So he did remember. Damn him. Why was he trying to soften her up? She’d already agreed to let him have dinner with her and Wendy. What else did he want?
He wanted her to take care of his mother. She spun away, happy to occupy herself digging out a vase from the back of a cabinet—she didn’t get flowers often enough to keep vases handy—and filling it with water and the powdery contents of the envelope of plant food attached to the bouquet’s stems with a rubber band. He remembered that she loved tulips because he remembered her planting them in his mother’s scruffy, unkempt garden. This was all about his mother—and maybe about Wendy. Talia was merely the facilitator, the person who took care of the important women in his life.
The tulips were pretty, though. And when he’d kissed her last night, she’d be willing to bet he hadn’t been thinking about his mother or his daughter.
And she wasn’t going to think about that kiss anymore. Not if she hoped to survive another meal with Cory.
***
“So,” Wendy announced once they were seated at the kitchen table, platters and bowls of food arrayed before them. “Are you guys free tomorrow at one o’clock?”
Cory studied his daughter. The older she got, the more she resembled her mother. Lucky girl, he thought, wondering if Anthony—or any other guy—had ever walked up to her at a party and told her she turned him on. If so, Cory might have to beat the guy to a pulp. He supposed he should count his blessings that Talia’s father had never had the chance to flatten him with a few well-placed punches. Given the opportunity, Cory had no doubt the old man would have done it, not only because he’d been a big, burly man, easily outweighing Cory by fifty pounds, but also because Cory had knocked up his precious firstborn. He’d corrupted sweet Talia Roszik so thoroughly, her parents had disowned her. They’d told her they didn’t want her around her younger sisters—as if falling in love and getting pregnant might be contagious. They’d told her she was ruined. They’d told her she had defied them, defiled herself, and destroyed everything the good nuns of St. Agatha had taught her, and she was no longer welcome in their home.
If Wendy came to Cory tomorrow and told him she was pregnant, he’d provide whatever support she needed. He’d outline her choices. He’d refrain from offering advice unless she asked for it. If she decided to have the baby, well, he’d be one hell of a young grandpa.
He couldn’t imagine disowning her. He’d had too little of her in his life while she’d been growing up—divorces could be that way—and he wanted to make up for lost time, literally. He’d be damned if he would ever do anything to alienate his magnificent daughter.
Somehow, he suspected, her plan for tomorrow did not include informing him and her mother that she was pregnant. “I could be free,” he said. He planned to contact his Tek-Palette partners tomorrow morning and fill them in on the properties Shirley had shown him today. He’d already emailed them everything he had on the loft in Somerville and explained why he thought it was the most promising prospect of all the places he’d seen so far. After getting their feedback, he intended to schedule a second day with Shirley to look at more properties.
He also wanted to investigate housing options for his mother in the Brogan’s Point area. She needed a residence that was on all one level so she wouldn’t have to contend with stairs. A condo or apartment, where she wouldn’t need to handle maintenance, would be ideal.
All of that could be worked around Wendy’s one o’clock request. “What’s happening at one o’clock tomorrow?” he asked.
“The senior awards assembly. I think you should be there.”
Talia had been picking at her chicken. At Wendy’s statement, she lowered her fork and stared at Wendy, her face blossoming with a smile. “Are you winning an award?”
Wendy giggled. “I’m not supposed to know about it. But Ms. Dempsey—you know, the front office secretary? She let it slip.”
“What award?” Talia asked.
“I don’t know. Ms. Dempsey said, ‘So, I guess I’ll see your mom tomorrow at the assembly.’”
“I should call her,” Talia said, then turned to Cory. “I know her from the volunteer work I do for the volleyball team.”
“No, don’t call!” Wendy erupted. “Honestly, I’m not supposed to know. Ms. Dempsey was like all pale and flustered after she blurted that out. I guess parents can come to the assembly if they want. But who’d want to sit through a boring assembly if your kid wasn’t going to win an award?”
“What kind of awards are these?” Cory asked.
