Love in Maine

by Connie Falconeri

  Praise for

  Love in Maine

  “Newcomer Connie Falconeri writes with the confidence of a novelist who’s been around forever, and she brings her charming characters to life with effortless imagination and breezy good humor.”

  —Kate Howard, publisher of Crimson magazine

  “Love in Maine is a perfect summer read.”

  —Diane Miller, author of The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli

  “Falconeri puts so much personality into her writing—it’s almost like she has two personalities!”

  —Ron Carlivati, professor of creative writing, Port Charles University

  Dedication

  For Molly,

  In spite of our differences.

  And for Sonny,

  In spite of everything.

  Epigraph

  Asked, “Who is the rich man?”

  Epictetus replied, “He who is content.”

  —EPICTETUS

  Contents

  Signed, from the Author . . .

  Title Page

  Praise

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  How hard could it be? It’s just taking orders from hungry people and bringing them food.

  “Yes!” Maddie lied. “I’ve worked at a couple of different restaurants and bistros here in Maine. I have tons of experience.” (She might have overdone it, she realized, with the “tons.”)

  The middle-aged cook was tired and skeptical. He’d obviously just finished a busy breakfast shift and he was looking over his shoulder away from Maddie to make sure his line cook was prepping for the lunch crowd. The small city of Blake, Maine, was a working-class, riverfront town that had been building boats for the Navy since the middle of the nineteenth century. A diner like this one tended to survive the ups and downs in the economy by sticking to the basics.

  “Bistros?” the cook scoffed, looking at the young woman more pointedly. One of the men at the counter laughed behind his newspaper. “I don’t need any fancy-pants college kid sticking her nose up at the customers around here.” He turned to leave.

  “I’ll wash dishes, I’ll chop onions, I’ll marry the ketchups!” she cried after him. Her friend Kara had told her about how the restaurant manager at the place where she worked on Nantucket made her take the leftover ketchup from one bottle and marry it into the other leftover ketchup bottles so they looked full the next day.

  The burly cook turned slowly around. “You’ll do what to the ketchups?” He looked furious.

  “I’ll marry them?” Maddie knew she should have sounded more convincing, but he looked like she’d just insulted him.

  “If you ever try that at this place, I’ll fire you so fast you won’t be able to work in this town again.”

  She looked quickly over his shoulder at the boarded-up storefronts across the street. It wasn’t Madison Avenue. If someone was going to threaten her with never working in a town again, crossing Blake, Maine, off the list wasn’t the end of the world.

  “Well . . . I didn’t realize—” she tried again.

  “This is a clean place. It might be a bit worn around the edges, I know the linoleum could use an update, but I’ve never mixed old ketchup bottles together, and no one’s ever gotten sick from eating at Phil’s.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  Phil stared down at her. She noticed the tattoos on his forearms, indicating he’d probably spent some time in the Navy. She had to really concentrate in order not to stare. It wasn’t the type of thing she saw every day at close range, ancient green tattoos of mermaids and anchors and crazy sailor stuff.

  He sighed and looked back at the kitchen, seemingly resenting the time Maddie was taking up that could have been better spent prepping for lunch. He curled his lip as if he might have a bit of fun at her expense. “All right, Miss Ketchup. I’ll let you show me your stuff during lunch today. I keep the tips.”

  “Well . . .” Maddie looked down at her khaki skirt and white-collared shirt. She was interviewing. She had dressed to be interviewing, not waitressing.

  “You can change in the back. That your bag?” His eyes skimmed over to her worn-out L.L. Bean duffle with the cracked leather handles. It was the closest thing she could find to casual in a closet full of T. Anthony luggage and Gucci loafers at her parents’ home in Boston.

  “Yeah. I’m renting a room from a lady in town, but I haven’t been there yet. I came into the diner right from the bus station when I saw your Help Wanted sign in the window.”

  “Who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who is the lady you’ll be living with?”

  “I think her name is Janet Gilbertson. Do you know her?”

  Phil smiled for the first time since she’d been there, and it had been a while. When Maddie first came into the diner, Phil had been swamped and asked her to take a seat until he was done with the final breakfast orders. Thirty-seven minutes later, he’d come out from behind the stainless-steel pass-through window and he hadn’t smiled once that entire time.

  “Yeah.” His smile was full now. “I know her.”

  “Is she funny?” Maddie tried to get in on the joke. “Why are you smiling like that?”

  “Oh. No reason. Just curious, anyone else boarding over there at Janet’s, or just you?”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought to ask. The ad on Craigslist said, ‘Single room available in safe respectable home,’ so I figure I’m the only boarder. Why?”

  “No reason.” Phil turned back toward the kitchen and then called over his shoulder, “Follow me.”

  Maddie picked up the duffle and followed him to the kitchen.

