The Guest House (3 page)

“I have someone here in Raleigh handling the research for the application,” Cooper continued, “but I need someone to photograph the property. The woman at the town office said you do architectural photography.”

“I do, yes.”

“I’m in Boston right now,” said Cooper, “but I’m planning to be on the Cape later tonight. Do you think you could come by the house tomorrow morning and we could talk specifics? Is eight too early?”

Lexi stared at the sidewalk, stunned into silence by the offer, her mind racing at the implications of it, the layers of impossibility. Going back to the Moss house. Seeing Cooper again, and what if Hudson was there too? But it was a job, a good job; how could she say no?

Cooper cleared his throat gently. “If you have plans, I understand. I know it’s short notice, and you’re probably already booked for the season. . . .”

Lexi heard a knock and glanced up to see Kim at the window, looking exasperated and waving her back inside.

Lexi turned away. “No,” she said. “Eight’s fine.”

“Great. I’ll look forward to it.”

She hung up, chastising herself for her indecision as she slipped her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and headed for the steps. What was she so nervous about? It was eleven years ago, for God’s sake. A lifetime, surely a blip on the radar of Cooper’s memory. If he remembered their kiss at all, he was probably hoping she wouldn’t bring it up, which she wouldn’t. Absolutely not. The subjects of that night and Hudson would be off-limits.

It was a job, right? No different from any other.

She reached the tavern door and tugged it open, her heart finally slowing its frantic beat, the familiar smell of freshly fried clam strips still sizzling in their paper baskets filling her lungs.

•   •   •

E
die Wright stepped up as close as she could to the fish market’s counter and squinted down into the blurry spread of price tags that pierced the carpet of crushed ice.

Sixty-four and she still refused to get reading glasses. It wasn’t vanity. God, no. A vain woman didn’t wear men’s jeans and swing a hammer at eighteen while her classmates preened in culottes and sling-backs. It was simple stubbornness; that was all. A refusal to acknowledge the onset of age and the annoying accessories that came with it. The aches and pains, the bolts of stiffness in hands that once could cut down a pile of two-by-sixes in thirty minutes—those clues were proof enough of time’s relentless march. Losing Hank to a heart attack three years earlier had been the cruelest clue of all. A wife always knew she could lose her husband, but Edie had never really believed the two of them wouldn’t leave this earth together.

“You could just
ask
, you know.” Faye Webb appeared behind the counter, chuckling as she secured the matching bobby pins that flanked her round face.

Edie righted herself, lips pursed. “And you could make the damn numbers bigger,
you know
.” The women shared a tired laugh; then Edie waved her hand at the case, exasperated. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “Just give me two pounds of shrimp. Lexi’s got some fancy dish planned for dinner.”

“Bet they worked her hard over there.”

“Oh, you know how she is. No one has to tell her to work hard. It’s telling her to let up that she needs to hear.”

“Seems everybody’s coming home to roost lately,” Faye mused as she scooped up a fistful of shrimp. “You heard the news about the Moss place, I’m sure.”

Edie looked up at the name. She blinked a moment at Faye, long enough that the woman offered an explanation as she dropped the shrimp on the scale. “Apparently Her Majesty wants to be done with the place for good now that Tucker’s gone. She’s sending one of the boys up here to check it out before they put it on the market.”

God, please don’t let it be Hudson
. The plea came reflexively. Edie lowered her eyes, as if her friend might detect her unfounded dread.

“When did you hear about this?” Edie asked, smoothing down the short graying red hairs at the base of her neck and forcing a casual tone to her voice that she most certainly didn’t feel.

“Yesterday, at the post office—it’s a little over two; that okay?”

Edie nodded dully, not even looking at the scale. Faye was an old friend, one of the few left of the old guard in Harrisport who remembered the days when the Moss family had swooped in and out of their town like a flock of exotic birds every summer. But for most of the residents, this news would be good for little more than a few minutes of gossip at Pip’s counter. After all, it had been years since the Moss family had held court at their seaside kingdom on Birch Drive. That was practically a lifetime, the way summer families turned over along the shore nowadays—a footnote.

She wondered what her daughter would think to learn the news. Would Lexi care? Probably not.

What was she so worried about, anyway? It wasn’t as if the Mosses were moving back to Harrisport. Faye had claimed they were returning for a quick visit to sell the house, to be done with it.

