Carolina Mist Read online

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, “they’re from Drew. ‘Thank you for the most wonderful night of my life. Love, Drew.’ Is that sweet?”

  “It is, and so is he.” Sunny nodded enthusiastically. “He was so sweet to Lilly last night, I could not wait to get upstairs and have myself a good cry. If Justin could show just a fraction of the caring that Drew showed, I wouldn’t be divorcing him. But, Abby, was it my imagination, or did Belle seem to be a bit cool to Drew?”

  “A bit cool?” Abby snorted. “That’s an understatement. Belle is convinced that he is an impostor who is up to no good.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, Sunny. I swear, I do not. But I have to take him on his word.”

  “Well, you won’t get any arguments from me,” Sunny told her, “because I would defend that man to the death.”

  “Good. Then you won’t mind if I ask him to join us for the town fair on Sunday. Naomi told me about it. There will be games for the kids, and all the churches will have craft booths and food booths and all sorts of stuff.”

  “Well, we had planned to leave on Saturday.” Sunny leaned back against the door. “As pleasant as this has been, I think we have imposed on your hospitality long enough.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Abby started back up her ladder. “I have enjoyed every minute of it.” Reaching the top step, Abby looked down on Sunny and smiled. “You know, I’d forgotten how much I liked you when we were kids. I like you even more now that we’re grown up. You are welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  “I appreciate that, Abby. I’ve always felt at peace here.”

  “Then take it while you can get it,” Abby told her as she opened the can of paint on the top shelf. “This time next year, the house will be home to someone else’s family.” Sunny stared at her for a long minute, then picked up the box of flowers.

  “I’ll put these in water for you. Would you like to keep the card?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  The threat of the sale of the house hung between them, and even as Sunny went down the steps to the first floor, Abby regretted having brought it up so abruptly, knowing how the very thought of letting the house pass from the family had upset Sunny. With a sigh, Abby snapped the cover back onto the paint can and slowly came back down the ladder. She leaned out the window, her gaze trailing to the carriage house, where she had learned the taste and feel of love. Directly below her, Leila’s garden began its stretch to the back of the property. She and Sunny, under Naomi’s direction, had worked a few hours each night. The herb beds looked liberated—from the second floor, Abby could smell the lavender as clearly as if Leila stood beside her. Sunny had spent the past few mornings cleaning out the rose beds, and Naomi had gotten Colin to drive his little tractor over to till the soil between the back fence and the dock to put in the vegetable garden Naomi insisted Abby had to have. The newly uncovered bricks formed a path through the yard as they had in days past, and the birdbath, cleaned and repaired by Naomi, welcomed the songbirds back.

  In spite of her best efforts to maintain the tunnel vision that goaded her back toward the corporate world, Abby knew with certainty that the tapestry of her life could not be completed anywhere else. The faces woven in silk were Belle’s and Naomi’s, Colin’s and their children’s, Young Foster’s and Pete Phelps’s and Steve the mailman’s.

  And at the center of it, still, after all these years, was Alex.

  33

  “This is fabulous.” Sunny laughed with all the glee of a young girl as she backed out of the driveway at Thirty-five Cove Road and headed the car in the direction of the interstate. “I think we both need to follow our impulses a little more frequently, don’t you?”

  Abby could have told her that she’d done just exactly that a bit earlier in the week, but kiss-and-tell had never been her style.

  “I haven’t been to the Outer Banks since I was fourteen or fifteen years old,” Sunny continued. “Remember, that year we all came out for two weeks—all the Dunham cousins and all us Hollisters? I thought Aunt Leila handled it quite well, though, didn’t you?”

  Abby laughed out loud. Aunt Leila had handled it by suggesting that the combined families rent two beachfront properties. All the boys stayed with the Dunham parents in one, the girls in the Hollister house with Sunny’s parents. Leila divided her time between them for the two weeks they stayed in Kill Devil Hills.

