Independence Day

On the verge of sleep or not, he sat bolt upright in the hammock. “No sex?” With the wild look of someone with one foot in dreams and the other in reality, he spotted his daughter lost in her music and lowered his voice. “Are you out of your mind?”

She seemed to have his attention now.

“Just till we’re back on track as a couple, hon.” She massaged the tense muscles of his back. “Sex can cloud the issue.”

“Dammit, we’re married.”

“I’m well aware of that. But I’d like to feel as if we were courting. And I, for one, am embracing celibacy until that hearts-and-flowers feeling returns.”

“What are you trying to do to me, Chess?”

“Us, Nick. Us. And I’m trying to make us better.”

Angry, he stood up. “Well, it sure feels as if it’s all about me. And none of it feels good.” He stormed off the terrace, past Isabel, who appeared oblivious to her father’s distress.

Chessie slumped back in the hammock as the first of the fireworks exploded overhead with a tremendous boom and a dizzying display of color.

CHAPTER THREE

TEN HOURS LATER Nick still fumed.

Last night, afraid he might say something he’d regret in the morning, he’d left Chessie on the terrace without discussing her ridiculous challenge. He’d been too frustrated to debate what he didn’t understand. Besides, pure physical exhaustion had caught up with him. He’d headed to bed.

He hadn’t slept, however, and his wife hadn’t joined him in their bedroom.

Morning had dawned with confusion dogging his sleep-deprived brain. Even now, after all the words exchanged yesterday, he didn’t see why she’d become dissatisfied with their marriage. And celibacy after eighteen years together? What a crock. He felt manipulated and hoped the old sofa in her studio, where she’d more than likely spent the night, had been lumpy.

He’d looked forward to reading the morning paper to see if he was still in the same universe he’d been in before the Fourth, but the new paper carrier had tossed it in the birdbath.

Aggravated before the work day had begun, he pounded the steering wheel of his old and cranky Volvo as he prepared to head to school. He empathized with cranky, wincing at the grinding sound the car’s transmission made when he pulled out of the driveway. Not unlike the discordant, grating gears of his once well-oiled life.

He’d stop at Tindall’s Service Center on the way to school and leave the car to be checked. John would give him a ride to work.

His thoughts crowded, Nick scratched the back of his neck in irritation. The mosquitoes had feasted on him last night, and now the nonstop itching was driving him nuts. At least something had been hungry for his body, he thought sourly.

Using extreme caution, he drove the short distance to the service center. As he pulled into the lot, he experienced a pang of envy for the automotive work of John Tindall, his former classmate. With machines, when something went wrong, the problem was real, physical and, for the most part, observable.

Unlike relationships.

As he stepped out of the car, Nick wished he could raise Chessie on a lift, hook her up to a diagnostic machine.

“Nick.” John hailed him from the gas pumps where he was putting out pails of water and windshield cleaning squeegees. “How’s it going?”

Nick shook his head. John didn’t really want to know. “If I leave my car here, could you look at my transmission sometime today? I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

“What I’m hearing,” John replied with a grin, “is that Chessie’s set to reform you.”

Just what Nick needed as he went about the delicate business of hiring new teachers, some new to the area. What if this gossip filtered through his staff to the recruits? How would it affect his image as a professional and a leader?

He spied Abigail, John’s wife and bookkeeper, peeking out from behind curtains in the office window, an unmistakable smile on her pretty face. Nick sighed heavily. “You know Chessie, John. Just some Fourth-of-July hijinks.”

“If you say so.” The mechanic wiped his hands on a rag.

“Oh, hell!” Nick ran his fingers through his hair. “Do you know what women really want?”

John snorted. “Abigail says all she wants is a little bit more than she’s ever going to get.”

“But what exactly is that little bit more?”

“In Abigail’s case, money.”

Nick shook his head. That wasn’t the case with Chessie. Or was it? She’d said she wanted to be romanced. Did that mean expensive jewelry and exotic bouquets? Those things hadn’t mattered to her in the past. But, as far as he’d been concerned, Chessie had seemed content, and look at how wrong he’d been on that score.

“What about romance?” he asked.

“Frankly, Abigail seems to get her kicks from a ledger in the black. But what do I know?”

“You’re saying you haven’t a clue.”

