Chances Are

by Barbara Bretton

  “Pull that seat belt tighter, honey, because I have some news you are not going to believe.”

  “MIKE’S GOING TO shack up with Mrs. Fairstein?” Aidan looked suitably shocked when Claire and Billy dropped by to grab some take-out chili for their supper and share the latest news. “When the hell did that happen?”

  Claire glanced at her watch. “About two hours ago. Lilly phoned to tell me he said yes.” She laughed. “Actually, he said, ‘Hell, yes!’”

  “Lot of changes going on around here,” he said, loading some corn chips into a container for Billy. “You need a score-card to keep up with them.”

  “Is that a dig? Because if you’re talking about Cuppa, you can just—”

  “Down, Red,” he said. “I was talking about myself. Maddy and I decided to move up the wedding date.”

  She did a good job of faking happiness. He had to give her that. “So when’s the new Big Day going to be?”

  “July twenty-first. She’s going to run it by Rose tonight.”

  “That’ll register at least a five on the Richter scale,” Claire said.

  “What’s the Richter scale?” Billy asked, looking up from Aidan’s computer, where he had been playing something that involved street-fighting dinosaurs.

  “It measures earthquakes,” Aidan told him and laughed when the kid’s eyes almost bugged out of his head.

  “We’re going to have an earthquake?” Billy asked. “Cool!”

  Claire launched into an explanation of sarcasm, irony, and metaphor that Aidan saw whizzing over his nephew’s head like a convoy of paper airplanes.

  “What your mother’s trying to say is that when Rose hears about this, she’s going to yell loud enough to rock the town.”

  “You’re good at this,” Claire said dryly. “Ever think of trying parenthood?”

  “Now that’s the sister-in-law I know and love: never met a zinger she didn’t like.”

  “I don’t think Olivia’s going to be too thrilled when she hears the news. That means Maddy will be useless the first month Cuppa’s open.”

  “Women have been known to work and plan a wedding,” he said.

  “You two are going on a honeymoon, aren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, unless you’re staying in beautiful downtown Paradise Point, that’ll leave me holding the tea bag until she gets back.”

  “So you’re saying July isn’t a good idea?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m just pointing out a few things you might’ve missed.”

  “Don’t blame Maddy for this. It was my idea.”

  “I’m not blaming anyone, Aidan. It’s just that it’s typical of—” She clamped her lips together in a tight line.

  “Typical of what?” Like he didn’t know what she had been about to say. Flighty, unpredictable Maddy Bainbridge . . .

  She shook her head and changed the subject. “Speaking of parenthood, what’s with Kelly? She said she’d take Kathleen to the train station, and she never showed up.”

  “I haven’t seen her since we got back. She stayed at The Candlelight last night. I suppose she’s still there.”

  Claire gave him one of those raised-eyebrow looks. “Didn’t you try to call her?”

  “I swung by home to see if she was there and left a note. She knows where to find me.”

  Claire tapped her front teeth with the nail on her right index finger. “It’s not like her to just drop out like this.”

  “Drop out? She blew a trip to the train station. What’s the big deal?”

  “I don’t know that it is a big deal,” she said. “All I know is it’s not like her, and it worries me.”

  It worried him, too. The nagging sense that something was wrong had been with him for weeks now. “She’s been a little edgy lately. I tried to get her to talk to me this week.”

  “Any luck?”

  “She burst into tears and ran from the room.”

  “Kelly did that?” Claire sounded shocked.

  “She was crying like it was the end of the world.”

  “Maybe she and Seth are having troubles.”

  “Nope. Sorry to say they’re tight as ever.”

  “School?”

  “Still pulling As.” He frowned. “She hasn’t been feeling too great. Some kind of stomach thing. That’s probably what it is.”

  “Maybe she’s pregnant.”

  Claire’s words hit him like rocket mortar. “What the hell are you trying to say?”