Lexi might never even know they’d come and gone.

•   •   •

T
he frozen custard stand was already busy with the early evening crowd when Owen Wright swung his truck into the gravel lot at seven ten and waved to his sixteen-year-old daughter where she waited for him on one of the stand’s weathered benches. Meg was hard to miss in her blinding electric-pink T-shirt and matching visor, the unfortunate uniform implemented by the stand’s owners—an outfit that would surely have resulted in life-ending humiliation for the fashion-obsessed girls his daughter went to school with in New York City.

“Busy day?” he asked when she’d climbed into the passenger seat and buckled up, her loose red ponytail swinging around.

“Crazy.” She fell back against the seat. “A Little League team showed up at four, and of course
every kid
wanted a Pirate Ship Split, and
every kid
wanted substitutions. And then Andy started freaking out because Sydney was putting the hats on upside down—like the kids even
cared
. I mean, seriously!”

Owen grinned as he steered them out of the parking lot. He loved his daughter’s work reports, loved every mundane second. The summer weeks she spent with him were a treasure, each day a piece of gold, and he pocketed every minute. He knew that scooping ice cream six days a week couldn’t compare to the excitement of her life with Heather in Manhattan, but he wouldn’t apologize for that. After all, Meg had spent the first fourteen years of her life in Harrisport; coming back for the summer may not have been exotic, but it was familiar, and Meg seemed to genuinely enjoy reconnecting with the places—and people—from her childhood. If her enthusiasm was false, Owen was ashamed to say he was grateful to her for it.

“Daaad . . .” Meg’s stern voice drew him out of his reverie. He glanced to where her narrow eyes pointed and saw the offending Tupperware on the end of the dash. “You didn’t eat your salad.”

“I know, I know,” he admitted. “I was just so busy.”

“Too busy to eat an already made salad? That’s so lame.”

“I’ll have it tomorrow.”

“After it’s been sitting all day in the sun? Gross. You will not.” She wrinkled her mouth. She always reminded him of Lexi when she did that; Owen’s grin widened. “It isn’t funny, Dad.”

He nodded, forcing his amusement down. “I know.”

“You’ll never live to see my wedding at the rate you’re going.”

“Oh, so you
are
getting married now?” Just the other day, she’d assured him she’d be a proud old maid, a declaration that had left him at turns relieved and guilty.

“I never said I wasn’t getting married,” Meg clarified. “I just said I wasn’t sure.”

“Hey, before I forget . . .” Owen glanced at her. “Your mom left me a message this afternoon. She said she tried your cell twice and you didn’t answer.”

Meg pulled at a hangnail on her pinkie. “I’ll call her back later. My phone’s almost dead.”

“Why don’t you call her now,” he said, gesturing to his cell in the cup holder.

“I’d better not. We might lose the signal.”

“I never lose a signal around here.”

“No, really, I can wait till we get to Grandma’s. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

She was making excuses, Owen thought, and he wondered why. Before his divorce, he’d never been a suspicious person. Now it seemed he saw secrets everywhere. He turned his attention back to the road and let the worry go. Most likely Meg just didn’t feel up to a call with her mother. As much as Heather and she got along, Meg would often claim exhaustion after one of her mother’s phone check-ins. Some days Heather’s text messaging was interminable; Owen could hear the alerts chiming out insistently.

Of course, his real worry was that Heather had found some reason to require Meg to return home early, some urgent commitment she couldn’t be excused from, no matter what court orders said. The previous summer had seen a similar battle, when Heather had informed him that Meg needed to get back to the city a week earlier than planned to start field hockey practice. Never mind that Meg wasn’t even fond of the sport, or that it had meant leaving the custard stand shorthanded at the last minute.

“So what’s this about George’s opening in LA?” he asked.

Meg spun to face him. “Mom told you about that?”

“She left it in the message.”

“What did she say?”

Owen glanced at Meg, thinking she looked stricken. “Just that it was over Thanksgiving and she wanted you to go. Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong.” Meg turned back to face the road, reaching out to turn on the radio. “I don’t have to go, you know.”

“Do you
want
to go?”

She shrugged, pressing at the radio buttons too fast to actually hear her selections. Try as Owen did to pretend otherwise, the mention of his ex-wife’s boyfriend still squeezed the air out of his lungs.

“You know, it’s okay if you do,” he said gently.