  Four hours later, she was nearly dead. What a ridiculous fool she was to think she could just traipse into a diner and . . . do anything. Phil had finally relegated her to the dishwasher after she nearly spilled a cup of coffee on a really nice old lady. Maddie managed to get most of it on herself instead, so at least she avoided a $10 million lawsuit from a burn victim, but even the dishwashing had turned out to be really stressful. It just went on and on, and everyone was in such a rush. She kept wanting to text her college roommate about how crazy it was to be washing dishes at a diner in Maine and how funny that was, and then she would remember that her brother Jimmy had taken her cell phone—along with all of her other electronics—as part of their little bet.

  “E-mail us from the public library,” Jimmy had ordered, “like everyone else in the world who’s got a hundred bucks to their name, Sis.”

  If—no, when—she won this wager, she would make sure her pompous older brother Jimmy never, ever called her ‘Sis’ again.

  Maddie put the last rack of dishes away and looked up to see Phil with his meaty, tattooed forearms crossed in front of the old white T-shirt covering his barrel chest. She tried to repress a smile over how much he was like Brutus in those old Popeye cartoons. All he needed was a pipe and a cockeyed cap on his head.

  “What’s so funny, Miss Ketchup?”

  He’d started calling her Miss Ketchup and hadn’t
stopped. She kind of liked having a nickname. And a boss. Who would pay her money.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Just what a lousy dishwasher I am.”

  He liked her honesty. For a few seconds he smiled, then scowled.

  “Maybe I’d be a better sous-chef or server?” Maddie offered quickly.

  Phil burst out laughing. “This here is a diner,” he said, like the native Mainer he was (This hee-yuh is a die-nuh). “We do not have sous-chefs. We do not have servers. We have cooks and dishwashers and waitresses.” He took off his filthy white apron, pulling it up over his head, wadding it into a ball, and tossing it handily into the laundry bin by the back door, like a basketball shot.

  “Nice three-pointer,” Maddie complimented.

  “You a basketball fan?”

  “I have brothers.” She shrugged.

  He turned off the lights where they’d been standing in the kitchen. “I’m not sure this is going to work.” He kept walking into the main part of the diner. The other cook had left, and the last waitress had finished wiping down all the tables and the countertop and had called good-bye as she let herself out the front door a few minutes before.

  “I will try really hard,” Maddie pleaded. “I swear. Please give me a chance. You don’t have to pay me—”

  He swung around fast. “What do you mean, I don’t have to pay you?”

  “I mean . . .” Shit. What an idiot. Maddie’s dad had always encouraged her to go for unpaid internships and that sort of thing, but how the hell was she going to pay her rent if she didn’t make any money? Idiot!

  Phil kept staring at her.

  “I meant, you don’t have to pay me for today.”

  He nearly choked on his short laugh. “Yeah, that’s pretty much a given.”

  “But seriously, I am—not that it’s your problem—but I am really strapped right now and I will work really hard for you.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  Maddie looked down at her flat stomach. “What? No! Why would you say that?” She felt like telling him he could get himself thrown in jail for that chauvinist crap, but she left her politically correct ego at the door.

  “Well, you said you were strapped . . . pretty girl like you . . .” He raised his shoulders and raised his eyebrows in what Maddie supposed was a kind of patronizing apology. He was probably about her father’s age and thought he was being kindly. “I mean, you don’t look pregnant,” he added.

  Oh, great, Maddie thought, now he’s embarrassed. “Look, Phil. I need a job. Plain and simple. You need someone to fill in for your regular waitress while she’s away taking care of her sick dad. I’ll work all summer, really hard. Come on. Just give me a chance.”

  He stared at her a few long moments. “All right, Ketchup. You’re hired. But no screwing around. You need to be here at five o’clock tomorrow morning for an eight-hour shift. You good with that?”

  “Yes! Yes, I am so good with that!” Maddie was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet.

  Phil kept staring at her. “You are going to be washing dishes and sweeping the floor and cleaning up after a bunch of slobs. You got that part, right?”

  “Yes!” She was so excited she couldn’t help it. She forced her body to still and her face to fall. “Yes.” She tried to act more subdued.

  He shook his head. “All right, then. See you at five. And you might want to wear a black T-shirt next time.”

  She looked down at her shirt and realized it was covered with a muddy rainbow of grease, juice, coffee, and unidentifiable muck. “Will do!” She saluted him for some reason, then felt like an even bigger idiot. “I mean, will do,” she repeated, keeping her hands firmly at her sides, tamping down her enthusiasm.

  Phil showed her out the front door and stood holding it open for her for a few seconds. “You know how to get to Janet’s from here?” he asked.

  “Yes. I think it’s just up that street, and then on to the left . . . Is that right?”

  “Yep. That’s right.” He looked at her again as if he were going to ask her what the hell she was doing in Blake, Maine, in the first place, then thought better of it. “Say hi to Hank for me.”

  “Who’s Hank?”

  But Phil was already shutting the door, and she only heard him laugh and lock it as he pulled the old horizontal blinds down and flipped the sign to “Closed.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Henry Van Rensselaer Gilberston. You do not speak to me in that tone of voice.”

  “Come on, Mom. You don’t need to speak to me like I’m twelve, either, but this is crazy.”

