“Job is great. I’m an analyst now. Kids are great. Josie’s twelve, Randy’s eight. I’d show you pictures, but I didn’t bring them.”
“You mean you don’t carry them around in your wallet?” She thinks of the sonogram stills in her purse.
He shakes his head. “I guess I’m a bad daddy.”
“Well, I would have loved to see them.”
“Next time.”
Next time? As far as Peyton is concerned, this is a onetime event.
“Do they look like you?” she asks.
A shadow crosses his eyes. “Not really. They—”
The waiter appears to recite a list of specials and ask if he can get them started with Bloody Marys or mimosas.
“I’ll stick with coffee,” Peyton says. “Decaf.”
“Oh, come on, live a little.” Gil looks at the waiter. “We’ll have the mimosas. And I’d like to select the champagne.”
“Wait, Gil, no. Seriously, I just want decaf,” she tells the waiter, who, to her absolute irritation, looks at Gil as if for confirmation.
“She’ll have decaf. And I’ll have regular. With a splash of Bailey’s.”
“In both?”
Unlike the waiter, Gil looks expectantly at Peyton.
“Just plain decaf, thanks.”
The waiter leaves.
“You’re no fun, Runt.”
Hearing the old familiar nickname, Peyton is transported instantly to the day they first met, back in grade school. He was throwing a tennis ball against the brick wall behind the gym and it bounced away, over his head, just as she was walking by.
“Hey, Runt,” he called, “can you get that for me?”
They laughed about it later—about her indignation that he assumed she was younger than him just because he was a whole head taller. In truth, he was a whole head taller than everybody their age, having inherited the notorious Blaney height genes.
Not to mention the notorious Blaney fondness for Irish cream, and Irish whiskey, she thinks, shaking her head with a smile.
“What?” he asks.
“It’s not that I’m no fun, Stretch.” The last word rolls off her tongue as effortlessly as Runt rolled off his.
Runt and Stretch. The pet names lasted as long as their romance did. How could she have forgotten?
She says lightly, “It’s just that you’re such the party boy that next to you, normal fun-loving people seem dull.”
“You weren’t opposed to a little cocktail back in the day, as I recall.”
“We were underage back in the day, remember? It was forbidden contraband. Now that I’m all grown up . . .”
“The formerly forbidden stuff isn’t half as much fun, right?” he asks with a spark in his eye that tells her he isn’t just talking about liquor.
Gil always was a flirt. So was she. But things are different now. Vastly different.
“Your wife,” Peyton says abruptly.
“My wife? What about her?”
“How is she?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She looks down at his left hand, where a gold band encircles his fourth finger. “Is she traveling or something?”
“We’re separated.”
“Oh, Gil . . . I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Is it . . . permanent?”
“Who knows? I’ve been trying for optimism, but she’s made it pretty clear that she can’t stand the sight of me.”
“What about the kids?”
“Oh, she likes them.”
“No, I meant—”
“I know what you meant. I was just being funny. Or trying to, anyway. Not that there’s anything funny about any of this,” he adds soberly. “She’s talking about moving out to Oregon.”
“Oregon! Why?”
“She said she wants to live on the coast. I told her that the last time I checked, this was the coast. Apparently, it’s the wrong one. But I swear I’ll fight her on it. I can’t let her take my kids from me.”
“Of course not. I’m sure it won’t happen.” This time, Peyton can’t keep her hand from coming to a sheltering rest on her belly.
Her child isn’t even born yet, and she can’t stand the thought of somebody wrenching it from her life. She can only imagine how intensely emotional this is for Gil—and wonder how his wife can even contemplate such a thing. What on earth could he have done to deserve losing his children?
He gives a bitter laugh. “Don’t be so sure it won’t happen. You’ve never met Karla, have you?”
“No.” But she glimpsed the statuesque blonde once or twice from afar in the first few years after Gil left. Back then, he came back to Talbot Corners more often, much to Peyton’s chagrin. It wasn’t easy, seeing her former love and his new bride, making certain that he didn’t spot her.
Their coffees arrive. Stirring his, Gil says of his estranged wife, “What I loved about her when I met her was that she was strong and independent. A lot like you, actually.”
But she didn’t have a needy mother in Talbot Corners. Peyton can’t help thinking of the road not taken, of what might have happened if her stepfather hadn’t died just as freedom was within her grasp.
“But you’re different,” Gil goes on, looking at Peyton with a wistful expression that makes her squirm in her seat. “You have a heart.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“I heard it got broken a while back.”
She sighs. “How’d you hear that?”
“You don’t get engaged to a guy like Jeff Rieger without feeding the local gossip mill for a good long time. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
“I’m not sorry. Not anymore, anyway,” she admits, unwilling to revisit the pain of being left at the altar.
“I’m not, either,” Gil confides, leaning closer. “I’m so glad you walked back into my life now, just when I needed you. It’s like all of a sudden, there is a God.”
“Gil . . .” She has to tell him that she isn’t back in his life. Not in that way, anyway. Not romantically.
