Safe Harbor Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kip’s
invitation. Just because her mother had married her father at the
age of twenty-one, just because she’d never had an outside job—let
alone a career—or an identity apart from “Mary Ballard, wife and
mother,” just because she’d never done anything solo didn’t mean
she couldn’t go to the Strouds’.
    She was nervous, though, and because she was
Shelley couldn’t be. Giving up on her hair, she tossed her brush
onto the dresser and stepped into her sandals. She wore a polo
shirt, khaki shorts and a thin gold chain about her neck—a birthday
present from her father. The best thing she could say about her
appearance was that, six weeks into the summer, she had acquired a
dynamite tan.
    “Well, let’s go,” her mother said brightly. It
was obvious that she was trying hard to be cheerful despite the
absence of her husband.
    Downstairs, Shelley’s mother stopped in the
kitchen to pick up her purse and a bottle of Zinfandel. When her
mother had purchased the wine Shelley had tactfully reminded her
that people at barbecues drank beer and soda, but her mother
wouldn’t listen. “When someone invites you to dinner,” she
explained, “it’s correct to bring a bottle of wine.”
    Her mother handed her the bottle once they were
both seated in the car. Shelley recited the directions, and her
mother drove. Her grip on the wheel wasn’t too tight, but Shelley
could sense the anxiety in her mother’s slender arms, in her taut
jaw, in her rigid posture as she squinted in the early-evening
sunlight. As much as Shelley missed her father, she realized her
mother missed him in different ways—not only because she wanted to
see him and talk to him, but because she felt insecure and exposed
without him.
    Shelley had always admired her parents’
marriage. Some of her classmates had divorced parents, and they
seemed sad and confused about it. But until this summer, when
strange, ominous undercurrents kept churning through her family,
Shelley had considered her parents an ideal couple. George Ballard
conquered the world and Mary Ballard organized the home front.
George earned the money and Mary spent it wisely, not on trinkets
and junk but on the sort of clothes, household furnishings and
jewelry that would earn the family a respectable place in the
world. Shelley’s parents strove hard; they looked good together;
they complemented each other.
    It had always seemed to work so well—until this
summer. Something was amiss, a gear out of alignment, a clamp
broken, two pieces of metal rubbing together, creating friction,
setting off sparks. For the first time in her life, Shelley found
herself wondering whether being in such a tight, self-contained
marriage was a good thing, after all.
    At least, she resolved, when she got married
she would have her own career. None of this
not-used-to-traveling-solo stuff for her. She would marry, of
course—a strong, ethical, handsome man like her father, a man
devoted to taking care of her, even if she would require less care
than her mother. She would marry a wonderful guy and live happily
ever after, but she would never let herself become dependent on
him.
    “That’s the driveway over there,” Shelley said,
gesturing toward the opening in the stone wall. She’d pointed out
the Stroud place to her parents before, but she didn’t blame her
mother for not remembering. There were so many pretty stone walls
on the island, so many tangled hedges of rose and honeysuckle, so
many charming Victorian houses crowned with cupolas.
    The sounds of laughter and conversation wafted
through the car’s open windows as Shelley’s mother steered up the
driveway, braking to a halt behind a mud-spattered Jeep. Outside
the car, her mother took the bottle of wine from Shelley and they
started around the house to the emerald stretch of lawn at the
rear. There they came upon a crowd of some twenty people: older
folks seated on lawn chairs, sipping beer and iced tea; two
youngsters playing badminton