“No, now, as a matter of fact, Fiona’s been in touch with her.” Uncle Charles looked at her. “When was it that your mother called?”
“A few months ago. Last summer,” she said, but Prescott was already on his way to the door.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Patrick said. He sat with his good side facing her.
“Well I could see what was happening,” she said.
“I don’t need you to lie for me.”
“I know how the Prescotts operate. The more blame they can heap on someone else, the easier it is to keep forgiving Todd,” she said, careful not to mention Mr. Prescott’s accusations.
No charges had been filed against Patrick. Todd had a minor concussion and back injuries, but no memory of the attack itself. The last he remembered was begging Fiona to let him spend the night at her apartment. Patrick Grady had been there, but that was all he could recall. There were no marks on Patrick, nothing to implicate him as Todd’s assailant.
“He said some really bad things about you,” Patrick said, wringing his hands.
“Yah, well, considering the shape he was in I’m not surprised.” She got up to pour him another cup of coffee.
“I told him to stop. I kept telling him,” he said, looking up at her. “He thought it was funny.”
“Well anyway, the most important thing is it’s over,” she said, setting the cup in front of him. “I’m sorry you had to get mixed up in it though.”
“It was sick the way he kept laughing. Even when he was hurt, even when he was—”
“Don’t. Please, don’t.” She touched his wrist. “Let’s just not talk about it anymore.” She couldn’t bear to think about what had happened, not only because of the pain it had caused Todd, but because of the guilty pleasure she took in Patrick’s desire to protect her.
“Okay.” He sat very still, and when she drew back her hand, he took a deep breath. “But I just want to say how glad . . .” He swallowed hard. “How glad I am that we’re getting to know each other.”
He hadn’t eaten since last night so she made him a sandwich, which he wolfed down as he watched television. A World War II documentary had just started. She made him a second sandwich, and now he was eating that one just as fast. He stared at the black-and-white images on the screen, unshaven soldiers inching their way onto a sun-washed farmhouse porch. One soldier nudged open the door with his gun. The door swung wide, and he jumped back against the wall. The three soldiers behind him froze. Seconds later they surged forward and began smashing the mullioned windows with their rifle butts. Soon, a white-haired man and toothless old woman shuffled out the door with their hands clasped over their heads.
“That’s so pathetic,” she said as a new scene flickered onto the screen, American tanks rumbling through the narrow stone streets of an ancient Italian village.
Watching closely, Patrick put down his empty plate. A slow grin seemed to trickle from his mouth.
“Was it like that in Vietnam?” she blurted, then was instantly ashamed for even reminding him of it.
He lifted the remote and turned off the television, then leaned forward and removed the cover from the box of chocolates. “What’s the matter? You don’t like them?” he asked.
“I do. They’re delicious!”
“There’s only three gone.” He held out the box.
“I want them to last.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll get you more.” He took one and peeled away the foil. “Here. Try this one.” He offered the chocolate nougat daintily between thumb and forefinger, raising it to her mouth with a look of fearful excitement.
She was still chewing when the phone began to ring. “Uncle Charles!” she said, trying to swallow.
He said he just wanted to see how she was doing and make sure everything was all right.
“I’m okay. Everything’s fine,” she said, conscious of Patrick’s nearness. He put his arm over the back of the couch.
“I was just telling Aunt Arlene we’ll have to get together, all of us, for dinner one of these days,” her uncle said.
“Yes, that’d be nice.”
There was a pause. “The other thing, Fiona, is I wanted to tell you that Todd’s out of the hospital. He’s home with his parents. It may take a while, but he should be fine.”
“Oh. Good.”
“Fiona, what is it? You don’t sound right. You sound tense. Is someone there? Fiona, it’s not Patrick, is it?”
“Yes. We were just having coffee.”
“And candy,” Patrick said with a quick squeeze of her shoulder.
“Put him on the phone,” her uncle said.
“Why?” she asked, trying to sound pleasant.
