The Good House: A Novel (11 page)

“I’ll use these keys. I always keep a key here,” I explained. “An extra set of car keys, too … that fucking car.” My hand flew to my mouth. Sometimes I swear, but usually only when I drink. “That … stupid … newfangled Range Rover has the automatic locks and it locks me out all the time.”

“But … you have your keys. I just gave them to you,” said Peter.

“I KNOW. I know,” I said, closing the drawer. I had, actually, somehow forgotten he’d found my keys. I was just so befuddled with all the worry about what he might think; about whether he might think I’d been drinking.

“So you’re sure you’re okay, Hildy?” Peter asked once I had opened my office door.

“OF COURSE,” I announced. “Thanks for your help, I’m sure you need to go back to your patient.”

Peter seemed flustered for a moment, and then he said, “I’m here alone. I’m just doing some paperwork.…”

“Oh, I thought I saw another car.”

“Really? I think people park here sometimes. Overnight…”

“Okay, well, thanks,” I said.

“You sure you’re all right? I mean, if you hurt yourself when you slipped, I’d be happy to drive you home.”

“What?” I snapped. “I’m totally fine.”

Of course, the next morning I had my moments of panic. Was it possible Peter knew that I had been drinking? Did he know I had been to rehab? There was a young woman I used to see at the AA meetings in Newburyport (I went, as instructed, for a few weeks after rehab) who was one of Peter’s patients, and sometimes I would pass her on the porch. I had often wondered if she’d told Peter that she had seen me at AA meetings. The meetings are supposed to be anonymous.

“Who you see here, what we say here, when you leave here, let it stay here” is a little chant everybody would say together at the end of the meetings, all standing and holding hands in a circle like a coven of smiling simpletons. Then they would bow their heads and say the Serenity Prayer, and at the end, they would say, again, together,
still with joined hands
, “Keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it. You’re worth it.” And then the people on both sides of me would
finally
let go of my hands, after a gentle squeeze, and I’d be allowed to leave.

Gimme a friggin’ break,
I always thought on my way out. But in truth, I felt sorry for the people at the meetings. Really, you would, too. The stories I heard. There was a guy who’d let his beloved poodle out on a cold winter night, then he’d passed out, drunk, and in the morning he’d found her frozen to death on his front porch. There was a woman who’d dropped her son when he was a toddler, she was so drunk, and he’d fractured his skull. I mean, these people had problems. What if the woman from the Newburyport meeting had told Peter that she had seen me at meetings and he thought I was like all those people? I fretted about this all the way to Beverly the next morning. After the closing, it didn’t seem like such a big thing. I had just accepted a commission check for thirty thousand dollars. This would help with my mortgage situation. I was one of the most successful businesswomen on the North Shore. How could anyone, besides my ridiculous, ungrateful, spoiled daughters, imagine that I had a problem with booze?

When I arrived back in Wendover, I pulled up to the bank to make my deposit, and as I was parking, I saw Rebecca McAllister opening the back door of her silver Land Cruiser so that her boys could climb inside. Sure, a lot of people drive Land Cruisers around here. Silver’s a popular color, but I paused and watched her for a moment, and I had a foggy recollection of having seen a similar car parked behind my office the night before. Rebecca had been talking to the boys as they climbed into the car, but as she closed the door and turned, she saw me and waved.

“Hi, Hildy,” she said, smiling. I smiled and waved back, and then she strode over to where I stood.

“I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said.

“Oh? What’s up?”

Rebecca looked down at her hands for a minute. “It’s a little awkward. Well, you were there when I had that little run-in with Cassie Dwight on the beach last summer. Her husband Patch’s company did all our plumbing, and now I need to have some more plumbing done. I’ve had a little studio built behind the house. I’ve started painting again.…”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Rebecca. I don’t know if I told you that my daughter is a sculptor. She painted for a while, too.”

“No, I didn’t know that!” Rebecca exclaimed. She was so cheerful. She was like she was the day we saw the foal, when I first showed her the house. She had been exuberant then, not the anxious, fraught Rebecca I had seen and heard so much about in the subsequent months.

