True Love

  Alix got out of the truck. “I’ll go in with you and you can introduce me. I’ll need a hairdresser while I’m here.”

  “I thought you were leaving tomorrow,” he said as he walked around the truck.

  “So were you. Changed your mind?”

  “Now that I know you aren’t going to ask me for my wisdom, maybe I will stay.”

  “If I meet Jared Montgomery that’s the first thing I’m going to ask him, but Mr. Kingsley just seems to go fishing and …” She looked up at him. “What else do you do?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been years since I had any time off. All winter I went back and forth to New York and even now I have one project that my partner is on my case to do.” They had stepped up onto a little porch and Jared was holding the door open for her.

  Alix had to clamp her teeth down on the sides of her tongue to keep from asking what project he needed to work on. But a deal was a deal and she wasn’t going to break it.

  The salon was large and well lit. Jared introduced Alix to Tricia, who was small, trim, and quite pretty.

  “I don’t want him shaved,” Alix said, then turned red. “Sorry for being so bossy.”

  “I’m not allowed to anyway,” Trish said and explained that she didn’t have a barber’s license so she couldn’t shave Jared. For a few minutes the two women discussed what to do with his mess of hair and beard while he sat in the chair in silence. When they had it settled, Alix sat down in the empty chair in the next booth.

  It turned out that Trish seemed to have read every novel published in the last ten years. She and Alix kept up a steady stream of conversation while Trish trimmed, washed, and cut Jared’s hair. If he so much as said a word, neither woman noticed.

  When Trish finished, the two women stood side by side to inspect her work.

  Jared looked at least ten years younger, and the beard and long hair suited him very well. His whiskers were perfectly trimmed around his strong jawline and his hair reached down the back of his neck. There were gray patches in his beard and hair, but on him they looked good.

  Alix wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but he looked even better now than he did a couple of years ago when she and Izzy heard him speak. Alix couldn’t help looking over his head in the mirror at his lower lip.

  “Is it all right?” Jared asked, looking at Alix in the mirror.

  “Yes,” she said and turned away.

  At the register, Jared paid, they said goodbye, then left.

  “Grocery?” Jared asked.

  She opened the truck door. “I’m beginning to feel guilty taking up your time. Maybe you could take me to a car rental agency and I could get a vehicle.”

  “If you’re going to be here for a whole year maybe we should buy you a used car. I have a friend who has a VW for sale.”

  “I think I’ll wait on buying a car. When Mom gets here she’ll probably do something. What does she drive when she’s here?”

  “Nothing,” Jared said. “She walks to town to eat. There’s a grocery a few blocks down and she gets fruit there. She and Aunt Addy went out to lunch often, but then most of the time your mother was here, she worked.”

  “Oh, yes. Plotting her novels,” Alix said.

  Reading my family’s journals and making notes, Jared thought. One year Victoria sneaked in a portable copy machine. She’d used it only in the privacy of her bedroom, but his grandfather, Caleb, told Aunt Addy about it and there’d been a huge fight. Victoria had accused Addy of spying on her.

  When Jared was told of it, he’d laid into his grandfather for doing the spying. “Do you sneak around and watch her dress and undress?!” Jared had meant his words to be a put-down, but Caleb had grinned and said, “Oh, yes. But only for Victoria,” then he’d disappeared.

  It didn’t matter how Addy knew, Victoria was told to get rid of the copier or leave. Reluctantly, she handed it over to Addy. Last time Jared looked, it was still in a cabinet in the second parlor.

  “Yes, plotting,” Jared said at last. “Would you like to go to the grocery or not?”

  “I could use a few things.”

  He pulled into a parking lot that she recognized. Across the road was Downyflake with its big doughnut on the front. It was the first time she hadn’t felt lost.

  “Know where you are?” he asked.

  “Vaguely.”

  He reached behind the bench seat, pulled out a big flannel shirt, and handed it to her.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The Stop and Shop grocery was the coldest one she’d ever been in and she quickly put on the shirt, which engulfed her.

  “You’re beginning to look like a Nantucketer,” he said, grinning.

  “Why do I feel like I’ve just been given a huge compliment? Right after being called a rum-drinking Kingsley sailor, that is.”

  Jared laughed. “Speaking of which, there’s a liquor store next door. Think we should visit? Get a case of dark rum for you, maybe?”

  “If I remember correctly, you drank as much as I did.”

  “But, alas, neither of us got drunk.” He walked ahead to pick up a couple of bags of baby lettuce.

  Alix held on to the cart, watching him. He’d just said his first almost flirty thing to her. Just minutes before she’d had to stop herself from drooling when she saw him in the mirror, but he’d continued to look at her the same way her father did.

  “So tell me about this date I’m having on Saturday,” Alix said. They were at the coffee and tea shelves and he was reading the packages.

  “Not much to tell. There are millions of daffodils on the island. There’s some story about a lawn mower nearly wiping them out, but they’re still here. There’s a parade of antique cars and a picnic out in ’Sconset.” He put two bags of coffee in the cart.

