Lucy busied herself with an invisible snippet of pith. “Nice atmosphere for Hannah.”
“Tell me about it. I wanted this to work. I wanted her to love what I’ve done with the old house and throw herself into growing the business with me.”
“She seems enthusiastic enough.”
Rose jabbed the orange with the tip of her knife and said nothing.
“You want her to be you,” Lucy observed quietly, “and that’s just not going to happen, Rosie.”
“Is that so terrible?” Rose swung around, knife slicing into the air between them. “I’m a successful businesswoman. I’m well liked in the community. I meet interesting people every day of the week without leaving home, and I have enough money in the bank so that I could say to hell with everything tomorrow and never have to worry.” She paused for effect. “Is that such a terrible fate to wish on my only child?”
“Maybe it’s not what Maddy wants.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants. If she knew what she wanted, she wouldn’t have—” She stopped, ashamed of what she had been about to say. Ashamed that she could have thought such a terrible thing.
Lucy took the cleaver from her and placed it safely on the counter. “This is Maddy’s life, Rosie, not yours. She’ll find her way sooner or later. We all did.”
“She had it all right there for the taking,” Rose said, her frustration boiling over like an unwatched pot of soup. “She was climbing the ladder at her job. She and Tom had a solid long-term relationship with a real future and then . . .”
Lucy sighed. “Hannah.”
Rose felt her expression soften. “The little girl who turned my little girl’s life inside out.” She thanked God for her granddaughter every day of her life. Hannah was a bit of heaven on earth, proof that angels sometimes deigned to mingle with mortals. She couldn’t imagine a world without Hannah in it, but how she wished Hannah’s arrival hadn’t exacted such a high price from Maddy.
“Maddy’s doing a great job with her,” Lucy said, pouring them each a cup of coffee from the decaf pot. “She’s a good mother.”
“Of course she is. That’s never been an issue.”
“You’ve told her that?”
Rose hesitated. “Not recently.”
“Ever?”
“I’m sure I—” She deflated like a failed soufflé. “I don’t know.”
“I know you mean well, Rosie. I know you love that girl more than life itself, but you’d better take a step back before you lose her all over again.”
“She doesn’t like me.” It hurt to say the words. Much more than Rose had imagined it would. “She never has.” Even when Maddy was a little girl, Rose had sensed the distance between them, a barrier she couldn’t break through no matter what she said or did. “You would think after thirty-two years I’d learn to accept that but”—she dragged the back of her hand across her eyes and winced at the sting of citrus—“I thought it would be different this time. I thought if we approached this as partners, we’d strike a balance.”
“You hurt her badly,” Lucy said. “When you didn’t fly to Seattle to be with her when Hannah was born, you almost broke her heart.”
Rose’s temper flared. “You of all people know why I couldn’t.”
“Yes,” Lucy said calmly, “and it was a valid reason. But the one person on earth who deserves to know the truth is still in the dark.”
“I know,” Rose said, her voice breaking. “I know.”
“So do it.”
“I’ve tried. I can’t seem to find the words.”
“Then write her a letter.”
Rose laughed despite herself. “Oh, Lucy, how did it all end up such a mess?”
“Blame it on the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.”
Rose couldn’t help but laugh.
“You owe her the truth, Rosie. She’s been carrying that burden around with her since Hannah was born. Help her out. Tell her why you weren’t there for her.”
“I wish I could, but it would only make things worse.”
“You don’t know that.”
“That’s the one thing I’m sure of.”
Lucy draped an arm around her little sister’s shoulders. “It’s only been three weeks, honey. Things will get better before you know it. I promise you.”
“I hope so,” Rose said. If they didn’t, she would be the first winner of the New Jersey Innkeeper of the Year award to run away from home.
“ENOUGH ALREADY,” CLAIRE said as she finished slicing hamburger rolls for the lunch crowd. “You’re staring at the screen like you lost your best friend. So you didn’t win the auction. So what. Kelly’s a smart kid. She knows you can’t win them all.”
“I’ve forgotten all about the auction,” he lied. “I’m checking tomorrow’s tide. Amos might come out to repair the dock and I want to—”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, brother-in-law. You’re still ticked you didn’t nail the teapot.”
“The hell I am.”
“Fine,” she said, brushing the crumbs into the palm of her hand, then tossing them into the sink. “Whatever.” She piled the rolls high on a platter. “I’ll bring these out for Tommy to toss on the grill before the natives start eating the bar rags.”
He mumbled something but didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“I have a dentist appointment in fifteen minutes and then I go to pick up Billy at school. I’ll be back around three-thirty, four o’clock.”
The second she left he flipped the screen back to the auction site, and the big, full color picture of Kelly’s teapot appeared. He felt a tug of emotion as he looked at it, and he wondered if Kelly had experienced the same thing when she first saw it. The original O’Malley’s had been a neighborhood restaurant with a regional reputation for good food and great atmosphere. There was a box of memories up in the attic, filled with newspaper clippings from the hundreds of articles that had been written about O’Malley’s in its heyday, before the Hurricane of ’52 swept it all away.
