Chapter 8
8
“So, the bunk room has a hole in the roof the size of a squirrel. Relatedly, it has squirrels,” Tom announced when Rose returned from picking up a sack of burgers for dinner, feeling exhausted and dispirited. “And the bees are still a little worked up on the second floor. But! I found us an awesome place to stay, right across the street.”
He was glowing with his success, his smile conspiratorial and welcoming.
“Those cottages over by the bluffs? Aren’t they pretty expensive?” Rose asked, wishing Tom’s mood would rub off on her.
Seth had texted her the names of three local Realtors. Just in case! The rest of the family had reacted with crying-face emojis to her pictures of the water damage at the inn, but still nobody had committed to coming out to help, even just for the next weekend. Max, who thought she was funny, had sent Rose a link to a beeswax crafts store on Etsy.
“Off-season rates,” Tom said cheerfully. “And insurance should pay for a hotel, I think. At least until the bees are gone. I read the policy.” He made these announcements in a tone that suggested that Rose should be very impressed. “You don’t think it sounds fun to stay at a nice little cottage, get reacquainted, relax, and put on some HGTV?”
Rose put her knuckles over her mouth. In the abstract, that sounded exactly like her idea of fun. But she’d woken up this morning thinking today would go one direction, and it had zigged and zagged so much she wasn’t sure which way was up.
“You’re going to love it,” Tom wheedled. His face had lit up with the pleasure of a small adventure. “It’s got Rosie written all over it.”
The cottages were the kind the island was known for—cedar shingles and white trim, cozy and inviting even with the hydrangeas dormant and the rocking chairs sitting empty on the small porches. Rose had walked by them many times on the way to the bluffs but had never gone in.
Tom led her to one at the very rear of the complex. Pausing to favor her with a devilish grin, he pushed open the unassuming door and flicked on the lights.
Rose gasped, because Tom was right. She adored it.
Most of the vacation homes on Martha’s Vineyard featured a classic nautical style in understated white and navy. WASPy. Boring. But the owner of this cottage had leaned toward a more maximalist aesthetic, with a strong dose of Palm Beach. Rose would never have imagined the interior.
The room was dominated by a magenta chandelier with shell ornaments. The wood floor was painted peony pink, and the appliances and furnishings matched it. Rose-colored toile on the love seats. Blush velvet on the curtains. Fuchsia on the printed rug. It was like an enveloping hug from a roll of cotton candy. The first pleasant surprise in a long day of shocks.
“You love it, right?” Tom said, lifting his eyebrows at her. When Rose choked on the appropriate words of gratitude, he brushed a kiss to the side of her temple as though she’d managed to say thank you anyway, which didn’t help her find her footing. What was Tom doing? What was happening? Who was this person, and where had he been when she’d needed him ten years ago?
As Rose was specifically thinking this was all too good to be true, she spotted signs that the cottage had been closed up for the winter: open cabinets under the sink in the kitchenette, drawn curtains, a stone-cold water heater. The air was a little stale too.
“How’d you get in touch with the owner?” she asked as Tom busied himself with putting away groceries.
“Just booked it online,” he said cheerfully.
“Huh,” Rose said. “Did they have a lockbox?”
Tom nodded at a window. “Not exactly. But it was unlocked.”
Ah, there it was.
“You broke in?” Rose asked, trying to summon some outrage over the trespassing. It wouldn’t come, probably because she’d been inciting him to arson an hour ago. “Is this a felony?”
“Raise your hand if you’ve never been arrested.” Tom stuck his arm straight up in the air and waved at her.
Rose narrowed her eyes at him. “I was only arrested because you ran faster than me.”
“Yeah, keeping up a good speed is pretty much the prime directive of streaking.” He laughed. “Don’t worry, baby, you’ve still got two strikes left.”
“I wish you knew less about me,” she said, flustered by the mention of a rare college indiscretion. She walked to the window to check whether she could see the road. She couldn’t. So maybe nobody would notice them breaking and entering.
“Anyway, it’s not breaking in if I have a reservation. Why don’t you sit down and eat some food? Here, you want a beer?” he asked, pulling one out of the refrigerator and pressing it into her hand. He found the remote and turned the TV to entertainment news. Rose wasn’t entirely mollified.
