The Love Season (13 page)

The poor girl
, Renata imagined Suzanne Driscoll saying.
She has no one to help her plan this wedding
.

Renata’s father had given her few details about Candace. Why was that? Was he consumed with his own grief, or was he worried that talk of Candace would upset Renata? Either way, he said very little; all Renata
had felt or known for sure was her mother’s absence. Renata had never felt as connected to any object as she did to this white cross. It was for her mother, as unlikely as that might seem, out here in the middle of nowhere.
This cross is a part of me, a part of my history
.

In the dusty grass next to her she saw a pair of feet, the silver-ringed toes. Renata looked up; she was crying, she realized.

Queen Bee spoke kindly. “Was this someone you knew?”

“My mother.”

“Your
mother?
”

“She was killed out here. Hit by a truck.”

“When?”

“A long time ago.”

“Oh, geez. I can’t believe it.”

“Hey!” Miles called out.

Renata stared at the cross, but no words came. She kissed the cross; it pricked her dry lips.
My mother
. They would think she was nuts, but it was true. It was true.

Renata stood up. Queen Bee held out her hand; the mirror in her navel winked in the sun.

“I’m Sallie,” she said.

Together they walked back to the car.

12:49 P.M.

The bread dough had risen again. Warm and humid, this was the perfect day for baking bread. Marguerite punched the dough down, then drank a glass of water, took a vitamin, surveyed her list. Just the silver, and…

As she had feared. She couldn’t procrastinate much longer.

She tied the ribbon of her hat under her chin.
Keys
, she thought.
Where are the keys?
She searched around the house—on the table by the front door? In the soup tureen that served as a junk drawer? On the hook drilled into the wall expressly to hold these very keys? No. She stumbled across a pile of mail on the floor by the front door. She bent to pick it up, thinking,
When was the last time I drove anywhere?
To the doctor in May? It seemed more recent than that. She had a memory of herself in late afternoon, the streets slick from a rain shower. She had been out near the airport—but why? She never had houseguests. Upstairs, five bedrooms waited like bridesmaids. They received attention once every two weeks, when Marguerite dusted. Would the keys be upstairs? Not likely.

Marguerite flipped through the meager envelopes. Did anyone receive less interesting mail than she? Bill for the high-speed Internet, bill for the propane gas, circular from the A&P—and then something thicker, addressed in handwriting: clippings of last month’s columns from the Calgary paper. The editor was good about sending them so that Marguerite could appreciate her words in print.

It had kept her alive, that column. When she was released from the psychiatric hospital in Boston after Candace’s death, she had to endure something nearly as painful—closing the restaurant. Marguerite had been unable to speak and refused to meet with anyone in person; therefore, her lawyer, Damian Vix, had set up conference calls, on which Marguerite remained mute. The conference calls had made her feel like she was locked with Damian and the gift shop people in a dark closet. The other side had thought—because of her “accident,” her “incarceration,” her “mental illness”—that they could take advantage of her, but Damian had extorted quite a price. (He negotiated brilliantly, motivated by the memory of a hundred exquisite meals, the bottles of wine Marguerite had
saved for him, the shellfish allergy she worked around every time he dined.) At the time, Marguerite had thought money would make her way easier, but she had been wrong. It was, in the end, the newspaper column that had saved her. A call came from out of the blue the very week that Marguerite felt comfortable speaking again. It was the food editor from
The Calgary Daily Press: Someone gave me your number, we’d love to have you write a weekly food column, explain techniques, include recipes. Calgary?
Marguerite had thought. She consulted an atlas. Alberta, Canada? But in the end, how rewarding she found it—thinking about food again and writing about food for a place where she knew no one and no one knew her. Her editor, Joanie Sparks, former housewife, mother of three grown daughters, was officially Marguerite’s biggest fan, and the closest thing she’d had to a friend in the past fourteen years. And yet they communicated primarily by yellow Post-it note. Today’s note said:
Everyone loved the picnic menu. Hope you are well!

Someone had given Joanie Sparks Marguerite’s name long ago—but Marguerite never discovered who. It was Porter maybe: One of the daughters could have been a student. Or it was Dusty: He liked to fish in Canada on vacation. Or it was one of the regulars from the restaurant who wanted to reach out when they heard about Candace’s death. Joanie had never said who passed on Marguerite’s name and Marguerite never asked. Now it would seem strange to do so, though Marguerite had always wondered.

