Return to Summerhouse (The Summerhouse 2)

“Use the tub!” Amy said in a commanding voice. “Zoë hasn’t finished the drawing of my son and she can use my bathroom. Go and enjoy yourself.”

“Okay, I will,” Faith said, then left them.

When they were alone in the room, Zoë went to the kitchen, Amy right behind her. “So what do you want to talk to me about?” Zoë asked as she opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white wine.

“What makes you think I want to talk to you?” Amy asked as she washed their wineglasses.

“You lied to Faith about the drawing that I haven’t even started and you’re in the same room with me. Alone. So what do you want to say?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “It’s just that Faith’s story upset me. What do you think really happened to Tyler?”

“He left town. That’s what she said. He hung around that town waiting for the woman he loved to come home from college, and when she did, he saw that she wanted someone else. So Ty did the smart thing and left.”

Amy held out her glass for Zoë to fill from the bottle she’d just opened. “I don’t know. There was something creepy in her story that bothered me.”

“You mean the way Eddie lied, cheated, and manipulated in exactly the same way that his mother did?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. Poor Faith,” she said, leaning against the countertop and sipping her wine. “I feel so sorry for her. She still says that Eddie was the love of her life but how could he be?”

“So what’s in your clean little mind to do? Take her to a hairdresser and give her a makeover?”

“Would you stop it?” Amy said, glaring at Zoë. “I’m beginning to be able to see through your tough-girl act.”

“I guess I’m just a scared little girl under a lot of face paint.”

“Is that what Jeanne said about you?”

Zoë smiled. “Yeah, it’s a direct quote.”

Amy looked toward the bathroom door where she could hear water running. “I wish there was something we could do for her. It’s hard to imagine all that’s happened to her in these past years. She went from being a—”

“Busty redhead,” Zoë said.

“Yes, a busty, lusty redhead, to a…” She looked at Zoë.

“To a worn-out, beaten-down old woman who isn’t even forty yet.”

“I wonder what happened to her mother?”

“Died years ago,” Zoë said. “Faith told me before you arrived. I bet the old bat died happy.”

“Why not? She’d badgered and bullied her only child into marrying a man with a defective heart and—”

“And had a mother-in-law with no heart, but she was rich.”

“I swear that I’ll let my children marry whomever they want,” Amy said.

“Oh yeah? And what if one of your beautiful, college-educated sons comes home with a bleached-blonde high-school dropout on his arm and he tells you he wants to marry her and adopt her three illegitimate children?”

“Good point,” Amy said, looking out the window at the garden. It was late and she should go to bed, but she kept thinking about Faith’s life that had been thrown away. “I wonder if we could find Ty?”

“We? When did you and I become ‘we’?”

“When you drew my husband as the sex god that he is.”

Zoë laughed. “I bet the truth is that he drinks and fornicates.”

“No, that would be his brothers. They’re on second and third wives. But Stephen is perfect.”