“Grandma.” Faith tugged at Margaret’s hand to get her attention. “When can we come home?”
Hannah opened her mouth to speak, then decided to let Margaret handle the question.
“What do you mean, you want to come home?” Margaret scooped Faith up on her lap, tucked an errant strand of hair behind her granddaughter’s ear. “You are home, my love. This is your home. And you know what? I think it’s a pretty nifty home.”
AND, GRADUALLY, the little apartment did begin to feel like home. Faith made friends with a girl two houses down who, she told Hannah, she liked even better than Tiffany. Hannah, with Helen’s assistance, made curtains for Faith’s bedroom windows, filled the window boxes with geranium cuttings from her mother’s backyard and even planted a few of the hated nasturtium seeds that Margaret was only too glad to be rid off. Three or four afternoons a week, Hannah and Faith dropped by the house to take Raisin for walks along the beach.
One evening, mostly at Faith’s insistence, Hannah invited Allan and Douglas over to dinner; another time, feeling lonely and a little blue, she went to dinner with Allan. At the end of the evening, she told him that she valued his friendship but wanted nothing more than that. He’d been sweet and understanding as he hugged her goodbye. “Have a happy life, kiddo.”
At La Petite Ecole, Taylor Becker aced his kindergarten screening test and Deanna Becker was so thrilled she tried to give Hannah a gift certificate for a weekend at the luxurious Ventana Inn in Big Sur.
“Take your sweetie,” Mrs. Becker urged. “The place oozes romance.”
Hannah thanked her, but explained that La Petite Ecole’s policy prohibited the staff accepting gifts from parents. Besides, she didn’t have a sweetie. Which was just as well, because she’d signed up for landscape design classes at Cal State Long Beach. She wouldn’t have time for sweeties.
THE WILD ROVERS PLAYED their final performance at a club in Hollywood where the audience seemed surly and bored from the first chord of the opening song. “Ah well,” Pearse muttered to Liam as they trouped off stage, “you can’t please them all.” His sentiments exactly, Liam decided as he half listened to Pearse and Brid and some of the others talk about where to go for a few pints and something to eat. Like the audience, Liam felt surly and bored. As far as he was concerned, the moment they stepped off the plane at Shannon couldn’t come soon enough.
“A lady here to see you, Liam,” someone shouted from the front of the theater.
Liam stopped dead. He’d imagined this so many times since he’d walked away from Hannah. Right down to the night she’d finally appear, the last one of the tour. And now it was happening. He stood, immobilized. His shirt was sweat drenched from the show and he pulled it off, realized he didn’t have another one and, grabbed a new Wild Rover T-shirts from the stack on the concession stand. Pearse’s sister, who worked the table where the shirts were sold, gave him a questioning look. He shrugged and headed back into the theater where a few diehards were still straggling out.
“Liam.”
Margaret. In a red blazer, white blouse and dark trousers, smiling but twisting her hands and glancing around her and looking about as out of place in a Hollywood club as any suburban granny would. Speechless, Liam stared at her. Disappointment hit him like a blow to the stomach—replaced immediately by fear that something had happened to Hannah or Faith.
“Is Faith all right?” he asked. “Hannah? Is something wrong?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Yes, well no, I mean they’re both fine but…is there somewhere we could talk?”
They went to a nearby Subway, where Margaret said she wasn’t hungry but she’d have some coffee. He was hungry but couldn’t focus enough to decide what sandwich combination he wanted. Two cups of coffee in hand, he sat down at the table opposite Margaret.
“However much you want to do what’s best for your children,” Margaret said, “there comes a time when you have to realize they’re not children any longer and they must be allowed to make their own decisions. You might not agree with them, but…” She shrugged and a smile flickered briefly. “They might not agree with your decisions, either. Usually don’t, in fact.”
Liam drank some coffee. A sense that Margaret had carefully rehearsed what she wanted to say stopped him from interrupting her.
“I should never have let you think Hannah had had an abortion. And I should have backed off when you returned. I should have had enough confidence to trust Hannah to make the right decision. But as I told her, we sometimes believe what we want to believe. I didn’t want you to take her and Faith back to Ireland, so one way to prevent that was to cast you in the role of the philandering no-good. I made myself believe it and hoped that she would, too.”
“How do you know I’m not a philandering no-good, Mrs. Riley?”
She looked at him for a moment. “I don’t. But Hannah seems convinced you’re not, and I need to trust her judgment.”
“How is Hannah?”
“Okay.” Margaret stared into her coffee. “But I think she’d be happier with you in her life again.”
“You think?”
“I know.” She drank some coffee, then set the cup down again. “I’m going to be honest with you. I would be far happier to see my daughter fall in love with an attorney who owns a house on Riva Alto Canal—”
“The pirate’s dad.”
Margaret gave him a puzzled look.
“Nothing. Go on.”
“Anyway, my new resolution is to try to be supportive of whatever Hannah decides to do.”
“But you think—”
“I think she loves you, Liam.” She shook her head in mock exasperation. “So do something about it, for heaven’s sake.”