  “And how wonderful of Naomi to offer to stay with Lilly and Belle. She is a most remarkable woman, Abby. You are so fortunate to have such a friend. She is one in a million.”

  “That she is,” Abby readily agreed.

  Naomi had not only offered to stay with Lilly and Belle, she had insisted, saying, “Colin is working all night, and Sam is staying at my sister’s overnight anyway. And, besides, it’s time Miz Matthews learned how to play Candyland. You two go have an overnight out to the beach, and enjoy yourselves. Abby, you need to get away from this house for a few hours, and the beach is sure the place to be when you need some downtime.”

  Abby had called ahead and booked a double room at the Holiday Inn on the beach in Nag’s Head. The room opened onto a balcony which overlooked the beach and the ocean just a stone’s throw away. They checked in around two and slung their hastily packed bags onto the bed. As eager to see the ocean as a pair of eight-year-olds, they ran down the steps and through the deserted lobby to the doors that opened onto a wooden walkway which they followed down to the beach. Sitting on the bottom step of a short flight of stairs leading directly onto the sand, they hastily untied their sneakers with fingers excited by the remembered feel of long-ago sand between their toes.

  The sand was cool in the April sun, and, without making a shared decision to do so, Abby and Sunny both spontaneously broke into a gentle trot, first toward the ocean, then parallel to it as they followed the water line. The sand washed over by the ocean was cold and the water bracing, but they ran with the delight of children too long kept from the sea. In silence, they ran, Abby puffing along, her short legs no stride-for-stride match for Sunny’s longer ones, until Abby could not take another step. She dropped off the pace, then stood by the water’s edge, her hands resting on her hips, and let the chilly waves plant icy kisses on her toes while she sought to fill her lungs with the salt air. When her breathing had regulated somewhat, she plopped herself onto the beach well beyond the tide line and leaned back on her elbows. Looking to her left, Abby could see Sunny still moving down the beach on long, muscular legs that churned, propelling her lithe body along the sand.

  Life changes were in the wind, Abby reflected, and decisions made now would guide the course of the rest of her life. Heady stuff. She sighed, welcoming these moments when she could gaze out at the sea and, without distraction, weigh her choices.

  Soon, movement from her left drew her attention, and she turned to watch her cousin approach. Sunny’s black hair swarmed around her face with every stride, reminding Abby of a shampoo commercial in which a hopelessly beautiful woman ran, in slow motion, into the arms of an equally beautiful man. Only, for Sunny, the beautiful man was fading from the picture. Abby wondered what it was like to love a child so much that you would be willing to give up everything in your world just to make things right for a tiny stranger—and what kind of a man would reject a child for such superficial reasons, would risk losing a woman such as Sunny for any reason.

  “Oh, God, I’m feeling old,” Sunny groaned as she flopped onto the sand next to Abby. “I can’t remember the last time I ran that far.”

  “How far do you think you went?”

  “Not near as far as it feels.” Sunny smiled. “I used to run every morning. I’m not one of these people who can do things sporadically, you know. If I run, I run every day. Or I don’t run at all.”

  “How far did you go each day?”

  “Just four miles.”

  “Four miles is not ‘just,’ Sunny. That’s a good distance.”

  “It was just right for me.
I’d like to get back into that. Maybe when Lilly and I get settled, I can get back into a routine again.” Sunny drew up her knees to wrap her arms around her legs. She inhaled deeply several times to fill her lungs with the cool salt air. “God, that smells good. Doesn’t it almost feel like if you close your eyes, we’d be fifteen again?”

  “Oh, God,” Abby groaned. “About the last thing I would want.”

  “Me, too.” Sunny laughed. “One stroll through the garden of adolescence was enough for me, thank you.”

  “I couldn’t bear it, going through those years again,” Abby said somberly.

