The Beach House (2 page)

He returned her smile. “Julia Grace Huntington . . . it has a nice ring to it.”

She'd been around a lot of men since Ken's death, had even had several come on to her in the past couple of months, but this was the first time she'd felt anything close to a response. The feeling was so unexpected, she didn't know what to think. “Thanks for fixing the water.” She moved back into the living room. “When I see Andrew again, I'll be sure and tell him that you kept your part of the bargain.”

“I didn't fix anything. Shutting the water off was a temporary solution. You still need—”

“I know—a plumber. I'll call one first thing in the morning.” She could see that he was aware he was being dismissed but that he didn't understand why. How could he know the effect he'd had on her when he'd done nothing to precipitate it? She held the door for him. “You should get back to your dinner while it's still salvageable.”

He stood on the small brick landing, his hands propped on the door frame. “Why don't you join me? I always make too much.”

“I'm not hungry,” she said, dismissing his invitation. “I already ate.” That was every bit as bad. She sounded like the homecoming queen turning down a date with the fourth-string quarterback. She might as well have told him she had to wash her hair. “I appreciate the offer, Eric. Maybe another time.”

He didn't say anything right away, just looked deeply into her eyes. And then, softly and with a depth of understanding that left him exposed, he said, “It's hard, isn't it?”

The question caught her off guard. “What?”

“Learning to live again.”

He was a stranger, someone she would likely see once, maybe twice, more in the time she was there and then never again. There would be no long-term consequences to revealing the feelings she'd kept hidden from even her closest friends. The answer created a lump in her throat. “Almost too hard sometimes.”

“It gets better.”

“When?”

“First it's only five or ten minutes at a time, and then it's whole days.”

“Did your wife die?”

“No, she found someone else before I learned how to stop loving her.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. But I'm past it now.”

“Really?”

“Maybe not completely. I'm still working on the guilt thing. But I think I've just about got that licked, too.”

“Is the offer for dinner still open?” she asked impulsively.

The question brought a smile. “You don't even have to help with the dishes.”

“Give me a couple of minutes to unload the car and change out of these clothes.”

“I hope you like eel.”

She was too surprised to hide her reaction. “Eel?”

He laughed. “Sorry, I couldn't resist. Actually it's just plain old spaghetti.”

“I don't know. . . .” At one time she'd been capable of giving as good as she got; it had just been a long time since anyone had allowed her the opportunity. “I'm not sure I can trust you now. Maybe I should send out for something.”

He started down the walkway toward his house. “Make it a sausage-and-pepperoni pizza and you're on.”

“You're not even going to try to talk me into tasting your spaghetti?”

“I'm easy, Julia—didn't used to be, but I've learned.”

“I wish you'd tell me how you did it,” she said, not realizing how much she was unwittingly revealing about herself until the words were out.

He turned and walked backward as he talked to her. “I don't know if I could, but I'd be willing to try.”

Chapter 2

Julia waited until Eric was inside his house before she took her suitcase out of the car and went inside to change. She started to put on a pair of linen slacks and then discarded them in favor of chinos and a knit top. It wasn't a date she'd agreed to, simply a shared meal.

On impulse, as she passed through the garden, she stopped to pick a bouquet. During the desolate eight months a timer had kept the small lawn watered and a gardener had come by to mow, but no one had tended the flowers. The bleeding hearts, foxglove, cosmos, plume poppy, and alumroot had long ago spilled from their tidy beds, collapsing from the weight of their flowers onto the brick walkways.

After picking only a few blooms from each plant, she presented the colorful assortment to Eric as he opened the door.

“For me?” He seemed genuinely surprised at the casual offering. “This is a first.”

“No one has ever given you flowers?” She'd always sent them to Ken, everything from single roses to wildly extravagant arrangements.

“Friends sent plants when I started my practice, but nothing that bloomed.”

She followed him into the kitchen, where he took a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water. “It smells wonderful in here,” she said. Her stomach growled in anticipation.

“It's amazing what you can put together with cans and packages.” He put the bouquet in the glass and the glass on the table, letting the flowers arrange themselves. The effect was in keeping with the casual dishes, paper napkins, and multicolored candles already there.

