Life's a Beach Read online

  Life's a Beach

  Claire Cook

  Hyperion (2007)

  Tags: Middle-Aged Women, Humorous, Fiction, Romance, Sisters, Massachusetts, Humorous Fiction, General, Love Stories

  Middle-Aged Womenttt Humorousttt Fictionttt Romancettt Sistersttt Massachusettsttt Humorous Fictionttt Generalttt Love Storiesttt

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  Dreaming of becoming an artist while living above her parents' garage, forty-one-year-old Ginger pursues a relationship with a commitment-phobic man and babysits her sister's kids while overseeing her eccentric family's descent into dysfunctional chaos. By the author of Must Love Dogs. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

  Life’s a Beach

  Claire Cook

  To Garet and Kaden

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  User’s Guide to the Fun, Feisty, & Fabulous

  If You Enjoyed Life’s a Beach

  Bonus Chapter from Best Staged Plans

  About the Author

  Also by Claire Cook

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A ZILLION THANKS, and more, to the incomparable Lisa Bankoff and Tina Wexler, whose support, advice, laughter, and excitement always make me want to write my next novel just so I can hang out with them some more. Josie Freedman and Michael McCarthy have been right there for me working their movie magic, too, and I’m also very grateful to the foreign rights department and to everyone else at ICM.

  I would have followed my brilliant editor Pamela Dorman anywhere, but how lucky am I that she decided to team up with Ellen Archer to start Voice. I’m so proud to be one of the first authors to lend my own voice to their new imprint. Many thanks to Pam and Ellen, and to my fabulous associate editor Sarah Landis and wonderful publicist Beth Dickey, for their support and guidance, and a heartfelt and alphabetical thank-you to the rest of the talented Hyperion team—Kathleen Carr, Jane Comins, Michelle Ishay, Maha Khalil, Claire McKean, Karen Minster, Shelly Perron, Sarah Schaffer, Jessica Wiener, and Katie Wainwright. Thanks so very much to Chris Barba and the Hachette sales group, too.

  Gary David Goldberg came into my life to turn Must Love Dogs into the movie of my dreams and then stepped it up a notch and became something even more important—a great writer buddy. A huge thanks to Gary for faxing both notes and encouragement.

  Thanks so much to Elisabeth Weed for bringing Elias John Amber Hansen with her to the Cape Cod Writers’ Center summer conference. Eli was such an original that suddenly a glassblower emerged in the novel I was just beginning to write. Thanks to the many glass artists who answered my questions along the way, especially Don Parkinson of the Sandwich Glass Museum, and also Marj Bates of glassthings.com, who kindly allowed me to crash her workshop. Thanks to Diane Dillon for airline insight and to Charlotte Phinney for support that cuts across the categories. And thanks to Sharon Duran for a funny carwash story that didn’t work on paper but inspired a different kind of carwash scene.

  Thanks to everyone on the set of the Must Love Dogs movie for letting me hang out. I was so sure I’d get kicked off the set for taking notes, but instead everybody from the producers to the actors to the caterers answered all my questions and even started brainstorming ideas for me. I don’t think any of them found their way into this novel, but I very much appreciate the encouragement. Thanks to Mike “Moishe” Moyer for being inspirational in the gaffer department, to Cathryn Michon for grrl genius insight into child actors, and to Billy Dowd for answering all my casting questions over a long laugh-filled lunch.

  Many, many thanks to my fabulous extended family. It’s such a thrill to be discovering more relatives almost every week. And thanks to my wonderful friends, old and new, for cheering me on and talking me up. In fact, so many old friends have come out of the woodwork that I held a random drawing and gave some of you a group cameo in this novel.

  A huge thank-you to the booksellers, librarians, and members of the media who have supported me and spread the word. And I’m forever grateful to my wonderful readers, who through the conduit of my website, www.clairecook.com, have become a kind of virtual extended family.

  And my biggest thanks of all, always, go to my husband, Jake Jacobucci, who has turned into one helluva first reader, to our daughter, Garet, for all things cat, and to our son, Kaden, for encouraging Post-its on an early draft: “Good line, Mom!”

  Chapter 1

  I WAS SQUEAKY CLEAN AND MY HAIR HAD BEEN CONDItioned for at least two of the suggested three minutes when the water went cold. I did a quick rinse, then turned the faucet off. The plastic shower curtain moved a few inches, and a clean white towel magically appeared. Noah had already left when I woke up, but maybe he’d only made a breakfast run. Or maybe he just couldn’t stay away. I smiled.

  “Here you go,” my mother said from the other side of the curtain.

  I screamed. I wrapped myself in the towel and stepped out of my tiny square shower and practically into my mother. “Jesus, Mom, I thought you were . . . someone else.”

  “Noah? He left at six-twenty-five this morning. And tell him to watch that pebble business or he’ll break a window.” My mother started dabbing my shoulders with another towel.

  “Mom, stop.”

