7. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
A fter an easy lunch of hot dogs on the grill and homemade macaroni and cheese, Nadine decided a walk was called for. Even though she was tired and achy from the long drive, she felt it would be a good opportunity to stretch her legs, wander through her hometown, and counteract all the calories from the comfort food her mother was famous for. It was a marvel to Nadine that her mother maintained a trim, slim figure.
“Mom, are you sure you don’t want to go with us?” Nadine asked.
Louise scowled. Her attitude had always been, Why walk when you could drive ? She was not a natural exerciser. “No, thanks. You go ahead. I’m perfectly content to stay here. Leave Herman with me if you want.”
“You don’t mind?” she asked with a glance at the dog, who was sound asleep against the paving bricks of the back patio. She’d read somewhere that animals didn’t travel well. Maybe this was jet lag for him. Plus, she wanted to stop in and see Angie, if possible.
“Of course not,” Louise said with a wave. “Herman and I are old friends. Besides, he looks beat.”
“We won’t be long. We might stop in and see Angie.”
The smile disappeared from her mother’s face. “If you do, remind her that I still live in Lavender Bay.” Her mouth puckered until her lips disappeared.
Uh-oh , Nadine thought. Angie was third in the lineup of Cook sisters and four years younger than Nadine. She’d never married, had no children, and had always been about work. The coffee shop she’d opened three years ago apparently consumed every waking moment.
Emma joined her and they headed away from Heather Lane toward the main area of town.
As they walked, neighbors who were tending their front gardens or sitting on their porches called out to them and waved, welcoming them back to Lavender Bay. The air was filled with the scent of fresh-mowed grass and Mrs. McAllister’s roses, which she grew in abundance in her front yard.
“Everyone is so friendly here,” Emma said. “And everyone knows you.”
“That’s what happens when you grow up in a place where most of the residents don’t leave. ”
It was different back home. They were friendly with their immediate neighbors, but if you went for a long walk around the gated community in which they lived, there was no one to wave to. No one was ever out front, preferring the privacy of their fenced-in backyards. If you didn’t hear the splashes from the pools in the summer, you’d almost think the homes were abandoned.
“Of course, the flip side of that is that everyone knows your business,” Nadine said with a sigh.
“Mom, you’re not the first person to have marital trouble,” her daughter said sagely. “Look at my friend Jenna. Her mother is on her second marriage. Her father is on his third, and the wives keep getting younger!”
Nadine winced and said nothing, not wanting to veer onto the subject of her imploding marriage with her only child. She wasn’t a big believer in oversharing. There was still some disbelief that her marriage was over.
“Come on, let’s cut over to Maple,” Nadine said with a nod in the direction of the street off of Vine, where they currently walked.
Emma laughed. “Mom, you’re so transparent. You just want to see Monsieur Aubert !” she said, affecting a French accent.
“I suppose,” Nadine admitted.
They didn’t have to walk far to meet up with Jacques Aubert, or rather the statue of him that had been there since the turn of the last century. The statue had been erected in an empty lot on Maple Avenue. At the time, there’d been a lot of infighting and politics, and he did not end up in the center of the park as some people had wanted. Instead, an early citizen had donated the land next to his house for the statue. Over the last century, it had turned into a small, impromptu park with a couple of benches that required repainting every few years. Volunteers kept the grass cut and the paved brick walkway weed-free. In the springtime, they planted flowers. It was an odd little spot, off on a side street, something only the locals knew about. It was one of Nadine’s favorite spots in Lavender Bay. If she were alone, she’d take a seat on a bench, but she figured Emma wouldn’t be interested. She’d want to keep moving.
A bee buzzed along the roses circling the statue, and a monarch butterfly flitted from one stem of goldenrod to another. They stood on the pathway and Nadine stared at the statue, an imagined likeness of the man who’d founded their town in the late 18 th century.
As the story went, Jacques Aubert had been traveling by boat across Lake Erie from what was now Canada when he drifted off course and ended up here. He found the sunsets remarkable and, according to his personal diaries, never grew tired of them. The light purple–hued skies at nighttime were purported to remind him of the lavender farms back home in France where he’d grown up and thus, he named the area—inhabited exclusively by Native Americans at the time—Lavender Bay.