  “I’m not trying to say anything. I said it. I’m worried about her, too, Aidan. Something isn’t right, and the signs are pointing one way.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Lower your voice. The kid’s listening.”

  “Like you haven’t said worse.”

  “I’ve reformed.” She had the grace to look embarrassed. “At least around home.”

  “Why would you think she’s—” He had trouble getting the word out.

  “Gut instinct. Mother’s intuition.” She shrugged. “The fact that she puked her guts out Monday afternoon at the mall.”

  “What?”

  “I thought I told you that night.”

  “You told me she didn’t feel well.”

  “It was more than that. Hannah was with her. Apparently she had a major encounter with the porcelain receptacle.”

  “Jesus.” This was worse than rocket mortar. He didn’t want to think about his daughter and Seth. She was still only five years old, wasn’t she? The sweet, innocent baby girl who thought he was a hero. “Kelly’s too smart for that.”

  “I was too smart for that, too,” she reminded him. “And so was Maddy. Even smart people make mistakes.”

  “I’m not buying it. This is a kid who makes lists of lists. She brings back her library books a day early. She rewinds tapes before she returns them to the video store. That’s not the type of kid who ends up pregnant.”

  She gave him a look that was too close to pity for his liking, and for the first time he was scared.

  “I’LL CLOSE UP,” Aidan said to Owen hours later as the last of the regulars waved good-bye.

  “I don’t mind doing it.”

  “Go home and get some sleep. You did double duty all weekend. You deserve it.”

  Owen didn’t even try to stifle his yawn. “Is Tommy opening in the morning?”

  “Last I heard. If he doesn’t, I have his back. We won’t need you until four.”

  Owen thanked him and took off, leaving Aidan alone with his increasingly troubled thoughts.

  It was too late to phone Maddy, but he needed to touch base with her, to reassure himself that he hadn’t dreamed last night, hadn’t imagined the things they did or the promises they had made to each other. He sent her an X-rated E-mail, then followed it quickly with a mushy, sentimental poem meant to make her laugh. She hadn’t responded yet, but he imagined things were pretty chaotic at The Candlelight, especially if she had broken the news of the new wedding date to Rose.

  He had spoken briefly to Kelly around ten o’clock. She was home and fine, hunkered down over some schoolwork. A normal Sunday night. He asked her about Kathleen and the train station, and she said she’d been so busy at The Candlelight that she totally forgot.

  Last week he wouldn’t have thought twice about any of it, but tonight it only added to the growing sense that something wasn’t right.

  He locked up the place a little before midnight and headed for home. As he pulled into the driveway, he noted that the porch light needed to be replaced and added it to his mental to-do list. Kelly’s room was dark, but the small table lamp on the desk in the living room was lit, and that was where he found his daughter, asleep over a stack of photographs.

  She looked incredibly young with her head resting on her arms and her buttery yellow curls tumbling this way and that. She wore his moth-eaten old black sweater, the one with the hole in the right elbow, and sweatpants. Her feet were bare and propped up on a stack of books. For a second he was
a young and terrified father, alone with a squalling, needy infant with feet so tiny they could both fit in the palm of his hand with room left over. Where had the years gone? In a few months she would be out of his house forever. Had he taught her everything she would need to walk this world? Had he taught her anything at all, or had she always been far ahead of him in the things that really mattered?

  His gaze fell on the stacks of photos scattered across the tabletop, and his heart seemed to stop beating for an instant as the ghosts of his family filled the room. Grandma Irene and Grandpa Michael, smiling up at him from the front door of the original O’Malley’s before the Hurricane of ’52 tore it apart. His parents in their Sunday best at his First Communion. Billy Jr.—but wait, that wasn’t his nephew grinning at him in black and white, that was his brother Billy on his ninth birthday, all freckles and scabbed knees and enough energy to power most of New Jersey.

  They were all there. Aunts and uncles he barely remembered. Favorite dogs. The cat Billy had rescued from the creek behind the church.