“I don’t know. Best math student or something. That won’t be me,” Wendy added with a laugh. “Maybe some scholarship money. That would be cool.”
“Definitely cool,” Talia agreed.
“That’s really great,” Cory said, wondering if he looked as ecstatic as Talia. He knew Wendy was amazing. If he ran the high school, she’d win every possible award, including the math award. Apparently, someone in a position of power at the high school thought Wendy was amazing, too.
Being in town to see her win an award—whatever the award was for—was a stroke of luck. If not for the Tek-Palette expansion, if not for his mother’s health issues, he might not have driven up to Brogan’s Point until Thursday, and then he would have missed the assembly.
He was tired of missing the highlights of his daughter’s life. This week—and maybe from here on out—he wouldn’t have to. He would be able to witness Wendy’s triumphs. And, if shit happened, he’d be able to help Wendy cope. All her big moments, good or bad, he would be able to share.
He and Talia.
His gaze met Talia’s across the table. Her smile was brighter than the midday sun. If he were to paint her right now, the painting would be more vivid, more colorful than that graffiti wall mural he’d created in the alley, back in high school. Flowers, rainbows, sunshine. Moonlight. He’d paint Talia moondancing.
He knew the glow illuminating her right now had nothing to do with him. It was all due to Wendy. Would she still be smiling so much once she realized they would be attending the assembly together? Would people stare at them and wonder who the man with Wendy’s mother was? Or would Talia insist that they go separately and sit as far apart as possible, and not even acknowledge each other’s presence?
He wanted to go with her. He wanted to sit by her. It didn’t have to mean anything, other than that they were two proud parents, there to beam at their daughter as she collected her award.
Bullshit, he thought. If he went to the assembly with Talia, he would want it to mean something. He wasn’t quite sure what, but something.
Just like his having brought her tulips—her favorite spring flowers—meant something. Just like sitting at her kitchen table and eating the meal she’d prepared meant something. Just like being in her house, in her town, in her presence meant something.
Her cooking had improved considerably since they were newlyweds. Not that she’d done all that much cooking back then. His mother had generally insisted on preparing meals, not so much to help Talia out as because it was her kitchen.
Talia used to complain that her mother had no normal food in that kitchen. She always had plenty of lentils and clover honey and whole-grain pasta. She’d insist on buying hormone-free chicken, but that cost so much money, there often wasn’t enough to go around. Cory had gotten into the habit of eating on campus so his mother wouldn’t feel bad about having prepared too little food, and so his wife and daughter would be sure to get enough to eat. On campus, he could save money by stretching a cup of yogurt or a bowl of soup and a few rolls into dinner, without his mother or Talia fussing about whether he was eating a nutritionally balanced meal. He’d lost fifteen pounds that first year at RISD. He doubted Talia had even noticed. If she had, she’d never mentioned it.
She’d been too resentful to care that he’d been growing scrawnier and bonier. She hardly ever saw him undressed—usually she’d be asleep by the time he got home. Once Wendy was born, their sex life sucked—but so did ev
erything else. Talia had accused him of eating on campus to avoid her and the baby. She’d said he didn’t want to spend time at home, playing with his daughter, learning how to be a father, changing a few diapers. She’d been wrong. He would have loved…well, maybe not changing diapers, but spending as much time as possible with his wife and daughter, bonding with them both.
But the more time he spent on campus, the more work he’d get done and the more connections he’d make. He had to earn his degree and be successful so he could support his family and move them out of his mother’s house. He had to plot a course that would lead to a good job so Talia would be able to stop working and go to college herself. With an art degree, that wouldn’t be easy, but that had been his goal and his focus. How could she have doubted him?
With the clarity of hindsight, he could see how she could have. At the time, though, her accusations had pierced him like bullets, leaving his soul lacerated and his ego bleeding.
Wendy’s cell phone serenaded them with a tinkly song. She pulled it out of her pocket, and Talia shot her a stern look. “Just because you’re an award-winning hot-shot at the high school doesn’t mean you can take calls at the dinner table,” she said.
