She was glad. Her mother was gone, and her bedroom was gone. Changing the décor had been a sane move on her father’s part.
With a nod, she abandoned the doorway and found herself facing the closed door to her own bedroom. Impulsively, she pushed the door open.
He’d changed nothing in here. The starburst quilt, the books piled on her desk, the stuffed animals nestled into the child-size rocking chair in the corner. The framed print of one of Renoir’s ballerina paintings hanging over her bed, which her mother had hung to inspire Maeve during the few years she’d taken ballet lessons. The collection of hair ribbons draped over the closet doorknob, ribbons she’d stopped wearing once her mother had died and she’d felt safer with her hair falling into her face, hiding her eyes.
Oh, God. This was her life, here in this room. The life she’d once loved, the life she’d grown to hate. The life she’d left after her mother had left her. The life she’d abandoned after her father had abandoned her.
She jammed her fist to her mouth to keep from crying out. Spinning away, she stepped back into the hall and closed the door, slowly and carefully, so it wouldn’t slam. Her heart was racing, her stomach churning. What little she’d eaten of her dinner threatened to return on her, but she swallowed it back down. Once she was sure she wouldn’t scream, vomit, or faint, she worked her way back down the stairs to the kitchen, where her father was propping the last of the scrubbed pots on the dish rack to dry.
“I can’t cook,” he said with a self-deprecating smile, “but I sure can scour pots.”
Maeve nodded and crossed the room to fetch her jacket from the chair where she’d left it. She had to say something. She just hoped her voice would emerge steadily. “I’ve got to go, Dad. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”
“It’s going to go beautifully,” he predicted, tugging the dish towel free of his belt and wiping his hands on it. “I know it is. I’ll stop by and spend some money. The guys on Saturday shift will appreciate it.”
“I’ll see you then.”
He was waiting for something—a hug, she suspected. She gave him a perfunctory one, and his arms tightened around her. He was her father, she loved him, and she did forgive him. But forgiveness didn’t magically make the scars disappear.
“Drive safely,” he said, escorting her down the hall to the front door.
She stepped onto the porch, forced a smile for her father, then pivoted and walked to her car in a slow, controlled gait. The night sky was a heavy black, speckled with stars and a half-circle of moon. The chill in the air nipped at her through her jacket. She settled behind the wheel, started the engine, and glanced toward the house. Her father stood on the porch, a silhouette in the yellow glow of the porch light. He waved. She couldn’t see his face, but she was sure he was smiling.
She backed down the driveway and steered down the street. Just as when she’d traveled to the house, she spent the entire drive back to her apartment taking deep, calming breaths. She parked in the alley, let herself into the apartment, and gathered Cookie into her arms.
Then she fell apart.
Chapter Ten
“I’m sorry I don’t still have my jersey,” Quinn fibbed. He wasn’t sorry at all. “When my folks moved to Maine, a lot of stuff got thrown out.”
Bill Marshall, Quinn’s former coach and the current Athletic Director of the high school, sawed away at the juicy slab of steak on his plate. “Not a problem. We’ve got extra jerseys. You were number twelve, just like Tom Brady. No way we’d forget that. We’ll put a new number-twelve jersey into the frame, and after the ceremony, it’ll be on display by the trophy case. Folks will wonder how come it’s so clean.” He chuckled at his joke.
Ashley chuckled, too. Quinn managed a weak smile.
Ordinarily, dinner at the Ocean Bluff Inn would be a fine experience. The dining room at the historic inn overlooking the ocean was lovely—heavy linen tablecloths and napkins, silver flatware that felt heavy in your hands, elegant china, crystal stemware, gourmet cuisine. But he really didn’t want to be at this dinner, which Ashley had organized so the participants in tomorrow’s extravaganza could nail down the final details.