“Not a one.” John raised his hat, repositioned it, then set it back on his head in the age-old male gesture that begged to change the subject. “So, you want a ride to work?”

“Yeah. I hope you’re better at figuring out transmissions than you are at figuring out women.”

At the high school, Hattie St. Regis, his administrative assistant, met him with a fresh pot of coffee and a double-parked agenda. “Restful holiday?” she asked, her eyes betraying no sign of gossip-induced interest.

“Yes,” he lied, trying to focus on the day planner on his desk, obscured with new paperwork.

“Good. We have quite a schedule today.” She poured them each a cup of coffee. “I’m thinking of getting an espresso machine in this place. Regular coffee just doesn’t spark my plugs any more.”

What did spark women’s plugs these days? He didn’t dare ask Hattie’s advice. For the past year the two of them had maintained a strictly professional relationship.

Shuffling papers, he spotted a petition from a large section of last year’s female student body, requesting the addition of an elective course on women’s studies.

“Hattie.” He held up the petition. “I think we’ve been vigilant in updating our curriculum. We’ve tried to include important contributions, events, philosophies from all groups regardless of ethnicity or gender.”

“Yes?”

“So why would we need a separate women’s studies class?” He noted her sharply raised eyebrows. “I mean, if we’re sincerely trying to appreciate the accomplishments of women in the curriculum at large, why would women want to segregate the issue? What do women want or need that’s so different from what men want or need?”

She eyed him sharply without speaking, and he wondered if she didn’t see clear through to his real question.

“Do you want a professional opinion or a personal one?”

He swallowed hard and took the plunge. “Personal.”

“Women of any age want to be taken seriously. Need to be noticed for the whole of who and what we are.” A hint of mischief warmed her eyes. “Sometimes we have to get demonstrative. With, say…petitions.”

She picked up her coffee mug and turned to leave his office. Over her shoulder she added, “If I were you, I’d okay the women’s studies course…and I’d pick up a big box of Chessie’s favorite chocolates on your way home tonight. It’s not a solution, but it’s a start.”

Nick rubbed his eyes. Everyone wanted to be taken seriously. To be noticed for their skills and accomplishments. Women couldn’t claim that need as their own. But Chessie felt strongly enough about it that she was afraid of turning forty and faded.

How could his own red, white and blue trumpeter feel faded? She was Technicolor, for crying out loud. Neon. Hadn’t he told her as much time and time again?

Hadn’t he?

Hattie was right. He’d pick up chocolates on his way home from work. And he’d find out all about that pottery project the museum trustee had shown interest in—a fifteen hundred dollar interest, no less. Maybe then Chessie would forget about her ridiculous no-sex challenge.

And if she didn’t? Well, Nick might just have to admit he had a problem. But wasn’t solving problems his stock-in-trade?

CHESSIE SUPPRESSED A SCREAM and the urge to hose down her heel-dragging daughter, who didn’t seem to care that her mother couldn’t wait to hook up with the art class that would begin in fifteen minutes. Couldn’t wait to be in the company of artists like herself. Self-motivated adults. As compared to her girls, who’d fought her at every turn today.

“Isabel,” she said, trying desperately not to nag. “I’ll be back in two hours. Your dad should be home from work by then. We can eat any time after that.” With dismay she viewed the mountain of dirty Fourth-of-July dishes. Obviously, she needed to provide some impetus. Not nagging, but nudging. “You can’t prepare supper, and we can’t eat without clean recruits from the dish department.”

“This is so unfair,” the teenager complained.

“Unfair or not, dishes happen.”

“But I have a headache.” With a pained expression, Isabel sank against the counter.

Chessie felt no sympathy. Her elder daughter was prone to hypochondria and a sort of Victorian lethargy. “A lovely hand-soak in dishwater should cure it.”

“We have to be the only house in Maine without a dishwasher. It’s absolutely prehistoric.”

“Nevertheless.” Chessie heard Gabriella thumping down the stairs. “Ah, reinforcements. I’m sure you and your sister—” She gasped in shock.

Gabriella, whose wavy strawberry-blond hair had been her crowning glory, now sported a buzz cut with only a fringe of bangs, which she had dyed a startling lime-green.

“Gabriella!” Chessie squeaked. “What have you done?”

