13
Celeste slipped into bed next to Jack, using a finger to hold her spot in the paperback she was reading. Jack had his reading glasses on, thumbing through a wooden-boat-restoration magazine.
“I just can’t believe Elodie showed up here like that,” Celeste said. Jack put down the magazine and looked at her.
“Try to look at it this way: It took two and a half decades, but at least she’s finally paid you a visit.”
“I knew you’d say something like that.” Jack had never understood her fraught relationship with her family. How could he? He saw his first cousins daily. He’d visited his mother at the senior home in Falmouth every Sunday until her death at age ninety-five. His entire family genuinely enjoyed spending time together, and Jack wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was just one of the many things she loved about him.
The Barroses had been on the shores of Provincetown for generations, ever since Jack’s great-great-great (however many greats) grandparents landed there from Lisbon. When Celeste first arrived in town, she was told the Barroses were the best people to rent a room from. At the time, Jack’s aunt and uncle owned a three-story house at the boatyard, right at the edge of Cape Cod Bay. She and her friend Nathan, who’d just graduated from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, rented two rooms on the third floor of the house—a place now inhabited by Jack’s cousin Manny and his wife, Lidia.
It had been Nathan’s idea to leave Philly for P’town. While she was busy licking her wounds after a bad breakup and feeling alienated from her family, he won a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center and suggested a change of scenery would be good for both of them. It was only later that she learned Nathan hadn’t moved to Provincetown for the writing fellowship; he’d learned weeks earlier that he was HIV positive and had gone there to spend his final days. Six months into their new life there, he was gone. Celeste had no real reason to stay in town. She was barely making ends meet with a part-time sales job at an antiques shop. And yet, she found herself in no rush to leave.
It wasn’t just the astonishing sunsets, or the majestic wildlife, or the arts scene. It was the people. She was eternally moved by the way virtual strangers had rallied around Nathan. They delivered meals. They organized his drug cocktails. They showed up in the backyard to sing and recite poetry while he sat bundled in blankets on a lawn chair. This, she thought, is family. Not the bunch of petty infighters she’d left behind in the city. No, she decided. Provincetown was meant to be her home.
The following summer, her landlord’s nephew passed through town in between runs as a merchant marine. Jack Barros was striking, with dark hair, a tan, and mischievous dark eyes. Celeste, wary from her last romantic disappointment, didn’t want to give in to her attraction. But her landlord’s sons—Manny and Tito—started teasing her that they hadn’t seen so much of Jack since their grandmother used to serve them fried dough in the afternoons.
By the time she finally agreed to go out to dinner with him at Ciro & Sal’s, she knew deep down she was already smitten. They’d been together ever since. The only tricky part had been convincing Jack to accept the fact that she never wanted to get married. “Marriage just isn’t for me. I don’t want any part of engagements, engagement rings, labels . . . none of it,” she’d said. That was true. But there was another reason, one she wouldn’t admit: She was afraid of the Pavlin curse.
Thankfully, over the years, marriage hadn’t been much of an issue. Their life was peaceful. It had a rhythm, a wonderful predictability. Making it all the more vexing that her sister had just shown up like that.
“My sister’s not here to visit. She wants something.” She’d mentioned the auction over dinner, fried oysters from his cousin’s oyster farm and a few cold beers, but he didn’t share her concern.
“Why not just sign the papers then and be done with it?” he’d said.
She couldn’t tell him about Mercury in retrograde. She and Jack were like-minded in so many ways: their love of P’town, antiques, the sea, cold beer on a warm night. But Jack’s patience for what he called her “hocus-pocus” was limited. And so she told him the second truest thing: “I feel like our parents are still manipulating us—even from the grave.”
Elodie’s temporary landlady, Lidia, seemed to be a competent, pleasant woman. She had silver-brown hair to her shoulders, deep-set brown eyes, olive skin with the hint of sunspots on her cheeks, and just enough New England saltiness to appear trustworthy. Yes, if she had to prolong her stay to put pressure on her sister, this place would do just fine.
The third-floor bedroom had plain wood-paneled walls, a queen-sized bed with an iron frame and headboard. The cotton sheets were crisp but mismatched. There were two white wicker chairs and a distressed wood bedside table also painted white.
Pearl seemed to feel right at home. She climbed the newly purchased doggie steps, which Elodie had found that afternoon in town, to reach the bed and promptly fell asleep. Elodie set her water bowl and food dish in the corner near the bathroom.
She opened her laptop, scrolled through some work emails, and resisted the urge to call her sister and yell at her.
Her phone rang. She sat up in bed, almost hitting her head on the dormer ceiling.
“Hello?”
“Elodie, Sloan Pierce. Sorry to call so late—I’m still at the office and just realized the hour. Here’s the deal: The team here is very excited at the prospect of the auction, but they do think we’re short on time if we’re going to get it launched during this centennial year. Publicity wants to start on the press release as soon as possible. Where are we with the paperwork?”
Elodie glanced out the window at the moonlit Cape Cod Bay. New York suddenly seemed very distant, and she felt a flash of anger at her father. Why had he tied her hands like this? What reason could he possibly have had to require she get her sister’s and her niece’s signatures before making a business decision? Or maybe it hadn’t been her father’s decision after all. Maybe the three-signature stipulation was something her mother put in place after his death. But why?
“I’m waiting for my attorney to get back to me,” she lied. “We should be wrapping it up shortly.” Tomorrow was a new day, and she’d figure out a way to apply pressure on Celeste. But that was only her first problem.
What was she going to do about Gemma? With no time to waste, how was she supposed to convince her sister to sign on the dotted line and then get Gemma to cooperate from three hundred and sixty miles away?
The answer was, she wasn’t.
She needed to find a way to bring the girl to her.