“Anyway,” she continued with a shy smile, “I know that you’ve known the Dwights for a long time. I really don’t know what to do. She clearly hates me, and I think I should just hire somebody else, just so I don’t have to deal with them. But then, I wouldn’t want them to think I’m hiring somebody else out of spite.…”

“Rebecca,” I said, “I doubt Cassie even remembers your ‘run-in.’ She’s overwhelmed, as you can imagine. Seriously, I doubt she’s given it a second thought. I’d call Patch’s office number and ask him if he’d come up and give you an estimate. If they have hard feelings, which I doubt, they’ll tell you they’re too busy. But I know they could use the business. It’ll probably help clear the air, having him working on the property again.”

Rebecca smiled then. “That’s what I was thinking.” Then she said, “Hildy, I’d love to have you up to see what we’ve done to the house. Would you come over for lunch or drinks sometime? I’m alone up here with the kids most weekdays and would love the company.”

I had been quite curious to see what the McAllisters had done to the old Barlow place, so I told her I’d love to, and we settled on the following Tuesday. I said I’d stop over after work. I told her not to go to any fuss, that I’d just have a quick tour and be on my way.

“No,” she insisted. “Stay for dinner.”

“Okay,” I said after a moment, thinking forlornly about my MG. It would be good to get out. I was getting a little too solitary.

After the bank, I stopped at the office to check in and then decided to go up and see how Frank’s guys were getting on at the Dwight house. He had told me he might be able to find one guy to work on the house. Two guys, tops. When I arrived, I was amazed to see several pickups parked out front, including Frankie’s own orange monster. There was a small Dumpster in the driveway, filled with debris. I went inside, and there I counted five men—the bulk of Frank’s off-season crew—hard at work. In the living room, the carpet had been removed, revealing polished hardwood floors. A man was applying a second coat of paint to the walls. I entered the kitchen and found another man painting the ceiling there, and, amazingly, two men were easing what looked like a brand-new stainless-steel refrigerator into the slot where the old dingy white one had stood. Frank’s denim-clad legs and worn work boots were jutting out from a cabinet beneath a shiny new stainless sink. There was no mistaking those boots.

“Frank?” I said.

Frank inched his way out from under the sink and smiled up at me.

“Whatta ya think, Hildy?”

“I’m … blown away. Where did you get all this stuff?”

“Well, I’ve always got plenty of sinks lyin’ around. This one, somebody ordered and it had a little scratch on the back there”—he was pointing at the bottom of the sink—“and they didn’t want it anymore. Decided they wanted a different type of sink altogether. They waited too long to return this one, and they were stuck with it. So they gave it to me. Fits perfect. And Patch can plumb it when he gets home. The one they had here was all dinged up.”

Frank stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans and squinting up at the paint being applied to the ceiling.

“What about the fridge?”

“Brand-new.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Just got it. I know everybody wants one of these stainless-steel jobs now. It really makes the kitchen look new, huh, Hil?”

It was amazing what a new fridge and sink and clean white paint could do to a kitchen. Frank was leaning back against the counter, resting on his elbows and smiling at me.

“I thought you had all your guys on another job.”

“Well, I pulled ’em off it for a few days. The owner of that place in Manchester … what’s he gonna do, find somebody else to clear his lot in the next two days? It’s fine. It’s nice to be inside for a change. Patch was always a good kid. Ya know, he worked for me a coupla summers?”

Like I said, I’m not the most touchy-feely type, but I walked over to Frank and did a sort of Wendy Heatherton clasp of his hand between both of mine.

“Thanks, Frank … really.”

“Anytime, Hildy,” he said, staring down at the floor. I don’t think it was my imagination. His face was a little red. I know mine was flaming.

*   *   *

A long time ago, when I was just out of high school, I was quite in love with Frankie Getchell. I’ll never forgive Mamie Lang for sharing that with my daughters one night, years ago, after we’d had a few.

“WHAT?” the girls had screamed. Then they fell over each other, contorting with laughter.

“EWWWW, gross, MOM.” They were shrieking. They were laughing so hard, they could barely breathe.

“Okay, okay.” I chuckled. I was a little tipsy and could see the comedy in it. They knew Frank only the way he looked now. And, of course, they were comparing him to their father, who was always so good-looking and kept himself in such great shape. “He looked better … then,” I said.

“You mean he looked like a young gnome instead of an old one?” Tess sputtered.

“EWW,” screamed Emily. “Just EWWWWW.”