Nadine and Emma headed to the end of Maple and rounded the corner onto Main. Nadine immediately picked up on the buzz that Main Street couldn’t help but have with its mishmash of shops and eateries.
There were no big chain stores in Lavender Bay. If you wanted that, you had to go out onto the main highway. Here in Lavender Bay, small businesses thrived. The townspeople were keen to support the local businesses because no town needed vacant storefronts and empty buildings. It would herald a downward slide.
She smiled as she spotted the familiar storefronts, including her aunt’s antique shop, Prime Vintage. Gail was her mother’s older sister. Nadine narrowed her eyes to see if her aunt’s dog was there. Brutus was a retired bloodhound who’d worked in the south as a tracker. His only job right now was to find the perfect sunny spot every day. Apparently, he’d found it right in front of the door. Nadine smiled and went to cross the street but saw that her aunt had customers and decided to visit her another day. Brutus was out cold and didn’t even lift his head as she passed.
Nadine was making her way around the corner onto Oak when she bumped straight into Edna Knickerbocker .
“You really need to watch where you’re going,” Edna said, putting her hand to her forehead and palpating the area.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Knickerbocker,” Nadine replied. The older woman had always been called “Mrs.,” even though she never married.
Edna narrowed her eyes and asked, “Do I know you?”
Nadine nodded. “Sure. Nadine Eberhardt. Used to be Nadine Cook.”
“Yes, of course. I didn’t recognize you. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“I’ve been away from Lavender Bay for a while,” Nadine said. “This is my daughter, Emma.”
“You look like a Cook,” Edna said, still running her fingers along her forehead and gently probing it. “Do I have a goose egg?”
Nadine peered at the older woman’s face. “Not that I can see.”
“Are you back for good or just a visit?”
“Just visiting,” Nadine said, hoping the other woman wouldn’t ask too many questions.
But Edna went off on a tangent. “I’m just back from Chicago.” She shuddered. “I really don’t like the big cities. Too much noise. Too much traffic. Too much wind. Too much of everything.”
“Were you there on vacation?”
“Nope. My cousin, Johnny Hadley, passed away. ”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nadine said.
Edna waved her comment away. “He was almost ninety. He had a good and happy life. He’s left me plenty to do, though. He made me executor of his will. I’ve got to come up with a plan for the house he still owned over on Pearl Street.”
A dim memory from her past surfaced. “Oh, the old Hadley place.” Nadine said.
“That’s the one,” Edna confirmed. “‘The house that takes in strays,’ we used to call it in the family. For years, my aunt ran it as a boarding house.”
Nadine remembered hearing that when she was young. She’d been fascinated by the thought of all those strangers living in one house. Many times, she would have preferred living with strangers over living with her sisters, parents, and grandparents in her own busy home.
“I’ll have to put the old place on the market,” Edna mused. “I don’t need a house that big.”
Edna’s fingers returned to her forehead. “Anyway, I’d better get to the doctor to make sure this isn’t a serious head injury.” Worry etched her features.
Though Nadine was sure that wasn’t the case, it was pointless to argue. Edna liked going to the doctor’s office. Despite being over eighty, she’d spent most of her adult life needing to be reassured by a medical professional that her death wasn’t imminent .
Nadine and Emma continued on their walkabout, picking out other familiar places: Pen Pals, the stationery shop; Fine Print, the independent bookstore; and Bits and Bobs, the sewing and craft store. Nadine’s eyes bounced up and down Main Street, taking in all the familiar sights and noting the new stores as well.
A tattoo parlor called the Ink Stain had opened, as well as BAC Security. There was a new restaurant, the Annacotty Room, which her mother had raved about. And directly across from her sister’s coffee shop was another coffee shop, Java Joe’s. She didn’t remember that being there the last time she was home.
“Come on, let’s see Angie,” Nadine said. She pushed through the front door of Coffee Girl, thinking as she did every time how much she loved the name of the place. When Angie was fresh out of high school, she’d taken a job driving a coffee truck that sold coffee, tea, sandwiches, and pastries. She drove from worksite to worksite, to places of business like the Gibson’s Grape Jelly factory out on the highway. She’d earned the nickname Coffee Girl, and people were always glad to see her coming. When she took a week off to go to Florida with her friends for spring break, there’d almost been a revolt.
