Just Desserts

by Barbara Bretton

  “How much have you figured out?”

  “We didn’t drive down here just to buy a cake.”

  “Good guess,” Finn said.

  “The girl has Tom’s eyes.”

  “She does.”

  “And his smile.”

  Finn nodded.

  “The mother has his eyes too.”

  “I noticed.” Beautifully expressive eyes that held more than a touch of wariness.

  “Does Tommy know?”

  “He sent me down here to check things out.”

  They were silent as Finn rolled up to the tollbooth and grabbed a ticket.

  “Damn,” Anton said as they merged with northbound traffic. “She was right, wasn’t she. She thought there was something else going on and there is.”

  “Mrs. Goldstein is a smart woman.” Finn shouldn’t have told her even as little as he had back there but when she looked at him with those wary and beautiful eyes, he couldn’t lie.

  “And funny.”

  “That too.”

  “And not bad to look at.”

  He’d tried hard not to notice.

  “Admit it, friend,” Anton said. “You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off the kid either. It was like looking at Tom.”

  “Agreed, but that’s not why you were looking at the mother.”

  “You’ve been reading too many romance novels, Anton.”

  Anton actually flinched. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

  “Probably not,” Finn agreed. “It was a memorable sight.” Anton sprawled out in the back of a private jet, lost in something called The Flame and the Flower.

  “Gotta get your happy endings somewhere.”

  When the man was right, he was right. “Things not going well with Lyssa?”

  “Not going at all,” Anton said, gazing out the window. “She says she’s filing for divorce.”

  He didn’t have to ask why. Life on the road with a rock band was great when you were twenty-two and single but when you were pushing forty-five and married, it was a whole other animal. It was hard to build a marriage when you were on the road eight months of the year.

  “You should ask her out,” Anton said, circling back.

  “What is this, high school? I’m not asking her out.”

  “She’s your type: tall, skinny, not likely to put up with your shit.”

  “Not funny,” he said, although he was laughing. He wasn’t about to get into the wisdom of dating a woman who would probably turn out to be Tommy’s daughter. “Want to pick up some burgers? There’s a McDonald’s at the next rest stop.”

  “If you want to change the subject, that’s cool.”

  “I don’t want to change the subject. I just don’t want you running with the wrong idea.”

  “That you thought she was hot?”

  “Is this going somewhere,” Finn asked, “or are you just trying to break my balls?”

  “She asked me about you when we were working on the cake.”

  “Yeah?” He slid a glance in his friend’s direction. “What did she want to know?”

  “If you were married.”

  “What?”

  Anton started to laugh. “Gotcha.”

  “You’re a real son of a bitch. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’ve heard that a few times before.”

  “That’s all she asked?” Could he sound any more like a sixteen-year-old kid without a date for the big dance?

  “She tried to get some on Tommy but I stuck to what’s been in People.”

  “Smart move. That way we won’t have to sue your ass from here to L.A. for breach of contract.”

  The thought of Tommy suing one of his own made them both laugh out loud.

  “When’s he going to tell her?”

  “I don’t know but I almost told her the whole story when she was signing the contract.” Only loyalty to Tommy had stopped him but it had been close.

  “Some people would be real happy to find out their father is a famous rocker. Everyone knows Tommy takes care of his own. She won’t have to worry about paying her bills anymore, that’s for damn sure.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be one of them.” The woman he’d met had something to prove.

  “She drives a twelve-year-old Buick,” Anton pointed out. “She cuts her own hair. Her life is going to do a one-eighty when she finds out about Tommy.”

  The thought depressed the hell out of him and, once again, he didn’t know why.

  Usually he rolled with things the same way Tommy did. The Stiles clan grew larger, the family tree more complicated, and the updates and codicils to Tommy’s will more frequent. It was what it was and the emotional fallout washed right over him and away.

  Tommy wasn’t an absentee father with a checkbook and a guilty conscience. He was the real deal, a hands-on parent who didn’t just want the best for his kids, he tried to help them achieve it. Okay, so maybe he had a few tats, some random piercings, and an addiction to highlights and supermodels, but when it came to family nobody did it better.

  If Hayley Maitland Goldstein turned out to be Tommy’s daughter, the sky would be the limit. That dented Buick would be history. Her Target days would be over. Tommy, in his benevolent way, would roll over her like a gift-wrapped tank.

  Finn tried to imagine what it would feel like if someone walked into his life right now and claimed to be his father. He couldn’t wrap his brain around the concept. By the time you reached your thirties, you had a pretty good idea who you were and where you came from. You knew why you were the way you were and if you didn’t, it was only because you weren’t paying attention.

  That wasn’t the case with Hayley Maitland Goldstein and her daughter, Lizzie. There was no way they could see this coming and as far as Finn could tell, they had Jane Maitland, Ph.D., to thank. The good doctor knew how to keep a secret. How she had managed to keep that particular secret for thirty-eight years was one of the things he hoped to find out someday.

  In the meantime Hayley was living over a bakery in South Jersey with a beautiful young daughter whose IQ was higher than Finn could count. She had an ex-husband who was down in Florida looking for trouble and probably finding it on a regular basis. She worked hard, took care of her kid, and maybe dreamed about winning the Pick-6 so she could upgrade her kitchen.

