74 Seaside Avenue

Page 16

“She was an elderly woman. Around ninety. I did her hair for the funeral.”
He didn’t like thinking about it. “That’s something you do?” he asked hesitantly.
“Of course. She was a lovely woman. I’ll miss her.”
“But why—”
“The funeral home occasionally hires me. And I was very fond of Martha so I wanted to do it.”
They chatted for another while, joking back and forth, filling each other in on what was happening at work. When he replaced the phone, Bruce was shocked to realize they’d talked for more than an hour.
“What did Rachel say?” Jolene asked. She’d been waiting patiently, completing a jigsaw puzzle of horses grazing in a field. Five hundred pieces! He was impressed.
“She said she’d be by to pick you up at nine-thirty on Saturday morning,” he said absently. An hour. He’d spent an entire hour on the phone with Rachel?
Something was wrong.
Bruce didn’t even like talking on the phone. Five minutes, tops. Say what’s necessary and hang up. He could barely remember a conversation in his entire adult life that had lasted more than fifteen minutes.
“Dad?” Jolene cut into his musings.
“What?”
“You’re standing up but you’re not going anywhere.”
“I am?” He hadn’t been aware that he was on his feet until Jolene pointed it out.
“Are you okay?” his daughter asked.
Bruce sat back down. “I—I don’t know.” He felt dizzy, and that was unusual for him. In fact, his head was spinning. Maybe he had the flu. Yeah, a flu named Rachel. Where did that thought come from? Squinting at his daughter, he noticed she was looking at him strangely.
“Should I call 911?”
“No.” He forced a laugh. “I’m fine. I do have a question for you, though.”
“Sure.” She knelt in front of him, her hand on his knee. “Do you want me to get you a glass of water?”
“No, no, it’s nothing.” His heart felt like an oil-rig pump that had gone berserk, but he chose to ignore that. “You like Rachel, don’t you?” But Jolene didn’t need to answer. Rachel had taken Stephanie’s place in her life. His own parents lived in Connecticut, and Jolene had only seen them two or three times. Stephanie’s parents had divorced when she was young and she’d never had a good relationship with her father. Her mother had died within two years of Stephanie; she’d never recovered from the loss of her only child. So it’d always been just Bruce and his daughter. Except for Rachel…
“Dad, of course I like Rachel,” Jolene said. “You like her, too, don’t you?”
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.
“You’re not mad at her or anything?”
“No, no, everything’s…fine.”
The relief in his daughter’s eyes quickly turned to fear. “She’s not marrying Nate and moving to San Diego, is she?”
Not if I can help it, his mind shouted. With Jolene studying him intently, he shook his head and pretended nothing was amiss.
Together they made dinner. Jolene prepared a green salad while Bruce fixed tuna sandwiches. Dinnertime had been important to Stephanie. Because he knew this was something his wife would’ve wanted, Bruce had continued the practice of having dinner with Jolene every evening. While she described her day, he did his best to pay attention. During the summer she attended a church day camp, which she loved. She launched into a long, complicated story about a little play she was in, and he forced himself to nod and exclaim in the right places.
Summer bedtime was nine-thirty and Jolene went without an argument. He cleaned up the kitchen, then thought about going to bed himself, only he wasn’t tired. After washing a load of laundry and dumping it in the dryer, he cleaned the bathroom. This burst of nervous energy wasn’t a bad thing, he decided. Rare and surprising, perhaps, but nothing to be alarmed by.
Once in bed, he tossed and turned for another hour, then realized he wouldn’t sleep until he’d talked to Rachel again. Her phone rang four times before she answered.
“Hello.” Her voice was soft with sleep.
“It’s me,” he said, feeling a bit unnerved when he glanced at the clock on his nightstand and saw that it was after midnight.
“Bruce? Do you know what time it is?” She sounded more awake now—and annoyed.
“Sorry…”
“What’s wrong?”
“When we talked earlier,” he began, not knowing where to go from there.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“We were on the phone for over an hour.”
His announcement was met with silence, so he forged ahead. “There’s something happening between us, Rachel.”
She sighed, or it could have been a suppressed yawn. “No, there isn’t.”
“I’ve never talked to a woman for that long in my whole life.” He hesitated, then added, “Someone other than Stephanie, I mean.”
“You woke me out of a dead sleep to tell me that?” Now her voice was incredulous.
“Yes.”
“Bruce, listen, we’re friends. We’ve been friends for years. Friends talk.”
“I don’t chitchat on the phone,” he said forcefully. “I just don’t. I never have.”
“You’re making too much of this, okay? It’s not a big deal.”