“He want to talk to me? I’ll talk to him,” Patrick said, taking the phone from her hand with her uncle’s voice still in the receiver. “Hello, Judge. It’s me. Patrick. I just came by to make sure everything’s okay here . . .” He looked at her, smiling as he listened. “No. No,” he said. “She’s not upset. No. She’s fine. You’re fine, aren’t you, Fiona?” He listened, then burst out laughing. “I know. I know, but that was before we got to know each other. But now we’re friends.” He listened again, gleefully chewing his lip. “We’re friends!” he repeated. “We’re getting to be really good friends,” he said with such a high-pitched squeal of laughter that he had to pass her the phone.
“Uncle Charles—”
“Fiona, get him out of there! You tell him I want him out of there right now!”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Fiona, he’s—”
“Goodbye, Uncle Charles.” She hung up the phone.
Patrick was still laughing. “He doesn’t know what to do, does he? He can’t believe this is happening!”
“There’s nothing he can do,” she said quietly.
“No, I know. I know. That’s the thing. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing he can do!” he gasped, sagging against her in helpless laughter. “Nothing. Nothing at all, is there?”
Sandy hadn’t been at work since Todd’s beating. Maxine said Sandy spent all her time at the Prescotts’ now, caring for Todd along with his mother and a nurse. The other day Maxine had seen Mrs. Prescott pushing Sandy’s girls through the park in an elaborate double stroller made in England.
“You’d be doing everyone a real favor if you’d just admit Patrick did it,” Maxine said.
“But he didn’t,” Fiona said as she clipped today’s specials to the menus.
“She said the doctors think he was kicked.” Maxine paused. Her voice trembled now as she began to speak. “I didn’t tell her, but that’s what he did to me. He hit me until I fell down, then he started kicking me. I rolled up in a ball, and then I passed out. He did the same thing to Todd. I know he did.”
“My God, Maxine.” Fiona sighed. “What powers of deduction! Let’s see now, I wonder how many other people in this town have two feet. Hm, quite a few, I think.” She looked up, shocked as Maxine grabbed her wrist and squeezed until it hurt.
“You think you have all the answers, don’t you? Nobody can tell you anything. You won’t listen to anyone, will you?”
“I listen. When someone knows what the hell they’re talking about,” she said, pulling away.
“I feel bad for you. I had to find everything out the hard way too, but at least I listened. I wanted to know how to do things right. You’ve had everything you ever wanted all your life, but you don’t want any of it, do you?”
Aunt Arlene called to invite Fiona to go to the bridal shop in Concord Saturday with her and Elizabeth. Afterwards they’d stop for lunch at the Inn. Ginny and Susan had been there last week and the food had been—
“How come you’re calling me?” Fiona interrupted. “Why isn’t Elizabeth?”
“I know,” Aunt Arlene sighed. “She’s wanted to, but lately she hasn’t had a minute to herself. Poor Rudy. I think he’s talked to me more these last few weeks than his own fiancée, and now with everything else she has
to do she’s taken on the job of directing the school’s Thanksgiving pageant.” Aunt Arlene laughed. “Your uncle and I find ourselves in charge of haystacks, of all things. We have to make three of them.”
“Tell her to call then if she wants me to go.”
“Yes. Of course, dear. And I’m sure she will, as soon as she gets a chance,” Aunt Arlene said.
An hour later Elizabeth called. Fiona pictured Elizabeth being handed the telephone the minute she came through the door, with Aunt Arlene’s steely smile smoothing, nudging all things and everyone back into place.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said in a faint voice. “I’m sorry for what I said.” She paused. “I mean that. I do. Really, Fiona. I’m so sorry. Tell me you’re not mad at me, please?”
“All right,” Fiona said stiffly. She’d never been able to stand being the cause of Lizzie’s pain.
“So will you come with us then?” she asked. Elizabeth never minded being the first to apologize. What she could not bear was any base and sweaty grappling in an effort to understand who had been wronged and who had said what. There would be no further discussion.
“Well are you and Rudy back . . .” Fiona hesitated. “Are you back on track then?”
