Island Girls (7 page)

Palmer had scarcely pulled out his chair when the waitress arrived, all smiles and flapping eyelashes. “Mr. White, how wonderful to see you again. Would you like your usual?”

“That would be great, Andrea.”

After the waitress went off, Arden said softly, “You know her?”

Palmer looked pleased with himself. “I know lots of people.” He lounged in his chair. “That’s why you should be very, very nice to me.”

Arden took a deep breath. “And I’m supposed to be nice to you
how
?”

“Don’t look so indignant. I’m not asking you to crawl toward me in harem pants.”

Her mouth quirked with amusement at the thought. She
couldn’t help but admire his persistence. She’d been accused of being too assertive herself.

“I’m suggesting,” he continued, “that you accompany me to a few parties. You’d be making some crucial connections.”

“What would you get out of it?”

“I’d have a beautiful and moderately famous woman on my arm. Most important, an intelligent woman. I get tired of good-looking airheads.”

The waitress appeared with his beverage—iced tea. Arden narrowed her eyes and coolly observed him. She’d Googled him when she got home from the party, naturally, and was impressed. He’d gone to St. Mark’s boarding school, Harvard, and the London School of Economics. He owned several technology and media companies. He’d been married and divorced, without children. Not that it mattered to Arden.

“Fine, then,” Arden conceded. “When’s the first event?”

“Now, see,” Palmer complained, “I don’t consider that to be pleasant or even nice. Couldn’t you at least pretend to be feminine?”

“I
am
feminine!”

“No, you’re controlling and abrasive. You want to make it crystal clear that you would only go out with me as long as I’m aware that it’s a kind of business deal. Let’s just make that understood, okay? I get it. So when we’re in front of other people, you don’t treat me like some kind of snake. You’ll act as if we’re on a date.”

Arden bristled. She found the man irritating—and tantalizing. She needed to keep her balance here. “All right, then, but you’ve got to stop taking the way I am personally. I talk to everyone the way I talk to you. It’s how I get things done. I have a chance to rejuvenate
Simplify This
, and that’s my priority. I’m not
interested in flirting with you so you’ll marry me, make me rich, and allow me to lie around having my toenails painted. I can already afford that myself. I’ll go out with you because you’ll introduce me to some people I need to meet, and I’ll be pleasant, but it’s agreed at the beginning that there’s no kind of sexual
niceties
involved, okay?”

Palmer narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice. “Of course I’d like to take you to bed. You’re bewitching. But I’m thirty-eight years old and quite a bit more complicated than the men you’ve obviously been seeing.”

“You know nothing about the men I’ve been seeing,” Arden shot back. Truth was, she hadn’t seen
any
men for quite a while.

Palmer sipped his iced tea. He waited.

The waitress brought Arden’s salad. It did not skip Arden’s notice that her salad came much later than Palmer’s iced tea. Of course, a salad took more time to prepare than … 
Oh
, she ordered herself,
stop it!

“Palmer,” Arden said in an amiable voice, “I would be pleased to be your companion at any events you might wish to invite me to attend with you.”

“How about next Friday night, then? Black tie, at the Forbeses’. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

“That sounds nice,” Arden replied, thinking,
Which Forbes?
But she wouldn’t give Palmer the satisfaction of asking. She’d find out online when she got home.

“Good.” Palmer stood up. “Enjoy your lunch.”

At eleven on Monday morning, Jenny sat in Genevieve’s office, located in what had once been the front parlor of the historic old home. Tim Robinson sat in a chair next to her as they waited for
Genevieve to make an appearance. Genevieve’s maid had ushered them into the room, asked if they wanted coffee, and promised that Ms. Beaudreau would join them soon.

Jenny usually wore tank tops, jeans, and flip-flops, but in deference to her southern hostess and temporary client, she’d pulled on a blue dress, sandals, and earrings. She wanted to tell Tim that she hadn’t dressed up because she was seeing
him
. She understood that Genevieve was an authentically considerate benefactress who wanted both island computer experts to be on board with her arts project. Genevieve was all about cooperation and harmony. It would upset her if Jenny and Tim couldn’t appear to be friendly. Genevieve had no idea of the personal history between them.

Tim wore khakis and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His sandy hair was, as usual, sort of sticking up all over, not for style’s sake but because each strand seemed to have a mind of its own.

