Erin’s room, she recalls, is done in tones of bright orange and green and purple, with geometric patterns, painted walls, and retro blond wood furniture Maeve ordered from one of those upscale household chain stores. Jen thought it was cool; Kathleen thought it was incredibly ugly: a throwback to the seventies-style stuff that cluttered her father’s house before the tag sale where he sold it all for pocket change.
Now, as she looks around Jen’s traditional bedroom, she tries to see it through her daughter’s eyes—and her daughter’s friends’ eyes.
Maybe we can update the curtains and coverlet, Kathleen concludes, realizing they’re somewhat frou-frou. And Matt will probably be willing to paint the walls.
But not orange, like Erin’s. Kathleen draws the line at orange.
Satisfied with her new resolve, she steps back out into the hallway just as the phone rings. She hurries to pick up the extension in her bedroom, hoping that, this time, the receiver is where it belongs.
It is. Either Jen is learning to put it back after she uses it, or the wonderfully efficient Sissy found it and returned it to its cradle.
Kathleen notes the absence of wrinkles in her freshly made bed as she perches on the edge with the phone, saying, “Hello?”
For the first few moments, her voice is greeted by silence.
Then she hears it.
The distinct sound of a baby crying.
“Hello?”
The cries grow louder.
A chill slips down Kathleen’s spine.
“Who is this?” she demands, her hand trembling as she presses the receiver against her ear.
The only reply is a click, and then a dial tone.
Shaking, her breath coming in shallow gusts, Kathleen lowers the receiver.
She runs downstairs to the kitchen, where the Caller ID box is hooked up to the phone, and checks the digital window to see where the last call came from.
Private Name, Private Number.
It had to be a wrong number, she tries to tell herself. There wasn’t anything ominous about it.
Just a wrong number, and nothing more.
“Hey, you! Where are you going so fast?”
Jen turns around to see Robby leaning on the low cement wall in front of the school, his thumbs hooked in the front pocket of his faded jeans. The sun casts auburn highlights in his unruly dark hair. For some ungodly reason she finds herself wanting to run her fingers through it.
“I have to get on the bus,” she tells him.
“Why?”
She laughs nervously, gesturing around them at the hordes of chattering students streaming out of the school. “Because it’s, um, time to go home.”
He shrugs. “Is there a law that says you have to take the bus?”
Uh-oh.
Rather than answer his question, she offers, “Erin had to stay after.”
Why did I say that? What does that have to do with anything? He must think I’m a total moron.
“Yeah, I know. She got caught skipping gym, right?”
Jen nods.
“You ever skip any classes?”
“Me? No!”
Did you have to sound so horrified? She notes his amused expression. Way to go, Jen. Nothing like coming across as a prissy strait lace.
She says hastily, “I mean, I never have, but . . .”
“But you plan to?” His grin broadens.
“Sure.”
Robby kicks off the wall with one black boot and leans close to her, both hands jammed into his pockets now. “Yeah? Let me know when you’re ready, okay?”
“Ready . . . ?”
“To cut a class. We’ll skip together.”
He makes it sound so . . . erotic. Jen’s breath catches in her throat. She forces herself to exhale, to inhale. She can smell smoke clinging to his blue plaid flannel shirt and jean jacket: cigarettes and woodsmoke, an odd and intoxicating blend of decadence and the outdoors.
“Where . . . where would we go?” she dares to ask, though she doesn’t dare to meet his dark gaze. “You know . . . if we skipped.”
“You can decide. I’m easy. I’ll go anywhere.”
She looks from his boots to his face and finds him grinning at her.
“Whatever.” She does her best to emulate Erin’s coolly noncommital attitude, wishing she had gum to snap or—or a cigarette to exhale.
Not that she’s ever smoked in her life . . . or intends to. Smoking is stupid.
And Robby . . . well, she always figured Robby was stupid as well.
Not anymore. Something about the way he’s suddenly noticing her, talking to her, makes Jen wish she were capable of her friends’ flippant nonchalance.
“Want a ride home?” he asks.
“Now?”
Duh, Jen.
“Isn’t that where you’re going?” he asks with a languid grin.
“I was going to get on the bus.”
“And the bus would take you home. Right?”
“No, just, um, to the bus stop.”
He actually laughs. But not at her. Not with her, either, because she’s not laughing. No, she’s just standing here feeling like an utter idiot and wondering why she’s tongue-tied talking to her best friend’s sort-of boyfriend, and why he’s bothering to talk to her at all.
“Well,” Robby says, quirking a black brow, “I’d take you right to your front door.”
