1 Once Upon a Lie

by Maggie Barbieri

  “My mother never thought your dad was doing a good enough job of looking after you.”

  Maeve bristled at that. “Oh, really?” she said, fixing Margie with a withering look. “And just what did your mother think that my father should have been doing better?” Maeve remembered the Haggertys—Fidelma and Marty—and didn’t think either of them would have won a Parent of the Year award.

  Margie drew back, just sober enough to realize that she had really touched a nerve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You just always seemed kind of sad.”

  “I lost my mother when I was seven. You would have been sad, too,” Maeve said, and then flashed on the hard, cold face of Fidelma Haggerty and thought Or maybe not.

  She left out the part where Sean Donovan, Margie’s brother-in-law and Maeve’s sometime childhood babysitter, had pummeled her to the ground one day, “wrestling” being his favorite form of entertainment, dislocating her shoulder. He’d popped it back into place before Jack had come home from doing a day tour at the precinct nearby, the memory of the pain making the adult Maeve wince. Or the part where he’d pushed her down a slide at the playground with such force that she had tumbled head over feet, getting a huge bump on her forehead that had turned the colors of the rainbow before finally fading.

  Clumsy? Hardly. Sad? Very much so.

  Margie pointed at Maeve’s glass before heading back to the bar. “Want another one?”

  Maeve looked down at her half a glass of Chardonnay and decided it would be best if she didn’t push it. One unhappy drunk at a Fourth of July party was enough. Two? That was trouble. She stood, ready to gather her daughters, her father, her wits. They were leaving.

  Before Margie walked away, Maeve asked her the question she should have been asking herself. “If you hate being here, why did you come?”

  Margie took a look around the room, her eyes settling on her mother seated a few tables away, on her face the unhappy, pinched look that Maeve remembered her having thirty years before. “Oh, you know. Family loyalty and all that.” She looked at Maeve over the top of her cup, held aloft. “And you?”

  Maeve’s eyes settled on Jack. “I guess it’s the same. My dad really wanted to come,” she said, unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  Margie laughed, a tinkling, mirthful sound that brought Maeve back to their childhood. “You’re a good daughter, Maeve. So we’ve got that in common.” She hoisted her glass high, as if to toast. “Maybe more, but we’ll never know,” she said, “because something tells me I’ll never see you again.”

  Maeve started to speak, but before she could follow up with Margie, she was gone, the keg her destination, lost in the throngs assembled around it.

  She grabbed her purse from the back of the chair and gave a wave to Heather. “Find your sister,” she mouthed.

  “Divorce suits you, Mavy,” came the voice from behind her, making the hair on her neck stand at attention. The arm around her waist, the finger pinching too hard through her linen top, it was textbook Sean and his maneuvers, every attempted show of “affection” tinged with cruelty and just a touch of pain.

  “Only my father is allowed to call me ‘Mavy,’” she reminded him, pushing her chair under the table.

  He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “And me, of course,” he said.

  He was a bully and always had been, and she hated herself for seizing up when he was around. Let it go, she told herself. Move on. But she couldn’t. Not when there were family gatherings to attend and no excuse in the world that she could give Jack as to why they couldn’t go and eat lobster and shrimp under the stars of an exclusive Bronx enclave, watching fireworks as they exploded overhead. She saw later on, much later, that she was in control. They didn’t have to go. But Jack wanted to be here, and she was always the good daughter, the one who couldn’t not let him have those short-lived memories of being among his family in his eightieth year. So she came, letting him experience the love of the extended family, giving him the chance to show them that he hadn’t “lost his marbles,” carefully nursing her Chardonnay, giving a wide berth to her hosts.

  “The girls are beautiful,” he said, his face close to hers.

  “I know,” she said. “And if you touch one hair on either of their heads, I will—”

  He cut her off, laughing. “Don’t push it, Maeve. Just have a good time.” He ran a hand down her back. “You never did know how to have fun.”