  My mother kept dabbing. There were no limits in our family. I could clearly remember sitting in the bathtub with a book one night when I was ten or eleven. My sister, Geri, had already gone off to college, and my parents had company for dinner. Suddenly, the door opened and four adults looked in at me and my bubbles. “Say good night to Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien,” my mother said.

  Today, my mother was wearing her GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN T-shirt, and a couple of tiny beaded braids in her thick gray hair made her look like she’d just come back from the Caribbean. I was kind of wishing she were there now. “Listen,” she said, “your father and I have found the townhouse of our dreams. The Village of Silver Springs. Fitness center with personal trainers, billiards, bingo, indoor boccie ball, salsa lessons. You know how your father loves to dance.”

  “It’s not just a townhouse, it’s a lifestyle,” a strange voice said.

  I peeked behind my mother to see two women wearing red hats. They were measuring what I liked to think of as my carriage house with a bright yellow tape measure. My cat watched silently from the rumpled sheets of my still-pulled-out sleeper sofa.

  On my best days, I could convince myself that, with me at the far end of my parents’ driveway, and my sister and her family about a mile away, we had our own little Kennedy compound. On my worst days, I had to admit that I lived in an apartment over my parents’ garage.

  The women waved. I hiked my towel up a little higher. “Mom,” I whispered, “get them out of here. Now.”

  My mother reached down and scratched my cat under his chin. She said, “Hi, handsome,” and he purred his acknowledgment. She nudged yesterday’s bra, which had somehow ended up in the middle of the floor, with her toe. “You’re goin
g to have to start keeping things a little bit neater around here, honey.”

  One of the women, the one wearing a jeweled red visor, didn’t seem to be the least bit bothered by the fact that I was dripping all over the apartment she was trying to help my mother sell right out from under me. In fact, she acted like I wasn’t even there. “A FROG is a nice bonus feature,” she said. “Everybody loves a FROG.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, not that it was any of her business. “But, actually, it’s not a Finished Room Over the Garage. It has a bath and a kitchen, which makes it technically more of a carriage house.”

  Everybody ignored me. “If you bury a statue of St. Joseph in the ground,” the visor woman said, “the house will get scooped up right away. Guaranteed.”

  “Mom,” I said with every bit of outrage I could muster without dropping my towel. I wondered if telling these women this wasn’t a legal rental unit would make them lose interest, or if it would only get me in trouble with my mother.

  “You have to be careful how you bury it,” the other woman said. Her hat had a frothy drape of red netting that covered her eyes, so maybe I really was invisible to her. “My cousin said she faced hers away from the house when she buried it, and the house across the street sold instead.”

  “Upside down and facing the house is the way to go,” the other woman said. “If he’s upside down, that way St. Joseph will work extra hard to get out of the ground and onto the mantel of your new townhouse.”

  My mother was actually nodding, as if these two trespassing red-hatted women were not completely and certifiably insane. “Well,” I said loudly, “I don’t want to keep you. Sounds like you’d better get over to the mall fast before they run out of statues.”

  Now they were all nodding, so I started inching my mother toward the door, hoping the other two would follow. They did, though the first woman had unfortunately mastered the art of walking and talking at the same time. “But,” she said, “for St. Joseph to be fully effective, you also have to do all the necessary fix-ups, price the house to reflect the current market, and of course, properly stage the home. Cut flowers, cookies baking in the oven, some pine-scent potpourri. Then you add the statue.”

  We were almost there. My mother leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, and I reached past her to open the door. “Sorry we have to run,” she said.

  “Not a problem,” I said as I hiked my towel up again.

  “We’ll catch up later, honey.”

  “You bet we will,” I said.

  When I slammed the door behind them, I just missed the backside of one red-hatted Realtor.

  THE DOWNSIDE OF LIVING in a carriage house over your parents’ garage is that you’re easy to find. “Your mother,” my father said when I answered his knock on my door about three minutes later, “wants to sell the house.”

  “Gee, Dad, thanks for the warning.”

  I was dressed now, but steam was still coming out of my ears. I’d just put down the phone after leaving an angry message for my mother. I’d been going over and over the piece of my mind I was going to give her when she finally came home long enough to call me back. She was probably still off saint shopping with her red hat friends. They were a seriously bad influence on her, in my opinion.

  My father didn’t look so hot. He was wearing shorts with a yellowed cotton tank-style undershirt, and one brown sock and one reddish one. He was color-blind, and from the time I was six or so I knew that whenever his socks didn’t match, it was a sure sign he was fighting with my mother.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, thinking a little levity might help us both. “You can move in here with me.”

  Not even a giggle. My father looked at me from under his hooded blue eyes. The hair that was no longer on his head seemed to have traveled to his bushy white eyebrows, I noticed.

  He looked over his shoulder. “Open the door,” he said. “Fast.”

  I did, and he pushed past me, carrying a big black trash bag. “Gee, thanks, Dad,” I said. “But you shouldn’t have.”

