Beach House Rules

2. Charlotte The Mommune

Charlotte The Mommune

It was a basic life rule: never get into a car with a stranger. But Alice wasn’t a stranger really, was she? I mean, it was true that I had seen her sing in the choir at church. Of course, church affiliation, as every good Southerner knew, didn’t equal a lack of bad behavior. But there was something so warm in Alice’s face, something so soothing. She had this dewy, glowing skin and long dark hair with a strip of gray that framed her face and made her look terribly elegant. I guessed she was maybe seven or eight years older than I am, forty-five to my thirty-eight? I wondered if the gray was natural or if she dyed it that way. It made her seem enigmatic. Bewitching, even. Oh! That was one of the rumors I had heard about her: she was a witch. But what did that even mean? I hoped she could cast a spell to take me back to a few days ago, when life was perfect.

“Charlotte, do you have anywhere to be?” Alice asked in her warm, syrupy voice. Just the sound of it soothed me. I wanted her to keep talking. I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the passenger seat.

“Court,” I said.

She laughed. “Okay. Well, besides that.”

I opened my eyes and looked out over the water beyond the road, remembering that we lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Usually that calmed me. Now, nothing could dislodge the boulder that was sitting on my chest. What in the world was I going to do?

“I have to pick Iris up at two thirty,” I said.

“I can take you.” There was a question in Alice’s voice.

“What?” I asked.

“I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings…”

I laughed. “Alice, if anyone is going to hurt my feelings, it certainly isn’t going to be you.”

“Well, it’s just… how do you not have any friends to loan you a car, take you to run errands, set up a job interview?”

“Well, Alice, I have been asking myself that same very pertinent question.”

“I know you haven’t been here long, but I would think you’d make friends quickly.”

That second part was untrue, though I wasn’t quite sure why. Juniper Shores seemed like an idyllic place to live. It was obvious that this was a beautiful Southern coastal town with a charming beachfront village and white sandy beaches, great restaurants, historic churches, and stunning houses. But what I hadn’t quite understood was that Juniper Shores was a town caught in the in-between, old versus new, the families whose cottages had dotted the oceanfront for a hundred years who wanted nothing to change and the people like Bill and me, the newcomers, who wanted to build their dream home and stay forever. Development was everywhere you looked; that wasn’t our fault. But some of the women who felt like natural friends for me saw us as part of the problem.

I didn’t let it bother me that much, though. Overall, people were friendly. We were regulars most places. Everyone knew our names. I got all the cozy small-town feels I was looking for. I just hadn’t quite found my best friends yet.

Bill was my only true confidant, the only person I trusted. And now I had to face the fact that maybe even he had betrayed me. Maybe . I felt the tug around my heart that I felt every few minutes lately. I closed my eyes and pretended, as was my habit now, that he was wrapping his arms around me. Could the man who’d always made me feel so safe really have done this?

I opened my eyes and looked out the window, at the charming Juniper Shores Village, the downtown area, which was filled with work-and-live spaces with shops on the bottom and condos on the top, the old-timey light-blue lifeguard station, the beach volleyball court, and the Airstream Park that held food trucks and pop-up shops and won this town more awards than I could count.

I didn’t know quite how to explain my complicated feelings about my place here to Alice. So I said, “We’ve been here three years, but two of those were in the midst of Covid. We moved to Bill’s stepmom’s house as a respite from our New York apartment once everything went virtual. It was supposed to be temporary, but we fell in love with it.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Alice asked.

I smiled. “Iris wasn’t in school here, so I wasn’t meeting school moms at first. I quit my job when Iris was born, so I don’t have a job to help me meet people—or, as I’m now seeing, to get me out of scrapes. I certainly have acquaintances. I’m in a book club, a mah-jongg group. But I don’t have anyone I can call to say, ‘Help! Can I come live with you?’?” I paused. “But does anyone have a friend that good?”

Alice smiled in a way that made me know that, yes, people had friends that good. She had friends that good. My friend situation hadn’t bothered me all that much until right this minute.

I’d never really seen grown-up friendships modeled, but I longed for them all the same. My parents had fellow professors they socialized with at university cocktail parties. But their friends were their books, their papers, each other. Bill had been my friend. Then I said what was perhaps truest: “You know, Alice, I think I was making headway, but let’s be honest: People want to distance themselves from you in situations like this, like you have a contagious illness. I don’t one hundred percent blame them.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

Alice and I pulled up in a driveway behind a beautiful two-story home, raised up a floor with a garage underneath. It was only a block or so from my house, the house that, because of my current situation, I couldn’t so much as enter the door of. I had driven by this beachfront beauty many times. The front doors were perfectly symmetrical, and the sides were arranged in what could only be described as wings. The house was massive, and, when I opened the car door, the salt air and rhythmic shush of the waves enveloped me. I had missed this sound for the past few days. I followed Alice wordlessly up the steps, unsure where we were or why. Again, basic not-getting-murdered rules would dictate not going inside. I could hear Oprah urging, from the TV when I was a child, Never let them take you to the second location!

