Chapter 16
16
“They’re multiplying,” Tom said, peering suspiciously through the inn’s open front door the next morning. Snow Wolf and the Great Puffin were still there with Boyd, now accompanied by several other young people with laptops, tablets, and large iced coffees. Almost a dozen of them, ranging in age from late teens to midtwenties, none of them answering to names known to the Social Security Administration. “Like…gerbils. Stuffed animals. Gremlins. You know? Did you ever see that movie? You got the little creature wet and new monsters sprouted.”
When Rose woke up today, Tom had been down in the kitchenette in his underwear, brewing coffee and slicing fruit. Her pounding hangover was buffering her from any tender, uncomfortably wistful feelings this display of half-naked domesticity might otherwise have engendered: This is for me?
“Did Boyd say who they were?” Rose asked.
“I don’t think Boyd really knows. He said he came back from his first morning jog and they were all here helping the first two tape the baseboards.”
Boyd was in the center of the group, head and shoulders taller than most of them, looking like clickbait: Great Dane adopts lost ducklings! He’s a great dad!
“They must be Snowy’s or Puff’s friends,” Rose theorized. It was hard to remember the precise events of the previous day after the first or second bar, but both girls had made loud promises of assistance with the inn renovations once it became clear to them that Boyd planned on sticking around. “They must be here to help.”
It was like someone else’s package had been delivered to her door, but instead it was someone else’s life. A week ago she’d thought this place would be full of her family instead of Boyd Kellagher’s fangirls. A decade ago she’d thought she was going to have her family love her instead of Tom. It was a good thing she’d decided to embrace the unexpected, because she might otherwise have been reeling.
“They’re shippers,” Tom said dourly. “People with funny ideas about me and Boyd.”
Rose surveyed the crowd inside. Several of them were casting inquisitive glances out at Tom, who was looking particularly handsome this morning in a faded Rent cast T-shirt that clung to a lot of places he hadn’t had as a college junior. He had several days’ worth of stubble, as he seemed to have forgotten shaving equipment while packing for this trip, but it only highlighted the strength of his jaw and the fullness of his mouth.
Rose was probably of less interest in her cable-knit sweater and comfortable corduroys. She wondered what Puff and Snowy had said about her. She’d responded to every personal question the previous day with a lengthy and entirely fictional account of her relationships with both men. She’d rescued Boyd from sex slavery in Peoria; she and Tom had been go-go dancers in Sugar Land and war buddies in Korea.
Served them right for doubting the very boring backstory that she’d met Tom in line at the registrar when he’d needed to borrow a pen.
Tom saw her expression tighten.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh, just remembering that Puff and Snowy seemed to doubt that a classy lady like me would ever have been seen with schlub like you,” she said lightly. “Even if you’re making an effort these days.”
It was fine that nobody else’s erotic fantasies revolved around thirty-four-year-old investment managers.
Tom cut his eyes to the fangirls, frowning. “Did they say something? I’ll throw them out.”
“It’s fine. I’m sure you’ll do something unexpectedly sexy, and they’ll realize what I ever saw in you,” Rose said.
“Hmm,” Tom said, appearing to ponder the proposition deeply, though it had been a throwaway tease. He poured the rest of his coffee into the grass and set his mug aside on the vacant concrete planter at the end of the walk.
Before Rose could recognize his intentions, he’d seized her around the waist and swiftly tugged her against the full length of his body. He wrapped his second arm around her shoulders and hooked one of her ankles with his heel so that she toppled back into a theater clinch.
He held her like they were onstage, but he kissed her like they weren’t. He held the curtain-drop position effortlessly, but he smirked right against her mouth and gave her a little aren’t-I-clever pause he’d never have allowed a paying audience to see before he pressed his lips to hers.
Tom always did kiss with his whole chest, his kisses marking rare moments when he wasn’t thinking of something else or doing three other things at the same time. He couldn’t sing while his tongue was in her mouth, she supposed. Couldn’t fidget or wander away with his hands supporting her. He was only kissing her, kissing her like there were no other things to do in the world. Rose dug her hands into the fabric of his shirt, off balance from the sudden shock of Tom’s full attention.
He pulled back long enough to check whether he was going to be slapped for his presumption, then kissed her again, rubbing his stubbly face against hers hard enough to chafe her chin and bruise her lips. It didn’t occur to her to be angry at him; it wasn’t as though she’d ever wished he wouldn’t kiss her like she was about to step onto the last plane out of Casablanca.
