Ruth woke up at seven, sent off a quick text to tell Amelia that she wouldn’t make it to class, and headed down to the kitchen to organize her equipment—a double boiler, a crockpot, measuring cups, and a few resealable tea bags that she’d picked up from Elise’s shop.
She felt bad about missing the mosaic class, but she told herself it was for a good reason. And if she didn’t finish her starfish, well, the hours she’d spent in Amelia’s studio had gotten her back to working with her hands. Now, thanks to Elise and the baby, she was reminded of what else she could be doing.
Her search through the local shops had been surprisingly fruitful, and she’d managed to track down the ingredients she needed to whip up a batch of organic soap: olive pomace oil, shea butter, castor oil, colloidal oatmeal, bentonite clay, and a pack of Egyptian chamomile buds. The hardest thing to find had been silicone cupcake molds, but a quick call to Lidia Barros led to a friend of a friend who had a few to spare.
Ruth had been tempted to start mixing and heating last night, but she didn’t want to disturb anyone—she would have been in the kitchen until the earliest hours of the morning—so she’d waited.
Her first task was infusing the olive oil with the chamomile. The olive oil was moisturizing, and the chamomile had calming/anti-inflammatory properties. Chamomile was one of her favorite go-to ingredients. She poured a little over fourteen ounces of the oil into the double boiler, then measured out two tablespoons of the chamomile buds, put them into a tea bag, and sealed it. She put the packed tea bag into the oil, set the heat to medium, and stirred gently.
How long had it been since she’d created a product from scratch? Years. A decade. She would have sworn that she’d been hands-on until the very end at the company, but really, she had become a conference-room chemist. A figurehead. It had happened so gradually, she hadn’t even noticed. But wasn’t life like that? One minute you’re a teenager, the next you’re a bride, the next you’re an exhausted working mother with a husband you barely have time to smile at over coffee in the morning. And so it was with her career—one minute she was mixing ingredients in her kitchen and the next she was signing off on multimillion-dollar ad campaigns for a company with her name on it.
She shook her head, thinking that she’d never had a road map to the life she wanted. But to be fair, neither had Ben. Four years of college had disabused him of the notion that he might be the next great American playwright. If this was a difficult reality for him to accept, he’d never complained about it. Although, Ruth realized only looking back on it later, he also never again wanted to visit Provincetown and stopped going to see shows. It was like he was trying to forget he’d ever had artistic ambitions.
But they needed an income while he was in medical school, and so she’d ended up with the company, working around the clock even after Olivia was born. Her one indulgence was getting manicures. At the time, a single brand distributed polish to the salons. It held all of that market share, but then they changed the formula and it started chipping sooner. It drove Ruth crazy so of course she had to try to create a better formula—and she did. She launched with a red called Cherry Hill, put it in a unique, square bottle instead of a round one, and labeled it Liv Lacquer. By the end of the year, she had a hundred different colors and her polish was in every nail salon in New Jersey and Philadelphia. The following year, it was in 90 percent of salons across the country. Ben was a year into his residency when she was able to pay off all of his student loans.
“Wow, what’s going on in here?” Olivia said, walking into the kitchen in a T-shirt and drawstring pajama bottoms, rubbing her eyes.
“I’m making an oatmeal soap,” Ruth said. “From scratch.”
“That seems like a lot of work,” Olivia said, stepping around her to reach the counter. “Where’s the coffee machine?”
“I put it away. Do you mind going to the Wired Puppy or someplace just for this morning? I need this space clear.”
“Seriously?” Olivia said, obviously minding very much. She picked up the jar of bentonite clay, read the label.
“Just for today. Sorry.”
“Why are you making soap?”
“Elise needs something gentle for Mira. You know half the stuff they sell as natural or organic is full of parabens and all sorts of things.”
“Can’t she just order something online?”
“Olivia, the internet is not the answer to everything, despite your beliefs to the contrary.”
“Jeez. I’m just asking. It seems like an obvious question.”
“Well, the answer is that I’m happy to be doing this. Don’t you remember when I used to make batches of products in our kitchen when you were little?”
“No.”
“Really? Well, how about the time I took you to see how lipstick was made?”
Olivia shook her head.
How could she not remember? “Olivia, come on. The underground tank?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“We had an underground tank and we would have fifteen hundred gallons of castor oil in it at a time. You can’t take dry pigment and add it to a base, so you take your dry pigment, which is highly concentrated powder, and soak it for hours in castor oil. Then you put it through this three-roller mill that blends it into a highly concentrated paint.” She could see Olivia’s eyes glazing over. “Well, anyway, I showed you all this when you were little. I can’t believe you don’t remember. Your father loved that roller mill—he found it fascinating. I can remember him lifting you up so you could look at it more closely.”
Olivia put down the jar of clay. “Um, speaking of Dad, I need to ask you something. Can he stay here for a few days?”
Ruth stepped away from the stove. “Your dad is coming to Provincetown?”
“I think so. And he could drive me back to New York.”