Meg smiled but didn’t answer, and Owen didn’t press, just let the sound of an old Dire Straits song fill the car. They drove on in silence, and even though Owen knew there might be lots of reasons why Meg had fallen so quiet, most of which had nothing to do with him, it was still hard not to calculate the time they spent in each other’s company not talking. Before the divorce, he’d never worried too much if they had gone whole days without a real conversation. Now the shared minutes were precious, as quantifiable as any limited thing. As of today, he had exactly twenty-eight days left with his daughter before she’d pack up and return to New York City.

Twenty-eight days.

In a few weeks, he’d get that figure down to hours. Then minutes.

And all he could think, for the thousandth time, was that none of this had been his idea.

R
egardless of the differences between mother and daughter—and there were plenty—when Lexi and Edie shared a kitchen, they were a seamless team, matched to perfection. Lexi, compulsively tidy and organized, always handled the prep work, while her mother, wildly messy and too impatient to be bothered with exact measurements, let alone recipes, took orders at the stove. Tonight’s menu was an ambitious one—orange-curry shrimp and roasted root vegetables—but Lexi was determined to make it a special meal, knowing it was the first family dinner since she’d returned from London, now that Meg was home for the summer. Team Wright was back in Harrisport; a celebration was in order.

At her chopping board, Lexi heard the telltale hiss of boiling liquid and glanced up to see the rice bubbling over while her mother stared out the kitchen window.

“Mom, the pot.”

“Oops. Shit.” Edie reached over for the knob and lowered the heat, stirring the foaming mixture back down to a manageable height. “I was just noticing Jeff Oberman’s van in the Doughertys’ driveway. I hope they don’t mean to have him take down that maple. I’ll chain myself to it if they do. Honest to God.”

And she would too, Lexi thought with a smile, pulling a standing grater down from the cabinet. It was no wonder their mother had burned so many of their meals growing up; a kitchen window with a perfect view of the street? What self-respecting busybody could resist such a temptation?

“Traffic’s already getting bad.”

“I’ve noticed,” Lexi said, sliding an orange up and down the bladed grooves, the oily sweetness of the zest quickly filling the air.

“I swear the Fourth never used to come this fast when you were kids.”

“It didn’t.” Lexi set down the orange to take a sip of the white wine she’d been nursing while she worked. “Winter was endless and summer was a blur.”

Edie glanced at Lexi and grinned. “Maybe it could be again.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Edie shrugged. “I’m just saying maybe you won’t rush into a new job right away. Maybe take some time for yourself first, find someone to spend time with . . . someone
special
.”

Lexi groaned. “You’re worse than Kim.”

“God, I would hope so. I’m your mother; I’m supposed to be.”

“I just got back. Let me at least move out of my mother’s house first, okay?”

Edie sighed, shaking her head. “You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make excuses for why you can’t get serious about someone.”

“And just who am I going to get serious about around here? I know everyone in this town, remember?”

“It’s summer,” Edie argued. “Half the people walking by this window are new faces.”

Summer
faces, Lexi wanted to clarify.
Summer people
. She’d been down that bumpy, dead-end road before; her mother knew that better than anyone.

“Speaking of familiar faces . . .” Edie sighed. “I don’t know if you heard—”

“About the Moss cottage?” Lexi asked. “Yeah, I know.”

“You do?”

“Cooper called me.”

“Cooper?” Edie blinked at her, startled. “Why in the world would he call
you
?”

“Because they’re finally listing the house on the National Register and he wants to hire me to photograph it for the nomination form,” Lexi said matter-of-factly, hoping she could avoid her mother’s concern if she kept her answers short. No such luck; she glanced up from her grating and found her mother staring at her.

Lexi frowned. “Don’t look at me like that. I thought you’d be thrilled they’re finally listing it.”

“I am.” Edie shrugged. “I’m just surprised you’d want to go back there, that’s all.”

“It’s a great opportunity to expand my portfolio,” said Lexi, scooping up the fragrant pile of zest and dropping it into a small bowl. “Not to mention it’s good money.”

“When did all this happen?” Edie demanded.

“This afternoon—you’re not stirring the sauce.”

Edie frowned as she picked up her spoon and swept it impatiently around the pan. “Were you going to tell me?”

“You’re acting like I took a job with the FBI.”

“I think I’d prefer that.”

Lexi gave her mother a level look. “I know that house like the back of my hand. Who better to photograph it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe someone who didn’t have her heart broken inside it?”

