He glanced up at the clock. He’d wasted enough time already. Slayney would be there any minute with a delivery, and once that was squared away, he needed to get the wings started and the ribs ready. The late lunch crew wandered in around two o’clock, followed by the happy-hour gang from the docks around five, who paved the way for the serious benchwarmers who began streaming in around eight and stayed until closing.
Still, he couldn’t leave her hanging like that. He wasn’t sure what exactly e-mail etiquette entailed, but it seemed to him that dropping the ball now was a lot like not returning a phone call. Besides, there was nothing wrong with keeping the lines of communication open. There was always the possibility that her kid might turn up her nose at the bucket of rust, and JerseyGirl would turn to him to bail her out.
He clicked on Reply and was about to start typing when Slayney’s voice rattled the rafters.
“O’Malley! Get your ass out here! I got six other stops and there’s snow coming.”
Walt Slayney was standing in the doorway, looking pissed as hell.
“Hey, Slayney,” he said with forced geniality. “Gimme a second. I need to send something out.”
“Quit screwing around on the goddamn computer. If you want your Guinness, you’ll get your ass out here now.”
He muttered something Slayney could probably sue him for, then got up to join the man out back.
Sorry, JerseyGirl. It was fun while it lasted.
WHERE WAS HE?
Six minutes had passed since she had hit the Send key and still no reply from FireGuy. Was it something she’d said? She had been enjoying their rapid-fire exchanges and wouldn’t have minded volleying a few more notes with him. FireGuy, however, had apparently exhausted the limits of e-mail chat and vanished into the ether whence he came. Easy come, easy go. When it came to men, she could give Houdini a run for his money. She was great at making them disappear, and she didn’t need a magic wand and a Vegas stage to do it. She had inherited her mother’s chin and her bad luck with men. Traits shared by all four DiFalco sisters and most of their descendants.
She fussed around with the Web site, but her heart wasn’t in her coding and she screwed up twice and had to start over from scratch. Thank God it was nearly two o’clock. Hannah’s preschool let out at two-thirty. At least when her daughter was around, she and Rose had a common interest beyond business.
At her feet Priscilla let out a whimper, followed by a frantic scratching motion that Maddy instantly recognized as trouble.
“Oh, no, Pris, no mistakes today!” She swooped the puppy into her arms and dashed for the back door, pausing only long enough to grab her jacket and shoulder bag from the brass coat stand in the corner.
Priscilla hated being leashed, but the days of neighborhood dogs running wild on Main Street were a thing of the past. “Good thing you’re a pedigree,” she said as she snapped the lead on the poodle’s tiny collar. “Before long they’ll be passing a law against mutts.” She slipped into her jacket, then grabbed the pooper-scooper and bag she kept stashed behind the trash bin near the garage.
Priscilla made straight for her favorite spot by the stand of dogwoods. A sharp wind whistled between the house and the garage, nearly lifting the puppy off her paws. She looked up at Maddy with an expression that managed to be simultaneously forlorn and indignant. Who could blame her? Maddy was a fan of indoor plumbing, too.
“There you are!” a male voice boomed behind her.
She turned to see a short, round man in a Philadelphia Eagles windbreaker bearing down on her. He seemed familiar. Where had she seen him before?
“I’ve been looking all over for you.” He completely ignored the fact that she was standing there with a loaded pooper-scooper in one hand and two pounds of growling poodle in the other. “The wife needs more towels tonight. She’s planning to wash her hair after dinner.”
It took her a few seconds, but she finally realized where she had seen him before: coming out of the second-floor bathroom. “Mr. Armagh,” she said, jiggling Priscilla to stem the growling. “You and Mrs. Armagh are in the Ocean Room, right. I’ll make sure she has plenty.”
“Make sure you knock twice,” Mr. Armagh said with an exaggerated waggle of his thick gray eyebrows. “We’re on our second honeymoon.”
Which definitely fell under the heading of Too Much Information.
