“Nuh-uh. They’re congratulatory.”
“But I lost the case.”
“So? Win or lose, you tried a damn good one.”
“Looks like it wasn’t good enough,” she murmured on her way to the kitchen. She put the daisies in a square vase and set them on the low slab of glass in the living room. Her decor called for something more chic than daisies, but nothing could have been more cheery.
Ben was lounging against the archway, jacket unzipped now, watching her. Watching him right back, she felt a swell of gratitude. “I should have known you’d come. You usually do, when I’m in need.” She reached for his helmet.
“I take it your esteemed partners weren’t thrilled.”
“To say the least.” She set the helmet atop her briefcase in token defiance of those esteemed partners. “Compassion isn’t in the firm directory. It’s a sign of weakness.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“The partners do, and that’s what counts.”
“Not as long as you have to work there. How do you stand it?”
“I’ve worked hard to get where I am.”
“Definitely. But you have heart. Or you would have, if your partners didn’t deem it a waste. They aren’t nice people. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Sure, it does. Then a case comes my way that wouldn’t have come if I wasn’t affiliated with the firm—or the clout of the firm gives me an edge in defending clients—and I realize that it’s a trade-off,” which was precisely the conclusion she’d reached during the walk home from work. “We feed off each other, the firm and I.”
“They get the better end of the deal.”
“You’re biased.”
“Yup,” he said and grinned.
The fluidity Caroline had been feeling became a honeyed melt. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sighed at the relief of it.
Ben was as close to a significant other as she had. While many another man had been scared away, in turn by her frenzy in law school, her dedication to the Cook County prosecutor’s office, and her willing self-servitude at Holten, Wills, and Duluth, he had remained undaunted ever since they met, ten years before.
He shouldn’t have liked her then. She had been the assistant district attorney who had sent his younger brother to prison for computer hacking. But she was fair, he had said with the smile that had been her undoing. When he asked her to dinner, she went, and when they ended up in bed, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
His life was the antithesis of hers. An artist, he spent weeks traveling the world taking pictures, then months translating those images into silk-screen prints that stole Caroline’s breath nearly as consistently as his smile. Art consultants bought entire sets of his prints for placement on corporate walls. Local galleries eagerly sold his work. But when Caroline suggested that he broaden his base and exhibit in San Francisco, Boston, or New York, he merely shrugged. He was as unambitious as she was driven. Each time he completed a series of prints, he spent a long stretch doing absolutely nothing.
Caroline had never done absolutely nothing. She wasn’t sure she could. Likewise marriage, which he had suggested dozens of times. Dozens of times she had refused, yet he kept coming back, which was one of the reasons she loved him. He was irrepressible. He made her smile.
She was smiling now, shaking her head not in denial of the inevitable, but in amused resignation. He took a single nip of her mouth, threw an arm around her shoulder, and guided her down the hall. Once in the bedroom, he kissed her until what little tension remained in her body was gone.
As was his habit, he removed his clothes first. Caroline had always suspected that he was simply more comfortable naked when aroused, but if there was a selfishness to it, she didn’t complain. Looking at him turned her on, so much so that by the time he leisurely freed her of her own clothes, she was needing far more than just a look.
He gave it to her without reservation, loving every inch of her body until she lost track of time and place for those few precious moments of orgasmic suspension. For all of their differences, in this they fit, and when it was done, when their breathing steadied and their bodies began to cool, there was the sated afterglow in which to bathe.
“Would you have still come to see me if I’d won?” she asked in a whisper that glanced off the tawny hair on his chest.
“You bet. Either way. I was glued to the tube, waiting for the verdict. Left as soon as I heard.” He looked down at her. “Come back with me for the weekend?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m way behind.”
“Bring work with you.”
He lived an hour north of the city, in a cabin in the woods. Between the scent of the firs, the abundance of natural sounds, and the preponderance of glass that made the cabin a studio, she fought a losing battle. “I can’t concentrate at your place.”
“Because you love it there. Confess.”
“I love it there.”
“So why don’t you move in with me? Sell this place, tell your cold-hearted partners to fuck themselves, and live off my money.”
She laughed. Of the two of them, she was the one with the money. Not that he wouldn’t give her everything he had. “But that’s not my life. I’m a city girl.”
“You’re a masochist.”
“I’m addicted to work.”
“Not when you’re with me.”
“I know. You’re a bad influence.”
“Hah. I keep you sane.”
She suspected there was some truth to that. “Yes. Well.”
He sighed. “So you won’t marry me?”
“Not this week. I have too much to do.”
But she wasn’t rushing to do anything now. She was feeling mellow in Ben’s arms and wasn’t ready to leave.
Too soon for her taste, he gave her a warm kiss and slipped from bed. She watched him dress, threw on a robe, and walked him to the door, where she took another kiss. When his presence was nothing more than a musky scent on her skin, she steeped a pot of tea and poured a cup. She drank that, plus a second, before she felt sufficiently steeled to open the envelope her mother had sent.
Dear Caroline, wrote Virginia St. Clair. Since I haven’t heard from you or your sisters to the contrary, I assume that this letter finds you well.
