Beach Trip (40 page)

Mel said flatly, “Your husband called.”

Lola’s expression changed, a series of emotions passing swiftly across her face: surprise, distress, sadness. “Oh?” she said.

“He said for you to call him back but no one would blame you if you didn’t.”

Captain Mike turned suddenly and crossed the room to the kitchen, setting his cup down in the sink.

“No,” Lola said. “I have to talk to him. He’ll just call again if I don’t.” She picked up her purse and went into her room, closing the door behind her.

Captain Mike waited until the door clicked shut, then said sharply, “Don’t forget. Be at the marina by one forty-five.” He went out the kitchen door and they watched him through the glass, striding purposefully across the veranda toward the crofter.

“Is it my imagination,” Sara said, “or does Captain Mike get more attractive as the week wears on?”

“It’s not your imagination,” Annie said. “Definitely not.”

“You two go on and get dressed,” Mel said. “I’ll check on Lola.”

They took the beach road to the marina. Mel drove with Lola sitting beside her and Sara and Annie in back. A strong wind buffeted the little cart. Sunlight shimmered on the white sand and the distant stretch of sparkling ocean. The narrow road was crowded with golf carts; teenagers with boogie boards strapped to their cart roofs, and families with beach umbrellas strapped to theirs, shuttled back and forth between the beach and the tall houses.

“Why is it so crowded?” Mel asked, pulling to the side so a cart driven by four underage boys could pass them. The boys honked and waved.

“It’s almost the weekend,” Lola said. She was wearing jeweled sandals on her tiny feet. Her toenails were painted a deep red. With her dark sunglasses and floppy hat she looked like a movie star from the nineteen-forties, like Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious.
“A lot of people from the mainland come over here for the weekend.”

“It’s still not as crowded as Hilton Head,” Sara said, turning her head to gaze at the expanse of sparsely populated beachfront.

“Or Destin,” Annie said.

Lola sighed and looked at the sparkling water. “I love the beach,” she said. She seemed none the worse for her conversation with Briggs. It must have gone on for some time but when Mel went to check on her, she was happily applying sunscreen to her legs and singing as if she hadn’t a care in the world. “It’s like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said when Mel stuck her head in the door, and when Mel said, “What?” Lola laughed her gay little laugh and said, “Do you want sunscreen?”

They passed a golf cart decorated with a sign that read
JUST MARRIED
, parked in the drive of one of the large houses.

Lola sighed. “I always wanted a beach wedding,” she said.

“It seems to be very popular these days,” Sara said.

“I always wondered how you’d keep the sand out of everything,” Annie said. “Out of your veil. Out of your train. It seems like it would be so—messy.”

“I got married on the beach,” Mel reminded them.

“Which time?” Sara asked brightly.

Mel ignored her. “Maybe Henry and Layla should have a beach wedding,” she said to Lola.

“Oh, no.” Lola shook her head gravely and put her feet up on the dash, wiggling her toes. “She’s from Ann Arbor. They’ll have a traditional wedding.”

“What does the ring look like?”

“What ring?”

Mel gave her a piercing look. “The engagement ring?”

“There is no engagement ring,” Lola said, tugging at one of her sandal straps. “Not yet, anyway.”

Sara and Annie swiveled their heads to look at Lola. “I thought you said they were engaged,” Sara said.

“Not yet,” Lola said, “but they will be.” She stopped tugging at her sandal and sat back with her hands resting in her lap.

Sara turned back around. Mel gripped the steering wheel and watched the road. Only Annie continued to stare at Lola over one shoulder. “How do you know?” she asked finally. “How do you know they’re getting married?”

Lola smiled sweetly. “I read their auras,” she said.

When they arrived at the yacht, April was in the galley and Captain Mike was up on the flybridge checking the trolling valves. Mel stood on the
dock with her arms crossed over her chest watching him until he glanced down and noticed her.

“Need some help?” she asked casually, shading her eyes with one hand. She was wearing a bikini and a pair of short shorts that she knew showed off her long legs to good advantage.

“Sure,” he said, going back to work. “Why don’t you go down to the galley and see if you can help April stow the food?”