“I like that,” Elizabeth said, a little too brightly. “Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.”
“Yes, Fiona thought, she would like that, would seize such a safe, bloodless phrase, and with its suggestion of convention, routine, and inevitability, make it her own.
The next call came from Uncle Charles, inviting her to dinner at the club Friday with him and Aunt Arlene and Ginny and Bob Fay. The campaign had begun, its mission to return her to the fold where she could be more easily monitored and managed. She might be disruptive and embarrassing, but at least he could jump in sooner before too many people were involved, before it hit the papers, before she offended or shocked half the town. “She said it’s been ages since she’s seen her little cousin,” her uncle continued, his attempt at joviality failing.
“Not since the engagement dinner,” she said, amazed as always by his ability to transcend discord. In their last conversation he had been shouting, demanding she get Patrick Grady out of her apartment. And now, only days later, not a word would be said about Patrick unless she mentioned him first.
“The engagement dinner. Well that’s even longer than I thought,” he said with a faltering chuckle.
“Sounds like fun, but I can’t,” she said.
“Please, Fiona. I just think it’s time we got this family back together, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, bristling.
“Life is too short. We’re a family, and when one of us in hurting we all feel it, and then none of us is at our best.”
“Do you mean me?” she shot back. “That I’m the one that’s hurting?”
“I . . .” He cleared his throat. “I mean any of us, all of us. We’ve all been in that . . . situation at one time or another.”
“Situation? What situation?”
He paused. When he spoke his voice was contained and oddly hollow, as if his hand cupped the mouthpiece. “You know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean.”
“No. I don’t. I never know what you mean. How could I? I never have, and I probably never will.”
“Because you choose not to! Sometimes I think you enjoy being difficult, you enjoy seeing the rest of us uncomfortable,” he said.
“Well, on that note I think I’d better hang up now,” she said.
“Oh, and Fiona!” he said, clearing his throat in a way that signaled Aunt Arlene’s approach. “There’s something else. I wanted you to hear it from me. It appears I’m being considered for a spot on the Superior Court bench.”
“Congratulations,” she said stiffly. “I’m very proud of you, Uncle Charles. I am. I mean it,” she said, trying but unable to rise above this flatness she felt inside.
“Yes, well, thank you. I appreciate that, Fiona. I’ve tried very hard to live a good life and make my family proud.”
Unlike you, he might as well have added for the way it left her feeling.
Aunt Arlene rang the doorbell again. The three women waited outside the small antique frame house on Concord’s Main Street.
“Maybe they’re not open yet,” Elizabeth said, shivering in the early-morning chill.
“The lights are on,” Aunt Arlene said. “They’re open.”
“Well, that’s weird,” Fiona said. “Having to ring a bell to get in a store.”
“Serena’s isn’t your typical store,” Aunt Arlene said. “It’s by appointment only.”
“Oh, of course.” Fiona winked at Elizabeth, who smiled weakly.
“They only sell their own designs. And the gowns are all made right here on the premises,” Aunt Arlene told them for the third time now. “Brides come here from all over the country,” she added, giving Elizabeth a quick hug. The ride here had been strained, with Elizabeth staring out the window and Aunt Arlene’s nervous chatter alternating between the wedding and the Superior Court judgeship for which Uncle Charles didn’t think he had a chance, but he was flattered just to be mentioned.
“Maybe you should ring it again,” Fiona suggested.
“They’ll come!” Aunt Arlene said, the sudden quiver of her bright smile as irreversible a portent as a hairline crack in crystal.
“Maybe it’s not today,” Elizabeth said.
“You wish,” Fiona said and laughed.
Aunt Arlene’s finger shot to the bell. This time she held it in. The door was opened by a tall, deeply tanned man in a cornflower blue jumpsuit.
“Good morning, ladies. My name is Desmond, and I’d like to welcome you to Serena’s,” he said, sweeping them through an effusion of sweet cologne and the funereal scent of eucalyptus sprays. They followed him down a softly lit hallway with Fiona mimicking him, swishing her hips and gesturing with a flip of her hand every time he spoke.
