“They’re just burning off energy, Lynn,” Lucy’s mother said tolerantly. “They’ll all be good as gold by the time we sit down to eat.”
“I trust Polly will insist on that.”
Sourpuss, Adrian thought, even though he rather hoped he wouldn’t be seated anywhere near anyone younger than eighteen. If he was lucky, family tradition might put the kids at their own table.
“Goodness, Helen,” Aunt Lynn continued, her gaze zeroing in on Lucy’s mother. “You must be wondering why you don’t have any grandchildren yet.”
Her tone was a little smug, leading Adrian to realize that the unfortunate Polly was probably Lynn’s daughter. Which meant some of the ill-behaved hellions were her grandchildren.
Lucy’s mother laughed. “I’d just as soon my girls got married before they considered becoming parents. And, of course, my children are considerably younger than yours, Lynn.”
That stung. Spots of color appeared on the sourpuss’s cheeks. “Well, mine weren’t so eager to wander all over tarnation before settling down. Assuming yours ever do.”
With a quick glance at the fire in her mother’s eyes, Lucy intervened. “Not fair, Aunt Lynn. Melissa’s still in college, and Sam and I are stodgy members of the Middleton Chamber of Commerce. That’s pretty settled.”
She sniffed. “Until you start families, I don’t consider you established. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d best find Polly. Heaven knows what those children are up to inside. Let me apologize in advance if they damage anything, Marian.”
To no one’s regret, she hustled away.
“Honestly,” Aunt Marian said. “How a man as nice as your Owen could have a prune-faced sister like Lynn!”
“Now, Marian,” Lucy’s mother said without much force.
“She’s just awful,” Lucy declared, earning two disapproving looks from her mother and aunt. Her chin rose. “I don’t care whether you think I should say it. She’s just...just...”
As she struggled to find the right word, her mother said, “What will Adrian think, Lucy? Lynn’s just...” She cleared her throat. “Just...”
Marian gave a hearty bray of a laugh. “We all know what she is, and so does Adrian. Young man, you probably have a few choice relatives of your own, now don’t you?”
Lucy made a quick gesture that came too late. Adrian said evenly, “Actually, my family tree is pretty sparse. Both of my parents were only children, like I am.”
“What a shame,” Aunt Marian exclaimed. “Not even any cousins?”
The children, he saw out of the corner of his eye, were streaming out of the house now, reinforced by half a dozen who were slightly older. He flashed on a scene from the movie version of Lord of the Flies, with the grimy child actors, half-naked and carrying burning torches. Was it really a shame he hadn’t grown up with a passel of shrieking girl cousins, or a bullying boy cousin like the one he saw deliberately trip a smaller boy, who immediately broke into angry tears?
Lucy seemed to be watching his face somewhat anxiously. “They’re really perfectly nice kids. They just get a little wild sometimes.”
Marian started. “Gracious, what am I thinking? Those scalloped potatoes are going to be creamed potatoes if I don’t get them out of the oven.”
“Do you need help?” Lucy called to their backs as the two women hurried toward the house.
“No, no.” Her mother flapped a hand as she went. “You brought your potato salad. You’ve done your part.”
“Well,” Lucy said into the little silence left in their wake, “I think you’ve met everyone.”
God, he hoped so, Adrian thought fervently. Juries didn’t intimidate him; extended families did. He’d sometimes wished he had a sibling, but one would have been ample.
He looked at Lucy, whose gaze moved from group to group as if she were doing a mental inventory. Making sure she hadn’t skipped Great Aunt Bertha or second-cousin-once-removed Algernon, Adrian suspected. Despite what he feared was going through her head, he enjoyed watching her, with the sunlight picking up shimmers of gold and bronze in her hair and highlighting the freckles on her nose. He didn’t recall ever considering anyone’s ears pretty before, but hers seemed perfect to him, delicate whorls with lobes that each held a single, tiny diamond.
He loved her neck, too, long and slender, with baby-fine hairs at her nape. He wouldn’t mind nuzzling it right now.
