The Promise of Paradise

Chapter Nine


Ash balanced a grocery bag in the crook of each arm and propped open the front door. She blew her bangs off her forehead. Where was the mild summer the weatherman had promised back in May? Each day in Paradise, she’d woken to nothing but humid temperatures that hovered around ninety. No rain, no relief, just heat and heaviness pouring down from above. At only noon on a Saturday, she’d already soaked through a T-shirt on her way back from the store.

“Ugh.” She let the bags slide to the floor and checked her mailbox. She’d worked well past midnight last night, thanks to a lively crowd that kept the band playing long after regular closing. She really couldn’t complain, though, not with a pocket full of tips that totaled well over a hundred dollars.

Someone giggled.

Ash closed the rusted door to her mailbox and spun around. She frowned. No one on the porch. No gaggle of pre-teen girls walking along the sidewalk. She heard it again: a giggle, definitely feminine. Turning in a slow circle, she eyed Eddie’s door.

“Woman stays the night, things get complicated…”

She swallowed. Looked as though Eddie had set himself up for some complications after all. She negotiated the paper bags back into her arms, wanting to get upstairs as quickly as she could. Sure, her housemate was entitled to entertain whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, but that didn’t mean she had any interest in seeing who it might be. They hadn’t spoken since that night in the bar, and she’d done her best to keep it that way. What would she say to him, anyway?

Ash turned away, but not quickly enough. Eddie’s door opened, and a petite blonde stepped into the foyer. Eddie followed. At their feet trotted the kitten, batting at the blonde’s heels.

“Y’all are too much,” she said, with a nudge at Eddie’s chest. “I don’t believe a single thing you say.” The words floated on the air, laced with a southern accent. Her mouth crinkled up at the edges as she laughed. Eddie scooped up the kitten and, with a rough pet across the top of its head, steered it back inside his apartment. The moment he shut his door, though, it began to cry, in plaintive little mews that broke Ash’s heart.

She stared at a patch of wall behind Eddie’s head, one knee propped under a grocery bag that had begun to seep something sticky.

“Oh, hi,” the blonde said. “I didn’t see you standing there.”

Ash felt her grip loosening. “Hi.”

“I’m Savannah,” she added.

Ash fought back a smile. Savannah? Did people really name their children such things? Yet somehow it fit this model-thin woman standing in the entryway, smelling like Eddie’s soap and flushed with morning lovemaking. Her fingers threw long, thin shadows on the walls as she adjusted her ponytail, like anemone waving in ocean breezes. Ash looked down at her own knotty knuckles and wondered if Eddie noticed hands as much as she did.

“Ash,” she said after a minute. “I live upstairs.”

“Oh.” The blonde’s eyes widened. “You’re the lawyer, right?”

Ash shot Eddie a look. He’d told his bed bunny about her? While something about that pleased her, down deep where she didn’t dare analyze it, she didn’t need too many people knowing about her past. Least of all someone who probably chattered to half of Paradise on a daily basis. Ash should have known better. She should have kept it all to herself, every last detail. It was just safer that way.

“Well, sort of. I haven’t passed the bar exam yet.”

Savannah shook her head. “Wow. I couldn’t even make it through two semesters at JC. Too boring.”

Ash’s back began to ache. She glanced at Eddie. Say something. Don’t just stand there. But he didn’t. Not to her, anyway. He just put his arm around Savannah’s waist after a minute and led her out into the morning.

Ash watched them go, and jealousy sparked a hot stone in her stomach. That’s what he likes? A ditzy bottle-blonde who barely made it out of high school? She slid to a seat, knees rubbery. Raspberry jelly had leaked through one bag, gluing her shorts to her legs. She rubbed her temples and told herself not to care.

She'd barely had a half-dozen conversations with him. He wasn't her type, anyway. He spent two years in college. She went to Harvard. He spent his life in Paradise, and she was using it as a place to hide out. He dated a different woman each week. She was trying to get over a three-year relationship. He fixed cars, and she—what, Ash? What exactly are you going to do with yourself now that you’ve decided that a hundred-thousand dollar degree isn’t going to work out the way you’d planned?

As if on cue, her cell began to ring.

Ash pulled the phone out of her pocket and checked the screen. Her oldest sister. Terrific.

“Hello?”

“Ashton? Where are you?” Jessica Kirk-Malloy’s voice, no-nonsense and demanding an answer, spat through the receiver.

“What do you mean, where am I?”

“Don’t play stupid. I know you moved out of your apartment. I saw Colin last week.” She paused, and the edges of her words softened a little. “I didn’t know you two broke up. Sorry.”

Like you really care. “Yeah, well, things weren’t working out.”

“Mm hmm.” Jess paused. “So what happened? Dad knows you turned down the job at Deacon and Mathers, by the way. He’s furious. You know he went to school with Bill Mathers, right?”

Of course she knew. It was all he’d talked about after they offered her the position. It was the other, unspoken, reason Ash hadn’t felt right about taking it. She wanted to prove herself after law school, make it on her own. Finding out her father had pulled strings had soured her on the whole deal.

“Mom says you’ve been avoiding her calls.”

“I haven’t been avoiding them. She just calls when I’m sleeping. Or working.”

“So you can’t call her back?”

“And say what?” Ash exploded. “How’s life on the home front? Is Dad ready for the hearing? Tell me, Jess, did he call in another favor to avoid jail time, or is that the next headline I’m going to read when I pick up the paper?”

“Don’t be cruel.”

What am I supposed to be, then? The good little daughter, who stands by her family no matter what?

“When are you coming home?” Jess tried another line of questioning.

“I’m not.”

Pause. “What does that mean?”

Ash rubbed at the stain on her shorts. Her fingers came away red. “It means I’m taking some time off this summer, okay? Yeah, I left Boston for a while. To get my head straight. Sorry if you and Anne have to handle the media circus by yourselves. But I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t.” To her surprise, Ash began to cry. Little choking noises broke from her lips.

Jess didn’t say anything.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad, please?”

“What am I supposed to say when they ask?”

“That I’m subletting an apartment for the summer.”

“Where?”

“New Hampshire.” It was as much as she could say.

“New—” Jess sputtered for a minute and then ran out of steam. “Fine. I’ll do my best to lie for you.” The guilt stabbed Ash right where she knew her sister meant it to.

Jess sighed. “You’re sure you’re okay? Do you need anything?” The softness in her voice threw Ash for a minute.

Jessica Kirk had always been the strong one, in charge of the three sisters from the time they were little. She was the director of all their backyard plays, the ruler of the tree fort and the sandbox. She was the one who tattled to Mom and Dad, the one who doled out cookies after dinner, the one who turned off the porch light if her younger sisters stayed out after dark. She’d been six going on sixteen going on forty, even back then.

“I’m okay, thanks. But I have to go. Tell Anne I said hi.”

“Tell her yourself,” Jess said. “You don’t have to ignore her too.”

Ash hung up before she could work up to words she knew she’d regret. She grabbed the groceries and hauled them to her apartment. She dropped everything on the kitchen counter and headed for the shower, pulling off her clothes as she went. She could picture Jess dialing their other sister, gossiping about where poor little Ash had ended up. They’d laugh, the two of them, with their wonderful law degrees and gung-ho political campaigns. They’d laugh and wonder how Ash had turned out so different from the rest of the Kirk family.

She turned on the shower, left it cold, and stepped under the stream of water. The chill took her breath away, and for an instant she was glad. At least goose bumps might make her forget where she was. Eddie. The blonde. Her father. Jess. Ash let the water run down her back and shivered. At that particular moment, everything in her life seemed twisted up and wrong.

Every single thing.