“Fiona!” her aunt said under her breath. “Don’t be so cruel.”
She wasn’t sure whether her aunt had said cruel or crude. Either way she was embarrassed. It was like being a child again, wanting to bring a smile to her cousin’s somber little face and succeeding only in irritating everyone. Just then Elizabeth began to sneeze.
“God bless! God bless! God bless!” Desmond called back each time. Fiona burst out laughing. The tension was finally getting to her. Aunt Arlene’s eyes burned into hers, and Elizabeth looked even more miserable.
“You’ll be in the back parlor,” he said, leading them into a pale pink room, where they were greeted by two elegantly dressed women.
With its oriental rugs and antique furniture, Serena’s seemed more like a gracious home than a bridal shop. The lamp on the table reminded Fiona of the pair in Aunt Arlene’s bedroom. “Belleek?” she said to please her aunt, who nodded stiffly. They sat in chintz-covered Martha Washington chairs, expectantly facing the wide expanse of rose moiré that curtained the dressing room. The younger, more slender woman stood ready to draw back the draperies as soon as Elizabeth was trussed, hooked, snapped, and buttoned by the matronly attendant with her in the dressing room. Desmond had just returned with a silver pitcher of coffee and a tray of miniature pastries.
“Umm. They’re so delicious,” Fiona said with a delicate bite of a glazed tart.
“Yes. Nobody makes plum tarts like Henri’s,” he said, dipping low in front of Aunt Arlene with the tray.
“Oh, Henri’s,” Aunt Arlene murmured with a sharp look at Fiona. She took a tiny croissant from his etched tray and thanked him. Still smiling, she watched the door close softly behind him. Her eyes flashed at Fiona. The slender woman stepped behind the curtain to confer with Elizabeth’s attendant.
“Please don’t,” Aunt Arlene whispered through her frozen smile.
“What?” Fiona asked in a low voice. “What am I doing?”
“Making fun of everything.”
“I’m not!”
“Please,
” Aunt Arlene implored.
“I was just trying to be pleasant,” she hissed back.
“This has been difficult enough.”
“You mean Lizzie?”
Her aunt nodded. “You have no idea,” she said, and Fiona couldn’t tell if her bright blue eyes brimmed with anger or tears. Aunt Arlene sighed deeply and her angular body seemed to sag into the sheen of the mauve cabbage roses.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Fiona asked, startled to see her aunt so troubled, this sedate woman who was always in control, who would never show anger or tears in front of strangers or even acquaintances. It was her aunt’s fierce conviction that to burden others with one’s pain and problems was selfish and rude. We are here to make this world a better place: Fiona had been raised on that dictum, though she had always considered it more her cousins’ legacy than her own.
“Everything.” Her aunt sighed, then sat up, eyes widening, smile fixed now as the slender woman emerged from the dressing room and pulled the cord. The curtains parted, revealing Elizabeth, pale and wanly smiling in yet another gown. The long-waisted, pearl-encrusted bodice seemed sculpted to her thin body, making her look even more delicate and fragile.
“That’s beautiful,” Fiona and her aunt both said.
“Is it?” Elizabeth said, her gaze oddly skewed as if she could hear, but couldn’t quite see them.
“Oh yes!” they assured her.
“It’s an exquisite design. Perfect for such a tiny shape,” the woman said as she strolled around Elizabeth, pausing now to point out some detail to the kneeling attendant, who was trying to smooth a crimp in the lace hem. She sat back on her heels and peered up. “See? Too high! Too high!” the woman scolded. She pointed at the dress back, and the attendant wobbled as she labored to stand up. “The bra,” the woman explained. “It’s the wrong one. She needs a waist cinch.”
Elizabeth shuddered as the attendant began to tuck her bra into the gown. Goose bumps mottled her arms and chest.
Aunt Arlene tensed forward in the chair. “What do you think, hon?” She bit her lip.
Fiona Range Page 23
