The Girls of Tonsil Lake (10 page)

Other than a hug from Jake Logan when we’d had dinner on his last trip to New York, it was the first time I’d been held by a man since Mark had become too ill to do such things. I was a little nonplused that it felt so good, even with his stethoscope gouging me between my breasts.

“When did you get in?” he demanded, pushing me back from him and looking me over with a critical gray eye. “Why didn’t you call, how have you been, and how about dinner?”

“I just got in yesterday, I have three friends with me, I’ve been fine, and dinner will have to wait a few days.”

“Oh, well.” He stepped to the outside of the boardwalk, stuffed my arm through his, and continued on the way I’d been going. “Three friends, huh?” He stopped momentarily to stare at me with sparkling eyes. “Be still, my aching heart. Not the infamous Tonsil Lake crowd?”

“The very same. And how about you, Dr. Bishop? Still working on that two years?”

Hope Island had sent Lucas to medical school. In return, he had promised to spend his first two years of private practice on the island. Twenty-five years after his return, he’s still saying the two years aren’t up yet.

“Still working on it. Just when I think it’s about time to pack it up and move to a city where I can make enough money to buy a house on Hope Island, I have a day off and go out with my brother on his lobster boat and realize I couldn’t leave here for that long.”

I laughed into his open, handsome face, thinking that it was so nice to look up at someone. God, I sound like Suzanne, but it was. Women who are five-ten in their bare feet don’t get to look up very much. “You have a house on Hope Island,” I reminded him. “It’s next door to ours.”

“Well, yeah, but I bought that before mainlanders started figuring out that the island was out here. You may have been the first New Yorkers, Stillson, but you weren’t the last. Hell, I’m prescribing as many antidepressants these days as I do plain old blood pressure medication.”

“Oh, phooey, as if Prozac consumption was confined to city-dwellers,” I scoffed, thumping his arm with the hand that wasn’t confined in the crook of his elbow. “Still not married?” I quirked an eyebrow at him, knowing he lived under the speculative eye of every unmarried woman under seventy-five on the island, and a few married ones as well.

“Lavinia!” He looked injured. “You know I’m saving myself for you.”

I thumped him again, for calling me Lavinia twice in one day, and maybe for something else I didn’t want to identify, then rubbed his arm where I’d hit it. “I hate it, Luke. I want him back.”

“I know you do.” We had reached the end of the business district of Hope Village—both blocks of it—and we went across the street. “Coffee? There’s a new coffee bar here next to the bookstore.”

“I just had lunch,” I protested, which was, as Jim Croce had described so well in a song, just like spitting into the wind. Within two minutes I found myself sitting on a tall barstool with my sandaled feet hooked into the rungs, sipping an admittedly delicious mug of hazelnut coffee.

Luke looked at me, and for the moment he was as much a doctor as a friend. “But you’re better, aren’t you?” His hand, large, blunt, and rough and gentle at the same time, reached for mine.

I thought to draw away, but I didn’t. Because it felt too good. It was warm and solid and—where his broad thumb rubbed my palm—sexual. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was better.

Chapter Six

Andie

At first, the rocks bothered my feet. My beach time had previously been confined to the white sands of Florida that are like a siren call to so many of us landlocked Hoosiers. Islands off the Maine coast were apparently quite different.

But good. Very good. Forny good.

I couldn’t resist the call of the surf, and negotiated the rocks to get to it, only to have my feet frozen so instantly I was afraid they might fall off—and I was damned if I was giving up any more body parts. I beat a hasty retreat, deciding the water would be just as beautiful from a safe distance.

I settled myself on a flat rock that had been partially warmed by the sun, setting my commuter cup of coffee and Jean’s latest book beside me. I was wearing so much sunscreen I was pretty sure all my pores were clogged and I was probably going to suffocate, plus a wide-brimmed straw hat from the selection that hung in an artlessly artistic arrangement inside the back door of Vin’s house.

The doctors had been so insistent that I avoid the sun’s rays that I overcompensated and looked like a bag lady in my plaid cotton pants and long-sleeved shirt, with the hat flopping with gaudy ostentation over the whole ensemble.

