“She gets her craving for spicy foods from her father,” Elizabeth injected derisively.
“It’s my favorite restaurant,” Johanna said softly, smiling at Holly.
“I’ll tell my brothers.” She smiled back.
“Your family owns this establishment?” Barbara asked, her expression cool. She glanced from side to side beneath thick dark lashes at the chic surroundings, as if the restaurant’s popularity could only be some sort of fluke, now that she’d met part of the management. “And the whole family works here?”
“No,” she said, feeling as if she were taking an oral test. “I mean, yes, two of my brothers own it, but we don’t all work here.”
“We... all?”
Holly recognized the intonation in her voice. Growing up in a large family, she was accustomed to the envy of some, the awe of others, and the disgust of a few who would automatically assume that Marie Spoleto had a problem with birth control.
She drew her head up high and tried to be as civil as possible, for Oliver’s sake.
“I have ten brothers, Ms. Renbrook. There are only three left here in town, and the rest are scattered across the country as far away as New York. Two are doctors, one’s a lawyer, one teaches at MIT, two own this restaurant, another owns a hardware store, another designs cars for Chrysler, and the other two own the Spoleto Construction Company in Atlanta. So, you see, we don’t all do menial labor. Just me.”
“And that’s only until tomorrow,” Johanna said, stepping in cheerfully. “Where is home, Holly?”
“This is home, but I live in Oakland now.”
“Really? We do too. Well, San Francisco, but what’s the difference?” she said.
With the Bay between them, Oakland was to San Francisco as Queens and the Bronx were to Manhattan. A part of the whole but never thought to be the best part or even a part worthy of belonging to the whole. The differences were enormous, but it was nice that Johanna didn’t think so.
“Which restaurant do you work in there?” she asked.
“I don’t,” Holly said, liking Johanna almost as much as she liked Oliver, who was sitting quietly at her elbow, watching her. Needing something to do with her hands, she blindly added cream to Oliver’s coffee. “I come down two days before Thanksgiving every year to put up my mother’s Christmas lights—on her house, you know? Then I work here on Thanksgiving because of the crowd, and to pay for the plane fare back, and to be with my family, of course.”
“Couldn’t one of your many brothers put up your mother’s house lights?” Elizabeth asked, with an obvious disdain for gaudy decorations. However, her curiosity was mere and mild compared to her interest in Oliver’s coffee—into which Holly added two white packets of sugar. “Aren’t there ladders involved? I believe most people would hire someone to do it.”
The Spoleto family finances were no one’s business but their own, but the woman’s attitude was irksome.
“They could do it, I suppose, or even hire someone. But I’ve always done it. And ladders don’t bother me.”
“Then do you come back for Christmas too?” Johanna asked, also watching Oliver’s coffee. Holly stirred it, then slid it closer to him without looking.
“No. I do something else at Christmas, but I come back in the spring and again about midsummer.”
“What service,” Barbara exclaimed dryly, making a point of Oliver’s coffee cup.
Holly frowned and looked, then gasped in horror when she realized what she’d done.
“Oliver, I’m so sorry,” she said, quickly taking the cup away, thinking Louis would be glad to know that the evening wouldn’t be tediously dull after all. “I’ll get you a fresh cup and—”
“No. No,” he said, taking her free hand. “That’s exactly the way I drink it.” He chuckled. “I was just trying to figure out how you knew I took cream and two packets of sugar and not artificial sweetener. I must have taken it that way on the plane. No, I...” He frowned.
“You had a drink on the plane,” she said.
“Yes, I did,” he said, puzzled. “Jack Daniels.”
He continued to look at her, a baffled smile on his lips as he recalled the drink she’d given him and his quiet surprise that she’d chosen his preferred brand. And now her strange knowledge of his coffee-drinking habits...
