Page 12 of Drawing Home
“Wait—I’ve never even seen this house. This is just…you’re kind of throwing me for a loop here.”
The lawyer looked around the room, and Emma saw it through his eyes. For the first time in a long while, she mentally kicked herself for not doing more with the place. She spent her free time out back in the garden. When she was inside, she barely saw the cracks in the paint, the water damage on her bedroom ceiling that she hadn’t gotten around to fixing. The area rugs were worn out, but they were functional. Why throw money away?
Mr. Bonivent handed her a set of keys. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.
Walking him to the door, she knew there was something she should say or ask but for the life of her, she couldn’t think of what that would be.
Chapter Six
Bea knew she had crossed a line in grabbing the ceramic plate from Kyle and throwing it at Victor. In her defense, it had missed him by a good foot.
Kyle knelt on the floor and swept the shards into a dustpan. She paced a safe distance away, contemplating her next move. There was only one place to go.
“When you’re finished with that, I need you to make a reservation.”
“Where?”
“The American Hotel, the only civilized place in town. No—forget calling. We’ll just pack and go there straightaway.”
He looked up at her. “Bea, I can’t stay out here any longer. I have a life back in New York.”
She knew this was not true. His life was managing her life.
It had started out simple; Kyle had framed paintings, put together art installations, done the odd touch-up job on her floors. He oversaw her kitchen remodeling.
Bea started to rely on him more. She taught Kyle how to manage the catering for parties. For a time, there was art business in the Hamptons or Connecticut, and Kyle would be dispatched to handle issues if Bea did not feel like making the trip. And she never felt like making the trip. Kyle was spending so much time at 720 Park Avenue, she offered him a room in the guest wing when he worked late, which saved him the hour-long subway ride back to Brooklyn. After a while it seemed like a waste of money for him to keep paying the rent on his twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month studio, so he let it go.
Bea did occasionally wonder why a young, attractive, capable young man like Kyle was so willing to let his life be swept up in her own. She’d asked him once, only half joking, if he was hiding from something.
“Am I going to flip through the television channels and see you onAmerica’s Most Wantedone night?” she said.
“I’m not hiding from anything, Bea. The truth is, I lost the one thing I wanted to do with my life, and I haven’t figured out a good alternative. I guess until I do, working for you is a pretty interesting distraction.”
So the job she had handed him and for which she paid him so handsomely had served as a useful distraction, but now thatsheneeded something, he was balking. People were so selfish! “Kyle, the whole reason we work so well together is that you are happy to let my life beyourlife. So stop with this nonsense. Have the car out front in twenty minutes.”
She marched back to her room, her pulse racing from the exertion and from her deep indignation at what was taking place. In the hallway, a splash of blue caught her eye and she stopped to look at the painting. Henry’s work always spoke to Bea, and this was true even in her current state.Untitled Blue,oil on canvas, 1960. It was the first painting Henry had ever shown her.
She hesitated only a second before removing it from the wall and marching it out to her car.
Emma could barely focus on the staff meeting.
Jack Blake had assembled everyone in the piano room. The staff pulled chairs around the Steinway, and Jack sat on the bench where a musician performed six nights a week all summer long.
Over and over, Emma mentally replayed the conversation with the lawyer, certain there had to be some mistake. How could Henry Wyatt have left his house to Penny?
“This will take only a few minutes,” said Jack. He wore a mint-green polo shirt, khaki pants, and one of the baseball hats emblazoned with the Sag Harbor zip code that they sold at the hotel. Jack was not very tall but he was distinguished-looking, with a year-round tan, deep-set blue eyes, and a thick head of white hair.
Jack Blake had bought the hotel in 1972 when he was just twenty-four years old. The Youngs family had owned the property and operated the hotel for ninety-four years. By the time Jack bought the place, it had been on the market for two years. No one but Jack had a vision of what the hotel could become.
In those early days, Jack didn’t have a chef for the restaurant. He did all the cooking—fish and chips and burgers—himself. He did a lot of the repair work himself too, and what he couldn’t do, he hired local plumbers and electricians to take care of. He’d spend days at wallpaper places looking for high-quality reams he could buy in bulk. He scoured antique stores for furniture. He was so consumed with his vision for the hotel, his young wife left him. Jack forged on, hiring a staff of people he wanted to surround himself with day in and day out. One of those first hires was Emma’s father, Tom, also twenty-four and tasked to run the new bar.
Now, as Jack sat at the piano, he told the staff, “I wanted to make sure you all know about the fund-raiser to rebuild the movie theater. This is a cause close to my heart, since I’d say that, second only to live music, a good movie is vital to the soul—the soul of a person and the soul of a town. I think we all miss walking down the street and meeting our friends and family to watch a movie together. And I want that back.”
Emma discreetly checked her phone. The visit from the lawyer was so unbelievable, she half expected someone to text her withJust kidding!
“So we’re going to have a food table at the fund-raiser and we need volunteers for that. And if you can get on any other committee to make the night a success, let me know and I’ll jigger your schedule here accordingly. Thanks, all.”
The staff members all filed slowly back to their posts. Emma thought that even more than the movie theater, she missed SagTown Coffee and a few of the other shops in the adjacent building that had also been destroyed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a movie—or done anything else for fun, really. But she’d picked up chocolate chip cookies from SagTown a few times a week. She could go for one right now.
