The Guest House (7 page)

Harrisport, Massachusetts

July 1966

T
ucker Moss steered the red convertible with one arm draped across the back of the plump leather seat. Up ahead, the long stretch of sun-speckled pavement would turn abruptly to rutted dirt and he’d have to draw his hand down to the gearshift, but for now, he could relax and let the sea air tumble through the car’s interior.

He loved these winding roads, loved the way the roadster took them. Never mind that in a few months this road would be impassable without a plow. He’d be back in Charlotte and stuck to a desk at the firm by the time snow fell wet and heavy here. But on this thick and humid day, winter was a thousand years away. There was only the moist, salty smell of the air, and the hot sun slicing through the trees, gloriously blinding. For just a while, he might have been anyone, free to do anything he wanted.

“Ten bucks says your old man calls me Joe again,” Jim Masterson shouted across the convertible’s front seat, his North Carolina accent nearly lost in the roar of the wind.

Tucker smiled at his college roommate and shouted back in his own similar drawl, “And ten bucks says you don’t correct him.
Again
.”

“Hey, I don’t want to be rude,” Jim defended, pushing his glasses higher with the pad of his thumb. “He
is
your father.”

As if he’d ever let me forget it
, Tucker thought. This wasn’t the first time he’d envied Jim Masterson his life: a father who was as agreeable to a son who wanted to follow in his legal footsteps as to one who wanted to run off and join the circus. No wonder Jim was always such an optimist. It was easy to hope for the best when you never knew what the worst might be.

“Hey, watch out.”

Jim pointed to a girl on a bicycle who appeared at the edge of the approaching curve, dressed in dungarees rolled to midcalf and a checkered shirt, a fat red braid swinging under her straw hat. She navigated the bike along the soft shoulder one-handed, her other hand flattened on the top of her hat.

Tucker slowed, afraid of startling her, but despite his best intentions, she glanced back and promptly lost her balance. She teetered for what seemed an eternity, her feet shooting out as the bicycle thumped toward the ditch.

“Oh, crap,” whispered Jim.

Tucker watched helplessly as she spilled into the culvert. He steered the roadster to the shoulder, shoved it into park, and dashed out to help. By the time he arrived, the girl had already climbed to her feet, her straw hat crooked, knees and palms covered with dirt and sand. Her bicycle lay on its side, its back wheel still spinning. He reached into the ditch to stand it up, but she stepped in front of him. “I can get it myself,” she said, glaring. Her eyes were piercing under the dappled shade of her bent brim, a startling shade of pewter. It was hard to be sure how old she was. She could have been fourteen or forty, given the hard frown line that ran down the center of her forehead, or the way her small, pale lips were set.

“I’m just trying to help,” Tucker said.

“It’s a little late for that,” she snapped back, straightening her brim. “I wouldn’t have crashed if you’d just kept driving, you goddamn maniac.”

Jim hooted. “Listen to this one!”

“You wouldn’t have crashed,” Tucker said gently, “if you’d had both hands on the handlebars.”

“What do you know?” The girl righted her bike and climbed back on, color seeping up her freckled cheeks.

Tucker saw a brown bag in the dirt and retrieved it, brushing sand off its bottom, then handing it to her. “I hope that wasn’t your lunch.”

“It wasn’t.” She took the bag from him and tossed it roughly into her basket.

“Why don’t you let me give you a ride,” he offered. “My name’s Tucker, and this is my good friend Jim—”

“I don’t need a ride,” she said, moving her bike past him.

“No, really.” Tucker was determined now, the desire to remedy his offense irrationally urgent. “I don’t mind. I can come back for your bike. I live right up the—”

“I know who you are.” She stopped and turned back to him. Their eyes locked. “And the way you drive, I think I’m much safer on my bike.”

The young woman continued on, pushing her bike through the sand.

Tucker considered her a moment longer as she marched beside her bike, her red braid sweeping furiously across her back, reminding him of the swishing tail of a vexed horse. He had the sudden and ridiculous urge to tug the knot from its end and unweave it between his fingers, wondering what shade of red it would be all spread out in his hands.

Instead he climbed back into his car and returned them to the road.

“Never let it be said Tucker Moss doesn’t know how to sweep a girl right off her feet,” Jim teased when they’d picked up speed.

Tucker said nothing, just shifted his eyes to his rearview mirror so that he could watch the young woman slip out of view, undone that she could know something about him and that he could know nothing about her.

•   •   •

H
eck, Moss, I thought you said y’all lived in a cottage!” Jim Masterson exclaimed as they rounded the final turn and the massive, multigabled house came into view.

“This
is
what they call a cottage around here,” Tucker said, steering the sports car down the driveway and pulling in beside the carriage house.

“What’s with all the trucks?” Jim asked as they made their way through the cluster of vehicles that filled the turnaround, the sounds of construction growing louder.

“Dad’s building a guest house.” Tucker led Jim to the side entrance and pushed through the screen door into the kitchen.