“What can I do to help?” Julia asked when he went back to the stove to stir the sauce. Over the years she'd been in Andrew's kitchen a hundred times and felt almost as comfortable in it as she did in her own.

“The garlic bread should be ready.” He handed her an oven mitt. “There's a knife in the drawer by the sink.”

They worked together, completing the meal in an easy, companionable silence, as if they were old friends who'd shared the ritual a dozen times before. When everything was on the table, Eric poured the wine, lit the candles, and held Julia's chair.

“Thank you,” she said, sliding into place.

When he was seated across from her, he held his glass up in a toast. “To broken faucets and new friendships.”

She touched her glass to his. “And successful publishing ventures.”

His thick eyebrows, several shades darker than his hair, drew together in a questioning look. “How did you know?”

“It was simple deduction, Dr. Lawson. I asked myself what a physician on hiatus would be doing with a computer and desk in the middle of the living room.”

“And from that you concluded I was writing a book?”

“That . . .” She smiled and reached for something on the counter behind him. Holding it up, she added, “And this—
Ten Steps to Writing the Best-Selling Novel
.”

“You had me there for a minute.”

She put the book back. “Have you always wanted to write?”

“Since I was in high school. I could never see myself actually making a living at it, though. Medicine seemed a more promising way to feed myself, at least in the beginning.”

“What happened?”

He reached for a piece of bread and laid it on the edge of his plate. “I got tired of some twenty-year-old sitting behind a desk in an insurance office telling me what tests I could order for my patients.”

Her father was a doctor, the complaint a familiar one. “I thought the problem was getting better.”

“Not fast enough for me. I figured out that my staff was spending as much time on the phone getting permission to treat people as I was treating them.”

“So you just up and quit?”

“Not until I'd taken my frustration out on all the wrong people, including my wife. Shelly tried to get me to see what I was doing, but by the time I did, it was too late.”

Julia took a sip of wine before commenting. “Don't you hate hindsight?”

“You sound as if you've been there.”

“Ken had his heart attack on the way to work. He was on the freeway at the time—the fast lane.” Which lane he was in, the temperature, the clothes she'd worn, were only a few of the meaningless things about that morning she couldn't put aside. She speared a mushroom and absently pushed it around the plate, focusing on the path it made through the red sauce to keep the image of Ken behind the wheel of his car from filling her mind. “There was a chain reaction, as people tried to avoid hitting him, that tied up traffic for hours.”

The accident had made the national news that night. The local stations and newspapers carried the story for days. Weeks and months later came the magazine articles. Half a year went by before she felt safe looking at any of the business journals that came to the house.

One detail, however, had escaped all of the media sources; it was something she'd never told anyone. For eight long months she'd kept her painful secret. It was time she let go. “I was on the freeway that morning. I left the house a half hour after Ken and got caught in the backup from his accident.” The rest was harder, something she hated admitting even to herself. “All I could think about . . . my only feeling was frustration that the wreck was going to make me late for my hair appointment.”

She chanced looking at him. He appeared neither shocked nor repulsed at her self-damning revelation. “I got to the accident a few minutes after the ambulance arrived, but I was so busy watching the clock, I didn't even look over to see what kind of car it was. The doctor told me later that Ken was still alive when they got him out of his Range Rover. I could have been with him if I hadn't been so damn—”

“Even if you had stopped, it wouldn't have changed anything. Beating yourself up about it is useless.” He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “The hardest thing any of us has to do when someone close to us dies is accept that there are times when shit just happens. Nothing we could have done or said would have made any difference.”

“I could have told him good-bye.”

“You're imagining something that wouldn't have happened even if you had stopped. The rescue workers had to get Ken out of there as fast as they could. There's no way they would have stopped to let you talk to him. At best, you would have been in the front seat of the ambulance when he died.”

They were the words she needed to hear, not absolution but reality. “You must have been one hell of a doctor. I'll bet your patients miss you.”

“I left them in good hands.”

“Have you always had a fatalistic attitude, or did it come with being a doctor?”

“I suppose a part of me has. However, I've never taken it so far as to think your faucet was predestined to break tonight so we could meet.” His eyes lit with a spark of amusement. “Some things in life I chalk up to blind luck.”

