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  “Yes, and the women they’re interested in are your age.”

  I laughed. “Men aren’t a priority at the moment. It’s my lifestyle I’m rethinking. I’m looking for less stress, more fulfillment.”

  “I’ll say it again, dear. Move to Stuart. And forget that crack of mine about the old men. You’d be surprised how many young people live here now.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been reading these magazine articles about people my age who are fleeing the cities for small towns like Stuart. They’re giving up big careers so they can become chefs, run B&Bs, learn how to paint.”

  “You used to paint when you were in high school, dear. Self-portraits, wasn’t it?”

  “No. Sharon was the one who painted self-portraits, although they all came out looking like Natalie Wood.” (The only characteristic Sharon shared with Natalie Wood was an attachment to Robert Wagner.) “I painted bowls of fruit, vases of flowers, that sort of thing.”

  “Well, you could pick it up again, couldn’t you? Get a job and paint in your spare time.”

  “Possibly. But what kind of jobs do they have in this area? Stuart isn’t exactly a bustling industrial center.”

  “No, but it just dawned on me that Melinda Carr, the director of the Historical Society, mentioned at lunch the other day that she’s got a job opening. I used to be a volunteer for the society, remember, dear? When I worked at the Elliot Museum out on Hutchinson Island?”

  I nodded. Hutchinson Island is a barrier island famous for its ocean beaches. Accessed from Sewall’s Point by a bridge spanning the Indian River, it’s Stuart’s answer to Miami Beach, its wall-to-wall condos rising high over the Atlantic, its population of five thousand doubling during the winter months. I spent many a holiday weekend there when I was in college, walking on the beach, picking up shells, wondering what I would be when I grew up. Little did I know I’d still be wondering at age forty-three.

  “Anyway,” my mother went on, “Melinda said they need a keeper.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “That’s what she called the position, Deborah. A keeper. Like a lighthouse keeper. I guess she means a caretaker, you know?”

  “Did she say what, exactly, needs caretaking?”

  “Yes. The House of Refuge over on MacArthur Boulevard.”

  I perked up. Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge, as it’s more formally known, is a pea-green, wood-frame building that was erected on a rocky stretch of Hutchinson Island coastline over a hundred years ago as a safe haven for shipwrecked sailors. Restored by the county and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, it’s open to the public as a museum, offering crusty old nautical charm and a view to die for. “So the Historical Society wants someone to run the House of Refuge?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head. “No, just to live in the keeper’s cottage next door. To make sure the House of Refuge doesn’t fall down, probably. I’ve never been inside the cottage, but Melinda said it has a bedroom, living room, kitchen, office, and, best of all, a porch facing the ocean. You wouldn’t make close to the kind of money your soap opera pays you, but you’d make something and you’d be able to live right on the water, rent-free. You could paint, read, decide what you want to do with the rest of your life. It could be a good temporary solution, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely.” The idea of spending six months or even a year living on the ocean, all by myself, with no thieving doormen to tip, no weekly breakdowns to write, no self-absorbed actors to dump, practically had me drooling. “But there’s got to be a catch. The job sounds too good to be true.”

  “Well, you might not be qualified for it.”

  I laughed. “You mean, I might be overqualified for it, don’t you?”

  “No. I mean, they might want someone with experience in building maintenance, someone who can get things fixed.”

  “I can get things fixed,” I told my mother. “I just pick up the phone and call someone to fix them. I did it all the time in my apartment. I was on very good terms with the super.”

  Lenore Peltz smiled. “Think about it over the weekend. If you’re really serious about moving out of the city, I’ll call Melinda and try to arrange an interview for you. Meanwhile, it’s late and I’ve got a big day tomorrow. The luncheon’s at noon, but Sharon wants us down in Boca at eleven.”

  “Why, so she can have an extra hour to vilify me?”

  “Deborah.”

  I hugged my mother. “You go to bed. I’ll clean up the kitchen.”

  She nodded. “Tomorrow will turn out better than you think. I have a feeling that you and your sister will finally bury the hachet.”

