1. Maggie
Maggie closed Vivien’s decades-old diary and held it against her chest, the echo of her daughter’s eighteen-year-old voice still in her head.
It drowned out the other voice she’d heard in her sleep not an hour ago. Roger’s deep baritone had awakened her from a dream at dawn. Her late husband had been desperately trying to tell her something, but he couldn’t get the words out.
At least until this one.
Maggie had been forty-eight when Vivien wrote those words. So heartbreakingly young, and so sure she knew everything a woman needed to know about life. What she had actually known, it turned out, was almost nothing at all. At least not where her husband had been concerned.
What had Roger been trying to—
“Morning, Mags!” Jo Ellen padded in from the small balcony, a watering can in one hand, a cup of tea in the other.
“I was just chatting with my plants. The hibiscus says hello. And Basil? The little guy that Jonah gave me? Thriving! I think I’ll put a garden down in the side yard.
I was just looking at it from the balcony, and I think I could grow veggies! How’d you sleep, dear?”
“Not as well as you did, apparently,” Maggie said dryly, but she was used to Jo Ellen’s daily optimism, especially the morning overdose of it. “Aren’t you tired from the wedding yesterday?”
“My feet, back, and the hips I’m trying to ignore are complaining, but my heart?” She let out a happy purr, half contented cat, half nearly-eighty-year-old clearing her throat. “My Tessa is finally married! Oh, that girl. She always surprises and delights me.”
A flash of Tessa as Vivien had described her at eighteen—a gorgeous banshee—made her smile. “It was a beautiful day for Tessa,” Maggie said. “Well worth the wait.”
Jo filled her kettle for another tea, turned on the front burner, and headed for her favorite spot on the sofa.
“You’re just going to leave that stove on?” Maggie asked, lifting a brow.
“It will not burn down the house, Mags.” She gave a dismissive wave and lowered herself onto the other end of the couch with a soft oof. “Oh, yes, I hear you, hips, but I don’t care…” She grinned. “I was like Scarlett at the ball. ‘I’m gonna dance and dance!’”
Now, Maggie did look skyward. “Don’t make me sorry I introduced you to my favorite book and movie, Jo. You quoting it is getting on my nerves.”
Ignoring the comment, Jo pointed to the coffee table. “Speaking of books—what’s that? Looks old.”
“Ancient. It’s Vivien’s diary from when we spent summers in Destin.”
“Oh, I’ve heard about those. Kate just finished reading one. How did you get it?”
“At the wedding, I was chatting with Vivien about a memory of our last year here,” she explained. “When the girls went out on a sailboat that some boys had, remember?”
“I do. You were firmly opposed, but I swooped in and saved the day. Did she write about it?”
“I don’t know, I just started, but I was thinking maybe I could get some…insights.”
“Into what? How you yelled at her when she did anything wrong and almost refused to let her go on that sailboat?”
Maggie winced. “For one thing, I didn’t yell.”
“No. You just gave the look and your children fell into line. Can you imagine trying that with Tessa?”
“I’m sure I did try,” Maggie said, shaking her head and thinking of Vivien’s comment about ruling with fear and judgment. “If I could do one thing differently, I would have been less of a disciplinarian and more like you and Artie.”
Jo shrugged. “Your kids turned out great.”
“Well, that’s not why I wanted to read the diary.” She leaned forward, knowing exactly how her friend would react to what she was about to say, but needing to say it anyway. “I want to know if there were any clues I missed. About Roger and Artie.”
“Oh, Mags.” She flicked her finger like a gnat had annoyed her. “We know what happened. We understand why our husbands separated us. Roger was determined to make up for his petty crimes and Artie worked with him and they were heroes who protected the family. Let’s look forward, not backward.”
“I can’t help but think I’ve missed something.”
Jo Ellen pushed up when the kettle whistled. “You are going to miss something—life. At least you will if you moon over issues that happened more than thirty years ago.”
Maggie closed her eyes, remembering that dream. She wanted to tell Jo Ellen, but knew it would be dismissed as foolish.
“Hard to believe those diaries survived all the years,” Jo Ellen said. “I mean, with Eli tearing down the old cottage to build the Summer House, it’s actually a miracle.”
“He said he found them in the rafters above the garage.”
Jo Ellen turned from the stove. “Why would Vivien put them there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she hid them from prying eyes.” Maggie suspected Vivien didn’t trust her mother not to read them and even the thought hurt her heart a little.
She hadn’t been a bad mother, just one who controlled too much.
“How fun that we have them, though,” Jo Ellen mused as she bounced a tea bag in her cup.
“I thought you were opposed to living in the past.”