“Let’s have dinner Wednesday night. I have meetings tomorrow night and Tuesday, but Wednesday is—”
“I can’t, Gil. I have a meeting, too.”
“Right. We haven’t even talked about your job, or your life—I swear I’m not always this self-absorbed. It’s just been a tough couple of months.”
“I’m sure. And it’s fine. You need somebody to talk to.” She instinctively reaches out and touches his hand, knowing she shouldn’t give him the wrong idea, wondering if the instinct is purely platonic on her part. She can’t ignore how deeply she loved him once.
First love.
She’s long since dismissed their romance as infatuation, easy to do after Gil vanished from her daily life. But now, remembering the intensity of emotion she felt for him all those years ago, she can’t help wondering if first love really was true love. Perhaps the feelings she thought she was burying forever weren’t dead after all.
Just don’t rule anything out, okay? You might change your mind.
She promised Allison she wouldn’t . . .
And she won’t. She has to nip this thing in the bud now, before it blossoms into a complication she doesn’t need. And she knows exactly how to do it.
“So what time will your meeting be over on Wednesday?” Gil is asking. “Is it in your office? Because I can meet—”
“It’s in Brooklyn, Gil,” she cuts in. “And it isn’t a meeting, exactly. It’s a support group. For pregnant, single women.”
“What’s this? More baby clothes?”
Derry looks up from the cross stitch she’s working on to see Linden standing over her with a cardboard carton. “Those are the pink receiving blankets I ordered last week. Remember? I showed you.”
“I don’t think you did.”
She knows she didn’t, but she shrugs and says, “You were probably busy thinking about something else.”
He shakes his head and puts the box back in the corn
er behind the door, where it rests on top of a stack that’s been accumulating for almost a month now.
Derry frowns and makes another pastel x in a configuration that will soon, she hopes, begin to look like the lamb it’s supposed to be. The duckie bib she made turned out so well she thought she should tackle the lamb. Being new to needlework, she probably should have stuck with easy little yellow ducks.
Linden turns down the volume on the Foreigner CD she was playing and returns to the couch to sit beside her.
“Derry, we need to talk.”
“About what?”
“All this crap you’re buying for the baby.”
“Crap?” She winces, not just at the offensive word but because a strand of embroidery floss just snagged on a bit of fingernail she earlier chewed to ragged splinters. She tosses the wooden hoop aside and bites at the ragged edge.
“Whatever it is. Little shoes and blankets and dresses—the baby isn’t even born yet. You don’t even know for sure it’s a girl.”
She removes her fingertip from her mouth to remind him, “Rose said the test showed it is, and we already said that we’re going to name her—”
“Tests can be wrong,” he cuts in. “I know what we said, but we don’t know it’s going to happen. And anyway, it’s not just the dresses that bug me. Where are we going to put all this cr—stuff? You’re going way overboard, don’t you think?”
“You’re being a little pessimistic, don’t you think?” she returns, glaring at him. “We were approved, Linden. The donor chose us. In a few months, we’re going to be bringing a newborn into this home, and I want to be ready.”
“Yeah, me too . . . when the time comes. But don’t you think you should hold off a little? Things can happen.”
Yes. Things can happen. Donors can change their mind. About the chosen parents, about adoption. There can be complications in late pregnancy, complications in labor.
“Rose said everything will work out,” Derry reminds Linden, refusing to allow her dreams of motherhood to be tainted by his negativity. “Why can’t you just be optimistic?”
“I am optimistic.”
Derry snorts, thinking he probably doesn’t even know what the word means.
“Weren’t you supposed to be going over to see Richie this afternoon?” she asks, anxious to get him and his bad vibes out of here.
“Yeah, in a little while. You trying to get rid of me?”
“Not at all,” she says, wishing he’d leave her alone with her lamb bib and pink blankies and dreams of sugar and spice and everything nice.
Pulling into the puddle-dotted circular driveway in front of her three-story brick home, Anne Marie realizes that Jarrett’s black Mercedes is parked just where it was when she left two hours ago.
Terrific. He’d promised to take the boys out to get some lunch, since the weekly groceries aren’t delivered until Monday morning and the cupboards and fridge are in their usual Sunday barren state.
Now Anne Marie’s going to walk in and find hungry children, and Jarrett absorbed in something else. Something selfish. It never fails.
She parks her own silver Mercedes in the garage, with no intention of venturing out again on this rain-soaked afternoon. Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest. With triplets in the house and a hands-off husband, there’s no such thing. But if Jarrett refuses to take them out to eat, she’ll scrape together something from the pantry.
Turning off the windshield wipers and then the engine, she leans against the leather headrest a moment to inhale the welcome silence. Then she reaches over to the seat to grab her cell phone and slip it into her Hermes satchel beside the small red-leather-bound Bible that accompanies her everywhere she goes.
Her heels tap on the concrete as she makes her way through the darkened three-car garage to the door that leads into the butler’s pantry. She can hear little voices squealing and the din of a Thomas the Tank Engine cartoon in the background.
The moment she opens the door, she’s met by the sound of pounding sock-feet and a gleeful chorus of one word sung in identical pitch and perfect unison. “Mommy!”
