“When did you say you were opening up?” asked Mike. He walked into what would be the kitchen. “Nice oven.”
“Yes, but there were supposed to be two ovens delivered. See, this is my new life, worrying about ovens.”
The door to the deck was open. Delia announced their arrival. “Hey, Greg, is that you back there?”
The new deck was gray, but unlike so much of the weathered wood along the coast, this wood was recycled plastic, possibly from mountains of single-serving coffee pods. “You’ll never have to do anything to it,” Greg had advised them when Delia and Juniper asked him to build a deck. “This stuff will last longer than I will.”
Greg leaned over a sawhorse, his right leg bent, the other leg stretched behind him, the saw pressed down on a length of eternal plastic wood. He wore ear protectors and safety glasses. Delia waved her arms to get his attention. He looked up and moved the safety glasses to his forehead. He took off the ear protectors, set the Skilsaw down and unplugged it. J Bird often accused Delia of being too methodical and not spontaneous enough, but Greg outclassed her by a mile. IBM would still be top dog if Greg had been the CEO.
“Greg, this is Mike Moretti. He’s a detective and we were just consulting about a case with one of my kids,” she said.
Both men took a long step forward and extended right arms as far as possible for a handshake while keeping an amazing amount of space between them. The male greeting system.
“Greg is the head honcho on the remodeling project to get the café ready for opening. He has already saved us from inspection disasters a dozen times,” said Delia.
“We could always use another place for cops to get coffee and pastries. And just in case you think that’s a stereotype, it’s not,” said Mike. His smile was on half wattage, but still enough to crinkle the skin around his eyes. “Nice work on this deck,” he said, with an appreciative nod to Greg.
“These two sisters are keeping me out of trouble. I plan to be a permanent customer when they open. Right now, I’m also their official taster,” said Greg.
Delia knew that Mike was itching to go, called by both his daughter’s soccer team and the desire to check back with his headquarters. She imagined his social exchanges had been stretched as far as they could go.
“Thanks for coming in, Mike. I promise to call you as soon as the report comes in,” she said. “I know you have to run. Remember, all those little girl soccer players will think you are the coolest dad.”
Mike nodded to Greg and Delia. Rather than going back inside again, he stepped off the deck, as agile as a deer with his long legs, and jogged along the side of the building to the street.
Greg crossed his arms over his chest and smiled. “Interesting,” he said, “very interesting.”
“What?” said Delia, suddenly self-conscious under Greg’s appraising eye.
“I believe the good detective has his eye on you. And you’ll have to trust me on this one. You might be the expert with bread and Juniper knows cakes. I know when a man has his eye on a woman.” He reached down to plug in the saw again.
“We’re working on the same case. He’s a super observant guy; that’s what you’re picking up. I mean, he has to notice everything, that’s his training,” she said.
“I’m too old to pretend that I don’t see what I see,” he said. He slipped the protective eye gear back on. “That’s only for young people. Although, from my vantage point, it seems like a terrible waste of time.”
Greg put the ear protectors on and switched on the saw.
Should she believe Greg? If J Bird were here, she’d be able to tell in a nanosecond if a guy was interested or not. Was there anything else she couldn’t see?
CHAPTER 31
The next morning at work, her phone rang before she had truly dug into the day. “I did it,” Tyler said, “I signed the papers for the house. The inspection was a piece of cake.”
The pile of files that she needed to transfer to other caseworkers was now down to five. Even Ira had been forced to take some of her cases.
“Congratulations,” she said, talking on the speakerphone. “No dickering back and forth? No horrible disclosures from the inspection like radon gas or cracks in the foundation?”
She pictured Tyler rattling around in the house. Did he say it had three bedrooms? It seemed a strange purchase for a young, single doctor. She imagined him living there, eating breakfast alone, sleeping, and putting on his blue scrubs to mend broken bones. He picked a family home, the kind she left behind after the fire. The clean lines of the house that she lived in with J Bird held no hints of ancestry.
“I have a moving van arriving in two days. Well, not a moving van exactly, more like the two pods that I packed up in California that have been in storage. But I have to buy a dining room table and chairs. I was wondering if you could help me pick out something that was, I don’t know, comfortable,” he said.
She remembered moving vans. She remembered Tyler and his family pulling out of town with their moving van when she could still taste the fire in her throat. Since he couldn’t see her on the other end of the phone, she shook herself. She had to let go of that. It was old news.
Delia pictured a drive to Boston, a tedious selection process in furniture stores while her clock ticked away at her job, while Hayley came closer to being assigned into permanent foster care if her parents couldn’t be found. Tyler would have to wait because Hayley could not.
“I can’t help you, Tyler. I have double the work these last two weeks.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean a shopping expedition. I meant online. It’s not like I need to try on a table,” he said.
Of course, J Bird was right. Delia was oddly out of step. Naturally Tyler would shop online for everything.
Dark clouds galloped in from the northwest, framed in Delia’s window. The season was changing and soon the leaf peepers would be in town from points south and from Europe and Asia. It was time to button up for the coming winter, time to find Hayley a safe port. In case her parents weren’t found, she had to find the best possible foster home for her.