Dressed in a neat button-front shirt and khakis, Quinn picked at the pink prime rib filling his plate. To his left sat Coach Marshall—who had asked Quinn to call him Bill, now that Quinn was ten years past his playing days at the school, but Quinn just didn’t feel right using the coach’s first name. Next to Coach Marshall sat Chuck Kozlowski, the president of the Booster Club, which raised money for the school’s sports programs. He was an overweight, over-the-hill good old boy who’d run the Booster Club forever and could bore anyone into a coma reliving his own gridiron glory days at Brogan’s Point High, back in the last century. Next to Kozlowski sat the new football coach, a bulldog-shaped, soft-spoken guy named Bart Sanchez. Next to Sanchez, directly to Quinn’s right, sat Ashley.
She didn’t have to attend at this dinner. She wasn’t going to be part of the ceremony. But she’d organized the whole thing, so of course she deserved to be at the table.
The last time Quinn had seen her, he’d declined her invitation to spend the night at her place. He’d kissed her cheek goodnight—he couldn’t see a way to avoid doing that, and a kiss on the cheek didn’t have to mean anything. But Ashley could impose whatever meaning she wanted on it, and apparently, the meaning she’d imposed was: If he kissed me, it means there’s still something between us.
As far as Quinn was concerned the only thing between them was a pile of memories, most of them pleasant, some of them painful. Ashley was still a beautiful woman. He’d loved being her boyfriend in high school. He’d loved having the prettiest girl in the school hanging off his arm, baking him her cheerleader cookies, hanging out with him, adoring him. He’d loved learning about sex with her. He’d been a poor kid, the son of a fisherman, and she’d been the rich daughter of an auto magnate. Laying claim to her back then had been a victory as big as the wins he’d racked up as quarterback of the high school team.
But once he’d quit playing football, he’d learned that her love for him was really just a love for his talent and stardom. She’d been all about prestige, all about having a football star hanging off her arm, all about hitching her fortune to someone who would ultimately make her even richer as a wife than she’d been as the daughter of the owner of Wright Auto Sales, Incorporated. Once Quinn was no longer a football star, Ashley hadn’t been able to imagine him doing anything else grand—or lucrative—enough to be worthy of her. So she’d dumped him.
Now he was a doctor. Suddenly he was good enough for her again.
Sorry, but that wasn’t the way love worked in Quinn’s scheme of things.
He glanced discreetly at his watch. In less than an hour, he’d be out of here, on his way to pick up Maeve. He hoped she was enjoying her dinner with her father more than he was enjoying this fancy meal.
“So after we present you with your plaque and show the crowd your framed jersey—”
“The stand-in jersey,” Kozlowski reminded everyone, as if that was important.
“Right,” Coach Marshall confirmed. “After that, you’ll give your speech—”
“My speech?” Quinn lowered his fork and scowled. “I have to make a speech?”
“Of course you do,” Ashley said in a sweet, cooing voice. “I told you the other night at the Faulk Street Tavern, you’d be expected to make a speech.”
Quinn honestly didn’t recall her saying that. He’d been distracted by the song pouring out of the juke box, and then by Maeve Nolan, by the way the song had transfixed her as much as it had transfixed him. Everything Ashley had said after “Take the Long Way Home” blasted out of the jukebox had passed right through him, leaving nothing behind.
“What kind of speech? I’m not really good at public speaking.” Especially when he had nothing to say beyond, “Thank you.”
“Why don’t you tell the story about the division championship game your senior year, when you
broke two tackles and took the ball in yourself for the winning touchdown?” Kozlowski suggested.
Christ, he remembered Quinn’s football history better than Quinn did. That had been an exciting game, and he supposed the touchdown he’d taken in on his own had been the one that put Brogan’s Point ahead for good, although they’d gone on to score two more touchdowns, so he hadn’t really thought of that particular play as the game winner. Besides, no one, with the possible exception of Kozlowski, could care less about a high school football game played ten years ago.
He must have made a face, because Ashley gave his arm a gentle yet firm touch. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Just thank everyone. They’re going to be cheering for you. Just bask in the love and say thank you.”
