The Cliffside Inn Read online

“Mom,” Charlie said sometime later. “How long have you been out here?”

  Alice blinked as she came to full consciousness very rapidly. Her head still felt fuzzy, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a nap that hadn’t stemmed from trying to shut the world out.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling at her handsome son. “You’re back.” She sat up, feeling some of the grogginess start to fade. “What time is it?’

  “A little after four,” he said. “Have you been out here long? You always tell me to put on sunscreen.” He cocked one eyebrow at her, and Alice laughed.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said, teasing him. “I’ve been out here maybe fifteen minutes.” She glanced at her mocktail, and sure enough, it still had tiny chunks of the ice cubes she’d used. She reached for it, her mouth suddenly very dry. The cranberry and ginger exploded against her tongue, and her stomach growled.

  “I brought Robbie back with me,” Charlie said. “Will too.”

  “Okay,” Alice said, swinging her legs over the side of the chaise as Charlie stood. “I’ll get some dinner going. Hot dogs and hamburgers?” If she did a barbecue, Charlie would cook the meat. All Alice would have to do is prepare the toppings and open the pantry to find a bag of chips. “We have a watermelon too,” Alice added, just remembering that she’d bought the fruit a few days ago.

  “Sounds good,” Charlie said. “I’ll get the grill going.”

  “Thanks.” Alice followed him inside to find his two friends sitting at the dining room table. Five Island Cove wasn’t huge, and it was spread out over five islands. Charlie had always been exceptionally gifted at finding and making new friends, while Ginny usually suffered a little bit. She really liked to trust someone before she told them too much about her life, as she’d had some problems with betrayal and gossip in the past.

  Today, she sat at the table too, something on her phone that both boys were leaning in to see. The three of them exploded into laughter, and Alice’s parental instincts fired. “What are we watching?” she asked.

  “The guy who does those pet tricks gone wrong,” Ginny said, still giggling. She handed her phone to Alice, who didn’t really want to see the video. She only watched them to make sure her children weren’t viewing something they shouldn’t.

  Even she laughed when the little white dog that was trying to jump through the hoop stumbled and fell off the length of fence it had been running along. “Oh, that poor thing,” she said with a small giggle as she passed the phone back.

  “You should see the horse one, Mrs. Kelton,” Robbie said. He was older than Charlie by two years, and Alice had worried about that for a day or two—until she’d realized how much of a teddy bear Robbie was. He was tall and dark, like Charlie, and they both loved to get up early and go surfing in the morning.

  Robbie came to Rocky Ridge on the first ferry over, and Alice much preferred her son spending his first hours of the day with Robbie over Mandie Grover, his girlfriend. It had been official for at least a month now, and that was definitely still something Alice worried about on a minute-to-minute basis.

  Thankfully, she had Robin on the other end of the relationship, trying to keep her daughter in line too. Alice wouldn’t even know what to do if she didn’t.

  Will was a year younger than Charlie, and they’d met on Diamond Island when Charlie had gone to see Mandie once. He lived around the corner from her, and he was the youngest in his family. The only child left at home, and Alice got the impression his parents didn’t really care what he did as long as he came home at night.

  She’d asked for his mother’s number once she’d realized that, and Alice quickly pulled out her phone and texted Rita. Will is here for dinner tonight. I’ll make sure he gets back to you soon.

  Thanks, Alice, Rita answered, as she usually did. As Alice got out a couple packages of hot dogs and one of pre-made hamburgers, she tried to envision her life in a few years, when she would have an empty nest.

  The first thing she needed to do was get rid of this huge house. It was ridiculous for just the three of them as it was. She’d tried to get Eloise to stay with her while she worked on the inn, but Eloise didn’t want to have to deal with the ferry. She’d opted to stay with her mother, and as she’d put it, “that will motivate me to get the caretaker’s suite done quickly.”

  Alice couldn’t even imagine moving back in with her father at her age, and she turned away from the thought as she moved to get the lettuce out of the fridge. Something caught her eye and made her pause.

  No, it couldn’t be…

  Alice turned back to the counter as if she were simply going to continue laying out cheese slices. Instead, she stared at where Ginny and Robbie sat at the table. Will had gotten up and gone off with Charlie somewhere, and Alice wished the older boy had gone too.

  She knew why he hadn’t though—he was currently holding Ginny’s hand right there on the table. Alice’s pulse hammered in her chest, then moved up into her neck and the back of her throat.

  “Ginny,” she said, well-aware that her voice sounded like a bark.

  The two teens jumped and simultaneously looked at her. Alice blinked and tried to pull back on her tone. “Can you come help with the condiments? I’m going to go see what we have in the storage room by the way of chips.”

  “Sure,” Ginny said, standing up and joining Alice in the kitchen.

  “Thanks, sweetie.” Alice stepped past her, saying, “We have avocados too. And maybe you could make that special sauce with the mayo, mustard, and ketchup.”

  “All right.”

  Alice passed the dining room table, where Robbie still sat. “Where did Charlie and Will go?”

  Robbie jumped to his feet, his eyes a little frantic. “I think to Charlie’s room. I’ll head up.”