“Don’t go ballistic.” Her younger daughter shrugged. “You’re not the only one in this family entitled to a little recognition.”

“But your hair…” Even Isabel seemed stunned by her sister’s daring.

Gabriella slouched against the door frame. “It’s not as if I pierced anything.”

“Oh, gawd! Just wait till Dad sees,” Isabel drawled dramatically. “You do remember Dad. The principal of your school for the next four years. You might as well learn early he’s a dictator when it comes to the dress code.”

“It’ll grow back by September.”

The new Chessie bit her tongue. Let Gabby deal with her ’do and any consequences. Chessie was headed for professional development.

“Dishes and dinner, girls.”

“We’ve got it covered,” Gabriella replied, reaching into the Mason jar that held money for emergencies. “On our way back from the mall we’ll stop at Boston Market and pick up supper.”

More tongue biting on Chessie’s part. She’d told Nick she didn’t care if takeout was on the menu. “Okay,” she conceded, “but feed the cats, please.”

She had to leave quickly before she reverted to form.

Once outside and hustling toward the town square, she spied the Art Guild members coming out of the Atlantic Hall where the class was to convene in the huge community room above the library. “What’s happening?” she called to Betsy O’Meara, a watercolorist.

“Our model canceled. She broke a leg, hiking.”

Chessie’s spirits fell. She had so looked forward to this, two hours of escape from worrying about her uncooperative daughters and the silent treatment Nick had given her since her declaration last night. She needed to test her fragile wings, to feel a part of a supportive like-minded community, if only temporarily. And, at this point, she didn’t care how she engineered it.

“I’ll take the model’s place,” she volunteered, jogging up to Betsy.

“You will?” The bushy white eyebrows of eighty-year-old sculptor Sandy Weston shot skyward.

“Not nude,” Chessie clarified. “My college days are over. Draped will have to do. Is there anything I can use to wrap myself in?”

“Perhaps.” Betsy looked dubious as she led the way up the stairs to the multipurpose room. “We share this space with so many other groups that we don’t like to leave much behind. Things tend to disappear.” She headed for the easels and stools pushed into the corner. “There’s this backdrop fabric.”

“Eew!” Glancing with dismay at the ratty piece of cloth, Chessie shivered at the thought of it against her skin. “I have an old white sheet that should make me look quite Greco-Roman. It won’t take a minute to get it.”

A chorus of thank-yous met her offer as she hastened downstairs and back across the square. It was the sheet she’d thrown over the studio sofa last night. Hopefully she could be in and out with it before anyone even knew she’d been back. So she didn’t have to explain…. Suddenly she felt angry at herself for feeling furtive. She’d suggested posing draped, for pity’s sake. Not nude. A big difference. She wasn’t certain, however, that Nick would, should he hear of it, see the distinction. Well, he didn’t have to hear of it.

The sheet fetched and bundled under her arm, she fairly flew back to the hall. It was so exciting to be part of an art class again.

“Chessie!” Thomas Crane, the UPS driver, called out to her from his truck parked in front of the hardware store. “Chasing Nick with leftover laundry?”

Exhilarated by the divergence from routine, she laughed. “No! I’m posing at the Art Guild,” she replied over her shoulder as she gained the Atlantic Hall doorway, immediately regretting her words. Thomas was an awful gossip.

Maybe he hadn’t heard her. Hope sprang eternal.

Hurrying up the stairs, she burst into the class as the members finished pushing the easels and stools into place.

Betsy came forward. “You’re a love! This isn’t much of a first day for you, but the rest of us appreciate it.”

“No problem.” Chessie ducked behind a screen set up for the model, slipped her arms out of her tank top so that it became a tube top, shed her capris and sandals, then began to drape, tuck and knot the sheet. “I’m just glad to be here. It beats making tuna casserole.”

She might not be sitting behind an easel today as planned, but in front of one, she certainly wasn’t invisible.

Satisfied with her impromptu toga, she emerged from behind the screen to perch on the model’s stool in the center of the circle of artists. A peace descended on her as she shifted positions until the guild members chose one in particular.

The past two days hadn’t gone smoothly, but she felt certain that with strength of purpose it was only a matter of time before her family realized her need for space and recognition. After that hurdle had been cleared, returning Nick to romance would be a snap.

