Off Season by Jean Stone

forget.”
    Mindy looked out the window, wishing she could go outside and play, ride her bike to the beach maybe and look for lucky stones.
    “Will they ask me about sex?”
    “Maybe. Does that bother you?”
    Mindy shrugged. “Will they ask me about Ben?”
    “Yes, of course. That’s what this is for. To prove what Mr. Niles did so he will never do it to any other little girl again.”
    “Oh,” Mindy replied.
    Jill said she wanted to tell Carol Ann and Amy. “You could use some family support,” she had argued to Ben, then added that no matter what Amy and Carol Ann thought, it was better that they knew. Before they heard it some other island-rumor-mill way.
    “I called Carol Ann,” she told him now, as they sat in the music room of the old sea captain’s house, the place that was home. “The only night this week she and John can make it for dinner is the night after Cranberry Day.”
    Ben wondered if family “support” entailed having things swirl around him and in spite of him like the way he felt he was being manipulated into telling the girls.
    “The freelancer will be here then, and I’ll be working with him and Jimmy,” Jill continued, oblivious to his nonreaction, “so it will be a little tight, but I can work it out. Oh, and don’t forget, while we’re at it, we need toremind Carol Ann that she and John said we can take the kids to Sturbridge. It will be fun, Ben. You need to absorb yourself in something fun.”
    He looked over at the oval-framed picture of Jill’s somber-faced grandmother. How much fun had she had in her short Yankee lifetime? Would she think that anything that could happen between now and the trial could be absorbing enough to be classified as fun?
    The truth was, he’d almost forgotten he’d promised to go to Sturbridge with Jill for her next story—something about Thanksgiving stuff in the seventeenth-century reenactment village. But she was right about one thing: he had looked forward to taking his grandkids. He had also looked forward to getting fresh ideas like building lobster traps—ideas he could adapt for Menemsha House.
    If he ever opened Menemsha House again.
    He stood up from the chair and went to the window. He rubbed his lower back: he hated the way he ached sometimes these days, as if the intrusions of the world around him had violated his spine as well as his psyche.
    Outside, Edgartown slept its post-tourist sleep.
    “I’m still not convinced we should tell them,” he said, because his voice seemed to need to give it one more try. Intellectually, of course, it made sense.
    Tell them before they learn some other way
.
    Running from something only makes you look guilty
.
    These people love you. Of course they’ll believe you
.
    Those were the “intellectual” things he’d say if this had happened to a friend, Charlie Rollins, for instance. But it hadn’t happened to Charlie. It had happened to him.
    “We’re a family now, Ben,” Jill said firmly. “Let’s act like one.”
    The thought that she might be right finally won out.
    He closed his eyes and wondered how he would survive until the day after Cranberry Day, and how he was going to tell the girls without breaking down.
    •   •   •
    Jill Randall McPhearson Niles became someone else when a camera was pointed at her face, someone Rita hardly recognized, someone like Diane Sawyer or Lesley Stahl or one of those TV women who always seemed so much smarter than she was.
    It was true Jill was smart, way smarter than Rita. Hell, she’d always been, always would be. But right now, as Jill interviewed the tribal medicine man about traditions of the cranberry harvest, she also came across as the perfect, all-together woman that Rita would never be. And that had nothing to do with smarts.
    Once the camera was off, Rita hoped Jill could take a few minutes for her—to congratulate her for deciding not to have an abortion and for telling Hazel the news. Then she admitted to herself that maybe