Autumn Dreams Read Free

“Mom?”
    “She’s sitting in my living room right now.” Mrs. Martin made a tsk-tsk sound. “She’s come looking for Elsie.”
    Cass closed her eyes. “I’ll be right there.”
    “Don’t rush. She’s calm for the moment, drinking a cup of tea.”
    Cass grabbed her red sweater, her keys and purse; patted Flossie quickly as she rushed past; and raced to her car parked in the paved area off the back alley. What was she going to do about Mom? And where was Dad, for heaven’s sake?
    Oh, Father God, what do I do?
    Thankful that her parents lived only a few blocks from SeaSong, Cass turned the corner onto Scallop Street, a residential neighborhood full of small, cozy retirement homes set back five blocks from the ocean. All the houses were neat and tidy, all lawns small with healthy but unimaginative plantings, all except her parents’ home where mums, marigolds, and petunias still bloomed in clusters of lush color while a clematis vine with small, sweetly scented white flowers climbed the porch rail.
    She pulled up in front of her parents’ white clapboard home and hurried up the walk past the porch planters of still glowing if slightly leggy red geraniums. Maybe Mom had come home. She opened the front door. “Dad? Mom?”
    “I’m in the kitchen, Cassandra,” her father answered. “Come on back.”
    Cass walked through the jam-packed living room where floral-covered chairs too big for the space sat cheek and jowl with a monster plaid sofa that could be pulled out into a queen-sized bed, had there been room to open it. The clutter and colors always made Cass shudder. Home décor had never been Mom’s strong suit, and recently that shaky skill had deteriorated even more.
    “I can’t give up my treasures,” Mom had said when she and Dad moved into the small Seaside house from the much larger one in the Gardens at the north end of the island where they hadraised Cass and the brothers. Mom had not only held on to almost everything, but she’d added considerably to her stock courtesy of all the garage sales she faithfully attended.
    “Look at this beautiful vase.” Or picture or little statue. “I thought of you as soon as I saw it.”
    Somehow a matador on black velvet didn’t seem the perfect gift to Cass, though her lack of enthusiasm never deterred her mother. Sleazy treasures appeared mysteriously in her antique-filled B&B. After years of trying to convince her mother that plastic flowers and little gnomes with their noses chipped didn’t go with SeaSong’s decorating scheme, she’d given up. She couldn’t deal with the flood of tears that filled Mom’s pale blue eyes at the criticism.
    Instead, she rounded the knickknacks up after Mom left. Since Mom never remembered what she’d put where, the only price Cass paid for her lack of appreciation for her mother’s eclectic taste was a back room full of atrocious oddities. She’d have a garage sale of her own if it weren’t so bad for business. Tacky. Plebian. When you aimed to be the best in the county, maybe even the state, and when you had guests paying a considerable sum for the privilege of staying at SeaSong, such things mattered.
    “Where’s Mom?” she asked her father as she walked into the kitchen, bright with sunshine and the yellow and white color scheme. The yellow was so brilliant and the paint finish so shiny that Cass invariably got a headache every time she spent more than fifteen minutes in the room.
    Dad sat at the kitchen table and barely looked up from the papers he was playing with. “I don’t know. Upstairs, I guess.”
    She looked at his bent head. He had beautiful white hair, thick with barely any receding at the hairline. His slim mustache matched his hair, and he kept it carefully clipped. When he was younger, she’d always thought he looked like Errol Flynn, though she never told him so.
    “Those people involved in movies are in league with the devil,” was one of his favorite lines as she and the brothers grew up.