Wednesday Night
“So,” Bess says as they pull away from the Sconset Café and head toward Baxter Road.
They talked all through dinner—short ribs and burgers, nothing fancy—but despite topics worn to the bone and that dang growling engine, things are still too quiet in the cab for Bess.
“Any idea how I can get Cissy out of the house?” she asks. “That’s why I hauled myself out to bother you at work. Am I a typical girl or what?”
“Oh, you’re hardly typical.”
“I went to you for advice about someone else’s problems and ended up blathering about myself.”
Evan smiles, tight-lipped and forlorn. “I’d say Cissy is very much your problem.”
“Well, you’re right about that. See? Who has time for a baby with my mother around?”
Bess gazes out the window, watching several homes pass before she speaks.
“Seriously though,” she says. “What am I going to do? About my mom. It was enough of a battle when we were on the same page. Now Cissy’s my antagonist. I pack up the dishes, she puts them away. I throw perishables in the trash, she digs them out or buys more. It’s infuriating.”
“Just take what matters, and let Cissy deal with the rest. She’ll come to her senses. She always does.”
“That has not been my experience. And ‘take what matters’? That’s Cissy! And we already know that she’s not going anywhere.” Bess laughs and leans into the headrest. “Oh Lord, I’m in trouble.”
“You can grab the book,” he says.
“What book?”
“That guest thingy everyone writes in?”
“Oh, the Book of Summer. Well, yes, that’s a given. In the ranking of stuff that counts in that house, the ‘guest thingy’ is number two, behind Cissy. Though if she keeps acting this way, I might have to reverse the order.”
“I wrote in it, you know,” Evan says.
“You wrote in it?”
Bess sits upright and then eyeballs him while making a snorting-baby-piglet sound that would’ve caused her to blush had she not been so flippin’ tired. Maybe this pregnancy is affecting her after all.
“Yup,” Evan says. “I sure did. The night of your wedding.”
“Okay, that’s a lie. Admittedly I haven’t read all of the entries, but I’ve read all of Ruby’s and certainly every single one written around the time of my wedding.”
“Not all of them.”
They roll up in front of Cliff House.
“Yes,” Bess says. “All of them. Twice, even. Three times.”
Evan jams the truck into park and kicks open his door.
“Not mine. Because I ripped that sucker out.”
Bess blinks and then hears the crunch of his work boots on the shelled drive. She slides out of the cab, eyes on Cliff House. A million memories worm through her at once.
Back in high school, Evan didn’t usually drive her home, living across the street as he did. But he always walked Bess to the door. Then, later, he could frequently be seen (though never by Cissy) escorting Bess right back out of the house via the butler’s pantry. Hands locked together, they’d creep past the flagpole and around the privet hedge. He’d bring Bess home sometime before dawn.
The flagpole.
Bess gapes. It’s back. Damn it all to hell, Cissy has reinstalled the flagpole in the five hours Bess has been away. It is all so very Cissy Codman, this point she’s trying to prove. The woman is steadfast as anything Star-Spangled to be sure.
“F’ing Cissy,” Bess mutters as she tries to help Evan with the bike.
He, of course, won’t allow it.
“What’s that?” he says.
“What’s what?”
“You mumbled something about Cissy.”
“Oh.” Bess shakes her head and glares accusatorially, as if Old Glory had something to do with it. “The stupid flagpole is back. Does the woman ever stop?”
“Come on, Lizzy C. You know the answer to that question.”
“Right. The very minute she should throw in the towel, is the exact moment Cissy steps on the lunatic gas.”
Her eyes skip back to Cliff House in time to see the grasshopper gait of Cissy scamper by a window. Bess turns toward Evan, who looks exasperatingly hot right then, standing in the fuzzy moonlight, her bike against his hip.
“So what’d you do with it?” Bess asks. “Your Book of Summer entry? I’d like to read it.”
“Sorry, can’t help you there.”
“It was my wedding. My grand event.”
