"Been too long, Doc," said Gloria, the original owner's daughter-in-law. "We haven't seen you since the Fourth of July."
"Lots of babies born this summer, Glo," he said as he followed her to a table near the window. "How's the chowder tonight?"
"First-rate," she said, plopping down a menu in front of him. "Should I start you off with an iced tea?"
Awkward moment number one.
"Hold off on the iced tea," he said, striving to sound casual and unconcerned. "I'm meeting someone here."
"Yeah?" said Gloria, leaning over the table. "Who?"
"A friend."
"Anyone I know?"
"You know everybody in town," he said, feeling like a sixteen year old being grilled by a girlfriend's parents.
"Unless she's wearing a disguise, I'll figure it out soon enough," Gloria said with a laugh. "Two iced teas coming right up."
Why even bother to order, Hall wondered, when Gloria was going to bring him exactly what she wanted to bring him. That was one of the best and worst parts of spending your life in the same little town where you grew up: you lost the capacity to surprise people around the time you went into puberty.The librarians knew your taste in books. The clerks in the record store knew your taste in music. The guy behind the counter at the coffee shop knew you liked it black with three sugars while Gloria here at Cappy's could recite your favorite menu even if you hadn't been in to visit since summer began. And because everybody in town knew everybody else, all of the information ended up in one gigantic data base meant to ensure that you had no privacy at all. Maine's version of the Akashic record, he thought and wished he had someone with whom to share the observation.
Gloria returned with the iced teas. "She's late whoever she is."
"Not very." Eleven minutes and thirty seconds.
Not that he was counting or anything.
The cowbell over the front door jingled. "Hi, Annie!" Gloria called out. "Pick a seat. I'll be there in a second."
Annie walked over to the table and claimed the seat opposite him. "I hope one of those iced teas is for me."
Gloria just barely managed to keep her jaw from hitting the table top. "You bet. And two lobster specials," she said, "coming right up."
"How does she do that?" Annie said, shaking her head as Gloria walked away. "She knows what I want before I do."
"Practice," he said, glancing down at the advertisements printed on his paper placemat. Teeth getting you down? Visit The Tooth Factory for 21st Century Solutions. Real romantic. Why hadn't he suggested they go to Renaldi's in town, some place with a tablecloth and ventilation that didn't reek of dead fish.
If she noticed, she didn't let on. She told him a funny story about the Sorenson-Machado wedding and he laughed when he was supposed to laugh but her words never got through. Something was different about her. Her hair was still the same wild mass of unruly curls. Her blue eyes were still framed by spiky lashes and the faintest beginnings of crow's feet. She still had the same off-center smile. He couldn't point to any one thing that had changed but somehow everything had and he had the sense of being left behind.
She pointed toward the window that looked out over the dock. "Isn't that Susan leaning against the railing?"
You're dead, Susie, he thought as he saw a familiar face trying to pretend she had a reason to be there. What the hell was wrong with her anyway?
"We should ask her to join us," Annie said.
"She's probably with the kids."
"That's not a problem," Annie said. "We're godparents to a few of them, right?"
He was about to say something incredibly witty when he saw two more familiar faces pressed against the front window of Cappy's. Four fists rapped on the glass.
"It's Daddy!" Willa cried out. Who knew her voice was that piercing?
"Daddy!" Mariah, the older of the two, hooked her pinkies in either side of her mouth and crossed her eyes. The gesture was particularly effective coupled with the fact that her nose was squashed flat against the window.
Annie waved at the girls. "I didn't know you had your kids with you this weekend."
"Neither did I," he muttered.
"We might as well ask them to join us," Annie said. "It's either that or pretend they're not out there."
"Great idea," he said, summoning up that old bedside manner once more. "The more the merrier."
"Pull over some chairs," she said to the newcomers as they approached, "and join us."
Hall's smile never wavered. It was part of his training. "I'm sure our Susie has something better to do than watch us eat dinner."
Susan looked guilty as sin.
"Hall's right," she said, leaning a hand on Annie's shoulder as she reached over and plucked a tomato off her sister-in-law's salad. "We're out of here. We came out for pizza and got a little sidetracked."
Is that what they call it these days, Susie?
"You know," said Jack, the only innocent in the room, "I haven't had a lobster roll in a while. Why don't we just pull up another table and those chairs Annie was talking about and join them?"
"Look at this!" Gloria exclaimed as she deposited more menus. "The whole family's here."
It was like trying to stop lava from rolling downhill. Jack shoved two tables together. Susan gathered up some chairs. The kids turned a quiet evening into a free-for-all. Not that his kids were loud all the time. They didn't have to be. They accomplished their goals with a few well-chosen words.
"Are you going to marry my daddy?" Willa asked Annie. "Aunt Susan said –"
"Willa!" Susan looked like she wanted to crawl under the table but Annie remained unruffled.
"No, I'm not," Annie said calmly. "I'm not marrying your daddy or anybody else for that matter." She laughed and looked over at Hall, expecting to find him laughing too at the crazy question. Only thing was, Hall wasn't laughing. He was sending Susan looks that would send a sane woman heading into the witness protection plan.
