"Hello, It's Me"
Warner Forever Release
March 2005
ISBN: 0-446-61453-X
©2005 by Wendy Corsi Staub
Page 4
Stop resenting Merlin's money, she chides herself. His money and his newfound domestic bliss with Jonathan, a Sag Harbor antiques dealer he met in January. A lifelong friendship shouldn't be tainted by the fact that Merlin is living happily ever after while Annie has become the Widow Harlowe, as Merlin himself dubbed her after one too many margaritas at a Cinco de Mayo bash last month.
Merlin's black sense of humor, along with his checkbook, have buoyed her through this stormy year. She has no right to resent his good fortune. "It's Uncle Merlin, Mommy!" Trixie shouts, leaping from Annie's lap. "Hey, Milo ! Come outside! Uncle Merlin's here!"
Setting the book aside, relieved to have this morning's third round of Green Eggs and Ham curtailed, Annie rises and brushes the Goldfish crumbs from her faded cutoffs. Belatedly, she realizes that the porch floor will be covered with bugs again in no time. She had to hose it off last night after she found the remains of a grape Popsicle hosting the entire ant population of Montauk less than a foot from the screen door.
The house is falling apart inside and out. It's hard to believe that she and Andre ever pulled up in front of this nondescript two-story cedar-shingled bungalow and proclaimed it their dream home. What were they thinking? They'd have been better off in a condo or a townhouse, like her brothers said. Especially now that Annie alone is responsible for the upkeep of antique plumbing and wiring and a huge yard she actually once, in her misguided new homeowner's bliss, considered an asset.
The grass needs mowing, the shrubs need pruning, the beds need weeding, and she really should move the snowblower back into the shed. It's been sitting under a tree since she abandoned it there in the middle of last February's single significant snowstorm, after realizing she had no clue how to use it. That, like lawn mowing, was Andre's department.
Not that he ever got much practice. Splurging on that snowblower as a holiday gift for him one year was wishful thinking on Annie's part. Since childhood, she had longed for a white Christmas to rival Dickens's London , but it never happened. Not once. At least, not way out here on Long Island .
Snow rarely fell on Montauk that early in the season, and it never stuck. The big storms, if they came, were reserved for February; March, even, when crystalline drifts had been known to blanket crocus blooms and emerging daffodil spires.
"I'll get my white Christmas sooner or later," she used to tell Andre. "You'll see." "Only if we get rich enough to buy a snowmaking machine," was always his reply.
"Are we going for a Serengeti motif now?" Merlin calls, stepping out of his car in Gucci loafers and wading gingerly through the puddles by the car, then the overgrown grass on the lawn. "Should I be keeping an eye out for roaming zebra? Or their droppings?"
"Bite me," Annie retorts to the man who is more of an uncle to her children than her two married older brothers ever have been.
"How about I loan you my gardener instead?" "If I could afford a gardener, I'd trade him in for a maid."
Annie stoops to pick up a small plastic army guy; the kind that kills one's bare foot if one steps on it while blindly feeling one's way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She's done that enough times to have declared all army guys "outside toys." She probably would have been better off banning them to the garbage while Milo was busy with his flight training in another room. "I'll loan you my gardener and my maid," Merlin offers.
Descending the porch steps, Annie laughs and says, "No, thanks." "Come on, Annie. I'm serious." "I know you are, but-" "Let me do something nice for you." "Merlin-"
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a platinum credit card. "Here, if you won't let me loan you Enzio and Louella, take this and go shopping. It'll get your mind off your troubles. My treat. For your birthday." "My birthday was in April."
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