Well, I was a goner because here I was. Second location. Alice opened the back door—no key. I wasn’t surprised. She seemed like a no-key kind of gal. We stepped inside the most beautiful hallway, and I turned to face an open-plan dining room on the right and an elegant chef’s kitchen to the left. Beyond that, the living room stretched the entire width of the house and was really more like two sitting areas, furnished in unstuffy French Provincial style with bleached-wood furniture, oversized cushions, and throws, with a built-in bar on the far-left wall and a shell-covered fireplace to the far right. It looked comfortable. It looked like the kind of place where a woman could curl up with a book and a glass of wine. Wine . Oh, how I missed wine. I certainly wasn’t wasting any of the precious money I had left on wine when I had a daughter to feed and only two weeks of lodging money left. My heart fluttered nervously. I’ll be okay, I thought. Even if I had to get a job I was way overqualified for, I would find something.

Mentally, I kicked myself for ever quitting my job. I had only myself to blame for this situation. Then again, I wouldn’t trade one single second of being home with Iris. And also, what about love? What about trusting a man who swore he only wanted to take care of you? Shouldn’t a woman be able to put her faith in that?

I followed Alice through the house and onto the front porch, where oversized rockers swayed in the wind. As we sat, looking out over a clear blue pool and onto the ocean, I was green with envy. Not over the house, per se, although it was very beautiful, but that Alice had a home of her own. When would that happen for Iris and me again? The things that, only a few days ago, I had taken for granted were astonishing.

“This house looks like you,” I said. “Earthy and elegant, simple and refined.”

She smiled. “This used to be a bed-and-breakfast. I ran it with my husband. Until he died.”

Having lived here only three years, I had missed out on so many people’s life details, like this.

“I’m so sorry, Alice. What happened?”

I had never even known Alice’s name until today, much less felt the pain she must feel, and here she was driving me around. I suddenly felt guilty. Maybe this was why I hadn’t found my “people” yet. I should be a better friend. A better church participant. A better school volunteer. Although, when would I volunteer now? I’d be working nonstop to try to put a roof over our heads. And who was going to drive Iris to tennis lessons? Oh my gosh . Who was going to pay for tennis lessons? And lawyer’s bills? I was getting ahead of myself. One thing at a time. Job. Money. House. Then we’d worry about tennis lessons. Bill always paid our club dues for the year up front, but I was fairly certain that once you stole money from other members you were kicked out. The board members were probably adding a bylaw right this minute, scratching their heads and saying, Who would have imagined we’d have to create a provision for this ?

Alice shook her head and waved me away in a gesture that indicated the death was too painful to even speak about.

“About the time he passed away, my niece Julie’s husband left her with three kids under five and a mortgage she couldn’t pay. So, I asked her to move in here with me.”

I was suddenly jealous of this Julie character. Imagine having a generous aunt to move in with. I had spent the first few nights since I fled Juniper Shores at my childhood home with my parents. But they were not generous. At least, not in spirit. I had reached the point yesterday that figuring out what to do next on my own had seemed more palatable than one more moment in Chapel Hill. Plus, Iris started school today. I wanted to maintain as much normalcy for her as possible, so I would just figure this out. Surely the feds wouldn’t keep us out of our house more than a week or so. Two weeks, tops.

“And then her best friend, Grace, split with her husband when he decided to take a job in Tokyo. It was amicable, but she was left with two kids, and she felt, um…” Alice paused. “Overwhelmed by the idea of doing it all alone.”

There was definitely more to that story… “It’s nice to have community,” I agreed.

“So she moved in here too.”

My eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? You just took these women in? With all their kids?”

She laughed. “I never had children, and I’d always wanted to experience a slice of motherhood.” She shrugged. “Plus, it was a bed-and-breakfast, so we were already set up for communal living.”

“Wow,” I said, incredulous. Who was this woman? She was either a saint or a lunatic. Did I want to find out which?

“Then Joy, the mom of a student I taught at the elementary school, lost her job and had to sell her house and needed a place to stay while she got back on her feet. So she moved in here too with her two teenagers.”

