Part One
One
Leslie Headrick looked out her kitchen window at the old summerhouse in the back. Now, in early fall, the vines and twisted stems of the old roses nearly covered the building, but in the winter you could see the glassed-in porch well. You could see the peeling paint and the cracked glass in the little round window above the front door. One of the side doors was hanging on one hinge, and Alan said it was a danger to anyone who walked past the place. In fact, Alan said that the whole structure was a danger and should be torn down.
At that thought, Leslie turned away from the window and looked back at her beautiful, perfect kitchen. Just last year Alan had gutted her old kitchen and put in this one. “It’s the best that money can buy,” he’d said about the maple cabinets and the solid-surface countertops. And Leslie was sure that it was the best, but she missed her ratty old Welsh dresser and the little breakfast nook in the corner. “That table and those chairs look like something kids made in a shop class,” Alan had said, and Leslie had agreed—but their perspective of what was beautiful differed.
As always, Leslie had given in to her husband and let him put in this showplace of a kitchen, and now she felt that she was ruining a piece of art when she baked cookies and messed up the perfect surfaces that scratched so easily.
She poured herself another cup of tea from the pot, strong, black English tea, loose tea, no wimpy tea bags for her, then turned back to again look out at the summerhouse. This was a day for reflecting because in three more days she was going to be forty years old—and she was going to celebrate her birthday with two women she hadn’t seen or heard from in nineteen years.
Behind her, in the hallway, her two suitcases were packed and waiting. She was taking a lot of clothing because she didn’t know what the other two women were going to be wearing, and Ellie’s letter had been vague. “For a famous writer, she doesn’t say much,” Alan had said in an unpleasant tone of voice. He had been quite annoyed to find out that his wife was friends with a best-selling author.
“But I didn’t know that Ellie was Alexandria Farrell,” Leslie had said, looking at the letter in wonder. “The last time I saw Ellie she wanted to be an artist. She was—”
But Alan wasn’t listening. “You could have asked her to speak at the Masons,” he was saying. “Just last year, one of my clients said that his wife was a devotee of Jordan Neale.” Everyone in America knew that Jordan Neale was the lead character that Ellie, under the pen name of Alexandria Farrell, had created. Jordan Neale was someone women wanted to imitate and men wanted to . . . Well, the series of romantic mysteries had done very well. Leslie had read all of them, having no idea that the writer was the cute young woman she’d met so long ago.
So now, in the quiet of the early morni
ng, before Alan and the kids came downstairs, Leslie was thinking about what had happened to her in the last nineteen years. Not much, she thought. She’d married the boy next door, literally, and they’d had two children, Joe and Rebecca, now fourteen and fifteen years old. They weren’t babies any longer, she thought, sipping her tea and still staring out the window at the summerhouse.
Maybe it was the letter and the invitation from Ellie, a woman she hadn’t seen in so very many years, that was making Leslie think about the past so hard. But, as Ellie had written, their one and only meeting had had an impact on Ellie’s life and she wanted to see both Leslie and Madison again.
Yes, Leslie thought, that meeting had had an impact on her life too. Since that afternoon nineteen years ago, she’d often thought of Ellie and Madison. And now she was going to fly all the way from Columbus, Ohio, to a tiny town in Maine to spend a long weekend with the other two women.
But what was it about the summerhouse that was holding her attention this morning? She’d been so restless that she hadn’t been able to sleep much last night, so, at four A.M., she’d got out of bed, dressed, then tiptoed downstairs to put together the ingredients for apple pancakes. Not that anyone would eat any of them, she thought with a sigh. Rebecca would be horrified at the calories, Joe would come down with only seconds to spare before he made the school bus, and Alan would only want cereal, something highfiber, low-calorie, low-cholesterol, low . . . Well, low-flavor, Leslie thought. Attempts at gourmet cooking were wasted on her family.
With another sigh, Leslie picked up a warm pancake, folded it, and ate it with pleasure. Last week when she’d received Ellie’s letter, she wished she’d received it six months earlier so she would have had time to get rid of the extra fifteen pounds she was carrying. Everyone at the Garden Club said they envied Leslie her figure and how she’d been able to keep it all these years, but Leslie knew better. Nineteen years ago she’d been a dancer and she’d had a body that was supple, muscular, and hard. Now, she thought, she was soft, not fat really, but her muscles were soft. She hadn’t thrown her leg up on a ballet bar in years.
Overhead she could hear Rebecca’s quick step. She’d be the first one down, the first one to ask why her mother had made something that was guaranteed to clog all their arteries with one bite. Leslie sighed. Rebecca was so very much like her father.
Joe was more like his mother, and if Leslie could get him away from his friends long enough, they could sit and talk and “smell the roses,” as she used to tell him. “Like your wallpaper,” he’d said when he was just nine years old. It had taken Leslie a moment to figure out what he was talking about, then she’d smiled warmly. In the summerhouse. She’d put up wallpaper with roses on it in the summerhouse.
Now she remembered looking at her son on that long ago day and seeing his freckled face as they sat across from each other in the old inglenook at one side of the sunny kitchen. Joe had been such an easygoing child, sleeping through the night when he was just weeks old, so unlike Rebecca, who seemed to cause chaos and confusion wherever she was. Leslie wasn’t sure if Rebecca had yet slept through a night of her life. Even now, when she was fifteen, she thought nothing of barging into her parents’ bedroom at three A.M. to announce that she’d heard a “funny noise” on the roof. Leslie would tell her to go back to bed and get some sleep, but Alan took “funny noises” seriously. The neighbors were used to seeing Alan and his daughter outside with flashlights.
Leslie looked back at the summerhouse. She could still see some of the pink paint on it. Fifteen years later and remnants of the paint were still there.