It’s true, Frank’s on the short side. And squat. But when we were in high school, I wasn’t the only one who thought he was cool. Not great-looking, no, but he was rugged and sexy, and I spent a summer making love with him on strangers’ boats. It was the summer after my senior year in high school. Mamie and I were both waitresses at the Wendover Yacht Club, and Frankie used to work down at the boatyard, which was right next door, refinishing and repairing boats. After work, when all the club members had left, the WYC manager—a great guy named Jim Randall—would let the staff have a few drinks. As the summer wore on, we all started inviting our friends in after work—sneaking them in through a side door to drink up the booze that had been paid for with the club members’ exorbitant dues.

It was a blast. It was the summer of ’69. We all liked to think of ourselves as hippies, but Frankie Getchell was the only one in town who really was. He had longer hair and smoked grass all the time—or everybody said he did. I used to cut through the boatyard on the way to work in the afternoons, wearing my little WYC waitress uniform—a navy knee-length skirt and a white short-sleeved blouse—and he’d be sanding the great wooden hull of somebody’s yacht, shirtless and sweaty. I wasn’t a beautiful teenager, but I wasn’t ugly, either. Actually, I was told, on occasion, that I resembled Grace Slick, and I cultivated that look, with my long, thick brown hair and bangs and heavy eyeliner. Frank had been in my cousin Eddie’s class and had played at our house as a child, and even though I’d pretend to not notice him, he’d always call something out to me. My name appeared to amuse him. He’d croon the words to the tune of a popular song at the time. “And then along comes Hildy. Along comes Hildy. Hildy Goo-oo-d.”

You wouldn’t be able to see how good-looking he once was if you met him now, but he was handsome, in a rough sort of way. He worked hard, his body was dense with muscle, and he had that brown skin in the summer from those Anawam ancestors. I used to thrill at the sound of his voice, though I tried to ignore him. Then, one night, he showed up at one of our after-hours parties at the club. We had really turned the WYC into our own little speakeasy by midsummer. We played music from somebody’s transistor radio—the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix—and we’d all drink and smoke and dance on the bar. Twice that summer, the cops came, but we always had a few people on alert up in the “Commodore’s Room,” which was on the top floor of the club, and they’d see the cops coming and call down to us, and we’d all pile into the liquor storage room while Jim assured the cops that he was the only one there.

I was already a little tipsy the first night Frank came to the club, and the sight of him pleased me, to say the least. Most of the Wendover boys were wearing their hair a little longer at that point, but Frank’s was really long, and it used to hang over his eyes like a thick forelock. He was always having to tilt his head a little when he looked at you, and because he was a little shy, he’d let his bangs fall right back over his eyes when he looked back down at the floor.

That night after a few beers, he and I got to talking. He asked if I was planning to go to college, asked about my dad. Both Frank’s parents had died by then—they died within six months of each other, of cancer, when Frankie was still in high school. His only brother, Dave, was in Vietnam. Frank lived alone in the saltbox up on the rise, where he still lives today. After a while, we walked out on the dock, and Frankie recognized one of the Boston Whalers that was tied up there. The owner had a yacht that Frankie had just helped slip into the water a few days before. Frankie was proud of the work he had done on the boat. He wanted to show me. In those days, everybody left their keys in their boats on the WYC pier. Who would take them? Well, Frankie and I did, all summer long. That first night, we started up the Whaler, and though the water was a little choppy, we sped through Wendover Harbor, Frankie weaving in and out of the moored boats as if it were a slalom course he had designed himself. We pulled up to a long wooden sailboat—the yacht I’d seen him working on those past weeks. We tied up the Whaler to the stern of the boat and Frankie climbed aboard. Then he reached out his hand, and when I grabbed it, he lifted me up on deck.

I was a skinny little thing then.

He had a key to the wine chest. We sat on the broad bow and drank wine from a bottle. We didn’t really talk. We would glance at each other, then stare up at the stars, smiling shyly. I smoked my first joint. I kissed Frankie Getchell. Later that week, we returned to the same boat, but after the kissing, we went below. He was my first. Anytime I catch a whiff of lemon oil, I’m brought right back to that dark hold and the scent of the rich, citrusy oil that Frankie had rubbed into every inch of the old salt-dried surfaces. There we crawled onto the owners’ berth. There, Frankie pressed his hard body against mine. Water sloshed against the hull and I could smell salt and lemons and the new, primitive odors of man and sex. The boat rose and sank and rolled—it was a rough sea that night—and, well, I’ll never forget how thrilling and dangerous it all was. And the exquisite pain of that first time that lasted for days and made my heart pound whenever I thought of it.