The grandfather clock struck one, forcefully, like a blow to the head. Picnic menu, yes. Lobster club sandwiches, coleslaw with apples, raspberry fizz lemonade. Marguerite had been late sending the column (she debated for too long about whether it was reasonable to put lobster on the menu when her readers were hundreds of miles from the sea)—and
that
was when she was last in the car. Right? Racing out to Federal
Express like the Little Old Lady from Pasadena. It was June, after a thundershower; there had been little rainbows rising up from the wet road. She had made it in the nick of time, and this self-generated drama had left her breathless, flustered. Which meant the keys were probably…

Marguerite’s “driveway” consisted of two tasteful brick strips with grass in between. Her battered 1984 Jeep Wrangler, olive green with a soft beige top, was a classic now; every year some family or other called to see if they could drive it in the Daffodil Parade. But the Jeep, like Marguerite, was a homebody. She asked very little of it—less than fifty miles a year—and it kept passing inspection. Marguerite opened the car door. The keys were dangling from the ignition.

Marguerite eased out of her driveway and puttered down Quince Street toward the heart of town. The Jeep had no air-conditioning and it was too hot to drive with the windows up; already it felt like she had a plastic bag over her head. She unzipped the windows, thinking that this was the perfect weather not only for baking bread but also for riding with the top down—but no, she wouldn’t go that far. Marguerite didn’t want anyone to recognize her. She wore her enormous hat and round sunglasses like an incognito movie star. Even so, she worried someone would recognize the Jeep. When she bought the Jeep, Porter had given her a vanity plate:
CHIEF
. (He had meant for it to read
CHEF
, but someone at the DMV misunderstood; hence
CHIEF
, and since it wasn’t inappropriate, it stayed.) When everything else went out the window, so did the vanity plate—now the Jeep was identified by numbers and letters that Marguerite had never bothered to memorize—and yet she still felt that the soft-top olive green Jeep itself was a dead giveaway.
Marguerite Beale, out on the street!

She felt better once she was out of town, once she was headed down Orange Street toward the main rotary, and even more at ease once she
was safely around the rotary and driving out Polpis Road. Wind filled the car and tugged at the brim of her hat. She felt okay. She felt fine.

How to describe Polpis Road, midafternoon, on a hot summer day? It shimmered. It smelled green and sweet in some places, like a freshly picked ear of corn, and green and salt-marshy in other places, like soft mud and decay. Polpis was, quite literally, a long and winding road, with too many turnoffs and places of interest to explore in one lifetime. On the early left was Shimmo—houses in thick woods that became, down the sandy road, houses that fronted the harbor. Shimmo was old money: At the restaurant, Marguerite had often heard people described as “very Shimmo,” or “not Shimmo enough.” Just past Shimmo on the right was the dirt road that led to Altar Rock, which was, at 104 feet, the highest point on the island. Marguerite swallowed. She had been to Altar Rock only once, with Candace. Suddenly Marguerite felt angry. Why was it that any memory that mattered led back to Candace or Porter? Why had Marguerite not opened herself to more people? Why had she not made more friends? All of her eggs had gone right into that family’s basket; she had put them there herself, and they had broken.

It had been autumn when Marguerite and Candace hiked to Altar Rock, the autumn after they met, perhaps, or the autumn after that. Porter was gone, and Candace came to the restaurant every night by herself. (Had it really been every night, or did it only seem that way?) Candace came late and sat at one of the deuces in front of the window with Marguerite. They ate together; Candace was her guest. That was how their real friendship had started.

“I can’t believe my brother leaves you here all winter,” Candace said. “And you let him. Why do you let him?”

