Tea and Primroses (2 page)

But her mother loved Legley Bay no matter the weather. She loved August the most. Her mother was soft and fair and beautiful and gracious—simple. She loved the beach, a good book, and a strong cup of tea.

When Sutton reached the rocky shore she trudged toward the water, eyes blurry with tears, until she reached the sand, newly wet from a crashing wave, and fell to her knees. She dropped her face into her hands, her torso bowed over her knees. She sobbed, her salty tears and the salty seawater like reunited sisters. A wave came, soaking her thin cotton skirt, but she didn’t feel the rush of cold on her skin. Another came. And another. Until finally she was exhausted from crying and shivering from the cold and she rose to her feet, looking as far out to the horizon as she could, squinting in the sunlight, remembering how as a child Declan had said he could see another country if he held his gaze just so.
See it, Sutton. Someday we’ll get married and go all over the world, just you and me.
She’d been frightened by the thought of all those foreign lands.
I’ll stay here instead and you can bring me treasures,
she had answered.

Where are you now, Declan?
Would he have felt the shift in their world, the life he’d left six years ago? Would he somehow feel the loss as keenly as she? Surely he would?

Declan, I need you. Wherever you are, come home.

***

Declan Treadwell, napping during the warm Italian August afternoon, with the shades drawn in his small apartment, was dreaming of Sutton. They were children and playing on the beach in Oregon. Their mothers were in low chairs, chatting like they did, sipping glasses of white wine, more friends than employer and employee.
Roma and Declan are family
, he often heard Constance say to Sutton. They’d all been together since before Declan could remember. His mother, Roma, had come to work for Constance when Declan was only eighteen months old and Sutton wasn’t yet born. Roma ran the house and took care of both Sutton and Declan while Constance wrote stories in the big office. But today was Saturday and they were all enjoying a day of play.

The sun was warm on his face. The waves crashed back and forth in nature’s music as Sutton buried him with sand, patting it with her tanned hands, her light brown hair in curls down her back. She wore a pink sundress; one strap kept falling off her shoulder. He counted the freckles scattered over her nose and cheeks, like flecks of nutmeg in a bowl of cream with a tad of vanilla. She was laughing, in the way she did, like cascading bells, and her face was alight, giving the world more air. “I need water to complete my evil plan,” she said, patting the sand near his chest.

“You have to be evil to have an evil plan,” he said, grinning. Sutton was his best friend even though she was a girl. She was such a girl. All she cared about was cooking and wearing pretty dresses. It should disgust him but she was so pretty. And sweet. When she smiled it was like the sun.

She threw her head back and let out a cackle, imitating the witch they saw in the movie,
Wizard of Oz
. Just last week they’d watched it, huddled together in her mother’s television room. Sutton was afraid of the monkeys and the wicked witch. She’d been sleeping in her mother’s room every night since. Sutton was afraid of things and Declan was brave. He was two years older and it was his job to protect her, his mother told him over and over. Sutton grabbed their plastic bucket, the red one with the broken handle, and ran toward the water. She knelt down, waiting for the water to come, the wet sand soaking through the thin material of her dress. After a moment, she fell to her knees, putting her face in her hands. Her body was shaking. Was she crying? Had he made her cry? Then he saw it. A wave was cresting, larger than it should be. A tsunami, like the signs warned. This way, the signs said. The giant wave would come and carry her out to sea, away from him. She would be crushed into the bottom of the ocean, mangled and broken. He called out to her as he twitched, trying to lurch his body from the sand that weighed him down. But he could not. He was stuck, as the girl he loved, the girl he’d loved all his life, was overcome by the wave and carried away. She screamed as the wave pulled her under, “Declan! Declan!” And then she was no more.

He awakened, his T-shirt wet with sweat.
Sutton
. Something was wrong. The clock said 6:12 p.m. Oregon was nine hours behind Italy. It would be just after 9 a.m. She lived in Legley Bay now. She’d come home to open a bakery of her own.

The bakery had been Sutton’s dream as a child. After being mentored for five years by the verbally abusive master baker in one of the famous shops in Portland Declan could never remember the name of, Sutton had finally had enough and quit, moving home to Legley Bay. In theory, she’d accepted her mother’s offer to finance her own bakery. “She will blossom back here,” Constance had written to him. “The city is no place for a girl like Sutton. And you know she’s wanted this all her life. She was just too proud to take a loan from me but I finally wore her down, as only a mother can.” He’d written back that he agreed about Sutton and the city, remembering the way she looked walking the beach below her mother’s house. He added that it would be nice for Constance to have Sutton home after all this time. She’d written back only one sentence: “If only you would come too, I could die a happy woman.”

But it had been six months and Sutton had yet to find a space for her shop. “She has one excuse after another,” wrote Constance. “Fear is ruling reason.”

Constance didn’t understand fear. She was always on both of them to pursue their dreams without fear. She’d bought him his first set of paints when he was eight years old. “I see the way you look at things. Like an artist.”

And Sutton, his sweet, beautiful Sutton, she’d lingered in the kitchen making things from sugar and flour and yeast from the time she could hold a spoon. “It was her destiny,” Constance often said, “to make the world a little sweeter.”

Constance understood why he stayed away, living like a gypsy, in one town in Europe after the other. Sutton Mansfield. Always Sutton. The love of his life. The one he could not get over.

He’d loved her for as long as he could remember. She was always there, like peripheral vision, this love, lurking unseen, just below his skin where warm blood flowed in his veins, always moving, coursing, pulsing her name.

When she’d rejected his marriage proposal six years ago something broke in him that he believed could not be repaired. He’d tried. There were women everywhere and they offered their bodies and their hearts to him and when he made love to them in the dark, he looked at their faces so he didn’t imagine Sutton. But it was no good. Sutton remained in all the broken places, no matter the ways in which he looked for glue to heal the pain.