She smiled and came back to the living room, blowing on the steaming brew.
“There’s a difference between remembering and second-guessing, Mags.
You couldn’t have done anything differently.
Not as a mother or a wife. Today is a new day, a new life, and a new start.
” She raised the mug. “Here’s to a great partnership here in our love nest above the garage. ”
Maggie had to laugh. She didn’t want to, but that was Jo Ellen’s greatest power. So she sipped her coffee and tried to follow her friend’s instructions to live in the moment.
Outside the big windows over the couch, the tips of palm tops bent in a breeze.
A car passed by on Gulf Shore Drive, tires loud on the warm asphalt, and then silence.
Then she heard men’s voices and the sound of a truck.
She suspected Eli was going to church early because he wanted to spend the day putting up the first-floor hurricane shutters.
“Did you find anything interesting about that summer in the diary?” Jo Ellen asked.
“Not yet.” Maggie let her head rest on the back of the couch. “Vivien noticed that Roger and Artie were ‘off’ with each other before we did. She heard them on the porch arguing and she wrote it down, but thought it was nothing. I was sitting two rooms away and I thought it was nothing, too.”
“We were busy.”
“Busy drinking the Cavallaris’ limoncello that you poured down my throat with the announcement that, ‘In Destin, we drink.’”
Jo Ellen snorted. “Limoncello then, green tea for antioxidants now. Oh, Father Time. What a cruel, cruel monster you are.”
Maggie closed her eyes and could see Jo Ellen in a bright yellow sundress with her hair in a French twist, Roger on the porch with a cigarette he was not supposed to be smoking. Maggie could feel the first tingle of the limoncello make her arms heavy, and hear the laughter that they shared rise up.
She could remember the girls—Vivien and Kate and Tessa—scampering off to the beach, with little Crista determined to follow.
Jo Ellen reached for the remote. “Shall we look at the weather and see what our hurricane is doing, then? I heard they’re calling him Norman.”
“Norman? It sounds like an accountant.”
“Or an artist, like Norman Vincent Peale.”
Jo Ellen wasn’t capable of seeing the negative.
“I say we wait until it’s closer and they send some idiot in a yellow jacket to pretend he’s in a storm,” Maggie said. “Eli will keep us up to date. I’d rather we have peace.”
Jo Ellen conceded with a little shrug and a sip.
For a moment, there was only the sound of the palms from the balcony door that, of course, Jo had left open. The breeze carried salt and not roses, which was surprisingly pleasant to Maggie, who’d lived for the scent of her rose garden.
“We’ll have to evacuate,” Jo Ellen said, obviously still thinking about the hurricane.
“Crista already did,” Maggie told her. “She texted me this morning that she and Anthony are boarding up their new bungalow and driving back to Atlanta this afternoon—with Pittypat.”
Jo Ellen looked at her over the rim of the mug. “You let Nolie take your dog?”
“Is she really mine anymore?” Maggie asked on a laugh. “Pitty loses her mind in a thunderstorm, so imagine her in a hurricane. Besides, she and Nolie are a matched set. The child will not sleep without that Yorkie wedged under her chin.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you driving back with them?” There was actually a note of fear in Jo’s voice, which touched Maggie in a way she couldn’t describe.
“No,” she answered. “Are you going back to Ithaca with Kate and Emma?”
A slow smile pulled at Jo’s lips. “Are you kidding? Leave and miss a hurricane? I’ve never been in one!”
“They’re not fun, Jo.”
She lifted a shoulder, as if she’d be the judge of what was fun, giving Maggie a flash of insight on where Tessa got her addiction to a good time.
“We’ll make it fun. And, point of surprising fact, Kate and Emma are staying, too. She told me last night that she wants to help Eli get the house ready and Emma doesn’t start school for a few weeks. She said when they evacuate inland, we’ll go with them. It’ll be our next adventure.”
Maggie choked, relieved that Jo was staying, but shocked by her naivety. Even for Jo Ellen Wylie, she sounded clueless.
“Expect a lot of damage and blown windows and people with no power for a week,” Maggie said. “No AC, which means no sleep.”
“Eli has multiple generators,” Jo Ellen replied. “And I’m so glad you’re not in that car with Crista going back to Atlanta!”
How could she? Maggie lived here now and—
Her phone buzzed on the coffee table.
She glanced down and read the screen and felt the small, annoying flicker she had been feeling for months now every time that particular name appeared.
Brick.
“Oh, good heavens.”
“What?” Jo Ellen leaned closer. “Who is it? Let me see. Oh, Brick!”
“That man is relentless.”
“What does he say? Read it.”