“Yeah, and my mother would freak.”
“What, she doesn’t want you hanging out with older guys?”
“I doubt it.”
“So tell her I’m younger. Tell her I’m seven, but I’m very mature for my age.” He laughs at his own joke.
This time, Jen laughs, too.
“So you want a ride?” he asks, grin fading, eyes taken over by an expression that makes Jen’s lower belly cartwheel.
“I can’t.”
He shrugs.
“Not today, anyway,” she adds as he prepares to walk away.
He looks intrigued. “Tomorrow?”
It’s her turn to shrug. “Maybe,” she says, as close to coy as she’s capable of being.
She turns and heads toward the waiting yellow bus, wondering what the hell she’s doing. She can’t get a ride home from Robby. Her parents will kill her.
But only if they find out, she tells herself as she climbs up the steps, acutely aware of Robby watching her from a distance.
Totally oblivious to the fact that he’s not the only one.
“Lucy?”
At the sound of her name, she spins slowly toward the booth in the far corner of the coffee shop, and there he is.
Fourteen years fall away in an instant.
His hair is still golden—that’s the first thing she notices. Still golden, unless he’s dying it.
Her hand goes to her own head, to the salt-and-pepper waves she hasn’t bothered to color in years.
She regrets that as she cautiously walks toward him. Regrets a lot of things, actually; far more important things. But right now, letting her hair go gray at such a young age is all she can think of.
He stands as she comes closer, and she sees that he’s as lanky as he was back then. She wonders if he’ll order the double bacon cheeseburger he always got when they came here, unless it was a Friday during Lent. It was the beer-battered fish fry then, with french fries and onion rings.
How he could eat, Lucy remembers, almost smiling despite her reason for being here. The man had a ravenous appetite.
Especially for her.
She feels her cheeks growing warm as she arrives in front of him, glad he can’t know what she’s thinking.
“Lucy. You look exactly the same.” He reaches across the table, across fourteen painful years, to clasp her hands just as he used to.
“No, I don’t,” she protests, embarrassed. “But you do.”
It isn’t a polite lie, not the way it was when he said it. Aside from the fine network of wrinkles around his eyes, he looks just as he did the last time she saw him
.
“Sit down, Lucy. I can’t believe you’re really here.”
She marvels that he manages to sound as though this reunion were his own idea, and not hers. As though it’s something they discussed in advance, when the truth is, she hasn’t heard his voice since he told her goodbye, and she believed, on that tragic day, that it was forever.
It would have been, too.
But everything has changed.
“I wasn’t sure you’d show up.” She sinks into the opposite side of the booth, remembering how they always shared the same vinyl seat all those years ago. It was an excuse to sit shoulder to shoulder, close together, but they always figured they should both sit facing the wall, just in case . . .
Just in case.
But this coffee shop is on the opposite side of the city. Nobody from the neighborhood was likely to wander in here, or so they managed to convince themselves.
We were reckless, Lucy realizes. Incredibly reckless.
Reckless, and in love. The two go hand in hand.
But age and sorrow have bred caution. She didn’t dare to initially approach him in person after all these years, or even to call him. She wasn’t sure whether his address was the same when she wrote the brief letter asking him to meet her here. Hell, she wasn’t even positive he was still alive . . . although she suspects she’d have known if he wasn’t.
When you love somebody, you sense things like that.
Or do you?
Maybe not, Lucy admits to herself, recalling the shock of a lifetime.
In any case, it took every ounce of her strength to come here today not certain what she’d find. For all she knew, he would bring his wife—or send her in his place, to tell Lucy to leave him alone; to leave them both alone, just as she promised she would.
“I can’t believe it’s really you, Lucy,” he says again, and she realizes that he’s staring at her. Not in dismay at what the years have done to her, as one might expect. He’s looking at her just as he used to. Just as though . . .
“How’s Deirdre?” she asks, to remind herself, as much as him, that neither of them is unencumbered.
“Deirdre,” he echoes, and the light goes out of his brown eyes. “Deirdre is—”
“What can I get you folks?” A waitress stands above them, pad in hand.
“Coffee,” Lucy says, when he looks expectantly at her.
“Make that two coffees. And menus.”
Lucy opens her mouth to protest, and he smiles faintly, saying, “You don’t have to eat. Let’s just see what the specials are.”
He used to say that back then, too. But he always ate, and she invariably wound up eating with him. Being with him awakened all sorts of fierce cravings within her.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, looking up at her.
“Nothing, I just . . . I wish you could still smoke in this place. I need a cigarette with my coffee.”
“Yeah, so do I. Some things never change, huh?”