“You made a reservation for tonight ?” she pressed, still suspicious.
Tom sucked on his pouty lower lip, thinking. Her stomach sank.
“Tom.”
“Well, we have a reservation for either January 5 or May 1 of this year, but American dates are so confusing to me,” he said, slipping into a deep Polish accent. “Why do you people put the month in front of the day? Makes no sense.”
She fought the urge to laugh. “You’ve never even been to Poland.”
“Nie mówi? po angielsku, nie rozumiem ci?.”
“You barely speak Polish ,” she corrected him, cracking a smile in spite of herself.
“Like anyone who comes to check on us will know that! And anyway, I couldn’t find anywhere else with open rooms tonight. Do you want to sleep with the bees?”
“No,” Rose admitted. “Where are you going to sleep though?”
She looked around the cottage. There were a pair of love seats in front of the fireplace and a chaise lounge facing the entertainment center, but only one bed: a king tucked into a loft over the living area.
Tom’s small disappointed frown said that he’d thought there was some chance they’d both end up there, when Rose was one more casual forehead kiss away from having a giant snotty emotional meltdown about how confusing this was.
“I guess I’ll sleep on the chaise?” he said, making that eventuality sound distant and unlikely. He rummaged through the cabinets and pulled out a stack of plates for the fast-food burgers she’d brought home. “Sit down and put some food in your face, babe. You look like you’re about to fall over.”
She felt like it. She felt like she’d fallen down the stairs.
She wasn’t handling this well. This was not the grace and sophistication and gentle forgiveness she’d expected to offer him. But Tom also wasn’t what she’d expected.
Maybe he’d changed. Maybe he wasn’t the same person he had been at twenty-three. That thought was more painful than Tom’s frequent displays of familiarity, because she hadn’t changed. Sometimes she thought she would have liked to—it would have been convenient to want different things—but it felt sad and awkward to show up here as essentially the same person he’d left.
Maybe Tom hadn’t finished growing up when she had. There were moments when he seemed like a complete stranger. It was startling, because she liked what she saw. It was just harder to understand what he wanted from her now. She’d thought he just wanted to make it up to her, but the way he looked at her, the way he kept touching her…Maybe she could figure out some way to navigate his movie star boyfriend and his Broadway lifestyle. She’d thought their lives were going to be a big adventure together. Maybe it was on her to figure out how to meet Tom where he was.
“We need to relight the pilot light for the water heater. It’s cold,” she mumbled around a mouthful of french fries.
“Right, right,” Tom said from the second love seat, patting at his pockets and coming out with a lighter. Which he should not have had on him.
When Rose glared at it, he held up a hand to fend off her remonstrations.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said.
“Tom.” She dug in.
“I would never smoke around you. You’ve got asthma.”
“You should quit,” Rose said firmly.
“Why, is it bad for me?” he asked with pretend innocence. He blinked his wide brown eyes at her like he was playing the ingenue, but there was an edge to it.
“It’ll ruin your voice, it’s bad for the environment…I can’t believe you started smoking.”
Tom got to his feet and shot her a look of mild reproof.
“Maybe not every single coping mechanism you’d pick up if the love of your life tossed you out on the street would be a healthy one, huh?”
Rose closed her mouth over a shocked breath, waiting for him to take that back. Obviously, she hadn’t been the love of his life. Obviously, she hadn’t tossed him out on the street , because he’d been sleeping somewhere else for the week before he left for good.
Tom stalked across the room and stood in front of her, pressing into her personal space. He put his hands on his hips, right over the loose band of his jeans, and stared her down, looming in a way that somehow emphasized the breadth of his chest. She was treated to the sudden, intrusive memory of that chest pressed against her cheek, the solid weight of his body. Heat suffused her face as she struggled to meet his heavy-lidded stare. He was standing too close, but that was probably the point he was making. She didn’t have any claim on him.
“Why smoking though?” she said weakly.
“Couldn’t afford coke, and sniffing glue would have freaked Adrian out,” Tom said, expression deceptively mild. His jaw worked.
“You can’t live your life without freaking Adrian out. He’s the most reactionary artist I know,” Rose said, backpedaling with all her might.