Down the rocky shore, far enough that I couldn’t determine their gender, two small children played. Chasing waves and then running shrieking away from them, their squeals a kind of music. I remembered Miranda and young Jake on the sand at Pensacola, chasing waves, chasing crabs, chasing their father down so they could bury him in the sand.

Jake Logan had been the very best of fathers. No concern had been too insignificant for him to listen to and try to offer resolution. He had lived in Indianapolis while the kids were still in school, making the two-hour round trip several times a week so that he didn’t have to miss ballgames, recitals, or awards nights.

“Why can’t Daddy just stay?” Miranda had asked while she was still in junior high, still in love with her father. “You laugh together all the time and you kiss him goodbye every time he leaves and tell him ‘for God’s sake be careful.’ Why can’t you be married?”

I’d looked at her, absorbed the fury and the questions in her eyes, and exchanged a helpless look with Jake. I’m not really into helpless looks, but that one came naturally.

“I’m not good at being married, punkin.” He stood her in front of him, his hands on her shoulders and his gaze holding hers. “I try to be a good dad, and your mom and I are great friends, but I’m not a good husband at all. I’m a slob, I snore, I forget to call when I’m gonna be late, I never change the tires on the car till the rubber’s peeling off.”

What a genius he was, giving a twelve-year-old reasons she could understand, reasons that didn’t make me into the bad guy. Later on, when both the kids were in high school, they heard some things, and we sat them down at the table in our cluttered dining room and gave them the real explanation. The nitty-gritty.

I don’t know what we expected from the kids, but it wasn’t what we got. It wasn’t Miranda’s screams of ‘I hate you, How could you, I wish I’d never been born.’ It wasn’t young Jake’s sullen silence, his shaking off of his father’s hand from his shoulder, his retreat into his room and the bag of pot he didn’t even try to hide when I confronted him.

Jake had aged before my eyes, the toll taken on his mind and heart as great as the price later demanded of my body by cancer.

“I’ll leave them alone,” he promised when he left the shaken-to-its-soul house that night. “They’ve lost who they thought their father was. They need to grieve.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “They haven’t lost a thing except some of their innocence.” I hugged him hard. “Call this week just like you always do. Come to Jake’s game. You’re still their dad.” I was crying. So was he. “For God’s sake, be careful.”

It hadn’t been that easy, of course, but I’ve learned that there’s truth to the axiom that worthwhile things seldom are.

Our children were good kids, raised with values that fell somewhere between Tonsil Lake and Jake’s suburban Indianapolis roots. Eventually, they came around, and life went on. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.

Suddenly new grief welled up to combine with old, creating a maelstrom of emotion that stuck in my chest like a rock with tentacles, heavy and constricting at the same time. I remembered the times during my illness when fear would come up the same way, squeezing and choking.

“Breathe deep,” Jean would say. “You’re not alone. Even if we’re not in the room, we’re always here. Breathe deep.”

A few deep-breathing exercises later, I sipped my forgotten coffee and frowned toward the horizon. I was spending more time thinking about my ex-husband than I was about Paul Lindquist. What in the hell did that mean?

“Are you stuck to that rock, like some large plaid barnacle?” a voice called from behind me.

“Hi, Suzanne.” I looked over my shoulder. “You coming up here?”

“Unless it’s your own private rock.”

She was wearing a brilliant turquoise bikini and looking like a million bucks in it. There’s something wrong with that, I swear. She doesn’t even have any stretch marks, at least none that I could see.

“Come on up,” I said, “but if anyone comes along and thinks I’m your mother, I’m shoving you into the drink.”

She slipped her
People
magazine—complete with an underdressed starlet on the cover—under Jean’s book and crawled onto the rock, managing to look graceful as she did it.

Her nail polish matched the bikini. “Do you have any plaid polish?” I asked, gesturing at her turned-up toes. “Maybe you could get me as color coordinated as you are.”

She grinned. “Smartass.”

“I try.”

We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, then she said, “So, what about Paul Lindquist?”

I gave her a look, one I’d practiced on my kids and perfected on recalcitrant chefs in my restaurant days. It generally worked. “What about him?”

“Is he good in bed?”