“So, you’re running, like, a lost ladies’ hostel?”

She laughed. “Sort of. We call ourselves the mommune.”

I laughed too. “The mommune. That’s really cute.”

“Everyone has responsibilities around the house based on what they do best. I do a lot of the driving because Julie and Joy have traditional jobs. But Grace works from home, so she does most of the cooking and shopping—she’s a fabulous cook. We split up chores and bills, and it just generally makes life a lot easier.”

I couldn’t tell if this was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard or the most sensible. “Like a sorority house for grown-ups?” I asked.

“Does it sound crazy? I’ve lost perspective.”

“No, not crazy,” I decided suddenly. “Kind of brilliant, actually. When you can’t be around, there’s another mom there to do your mom things.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Alice said. “Because I was thinking maybe you could be one of those moms.”

I was at once totally sure of what she was saying and not sure at all. “What?”

Alice got up and walked inside, and I knew I was supposed to follow her, so I did. She walked up the cream-carpeted stairs, and I couldn’t help but wonder whose job it was to keep those clean while I looked at the eclectic art lining the stairwell. She took a right at the upper landing into a bedroom with a charming pair of twin beds and a dresser made entirely of light-colored shells. The walls were covered in a pale-blue bamboo wallpaper. Then she led me through a bathroom with double sinks—the countertops had bits of oystershell embedded—and marble mosaic tile floors, a huge soaking tub, and a separate glass shower, into another bedroom with a king bed. I couldn’t even take in how lovely it was because, right in front of me, outside the wall of windows with one door in the center that led to a porch, was an expansive view of the ocean, which was very calm today, retreating and then returning to the sand. Shorebirds flitted to the water’s edge and, as the waves came in, pranced toward the beach again, which was full of umbrellas and intact families eating sandwiches and building sandcastles.

A sob I didn’t even realize was building burst out of me. The last few days hadn’t even felt real, and my sole focus had been trying to get in touch with my lawyer, trying to keep a roof over my daughter’s head, trying to figure out what to do until—God willing—some court somewhere had mercy on me and released our money. Our clothes. Our house. Something . I hadn’t even had a moment to realize that the family Bill and I had created was gone. That the man who swept me off my feet, and spent sixteen years doting on me, had lied to me the entire time. Hadn’t he? Alice pulled me to her as I cried. “Things are very bad right now, and that’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay to let them be bad.”

She stroked my hair, and it occurred to me that, of all the women in the world, she should have been a mother. She was so soothing. Her house was a magical oasis of beauty, and her light shone over all of it. I finally composed myself enough to pull away from her. I wiped my eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“You aren’t the one who should be sorry.”

“Wow. Tantrum in the bank, sobbing in a stranger’s house. Is this what a complete nervous breakdown feels like?”

“You haven’t shaved your head yet, so I think you’re still on the right side of the line.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “I suspect my marriage is over,” I said. “My family is over.”

“You don’t know that,” Alice said. “Have you even talked to Bill? Maybe it’s all a misunderstanding.”

I considered that briefly. And that’s how I knew that I was a little to blame here too. Because my husband, the man I had pledged my life to for better or worse, had been sitting in jail for three days, and I hadn’t been able to make myself go over there to see him. At thirty-eight, a woman has a certain level of knowledge about herself, and I knew I was bad in a crisis. Bill was great in a crisis. I felt frozen. Deep down, I knew I hadn’t gone because I didn’t believe he was a criminal. But the minute I looked at him, the minute I saw his face, I would know for sure. And if he was guilty, I wasn’t sure how I could survive it.

When I closed my eyes at night, while I was trying to sleep, I would think of that face, of the first moment I ever saw Bill. I had just graduated from college, just moved to New York. But I wasn’t exactly living out my Sex and the City dreams. I had interned for Bank of America the summers after my sophomore and junior years of college and was incredibly lucky to have been offered a job—albeit an entry-level one—right after graduation. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was scared. I was scared of leaving the safety of the small-town existence that I’d had in Chapel Hill and going out on my own. I was scared, that is, until my great-aunt asked me if I wanted to come live with her, save on rent. She lived way up Fifth Avenue, in a dated apartment in a beautiful prewar building that overlooked Central Park and the reservoir. The kitchen appliances were old (but who cooked anyway?), all my cool friends were living in Tribeca, and, well, my roommate was a seventy-eight-year-old woman. But I had my own bedroom and bathroom, and, what’s more, I had what I needed to make that leap: a sense of security. I was leaving the nest without leaving the nest.