Maddy disposed of the pooper-scooper and its accessories, then checked her watch. Hannah’s bus would be at the corner in fifteen minutes. She considered popping into the kitchen for a quick glass of milk and a chocolate chip cookie, but the thought of another round with the DiFalco girls was a strong deterrent. She’d do without the cookies; her thighs would thank her for it.
She bent down and deposited a reluctant Priscilla on the sidewalk in front of the Candlelight. Priscilla sniffed the concrete delicately, took two hesitant steps forward, then slammed on the brakes.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to walk,” Maddy said as she once again scooped up the puppy. “We all do.”
The dog looked appropriately smug as she cuddled against Maddy’s chest and closed her eyes.
Paradise Point’s Main Street ran parallel to the shoreline. Five blocks of wide sidewalks, tall trees, and a score of quaint gift shops, boutiques, and craft stores redesigned with the tourist trade in mind. A glittering crown of B&Bs reigned supreme over the south end of the street, benevolent despots that set the tone for the entire town. With the expansive porches and gingerbread trim, the beautifully restored Victorian ladies served as time machines that invited visitors to step back into a more gracious era.
Gone were the days when you could park on the street and race up the lawn to the front door. Now you had to drive around back to a tiny eight-car lot near the garage and pray the paying customers hadn’t taken all the best spots. It was like living in an upscale Motel 6, except if she were really living at Motel 6 she would be able to park at her door and somebody else would be worrying about clean sheets and fresh bath towels.
The B&Bs soon gave way to a block of charming single-family dwellings that whispered old money. No taking in boarders for those houses, thank you very much. They were holding the line between the raffish charm of the north end of Main Street and the upscale trendiness of the south end and doing it quite well. She crossed the street in front of Upsweep, her cousin Gina’s hair salon, and joined the knot of women at the corner of Main Street and Paradise Point Lane. She was related to almost every single one of them by either blood or marriage, and the ones she wasn’t related to she had gone to school with.
“Hey, cuz!” Gina greeted her. “Were your ears burning? We were just talking about you.”
“Nothing awful,” her cousin Denise quickly added as she rocked the stroller back and forth while her son slept. “You look like we jumped you in an alley somewhere.”
“Bad day,” Maddy said, placing an unwilling Priscilla on the sidewalk by her feet. “A really bad day.”
“Uh-oh,” said Gina. “This might change the odds.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. “What odds?”
“They were taking bets,” Joann Colarusso said with a laugh as she patted Priscilla’s furry head. “How long until you buy a one-way ticket back to Seattle.”
“So far it’s split evenly between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve,” her second cousin Delia Sweeney offered. “Personally I think you’ll be gone a week from tomorrow.”
Maddy opened her mouth to say something she probably shouldn’t, but was saved by Claire’s arrival.
“Advil,” Claire said with a loud groan. “My kingdom for an Advil.” She placed a hand against her cheek and rolled her eyes.
“Cramps?” Gina asked, digging through the pockets of her down jacket.
“Root canal.” She groaned again. “I’m telling you, childbirth was easier.”
The knot of mothers burst into laughter, and Maddy felt some of her tension ease. It felt good to stand there on the corner in the brisk winter
wind with a group of women she’d known and loved forever. The only one she hadn’t grown up with was Claire, but they had already formed an easy waiting-for-the-school-bus relationship that she enjoyed.
“I have Tylenol,” she said to Claire, “if you don’t mind reaching around Priscilla and digging through my shoulder bag.”
“Bless you,” Claire said with a grateful smile. “Bless you and all of your descendants!”
Fran and Gina were engaged in a lively debate on the relative horrors of dental surgery versus hard labor that had the other women cheering them on. Claire pulled a sports bottle of water from her tote bag and washed down a pair of Tylenols with a healthy gulp.
“Thanks,” she said to Maddy. “I owe you.”
Claire launched into a very funny story about her first experience with nitrous oxide that had the other women literally holding their sides with laughter. Beneath her own laughter, Maddy found herself inexplicably close to tears.
