Chapter 4
Diana
There’s embarrassing, as in “I pushed on a ‘Pull’ door in front of a crowd.” And there’s embarrassing, as in “the only man in Cape Georgeana who makes my blood boil just rescued me like a cat in a tree.” I know for a fact that he clocked me shaking with fear back in the lighthouse.
When we reach the shore, Ike lowers me unceremoniously onto the beach like he can’t wait to be unburdened of my load. I remove my single heel, and attempt a few aching steps toward my car. The rocks are like knives against my cold, bare feet. It’s slow going.
I feel Ike’s eyes on my back. Why is he walking behind me?
The other guys beat us to the shore by a longshot and are watching the show from the truck.
I recognized Ike’s brother, August, right away—he always seemed like the nice one of the family—but the blond guy must be new to town.
This is his first and only experience with me. That tracks.
I’ve never made the best impression on the people of Cape Georgeana.
I’ve heard the whispers. Stevie and I have laughed at the far-fetched stories they’ve invented about the reclusive woman whose family’s beachfront estate is older than the town itself.
That’s what I get for snubbing public school, I suppose—not that I was ever given the option.
The York family lives a certain way, and for female progeny the way is: Nannies, boarding school, Ivy league, marriage, child bearing, repeat.
My mother is the only person I know who has broken the cycle.
She rejected the Ivy league and marriage steps, jumped straight to child bearing, and left me in the capable hands of her parents when I was a few years old.
They hired a nanny without skipping a beat.
She took care of me on the weekends and summers when I came home from boarding school. And here we are.
I stalled after the Ivy league portion of the cycle. I have a decent job in New York City, but Charles and Patricia York are verklempt about my inability to get married.
Am I bucking tradition like my mother? Not consciously—maybe fifty-percent consciously. Half of me is an obedient granddaughter—I love my grandparents and want to make them happy—and half of me wants nothing to do with getting married and becoming a baby factory.
Or do I? I like kids. I love the idea of having a few babies, but not because my grandparents are breathing down my neck to do it.
The internal conflict is agonizing. Inside every woman there are two wolves: One who wants to make babies and homemade sourdough, and one who wants to do brain surgery—or in my case, a mid-level accounting job.
“This is like torture.” Ike’s gravelly voice repeats my thoughts as I pick my way across the rocks, contemplating my life.
And just like what happened in the water, he scoops me up with those surprisingly strong arms of his. He tries to, anyway. This time I’m prepared. I wriggle out of his hold before he gets me off the ground. Smoothing my skirt, I try to put some distance between us.
“I can walk, thank—” I wince when something sharp jams into the soft arch of my foot. “Thank you,” I wheeze.
“But I want to go home,” he says, a little too close.
Bumps raise on my arms. “You can go. Thank you for the rescue, but I can make it from here,” I state calmly as I hobble toward my car.
I don’t know why I’m speaking like my grandparents are listening.
I should use language Ike will understand, like grunts and armpit scratches.
The corner of my mouth ticks up, but guilt pricks me. “I’m sorry. That was unkind.”
“Was it?” Ike sounds genuinely confused.
I just apologized for my thoughts. I’m really tired. I can only shrug in response. This day has drained me.
Instead of trying to pick me up again, or leaving like I wish he would do, Ike stays with me until I reach my old car and pop the trunk.
I have a fresh, complete pair of heels in here to wear to my grandparents’ house.
I start to unzip my luggage, but rethink it when I realize he’s still standing quietly behind me with his arms folded across his chest.
I straighten. “Can I help you?”
“Oh.” Ike startles. “Uh, no.”
I don’t want him to watch me open my luggage.
There are personal things tucked in there, and Ike is a tease.
He’ll find something to hold over my head.
Maybe literally. “Okay, well…” I make a shoo-ing motion toward the waiting fire truck.
His cohorts are watching us with the windows down, and the eyes of all three men make me feel extra awkward in my shoeless state.
He straightens. “You sure you’re good, Princ—”
I cut him off with a sharp look.
His eyes flash with mirth. “You good, Diana?”
I’m shaky and tired, but he doesn’t need to know that. “Fine, thank you. You can go.”
He smirks. “It was a pleasure serving you, Your Highness.” He makes a production out of bowing before he backs away, and the other guys chuckle.
