Ben was one of the few professional snowboarders to have a college degree, having cobbled together the credits from online courses and summer classes. When the other guys had grimaced at his books, he would blame his parents, saying it was important to them that all their kids had degrees. That was true, but he had really gotten his education for himself. He liked learning new things and was glad not to be completely clueless about differential calculus and the Boer War.
It didn’t take a bachelor’s degree, however, to see what Mrs. Ridge’s game was. By Sunday noon it was clear that she was trying to fix him and Colleen up. What a shame. If the old lady cared about anyone, it would be Colleen, and here she was trying to arrange for a lifetime of frustration and disappointment.
We tried it, ma’am. We’re too different. It won’t work.
At least Colleen was awake to the scheme and able to outmaneuver her grandmother.
“Why, Grannor,” she had said when Mrs. Ridge had suggested that the two of them go down to the lower level of the boathouse and check the boat before the dock was put in, “Jason grew up in Annapolis. He’s been around boats his whole life. He’ll know lots more than Ben or me.”
Then Mrs. Ridge had asked Ben to take her winter coats upstairs. Colleen would show him where the cedar closet was. “Are you really suggesting,” Colleen had said with a laugh in her voice, “that I can’t carry three coats up one flight of stairs?”
Sometimes the old lady’s moves weren’t worth countering. On Monday he and Colleen worked quietly side by side, counting all the cards in each deck of aging playing cards, making sure that each one had fifty-two cards and two jokers. She had a pale-pink natural-looking polish on her fingernails. Four years ago she hadn’t worn nail polish.
Mrs. Ridge asked them to take some old prints out of the frames. The frames were dusty. Colleen happened to touch her hand to her face. There was a smudge on her cheek. He wanted to wipe it off, but he didn’t.
After a while it did seem pointless to pretend that they didn’t both know exactly what was going on.
“Why is your grandmother doing this?” he asked as they were doing yet another invented chore. “You must be able to get your own boyfriends.” Surely all she would have to do would be to walk into a bar and smile.
“I manage,” she admitted. “But apparently my grandmother thinks that at twenty-seven, I am over the hill. She was married at nineteen.”
“But guys must have proposed.”
“Actually, no. Whenever I sense anything close to that might be on the horizon, I head them off. I don’t want to make someone hear a no.”
Who were they? He suddenly wanted to know. Were they good enough for you? Could they have made you happy?
But was that any of his business? He had already declared himself not good enough for her, unable to make her happy. He needed to shut up and count cards and dust picture frames.
* * * *
Although it took a day longer than they had hoped, Colleen and Amanda had conquered Mount Grademore by Monday evening. They would have been finished by noon, but once the dock was in, they took long breaks to go out and check their email and texts.
After lunch on Tuesday, Grannor decided that Jason and Colleen should take her out in the boat. The afternoon was warmer than they had expected, and Grannor asked Colleen to run back into the house and get her a lighter jacket.
“Why didn’t she just unbutton the one she was wearing?” Amanda asked as she helped Colleen look through the front hall closet.
“Because she doesn’t have to.” Colleen had decided that because she was resisting her grandmother on her matchmaking schemes, she would give in on the other requests, no matter how irrational.
“Maybe she wants to talk to Jason behind your back.”
“No doubt,” Colleen agreed. “But if he tells you anything, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” She did enough for her grandmother. She wasn’t going to be bullied into changing her shirt, her nail polish, her accent, her manners, or whatever else Grannor was disapproving of today.
She draped the coat over her arm and paused to look in the dining room. Ben was alone, sitting at one end of the table, a large piece of green felt unrolled in front of him. It was covered with little stacks of silver flatware. A gooseneck reading lamp was plugged into an extension cord, and he had tilted the brass apothecary shade so the light pooled on the green felt. He was looking through a magnifying glass at the handle of a cake fork.
“Are you having to do that for every piece?” she asked.
“Yes, but don’t ask me why.” He had set down the fork as he spoke, and as if he was suddenly noticing that the room had grown warm, he unbuttoned the cuff of his left sleeve, turning it back over and over on itself until it was up to his elbow. The light from the reading lamp reflected against the narrow gold lines on the case of his watch.
She had not seen this watch before. It was elegant, having a black alligator strap and a gold case; the face was white with slim black Roman numerals. A gold second hand swept around a small circle inset near the “VI.” Snowboarders didn’t wear watches like this. She couldn’t imagine Ben buying such a watch for himself even though he had plenty of money. And it didn’t look new. The strap was, but the gold had a rich matte patina that comes with age and use.
“That’s a nice watch,” she said.