And it was both of these things, but strangely enough they almost eloped.
“Cissy’s driving me bonkers,” Bess said to Brandon one night, or something along those lines. “Well and truly nuts.”
“So let’s scrap the fancy to-do,” he suggested, quickly, like he’d been thinking about it for days. “Go down to the courthouse. Make it official, just the two of us, on our own terms.”
He made it seem so romantic. Just the two of us. You and me. Forever. We don’t need anyone else. She almost agreed to the courthouse nuptials but in the end wanted the Cliff House hurrah, same as her mother, same as Grandma Ruby. If she was being completely honest, Bess wanted it not merely for tradition but also for the guests who might come. She wanted it for Evan, so that he might see her on her very best day.
“You have to tell me what you wrote,” Bess insists. “It’s only fair. Like I said, it was my wedding.”
“Sorry. Don’t have it. And are you sure it was your wedding? Because I could’ve sworn it was your mom’s.”
“Ha, well, you’re not wrong. Lala says she’ll never get married because Cis can’t figure how to be moderate. And if she eloped. Well.” Bess chuckles and lets her eyes wander back to the flagpole. “Forget Hurricane Sandy. The wrath of Cissy Codman would rain down like a hundred-year storm. For Lala, it’s better to live in everyday sin.”
“It usually is.”
Evan steers her bike through the gate, Bess dragging behind him.
“Here we are,” he announces. “Delivered to your front doorstep. Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not a gentleman.”
“No one needs to tell me that. I already know.”
“Hilarious.”
Evan leans in for a hug. Bess startles as if he’d grabbed her breast. Her hands fly up and she accidentally punches herself in the face.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Evan says.
“Sorry, it’s just…” Bess tries to find the words. “Like I said. I’m ‘off.’”
“Stop kidding yourself. You’re more ‘on’ than you know. After all, you’re Bess Codman.”
“Doctor Bess Codman,” she says, kidding, though it comes out sounding pompous as hell.
Thank God Evan’s dad isn’t around. Chappy Mayhew would use this as exhibit A as to why every single person in the Codman family is a Summer Person to the core.
“Yes, well,” Evan says with a smirk. “The doctor part goes without saying.”
He has enough manners to let her obnoxiousness dissolve into the gloom.
“I’m shocked you can still look me in the eye,” Bess says. “After everything I’ve told you. I’m such a wreck.”
“Everyone’s a wreck,” Evan says. “Most are way worse than you. Admittedly, you’ve been through some tough shit. But it’s temporary. You’ll move on from here. Bess Codman can do anything. She knows what she wants and goes after it.”
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
“The girl I knew,” Evan says. “The girl who beguiled a poor, young local with her beauty and smarts, the one who scrambled him up for years—”
“Gimme a break!” Bess chirps. “If anything, I was the one mixed up.”
“The girl I knew also had a hard time figuring out when to shut the hell up and listen.”
Evan gives one of his earth-cracking smiles.
“And she always understood exactly what she wanted, even when she couldn’t say it.”
Evan reaches out and places both hands, gently, on her shoulders. He pulls Bess in and gives her a whisper of a kiss on the forehead, another on her nose. Bess tilts imperceptibly forward, waiting and hungry for a third.
“Good night, Lizzy C.,” he says, stopping at just the two. “It’s great to have you back.”
Bess watches as Evan returns to his car and drives away. She half expects him to pull into Chappy’s drive, his old home.
Insides churning with some unsavory mix of giddiness and flat-out insecurity, Bess shuffles through the front door of Cliff House, which she’d left unlocked, secretly counting on a robbery. It’d be one way to move all that junk.
“Evan Mayhew, huh?” Cissy says, emerging in the hallway with a cocktail in one hand, a rolled-up yoga mat in the other. “That explains where you’ve been all night.”
“Where I’ve been?”
Bess wishes her heart would stop pounding to this great degree.
