Bringing Home a Bachelor

by Karen Kendall

  “I’ll deal with her,” said Richard, as he walked into the dining room. “Dear God, what happened in here?!”

  “Mark and Pete happened in here,” Kendra said acidly, as she rescued a headless Lladro shepherdess from the china cabinet, along with a couple of broken porcelain cups. “Mark will be replacing everything he broke,” she added, brandishing the shepherdess’s broken lamb at him.

  He nodded.

  Richard looked around in dismay. “Son, this isn’t a football stadium!”

  “Yeah,” Mark muttered, his gaze on the floor. “I lost my temper. I screwed up.”

  “We’re very sorry,” Pete interjected. “I’ll help with the replacing, too.”

  “Peter, I must apologize on behalf of my wife. I’m mortified. But I can’t say that I’m pleased with your part in things, either.”

  “Sir, I never meant—”

  They all froze as Jocelyn stumbled into the room in her stocking feet, clearly stoned out of her gourd. “Ris-shard? Oh, Rishard. You came back.”

  “I did,” he agreed, eyeing her warily.

  She’d cried off all her makeup, and she looked absurdly young and yet a hundred years old simultaneously. “Please forgive m-me. I…I din’ want her to feel rejected. I din’ want her to feel, ever to feel, l-like I did.”

  Her husband just stood there, his expression pained, not making a move towards her.

  The hand she’d stretched out toward him dropped, and, unsteady on her feet, she clung to the doorjamb for support. “I din’ want her to feel…used an’ thrown away.”

  Mark frowned. “Ma, what are you talking about?”

  But she just stood there, swaying, eyeing her husband.

  An excruciating silence followed. Pete had the uneasy sensation that the lid on a family Pandora’s Box had just been pried open, and he didn’t want to be around when the rest of the awful secrets flew out to torment everyone.

  He opened his mouth to make his excuses, feeling that it was long past time he got out of Dodge.

  Then Jocelyn lost her feeble grip on the doorframe and her consciousness. She toppled forward, and Richard instinctively stepped forward to catch her.

  24

  MELINDA HADN’T EATEN in forty-eight hours, despite the turnabout of her cursed Inner Drill Sergeant, who urged her to do so, and tried to tempt her with Dove ice-cream bars. She told him where to go, as usual.

  She’d tried to call Kylie twice, but she’d been unable to reach her. Cryptic Kylie had become Scarce Kylie.

  Mel cried into the batter of a chocolate groom’s cake and had to throw it out and start over. She wept into the strawberry icing of a sweet-sixteen cake, too, with the same results. And she dissolved the head of a little yellow marzipan duck for a shower cake, also with tears.

  That was all on Monday, while she hid in the back of her shop and made Scottie deal with customers. On Tuesday, he found her flooding the order book, smearing the details and endangering the receipts.

  “Okay, I’m doing an intervention, here,” he announced.

  She was tucked sideways into her chair, barefoot, clutching Mami like a tiny canine life raft while the poor dog looked bewildered.

  “It’s either that or build an ark. You’re raining on Mami’s head, did you realize?”

  Mel sniffed and looked down. Her dog’s head was soaked, her little mane matted with salt water. Mami twirled in her lap, put her paws up on Mel’s chest and licked her chin and cheek.

  “At least Mami loves me,” she said brokenly. “Oh, Scottie,” she wailed, “how could he do it?”

  “Who? Oh, him. You know, if you’d take one of his phone calls, you could ask him. But as long as you’re not speaking to him, there will be some communication problems. Know what I mean? It’s inevitable.”

  “H-h-hate him,” Mel said, into Mami’s fur.

  “Don’t tell me that. Tell him. To be honest, I’m starting to feel sorry for the guy.”

  “Don’t you dare. You’re on my side. I pay you, remember?”

  “Very true. But Melly, you do not pay me enough to deal with your mother.”

  “Just hang up on the witch!”

  “Yeah…I would, but she’s here in person and she’s refusing to leave until she’s seen you.”

  “Call the cops and have her hauled off the premises in chains.”

  “The cops have better things to do.”