That wasn’t really what she’d had in mind but she couldn’t very well refuse now that she’d offered. She climbed aboard and set her beach bag on one of the aft bench seats and then went into the galley. April was loading groceries into a Sub-Zero undercounter refrigerator and when Mel told her Captain Mike had sent her to help, she seemed annoyed. She was a quiet girl who kept mostly to herself, and Mel had a hard time reading her. Of course, there was always the chance that she had picked up on Mel’s flirtatious manner toward the Captain, in which case she wouldn’t blame April for being unfriendly, although Mel was surprised to find that she wanted April to like her. She wanted to reassure April that her feelings for Captain Mike were nothing more than an idle distraction, a chance to fill the dull hours until she could figure out some way to get her life back on track. But then she thought better of it and said nothing at all.

“Those canned goods need to go in the lower pantry,” April said, pointing at a brown bag on the counter.

They worked for a while in silence, each one efficiently ignoring the other. “You’ve got enough food here to feed an army,” Mel said finally, closing the door of the pantry. She could see Sara out on the dock, talking on her cell phone. She was probably talking to her daughter, who had already called twice this morning to ask her mother’s advice about some boy she was seeing. Mel had listened intently to both conversations, wondering what she would have done if the situation had been reversed, and she had been the mother on the phone giving advice. Would she have said things like,
Be careful, you’re only twelve.
or
Take it slow, boys can be fickle and you need to concentrate on the things you can control, like schoolwork or finding a hobby?
No, of course not. She would have said something like,
You’re only young once, go for it, Nicky!
It was probably best that she was childless.

She flattened the brown bag and folded it against her chest. “So how long have you worked for the Furmans?” she asked April.

“Off and on for four years.”

“How about Captain Mike?”

“I don’t work for him.”

The girl was being purposefully obtuse. Mel smiled wanly and said, “I meant how long has Captain Mike worked for the Furmans?”

April gave her a steady look. “You’ll have to ask him,” she said.

She was pretty, there was no denying that, with her perfect skin and almond-shaped eyes, but she wasn’t exactly
warm.
She wasn’t the kind of girl Mel would have pictured Captain Mike with. She wanted to ask her about him, to ask her how they had met, how long they’d been dating but she had the feeling the girl would only shrug and say,
Ask him.
She didn’t look like the kind of person who gave away confidences easily.

Mel picked up the empty brown bags scattered around the galley and began to fold them flat. “So you grew up in Wilmington?”

“That’s right. My parents still live there, and my little sister.” April seemed distracted, checking a handwritten list and ticking things off.

Mel went back to staring at Sara through the window. She watched her animated face and she thought,
What must it be like to have a daughter?
Even if she ever, by some miracle, found the right man, would she really want a child? Not that she needed a man. She could adopt. She could find a surrogate. You didn’t need a man these days to have a child (although she wouldn’t, of course, broach this subject with Sara). But even if she
could
have a child, would she really want the responsibility of caring for someone who was totally dependent on her, whose every whim must take precedence over her own desires for the next eighteen years?

No, of course not.

She stacked the folded bags on the counter. “I can’t imagine working for anyone nicer than Lola,” she said.

April stared at her list and didn’t look up. “Lola’s awesome,” she said.

“I’ve known her since she was just a girl,” Mel said. “Since college. We all met in college.”

April crossed out an item on the list. “She paid my tuition to culinary school,” she said.

“Lola?”

April glanced up from her list, fixing Mel with a studious expression. “She paid my tuition. She paid for my sister’s operation. My parents don’t have insurance and she paid for it out of her own pocket.”

This didn’t surprise Mel. Lola’s charity was legendary. “Lola’s a generous person.”

“She’s awesome,” April repeated.

“Yes. Awesome.”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her,” April said, giving her head a fierce little shake. “Nothing.”

Mel wondered if anyone had ever felt that way about her. The mood in the cabin had grown heavy and she said, “Briggs, now he’s an asshole but you have to take the bad with the good.” She grinned when she said it but April only glanced at her, then went back to the list.

