Summer Beach Reads 5-Book Bundle: Beachcombers, Heat Wave, Moon Shell Beach, Summer House, Summer Breeze (55 page)

A solution. A job.

What she wanted to be, fortunately—and now, perhaps unfortunately—was just what she was. A stay-at-home mom with a big house and lots of friends. Growing up, she’d never had a dream career—lawyer, nurse, pilot, belly dancer—so it had been a continuing delightful surprise, each day, that completely by accident she’d achieved a life that seemed exactly right for her.

So, first, her father. Next—next, she would sit down with Vanessa and Maud and brainstorm ideas. They were bound to come up with something.

Vanessa Hutchinson and Maud Parsons were Carley’s two best friends on the island. On the planet, actually. Maud and Vanessa were best friends, too, and for some inexplicable reason, their trio worked. They’d met thirteen years ago, when Carley had just married Gus and moved to the island. Their husbands were fishing, sailing, and football-watching buddies, so they were thrown together a lot, part of a larger young married gang who spent New Year’s Eve together, and sailed to Coatue for an all-day Fourth of July picnic, and turned out to cheer the local high school football team, where once Gus had been linebacker and Toby quarterback.

Gus Winsted, Toby Hutchinson, and John Parsons had been born on the island and had grown up here. Gus’s best friend, Wyatt, was another island man who attended the picnics or football game parties, but he was single. Each time he brought a different knockout girlfriend who caused the three husbands to stare, suck in their guts, and straighten their shoulders.

“Hey!” Vanessa would snap. “Down, boys!”

“Yeah, you
pillars of the community
,” Maud would chip in.

Then the three women would exchange glances sparked with mirth and mischief, because all three women secretly agreed that Wyatt Anderson was center-of-the-sun
hot
. When he came around, they stared at him as much as their husbands did at his dates. Wyatt had wavy brown hair and truly green eyes and no insidious flab creeping over his belt buckle. He was relaxed and good-natured, unlike their husbands, who were always stressed-out and cranky, or at least so it seemed. John Parsons taught English in the high school and worried constantly about not making enough money, and Toby was the local pediatrician. He didn’t worry about money, but he was always overwhelmed and hopeless at home.

Carley, Maud, and Vanessa loved their husbands, but as the years passed, they were just naturally drawn into their own little trio by the need to discuss female matters. At least that was why, they
explained to their husbands, they spent so much time on the phone with one another.
Yeast infections
, they’d murmur, or
PMS
, and their husbands would scurry away as if they had the flu. The three women served on many of the same committees, too, but really what bonded them was a similar sense of humor, a love of the sting of sarcasm, and a general sense that everyone should just
relax
. When cornered at a cocktail party by Beth Boxer, one of their extended group by virtue of her husband, and a savagely gossip-mongering little rat terrier of a woman, they would look at each other with deadpan faces and slowly twitch the left eyelid, their signal for “Get Me Out of Here.” Later, they would collapse with laughter and clever Maud would do an eerily perfect impersonation.

Maud was petite and Audrey Hepburn pretty. Carley was lanky, brown-haired, and athletic. Vanessa was tall, voluptuous, and raven-haired. So they weren’t like peas in a pod. They weren’t like anything, really. They weren’t rebels, they were just young wives and mothers who shared a sense of humor, and that got them through some pretty hard times. And through some funny times, too.

Six years ago in January, the town was hit with a flu epidemic at the same time a gale force wind blasted a blizzard across the island, dropping mountains of snow, toppling trees across driveways, tossing the huge ferries in the harbor around like toys in a bathtub. This was the side of Nantucket life the tourists never knew about and it wasn’t pretty. The DPW wasn’t prepared for snow removal of this magnitude because it so seldom snowed with such fury on the island. Roads were blocked. Shops were closed. Schools were closed. Worse, the ferries carrying the necessities of life—fresh milk, bread, orange juice, cough medicine—couldn’t make it over from the Cape because of the wind. People shared their baby aspirin and ginger ale as if it were gold.

When the front finally passed and the sun came out, life returned to normal. The children, over their flu, went skipping energetically back to school and the husbands shaved off their caveman bristles, took much-needed showers, and went back to work.