  Yeah. In each other, I thought, as I kissed my mother goodnight.

  Chapter Three

  After my mother and I pulled into Broken Sound, the golf community where Sharon lived (I joked that it should be called “Broken Record,” because she was one), we made our way through the maze of streets into her brick-paved, circular driveway. There, we were greeted by a man wearing a double-breasted suit, slicked-back dark hair, and a fake handlebar mustache. As he helped us out of the car, he flashed us the gun that was wedged inside his waistband. I have some pretty scary relatives, but this guy wasn’t one of them.

  “Who’s he?” I whispered to my mother. “He looks like a gangster.”

  “He’s supposed to,” she whispered back. “He goes with Sharon’s theme for my party.”

  “Her theme?”

  “Yes, dear. You know, the way she has themes for her weddings? Since I was born in 1924, she decided to have a Roaring Twenties birthday party for me. This man’s the valet parking attendant.”

  I smiled weakly and helped my mother to the front door.

  She rang the bell. Seconds later, a flapper let us in—a young redhead in a black satin dress and matching feather boa. No, she wasn’t a family member, either.

  “You must be Mrs. Peltz,” she said, shaking my mother’s hand. “I’m Paula, Sharon’s assistant. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Nice things, I hope,” said my mother. She turned to me. “And this is Deborah, my other daughter.”

  Paula did not shake my hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you too,” she said instead.

  Paula guided us inside her boss’s palace with its requisite vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and faux-finished painted walls. For the special occasion, it had been schmaltzed up with little touches from the ‘20s—music from the period, models of antique cars, magazine articles about Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Most touchingly, Sharon had blown up a dozen grainy, sepia-toned photographs of my mother when she was a child, framed the pictures, and displayed them in the living room, where she had also hung a huge banner, proclaiming:

  Happy Seventy-Fifth Birthday to Lenore!

  And Here’s to Another Seventy-Five More!

  A regular Emily Dickinson, my sister.

  My mother seemed genuinely moved by the to-do in her honor. “I can’t believe the trouble Sharon went to,” she marveled, shaking her head. “She really outdid herself, don’t you think, Deborah?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, feeling desperately inadequate suddenly. All I’d done for my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday was to show up. Sure, I’d gotten her a gift—a cashmere sweater from Saks—but I still felt like a slug, compared to you-know-who. It wasn’t so much that I hadn’t helped with the party—Sharon hadn’t even called to invite me, let alone included me in the planning. It was that it hadn’t occurred to me that my mother needed or wanted such a flashy display to mark her seventy-fifth year. She’d always seemed content to celebrate her birthdays quietly, with little fanfare, particularly after my father died. But there she was, obviously thrilled by Sharon’s effort and creativity and extravagance, and the whole thing made me want to wrap Paula’s feather boa around my neck and strangle myself.

  “If only you could live another seventy-five years,” I told my mother. “Forever would be okay too.” It was important that she kn
ew I loved her, banner or no banner. And not just because I was feeling competitive with Sharon. I really did think she was a wonderful mother. Aside from her inability to face her daughters’ antipathy toward each other, aside from her often too-stiff upper lip when it came to sharing her own problems, aside from her unwillingness to acknowledge that she ever had any problems, Lenore Peltz was the type of mom you could be proud of. She was affectionate, fair-minded, supportive without being possessive. She offered advice but didn’t nag, for the most part. She even told jokes every now and then, although in recent years she couldn’t remember the punch lines. When I was growing up, it was my father who was God (it’s impossible to upstage a kindly general practitioner who makes house calls), but it was my mother who was there. She made sure that we were fed and clothed, helped us with our homework, and meted out our punishments. She was a ‘50s wife, but she was no June Cleaver leaving it to big Ward to make the tough decisions. While my father was out saving the good people of Westport from ailments of varying degrees of severity, she rolled up her sleeves and raised two children.

  The fact that her two children still behaved like children wasn’t her fault. As I said before, we had a father.

