True Love (35 page)

T
he day Jared left, they drove to the airport in silence. Alix seemed to be full of thoughts and worries—and maybe even a dread of the future. No matter what Jared said about this separation not changing anything between them, she was still concerned.

“Will you put on a suit?” she asked as he stopped at the token machine at the airport parking lot.

“Yes. I don’t want to but it’s New York.”

“Will you shave and get your hair cut?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “Unless you want me to, that is.”

“No, I don’t. Will Tim yell at you for being away so long?”

“All he cares about is that the California house plans are finished.” Jared pulled into a parking place, turned off the engine, and looked at her. “What’s really bothering you?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve known each other such a short time and you’re—” His look made her say what she didn’t want to. “You’ll be
him
again.”

“And ‘he’ is a bad guy? An exploiter of women? Love ’em and leave ’em?”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, then grimaced. “Maybe I did.”

“If I did that to you, your parents would kill me.”

“Great,” she said. “Glad to hear that it’s fear that keeps you with me.”

Jared just shook his head. “Words aren’t going to prove anything. Call me, I’ll call you. Text, email. All of it. I’ll let you know where I am at all times. Will that make you feel better?”

“Only when you return will I be sure. Return to
me
, not just to your old house and your beloved island.”

Jared laughed. “I think you know me too well. Come on, let’s go.”

In the airport he was about to go out the door to the small jet, but he turned back, took Alix in his arms, and kissed her yet again. He put his lips near her ear and whispered, “Within four hours everyone on this island will have heard that we’re a couple.”

There was another kiss goodbye, then Alix watched him walk across the tarmac and go up the ramp to the plane. His seat was by a window on her side and he waved to her as they took off.

When he was gone, Alix turned to leave the airport and saw that a number of people were smiling at her. Not the tourists who traveled in packs and had a frantic look in their eyes, not the summer people in their linen and bracelets. These were the Nantucketers, the men and women who lived and worked there. The
real
people. The people who mattered. The women smiled and the men nodded to her—just as she’d seen them do to Jared. It was almost as though his public kiss had been an announcement that Alix was now … What? she wondered. Somehow related to the people who’d settled the island? That she
belonged
?

Alix couldn’t help returning the smiles. As she walked outside
toward the truck, a man loading luggage nodded at her. Word was spreading outward.

The next morning Toby showed up asking Alix if she’d like to see some of Nantucket, and she readily agreed.

Toby drove around the island, to beaches and moors, altar rock, and the oldest house with its beautiful herb garden. They walked behind the lovely old house to Something Natural to have lunch.

They drove back to Kingsley Lane, parked, and walked into town. Since Toby hadn’t been born on the island, she had a clearer idea of what was unusual about it. “Everything is named Nantucket—the town, the island, the county.” She went on to say that Nantucket had recently been given the dubious honor of being declared the richest county in the U.S. “Although a lot of us are struggling to put food on the table,” she added.

Alix couldn’t believe such a predicament was true of Toby. She had an air about her that could only be described as elegant. Her clothes were the best quality, but understated. She didn’t wear a dozen bracelets or a gold necklace as big as a horse collar, like the off-islanders did. And no cute little hat with an upturned brim that you knew cost a normal person’s monthly salary. With Toby, everything was simple and refined. By the end of the day, Alix found herself standing straighter and vowing to toss out her oldest pair of sweatpants.

Later, Lexie showed up at Kingsley House with a bag full of fresh vegetables for dinner, just harvested from her boss’s garden. “Heaven knows
he
never picks any of them. He just likes to watch the girls bending over and weeding.”

Toby and Alix looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

“What does Roger wear while he’s watching the girls?” Alix asked.

“As little as he can lawfully get away with,” Lexie answered.

Toby and Alix smiled at each other. It was a nice image.

After dinner the three women sat in the living room and finished off a bottle of wine. As usual with Lexie, she got right to the point. “So how are you and Jared getting along?”

Alix was very aware that Lexie was Jared’s cousin, so how could she tell of her worries about his departure? “Great. Fine,” she said.

“Anything we can help with?” Toby asked. Obviously she wasn’t fooled by Alix’s bravado.

“It’s just a matter of time,” Alix said, then took a breath. She
did
have worries and her best friend wasn’t here to talk to, so cousin or not, she needed to get her thoughts out into the open. “I know Jared likes my designs and my work ethic, and the sex is truly great, but I think he’s happy the way he is. And …” She took a breath. “He has a life in New York as well as here, so maybe I won’t fit into his world there.” She looked at Lexie. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because Jared isn’t like you think he is. He isn’t the famous public guy that people see. Here on Nantucket is the real him.”

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” Alix said. “Okay, that’s more than enough soul searching from me. I want to know about you two. What are you looking for in life?”

Lexie grimaced. “My problem is that I
know
my future and what my life will be like. I’m sure I’ll marry Nelson within the next couple of years. I know where we’ll live, even the house we’ll live in. All of it. Everything.”

“Who is Nelson?” Alix asked. She’d seen no man near Lexie except her boss, and it was clear that she wanted nothing to do with him.

“He’s my Eric.”

“But I was dumped by him,” Alix said.

Toby nodded. “If Lexie doesn’t marry him soon he’s going to drop her.”

Lexie took a drink of her wine. “I just want a life where I can’t see straight down the road. I want some hills, mountains even. I want an adventure. Actually, I’d settle for something that’s merely out of the ordinary.”

Alix turned to Toby. “What about you?”

Lexie spoke first. “Toby has more than boyfriend problems. She has a mother.”

