Chapter Four
To Do:
Unpack
Return trailer
Go to bed early and recover
Aunt Edie looked at Jenna with concern when she came back into the living room. “Your daughter’s not happy with our arrangement.”
There was an understatement. “Right now my daughter’s not happy about anything,” Jenna said, and fell onto the couch.
Aunt Edie twisted the large agate ring on her middle finger. “I’d hoped this would help you. I thought we’d all be so happy...” Her words fell away and she gave the ring another twist.
Jenna reached out to hold her aunt’s hand. “We will be.” She wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince, Aunt Edie or herself. “It’s just going to take her a little time to adjust.”
Aunt Edie nodded and made a brave attempt at a smile.
“The divorce has been hard on her. Even though her dad’s never been much of a father, he’s all she’s got. Moving away, well, that just makes it easier for him to ignore her and for her to blame me.”
“It’s never easy to admit when your father’s no better than seagull droppings.”
Good old Aunt Edie, she always did have a way with words. “Everyone tried to warn me. I was just so...”
“In love,” Aunt Edie finished. “Of course you were. And I remember when you brought him to visit. He was a handsome young man with all that straight, dark hair and that Roman nose, that perfect physique. He was a beautiful work of art.”
“Only on the outside,” Jenna said, and helped herself to another cookie.
“We all make mistakes, dear.”
“You didn’t. Uncle Ralph was great.”
Aunt Edie took a cookie and inspected it. “Well, your Uncle Ralph wasn’t the first.”
Jenna stared at her in astonishment. “He wasn’t?”
“No. My first love was a banker.”
“A banker,” Jenna repeated, trying to process this new information. It was hard to think of her free-spirited aunt married to a staid businessman. “Nobody ever told me.”
Aunt Edie nodded. “Oh, yes, he was quite the catch. He looked so handsome in a suit. And he could dance beautifully. He beat me, you know.”
This time Jenna’s mouth dropped and she set aside her cookie. “Seriously?”
“Back when I was young you didn’t talk about those things in polite society. Not in my circle, anyway. That sort of thing only happened on the other side of the tracks. Or so people said.”
“So, you divorced him?”
“Actually, he divorced me. There was a big scandal, of course. Everyone thought I was a horrible, ungrateful wife.”
“Ungrateful to leave a man who beat you?” scoffed Jenna.
“I hadn’t told anyone about that. I couldn’t. I was too embarrassed.”
“So, you let him get away with it?”
Aunt Edie shrugged. “Things were different back then. Anyway, I just wanted to get out of the marriage and get away. He finally agreed to let me go, on one condition.”
“That you not have him arrested,” Jenna guessed.
“That I not tell our families why we were divorcing. Of course, this made things difficult because, when I was young, divorce wasn’t quite so easy. There was no such thing as no-fault divorce. It was costly, and you had to prove that there was a reason your marriage couldn’t work—adultery, cruelty, rape.”
“Well, you had him on cruelty.”
“I could have, but frankly I was too afraid of what he’d do if I told anyone, so I agreed to come out the bad one. He sent a friend over to deliver some flowers and then conveniently arrived to catch me ‘in flagrante’ with the man.”
“Seriously? And it worked?”
Aunt Edie shrugged. “Back then couples created a fiction that their lawyers could present to the judge. That was what he came up with and I could take it or leave it, so I took it. We both got what we wanted. I got free and he kept his good reputation.”
“A fake reputation,” Jenna muttered. How could her aunt have let this man get away with that kind of dishonesty? “Aunt Edie, you left him to go on to abuse the next woman he married.”
Aunt Edie dropped her gaze. “Yes, I suppose you could say I did, letting him go on record as the injured party. But once I was free of him I made sure word got out about his violent temper. I told a friend in the utmost confidence and, well, you know how that goes. Suddenly, he wasn’t so welcome at parties anymore. No woman in town would have anything to do with him.”
“What happened to him?”