Well, it worked on anyone who hadn’t grown up on Tonsil Lake, anyway. I intensified it, glowering at her from under the shade of my hat. “Why?” I said. “Thinking of trying him out?”

I was sorry the instant I said it, but she appeared not to notice that my bitchiness was more overt than usual. She just kept looking at the horizon, her blue-tipped toes raising and lowering on the rock.

“I talked to Jake last night,” she said.

“Did you? How is he?” I kept my voice even.

“Fine. He said if he had to come east while we were out here, he might come to the island. Just for a day, you know, not to encroach on Vin’s hospitality. Is that all right with you?”

“Of course.”
Oh, Suzanne, stop now. Don’t go there.

“Andie?”

Oh, hell. “Yeah?”

“Would you mind if I started seeing Jake? I mean really seeing him.”

Damn you, Jake, you sonofabitch. You could have prevented this. Why didn’t you tell her? Now it’s up to me, and that’s not fair.

But when I opened my mouth, the ugly words wouldn’t come out. I sat in silence for a minute, looking at my own bare toes. When I answered, the words I did say weren’t right, either. Not really.

“Yes,” I said quietly, looking at her until she met my gaze, “I’d mind, Suzanne. I’d mind it a lot.”

Jean

I love bookstores, especially small independent ones like the one on Hope Island. I’ve learned not to visit them when I’m shopping with anyone else, because no one seems to understand that it takes more than fifteen minutes to buy one book and scan the spines, back cover copy, and teaser pages of hundreds more.

The romance section was in the back, as it often is, but the shelves were well kept and my last book was displayed with its front cover out. I picked up a copy, remembering when I used to run out and buy one the first day a new book hit the stores.

“She’s very good.” A woman with a duster in her hand and a nametag identifying her as “Meg” pointed at the book, the feathers from the duster tossing little dust motes into the air. “Oh, sorry.” She tucked the duster under her arm.

“Thank you very much.” I extended a hand. “I’m Jean O’Toole. Would you like me to sign the copies you have?”

“That would be very nice.” She shook my hand, and we exchanged the usual pleasantries. Then she said, “Actually, you can do more than sign these.”

“Oh?” I looked up from the book I held.

“Yes. I wonder if we could have a book-signing with you while you’re on the island, if you’re free. Vin’s always kept us up on when your next one’s coming out, so we feel rather as though you’re an islander-by-adoption. We have several customers who would be thrilled.”

“Vin’s done that?” I was touched. I knew she read my books, that they all did, but I had always thought Vin looked down on them from behind her desk at Gunderson’s, where even the mention of a romantic novel caused lips to curl in disdain.

“Oh, yes.” Meg smiled. “She’s very proud of you.” A look of compassion crossed her face. “We’ve missed her since her husband died. It’s good that she’s back.” She placed the signed books on a table with the titles on this week’s
best-seller
lists, which is probably the closest I’ll ever get to them. “So, would you mind?”

“Not at all. I’d be pleased.”

That wasn’t strictly true; I hated book-signings. Sitting there at a table while people walk past you with pitying looks or queries as to where they can find the most recent Stephen King blockbuster is not exactly an ego-builder. But having Vin tell people about my books was.

When I walked past the French doors that led into the coffee bar adjoining the bookstore, I saw Vin sitting at one of the high tables. I started to go through the doors, then noticed she wasn’t alone. A large man with a thick mane of silver hair sat across from her, and he was holding her hand. I stepped away from the doors, going to hide in the sports section, where I found David a book on Maine golf courses.

When I left the bookstore, I walked back to the house slowly. My stomach was hurting again.

I took some antacid and put on my bathing suit, then headed for the beach, wearing flip-flops to negotiate the stony path. I saw Andie in navy blue plaid sitting on a rock and raised my arm in greeting.

“Come on up,” she said when I got closer. “You won’t look as good climbing up here as Suzanne did, but you’re welcome.”

I grabbed her extended hand and scrabbled up, then looked around, squinting. “Where is she? You haven’t drowned her, have you?”

“No, but she’s mad.” Andie sighed, looking off into the distance. “And the hell of it is I don’t blame her.”

“Why? What did you do?”

She answered my questions with one of her own. “Jean, is there anything that would make you leave David?”