The Summer Cottage by Viola Shipman

Author:Viola Shipman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2019-02-21T14:54:17+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

The Dragoon Lady is alone.

I wasn’t expecting this.

I was expecting her to be surrounded by her Red Hat posse. Seeing her all alone unnerves me. I had entered the Saugatuck Country Club like Al Capone, guns blazing, ready to do battle with the Blue Hair Gang. But one-on-one with my nemesis—my personal Eliot Ness—freaks me out.

As I approach Iris, who is sitting as rigid and upright as the floral arrangement on the table, I feel dizzy.

I should have brought Sonny—who I left in the car, his ears blowing in the air-conditioning like Snoopy’s were when he was battling the Red Baron—for backup.

“You’re late,” Iris says as a greeting. She checks her thin gold watch and gives me a tsk-tsk.

I check my cell. “It’s 2:01,” I say, already exasperated.

“As I said...”

She sips her tea without making a sound. She has yet to look at me.

I take a seat and scan the dining room at the country club. It is octagonal and lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the first hole of the golf course. It’s old-school—parquet floors and white linen tablecloths—and the tables are filled with distinguished silver-haired couples in plaid golf sweaters.

My parents were not country club people. My dad liked a beer on his boat. My mom socialized with women who baked, and cleaned their own houses. New-and old-money locals referred to families like ours as “the ones whose parents bought their cottage when property was cheap.”

A waiter approaches as quietly as a whisper.

“What may I offer you, ma’am?”

I glance at Iris, who has yet to look me in the eye. For some reason, I think of when Trish and I dined this winter at RL in Chicago.

“I’ll have a manhattan, please. Thank you.”

There’s my reinforcement, I think. A stiff drink.

For the first time, Iris looks at me. The waiter shoots me a bemused smile and disappears.

“It’s awfully early for a drink,” the Dragoon Lady says.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” I say for some reason, sounding like a total Jimmy Buffett Parrot Head.

The Dragoon Lady checks her watch. “Where?” she asks pointedly.

She makes me feel like a kid who constantly gets busted by a teacher for not having done her homework. Thankfully, the waiter brings me my drink, and I take a healthy slug.

“Why am I here?” the Dragoon Lady asks, staring at me before glancing around the club.

She’s embarrassed to be here with me, I think.

I take another gulp of my manhattan. “I have a proposition,” I say.

She raises an eyebrow and takes a sip of her tea. I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t utter a word.

“Well, okay, then...” I fumble my words and reach for my bag. I pull out the requirements the Preservation Committee has provided for the fish house, and then the proposal Frank and I have for it. “I’d like to...” I stop and rephrase my request. “I need to renovate the fish house into a honeymoon suite,” I say.

“That’s not possible,” the Dragoon Lady says, cutting me off. “It’s historic.”

“I

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