This was the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Paradise Point, the same world her cousins had never left. She tried to imagine herself married to—and probably divorced from, given the DiFalco luck with men—a local boy, popping into Upsweep every other Saturday as much for the gossip as for maintenance. Denise, Gina, and her other cousins had all stayed put down there in South Jersey, digging their roots even deeper into familiar ground. They shopped in the stores where they had worked as teenagers, shared baby clothes and strollers, carpools and covered-dish suppers at Our Lady of Lourdes R.C. Church. Their children played together. Their husbands and ex-husbands bowled together and shouted themselves hoarse at Giants games up at the Meadow-lands. They knew each other’s secrets and sore points, and they understood without being told why Maddy had chosen to build a life for herself on the opposite side of the country.
What they couldn’t seem to understand was why she had come home again. Who could blame them? Since leaving Seattle, Maddy had asked herself the same thing every hour on the hour.
“Look!” Denise pointed in the direction of an old Honda whizzing past them. “Isn’t that Kelly in the passenger seat?”
“Couldn’t be,” said Claire. “Kelly usually doesn’t get out of class until four.”
Maddy quickly scanned her mental database. Claire had married one of the O’Malley brothers whose family owned the bar/restaurant on the pier for as long as she could remember. By all accounts Claire had enjoyed a happy marriage until her firefighter husband was killed in a warehouse collapse a few years ago.
“Your daughter?” she asked Claire.
“Don’t I wish! My niece.”
The image of a lovely young girl pressing a kiss against the faintly stubbled cheek of a teenage boy seemed to linger in front of the young mothers, even though the car had long since turned off Main Street.
“I think that was Kelly with Seth Mahoney,” Gina said. “That’s his brother’s Honda.”
The sound of the wind off the ocean filled the silence that suddenly surrounded the women.
“They should still be in class,” Claire said after a long moment.
“It’s genetic,” said Fran. “O’Malleys skip classes. Always have, always will.” Fran had gone to school with the O’Malleys’ second son, Aidan, four years ahead of Maddy.
“Not to worry,” Gina said to a frowning Claire. “Your niece is set to be valedictorian. She’s National Honor Society, a scholarship winner—I think she can skip social studies without too much of a problem.”
“Besides,” said Pat, “knowing Kelly, she’s probably headed to the library.”
Of course they all knew it wasn’t school that had them worried. It was young love.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Denise said, “but I’m feeling old right now.”
“Nothing lasts,” said Gina. “That’s the one thing you can count on. A year from now she’ll be walking across a campus somewhere with a new guy by her side.”
“Right,” said Claire. “And we’ll still be here, waiting for the school bus.”
Maddy burst into laughter and a second later the rest of the women were laughing, too, but Claire’s remark had struck a nerve. They had all been Kelly’s age once. Maddy had been bursting with dreams at seventeen, so eager, so ready to meet her future that she had never once stopped to consider that her future might not end up being the one she’d planned. She had the feeling most of the women standing there on the corner with her would say the same thing. There was an almost palpable sense of relief when the bright yellow school bus rolled to a stop and their kids exploded back into their lives.
Gina’s two little girls were first off the bus. Heather and Saylor were five-year-old twin firecrackers, much like their mother had been at their age. Their father, Gina’s second husband, Frank, had contributed the silky black hair and huge brown eyes, but his quiet, calm personality was nowhere to be found. Denise’s only son, four-year-old Peter, leaped down from the top step, then burst into tears when Heather hit him in the head with her Barbie backpack. Fran’s son and daughter neatly stepped around the melee while Delia’s and Pat’s daughters giggled and ran to their mothers.
Hannah was the last off the bus. She stood for a moment on the top step, her enormous eyes scanning the knot of women and children until her gaze rested on Maddy’s face. Hannah’s look of relief almost broke her heart.