“I can meet you after work, around six,” she said. “But not The Daily Grind.” Delia now associated The Daily Grind with Match.com coffee dates.
“How about the Portland Hotel? They have a quiet bar,” he said.
* * *
By the time Delia arrived, Tyler was already set up, his laptop in play at a corner table. It was a low decibel bar with thick carpets, no TV, dark wood. For a moment Delia wanted to live there, her meals prepared and served to her by the young waiter in black pants and white shirt, the massive vase of flowers wafting its scent to her from the fireplace hearth. No children needing homes, no upcoming sad good-byes when she left her job, no jumping off the career cliff hand in hand with J Bird by starting a café.
Tyler hailed her with one arm. The soft, glowing light of a wall sconce caught the sun-lightened glow of his hair. She could live here in pretend land for an hour or two. Was Tyler part of pretend land, or was he real?
“I’m on call,” he said, “so let’s visualize no rush on the ER tonight.”
Delia ordered a glass of white burgundy, drinking too quickly, then self-consciously putting the half-empty glass on the table. Tyler stuck to iced tea in deference to his on-call duties. He turned the screen to face Delia. Four pages were marked, all on the screen at once.
“Which one do you like?” he asked.
This felt like a question a guy would ask his girlfriend. Delia wasn’t his girlfriend.
One table was oval, oak, and uninspired. Another was light wood, Scandinavian and sleek, not one unnecessary curlicue to be found. The third was oddly familiar. She swallowed more wine, but this time a drop of it slipped into her windpipe and she choked as if she were drowning. The table was round, central pedestal. Sloping claw feet gripped the floor, all shrouded in a warm brown finish. So much like the table she had grown up with. She pictured her father, mother, little J Bird, and herself all hunch
ed in forward toward each other at dinnertime.
Tyler’s eyes widened in alarm. “Are you okay?” Then his physician’s training kicked in, and he settled down. “Just cough it out. It’s only a few drops of wine that took a wrong turn.”
Her throat pulsated with spasms, sending her body into full alarm. A surge of extra blood would turn her face red, something she knew from experience, and tears already breached the rims of her eyes. “I’ll be right back,” she choked out as she headed for the ladies’ room. She could at least convulse in private. As soon as she pushed open the two doors of the bathroom, one for the outer sanctum and one for the inner sanctum, her throat relaxed. She leaned against the dark paneling in the bathroom.
The kindness of soft lighting couldn’t hide the fact that she looked a mess. What remained of the mascara that she’d put on this morning was now smudged along her cheekbones. Her eyes were bloodshot, and, to complete the picture, she’d spilled wine on her shirt, her one expensive splurge at a store in Boston. She ran her hands through her shoulder-length hair, a brown that eerily matched the dark wood of the hotel.
Did Tyler know what he was doing? Was he recreating her past? Or his past? She splashed water on her face, used some of it to run through her hair, and sighed. People recreated their pasts all the time. It was called nostalgia, and except in Delia’s case, it seemed to be a perfectly delightful thing to do. Magazines were devoted to it. Nineteen fifties furniture was all the craze. Nineteen seventies ranch houses were turned into something modern with austere retro lines. But not for Delia. Their present house was without a past, furniture designed entirely by IKEA.
Delia took one last look in the mirror; her red eyes were returning to normal, and while the mascara was gone, her face was clean and no longer splotched with red. She pulled open the door to the outer sanctum and pulled open the door to the restaurant.
Tyler had put away his laptop. A fresh glass of wine waited for Delia. For a second, Tyler looked so young and expectant, the way she remembered him when they’d been together, when he’d been her one confidant about her father’s deteriorating condition. He was once again the boyfriend who would do anything for her. That’s what he had whispered to her when they had curled entwined in her dorm room. But what he did was leave.
She slid into her seat. “That table that you showed me is a replica of the table I grew up with. My parents bought it when they were first married. It was one of the things that my father didn’t deconstruct in his paranoid delusions. I was caught off guard when you showed me the photo.” She carefully sipped her wine and swallowed deliberately. “Why is it one of your choices?”
Delia wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
Tyler sat back and closed his eyes. His Adam’s apple rode up and down. “I thought you would like it. I wasn’t in your house very often; you wouldn’t let me come in except for a few times. But I remember how much you loved that table. Do you remember the day that you let me come in when your parents were out and you were looking after Juniper? You two told me how you used to play beneath the table, making a tent with a huge blanket, and you called it your tiger house because of the clawed feet.”
Tiger house? When Hayley spoke about a tiger in the house, it was a dire warning from Emma Gilbert. What had the tiger house been for J Bird and her when they were growing up? Was it really the childhood playhouse that Tyler described or had it been a place for little girls to hide when a rampaging father, who was nothing like their good father, threw all the pots and pans from the cabinets looking for listening devices? Or were all tigers inherently dangerous?