“Eleven years ago.”

“Your brother will have a fit,” Edie warned.

“It’s none of Owen’s business what job I take.”

“He’ll make it his business.”

Lexi stared at her simmering garlic, knowing her mother was right. As much as she had appreciated Owen’s loyalty, Lexi had grown tired of her brother’s inability to let go of his grudge. She’d moved on—why couldn’t he?

“You should really tell him,” said Edie. “Before he hears it from someone else.”

As if on cue, Owen’s truck rumbled up the driveway, sliding into view of both women through the kitchen’s screen door. Meg came into the house in front of her father, a pie box in her arms, which she delivered to Edie with a hug.

Edie pointed Owen to the fridge. “There’s beer or wine, Owe. Help yourself. What do you want to drink, Meggie?”

Meg slipped between her aunt and grandmother, inspecting the pan. “I’ll have some wine.”

“You will not,” Owen said, looking startled.

“Mom lets me have wine when we have people over,” Meg informed him gently. “All the girls at my school drink wine, Dad. It’s not a big deal.”

“I passed the Bells’ place today, Owe,” said Edie. “The dormers are looking fabulous.”

“They’re getting there,” Owen said. “You hear back from Lou on that bathroom reno you quoted him?”

“Not yet,” Edie reported, handing a basket of bread to Meg for the table. “I may have to start Operation Nag if I don’t hear soon.”

Owen pulled a beer from the fridge. “How about you, Lex? Any leads on work?”

Lexi stirred her dish, feeling her mother’s pointed gaze beside her. She shot her a silencing look before she answered, “Nothing firm yet.” After all, what was the point in telling her brother now? She hadn’t even met with Cooper, for God’s sake. For all she knew, he might change his mind when he heard her rates—though Lexi doubted it. Money was never an issue for the Moss family. Still, she had no interest in stirring a pot she had yet to put on the stove.

“You could always work at the bike shop, Aunt Lex,” Meg said cheerfully as she set the table. “Caroline’s older brother works there. She said they’re really short-staffed this summer.”

Owen frowned. Caroline Michaud worked the frozen custard shack three days a week and had returned this summer, according to Meg and much to Owen’s distress, with an ankle tattoo and an affinity for clove cigarettes. God only knew what her brother was into. Owen had seen those guys at the bike shop—hell, he’d
been
one of those guys once—caring only about kegs on the beach or scoping the shoreline for the season’s new crop of bikini-wearing summer visitors.

As much as he missed having Meg with him in Harrisport, a part of him was relieved that she didn’t have to contend with boys like that year-round.

•   •   •

D
inner ended the way it always had in the Wright house—with a clatter of dishes and a few hurried good-byes. Growing up, she and Owen had always had somewhere to run off to: a party, a date, a friend waiting. Now as she climbed the stairs shortly before ten, Lexi realized she had nowhere to be. Her brother, her niece, even her mother had rushed from the table with a destination. For Lexi, the night was an empty page.

Going up, she smiled at the patchwork of framed family photos that covered the wall, stopping briefly at her senior picture. It was always so hard to look at that photograph, knowing it had been taken just six months before she would meet Hudson Moss—harder still to analyze her confident and carefree eighteen-year-old face and not feel longing, the desire to step back in time and stop the girl she was from falling headlong toward heartbreak. And now she had agreed to go back to the house where it had all started.

She thought about her mother urging her to seek out a relationship this summer, how she’d bristled when Lexi had claimed—rightly so!—that there was no one here in Harrisport to date whom she hadn’t already dated. It wasn’t an excuse; it was the truth. Or Kim looking discouraged when Lexi hadn’t come back from London with sordid stories of great love affairs. She’d been neck-high in photography critiques for twenty-four months—who had time to get involved in something serious?

In her room, she sat down and opened her laptop. She had always been drawn to architectural photography, seeing the curves and edges of a building’s construction much in the same way a portrait photographer might capture the lines of the human form. It was a natural desire; growing up around her parents’ building business, she had been raised to appreciate architecture in all its iterations, from the sweetly scented skeletons of new lumber frames to the weary and parched bones of an old property, but it was the details she loved most: the parts of a room that most people passed by without seeing, the beauty and grace in a simple drawer pull or a built-in cabinet; the textures of historic fabric, the roughness of hand-hewn beams; worn hardware, cabinet pulls and latches; the puzzle pieces of dovetails; mortises and tenons. If she’d had more time, she would have dug through boxes to find some of her older work, but these shots would do, she decided, as she scrolled through several of the digital portfolios she’d compiled during her graduate program. She hoped Cooper would find the samples acceptable.

