She's Up to No Good(20)

Rapping on the doors of the cottages produced no answer, so Joseph made his way to the manor house, where a much older woman answered the door.

An hour later, Joseph returned home and announced to Miriam that her days of sweltering in town were done. He had bought her a beach cottage to summer in.

She looked at him as if he had grown a second head, but Joseph was undeterred. He had bought two, he explained, so all their children and grandchildren could come for the summers as well.

“It’s good for the children,” Miriam said finally. “But what about you? You have to be here for the store. I will stay here with you.”

Joseph went to his wife and cupped her face in his hands. “I can drive back and forth. And if I stay here, I can take care of myself.”

“You don’t even know how to make your tea. How would you eat?”

Chuckling, he kissed her forehead. “I can manage. You deserve time to be comfortable with the children.” He released her and turned to go, his mind already on furnishing the two houses.

“Joseph,” Miriam called after him, and he turned around. “Thank you.”





By the summer of 1950, Bernie and his wife had a house in town with their three children, so they were the first to move in for the summer, claiming the smaller of the two cottages. Sam had just completed his degree after returning from service in Europe and stayed the summer in Bernie’s cottage before his job began in late August. Miriam, who for the first two summers spent only weekends at the cottage, and those only when Joseph was there, now spent most of her summer in the main bedroom of the larger cottage, whether Joseph joined her or not. Margaret returned from college, and Helen brought her two children for several weeks at a time, her husband driving out to stay when he could. Gertie, carrying a newborn in her left arm and a two-year-old on her right hip, came out on the train from Boston Monday mornings and left Fridays, as her husband worked long hours during the week.

Vivie and Evelyn shuffled between the two cottages, sleeping wherever there was room, usually sharing a bed with each other but sometimes with Margaret or Gertie, helping with the children during the day.

All in all, the arrangement suited everyone. And that summer, when there were so many grandchildren to keep track of, it suited no one more than Evelyn. Because with the ever-changing sleeping arrangements, there was no way to monitor how late she got back from spending time with Tony. Miriam thought she was in Bernie’s cottage, as it came to be known, while Bernie thought she was with her mother. And Evelyn quietly did as she pleased.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN





When the road split, we took the turn toward Hereford and crossed over a bridge. My grandmother rolled down her window and inhaled deeply. I did the same, trying to capture whatever essence she had claimed my soul would recognize. There was the unmistakable smell of salt air, seaweed, and . . . fish. I wrinkled my nose.

She looked at me from the corner of her eye and shook her head. “This is what home smells like.”

“Fish?”

“Yes, Miss Sass. And there’s nothing wrong with coming from a blue-collar town where people use their hands to earn a living.”

We rounded a corner, and the ocean sprawled to our right, pure and blue, sparkling in the late afternoon sunlight, the town just up ahead. The familiar green mermaid of a Starbucks greeted us from one of the first buildings. “When were you here last?” I asked her.

“Not that long ago. Six years maybe? Layla’s wedding.”

“Who is Layla?”

“Your cousin. My brother’s great-granddaughter. That’d make her your . . .” She worked it out in her head, her lips moving silently. “Second cousin once removed.” She paused. “Bernie was twelve years older than me and had his kids young.”

“That’s a big gap.”

She shrugged. “There were seven of us. And a few losses, we think. No one really talked about it back then, but my sisters remembered Mama being sick. And Mama was never sick except when she had us. Until the end, that is.”

I shook my head to myself. That had been what drove house hunting into an imperative. A late period that might have been nothing. Or might have been something. We don’t talk about it now either, I thought. I gestured toward the Starbucks as we passed, to change the subject. “Things may have changed a bit.”

Grandma scoffed at the storefront. “They made it stay at the edge of town. It’s much more upscale now. The Brooklyn of the north shore.”

I suppressed a laugh as a bearded man in sandals and thick, black-framed glasses walked by pushing a stroller. She might not be wrong.

We drove along Main Street, where old Victorian houses now held shops. “Where did you grow up?” I tried to picture the version of my grandmother I knew from black-and-white photos skipping along this street and walking up the steps to one of the front porches we saw.

“There.” She pointed to a bank at the top of the hill. I looked at her, confused. “The house is gone. They tried to move it—it was going to be a museum—after Mama and Papa died. Not to them. A town museum. It was such a grand house. But something about the zoning. And the house didn’t survive the move.”

“When was that?”

“Almost forty years ago now.”

“I’m sorry.”