  “I take it you don’t participate.”

  “I did when I was a kid. My parents took me to it every year. My mom used to cover me in daffodils, then she’d put me in the back of an old pickup with my cousins. But when I got older I was too cool for any of that.”

  He was leaning on the cart handle and watching Alix put things in. They stopped at the big glass counter that held an assortment of meats and salads. Jared greeted everyone who worked behind it by name.

  “What do you want to get?” she asked without thinking, then said, “Sorry. It’s not like we’ll be sharing a lot of meals.”

  “Chicken salad,” he said, “and get me some of the ham for sandwiches. We forgot tomatoes. I’ll go back and get them. Oh! And get me some of that smoked turkey.” Turning, he went back to the produce section.

  Alix couldn’t help smiling. It looked like she wouldn’t be eating every meal alone after all.

  The rest of the grocery shopping was fun, but by the time they got to the frozen foods, Alix’s teeth were chattering. Jared put his hands on her upper arms and rubbed briskly. “If you’re going to live here, you need to toughen up.”

  They headed to the checkout, but Alix stopped at the magazines. She got a Nantucket Today and hesitated over an issue of a remodeling magazine. Jared picked it up and put it in the cart.

  “Later, you can tell me everything they’ve done wrong,” she said, smiling.

  “Didn’t you learn anything at school? You tell me.”

  They were unloading the cart onto the checkout belt.

  “Right. I’m going to tell an American Living—” His look cut her off. “What does a Kingsley sailor know about remodeling?”

  He gave her a smile of such sweetness that Alix’s knees began to give way.

  “You learn quickly, don’t you?”

  “I do when it’s in my own best interest. Did you get any eggs?” she asked.

  “No. They’re straight down that aisle, and be sure to open the carton to see if any are broken,” he said.

  Alix stood up from the cart and looked at him.

  With a sigh, he hurried down the aisle to get the eggs.

  When Alix fi
nished unloading, the young woman at the checkout said, “Are you and Jared a couple?”

  For a moment Alix was speechless. Did everyone on this island know everyone else? “No,” she said at last. “We just met yesterday.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “You two argue like you’re married.”

  Alix started to say something but Jared returned with the eggs.

  “Did you get any Greek yogurt?” he asked. “I can’t stand those little cartons with all the sugar in the bottom.”

  Alix, very aware of the woman watching, held up the Greek yogurt.

  “Good,” he said, smiling. “That’s just the kind I like.” Ken had introduced it to him.

  She glanced at the checkout girl, who again raised her brows. Jared held out his key ring with the Stop and Shop card on it, then paid.

  Outside was warmer than inside and they hurried to the truck. Alix handed him bags and he put them in the back. When they were inside the truck he took one look at her and turned on the heater. “How are you going to survive winter here in a drafty old house?”

  “I’m going to get a fat boyfriend,” she said.

  When Jared didn’t reply she looked at him. He was pulling out of the parking lot and saying nothing. It looked like boyfriends were another subject she wasn’t supposed to mention. But the truth was that if she didn’t get a man to distract her, she was going to make a fool of herself over Jared Montgomery slash Kingsley.

  “How about if we go home, put the groceries away, then walk around town for a while?” he asked.

  “And maybe you’ll see someone you know.”

  He looked at her quickly and saw she was joking. “We all know each other now but that won’t last long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Theeeey’re commming.”

  She couldn’t help laughing. He sounded like an announcer on a horror movie trailer. “Who is coming?”

  He turned down a street that looked too narrow to have even one-way traffic, but another truck was coming right at them. Neither Jared nor the other driver seemed to think anything about passing one another in such a narrow space and of course they lifted their hands in greeting.

  “You’ll find out,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer.

  When they were back at the house they carried in the groceries and quickly put them away. Alix knew where everything went in the lower cabinets, and that made them laugh. Twice she ducked under his arm to get to the fridge. All in all, they worked well together.

  Twenty minutes later they were back outside and walking through the streets of Nantucket. She followed Jared as they went down one gorgeous street after another, stopping now and then to comment on a door or some other extraordinary feature of a house.

  After a while he stopped in front of a small house and for a moment Alix didn’t know why he’d halted. But then she looked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. “You did that, didn’t you? I mean, Jared Montgomery remodeled that house.”

  “He did,” Jared said, his eyes twinkling. “And I happen to know that he was just fifteen years old when he designed it. Of course this is nothing compared to his later work, but it is his.”

  “Are you kidding?” Alix said. “I knew it was his. Look at the way that door is set into the wall. That’s pure Montgomery.”

  Jared lost his smile. “Are you saying that he hasn’t changed in his whole career?”

  “I think he has very wisely stuck to what works.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jared laughed. “Very diplomatic of you.”

  “I know I shouldn’t ask, but how did he get to design a building when he was just fifteen?”

  “He worked with a master builder who let him … let me design it.” His voice grew softer as he remembered that time and they began to walk again. “I drew my ideas with a stick in the dirt, so he taught me rudimentary drafting. He showed me how to use a triangle and a T-square, and my first drafting table was an old door on sawhorses, with—”

  “With triangular pieces of plywood to put it on a slant,” Alix said.