He had been rolling up his other sleeve. He stopped and glanced down at his left wrist. “It belonged to Judge Rutherford. I was named after him. I inherited it when he died.”
“Judge Benjamin Rutherford?”
“Yes. I use ‘Ben’ on everything because marketing people said that ‘Benjamin R.’ sounded too stodgy for the cool dude I was supposed to be, but the judge was one of my grandfather’s oldest friends.”
“He signed my adoption papers.”
“The judge did? I didn’t know that.” Ben picked up another fork. “It makes sense. If my grandfather or father helped with the paperwork, they would have taken it to Judge Rutherford.”
He tilted the handle of the fork to the light to see the monogram, going back to work as if there was no big deal.
But it was. He had been named after the man who had signed the papers making her herself, Colleen Marie Ridge. In fact, when the judge had signed the papers, he might have been wearing the very watch Ben was wearing right now.
She knew that she could be sentimental, but she loved the idea that this was a sign that they were supposed to be together. This watch was on its second owner; it was having its second chance. Why couldn’t they?
The door to the kitchen swung open, spreading natural light into the room. Leilah came in, carrying a stack of photographs. Colleen knew that there was no printer in the house. Leilah must have gone out to the boathouse to use her own.
“Your grandmother was wondering where you were,” she said to Colleen and then put the pictures in front of Ben, leaning so close to him that her breast almost brushed his shoulder.
Colleen froze. Leilah? Leilah and Ben?
There was something compelling, even erotic, about Leilah’s controlled elegance. When she moved, her clothes floated with liquid grace; when she was still, they draped about her in a marble statue’s graceful folds. She carried herself with self-possession and mystery, elegance and control. She was the White Goddess, alluring and dangerous.
She was a force out of Jungian myth, and she made Colleen feel trivial, a force out of Pat the Bunny.
* * * *
The deep sleep that had embraced her each night in this luxurious room had abandoned her. She was restless, turning off her light when she thought she was ready to sleep, then having to turn it back on ten minutes later. At 4 a.m. she woke up with her light on and her book open on the pillow. She turned off the light, but then couldn’t go back to sleep. With the light still off, she got up and went out on the balcony.
Charcoal clouds hung low in the night sky, and the dank-smelling fog was heavy. Even the light at the end of their dock was blurred, and those across the lake were nothing more than yellow smudges against the single black mass that the lake and trees had become.
A light came on in the second floor of the boathouse. Colleen was surprised. Leilah did not come over to the main house until six. Why would she get up so early? A few minutes later a figure emerged. It wasn’t Leilah.
It was Ben. His broad shoulders, his easy walk…Ben.
Colleen jerked back, pressing herself against the cedar shingles. No, no. Ben and Leilah together…in the dark, in bed…her hair spread across a pillow, his hands on either side of her naked body…the two of them together.
The wall was hard against the back of her head, the shingles rough against her arms. She couldn’t move.
What we had mattered. He had said that. Didn’t it matter anymore?
Had Leilah laced her fingers through his thick hair to guide him, to show him what she wanted?
Air sat heavily in the base of her lungs, strangling her. The fog from the lake must have surged up to the balcony in some kind of nightmare wave. It was a heavy, choking, poisonous fog; she couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe.
Had they undressed each other? Colleen remembered watching his long fingers working the buttons of her blouse. What of his would she have taken off first? His shirt?
Or the watch. Leilah would have taken his hand and turned it over, slipping her fingers under the wide band and tugging at the strap, freeing it from the prong. Colleen was imagining herself doing that.
I wanted us to have a second chance. But he must not have. This hurt. It hurt so much.
What about all the connections? Judge Rutherford’s watch, their mothers wanting her to marry a Healy…didn’t that mean something?
If it did, it wasn’t something that he wanted. He hadn’t wanted it four years ago; he didn’t want it now.
Why, Ben, why?
* * * *
Leilah had smiled that little smile of hers and brushed his hand away. She was not going to let him take her nightgown off. He could ease the delicate strap off her shoulder, exposing her breast. He could run his hands up her thighs, the silk of the gown riding up along his forearms. But the nightgown stayed on.
“I won’t lock the boathouse door,” she had said to him Sunday afternoon. She was mysterious and seductive, but not coy.
She had already been in her floaty nightgown when he had come that first night, and the sex had been focused but leisurely. She had been on top, and after he was finished, she had slipped her hand between her legs, her orgasm accompanied only by a flutter of her eyelashes and a slight jerk in her torso.
The second night she did have a bottle of wine opened, and they sat out on the balcony, saying only a word or two about the moon. He knew very little more about her than he had when first shaking her hand Friday afternoon.
