“This is home.”
“I don’t drive much in New York, is what I meant.” They passed the bookshop and the market, the café and the medical clinic, the bright awnings of the downtown stores flashing by like kites.
“Wait,” he said and pressed his hands to the side window. “Where are you going?”
“To the pub, Dad.” Colleen stopped at a striped yellow tape stretched across the road and attached to two gas lanterns: construction crews blocked Second Avenue.
“But this looks . . . wrong.” His brow furrowed.
“Sorry?” Colleen glanced left and right. “Dad, I’m taking Blue Willow because Second is closed.”
“Oh, yes.” He leaned back on the seat. “Construction drives me crazy. Makes the familiar seem unfamiliar. Sometimes it feels like I left for years and just returned.”
“I know.” But she didn’t. Yes, there were a few new buildings, two just-opened bars and a small strip mall. A couple of old warehouses had been converted into modern apartment buildings. None of these should have confused him.
A minute later, Colleen parked in the back lot of the pub and her dad jumped out of the passenger side with the agility of a younger man. Colleen stayed buckled in, watching him go through the back door without glancing back to see if she was following. Maybe he’d already forgotten her. If he forgot her, would she disappear? Without her dad’s memories of her, would she exist at all? A hollow place inside her echoed with his absence not yet real, but clearly soon it would be. It was like watching the sun shrink below the horizon—there and bright and full of colors until it was gone, only darkness remaining.
“No,” she said to the empty car. “No.”
Needing preoccupation, Colleen checked her cell. There were a slew of group texts from her girlfriends wanting to know if she’d like to join them for happy hour. She’d forgotten to tell them she’d left town. Then another few from Philippe—he adored her; he missed her; he hoped her time at home was going all right; he was thinking of her. She didn’t answer because she didn’t know what to say.
She sent quick texts letting her friends know she was out of town . . . again.
Colleen climbed out of the car and stood in the sweltering heat, closed her eyes and drew on her internal compass that allowed her to focus when all was going awry. But focus didn’t arrive; instead, Walter did.
Chapter Ten
Explore memory as the place where our vanished days secretly gather and . . . the passionate heart never ages.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara
The pickup truck swerved into the parking lot, into the second owner’s spot, marked Leprechauns Only. The man at the wheel wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and a smile; he was either talking on the phone or singing to himself, Colleen wasn’t sure which. He didn’t see her; that much was clear. But she damn sure saw him. Walter Littleton.
Somehow he’d been frozen in her mind, an image as firm as a statue. He’d become someone to despise, Exhibit #1 of all men who cheated and lied, so much so that she’d almost forgotten how real he actually was. Colleen took two steps back, mostly hidden behind the Jeep. But she didn’t need to hide—Walter was preoccupied and hurried.
He held a cell phone in his hand and from where she stood Colleen saw the earpiece dangling from his ear to the cell. He laughed and simultaneously opened the back door to his truck. Two little girls, both in tutus and T-shirts, spilled out and ran for the back door, small backpacks—a pink one shaped like a pig with pointy ears where the pockets would open, and a red one designed as a ladybug—flopping on their shoulders. Walter hollered good-bye and I love you to them and returned to his call. The girls were inside before Colleen could register their faces and decide which one was Rosie, which one was Sadie.
There stood the man who was supposed to be her husband. Those little girls—they were both she and Hallie as children, and they were also the children she was meant to have had with Walter; they represented a life lost with the man who drove the pickup and laughed on the phone. They were her nieces; her sister’s children; Walter’s daughters.
His hair was thick and tousled; nothing there had changed. His dark curls caught in the breeze and tangled as he skimmed them back from his forehead. His jeans and boots hinted that he’d come from a work site, dark mud on the side of his left leg. His red T-shirt declaring Littleton Construction was tight on a body that had not gone soft, not one bit. It was the smile, the damn smile, that left Colleen momentarily unnerved. She anticipated feeling the particular grief of her insides folding up, closing inside of her like a shell, but it didn’t come.