Her hand remained on his wrist, as light as silk yet strong enough to feel like a manacle, locking him to the arm of his chair. Locking him to her. He couldn’t think of a way to shake her hand off him without the others at the table noticing. He shot her a sharp look, but she was busy smiling at the others. All these years later, she still had a mesmerizing smile.
“So,” she was saying, “The band will play the school song while Quinn marches onto the field. He’ll have to march slowly so the music doesn’t last longer than his walk. If you’re set up on the fifty-yard line and he walks slowly enough, it should time out well.”
“I don’t want to march out there slowly,” he muttered. He just wanted to race to the fifty-yard line, accept his plaque, say thank you—that was all the speech he wanted to give—and get the hell off the field.
“Everyone will be singing the song. I don’t know about you—” she sent him a kittenish smile “—but I still remember all the words. Brogan’s Point, our lovely town, land of seafarers on solid ground. Work hard, play hard, always do your best. Brogan’s Point High School, we are truly blessed...”
God, what an inane song. At the start of every game, the team used to storm onto the field from the locker room while the band played that song and the fans in the bleachers sang along. But he wasn’t on the team, and he wasn’t going to storm anywhere. If he had to be accompanied by a song as he accepted his honor, he’d rather it be something appropriate. Like Take the Long Way Home.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” Ashley said, and he could actually see a few sentimental tears glistening in her eyes. Then again, she had always had a knack for producing tears when she felt they would enhance the moment or win her some points.
Tomorrow’s ceremony was not worthy of tears, Ashley’s or anyone else’s. He had to keep reminding himself to be grateful that this group of decent folks wanted to honor him for his past achievements, but that was all those achievements were: the past. He’d left town a sports hero. He’d come back a medical resident who’d been through the academic grinder several times, who’d set broken bones and diagnosed bursitis, who’d assisted on several dozen ACL repairs and splinted jammed fingers and injected cortisone into inflamed joints, and who still felt awed by medical science, what it could do, how it could help injured people become whole again.
A has-been high school football star was not worthy of the esteem Ashley and these men were lavishing upon Quinn. Not even if he’d been recruited by a Division One university. Not even if he’d set a bunch of school records and led the local team to a state championship.
But they were so into it. To dismiss the whole thing would be rude, and Quinn was trying hard to be a nicer person than he’d once been. How ironic that allowing his one-time athletic mentors honor him was in fact a kindness to them.
He managed to finish his prime rib and iced tea. When the others suggested dessert and after-dinner drinks, he politely declined. Ashley did, too. Of course she would. She’d never allow all those excess calories to pass her pretty pink lips. As it was, she’d consumed less than half of the poached salmon and steamed vegetables on her plate.
“I really do have to be going,” Quinn said, easing back his chair. “I’ve had a long day.”
“I’m sure you have,” Coach Marshall said.
“So busy saving lives,” Ashley added, giving Quinn an admiring gaze that made him wince inwardly.
When he excused himself with the promise that he’d meet everyone at the high school stadium before the game the next day, Ashley excused herself, too. She tucked her hand through the crook in his elbow as they left the elegant dining room. It was a proprietary gesture and a presumptuous one, but just as when she’d pressed his wrist at the table, Quinn didn’t want to embarrass her by jerking his arm out of her clasp.
As soon as they reached the inn’s broad front porch, however, he took a decisive step away from her. “Ashley,” he said, his voice as firm as her grip on him had been. “Enough, okay?”
She gave him a wide-eyed stare. In the golden light from the lamps illuminating the porch, she seemed radiant. She was almost too beautiful—yet her beauty left him cold. “Enough what?” she asked innocently.
Be kind, he reminded himself. “The way you keep touching me,” he said, his tone as gentle as he could manage. “We’re not a couple. We haven’t been a couple for ten years. We’re never going to be a couple again. I wish you wouldn’t keep touching me as if we were.”