"Daddy likes getting married," Mariah confided as she nibbled the edges of a heavily sugared lemon wedge. "Mommy says that's why he does it so much."
"And I'm going to keep doing it until I get it right," Hall said.
Everyone laughed and the tension at the table fell away. They all knew that kids said the damnedest things and if you took any of their gossipy pronouncements seriously, you'd string them up by the umbilical cord. Better to laugh and change the subject and hope that wiser heads than yours didn't know exactly what was going on.
#
"Awfully crowded for a Sunday night," Roberta observed as she carefully eased her way into a parking spot in Cappy's lot.
"Still summer weather," Claudia pointed out, rooting through her purse for her lipstick. "This is the last hurrah, so to speak."
She found her tube of clear red and applied it swiftly without using a mirror. That was one of the few benefits of being as old as she was: there were certain beauty rituals a woman could perform in her sleep. Roberta flipped open her silver compact and painstakingly applied her pink lipstick then carefully brought down the shine on her aquiline nose. She shut the compact with a loud click then laughed.
"And who are we doing this for?" Roberta asked as they climbed from the car. "Men don't notice you once you reach our age."
"Men stop noticing you once you reach forty," Claudia said. "That doesn't mean you stop caring about how you look."
"Are we really this vain, Claudia?" Roberta smoothed her coif with the flat of her hand.
"Yes," she said, opening the door to Cappy's for her dearest friend. "We really are."
Time was having its way with her each and every day, wrinkling what once was smooth, lowering what used to sit high, playing tricks on her digestive tract she wouldn't wish on her worst enemy. Was it so wrong to want to fight back just a little?
Gloria waved to them from behind the counter. "Should've known you weren't far behind, Claudia. C'mon in and join the family."
"Over there," Roberta said, nudging her in the si
de. "Susie's here with her brood, and isn't that Doctor Hall and Annie? Well, well, well."
Something inside Claudia's chest began to burn and it had nothing to do with the buttered roll she'd treated herself to during the break at the seminar. Hall and Anne? How ridiculous.
"Grandma!" Susan's youngest tackled her before she was halfway to the table. "Tell her we can so have dessert first."
Claudia chuckled. On her darkest days, her grandchildren could call out the sun just for her. "Your mother makes the rules, sweetie," she said, ruffling his hair. "Same as I did when she was your age."
It was clear from the look on the boy's face that he didn't believe his mother had ever been his age.. One day she would blink her eyes and he would be walking down the aisle like Frankie Machado this afternoon.
Hall, ever the gentleman, leaped to his feet when he saw Claudia and Roberta approaching.
"Ladies," he greeted them, as casually as if he'd never once held an icy speculum to their nether regions, "you'll join us, won't you."
Roberta almost giggled as she took a seat at the one of the tables. The woman had herself a small crush on the middle-aged doctor, an affliction shared by half of the women in their crowd. Their foolishness appalled Claudia. To her, he was still the same gangly high school student who ran with Susan and her crowd. Oh, there had been a time when Claudia had entertained the hope that maybe he and Susan would one day get together (there was nothing wrong with wanting a doctor in the family) but her Susan had a mind of her own. She looked over at Jack who was chatting amiably with one of Hall's impeccably well-groomed little girls. Jack was a good husband and father and, on a purely selfish level, it was grand to have a first-class auto mechanic in the family. Her four-year-old Oldsmobile still ran like a dream and she had her son-in-law to thank.
"I didn't know you were all meeting here for dinner," she said, trying very hard not to single out Annie and Hall when she said it. "What a nice surprise."
"We'd just placed our order when we saw Susan out there on the dock," Annie said. She turned to Hall's youngest and stroked her silky blond hair. "This is more fun than pizza, right?"
Claudia's internal alarm system began to buzz softly. Did Annie say "We'd just placed our order" or had she imagined it?
Susan leaned over and pressed her lips close to Claudia's ear. "Say one word and so help me, ma, you'll never babysit again."
She pretended to peruse the laminated sheet of paper that served as Cappy's dinner menu. If there were sparks flying between Annie and Hall Talbot, they were invisible to her. They seemed friendly, very comfortable with each other, and as devoid of chemistry as two people of the opposite sex could be. Annie chatted easily with him, the same way she did with everyone else, although Claudia did notice that Hall's eyes kept drifting back toward Annie in a way that seemed a tad more than platonic. That didn't worry her. Hall was free to pursue Annie in as ardent a fashion as he might like, just so long as Annie didn't return his ardor in kind.
Now that man who'd showed up at the flower shop the other morning – well, he worried her. The atmosphere between him and Annie had veritably crackled with something Claudia didn't like one single bit. She had given Warren a good talking to last night about keeping his nose out of her daughter-in-law's business. Annie was fine, even if she had made a terrible mistake when she chose to sell the house she and Kevin had lived in for most of their marriage. If she ever – and it was something Claudia could scarcely bear thinking about – found herself in love with another man, it would be someone from Shelter Rock Cove, someone who shared her history, someone who understood what was important in life. Not some surly-looking stranger from New York.
