Seeing him with Polly was one of the reasons she’d been attracted to him.
“Remember the incident with the fish hook?” Rory asked with a laugh.
“When you said you were an EMT, that’s what I thought of.”
She’d forgotten about that, but the memory came back to her instantly.
Polly had managed to get a fish hook stuck through her toe. Neither Rory nor his mother seemed to know what to do to get it out, and Daria, then only twelve, had performed the feat.
“You knew exactly what to do,” Rory said.
“It makes sense that you got involved in medicine.”
“Dad had told me how to extract a fish hook in case I ever got stuck by one,” she said simply. She didn’t want to discuss her EMT work and answer the inevitable questions about why she was no longer doing it, so she changed the subject.
“I don’t remember Polly and your parents ever coming to Kill Devil Hills again after you went off to college,” she said.
“That’s right,” Rory said. He let out a long sigh and stretched. His T-shirt strained across his chest, and she looked away for the sake of her own sanity. “They stopped coming,” he said.
“That’s when I realized they’d bought the cottage primarily for me, so I could get to spend time on the beach in the summer. But my parents never sold Poll-Rory. I’m sure they were hoping I might use it for my own family one day. Until this summer, that just wasn’t possible.”
“Why not?”
“Glorianne. My ex-wife.”
“She didn’t want to come here?”
“An understatement. She and I were very different. She was…” He looked toward the ocean for a moment, as though carefully selecting his words.
“When I first met her, she was very young and shy and… unassuming. Her parents had been killed in an accident. They’d had little money and left lots of debts, so Glorianne had essentially nothing. She needed me, and I liked being needed. She changed over time, though. Once we had money, it was as though it all went to her head. I’d always wanted us to live in a middle-class neighborhood, with Zack attending public school and experiencing the sort of down-to-earth upbringing I’d had. Glorianne thought we should live in Beverly Hills and send Zack to a private school, since we could afford it. I didn’t want Zack to think that being famous and having money was more important than being honest and having good values.”
Rory paused before continuing.
“So, the upshot was that we did live in a very nice upper-middle-class neighborhood and Zack did attend public schools, but I had to compromise. And that compromise took the form of where we vacationed. I would have loved to have spent all our summers here in Kill Devil Hills, but Glorianne hated the beach and she didn’t like the East Coast altogether. She always wanted to travel during the summer, and said that if I was going to limit Zack in what he could be exposed to during the year, then the least we could do was take him to Europe for the summer.” Rory looked perplexed, as though he was still amazed that his simple, unassuming wife could have changed so much.
“So, that’s what we’ve been doing,” he said.
“Till now, anyhow.”
“This summer with you should be good for Zack.”
Rory laughed.
“He doesn’t seem to think so,” he said.
“At least he’s doing a lot of complaining about it. But I do have hope. I think he’s already making some friends. He’s out on the beach right now.”
“Is that what ended your marriage?” she pried, curious. The article she’d read had claimed irreconcilable differences as the cause, and she’d always wondered.
“Your disagreements over where to live and how to raise Zack?”
“And a million other things,” he said.
“Actually, Polly turned out to be a big reason for the demise of my marriage,” Rory said.
That surprised her.
“Why?” she asked. “Well, after my parents died, I took Polly in. I moved her from Richmond to California to live with us. I wanted Zack to get to know her,” he said.
“I wanted him to understand that people with Down’s syndrome were still human and lovable and valuable. And I think that really did work. Zack got along well with Polly.” Rory looked up at the darkening sky, as if searching for the words. He returned his gaze to Daria.
“But having Polly there put a terrific strain on Glorianne and me,” he said.
“We were already shaky enough to begin with, and Glorianne always felt as though Polly was an intruder in her family.
And Polly never really adapted to living on the West Coast or to losing our mother. Plus, she had cardiac problems and needed a lot of medical care, and making sure she took her medications and running her to doctors’ appointments just wasn’t Glorianne’s thing. “
“That must have been hard on you,” Daria sympathized, moved by the way Rory talked about his sister. She was struck by the similarities between Rory’s situation with his wife, and her situation with Pete. At least Glorianne