“Maybe we could sneak around the corner of the house for a few minutes,” Adrian suggested.
Alarm flashed in her eyes. “Are you kidding? There’s no privacy around here. Oh. There’s Samantha.” She sounded relieved as she raised her voice and waved, too. “Sam!”
Sam came, a man in tow. Evidently, he was a cousin of some sort, too, rather than an actual date. He and Adrian exchanged desultory conversation for a minute, then he wandered away.
Letting the sisters’ conversation wash over him, Adrian thought longingly of that morning, when he’d actually had Lucy to himself. He’d gotten to watch her cook, which meant he’d had plenty of time to appreciate her back—her tiny waist, encircled with the apron ties, gently rounded butt encased in snug jeans and the flirtatious bob of her ponytail as she moved between mixing bowls and stove.
They had talked, too, arguing politics, sharing musical tastes, trading snippets here and there of their daily lives. An hour had passed, two hours, immensely satisfying in a way in which Adrian wasn’t much accustomed. It was something like a gift exchange: here’s a bit of me, to which she offered a bit of herself, upon which he gained courage and gave more. Casual, but feeling important. He wanted her, yes, with an urgency he was keeping banked to the best of his ability. But he also didn’t want to ruin whatever was happening between them by pressing her too soon.
He’d never had that worry before, or this sense that they were creating something delicate and easily damaged. Adrian hoped like hell that whatever it was gained some solidity soon, both because he’d like to get her in bed and because he simply had to go back to Seattle. Carol, he knew, was increasingly perplexed by his lack of interest in ongoing cases. That morning, he’d dodged a phone call from one of the firm’s partners. He wouldn’t get away with hanging around Middleton for another week.
After brunch, Adrian had left Lucy with a promise to come back for her at four and gone to the hospital. It had gotten so that he had a favorite parking spot, and he knew most of the women who staffed the information desk as well as the nurses on his mother’s floor. Initial suspicion had melted away in the face of his seeming devotion.
Maybe real devotion, he’d thought, sitting at his mother’s bedside and watching her face twitch as some kind of impulses fired in her brain. He didn’t know anymore. Did he love her? The idea of her? Would he feel an instant, heartfelt connection when/if her eyes opened? Or realize anew that this woman was a stranger?
Right now, he was in the eye of the hurricane, so to speak, over the first turbulent emotions, bemused by this odd, quiet town, separated from everything familiar in a disconcertingly thorough way given how near he was geographically to Seattle. Sooner or later, he was going to be flung back into the necessity of making decisions. The fact that his mother was so clearly battling her way free of the coma was all that kept him in this peculiar state of suspension.
The weird thing was, he would have expected to be bored and impatient, disdainful of this backward little town and the inhabitants who seemed placidly unaware that the world was passing them by. Ten days ago, he wouldn’t have been able to conceive of himself enduring Sunday dinner with fifty or so relatives of a woman he’d barely met himself.
Much less, after watching their bickering, laughter and tolerance for each other’s foibles, having the passing thought that it might not be so bad to have a whole bunch of people who actually cared about you even when you screwed up, who embraced even a member nobody actually
liked, because she was nonetheless one of them.
He was even starting to understand why Lucy had mixed feelings about the whole family thing—wanting, on the one hand, to escape their nosiness and interference, while on the other finding it hard to pull away.
He quelled a tug of anxiety by reminding himself that Seattle wasn’t so far she couldn’t come home often. It was a perfect compromise. Surely she’d see that.
Aunt Marian appeared on the back porch bearing a casserole dish and called, “Time to line up!” The women ferried food out to the long serving table while the men and kids scrambled for position. Even Lucy deserted Adrian to help bring out dish after dish.
That was another thing, Adrian realized, making this town feel so backward: there were definite gender roles here that had been mostly abandoned among his friends and contemporaries. He knew couples where neither of them cooked; they ate out or brought home take-out every night. One of his occasional racquetball partners, a bank trust officer, liked to cook and did most of it in his home. Not many people he knew had children; they were too busy building careers to take time out yet, and weren’t sure they ever would.
