A Saltwater Christmas (The Southern Isles #1)

Chapter Nine

A llie was going to kiss Joey. As soon as she saw a chance, she would just lean on in and plant one on his very Mark-like lips. The lips that were currently moving around as they said something incomprehensible to her. Kissing someone was not a big deal. It was a test. A foolproof way to know if there were sparks. Happy, happy, happy . The words in her head were now set to the swinging tune of the band as she stood and wiggled next to the picnic table. Her dancing was exceptionally good, she could feel it. People were probably watching and thinking how impressed they were with her tight grasp of rhythm and her unique moves. She twirled and tripped over a tree root. It wasn’t a bad fall, so she got up and kept grooving.

Happy, happy, happy, dance, dance, dance, drunk, drunk, drunk . God, the band was good. How did those people get their instruments to play the right notes at the right time? It was genius! Musicians were such amazingly talented humans. She could kiss all of them. Even the gross one with the long beard. She laughed out loud. “Joey!” she called. He had spun away from her and was talking to Libby. “Joey! Come here and kiss me!” She laughed as she shuffled her feet and swung her hips.

He came toward her, but he brought Libby with him. “Allie, Libby will be driving you home tonight.”

“I want you to drive me home, Joey!” She meant to step forward and reach for his hand, but instead fell onto him. Thankfully, he caught her.

“That would not look good for either of us,” he said sternly. “Libby will take you home.”

“I don’t like Libby,” she said with her face smashed into his chest.

“Well,” Joey said like he was highly annoyed with her. “She doesn’t like you either.”

Allie righted herself and tried to focus on her surroundings. “I’m not riding with her.” She squinted at Libby’s face all tight with judgment and superiority. “I’m not riding with you.” Dottie’s yellow truck with the bright Christmas lights caught her eye. “Dottie can take me home. She’s my neighbor.”

Joey sighed loudly before thanking Libby and saying something about making sure it was okay with Dottie. He sat Allie at the picnic table and left.

“Screw them,” Allie said under her breath. She didn’t have to do anything they said. She stood and followed him to Dottie’s truck.

“Allie-girl,” Dottie yelled. “You been overserved?”

Allie nodded, grateful to have made it to the truck. She leaned against it, shooting the meanest face she could muster at Joey.

“We’ve got an hour of cleanup, and then we’ll go,” Dottie said. “Stay where I can see you.”

What was she, a child? Her mother used to say the same thing. “Okay,” Allie answered, knowing full well she would do no such thing. “I’m not going to bed tonight,” Allie informed Dottie. “I’m not tired.”

“Well, we’ll just cross that bitch when we come to it now, won’t we?” Dottie said.

Allie was somewhat sure Dottie meant cross that bridge , although crossing a bitch sounded really, really good.

“Thanks for getting her home safely, Dottie,” said Joey, the prude traitor. “Allie, I’ll see you Monday.”

“See you Monday,” she mocked him before turning back to Dottie. “Joey won’t kiss me, he won’t even freaking drive me home, but he’ll see me Monday.” It felt like Mark abandoning her all over again. It felt like her dad dying and never, ever coming back. Why wouldn’t men do what she wanted? What was wrong with her?

Joey ignored her and walked away. If she had been able to bend down and successfully stand back up, she would’ve thrown a rock at him. Dottie was deep in the truck, back at work, so Allie took the opportunity to skedaddle out of there. If she snuck through the vineyard, no one would see her. She was smart enough not to drive, but she could darn well get herself home using her own two feet.

It was hard not to laugh out loud as she ran through the vineyard in her black ballet flats, with the moon as her only source of light. It was chilly, but the wind in her hair felt fabulous. She tried to do a split leap like she used to back in her childhood ballet class. She was a lord a-leaping. How many of them were there in that Christmas song? Ten? Or was that ladies dancing? She spun around and stopped when she got dizzy. She had to bend down and hold on to her knees until she caught her breath. When she stood back up, she sang as loudly as she could, “Five golden rings.” Then she ran again, picking up the pace.

“Four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves”—she stopped and spread her arms out wide—“and a partridge in a pear tree.” It was hard to run in a straight line between the prickly vines. She kept scraping her arms by swerving when she didn’t mean to. She needed more room than the pathway offered, so at her first chance, she pivoted left and made her way to the main road with the plan of hiding if any cars or big yellow food trucks drove by. She loved how fit she was, and the fact that she could run for miles. Not everybody could do that. She focused on the strike of her foot, the length of her stride, and her posture. She looked good, she knew she did, just like when she was dancing.

Wait. She stopped, suddenly assaulted with the memory of falling back at the winery. Had she tripped on a tree root and fallen? Oh, no . Had Joey seen her? The late stages of her evening began to come into view. Her body must be metabolizing the alcohol, her liver working hard, the French fries she barely remembered eating probably helping by closing the valve at the bottom of her stomach for digestion and thereby keeping the remaining alcohol from absorbing into her intestines as quickly.

It took at least one hour to process each drink. How many glasses of… Oh, no . Her mouth fell open when she remembered telling Joey to kiss her. And, oh, Lord , she’d told Libby she didn’t like her. Allie looked down at her black dress pants and yellow sweater. She was out in the wilderness running in her work clothes. No, she did not look good. Nothing about her evening had been good. There was no happy, happy, happy . There was only drunk, drunk, drunk . Her stomach churned, and she knew what was coming. She leaned over the nearest bush and vomited a stomach full of liquid. Stumbling, she made it to a giant oak tree and used the ground as a seat and the trunk as the back of her nature-chair. She promptly fell asleep.