“He moved away. He finally married again. I saw the announcement in the paper.” One corner of Aunt Edie’s mouth lifted. “He died only a few years into his second marriage. Food poisoning, so the story went. But we all knew the truth. His wife poisoned him. Sometimes I wish I’d had to nerve to do that. But in the end he got what he deserved. You know what they say. Every dog has his day.”
Gram always said that, too. Jenna never had known exactly what it meant, but she’d gotten the gist of it. She hoped a certain dog up in Seattle had his day and soon.
“Anyway, things worked out. Along came my Ralph. I can tell you, everyone wondered what I saw in a rough old fisherman. I told them I saw a kind man with a big smile and a big heart. I saw how he treated his mother and his sisters and I knew he’d never raise his fist to me. And he didn’t. He hardly ever even raised his voice, God bless him.” She reached out and patted Jenna’s arm. “That’s how I know that things are going to work out fine for you, too, dear. You’ve had your struggles, but remember, every storm brings a rainbow.”
“You sound like my mom,” Jenna said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.
Aunt Edie grinned. “Who do you think she learned it from?”
“Oh, Aunt Edie, you’re great,” Jenna said, and hugged the old woman.
“No, I’m just a selfish old woman.”
“No one would ever accuse you of being selfish,” Jenna told her.
“I am, dragging you down here, uprooting your daughter...”
“She needed to be uprooted.”
“All so I could keep this place going.”
“You should keep it going,” Jenna said firmly. Why give up on a dream that meant so much?
“A lot of people have made wonderful memories here over the years,” said Aunt Edie. “Ralph and I built the place back in 1962. We made a good life in Moonlight Harbor. I thought you and your daughter could, too.”
“We can,” Jenna said, and patted her hand.
“I’m afraid the place needs a little work now.”
A little? That was like saying the Titanic had a tiny leak. “We’ll make it work,” Jenna said. “It’s probably going to cost a bit.”
“Don’t you worry about that. I have a little of Ralph’s life insurance money left to live on and my social security. And I’ve got three thousand dollars in savings in a bank in Quinault that Sherwood Stern here at Harbor First National doesn’t know about,” Aunt Edie said with a firm nod of the head.
And Jenna had eight hundred and one dollars and fifty-two cents—couldn’t forget that fifty-two cents—in the hidden account under her mom’s name. Oh, yeah. They were rich. “We may need a little more than that. Maybe you could get a business loan.”
“I did take out a loan, oh, let me see, I think it was a couple of years ago. Or was it three? I used it to do a few repairs.”
Where? Jenna wondered.
“I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of a struggle paying it back.”
With nothing but vacancies? What a surprise. “So, no chance of a loan from the bank?”
Aunt Edie’s mouth drooped. “Probably not.”
And here came the tic. Blink, blink.
“Well,” Jenna said, determined not to spoil her first day by thinking about their lack of funds. “I’d better get the trailer unloaded and returned to the trailer rental place.”
“And while you’re doing that I’ll put together some clam chowder for our dinner. If you need any help unloading, Pete can help you.”
“Pete?” Had Aunt Edie hired someone?
“Pete Long. He’s been here a couple of years now. He’s my handyman.”
Jenna thought of the pathetic fence around the pool, the dangling sign and the slanting steps. What exactly was he handy with?
“I let him stay in one of the rooms in exchange for working around the place.”
“What kind of work does he do?” Jenna asked.
Aunt Edie shrugged. “Oh, this and that.”
In other words, he was a loafer. Well, once she was settled in, Jenna would make sure he moved on down the road and found a new place to loaf and a new little old lady to take advantage of.
She hurried to her car under an assault of rain, opened the trailer and pulled out a box, trying not to look in the direction of the derelict pool. What had she gotten herself into?
She turned, box in hand, and nearly ran into a grizzled old man with a chin full of gray stubble. Tall and thin, with a long face, he looked to be somewhere in his seventies. He wore an old navy peacoat over tattered jeans and a hat on his head that could have been stolen from the Gorton’s fisherman. Where had he come from? He looked like he’d popped out of a copy of The Old Man and the Sea.
He put his hands on his hips and scowled at her. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” she countered.
