Free Off Season by Jean Stone Page B

mother needed to be told, and he’d found her on an island in the West Indies, wherever that was.
    She called early that morning before Mindy went to school.
    “Do you like Dr. Reynolds?” her mother asked now, her voice crackly through the wires.
    “She’s okay.”
    “Is she pretty?”
    Mindy shifted on one foot. She hated that her mother always seemed to think that if someone was pretty, that meant they were smarter or better than those who were not.
    “She’s okay.”
    There was a long pause over the Caribbean and up the Atlantic.
    “I’d be there if I could, Mindy. But the people who own the boat are very demanding. You understand, don’t you, pumpkin?”
    Oh, sure, of course. Mindy gripped the phone cord more tightly. “It’s okay, Mom.”
    “Your grandfather said he’s taking care of everything.”
    “I guess that’s why he’s my legal guardian,” she said.
And not you
, she did not add.
    The static grew stronger. “Yes. It’s been a good thing that I left you with him. With your father dead and my work taking me so far away …”
    There were so many things Mindy could ask. Starting with
why don’t you get a damn job as a waitress or something? Or why don’t you come back here and take care of me like you’re supposed to?
    Outside she could see Grandpa brush the rain from hishat and lay a fresh tarp across the bed of his pickup truck. Next he’d come in and eat the oatmeal that she’d set out last night before going to bed. Then he’d drink his coffee and take the pills for his heart and be gone for the day while she went to school. It was kind of a dumb life that they had together, but it was predictable and it didn’t hurt much.
    Until now.
    Until Ben had done what he’d done, and she’d done what she’d done, and now, worst of all, she had to talk to her mother
—mother?
Ha, ha, that was a laugh.
    “Pumpkin?” her mother asked. “Ben Niles is still rich, isn’t he?”
    Mindy frowned. Next to being pretty, the one thing that mattered to her mother was money, which, Mindy supposed, had to do with her being ne’er do well. “How would I know?” she replied. “His car’s pretty old.”
    Her grandfather came in the back door then, stomping wet leaves from his boots. Then Mindy remembered he wouldn’t go fishing today, because he had an appointment with the district attorney. That rumbly feeling returned to her belly: she rubbed it a little, but it didn’t leave.
    “I have to go,” Mindy said.
    “Well, be a good girl. I’ll send you something from Antigua.”
    Don’t bother
, she wanted to say, but said good-bye and hung up quickly instead, wishing that her mother had died along with her father and that she could go over to Menemsha House and help Ben for a while.
    But right now one dream was as impossible as the other.
    “Are you planning to live in one of those big houses you and your friends are building?” Hazel Blair asked Rita asRita finished reading the prospectus and sales brochure just back from the printer. Until now she’d not minded having her office in her home. After Kyle died, she’d moved her files into his old bedroom so she could feel closer to him. Unfortunately, before Kyle the room had been Hazel’s. Hell, the whole house—what there was of it, with two slant-roof bedrooms and the office upstairs, and the kitchen, living room, and small den down below—had been Hazel’s, who apparently now felt she had the right to come and go as she pleased.
    “This house is perfectly fine,” Rita replied. “Besides, what would I do with four thousand square feet? Hold a ball every other Saturday night?” She had not yet told her mother that there would soon be an unexpected addition to their family—she had hoped Hazel would return to Florida before it was obvious, and then maybe Rita would never, ever have to mention it. Denial, she’d found, was often a much happier place to dwell.
    “You could have a suite of rooms for your mother.” Hazel