The Husband Hour(8)
She smiled politely. “Well, nice to see you. I should get going.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. But, listen, I’m here for the summer. We should hang out some time.”
“I don’t hang out,” she said.
She knew it sounded harsh, bitchy, cold. But it was better to just be up-front about it. She didn’t date, would never date. And she didn’t need a new friend. It would take all of her energy just to tolerate her family.
They say a mother is only as happy as her most unhappy child.
That explained why Beth hadn’t felt any real joy in years. Both of her daughters were miserable.
“I left messages for Lauren and Stephanie asking what they wanted for dinner, and neither of them have gotten back to me,” she said to her husband as she poured Worcestershire sauce into a bowl to start her marinade.
“Hon, they’re grown women. Why don’t you and I go out to eat and they can fend for themselves?”
Was he serious?
She set the bottle down. “The point of being here is to spend time together as a family.”
“Well, maybe Lauren and Stephanie don’t share your enthusiasm for that. You’re pushing too hard about living here for the summer.”
She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I want one last summer here before we have to sell the house. Is that so much to ask?”
He sighed.
She unwrapped the flank steak.
“This isn’t just for me, Howard. Ethan should be surrounded by family. He just lost the only father figure he ever had.”
“That schmuck wasn’t a father.”
“You know what I mean. And Lauren has been out here alone long enough.”
“I certainly agree with that,” Howard said, looking out at the beach. “Have you told her about selling the house?”
“I haven’t found the right time.”
“What’s the right time? It’s your house, Beth.”
“And the house in Philly was our house, and you just lost that! So don’t lecture me.”
They’d lived in the old stone house in the suburbs of Philadelphia since before Stephanie was born. Beth had been sure they would live there for the rest of their lives, that her grandchildren would run around the same yard that the girls had grown up playing in.
She still shuddered thinking about the day, only weeks ago, that he’d confessed. I took out a second mortgage… Last-ditch attempt to save the business…
The business.
Howard ran Adelman’s Apparel, a store his grandfather had started as a hat shop in 1932. Saul Adelman had the foresight to lease a space in the shadow of the famous Wanamaker’s department store, a retail behemoth that attracted visitors from all over the country. But while throngs of people went to Wanamaker’s to see the world’s largest fully functional pipe organ or the twenty-five-hundred-pound bronze eagle in the Grand Court, many seemed to prefer a more intimate experience for shopping. That’s where Adelman’s came in, with Howard’s mother, Deborah, acting as a personal shopper long before there was any concept of such a thing. From the 1950s through the 1970s, it was unthinkable for a well-to-do young woman in Philadelphia to go anywhere other than Adelman’s for her trousseau.
But the world changed. Retail changed. Wanamaker’s closed its doors after a hundred and twenty years. The trend toward casual dressing edged Adelman’s out of its comfort zone, and eventually it became impossible for the store to compete with the national chains.
Beth had known it was bad. She just hadn’t known how bad until they’d lost their home.
Now Adelman’s was closed, left half filled with merchandise Howard had failed to unload while he pumped money into the store, trying to hold on long enough to find a buyer. He was stuck with five more years on a twenty-year commercial lease.
Still, regardless of the circumstances, Beth could not stomach the idea of selling the Green Gable. Looking around the kitchen, she could envision her mother at the counter, unwrapping fresh cinnamon buns, still warm from Casel’s grocery. Beth closed her eyes.
“My parents intended for the girls to have this house someday.”
Howard sighed.
“You’ve indulged the girls too much the past few years. Now you and I need to dig ourselves out of this hole, and Lauren and Stephanie need to move on with their lives.”
Was he right? Beth had known it would take time for Lauren to recover from the loss of her husband. It had taken all of them time to get over losing Rory. But it was becoming increasingly clear that her daughter was frozen.
And she was scared nothing would ever change that.
Chapter Six
Ethan asked to sit next to Lauren at dinner. She hadn’t seen the kid since last summer, and yet he loved her. She wished she could still see the world through the forgiving eyes of a six-year-old.
“I saved you this seat,” she said, smiling at him.
Ethan was quiet but achingly cute, with big brown eyes and the same high forehead and good cheekbones Lauren had inherited from her father. He looked more like Lauren than Stephanie, and Lauren wondered if her sister realized this, if he reminded her of when they had been young and best friends.
“I like this long chair,” Ethan said, looking up at Lauren.
“Me too. It’s kind of kooky. Like your great-grandmother,” she said. The wall banquette was upholstered in an outrageously bold chinoiserie pattern her grandmother once had identified as Chiang Mai Dragon. The walls were cerulean blue, the modern table white marble. Her grandmother had tried as hard as she could to do a simple beach house, but with some rooms she’d caved to her truest design impulses. The living room was all distressed wood and white linen, framed starfish, and several vintage suitcases stacked next to a towering bookshelf. But if you turned a corner, you’d find a velvet-upholstered modern wingback chair under a large-scale abstract painting. Lauren’s grandmother had a fondness for monogrammed trays and chinoiserie vases, and her collections of zebras—Lalique zebras, porcelain zebras, hand-carved wood zebras—were scattered everywhere.