SITTING BESIDE Felicity Kincaid in the town’s one taxi, Nick pressed his foot to the floor as if he could increase the vehicle’s speed from the passenger’s seat. “Can’t you go any faster?”

“I could,” the cabbie replied, “but it would probably mean losing my license. What’s the hurry anyway?”

Chessie.

Yesterday his wife had bared her soul publicly on a sandwich board. Today, according to Thomas Crane, she was planning to bare her body as well. Posing for the Art Guild.

Everyone knew that figure drawing classes used nudes. But not his nude, his wife. Call him a chauvinist, but Chessie’s body was for his eyes only.

“It’s a family emergency,” he muttered.

“It wouldn’t have to do with your wife throwing your laundry out the window, would it?”

“No.” Nick bit back an oath. The laundry seemed tame compared to today’s antics.

“Uh-huh.” The normally loquacious cab driver seemed to suppress a grin. “We’ll get you to your destination safe and sound. The Atlantic Hall, you said?”

“Right.” He looked out the window as if he found the passing New England scenery fascinating, hoping Felicity would think conversation an intrusion.

Truth be told, he couldn’t think straight. Chessie, with her unlikely behavior, had yanked out his emotional underpinnings, sending his senses and his thoughts reeling. He could only await her next salvo. He’d always thought of himself as a proactive kind of guy. He hated feeling reactive.

Because Pritchard’s Neck was a small community, it didn’t take long before Felicity pulled up in front of the hall. Reaching in his pocket and withdrawing a twenty, Nick dropped it on the front seat, then vaulted from the taxi without waiting for change. The moment’s urgency overrode any sense of frugality.

He had to get to Chessie before she took her clothes off. Or if she’d stripped already, he had to bundle her up and hustle her home, back to routine and sanity. He was prepared to bodily carry her away if necessary. Pressing through the hall’s outer door, he charged up the stairs, up to the meeting room where his wife might even now be lounging in the altogether.

Chessie had posed, briefly, as a single college student. Back then, he’d thought her daring sexy. Now, the thought made him seethe. What in blazes did the woman think this stunt was going to do to two impressionable teenage daughters?

“Chessie!” His voice echoed on the upper landing as he thrust the door to the meeting room open and caught the gaze of the lovely model in the circle of easels. Chessie. His Chessie.

She reclined against a stool, her arms, shoulders and feet bare, one slender leg emerging from the folds of a white sheet draped about her as if she was a Greek goddess. She’d swept her Titian hair up on top of her head, exposing her long, smooth neck. Surprisingly, she showed more flesh when she bicycled about town in tank top and gym shorts, but somehow the toga was more sultry, more suggestive. His wife was, in fact, unmistakably, breathtakingly beautiful.

And, having burst, like a Viking marauder on drugs, into the room full of fellow Pritchard’s Neck residents, he felt the fool. Yet he still couldn’t bring himself to let go of the unaccountable anger he felt.

Chessie beamed at him, then turned to the stunned little group. “It’s about time to take a break, yes?”

The artists agreed with alacrity as if Nick might begin the pillage at any moment.

Swishing lightly toward him, Chessie seemed a different woman. Neither of this time or place. Certainly not the mother of two teenage girls.

For a minute Nick had thoughts of how her costume might play out in their bedroom. Abruptly, he reined in those thoughts. If he could be turned on by this getup, what about Sandy Weston over there, pretending to put the finishing touches on his sketch, or Patrick Goodall who seemed to pay a great deal of attention to the sharpening of his pencil?

Nick had always consigned jealousy to the knuckle-draggers, but now Chessie’s exposure cut deep to a possessiveness he didn’t know he had.

She drew him out on the landing, then closed the door behind them. “I’m assuming UPS delivered more than the usual school supplies.”

“You assume right.” Trying and failing to find a neutral tone of voice, he lifted the corner of her toga. “This isn’t what I had in mind when you said you were joining a professional group.”

“It’s just for today. The model canceled. Next week I’ll be on the other side of the easel. Fully clothed.”

After today, with his all-too-public reaction to her participation, he didn’t want her on either side of the easel with this group. He wondered if she even had anything on under that outfit.

She touched his cheek with her fingertips. Her eyes flashed mischief. “Were you about to carry me off, Nick?”

