“We didn’t really give it to him, Daddy,” Mariah said in a tone of utter innocence. “He found it.”
“We just opened it for him,” Willa said, then yelped when her sister whacked her in the arm.
“Great,” Hall muttered. “He ate a two-pound package of beef jerky.”
“You’d better do something, Pop.” Kate was starting to sound desperate.
Finally Hall clicked on his right turn signal and was just about to ease onto the shoulder when Stanley redecorated the backseat.
* * *
“Just drop us off at the corner,” Ellen said an hour later as they entered the Shelter Rock Cove town limits. “I think you need to get the girls home stat.”
“I think you can’t wait to get out of this car.”
“You always were able to read my mind, Talbot.”
“Not the afternoon I had planned for us.” He turned to her as he stopped for the town’s only traffic light. “Welcome to life with kids.”
“The kid part was great,” she said. “The dog part needs a little work.”
“I should put them to work hosing this thing out.”
She grinned. “Their inheritance?”
“Shot to hell.”
“Daddy’s laughing.” Mariah’s stage whisper could have carried all the way to Canada.
“Maybe he’s not mad anymore,” Willa stage-whispered back.
“Maybe you two should think about what you did to that poor dog,” Hall said, looking at them through the rearview mirror. “You show him two pounds of beef, and he’ll eat two pounds of beef. He doesn’t know it’s going to make him sick. You’re supposed to know that.”
“We thought he’d stop when he had enough,” Willa said. “We didn’t know he was a pig.”
“You only made him sick this time, but it could’ve been a lot worse. Dogs don’t know how to look out for themselves. They depend on us to do it for them.”
Willa burst into tears. Mariah wasn’t far behind. His older daughters rolled their eyes.
“You’re good,” Ellen said to Hall as she and Stanley climbed out of the Land Rover. “You could give lessons.”
“You can manage Stanley?”
“I’ll let him run through the sprinklers, then take him down to the beach. We’ll be fine.”
He touched her hand just long enough to register his warmth but not long enough for the girls to notice.
“I’ll call you later.”
She waved goodbye, then started up the road with Stanley by her side. “We’ll get you all cleaned up, Stan, I promise.” He wagged his tail, then started tugging her to walk faster. “I know, I know. You can’t wait to run through the sprinklers. I don’t blame you one bit.”
She hadn’t been kidding when she told Hall she’d considered running alongside the Land Rover. Clearly parenthood required a strong stomach along with nerves of steel.
Late afternoon sun spilled across her shoulders, hinting at the approaching summer. The wonderful scent of beach roses wafted toward her as they rounded the bend toward her house. Even Stanley seemed to appreciate it. He greedily sniffed the air, tail wagging madly.
The day hadn’t been at all what she had expected. There was no denying that she could have done without poor Stanley’s discomfort. Still, there had been something wonderful about being part of a Saturday with Hall and his daughters. She had enjoyed watching the way they laughed and joked together, the obvious devotion he felt for them, and the equally obvious love they offered in return.
He might not have mastered Marriage 101, but he was Phi Beta Kappa when it came to fatherhood.
A child couldn’t ask for a better father. What would it be like, raising a child with a man like Hall to share the burden and pleasures? Someone who understood the importance of it all and embraced it. What a wonderful gift to give a child.
Not that she was thinking about children. The odds were against a pregnancy. She had had no reason to be charting her periods or keeping tabs on her BBT, but simple arithmetic told her that fertilization was unlikely. Still, she had enough experience trying to convince astonished expectant mothers that yes they really were going to have a baby to know that in this world just about anything was possible.
“Okay, Stan,” she said as they started up the driveway. “First we wash you off, then I’ll take you down to the beach and—I don’t believe it!”
The front porch was littered with battered luggage, an empty McDonald’s sack, a bottle of Poland Spring, two harps, and there, sprawled on the glider in the corner was her missing sister Deirdre.
Chapter Twenty-four
“I’m not really asleep,” Deirdre said as she heard her sister’s approaching footsteps.
“I didn’t think so,” Ellen said as Stanley galloped onto the porch.
Deirdre sat up and rearranged her floaty shirt. “Stanley!” She wrinkled her nose and ducked the dog’s enthusiastic hello. “He stinks! What happened?”
“Hall’s kids plied him with beef jerky. Our boy turned the back of Hall’s Rover into a biohazard.”
“He needs a bath.”
“I was going to rinse him off, then take him down to the beach before it gets any later.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She stifled a yawn.
“You’re going to help, right?”
“Oh.” She smiled widely. “Sure... of course I am. He’s my dog, isn’t he?”
Ellen and Mary Pat had more in common than either one of them might realize. Both sisters had the uncanny ability to make her do something she really didn’t want to do. Mary Pat did it by intimidation. Ellen did it with a smile and a wink.
She stood up, stretched, then followed Ellen and Stanley around the side of the house and into the backyard.
“The hose is hanging on a hook beneath the kitchen window, and there’s dog shampoo on the shelf in the garage,” Ellen said, pointing somewhere to the right of the deck. A familiar beep-beep-beep sounded from her waistband. “I need to make a phone call. You get started. I’ll be right back.”