HE ACCEPTED Margaret’s offer of a ride back to Long Beach and, with forty-eight hours left on his visitor’s visa, knocked on Hannah’s front door step.
“Can I come in?” he finally asked after she’d stared at him for several seconds. Without a word, she motioned him inside—where he made the mistake of telling her about Margaret’s visit.
Big mistake. For the next fifteen minutes—he’d checked his watch—he sat on the couch saying nothing as Hannah paced around the room; railing on about her mother and her aunts, about how she just could not believe that they hadn’t learned their lesson and were they ever, ever, going to stop interfering in her life and she could fight her own battles thank you very much and she certainly didn’t need Margaret tracking him down on her behalf as if she were some desperate, pathetic woman who couldn’t keep a man and if he imagined for a moment, an instant, that she had nothing better to do with her life than sit around waiting for him to make up his mind, he’d better damn well think again. And then she seemed to run out of steam.
“The place looks different,” he said into the silence that followed her outburst. “With the furniture and everything. It looks nice.”
“Liam. I want you to go, okay?”
He looked at her. Her hair was clipped up with this black-and-white plastic dog thing, and she had on a pair of baggy gray sweatpants. Beneath the faded blue shirt that read, Got My Dog, Got My Horse, Don’t Need No Damn Man, he could see the outline of her breasts. No bra. He remained seated.
“I mean it.”
“What if I said that I was here because I wanted to be here?”
She shrugged, walked to the door and pulled it open. “Life is full of the things that we want. For example, I want, really, really want, just for once in my life to be left alone. No family interference, no one breathing down my neck. But, God, what are the chances of that ever happening?”
“Come back to Ireland with me. That should help.” It wasn’t what he’d intended to say, it had just come out. But it didn’t seem like a bad idea and when he saw something flicker in her eyes, it was all the encouragement he needed. “I’m serious, Hannah. Come on, close the door and let’s talk.”
Her hand was still on the door. “There’s nothing to talk about, Liam.”
“At least close the door then.”
She did, and sat down on the arm of the couch. “I’m not going to Ireland with you. We might as well establish that right now.”
“I just hit you with it, I know, but think about it.” He could hear his voice speed up; enthusiasm like a whip, driving his words to move faster. “It would be great, terrific. We’ll live in my house in Galway. Near the recording studio. It’ll be just like a regular job, at least for six months or so. We can get Faith into a good school.”
“Liam, she’s six. I can’t uproot her from her family and take her off to a foreign country.”
“We’re her family,” he said, but Hannah was clearly unimpressed. “Look, it’s wonderful for her to have your mother and aunts, but it wouldn’t hurt her at all to know there was a life outside of Long Beach, California.”
She shook her head. “It won’t work, Liam.”
“It could, if you wanted it to.”
“Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe I don’t want it enough to make that kind of change.”
“Or maybe you’re scared to leave the nest.” He could see he was losing, so he decided he might as well fire all his weapons. “It’s comfortable for you here, isn’t it? Your mother and aunts twittering around, fussing over you. Maybe they get on your nerves at times, but on the whole it’s safe and nonthreatening and you never really have to challenge yourself, do you?”
Hannah stood up. “You’re incredible, you know that? You’re asking me to uproot my life to follow you across the world. You’re talking to me about not challenging myself? Where the hell is the challenge for you, Liam? Huh?”
“Hannah, come on—”
“No.” She pulled open the door. “Go. Leave.”
“Your mother gave me a ride down here.”
“Oh really? So you just thought, ‘Oh, I’ll hop into bed with Hannah.’”
“Well…”
“Well, tough. Walk over to my mom’s house. I’m sure she’ll be happy to drive you back.”
OF COURSE sleep was out of the question. If the mental picture of Liam walking through the darkened streets of Long Beach looking for somewhere to spend the night didn’t make her feel guilty enough, the anger at Margaret kept her brain working at a furious pitch rehearsing all the scathing things she would say to her mother once she’d calmed down enough not to actually kill her.
At one in the morning, she was wandering around the apartment, looking for something to organize. At two, she was sitting at the kitchen table trying to work out a filing system for the recipes she’d clipped from newspaper food sections. When she suddenly realized she’d been staring blankly at the same recipe for a while, she forced herself to concentrate on the title. Irish soda bread.
Maybe it was a sign.
Follow Liam to Ireland, bake Irish soda bread, have babies and live happily ever after. She got up from the table, and wandered into the bathroom. She looked at her face in the mirror, and pulled the stupid dog barrette out of her hair. Faith’s 101 Dalmations barrette. God, what a dork she must have looked.
Why hadn’t she even considered his suggestion? She didn’t love him enough? She was scared to leave the nest? Last spring, a little bird—a baby bird—kept flying against the kitchen window; bumping its head against the glass before it flew away, looking stunned.
She had flown the nest once, gotten a little bruised, then returned to be soothed and consoled. And Liam was right, it was pretty comfortable with everyone chirping and twittering all around. Now she had her own baby bird and it was scary to think of flying away again. Sure, she’d moved out of Margaret’s house, but nothing else had really changed. Margaret, Rose and Helen—even Deb—were all there for her when she needed them. All there for her even when she didn’t need them, which was probably more to the point. Maybe it was time to stop fooling herself. Maybe it was time to leave for real.