Mel turned her face to the small galley window. “It looks like we’re getting ready to shove off,” she said. She could feel the engines throbbing beneath her feet.

Out on the dock, Sara clicked off her phone and slid it into her bag. She was smiling.

Mel turned away, gathering the folded bags in her arms. There was a price to be paid for shutting yourself off, and she had paid it.

Sara stood on the dock watching Mel unsuccessfully flirt with Captain Mike and trying not to feel that little flutter of happiness she always felt whenever Mel tried, and failed, at anything. It happened so rarely. The flutter of happiness was followed quickly by a stab of guilt. She was old enough, surely, to have left the competitiveness of girlhood behind her? Apparently not. She watched Mel, looking like a movie goddess sex kitten in her short shorts and T-shirt, set her bag down and disappear through the sliding glass doors into the galley. Apparently there were some things you never got over, no matter how old you were.
I’ll have to tell Tom about this
, she thought, but then realized just as quickly that she would not.

She and Annie walked down to the end of the dock to look at the boats. They stood for a while, looking out at the green sparkling water. Seagulls glided above the harbor or perched noisily atop tall masts. A large yacht christened the
Lisa Marie
pulled slowly into port.

Annie, noting the name, said, “Hey, you don’t think that’s Elvis’s boat, do you?”

“Elvis is dead. What would he want with a boat?”

“How do you know he’s dead?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No, really. Think about it. How do you know he didn’t fake his own death to get away from the paparazzi? How do you know he isn’t out there
right now, living the life he always wanted to live, cruising the seas under an assumed identity?”

Sara couldn’t think of anything to say to this, so she said nothing. A ferry pulled slowly into the harbor with its load of happy, waving tourists. The big engines throbbed as the boat nosed up along the landing like a nursing calf. Shouting stewards began to frantically unload, pushing heavy carts up the gangways to the baggage station. Annie put her hands on the rail and peered anxiously down at the water. A dead fish floated forlornly on its side. “Do you think we’ll go out of sight of land?” she asked.

Sara, noting the concern in her voice, said, “Have you never been on a boat before?”

“Not on the ocean.”

“Well, Annie, I’m pretty sure we’ll go out of sight of land. Captain Mike says it’s about a forty-five-minute trip to the other island.” Golf carts trundled gaily around the perimeter of the harbor. On the village green a group of children played tag. Annie, looking down into the water, shivered.

“Will you be all right?” Sara asked, putting one arm around Annie’s narrow shoulders.

“Yes.” She sniffed, watching a man and a child fly a kite on the village green. The kite was a tiny speck in the sun-bleached sky. “It’s silly, I know, but I’ve always been afraid of dark water.”

“You and Natalie Wood,” Sara said. She gave Annie a quick squeeze and dropped her arm.

“Very funny,” Annie said. “I haven’t thought of her in years.”

Sara smiled faintly, watching the steady stream of ferry passengers as they disembarked. She had been a junior in college at the time of Natalie’s death, still brooding over a boy she couldn’t have, and the whole affair had seemed so sordid and sad. Beautiful, childlike Natalie dead at the tragic age of forty-three. Fragile Natalie, floating in the dark water off Catalina Island in her flannel nightgown and knee socks. Rumors had swirled about a lovers’ triangle turned deadly, and caught up at the time in her own lovers’ triangle, Sara had understood how it might have happened. She still understood how it might have happened. She saw it every day as she struggled with the aftermath of so many failed marriages.

“Don’t worry,” she said, trying to reassure Annie. “She wasn’t wearing a life jacket.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Annie asked morosely.

After her years in family law, Sara was an expert on infidelity. She knew
it happened slowly, gradually, over a period of time. In the beginning it was harmless, just a flirtation. A glance, a shared joke, a moment of false camaraderie when you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, you’re just friends. Good, good friends. It could have happened with Dennis McNair if she’d let it. But she’d seen too much of what followed: the bitterness, the guilt, the loss of self-esteem that infected lives like a sickness. A very modern sickness.

“I’ll probably wear a life jacket the whole time I’m on board,” Annie said. “I’ll probably have Mel make a pitcher of Margaronas.”