  “She’s a menace to society. Seriously, have her arrested.”

  “Melinda, I can’t do that.”

  “As your boss, I’m ordering you to.”

  “Mel, you have to talk to her at some point,” Scottie said reasonably.

  “Do not.”

  “You sound like a little kid. Grow up, boss.”

  “Please make her go away,” Mel whined. “I’ll give you a raise if you do.”

  “I’m still waiting for the last one you promised me, so no offense, but I don’t believe you. Now, man up and go talk to your mother, missy.”

  “Sic ’im, Mami,” Mel ordered her dog. “Gnaw off his toes.”

  Mami jumped down and ran to Scottie. She sat up on her hind legs and begged. He gave her a cat-shaped biscuit iced in orange-and-white, complete with green eyes and black licorice whiskers.

  Mami lost no time in eating it, tail first.

  “I’m surrounded by traitors,” Melinda moaned.

  “Mel, I do have sympathy for you, really. But you need to get up and go face your mother.”

  Slowly, Mel twisted in the chair and put her feet on the floor, slipping them into the padded clogs she wore at the shop. She had a hard time forcing herself to get up.

  “Now!” Scottie ordered. Evidently this was tough leprechaun love.

  “Jeez. Okay, okay.” Mel grabbed a clean tea towel and mopped at her face. “Can you send her out back, though? I can’t deal with her in front of customers.”

  In back of the bakery, in the little alleyway where the retail shops in the strip mall took deliveries, Melinda had placed a small café table and two chairs. She didn’t want to encourage her mother to stay, though, so she stood near them, leaning against the wall with her arms folded across her chest as Jocelyn made her approach.

  “Why are you bothering me at work?” she asked rudely.

  “Because you haven’t left me any choice. I can’t get through the gate at your town house and you won’t answer the phone when I call. You ignore texts and emails. So I’m here.”

  Her mom looked frail, and it was evident that she, too, had been crying behind the huge, Jackie-O style sunglasses she wore. Her nose was red and raw; she’d bitten off her pinky-brown lipstick. And horror! Jocelyn had applied her foundation hastily and sloppily—Mel could see a beige line demarcating her chin from her neck.

  “The question is, why are you here? I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “I have something to say to you.” She gestured at one of the wrought-iron chairs. “May I sit?”

  “If you insist.”

  With a sigh, Jocelyn lowered herself into the seat, rubbing absently at a blue vein in her hand. “I’m not sure where to start.”

  Mel eyed her stonily.

  “Melinda, I don’t mean to be the food police. Wait, let me rephrase that. I have meant to be the food police, but my motives didn’t stem from wanting to criticize you. They stemmed from wanting to protect you. The truth is that your father had an affair a number of years ago—”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  “He told you?”

  Mel nodded.

  Her mother looked nonplussed. “Well. All right. Well. I was devastated. I thought that he’d had the affair because I was fat, because I’d gained weight when I had Mark and you. And I became obsessive. I looked at the women whom your father’s contemporaries married after their first wives, and they were all thin, all pretty and well-maintained.”

  “I get it, Mom. What I don’t get is—”

  “Just hear me out. Fast-forward to Mark’s wedding. I had said nas
ty things to you when you told me you’d, ah, been with Peter.”

  “He doesn’t go by Peter anymore. He’s Pete.” Mel wondered why she cared enough to point that out.

  “Pete. Fine. Anyhow. I’d said awful things to you, things which I very much regretted. But I couldn’t unsay them. And I felt fiercely defensive of you, my darling daughter, and very suspicious of Pete’s motives. I wanted to let him know that he wasn’t going to get away with using you—and I also wanted to do something to make up for my assault on your self-esteem.”

  “Make up for it?” Mel repeated scathingly. “Or make it a hundred times worse?”

  “Darling girl, I regret what I did with all my heart. It was wrong, on so many levels. I’m sorry.”

  “Mom, the words don’t change what you did. And they don’t change what Pete did, either.”

  “I know that I can’t say ‘sorry’ and make it all better. But I haven’t really come on my behalf. I’ve come on Pete’s.”