  “God knows you had a rougher time than most of us. You know, when my mom got the call that your mother had been killed in that plane crash, she fainted. It was the only time I ever saw my mother so overcome by something that she just chose to shut down. She had always thought her sister was one of the immortals, she said. That Charlotte’s life force was so strong, it could defy the heavens, and she could live forever. I don’t think anyone in the family took her death as hard as my mother did.”

  “She stayed with me for a week,” Abby reminded her. “After the rest of you went home, Aunt Catherine stayed. She told me things about my mother that I never knew. About what a daredevil she had been as a girl. About how she liked to break the wild horses on the ranch. How she once shot a rattlesnake that had somehow gotten into Gramma Sarah’s laundry basket one day when Gramma was out hanging up the wash. My mother shot it with Grampa’s rifle, splattered it in pieces right there in the basket. Gramma was furious that my mother had ruined the entire family’s supply of underwear.”

  They laughed at the thought of their grandmother scolding her daughter and shaking bits of rattlesnake from the week’s wash.

  “Your mother had invited me to come stay on the ranch after that, did you know?” Abby asked.

  “Of course.” Sunny nodded.

  “I thought it was really sweet. But I had school in Philadelphia. And besides,” Abby confessed, “I always felt so out of place out there. When I was thirteen, we went out to stay with Gramma Dunham for a couple of weeks, and I thought I’d woken up in a foreign country. All of you swinging saddles onto your horses as easily as you tied your shoes. I never felt so incompetent in my life. Trevor saddled up that white horse for me, and I knew I had to get on it…”

  “And then Trevor smacked its rump, and that horse took off out of the corral with you hanging on for your life.”

  “I thought that beast was going to drag me to the highest peak overlooking the ranch, stop dead at the edge, pitch me over her head as neatly as you please, and dump me in the gully, just like you see on cartoons.”

  “I never did see a face whiter than yours was when we caught up with you.” Sunny grinned. “But my brother paid dearly for that little stunt. My dad didn’t go for practical jokes that could end in someone being hurt. He made Trevor muck the stables every day for a month. But I’d say you had the last laugh anyway, when we were out here two years later.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember the first day we were all in the ocean—all of us—and my brother Schyler saw those dark fins not twenty feet from where we were…”

  “And you all took off like crazy people, couldn’t get to the shore fast enough.”

  “And we were all on the beach, jumping up and down, yelling for you to get out of the water, and Clay Dunham swam out to get you.”

  “I could not understand why you all panicked so at the sight of a couple of dolphins.”

  “Which we all thought were vicious, man-eating sharks. We still tease Sky about that—it was days before he’d even come onto the beach again. And we all thought you were so cool, Abby, standing there waist-deep in water while those huge things were closing in on you.”

  Abby smiled and pointed out toward the ocean. “Straight out,” she told Sunny, “about fifteen yards from shore.” The gunmetal-gray dorsal fins split the crown of the waves as first one, then two, then two more dolphins flipped themselves above the surface of the ocean and for a split second seemed to dance upon the crest, a conga line of slapping tails and curved bodies in a nearly straight line across the horizon.

  “Wow!” Sunny jumped up and ran to the water’s edge, where she hopped up and down with all the exuberance of a child. “Oh, aren’t they just so magnificent!”

  They watched the silent ballet until the dolphins had moved farther down the beach, where their antics drew the attention of a couple who strolled arm in arm along the sand.

  “Sunny, don’t tell me you don’t have dolphins off the shores of Connecticut.” Abby had followed her to the shore.

  “I’ll tell you the truth, I spend so much time at work, I couldn’t tell you if we do or if we don’t. But that is going to change.” Determination set into her jaw line. “No more working seven days a week for this woman. Uh-uh.” She shook her head.

  “You, too?” Abby thought back to her days at White-Edwards.

  “You know, we have done it for eight years, Justin and I have. I started that business right out of college with money from my Aunt Hallie on my father’s side.” She shook her head. “But that business became bigger than me, bigger than Justin, bigger than anyone. I’m ashamed to tell you that it took Lilly’s arrival to show me how foolish that all is. I’ll never do that again.”