As ornery as Olivia could be, Ruth didn’t want her to leave. Even just this simple conversation about the soap and the old lipstick mill was a start. It was something. Maybe Olivia didn’t remember the trip to the factory that day, and maybe she’d forgotten how her mother had mixed batches of moisturizer in the kitchen in big metal bowls with Olivia sitting at the small breakfast table making things out of Play-Doh while she worked. But Ruth had to believe that one of these conversations would offer a point of connection. One morning, Olivia would have her own memory of a shared moment together. But if not, if for some reason Olivia could remember only the difficult times, then at least now she could try to create new memories.
But having Ben stay in the house? That didn’t seem like a good idea. It didn’t even seem like something Ben would do. “Your father wants to stay here?”
“Well, no. But he said everyplace is booked this week and next. And we have that room upstairs that I’m not using. We’ll stay out of your way, I promise. I won’t even try to make coffee here.” She smiled.
We’ll stay out of your way. There it was—the two of them a united front with Ruth as the outsider. It was time for that to change. Ruth was done being the bad guy.
“Okay,” she said. “He can stay here.”
Somehow, her new life was starting to look an awful lot like one she had left long ago.
The first thing Olivia noticed was the smell.
Stepping outside to call her father in private, she was surprised by a salty, sulfuric odor that was more beach than backyard. The source of this was even more surprising.
Two clotheslines had been strung across the yard, but instead of shirts and socks hanging to dry, the first line was half covered with yellowish-brown plant fronds reaching nearly to the ground. Even more bizarre, the person at the helm of this operation was Marco Barros.
Olivia was thankful she’d taken the time to change out of her pajamas into jean shorts and a tank top. “Hey—what’s all this?” Olivia said, standing in front of the stone bench and putting her phone in her back pocket. The call to her father would have to wait a few minutes.
“Seaweed. I’m hanging it here to dry,” he said, barely looking at her.
This, of course, led to a few obvious questions: Why here? Why seaweed?
And one less obvious question: Why am I so attracted to you?
Olivia forced herself to focus on question number two.
“Oh. Interesting. What’s it for?”
“I’m cultivating it for possible commercial use.”
She was tempted to take a photo for her Instagram but refrained. Somehow she didn’t think that would go over too well with Marco. “Like what?” she said.
He bent over a wide plastic container, a large cooler, and pulled out more of the seaweed, then moved to a fresh spot on the line and clipped it in place. He didn’t answer the question, but he said, “If you’re just going to stand there, I could actually use an extra set of hands to make this go faster,” he said.
“Oh—okay. Sure,” she said nervously. “I’m just having some issues with bending down. My back is sort of…”
“You can stand right here and I’ll hand you the plants and you just clip it—like this.” He held up what appeared to be a regular clothespin, draped one of the fronds over the line, and clipped it in place. “Simple.”
She walked closer to him, willing herself to keep a neutral expression on her face, not to give any hint that she was distracted by his rugged good looks. He really had the most divine face, with sharp cheekbones and a lush mouth and mysterious dark eyes.
Looking at Marco, feeling that undeniable pull of animal attraction, she realized she hadn’t thought of Ian since she’d arrived in town. As emotionally taxing as it was to deal with her complicated feelings toward her mother, at least she was no longer burdened by her failed relationship. She had no interest in starting something messy in Provincetown.
Marco bent down and sorted through whatever was in the container—the open lid blocked her view. She looked at the back of his neck, deeply tanned, and noted how his thick brown hair curled just above the nape.
He handed her some seaweed. It was less slimy to touch than it appeared, and she lifted it up carefully so that it didn’t touch the ground.
“That’s it—just drape it over the line and you can even it out as you go,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s not delicate. If you’re worried about the smell and your hands, I have gloves over there somewhere.”
“It’s fine.” His attention and encouragement felt like the sun warming her back. She smiled and he noticed.
“It’s not so bad, right?” he said.
“Not bad at all.”
They fell into a rhythm, moving more quickly; they filled the first line and started on the one behind it. They worked in silence, and it wasn’t until the silence was broken that she realized the task had become meditative; she hadn’t been thinking about her mother inside the house or about her back, and she’d forgotten all about the call she needed to make to her father. If Marco hadn’t asked her a question, she might even have forgotten he was there.
“I’m sorry—what was that?” she said.
“I asked if my sister has been around here lately.”
“Oh,” she said, stalling, thinking of Jaci’s forlorn expression when she sat on the couch. “Um, no. Not lately.”
Marco didn’t respond and they went back to working in silence. When both lines were filled to capacity, there was still a little bit of seaweed left over.
“That’s enough for now, anyway,” he said, packing up the containers and a knapsack.
Olivia felt a pang that he was leaving and wondered how long it would be before she ran into him again. “You never told me what you’re going to do with this stuff,” she said.
“Different things. One of them is a bit of an experiment. I’m working with Elise and Fern to make seaweed tea.” Olivia’s expression must have conveyed exactly what she thought of that, because he laughed and said, “It won’t be that bad, I promise.”
“I’m sorry. This just doesn’t smell like something that would taste good.”
“That’s why we’re hanging it in the sun. It’s going to dry, and the flavor becomes more complex. And for the tea, they’re going to blend it with other ingredients. In fact, we could use help taste-testing.”
He could use her help? She felt an undeniable surge in her mood. “Sure. Just let me know.”
Why not have a new friend? It was completely innocent. There was no harm in spending more time with Marco Barros.