“Never say never.” She sounded almost chipper, like the cheerleader she’d once been.
“I’m saying never. It’s not going to happen.”
“We were in love once, Quinn. I was stupid, thinking our love no longer existed. But it does. I know it does.” She rose on tiptoe, planting her hands on his shoulders, about to launch into a kiss.
He took a long step backward. Hell, she was harder to evade than some of the two-hundred-fifty pound linemen he’d faced during his playing days. A vision of Maeve Nolan flashed across his mind, and he blurted out, “I’m seeing someone, okay?” He didn’t want to use Maeve as an excuse to escape from Ashley. But…he was seeing Maeve. He’d kissed her. He would be heading to her apartment as soon as he could extricate himself from Ashley. He would take her out for a drink, and he would talk to her, and listen to her, and—if he was lucky—kiss her again. More than kiss her, if he was very lucky.
The odd girl from school, the loner, the freak… He was seeing her. And right now, he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather be seeing. Even if seeing at her—looking at her—was all he did.
Ashley’s eyes filled with tears again, and this time he could almost believe they were real. “First love is true love,” she said. It sounded like a line from a bad poem. “You’ll never love anyone the way you loved me.”
He couldn’t argue that. First love was what it was. He’d been with his share of women since Ashley had broken up with him—not that he’d had a wild sex life, given how much time and energy he’d had to devote to pre-med studies, medical school, and his internship. But he’d loved a few of those women. He hadn’t had enough spare time to waste on women he didn’t love.
Each love had been different. Each love had taught him something about himself. Each love, he’d like to think, had made him a better person. Like aerobic exercise, each love had strengthened his heart.
Ashley was right. No other love he’d experienced had been like the love they’d shared in high school. But they weren’t in high school anymore.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. If he were a true gentleman, he would walk her to her car. If he walked her to her car, though, she might try to kiss him again. He just wanted to get away.
Maeve was waiting for him. Maeve with her modesty, her honesty, her lack of pretension. Her cookies. Her piercing hazel eyes and her soft, sweet lips.
He headed down the porch steps and across the parking lot to his car, his footsteps crunching against the crushed seashells and pebbles that surfaced the lot. Ashley shouted something after him, something much too crude to have come from her lovely, well-bred mouth. The incongruity of her using that language jarred a laugh from Quinn.
Settling behind the wheel, he let out a breath. The woman had exhausted him. Yet he knew s
eeing Maeve would rejuvenate him. She was so fresh, so direct. He wouldn’t have to knock himself out trying to figure out tactful ways to keep his distance from her.
The address she’d texted him was on Atlantic Avenue, the road that ran parallel to the town beach. The houses lining the road were older, many of them broken into flats. They weren’t quite gentrified enough to qualify as charming, but living across the street from the beach—even if the street was a broad, heavily trafficked avenue—made up for the weariness of the row houses, their clapboard siding faded by the constant salty sea breezes, their porches and roofs weathered a few degrees beyond picturesque.
He found her building and parked at the curb. The front door had several doorbells next to it. He pressed the one for her apartment and waited.
A long minute passed. He pressed it again, trying not to get pissed. If she’d stood him up… No, she wouldn’t. Maeve was the kind of woman who would have told him if she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t play games.
She must have gotten delayed. She could still be at her father’s. Her dinner might have lasted longer than she’d expected. Her father was a cop; maybe he’d demanded that she linger over coffee. A wise person didn’t argue with a cop, even if he was her father.
Quinn pressed the button one last time, his mind scrambling to come up with a strategy. He could wait for her here, or he could look up her father’s address and track her down there, or—
The door opened and she stood before him, her cheeks tearstained, her eyes puffy. She wore jeans and a sweater that looked unbearably soft, and in her arms she cradled a gray striped cat who stared at Quinn with undisguised skepticism.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, and started to weep.
Take the Long Way Home Page 10