* * * *
“So you’ve been jilted.”
“Gran!” Colleen was so shocked she couldn’t get out more than the one syllable. How did Grannor know? Colleen had not said anything to anyone about what she had seen before sunrise. It was unlike her not to instantly tell all her friends everything, but she had known what would have happened if she had told Amanda. Amanda would have been so outraged on Colleen’s behalf, attacking Ben so harshly that Colleen would have felt compelled to defend him. That’s what had happened with her other friends four years ago.
“I suppose you aren’t used to that, a pretty thing like you.”
“Ben did not jilt me. We were not a couple.”
Grannor’s laugh was almost a crackle. “Is that what they call it now, ‘being a couple’? I don’t imagine that he plans on marrying her.”
Marry? “He hasn’t even known her for a week.”
“I hope you have a plan. If you want him, you’ll have to fight for him.”
It was after lunch on Wednesday. Colleen and Grannor were supposedly going on a short walk, but her grandmother had gone directly to the Adirondack chairs angled away from the shore line. Colleen waited until her grandmother was settled in one. “I’m not willing to think about relationships in such combative terms.”
“Don’t think big words can change anything, missy,” Grannor scoffed. “I told you that you needed to act quickly, and now you see what happened when you didn’t. I imagine the Healys are going to be none too pleased when they hear about this.”
What about me? Don’t you care about how I feel?
No, probably not. Any normal grandmotherly concern was entrenched behind Grannor’s prickly fortress. Colleen had thwarted her. Colleen hadn’t taken her advice. Colleen was now another exhibit in Grannor’s museum of grimly gleeful “I told you so.”
Why do I put up with her?
Colleen knew the answer to that. Because she needs me. Her maternal grandmother, her mother’s mother, was easy to love, easy to be with, but having had eight children of her own, Grammy O’Connell had many granddaughters, five of whom lived near her in St. Paul. But whom did Eleanor Ridge have? She, Laura, Kim, and Norton’s wife all brought out the worst in each other. Colleen was the only one who could deal with each of them without turning into—her mother wouldn’t like her saying this, but the phrase fit—a white-hot Southern bitch.
Her grandmother was a bigot and a snob. She was arrogant. She had no interest in other people’s opinions. But Colleen did have good memories. Sometimes, when her mother and brothers were escaping to the familiar carnival of the Healys’ home, Colleen would stay in Carlsville with her grandmother. Together they would go through the china closets and select what dishes to use at dinner. Then they would go into Grannor’s shaded, lavender-scented bedroom with the high four-poster mahogany bed. Grannor would take out her jewelry and let Colleen play with it. The fox-head brooch with its glittery diamond eyes scared her, but she loved the rest of it, looping pearls around her neck, topping them with a garnet necklace and a set of lapis lazuli beads, turning herself into a Christmas tree. She would cover her arms with heavy bracelets, cloisonné cuffs, silver bangles, and gold charm bracelets. She would have to spread her fingers wide to keep the bracelets from slipping off her narrow wrists.
As a child, Colleen had loved her grandmother; as an adult she felt sorry for her. But if Grannor was going to be nasty about Ben, that would be nearly unforgivable.
* * * *
The punishment for not following Grannor’s advice started on Thursday evening. The inventory was almost complete. A lid to a chafing dish, a sterling water pitcher, and a few stray pieces of flatware could not be found. Only two of the sets of china were completely intact, but Grannor said that some of those pieces had been broken even before she herself had been born.
As usual, Colleen went into her grandmother’s room after dinner.
“That young man of yours—”
“If you are referring to Ben,” Colleen interrupted—and no one ever interrupted Mrs. Norton W. Ridge IV—“he is not my young man.”
Grannor ignored her. “That class he has been working on, whatever it is that he went into the village for Friday night, he said that he didn’t have to actually sit in a classroom.”
“A lot of instruction happens that way now.”
Grannor was shaking her head as if online classes were yet another way that the world was going to hell in a golf cart. “Tell him he can stay on to do it here after you all leave. He can have dinner with me and keep me company, at least until the bridge ladies return.”
“Wait. You want him to stay here?”
“Yes. We should invite him to stay here while he works on that. He doesn’t have other plans, does he?”
“You want him to stay on here? At the lake?” With Leilah?
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“But he can’t work here,” Colleen countered. “He needs an internet connection.”
“He has managed so far, hasn’t he? Leilah says that she gets some kind of dial tone in the boathouse. That’s why he hasn’t had to go back to the village.”
“Leilah can get a cell signal?”