And just like that I’m a teenage girl, lonely and misunderstood in the life she was handed, and angry at Ike Wentworth all over again.
∞∞∞
Before I head to my grandparents’ home for the night, I have to see Stevie. It’s the law. If I don’t pop in now that my old Mercedes was spotted, it’ll be weeks before the guilt tripping stops.
My best friend lives a few blocks from the ocean in a tiny cottage she shares with a roommate I haven’t met.
It’s dark now, but the place looks the same as it did the last time I was here—its brown shingle siding is still faded from the sun and salt air.
There are pots, buckets and boxes of flowers in every color scattered around the front porch, and a thick vine of yellow flowers climbing around the white door.
Stevie and I have been on walk-in terms since seventh grade, so I turn the knob as I knock.
“Stevie?” I call, opening the door. The familiar apple-cinnamon scent of her house invites me inside, but the living room is empty.
A gasp and the sound of a pot being dropped into the sink comes from the kitchen.
“Di?” Stevie crashes into the doorjamb of the kitchen in her gray sweats and bare feet.
“Di!” She screams and launches toward me, a blur of red hair and hugging arms. She doesn’t waste any time. “Okay, what are you doing in town?”
“I had a dream that I made out with Tom Selleck at the top of the lighthouse.” Wow, that felt like dumping a load of bricks. My friendship with Stevie is as liberating and comfortable as holey, ten-year-old sweatpants.
She laughs, dragging me to her threadbare yellow couch. “Um, what?” she asks with a snicker. “I’ve been nagging you to come home for years, but Tom Selleck got you here?”
I fall back against the cushions. “Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve been feeling—” I run my hands down my face. “My life has gotten—” I groan.
“I knew it.” She crosses her legs under herself on the cushion.
I pull my hands away from my face. “What?”
“You don’t like your job, or living in New York.”
She’s partially right, but I’ll never admit it.
New York City is the symbol of my silent rebellion.
I can’t tell my grandparents I don’t want to get married.
But I can hide in my dumpy third floor walkup on the Lower East Side while I studiously avoid it, doing a job that feels like hitting my head against a brick wall every day.
I am a strong, independent woman and it just be like that sometimes.
Choosing not to accept my grandparents’ financial help after I finished school narrowed my options.
“I love the city. I don’t always love the job. ”
“What is it that you do again?” Stevie asks with a smile in her voice.
I’ve told her at least a dozen times, but I don’t blame her for forgetting. “I’m on an FP&A team for an ergonomic bathroom solutions company.”
Stevie snickers. “I love you, but I fell asleep halfway through that sentence.”
I take a deep breath. “I help the Dynamic Dumper people make smart financial decisions so they can get rich off of their customers having an effective BM, okay?” I spit out in a rush.
I don’t love my job, but it allows me to work remotely and live in stretchy clothing from the waist down.
My grandparents would not approve. Fortunately, they don’t visit my apartment often.
“Not all of us lucked into our dream job.”
Stevie is the choir director at the local high school.
Her college graduation aligned near-perfectly with the retirement of the former choir director.
Stevie claims she got the job because she was always Ms. Maynard's favorite soprano. I say it’s because Stevie is musically gifted, and no one with her level of talent would teach choir at a 2A high school for five dollars an hour.
She’s doing what she loves, and she’s not a slave to greedy Big Toilet. I envy my best friend.
Stevie smiles like she knows exactly how lucky she is. Then she purses her lips with a frown, like she pities me for living in the big, smoggy city. “Okay, let’s talk about how you’re in love with Tom Selleck. What in the actual h—”
“I’m not in love with him,” I correct her.
“We kissed in the lighthouse.” There is a distinct difference.
After a day of feeling phantom whispers of Tom’s mustache on my cheek I’m sure of it.
A woman can make out with someone in the lighthouse without being in love with him.
Then I remember the feel of Ike Wentworth’s firm hand wrapped around my ankle at the top of the same lighthouse, and warmth covers my face.
“My, my.” Stevie settles deeper into the cushions. “Someone’s blushing.”
I pull my dress away from my body to fan myself. “I’m just embarrassed. And hot.”
“I bet you are.” She wags her eyebrows. “For Magnum P.I.”
