Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

“Eight thirty,” Laurel said.

Eight thirty already? JP, being reliable and prompt, had come to collect Angie for her archery lesson. But now that Joel was here, Angie didn’t want to go. She didn’t need to go. She didn’t have to prove anything to herself or anyone else. Joel had shown up. She, Angela Thorpe, was desired; she was loved.

Oh, how she wanted Laurel to go downstairs and break the bad news to JP, but that was unfair. Angie would do it.

She hurried down the stairs in her bare feet and squinted at the burst of sunlight pouring in through the front door. JP stood respectfully outside, wearing his visor and Blues Brothers sunglasses, grinning.

“Look at you, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “Get your shoes on. I have coffee for you at my cottage.”

Angie smiled ruefully. She felt awful about this. If Joel hadn’t shown up, she would have been happy and grateful to have gone with JP. It would have made the sad day in front of her bearable.

“I’m going to have to take a rain check,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. He took his sunglasses off so that he could study her. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything is great,” she said. She lowered her voice. “My boyfriend, Joel? The one I told you about? He showed up last night. He’s upstairs.”

JP’s face fell into an expression halfway between dejection and skepticism.

“I didn’t know he was coming,” Angie said. “He literally just appeared.” Then she said, “I can’t believe I just used the word ‘literally.’”

“Okay,” JP said. He didn’t bother hiding his frown, and Angie wondered what exactly he was unhappy about. Angie had wasted his time, making him come out here from Coatue, but only twenty minutes at the most. Maybe he didn’t approve because Joel was still married. Or maybe… maybe JP had been looking forward to spending time with Angie. She sort of thought this last thing was it, and she felt really bad, but she hadn’t lied to JP-and she certainly hadn’t made him any promises.

She said, “I’m sorry you had to come all the way out here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” JP said. “I’ll see you tonight on the boat.”

“Right,” Angie said. She wondered if Joel would want to come out with her family to spread the ashes. She wondered if her mother or Laurel or Scarlett would have a problem if he did. While she was thinking about this, JP turned and walked down the driveway to his Jeep. Angie wasn’t sure why, but she followed him.

“Listen, JP, I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel terrible. Honestly, I forgot you were coming this morning.”

JP laughed. “This guy must be pretty terrific if you forgot about your shooting lesson,” he said. He gave her a genuine smile. “I’m glad he showed up. You deserve to be someone’s everything, Angie.”

For some reason, tears pricked Angie’s eyes. “I was someone’s everything,” she said. “But he’s dead now.”

JP reached out and wiped away the tear that fell. Then he climbed into his Jeep, started the ignition, and gave her a wave as he backed out of the driveway.

“Wait!” Angie shouted. She waved her arms for him to come back. She would get her shoes on; she would go with JP, strap on the bow, nock an arrow, line up the pin, and-whoosh!-hit the target.

But JP didn’t see or hear her. He took off down the road, and after he was out of sight, Angie turned around and made her way back to the house.

Joel was sitting up in bed. The window shade had been raised.

“Who was that?” Joel said.

“Who?” Angie said.

“Um… the guy in the Jeep in the driveway? The guy you chased? The guy who touched your face? Who was that guy?”

“That was JP,” Angie said. “He’s the ranger out at Coatue.”

“‘The ranger out at Coatue’?” Joel said. “Am I supposed to understand what that means?”

“No,” Angie said. “You’re not. I’m sorry.”

“Are you hiding something from me?” Joel said.

“No,” Angie said. On the one hand, she wanted to tell Joel all about JP: He spends the summer in a shack out on a deserted stretch of beach, he gets up at dawn and fly-fishes on Coskata Pond, he goes clamming and scalloping, he makes a mean Concord grape jam, he reports shark sightings, he rescues sunburned tourists whose Jeeps are stuck in the sand. He’s a bow hunter, and he’s teaching me to shoot. But on the other hand, Angie wanted to keep JP to herself. “He’s a friend. A friend of mine.”

His morning dreams were about pizza. He was awake enough to know he was dreaming, awake enough to remember that he hadn’t really slept because he had spent most of the night making love to Laurel Thorpe, awake enough to feel Laurel rise from bed and to think, No, please, don’t go anywhere, awake enough to see the promise of morning sunshine-another beautiful day, living the life on Nantucket-and yet, he was also still asleep and dreaming of pizza.

He had been born and raised in New York City, so to him, the only real kind of pizza was pizza with a very thin, crispy crust, tomato sauce, and loads of gooey mozzarella cheese. Buck had to have his cheese gooey; he lived for pulling the strings and winding them around the tip of the triangle before popping it into his mouth. Deacon had liked his pizza well done, hard and a little brittle, which was not a preference Buck was ever able to understand. When they went out for pizza-maybe two or three hundred times over thirty years-they each got their own pie, because two men so particular and opposite about their cheese could never share. Buck was a purist about toppings-pepperoni only. Deacon would throw on anything-meatballs, onion and mushrooms; olives, green pepper, sausage. Deacon accepted white pizza as pizza, which Buck did not. Deacon would eat square Neapolitan slices and the “tomato pie” that people from Philadelphia called pizza, which Buck did not.

In Buck’s dream, he and Deacon were at Ray’s on St. Mark’s Place, and there was one pie in front of them, with gooey cheese. Buck looked up at Deacon, who was smoking a cigarette, and said, “Are you actually going to eat this?” And Deacon said, “No, man, I’m out.” He crushed the cigarette in the crappy black, plastic ashtray, stood up, and walked out the door of Ray’s with a jingle. Buck wanted to follow him, but in the weird way of dreams, he couldn’t follow. Something kept him from rising from his chair. He stared at the pizza for a moment; then he reached for a piece and wound the mozzarella strings around the tip and stuck it in his mouth.