“I’m Pete Long. I run this place.”
“Ah. You’re the handyman.” Run this place indeed. “You work for my aunt.”
The scowl got darker. “You’re the niece nobody’s seen in years.”
Jenna pushed aside the guilt. “That’s right. I’ve come here to help Aunt Edie.” She shoved the box into his midsection, making him grunt. “She said you’d help me unload my things.”
He took it grudgingly. “She doesn’t need any help here. She’s got me.”
“And just by looking around I can see what a help you’ve been,” Jenna said sweetly.
“We were doing all right,” he informed her. “But your aunt’s glad you’re here, so I guess it’s okay by me,” he said, and walked off toward the house.
“So glad you gave your permission,” Jenna muttered, and pulled out another box.
She followed Pete inside the house and set her box in the front hall. Aunt Edie was standing there now, along with Pete, who seemed in no hurry to make a trip back for more.
“I see you two have met,” Aunt Edie said, smiling from one to the other.
“We have,” Pete said, sounding like he’d just been forced to make nice with a cobra.
“I know we’re all going to be a great team,” Aunt Edie gushed.
Yes, as soon as Pete learned there was no “I” in Team. Jenna said nothing, just turned to go out for another box. As she went down the steps she heard Aunt Edie say to him, “You’ll have dinner with us, won’t you? I’m making clam chowder.”
“You know I love your clam chowder, Edie,” he said, the gruffness gone from his voice.
Oh, brother. What a suck-up. Not only was he getting a free room from her aunt, he was also getting free food. If this was how Aunt Edie ran things, no wonder she was in trouble.
Jenna spent the next forty minutes hauling in boxes, stowing them in her room and Sabrina’s. Sabrina didn’t offer to help and Jenna didn’t ask. Better to let her daughter sit in the window seat like a sphinx until she calmed down, which would hopefully happen sometime in Jenna’s lifetime.
She stowed her bike and massage table in Aunt Edie’s garage, next to yet another gas-guzzling car leftover from an era before she’d been born, then went to the trailer rental place next to the gas station and returned the trailer. The semisupermarket was right across the street, so she dropped in and picked up a bottle of white wine to contribute to dinner and a bottle of root beer for the unhappy one. And a giant chocolate bar for herself.
“All the right food groups,” the checker said to her with a smile. “Enjoy.”
The store might not have been huge but what it lacked in size it obviously made up for in friendliness.
Since there was a Redbox right outside, Jenna also found a movie she thought Sabrina would enjoy. Ice cream, root beer, movies—what else could she bribe her daughter with? A promise to buy out every shop in town the following day? Right. Because she had money to burn. She was made of money. She was frowning when she walked back to her car.
Her mother called as she was pulling into the motel parking lot. “I wanted to see if you made it there safely,” Mel said.
“We did.” Jenna wished she had more to say, something positive. Nothing came to mind.
“How’s Aunt Edie?”
Now, there was something positive. “She’s as sweet as ever. But she’s got quite a past. Did you know about it?”
“I did.”
“How come you never told me?”
“I never thought to. Ancient history, dear. I mean, you don’t want to be defined by your past mistakes, do you?”
“Good point. And I’ve got to admit, hearing about how she restarted her life gives me hope that I can, too.”
“Of course you can,” said Mel. “That’s what we do when things take a turn for the worse. We move in a new direction.”
“Is there any woman in our family who isn’t a superhero?”
“We’re all made of pretty sturdy cloth,” Mel said. “Speaking of sturdy cloth, how does my darling granddaughter like Moonlight Harbor?”
“Well, the ice cream parlor was a hit. Nora Singleton’s still there, dishing up the calories.”
“Good old Nora, she’s a treasure.”
“Yes, she is, and stopping there got me points. Plus, we saw a deer and its fawn, which Sabrina thought was really cool. But then we hit Aunt Edie’s. Oh, Mom, the place is a disaster. I don’t blame Sabrina for being mad. And let me tell you, she was. She let me have it. Naturally, Aunt Edie had to overhear.”
“I’m sorry. But it’s only your first day. Things will get better,” Mel predicted.
