Chapter Twenty-Five Beverly
Chapter Twenty-Five
Beverly
“As I live and breathe, it is Mark Oakley in the flesh. On my doorstep.”
My own Olympian is standing under the portico of our Burlingame bungalow, and I feel a tingle run through me that cannot be attributed to the mist that is blowing over from where a hose attachment is watering our lawn.
“Geography can’t stop what we have.” He grins, and I know that he intends to be corny. I roll my eyes.
Then I step forward and grip the collar of his Hawaiian shirt with both hands, pulling him toward me and pressing my mouth against his with all the ferocity that months of imagination could conjure. He lifts me up with seemingly no effort and wraps my long legs around his waist. He sets my back against the door and presses into me. Mouth, torso, hands.
It’s the drive-in all over again.
Hallelujah, I have missed this!
“People might see us,” I whisper when I can catch a breath.
“People can leave a quarter on my suitcase for the show,” he says.
We stop just at the point where we might cross a line, and I slide my legs back down to the herringbone brick on the porch. They nearly buckle, and I turn around to grip the doorknob for fear of falling. As I do so, I catch my reflection in the glass. My hair is matted, and my lipstick has smeared.
Mark takes my hand and pulls me toward him again, this time with gentleness. He presses his forehead against mine. “Best kiss ever.” He sighs.
No one could argue that.
“What are you doing here?” I ask once we are sitting down at the dinette in our kitchen. I’ve moved his suitcase to the bedroom I share with Judy. But not because he’ll be staying. We have a house rule that there will be no overnight visitors of the male variety. We’ve all spent enough time in hotel rooms as we travel that we cherish any night in which we can sleep in our own beds. And no one wants to come out in their nightgown and curlers to find a stranger.
“I got a last-minute offer for a Coca-Cola photo shoot, and I’m flying to Los Angeles tomorrow. But I couldn’t come to California without seeing you. So I booked myself through San Francisco first.”
“My, my, how about that!” I marvel. “Will we see you grace more magazine pages, then?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he runs a finger down my arm, leaving a trail of goose bumps.
“How did you know I’d be here?” I ask. There’s no way he would have known my flight schedule. And there was every chance I’d be somewhere in Asia.
“I didn’t. I just hoped.”
“You are crazy, 15A.”
“I would be crazier not to give it a try.”
He stands up and towers over me, wrapping his arm around my waist and planting another kiss on me, this time a deep one that thoroughly defines the term swoon .
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.” I stand up to take the whistling teakettle off the stove, but he stops me, wrapping his other arm around me in protest.
“I don’t have any other girls,” he says. Each word enunciated, slowly and deliberately.
Leaving no doubt that he means it.
I meet his gaze, soft but intense, and I feel like I’m standing on a cliff questioning whether or not I should jump.
“We barely know each other, Mark.”
“Exactly,” he says. He stands up, and I admire how he is a full head taller than me. I’m so used to being the strongest, boldest person in a room, but with Mark, I feel delicate. Like my femininity is getting a chance to emerge because I don’t have to prove myself to anyone. Like I don’t have to fight for myself all the time. “Because you have to be one special girl for me to be ready to forsake all others based on a couple of visits and a handful of letters.”
“That’s—”
“That’s crazy.” He nods. “I know. You already said that. But I’ve already been going crazy in Sunset Beach thinking about you the way I do.” He runs a finger through a strand of my hair. “I can’t wait for you to see it.”
I have a heightened baloney meter, well honed in New York City. And Mark’s words are not registering on it. After all, once I’d finally had a chance to read that Life article, I saw how it had practically knighted him, explaining how he volunteered teaching handicapped children how to swim.
Surely he has flaws. No human being escapes that sad fact, myself included. But Mark Oakley seems like the sort of man whose foundation is so solid that none of the typical cracks can topple it.
I am nervous. Meeting a man this early on had not been a part of my plan. But then the best things in life are often the unexpected ones.