  “It’s like you’ve seen it.”

  “My dad made me one like that. But he used the bottom half of a Dutch door.”

  “How old were you?” Jared asked.

  “Eight.” She gave a little laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I was just thinking about the Legos. I guess I left the ones you gave me behind, because later I was in a store with my dad and I saw boxes of them. I still remember how I went crazy and started crying. I was never a tantrum-throwing kind of kid, but I don’t think I’ve ever before or since wanted anything as much as I wanted those. Dad seemed to understand because he filled a cart with sets of them.”

  Jared was grinning. “Did you use them?”

  “Constantly! But my mother hated them because the little pieces were all over the house. She used to say, ‘Kenneth, my child is going to grow up to be a writer. She doesn’t need those annoying little blocks.’ ”

  “What did your father say to that?”

  She lowered her voice. “He said, ‘She’s already an architect. I don’t think she can be what both of us are.’ ”

  “It looks like he was right,” Jared said.

  “He was. While I was growing up, Mom tried to get me to make up stories but they just weren’t there. If I heard a story I could write it, that was easy for me, but I couldn’t do what my mother does and come up with fantastic plots.”

  “You can write but not plot?” He sounded amused by something that used to plague Alix when she was growing up.

  “That’s about it, but then whoever heard of things in real life like what happened in my mother’s books? Murder, secret rooms hiding criminals, forbidden love, scheming and plotting to get some old house, and—” When she looked at him, she saw that he was staring at her in shock. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m horrified by what people read. Now you’re the one looking strange.”

  “I’m still adjusting to the fact that my mother spent every August here and not in Colorado.”

  He didn’t think she had told him everything on her mind, so he waited for her to continue.

  “I just thought of something,” she said. “Your family is old, and your house is old.”

  “Please tell me you aren’t thinking that my family is the prototype for a bunch of murderers.”

  She barely heard him. The idea that her mother had based all of her books on the Kingsley family was becoming stronger and stronger. Was it possible that her mother’s outrageous novels were true?

  Jared had an idea of what Alix was thinking and he didn’t like it. He truly believed that a person’s family history should be kept private. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face a house. “This is Montgomery at sixteen.”

  Alix just stood there blinking. One of her mother’s books was about a soap recipe that had become the basis for the whole family’s wealth. “Kingsley Soap,” Alix whispered, her eyes wide. It was a real product and the wrapper said it had been around for centuries. It wasn’t a big seller today, but bars of it were still in every grocery in the country. Her dad’s mother used to swear by it.

  “You’re right,” Jared said loudly. “This couldn’t be a Montgomery design. The windows aren’t right and he would never make dormers like those monstrosities.” He started walking down the street.

  “He would make them just like that,” Alix said as she tried to pull her mind away from the soap.

  Jared stopped walking and turned to look at her.

  “The Danwell house,” she said. “It has dormers exactly like that.”

  Smiling, Jared started walking again.

  Alix ran to catch up with him, tripping once over the uneven sidewalk. He turned down an alleyway that didn’t look wide enough to get a motor scooter down, but there were cars parked on both sides. He was walking fast, his long legs eating up the distance.

  Alix nearly had to
run to keep up with him.

  Abruptly, he stopped at a house that was close to the road, reached into his pocket to withdraw his keys, and unlocked a door. Alix followed him inside.

  “I think the electricity is on,” he said as he felt along the wall and flipped a switch.

  They were in a downstairs kitchen, an old brick wall to the right. Through the doorway she could see what was probably a dining room with a big fireplace on the far wall.

  Jared was glad to see that finally the faraway look had left Alix’s eyes. The house seemed to have overridden her thoughts about his family and her mother’s novels and how they were connected.

  “This house is quite old,” Alix said, her voice low and full of the reverence such a house deserved. She looked into the far room, saw the huge fireplace, then looked back at the old kitchen. There was an old Tappan range, a scarred and chipped sink. The cabinets had been made by someone who had never heard of a mortise and tenon joint.

  “Maple cabinets and granite?” Jared asked.

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’d—” She broke off as she remembered who she was talking to. “Whose house is this?”

  “My cousin’s. He wants me to do a design for a remodel, he’ll do the work, then sell the house. Want to see the upstairs?”

  She nodded and they went up the steep, narrow stairs to see a rabbit warren of rooms. The house had been added onto in a very haphazard way. Some of the rooms were beautiful, but others had been cut apart by ugly Sheetrock partitions.

  Jared sat down on an old couch that was propped up in the back by phone books and waited while Alix wandered from room to room. He saw her looking up at the top of the walls and knew she was figuring out what was old and original, and what had been thrown up in the sixties in an attempt to make as many bedrooms as possible.

  He let her have about twenty minutes, then the growling of his stomach made him stand up. “You ready to go or should I go home and get you a measuring tape?”

  “Like you don’t already have the whole floor plan on paper,” Alix said.