I told people that my parents had insisted I live with Aunt Mary, which was completely untrue. She gave me a gift that year. Not only did I save a ton of money, but I also found the courage to take the next step, to find a career I loved, a man I loved, and friends who helped me grow up.

That first, sweltering summer, I felt like I was the only person in Manhattan. I was working nonstop and had neither the money nor the cachet for a summer place in the Hamptons or any other chic city-adjacent locale. By the time I left work around eight each night, I was exhausted and hot and the last thing I felt like doing was eating. Every now and then, I would walk the dozen or so blocks from the Bank of America Tower to Serendipity 3, decompressing from my day, to get my favorite banana split. Maybe it was childish, but, well, I was twenty-one: part of me was still a child.

That particular night, I was dreaming of that perfect dish with the delectable ice cream and light, fluffy whipped cream, but when I took my seat in the colorful restaurant right beside a flying unicorn and tried to order, the server said, “I’m so sorry. We’re out of bananas. We just served our last banana split.” As luck or fate would have it, he pointed to the person at the table beside me, a man in his midtwenties, with blond hair swept casually over his forehead, his blue eyes sparkling. My heart skipped a beat when he smiled at me. “I’ll share,” he said, gesturing to the seat across from him.

The good Southern girl in me should have protested, but even I—young and inexperienced in the ways of the world—knew when a man was flirting with me. I took the seat and his extra spoon and Bill said, “You can’t call ice cream dinner if it doesn’t have produce.”

“That’s what I always say!” I smiled and whispered, “But the frozen hot chocolate is really my favorite.”

“Then we should get that for dessert,” he said.

I had fallen in love with that sweet, charming man on the spot—or, well, maybe while we were sipping one frozen hot chocolate out of two straws. I had found him to be kind but passionate, thoughtful yet driven. Sure, he had made some mistakes. But hadn’t we all?

And now people were saying my husband had defrauded dozens of people out of millions of dollars. Why wouldn’t he have come to me if he was in trouble? After days of first-class, hard-core avoidance, I felt desperate to know the answer. I was swamped with guilt over not attending his arraignment. But now I was ready. I would march myself, like many, many scorned women before me, down to the county jail where my husband was being held without bond because he was a “flight risk.” And, well, he might have had a teeny, tiny, nothing, stupid prior conviction for check fraud. (The mistake…) It was only a state misdemeanor, and it was years ago. But it was enough to justify holding him without bond, enough to make me doubt him.… And I wasn’t the only one.

I had spent three days with my parents’ I told you so s. Three days of humiliation that my life had fallen apart. Three days of, quite honestly, missing the man I thought I knew. I needed to see Bill; I needed to know the truth, good or bad.

But I didn’t mention any of that to Alice. To her, I just said, “Maybe so.”

Alice opened the glass door, and I stepped out onto the porch, taking a deep breath. “These would be your rooms,” she said. “Joy’s children have graduated and she has left us, so we have the space.”

I studied her, my heart quickening. “Seriously?”

“If you and Iris choose to join us here at the mommune, we’d be happy to have you. There are responsibilities, but I think you’d find that, overall, being in a friendly, loving environment in the company of other women and children is quite satisfying. I feel that it would be a good fit for you. A step in your healing journey.”

I wanted to fall into her comforting, motherly arms again. I wanted to sink into the king bed and take a nap. Instead, I said, “Alice, I’m so flattered, but there’s no way I could afford the rent.”

“Get on your feet and then we’ll worry about rent.”

My breath caught in my throat. Bill was the only non-relative who had ever been this nice to me. I was suspicious of that at first. I wondered how it could be real. Maybe it hadn’t been, in the end. And so this, too, seemed too good to be true. “But why?” I whispered.

Alice took both of my hands in hers, and I found myself, not for the first time today, unable to look away from her. “Charlotte,” she said with so much emotion, “I know how it feels to have nowhere to turn. And when I saw you in the bank this morning, I knew that’s how you felt.”

I bit my lip to keep from crying again. But I nodded because she was right. That was exactly how I felt. Trying to lighten the intensity of the moment, I said, “Wait. In the car, you said we’d be helping each other.”

She nodded. “Oh yes. Well, we have homework time at night and each of us helps the kids with a subject. Julie is language arts, Grace is history, and I am somehow stuck with science and math. I am terrible at math. So you can take math.”

I burst out laughing. I was overwhelmed by so many emotions I wasn’t sure which one was at the forefront. But then I recognized it. Relief. Because my daughter wouldn’t be on the street.

“It’s perfect here,” I whispered, getting choked up again.

Alice squeezed my shoulders. “Charlotte, darling, welcome to the mommune.”