Dad. He's forty years old and he's done absolutely nothing with his life. He's a waste of oxygen, if you ask me.”

“No one did ask you, Adam,” Hannah retorted. “And where's all this hostility coming from? What's Craig ever done to you? Except get more girls in high school.”

“I just wish he would do something constructive with his life,” her father was saying now. “It's such a waste. He showed such promise when he was young. He had a real talent with numbers.”

It was sad, Tilda thought, that her father was so disappointed with his younger son. What it was, exactly, that Bill had wanted for Craig Tilda couldn't say, but it certainly wasn't the nomadic life he had been living since college. She thought she understood her father's disappointment. She would not be thrilled if her own son chose Craig's rambling, unsettled way of life. Still, she wished her father could be more loving and less judgmental of her brother. After all, he was an honest, kindhearted person. He didn't do drugs. He wasn't a criminal. He just wasn't—usual.

Ruth kept her mouth shut during this conversation. While she was often inclined to judge, she saw her younger nephew as more sinned against than sinning. She alone knew things about the circumstances of his birth. She alone knew with what tepid welcome he had come into this world.

Kat had been silent throughout the discussion, of course, but Ruth had noticed she looked to Adam every other moment, after every bite of food or sip of wine, almost as if he were the repository of all wisdom, as if she was looking for a clue as to how to behave or maybe as if she was hoping for an encouraging wink or pat on the head.
You're doing just fine, honey. Just follow my lead.

But maybe, Ruth thought, she was reading into the situation. She didn't know Kat at all. Maybe that almost reverent, almost worshipful look was really her disguised version of disgust. Doubtful, but she would wait and see what developed during the couple's visit before making any big or final judgments.

After dinner, Bill and Ruth each retired, Bill to his bedroom to read, which he did every night until late, Ruth, a lifetime lover of blues and jazz, to the York Harbor Inn with Bobby, where Lex and Joe were playing their usual gig in the downstairs pub.

Kat excused herself before long. Of course she had nothing to contribute to the conversation, which was all about the family, and after watching Kat closely, Tilda suspected that the conversation had been making her uncomfortable. She read that as a possible sign of the young woman's sensitivity. One could wear deliberately provocative clothes and still be sensitive to situations in which one did not really belong. Tilda tried to be careful not to make assumptions about the book based only on the cover.

“She seems very nice,” Tilda said, when Kat had gone up to bed. “How old did you say she was?”

“I didn't say,” Adam replied. “She's thirty-two. She's never been married.”

“Putty in his hands,” Hannah muttered.

“Excuse me?” Adam said, frowning.

Susan shot her a look of warning.

“Nothing. I said nothing.”

“Has she ever been to Ogunquit before?” Tilda asked.

“No, but enough about her. I want to know about this girlfriend of Dad's.”

Hannah shrugged. “You know as much as we know, which is next to nothing. She's divorced, owns her own business, and lives in Portland.”

“And has a good eye for an easy mark.”

“You don't really think—” Tilda began, then she caught herself. She didn't really want to hear her brother confirm his opinion that their father was being fooled. She didn't really want to contemplate the notion that someone might be out to snatch Larchmere away from the McQueens. Larchmere was essential. It was safety and security. Larchmere was her emotional inheritance. If anyone was to be Larchmere's eventual caretaker, Tilda felt that it should be her. She was aware of her cheeks flushing just slightly.