“Weird, huh?” she asked, moving her gaze from the cup to his face. She wasn’t reading his mind, was she? He didn’t believe in such stuff, but still, she had an uncanny way of responding to things he was thinking about. “Or are you just saying you drink it like this to be nice?” she asked.
“Oliver? Nice?” Barbara chuckled, sounding as if she thought Oliver couldn’t be nice. The notion rang a familiar bell with Holly. Her first impression of him was that he might be a rather severe sort of person, but as he’d been nothing but kind and gentle with her, she took instant umbrage to the inference.
Oliver didn’t notice it.
“Truly,” he said, squeezing her wrist gently, reassuringly. “This cup is fine. Perfect.”
“Okay.” She nodded feebly. “Then if there’s nothing else I can get you, I’ll leave you to finish. It was nice to meet you,” she said to the ladies in general, with a special smile for Johanna. “It’s been nice seeing you again, Oliver. I’m glad you came.”
“I am too,” he said, and then he watched her walk away.
“Not much room to kick yourself in here,” Holly muttered to herself, glancing at the walls of the employee’s rest room/lounge that wasn’t much bigger than a closet. She bent to splash cold water on her face.
The thing with Oliver’s coffee had been bad enough, but it hurt in a way that was totally unreasonable that his family hadn’t liked her. Except Johanna. Who seemed to be a very kind person—which meant she wouldn’t show her dislike of a stranger if she had any, anyhow.
She shouldn’t have gone to the table. She should have left Oliver in peace to enjoy his meal with his family and his friend and not have been so stupid and self-indulgent as to intrude on his privacy.
Who was she to him after all? A person he’d met on an airplane. She should have been grateful that he’d remembered her name. Well, part of her name, anyway.
“Holly?”
She frowned. For a moment she thought she’d conjured up his voice at the door.
“Holly? Are you in there?”
“Oliver?”
“Yes. Will you come out? Or... or can I come in there?”
She opened the door to face him. She wasn’t going out and she wasn’t letting him in, but she couldn’t have him speaking through the door at her.
“Hi,” he said gently. Because he wasn’t sure of what he was seeing, he tipped her chin upward with two fingers. “Have you been crying?”
“No. I burnt my finger in the kitchen,” she said, hiding her perfectly fine index finger in the palm of her other hand. “It smarts.”
“Let me take a look. How bad is it? I’ll get some ice—”
“No. It’s fine. I’m clumsy. I burn myself all the time. What are you doing back here?”
“Oh,” he said, recalling the reason himself. “Louis told me where to find you. He... he won’t give me our bill. He says it’s on the house, which is very nice of you, but I really can’t let you do that.”
“Why not? I invited you here for a free dinner. I know it isn’t much, but... you saved my life.”
“That was my privilege,” he said, his eyes roving over every inch of her face, enjoying every simple detail for the hundredth time. “I don’t need to be paid for it.”
“But I feel indebted. So do my brothers. And my mother. Besides, who’s going to miss four plates of Italian food in a place like this? Please, it’s a small price to pay for my life.”
“All right,” he said, giving in and not liking it. “But I insist on paying the bar tab. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
Before she could stop him, he was reaching inside his suit jacket for his wallet. He tried the other side and his pan
ts pockets before he looked at her, embarrassed to the bone.
“I don’t have my wallet,” he said.
“You see,” she said brightly, feeling for him. “It’s fate. Destiny knew you weren’t going to need it tonight, so she let you leave it at home.”
“I can’t even pay you with a credit card,” he said, shamefaced.
She laughed.
“Oliver Carey, you’re a very stubborn man,” she said, stepping out of the rest room. She couldn’t stop the hand that reached out to touch him. “If you don’t let me do this for you, all of it, the whole bill, I’m going to tell my brothers that you’re here.” She made it sound worse than facing a firing squad. “I was going to spare you that. They’re full-blooded Italians and very emotional, and they love me very much. Your worst nightmare won’t compare to the stink they’ll make over you for saving their favorite girl’s life.”