“That’s what I keep telling him.” Tom let her off the hook with a knowing twist of his mouth and took a step back. She felt like she’d been the one smoking unfiltered Marlboro reds when he moved away. Tom’s force of personality was giving her a contact high.
“Anyway, I quit smoking cigarettes three months ago. Just have the lighter out of habit,” he said.
He went to ignite the pilot light with his cheap Bic lighter, leaving it on the floor by the water heater. Then he straightened and looked at her with patient, steady expectation.
He’d tried to talk to her. About the things they both wanted. She was afraid she’d been unfair to him.
“Tom, I—if I haven’t said it yet, thank you,” Rose said. “And I’m sorry if I’ve acted less than grateful about everything. I’m glad you came.”
His face gentled. “Don’t worry about it. I know this is a lot for you. Not just me, but the big construction project. I’m sorry Seth wouldn’t help.”
“Yeah. But I’m going to try to stop…stop thinking I ought to know how this goes. Stop making any assumptions about you, really. You obviously know how to handle your own life. I think this is going to be good for me, actually. I need to learn how to let go of…a lot of stuff. Every time I’ve tried to make a big plan and force everyone else to go along with it, I’ve fallen flat on my face. I need to stop.”
Tom frowned. “Well, I’m not sure if that’s the primary lesson, actually—”
“No, I mean, I think working with you will go a long way toward helping us figure out a way to…you know. Meet where we are now. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come to bail me out,” she said. “I’m sorry for getting on your case today.”
Tom had been nothing but kind and helpful. She needed to stop judging him based on who he’d been to her a decade ago. This was a man who was actually living up to his promises—one who’d dropped everything, volunteered to take over a big dirty job, and lodged her in a cute little pink cottage. He was doing this his own way and doing it better than her.
“So,” Rose said, shoving her tote bag full of binders and folders into the corner. “You’re in charge. We’re going to do this your way. What’s first?”
Tom rubbed his jaw, scratching his cologne-model five-o’clock shadow. He looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the inn. He wet his lips, shifting his weight.
“Yeah, why don’t you just relax here for a while? I’m going to fill a few bags of trash at the inn, check on the bee situation, and, um, make a few phone calls.”
Rose winced. She’d thought she’d just given him an opening to talk. But of course he hadn’t spoken to his boyfriend all day, and no matter how confident a man like Boyd might be in his relationship with Tom, and how little a threat Rose might pose to it, he probably wanted to hear from Tom.
“Of course,” she said, pushing her knees together.
Tom took two steps toward the door, hesitated, then came back to where Rose sat on the couch.
Her expression must have been wary, because he telegraphed his motions as he reached out to brush one careful thumb along her cheek. The gentle, reassuring touch felt better than it had any right to. As if he could read her thoughts, he sighed, his own expression troubled.
“I should have done this years ago,” he said.
“Done what?” Rose asked.
“Anything,” he said with a little half shrug, like he hadn’t really been speaking for her benefit.
···
Tom paced the entryway of the inn, feet scuffing some remaining debris. He’d filled the existing dumpster; he needed to find out how to order a new one. He’d opened a bunch of windows to let the trash smell and the bees out, but snow was in the forecast for the next day; he needed to go through and shut them.
He was panicking.
Tom knit his fingers on top of his head, mind flitting from necessary task to necessary task like a bug trapped in a porch light. He groped for focus.
“Fortunate Son.” “Alice’s Restaurant.” “WAP.” Three songs about cleaning up.
He knew a lot of songs, but he didn’t think he knew enough to keep him on mission long enough to fix this place up. Things would slip through his fingers, he’d lose track of time, he’d get overwhelmed, and then there’d come some neck-snapping moment of reckoning. Like the time he’d absentmindedly buzzed a pleasant middle-aged lady into the lobby of Adrian’s apartment building, only to discover that she was there to serve him with divorce papers.
How are you going to handle this one, Tomek?
With jittery hands he pulled out his phone and called the first responsible, available adult he could think of.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered at the phone.
Ximena picked up on the last ring, her voice muffled.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m about to head into prenatal yoga, can it wait?”
“Um,” Tom said, because he wasn’t sure it could wait. He had no idea how long it took to order furnishings, how long it took for that stuff to arrive on Martha’s Vineyard in winter, and how long Rosie would give him to finish the work before she pulled the plug. “Do you have a minute?”
