Return to the Beach House (12 page)

“Just like that, ten seconds—actually less, according to some witnesses—and her life was over. For a long time, I thought mine was too. Our youngest daughter, Caroline, was in the car, but in one of those ironic moments that make you believe in destiny, she managed to escape with only minor injuries. Even the bruises were gone in a matter of weeks. The rest wasn’t so easy—she was affected mentally for a couple of years. Dangerously so. She and her mother had been arguing about a sleepover she wanted to go to, and the last thing she said before the accident was something hateful.”

“How is she now?”

“Married with a couple of kids of her own. She says she’s fine, but every once in a while, mostly during the holidays, I see that same lost look she had after the accident. It’s pretty obvious, at least to me, where she’s gone and what she’s thinking.”

“How many kids do you have?”

“Three. All girls.”

“Were they home when Caroline was having problems?”

“The oldest, Karla, was in her final year at Stanford, and Sidney was just finishing her freshman year at UCLA.”

“Did they come home?”

“For a semester, and then I insisted they go back to school. They were great about spending weekends with their sister, but she needed someone available to her full-time. So I sold my car dealerships in the Bay Area and brought Caroline down here with me. We moved into what had been our family vacation home, and I put her to work helping me remodel. It was the smartest thing I could have done. She needed to get away from the everyday reminders of home and from the friends who’d stopped calling. Most of all, I had to convince her that what happened wasn’t her fault.”

“How long ago was this?” Alison asked.

“Ten years last August.”

“And now you’re a grandpa.”

“Times five. I’m still waiting on Sidney. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long wait.”

“Career?”

“She works for Apple in their design division and lives, eats, and breathes her job. She loves what she does so much we damn near have to kidnap her to get her to come home for the holidays.”

“And Tanner Motors? How did that come about?”

“Boredom.”

Alison knew little about car dealerships, but she did know there was a lot more money selling new models. “Why used cars?”

“I didn’t want the headaches that come with new-car dealerships, especially the high-end kind that I’d owned before. Then when the economy took a nosedive and people started losing their jobs and then their homes, I figured it was time I did something to help out where I could.”

“Which is why you handle the safe, affordable cars.”

He put his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. “With a couple of exceptions.”

“The Mustang being one?”

He nodded. “It’s gone, by the way. Sold it to the family of a guy who spent his high school and what should have been his college years working the fields in Salinas to help put his brothers and sisters through school. It was a present from his family to celebrate the youngest sister’s graduation from medical school.”

“What a great gift.”

“The best part is that it’s his turn to go to school now. He needed the car for transportation, and his siblings felt it was time he had something that wasn’t held together with duct tape.”

“You’re a nice man,” Alison said.

He frowned. “What brought that on?”

She ignored his question and asked one of her own. “How big a loss did you take on the car?”

He stood and brought her up with him. “I wound up a whole lot richer at the end of that transaction than when I went in. I wish you could have seen the look on Francisco’s face when his family showed up on the lot and his brother handed him the key.”

“Like I said, you’re a nice man.” She came up on her toes and kissed him. She liked that he was the first man since Dennis who’d let her initiate the first kiss between them. Most of all, she liked the way kissing him made her feel, especially when he got over the shock and kissed her back. His lips were soft and yielding as the kiss deepened. Desires she thought she would never feel again spread through her midsection with a sweet ache of longing.

Dennis cupped her face with his hands. “Before this goes where I want it to go, we have unfinished business.”

At first she didn’t understand what he meant, and then it hit her. “Here or back at the house?”

“Doesn’t matter. The elephant is going to follow us until we set it free.”

“I could use a cup of coffee.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and started back, following their footprints, creating a path just wide enough for them to travel together.

Two hours and a pot of coffee later, Kyle said, “It’s hard to let go and rebuild your life when you’re not allowed to move past your grief in private.”

Alison saw an understanding and compassion in his eyes that she’d received from no one else. “I hung on too long, and now I don’t know how to let go.”

“Sure you do.” He took her hand, slowly opened her clinched fingers, and kissed each one, ending with her palm.

She caught her breath, torn between wanting him and terrified at the thought of leaving the imperfect world that had sustained her for the last decade. How could she walk away from the only shelter she knew?

God, she was such a coward.

Chapter 10

Alison tossed Christopher a head of lettuce. He dropped it. “Good thing it’s wrapped in cellophane,” she said as he dove to retrieve it from under the table.

He unwrapped the lettuce, broke it in two, and put the smaller piece under the faucet. “How hungry are you?”

“What you’ve got there will do.” She put on an oven mitt and checked the salmon. “Five more minutes.”

“I thought you told me a couple of days ago that you were going out for dinner.”

“I postponed it until tomorrow. I told Kyle I wanted to spend some time with you tonight. We haven’t had a chance to really talk since you got here, and I wanted to catch up.” She poured two glasses of water and put them on the table.

“You didn’t have to do that. It’s not every day you get asked out on a date,” he teased. “As a matter of fact, I can’t seem to remember you ever being asked out.”

“How could you forget Charles?” Her friend Linda had fixed her up with a man she said she was willing to bet her $14,000 Manolo Blahnik alligator boots would be the one to get Alison back into the dating scene again. Since Alison didn’t wear anything that had to die to satisfy fashion, Linda had always known her boots were safe. Instead, when it turned out that everything about Charles was a lie, from his alma mater to his hairline, Alison insisted Linda make a donation to Planned Parenthood.

“You count him?”

