For her first night at Shell Haven, Ruth slept with the curtains open. She wanted to greet the day with a view of the water.
At dawn, she pulled on her robe and walked to the window. The sky was cerulean, and the houses across the street appeared to be lit by a pale pink glow. She had long remembered this about Provincetown, the spectacular, almost otherworldly light.
Despite the scenery, Ruth could not stand still for long. Always in motion—her blessing and her curse. She headed down to the kitchen.
Yesterday, following her very bumpy arrival, she’d managed to stock the kitchen with essentials (of which coffee was at the top of the list) and unpack a few of the boxes that she’d sent ahead.
The house was in a prime location with gorgeous views, but the kitchen had sealed the deal for her. It had a French Country feeling, with long shelves of unfinished wood filled with mismatched bowls, white subway tiles on the floor, a white hutch displaying a collection of tin plates, glass-fronted cabinets, and a rustic wood table that could seat six to eight. Clifford Henry told her it had been made by an artisan in Provence. The wide windows overlooking the back patio and the garden were clearly a modern addition.
Ruth made her coffee, then sat at the table and contemplated the day ahead of her. Six months after selling her company, she still felt the occasional moment of panic at the seemingly endless stretch of free time ahead of her. Think positive, she told herself. Retirement wasn’t an ending. It was a beginning!
And yet, last winter, she’d been reminded that it wasn’t that simple. Her newfound leisure time became a minefield when she decided to go for a manicure.
It started out fine. Inside the salon she was greeted by a familiar—and gratifying—sight: a wall of narrow white shelves filled with bottle after bottle of the nail polish she’d created thirty years ago, a brand she’d named Liv, after her daughter, Olivia.
When Olivia was small, she’d happily answered to Ruth’s nickname for her. As a teenager, she insisted on Ruth using her full name. Now the only trace that remained of Liv the sweet toddler was the label on the bestselling nail polish in the country.
Ruth had scanned the shelves of Liv bottles meticulously arranged by color and shade. She searched through the deep reds, looking for her signature color—the first she’d put on the market—Cherry Hill. She looked and looked, moving farther into the purple shades, thinking it might have been misplaced. No luck.
She asked a technician for help finding the color and was told, “Oh, that’s been discontinued.”
Discontinued? Impossible. Cherry Hill was a classic. Ruth insisted there had to be some mistake. The woman told her that she was not the first to request the color, and when they’d called their distributor, they’d been told no more bottles would be shipping.
Cherry Hill was the most perfect red, a true red, not too orange, not too pink. It flattered every skin tone. It was a perennial bestseller. But more significant, it was her sentimental favorite. How could the new owners of the company do such a thing?
This discovery accelerated her growing sense that selling the business had been a colossal mistake. She had signed on the dotted line, believing the buyers’ promises about an ongoing consultant role—and then never heard from them again.
She tried not to think about it, tried to accept it, but if the new owners would do something like discontinue Cherry Hill, the day might come when her brand, her baby, was unrecognizable. And there was nothing she could do about it.
This was the realization that had sent her looking for something else to put her energy into. She’d turned her attention to the new phase of her life with fresh vigor. And now, six months later, there she was in Provincetown. And yet…
Ruth got up from the table, leaving her coffee, and walked up to the second floor, where there were a few remaining unpacked boxes. She knew that buried somewhere inside one of them were the last remaining bottles of Cherry Hill. It suddenly felt very important for her to find them and make sure they had weathered the move.
Her approach to packing had been as ordered and methodical as her approach to everything in life, so she easily found the box labeled BEAUTY/SUPPLIES. She sliced through the tape.
On top, protected by bubble wrap, was a cosmetics mirror. It was the type sold at any high-end drugstore, with a metal stand and a rotating mirror that was magnified on one side. But this particular model was nearly fifty years old. It had belonged to her mother.
Ruth had vivid memories of her mother sitting in her bedroom in front of her vanity performing the morning ritual of “putting on my face,” as she called it. In the 1960s, this entailed making the eyes as big as possible with heavy, winged black eyeliner, pale blue eyeshadow, and false eyelashes topped with gobs of mascara. Ruth would watch with fascination, certain her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Joan Goldberg had been a loving mother but a very unhappy woman. Her life advice to Ruth? “Don’t start cooking dinner every night. Then it will always be expected of you.”
Her mother received a weekly allowance of ten dollars from her husband; she had to save up to buy things. Ruth decided early on that she would not live like that. She would be financially independent of her husband—if she bothered to get married at all.
And then, when she was just eighteen years old, she met Ben Cooperman. They were engaged one month after his college graduation.
Ruth placed the mirror to the side and continued digging. As expected, she found a small cardboard box, a six-pack of Cherry Hill. She opened it and shook one bottle into her hand. How painfully ironic that the product that had changed her life was the first thing to go. It was like the universe was telling her: You’re really done. There’s no looking back.
And yet here she was, her life packed up in boxes, sitting alone in a beautiful home that was not hers. It was difficult not to look back. At her age, you were left with the results of decades’ worth of decisions, large and small.
