Page 71 of Surfside Sisters

Keely settled on a chair and raised her face to the sun. Her parents had planted flowering trees when they’d first bought the house, and now they were sturdy, their winged branches dappled with opening buds of pink and white. Birds flew back and forth between the trees, singing, and Keely leaned back into the chair and into the day and breathed it all in. She wanted to walk down South Beach Street to see the cherry trees in bloom. And maybe she’d bike over to the Wicked Island Bakery and get a morning bun, which wasn’t a bun at all but a delectable swirl of sugary cinnamon pastry like nothing else in the world. And maybe she’d walk down to The Creeks at the end of the harbor and see how the water had shaped the inlets over the winter. And maybe…

First, she would concentrate on helping her mother with the house. Next, she would get her motheroutof the house. This afternoon, she would set up her laptop and download the notes Juan had sent and start rewriting, again, her third novel. She went back inside, poured herself another cup of coffee, and rapped on her mother’s door to waken her.

—

By late afternoon, she hadn’t touched her laptop, but she had dropped her mother off at the hairdresser. She made a quick run to Stop & Shop, where she’d bumped into several friends and caught up on their news—births, weddings, divorces, feuds, and for some of her mother’s friends, deaths.

Keely clapped her hands when her mother walked out of the salon.

“Mom, you look so pretty!”

“Thank you.” Eloise blushed.

“Hey, Mom, guess what Janine told me at the grocery store. Kathleen Knight’s art gallery has an opening tonight. I think we should go!”

“Darling, you go on without me. I’m not really up to it today.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Come on, this will be fun. You know Kathleen always serves champagne and fabulous munchies.”

Eloise waved her hand vaguely. “Too many people…”

“Yes, and they’ll all point and snicker and whisper, ‘There’s that pitiful Eloise Green who retired from the hospital and now just sits around being uninterested in the world.’ ”

“Don’t be mean.”

“Don’t be lazy.” Keely bit her cheeks to keep in a smile.Lazywas, to her mother, a deplorable trait.

“I’mnotlazy! I worked with you all morning sorting out the house. Now I’m tired.”

“I’ll take you to dinner at the Boarding House if you go with me.”

“I’m not hungry. That sandwich you made was too filling.”

“Mom, are you depressed?”

“Possibly. I certainly have the right to be depressed. My husband’s dead and I no longer have the job that was mylife.”

“Okay, think aboutmefor a minute. Obviously I don’t rate very high on your scale of reasons to live—”

“That’s not true! You’re putting words in my mouth!”

Keely stifled a grin. She’d gotten a rise out of her mother. “Back to the subject of me.Iwant to go into town.Iwant to see old friends. But, Mom, what if I run into Isabelle or Tommy? They’ll be together, the happy married couple and I’ll be all alone, the pitiful and unattached.”

“No one thinks you’re pitiful!”

“No one thinksyou’repitiful!” Keely fired back.

Eloise sighed and slumped. “You are a manipulative child.”

Keely pulled into the drive. “Wait till I get some lipstick on you. Maybe some blush. You’ll look gorgeous.”

—

Early in the evening, Keely drove into town. Nightlife wasn’t up to full speed yet, so not all the boutiques and galleries were open. Still, the winter was over, and the island was waking up. Lights shone from the stores, and the doors of some of the shops were open, allowing alluring fragrances to drift out.

She strolled side by side with her mother, window shopping.

“Do you remember, Mom, how Isabelle and I used to attend the gallery openings on Friday nights in the summer?”

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