“It’s just a text from Anthony,” Wendy protested.
“It can wait. He knows it’s dinner time.”
Wendy pouted. Talia remained firm.
Cory observed and wisely kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t witnessed Talia disciplining Wendy since those early years at his mother’s house. Back then, the discipline had amounted to Talia’s shouting, “No, no, no!” when Wendy attacked a wall in the upstairs hallway with her crayons or put a pebble in her mouth. Cory wouldn’t have yelled at her for drawing on the wall. Drawing on walls was how he’d discovered and developed his artistic talent. Eating pebbles didn’t seem like such a good idea, though.
But scolding a toddler for doing something she probably didn’t know was forbidden wasn’t the same as scolding a teenager for responding to texts during dinner. Cory noticed Wendy’s eyes narrowing, her eyebrows pinching together above the bridge of her nose. Talia’s eyes narrowed, too, and her eyebrows pinched the same way. They glowered at each other across the table, locked in a silent duel. Wendy’s mouth tensed and she tossed her phone onto the table. Its message light flashed on and off like a beacon. “I don’t know why you gave me a phone if I can’t use it,” she snapped.
“You can use it when you aren’t eating dinner,” Talia reminded her.
“Fine. I’m done with dinner. May I be excused?” She pushed her chair back from the table, the legs scraping noisily against the floor.
“Please clear your dishes,” Talia muttered. Cory suppressed a laugh. The tense, angry tones of their voices contradicted the proper manners of Wendy’s “May I be excused?” and Talia’s “Please.” Still, they went through the motions of mealtime courtesy even as they glowered at each other. Wendy carried her plate to the counter by the sink and Talia thanked her.
Snatching her phone from the table, Wendy stomped out of the room.
Cory waited a moment. “Wow.”
“Wow, what?” If Talia was still angry, she managed to keep her rage out of her voice. “Wow that she’s winning an award tomorrow, or wow that she’s pissed at me?”
“Both, I guess. Mostly, wow that the mood in the room could change so abruptly. It’s like a cold front suddenly blew through.”
“She can be mercurial,” Talia said, then sipped her water, gazing at her glass as if she wished it contained something more potent. “With me, anyway. Maybe she’s mellower with you.”
Cory tried to recall any time when Wendy’s mood had U-turned so abruptly with him. He came up blank. “Maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing,” he suggested.
“Maybe you aren’t as firm with her. She’s told me you let her get away with things when she’s visiting you.”
He wasn’t sure, but Talia seemed to be impugning his parenting skills. “I don’t spoil her,” he said, hating the defensiveness in his tone.
“But you also don’t lay down rules about—oh, for example, texting at the dinner table.”
Cory ruminated. He couldn’t remember Wendy ever pulling out her phone while they’d been eating. But then, he usually took her to restaurants for dinner. He wasn’t anywhere near as good a cook as Talia. Besides, he saw Wendy so rarely. When she was visiting, he wanted to pamper her, to make the weekend special. “You should have passed your rules along to me so I could make sure she was obeying them when she was with me.”
“I’m not going to tell you what is or isn’t acceptable in your home,” Talia said. “That’s your call. In my home, people don’t text at the dinner table.”
Her voice was level, but her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling with…no, it wasn’t anger, not anymore. Conviction, maybe. Determination. Perhaps a trace of defensiveness, too.
“You’ve raised her well,” he said. “Someday she’ll realize how lucky she is to have you for a mother.”
He meant his words sincerely, but Talia shook her head and huffed a laugh. “Maybe. Someday, decades from now.”
He hadn’t sensed any hostility between Talia and Wendy. Even this spat over Wendy’s cell phone hardly struck him as a major battle. “You get along with her pretty well,” he said.
“I’m different from all her friends’ mothers,” Talia argued, her voice still muted, pensive rather than bitter. “I’m a decade younger than most of them. Strangers think I’m Wendy’s older sister.”