“Hi, everybody!” She bends to welcome her sons into her embrace, searching over their heads for Jarrett.
“How was mass?” he asks, coming around the corner from the kitchen.
Is it her imagination, or does he seem suspicious? Is he wondering if she really was at church? Did he snoop around the house while she was gone and find the envelope she slipped into the top drawer of her dresser last night, beneath the layers of bras and panties?
You’re just being paranoid, Anne Marie scolds herself.
Jarrett asks the same question every Sunday. It’s a polite nonquestion, in a league with “How’s your meal?” and “How was your day?” He doesn’t really want to know. It’s just something to say, just another of his maddeningly impersonal interaction skills.
Early in their relationship, it bothered her that he didn’t use endearments. She long since gave up longing for honey or sweetheart. Now she just wishes he would occasionally address her directly by name. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s heard Anne Marie pass his lips.
She can almost hear her grandmother saying, So what? There are worse marital offenses. He’s faithful and a good provider, so why are you complaining?
“Mass was fine,” Anne Marie tells Jarrett. “Long sermon,” she adds, in case he really was wondering where she’s been all this time. She motions at the triplets, who are scampering out of the room, and can’t help saying, “I thought you were taking them out for lunch.”
“They didn’t want to go out in the rain so we ordered a pizza.”
Instantly, Anne Marie regrets her accusing tone. “Oh. Good idea.”
“You thought I would let them starve?”
“No. I thought you didn’t feed them . . . yet.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not such a horrible father, am I?”
“No,” she says, looking down at her Ferragamo pumps. “You’re not a horrible father at all.”
I’m just a horrible mother.
No. That isn’t fair. It isn’t true . . . not now, anyway.
Anne Marie Egerton loves her babies fiercely. All of them.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Don’t I know you?”
Glancing up from the keys in her hand, Peyton spots Tom Reilly standing on the sidewalk beneath her stoop. He’s not even wearing a jacket, just navy sweatpants and a maroon sweatshirt that’s spattered with raindrops.
She should be startled to see him, but for some reason, she isn’t. If anything, it’s almost as though she’s been expecting him. Like Allison said, this city can be an awfully small town.
“You sort of know me,” she tells him, wondering if her mascara has run and if her hair is as plastered to her head as it feels. “I’m the one who—”
“I remember. Watermelon, right?”
“That’s me. Watermelon.” She smiles briefly before turning back to the door, where she almost puts the wrong key into the lock. Her heart is pounding. Not out of fear, really. Not this time. She can’t help noticing that he’s one attractive man.
“So there I was, walking down the block, and there you were, coming in the opposite direction. We’re the only two idiots out in this weather without umbrellas, so I looked at you, and . . . I recognized you.” He rests an arm on the dripping wrought-iron railing beside the steps.
You’d think he would mention having seen her in Tequilla Moon that day a few weeks ago.
Why doesn’t he?
Maybe he didn’t really see you that day, she tells herself. Maybe Allison just said that because . . .
Well, because Allison seems to want to see her hook up with somebody, almost as though she doesn’t think Peyton has what it takes to raise a baby on her own.
Then again, maybe Tom saw her, and is . . .
What? Following you around the city? Stalking you?
It’s all Peyton can do not to roll her eyes at the thou
ght. She must have left the better part of her earlier paranoia behind at the restaurant along with her umbrella. Her spirits buoyed by two hours of laughter and reminiscing with Gil, she can’t seem to muster much concern about this chance meeting with Tom Reilly.
In the broad, if gloomy, light of day, his being a sinister character seems about as likely as bright sunshine suddenly bursting through the oppressive storm clouds overhead.
He glances up as if he’s read her mind, barely seeming to notice the droplets sprinkling him from the heavens. “This is a great building.”
“Yes, it’s . . . great.”
“Is it full of fireplaces and French doors and crown moldings? Is there a beautiful garden out back?”
“No French doors, and the fireplace doesn’t work, but there are crown moldings. And there’s a garden, but it backs up to an alley and it’s usually more overgrown than beautiful.”
“Yeah, that’s what I always picture in a place like this. Like the apartments in those Nora Ephron movies. New York apartments always look so charming in them. It’s like nobody ever lives in a rectangular box in a high-rise building, you know?”
She laughs and nods, knowing exactly what he means—and pleased that he’s no stranger to chick flicks. Macho Jeff used to scoff at romantic comedies, when she could get him to accompany her to one.
Still looking at the brownstone, Tom asks, “Which floor are you on?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she manages to say lightly. “You might be a lunatic prowling the streets for innocent women, remember?”
The moment the words are out of her mouth, she regrets them. Why did she have to refer to their former conversation? Now he’ll realize that she remembers it in that much detail—if, indeed, he happens to remember it in that much detail.
He probably doesn’t, she assures herself. Of course he doesn ’t.
“Nice day, isn’t it?” He takes a step up from the sidewalk, ducking his head a bit as though he’s trying to escape the rain.
She looks around dubiously. “A little wet, isn’t it?”
“The weather? I don’t mind. It’s good for staying indoors and lounging around with the Sunday Times.”
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