  Alice nodded as the boy scampered past her and up the steps leading to the twins’ rooms. They’d moved out of the one across the hall from her now that the house was empty, and Alice liked having the whole wing to herself.

  She deliberately forced herself not to turn around and march right back to Ginny to ask her what was going on with her and Robbie. “Be right back,” she said, moving toward the steps that went down instead of up. Before she could get there, the doorbell rang.

  Alice detoured toward the foyer and the huge, wooden door she rarely used. It took her a moment to figure out how to unlock it, and most of her strength to heave it open. She could hardly think, because how was she going to deal with both of her twins in their first real, romantic relationship? How could she protect Ginny when she didn’t go to lunch with Robbie’s mom every week?

  Because her thoughts took so much of her mental energy, it took several seconds for Alice to realize who stood on her front porch. “Kelli?”

  The honey blonde woman lived far, far away in New Jersey. She shouldn’t be here.

  She wore a nervous look on her face that faded as pure determination took over. She put one hand protectively on her son’s shoulder. “Hey, Alice,” she said. “Sorry to just show up like this. I’m wondering if we can stay with you for a day or two.”

  Chapter Five

  Eloise entered the kitchen where she’d grown up, so many memories streaming through her head. “Morning, Mom,” she said, reaching for the coffee pot.

  “Morning, dear,” her mother said back. This was also typical of what happened in the Hall household. Nobody ever spoke about anything hard. Whatever had happened the night before was in the past. Even if her father had hit her mother or her, and they’d both left the house and then cowered in the car for an hour.

  Nothing was ever said.

  More often than not, it was her father who’d fled the house, leaving Eloise and her mother to deal with whatever he’d left behind. Broken Glass. Damaged items, and the walls full of shouting and his breath that smelled like whiskey.

  Eloise pushed against the memories. She’d stayed with her mother before, but never for very long. She’d only been here for two nights now as it was. But she h
ad many more in front of her.

  As she stirred a spoonful of sugar into her coffee and turned to the fridge to get out a carton of cream, her determination to get the inn livable renewed. She just needed to get the caretaker suite livable as quickly as possible, not the whole inn.

  She’d only been up there once since she’d arrived back in the cove. She’d rationalized that she had so much to do, but she couldn’t just jump right into the complete renovation that the Cliffside Inn needed. She was planning to take the next six months to do the renovations, and then spend the next few months after that getting her marketing in place, her social media in line, her website perfect, and things booked for the summer.

  She knew that she could start booking as early as February, if she could attract the right crowd to the inn. Her father had often run Valentine’s Day specials, and something like a spring vacation getaway.

  Eloise knew those events brought in some good revenue in the offseason. Her summer months would be the where she made the bulk of her money. As early as mid-May, people would start coming, and if she could keep them here until mid-September, she believed she could turn a profit with the inn.

  She’d had it for so long, that the monthly payments were quite low. She’d been able to secure additional funding for the renovations, and she’d rolled that into the original loan.

  She’d made a list of things that needed to be done, and every day, more got added to it. In another page in the notebook where she’d been keeping track of what she needed to do, she’d started a list of contractors, merchants, suppliers, handymen, and other people that could come help with things that she simply couldn’t do herself.

  For example, Eloise had no idea what needed to happen to make sure that the swimming pool in the back yard of the Cliffside Inn would be at the right pH for guests. She wanted everything about the inn to be an oasis, and that required a professional to come clean the pool and make sure that it was properly filled and chlorinated.

  She’d added the name of a guy who could come do that for her, but he was very busy around Five Island Cove. The pool at Cliffside wasn’t the only pool in the cove, and she had to get on Mitch Hancock’s schedule if she wanted the pool to get serviced. Luckily for her, she wasn’t trying to get it ready for the winter. She was trying to get it ready for next summer.

  Either way, she had a list of people that she’d be relying on. For one, there was a ton of mold in the caretaker’s suite. That would be the first call that she made on her first Monday morning in Five Island Cove. There was only one more week until the kids would start school, and she wanted to be able to spend time with Aaron and his girls before they would be entrenched fully in a new routine.

  Billie was entering junior high, and Eloise wanted to be there for her as she made the transition. She always made sure to talk to Aaron first, so he wouldn’t be upset about what she was doing with his children. At the same time, her maternal bonds to both Billie and Grace was growing day by day, and she was starting to think of them as hers. It was easy for Eloise to step into that role, since their mother was not in the picture at all.

  She was very careful not to call herself their mother, and she was also mindful about asking each of them questions about their mother, so that they would feel comfortable talking to her about their mom.

  When she’d asked Aaron about her tactics, he’d said that she really didn’t need to bother with that. That Carol was completely out of the picture. She’d made it clear that she was not interested in being Billie or Grace’s mother. He wasn’t even sure where she was, and she had not sent cards for their birthday nor called them in the last two years.

  Eloise could not understand the woman. She had spent most of her adult life wanting children and coming to the realization through therapy and meditation that she would not be a biological mother herself.