“Suspiciously good timing,” Deirdre called out as Ellen unlocked the sliding doors. “How much did you pay someone to call you?”
“A bargain at half the price,” her sister said and disappeared inside the house.
Stanley was a lot of dog and he required a lot of dog shampoo and water. By the time she finished they were both drenched and exhausted. Each time he shook out his fur, it looked like a nor’easter had blown in.
Ellen finally popped out of the house. It occurred to her that you could deliver twins in less time than her sister had taken on the phone, but she was probably on shaky enough ground as it was. She kept the observation to herself.
“So how’s it going?” Ellen asked.
“All done. He smells like a lavender dandy.”
Ellen’s smile widened. “Great timing, huh?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” She shivered in the evening breeze. “I think it’s too cold to take him down to the beach.”
Poor Stanley looked up at them with beseeching eyes. “Maybe we should go inside and dry him off. I have an enormous stack of beach towels Claudia left behind.”
“I have a blow-dryer we can use.”
They trooped inside. Ellen started a pot of water for tea while she dug her blow-dryer from one of the overstuffed bags she dragged in from the front porch. The night air was damp and chill, not the best of conditions for her temperamental harps. She brought them into the living room, took them out of their cases, and hoped for the best. Not that it really mattered, come to think of it. It wasn’t as if she had a gig on the horizon or anything.
Two steaming mugs of tea rested on the counter when she returned to the kitchen. Ellen was crouched down near the open back door, chatting away while she toweled Stanley off with an enormous hot-pink beach towel.
Stanley adored Ellen. All you had to do was look at him and you could see waves of love radiating from him. And why not? It was clear she adored him right back.
> The more things change. She had read all of the books on birth order. The youngest child was supposed to be cosseted and spoiled, the one everyone couldn’t help but love best of all. Too bad nobody in her family had ever bothered to thumb through any of those books. They might have learned a thing or two.
She grabbed a towel from the stack near the stove and started drying Stanley’s fluffy tail.
“So what happened? Mary Pat’s been trying to find you since yesterday afternoon. She’s a half-step away from calling in the FBI.”
“I was fired.” She laughed as Stanley shook himself again. “Actually I wasn’t really fired. Turns out I never had the job in the first place.” She managed to fill in the blanks of the story in less than one hundred words.
“Those bastards.”
No lecture. No probing questions. No critical comments. Welcome to Bizarro World.
“I didn’t handle it too well,” she said, burying her face in Stanley’s sweet-smelling fur for a second. “I melted down right there in the lobby when the owner told me.”
“Who wouldn’t,” Ellen said. “He just screwed up three months of your life.” She reached for a dry towel. “Did he at least give you compensation of some kind?”
“Two weeks’ salary and a stay at the inn with all the amenities.”
“And you only stayed one night?”
“One night was okay. Two smelled of desperation.”
Ellen drew a flat brush through Stanley’s thick fur. “So how did you get home?”
“Scott.”
Ellen stopped mid-stroke. “They gave him a room, too?”
“We shared the suite, and believe me, it isn’t what you were thinking.”
“He’s pretty easy on the eyes.”
“Is he?” She busied herself detangling Stanley’s tail. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Neither have I.”
“My sister, the stand-up comic.” She couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. “Maybe we should go on the road together. O’Brien and Markowitz: music and mirth for your listening pleasure.”
“Markowitz and O’Brien, thank you very much. I’m six months older than you are. It has to count for something.”
“Ask my agent,” she said, laughing. “He’ll tell you he always gets me top billing.” She paused for emphasis. “No jobs, you understand, just top billing.”
“Back to Scott,” Ellen said. “Does he talk? I swear he’s the most silent man in town.”
He cried, Elly, that big strong guy cried in my arms last night, and now he can’t even look at me.
“We had a great time,” she said. “Thanks to him, I can finally locate the Big Dipper.”
“Way to go,” Ellen said. “I wish you’d show me, because when I look up, all I see are stars.”
“That’s what I said to Scott.”
“Must be a family thing,” Ellen said, “like the red hair.”
They finished grooming Stanley, who, by that time, wanted nothing more than to curl up in the corner of the sofa and go to sleep.
Ellen warmed up their mugs of tea in the microwave, and the two of them wandered out onto the deck. The scent of beach roses and sea air was more intoxicating in many ways than last night’s champagne. Ellen pulled her chair closer to the railing and propped her feet up while she curled her legs beneath her.
“You should call Mary Pat and let her know you’re okay.”
Deirdre took a sip of tea. “I was hoping you had already done it.”
“I did but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call her yourself. She really was very worried about you.”
“She’s a control freak.”
“Cut her a little slack, Dee. She has a lot on her plate right now. Things aren’t going too well for Billy. He has an appointment with a specialist on Monday.”
“And she was calling me in Bar Harbor to let me know?” She wasn’t the one with the medical degree. There wasn’t anything she could do to make things right. There never had been.
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“I will,” she said.
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow sounds better.”
They fell quiet for a while, sipping tea, listening to the ocean, thinking their own thoughts about Billy and Mary Pat and the strange set of circumstances that had turned them into family.