  I was pondering the impact he had on my relationship with Sharon when she entered the room on a dead run, breathless, harried, focused on her responsibilities as the hostess, firing instructions at Paula, the flapper-assistant.

  So she’s a blonde now, I mused, noticing that her once-brown, chin-length hair was a rather loud reddish-gold.

  Otherwise she looked just as she had the last time I’d seen her—petite like my mother, pretty in a calculated, heavily made-up way, and pinched, really tight, as if there were too many tasks for even a little dynamo like her to complete. That was another thing about my sister: she was so capable yet so joyless; superwoman and supervictim, simultaneously.

  “Here you are, Mom,” she said, hugging my mother, chatting with her about party decorations, pretending I wasn’t standing there. I cleared my throat. She turned, unable to avoid me without seeming totally out of it. “Oh, and here’s Deborah. It’s been so long I hardly recognized you.” She hesitated, then stepped forward and air-kissed me, with the affection of a python.

  “It’s good to see you, Sharon,” I said, determined to at least start things off on a positive note, knowing how quickly they could deteriorate. “I love your dress.” She was not attired in Roaring ‘20s garb—that was for the hired help, apparently. She was wearing a turquoise linen dress adorned with large gold buttons that were nearly the same color as her newly golden hair. Very Boca.

  She thanked me and then appraised my outfit, a loose-fitting cotton dress with a floral pattern. I braced myself.

  “Your dress is lovely, too,” she said. “I had an old tablecloth just like it.”

  Off we go, I thought. Fasten your seatbelts, everybody.

  “How’s Norman?” I asked, referring to her son, the freshman at the Citadel. “Is he happy at school?”

  “Reasonably,” said Sharon. “He told me he got a letter from you. He was surprised.”

  “Surprised? Why? He is my nephew,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, but after you skipped his high school graduation—”

  “I was sick that day, Sharon. I had a one-hundred-three-degree fever. Norman knows I would have come to the graduation if I could have.”

  “What Norman knows is that his aunt is very busy in New York, writing for a”—she smirked—“soap opera.”

  “Do you have a problem with my show, Sharon? Is that what this is about?”

  “God, no. I’ve never even seen it. I don’t have time to watch that kind of trash.”

  I glanced at my mother and said, “Don’t say I didn’t try, okay?” And then I stormed outside, to the patio, and sat by the pool, hyperventilating.

  A few minutes later, my mother joined me. I apologized for Sharon and myself. “I’m ruining your birthday because I can’t get along with my own sister.”

  “You’re not ruining my birthday,” she assured me. “I’m going to have a wonderful time in spite of you and Sharon. She just took me into the kitchen to see all the food. My goodness! What a spread!”

  I regarded her. Was it possible that her daughters’ sniping didn’t bother her as much as I thought? Or was she doing what she always did when it came to my relationship with Sharon—keeping her emotions in check, swallowing her hurt and disappointment, putting on a smily face when inside she was boiling?

  “You’re going to have a wonderful time too,” she added.

  “Come on, Mom. You were a witness to that.” I pointed inside the house. “My first exchange with Sharon in two years, and it was a beauty, huh?”

  “Yes, but it’s over now,” she said cheerfully. “You girls have broken the ice. Everything should be fine from here on.”

  The guests started arriving at noon—about forty people, more than half of them relatives. Like me, they had flown down to south Florida especially for the party. Unlike me, they were spending an entire week in the area, making a vacation of it, heading up to Orlando the next morning so they could go to Disney World.

  There were my mother’s three brothers, Uncle Bill, Uncle Bob, and Uncle Bernie (the Killer B’s, they called themselves), along with their wives, Aunt Gloria, Aunt Jean, and Aunt Harriet, as well as their children, their children, and an au pair or two. Members of my father’s family showed up too, among them his brother, Uncle Stanley, and his wife, Aunt Lydia, his divorced sister, Aunt Shirley, and her unmarried daughter, Jill.

  During the first hour of the party, I mingled.