  “I am not crazy. We settled that years ago. I have the paperwork to prove it.” She winked at her handsome son, then tried to stay mad at him, which was always impossible. At twenty-eight, after ten years in the Army, Henry could never hold his mother’s wrath for long.

  “I didn’t say you were crazy, I said this is crazy,” he said. “I will get a second job or do some part-time work cleaning yachts over in Back Cove. There is no reason for you to be taking in strays.”

  “You make it sound like the city pound. I think Maddie Post sounds like a perfectly nice lady. And someone I can talk to, unlike you, with your buttoned-up, I-just-want-to-be-left-alone thing you’ve got going on.”

  Hank turned away from his mother and tried to figure out the best way to tell her he was not about to let some old cat lady from who-knew-where live in his mother’s house for a few hundred dollars a month.

  “You are charging her way too little,” Hank tried, turning back to face her and folding his arms in defiance. “Donald’s got a roommate who pays six hundred bucks a month.”

  Janet Gilbertson folded her arms as well. They looked like mirror images of one another. Rather, they looked nothing like one another, Hank being bulky, tall, and stock-still, and Janet being tiny, birdlike, and fidgety. But their stubborn scowls were identical.

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Janet said. “Who would pay six hundred dollars to live in my guest room? In Blake, Maine. That’s just plain old silly.”

  “Mom! Are you doing this to make money or just to piss me off?”

  She let her hands drop to her sides and turned toward the kitchen. “Are you staying for supper?”

  Typical, he thought. Subject change. Ten years gone and everything stays the same. “Well, yeah. I am now. You think I am going to let you welcome some Lizzie Borden into this house without getting a good look at her and running a security check on her later?”

  Hank had followed his mother into the kitchen. Oh, the scenes he’d endured in that kitchen. His mother and father drunk as loons, kissing or fighting or passed out. The fear of what he’d find when he came home from a friend’s house during high school. The desire to bolt, finally achieved when he enlisted on his eighteenth birthday. The mottled yellow Formica of the countertop was like a visual cue that set all those memories into motion. He still wasn’t used to being here, even though he’d gotten back from his final deployment nearly four months ago.

  “Hank?”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “She’s just a woman looking for a place to stay for the summer,” Janet said gently, holding out a glass of iced tea for him. “I want some company.” He accepted the glass and took a sip.

  “You always knew how to make the best iced tea, I’ll give you that.”

  They heard the slow steps of someone on the path to the front door before they could see the much-anticipated Maddie Post. Janet had let the hydrangeas grow to massive proportions, concealing the few visitors she had until they were right at the front door.

  “We need to cut those shrubs back, for security,” Hank grumbled.

  “Oh, hush. We don’t need security on a little side street in the middle of nowhere. You cut that out and be nice.” Janet walked to the screen door at the front of the living room and pushed it open. “Well, hello! You must be Maddie Post! Aren’t you just cute as a button!”

  Henry groaned in the shadowy corn
er of the living room, waiting to see some little old lady come in with her carpetbag.

  “This is my son, Henry.”

  Hank stepped forward into the center of the living room and lifted his chin in silent greeting. He felt sucker-punched. She wasn’t little and she wasn’t old.

  Maddie hoisted her duffle bag higher onto one shoulder. “Hey! I didn’t realize you had a son, Mrs. Gilbertson!” She looked at Janet, then extended her hand to shake Henry’s. He hesitated for a split second before taking it. Her face screwed up for that tiny moment of confusion, then broke into a big smile when he took her hand after all.

  “Whew! I thought for a minute you were going to be all stormy and moody like Phil down at the diner.” Hank pulled his hand away after they’d finished shaking.

  “Oh, have you met Phil already?” Mrs. Gilbertson asked, steering Maddie away from her moody, stormy son. “Come this way, dear. I’ll show you your room. I hope you like it. I didn’t want to make it too cluttered, but I wanted you to feel welcome, if you know what I mean, and it doesn’t look like you’ve brought too much stuff, so . . .”

  Henry listened as the two women went up the stairs and his mother kept a constant stream of her trademark prattle going. He set down his glass of iced tea, let himself fall into the big armchair, and stared up at the ceiling. He could follow their movements by the sounds of creaks and cracks created by their footfalls across the floorboards of the 1920 home.

  What the hell was a hot woman like that doing renting a room in some stranger’s house in—he had to admit his mother was right—the middle of nowhere? Maddie Post looked like she should be on the cover of some glossy woman’s magazine with a headline that promised seventy-four ways to satisfy your man. Long chestnut hair. Dark violet eyes above wide, high cheekbones. Full, promising lips. Her messed-up shirt and disheveled ponytail only served to make her look more . . . accessible.

  Raking his nails through his buzz cut and along his scalp, Hank tried to ignore the sound of the mattress springs as Ms. Post bounced up and down on the bed to make sure it was to her liking. With everything he’d been going through since he got back from the Middle East—trying to remember what it was like to be a normal person in a normal town—the last thing Henry Gilbertson needed was to be thinking about some fresh-scrubbed college girl alone and rolling around in his childhood bedroom.