When he pulled back and set her safely on her feet, Rose held on to him, feeling absurdly as though she ought to have done something cleverer herself. Something interesting with her hands or tongue—she couldn’t think of what. Something other than clinging to him like an understudy ingenue who hadn’t learned her lines.
Still, she couldn’t help but grin back at him, because his expression invited her to be in on the performance with him. She was costarring today. Thank you, everyone, we’ll be back for the two o’clock matinee.
“Sorry if today wasn’t a kissing day,” Tom told her, sounding anything but apologetic. He waved at the fangirls, who were all gaping in varying degrees of shock and consternation to see Tom rub faces with a random office lady, all except for Boyd, who was beaming like a gymnastics spectator who’d just watched a Ukrainian teenager spin three backflips and stick the landing.
Boyd extricated himself from the crowd of admirers and came outside, his phone in his hand.
“I just heard from my publicist. I told him about the inn, the basement bar, the whole idea, and he’s going to pitch the feature to some magazines. He asked if we could send him a few pictures today.”
“Oh my God,” Rose said. “Are you serious? What magazines?”
“ People , Entertainment Weekly , House Beautiful …”
Rose gasped in happy surprise. The inn had mostly served as a family retreat for the past several decades. There were much nicer places to stay on the island. She’d never imagined it attracting a wider audience, but if it did , Max could really use the extra income.
She needed to text the family group chat to tell them Boyd was here. She’d been posting nothing but bad news for months now. Finally she had something good to share. Wasn’t her youngest brother a Meteor Man fan? Maybe he’d want to come out and meet Boyd?
“What would the article be about?” Tom asked, sounding cautious.
“The basement project could be a great angle,” Boyd said.
Tom was not on board. “You mean the project you came up with while drunk yesterday and which only exists as a few notes on a teenager’s iPhone?”
Boyd and Rose both frowned at Tom in disappointment.
“It looks better inside,” Rose said. “You got the kitchen cleaned out, right?”
If she made a big breakfast spread, they could probably find an angle to shoot the kitchen where it looked appealing. She probably also needed to feed the kids if she wanted them to stick around.
“I only got the bees out yesterday,” Tom complained. “It’s not House Beautiful in there right now.”
Rose opened her mouth to offer help, but Tom seemed to gather himself.
“But I’ve got it,” he insisted, still looking a little wild-eyed. “No worries.”
“Are you sure?” Rose asked. “Tell me what you need help with. I’ll organize the fangirls.”
“I can handle the remediation,” he said, firming up the line of his lips. “Go have fun with the kids.”
···
Aunt Max’s “office” was more of a closet at one end of the third-floor bunk room, the air warm and wet even in winter, the only natural light coming through a screened-over ventilation hole high on one unfinished wall.
Tom had mostly happy associations with the bunk room: it was hot and stuffy there too, especially in the summer, and several of Rosie’s cousins had snored, but he’d also gotten laid in secretive but spectacular fashion on several occasions. He’d never previously had a reason to go into the office, but it was a much less fun place. There were generations of spiders living in the corners of the room, a PC somehow still running Windows NT, and a couple of long-deceased orchids. Also the inn’s records. After several days of fruitlessly calling contractors, Tom had gone up to see if there was any record of previous repairs.
Max had at some point exhibited Rosie’s genius for planning and organization, but the files for the most recent decade provided evidence of Max’s decline and the Kelly family’s neglect. Papers were shoved haphazardly into folders and wedged in drawers with unopened mail and invoices that might or might not have been paid. He’d been going through it the entire morning with no success. Perhaps Rosie might have made sense of it, but the aromas of dust and mildew and the debris of storm damage made Tom fear she’d cough out a whole lung if she came in here.
Nonetheless, he brightened when there was a careful knock on the door behind him, because he thought it was her. It wasn’t—it was that Puffin character, who was still lurking around the inn, bearing a covered paper bowl full of hot shepherd’s pie. She silently put it on the desk and took a step away with her hands clasped behind her back. Tom checked his phone; it was already lunchtime, and he hadn’t even found the papers he was looking for yet. He had a missed text from Rosie asking if he was coming down to eat with everyone else. From forty-five minutes ago.
Shit. Not only had he made no progress, it looked like he’d blown Rosie off. Fuck his life.
“Thank you,” he told the girl belatedly.
“Rose told me to ask you if you needed anything,” she said, looking hopeful.
