Free Life Guards in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome Page A

good riddance.
    “Yes, him. Him and his cockamamie clairvoyance. Do you know why he dreams of disasters? Because, for all his faults, he cares deeply about you and your mother and his best friends. Even me. Did I tell you how he once warned me about an Indian chief?”
    “Good grief, no.” Grandma Eve would have skinned him alive.
    She poured me another glass of lemonade. “I belittled him. In front of your mother and the others.”
    “You should not have done that. He never, ever meant harm to anyone.”
    “I know that, and I apologized the next day, right after I got rear-ended by a Pontiac. Do you know what they look like?”
    “I don’t pay attention to that kind of thing. I don’t think they make them any more.”
    “They used to be big and flashy, with a silver statue on the hood, like the Jaguars have. This one was ChiefPontiac himself. I found it in the road when they towed my car away.”
    “But could you have prevented the accident if you knew Dad meant a car? You couldn’t stay home forever, or pull over every time you saw that make.”
    “No, but the point is your father tried because he has a good heart. That’s all I am asking of you. Try. Oh, and if you come upon a doddering Brit, call Lou. Royce University in London has misplaced a beloved retired professor.”

C HAPTER 8

    I  WALKED HOME FROM MY GRANDMOTHER’S house, full of pie and resolution to be a better granddaughter. She believed in me, whatever I was. The least I could do was try to deserve that trust.
    No tweeting came across the fields or from the trees that bordered the private dirt drive. No missing professor either. As I stepped around the ruts from the rain and the extra traffic, I heard crickets and a bullfrog in the pond behind Aunt Jas’s house. Sometimes the pond dried up in the summer. Where did the frogs go then? But this year we’d had plenty of rain, floods, in fact.
    I didn’t like walking in the dark this way, with nothing but Little Red and a flashlight for protection. My grandmother would have sneered if I’d taken the car for such a short distance, though, and I needed the exercise, especially after the pie. Besides, I could see the many lights I’d left on at my house.
    And, I told myself, none of the Hamptons’ new robbers would be stupid enough to come down a narrow dirt road, not that I’d heard of them housebreaking or waylaying pedestrians. No masked man was about to ride out of the trees shouting, “Stand and deliver,” like they did in Mrs. Terwilliger’s romance novels. Still, I’d locked the house up tight, so it took me three tries with two keys to get the front door open.
    All shut up that way, the house felt hot. Summer lingered and the breezes didn’t blow tonight. Off came thesweatshirt, up went the windows. The front door stayed locked.
    I decided to work a little, since the day hadn’t been productive beyond a couple of notes and sketches on the bus ride out. That deadline loomed.
    I checked my email, checked Facebook in case I got fan mail, played solitaire till I won, then got to it. Blank screen, blank sketch pad, blank mind. Blech.
    So I played solitaire some more. Got a Diet Coke from the fridge. Did a mental smack in the head, kick in the butt, poke in the ribs. And sat and thought about my plot, my character, my readers. And, hot damn, I finally figured out the perfect companion for my hero. Not a young boy, a butler, or best friend, but a creature that was both fanciful and fun. I did a bunch of sketches, added colors that would look good on the cover, adjusted the size, fixed the highlights in the eyes to look more intelligent. Lost in the creative cloud, I tried out names, abilities, character traits. Maybe I’d give it a limp. No, a lisp. It had to talk, to fit the story, but a speech impediment made it unique, like my three-legged dog.
    Before I knew it, hours had passed. My back ached from sitting. My eyelids felt scratchy. I let the big dogs out in the fenced front yard,