CHAPTER THREE
ADELE
Adele knelt in her front yard on Onyx Avenue, her orange silk headscarf tied around chin-length brown hair. With gloved hands she snipped the full, fragrant head off the stem of the rosebush with a pair of razor-sharp secateurs. She lay the flower in the wicker basket by her side, then she snipped the next, then the next.
Some might find it ruthless to decapitate a rosebush laden with early blooms, but Adele wasn’t sentimental about that type of thing. It could do better. She knew what it took to achieve greatness, and this bush wasn’t going to blossom to its fullest potential without someone raising it with a stern hand.
If it hadn’t been for Mr. Tucket, who owned the hardware and gardening store on Marine, she never would have guessed that something as fragrant and delicate as a rose would prosper near the ocean. He’d assured her, some twenty years earlier, that because Balboa Island was surrounded by a bay and was protected from the ocean by the peninsula, it meant that her roses wouldn’t get too much sea breeze, and as long as they were cared for and pruned properly, they would grow beautifully in her front yard.
She sat back on her heels and stretched her back. She started every morning this way, clipping and pruning or planting or weeding,depending on the season. She liked to enjoy the damp, salty air and the comfort her small but meticulous garden gave her, without busybodies looking her way. She’d been out here for an hour already, when the sun was barely up, trimming the eight-by-six-foot patch of grass with her old lawn mower. As she pressed her shoulder blades back and rolled her head a few times—the way she used to in the seconds before she began a match—she had to admire her handiwork in the garden. It had come a long way since she first bought the place over two decades ago. Back then, she’d used every penny she owned to buy the cheapest cottage she could find on the island. It had cost her $1,500 for a shoebox, really, with nothing but a worn-down pile of dirt out front. But she’d worked hard on that pile of dirt, and it had grown into something quite spectacular.
She’d settled on Balboa Island in 1932, when there were almost no permanent residents on the island. Back then people came for the summer and then vanished the rest of the year, leaving it empty and almost desolate September through April, just the way she liked it. At night, men still used to come in looking to wash away their cares, disappearing into taverns through the back doors. Plenty of steamers gambled their money away as law enforcement turned a blind eye, but by daybreak they were gone. Now, though, the secret was out. People had moved to the island in hoards over the past few years, away from the heat and hustle of the big cities. Beach cottages were being torn down, and in their place permanent homes were going in with heat and indoor showers.
She was about to start on the next rosebush when two women walked along the sidewalk with tennis rackets in hand, hardly even used, by the looks of things. She recognized the redhead, Sylvia Johnson; her husband owned the fancy new tennis club in town. The other one, a blond, slowed as she walked by.
“Oh my, your garden looks lovely,” she said.
Adele pressed her lips together and nodded, hoping they’d move on.
“We just moved in on Amethyst. Our garden needs a lot of attention, but it will have to wait until the inside’s all organized first. I’m Milly, by the way, Milly Kincaid,” she said.
“Adele,” she said quietly.
“Gosh you look so familiar,” Milly said, staring at her intently.
Adele clenched her jaw and kept her head down, busying herself with her gardening tools. She noticed out of the corner of her eye the way Sylvia took the woman by the elbow and nudged her on.
“Well, nice to meet you,” Milly called out as they began to walk away. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
Once they were out of view, Adele took out the secateurs and severed the rest of the roses in a wild fury. It had been a while since someone had recognized her—years, in fact—and the encounter left her feeling irritated, jittery. She should lay low, Adele thought, but then scoffed at the idea: How much lower a profile could she possibly keep? She’d changed her name. She’d arranged her life to be bland, routine, predictable, to avoid such an intrusion, and it grated on her nerves that someone like that blond should waltz along and disrupt things.
She looked up and tried to take in the clear blue sky and wisps of clouds, hoping to shake her concerns. She shouldn’t worry so much; it was probably nothing, just a passing comment. She’d stay out of her way, that’s all, but she knew she couldn’t let it go that easily. She’d worked so hard to bury her past, and anytime someone so much as looked her way for a moment too long, she feared that they threatened to dredge things up again. She picked up her gardening tools and went back inside the house, trying to push those old familiar feelings of shame and humiliation down, deep down inside her, where they belonged.
She poured herself a cup of hot coffee and sat down, eyeing her old racket leaning against the wall. She envied the way those women had walked by with ease, likely on their way to the tennis club. They’d be warming up soon, feeling the vibration of the ball hitting the strings, softly at first to loosen up their arms and shoulders. But in fifteen minutes they’d be sending the ball soaring, corner to corner. Just the thought of it made her ache with longing.
She could still remember the feel of the racket the first time she picked up an old wooden Spalding, with peeling red-and-blue paint, from acrate next to the courts at the tennis club in Nice, France. She had been ten at the time and children were not supposed to be in the club, but her father had not been one to follow the rules.
“Can you teach me to play, Papa?” she’d asked her father when he stepped off the court, red-faced and perspiring in what had been pristine tennis whites just thirty minutes earlier.
“Pas maintenant,” he had said, pushing past her and dabbing his face with a handkerchief before rushing to shake his opponent’s hand. Adele followed him with a cup of water.
“Better luck next time, chap,” the man had said to her father. He was English, much younger, in better shape, and he hadn’t looked nearly as winded.
“Canyouteach me to play?” Adele asked the man, standing at her father’s side. Both men laughed, but her father squeezed her shoulder tightly, suggesting she’d embarrassed him.
“I’ll teach you,mon chou, just as I promised,” he said as he firmly ushered her away.
While her father had lunch with a group of men, also in long white trousers and collared shirts, Adele couldn’t help but notice how majestic they looked together in their white uniforms of leisure. After she’d climbed all the trees surrounding the courts to give her shade from the midday sun and had drawn circles in the red clay of an empty court, she asked her father once more.
“Now Papa? Now can you teach me?”
He leaned back in his chair and stretched. “Fine,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and knocking back the last of his brandy. “A few minutes while no one’s playing, and then we have to go home so I can take mysieste.”
Her father stood on the opposite side of the net and threw the white felt balls toward her gently. She swung and missed every ball at first, but then she turned her body to the fence, perpendicular to the net, and stretched her arms out like an airplane. When she swung that time, she made contact.
“Catch the racket,” her father said, showing her how to continue the swing up and over her left shoulder in one sweeping motion. When she swung the next time, she hit the ball over the net, and after that she sent almost every other ball over.
“Trés bon,” her father said. “Trés, trés bon.” Adele beamed when she noticed the surprise in his eyes.