Besides, when it came to love and romance, men were just along for the ride. Women were the ones behind the wheel. They decided where the romance went and how fast and when it was time to slam on the brakes or put pedal to the metal as the kids liked to say. She glanced over at ardent Hall and cool Annie, and smiled to herself. As far as Claudia could tell, they were still in separate cars.
#
Claudia, you're looking a little bit too self-satisfied for my taste, Annie thought as she nibbled her side of cole slaw.
She had seen her mother-in-law's blue eyes zeroing in on both her and Hall as she tried to assess the situation for potential landmines. Apparently, she had decided that Hall presented no threat to the status quo and was settling down to enjoy her meal in peace and harmony.
I love you, Claude, but this is really none of your business.
She glanced toward Susan who looked edgy, guilty, and very disappointed.
Serves you right, Suze. This is what you get for being so nosy.
She smiled at Hall who was busy cracking a lobster claw for Willa.
It's easier this way, Hall. I'll never know if you were really interested and you'll never know that I'm really not.
"So, Roberta," she said, "how was the seminar?" She would have asked Claudia but she wasn't sure her mother-in-law was speaking to her.
Roberta cast a furtive glance at Claudia. "Long," she said. "More information than you can absorb in such a short time."
Hall looked up from Willa's lobster claws. "Another seminar, ladies?" Roberta's and Claudia's penchant for seminars and workshops was well known. "What was it this time?"
The two older women exchanged glances. How peculiar, thought Annie. It wasn't like it was a secret or anything.
"Informational," Claudia said. "The history of American finance, that sort of thing."
Hall frowned. "Not that Adam Winters I saw on television."
Claudia laughed but nobody believed her. "Now don't you start casting aspersions, young man. My own children do enough of that to last me a lifetime, thank you very much. Roberta and I look at these seminars as performance art."
"You do not," Susan said. "You – ouch!" She turned and glared at Jack. "She's my mother, Jack. I can say whatever I want to say to her."
"Oh, no, you can't," Claudia retorted. "What I do with my time is my business, young lady. I don't tell you how to live your life –"
"Hah!"
" – and you don't tell me how to live mine. That way we'll get on quite well together."
"Say something, Hall!" Susan commanded. "You're the only one here who isn't related to her. Tell her those so-called financial experts are bad news."
Hall seemed deep in thought.
"Don't tell me you're secretly addicted to those seminars too," Annie said with a laugh.
"No," he said. His brow was deeply furrowed. "Damn it. This little piece of memory has been circling around all day and I almost grabbed it when you mentioned that seminar."
"Run through the alphabet," Roberta suggested. "That always jogs my memory."
"It probably wasn't important," Jack said. "If it was, you'd remember it."
"There's a brilliant statement," Susan said, rolling her eyes. "Like you've never forgotten a birthday or anniversary."
That kicked off a mildly amusing round of marital banter that served to forestall further discussion of Adam Winters and his financial wizardry.
Annie decided she would finish her lobster, have a little ice cream, then say goodnight before Hall made a move or Claudia said something incendiary or Susan threw herself on her sword.
She had never been one to push her luck and she wasn't about to start now.
#
"The place is crowded," Warren observed as Sam whipped into a parking spot at the far end of the lot. "Bet there's plenty of room at that new steak and ribs joint."
"We're here," Sam said, turning off the engine. "Might as well give it a try."
"Nothing like a big juicy slab of prime rib with a baked potato piled high with sour cream." Warren sounded downright wistful.
"Heart attack on a plate," Sam said. "You're better off eating fish."
"Lots of cholesterol in shellfish too," Warren pointed out but Sam ignored him.
He was exactly where he wanted to be. Hell, where he needed to be
. Annie was in there. He'd spotted her Trooper before he even turned into the driveway and right away he felt like a teenager getting ready for his first date. The gaping hole in the pit of his stomach, the sweaty palms, the fear he might walk in there and say something they would both regret. Something irrational and downright crazy like, "I love you." You couldn't love somebody you didn't know. Love at first sight was a construct of romantic fantasy. It didn't exist in a brick and mortar world.
But try telling that to his heart. He felt expectant, hopeful, terrified, elated, determined, uncertain, every combination of emotion possible. He'd never done anything like this in his life. She was in there with another guy, on something that came pretty damn close to being a date, and he was about to crash their party.
#
"I've had a wonderful time," Annie said as she reached for her purse, "but it's been a long day and I'm just about out on my feet."
"You're not going already," Hall said, in a voice meant for her alone.
"I'm afraid so." Had he always looked at her with so much longing or was she just seeing him for the very first time? "There was the Sorenson wedding today and tomorrow's the picnic." She forced a lighthearted chuckle as the cowbell announced another new arrival. "I'm not getting any younger, you know. Long days and late nights can do a woman in."
"Why don't you --"
He stopped speaking mid-sentence. Annie followed his gaze. Her heart slammed hard against her ribcage. Sam and Warren were standing by the cash register. Warren was chatting happily with Gloria. Sam looked edgy, solitary, strange and familiar both. She'd slept in his arms. He'd made love to her and asked nothing in return. She knew everything about him and nothing at all.
A Soft Place to Fall Page 17