“No.” I groan. This has to stop. “I ran into Ike Wentworth at the top of the lighthouse.”
Stevie sits up. “You dreamed about Tom Selleck and Ike Wentworth in the lighthouse?” She fakes a gasp. “Juicy.”
“No. I dreamed about Tom, but I climbed to the top of the lighthouse and saw Ike in real life. It was terrible.”
Familiar lines form between my friend’s dark eyebrows. “You went to the top of that thing? Isn’t it condemned?” She shakes her head. “Okay, start from the beginning.”
So I do. I recount the whole lighthouse debacle, including my sad realization that I've lost my joie de vivre, the singing of “Toxic,” the staircase falling apart, and my call to 9-1-1. Stevie gasps in all the right places. And when I tell her how Ike Wentworth climbed a ladder to rescue me, she purses her lips to hold in a laugh. She doesn’t make it long. Now she is full-belly cackling.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re okay, but of all people—”
“I know.”
Ike has never cared for me as a person, and I don’t particularly like him.
The situation would be amusing if I wasn’t still stinging.
The heartbreaking images of the crumbling lighthouse underscore all of it, which only makes me more angry at Ike.
He’s in the position to do something about it, but he won’t.
“Do you know why he isn’t maintaining the lighthouse? ”
“Isn’t it sad?” Stevie frowns. “It always comes up at the town meetings. They don’t have the budget for a keeper, and it needs a full renovation. There’s no money for any of it.”
My guess is the money is there, but it’s being mismanaged because this town is run by an over-muscled, aged-out frat boy with a beard. Maybe if he spent more time looking at the books and less time in the gym—
“You’re making the face.”
“What face?” I will the tense muscles in my brow to relax.
“The face you make when you’re either hating on Ike Wentworth or hating on Cape Georgeana. Take your pick,” she says with forced lightness.
Guilt niggles at me. “Hey, I don’t hate Cape Georgeana.”
What’s not to like? It’s a quaint, if slightly run-down, seaside village with a green at the center of it and rows of shingled shops. It’s adorable. I bite my lip. That’s all I can say honestly. I can’t comment on the residents.
Besides that they all seem to think I’m a witch—and that I invented paper straws, shot out the lights in the high school football stadium, and am a sleeper spy for the People’s Republic of China—they are a never-ending parade of human curiosities.
Each resident is weirder than the last. P.T.
Barnum would make a killing in this town.
If they’re struggling to attract tourists, Ike should consider starting a circus to bring in revenue.
This sounds mean, I realize. It’s hard to be kind to the people who have basically ostracized me from the time I went through puberty. They started it.
“Ugh.” Stevie shoves my leg. “Your long-standing beef with Ike is getting so old. He’s a good guy.”
“I don’t care about Ike. I care about the lighthouse.”
“Really?” Stevie arches an eyebrow. “When was the last time you even came to see it?”
“I was here…” I look at the ceiling to remember. It’s been a while, which might be why I’ve felt so down. Even Stevie's trips to see me in the city, or our twice-weekly video calls haven't been enough to keep me mentally afloat.
“It was three years ago on my birthday.” She fails to hide the hurt in her voice this time.
“I thought you liked visiting me in the city,” I say, though there’s no defense for me.
“Have you smelled New York City?” Her pert nose pinches. “I love you, and we always have fun, but…”
I wonder at her sad eyes. I didn’t think she cared that we don’t see each other on her turf. “I’m sorry, Stevie. I’ll do better.”
She waves me away. “It’s fine. You’re here now.” She sniffs. “How long do I get you?”
I haven’t thought that far ahead, which isn’t like me. I blame Tom Selleck’s mustache. But I have one more item of business. “It depends. When’s the next town meeting?”
“Why?” Stevie asks with an amused grin.
“I'm going to talk Ike into dealing with the lighthouse.”
“You?” Stevie snorts. “At a town meeting. With Ike.”
“Yes, yes, and yes.” Nothing makes me more determined than someone telling me I can’t do something. Stevie's disbelieving tone seals the deal. This is happening.
“Oh, I have to see this.” She drags her fingers through her hair, flipping the deep, red waves. “And you’re in luck. There's a meeting tomorrow night.”