“I hope you’re right. By the way, there’s some old guy hanging around here who’s supposed to be her handyman. He’s about as useful as a tanning bed in a desert.”
“Maybe there’s a shortage of handymen down there,” Mel said.
“Maybe. He’s invited to dinner tonight.”
“A regular dinner party.”
Yes, wouldn’t that be fun? Her, Aunt Edie, the grumpy handyman and her discontented daughter. She could hardly wait.
She ended the call and went inside, delivering the wine to the kitchen, where Aunt Edie was busy stirring a big pot of chowder. The aroma of garlic bread danced over from the oven to greet Jenna.
“It sure smells good in here,” she told her aunt as she pulled the bottle from the bag.
“Let’s hope everything will taste as good as it smells,” said Aunt Edie. She caught sight of the wine. “Oh, aren’t you a sweetie.”
“You can’t show up to dinner without bringing something,” Jenna said.
“You can when you’re family.” Aunt Edie smiled at her. “I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that you’re here.”
“It’s good to be with you again,” Jenna said. That much she could truthfully say. And she would have been ecstatic to be there in spite of the motel’s run-down condition if only her daughter wasn’t so unhappy.
“I’m glad you had a chance to meet Pete,” Aunt Edie continued.
Yes, Pete. “What exactly does he do around here?” Jenna asked.
“Oh, he just helps keep things shipshape,” Aunt Edie replied vaguely.
“But what specifically does he do?”
Aunt Edie became very focused on stirring her clam chowder. “He repairs things.”
“He hasn’t repaired your sign.”
“He’ll get to it,” Aunt Edie said.
Sometime this decade? “So, how’d you come to hire him?”
“Well, we met quite by accident. I’d stepped over to the Seafood Shack for some popcorn shrimp and he was there drinking coffee. He was new in town and retired. It turned out he was looking for a room to rent and I told him since I had some rooms free at the motel he was welcome to stay in one. That was when he suggested we do some good, old-fashioned bartering.”
Obviously, Pete had gotten the good end of that deal.
“That seems like only yesterday. But then so do those days when you were a little girl. My, how the time does fly by after seventy,” Aunt Edie mused. She set down her spoon. “I think our dinner is just about ready. Why don’t you fetch Sabrina, and I’ll go find Pete?”
Jenna almost suggested Aunt Edie fetch Sabrina and let her go find Pete. She didn’t much like the guy, but she’d rather deal with him than her angry daughter. But she went up to the blue bedroom, resigned to more unpleasantness.
The door was now shut, a sure sign that she was still Poopy Mom. She steeled herself and knocked on it.
“Go away,” came the muffled response.
She opened the door and poked her head inside. “It’s time for dinner.”
Sabrina was sitting on the bed, her knees pulled up, glaring out the window at the view. “I’m not hungry.”
“You will be later if you don’t eat. And this isn’t a restaurant where you can get a meal whenever you want, so you need to come down.”
Sabrina transferred the glare to her mom. “I don’t want to.”
Decision time. What to do? Wimp out and let her daughter have her way or insist she be polite and come down and eat?
Maybe letting her stay in her room and sulk wasn’t such a bad idea. Sabrina loved her food too much to maintain a hunger strike for long. Jenna should let her suffer the consequences of her decision.
“Okay,” she said. “If you’re not hungry, you’re not hungry. But there will be no more opportunities to eat after this and it’s a long time until breakfast.”
Sabrina shrugged and returned her attention to the view out the window.
“And I brought home a movie,” Jenna added.
“She probably doesn’t even have a DVD player,” Sabrina said in disgust.
Maybe Aunt Edie didn’t. “Suit yourself,” Jenna said, and shut the door.
She went back downstairs and stopped in the living room again. The TV looked fairly new, but it appeared that Sabrina was right. There was no DVD player. There was an old VCR, though. Wow. Special. So it looked like there would be no visits to Redbox anytime in the near future.
Jenna went on into the kitchen to find that her aunt had emptied the grocery bag. The root beer was gone, along with the wine, probably both in the fridge, and the candy and movie were on the counter.