His voice slid past her, the words unintelligible but the sound familiar. Then Walter climbed back into the truck, still talking, and drove off. Just like that. She didn’t throw rocks at his truck, cry or lose her breath. She merely stood still, waiting for her heart to find its rhythm again, and then she walked inside the Lark.
The pub’s back room had always felt like a secret, a place only the family and employees were allowed, where boxes and dirty glasses and bottles were untidily shoved onto shelves and into bins. Shane was bent over a box, yanking off the tape with a zipping sound, and Colleen wanted to tell him that she’d just seen Walter and the world hadn’t tilted off its axis, that she was breathing in and breathing out and that was just that.
Instead a small voice called out, “Aunt Lena!” and Colleen glanced down to the source behind Shane—to one of the little girls who’d jumped out of the pickup truck. Which one? The child peered from behind Shane’s leg. She wore a bright pink tutu, garish and torn in places. Her white T-shirt was adorned with a picture of a princess; Colleen wasn’t sure which one. The little girl’s hair hung in a long braid over her shoulder, a mimic of the princess on the shirt.
Colleen’s blood rushed to her face: was this Rosie or Sadie? Rosie was the name she and Walter had chosen for their firstborn, her aunt’s name. Hallie had taken even that. Did she even know she’d taken it? Had Walter told her? The betrayal, a gong sounding in a canyon, echoed on and on and on.
“Rosie?” Colleen bent, her hands on her knees, to lock gazes with the child. It was like looking into her sister’s eyes.
The girl nodded and grinned before stepping out and placing both her hands on her hips. “I knew it was you. Mommy showed me pictures.”
“She did?” Her niece was the cutest girl she’d ever seen, in many ways a replica of Hallie at the same age but more brazen. Hallie had been shy, reticent, always waiting for Lena to make the first move.
“Yes, and she tells us stories all the time. I know everything about you.”
Hallie told stories about Colleen? To her children? This took a minute to absorb, and all the while the little girl stared at Colleen until she spoke, patient in her waiting. “I doubt that,” Colleen said with a laugh. “Now, who is that princess?” Colleen braved a touch to Rosie’s shirtsleeve.
“You don’t know who Anna is?” Rosie’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened.
“Seems there’s lots of new princesses lately. I get confused.”
Rosie’s smile was Walter’s, lifting high onto each cheek, leaving Colleen shaken as if a tiny tremor passed under the floor of the pub. She turned to Shane for help.
“Anna is the princess sister in Frozen,” he said, as serious as if he were explaining the difference between distilling and fermenting whiskey.
“Ah, yes.” Colleen looked at Rosie again. “I didn’t know her name.”
“You haven’t seen Frozen?” Rosie asked, as incredulous as a seven-year-old could possibly be.
“Nope. How about we watch it together?” Colleen suggested.
Rosie gazed at Colleen, tilted her head. “Why don’t you ever come visit us? Mom says you never come home. I want to catch shrimp with you. Mom says you’re better at it than she is.”
“Rosie,” Shane said. “Go find Sadie before she gets int
o trouble.”
Rosie didn’t break her gaze with Colleen. “He always says that when he wants me to go away.” She scowled and ran off, her tutu bouncing, through the swinging door that led to the main area of the pub.
“Adorable, like you said,” Colleen admitted as she stood straight and stretched her back.
“Precocious, too,” Shane confirmed.
“If she was sent here to charm me, it worked.”
“Not sure if that was the purpose, but Hallie is out there waiting on us.”
“To do what?”
“So the two of you can get started on this project.”
“This project.” Colleen dropped both hands on her brother’s shoulders and glanced around the room to check that her dad hadn’t walked in. “We can still do it, but I think the doc appointment will tell us a lot—maybe there’s a new treatment.”
“Okay.” He nodded with a slightly crooked smile.
