The morning brought no relief. Olivia didn’t feel any more capable of the five-hour drive than she had on the day her back went out. Still, she had to get to the office, even if it meant taking the ferry and returning for her car at a later date.
“What’s your rush?” her mother said from across the breakfast table.
Um, not everyone around here is retired. “For one thing, the Wi-Fi here is nonexistent,” Olivia said, tapping away at her laptop, trying for the umpteenth time to log in to her HotFeed e-mail.
“There’s nothing wrong with the Wi-Fi,” said Ruth.
“Well, there must be, because I can’t get into my work e-mail.” But even as she said it, Olivia was checking the settings and saw she had an internet connection. So maybe something was wrong with the server in New York? She’d have to let someone know. Just as soon as she figured out her travel situation.
“If you want to leave your car here, I could drive it to New York one day next week. We could have lunch,” Ruth said.
Olivia looked at her. Suddenly, all the conflicting feelings she’d felt for the past few days crystallized. “I don’t think you understand how painful it is for me to see the mother you could have been.” She closed her laptop and eased to her feet.
“Could have been? It’s the mother I am—today. Why do you insist on punishing me for the past?”
“I’m not punishing you, Mother.” Olivia felt a surge of anger. She’d worked very hard not to need her mother. It had been painful, but she’d gotten there. She wasn’t about to undo all of that now just because her mother was having a midlife crisis. “I just…look, thanks for the offer about the car but I’ll be back for it at some point.” Was this something she could hire someone to do? She’d figure it out once she got back to civilization.
Her mother stood up. She reached out to hug her and it was awkward but mercifully quick.
“Well, I’m glad you came,” Ruth said. “I really am. And even if the only reason you’re coming back is for the car, I’m looking forward to it already.”
Don’t, Olivia thought. Don’t look forward to it. Don’t expect anything. Olivia knew in that moment she had to make a clean break. There would be no leaving the car and coming back for it, no meeting her mother in the city. She would have to just drive off today, even if it meant stopping every half hour to relieve the pain in her back.
“I’m actually feeling okay to drive,” she said. “Can you help me get my bag into the car?”
“This is not a good idea. It’s not safe. What’s your rush?”
“I have to get back to work, Mother! You of all people should understand that.”
Her mother followed her outside, dragging her suitcase, protesting even as Olivia eased into the front seat. The angle of her body behind the wheel triggered a fresh round of spasms, but she did her best to hide it. She took deep breaths and asked her mother to close the door for her.
“Call me from the road. Let me know you’re okay,” Ruth said.
Olivia would have liked to sit there for a few minutes, to acclimate to the position and maybe make a few phone calls. But her mother continued to stand there, and Olivia knew she wouldn’t go inside until Olivia drove off.
She backed out of the driveway and drove one block on Commercial. She pulled over to check her phone. To her left, she glimpsed the bay between houses. Three days in this town, and she hadn’t even made it to the water.
Still no e-mail connection.
“What the hell?” She dialed Dakota’s office line. It went straight to voice mail. Strange. She should be at her desk at ten in the morning. She tried Dakota’s cell phone.
“Hello?” Dakota said.
“Oh, good! You’re there,” Olivia said. “I’m driving back to the city now but I can’t get into my e-mail. Can you ask the IT department to see what’s going on?”
“Um, you should talk to Peter.”
Why would she bother Peter with her e-mail issues? Before she could ask, her assistant hung up.
It was suddenly very hot in the car. Olivia turned up the air-conditioning and dialed Peter Asgaard’s assistant.
“Hi, it’s Olivia. Is Peter—”
Immediately, she was put on hold. While she waited, two women walked in front of the car, one holding a colorful bodyboard and the other with a large cooler. Olivia looked out the window at the cloudless sky.
“Peter Asgaard here,” her boss said on the other end of the line.
“Oh, Peter, hi. It’s Olivia. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m on my way back to the office but there’s a problem with the e-mail server.”
“There’s no problem with the e-mail server,” he said.
“Well, yes, there is, because I can’t log in.”
“I’d prefer to discuss this in person. When will you be back in the office?”
“Discuss what in person?” Olivia’s heart began to pound.
“Please report to HR first thing tomorrow morning.”
What? This couldn’t be happening. Olivia unplugged her headphone and held the phone directly to her ear. “I’m sorry—did you just say—”
“I approached April Hollis, hoping to regain her business. She had an interesting theory as to why you botched her Instagram feed. It appears you might be distracted, considering your plans to go out on your own.” A pause. And then: “Olivia, you can’t log in to your e-mail because you’re no longer an employee of HotFeed Media.”
Olivia stammered something, a lame murmur of there having been a misunderstanding. Peter repeated the instruction that she meet with the company’s human resources department.
Trembling, Olivia tried to restart the car. She had to get back to New York, to fix this somehow. But she could barely lean forward to turn the key in the ignition; pain radiated from the base of her spine up through her shoulder blades.
A pink pedicab passed in front of the car, and the driver waved at her with a smile.
She burst into tears.
Ruth would not sit around the house all day moping about how the visit had turned out. After Olivia had driven off—ill-advised, but her daughter was nothing if not stubborn—Ruth borrowed one of the bikes resting on the back porch and rode to the beach.