“Not willingly—only to make a point.” She checked the salmon again, this time with a fork. She was after crisp on the outside and still pink and moist in the middle, which was sometimes a matter of seconds. “Besides, I know I didn’t have to stay home with you. I wanted to. Wasn’t that supposed to be one of the reasons for this trip? So we could spend some time together before you take off for school?”

Christopher tore the lettuce into bite-size pieces, added the tomato, green onions, carrots, and celery he’d been cutting, topped it with croutons, dressed it, and put the bowl on the table. “It’s not like I’m leaving as soon as we get back.”

“And it’s not like I’m trying to guilt you into spending time with me now.” She reached up to brush a strand of hair off his forehead and then gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I happen to enjoy your company.”

He leaned his hip into the counter and took a bite of lettuce. “Oh yeah? Seems to me you’re spending a lot of time with this car guy.”

“His name is Kyle Tanner. You’re too young to have this much trouble remembering someone’s name.”

“Okay, so what’s up with you and this Kyle Tanner guy?”

“I like him.” She purposely busied herself getting the salmon out of the oven, but managed a glance to see how he’d reacted to her statement. “He’s fun to be around.”

“ ‘Like’ as in, ‘he’s a great guy who gave me a good deal on a car,’ or ‘I can’t wait to get my hands on his hot body’?”

“Oh,
definitely
the last one.” She could feel herself blushing and knew if she didn’t do something to discourage him, Christopher would be all over her with questions. She nudged him out of the way with her elbow. “You know I always go for the ones with the hot bodies.”

“Oh my God, Grams. You really do like this guy. When did this happen? You’ve only seen him a couple of times.”

“It’s been more than a couple,” she admitted.

“How many?”

“Nearly every day since I bought the truck.”

“Whoa—what’s up with that?”

“Like I said, he’s a nice guy. And only one of those times was a real date.” She pulled the baked potatoes and salmon out of the oven and put the larger piece of fish on Christopher’s plate. “Enough about me. Is surfing as much fun as you thought it would be?”

He held her chair, a nearly extinct social mannerism that he’d been taught by his mother, then sat down at the opposite side of the table. “I’ll tell you in a minute, but first I want to know more about Kyle Tanner.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t know everything. Just some of the important stuff.”

“Why are you making me drag this out of you?”

“Because it’s fun.”

“Not for me.”

She relented. “Kyle is two years older than I am. He has three daughters and five granddaughters. His wife died in an automobile accident over ten years ago, and he hasn’t had a serious relationship since—mainly because he’s been too busy taking care of his family. He lives in Carmel. His house is bigger than a cottage but smaller than this one. It has an uninterrupted view of the ocean. Which, I have a feeling, pushes it up a couple hundred thousand dollars in this real estate market.” She sliced open her potato and added sour cream and chives.

“I’m only telling you that to let you know he’s comfortably situated and can take care of himself,” she added.

“Hmmm . . . ‘comfortably situated.’ Kind of a stuffy term, don’t you think?”

“Eat your salmon.” She took a bite of salad. “Now let’s get back to the surfing.”

“Not yet. I think I should know what you were doing at his house.”

“We stopped by—” She realized he was teasing her. “He’s just a friend, Christopher. Who also happens to be a lot of fun to be around.”

“Have you kissed him yet?”

Her only answer was an immediate flush that spread from her neck to her cheeks—the second time she’d blushed in less than ten minutes.

“You
have.
I guess that means I’m going to have to give you the social diseases lecture.”

She couldn’t look at him. “I think I have it covered.”

Christopher sat back in his chair and stared at her. Suddenly serious, he said, “Too bad he lives here.”

Not until that moment did she realize that he was worried about her being alone when he left for school. Not just the surface things, like who would climb up in the rafters in the garage to get the holiday decorations down, but the important ones, like who would she share her day with over dinner. Her heart swelled with sympathy. She’d spent far too much time worrying about herself and what Nora’s marriage and Christopher’s leaving would mean and hadn’t stopped to think how worried they might be about her.

“I’ll be fine, Christopher.”

“I know you will.” He picked off a crispy corner of the salmon with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. “This is better than what we get at home.”

“I don’t know about better, but it’s different.”

“It’s okay, you know.”

“What?”

“That something might be better here. There are lots of things we have at home that are different than California. And that’s okay too. It’s not like this is some big competition. Not being the same is okay.”

“Sounds like you’ve been giving this some thought. Any particular reason?”

“I want to travel and meet new people and see how they live—how they think.”

“You travel now. You’ve been to almost every state on the East Coast.”

“To compete. It’s like being in a bubble that just floats from one location to another, carrying the same people with the same interests with the same background from place to place. You could drop me in the middle of Lexington and I’d swear I’d never been there. And how many times have I competed at the Kentucky Horse Park?”

“What about school?” she asked, afraid of his answer.

He ignored her question. “How did my dad wind up at Penn State? Was it because that’s where Grandpa went?”

Alison got up and poured herself a glass of wine from the bottle she’d opened the night before. “Where did that come from?”

Christopher sat back in his chair and put his napkin on the table. “I wonder all the time whether I’m this clone of my father and grandfather because it’s what you and Mom want me to be, or if it’s really true. There has to be something different about me. There has to be some small part of me that’s just me, a part that would be me no matter who my relatives were.”

Alison didn’t know how to answer him. How could she admit she purposely looked for Peter and Dennis in Christopher as a way to convince herself that the essence of her husband and son hadn’t really died? Maybe it had been understandable and even forgivable in the beginning, but how had she let it go on for over thirteen years?