The moon was hidden behind dark clouds when she awoke, still living her nightmare. It was hard to tell which direction to walk in the pitch dark, but at least she had the road to follow. It would get her somewhere. She didn’t have her purse or her cell phone. Maybe they were still at her desk. She wanted to cry. Why was she so stupid?

There was a dim light up ahead, and she hoped it was Fred’s gas station. She had no idea what time it was. Maybe it was still open and she could sit for a minute and have some water. He could call Dottie for her too. Someone needed to tell her neighbor not to worry.

But as she came upon the building, it was obvious it’d been closed for a while. The only light came from the masthead on Fred’s grounded houseboat. Should she bother him? Was this enough of an emergency to wake someone she barely knew from what she presumed was a sound sleep? She rambled over the gravel parking lot to the graying picnic table and plopped down with a loud squeak. Immediately, Fred’s dog started barking. Whiskey barked for several minutes until a light at the back of the boat flicked on, and Fred appeared with a flashlight. She braced herself for discovery.

Whiskey got to her first, screeching to a stop once he found her. “Hey, boy,” she said. “It’s okay. Just me.” Either the dog remembered her or sensed she wasn’t a threat, because he stopped barking immediately. “Hi, Fred,” she called out. “It’s just me, Allie Westley.”

“You alright?” he asked, shining the flashlight at her.

“Yeah. Just walking home.”

“Dottie’s out at the winery looking for you. I’m gonna call her.”

She could barely see him, but she did notice that his beard was brown instead of white. He must spray it with something when he dressed up like Santa. He hung up the phone after filling in Dottie, and sat across from her. “Listen, I worked over twenty years as a corporate lawyer, and I’m good at keeping secrets, so you don’t need to worry about me tellin’ anyone.”

Did the gas station owner just say corporate lawyer ? “I thought you were Dottie’s brother,” Allie said.

“I am. I’m also a Harvard grad.”

It took a minute to sink in. How did toothless Dottie have a brother who was a lawyer? Harvard? This was Tulip and Jessa’s uncle? Allie felt like she was in an alternate universe.

“People aren’t always what they seem,” he said.

She’d heard that said before, but it never meant as much as in that moment. “Yeah, and I hope the people realize that the drunk person they saw tonight is not the real me.”

“Some will know, and some won’t.”

Allie put her head in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed. And I’m so sorry for waking you up. I don’t even know what time it is.”

“It’s not too late.” He checked his phone. “Comin’ up on midnight. You need a ride home?”

“Yeah, I think I do.”

She climbed up into his old red pickup truck and slid onto the torn bench seat, finding herself in awe once again. This man had been a lawyer? “Can I ask why you’re not a lawyer anymore?”

“Because a smart person is a surgeon of the mind.”

She had no idea what that meant and couldn’t think of an intelligent response. Thankfully, he spoke again.

“I wasn’t happy,” he said, waiting for Whiskey to jump in before he got behind the wheel.

“I know what that feels like,” she whispered, putting her hand on Whiskey’s back as he sat in the middle of them.

“I wanted a calm life and a kind one,” he went on, starting up the truck with a roar. “See, there are two ways of being rich. Either you can increase the amount of money you make or you can decrease the kinds of things you want. All of the money I had wasn’t making me happy—it was doing the opposite. So, I worked on my mind. I cut out the parts that didn’t serve me, and here I am.”

“You wanted a simpler way of life?” Allie tried to distill what he was saying down to something easily understood.

“No, I wanted a richer way of life. It’s not simple at all.”

Maybe there wasn’t an easy answer to big life questions. “So, more meaningful?”

“Yes. And, for me, that means being around people. I try not to guess their intentions or have expectations of them. I just accept them how they are.”

“That sounds impossible.”

“Sometimes it is.”

They hit a pothole, and Allie’s head brushed the ceiling. “But what if people are awful?”

“Serial killer awful? Are we talking evil? Or just your average, everyday awful?”

Allie thought about Libby’s pinched face and didn’t want to admit that the woman was probably everyday awful but not actually evil. “Average, I guess.”

“Well, it’s not your job to fix them, so just love them from a distance.”

“And hope they change?”

“Don’t have the expectation that they will ever change. Just know that you hold the power because you get to decide if you will have a relationship with them or not.”

“Well, I don’t think I’m going to be loving this person or having a relationship with her. But I have to see her at work every day.”

“Then maybe just try to understand her.”

She looked past Whiskey to Fred’s bearded face and messy hair. He had wrinkles by his eyes from years of smiling, and a look of strength about him despite his thin frame. There he was in faded plaid pajama pants and an old New York Yankees T-shirt, counseling her and driving her home at midnight. Gas station Fred was so much more than she’d ever considered. How many other people did she think she knew when, in fact, she was completely wrong?

They pulled up to her little cottage, and all the lights were on. Sam and Cuppie stood on the front porch. Sam was dressed in sweats and running shoes, and Cuppie was all leashed up like they were about to go for a walk. Allie knew she’d just been caught. They were clearly about to go out searching for her.

Embarrassment spread from her chest, up her neck, and settled like a burn on her face. How much worse could one night get?