Angie’s coffee shop was housed in a hundred-year-old red-brick Italianate building. It was a long, narrow space with a copper-tiled ceiling and gleaming hardwood floors. There were high tables with polished black walnut chairs and low tables made of the same walnut. A bar ran along the length of the front window for those who wanted to sip their coffee and people-watch. Currently a couple sat in the front window, a discarded, well-thumbed newspaper beside them. The counter ran half the length of one side wall, and it housed a long pastry case and a grouping of glass-domed cake plates. As it was the end of the day, there wasn’t much left.
Nadine couldn’t see her sister, but she could hear her, as vocal as ever: “Come on, get the lead out, we’re leaving on time tonight.”
The stainless-steel butler door separating the front of the café from the kitchen swung open, and Angie pushed through holding a tray of clean coffee mugs emblazoned with the Coffee Girl logo. She set the tray down, oblivious to the presence of her older sister and niece.
Nadine elbowed her daughter and grinned. “Come on, let’s make our presence known.”
Slowly, they approached the counter. Angie had her back to them, stacking the clean mugs on the counter.
It had always seemed to Nadine that the Cook sisters got prettier the farther they got down the line. It wasn’t that she herself was unattractive; she wasn’t, but she was no match for Angie, with her curves and her red hair and beautiful face. And as for their youngest sister, Deedee, she had movie star looks that left them all in the dust .
Finished with the mugs, Angie spun around to approach her next task when she spotted Nadine and Emma in front of her. First, she blinked several times as if she were seeing a mirage. Then her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. Finally, she came out from behind the counter, arms out, and embraced the two of them.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “And how are you?” She pulled back and looked at them, focusing first on Emma. “Look at how much you’ve grown. We’ve missed you.” And then as if a thought had occurred to her, she asked, “Did you get my graduation card?”
“I did, thank you for your generous gift,” Emma said, casting a sheepish look at her mother.
Nadine rolled her eyes, thinking she wasn’t going to mention in front of Angie how she’d been reminding Emma how important it was to send thank-you notes. You could only do so much as a mother; at some point, they had to learn for themselves.
“What are you doing here? You didn’t say you were coming,” Angie said.
Evangeline Cook, of all the sisters, was determined to be taken seriously. Growing up, she’d been known as Nadine and Maureen’s younger sister. But she’d been set on making her own mark on the world. On her terms.
“There’s a lot going on. I’ll fill you in later,” Nadine said. The coffee shop wasn’t the place to inform her sister about her marital drama .
“Come on, come on, let’s sit down,” Angie said. She looked quickly around at the other tables.
“We won’t stay long,” Nadine said, knowing of her sister’s inability to relax and take a break.
Angie herded them over to a table close to the front window, where she took the seat that would allow her to keep an eye on the shop.
She’s consumed by her business , Nadine thought. Her sister had never married and had no children, and she supposed in a sense the café was her baby. But she wondered if Angie was happy. She probably didn’t even have time to think about abstract thoughts like these.
“Oh gosh, where are my manners,” Angie said. “Would you like coffee?” To Emma she said, “We have iced coffees, too.”
Emma shook her head. “No thanks. I’m coffee-ed out. We drank a lot on the drive from home.”
“You drove?”
“We had to. We’ve got Herman with us,” Nadine explained.
“You brought Herman?” Angie said. “How long are you staying for?”
“For a while,” Nadine said vaguely, squirming in her seat. She wasn’t sure herself.
Without taking her eyes off Nadine, Angie turned her head slightly and narrowed her eyes as if drawing her own conclusions. Abruptly, she changed the subject .
“Have you seen Maureen?”
“Not yet, she doesn’t know we’re here. I’ll call her tomorrow.”
Angie nodded. “Good.”
“How’s she doing?”
Angie shrugged. “As far as I know, fine. You know Maureen, she’s got the perfect life.”
Nadine almost winced but didn’t. That’s what her friends used to say about her and Richard, that they had the perfect marriage. Even Nadine had gone along with that and had eventually believed it.
“What about Deedee?”
“I get a text from her every so often. She’s with some acting troupe down in Florida. She likes it. Seems happy. She was going out with a lawyer, but I don’t know if that’s still a thing.”
