An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach), Mariah Stewart [best classic novels TXT] 📗

reflection, barely recognizing the woman who stared back. She’d been walking to the bakery to pick up a birthday cake for her granddaughter—the first real family celebration since Art’s passing—when she’d paused to look at the window display. She’d been so shocked at her appearance she was embarrassed to go inside and identify herself as Maggie Flynn.

“Why didn’t you say something?” she demanded of her daughters that night. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Mom, we tried,” Natalie, twenty-nine, the younger of Maggie’s two daughters and mother of three-year-old Daisy, pointed out. “You didn’t want to hear it. Remember when Grace and I offered to take you for a spa day?”

“Vaguely,” Maggie admitted.

“We’d thought about tying you up and forcing you into the car, but we didn’t want to alarm the neighbors,” her thirty-two-year-old daughter Grace said. “You know how Mrs. Crenshaw next door is always looking out the window.”

Natalie turned to her sister. “Maybe next time we should do that.”

“I like it.” Grace nodded solemnly.

“There isn’t going to be a next time.” Maggie’s jaw set as she reached for her phone and scrolled through the preset numbers until she found the one she was looking for.

“Who are you calling?” asked Grace.

“My hairdresser,” Maggie told them. “And tomorrow I’m going back to yoga and I’m renewing my membership at the gym.” She paused, waiting for the call to be answered, inspecting her chewed and ragged nails. “Yes, hello. It’s Maggie Flynn. When’s the earliest I can see Kim? And can I get an appointment for my nails on the same day?”

It took more than an appointment with her hairdresser before Maggie felt like herself again, but even the smallest steps brought her back to the woman she used to be. Maggie harbored no illusions she’d look eighteen again—not that she’d want to, eighteen had been the worst year of her life—but she knew she could look good.

Good was an achievable goal.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the airport, the sign for the first of two turns into Wyndham Beach loomed straight ahead on the right. The first led directly to Liddy’s, where she’d been invited to spend the long weekend. The second turn would take her past the harbor and eventually to her childhood home. She hesitated as she approached the first road before opting for the second.

She opened all the car windows and took deep breaths of sea air as she crept along Front Street, noting changes that had taken place since her last visit shortly before Art became ill. Since then, she’d hardly felt like going anywhere, but her fortieth reunion was too important to miss. Off to her left, the exclusive two-hundred-year-old all-boys private school, with its three-story, unexplainably Tudor-style buildings in this town where almost everything was built of clapboard or weathered cedar shakes, wrapped around the harbor like a tight hug. Through a break between buildings, she could see the Jasper V, the school-owned schooner, its sails folded at rest, moored at the same slip the Jaspers I through IV had called home. The boat rose and fell as the wake of a passing boat rolled toward the shore.

In the center of town, the Wyndham Beach General Store stood on the corner of Front and Church, and Maggie knew once inside everything would be just as she remembered. The bakery with its long glass shelves lined the right side of the building, the butcher shop ran straight across the back. The left side held refrigerated cases of dairy and frozen foods, and all other grocery items would be found on the aisles in between. The gift shops, the boutiques, the candy shop, the bookstore, all looked the same. There was one new restaurant—Mimi’s—three blocks from Harbor House, which had been in business forever. Around the corner from the general store was a new coffee shop, Ground Me, which Liddy said had fabulous coffee and pastries. The pizzeria was still in the same place it had occupied when she was in high school, between the liquor store and a Realtor’s office. The sign on the lawn of the tall-spired, white nondenominational church still read ALL WELCOME. A new sign hung over the door of Dusty’s Pub, the only true watering hole in town. Otherwise, Wyndham Beach looked pretty much the same.

She slowed as she approached the point where Front Street veered off to the left and eased into Cottage, trying to remember who’d lived in which house when she was a girl, wondering who lived in them now. She pulled to the side of the road to let a panel truck pass, then crept along the curb a few more feet until she was almost directly in front of the gray-shingled house in which she’d grown up. A new sign out front proclaimed it to be THE ISAIAH WAKEFIELD HOUSE, CIRCA 1796—a sign obviously added by the new owners. The Blanchards? Something like that. Maggie’s mother, Ellen Wakefield Lloyd, wouldn’t have seen the need to advertise the provenance of her family’s home. Just about everyone in town knew who’d built the house and when.

Maggie took it all in: not just the house but every tree and shrub. She’d hoped to get a peek of the backyard, since Liddy had told her the new people had built an addition, but a row of arborvitaes acted as a barrier between the front and back. They’d had to go to the historical society with their construction plans, Liddy’d said, and since she was on the architectural review board, she knew exactly what had been done (master bedroom, bath, closet, and sitting room on the second floor, and a family room, powder room, and expanded kitchen on the first) and how much they’d had to pay for all the work (close to $200,000—“But,” Liddy’d confided, “you didn’t hear that from me”). Maggie’s curiosity got the best of her, and she got out of the car, feet crunching the dried fallen leaves on the sidewalk, and she tried unsuccessfully to peer around the