  And Sandy.

  There she was, his first love, cradling their newborn baby daughter. She was only a kid herself at the time, young and wide-eyed and in love. Same as he had been. The head-over-heels, forever kind of love people prayed for but rarely found. Everybody had said the odds were against them, but for a little while they had proved them all wrong. Sure they were too young and too poor and too unprepared for what it meant to be parents when they were still kids themselves, but somehow they’d managed. Or they would have managed if fate had been kinder to them and—

  “Dad?” Kelly’s voice was soft, almost apologetic. “You’re looking at Mom’s picture?”

  “Hey, sleepyhead, where did you find this? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

  She yawned and wiped the sleep from her eyes. “Mrs. DiFalco gave me a box of photos from her attic. Can you believe how amazing they are?”

  He picked up the photo of Sandy and looked at it under the lamplight. “This was taken just before you were baptized. It had been raining on and off all day, and your mother was fussing over you, worrying you were going to catch cold, even though it was ninety degrees outside.”

  “I wish—” She stopped and lowered her head. “You know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He had wished it, too, over the years. “I’m lucky, though. I see your mother every time you smile.”

  She looked at him with those old-soul eyes of hers. He had always joked she had been born knowing everything she needed to know and had been teaching him ever since. “Doesn’t that make you sad?”

  “Knowing that your mother lives on through you? No, that doesn’t make me sad, Kel. It makes me—” He struggled for the right word to convey a concept so profound it humbled him. “Grateful,” he said at last. “It makes me feel grateful.”

  She made a small noise and looked away.

  “Don’t go crying on me, Kel. These are good memories.”

  Her arms were wrapped tightly across her chest in classic defensive posture.

  “Kel, you haven’t been yourself all week. Claire—”

  She spun around and flashed him her mother’s smile, derailing his train of thought. “Wow, I completely forgot! Did you and Maddy have a great time?”

  “Great enough that we’re moving up the wedding to July.”

  “July? Wow!”

  “You’re okay with that?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be? I really like Maddy, and Hannah’s a doll.”

  He started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You never disappoint me, Kel. I must’ve done something damn good in another life to rate a daughter like you.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

  “You’ve earned them. A man couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”

  She shook her head. “You’re wrong. I’ve made lots of mistakes, really bad mistakes.”

  His gut twisted into a sailor’s knot.

  “I’m listening,” he said. “You know you can tell me anything.” God, if you’re listening, if you remember my name, help me know the right thing to say.

  The look in her eyes was very old and very sad. “I’m not a little girl anymore,” she said. “I can’t run to Daddy with every problem.”

  “You have a problem?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Claire’s worried about you, sweetheart. She said you were sick to your stomach last week at Short Hills.” She’s a great kid, God. She deserves all the good luck you can send her way.

  “Great,” she exploded. “I suppose she told you I was . . . bulimic or something.”

  “Are you?”

  “No!” She pulled a childish face. “Yuk!”

  “So what happened?”

  Silence had never sounded so loud as he waited for her answer.

  “Sometimes I get sick when my period starts. That’s all.”

  He held her gaze. You’ve never lied to me before, Kelly. Tell me the truth, and I swear to you everything will be okay. “You’re telling me the truth?”

  “Yeah,” she said, shooting a fiercely indignant look his way. “Not that it’s any of your business.” She started tossing photos back into the box marked O’Malley. “And you can tell Aunt Claire the same thing.”

  Relief almost brought him to his knees. “I’ll tell her.”

  “Good.” She stomped out of the room. Seconds later, her bedroom door slammed shut behind her.

  She was pissed off, but she wasn’t pregnant. Apparently God hadn’t entirely forgotten his name.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “THE CELTIC CROSS?” Gina demanded Monday morning as she flashed her upper left hip to the mothers crowding around her and to her little Joey’s delight. “I’m Italian! What the hell was I thinking?”