She needed inspiration for her mosaic. She had her design, but she didn’t yet see how to bring it to life. Working with tile seemed like the easiest way to go, but she suspected the end result would be far from the shimmering glory of the Beach Rose Inn starfish. Frankly, she wasn’t sure she had even the slightest aptitude for this particular art form. And yet she liked having something to focus her energy on, so, for now, she would stick with it.
“Go to the beach,” Amelia had advised her when she’d confessed her creative impasse.
In general, Ruth found Go to the beach to be sound advice. Need to get some reading done? Go to the beach. Looking to clear your head? Go to the beach. Need some exercise? Go to the beach.
Need to forget about the fact that your weekend with your daughter was a huge failure?
Ruth walked along the edge of the ocean, adjusting her wide-brimmed sun hat and scanning the wet sand for sea glass.
Had she made a mistake in inviting Olivia out in the first place? The time she’d spent here had certainly not brought them closer together. If anything, Olivia seemed angrier when she left than when she’d arrived.
I don’t think you understand how painful it is for me to see the mother you could have been.
Ruth did understand, because this weekend had given her a glimpse of what her life might have been like if she’d had more of a relationship with her daughter. She saw it in Amelia and Rachel. She certainly saw it in the Barros family. In contrast, she and her daughter might as well have been strangers.
What had she hoped? That Olivia would find herself as transformed by the town as Ruth had been when she first saw it? She had been a teenager. Olivia was a grown woman—again, a fact she sometimes lost sight of. Maybe, if Ruth had first set foot on the shores of P’town at an older age, it wouldn’t have made such an impression on her. But as it was, the town had always been synonymous with her youth. Although, in reality, she had spent only one summer in P’town. The reason Provincetown was so indelible, she decided, was that it had been the hinge in her life between youth and adulthood. If pressed, she might say her final moments of true, unencumbered happiness and, yes, innocence had been spent on that spit of land.
She and her mother had had a routine when they were here: They woke up early, took a walk on the beach, bought bread or pastry at the Portuguese bakery, then made eggs for breakfast. There were no bagels to be found but that was a minor culinary sacrifice for the summer. They spent the rest of the day at the beach, her mother coating herself with oil (oil!). Ruth met a few other teenagers, and they reveled in their understanding that there was no better place to spend the precious time between high school and college than in a town that felt separated from reality.
It was the last night of June when a friend invited her to attend a reading for a play at the Fine Arts Work Center. The center had been founded ten years before as a place for emerging artists to live and work together while developing their craft. Ruth, who had never been particularly artistic, was amazed not only by the prevalence of art and artists in Provincetown but by the casual way people pronounced themselves painters, writers, or actors. It was something she never encountered in Philadelphia; there, either you were a famous artist or you had a real job. In P’town, there was no such distinction.
She had little sense of time that summer; the only clues offering structure to her day were hunger pangs reminding her to eat lunch or dinner and the changing light. As a result, she and her friend arrived late to the play reading, missing most of it. The part she did manage to catch barely held her attention; she was distracted by a boy. He stood a few feet away from her, holding a plastic cup of red wine. Unlike Ruth, he was focused completely on the reading, his eyes locked on the actors. (Or were they the writers?) He was tall and lanky with glossy dark hair. He was dressed in a red T-shirt with a Coke logo on the front and jeans.
If Ruth had a type, this guy was it. He was boyishly handsome. Not gorgeous, but solidly good-looking. More than that, she felt a pull toward him that could only be explained as chemical. She felt it even before she saw his big hazel eyes, but when he did finally look at her—after the reading, during the cocktail portion—it sealed the deal.
They were standing in a small group. Ruth had worked her way into the loose circle just to be near him.
“You can’t help but think of Lillian Hellman,” he said to the small group, talking about the play everyone had just experienced. “And I mean that in a positive way—not to suggest it’s derivative.”
Ruth had no idea who Lillian Hellman was and didn’t really care. “The play probably couldn’t exist without Hellman,” Ruth said.
“That’s so reductive,” a woman said, turning to her, her face red with anger. “Just because it’s feminist, it’s Hellman?”
Ruth, realizing she was most likely being confronted by the writer, said the only thing she could think of in the moment: “He said it first!” She gestured to Coke T-shirt boy. Incredibly, he laughed.
“This is some high-level discourse,” he said.
Ruth, embarrassed, slunk away. She walked around in search of her friend, failed to find her, and returned to the room with the bar. She poured herself a cup of wine. No one seemed to care that she was underage.
“Don’t feel bad; Shari gets defensive, but we all do.” It was Coke T-shirt boy, right behind her.
“You’re a playwright too?” She said.
“Guilty as charged,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Ben Cooperman.”
“Ruth,” she said.
To this day, Ruth could remember the way it felt when Ben Cooperman first touched her. It was an innocent handshake; well, considering what happened a few days later, maybe not entirely innocent. But she felt that handshake more deeply than any of the kisses or fumbling groping she’d experienced with the boys she’d dated in high school. It was a variation on a feeling she would have again and again that summer, the sense of understanding a moment’s importance as it was happening, a certainty that she would never feel that way again and that she would remember it for the rest of her life. She had been right.
Her phone rang, and she was relieved to have something to anchor her in the present. The past was the past. The town, because it was in so many ways unchanged, had a way of playing tricks on her mind, of collapsing the years between then and now so that there was no emotional buffer. She had never been one to look back, and she had no interest in starting now.
She wiped her sandy fingers on the outside of her tote before reaching inside to look at her phone. “Olivia?”
“Mom,” Olivia said. “I need you.”