Page 47 of Under the Stars

He cocks a confused frown. Then the joke hits him and his face splits wide in the old grin—the one that used to defeat her, every time.

Because why wouldn’t you want to grab hold of that bucket of unfettered joy and drench yourself with it?

Why wouldn’t you give yourself up to that smile?

She remembers the look on his face when they had sex for the first time, the way he couldn’t stop grinning afterward.

Then she remembers that it happened right here in this pool house, on some old cushions they dragged in from the sunbeds because it had started to rain.

Mike doesn’t bear much resemblance to that skinny teenager now.

Well, neither does she. His shoulders fill up the room.

His eyes are mere blue slits below a pair of scraggly eyebrows.

His ginger hair is losing color and volume by the second.

But the grin. The grin she recognizes.

He meets her gaze and the smile fades. “Damn it, Mair,” he says. “How do you still look so hot, when the rest of us are falling apart?”

“I sleep in formaldehyde,” she says.

Mike tilts back his head and laughs from his belly, that stupid laugh of his, and it’s the last straw.

She hasn’t had sex since Thanksgiving, after all, and she’s been on this fucking healthy diet with no booze, no cigarettes, no sugar, no nothing to ping the pleasure centers of her brain, which have always required a lot of pinging to drown out the noise from everything else.

She lifts her hand and touches the corner of his mouth.

He stops laughing. His gaze drops to her breasts, which are perfectly visible under the translucent white linen of her cover-up, even in the moody darkness of the pool house interior.

Go ahead, she thinks. His hands find her hips, underneath the tunic.

The same damn cushions are piled in the corner, reeking of mildew.

But who cares about mildew at a time like this.

—

“Holy Mary,” Mike groans, dead weight on her chest. “I did not the fuck see that coming.”

“Oh my God, you’ve gained weight.” She pushes at his shoulders.

“Sorry.” He lifts himself up on his palms and kisses her. “Did I do okay?”

“Sex was never our problem, Mike.” She closes her eyes to block out his smile. “Damn it. Audrey. ”

“I don’t think she’ll have a problem with this, do you?”

“ This? Audrey isn’t going to know about this, do you hear me?

It’s a one-off. Old times’ sake. And because there’s no one else available.

” She sits up and looks around for her tunic.

“Where is Audrey? You didn’t leave her alone at that fucking inn, did you?

With Harlan Walker running around loose? ”

“She’ll be fine. She’s got a cellphone.” He yawns. “Come back here, babe. Soften up a little, all right? I know you’ve got it in you. Sweet child of mi-ye-ine. Remember how I used to sing that to you?”

Meredith allows herself to be pulled back against Mike’s comfortable chest. It’s funny how her mind rests when she’s there.

No intrusive thoughts. No pieces of memory falling from the blue sky.

Just peace. The throb of contented nerves.

The blissful amnesia induced by a pair of familiar arms. “I think your phone’s ringing,” she murmurs.

“Fuck ’em.”

“No, it might be Audrey.”

“Since when did you turn into such a concerned mother?” he grumbles. But he reaches for his pants anyway and draws his phone from the back pocket. “Mallory Adams ? What the hell?”

Meredith lifts her head. “Who’s Mallory Adams?”

He holds up his index finger and speaks into the phone. “Mallory. Hey. What’s up?”

As Meredith watches, a frown gathers on Mike’s face.

“Are you serious? No, no. Don’t blame yourself, kiddo.

No, I got it. No, keep them there with you.

Audrey’s got the last one with her at the inn.

I’ll bring it here to Greyfriars. Um, yeah, I’m there now.

Checking on some stuff for Audrey.” He flashes a helpless glance at Meredith. “Yep. All right. Sure. Got it.”

“What was that about?” she asks. “And who’s Mallory?”

“Mallory is Monk’s wife, babe, so pull in your damn claws.”

“Monk Adams, you mean? The singer?”

“Yeah, the singer. Also your fucking nephew, remember?”

She grabs his arm. “You haven’t told Audrey, have you?”

“Course not. You get to lob that grenade, not me.”

“All right. So what’s Mallory so upset about?”

Mike hoists himself to his feet with a pained, middle-aged grunt and shakes out his pants.

“Because the cat’s out of the bag, that’s what.

Those paintings? Audrey told you about them, right?

Mallory’s art restorer friend—the one who was helping her out—went out drinking with her artsy fucking friends a week ago and accidentally let slip about the pile of Irvings lying in my cellar. Now it’s all over the news.”

