Tides of the Heart Read Free Page A

beauty of cell phones, huh?”
    Boston? she wondered. Wasn’t that awfully close to Martha’s Vineyard?
    She closed her eyes and tried not to think what she was thinking. Then she said something like yes, well, call me when you get back into town, then good-bye. But when she’d hung up the phone, Jess stared out the window and did everything in her power to convince herself that the fact Chuck was in Boston meant nothing at all, that just because he was so much like Charles did not mean he followed in every one of his footsteps. Besides, she reasoned, Chuck was her son. And he would never do anything to hurt his mother.
    She turned back to her list to divert her thoughts.
    Father.
    Miss Taylor
—the housemother.
    P.J.
,
Susan, Ginny
—her long-ago friends.
    She thought of her friends now and of how only Ginny—of all people—had had a happy ending. She smiled and wondered how Ginny would handle such an obscure letter, and if she would stoop to accusing her own child of the deed.

Chapter 2
    Ginny Stevens-Rosen-Smith-Levesque-Edwards preferred to divorce husbands. Not bury them. She stood in the front of the dim funeral home room in L.A. and stared into the oak casket framed in camellias, Jake’s favorite flowers.
    “You son of a bitch,” she whispered at the satin-covered pillow that cushioned his motionless head. “You rotten, pig-fucking, son of a bitch.”
    He had no right to die. For five years, Ginny had been faithful to him. She had
loved
him, for chrissakes, if love was a word that anyone could define beyond saying it was a feeling that made you do bizarre things, like be faithful and give a shit when you wished that you didn’t. But she
had
been faithful and had given a shit, at least for the past five years. And all it had gotten her was nowhere, except right here, staring into the box that held the bones of the man she had loved, and hoping she’d picked out the right kind of casket, and that he would have liked the pale blue satin lining.
    Everyone but Ginny had been surprised that Jake had specified he did not want to be cremated in popular California style. True, Los Angeles was overcrowded and landwas at a premium. But Jake had always been afraid of fire, and Ginny knew that. She knew that the same way she knew so much else about her husband—the fact that he harbored a secret longing to be a singer though he couldn’t carry a tune, the fact that he had become a successful documentary film producer only because his alcoholic ex-wife, the mother of his two children, had not wanted him to, and the fact that he was the best goddamn thing that ever happened to Ginny.
    And now where was he? Cold as a clam. Dead as a doornail. The rotten son of a bitch.
    The touch of a cool hand at her elbow did not avert Ginny’s eyes from the pillow under his head.
    “Ginny?” The voice came from Lisa, Ginny’s TV-star daughter, the only person left on earth now who gave a shit about
her.
“They want to begin the service, Ginny. Come and sit down.”
    Drawing in a breath, Ginny nearly gagged on the pungent aroma of hundreds of floral grotesqueries: pots and baskets and sprays and vases from studios and clients and actors and producers—everyone in the movie business who was shocked that Jake Edwards had dropped dead at sixty-four. Of course, many of the flowers were from Lisa’s camp of ass-kissers: the herds of groupies who apparently felt it essential to send condolences to the girl they knew as Myrna the witch-bitch on
Devonshire Place
, the girl whose real-life sort-of-stepfather now lay in the box, which meant she must be devastated and they really must let her know that they cared.
    “Ginny?” Lisa/Myrna repeated.
    Ginny raised her chin and swallowed back a tear. Then she took a last look at the son of a bitch and let her daughter lead her to the bank of wing chairs reserved for the family that had been set apart from the white folding chairs and came complete with boxes of pop-up Kleenex at no extra