Colleen knew that damn smile. It was the same one he used when he wanted to brush off a flirting girl he had no interest in. The same one he’d used to placate one of her childish temper tantrums, or convince their mother he wouldn’t do the forbidden something he intended to do anyway.
Colleen removed her hands from his shoulders. “Don’t patronize me, Shane.”
“I’m not, sis. I’m just exhausted.”
“I’m sorry you’ve had to bear this burden without me. But you know, it’s odd. He seems okay for a long while and then he’ll say something that doesn’t make sense.”
“Like?” A new voice joined their conversation and there stood Hallie. She looked tired, her eyes sinking into dark circles and her hair tied back in a knotted mess. “What doesn’t make sense?”
Colleen tried to smile at her sister, attempted to get past the habitual inclination to cringe and withdraw. “I was telling him that sometimes Dad seems fine and then he doesn’t. On the way here, he seemed lost but blamed it on the construction.”
“He does that about once a week—blames the construction,” Hallie said and then turned to the squeals of her daughters, who barreled into the back room, bouncing off each other like pinballs. The second, smaller version of Rosie was also wearing a tutu, but hers was red and not quite as tattered.
“Is this her?” Sadie asked Rosie, speaking around the thumb in her mouth.
“Yes, dummy. Can’t you tell from all the pictures?”
Sadie nodded. “She’s prettier in pictures.”
Colleen couldn’t help it—she laughed, until Shane joined in, and then Hallie.
“What’s so funny?” Sadie asked.
“You, silly.” Colleen leaned down to her second niece. “Hello, I’m your aunt Colleen.”
Sadie sidled farther behind Rosie, as if she needed a shield. “I thought her name was Lena.”
“It is,” Rosie confirmed and then turned to Colleen. “We made this for you at summer camp.” She held out a plastic stick covered with silver glitter and bright ribbons of every color.
“Oh?” Colleen took it, avoiding the lumps of glue by holding it between two fingers. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s a magic wand,” Rosie explained.
“I’ve always wanted something magical.” Colleen waved it in the air; glitter scattered, clinging to whatever it touched.
“I told you,” Rosie said to Sadie, giving her the littlest shove. And then there they were in her memory, herself and Hallie as little girls. She was telling Hallie, “I told you so,” and Hallie was grinning from ear to ear. Just like these little ones, Hallie and she had worn ratty tutus and believed that life’s glittery path would lead them to become princesses—Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty—who would be saved by men’s kisses. Look how that had worked out.
“I think I need a drink,” Colleen said and held her wand high.
“It’s only four in the afternoon.” Hallie placed her hand on top of each little girl’s head to protect them from their happy hour aunt.
Colleen waved her glittering wand. “It’s magically five o’clock. Thanks, princesses.” She set out for the bar in search of her dad and a whiskey.
The pub was mostly empty except for Mr. Brown, who sat in the same seat he’d occupied in Colleen’s memories. A widower even when she was in high school, he drank whiskey sometimes and other times just water, staring at the TV above the bar and making conversation with whoever crossed his path. His bald head as polished as the bar top; his gold wedding ring still on his left hand.
He glanced up. “Well, hello there, Lena Donohue.”
“Hi, Mr. Brown.” Colleen reached his side and offered a hug. “How are you?”
“About the same as I always am. How are you, dear? How is the big city treating you?”
“Wonderfully, actually.”
“We miss you ’round here. We all do.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say. It’s good to see you, too.” Colleen smiled and walked away as he returned his attention to the soundless baseball game. This was the way of the Lark—tradition built in as firmly as the bricks and mortar, as the beer taps and bar counter thick with shellac. This pub—just as the marsh behind her house—held the invisible geography of her memories.
At a side table, empty whiskey glasses next to them, two men in baseball caps were deep in animated conversation. The words “mayor” and “bullshit” and “roadblocks” slipped out in loud proclamations. Yes, Colleen also remembered this well—the men and women who argued about politics or religion or family or ex-lovers then went right back to being friends again. It was as though this place allowed the venting without the consequences. Well, most of the time.
