The High Season(5)

“It’s not a problem,” Ruthie lied. “We were just leaving.” Summer renters usually didn’t want the whiff of owner around, let alone coffee. A note explaining about garbage and recycling, beach chairs and parking permits, a drawer full of restaurant menus—that was all the greeting renters desired.

    “Would you have time to show me the house before you go?” Adeline pushed her sunglasses up into her hair. Her eyes were an unclouded green, her eyebrows perfect. “Lucas, do you want to see the house?”

Texting, he waved a hand that must have meant, No, go ahead, because Adeline lifted her shoulders and started up the stairs. She tripped over the loose board on the second step, then frowned down at the chipped polish on a toenail. Ruthie felt the mood tilt into frost.

“Don’t panic. Lucky for you, I’m a carpenter.” Mike crouched down and inspected the board. “Needs to be fixed.” Then he looked up and smiled.

“Ah,” Adeline said, “so you’re one of those astute carpenters I hear about.”

“That’s right,” Mike said, standing. “And if you wait a sec, I’ll identify a hammer and a nail.”

They smiled at each other, and, just like that, Adeline’s ice melted away. Mike had that effect on women. There might as well be a puddle on the floor, but Ruthie would be the one to clean it up.

“Won’t take long,” he said. “I can come out later today, or I can let you have the long weekend to settle in and come out on Tuesday.”

She waved in the general direction of her Range Rover. “I was so happy to avoid the expressway. I get so nervous in traffic. I grew up in California, you’d think I wouldn’t be intimidated by a few cars. But I’ve lived in New York so long I’ve forgotten how to drive.”

That night in the bar—Peter had called Adeline my farmer’s daughter. His arm slung around her neck, his face telegraphing the fact that he was besotted. Ruthie had been in her mid-twenties then, and had thought, Ew. She’d been repelled by the sight of Peter’s paint-stained, veiny hand on the smooth skin of Adeline’s shoulder. She’d assumed that Adeline didn’t love him, that she was playing the Manhattan game of advancement by seducing a rich and famous man. Adeline had been a waitress at Lucky Strike in SoHo, one of the beautiful young women who took your order in thin T-shirts with the sleeves rolled to reveal their tiny, tight biceps. That night Ruthie had wished Peter’s morning breath on Adeline; she’d smelled it often enough.

    But Adeline was talking, and Mike was listening. “All this week I’ve been dreaming of the Long Island Expressway. You know those landscaping trucks with a chain on the back that’s supposed to hold all that lawn equipment in? I kept seeing a lawnmower crash through my windshield.”

“I know how it is,” Mike said, even though Ruthie knew he didn’t. Only women were afraid of highways and lawnmowers. He stood like a doorman, holding the screen door ajar, and smiling at Adeline.

“I hate driving to Manhattan,” Ruthie volunteered. “Once I ended up in New Jersey by mistake. Went right over the George Washington Bridge.”

That was usually the signal for Mike to complete the story, how she’d called him in tears from Hackensack. It had been a dinner party staple for years. “Well, you made it,” Mike said to Adeline.

“It feels like you’re at the very edge of things here,” Adeline said. She stopped short as they walked inside. “Yes,” she murmured. She toured the room, trailing her hand on a sofa, stopping at the view. “You can’t see another house. And the plantings!”

“Catnip,” Mike said. “Yarrow.”

“I knew when I saw the photos. I knew I could live here. I love your taste. It’s just the right mix of sophistication and quirk.”

Adeline Clay, whose Manhattan apartment had been showcased in Architectural Digest, was a fan of her quirk.

“The house was built in stages,” Mike explained as they toured the kitchen with nods from Adeline and “Only four burners?” when she saw the stove. “The original structure was built in, we think, the 1780s. That little office off the kitchen was once a birthing room.”

    “Really.”

“I inherited it from my great-aunt Laurel.”

Ruthie felt a slight sting. Mike had always said we inherited it. When did it become I? At this point, the house was so leveraged and mortgaged that it was joint property.

“Let’s just say it was in a state of extravagant deterioration. We did most of the work ourselves. Put in the laundry room, all-new bathrooms, bumped out the back.”

“You should see me with a sledgehammer,” Ruthie said.

Adeline approved of the guest suite downstairs, perfect for Lucas, who had just graduated from Brown and was working at the Clay Foundation that summer. He’d be coming out on weekends. Upstairs she poked her head into the smaller of the guest bedrooms. “If you knocked down this wall, this could be a dressing room for the master.”

“Terrific idea,” Ruthie said, thinking, A dressing room?

Adeline stopped in front of one of Mike’s paintings, hung in the hallway, a black-and-white abstract not typical of his work. Mike was a colorist. “Oh, I like this very much. Who’s the artist?”

“That would be me,” Mike said.