“Crazy can be good,” I finally acknowledge.
“How about we retire that word?” He doesn’t let me respond, though, because he is placing feather-like kisses around the perimeter of my mouth. The heat from his breath shoots lightning down to my toes.
The front door opens, and I leap back. Judy comes in, shopping bags on her arms, mail and magazines in her hands.
She flips through the letters. “We have a past-due notice for our water bill. Vanya must have forgotten to pay it again. And there’s a letter from your mother. And—well, that’s strange. A special-delivery letter for me from Pan Am. Registered mail.”
Only then does she look up.
“Oh! Hello.” The bags start to slide down her arms as she stares at Mark in surprise.
Before I can introduce him, he walks over in four long strides and takes the bags from her, setting them on the couch. Then he puts out his hand with all the assertiveness of the Texan that he is.
“Mark Oakley. You must be Judy.”
“Mark Oakley,” she says slowly as she takes his hand. She catches my eye, and we know each other well enough by now that her expression asks me if she should act like she’s never heard of him when, in fact, I’ve shown her every letter he’s ever written. Even the ones of a romantic nature.
“I’m a friend of Beverly’s,” he says.
“Yes. I see that. How nice to meet you.” The stilted tone of their conversation makes me want to laugh, but I keep my composure.
“Here, let me help you with that,” I say, reaching into the bags. Judy and I both just completed the long Asian segment, and our refrigerator is bare. I pull out eggs and milk and red wine. And before I can carry any more, Mark joins me and puts items away in the refrigerator and pantry.
“Was there a sale on tuna tins?” I count eight cans. It would take me a year to go through that much tuna, and I’d have to have a knife held to my throat to do it. A lifetime of Alaskan salmon at Delmonico’s can make a seafood snob out of a girl.
“No, but my monthly weigh-in is next week. One of the girls on my last flight told me that’s her secret to staying slim.”
“That’s the secret to getting mercury poisoning,” I retort. “Besides, Judy, remember that I’ve seen you in your skivvies. You’re still too thin, if you ask me.”
I’m sorry that I’m having this conversation in front of Mark, but the unusual purchase took me aback, and I’ve been meaning to talk to Judy about my concerns anyway.
“I can’t risk Pan Am firing me, Bev. You know what’s on the line for me.”
I sigh. She’s right. But I hate to see the pressure she puts on herself. Even more than the airline does.
I stack the tins in a cabinet. “Did they not have any dented ones?”
Judy has continued what she calls Beverly’s Budget Basics class with me, never missing an opportunity to teach me about day-old bread, damaged cans, and off-season sales. It was my first instinct to turn my nose up at these things. But then she got me right where she knew I could be convinced. “Think of it as a competition,” she’d said. “You against the other customers, you against the store. The lower the price, the greater your victory.”
I know that’s not how she views it—for Judy, it is an ingrained survival skill. But the beauty of letting someone in enough to know you—really know you—is that they know what hits your buttons.
I smile wanly at her, protective of this friend I’ve grown to love so much.
“Put your feet up, Judy. Mark and I will finish putting things away,” I shout to her over my shoulder, and I’m pleased to see that she agrees, if reluctantly. She collapses onto the couch and throws her feet over the arm of it.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I say again from the kitchen. “Joe called. There’s a ferry flight from Miami to San Francisco this weekend, so he wants to come out and see you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him yes, you dummy. Would you really have wanted me to check with you first? I know your calendar as well as my own.”
“Oh my goodness!” she cries suddenly, shooting straight up. And I can tell it’s not a reaction to what I just said.
Mark pauses just as he’s putting a bag of rice away, and I turn my head at the alarm in her words.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She is holding a letter from the mail pile. The certified one from Pan Am.
“I’m being grounded. They found out that I’m—”
She looks at Mark and then at me. The desolation in her eyes is heartbreaking.
“They found out about Henry.”