Thank God it was Joe who answered the call about the ship. Talked the owner out of a trespassing charge, brought Archie home.
Sandra threw back the covers, swung her legs off the bed, and turned on the small lamp on the bedside table. Sitting on the edge, she did what she always did every morning, even before going into the bathroom.
She checked her phone.
It rested next to the lamp, charging. She’d muted it, but the moment she brought the screen to life, she wished she hadn’t. Five missed texts from Ruskin, the first of which had come in at half past four. Christ. Well, he was probably as stressed as she was. There was a hell of a lot riding on this.
His texts offered ample evidence of his state of mind:
CNN is confirmed! They want to do live remote. You can handle that? Do we have enough Arrival backdrops?
“Yes, of course,” she said aloud.
Did you get revised video?
She nodded at the phone.
Just found out Fox News reporter is vegan. Who would have believed that? You’d have thought they were all raw meat eaters. Check menu selection!!!!
Sandra shook her head wearily. She’d pulled together a buffet that considered every possible taste. Gluten-free, vegan, and not a peanut on the goddamn table. The last thing you wanted at a presser was someone going into anaphylactic shock. Tended to put a damper on the festivities.
The final two texts had landed in the last five minutes.
Where are you?
Get the fuck up!
She tapped the screen and typed her reply.
Up. All issues in hand.
She tapped the send icon.
God, there were times when she wanted to go back to a landline. No one could send you annoying texts on a landline. But she’d found herself using it so rarely that she’d had it disconnected three months earlier.
There was one other text, but it was not from Ruskin. It was short and to the point:
Luv ya.
That was Joe for you. Man of few words. But one of them caused an uncomfortable stirring within her.
Luv.
She held her thumb over the screen’s keypad, wondering whether to reply and, if she did, what she would say. Okay, maybe luv was not quite as serious as love, but it was still an expression she was not ready to make. She liked Joe, no doubt about it, but he was the first man she’d dated — and slept with — since, well, it happened.
Was it written down anywhere that you couldn’t have sex while you were still grieving? What if the heartache never stopped?
She knew she had every right to get on with her life, but the guilt was still there. And she was definitely not ready for the kids to know she was seeing someone, let alone getting between the sheets. What was she thinking, that night the week before, when she let him sneak into the house after midnight? Risky enough, having sex in her bedroom with the kids down the hall, but letting Joe fall asleep after? She had to shake him awake at four in the morning and get him out of the house before anyone else found out he was there. He nearly fell over trying to pull on his pants in the dark and almost forgot his Glock. A fucking pantomime is what it was.
And, considering how important today was, it had been a huge mistake meeting up with Joe the evening before at a cheap hotel on the mainland. Making up a story for the kids that she was at the community center getting things ready for the big event, then the two of them boarding the ferry on foot, picking up Joe’s car on the other side from the paddock, heading to a hotel in North Falmouth. You couldn’t take a chance like that on the island. Sure as shit, next time you were at the Garrett Diner, someone would stroll over and say in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “Hey, wasn’t that your car parked out front of the Seagull Motel?”
Even these days, when every car on the island looked the same, except for color, it wasn’t a chance you wanted to take. And Joe didn’t want her coming over to his house. He lived with his mother — God, don’t get me started — and didn’t want to have to explain the sounds of squeaky bedsprings at breakfast. Okay, yes, he was a good son, moving her in with him after she’d taken a couple of falls living on her own. And now she was in a wheelchair and Joe was exhausted from taking care of her. So, yeah, he was a saint. But weren’t saints entitled to a sex life without having to hide it from their moms?
And then there was this whole business about what he did for a living. A cop, for crying out loud. Her whole life, she’d never dated a cop, wasn’t even sure she’d ever even known one personally. The only ones she’d ever met were those who’d pulled her over, and there had been a few occasions like that, back in the day. Not that she hadn’t encountered a few who didn’t like to get a little handsy, copping a feel while they patted you down for drugs.
It was a long time ago.
What was so weird about Joe was he started out working in the tech field. He was good with computers. But from the time he was a little boy, all he’d ever wanted to be was a policeman. Any picture of him as a kid, he had a six-shooter strapped to his waist. Forget Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Joe wanted to grow up to be Roy Rogers, or, as he got a little older, maybe Lieutenant Columbo. So instead of heading to Silicon Valley, he enrolled in a police academy. And now, well, he wasn’t exactly Columbo with the rumpled raincoat and cigar. He was more Chief Brody, from Jaws. Top lawman on an island, although, so far, he hadn’t gone mano a sharko with a Great White. What he did have to deal with were parking infractions, drunken beach parties, snooty city folk who thought their shit didn’t stink, and, of course, one crazy kid who wanted to take up residence in a crow’s nest.
Sandra tossed the phone back onto the bedside table, knocking over a three-by-five framed photo.
“Fuck,” she said, and righted the photo. “Sorry.”
She touched the plastic glass protecting the image. Taken nearly twenty years earlier, it featured her on the right, arm in arm with a bearded, stocky man on the left. Smiling for the camera, they were both wearing black leather jackets and chaps and gloves, reflective shades, the whole nine yards.
Sandra smiled sadly as she ran her fingers over the picture of the man.
“You get it, right?” she whispered to the photo. “It’s been almost a year. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, that I won’t always love you.”
She paused, as if waiting for a reply. In her head, she heard, Your life doesn’t have to end just because mine did.
Was it wishful thinking, imagining that he would be that understanding?
“Got a big day ahead of me, babe,” she said quietly. “Wish me luck.”
She got up and went over to the window to open the blinds. She liked to make the bedroom as dark as possible overnight, but welcomed the sunshine every morning. She twisted the wand on the slats, allowing light to stream in, and peered between them.
Garrett Island’s residents were already on the way to work. The local economy thrived on the tourism dollar, and while many vacationers had left by October, there were still plenty of year-round residents and year-round jobs to keep islanders engaged. Vacant beach house rentals were upgraded and renovated. Marina owners who didn’t head to Florida for the winter spent the colder months doing boat repairs indoors. And the Garrett Mall, respectably-sized at just under half a million square feet, kept on going twelve months of the year even if the winters were on the lean side.
Gazing out her bedroom window, Sandra observed how radically different the morning commute was today from a couple of weeks ago. She didn’t see Bill Winston, manager of Winston’s Grocery, driving by in his usual mid-’90s Ford Taurus on his way to work. Ann Worley, who’d be passing the house in another hour taking her twin five-year-old boys to day care before arriving at her law office, wouldn’t be behind the wheel of her Honda van. And the Klepmanns, the elderly couple in the small cottage around the corner, wouldn’t be in their ’70s-era Buick station wagon — a land yacht if there ever was one — on their way to the shopping center for their daily mall walk.