He was flirting with her. The thought left her disconcerted. She quickly changed the subject. “Do you like being a writer?”

“Some days.”

She twirled her fork against her spoon, capturing a round of spaghetti. “And the others?”

“It just seems like plain old work.”

“Have you given yourself a deadline?” she asked.

“For finishing or succeeding?”

“Either—both.”

“The end of the year to finish. After that it's out of my hands for the most part.” He reached for another piece of bread. “How about you? Are you working on any deadlines?”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, you know . . . three months to get the finances in order, six months to grieve, a year to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life, that kind of thing.”

She shook her head. “I've never been that organized. Things just kind of happen with me.”

“I've always admired people like you.”

“You're kidding.” She took a bite and licked the sauce from the corner of her mouth. “I was under the impression I drove your kind crazy.”

“My kind?”

“People who are driven to succeed. Overachievers.”

He winced.

She had her wineglass halfway to her mouth and put it down again. “What did I say?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on . . . I thought we were being honest with each other.”

“You sounded just like my wife—my ex-wife. She used words like those when I tried to talk her into giving me another chance.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.” He put his napkin on the table and leaned forward on his elbows. “I see my kids every other weekend now.”

“That must be hard on all of you.”

He made a disparaging sound. “I hate like hell to say it, but it's more time than I spent with them when we were living together.”

She could see the admission had cost him and offered a commiserating smile. “There's that damn hindsight again.”

“Time for a change of subject.” He put his hands against the table and pushed back his chair. “More wine?”

“No thanks. I think I've had enough.” It was easier to blame the wine for her talkativeness than to acknowledge the need that prompted it.

He brought the bottle to the table and poured himself a healthy splash. “Before Andrew left he started telling me about an old couple who spend July here, but we got interrupted and he never got around to finishing the story.”

“Joe and Maggie.” Just thinking about them brought a smile. “They're the ones who sold the house to Ken. They kind of adopted him in the process.”

“Andrew said there was a special connection.”

“They really didn't want to sell, but Joe had had a stroke that used up his and Maggie's savings, and they really needed the money. Ken was renting the place at the time and told them that if they would carry the note themselves so that he wouldn't have to look for outside financing, he would give them the summer months to do with as they pleased for as long as he owned the house.”

“I wondered how the place had become a summer rental—Joe and Maggie used it to supplement their income. Now it makes sense.”

“Actually, Joe gave the money to Ken.” Again she smiled. “He was so proud of himself for figuring out a way to help Ken financially that Ken didn't have the heart to tell him he didn't need it.” Every September for eighteen years Joe and Maggie and Ken had gotten together for dinner. Joe would give Ken the rental check, even after he realized Ken was long past needing financial help—and Ken would give a toast to their friendship. When Ken and Julia were married, Joe and Maggie came as honored guests. At the end of summer the September dinner reservation went from three to four. It was as if Julia had always been a part of their little group.

“They sound like special people.”

“They are. But then so are the others. Joe was very selective in whom he chose as renters.”

“It will be nice to see someone there. The place was getting pretty desolate looking.” It took half a second for what he'd said to hit. “Jesus, I'm sorry, Julia. I shouldn't have—”

“It's all right. The same thought hit me when I drove up.”

“How about some coffee? It would only take a minute to fix.”

She shook her head. “I should probably call it a night. I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow.”

“I'll walk you home.”

Deciding that protesting would take more effort than giving in, she let him see her to her front door.

“Thank you for dinner.” She stepped inside and turned to face him. “It was wonderful. You really know your cans and packages.”

“Someday I'll have to show you what I can do with bakeries. There isn't one within a five-mile radius I haven't tried.”

“Now you're stepping on my territory.”

“Restaurants?” he asked.

“I have a drawer full of menus.”

“Delis?”

“Kosher or non?”

He held his hands up in defeat. “I yield to your time and experience.”

She smiled. “Thanks again for the plumbing lesson.”

“Anytime.” He stepped up to the landing, leaned forward, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

Julia waited until she saw him cross the road, then went inside and closed the door. The thought hit that she was as alone as she had been that afternoon, but not as lonely. Progress could be a funny thing sometimes, coming not only when one least expected it, but from a direction never imagined.