“No, just tell her thanks for lunch,” Tom said, shoulders slumping. He couldn’t go back down and report exactly no progress. “Are things going okay downstairs?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the Great Puffin said, fidgeting. “We got the hallway walls and baseboards all painted, and now we’re starting the crown molding.”
“Um. Does she look like she’s having an okay time?”
The Great Puffin blinked at him. “For sure. I mean, she made Boyd Kellagher go to Alley’s and get her stickers for a chore chart. And he did it. That would be, like, a big day for me?”
Tom wondered when Boyd might be going home. Or at least away. While he was glad for Rosie to have fun creating years’ worth of blind items for Boyd’s publicist to rebut, or to enjoy the questionable thrills of commanding a dozen underemployed members of Gen Z, it was hard to imagine the two of them having time to work on their relationship while supervising Boyd and the growing number of fangirls. He’d barely seen her alone for a single minute over the past week. She cooked and planned and organized from sunup to evening, then collapsed in a happy heap—alone—in the big bed in the loft.
Tom sent the Great Puffin back downstairs with instructions to get him if it looked like Rosie was not having fun at any point in the afternoon, then resumed his fruitless search for any documents evidencing the previous roof replacement. The insurance company was fighting him on how many years the roof was supposed to have lasted before being swept off in the hurricane. Finding no records, he made a last-ditch call for help. He’d called everyone he knew at this point. Cashed in every favor.
“Do you remember when it was that you last had the roof at the inn replaced?” he asked Aunt Max once he’d answered fifteen questions about his parents’ health.
“Sweet boy, I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning,” she told him cheerfully. “But I’m glad you called anyway. When’s your next premiere? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? You’re not getting too ambitious with your auditions, are you?”
“Mm, literally nobody has ever called me too ambitious, Max, but I’m waiting for the negotiations on a Broadway transfer right now,” he said, identifying a folder of tax returns from the early 1990s. It appeared that the inn hadn’t ever done much better than break even, gauging by the losses described. He tossed the tax returns in the trash.
“Broadway! I’ll have to buy a new dress,” Max said dreamily. She coughed, then cleared her throat. “I haven’t been to New York in a couple years. Since before you were acting.”
During the decade Tom had spent in exile in Boston, he’d made sure to send Max a couple of tickets for every show he appeared in. He’d started doing so in hopes of getting some intelligence on Rosie, or at least a little goodwill, but he’d continued as his parents grew older and more reluctant to travel up from Florida to see him perform. Max had come without fail, though she was hit or miss on whether she acknowledged that Tom and Rosie had ever married or divorced.
It would be more complicated to get her down to New York in her increasingly poor health, but keeping the approval of a single member of Rosie’s family was probably a good idea.
“Sounds like a plan,” he deflected. “Any idea on where you might have kept the repair records for the inn though? I’m in your office.”
“Why are you up at the inn? It’s awful there in January. Damp and gray. You should take Rosie down to your parents’ place. Somewhere warm. I’d like a little great-niece next. One that looks just like her. She was the most adorable baby. Born with a full head of hair. Think you can manage?”
“We don’t have any kids,” Tom told her, confused. “Um. Yet.”
“Well, what are you waiting for, then?” Max demanded, tone sharpening. “Rosie’s not getting any younger.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tom said, shoving the drawer shut. “I’ll get right on that.” He slumped into the ancient, creaky office chair and bent over the desk to rest his chin on his forearm. No, Max, you’re thinking of how my life was supposed to go.
“I hope I didn’t scare her off the idea,” Max mused. “I used to put her in charge of her brothers and cousins when we were at the inn. Had her feeding and dressing them, all that. She was the only responsible one in the whole bunch. My parents did the same thing to me, and I’d decided I was never having any of my own by the time I was married.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s it,” Tom said lightly, though his chest hurt. “She used to tell me we were having six or seven, all their names on a theme.”
Not knowing whether she was joking had been part of the fun. Rosie could really commit to a bit, and he’d imagined telling some horrified nurse that yes, they really meant to name their second set of triplets Egbert, Fiona, and Gus.
“That’s good,” Max said approvingly. “Let me know when the baby shower is. I want to get the crib.”
Tom promised as genuinely as he could, knowing both that Max would not remember this conversation in ten minutes and that Rosie probably had ten more trials for him to pass before she might reasonably consider him father material.
Maybe he should just put the roof aside for now. There were plenty of other problems in the insurance report that had not yet been tackled while he fruitlessly pursued roofing contractors and Rosie turned the basement pub into a karaoke bar.