Her dad, they all knew, had tried to replicate a true Irish pub in the Lark and maybe he’d succeeded, but surely those pubs didn’t have cobia fishing trophies on the wall, sand between the floorboards and the sweet-sour aroma of pluff mud that would never dissipate no matter how many scented candles were lit. Those pubs on the Emerald Isle didn’t display the South Carolina flag—featuring a palmetto tree and crescent—hanging on the wall next to the University of South Carolina baseball team photo signed by every player. No, Dad might have tried to imitate the idea of an Irish pub, but the details made this place exactly what it was—a Lowcountry home for many.
One other man stood at the bar, and Colleen quickly sized him up—midthirties, maybe early forties; the dim light obscured too much of his features to tell for sure. His hair was dark and tousled like he’d been out on a boat all morning. He wore fishermen’s shorts and a faded red T-shirt announcing a long-gone event at a bar in Savannah.
A guy in a pub in the middle of the afternoon was obviously there to drown his pain, most likely heartache. She’d become an expert at guessing why men and women were at the pub, a game she used to play when bored while washing glasses behind the bar. But what this guy would soon discover was that heartache could never be drowned. It had to be buried alive.
* * *
• • •
It had been two weeks since the wedding, two weeks since Lena Donohue had loaded her car and driven to Greenwich, Connecticut, to her friend Maggie Marlow’s house. Maggie hadn’t been able to attend the wedding, what with a two-year-old at home and no real help. Maggie had been her college roommate and now lived in a place where her husband took the train into Manhattan each day, and she tried to fit into a life she’d decided she was made for. Maggie also had a pullout couch in the basement and bottles of vodka.
Lena’s drive from Watersend to Connecticut had been accomplished in a fugue state punctuated by tears and recrimination, of roiling anger and slamming her fists on the steering wheel. She hadn’t stopped to sleep or eat, only to refuel the car and use the dirty restrooms at convenience stores that all looked alike, selling junk food, beer, soda and beef jerky. She spent most of the drive reviewing the wedding and the weeks leading up to it in obsessive loops.
When had her sister and her fiancé found the time and privacy to become lovers?
Colleen had been out of town only once since the engagement—a weekend spent traveling with her father to check out pubs along the East Coast. It was their annual dad-daughter trip and they always came home with new ideas, some innovative way to streamline the ordering or to attract new patrons, although new patrons were rarely truly needed. After the wedding, Colleen was going to stay and help run the pub whenever she wasn’t working for the local newspaper; she and Walter had even discussed adding a microbrewery with their own brand of Lark beer.
As the ribbon of highway had disappeared under her tires, the signs and exits a blur, Colleen tormented herself with endless questions. When had Hallie and Walter hooked up? Had they been running around together this entire time? Had her sister always hated her and only pretended to admire and love her? Was Hallie getting back at her for being older and being, well, so freaking bossy?
And Walter. My God, Walter. Loving him seemed to be stapled onto her bones, infused in her blood, so much a part of her body that she would never be able to stop feeling it. Yet, he chose her sister. The only thing she knew to do was run—get away from him as far and as fast as she could even as her body and her heart beat with the need for him.
It seemed impossible to hate the very same person she desired. A cauldron of toxic, contradictory emotions bubbled inside her. During that drive (and in the years following) the love sometimes won out and she wept with grief; other times, hate and rage took over and she seethed.
Fourteen hours of such fruitless thinking, of angry expletives and ignoring her ringing cell phone, passed before she pulled into Maggie’s driveway and stumbled to the pullout bed. For the next two weeks, Maggie listened and Colleen ranted.
Colleen’s family did not retreat so easily. They all called, one after the other, in hourly increments and quick sequence. They left messages. They texted. Colleen refused to tell them where she was. Let them worry. She answered her dad once, told him she was safe and asked him to give her time to grieve.
The Favorite Daughter Page 9