“You’re welcome to stay with me as long as you’d like,” Ellen said, breaking the silence. “You and Stanley both.”
“I’m sure a new gig will turn up any day,” she said, “but thanks. It helps to have a place to field offers and pick up my mail.”
“Glad I can help,” Ellen said. She sounded a little amused, maybe a little bit hurt.
Deirdre knew she should thank her again, let her know how much she really appreciated the offer, but there was a stubborn, ugly little part of her heart that wouldn’t let her. How had her life gone so wrong that she was reduced to begging for shelter from the sister she barely knew when the sister she grew up with had room to spare?
And while she was asking questions nobody could answer, how could silence sound so loud?
* * *
“Victoria Abigail Thornton,” Ellen said to Hall as they waited for the elevator on the maternity floor a week later. “Six pounds, three ounces; twenty inches long.”
“I heard her all the way down in Four,” he said.
“That was you in Four?”
“Adam and Jason Harris. They each weighed in at a little over five and a half pounds, eighteen inches long.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and she quickly brushed them away. “How are Ginger and David?”
“Over the moon,” he said. “Her mother was there with the videocam.”
“What about her father?”
Hall laughed. “Every time he came within five feet of the delivery room door, he felt faint. The poor guy spent most of Ginger’s labor with his head between his knees.”
The elevator doors slid open and they nodded to the two nurses who exited as they waited to enter.
“I never asked you how you held up when your girls were born,” she said as the doors slid closed. “Did—”
He turned to her and she was in his arms so quickly it felt like a dream. The smell of his skin, the hard warmth of his body, the wet heat of his mouth, the low moan she couldn’t suppress as he cupped her bottom and pulled her up against him.
They broke apart as the elevator shuddered and clanked into position at the ground floor.
“Talbot. Markowitz.” Joe Wiley, the hospital’s chief of staff, moved aside so they could exit. “When are we going to set up a golf date? I made Maria promise she’d join us so we could have ourselves a wicked good foursome.”
“I still need practice, Joe.” Ellen was positive he knew exactly what they had been doing before the elevator stopped. “If you don’t mind a rank amateur in your midst, I’d love to.”
“Same here,” said Hall. “Ellen can putt. I can hit for distance. Put us together and we’re Tiger Woods.”
Joe threw back his head and laughed heartily. “Then let’s check our schedules and do it before I leave for Wyoming.”
“He knows,” Ellen said as they walked through the lobby toward the main entrance.
“You said that the last time, too.”
“Did you see the way he looked at us? I swear it was like he had X-ray vision.” She stopped dead in her tracks a few feet away from the information desk. “Do they have cameras in the elevators?”
Hall shrugged. “Probably.”
“You don’t mean they filmed us kissing, do you?”
“You should see the tape they had of Doug Flax and Connie Della Cruz a few years ago. You could have sold tickets.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“It didn’t slow down their careers any.”
They pushed through the heavy glass doors and stepped out into the soft and fragrant early June air. “You’re not funny, Hall.”
“Okay. Doug and Conni
e had a fling, but it’s not on tape. At least not as far as I know. And yes there’s a security camera in the elevator.”
“Don’t tease me that way! I’m furious with you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re wishing we could find a place where we could kiss again.”
He was right. Damn him. Ever since that crazy drive to Idle Point last Saturday, she had the feeling she was standing at the center of one of those nor’easters that make even the old-timers sit up and take notice. She could feel destiny swirling around her, faster and faster, until there was nothing she could do but give in. The truth was, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The elevator. The back stairs. The parking lot under cover of darkness. The movie theater three towns over where they made out like teenagers during a Jackie Chan double feature.
Deirdre, who usually wasn’t known for either her discretion or her sensitivity, gave them lots of space when Hall came over. Sometimes she grabbed her car keys and went for a drive in the repaired Hyundai. Other times she carried her lap harp up to the bedroom and practiced while the heartbreaking sound of her music spilled from the window like a blessing.
And, thinking of blessings, it seemed they had Claudia’s as well. She had met Claudia for lunch at Cappy’s the other day as a way of thanking her for the delicious carrot cake and casseroles she had brought over the night of Deirdre’s adventure in Bar Harbor. Some invisible barrier between them had disappeared that night in her kitchen, and they spent a long, agreeable interlude together over a bowl of creamy clam chowder. Her house had a rich and wonderful history, and she had listened with rapt attention as the older woman spun out the stories. She found herself telling Claudia about Deirdre’s return, about her surprise at the relief she felt when she saw her sister asleep on the front porch. She even touched briefly on Deirdre’s brusque response to her open-ended invitation to stay with her. Claudia had been very maternal, if occasionally acerbic, and she began to see why Hall loved her in a way he didn’t seem to love his own mother.
She and Hall wandered out into the sensory garden behind the hospital where ambulatory patients and their families liked to drink up the sun on nice days like this. A young man in a wheelchair sunned himself near the fountain. His eyes were closed, his face tilted toward the sun. They claimed a bench on the side nearest the herb garden. The smells of lemon verbena, sweet basil, and mint almost made you forget you were on hospital property.
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