“Well, Evan’s not too bad,” Cissy says. “At least compared to that father of his. He’s crazy handsome and a real ladies’ man, from the sounds of it. I’m referring to Evan. Because Chappy…”
Cissy makes a face.
“I’m not really interested—”
“Kinda assumed you’d gotten him out of your system in high school.” Cissy sighs. “Don’t get any ideas, missy. You’re not permitted to marry anyone with the last name Mayhew.”
“Who said anything about marriage? And anyway, nothing’s going on.”
“He has a fairly serious girlfriend, far as I know.”
“Good for him,” Bess says as her insides collapse at the thought.
A “fairly serious” girlfriend? Of course he does. But then, why should she care?
“Can it, Cissy,” she says. “I’m not even divorced yet.”
Also, she’s pregnant by someone else. Bess can’t imagine Evan Mayhew, or any other sensible male, itching to hook up with a divorced, knocked-up chick who’s already eclipsed her prime.
“It’s not like that with Evan,” Bess prattles on. “I went to him for advice. You see, there’s this very stubborn elephant I’m trying to move out of a house.”
Bess tries to sweep past her mom and on down the hallway, but Cissy springs in front of her, not dribbling a drop of booze in the process.
“Bessie, never mind those Mayhew creeps. I have terrific news. I got it!”
“Got what?”
“I got the emergency town meeting to approve the geotube installation. It’s happening tomorrow night.”
Bess doesn’t know whether to give Cissy a high-five or dissolve into a sobbing mess. Another meeting. More straws for Cissy to grasp at. More flyers for Bess to pass out.
“You did?” Bess asks.
“Yep! The information about having to buy more land and rebuild the infrastructure, well, it really made those fogies take notice. They’ve realized it’s better to keep what we have. Not only does it preserve Sconset’s historical and aesthetic integrity, it’s far cheaper. Finally, they’ve seen the light!”
“Or else they decided it’s the quickest way to get you to zip it.”
Cissy gives Bess a pinched look.
“They’re lucky someone cares as much as I do!” she says. “In twenty years—in thirty—after I’m long gone, they’ll be grateful for what I did. No one will remember my face or my name, but one day some soul will say, ‘Hey, did you know they almost let all this fall into the ocean?’”
“Congratulations. Truly. I guess the fighting will finally pay off.”
Bess makes her way toward the stairs.
“We need to discuss the big move tomorrow,” she calls over her shoulder. “And why you bought a flagpole. Right now I’m too beat. I could sleep forever.”
“It’s not even nine o’clock!”
“What can I say? I’m getting old.”
“Bessie?”
“Yes, Mom?”
She turns back around.
“You look good,” Cissy says. “Pretty. Beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
“You should lose the glasses, though. What happened to the contacts you wore in high school?”
“Twenty years ago? I can’t really say.” Bess shakes her head. “You really are something else.”
“Island life agrees with you.”
Bess remains unmoved. It’s one of Cissy’s favorite mantras.
“Thanks Mom,” she says.
“You’ve … I don’t know. Filled out.”
Cissy tries to make a shapely-woman sign with her hands, but both arms are still occupied with yoga props and vodka.
“Filled out,” Bess says with a snort. “That’s one way to put it.”
Her mom smiles then, wide and hardy, all telltale Cissy toothy.
“There’s nothing left for you back in the Bay,” she says.
“Except for my job, a new apartment, a cat…”
“You should make this a permanent change,” Cissy says, not hearing her at all.
Bess thinks of her fake novel, the one with the island practice and Nantucketer ailments and charming high school boyfriend brought back to life. She can stay here with Cissy, and eventually marry Evan. On weekends they’ll play a few rounds at Sankaty Head; attend Yacht Club balls at night. It’ll be sunshine and bicycles the rest of their days.
Except, of course, for all that fog perpetually hanging around.
“Oh, Cissy,” Bess says with a sigh, and wraps her mother in a hug. “Stay at Cliff House? If only that I could.”