He grinned and let her turn him back through the kitchen toward the restaurant.
“You’re your brothers’ favorite girl?” he asked, intrigued by the wording.
“The family’s token girl,” she said, lighthearted, tucking her arm into the bend of his as they walked. “Marie Spoleto is my foster mother, and four of my brothers are actually other children she adopted and raised alongside her own six boys. Let’s see, does that make eleven of us? Yes. I was the last one she took in, and, of course, the joke at home goes two ways—either I was the girl she’d been wanting all along, or once she got me, she couldn’t tolerate any more children.”
He chuckled with her. “Were you a little handful?” he asked, thinking she must have been. Wishing he knew firsthand.
“No. I was shy and quiet most of the time.”
“Who is this you’re talking about?” Tony asked, coming into the kitchen from behind them. “Not yourself, I hope. She lies all the time,” he told Oliver with a twinkle in his eye. “She was the worst. A terror. My mama turned gray overnight.”
“She was gray when I got here, from raising you.”
He nodded the sad truth to Oliver, saying, “My mama is a crazy old woman. She raises her children, gets sad when they leave her, and goes out to find five more to raise. Me?—I want to kill my two children twice a day. Who is this?” he asked, turning abruptly back to Holly.
With an evil smirk on her lips she looked questioningly to Oliver, who gave her a sharp quailing stare.
“This is a friend of mine from San Francisco, Tony. Oliver Carey, my brother Antonio Spoleto. Bobby is around here too someplace, but Tony doesn’t get quite so personal with his interrogations.”
“Interrogations?” Tony looked shocked. “What she means is that I’m never anything but pleasant and charming with my inquiries,” he said calmly. “So, what kind of a friend from San Francisco are you, Oliver Carey?”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Holly said. “You have the right to an attorney...”
“Okay, okay,” Tony said, laughing. “No questions. She confuses our loving concern with being nosy.” He poinked her on the nose. “Growing up in our family hasn’t always been easy for this girl.”
“It was always easy,” she said. “But annoying sometimes.”
“Holly’s very proud of her family,” Oliver said. “You can tell when she talks about you.”
“Awk”—he covered his ears as if they had suddenly caught fire—“I can hear her now,” he said, then added, “You take your friend’s bill, okay? He eats on the house. And now I’m going to find my big brother Roberto, to tell him we have a friend of our girl in the restaurant.”
“You better hurry, Oliver. Bobby’ll want to know everything from your social security number to your intentions toward me.”
“It must be nice to be loved by so many.”
“It is.” She pushed him through the kitchen door into the restaurant. “One thing I know about is love.”
“I like your brother.”
“Me too,” she said, pushing him toward his table.
“Are they all like him?”
“Yes. Some are worse.”
He turned and wouldn’t let her push him any farther.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said formally, then more personally he went on, “Thank you for the plane ride. Thank you...” just for being here tonight, he was about to say. “Well, just thanks. I won’t forget you.”
“I know you won’t.” Her smile was sagacious.
“Look,” he said with a hesitation he was unaccustomed to and couldn’t appreciate. “Here’s my card if you ever... if you ever need anything or... if you feel like getting together for a drink or something sometime. I’d... I’d like to see you again.”
“Thanks.” She took the card. It seemed like a very upper-class thing to do, handing out cards. Aside from his wallet, Oliver Carey appeared to have everything. Wealth. Privilege. Sophistication. Yet there was a great need in him that pulled at her. And she sensed that before long his need would become even greater. “When you’re... well, I’m in the book, if you want to talk to me.”
Three
HOLLY LOFTIN WAS NEVER home. She didn’t sleep. And she never used her telephone. Oliver knew these things for certain, because he’d called her apartment fifty times over the past two weeks. The line was never busy and she never picked up, even when he called after midnight.
He wasn’t used to people being unavailable to him, and it was damned irritating—in an illogical, irrational sort of way.