Marguerite sighed. Sipped her champagne. She had been drinking champagne that night with the aim of getting very drunk because, the
previous Sunday, Porter had appeared on the society page of
The New York Times
with another woman on his arm. The photograph was taken at a gala for Columbia’s new performing arts center. The caption underneath the picture read:
Professor Porter Harris and friend
. Marguerite had stumbled across the picture on her own; she had been alone, in her newly purchased house on Quince Street, drinking her coffee. Porter’s face had jumped out at her from the sea of faces. He was smiling in the picture; he looked positively delighted, smug; he was the cat that ate the canary. He would never have admitted it, but he
wanted
to be on the
Times
social page and had wanted it his whole life—and if he was captured with an attractive escort, so much the better. The woman on Porter’s arm—and how many hours had Marguerite wasted scrutinizing that damn picture, cursing the fuzziness of the newsprint, to see precisely
how
Porter was holding the woman’s arm—was a brunette. Her hair was in a chignon; she wore a pale, sparkling dress with a plunging neckline. Her face was pleasant enough, though something was off with her mouth, crowded teeth, maybe, or an overbite. Overbite Woman, Marguerite named her. That Sunday the phone rang and rang, but Marguerite didn’t answer. It was someone, many someones, calling to tell Marguerite about the picture, or it was Porter himself with an explanation, an apology. Marguerite ignored the phone. She considered calling Porter to tell him she couldn’t do it anymore; she didn’t want to be treated like a possession he kept in storage and dusted off at the start of every summer. Marguerite took a small comfort in the fact that the woman had not been identified by name. She was “friend,” a newspaper euphemism for someone unimportant, someone nobody knew. It could simply have been a woman Porter happened to be standing next to when they were caught by the photographer. But it was humiliating nonetheless; it was a symptom of a larger illness.

Candace had said nothing about the photograph. She had seen it, no
doubt, the whole world had seen it, but Candace fell into the category of people who wished to protect Marguerite from it. Now, as they ate dinner five days later, Candace was rallying against Porter in a general way.
Why do you let him go every autumn? Why don’t you go to New York? Why don’t you leave him?
Marguerite was stumped by these questions; she had never had a friend who cared enough to ask. She was grateful for someone to parse the relationship with, to help her analyze it. But things were complicated by the fact that Candace was Porter’s sister. Candace loved to talk about how Porter had refused to indulge her as a child, even though he was fifteen years older. He was, Candace said, stricter and less fun than her parents. Always so self-important with his
art
, his books, his articles for the journals that only a handful of people ever read.

“He takes advantage of you,” Candace said.

“Or I take advantage of him,” Marguerite said. “I like things this way.”

“Do you?”

“No,” Marguerite said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” Candace said, swirling her champagne and studying the glass for legs. (She was charmingly naïve about wine.) “Bastard. He’s a bastard; he really is.”

“Oh, Candace.”

“To not realize what he has in you. Look at this restaurant. The ambience, the food. All Daisy. This place is yours. It’s you.”

“Some days I wish I had something more,” Marguerite said. “Or something different.”

“You need to get out of the restaurant for a while,” Candace said. “It would take your mind off things. How long has it been since you’ve been to the beach? Or taken a walk through the moors?”

“Long.”

“Tomorrow we’ll go together,” Candace said. “To see the moors.”

And go they did. It was a mercy trip; Marguerite understood that. A feeble attempt to get Marguerite’s mind off the photograph she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. (It was sandwiched in her copy of Julia Child on her kitchen counter.) But Marguerite knew she had to do something different, no matter how small, and so she laced up a pair of hiking boots that she hadn’t worn since her years at Le Ferme. She followed Candace along the winding sand paths that climbed through conservation land to Altar Rock.

“This feels a lot higher than a hundred feet,” Marguerite said. “This feels like the Alps.” She was breathing heavily, cursing butter and cream, but she plodded along behind Candace to the top. From Altar Rock they gazed out over the moors, which were crimson with poison ivy. Tiny green ponds dotted the moors, and beyond lay the ocean. Marguerite could hear the eerie, distant cries of seagulls.

Candace flung her arm around Marguerite’s shoulders. She was not even a little winded; this was nothing but a walk through the park for her. She let out a great yell, a yodel, a howl. “Come on,” she said to Marguerite. “It’s good for you. Let it all out.” When Marguerite regained her breath, she shouted; she bayed.
He’s a bastard. He really is
. The words seemed easy and true with Candace at her side. Blood was thicker than water or wine, and yet Candace always sided with Marguerite. As she yelled, Marguerite imagined her anger, her embarrassment, and her longing, floating over the land like mist or smoke and being carried away by the sea. She and Candace howled together until they were hoarse.