“I’m afraid I don’t have one of those machines for playing that,” Aunt Edie said, nodding to it.
“That’s okay,” Jenna said. “We can find plenty of other things to do.”
“Well, I do have cable. And that’s a smart TV, so we can always stream something.”
Aunt Edie even knew what streaming was?
Jenna’s surprise must have showed on her face because her great-aunt chuckled, then said, “I’m eighty-two dear, not dead. I’ve got a smartphone and an e-reader and an iPod where I listen to Adele and Lady GooGoo.”
Jenna smiled at that. “You mean Lady GaGa?”
“Yes, her. I think she’s very talented, and I always appreciate creativity.”
Pete opened the kitchen door, stamping his feet on the mat and then stepped into the kitchen and brushed the rain off his coat. “It’s coming down like crazy out there,” he announced in case no one had looked out the window or just been out in the squall. “Supposed to get some sixty-mile-an-hour winds tonight. Make sure you batten down the hatches.”
Batten down the hatches? Had Pete been a sailor? Maybe he was just a sailor wannabe. Who knew?
He removed his hat, showing wisps of hair over a shiny pink scalp, and walked over to the table, took off his wet coat and hung it over a chair, letting it drip on the floor. No, Pete couldn’t have been a sailor. He’d been born in a barn.
Aunt Edie was now struggling to pour the contents of the pot into a soup tureen. “Let me do that,” Jenna said, and jumped to the rescue.
“Oh, thank you, dear. I’m not used to having help.”
“Well, you have help now,” Jenna told her.
“You’ve had help all along,” Pete muttered.
“Where’s Sabrina?” Aunt Edie asked, looking around the kitchen as if expecting her to pop out from under the table.
“She’s not hungry,” Jenna said.
“She has to eat,” protested Aunt Edie.
“She will. But not until breakfast.”
“Hunger strike, huh?” Pete guessed. “In my day kids did what they were told. If you said come to supper they came to supper.”
And who had asked him? “Oh, do you have kids, Pete?”
“Nope. Never had any.”
Jenna nodded. “Ah.” A real expert.
Suddenly, to Jenna’s surprise, her daughter appeared in the doorway, looking sheepish. “I guess I’ll eat something,” she said.
Jenna nodded.
“I’m so glad,” said Aunt Edie. “I know you’ll love my clam chowder.”
“I’ve never had clam chowder,” Sabrina said.
Aunt Edie looked at her in shock. “Never had clam chowder? Oh, my, we definitely have to rectify that situation.” She pulled on an oven mitt and took out a loaf of foil-encased French bread. “Chowder and garlic bread, the perfect meal for a stormy day.”
Once the food was on the table and everyone was seated, Aunt Edie smiled at Pete. “Pete, would you offer up the blessing?”
Pete didn’t look all that happy to be put in charge of blessing the food, but he grunted and shut his eyes and Jenna followed suit. “Thanks, God. Keep us going.” And that was it. “Let’s eat,” he said, and rubbed his hands together.
Conversation didn’t exactly flow at dinner. Roger, freed from his cage, sat on his kitchen perch and chattered, reminding everyone what a pretty bird he was. Aunt Edie chatted about the joys of digging clams and how the chowder was her own top-secret recipe. Then she volunteered Pete to take Sabrina clam digging.
But since Sabrina had made a face with her first taste of chowder he didn’t appear too enthused at the prospect. “The kid doesn’t even like clams.”
“No matter,” Aunt Edie said easily. “It’s still fun to dig them. And clams are an acquired taste,” she said to Sabrina. “Would you like something else? A grilled cheese sandwich, perhaps?”
“Oh, you don’t have to go to all that trouble,” Jenna said, and earned a scowl from her daughter.
“It’s no trouble,” Aunt Edie assured her. “Your mother always loved grilled cheese sandwiches when she was a girl,” she told Sabrina.
No way was Jenna going to let her aunt wait on them hand and foot. “I’ll do it,” she said, getting up. “You stay where you are.”