“You should be flattered.” Talia did look young, but after a certain point, women were supposed to want that, weren’t they?
“I don’t want to be mistaken for Wendy’s sister. It’s embarrassing to her. I want to be her mother.”
“You are.”
“I hardly knew what I was doing when she was a baby. Any advice your mother gave, I did the opposite. Your mother used to say I should leave her out on the back porch in her stroller on winter days, so she’d get used to the cold. She used to say I should let her eat her mud pies so she’d know what mud tasted like. I don’t know—maybe your mother was right and I was wrong. I always felt like an apprentice, struggling to learn on the job.”
“All parents feel that way,” Cory argued. He’d dated some single mothers who seemed as bewildered and overwhelmed by their children as he and Talia had been. He’d talked to people at work who had new babies—most of the graphic artists at Tek-Palette were in their thirties like Cory, but that seemed to be the age young professionals in New York City started their families—and they expressed the same insecurities Talia was expressing.
“When we moved here,” she said, “Grammy took over everything so I could go to school. I’d come home exhausted, and Wendy would want all my attention. Sometimes I was just too tired to give it to her.”
“It’s okay if kids don’t always get everything they want,” he said, not bothering to add that when Wendy visited him, he generally gave her everything she asked for. A trip to Coney Island? Of course. Dinner at that fancy steak place with the crystal glasses that made sweet bell-like sounds if you tapped them with a teaspoon? Absolutely. Do-it-yourself ice cream sundaes? Bring it on! Staying up late, watching animated videos, and listening to Cory explain computer graphics and story boards and the esthetic choices the animators made? No problem.
All those years, all those visits, he’d had no idea if what he was doing with Wendy was right or wrong, good or bad. He just did it. And she seemed to have turned out pretty damned nicely, an occasional dinner-time text message notwithstanding. He hadn’t damaged his daughter.
But most of the credit for how well she’d turned out belonged to Talia. “You’re a fantastic mother,” he told her.
She allowed herself a crooked smile. “Okay. You brought tulips, and now you’re complimenting me left and right. What’s this about, Cory? You want me to take good care of your mother?”
“No. I—well, sure, I do want that.” He shot a sheepish grin back at her.
“But I want…” I want to moondance with you. Her eyes were so large, so dark, and her lips were so soft. Her lower lip, especially. Forget dinner. He wanted to nibble that lip.
He averted his gaze and shook his head.
“What?” she prodded him.
What the hell. He had never lied to Talia. He wasn’t going to start lying now. “You still turn me on,” he said.
Chapter Nine
Talia took a steadying breath. The fact was, Cory still turned her on, too.
His ability to turn her on had never been in question. From that first night at Charise’s house, when he’d approached her, exuding an odd combination of bravado and reserve that added up to a whole lot of charisma, he’d turned her on. When he’d shown her the mural he had created, he’d turned her on. When he’d taken her hand in that alley, and rotated her to face him, and lowered his mouth to hers… Oh, God, had he turned her on.
She’d gone on dates before that night. She’d read steamy novels under the covers, with a flashlight. She’d viewed TV shows that would have straddled the border between PG-13 and R if they’d been rated as movies. She’d grilled friends like Charise, who, while not wildly experienced, had traveled a little farther around the block than Talia.
Hell, everyone had been farther around the block than Talia back then. She’d kissed a few boys, but hadn’t gone much past that. She hadn’t really wanted to. Other boys had never made her feel anything like what she’d felt when Cory held her, or touched her, or simply gazed at her with his smoldering eyes.
She’d been so unnerved by his effect on her that she hadn’t dared to introduce him to her parents. She’d feared they would take one look at him and realize he was the boy who was going to steal their daughter’s heart—and, as it turned out, her innocence, her educational opportunities, the future her parents had planned for her. And once they realized that, they’d ban him from her life.
So he was her secret. She developed a flair for lying to them—“I’m getting together with Gina and Suzanne,” she’d say as she raced out the door, down the street, around the corner, to where Cory would be waiting for her.
Moondance Page 8