  I’m an adult now, she reminded herself. There’s no reason to fear him, she intoned mentally. But she felt the way she had all those years ago and more than that, angry at herself for letting herself be manipulated into doing things she didn’t want to do. Back then, it was one thing, but now, she had control. She stood silently and waited for him to lose interest in her, something he eventually did, seeing Dolores trying to get his attention. He slithered off, but not before giving her a chaste peck on the cheek in a way that almost made her imagine that she had dreamed everything. A kiss between cousins. Family affection.

  She watched him slide past Heather, a hand lingering on her back just long enough to make his point, but not long enough to arouse suspicion in anyone else. If it rested much longer, she might have snapped, but as always with Sean, she was never entirely sure of what she had seen or what had just happened. The end result of being in Sean’s sights? An inability to discern truth from fiction.

  She texted Rebecca in the library and Heather, still lingering by the bar, to meet her at the car. She found Jack and dragged him away from the clutch of men who were enthralled by his semi-true stories. She had been sleepwalking, she decided, and now, for some reason that she couldn’t figure out, she was wide awake. They had left the party earlier than Jack wanted—just an hour after they had arrived—long after the girls wanted, and right when Maeve wanted.

  Jack had always said what a good girl she was; Margie had told her she was a good daughter. Stupid and manipulated was more like it. As she drove down the highway, away from the party and her cousins, all she could think was that good, stupid, or manipulated, all of that ends today.

  She was still at the sink, lost in thought when she heard Rebecca speak.

  “Kind of cute, too.”

  Maeve looked up, not realizing that her daughter had been talking the whole time. Her hands were still in the water, red and waterlogged after her extended mental trip down memory lane. “Cute?”

  “Yeah. Sean.”

  Maeve didn’t see it.

  “Like an older Ryan Gosling.”

  “Really?” In her mind’s eye, Sean looked like pure evil. To this day, she couldn’t describe one characteristic of his face beyond his eyes, which were blue, mean, and devoid of any emotion beyond hostility and menace.

  “Do the police know who did it?” Rebecca asked.

  Maeve flashed on Jack and his disappearing act. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Probably a robbery, right?” Rebecca said, probing more, suspecting that she had hit on a topic her mother didn’t want to discuss. Usually, Maeve was chatty, bringing up things that she liked to talk about but that made her daughters sick to their stomachs. Topics like safe sex, responsible drinking, and a host of other things that she probably read were good topics to have conversations with her teens about but in which they were loath to participate. If she really wanted to get them talking, she made vague references to getting an eyebrow ring or a tattoo with their names on her forearm, anything to start a conversation. “Or something else?”

  The glass slid out of Maeve’s hand and clattered to the floor, breaking into more pieces than she would have imagined. Months later, she’d still find a shard, like a memory long forgotten, sticking up from the floor, waiting to pierce a bare foot or slice a toe. No, they’d reappear when she least expected them to, hopefully not doing any damage. She gripped the edge of the sink. “Probably a robbery. Right.” She bent down and picked up the largest piece of glass, the stem, and held it in her hands. “If I asked you to stay with me and never le
ave, what would you say?” she asked, intending for it to sound like one of her regular pleading jokes about missing Rebecca when she left for school. But this time even her daughter picked up on the hint of desperation in her voice. When Maeve took in Rebecca’s worried expression, she quickly added, “You can’t leave me here alone with Heather. You know that, right?”

  Bonded in their mutual fear and trepidation for the younger Callahan, a girl who could push her mother’s buttons with the greatest of ease, they managed to get back on track. “You are so screwed,” Rebecca said, laughing.

  Maeve hated that she couldn’t leave well enough alone, but that was an ingrained part of her nature. That and a feeling that if she failed to protect her girls, as she herself had been left unprotected, she would never forgive herself. “You never have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Rebecca responded with a groan.

  “I know I’m a broken record, but it’s just—”

  Rebecca threw her mother’s words back at her: “You’d never forgive yourself if something happened to me.”

  Maeve bent down and saw she was surrounded by broken glass, each shard a threat. Rebecca, finally realizing that her mother was stuck, got up. “Careful,” Maeve said.