  Uncle Stanley told me stories about my father, the same stories he told me every time we got together—the one about their sandlot baseball team, the one about their first car, the one about the day my father met my mother and decided right then and there that he was going to marry her. I listened attentively, as I always did, because they were nice stories and Uncle Stanley recounted them well and I missed my father so talking about him made me happy.

  I had my usual, bizarre conversation with my cousin Keith, Uncle Bob and Aunt Jean’s fifty-year-old son. Keith was a travel agent who lived alone in Philadelphia. His claim to fame was that he was once a contestant on Jeopardy and would have beaten the other two contestants if not for a question concerning the Yangtze River. Keith was a major trivia buff who was also a major bore. He tried to dazzle you with his knowledge of impossibly obscure facts and never asked you anything about your personal life or gave away anything about his own. I had a hunch that all the minutia he spouted was a cover; that he was probably with the CIA or FBI or KGB and didn’t want his family to know about it.

  Keith’s polar opposite, personality-wise, was his younger sister, Marcy, who’d had a lifetime of adventures in psychotherapy and was interested exclusively in delving into personal issues, largely her own. She was incapable of making superficial chitchat, as I was reminded when she struck up a conversation with me at the party. The question “How’ve you been, Marcy” triggered a long, rambling response involving eating disorders, self-mutilation, and sexual encounters with cable TV repairmen.

  I was escaping from Marcy when I was cornered by Uncle Bill’s wife, Aunt Gloria, an avid watcher of From This Day Forward. Whenever we got together, she loved quizzing me about the show, loved getting the inside scoop on the plot so she could tell her friends in Parsippany.

  “You have to fill me in about Holden Halsey,” she begged, referring to the character played by my old pal Philip. “The actor is exquisite, Deborah. Absolutely exquisite.”

  “Not in person,” I told her. “He has acne scars.”

  “Really? You can’t see them at all,” she marveled. “On TV, he looks like an angel.”

  “It’s the makeup,” I said. “Up close, he’s grotesque. Trust me.”

  After bursting Aunt Gloria’s bubble, I wound up talking to Aunt Harriet, Uncle Bernie’s wife. She took me aside to register her disapproval of my cousin Jill, Aunt
Shirley’s daughter. Jill was my age but not my weight; while I had a little excess baggage around my hips and butt, Jill had genuine thunder thighs, made even more thunderous by the revealing, skin-tight clothes she wore.

  “That girl’s skirt is so short she should wear a hair net,” Aunt Harriet whispered, as we observed Jill sitting on the sofa and crossing and uncrossing her legs. “Men don’t appreciate that sort of advertising. That’s why she’s never found a husband, if you ask me.”

  “Then what’s my excuse?” I kidded, pointing at my billowy, ankle-length dress, which was about as revealing as a nun’s habit.

  “That’s easy,” said Aunt Harriet. “You’ve never found a husband because of your sister.”

  I laughed. “You mean, because I’m afraid she’ll scare him off?” I assumed Aunt Harriet had seen Sharon at her witchiest.

  “No,” she said. “Because you’re afraid you’ll piss her off.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re—”

  “Look, Deborah. You’re a sweet girl so I’m going to speak plainly to you.” Aunt Harriet was an extremely opinionated woman. I had never known her not to speak plainly to anyone. “Sharon’s had nothing but bastards for husbands. Three of them, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Imagine how mad she’d be if you brought home a husband who wasn’t a bastard, a good man who really loved you. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I’m telling you, honey. That’s why you’re not married. Because you don’t want to outshine Sharon. I had a similar situation with my older sister, may she rest in peace.”

  “You did?”

  “Oh, yes. Whenever Lottie got a B on a test in school, I made sure I got a C or worse. For the longest time I let everybody think I was dumber than Lottie, but I was only hiding my light under a bushel. So I wouldn’t outshine her. You think about what I’m saying, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Aunt Harriet.”

  She hugged me, then refocused her attention on cousin Jill. “It’s a pity,” she tsked-tsked. “The girl’s got a pretty face. She should get rid of all that weight and start dressing like a normal person.”