“Look,” Tim whispered to Jenny now. “Let’s agree before she gets here that you’ll design the logo for the arts coalition, and the home page of the website.”

Jenny shook her head. “I think Genevieve should hold a contest among the artists for the design of the logo and the general overall appearance. We’ll take it from there.”

Tim didn’t flinch. “Hey, great idea. I should have thought of that. Okay. You take the lead when Genevieve gets in here. She doesn’t need to know every detail of what you and I are going to do; she couldn’t understand the whole code-writing business.”

“We’ll say we’re going to share the work and the pay, right?” Jenny asked. “Half and half, equally?”

“Right,” Tim agreed, just as their client entered the room.

Genevieve was frothed in turquoise silk from shoulders to
ankles. “I am so sorry I’m not dressed yet,” she apologized, although she could have worn the garment to a party. “But you can just ignore that, okay? Now, what do you have for me?”

Jenny explained the idea of a contest for a logo and the overall look of the site.

Genevieve’s brow puckered. “But won’t that just take forevah?”

“Not if we put a deadline on it,” Tim told her. “We’ll e-mail the artists on your list today, tell them we need the idea by Thursday, and the three of us can decide on Friday.”

Her lily-white brow crinkled even more. “The
three
of us will decide?”

Jenny leaned forward. “You’ll have the final say, of course, but Tim and I will have to weigh in on feasibility and efficiency.”

“Efficiency?” Genevieve looked as if the word hurt.

“Some designs might be simpler, and offer more versatility for our purposes. We can get the site live faster. Also, what might be striking on paper might be impossible to reproduce on a website.”

“I see.” Genevieve tapped her lip with a long, perfectly filed silver fingernail.

Jenny and Tim waited.

“No.” Genevieve shook her head. “No, I don’t like this idea. Someone’s feelings are gonna get hurt. I don’t like having to choose one person over the others. Those artist types are already sensitive enough. No. You two design a prototype and e-mail it to me by the end of this week. We’ve got to get the site up and running before August.”

Jenny glanced over at Tim. They both took a deep breath, then smiled at Genevieve.

“You got it,” Jenny said.

Genevieve stood up in a ripple of turquoise. “All right, then.
I think we can do most of this by e-mail, okay? You have my e-mail address?” Reaching in a drawer, she took out two cards and handed them over.

Jenny and Tim stood up. Genevieve sashayed out of the room.

Jenny looked at Tim. “So. How are we going to do this?”

“Let’s go to my office,” Tim suggested.

Jenny started to object, then remembered that her office was in her bedroom.

It was all too complicated to explain right now, how she couldn’t put an office downstairs because the house wasn’t wholly hers and her stepsisters were living there this summer. She didn’t want to spend the money to rent a space on Nantucket yet. Besides, most of her clients contacted her online and she’d meet them at their place of business. She seldom needed a face-to-face meeting. Tim’s office was in a building in a minimall on Airport Road. “Fine,” she agreed.

Tim held the door open for her as they walked outside into the sunshine. “I’ll meet you there.”

She nodded. In her car, she gave herself a moment to compose her roiling emotions. Why did that man get her so revved up? She’d have a heart attack and die someday arguing with him over something like the size of a font.

Meg lay on her towel in the sand, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves against Jetties Beach. She’d been waiting almost twenty years for this moment. Next to her was her beach bag, stocked with bottled water, sunblock, and a book that so far, surprisingly, she had no interest in reading. It was just too sweet to lie here feeling the sun on her skin.

Because it was early June, the air was a perfect temperature, in the high seventies and cooled by an occasional sea breeze. Other
people had their own spots established up and down the beach, but it wasn’t as crowded as it would be in July and August.

Perhaps by then she would have managed to lose enough weight so that her bust wouldn’t bulge out of her suit like too many pillows in a case.

Perhaps not.

Did she eat as sublimation for sex? She’d talked with friends about this enough. She hadn’t been a chubby teenager. Well, she hadn’t been thin, either. She’d just been nicely rounded. She’d been that way in college, too, and when she was working on her master’s.