Caroline made a small, sad sound. Her sisters wouldn’t have known if she was sick. She hadn’t spoken to either of them in weeks.
I returned from Palm Springs last Tuesday. The weather there was beautiful and the company lovely, as always, but it was good to get home. It’s more restful here. I suppose my age is finally catching up with me. I can’t go from one dinner to the next the way I used to. Lillian says I’m becoming a hermit. She may be right.
Caroline doubted that. Her mother had been a social creature all her life. She spent mornings at meetings of one ladies’ group or another, afternoons playing golf, and evenings playing bridge. If she wasn’t attending a dinner at the club, she was hosting one. The death of her husband—the girls’ father, Dominick, an innocuous bear of a man—three years before had hardly caused a ripple in that social flow.
Oh, Ginny had mourned him. She had been married to Nick for forty-four years and suffered the loss of a good friend. Had she cried for days? Not quite. That wasn’t her way. Nor was it Nick’s. He had the complacency that came with being born into wealth. He was confident, noncombative, and undemanding.
Caroline resented him for not demanding more, just as she resented her mother for not giving more. But Nick didn’t know how to demand, and Ginny’s greatest giving was to social convention. Caroline couldn’t imagine age slowing her down.
It was therefore with surprise that she read, I sold my house here and will be moving in June. My new house is farther north—much farther north, actually—in a small town called Downlee, on the coast of Maine.
Caroline didn’t understand. Her mother had never spent time in Maine. Her mother didn’t know anyone in Maine.
Call it a
birthday gift to myself, a gift of quiet and rest. Do you realize that I’ll be turning seventy in June?
Yes, Caroline realized it. There were an even thirty years between her mother and her, which meant that they shared big birthday years. Some families would have thrown joint bashes. Not the St. Clairs.
The house itself is old and in need of work, but the grounds are breathtaking. They overlook the ocean and spread inland, with a saltwater pool and gardens of heather, wild rose, primrose, peony, and iris—ah, but flowers aren’t your thing. I do know that. And I know how busy you are, so I’ll get to the point.
I have a favor to ask of you, Caroline, and I’m aware that you may refuse. You feel that I haven’t given of myself as I might have to you. So I have deliberately asked little of you in the past. But I care a great deal about this new house, which is why I’m writing you now. If ever there was a time when I might cash in on what little feeling you have for me, this is it.
Caroline was surprised by Ginny’s insight, and felt the tiniest stab of guilt.
I’d like you to help me settle in.
Come again?
You have a knack for pulling things together. I may not be quite as contemporary in my tastes as you are, but I do admire what you’ve done with your apartment.
Flattery will get you nowhere, Mother. Then again…
Caroline read on. You especially have an eye for art. The pieces you’ve chosen warm up the place. I particularly remember the oil that hangs in your living room. It was done by a friend of yours, I believe.
Caroline’s eye flew to the piece in question. It was something Ben had painted before her own eyes in a single afternoon, a large canvas with splashes of greens, blues, and golds suggestive of a meadow not far from his home. Caroline thought it symbolic of the genius of the man. She adored its simplicity and, yes, its warmth. But it was more abstract than realistic, a definite departure from Ginny’s taste.
You use art to soften the harsher lines of the modern decor you favor. Those harsher lines aren’t unlike those of the headlands at Downlee. I think you could work wonders with Star’s End.
Caroline felt a sense of foreboding as she glanced at the still-thick envelope from which she had taken her mother’s letter.
I’ve enclosed herewith airline tickets that will take you out of O’Hare on the fifteenth of June and return you there at the end of the month.
Her jaw dropped.
Yes, I know, two weeks is a long time, and you have a job. That’s why I’m writing now. With two months’ notice you can plan your work accordingly. Surely you’ve attained enough stature in your field to do that, and if not, you can always say that this is a family emergency. In a sense it is. I’m not young. I don’t know how much time I have left.
“Oh, please,” Caroline moaned. She let the vellum fall to her lap. A two-week absence would wreak havoc with her practice. She couldn’t possibly do it, regardless of how maudlin Ginny got.
The woman had gall. Caroline had to give her that. She hadn’t been much of a mother during Caroline’s growing-up years, preoccupied more often than not, physically present yet distant. She hadn’t been emotionally involved enough to help when Caroline had broken up with her first boyfriend or been rejected from her top college choice, and on the day of her graduation from law school, Ginny had had the flu. Oh, she had offered to attend the ceremony anyway, but the offer had been half-hearted, so Caroline hadn’t pushed.
Caroline didn’t owe Ginny a thing.
Not a thing.
Then again, seventy was seventy.
And Ginny was her mother. Melodrama aside, Caroline would have to be totally unfeeling not to experience a twinge at the thought of the woman dying. She was the only parent Caroline had left.
Feeling frustrated in totally different ways than she had earlier that day, Caroline read on. Ginny, her housekeeper, and the furniture would be arriving a mere day before Caroline—which meant, though Ginny didn’t say it, that Caroline would be helping unpack.
Oh, yes, Ginny was sly. And selfish. And presumptuous. She clearly felt that her needs were more vital than Caroline’s work.