Angie knew more than Nadine did. It was sad how the four of them weren’t close, not the way their mother was close to her sister. As teenagers and young women, Nadine and her sisters had tended to rub each other the wrong way and would spend days or weeks not speaking to one another, despite their mother’s insistence that they “get over themselves.” It wasn’t that they’d ever had some big falling out, but they were different people with different personalities, and each one of them was guilty of nursing those old slights, real or imagined. Nadine and Deedee moving out of state didn’t help matters. Their lives had all gone in different directions.
“Still working eighty hours a week?” Nadine asked. This was a constant complaint from their mother when she spoke to her on the phone. How worried she was that Angie was working herself to death.
Angie grinned. “It’s not work if you love doing it.”
Nadine was happy that she felt this way about her café, and her sister should be proud as she had built her business from the ground up. She was about to say so when Angie’s smile disappeared and she hooked her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the business across the street. “Did you see I have competition?”
“I did. Java Joe’s,” Nadine said.
“As small a town as Lavender Bay is, that clown had to go and set up shop directly across the street from me,” her sister griped. Nadine had forgotten about Angie’s tendency to take personal offense.
“I’m sure he didn’t open his café with the sole intent of aggravating you, Angie,” Nadine said, trying to be the voice of reason.
Angie snorted. “Well, I know that, Nadine. But how much of an idiot is he to try and start a coffee shop right on the same block? Why didn’t he go somewhere else in town? ”
Nadine didn’t know if this was a rhetorical question or if her sister really wanted an answer. She didn’t offer an opinion.
There was the sound of dishes crashing to the floor in the kitchen, and Angie jumped up. “I better see what’s going on.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Angie said and before they could say goodbye, she was pushing through the butler door to the kitchen.
“Come on, Mom, let’s go,” Emma said, standing up and pushing her chair in.
“Sure. Let’s walk over to the beach,” Nadine suggested.
The air was heavy with humidity, and Nadine could feel her hair beginning to frizz. Emma pulled a hair tie off her wrist and quickly and expertly whipped her hair off her face and into a chic-looking messy bun. Nadine tried to remember if she was as put together and confident at that age, and somehow didn’t think so. She remembered being very shy as a teenager.
“Why, I don’t believe it! As I live and breathe! Is that you, Nadine Cook?” called out a voice that had a little bit of a croak to it.
Nadine turned to see Lavender Bay’s oldest resident, Grace Gibson. Grace didn’t let the fact that she was almost one hundred years old hold her back. She wore white capris with hot pink piping and had a pair of silver sequined sneakers on her feet. Nadine hoped when she was elderly, she had fabulous hair like Grace’s: thick, silvery, and with a nice wave. It complemented her bright blue eyes.
Grace was the daughter of the founder of Gibson’s Grape Jelly She’d never married, and lived in the oldest and grandest house in Lavender Bay. For as long as Nadine could remember, Grace had almost always had a smile on her face. Maybe the secret to a long and happy life was remaining single. She’d have to think about that later on when she was alone.
Nadine leaned toward the diminutive woman and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She smelled of Chanel No.5, as always. Nadine’s mind drifted off, a small smile forming on her lips. When she was fourteen, she used to go up to Grace’s home and dust for her. She’d had a treasure trove of knickknacks: lots of Hummel figurines, Precious Moments statues, and Lladro. But the Napcoware head vases had been Nadine’s personal favorites. She’d been intrigued with these, with their pearl earrings, their lustrous hair, and that thick line of black eyeliner painted on the eyelids.
“Oh dear, I think we’ve lost you,” Grace said, waving a thin, gnarled hand with a signet ring on one finger in front of Nadine’s face.
“Mom!” Emma said sharply to get her attention.
“I’m sorry,” Nadine blustered. “I was just thinking about how I used to come and dust for you after school. ”
“That’s right!” Grace said, her eyes sparkling.
“I used to love those lady head vases,” Nadine said.
“I didn’t know that,” Grace said.
“Lady head vases?” Emma said.
“Have your mother bring you up to the house someday and I’ll show you my collection. I’ve been collecting them since the 1950s.”
“There were a lot of knickknacks to dust,” Nadine said with a laugh.
“And it was worth every penny to have you do it,” Grace said.
“You said back then that you didn’t know how much time you had left, and you didn’t want to spend it dusting,” Nadine said.