  “That’ll leave a mark, right?” Rebecca said, echoing one of her grandfather’s favorite sayings.

  “Right,” Maeve said, her mind on other things. “That’ll definitely leave a mark.”

  CHAPTER 4

  On Monday, after the bakery closed at four, Maeve made an unscheduled visit to the assisted-living facility. When she got to Buena del Sol, she found out that Jack was in the weight room, an idea that frightened Maeve more than the fact that he had snuck out a several nights earlier.

  The “concierge,” a young woman who sat at the front desk, a stuffed monkey attached to her shoulder, gave her a warm smile. When Maeve asked her what kinds of weights one found in the weight room of an assisted-living facility, the monkey did the talking. “Nothing too heavy, Miss Conlon,” the monkey said by way of the woman’s hand. Maeve stared at the woman’s mouth, noting that she was a pretty good ventriloquist while also being completely insane. “And our residents are completely supervised while in there. Isn’t that right, Doreen?” the monkey asked the woman around whose waist its long legs were attached.

  The woman nodded vigorously.

  “Doreen?” she asked. “Could you ask my father if he could meet me in the community room?”

  Doreen affected the husky voice of her stuffed simian counterpart, her lips not moving. “Doreen can’t, but Caesar can,” she said.

  Maeve was used to seeing the staff talk to the residents like children, but this was the first time she had ever been treated that way herself. Rather than dwell on the fact that Doreen really took her job seriously—or rather, Caesar did—Maeve went with her fallback position: Doreen was crazy. She waited patiently while Doreen, using her Planet of the Apes voice, paged Jack in the weight room. When she gave Maeve the high sign, in this case a regular old thumbs-up with one of her own opposable digits, Maeve started down the hall, taking one deep breath before she hit the community room, a place that invariably smelled like a combination of oatmeal, disinfectant, and something else that she would never attempt to discern, no matter how curious she was.

  She took a seat by the window, looking out over the back lawn and the various residents who were taking advantage of an unseasonably warm October day. Some were in wheelchairs, while others wandered freely. Two, to Maeve’s surprise, were engaged in a rather passionate kiss, confirming her suspicion that life at Buena del Sol was a hell of a lot more interesting than Maeve realized. To the best of her knowledge, Jack wasn’t involved in a romance, but nothing would surprise her. While he talked a good game about breaking hearts left and right during the five o’clock supper hour, his own heart was still devoted to his lovely Claire, long gone but still a presence in his fragile mind and memory.

  He arrived a few minutes after she sat down, by now fully engrossed in a home improvement show that boasted that she, too, would be able to make her own valances by the show’s end just like the show’s trained designer. Now that Jack had arrived, she’d never know. Jack was wearing a tank top that showed off his ropy yet still muscled arms and the slight paunch that had developed only since he had discovered the joys of assisted-living dining hall chocolate pudding. His smile widened as he got closer, the look on his face one that greeted her every time they came together and one that she would treasure, even when it eventually would hold no recognition of who she was or what they once meant to each other. “Mavy!” he exclaimed, leaning over and giving her a big kiss. He pulled out the chair across from her.

  His pants were on backward, the drawstring for his sweats trailing down over his backside.

  “The concierge is interesting,” Maeve said.

  “Doreen?” Jack said. “She’s two sandwiches short of a picnic.” He leaned in and smiled conspiratorially. “If I do say so myself.”

  Maeve smiled.

  “To what do I owe this enormous pleasure?” he asked.

  “You lift weights?” she asked.

  “Amazing, right?” he said, flexing a bicep in her direction. “Give me one other guy at seventy who can lift as much as I can.”

  “I can’t think of anyone, Dad,” she said, but then again, she didn’t know too many seventy-year-old men, and even if she did, he wasn’t one of them. But she didn’t share that with him.

  “I can bench-press more than Lefkowitz,” he said. “And he was Golden Gloves back in the day.”