Buck woke up just as Laurel was climbing back into bed. She had shed her bathrobe and was deliciously naked.

“I heard someone at the front door,” she said. “It was JP. He was looking for Angie, I guess.”

Buck collected Laurel in his arms. There had been a couple of times the night before when he had experienced pangs of guilt about making love to his best friend’s ex-wife. Buck wondered if this most recent dream was meant to put his mind at ease. Deacon had left; Buck couldn’t go with him. Buck should stay and live on, live as fully and happily as he could. That was what Deacon would have wanted him to do. If Buck was wrong and Deacon didn’t want that… oh, well. Buck kissed Laurel’s shoulder.

Laurel wanted to sleep a little longer, so Buck slipped down the stairs by himself to make coffee. The rest of the house was quiet-nobody could have been too enthusiastic about having another scene like the one last night; therefore, Buck was startled to find the coffee already made and Scarlett, wrapped up in a red kimono with a white stork embroidered on the back, sitting out on the back deck. She looked at peace as she took in the view-fog was just lifting off the moors-and Buck thought he’d better leave her be.

But then he realized that this was his chance.

He stepped out onto the deck. Scarlett turned, saw it was him, and gave him a small, relieved smile.

“Mind if I sit?” he asked.

She held out a showcase hand, indicating the seat next to hers.

Buck took a moment to sip his coffee. He wanted to cultivate the right tone of voice for this conversation-comforting but not indulgent.

“Scarlett,” he said, “I need to talk to you about a few things.”

She arched her eyebrows but did not speak. This was sort of like communicating with a mime.

“I’ve sifted through Deacon’s affairs,” Buck said. “The first thing you need to know is that in his will, Deacon left a third of this house to you, a third to Belinda, and a third to Laurel.”

Scarlett didn’t move, didn’t speak. Dread gathered in Buck’s gut. Did she understand?

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he asked.

Scarlett nodded.

“Now, that’s a moot point, because this house is going into foreclosure at the beginning of next month.” He checked his watch. “Eleven days from now. Deacon had three mortgages on it, and he’d let them all slide since January. At the end of December, he had an investor pull out of the restaurant-your uncle, as it happens-and Deacon replaced your uncle’s money with a million dollars from his brokerage account. He owes over four hundred thousand dollars on this house, and the estate just doesn’t have it. The estate doesn’t have much of anything, other than a one-sixth interest in the Board Room. And he left a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy that listed you and Ellery as the beneficiaries. That quarter million is yours. It should be enough to get you through until you figure out something else.” Buck stopped and reminded himself to breathe. He had done it. He had told her. Suddenly, he perked up. “I saw the canceled check made out to Skinny4Life. Is that something he invested in that might pay off?”

“No,” Scarlett said. “The company folded. All I ended up with was one of the huge suitcases I brought with me, filled with product.”

Buck closed his eyes. The last hope popped like a soap bubble.

Scarlett pivoted in her chair to face him, adjusting the kimono around her legs. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted crimson. Red was her signature color-Buck understood this-but it always put him on edge. “I trapped him, Buck.”

“He believed in you,” Buck said. “He wanted you to find a career that would make you happy.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Scarlett said. “I mean, back in the beginning.”

Buck waited. He wasn’t sure which beginning she was talking about.

“We’d been engaged for a while,” Scarlett said. “But when he started working on the restaurant, when he got all the investors in place, I felt him slipping away from me. He was going to break the engagement, I could tell. And I loved him so much. I had wanted him for so long. I had a terrific crush on him the entire time I worked for him and Belinda. He was so talented, so funny, so… irreverent. And sexy, with the tattoos and the brooding looks on the one hand, and the sweet daddy persona on the other. I used to catch him looking at me, and I wondered if there was any way I could steal him from Belinda. From Belinda Rowe, whom I had grown up idolizing. You can’t imagine what a rush it was to fantasize that I could have what she had, that I could, in a way, become her. I had to keep him. And so… I threw my diaphragm in the trash. I got intentionally accidentally pregnant.”

“Oh,” Buck said.

“And he stayed.”

“Of course he stayed,” Buck said. “He loved you.”

“Did he?”

“Yes,” Buck said.

“He told me about the girl at the gentlemen’s club, and he said he was going to stop drinking and stop the drugs, and I told him I didn’t believe him. I told him it was too little, too late, and that he’d lost me and it was his own fault. I knew he was mad that Uncle Cal pulled his money out, and I knew he thought it was because Bo Tanner and I were having an affair and my uncle knew about it and didn’t want to keep his money in Deacon’s pockets. But I didn’t realize that Deacon had replaced my uncle’s money with his own money. He told me he found another investor, someone who shared his vision.”

“Were you?” Buck asked. “Having an affair with Bo Tanner? Are you?”

Scarlett shrugged, and the kimono slipped to reveal her shoulder. Was that supposed to be an answer or a distraction tactic?

“It’s so obvious in retrospect!” she said. “Deacon became obsessed, all of a sudden, with writing his cookbook, but it wasn’t going well. You would have thought he was working on some insane deadline. He was pulling his hair out about it, losing sleep, telling the same story over and over again about how he nearly failed English in high school, but somehow he passed, somehow he squeaked by. And then this woman at my gym approached me with the Skinny4Life proposal, and I thought, Deacon is never going to go for it. But when I brought it up, he jumped on it. He invested a hundred thousand in January, thinking we would have double or triple that by the end of June. But that failed. Like everything else I’ve tried.”