Doreen Packard looked up from the far end of the long counter. The stout, red-cheeked woman with a bowl of silver-black hair and thick glasses broke into a broad smile of tiny square teeth. For five years, the Packards had managed the Moss cottage: Dorrie its kitchen, her husband, Louis, nearly every other inch of the grounds. Their twin daughters, now living off the Cape, had each served as waitress, sous chef, and chambermaid every summer of their teens.

“Your father’s fit to be tied,” Dorrie said, one plump hand on her hip. “You were supposed to be here for break- fast.”

“I know; I’m sorry.” Tucker stopped to give the woman a kiss on her upturned cheek.

Doreen surveyed his guest. “You must be James.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I suppose you boys would like something to eat?”

Tucker smiled. “You’re the best, Miss Dorrie.”

“I know I am; now scram,” she ordered, gently shoving him out of the way. Tucker grabbed a pair of nectarines from a bowl of fruit on the banquette and handed one to Jim, buffing his on his sleeve and biting into the sweet flesh as they walked through the dining room and into the great hall.

“This house is unreal,” said Jim, his eyes huge as he looked around. “Why do you ever leave?”

“Winter.” Tucker led Jim past the enormous stone fireplace to the end of the room, where a bank of windows looked out onto the grass, and beyond it the dunes. Jim pointed to a group of builders who sat in the shade of the pines that trimmed the lawn, eating their lunches.

Almost at once Tucker spotted the girl on the road mixed among the men. She’d taken off her straw hat, her bright red hair shining like a siren in the cluster of bent heads.

“Hey,” said Jim, seeing her too. “Isn’t that the . . . ?”

“There you boys are!” Garrison Moss marched into the room smoking a cigarette, hand outstretched. Tucker offered his reluctantly, then stepped aside for Jim’s turn. “You’re looking skinny, Joe,” Garrison said sternly. “Aren’t they feeding y’all down there?”

Jim flashed Tucker a quick told-ya-so look. “Oh, they are, sir. Too well, honestly.”

“I hear you’ll be starting with your daddy’s firm this fall too.”

“Yes, sir. I’m looking forward to it.”

“As well you should be.” Garrison gave Tucker a pointed nod.

Dorrie leaned in the doorway. “Lunch is ready when you are, boys.”

“Great, I’m starved.” Tucker took the opportunity to escape, relief flooding his face as he moved to the door and nodded for Jim to follow.

“You boys get unpacked and settle in,” said Garrison. “Son, take Joe down to the beach and show him our little slice of heaven. Dinner’s at six. Dress like gentlemen, and don’t be late.”

•   •   •

T
ake your pick,” Tucker said, gesturing to the four guest rooms that flanked the corridor.

Jim, not surprisingly, bolted for the one seaside.

“Boy, is this the life!” he declared, flinging his bag onto the creaky twin mattress and circling the low-ceilinged, beadboard-paneled room like a goldfish trying out a new tank. “All this space for just the three of y’all?”

“It’s never just the three of us,” said Tucker. “You’ll see for yourself soon enough. My mother can’t stand less than forty people here at any given time.”

“Where
is
your mother?”

“Probably shopping somewhere.” Tucker walked to the dormer window and drew back the curtain, absently searching the lawn and the activity surrounding the new foundation on the edge of it.

Jim picked up a corked glass bottle filled with tiny shells and studied it. “Florence must love it here.”

“Actually, she hates it,” Tucker admitted. “She came once last summer, got bit by a tick, and didn’t leave the house for the rest of the week.”

Jim chuckled. “And you figured the only way you’d get her back was to promise her a proposal, huh?”

“Something like that,” Tucker muttered, the plan to ask his college girlfriend to marry him not exactly his, any more than it had been his idea to ask Florence Stoddard out on a date in the first place two years earlier. But with her father being the Stoddard in the Moss and Stoddard law firm, the match had been orchestrated as effortlessly as any of the firm’s settlements.

Jim flopped onto the bed, hard enough to make the frame shiver, a wicked grin sliding across his face. “So how long before I get to meet this Helen goddess you promised me?” he asked.

“Slow down, Jimbo. We only just got here.”

“Easy for you to say.” Jim rose up on his elbows, his chin thrust out with playful indignation. “You’ve been talkin’ her up to me for three months!”

Tucker smiled, guilty as charged. “Soon,” he promised.

“All right, then.” Jim tore open his bag and yanked out his swim trunks, snapping them in the air like a flag at the start of a race. “Then let’s see this beach!”

T
he real pisser about divorce was the lack of closure. It didn’t matter that you had the court order, the piece of paper, the signature. What had amazed Owen Wright—and still did—was how little all that paperwork did for one’s heart. Instead of having the chance to really hash it out with Heather in a way that he might have understood, she’d leaped immediately under the safe canopy of documentation and legalese and stayed there indefinitely, virtually untouchable and wholly unaccountable. Try as he did to make peace with the process, no amount of sessions with lawyers, no amount of testimony or counseling could force a person to accept the end of his marriage if he hadn’t been the one to choose it.