  Discovering she was the daughter of a multimillionaire rock star could be the best thing that ever happened to her. Tommy would wave his magic checkbook and wipe away her debt. He would see to it that her bakery had the newest and best of everything. Her daughter had talked about Cinderella moments and maybe it would be once the dust had settled.

  One thing he knew for sure: the truth was going to slam into the two of them like a runaway train, and no matter how much he wished he could soften the blow, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it.

  Back in New Jersey

  Hayley pulled into the parking lot then looked over at her daughter. “Do you think we should do this?”

  “I think we should,” Lizzie said. “I think we earned it.”

  “It’s a major splurge.”

  “I think we’d be seriously deranged if we didn’t do it.”

  “No complaining at the end of the month when you balance the books.”

  “Promise.” Hayley could see her daughter’s wide smile even in the darkened car. “Besides, this time next week we’ll be rich and famous.”

  She didn’t want to dim Lizzie’s enthusiasm with a standard-issue lecture on counting unhatched chickens but she was a mother. She had to do what she had to do.

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” she said as they followed the Olive Garden hostess to a tiny table next to a huge display of Tuscan wines. “A lot can go wrong between now and next week.”

  The hostess, who wasn’t all that much older than Lizzie, quickly distributed the menus, ran through her spiel of specials, then went back to her post in the l
obby.

  Hayley had been running on autopilot since signing the contract with Finn Rafferty. Correction, she caught herself. Finn Rafferty negotiated the contract, but it was Tommy Stiles who had set the whole thing in motion and she still couldn’t figure out why. Rafferty had admitted there was more to this than cake and that admission still had her unnerved hours later.

  “I know what I want.” Lizzie turned her menu facedown on the table top.

  Hayley couldn’t help but laugh. “I know what you want too: salad with lots of red onion, no black olives, lasagna with extra sauce and grated cheese, and everything chocolate for dessert.”

  “I know what I like,” Lizzie said.

  “You’ve known what you liked since you were six months old and decided it was time to stop nursing.”

  Lizzie’s cheeks flamed. “Do we have to talk about that in public?”

  She kept forgetting that they were sailing into dangerous waters these days, a place where every maternal utterance could stir up a tsunami of embarrassment and hurt feelings.

  “Grandma Jane used to talk about placentas at the playground,” Hayley said as she scanned her menu. “I’d be sitting in the sandbox, wishing I could dig my way to China and disappear.”

  “Mom! Could we not?”

  “I’m just telling you that I understand.”

  “If you understood, you wouldn’t talk about stuff like that.”

  “When you’re a scientist, you’ll be talking about things like that all the time.”

  “Not in Olive Garden,” Lizzie said, rolling her eyes. “There’s a big difference.”

  They ate their way through the salad bowl, then threw caution to the wind and asked for a refill.

  “Is this the life or what?” Hayley said as she reached for her glass of iced tea. “A bottomless salad bowl, all the breadsticks you can eat, and no dirty dishes to wash when it’s over.”

  “Maybe we can do this again next week after we deliver the cake to Atlantic City.”

  “I was going to have Dominic deliver it.”

  “What!?” Lizzie looked downright horrified. “You have to deliver it yourself! This is your chance to get noticed.”

  “It’s going to be huge, Lizzie. We’ll need the van.”

  “You’ve driven the van.”

  “And it will be heavy. I’ll need help.”

  “I can help.”

  “Help with muscles,” Hayley said. What she didn’t say was that an after-party for a famous rocker probably wasn’t the place for an overly articulate, highly impressionable fourteen-year-old girl. Especially not one with huge blue-green eyes and long blond hair.

  “Then let me go along for the ride.”

  “Not happening.”

  “Why not?”

  “Where do I start? How about this: I’m not going and neither are you.”

  “But you have to go.”

  “I don’t recall seeing that spelled out in the contract.”

  “Mom! This is your big chance. You have to go so you can bask in the glory.”

  “We’ll let the cake bask in the glory. I’d be happy basking in a flood of new commissions.”

  “What about Entertainment Tonight and all of the local news guys? The place will be jammed with promo ops.”

  She shrugged. “Word will get out.”

  Lizzie narrowed her eyes and leaned across the empty salad bowl. “You’re afraid!”

  “I am not.”

  “You are! You shouldn’t be but you so are.”

  It would be nice to keep at least one emotion secret from her daughter. She gestured toward her basic uniform of T-shirt and jeans. “Look at me. I’m not exactly red-carpet worthy. I’d need a whole new wardrobe.”

  “Wear your whites like they do on the Food Network.”

  “I haven’t had my hair cut since Christmas.”

  “Wear it in a ballerina bun.”

  “All I have are sneakers and clogs.”

  “Clogs are way cool. The interns on Grey’s Anatomy wear clogs.”

  “They wear running shoes.”

  Lizzie was adamant. “Some of them wear clogs.”

  “You think I should wear my red clogs?”

  “Mario on the Food Network wears orange ones and he’s famous.”

  “How much television are you watching lately anyway?”