She did have an answering machine. Loath to admit it, he’d called several times simply to hear her voice, but he hadn’t left a message. What could he say?
“Holly, my father died and you were the first person I thought of... actually, the only person I thought of?”
“Holly, I need to talk?”
“Holly, we buried my father today, and I know this is going to sound really perverted because we hardly know each other, but I was wondering if you might be willing to hold me for an hour or two?”
“Holly, my father is gone and I think about you constantly?”
“Holly, I’m lonely. Where are you?”
He’d tried every missive out loud, but couldn’t bring himself to leave them on the machine.
With every passing day and with every beep from her machine, his need to see her escalated beyond desire and longing, beyond craving, to a point that found him leaving work on Friday, taking the top deck of the Bay Bridge straight into the heart of Oakland, then driving up and down quiet, Christmas-frilled neighborhood streets with every intention of camping on her doorstep until she finally came home.
“Who is it?” she called through the door when he knocked.
He was so shocked to hear her voice, it took him a second or two to answer. The door was draped with a glittering gold garland and tiny bright lights. An extension cord ran thirty feet down the hall to light them up. It had to be her.
“Oliver Carey,” he said.
“Oh, Oliver!” she said, and he was pleased to hear the excitement in her voice. “Don’t move. I’m not dressed. Don’t go away. I’ll only be a second.” A pause. “I’m so glad you’ve come.”
Still a bit perturbed, he was about to tell her that he’d have come sooner if she’d answer her phone once in a while, but decided to wait until she opened the door. Which would happen at any second if the running footsteps from inside were any indication.
The muffled cries of a baby drew his attention down the corridor, beyond the extension cord. The walls were drab and dirty. Someone was listening to the evening news on television, and the air reeked of long-gone cooking.
It wasn’t the sort of place he frequented. And he hadn’t pictured Holly living in quite so impoverished a state. It wasn’t the first time that he realized how little he knew about her. He recalled that she’d said she didn’t wait tables for a living, so what did she do? Did her brothers know she lived liked this? If Spoleto’s Restaurant was any indication, they had plenty of money. Why didn’t they help her out a little financially? Did it
ever frighten her to live in such a place, alone and unprotected?
Of course, when Holly whipped open the door, every thought in his head was blown away, save one.
She was naked. Well, she’d said as much when he knocked, but... and... well, she hadn’t covered much up in the meantime.
She stood barefoot before him, wearing nothing but a slip, panties, and a huge smile.
The slip was black silk, and though it had straps, it seemed to be clinging precariously low along the firm rounded swell of her breasts, as if any draft could send it floating to the floor. Lower there was a faint outline of skimpy underpants and that was all... except for the words.
In white, the words mother, father, toilet, thumb, dreams, and a couple more that curved around to the back, were affixed somehow to the slip.
“Oliver, I’m so happy to see you. How are you?” she said immediately. “I saw the notice about your father in the paper, and I’ve been so worried about you. I tried to call a couple of times but... well, it doesn’t matter now.”
She reached out and led him into her apartment as if she were dressed to the nines and showing him in to tea. His stunned expression must have caused her to add, “It doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are for something like this, it’s always a shock when it actually happens, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It is,” he said, his mouth dry as a cotton ball. He could see the impression of her nipples in the silk—which was nothing compared to the impression they were making in his mind. “I... seem to have come at a bad time,” he said, motioning to her attire—or lack thereof.
“Bad time?” She looked confused and then down at her costume and laughed. “No. It’s not a bad time. Please. Come in and sit down. I was getting ready to go to a party, but I still have a while and... What?”
“You’re going to a party like that?”
She smiled as she recognized the expression on his face. It was the same rather annoying mask of dubious disapproval her brothers wore when they thought her hems were too high, her neckline too low, her jeans too tight. Except that on Oliver the guise was sort of endearing, even flattering because he looked a little nervous as well.
Wait for Me Page 3