Kelly said the teapot she was bidding on reminded her of one of the many teapots Grandma Irene had had on display at the restaurant years ago, but that was like saying you liked one grain of sand over another grain of sand. Who could tell the difference? Still, he couldn’t deny the way the thing pulled at him.
“Hey, boss,” Tommy greeted him as he pushed through the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the bar itself. “I thought you were back there getting the books ready for Bernie.”
“He’s coming tonight,” Aidan said, moving swiftly to the framed photos nailed to the wall above the cash register.
Tommy glanced up at the television screen. “How many times are you gonna marry the wrong guy, Erica?” He sounded more like a lovestruck teenager than a sixty-year-old retired cop.
“You talking to Susan Lucci again?”
“Damn straight and one day she’s going to answer and”—Tommy made a va-room noise like a fast-moving car—“hasta la vista, baby. Send my last paycheck to Pine Valley.”
“You’re a sick man, Kennedy.” His own glance bounced quickly over photos of his late parents on their wedding day and his brother, Billy, the first day he reported for duty at the firehouse. Where was the one of Mike and Irene and the old restaurant? “Good thing Jean’s an understanding woman.”
“Works two ways, pal o’mine.” Tommy’s eyes were glued to the screen. “She’d leave me in a New York minute for Harrison Ford.”
It was bar room bullshit and they both knew it. Tommy and Jean Kennedy were one of those till-death-do-us-part couples who were happy to be in it for the long haul. During forty years of marriage the Kennedys had been hit by just about everything life could possibly throw at them, but somehow the good times always managed to outnumber the bad in their eyes. They were lucky and they knew it, which made them luckier still.
Sometimes Aidan wondered what he and Sandy would have been like ten or fifteen years down the road. Would they have grown together like the
Kennedys or lived parallel lives in the same house like so many of his old friends? He liked to think that what they had shared would only have grown deeper and richer with the years, but the truth was he would never know. Intimacy required an openness of spirit, a willingness to risk heartbreak. O’Malleys seemed to have the ability to bypass intimacy and go straight to heartbreak without passing GO.
“You need anything?” Tommy asked. “I already made the drop-off to the bank.”
“Didn’t we have a picture of Irene and Mike’s old restaurant hanging up here?”
“The one taken the summer before the Easter Sunday hurricane?”
Aidan nodded.
“The nail gave a couple weeks ago. I stashed the picture in the drawer under the register.”
Aidan slid open the drawer. Rubber bands. A crumpled Canadian dollar. Two Frank Sinatra CDs, one Pink Floyd, a well-thumbed copy of last year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. He slid his hand under the magazine and poked around.
“It’s not here.”
Tommy tore his attention away from All My Children for a minute. “I think that’s where I stowed it.”
Aidan checked the drawers, the cabinet adjacent to the dartboard, even unlocked the utility closet hidden behind the rack of pool cues and looked behind mega-sized bottles of Clorox and Mr. Clean.
“I know it’s somewhere,” Tommy said.
“You didn’t throw it out, did you?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? Why would I throw it out?”
“Beats me,” said Aidan, “but it’s not hanging on the wall, and so far it doesn’t seem to be anywhere else.”
“It’ll turn up,” Tommy said as he upped the volume on All My Children. “Wait and see.”
Not much else he could do. He went back into the kitchen, poured himself his sixth cup of coffee, then stared at the open laptop on the table. No matter what Kelly hoped, that dented teapot wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t about to undo years of neglect and turn Grandma Irene into the kind of cozy, nurturing figure both he and his kid secretly longed for. It wouldn’t bring Sandy back or save Billy. It wouldn’t make him whole again.
But his kid had seen something in it, the possibility of something wonderful, and that was reason enough to give it one more try.
Chapter Five
THERE WAS NOTHING like a guilty conscience to keep a woman from settling down to work. Maddy missed the old days when these fierce skirmishes with her mother had left her feeling exhilarated and morally victorious instead of ashamed of herself. It wasn’t like she had really expected Rose to cheer her auction win. A mild display of excitement would have been nice, but this was her mother she was talking about. A woman who saved her displays of excitement for the really important things like a reduction in the prime interest rate.
All Maddy had been looking for was a simple “nice going.” Or, if that was too much, she would have settled for a look of benign maternal amusement. Unfortunately, neither was in Rose’s limited repertoire of responses. Maddy knew she wasn’t being fair, but she couldn’t help herself. The truth was Rose had been genuinely baffled by Maddy’s determination to win the teapot. She could’ve talked herself blue in the face down there in the kitchen, laid her heart on the table with the arugula, and Rose still wouldn’t understand. You either believed in magic or you didn’t, and everyone knew on which side Rose cast her vote.