In Middleton, it appeared Lucy and Samantha were the anomalies, women too engaged in their careers to get married or have children. Of course, Lucy’s career was cooking and Sam’s making a home-away-from-home for people with the bed-and-breakfast. He wondered what people would have thought if the sisters had gone into law or medicine or dentistry instead. Maybe a little less tolerant, a little less certain they’d “settle down” eventually.
But then he noticed the men didn’t actually get their food first; their wives edged into line with them, and a few men dished up for their women. Aunt Lynn’s Will, Adrian saw, was one of those. From what Lucy had told him, that was no surprise; Will probably simply chose anything bland. But Adrian also saw the way she smiled when she took it, as though—damn it—she really loved him. Go figure.
Lucy joined Adrian in line right before he reached for a plate, and quietly steered him clear of a few dishes.
“Jeri’s bean dish is really awful. Most of us take some to be nice, but you don’t have to.” And, “Emily loves pepper. We haven’t been able to cure her of it. Unless you want to clear your sinuses...”
He didn’t. There was ample food to choose from, and his plate was soon heaping.
They sat squeezed together between Samantha and the cousin whose name he couldn’t remember on one side, and a wheezing grandfather and his live-in nurse on the other. Lucy’s side, thank God. She cut up some of the old guy’s food for him. Conversation was table-wide and lively, with rejoinders shouted from one end to the other. Adrian found himself laughing more often than he remembered in a long time, sometimes at the absurdity, sometimes at a jab of surprisingly sharp wit.
The squeezed part he didn’t mind. Lucy and he kept bumping arms. Her hip was snuggled cozily against his. He could turn his head and find her smiling at him from inches away.
Several assorted children were across the table from them, but Aunt Marian was right; they’d burned off their energy and were well-behaved and even semihuman. All except one boy, not more than six or seven, who kept squirming and occasionally slipping out of sight under the table. A girl who might have been ten or eleven kept hauling him back up, sometimes while still whispering with the friend on her other side. It seemed she’d had plenty of practice.
“The doctor recommended Ritalin for Jake,” Lucy told him, as if reading his mind. “But Jeri is digging in her heels, and I don’t blame her. He’s just a boy. He’s learning to read, he’s actually a whiz with numbers, and why should she drug him to make teachers happy, is her theory.”
His own father wouldn’t have tolerated any behavior approaching hyperactivity, Adrian couldn’t help thinking. He’d have been drugged into submission.
He nodded. “I’ve read about the concern that drugs like Ritalin are being overused. I had a friend like Jake, and he grew up to be perfectly normal.”
Once Tony Brodzinski had started playing sports, he’d been able to use all that restless energy. He’d gone on to play baseball for a couple of major league teams and was currently pitching for the Cincinnati Reds. Adrian hadn’t stayed in touch with him, but other friends had.
He told Lucy about Tony, and she said with satisfaction, “Jeri will be glad to hear about him. She can use reinforcement.”
On the other hand, Adrian thought, watching the kid bat away his sister’s hand, knock over his milk and accidentally poke the boy on his other side in the eye with his elbow, maybe Jake could use a little help.
But his mother appeared, mopped up the mess and soothed the younger boy, issued a stern warning then went back to her seat farther down the table. Jake managed to stay still for the next two or three whole minutes. Adrian hid a grin when he saw the boy’s gaze slide sideways to be sure his sister was distracted before he slithered out of sight as quick as a snake vanishing under a rock.
“Mo-om!” the girl complained.
“He is a handful,” Lucy said with a sigh.
Adrian had never given serious thought to having children of his own. He’d even said, when friends asked, that he didn’t intend to have any. What in hell did he know about raising kids? Great example his own parents had set, the one abandoning him and the other stern, demanding and distant.
But suddenly, sitting there at the long table with Lucy on one side, Samantha on the other, a hyperactive boy bumping into Adrian’s legs to escape his sister, who had also gone under the table, Grandpa Peterson cackling at a joke Lucy had just told him, Adrian knew: he wanted children.