  “Well, sometimes you have to do that to earn a living.” Abby shrugged.

  “You can earn a living without letting your life pass you by. Justin is welcome to the business. I want to spend time with Lilly and learn to be a mom.”

  “You’re very lucky to have such options.”

  “Don’t I know it? But I won’t take that much time off. I’ll find something I want to do. It just won’t be something that will take over my life.”

  “Look, Sun.” Abby pointed skyward. “Pelicans.”

  The brown birds, following their leader on their endless primeval flight pattern—flap-flap-flap-glide, flap-flap-flap- glide—skimmed above the ocean just inches from its surface.

  “The first time I saw them, I thought they were pterodactyls.” Sunny grinned.

  “So did I.”

  “Let’s go back to our room and clean up and go out to eat. My treat.” Sunny swung an affectionate arm over her cousin’s shoulder. “There has to be at least one wonderful seafood restaurant out here on the island. I want a fabulous dinner and good wine and a totally decadent dessert. And maybe even champagne,” Sunny said as they headed back up the beach to their distant hotel. “I want to celebrate tonight. I want to celebrate Lilly and celebrate my favorite cousin and drink to the changes ahead.”

  “You feel it, too?” Abby asked as they gathered up their discarded sneakers.

  “I have since I pulled into the drive on Cove Road.” Sunny nodded. “And I aim to welcome them in style.” They found their restaurant on almost the exact opposite side of the island. The Windmill stood looking over the Sound, its namesake but several feet from the shore. Midway through dinner, a storm rolled in from the ocean, taking Abby and Sunny by surprise. The locals, however, appeared hardly to notice that angry waves threw themselves over the bulkhead and raced toward the far end of the parking lot. Rain came down in torrents, splashing at the wide windows overlooking the water with the fury of a demon. Abby had never seen such rain. The darkness was sudden and complete, the Sound obliterated by the totality of the storm.

  “Were they predicting a hurricane?” Abby asked the waitress, trying to sound blasé.

  “Oh, no. This is just a little storm,” the blond waitress assured them. “It’ll be gone before your dinner even gets to your table.”

  And so it was, the storm clouds passing as quickly as they had arrived. Within minutes, the Sound was bathed in light, the sun beginning its drop into the purple and orange arms of the horizon.

  The waitress uncorked the champagne, and a smiling Sunny filled the two fluted glasses.

  “To you and to Lilly,” Abby proposed.

  “
And to you and Alex,” Sunny responded without missing a beat.

  “Is it that obvious?” Abby looked chagrined.

  “Totally. But it’s too marvelous, don’t you think? I always knew he was yours. Even when I was fifteen and thought he was just the cutest thing I’d ever seen.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. And here you are, together at last. You know, Gramma Sarah always said that one door didn’t close that another didn’t open, and I guess, once again, she was proven right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Abby, just look at you. You lost your job and came down here and found him again. What could be more perfect than that?”

  “Well, it could be a lot more perfect. I still don’t know where I’m going from here. And, certainly, there’s been no commitment made. I mean, as far as I know, he’s still involved with another woman.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Abby slowly shook her head.

  “What’s the status of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think you’d better find out?”

  “Yes.” Abby nodded, resolving to do just exactly that, at the earliest possible opportunity.

  34

  Abby was alone in the kitchen when the Saab pulled into the driveway. She peered through the curtains just as Alex got out of the car, slung his overnight bag over one shoulder, and hoisted a grocery bag from the trunk with his free hand. With two long strides, he had crossed the drive and reached the lawn. She watched him with a longing so real her insides began to ache. He paused in the yard to look down toward the river, then turned toward the house. He stopped for another moment and appeared to admire the work they had done that week.

  Abby unlatched the door, and, at the sound of the lock turning, he grinned and quickened his stride. She had wondered if he would be as hungry for her as she was for him. She need not have worried.