Part of her had wanted Tyler back since the day he left Maine. Not a loud or public part of her, but in a tight and twitchy sealed-off room. She tried never to speak of him, and even when Ben had asked about Tyler after the girls went to live in the house his mother sold to them, she responded lightly. “Oh, that ended. We talked about it and decided not to try a long-distance relationship.” They had never talked about it because Delia didn’t know he was leaving until she was hit in the face with fumes from the moving van.
And now, here he was, with a deed to a house in his pocket, enticing her with beloved furniture from her childhood home. Something was wrong.
“You’re going to buy furniture because you want me to like it? I’m not nineteen anymore. We can’t just leap ahead like this. We’ve skipped too many steps,” she said. Every word scraped out of her with jagged pain, picking away at the very thing she had secretly wanted for so long. Tyler. She started to get up.
“Wait, Delia. I can see this wasn’t the right thing to do. I’m not trying to entice you into my new house with haunts from the past. I swear.” His eyes were moist. She settled back into her seat, yet tigers growled in the background, the dangerous ones who attack and the ones who protect little girls.
“You’re exactly right; I wanted to skip all the hard steps and magically have you back again. When I first went to medical school, an older doctor told me that I’d learn everything about the human body and nothing about meaningful social interactions. His wife said he was socially and emotionally delayed when they met and that it took him years to catch up. That might make me emotionally equivalent to a teenager. And you know, guys are delayed anyhow.”
A little self-effacement went a long way with her. It was always the characteristic that made Delia stop and listen.
“Then let’s slow way down and get to know the new and improved, grown-up version of each other. And I want to know why you broke up with me when you did. You didn’t just move away, you broke up with me,” she said.
Tyler reached across the table with both hands and grabbed hers, rubbing his thumb along the top of one hand. Delia felt the zing of the connection run up her arm.
“No more furniture selection, I get that,” he said.
This was the old Tyler, or the essence of Tyler tucked inside the grown-up doctor, the one who understood her right away, who wasn’t blown over by her directness. Could she have it back again, that feeling of being understood, of loving someone full out, feeling loved?
In a quiet bar, you could hear everything, even a phone set on vibrate.
The center of his eyebrows rose up. “Oh, no. I’ve only given this out to a few people including work. I have to look,” he said, withdrawing his hands.
He pulled the phone out and frowned when he saw the number. “Work.” He took the call, and Delia knew instantly that he would soon be running out the door, that medical emergencies awaited him. “Fifteen minutes,” he said into the phone.
“You didn’t pay someone to call you at this exact time, did you?” she said. Teasing him felt natural.
“Yes, I have a special device that signals for help when you have me by the short hairs,” he said, smiling. “I will call you.”
Tyler left first, and Delia finished her wine alone.
CHAPTER 32
Juniper
Juniper’s phone gonged with the Tibetan bell sound that she’d assigned to Delia’s text messages. If her sister knew that she’d been characterized in this solemn, echoing way, she’d pitch a fit. It delighted Juniper each time that Delia sent a text, which wasn’t often. It had been hard to entice Delia into the world of texting instead of phoning. What other thirty-two-year-old in America was this averse to texting?
She was still at the Bayside Bakery, finishing up with prep for the next day. She was nearly finished with rolling out pie dough for sixteen pies, fitting the circular dough into pans, and sliding them into the supersized freezer. This made her morning shifts so much easier. Cold pie filling scooped into frozen pie shells, slid into an oven made the rhythm of the morning start like a NAS-CAR race, but in a good way. Pies never crashed into each other.
There were still a few clean places on her white apron, even after seven hours of baking, and she wiped her hands before reaching for her phone. She looked at the message.
“Can Baxter come to work with me tomorrow? He needs to snuggle with a little g
irl.”
Was Delia serious? Baxter was made for kid snuggling, or any kind of continuous body contact. She texted back: “Sure.”
Response: “Thank you.”
The other thing about Delia was that she refused to abbreviate. J Bird wondered if her sister’s precision with all forms of communication had to do with her career with children and never wanting to make a mistake with the kids, or if it had as much to do with their father. Because his form of communication became so muddled during his delusional state, Delia swung as far as possible in the other direction. Exactness at all costs.
But what was it that their father had told her in the last year of his life, during the briefer periods of lucidity? “J Bird, you’re okay. It’s your big sister who worries me. She can connect the dots when she shouldn’t, like me. She might have only a drop of my messed-up thought disorder, but I see it in her. You take care of her,” he said, one night when Delia was out with Tyler.
At the time, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, Dad, are you kidding me? Delia?” But it was the kind of thing that stayed with a kid, tucked away, especially when all she had was Delia. And it was something that she never shared with her worrywart big sister.
The life of a baker was not in sync with the rest of the world, and maybe their father should have been worried about her and not Delia. She started at four a.m. and was done by one p.m., four days a week. On work days, she had to go to sleep by nine p.m., aided by a gummy bear–style melatonin and an eye mask. Her schedule didn’t exactly match that of her peers. But it worked well for Baxter. He was not alone for such a huge stretch of time. He had a quick pee break in the backyard when she woke up and then again when Delia woke, hours later. If Delia had time, she and Baxter went to Willard Beach. If not, J Bird took him on a long walk when she got home. It was a good tag team approach to dog care.
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