It was a strange and bewildering feeling, this sudden sharp need to pass on his genes, his memories, to have a child count on him. Something close to panic clutched him. This was like being on a bullet train, the landscape that might have been familiar blurring because of the speed. So much was changing, so fast. Two weeks ago, he’d been contented with work, friends, condo. Now he wanted...everything. A wife, children, love, maybe even some of the chaos of this big family.
He tried to tell himself he was having a momentary impulse that he’d get over. By the time he drove off the ferry into downtown Seattle he’d have gotten over this idiocy. Lucy, he definitely wanted; all the rest of it, no.
But the panic continued to crawl over his skin like goose bumps, and he knew, deep down, that he really had changed. Lucy had found him. Something so simple, hardly even a huge effort on her part. But because she had found him, he in turn had found her, a woman with an astonishing capacity for love and kindness, thinly veiled by wariness that she’d be hurt. And because she’d brought him here to Middleton, he’d remembered the time before his mother left, when he’d known hugs and silly jokes and a playfulness he’d later had to suppress. He’d remembered being loved, being encouraged to dream.
And now he wasn’t sure the man who two weeks ago he had believed himself to be existed at all.
In desperation he thought, I have to get away. I have to find out if something in the air here is screwing with my mind.
“Time for dessert,” Lucy told him, her smile intoxicating. “I hope you saved room. Sam’s pecan pie is to die for.”
“What?” her sister exclaimed indignantly from his other side. “Are you telling him my pie will kill him?”
Lucy laughed. “Only from bliss.”
Still dazed, he had a slice of the famous pie and a cup of coffee, the old-fashioned kind. Middleton, he had been shocked to realize soon after his arrival, not only didn’t have a Starbucks, but it had no espresso stands, either. You wanted a cup of coffee in this town, you made it yourself or you signaled for the waitress at the café or the Truck-Stop Diner outside of town. They did not call black coffee Americano in Middleton. Coffee was coffee, same as it had always been. Fortunately, he liked a plain cup of black coffee, but still. It was another sign Middl
eton was out of step with the world just down Highway 101.
Pretty much everyone pitched in to clean up, tossing paper plates, covering leftovers and sorting out which bowls and dishes were whose. Lucy clutched her empty bowl when they left after an exhausting round of goodbyes.
The sky was a dusky purple that would rapidly darken into nightfall. He guessed the sun was still above the horizon on the other side of the Olympic Mountains, where beachgoers could watch it sink into the ocean. Adrian wondered if Lucy could be talked into running away for a couple of days. He’d love to walk the beach at Kalaloch with her, see her eyes widen in delight when she spotted a perfect sand dollar and lifted it triumphantly from the damp sand. They could sit with their backs to a driftwood log and watch the sunset, the fiery orb seeming to melt as it met the vast arch of the Pacific Ocean.
His jaw tightened. He couldn’t run away. He had to go back to Seattle no later than the day after tomorrow. Kalaloch with Lucy would have to be deferred until he’d persuaded her to sell the café and move to his side of the sound.
If she took a job as a sous chef at a high-end restaurant, would she be able to get away? Or would he find himself waiting for her occasional night off? Perhaps a Saturday-morning breakfast, before she left for work? Perturbed, Adrian realized how inconvenient it was that her career involved such long hours that happened not to coincide at all with his working schedule. Even if she was in Seattle, when the hell would they see each other?
“Thank you for coming.” Seated beside him as he drove, Lucy was looking straight ahead, not at him. “I know a big family gathering isn’t your idea of a good time, so it was nice of you.”
“I had fun,” he was surprised to hear himself say—and mean. “I’m pretty sure I ate more food today than I usually do in a week, but I think I’ll survive. And, damn, it was good.”
“The Martin women can all cook,” she said, sounding pleased. “Now, Dad’s side of the family...”
Jeri, who was so fond of pepper wasn’t a Martin, he remembered. On the other hand, Aunt Marian’s scalloped potatoes were darn near as good as Lucy’s potato salad, and an amazing rosemary chicken with pearl onions had been Lucy’s mother’s dish.
The Trouble with Joe Page 36