“Signal, dial tone, it’s all the same, isn’t it? Leilah says that it isn’t, and she is making a plan to bring some kind of wire into the house. It seemed like nonsense to me, but I told her to do what she likes. You should also tell him that he can clear his comings and goings with her.”
Nonsense wires and Colleen telling Ben something? What was happening here? “Are you saying that it’s all right for Ben to stay in the boathouse?”
“My dear child, what would ever make you think that I would dream of intruding on such a private matter?”
Only every breath that you have ever taken. “Then shouldn’t Leilah have some say in this?”
“The invitation needs to come from the family, honey lamb. You should know that.”
“Then shouldn’t it come from you? Why bring me into it?”
“But it is from me. I’m merely asking you to deliver it.”
Why? “Is this some kind of test, Grannor? To see if I can hold up my head, act like a Ridge?”
“And if it is?”
Then figure out a better one. A poorly designed test enraged the students and then was impossible to grade. Colleen had learned that her first year in teaching.
But whatever the test, Colleen liked getting As.
Jason and Amanda said that Ben had gone to the second floor to inventory what was stored there. Colleen could hear Leilah working in the kitchen, so she went up to her grandparents’ old bedroom at the far end of the second floor. It was being used as storage for the bulkier items that Grannor had brought up from Georgia.
Ben was sitting on one of the rolled-up carpets, a pile of crumpled newspapers at his feet. He was unwrapping Royal Doulton toby jugs, pottery vessels fashioned in the likeness of the heads of famous personages—pirates, presidents, Henry VII’s six wives, the Three Musketeers. There were ten or so already lined up. Colleen hadn’t known that her family had them. They were ugly. She hated them.
The one he was unwrapping was a woman wearing a white Tudor-era headdress. A brown stick-thing was leaning against her head forming the jug’s handle. It was an axe. This must be Anne Boleyn. Oh, lovely.
She should look on the bright side; she liked looking on the bright side. Ben might not want her, but at least he couldn’t chop off her head. How was that for sunny optimism?
“I have a message from my grandmother. She really does appreciate how much time you’ve spent on these inventories.”
That was a lie. Grannor was gracious when people did things for her. Her manners were appreciative, but actual appreciation, awareness of what sacrifices had been made on her behalf…no, Eleanor Ridge took other people’s helpfulness for granted.
So why was Colleen lying? She didn’t like to lie. She hated it. And why, of all people, was she lying to him?
Because I don’t want you to know how much you hurt me. Not ever.
She knew that she had the world’s worst poker face. She could never hide how she felt. Her brothers used to tell her that they won card games because they were so good at calculating odds. Finally her mother had told her that she either needed to quit playing with them or stop squirming every time she pulled a good hand. She hadn’t done either one. She had gone on playing, squirming, and losing. She hadn’t minded losing.
She minded now. She was losing now.
“It was no trouble,” he said.
Now he was lying too. Of course it had been trouble.
“She says that you are very welcome to stay while you work on your degree.” Colleen rushed her words. She needed to get it out.
“What?” Clearly he had not expected this. “Stay here? I would not want to impose on her.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. My grandmother only lets people impose on her when she wants to have something to get outraged about.” That, at least, was the truth.
Ben was standing now. Colleen didn’t remember him getting up. She used to find his posture sexy. His collarbone held his shoulders broad and straight; his hips were trim and tucked. Now it made him seem aloof, like the sort of guy who stopped returning your calls or didn’t remember your birthday.
“She is being very generous,” he said. “I will think about it.”
This was the right place to end the conversation. Yes, she had told a white lie, but she hadn’t gotten weepy or whiny. It was time to stop.
Except she wanted to punish him. She wanted to make him pay for what he had done. I know, she wanted to say. So much for having a poker face. I know about you and her. I saw you on the lawn. I heard your footsteps in the hallway.
“So she says,” she continued, her voice as even as before, “you can clear your comings and goings with Leilah.” I know.
She wanted him to suffer. She wanted him to feel guilty.
And what exactly would that accomplish? It wouldn’t make her feel any better, and this wasn’t about her. It was about her grandmother. Grannor would never admit it, but she had made a mistake coming here during the off season. “Grannor’s lonely, Ben. She doesn’t care what you do with the rest of your time. She wants someone to have dinner with.”
“I’m not good at chitchat. You know that.”
“Then don’t chitchat. If you can get her off that gossipy, bitchy thing, she’s an interesting woman. I suppose you’ll have to talk to Leilah, but please think about it. Please.”
Was she begging again? Pushing him, pressuring him? Well, maybe. But how could it be wrong to ask someone to help a lonely old woman?