“So? What’s the trouble? It’s a windfall, Mike. You’ll be rich.”

He pulls the T-shirt over his head and gives Meredith a look that shrivels her bones.

“You see? That’s your problem right there, babe,” he says.

—

When Mike leaves, the nostalgia leaves with him. The pool house is just shabby; the mildewed pillows are gross. She picks one up and throws it across the floor.

What was she on, just now? Having sex with Mike Kennedy, proprietor and bartender of the Mohegan fucking Inn on Winthrop Island?

On the floor of a leaky shack covered in gull shit?

How desperate could a woman get? She’s had sex with the literal Sexiest Man Alive—at least, according to People magazine.

Two of them, in fact. Although, to be honest, the sex in both cases was kind of meh.

Men always complain that beautiful women don’t feel they need to perform in bed— well. Vice, meet versa.

Whereas Mike. He aims to please, she’ll give him that. It felt good. She feels good. For the first time in ages.

Then the shriveling look. That’s your problem right there, babe. Like Mike Kennedy has any right to judge her, Meredith Fisher! He has a paunch, for God’s sake.

Thank God she’s leaving in a couple of weeks.

She picks herself up from the floor. As she piles the remaining cushions back in the corner, a scrap of paper catches her notice, on the floor where Mike dropped his pants. She picks it up and holds it by the extreme bottom-right corner. A name card.

Harlan Walker, it says, in tidy thermographic print, with a telephone number printed underneath.

And underneath that, scrawled in ink in a style that reminds her of her grandmother’s handwriting, an address on Bay Hill Lane.

—

When Meredith arrives at the Mohegan Inn half an hour later and props her bicycle against the same back door through which she used to sneak up to Mike’s room thirty years ago, there’s already some kind of commotion going on inside.

The back door’s locked. She walks around the corner of the building, along the side of the parking lot. Mike’s pickup angles into a slice of gravel near the front. She hears his voice through the open door. On the phone, she thinks. Something urgent.

Audrey.

The old panic shoots through her veins. She used to feel it all the time, when Audrey was a baby; even worse when Audrey was a toddler who marched around a world that had, on the turn of a maternal switch, filled with unpredictable dangers.

When she drove Audrey across the country in the back seat of a crappy little Nissan Sentra, as far away from Winthrop as she could get, until she reached the Pacific Ocean and thought, Here.

Over time, the panic faded. Audrey was such a wise, capable child.

Meredith remembers this party when she walked outside at four in the morning, plastered, stoned out of her mind, and Audrey—why was Audrey there?

She can’t remember—Audrey took the keys from her and drove them home.

The party was in Palm Springs and Audrey was maybe fourteen, and they had driven across the desert as the purple dawn lit the rearview mirrors, smell of sagebrush, radio amped to maximum volume, top down on that stupid BMW convertible she had bought—why?

She hadn’t worried about Audrey after that.

She had moved to Montana with Owen and Audrey had gone to that New Age boarding school in New Mexico where she learned to rope a calf and grow tomatoes, alongside all the quadratic equations and the Emily Dickinson.

After that, Audrey had probably worried about her .

Now the panic returns, like it was only ever in remission.

Meredith scoots around the corner of the Mo’s slanting clapboard facade and bursts through the door into the taproom, as Audrey calls it.

Taproom At The Mo, her shirt proclaims. It looks exactly the same as before, only polished up.

Her gaze lands on the heavy ceiling beams, refinished to a depthless auburn gleam, and Meredith thinks— American chestnut.

In the middle of the room stands Mike, locked in some kind of animated exchange with a woman in a navy suit. A suit! Meredith hasn’t seen one of those in months. She spots an open briefcase perched on the corner of the bar. Immaculate papers stacked inside.

Uh-oh, she thinks.

“Mike? What’s going on? Where’s Audrey?”

Mike turns. “That’s a good question. I could use a little backup here. This fucking lawyer here seems to think—”

“ Excuse me, Mr. Kennedy,” the woman says.

Shit, Meredith thinks. That asshole husband of Audrey’s. The restaurant. She tried to warn Audrey, but no. Always determined to prove Meredith wrong. All right, so most of the time she succeeded. But not this time. That man was bad news. Even the damn dog knew it.

Meredith draws in some breath. She can do this.

She sticks out her hand and puts on her warmest public-facing smile. “Hello there. I’m Meredith Fisher. What can I do for you, Ms…. ?”

“Burnside,” the woman whispers. “I’m sorry, are you…are you actually …”