“It seems to me that the Good Lord has forgotten me,” Grace quipped with a glance heavenward. “Not that I’m in any hurry to leave my wonderful life, but I think people are beginning to talk.”
Nadine and Emma burst out laughing.
“Anyway, it was wonderful to see you again. Stop by and see me anytime,” Grace said. “Ada is still making those wonderful lemon bars.”
“Is Ada still with you?” Nadine asked. Ada Katz had been with Grace for a long time, as a cook and companion. She’d been there already when Nadine went up the hill to dust after school thirty years ago .
“Of course. I think the Lord forgot about her, too,” Grace said, smiling.
“Say hello to her for me,” Nadine said.
“Will do,” Grace said. “Now, I must keep moving. If I stand for too long, my joints start to get stiff.” She looked at Emma. “Young lady, it’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”
Emma smiled. “I’ll tuck that away for future reference.”
“Good girl.”
They parted ways, with Nadine and Emma heading north along Pearl Street, which ran parallel to the beach, and Grace going south, heading toward her home.
“Can you imagine living in these big houses with the beach in your backyard?” Emma asked, her eyes wide as her gaze swung from one house to the other.
Emma had been enthralled with the beach ever since Nadine and Richard first brought her here as a two-year-old. Every summer when they came home, it would be the first thing Emma would want to do. When they’d visit Maureen’s and all the kids would be in the pool, Emma would lean into Nadine, her lips blue, her wet hair slicked back, water dripping off her bathing suit, and whisper, “Can we go to the beach?”
All the homes on the street were older Victorian-style houses replete with gingerbread trim and painted the obligatory three colors. As they walked along, they could hear the surf from behind the houses, which backed onto the shore. As long as Nadine lived, she’d never get tired of that sound. And when she came home, she always realized how much she missed it.
With the sound and the scent of the beach, she realized this would be a place where she could sort out her life. Figure out her problems and decide where she wanted to go from here.
Whether consciously or not, she found herself heading in the direction of the Hadley house Edna Knickerbocker had mentioned, and when she reached it, she paused on the cracked sidewalk. It was such a grand house! It was almost three stories if you included the top-floor attic. It had a deep front porch with wide steps. Above the porch was a balcony off one of the upstairs rooms. The faded paint was the color of cocoa, with cream and green accents. A bay window on one side of the house, toward the rear, must offer a partial view of the beach and the lake beyond.
What was it about a house that you could always tell if it was uninhabited? Had it lost its soul? Its spark for life? Despite the architectural prettiness of the house, it seemed forlorn. It seemed how Nadine felt: alone, lonely. At that point in her life, it was hard to separate the two. Edna Knickerbocker’s words rang in her head: it was a house that took in strays.
“It’s sad that the Hadleys didn’t remain in the house,” Nadine said, more to herself than anyone .
“Mom, people move. They do it all the time,” Emma said, one hand on her hip, her knee bent slightly as she studied the house.
Were they a rare breed, people who remained in the same house for forty, fifty years? Nadine’s own mother had lived nowhere else since she’d married but the tidy little Victorian on Heather Lane.
“If I had the money, I’d buy that house,” Emma announced.
“You would?”
Emma nodded, her arms folded across her chest, the short sleeves of her T-shirt laid smooth along her slim shoulders, her collarbones neat and symmetrical. Sometimes Nadine could only stare at her daughter, stunned that this other person, in all her perfection, had come forth from her. It was mind-boggling.
“I’d love to live on the beach, or near it. Especially this one,” Emma was saying.
“Why’s that?”
“I have great memories of our summers here by the lake,” Emma said with a laugh. “Why wouldn’t I want to live here?” She paused, kicking at some loose sand on the sidewalk. “It’s one of my life goals: someday, I’m going to live on a beach.”
It bothered Nadine that she didn’t know this fact about her only child. How had she not known that? What else didn’t she know about her daughter ?
Early in their marriage, she’d been hopeful that she and Richard and Emma could move back to Lavender Bay, but Richard had never been keen on the idea of living in Nadine’s hometown. The things we sacrifice, she thought. All in the name of love.
“Come on, we better head back. Your grandmother will wonder what happened to us,” Nadine said, pivoting. As they walked in the general direction of home, she looked over her shoulder at the house, one might almost say longingly.