  “Hey, Toots, where can we stash this to keep it safe?” He’d clearly been watching too much television since he retired.

  Though technically larger than a FROG, it was a very small apartment, with a dollhouse-size bathroom and an illegally added kitchenette. I stalled for time. “Do you mean we in the royal sense, or are you suggesting your daughter join you in a life of crime?”

  My cat jumped off the couch and circled my father and his garbage bag. Then he pounced. “Down, Boy,” my father and I said in one voice. He dug in his claws anyway and teetered on top of the bag, so my father waltzed the bag back to the couch. My father had always been a good dancer.

  He put the bag on the couch, and my cat disembarked when he realized the fun was over. My father reached down and pulled up his red sock until it was even with his brown one. “Listen, Dollface. You’ve got a nice lily pad here, but it’s all gonna go away if we don’t play our cards right.”

  Now he was talking like he was in a bad movie. My mother must really be serious about this. “I’m with you, Dad. We have to stop her before it’s too late.” Apparently talking like you were in a bad movie was contagious.

  My father straightened up and put both hands on his lower back. He swiveled his hips around a little, as if he wanted to be sure they were still working. “Don’t worry, Toots, I already have a plan cooked up.”

  Ever since I could remember, my father had always been there for me. I felt my eyes tear up. “Great, Dad. What is it?”

  He didn’t answer. He was too busy stuffing his garbage bag into my tiny shower.

  “DID YOU KNOW Mom wants to sell the house?” I asked my eight-years-and-three-months-older sister Geri when she answered her phone that afternoon. “And she won’t even call me back to discuss it.”

  “You shouldn’t still be living there anyway.”

  “I’m not living here. I’m just staying here for a little while until I figure out what I want to do next.”

  “Technically, two years is not a little while.”

  I tried not to do the math in my head. “I have not been here for two years.”

  “Have too.”

  “Have not.”

  “Yes, you have. It’s time to get a life again, Ginger.”

  Get a life, Ginger, I mimicked silently. I didn’t say it out loud because I thought there might still be a slight chance I could talk her into being on my side, so I didn’t want to piss her off unnecessarily. I twisted some silver wire around a piece of bottle green sea glass while I held the phone against my ear with one shoulder. “So you did know,” I finally said. “Gee, thanks for telling me.”

  My sister sighed. “Every four seconds a baby boomer turns fifty,” she whined into the phone.

  I held the receiver away from me and looked at it, thinking it might somehow cough up the missing conversational segue. Geri was still waiting for a reply so I said, “Think of all the company you’ll have.”

  “And every three seconds, more or less,” she continued as if I hadn’t said a word, “I consider the fact that I’m about to be one of them.”

  “Excuse me, but what exactly does this have to do with Mom selling the house?” I asked.

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it?”

  I added another loop of wire, keeping my eyes closed so it wouldn’t come out looking too anal. “Come on, Gerr, you have almost a month left.”

  “I wish. It’s not even half a month.” My sister sighed again.

  I fished a hypoallergenic pierced earring wire from a Ziploc bag and worked it into a little loop I’d made at what I’d randomly decided would be the top of the earring. I executed another perfect twist with my wire, then walked to the bathroom mirror to hold the earring-in-progress up to my nontelephone ear. Not bad, if I did say so myself. Now all I had to do was make another one that looked reasonably like it.

  Geri was still wound up. “They say fifty is the new thirty. I like that. I don’t believe it for a minute
, but I like it a lot.”

  “They say tangerine is the new neutral, too, if that helps any.”

  I swirled my finger around in a jar of sea glass, then placed three likely candidates on the floor in front of me. I covered the receiver and called, “Here, Boyfriend.”

  Apparently I didn’t cover it very well, because Geri said, “Don’t call him Boyfriend. It’s undignified.”

  “I can call him anything I want. It’s not your business.”

  While Geri ignored my comment, something she’d been doing fairly consistently since I was born, Boyfriend, my cat of indeterminate age and lineage, stretched provocatively. He eyed me, as if deciding whether he remembered me or not, then vaulted off the couch and leaned his full weight possessively against my lower left leg.

  I reached down and scratched him behind one ear. He began to purr, and the vibration made the back of my throat tickle, the way it always did. I nodded toward the sea glass. He eyed all three pieces, then reached a paw out like a hockey stick and shot one across the room.

  Boyfriend’s taste was impeccable. “Good boy, Boy,” I said as I stroked him slowly from the top of his head along the full length of his tiger-striped back. I reached down to pick up the winning piece of sea glass. Boyfriend gave me a dismissive look and headed for his water bowl.

  Geri was talking again. “And,” she continued, “they also say that a happy family life and the courage to take on new challenges are the best indicators of a successful transition to the second half century of your life. Rachel, open a window if you’re going to use nail polish in here, and Rebecca, turn that TV down. Now. Half century. God.”