Caroline sighed. Given the day’s verdict, maybe she was right.
Then again, maybe the day’s verdict was proof that Caroline did need a vacation. The thought of spending time by the sea, away from the office, with a housekeeper to look after her and, unpacking notwithstanding, little to do but give her opinion on what should go where, held a certain appeal.
The guys might just buy a family emergency.
She hadn’t taken more than three days off at a stretch since she had joined the firm. At the rate she was going, by mid-June she would amass a personal best in billable hours, and if that wasn’t good enough for the senior partners of Holten, Wills, and Duluth, she didn’t know what was. Besides, come late June they would be gone themselves, off to huge lakeside homes for vacations of their own.
So, resentful as she felt that her mother dared to ask for two precious weeks, there was this lure. There was also, unwelcome but inescapable, a glimmer of pride that her mother admired her taste. Ginny hadn’t asked for Annette’s help. Or Leah’s.
And then there were her closing lines. We haven’t been close, you I. I’d like to try to rectify that, if I might. This would be a good time for us to talk. What do you think?
What Caroline thought was that Ginny was a cunning old bird. She had offered the one thing Caroline couldn’t refuse.
If wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Ginny deserved to be rebuffed.
Caroline fully believed that if their positions were reversed and she had been on the inviting end, Ginny would have offered some excuse and politely refused. But she wasn’t Ginny. She couldn’t possibly do that. For as long as she could remember, along with wanting Ginny’s attention, she had been driven by the desire to be different from Ginny. She wasn’t about to change now.
two
THE LAST THING ANNETTE ST. CLAIR COULD ever be accused of was resembling her mother. Virginia was petite, Annette tall; Virginia was blond, Annette dark; Virginia was cool, Annette warm.
Physically, Annette most resembled her older sister Caroline, a fact that she had cursed for years. Caroline had been a straight-A student, a class leader, an achiever. Following in her foot-steps had been a nightmare for Annette, whose strength wasn’t so much in academics as in character. She was the Dear Abby of her class; friends turned to her for comfort and support. She listened and advised, and was adored by her crowd.
Unfortunately, prizes weren’t given for peer adoration, nor was there an appropriate category for it on a résumé, which was fine. Annette had never needed a résumé. She was a full-time mom, which was, in her judgment, the most important job in the world. She took pride in doing it well, spent upwards of sixteen hours a day at it, and saw the results in a loving husband and five wonderful kids.
Caroline had none of that. For all the times as a child when Annette had envied her, she wouldn’t trade places with her now.
Nor would she trade places with Leah—poor, pathetic Leah, whose life was as shallow as Ginny’s. In love with the idea of being in love, Leah had rushed into marriage at nineteen and divorced at twenty, married again at twenty-two and divorced three years later. Now thirty-four, she lived for the night, but for all her partying, she remained unattached.
Annette was very definitely attached, which was why she ignored the thick envelope that lay on the kitchen counter with the mail. Between its Philadelphia postmark and the elegant script directing it to St. Louis and Mrs. Jean-Paul Maxime, there was no doubt as to its source. And it could wait. It could wait a good long time, which was how long Annette had waited for her mother to give her a hug and a soft heartfelt, “I love you.”
No, Ginny hadn’t earned the right to take Annette’s time, not when Annette had so much else to do. She had started the morning chaperoning a field trip for twelve-year-old Thomas’s class, then had stopped at Neiman Marcus to buy dresses for her sixteen-year-o
ld twins to wear to their semiformal two weeks hence. While she was at it, she picked up matching shoes and the appropriate underclothing, and now, with the one o’clock chimes in the front hall set to ring, she carted the bundles up the broad spiral stairs.
“Let me help, Mrs. M.,” called her housekeeper, Charlene, as she dashed to catch up.
Annette yielded the packages that teetered on top and proceeded to the girls’ room, where she removed the dresses and laid them out appealingly, one per bed.
Charlene was all eyes. “They’re beautiful.”
Annette agreed. “I think they’ll be perfect—teal for Nicole and red for Devon. They’ll probably want black, of course. Everyone wears black, they’ll say. Fortunately, they don’t have time to shop for themselves, so they may give in. If they don’t, if they absolutely detest these, I can return them and try again, but at least we have something to start with.” Satisfied, she glanced at her watch. “Let me grab a little lunch. I have an appointment with the second-grade teachers,” for Nat, her youngest, “at two, and Robbie’s game starts at three.”
She started back down the stairs. When the phone rang, she quickened her pace to the kitchen.
“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”
“Robbie. I was just thinking about your game.”
“That’s why I’m calling. Don’t come, Mom.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t be playing.”
“Why not?”
“Because the coach just told me so.”
“But you had a great season last year.”
“That was JV. This is varsity.”
“You’re an incredible first baseman.”
“Hans Dwyer is better, and he’s a senior. I’m only a junior.”
Annette’s heart went out to her son. “Won’t you play at all?”
“Maybe in the last innings, if we’re way ahead or way behind.”
“But that isn’t fair.”
“It happens all the time.”
“Then I’ll come to watch in case it happens today,” Annette decided.
For My Daughters Page 2