The doorbell rang. Ruth looked up, startled. She closed the box, brushed the dust off her hands, and descended the stairs to the front hallway. She peeked out the window. No one was there. She unlatched the door and opened it. An infant car seat had been left on the doorstep.
With a sleeping baby inside.
The string of small bells above the Tea by the Sea front door heralded the arrival of customers; this time, it was a family of tourists. The parents gravitated to the shelf of tea tins while the teenage girls stood in front of the window taking selfies with the backdrop of the bay.
Elise breathed deeply as she watched Fern explain their different blends and open a few tins so the customers could experience their aromas. Elise was filled with gratitude—for her marriage and for the wonderful shop, which really was a dream come true. She had to let the other stuff go.
The big decision they had to make at the moment was whether or not to hire part-time help. Elise and Fern vacillated between feeling they could go it alone and wanting the insurance of a third set of hands.
“I think we should offer the job to that Cynthia Wesson woman,” Elise said after the family of tourists left, briefly looking up from the tin she was filling with loose-leaf, custom-blended tea. When two ounces of tea had been measured out and dispensed into a tin, Elise labeled it with three stickers—the name of the blend on the front and top, the brewing time and temperature on the bottom—and finished it off with a navy-blue ribbon. It was a time-consuming but wonderfully meditative task. It reminded her of what she enjoyed about tea in the first place, the way it encouraged you to slow down. “She seems genuinely interested in tea and she’s been visiting P’town from Chatham her whole life.”
The front door’s bells chimed again. This time, the arrival was a petite middle-aged woman. She had thick dark hair with a white stripe on one side and blazing black eyes.
“It’s the Wicked Witch of the West End,” Fern muttered. “When did she get back to town?”
“Be nice!” Elise whispered. Louder, she said, “Hi, Bianca.”
The woman squinted up at them. “My sister-in-law told me about this place. I walk up and down the street and there’s so much change. And not for the better!”
“Welcome back. At least you were able to escape the cold by spending the winter in Florida. Where are you staying?” Elise asked pleasantly.
“At the boatyard,” the woman said. “Since you two got your hands on my daughter’s house, where else would I stay?”
Elise and Fern exchanged a look. “Pilar was happy to sell to us, Bianca,” Fern said.
When they’d first moved from Boston to Provincetown, finding a single-family house to buy seemed too much to hope for. Very little real estate was on the market, and most of the living quarters for sale were condominiums made from large houses divided up for multiple owners.
That first summer, they’d sublet the bottom floor of a Victorian just off Conant Street and begun the search for a forever home. How bad could sharing a cottage with a few other couples be?
As it turned out, pretty bad. Their upstairs neighbors rolled in from the A-House or the Crown and Anchor in the earliest hours of the morning, blasting music and treading on the hardwood floors like a herd of elephants. The afternoons weren’t much quieter.
Fern and Elise found escape by renting a sailboat and mooring from Barros Boatyard. Marco made it easy for them to get set up on the water. His father, Manny Barros, had run the boatyard for fifty years, and he’d taken it over from his own father. Marco had also started an oyster farm on the two-acre grant of intertidal water that his paternal uncle—and godfather—Tito had given him.
Fern and Elise spent so much time at the boatyard that they struck up a friendship with the Barroses. They were invited to the Fourth of July party at their house, then to a few Sunday-night barbecues. They met Manny’s wife, Lidia, and his sister, Bianca. And that summer, Bianca Barros’s daughter, Pilar, was looking to sell her home.
Fern made a deal with Pilar over oysters and gin on Manny’s deck. That’s how things happened in Provincetown real estate—through a friend of a friend of a friend. The right place, the right time.
“You got that place for a steal,” Bianca said now, glaring at Fern. “And I do mean steal.”
Fern shook her head. “Can I offer you an iced tea? On the house, of course.” She winked at Elise.
“I heard a disturbing rumor I hope you can put to rest. You didn’t rent out the house to a summer person, did you?”
Elise and Fern looked at each other. “Yes, we did,” Fern said.
“That is an outrage. An affront to me and my family and everything that house has ever stood for. My great-great-great-grandfather built that house!”
“Bianca, with all due respect, it’s our house now and there’s nothing wrong with renting it out for the summer.”
“You would say that—you’re barely more than tourists yourselves.” She peered up at the menu and clucked with disapproval. “You think you can get away with charging that for an iced tea?” She stormed out.
“See,” Fern said with a pointed look at Elise. “That’s what happens when you don’t let things go. You turn into a Bianca.”
“Very funny,” Elise said.
The shop phone rang, and she reached for it. “Tea by the Sea, Elise speaking.”
“This is Ruth Cooperman. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I need Fern to come back to the house right away.”
“What’s the problem?” The last thing Elise wanted to think about was Ruth Cooperman at Shell Haven. She sighed impatiently. “Is the key not working? Sometimes the back door gets stuck in the heat.”
“The doors are not the problem. The problem is that someone left a baby on your front porch.”