  “Oh, please. This should be good.”

  “You need to know that he did say no. That he did tell me that he was going to call you anyway. I rode right over him. I simply assumed that he was being polite, but I don’t think he was. He was angry, Melinda. He wanted to throw me out a window.”

  “Big deal. He still took the bribe.”

  “I’m not sure I left him a lot of choice, honey. In all fairness, it is his job to bring in business for that hotel.”

  “Don’t make me sick.”

  “I think he truly loves you.”

  “Right.”

  “After you and Daddy left, Mark attacked him. He hauled him over the dining room table and they destroyed things while going for each other’s throats. And he kept yelling—Pete did—that he loved you, and why couldn’t anyone get that through their heads?”

  Mel felt her face crumpling, and resisted fiercely. She wasn’t going to cry in front of her mother. She especially wasn’t going to let Jocelyn see that her words had given her any kind of hope. She told herself not to be stupid.

  “He’s a good man, Melinda. He stayed to clean up. He was agonized about his part in the whole thing, and let your father reprimand him. I really think he loves you, darling.”

  “Love? What would you know about love?” Maybe it was wrong, especially in light of the fact that her mother was here to apologize, but all Melinda wanted to do was hurt her as badly as she’d been hurt.

  “What would I know about it? Well, you think about this, I loved your father enough to stay with him after he’d betrayed me for another woman. I could have walked out, taken him to the cleaners and deprived him of his children. He certainly deserved it. But I loved him. He was my husband and we’d built a life together. So I swallowed my pride and my hurt and I let him come home…I worked on trying to forgive him. I love your father more than the air I breathe. He’s my rock. He’s my reason for living. Maybe it’s not always easy for you kids to see that. But it’s true.”

  In the face of Melinda’s unforgiving silence, Jocelyn got up and hitched her purse over her shoulder. “You don’t have to forgive me. I understand that it may take a very long time for you to even think about it. But I do think that you should give Pete a chance to explain to you, to make it up to you, and to love you.”

  She touched Mel’s shoulder, and Mel did her best not to recoil. “Thank you for at least letting me talk…letting me apologize.” Jocelyn turned and walked away, back down the little alley, toward the parking lot where she’d left her car.

  Melinda watched her go. She couldn’t tell her that everything was okay between them. She couldn’t yet forgive her. But she did recognize that it hadn’t been easy for her mother to come here, to talk about the past and old wounds, or to plead the case of a man who had every reason to hate her.

  She’d done it out of love, plain and simple—even if that love was buried deep under Botox and St. John knits, under compulsive dieting and Valentino handbags. She deserved an acknowledgement of that, some kind of crumb.

  “Hey, Mom,” Melinda called. “You want to come inside for an oatmeal-raisin cookie?”

  Okay, so it was a test. She admitted it. Was her mother up to the challenge? Would she ingest actual calories in the name of peace?

  Jocelyn stopped in her tracks. Put her hand to the strap of her bag. And turned around. She walked three steps back toward her daughter. And her voice trembled as she said, “Yes, Melinda. Thank you. I’d love an oatmeal-raisin cookie.”

  25

  PETE WAS BONE-WEARY as he met with his boss on Wednesday. They stood in Pete’s office, a small miracle, since usually Rafi made his employees come to him.

  Pete went through the motions, listening with half an ear and responding with half a brain. Since the debacle at the Edgeworths’ home; since losing Melinda, he couldn’t make himself care about anything at all.

  He’d gone from pleasing everyone to pleasing no one. He’d gone from aboveboard to downright manipulative and Machiavellian. He’d gone from pacifist to brawler. The bottom line? He no longer knew who he was anymore. He was only conscious of being a sad sack of shit who’d hurt the woman he loved, and in the process, destroyed his life.

  Reynaldo’s petty concerns held no interest for him. He only wanted to get his desk and phone back from his boss, so that he could try calling Melinda yet once more.

  Not that she would answer.

  He’d apologized on her voice mail until he was hoarse. Begged her to at least give him a chance to explain. He’d even enlisted the leprechaun’s aid, to no avail. She wouldn’t see reason, much less Pete.