THE DAY AFTER Hannah told him never to darken her door again, Liam found himself driving south on the Golden State Freeway in a compact rented from Budget, and having serious misgivings about what he’d just done. By the time he turned onto the 710 heading back to Long Beach, he’d started rehearsing the reasons he would give to the Celtic Arts Collective for changing his mind about taking the position they’d just offered him.
He’d called the collective on a whim—there was that word again—after reading an article in the Hollywood Reporter. As luck would have it, there was a position he might be interested in. If he’d like to come up and talk to the director, he’d been told, maybe they could work something out.
So he’d made the trip to Burbank today and had accepted the job.
He’d be doing a bit of everything—developing new talent, helping to promote Irish music and culture and teaching guitar classes a couple of days a week.
“We can’t pay you much,” the director told him, “But you’ll have the freedom to work on some of your own music and if your wife is working, too, you’ll do okay.”
His wife. Liam hadn’t corrected the administrator’s assumption and now the thought of Hannah as his wife filled him with equal parts exaltation and dread. Dread, because if she were still of the same mind as last night, he’d created a bit of a mess for himself.
And everybody else, come to that. Before he left for the interview, he’d told Brid and the fellows in the band that he was probably going to quit. And, determined to show Hannah he was serious, he’d told his manager to put an indefinite hold on plans for the European tour.
But now he felt less certain that he’d done the right thing.
In fact, by the time he pulled up outside Faith’s school, he’d all but convinced himself that the best thing he could do now was let everyone know that he’d experienced a temporary bout of insanity and nothing he’d said or done in the past twenty-four hours should be taken seriously.
And then he got out of the car and walked across the road to wait for his daughter.
AT THREE, Hannah sat on the grass across the road from Faith’s school, slightly apart from the knot of parents on the other side of the road. Her head lowered slightly, the visor of her baseball cap and dark glasses shielding her eyes, and—she was pretty sure—her face from Liam, she watched him take in the parents waiting by the entrance. He looked good. Terrific. Stylish in dark sage-green pants and a long-sleeved cotton jersey a shade or two lighter.
He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t looked across the street in her direction. Which was good, because she had no idea what she would say to him if he did. She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them and propped up her chin. Still eight minutes to go.
She imagined various scenarios of what would happen when Faith walked out. In one, Liam spotted his daughter before she did and he and Faith came over to where she was sitting. In another, she was the first to see Faith, she grabbed her daughter’s hand and they made a quick getaway before Liam noticed them. In the third, they both spotted Faith at the same time, Liam smiled at her, birds twittered in the trees and they all walked off into the sunset, hand in hand.
Or none of the above.
She watched Liam say something to a woman in a red dress. The woman smiled up at him. She probably thought he was cute, which he was. Hannah chewed the edge of her thumbnail. God, her heart was going crazy. I love you. She could just walk up to him and whisper it in his ear. Cut through all the other stuff. I love you.
If she could get her brain past the thought that he was back because Margaret had intervened. He’d left because of Margaret. He was back because of Margaret. It was almost comical. Like a soap opera. What will Margaret do next? Tune in tomorrow for the next episode of As Margaret’s World Turns. Or maybe, As Margaret Turns The World. Better yet, As Margaret Turns Hannah’s World.
A thought struck her. Was saying no to him last night actually an act of rebellion against Margaret? When Margaret had seen him as evil incarnate, she herself had rushed to his defense. But now that he had Margaret’s blessing, could it just be that…nah. She pulled he
rself to her feet, brushed grass off the back of her shorts and sauntered over to where he stood. Came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey.”
He turned and smiled at her. “Hannah.”
“You know that old saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face? Don’t ask me to explain because I get a headache even thinking about it.” On the other hand maybe Margaret had been just using reverse psychology…God, no, she couldn’t think about that, either. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you…that you look very nice. And…” She kicked at the grass with the toe of her sneaker. “I love you.”
Liam made a melodramatic swipe at his brow. “Phew.”
“What?”
“I’ve just taken a job in Burbank which I’d have absolutely no interest at all in doing if you didn’t love me.”
“A job?” She stared at him. “What kind of job?”
“This nonprofit group that’s trying to promote Irish arts. Music, theater. That’s why I’m all dressed up. I drove straight here from the interview.”
“Wow.” She smiled at him. “That’s fantastic…isn’t it? You’re pleased about it?”
“Yeah…” He shrugged. “Sure. I’ll still have time to write some of my own stuff. It’ll work out.”
She watched his face as he told her about what he’d be doing. He sounded okay about it, but something was missing from his voice. The spark she always heard when he talked about his music. “Are you sure you’ll be happy? What about the rest of the band? Brid? The European tour?”
“Listen.” He caught both her hands in his and looked into her eyes. “Stop worrying about whether I’m happy. Just tell me this makes you happy.”
Keeping Faith Page 24