He opened the binder to a random page. The gutters needed to be cleaned out and patched. He hadn’t the faintest idea how that was done, and the insurance company had only allowed him the princely sum of $83 to accomplish it. As his heart rate miserably picked up, he heard cars on the front gravel.
It was probably just more teenage fangirls, but he was expecting Ximena today. Please let it be Ximena. He needed reinforcements, someone to keep Boyd and the girls out of Rosie’s hair and Tom’s jock.
Tom climbed up on the desk to peer out the single window. There was a traffic jam down below: the front drive was totally full. Ximena’s roundly pregnant figure stood next to a rental car, in heated conversation with Rosie’s cousin Seth and a middle-aged woman in a code enforcement uniform. A dozen or so teenage girls had stopped what they were doing—spray-painting furniture, beating throw rugs, taking selfies—to watch.
“What fresh hell…?” Tom muttered.
He pounded down two flights of stairs and out the front door. They were being written up. Tom had never owned a car, so he’d never been pulled over, but he recognized the smugness of a civil servant engaged in a satisfying bout of ticket writing. The code enforcement officer was scribbling a novel onto her pad while Ximena argued with her and Seth stood by with a mildly anxious expression on his face.
Everyone stopped what they were doing when Tom made it to the front yard. They looked at him as though they’d been waiting for him to make an appearance, even though this wasn’t his inn, it wasn’t his circus, and these were not his monkeys. He swallowed hard.
Time to perform a Tom who was a respectable father of three, a Tom who paid his mortgage and voted. A person to whom anyone in the world might defer.
“Is there a problem?” he asked in his most authoritative voice, praying it didn’t break.
The code enforcement officer flipped back a couple of pages in her notepad. “You’ve got no permits for construction work, you’ve got three vehicles parked in the roadway, and you’ve got no certificate of occupancy for all those guests you’re lodging here, to start,” she said.
“I told you that you needed a certificate of occupancy,” Seth said mournfully, to nobody in particular.
“What—we’re not renting,” Tom said.
“Then you need to fill out the paperwork stating an intent to use it as a habitation again,” the code enforcement officer said, unimpressed.
Paperwork. Tom was terrible with paperwork.
“Okay, I’ll…do that right now. But do we really need permits? We’re just painting. Nobody’s paying to be here. Nobody’s getting paid to be here,” Tom said.
The code enforcement officer looked at Seth. “We got a report that someone was doing unlicensed renovations.”
Tom cut his eyes over to Rosie’s cousin, who was fidgeting with his tucked-in polo shirt. Had he narced on them to code enforcement?
“There aren’t any contractors here yet,” Tom insisted.
Seth scratched his head. “But you’re still doing renovations. Rosie’s been spamming the group chat with photos of Boyd Kellagher taking out drywall. That’s renovations, right? Why didn’t you get a permit?”
Everyone gazed at him judgmentally for a moment. In response, Seth blushed but didn’t back down. “And I saw a TikTok of Boyd replacing some rotten studs too,” he muttered, tucking his chin into his chest.
Tom briefly shut his eyes, praying to Old Testament God for some lightning bolts.
Ximena folded her arms over her bump before elbowing Tom to bring him back into the conversation. “Do you really need a permit if you’re not doing anything structural?”
The code enforcement officer had perked up at Boyd’s name. “Wait, Boyd Kellagher? From the Meteor Man movies? Seriously? That’s who’s doing the renovations?”
Ximena and Tom exchanged lifted eyebrows.
“Meteor Man himself,” Tom said. “Just hanging out. Not doing any renovations.”
“Would you like to come inside and meet him?” Ximena smoothly suggested to the county official. “And I’m sure Tom’s…young friends…will move their cars to a better spot if we just let them know they’re in the road.”
The other woman hesitated in the face of this blatant play for leniency in exchange for celebrity selfies. But as celebrity encounters had to be one of the chief perks for drawing a Dukes County salary in an expensive town, she agreed.
“I’ll just verify that there are no renovations going on inside,” she said, justifying it to herself as she slowly lowered her ticket pad.
“It’s just some good friends spending some time together out at the vacation property,” Ximena said, leading the code enforcement officer into the inn. “Having a relaxing vacation.” She looked back over her shoulder at Tom while making an exasperated face at him, one that eloquently stated that she was too famous for this shit too.
Seth nearly went in after them, but Tom seized him by the back of the polo shirt and dragged him around to the side of the porch. Rosie had been texting her family all week, trying to convince them to join in the fun. Nobody had agreed to come. Now this douchenozzle showed up with the cops?