  He was done. Someone needed to stick a fork into him.

  “Pedro! I asked you a question,” Reynaldo snapped.

  Pete blinked at him. “Sorry. What was that?”

  “How many events has Gareth Alston booked here for Governor Vargas?” Reynaldo asked.

  “Four. Two fundraising dinners, a ball and a luncheon.”

  Reynaldo’s eyebrows shot up and his mouth opened, releasing his unlit cigar into his lap. “You have done well, my friend. Clearly you made Gary quite happy.” He winked and dug the cancer stick out of his crotch, then waved it. “You swing both ways, my friend?”

  Pete bit down hard on an unwise retort.

  “No, Rafi, I do not. You know better. But I did introduce Alston to his new squeeze, Scottie, a couple of weeks back. Evidently they’ve been tearing up the town—and the Bal Harbour shops—together.

  Reynaldo snorted. “Maricones,” he said, in dismissive tones.

  Pete gritted his teeth.

  “Now. The bakery,” said his boss. “I do not like the colors. I do not like the, how you say? The logo. And no café seating outside of the shop—Playa Bella is not a Parisian sidewalk.”

  Great. Wonderful. And how was he to deliver that message to Melinda?

  “Pedro, what happened to your face? Were you in a fight?”

  “Me?” Pete asked. “No, no. I got hit with a baseball over the weekend.”

  “This baseball, it got you in the ribs as well as the jaw? Because you are moving like an old man.”

  “Arthritis,” Pete said.

  “Indeed? In one so young. A shame.”

  Pete didn’t give him an inch. His personal life was none of his boss’s business.

  “So,” Reynaldo said, “you will inform Ms. Edgeworth that she will change the paint colors in the storefront, and that we will work with her on modifications to the logo. Also—”

  Pete cleared his throat. “According to her contract, Melinda has the right to make design decisions for the boutique space.”

  Reynaldo waved that famously dismissive right hand of his. “Playa Bella is my hotel. Her business must work within the existing space.”

  “I think she and the architect tried very hard to honor that, Rafi.”

  “I don’t like the colors,” his boss repeated. “They will be changed.”

  “Well, I’ll speak to Melinda about it, but—”

  �
�No buts. And the logo—it must be more formal, more stylized. This is too casual.”

  “Sir, I believe she’s already ordered all the bags, boxes, stationery and labels with this logo on them.”

  Reynaldo guillotined the end of his cigar with his platinum cutter. “This is my problem why?”

  “Again, according to her contract, she has the right—”

  “This is my hotel,” Reynaldo repeated. “She must work with me, according to my preferences.” He walked to Pete’s desk and riffled through some files, without excusing his nosiness or invasion of privacy. “Ah. And here is the pilot script for the television show. I will approve it, with some small changes, but there is a larger issue.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have spoken with the prospective producers, and they agree that she is quite pretty, but she’s gorda. She must lose some weight. Tell her.”

  Pete opened and then closed his mouth. “You want me to tell her that she has to lose weight?”

  “Si, Pedro. Are you deaf?”

  Pete eyed him with long-suppressed loathing. He’d had it. Mr. Nice Guy? He was leaving the building.

  “My name is Pete, Rafi. Please don’t call me Pedro.” He said it calmly, however, keeping the edge out of his voice.

  His boss looked up from the file, one eyebrow raised. “Perdón, Pete. You have never objected before.”

  “Yeah. Well. I’m objecting now. Another thing, Rafi—I’ll speak with Melinda about the colors and the logo, but you should know that she has the legal right to keep what she’s chosen.”

  “And you know what to do if she proves stubborn. Cancel her contract.”

  “That would be cutting off your nose to spite your face, sir. You’d have to release the space. Build it out all over again. The storefront will sit empty for months, especially in this economy.”

  “It’s your job, Pete, to make sure that I don’t have to deal with that. Get her to make the changes.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “And get the girl on a diet.”

  “About that.” Pete fought to hang on to his long-dormant temper. “I think Melinda Edgeworth is a beautiful woman. I don’t think she needs to lose weight.”