Ximena sighed heavily, as a celebrated, Tony-nominated actress had every right to when her flaky younger friend began unexpectedly imposing on her charmed existence. “I’ll go sit in the break room.”
As soon as the background noise of other parents faded, Tom began to babble at her, detailing the trip out here, the state of the inn, and his conversation with Rosie this evening. As he moved through the inn, shutting windows, his eyes kept falling on things that would need to be replaced or repaired.
He didn’t know how to do this. He’d never done anything like this. He should never have told Rosie he could do all this.
“Calm down,” Ximena said. “You’re stressing me out, and stress is bad for the baby.”
“No, you don’t understand, panic is a great way for me to get things done,” Tom told her earnestly. “Basically that and spite? Those are the only fuel this machine accepts.”
“Are you going to panic until everything’s done? No? Well, then, I think you should just go to your ex, level with her, and apologize for wasting her time. If she’s a reasonable person, she’ll understand that you can’t spend the next six months playing Chip and Joanna with her when rehearsals start in three.”
“Six months!” he yelped.
“Yeah, have you ever ordered furniture? Even stuff like rugs can take weeks to arrive.”
“My furniture is all thrifted,” Tom said. He put his palm against his forehead. “Ximena. Please, you have to help me.”
“I am helping you. I’m sure she doesn’t want to set you up to fail. Maybe you could just help her pay someone else to do the interior—”
“You know how to do that stuff. I’ve been to your apartment. It’s gorgeous. It looks great.”
“Yeah, because Lú hired a decorator,” Ximena said, sounding amused.
“But you have good taste,” Tom begged. “Can you just come out here for a little while and tell me what stuff I need, even? Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
“I’m in my second trimester, and your inn is full of bees,” she pointed out. “This isn’t going to work. Besides! What are you going to do if rehearsals start while you’re in the middle of this disaster?”
Tom chewed helplessly on the inside of his cheek. From this last window, he could see the lights on in the cottage he’d left Rosie in. She was less than a thousand yards away, and she’d probably put on fuzzy socks and soft, stretchy pants that clung to her ass and that lip balm that smelled like vanilla.
When he was twenty-two, he’d thought there would be unlimited opportunities to see Rosie getting ready for bed, and he’d missed it more often than not. He’d taken the worst, least scenic, longest detour imaginable from the life he could have had, and he just wanted back on the interstate. He didn’t want to be in this fucking decrepit inn; he wanted to be over in the cottage, watching Entertainment Tonight with his head in her lap as she put three specific types of lotion on specific delicate parts of herself.
But the only clear path to that position he could see led him through this impossible task first.
“I won’t do the show if I can’t get this done first,” he said. “I swear I won’t, so you’ve got to help me.”
It was almost blackmail.
“You can’t pull out of a lead role on Broadway, Tom, Jesus Christ.”
“I haven’t signed anything! It’s not pulling out—”
“They’re writing you new lines! They are planning promotional T-shirts with your face on them! You barely have a professional reputation to wreck, but if you tell the producers you’re out at this point, I’m pretty sure that would do it.”
Tom leaned forward and rested his forehead against the clammy wood of the doorpost. “I know, I know.”
“Just tell your ex you can’t do it,” Ximena insisted.
“I can’t tell her no. If I have to choose between another ten years in regional theater or another ten years where Rosie’s not speaking to me, I know which one was easier to live through the last time,” Tom said. That, at least, felt crystalline clear when he spoke it. If Rosie watched him make a giant hash of this, at least she’d see him trying .
Ximena groaned dramatically.
“Okay, let me see what I can do,” she grumbled.
“You’ll come over here?” Tom asked, hopes rising.
“I’ll come by for a weekend once it’s bee-free and you’ve got somewhere decent for me to stay,” Ximena said sharply. “But I’ll see what I can do from here right now. Jesus, you asshole, you had better buy me the biggest bouquet of flowers you can find as soon as you get that next Equity check. I mean, entire rainforests had better disappear from the size of that thing.”
“I will,” Tom promised, grasping for the thread of hope, even though Ximena hadn’t promised anything specific. “The size of a Thanksgiving Day float.”
He felt only a little better as he hung up the phone, but at least he’d done something. Doing the first thing was often the hardest part.