“Did you call code enforcement on us?” Tom demanded, leaning in to the other man’s shocked, pink face. “On your own cousin?”
“No,” Seth yelped. “I didn’t call her.”
Liar. Tom glared at him. He wouldn’t come eat Rosie’s dinner, but he showed up now?
“No. I mean, Lettie’s in my golf group. I just happened to tell her today that the property’s value is going to take a hit if you guys wreck the place. If Rosie does sell, I mean.”
Tom fisted his hand in the front of Seth’s shirt, knuckles going white. Rosie would literally tape herself to the front door before she agreed to sell.
“If anyone else wants a vote on how I fix up this shithole, they can fucking show up and help,” he growled. “And you. How do you not have time to help at all, but you have time to watch the stupidest content on the whole Internet and tell your golf buddies about it?”
“Hey!” Seth objected. “I’m not in control of what the algorithm shows me.” His bland face turned threatening. “And anyway, maybe you shouldn’t be getting all in my face while you’re cheating on my cousin?”
“I’m…what? Cheating?” As aggravating as it was to be dogged by Boyd Kellagher allegations, it was news to Tom that Rosie now considered the two of them to be in a relationship. “When? I’m literally sleeping in the same cottage as her, and I think fifteen teenagers can report I haven’t even been alone with Boyd.”
Seth sneered at him. “Bro, there are like a million videos online of you two making out.” He pretended to pick lint off his shirt where Tom had grabbed him. “I can’t believe you invited the dude you’re hooking up with to stay in the same house as Rosie, but you know she’s gonna find out eventually. Maybe you should, um, go do some counseling about how you’re into men?”
Tom goggled at this person who was somehow related to the love of his life despite sharing no personal qualities past their eyebrows.
“Seth…do you remember that I’m bi? I was always bi? Not to mention, Rosie and I were divorced ? For ten years?”
From the vacant look of nonrecognition Seth gave him, Tom’s absence had not been noted at the past decade’s worth of holiday celebrations nor had Seth ever managed to absorb a single pertinent biographical detail about him.
Tom curled his fists and uncurled them. Rosie would not thank him for beating the shit out of her cousin.
“Why don’t you go back to your property management office and look up whether there’s any other paperwork you can fill out for us before I call your wife and tell her you’ve got plenty of time to golf and watch videos from my stupid queerbaiting Broadway play instead of taking care of your baby, huh?” he growled at Seth. “Next time you show up uninvited, you better have a paintbrush in hand or I’m turning the hose on you.”
He shoved the hapless cousin off the porch, then gathered himself. He was a dependable version of Tom, a man who didn’t lose his temper when asked to do home improvement tasks, a Tom who cheerfully managed houseguests.
After a deep breath, he went back inside. Boyd was slowly touching up a section of crown molding while the code enforcement officer and half a dozen young women watched with rapt attention, phones at the ready to document every second of this process.
Rosie came up from the basement, a flowered silk scarf tied on top of her head to hold her hair out of her face. She had a smudge of dust on her nose and paint on the overalls she’d rolled up three times at the ankles so they wouldn’t drag. The smile on her face when her gaze landed on him washed all the week’s frustrations away like rain. Whatever it was about this place, it was working for her. She looked happier by the day. Like his Rosie.
“I think I narrowed it down to three,” she announced, unaware of any of the day’s events and fanning three nearly identical paint samples in her hands. “For the accent wall behind the stage. What do you think?”
She waited for his answer, utterly serious.
“Hmm,” Tom said, stepping closer to pretend to consider the paint chips. He put his thumb in his mouth and wiped it across the smudge of dust on her nose before answering.
“This one,” he said, choosing a shade at random.
Rosie squirmed away from his wet finger on her face, then held the paint chip at arm’s length.
“Are you sure?” she said doubtfully. “You don’t think my dad will say it’s too pink?”
Tom thought if Mr. Kelly cared, he would have shown up by now, but he wasn’t going to break Rosie’s heart by telling her that.
“I think it’ll set off my summer tan wonderfully,” Tom said.
Rose pulled the corner of her mouth out to the side, because she recognized both the evasion and the implied promise in that statement. Her expression was hesitant, but she took a deep breath, checked to make sure that nobody else was watching, then went up on her tiptoes to brush her mouth across his lower lip. Her palms splayed across his stomach for balance. Tom savored this tiny bit of sweetness, even though he wanted a lot more of it.
At least he was the romantic lead in this play. Now he just had to hope the show was a comedy.