“If you were nude, yes.” He felt like one of his students caught doing something rash and adolescent. And totally uncool.

“How politically incorrect,” she sighed. “How impulsive. How almost romantic. Against my better judgment, I’m flattered.”

She thought his actions romantic? She was flattered?

Comprehension dawned.

“So this is how you’d have me spice up our marriage?” he demanded. “Cut out of work early? Spend my last twenty on a cab? Barge like a fool into a group of residents, three of them with kids in my school?” Prickly heat rose up the back of his neck.

“You spent your last twenty on a cab?” she asked as if she hadn’t heard anything else. “That’s something my boyfriend Nick would do.”

“Well, boyfriend Nick didn’t have three mouths to feed.” He gestured toward the closed door. “That seems beside the point now. What are those people thinking?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. They only know you’re upset. We have two teenage daughters. It could be anything.”

“But it was you.”

“Yes.” A dreamy look crept into her eyes. “You came for me—in a cab that wasn’t in the budget, no less—because you were, what, intrigued? Jealous? Hot to get behind one of those easels yourself and take up a new career?”

“I was—am—ticked.”

“That’s better than preoccupied.”

Suddenly weary, he turned away. “Don’t expect me to play the town fool again to inject some fizz in a marriage that you, for some reason, seem to think has gone flat. I’m going home.”

Chessie reached for him. “Just when we’ve begun to get to the heart of the matter?”

“Is that what you call it?” Eluding her touch, he started downstairs. “I thought we’d reached an impasse.”

“You can’t walk away, Nick!” She opened the door to the meeting room and called, “Sorry, folks. Family emergency. See you next week,” then followed her husband down the stairs and out the door into the town square.

Nick winced. Although he didn’t pause to look over his shoulder, he could imagine how she looked, barefoot and determined, with that…that…toga flapping.

It was just his luck that Eban Hoffman, one of the local lobstermen, stood at the hardware store gas pumps, filling his pickup, watching with taciturn interest every movement on the square. Six hounds in the truck bed stood at attention as they spotted Chessie, who padded up alongside Nick.

“Would you slow down?” she asked, breathless, clutching fabric to her chest. “My sheet’s unraveling.”

Sure enough, great swaths of the makeshift robe flapped like pennants in the brisk coastal breeze. She was in danger of exposing more than shoulders and arms.

What did she have on under that thing?

Eban’s dogs, excited by the movement, began to bark and pace the truck bed, eager to get out and join the fun. Their owner, more interested in the drama playing out before him than in controlling his dogs, stood staring and scratching his head.

Nick refused to prolong this public entertainment. With authority, he swept Chessie into his arms and began marching for the privacy of home, the sheet billowing out behind them.

“Oh, my,” Chessie said as if this was just the afternoon’s activity she’d had in mind.

Not about to waste breath explaining to her that his actions did not in any way constitute romance or a harbinger of marital changes to come, he picked up his pace. He simply wanted to get her off the square before disaster struck.

Too late.

“Come back he-ah this instant!” Eban shouted.

Nick heard the playful canine whines, heard the scrabble of claws on asphalt, heard the jingle of rabies tags before the dogs surrounded them. Yapping, jumping, snapping and intent on seizing whatever loose fabric they could reach in a frenzied game of tug o’ war, they probably hadn’t had this much fun since that crate of spider crabs got loose at the pier.

Chessie shrieked as two dogs, their toothy grip firm in a corner of trailing sheet, their eight combined feet planted in the roadside grass, threatened by sheer dog-headedness to unwrap her.

Nick broke into a jog.

Just as Eban and Hamilton Quick, owner of the hardware store, caught up with them, one of the dogs, leaped up and snapped. Instead of coming away with a prized hunk of fabric, he sank his teeth into Nick’s left buttock.

CHAPTER FOUR

WERE HER PARENTS TRYING to screw up her life totally?

It sure seemed that way.

Having escaped to Keri’s room, Gabriella wanted to disappear from the face of the earth. Pushing herself back into the mound of stuffed animals on her friend’s bed, she tried to erase the awful memory of them in the square just now. Tried to focus on the perfectly normal trip to the mall beforehand. Focus on her new flavored lip gloss. On running into Danny Aiken, Keri’s boyfriend. On Danny saying how phat Gabriella’s haircut was…