If anything, the process was worse. Coating it in formalities only made the pain that much more acute, as if he might get so wrapped up in the logistics that he would forget to be angry, to be hurt, to be sad. And adding insult to injury was the decree that he was supposed to cloak those emotions for the sake of Meg, not because he didn’t want to spare her any pain—God, he did; of course he did!—but because it was the fair thing to do, the adult thing to do—a claim that boiled Owen’s blood. Fair?
Adult?
What about the adult thing of not cheating on one’s spouse? What about working through problems instead of throwing in the towel at the first opportunity? Heather had been neither adult nor fair in their marriage, yet he was supposed to be both in the demise of it? The hell with that.

But he’d done it, bitten his tongue every time he’d felt the urge to bad-mouth her in front of Meg, to speak openly about the betrayal. And likewise, Meg had steered clear of blame around him. Once in a while she’d sprinkle their conversation with condemnation of her mother’s behavior, comments spoken under her breath, never loud enough that Owen believed they were intended to be heard or used as a jumping board to a more full dialogue. He wasn’t the one who had put their daughter in this terrible situation—that had been Heather’s doing—and yet he was expected to bear the weight of its fallout honorably. What a crock.

It hadn’t helped that he knew very few other men who’d gone through a divorce. Sure, there was the support group that met every Thursday night in the basement of the Congregational Church (he’d gone there for a few weeks at his family’s urging, sucked down weak coffee, mostly stared at the floor, then missed a meeting and never gone back), but outside of that smoke-filled, drop-ceilinged room, he felt freakish, a failure. Regardless of what friends claimed over and over—that he, Owen, wasn’t the first (or the last) man to be cheated on—Owen felt certain no other man’s pain could be anywhere near as intense as his own. And no amount of muffins or cigarettes or folding chairs set up in a circle would convince him otherwise.

It still ached and it still stung and he’d come to believe it always would. Yet whenever Heather called, whenever he heard the ding of his phone and glanced down to the caller screen and saw her number there (like he was doing right now), his first instinct was to take the call, and to take it as quickly as possible. Shameful as it was, a part of him still wanted to hear from her, still wanted to believe there was a chance she’d come to her senses and changed her mind.

He took a fortifying swig of coffee and answered.

“Did Meg lose her phone? She hasn’t responded to any of my texts.”

Heather offered no greeting, just got straight to the point, as she always did.

“She said she did.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

“Fine, I’ll make sure she does.”

“Is she there now?”

Owen glanced at the ceiling. “She’s upstairs getting ready for work.”

“Did you get my message about LA?”

He reached out to straighten a picture of him and Meg on the fridge. “I got it.”

“I want her to come with us, Owen.”

Us
. The pronoun that used to refer to him and her. He frowned. “I have to think about it.”

“What’s to think about?” Heather demanded. “I’ll be with her. It’s not like I’m sending her out there alone.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s Thanksgiving. She comes here for Thanksgiving.”

“I thought we could switch for Christmas this year. Owen, she really wants this trip.”

Did she really? When he’d asked Meg, she’d seemed ambivalent.

Owen leaned back against the counter and dragged a hand down his face. The truth was, he loved the idea of having Meg back for Christmas. Loved it more than he hated George’s insufferable art opening. It meant she could visit for twice as long. Really, aside from the reason for the switch, it was great news.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “We’ll work it out when the date gets closer.”

“Of course.” Heather’s voice rose agreeably. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

You
do
, Owen wanted to say as he hung up.
You’ve got our daughter almost all year round
.

jeff says this party at aidan’s is gonna be sick. sure u cant sneak back for 1 nite?

i wish! don’t have 2 much fun w/out me

wanna skype 2nite?

if i can

lets do like last time

my dads home! no way

chicken

perv

•   •   •

W
hat’s so funny?”

Meg looked up from her smart phone to find her father glancing inquisitively at her, realizing too late that she’d been smiling as she read through Ty’s text messages. She forced her amusement down and changed the screen.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just some joke someone posted on Facebook.”

Owen frowned at the road. “You should be careful with that,” he said. “What you put on there gets saved for all eternity, you know.”

Meg turned to the window so he couldn’t see her roll her eyes as she answered patiently, “Yes, Dad. I know.”

“I read about stuff that kids put on there—and ten years from now, when they go to get a job, that stuff’s still there—”

“I know, Dad.”

“—and you think you deleted something and the next thing you know—”

“Dad,” Meg cut him off gently, “I know, okay? It’s not like I’m going into politics.”

He smiled. “You don’t know that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Owen pulled them into Scoop’s parking lot. “I was thinking we could go into Boston tomorrow like we talked about.”

His face was lit up with hope; Meg dreaded telling him: “I can’t. Aunt Lexi’s taking me to the beach. I told her she didn’t have to now that she was working down at that house, but she said it was fine.”

Owen blinked at her. “What house?”

“That huge place on the water,” said Meg. “The one Grandma and Grandpa worked on once. She’s taking pictures down there. You didn’t know?”