Alix looked at Toby in question.

“My mother,” Toby said, “was—is, I guess—obsessed with being … I don’t know how to explain it, but the most accurate thing to say is that she wants to be considered upper class. You see, my dad is …”

“Blueblood,” Lexie said. “Or as close as America can get. Golf clubs, private schools, a family tree back to … What is it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Toby looked away, embarrassed.

“What’s your mother’s side of the family like?” Alix asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never met any of her relatives or anyone who knew her before she married my dad. It’s like she was born on the day she got married.” Toby looked at them. “However …”

“What?” They leaned forward.

“One time my mother was quite angry at me and—”

“That’s her usual state from what I’ve seen of her,” Lexie interrupted, her tone showing her disapproval.

Toby continued, “One night after dinner, Mother wanted Dad and me to hurry up to go somewhere. She grabbed our half-full plates and put one on her forearm and one in her hand. It was very efficient. I said, ‘Mother, you do that like an experienced waitress.’ I wouldn’t have thought anything about it except that she immediately dropped the plates and stomped off—and my dad couldn’t stop laughing.”

“Very interesting,” Lexie said. “That sounds like a mystery worth pursuing.”

“Lexie loves mystery novels,” Toby said.

Lexie grimaced. “In this mystery, the only man your mother would approve of for you is Prince Charming.”

“Too late,” Alix said, her face serious. “I already got him.”

Toby laughed and Lexie groaned.

“We want to know about
your
mother,” Toby said. “What’s it like to live with someone who is as unique as she is?”

“Unique?” Lexie said. “Toby is being polite. Victoria Madsen is an international sensation, beautiful, successful, and those books!”

“You do know the Great Secret of the origin of them, don’t you?” Alix asked.

“That they’re about my family?” Lexie said. “Of course. Everyone on Nantucket knows that.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “I know about my family. I want to know about
yours
.”

“Well,” Alix said slowly, thinking how to explain her mother in a way that wouldn’t take hours. “She is a mix of practical and flamboyant, vain and selfless, naive and very sophisticated.”

“That sounds either horrible or wonderful,” Lexie said. “But what we want to know is what it was like to be with her on a daily basis.”

Alix thought for a moment. “All right, I’ll tell you a story that might illustrate my life with her, and I only know the details because years later so many people told me what happened. It was my fifth birthday, and Mom and I were living in an apartment on the sixteenth floor of a building way downtown in New York City. It was after her first book had been accepted for publication, but before it came out and hit the best-seller lists. But what was important to me was that my parents had recently separated and I was missing my dad a lot.”

Alix looked away briefly. “Anyway, on the morning of my birthday, I woke up looking into the eyes of a real live pony.”

Lexie smiled. “That’s nice. Your mother took you to a stable while you were asleep.”

“No,” Alix said. “I was in my own bed in our apartment in New York. My mom had brought the pony up in the service elevator. She had so charmed the doorman—I think she even wept a bit at her failed marriage—that he’d looked the other way.”

“I wonder what the neighbors thought,” Toby said.

“You hit it there. My mother couldn’t have cared less that the floor was permanently damaged by the hooves, but when the neighbors complained about the noise, she had to
do
something.”

“What did she do?” Lexie asked.

“She turned it all into an impromptu party. She chose the ugliest little man there, who was standing silently by his angry wife, and asked him to go buy some booze. And of course my mother had no money so he paid. Then she got some big, good-looking teenage boy to make drinks for everyone who showed up to complain.”

“I don’t think using an underage boy like that was legal,” Toby said.

“My mother doesn’t believe that laws apply to her. When school let out, even more neighbors showed up with their kids and they rode the pony around inside the apartment.”

“What about the mess?” Lexie asked.

“My mother went to two teenage girls who couldn’t take their eyes off the boy at the bar and told them
he
wanted them to help out.”

“They got the poop scoop detail?” Lexie asked, grinning.

“Exactly,” Alix said. “And you know what? Years later my mother told me that one of those girls married that boy.”

Both Lexie and Toby laughed. “Your mother is a matchmaker.”

“She loves romance in any form,” Alix said.

“What happened to the pony?” Toby asked.

“At the end of the day, when the owner returned, he was livid! Mom had lied, telling him she had a farm in the country and a trainer. She’d been so convincing that he’d turned the pony over to her. When he found out the truth, he was furious, but Mom flirted with him so much that by the time he took the pony back down in the elevator, he was smiling. And by that point, Mom had to push everybody out of our apartment because they were drunk. She gave me a bath, then snuggled down with me in bed and read me a book. That it was the galleys of her own novel with the sex skipped didn’t matter. I was asleep instantly. And after that I was the most popular child in the building. Everybody cried when we moved to the suburbs.”

For a moment Lexie and Toby sat in silence, taking in the story.

“How wonderful!” Lexie said with a sigh. “I could stand some adventure in my life.”

“Doesn’t your boss—” Alix began.

“He’s too in love with himself to matter,” Lexie said.

Alix and Toby looked at each other. From what they’d seen of Roger Plymouth, he was madly in love with Lexie, not himself.

After that first evening, the young women became a threesome—when they could, that is. Both Toby and Lexie had jobs, and Alix was trying to complete her sketches for Jared’s clients.

And then, of course, there was Izzy’s wedding to work on. Without the rose arbor and with the inclusion of the chapel, everything changed. Alix came up with a theme of wildflowers based on the dishes in Kingsley House. She showed Toby a place setting and Toby made an arrangement that looked like the china pattern. They planned everything around small flowers, many of them on a stem, all of them light and airy, nothing heavy.