Smiling broadly, she waved at Hannah and struggled with the powerful urge to run over to the bus and scoop the child into her arms. This was only the beginning of Hannah’s second week in preschool at Our Lady of Lourdes. Gina and Denise had convinced her that putting Hannah on the small parish school bus was the best way to help her little girl settle in, but so far it didn’t look like the idea was working. Still, you couldn’t expect a miracle in only six days. Unfortunately, patience didn’t come naturally for her. She wanted her daughter to be happy now, right this minute. She wanted Hannah to feel safe and protected in her new hometown, surrounded by family and friends and so much love that nothing, not even her father’s absence, could hurt her again.
She maintained her smile as Hannah slowly descended the metal steps.
“She’ll get used to it,” Claire said as her own seven-year-old son barreled up to them. “A new school is always hard, no matter how old you are.”
“Ma!” Billy O’Malley tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Hurry! I gotta pee real bad.”
“Emergency, ladies,” Claire said with a good-natured shrug of her shoulders. “I’ll see you all tomorrow morning.”
“We’re off!” cried Denise as she rounded up her tribe.
The rest of the women called out their goodbyes and, kids in tow, headed their separate ways.
Hannah slipped up next to Maddy the second Claire and Billy disappeared down the street. She reached up and tickled one of Priscilla’s back paws. Priscilla shot her a look of regal indignation.
“So did you have fun today?” Maddy asked as she reached down for Hannah’s hand.
Hannah shrugged. “I guess.”
She was so small, so vulnerable. What idiot came up with the idea for preschool anyway? Her baby was barely out of diapers, and already they were telling Maddy it was time to start letting go when what she really wanted to do was hold on tight.
They turned onto Main Street and waited to cross to the other side. “Did Susan bring the butterflies to class?”
“She forgot.”
“That’s too bad. I know how much you wanted to tell them about the butterflies in Grandpa Bill’s yard.”
Hannah seemed fascinated with the workings of the traffic light swinging overhead. Maddy regrouped and tried again.
“Did Mrs. Shapiro tell you what character you’ll be playing in the holiday pageant?”
That elicited a nod. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
“Will you need a costume?”
“I guess.”
“Did Mrs. Shapiro send home a note for me so I know what to make?”
“I forge
t.”
She looked so small and forlorn that Maddy’s impatience disappeared as quickly as it had come. “I’ll call Mrs. Shapiro and ask her.”
If Hannah had an opinion one way or the other, she wasn’t sharing it with Maddy. Mother and daughter walked up Main Street in silence, past the Cheese Shoppe, Upsweep, the Paradise Point Savings and Loan. Maddy called out hello to Ethel Santori, who was sweeping her front porch. Ethel owned the Captain’s House, the second-highest-rated B&B in town. Ethel managed a tight smile and nod of her head, but if Maddy had been expecting a display of neighborly effusion, she would have to look elsewhere.
They reached the Candlelight and walked up the driveway toward the backyard. Maddy put a squirming Priscilla down on the grass, and she and Hannah waited for the puppy to take care of business. Hannah carried the dog into the kitchen.
“That poodle has two more legs than I have,” Rose observed as Maddy closed the door behind them. “Put her down, Hannah, before she forgets how to walk!” Rose’s expression was pleasant; her tone, amused, but it didn’t matter.
Aunt Lucy chuckled as she chopped carrot coins in half at the counter. Maybe on a different day, with a different set of characters, Maddy might have chuckled along with her, but the look in Hannah’s eyes as she stepped off the school bus still tore at her heart. In her gut she knew Rose was teasing, trying to smooth over the bruised feelings of a few hours ago, but Maddy wasn’t ready to let go of the bruises.
Hannah clutched the puppy close to her chest. “Mommy? Did I do something wrong?”
“Don’t worry,” Maddy said through clenched teeth. She thought the top of her head was going to explode. “Grandma Rose was making a joke.”
Rose opened her mouth, but Maddy shot her a look that said, One more word and we go back to Seattle.
Rose’s cheeks turned a violent shade of red, but she said nothing. Aunt Lucy concentrated on her carrot coins. Hannah hugged Priscilla tight and stared at the floor.
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