Carley could never remember who it was who made the first phone call. Probably Maud; she was the most imaginative. She suggested they fly to the Cape for the day, to shop, see a movie, have a girls’-night-out dinner, and fly home on the last plane. Carley asked her mother-in-law to have her daughters and Gus over for dinner, and Annabel was delighted. Margaret was only a little over one then, but she’d spent a lot of time with her grandparents and loved being in their home. Everyone would be fine for one day without Carley.

It was a brilliant escape from reality. They shopped like women just set free from a sensory-deprivation tank, shrieking with joy over the January sales and discovering the pretty young women they still were under all their practical L.L. Bean fleece. When they finally settled around the table at the Mexican restaurant, their arms, necks, and ears jangling with new, totally unnecessary jewelry, they ordered the most extravagantly unusual margaritas on the menu.

“Oh my gosh!” Maud stretched her arms above her head. “I feel like I’ve just been let out of prison. Carley, you have two kids, too, but you have
girls
. Believe me, little boys are different. Manic. Little animals. Sometimes I watch them run through the house bellowing and the entire history of the world comes clear before me.”

Carley snorted. “Cisco and Margaret were easy, I guess, even though they were both so sick. It was Gus who was driving me crazy. We
all
had the flu, but with Gus it was like the last act of
Romeo and Juliet.
”

For years, Vanessa had been trying to get pregnant, and it hadn’t happened—or as Vanessa always insisted optimistically, it hadn’t happened
yet
. Still, she waved her hand. “No, no, you haven’t seen sick until you’ve seen
the doctor
sick. True, Toby worked at his office all day, and true, he did have the flu, but he so seldom gets sick, he acted as if he had cholera. The coughing, the sneezing, the whining—I’d bet good money he didn’t do that at the office. And could he ever ask for two things at the same time? No. First, could I bring him tissues. Then a blanket, because he had to languish on the sofa, watching TV. Then a whiskey, mixed with the scientifically
precise amount of soda water. Then some crackers. No, not the wheat thins. Just plain saltines. Then—”

Carley and Maud were laughing with Vanessa, sipping their drinks, eyeing their jewelry, when they suddenly became aware of a man standing in front of their table. He was wildly handsome in a Ricky Martin way, wearing a satin shirt unbuttoned for full exposure of his own fine gold chains, and he was young. They were around twenty-six. He was probably twenty-one. His skin was like honey, his lips full, his dark eyes deep with sexual promise.

He swept his thick-ebony-lashed eyes across the three of them. He said,
“¡Hola!”

The three women stopped laughing. For a long moment they just stared, lips clinging to their margarita glasses.

Vanessa, who spoke some Spanish, replied,
“¡Hola!”

At this, the Ricky Martin clone leaned toward them, and putting his hands on the table, unrolled a series of silken Spanish words toward them with such speed not even Vanessa could understand him.

“¿Perdón?”
Vanessa asked.

And then the spell was broken by the arrival of their waiter, not nearly as handsome as Ricky Martin. In rapid-fire Spanish, with many gestures, the waiter made it clear that the young man was bothering the ladies and should leave them alone
pronto
.

Ricky Martin shrugged sadly, and walked away, turning only to say,
“Las tres enchiladas.”

“What?” Maud demanded of Vanessa. “What did he say?”

“It sounded like he called us enchiladas,” Vanessa told her.

“Yeah,” Carley agreed. “I heard that, too.
Las tres enchiladas
. Why would he call us enchiladas?”

“Well, obviously, he
didn’t
call us enchiladas,” Maud said. “He must have said something that
sounded
like enchiladas.”

Carley suggested hopefully, “Maybe in Spanish
enchilada
is a compliment. Like in French they call someone
ma petite choufleur.
”

“I don’t think so,” Vanessa dryly disagreed.

“Well, I’m going to buy a Spanish dictionary!” Maud decided.
“I’m going to go through every word that sounds like enchilada until I find one that he might have meant.”

“Girl,” Carley teased, “you are desperate for a compliment.”

After that night, they called themselves Las Tres Enchiladas. When people asked them why, they said it was too complicated to explain, which made people like Beth Boxer, the gossip of their married group, suspect all sorts of erotic misbehavior. That made it all the sweeter. Really, the word sparked a touchstone in their spirits, reminding them vividly, for just a moment, of that evening of freedom and lighthearted camaraderie. It brought back the jangling jewelry, the silken non-mommy clothes, the salty margaritas, and the hooded-eyed young man.