But Hannah still believed and the thought of her little girl’s excitement when she first saw the teapot, all polished and gleaming like new, filled Maddy’s heart with delight. Even Rose would have to admit she’d been right to pursue it when she saw how happy the ersatz magic lamp made her granddaughter.
First, though, there was some work to get done. It felt good to have a purpose again even if it wasn’t quite her heart’s desire. She settled back down at the computer and tried to wrap her brain around the ongoing task of updating the Inn’s Web site. Her plan to add voice-overs to the site was still in the early stages, but she’d been tinkering with the idea of designing a Flash page that featured flickering candles that would lead you to the area you wanted to explore. Unfortunately her experience with Flash was limited and she needed to contact one of her geek friends in Seattle for direction.
So much for working on the Web site. She could always check the upstairs bathrooms and see if they needed some spot cleaning. Rose’s standards were higher than the ones imposed by the Board of Health, and it took a lot of hard work to maintain the place to her satisfaction. The rewards, however, were undeniable, and Rose deserved all of the credit for the Inn’s overwhelming success.
She clicked on her e-mail program and was instantly rewarded with six invitations to repair her credit history; three reminders that it really was time to lose that excess weight; and one promise that she could (pick one) enlarge either her breasts or her penis in forty-eight hours simply by popping a magical herbal preparation made from powdered Siberian goat tails.
And there was a note from FireGuy.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 4 December
SUBJECT: Samovar—Item #5815796
I know this is a long shot, but would you consider selling the teapot for a $25 profit? I was bidding on it for my kid and she’ll be real disappointed when I tell her I lost out. Let me know.
She read the note twice, then started to laugh. The guy had a lot of nerve, but she couldn’t help admiring his style. Any man who wanted to make his daughter happy was a winner in her book. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. The spellcheck hiccupped on “fuhgedaboudit,” but that was only because it wasn’t programmed to speak Jersey. She bypassed the error message, pressed Send, then waved goodbye to FireGuy.
AIDAN WAS IN the bar kitchen adding more of his special spice mix to the huge vat of chili bubbling away on the stove when he heard the bell that signaled new mail. Wiping his hands on the dishtowel looped into the waistband of his jeans, he made for the laptop on the table.
Point. Click. Damn, he was getting good at this. Next thing you knew he’d be asking Santa for a pocket protector and a laser pointer.
JerseyGirl hadn’t wasted any time answering him. She must have some kind of office job where she could play around on the Internet and still look like she was working.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 4 December
SUBJECT: Re: Samovar—Item #5815796
Nice try but fuhgedaboudit. I bought the teapot for MY kid and believe me, she’s going to be very happy Christmas morning. Better luck next time.
The fuhgedaboudit was a nice local touch. He limbered up his index fingers and started pressing keys.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 4 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Samovar—Item #5815796
Sorry. Wrong answer. What does YOUR kid want with that dented piece of junk anyway? (How does an extra $35 sound?)
“Poor FireGuy,” she said to the screen. “You’re spending way too much time at the keyboard.” Unemployed, she thought as she started typing. Who else would have so much free time? Probably an ex-dot-comer like herself who suddenly found himself on the outside looking in. If she didn’t want the teapot for Hannah, she’d almost be tempted to sell it to him.
For a small profit, of course. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter.
HE DIDN’T BOTHER getting up to check on the chili or mix a batch of blue cheese dressing for the Buffalo wings. JerseyGirl would be sitting in his in box before he reached the stove.
He grinned at the sound of the new mail chime. He grinned even wider when he read her response.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 4 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: Samovar—Item #5815796
An extra $35 sounds great, but you’re not getting the teapot. (And, since you b
rought it up, what does YOUR kid want with MY dented, rusty teapot anyway????)
He clicked on Reply and started typing. Who knew you could type so fast with just two fingers? (Who knew he had so much to say to a stranger?)
FIREGUY DIDN’T DISAPPOINT her. She fiddled with the screen brightness, deleted a half-dozen spams, then started grinning like a fool when the new mail icon started flashing.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 4 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Samovar—Item #5815796
My kid wants to give it to her one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother for Christmas.
Top that, JerseyGirl!
Her reply seemed to appear on her screen by magic. She hadn’t had this much fun since her senior prom. She hit Send, then leaned back to wait for his answer.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 4 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Samovar—Item
#5815796
Oh, please. I can do better than that with my typing fingers tied behind my back. Maybe you were bidding on a teapot, but I was bidding on Aladdin’s magic lamp. Would YOU take a magic lamp away from a four-year-old child? I think not. . . .
She had a four-year-old child.
He stared at the screen as the fizz went out of the enterprise. If she had a four-year-old child, she probably had a thirty-four-year-old husband.
He caught himself and laughed out loud. What difference did it make? All they were doing was exchanging some e-mail banter about an old samovar. They weren’t flirting. They weren’t baring their souls. It didn’t matter if she was twenty-five or seventy-five, married or single, mother of eight or not mother material at all. The only thing that mattered was the fact that she had won the auction and he hadn’t.
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