So he lived this vagabond life, never staying in one place for too long, hoping the next destination might distract him enough so that he could finally let go of the past. His only peace was in his work. Sometimes, oftentimes, peace came when he held the paintbrush in his hand, the smell of oil and turpentine in the room, and he created something beautiful on the blank canvas. Luckily, he was able to make a decent living selling his paintings, especially commissioned portraits for the aristocratic families of Europe. “Reputation and word of mouth is everything,” he’d written to Constance. “They know I can be discreet about their family business.” But it was his paintings of Sutton and Constance and his mother, some done from memory, others from old sketches or photographs, that sustained him during the black hours of sleepless nights. There were hundreds of the paintings now, piled one on top of the other in the closet of his small apartment.

He’d been in a village in Tuscany for almost a year now, the longest he’d stayed anywhere in the six years since he left Oregon. While here, he spent his time traveling throughout the region for commissioned work, expanding into landscapes for several of his wealthy clients. He loved Tuscany. He could breathe here in a way he couldn’t in some of the other places he’d lived. It was the brown rolling hills and the particular blue hue of the sky and the orange of the egg yolks next to cured meats and espresso in the mornings and the way people lived simply in the indelible moment and grew vegetables in their gardens.

Now he sat up, looking for his phone.
Sutton Mansfield
. He had the number programmed even though he hadn’t spoken to her in six years. How many times had he stared at the number after a glass or two of wine?
Let it be
, he said to himself a thousand times.
Let her go.
He’d been letting her go for six long years now.

He sat, staring at the phone in his hand. What could it be, this sudden longing, this sudden urge to call her, to make sure she was safe, to protect her, like when they were children? Could she be in danger? Was it possible that after all this time he would be able to feel it across all the miles between them?

He went to the desk and logged in to his email. The most recent correspondence he’d received from Constance was from two days ago. He didn’t need to see it again; he had it memorized but, like poking a bruise, he read it once more.

Declan,

Forgive me for not having the courage to tell you this over the phone but, as you know, I’m better in writing than in conversation and I found this too difficult to say out loud. Here’s the thing–right before she left for Paris at the beginning of June, Sutton announced her engagement to a man she’s been seeing for a year or so. I didn’t mention Roger to you previously because I didn’t think it would last. You know I’m not one to mince words and I won’t now. Roger isn’t a bad man but he’s odd, socially speaking, and has absolutely no sense of humor. How can Sutton be with someone who doesn’t make her laugh? I thought she would break it off with him at any moment and didn’t spend any time worrying over it. But as my mother used to say, it’s the things you don’t worry about that actually happen. I’m a bit beside myself because he’s pushing to set a wedding date for the weekend before Thanksgiving. Sutton deserves a romantic, perfect wedding and there’s no way we can plan something in this amount of time that will be in any way suitable. You know her—she needs rose petals and white chairs and dancing. That’s the other thing, this Roger hates dancing–told her no dancing at the wedding! You know how our girl loves to dance.

Dec, you have to come home. I’ve never asked you to do it because I know your heart was broken when she refused you, but that was almost six years ago. You were both so young. You’re both mature now. The feelings you had will return if you come home; it will only take a look between you and it will all come rushing back. Don’t ask me how I know this but I do. When you love a person as deeply as you two loved one another, well, that love never leaves. It can be rekindled in the amount of time it takes to say hello.

Please, I’m begging you. Come home. Remind her of what it is to really love a man. There hasn’t been anyone since you, except a few dalliances with men completely unsuitable, because she’s never gotten over you.

When you get this, you must call me immediately so I can book your flight. I love you. Sutton loves you. Don’t let her slip away a second time.

Love, Constance

For two days now he’d thought about the email. But Constance’s assurances that everything would come rushing back to them both seemed unlikely. He knew how it would go. His feelings would be as strong as ever but would not be reciprocated. She must love this man she was engaged to. Constance must not be seeing it correctly.

He’d talked to Constance over the phone two weeks ago and he’d had a vague notion that Constance was leaving something out; obviously he was correct. Sutton was marrying someone else. Someone besides him.

But there was something else, too, in her voice the last month or so. She’d sounded like a girl, giddy and gay, talking faster than usual. She’d sounded happy, now that he thought about it. Was it possible Constance had a lover? No. He quickly dismissed the idea. After Sutton’s father had died when she was only three, Constance never dated. There had never been one hint of a flirtation or attraction in all the years they were growing up.

Should he call Constance now? Yes. He would do that first. This would answer any of his concerns. He punched in her mobile number. Her voicemail message came on after only one ring. “It’s me. Leave a message,” in her soft, husky voice.

“Constance, it’s me, Declan. Just checking in. I know it’s early out there so maybe you’re sleeping in for once but probably not.” Constance Mansfield rode the ten miles into Legley Bay from her house every morning at eight. After a breakfast of black tea, a boiled egg, and dry toast at the small table in the kitchen, she donned tennis shoes, a light fleece, and her helmet (Sutton insisted on this) and rode into town to do errands. Her Cape Cod style home was located south of town above a long stretch of beach, shared by the other houses that peppered the hillside, mostly second homes of wealthy people from Portland and Seattle.

Growing up, he and his mother had lived in town in a modest house owned by Constance but spent most days at the big house where his mother was primary housekeeper, cook, and assistant to Constance. His mother, Roma, was as tall and strong as Constance was petite and delicate and took care of them all, teaching Sutton how to cook and bake while Constance concentrated on writing and making sure the two children were properly schooled. After he and Sutton moved away, his mother had remained working for Constance until her sudden death six years ago.