  “How many margaritas did you have anyway?” Gina’s sister Denise grabbed her youngest by the back of his collar before he skittered away. “You pass out at the sight of a sewing needle.”

  Everyone laughed but Maddy. She lingered at the edge of the crowd, mimicking their responses while her thoughts remained with Kelly. She had gone through the motions with Hannah and her mother, the usual morning routine, but she hadn’t really been present. All she could think about was Aidan’s daughter, what she was doing, how she was feeling, what the future would hold for them all.

  Anything could happen between now and late afternoon when they had arranged to meet up in the parking lot. She might decide trusting Maddy was a big mistake and take matters back into her own hands. The entire issue might be resolved before Maddy had a chance to make a difference. It wasn’t that she wanted to bend the girl to her will. This was Kelly’s life and future, not hers. She understood that. She also understood that she had never needed her own mother more than the day she had discovered Hannah was on her way.

  She had longed for her mother, a Rose she had really never known, during those first few weeks, and had never felt the emotional distance between them more keenly. Her father Bill had been enormously supportive and understanding, but it was her beloved stepmother Irma who had provided the maternal warmth and unconditional love she had desperately needed.

  She saw all that and more, maybe too much more, in Kelly’s eyes, and she couldn’t turn away.

  Maybe she was crazy to be taking this risk for Kelly. She was crawling out on a very shaky limb, one that could send her future with Aidan crashing down at the slightest breeze, but the girl had no one else to turn to. Kelly was the quintessential golden girl, the good girl who solved her family’s problems rather than made problems of her own. There was no room in that perspective, at least not that Kelly could see, for mistakes. She had to be perfect, or her entire family would collapse.

  It wasn’t fair. Not to Seth or Aidan. Not to Claire. Certainly not to Kelly herself. Families pulled together in times of trouble. At least that was what they were supposed to do, and neither Seth nor the O’Malleys would have that
chance if Kelly followed through with her plans.

  Since when do families do what they’re supposed to do? You can’t guarantee it will work out the way you hope it will. Kelly knows them better than you do.

  It was a chance Kelly needed to take, no matter what her ultimate decision turned out to be. All Maddy wanted to do was open up a window of time for Kelly to think about her options, to consider all possibilities, before she made a truly irrevocable decision.

  She says her mind is made up. She’s going through with it tomorrow. What then, Bainbridge? Will you be able to keep her secret from the man you love?

  Kelly wasn’t the only one in trouble. Aidan might never forgive her for what she was doing, but she couldn’t see any other way. She believed Kelly when she said she would run off to a clinic in New York if Maddy broke her promise and told him. She knew the odds were against it, but if anything happened to Kelly and she hadn’t at least tried—

  “. . . really think we were going to let you off that easy, did you, Maddy?”

  The Great Tattoo Unveiling was over, and they had turned their attentions to Maddy and her romantic weekend.

  “Was it wonderful?” Denise asked with a big fake romantic sigh.

  “The hell with that,” Gina said. “Was he wonderful?”

  They all laughed, even Claire, who up until that moment had looked like she was undergoing root canal.

  “So wonderful they moved up the wedding date,” she said before Maddy could open her mouth.

  “Get out!” Gina gave Maddy a Seinfeldian shove that almost knocked Maddy on her butt. “I still have five pounds to lose before Lucy measures me for my bridesmaid dress.”

  “July twenty-first,” Claire said. “Better get moving.”

  “You’re well informed,” Maddy said to her future sort of sister-in-law. Aidan must have spread the word last night at the bar.

  “Have you mentioned it to Olivia yet? It’ll be interesting to hear her take on it.”

  Gina let loose with a loud meow that made everyone except Maddy and Claire laugh again.

  “Why would Olivia care when I get married?” Maddy asked, her temper sparking dangerously. “She knows Aidan and I are—oh.” She had completely forgotten about Cuppa. “Oh God. That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?”