It was good for them to have a tight little clique in those days because shortly after that night, Maud’s husband John left her for a much younger woman. He moved to California, never called his sons, and was systematically late with child support checks.

Maud struggled along financially, writing children’s books. She illustrated her books, too; she was very talented. Her
Flip and Bob
books, about two harbor seals (brothers, like Maud’s sons) and their adventures in the waters around Nantucket, became popular, bringing in the income Maud truly needed.

Maud had wanted daughters. She’d dreamed of having three little girls she could dress in identical white dresses with blue sashes. Instead, she had her two boisterous, energetic, noisy boys, named Spenser and Percy by her English-teacher ex-husband. After John left her, Maud often called Carley and Vanessa in a panic; her two sons were accident-prone, or perhaps, Carley thought, they were just normal. Carley drove Maud and the boys to the emergency room when Spenser fell out of a tree and broke his arm. When Percy stuck his soggy chewing gum in his older brother’s hair Vanessa drove over to help Maud cut it out because Maud couldn’t get Spenser to calm down and sit still.

And when Carley’s husband died, Maud and Vanessa had been her rock, her parachute, her safety net, her emotional 911. Carley didn’t know how she’d have survived without them.

Tomorrow morning Vanessa was coming over to help Carley make several dozen cookies for the bake sale Margaret’s kindergarten class was running to raise money for a trip to Boston. Carley would talk things over with Vanessa then, and make plans to see Maud, too.

Perhaps Carley could start a bake shop? She loved to bake. But there were already too many good bakeries on the island. Was there something she could sell on eBay? Should she take a course online? What kind of course? The wind whipped the waves up so that they crashed down on the sand in a relentless roar. The low winter sun sparkled on the water, sending shards of light into her eyes. She couldn’t think. She needed help. She’d be tired enough when she got home to be calm around her girls, and tomorrow she would begin again.

• • • • •

Saturday morning, Carley whipped her hair back into a high ponytail and slid her feet into flip-flops. She went down the back stairs. Sounds led her to the den, where Cisco and Margaret sat side by side on the sofa, munching cereal out of the box and staring at the television set. They were not supposed to watch television in the morning, but since their father’s death, Carley had relaxed the rules. Cisco and Margaret seemed normal now, after the first crushing weeks of sorrow and shock. And that was what mattered, that her girls were healthy and happy.

“TV,” Carley said, disapproval in her voice.

“It’s not TV,” Cisco argued sweetly, tossing her mother a glowing smile. “It’s
Swan Lake.
”

Carley couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re going to grow up to be a lawyer.”

“Just like Daddy and Granddad!” Margaret squealed. “I am, too!” She’d seen the DVD of the ballet before and didn’t really care about it, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be with her sister.

And
there
! Carley thought, her heart lifting. Margaret mentioned her father without sadness, without crying. She was
healing
. They all were. She gave herself a moment to soak in the glory of her daughters. Their black hair, ebony eyes, and snowflake skin, direct genetic echoes of their father, gave them a fairy-tale-princess aura.
Like their mother, they were tall and lanky, which sometimes made them clumsy. As adults, they would be stunners.

She tore her eyes away. “I’m making coffee. Vanessa will be here soon.”

While she drank her coffee and ate her granola, she flipped on the computer and scanned the newest recipes for cookies. She loved cooking and baking, loved experimenting with unusual ingredients. The kitchen was at the front of the house, facing the street, giving the long living room and den the fabulous blue views of the waters of Nantucket Sound. She’d see Vanessa’s SUV when she arrived.

Carley was sipping her second cup of coffee as Vanessa parked her car, lifted out a bag of groceries, and came up the walk.

No doubt about it: Vanessa was gorgeous. A sex bomb. Carley and Vanessa were the same age and the same height, but Vanessa’s figure was voluptuous while Carley was wide-shouldered, small-breasted, and angular. Carley’s hair was a glossy brown, manageable, no bother, but Vanessa had wavy black hair that bounced and tossed around her face in sensual curls as rounded as her body. Men always did a double take when Vanessa walked into a room.