  She thought she was too old to have children now, but she hadn’t been to a doctor to find out. It didn’t really matter because she and Aaron had talked about having more children, and he didn’t particularly want them. Grace was eleven years old now, and having a baby would be a huge age gap for him.

  Eloise completely understood. She was in her mid-forties anyway, and there were plenty of complications for having a baby at that age. Still, she’d heard that fifty was the new forty for motherhood, and the idea lingered in her mind.

  “I don’t know what you’re worried about,” she told herself. “Aaron isn’t any closer to asking you to marry him.”

  They talked about marriage, sure. He hadn’t done anything beyond that, at least to her knowledge. There’d been no ring shopping. There’d been no mention of where or when. There’d been no discussion about if the girls would participate or not.

  She adored Aaron, and she knew she was only one step away from being fully in love with him. In her mind, an engagement would solidify that, and she could start to make a plan for what she wanted to have happen next.

  Frustration filled her as she poured a little bit of cream into her mug and turned toward her mother, who sat at the small kitchen table crammed against the wall. Everything about this house was too small for Eloise. Everything she looked at held a memory, and most of them were not good.

  “What’s on your agenda for today, Mom?” she asked.

  “Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” her mother said, which was about what her mother did every day since her father had left and then passed away.

  She’d been working from home, doing what she knew how to do. She had a sewing studio that took up two of the bedrooms in the house, and Eloise slept among spools of thread and a half-dozen machines. Everything from sergers to sewing machines to an electronic quilting arm whenever she came to visit.

  “How are the cats treating you?” Eloise asked. She’d given her mother her two cats several months ago, when it became too difficult for her to travel back and forth between Boston and the cove and keep the felines happy.

  “Just great. Eloise,” her mom said, glancing up with a smile. She actually loved the cats, and Eloise knew it. She pampered them with plush beds in her sewing studio so that they could sit in there with her while she altered dresses. She seemed to have a very steady stream of work, especially in the summer, when there were dozens upon dozens of weddings in the cove.

  Around the holiday season, when the rich and famous came to have their holiday parties, she sewed her fingers to the bone, and then again in the spring for the prom season, when all the girls were buying beautiful ball gowns that needed to be hemmed, needed to have the waists taken in or back out, or to have the shoulders adjusted so that they wouldn’t fall out of their dresses.

  Eloise was glad that her mother was able to support herself with something as simple as sewing. She was beyond happy that they’d both been able to carve out a life from so much ugliness.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” Eloise asked, not quite sure where the words came from. She knew Kelly’s mother had started to date a little bit, so it wasn’t completely uncommon for older women to have a date.

  Her mother, though, gave her a look that said, yes, it would be completely uncommon for her to have a date.

  “Sorry, I don’t know why I asked that.”

  Her mother nodded and said, “I suppose women my age date.”

  “Are you lonely, Mom?” Eloise, asked, deciding that sometimes hard conversations needed to be had. In her family, she’d never really had them, and that was one of the reasons her first marriage had failed so spectacularly. That, and the fact that Wes had been a complete jerk. She’d known he was bad for her from the beginning, but she’d been so desperate to have the wedding and family she’d thought she should have.

  There’d been so much surrounding her telling her what she should want, what she should do, and what life should be like for a woman. She’d bought into it, and she’d been unhappy for years.

  For several years after her divorce, she’d attended therapy, trying to recover and find her own way in the world.
She’d become a professor at Boston University, and everything had fallen in line for her then.

  She thought she’d found her true calling, something that was at the root of who she was. As a biology professor, she became someone who had the answers for people who didn’t. Someone who knew science and could reference it. Someone who didn’t have questions or if they did, the answers were easily obtained through research and study.

  When she’d found her true LSAT scores in Joel Shields’ office five months ago, Eloise’s foundation had cracked. Her relationship with Aaron had contributed to the ultimate ending of her career at Boston University, sure, but the real reason was that perhaps she’d been wrong for the past twenty years. Perhaps at the root of her soul was not a biology professor.

  She’d been trying to figure out who lived there since she’d learned that Joel had doctored her scores. Eloise had always been smart. She did very well in school and, out of her Seafaring Girls friends, she scored the highest on tests and got the best grades. For whatever reason, her test scores had not reflected that.

  She’d thought they’d been good enough, and she’d never taken the test again. Had she known her real scores had been too low, she would’ve studied harder, she would’ve tried again, she would’ve earned her way into the universities.

  She pushed away the feelings of fraud, wishing she could eliminate them completely. But she never could. They always came creeping back, especially in the quiet moments, when nothing was happening.

  “Well, I’m going to be up at the inn today,” Eloise said, standing up.

  “You’re not going to have breakfast?” her mom asked.

  “I don’t eat breakfast, Mom,” Eloise said not for the first time. She wasn’t sure why she expected her mother to remember these things, but she did. It wasn’t like her mom had a lot of people to keep track of as Eloise only had one brother, and he came around less than Eloise did.

  “I’m going to see what I need to do,” Eloise said. “I’ve got a lot of phone calls to make. I should have a big dumpster up there, so I have somewhere to put all the garbage.” She kept talking to herself, outlining what she needed to do that day. Her mother never stopped or interrupted her.