Roger put in an order, too. “Give me whiskey, give me whiskey.”
He was more talkative than Sabrina, who concentrated on looking at her plate and eating her sandwich.
“You don’t say much, do you?” Pete said to her.
She bit her lip and shook her head. Then a moment later she asked to be excused.
“Yes, you may,” Jenna said, resigned to letting her go back to her pout. Their first meal in their new home hadn’t exactly been a success.
“Not a very friendly kid,” Pete observed.
“She’s unhappy,” said Aunt Edie. “The poor child has been through a lot.”
“Was she abused?” Pete asked.
“No,” Jenna said, horrified.
“Beat up at school?”
“No.”
“Has she got some disease?”
“No,” Jenna said, exasperated.
“Then what’s her problem?”
You. “If you must know, her father and I are divorced. She didn’t want to move so far away from him. And she had to leave behind all her friends.”
“Yeah, well, that’s nothing. My mom went through two husbands after my dad died and they both beat me. Had to fight in ’Nam and saw my best buddy die before my eyes. Life is tough.”
“Well, thank you for those encouraging words,” Jenna said.
Her sarcasm was lost on Pete. “She’ll be okay once she settles in,” he added. “Just don’t baby her.”
This sage advice from the man who never had kids.
“Well,” said Aunt Edie with forced cheer. “What would you like to do after dinner, dear? We could play some Anagrams.”
Another game Jenna had loved as a kid. Aunt Edie had an old trunk in the dining room where she kept her collection of games, including an old Folgers coffee can filled with small cardboard squares each with a letter of the alphabet on it. They would draw letters from that can and take turns making words, adding letters to existing words to make them bigger and steal back and forth.
But tonight Jenna was too pooped for that much brain work. “How about tomorrow night?” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just go flop on my bed and read for a while.”
“Oh, of course. You must be exhausted,” said Aunt Edie. “What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking of me,” Jenna said, and reached over and laid a hand on her arm. “Thank you.”
After dinner, she left Aunt Edie and Pete to play Anagrams without her and went upstairs to her bedroom. She looked in on Sabrina, who was back to employing the silent treatment, kissed the top of her head and told her she loved her.
Then she went to her own room, where the dolls were waiting, and unpacked the Muriel Sterling book Mom had given her. New Beginnings. Well, that was appropriate, for sure. She opened to the first page and read the chapter title—“Death in Winter, Growth in Spring.”
A garden is God’s constant reminder to us that we live in a world of change, a world of birth, death and rebirth. What happens to us is often exactly like what happens in our gardens. Winter comes and the garden dies.
Cheery. Jenna frowned but read on.
But in reality it’s not dead. It’s merely dormant, waiting for the warmth of a new spring to bring back to life those perennials we so enjoyed the year before.
It’s often the same with our lives. We plan for certain things and hope for positive outcomes, dream big dreams, only to see our plans crumble and our dreams die.
Jenna couldn’t help but feel as though the woman had written this just for her. Was Muriel Sterling psychic?
You may be mourning the death of a dream, but you don’t have to mourn without hope. Like a flower in winter experiencing a period of dormancy, use this time to heal and gather strength for spring when a new dream will crop up.
Jenna hoped she could heal here at the ocean’s edge. She read on, the book growing heavy in her hands, and soon her eyelids had fallen shut.
Next thing she knew, she was out in the ocean, paddling around desperately in the icy cold water, waves crashing over her and pushing her under. In the distance, she could see a fishing boat chugging away. There, in the stern, stood Damien and Sabrina. He had his arm around Sabrina’s shoulders and was waving goodbye to Jenna.
“I told you I didn’t want to stay,” Sabrina called.
“Come back!” Jenna cried. “Somebody help me.”
Oh, hallelujah, here came rescue—Pete in a little dingy. He stood up, a life preserver in his hand, and threw it to her. She reached out and caught it only to discover it was made of cement.
She awoke with a gurgle and a cough, her heart pounding as furiously as the waves on the beach. The rain was beating against her window. Great. Welcome to Moonlight Harbor.