Excitement charged through her. After all the summers she’d spent in the Moss house, all the times she’d marveled at its interiors and wanted to capture every inch on film, now she’d finally have her chance. If only her family could have been half as excited for her—but what had Lexi expected? The roots of their battle reached far and grew deep. Lexi doubted anything could uproot her family’s distaste for the Mosses now.

L
ike all kids who grew up in Harrisport, Lexi knew about the Moss house long before she’d ever seen it. Even if you’d never set foot on its lush and rolling back lawn (and why would you unless you’d been hired to mow it?), even if you’d never walked through its kitchen and caught a whiff of fresh-glazed pastries, you knew it was the house where the lavish display of fireworks blew up the sky every Fourth of July, rivaling Provincetown’s show year after year. The fact that Lexi’s parents had been hired to build a guest house on the property in the sixties led friends to believe that Lexi had a superior knowledge of the inner workings of the summer family from North Carolina, but the truth was that growing up, Lexi couldn’t have cared less about the Mosses or their fireworks. She’d gleaned early on the rules of engagement when it came to summer families, and she had no interest in playing a game she couldn’t win.

It hadn’t helped, of course, that for as long as she could remember, every time the subject of the Moss family came up around her father, his expression would darken and, without fail, the usually fair and forgiving Hank Wright would purge a shocking serving of vitriol.

“Maybe he and Tucker Moss got into some big fight,” Kim had suggested once when they were young. “Maybe they beat the shit out of each other that summer they built the guest house.”

“It’s possible,” Lexi had replied, though she’d never known her father to lose his temper that way. Still, it had seemed a likely theory, for what else could possibly have happened to leave such a sour taste in his mouth so many years later?

The summer after her senior year, Lexi became determined to find out.

“Why does Dad hate the Mosses so much?”

She’d joined her mother at the sink to work on the dinner dishes and just come right out with it, startling Edie with the question almost as much as she’d startled herself.

“He doesn’t hate them,” Edie had insisted, keeping her eyes fixed on the basin of dirty dishes. “You read too much into things. You know how impatient your father gets with summer people. He’d say the same thing about the Douglases or the Flemings.”

But Lexi didn’t believe it. An hour later, when the house had grown quiet, she’d borrowed her father’s truck and driven to the off-white cape Owen and Heather had been renting just outside the village.

Lexi had smelled the charcoal as soon as she’d pulled into the driveway. Lilacs grew against the garage, swollen with lavender blossoms, but she’d pushed past them without stopping for a sniff, intent on finding her brother in the backyard, where he stood over the grill, monitoring a pair of sizzling steaks.

He looked up and smiled. “Hey, Lex, what’s going on? Hungry?”

She took a seat in one of the rickety lawn chairs and sat forward, arms crossed, wanting to get right to it. “Did something happen with Dad and the Mosses?”

Owen looked at her through the chimney of cooking smoke that climbed toward the star-sprinkled sky. “Why would you ask that?” he said.

Lexi held his gaze, just in case he meant to derail her as her mother had done. “Mom won’t tell me, but I know something happened, so what was it?”

Owen frowned down at the grill.

Lexi bit at the inside of her cheek. “Dad and Tucker Moss got into it over something, didn’t they?”

“You could say that.” Owen hooked the long-handled spatula on the edge of the grill and came over to take the other chair, sitting forward like she was. “It was over Mom, actually. She and Moss were together once.”

Lexi sat back, startled at the admission. “What do you mean,
once
?” she asked. “You mean like once upon a time? Or like,
just
once?”

“I mean they were together that summer.”

“But Mom always said that was the summer she and Dad fell in love.”

“It was,” said Owen.

“So what happened?”

“I don’t know, Lex. Just that Tucker Moss broke her heart before she started seeing Dad. It’s not exactly a popular topic of conversation.”

The steaks popped. Owen climbed to his feet and returned to the grill.

“That’s why Dad refused to try for their roof replacement job a few years ago,” he said. “It would have been huge money—and it’s not like we didn’t need it—but he wouldn’t even put in a bid.”