  “Impressive, Dad,” she said, sneaking a look at her watch. “Listen, I have to talk to you about something.”

  “What did I do?” he asked, his brow furrowed. Anytime Maeve had to talk to Jack, it usually meant trouble of some sort, and he was smart enough to know that.

  “You didn’t do anything, Dad,” she said. She didn’t think he had, but she couldn’t be sure. She looked out the window, the lovebirds drifting by, their arms entwined.

  “Get a room,” Jack mumbled.

  She knew it was useless to ask, but she had to. “Dad, where were you a week ago Saturday?”

  Jack screwed up his face, deep in thought. As if that would help. He searched his brain for the answer and came up empty, using what he always did when he was at a loss: a big smile. “Not a clue.” He took a gander at his left bicep. “Do you know where you were?”

  “At the shop,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “The Comfort Zone?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, but she wasn’t sure he knew what that was.

  “I’m easy to keep track of.” She tried again. “Think, Dad. A week or so ago?”

  He gave it another shot. “Church?” He wiped a bead of sweat that had appeared on his forehead, the fruits of his exertion still exhibiting themselves in little ways. “Why?”

  “Were you really at a church?” she asked.

  He knew the jig was up. “What did that old battle-ax Harrison tell you? She’s framing me, I tell you. It’s a frame-up!” he said, cracking himself up with his own joke.

  Maeve knew better than to get frustrated with him and offered a little laugh in return for his overacting. “She’s not framing you, Dad. She just let me know that you weren’t here and nobody signed you out. She was wondering—I was wondering—where you might have gone.”

  “What difference does it make?” he asked, his own frustration at his lack of memory showing its face. He turned around and glared at the man sitting by the television and in an uncharacteristic display of ill temper yelled at him to turn the volume down. “I hate when you do this, Maeve. I’m a grown—”

  “Man,” she finished. “I know. You’re a grown man. But I need you to stay put, Dad. I really, really want to keep you here.”

  As quickly as the anger came, it was gone, replaced by the Jack she knew and loved. “And what would be the big deal about a week ago Saturday?” he asked.

  “Nothing,”
she said. “No big deal. You were probably at the river, right?”

  “Probably,” he said. “That’s my favorite spot, you know.”

  It wasn’t the first time he had told her, nor would it be the last.

  “A week ago Saturday, you say?” he asked. The set of his mouth told her that he was absolutely sure about what he was going to say. “It was book club. We read Water for Elephants. Brand-new book. Had the library in the village hold it for me. Hated it. Don’t like elephants. Never did.”

  The book wasn’t brand-new, nor did Jack have borrowing privileges at the village library; the fines for his overdue books had become too steep for Maeve in spite of her friendship with the head librarian. As Jack waxed poetic on the finer plot points of the book, all of which were correct and astute, Maeve’s mind wandered back. A week ago Saturday. Jack wanted to know what would be the big deal about that day, but she would never tell him, even though he would forget anyway.

  She wondered how long it would be before he asked again, because it was the night that Sean Donovan had gone out for a gallon of milk supposedly and ended up with a hole in his head he didn’t need. Some things the old guy just didn’t need to know.

  CHAPTER 5

  Maeve started her day earlier than anyone she knew: her alarm went off a little past four thirty, and she left the house at five thirty that next morning, just like always. Although she planned her days and her baking with precision, there were always things that needed to be done, coffee to start, and papers to arrange so that she could open at six on the dot. Her one employee, Jo, was not the most punctual, but Maeve cut her some slack. They had been friends for years and had been through a lot together: Jo’s cancer treatment, her divorce, and a host of other life experiences that neither had foreseen but both had weathered together.

  The Comfort Zone was walking distance from Maeve’s house, but she always drove. The people in the village of Farringville—a forty-minute train ride to Grand Central Station in New York City—took their morning commute seriously, and many cut it close when driving to the local train station. The last thing she needed was to be walking along a dark street in the wee hours of the morning, a speeding commuter mowing her down as she traversed the one stretch that had no sidewalk.