“Jolene’s worried.” He said the next thing that came to mind.
“About you?”
“No,” he told her swiftly. “She’s worried about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. She’s afraid you’re going to marry Nate and leave.” He was worried, too, but he couldn’t tell Rachel that. He’d already revealed far too much of his confusion. His feelings for Rachel were changing—or perhaps he simply hadn’t recognized them for what they were.
“Bruce, Jolene and I have discussed this at length. If she mentions it to you again, tell her the person she needs to talk to is me.”
“What did you say to her?” he asked. They were talking about his daughter here and he had a right to know.
Rachel yawned before answering. “I promised her she’d always be part of my life.”
“So you’ve decided to marry Lover Boy, after all.”
“Would you stop it,” she chastised none too gently.
“Now I’m worried about Jolene,” he whispered. It felt like he was about to lose his best friend, and depression settled heavily on his shoulders. If Rachel did marry Nate, that was exactly what would happen. She’d move away and leave them both.
“Can I go back to sleep now?” she asked.
“I feel like talking,” he murmured, lying down again, the pillow nestling his head.
“Bruce, it’s almost one in the morning!”
“I know. But you’re awake now, aren’t you?”
“Yes, thanks to you. What would you like to talk about—other than Nate and me?”
“You want to go out for dinner on Saturday night? After shopping?”
“Bruce!”
“What?”
“I want to go back to sleep. That’s what I want to do.”
“Oh.”
“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”
Despite himself, he grinned. “Good night, Rachel.”
“Good night, Bruce,” she said pointedly.
He was smiling as he replaced the receiver—even though he didn’t have anything to smile about. Because Rachel might very well marry Nate Olsen, and then the emptiness she’d filled would be deeper than ever before.
Thirteen
Sitting with the other ladies at the HenryM.JacksonSeniorCenter, Charlotte Rhodes knitted with furious speed. Her friends chatted, but Charlotte’s mind was moving as fast as her hands.
“Charlotte,” Helen Shelton said. “You look like you’re a thousand miles away.”
“Oh…” she murmured with a start. She hadn’t been listening to her friends’ conversation, but the fact that they’d realized it was embarrassing. She smiled apologetically at Helen, who was a favorite of hers and another expert knitter. She was a widow, living in a lovely duplex on Poppy Lane
; the two women had much in common and spent many an afternoon knitting and exchanging stories.
But at the moment Charlotte was worrying about her son and his recent move to Cedar Cove. On the surface, Will’s decision to retire in Washington seemed logical, but knowing what she did, Charlotte had good reason to be suspicious.
“Bess asked if you’d check her knitting,” Helen said. “I can’t quite figure out what she’s done wrong.”
“Of course.” Charlotte set her own knitting aside and studied her friend’s half-finished sock. She’d discovered many an easy fix in sixty years of working with needles and yarn. When people came to her with knitting difficulties, her initial advice was always the same: Read the pattern. If the directions weren’t clear the first time, then read them again.
She glanced at the sock pattern, which had been passed around among the knitters and looked a little the worse for wear. She found Bess’s mistake quickly enough and repaired it, using a crochet hook to pick up a dropped stitch.
The ladies at this table were her dearest friends in the world, and yet Charlotte couldn’t divulge her troubles to them. That just wasn’t done by most women of her generation. Family problems stayed inside the family. They were not to be discussed with outsiders, and that included one’s very closest friends.
She envied Olivia and Grace their friendship. There wasn’t anything those two couldn’t and didn’t talk about. But Charlotte couldn’t share her disappointment in her oldest child with anyone other than her husband. Ben might not be Will’s father but he was part of her family now.
How could she tell her friends that her only son had a weak character? How could she reveal to these women that Will had dishonored his wedding vows? Not once, but repeatedly. His ex-wife, Georgia, had kept this a secret for as long as she could and then the poor girl couldn’t take it anymore. Charlotte didn’t blame her. If Clyde had been alive, she knew he’d be embarrassed and ashamed by Will’s behavior and would no doubt have a few things to say to his son. Maybe it was just as well that Clyde had gone on to his heavenly reward rather than suffer such disillusionment about his only son.
Ben was at home when she returned from the knitters’ group. He opened the front door as she approached the steps, taking them slowly and one at a time.
“You look like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he said, taking the bag from her hand and steering her into the house. Charlotte went automatically to the kitchen.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.
“If conversation goes along with that tea.”
Charlotte wasn’t sure she could talk; her throat felt like it was closing. Swallowing hard, she nodded because she needed to talk, needed to share the feelings that pressed on her so heavily.