Jared went downstairs, started to reach for the rum, but knew that wouldn’t calm him down. He found a bottle of tequila, and had two shots before he allowed himself to think about what had happened tonight.
He went into the living room and sat down and his mind went back to when he was, as Ken had said, a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent.
As Aunt Addy and Ken later told Jared, Kenneth Madsen had come to the island to find his wife—who he thought would be living in abject poverty and therefore glad to see him—to let her know that he’d think about taking her back. He might even forgive her for her one-night stand with his business partner, followed by her flight to Nantucket with their small daughter, Alix. Eventually.
The truth was that he missed her and his daughter so much he could hardly function.
But what he found on Nantucket wasn’t what he’d expected. His wife had written a novel, it had been accepted for publication, and she was planning to divorce him.
She was fabulously happy; he was fabulously depressed.
After Victoria took little Alix and left the island, Addy suggested that Ken stay in the guesthouse until he recovered from his melancholia. After he’d been there a couple of months and showed no signs of going back to his architecture business or even of coming back to life, she said he could renovate an old house owned by the Kingsley family.
“But I can’t afford to pay you,” she said. “I can just afford materials.”
“That’s all right,” Ken said, “my former business partner is footing my bills. He owes me big time.”
Addy waited for him to continue but Ken didn’t say any more about why his partner owed him. “You can hire workmen on the island, but you’ll have to pay them. On the other hand, my nephew Jared is young and inexperienced, but he’ll work for free. But then it doesn’t matter because I don’t think you can handle him.” She looked Ken up and down in a way that said he wasn’t man enough to deal with the boy.
Ken’d had enough of being treated like less than a man. He said he’d take on the kid.
From the first meeting, Ken and Jared were a match. Ken’s life was a mess, but then so was Jared’s. A big, angry teenager and an elegant, angry young architect were a perfect pair. Ken’s attitude was that if Jared didn’t behave he was out of a job. Since the job was a free remodel of the falling-down old house he and his mother were living in, Jared felt he had to stay with it. Besides, Ken listened to what Jared had to say about how he thought the house should be changed.
Jared knew nothing about construction, and at first he’d worked every day with a hangover. At fourteen he was on his way to being an alcoholic. To his mind at that time, drinking was okay because most of the kids he ran with did drugs. Jared’s teenage mind thought that if he stayed away from drugs he could drink all he wanted to.
But being hungover on a construction site was bad. He’d ended up with smashed thumbs and one accident after another until he’d finally learned to say no to going out at night with his buddies. It hadn’t been easy as they told him what they thought of him. “Selling out to the other side,” they’d said.
Ken had helped, even though his “help” hadn’t been gentle. He didn’t put up with any nonsense, never felt sorry for Jared’s circumstances, and made him work no matter what.
One day after the boys had skidded off in their cars, their catcalls that Jared was a wimp still hanging in the air, Ken said, “You might make a man after all. Who would have guessed?”
Gradually, Jared began to want to prove himself. Ken stayed on the island full time for nearly three years and the two of them worked construction constantly. One time Jared saw Ken crying and he’d stepped away, not wanting to embarrass him. Later he found out that the divorce papers had come that day. “It was all my fault,” Ken said over his sixth beer. “I was the one to ruin it all. I thought I was of a higher class than pretty little Victoria Winetky and she knew it.”
That night Jared had to throw a drunken Ken over his shoulder, put him in his pickup, drive him back to the guesthouse, and put him in bed. The next day neither of them acknowledged what had happened and they never spoke of it.
Eventually, Ken recovered enough that he wanted to go back to architecture—and by then he’d discovered that he liked teaching. But by that time he and Jared were like father and son and the thought of separation hurt. “I can’t stay here,” Ken said. “Victoria won’t allow Alix to return to Nantucket. That book of hers sold millions and she says she has an image to uphold. Between you and me, I think Victoria doesn’t want Addy to take over Alix.” He looked at Jared. “If I want to be part of my daughter’s future, I have to go back to the mainland and set up a life there. I’ll come back when I can.”
Jared worked to conceal his pain. A few years before he’d met Ken, his father had gone out on his boat one day and never returned. It was days before they found him. He’d had a heart attack in his sleep. Jared had loved his father to the point of worship and losing him had brought out the worst in the boy. He’d always been a big kid, nearly six feet when his father died, and Jared started drinking just months later. Fistfights, racing cars, vandalism—you name it, he’d done it. His mother, trying to deal with her own grief, had no control over him.
Then Ken, also angry at the world, had stepped in and taken over.
When Jared said goodbye to Ken, he thought that would be the end. Nantucketers were used to summer visitors. They came and went and you never saw them again.
But Ken had returned often. He was the one who got Jared into college, then into architecture school. And when Jared made his mark by building his final project, it had been Ken who left his office and his classroom, strapped on a tool belt, and helped Jared build it.
Yes, Jared owed Ken, and he owed Victoria because she was part of his life too. And now he owed their daughter.
He stood there for a moment and all he knew for sure was that he wanted to talk to his grandfather.
Jared was sitting in the family room of Kingsley House. He hadn’t turned on any lights, but he didn’t need to. He knew that if he sat there long enough, his grandfather would show up.
When he did, Jared didn’t even look up. “I messed up. Really big. Ken is angry at me, and when Victoria hears what happened she’s going to tear me apart, piece by piece. I doubt if I’ll live through it. Our friendship certainly won’t survive it.” He looked toward the window at his grandfather. “If you’d only told me she was here, I could have escaped.”
“Young Alix has always been a considerate person,” Caleb said.
When Caleb started to say more
, Jared cut him off. “If you’re about to tell me some of that reincarnation mumbo-jumbo, don’t do it. I don’t want to hear.”