Of course she’d dated. She’d even had flings. Kind of. In her deepest heart, she knew that for years, perhaps most of her twenties, she’d been obsessed with literature, poetry, and women writers. Her two best friends, both graduate students, got married; Meg was a bridesmaid for both of them. Kyla married another grad student who was working toward his PhD and expected Kyla to be his cook, housekeeper, and general gofer. Winnie married a studly mechanic who looked like sex in tight jeans and didn’t know who Edgar Allan Poe was. Winnie now had two adorable children, and her dreams of her own PhD and a career teaching English literature had evaporated.

Meg didn’t want either one of their lives. As Louisa May Alcott had said, “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.”

But Meg wanted children. And she had to admit she wanted them with a husband, a man she admired and desired, who would cherish his children, and all she asked was that he be
intelligent
. Well,
kind
would also be a good quality.

Would she give up teaching to be a wife and mother? Why should she have to? If only she could meet an insurance agent, or the manager of a Home Depot, or a mailman. A good guy with a
steady job and a steady, kind, reliable heart. Was that too much to ask?

It was some comfort that Arden and Jenny weren’t married or engaged, either. Back in the old, old days, when the three of them were on the island for that first summer after their father married Justine, it was already clear that Arden was the man magnet. Of course, she was fourteen, with boobs and curves, while Jenny was the stick she still remained and Meg had looked like a plump little kid.

Now that Meg allowed herself to sink back into the memory, she marveled at how much fun that long-ago summer had been.

After breakfast, the three girls would gather up their beach bags and hurry along the narrow lanes to Jetties Beach. They’d toss down their stuff—beach umbrella, sunblock, and cooler of cold drinks—and dash into the surf. They’d have swimming races, contests to see who could stay under the longest; they’d build extravagant sand castles; they’d beachcomb; they’d fall asleep on their towels, returning home red as lobsters. They were always giggling at something, anything, a woman’s jiggling bosom, a boy’s smile—everything seemed hysterically funny.

After lunch, they’d walk into town to check out books from the library or buy fashion magazines and ice cream. In the heat of the afternoon, they’d sprawl in the backyard, reading and snoozing, or if it was raining, they’d play games. Monopoly. Scrabble. Clue. In the evening, they might go back into town to see a movie or just to hang around Main Street, people watching, listening to the street musicians, giggling at how cute the guitarist was.

Meg didn’t remember them fighting, not that first year.

It was the next year, when Arden was fifteen and she and Jenny were twelve, that everything changed.

Arden had cut her long red ponytail into a short asymmetrical mess that fell in her eyes. She had three holes in her left ear, two
in her right. She wore heavy eye makeup, black fingernail polish, and slutty clothes. While Jenny and Meg were still singing songs from the Disney movie
Beauty and the Beast
, Arden was blasting the house with Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

The three girls had seen each other about once a month over the winter, when their father took them all out to dinner and a play or a movie, so Meg was aware of how Arden was changing, but living with her in the Nantucket house was a whole new experience. Meg expected Arden to favor her over Jenny; after all, Meg and Arden were half sisters, not stepsisters. But Arden treated Meg with the same disdain as she treated Jenny. It was confusing, and it hurt.

When they first arrived on the island, as they lugged their duffel bags up the stairs, Arden said to Meg, “I’m taking the back bedroom this year.”

“But I choose the back bedroom,” Meg protested. “I can pretend I’m a writer there.”

“Tough. I’m taking it.”

Meg changed tack. “Your bedroom is so much prettier, with all the mermaids. You’ve got so much more space.”

Arden had whipped around and hissed at Meg, “Yeah, and I can lie there and hear Dad and Justine talking and laughing. The happy married couple. They always make me turn down my music.” She stormed past Meg, dragging her luggage, down the hall, into the back bedroom, and slammed the door.

Unhappily, Meg had moved into the mermaid bedroom, which was pleasant, she had to admit. She didn’t know why Arden had been so upset, but she didn’t have a portable CD player, and she didn’t listen to Nirvana. She was twelve, but a young, unformed twelve, continuing her lifelong obsession with reading. More and more aware of her weight, she didn’t want to go to the beach as often, or out for an ice cream cone. Jenny got cranky because Meg
was always reading. Arden was either out of the house or locked in her room, and she refused to play any board games, ever, which limited what Meg and Jenny could play. Meg could overhear her father and Justine arguing about the girls: Justine wanted Rory to make Arden be polite and Meg stop being such an introvert. Rory reminded Justine she was talking about teenagers.