  Lizzie ignored the question. “You’ll stand out from the crowd. You need to work this, Mom. I mean, what are the chances something like this will happen again?”

  “I’m still trying to figure out why it happened in the first place.”

  Lizzie fell silent for a moment. “It’s not like you aren’t great at what you do.”

  “Lots of people are great at what they do,” she reminded her daughter, “and they live their entire lives without a single Cinderella moment.”

  “Karma?” Lizzie asked. “Like maybe you did something wonderful in another life and now you’re being rewarded.”

  “I’m Catholic,” she reminded her daughter. “I don’t get rewarded until I die.”

  Lizzie, who was forging a more ecumenical path between her Catholic mother and Jewish father, sighed. “Does there have to be a reason?”

  “You’re the logical, scientific one. I thought you believed everything that happens, happens for a reason.”

  “Luck is luck,” her daughter said. “Luck doesn’t need a reason. It just is.”

  That was what Hayley used to say about love and look where that had gotten her.

  She tried to push the negative thought from her mind for her daughter’s sake.

  “Your dad and I used to eat at Olive Garden all the time,” she said after Margo dropped off their entrees. “We went to the one near Aunt Fiona’s old house the day I found out I was pregnant with you.”

  She rarely spoke about Michael and when she did, it usually wasn’t complimentary. The man had come close to ruining her life and Lizzie’s with his gambling and risk-taking. It wasn’t an easy thing to forget. She tried to be careful around Lizzie but unfortunately she was only human. Like it or not, the man was still her daughter’s father and always would be. She needed to remember that for Lizzie’s sake if not her own.

  “That’s when you two were happy together, right?”

  “We were trying, honey.” How young Lizzie looked, how innocent and hungry for bits and pieces of her family’s past. “Sometimes we were very happy. The day you were born was probably the happiest day of our lives.”

  Lizzie fell quiet, directing her attention to the plate of lasagna in front of her while Hayley picked at her grilled chicken and pretended it was shrimp scampi drowning in butter and garlic. The silence between them could be a brief one or it could last for hours. The last few months had been a roller-coaster ride of emotions where Lizzie was concerned and there were times when Hayley hadn’t a clue what to say or do.

  “Hormones,” Michelle, her former sister-in-law had said. Michie was the mother of four teenagers and an expert on the subject. “There’s nothing you can say or do to make her hear you until she’s ready. Just sit back, strap yourself in, and wait for the storm to pass.”

  Hayley couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more than hormones going on. Lizzie had planned to visit her father in Florida over the Christmas/Chanukah holidays but Michael had begged off, saying he had some business to take care of in the Bahamas. He said winter break wasn’t good for him and then a month later he cancelled their plans for spring break. Easter and Passover raced by without acknowledgment. Eleven times he had promised his daughter—the daughter who adored him—that they would spend some time together and eleven times he had broken her heart.

  Lizzie had tried to put a brave face on it, but Hayley knew she was hurting badly. Given the chance, she could happily kill Michael with her bare hands and not feel one single second of regret.

  “Did you miss having a dad when you were growing up?”

  The question brought Hayley up short. “You can’t miss wh
at you never had.” She aimed for bright and breezy honesty.

  Lizzie didn’t smile. “I mean, didn’t you ever wish you could have had a dad you could talk to?”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “I was thinking about Grandma Jane and how she’s coming home soon and I started wondering. That’s all.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  Lizzie shrugged and looked away. Hayley followed her gaze to the table by the window where a middle-aged father and his teenage daughter were talking earnestly over plates of spaghetti and meatballs. A small event in the scheme of things but one neither of them had ever experienced.

  “You’re missing your dad, aren’t you?”

  “Not so much,” Lizzie said with a vigorous shake of her head. She looked down at her lasagna. “Maybe a little.”

  “I know he e-mails you. Has he been in touch?”

  “You know.” Amazing how inarticulate her straight-A child could become when it benefited her. “Sometimes he leaves comments on my blog.”

  “Anything I should know about?”

  She shrugged. “Just regular stuff.”

  Whatever that meant. Hayley was constantly torn between wanting to keep close tabs on her daughter’s creative outlet and understanding the girl’s need for breathing room. It was a difficult and dangerous balancing act. She visited Lizzie’s blog every few weeks just to keep an eye on things but she knew that what she saw wasn’t necessarily all there was. The rest she had to take on faith.

  That wasn’t an easy thing for a worrier to do.

  “School will be over before you know it. Grandma Connie got a great deal on tickets. She can’t wait to see you in July.”

  “Will Dad be there?”

  “I think he’s there now,” Hayley said, treading carefully. Michael wasn’t known as the escape artist for nothing. “Why don’t you e-mail him and ask about his plans?” If she had her way, she would hog-tie the son of a bitch to his mother’s lanai until Lizzie got there, but the authorities might not take kindly to the idea.

  “If you want to talk…” She said it gently, letting the words drift across the table and into her daughter’s ear. These days there seemed to be dozens of invisible barriers dancing around her daughter. She never knew which of her approaches would succeed and which would be deflected. No topic was more fraught with peril than Michael Goldstein.