“Deirdre,” she says abruptly, again. “How is she?”
He shrugs. “She’s fine. Henry?”
“Henry’s fine. What about Susan? She must be grown up by now, or at least in college.”
The question is as mechanical as his reply.
“Yes. She is. All grown up, and in college.”
The waitress returns just long enough to deposit two laminated menus on the table. Lucy pretends to scan hers, but all she can think is that she has to tell him.
Now.
Before they sit here another minute pretending they’re just old lovers saying hello. He has to know she contacted him for a reason. He may even suspect, or already know what it is.
She looks up at him; studies his face intently, as though it weren’t indelibly etched in her mind for all these years.
He still has the whitest teeth she’s ever seen.
He still has those big brown puppy dog eyes.
And he still has the distinct tuft of pale hair running down the middle of his left eyebrow.
The dust, crumbs, and cobwebs might have been swept from the house, but there is a lingering tension with Jen that only seems to have escalated despite Matt’s relenting about her babysitting job.
It’s nothing that their daughter has said or done, Kathleen notes halfway through her third slice of mushroom pizza. It’s more that she hasn’t said or done anything, other than appear at last from her room after being called twice for dinner.
Now she sits picking at her first slice as her brothers vie for the stage, full of news about school and friends and sports.
“How about you, Jen?” Kathleen seizes a rare lull to ask. “How was your day?”
“Great,” she says, without much enthusiasm.
“What did you do?” Matt asks.
“Went to school, came home. Don’t worry, that was all. Why? Did you think I escaped when Mom wasn’t looking?”
Kathleen and Matt exchange a glance. Kathleen shakes her head slightly. Leave it alone, Matt. Don’t make an issue out of her tone.
Matt scowls but remains silent.
“How was school, Jen?” Kathleen asks brightly.
“I just told you, it was great.”
“Be more specific.”
“What’s specific?” Riley wants to know.
“It’s nosy,” Jen informs him.
“Is Jen nosy?” Riley asks Kathleen.
“No, Mom is,” Jen answers for her.
Matt plunks the remainder of his slice on his paper plate and glares at Jen. “Okay, that’s enough with the mouth. Your mother asked you a question. Answer it.”
“I did.”
“Be . . . more . . . specific,” Matt says darkly, and Kathleen wishes he would just shut up and let Jen off the hook.
That she’s far more vexed with Matt than with their suddenly bratty adolescent makes little sense to her, but she can’t help feeling suddenly protective of Jen. Maybe it’s because there’s an aura of vulnerability about her even now, a sense that she doesn’t want to behave this way but is powerless to control her emotions or her mouth.
For a moment, there’s silence.
Kathleen rescues Curran’s teetering plastic cupful of grape juice before it spills, then almost wishes she had let it fall just to deflect attention from Jen.
“We’re waiting,” Matt tells her.
“I don’t know what you want to know,” Jen says, her sullen monotone giving way to high-pitched exasperation.
“How are your grades?” Kathleen asks quickly. “Are you doing better in biology?”
Jen hesitates.
Okay, wrong thing to bring up.
“We had a pop quiz today and I got a few wrong.”
“Daddy’s good at science,” Curran pipes up, picking the pepperoni off another piece of pizza. “Maybe he can help you.”
“Good idea. What are you learning?” Kathleen asks Jen, hoping they’re not on the reproduction unit yet.
“Punnett Squares.”
“Isn’t that geometry?”
Matt rolls his eyes at Kathleen’s question, and she retorts, “Hey, I was just kidding. I know what Punnett Squares are.”
He laughs. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. I only stink at math, not science.”
“So what are they?” Jen asks. “We’re waiting, Mom.”
Seeing the hint of a twinkle back in her daughter’s eyes, Kathleen is tempted to pretend she’s clueless, if only so that Jen will crack an actual smile.
“Punnett Squares are grids that are used to determine heredity, right?”
“Right,” Jen says, apparently—and insultingly—surprised.
“See?” Kathleen playfully sticks out her tongue at Matt, then turns to Jen. “If you need help with your science, Jen, you can ask me, too. Not just Daddy. Do you have homework for tonight?”
“Yeah, more Punnett Squares.” Jen makes a face. “I just can’t get it right. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?” Kathleen picks up her pizza a
gain, crisis over and appetite retreived.
“Genetics in general. I mean, your mom had brown eyes, right, Mom?”
The pizza turns to a sodden mass in her mouth. She can feel Matt’s eyes on her as she reaches for her glass and gulps water to wash it down.
“Mom’s mom is dead,” Riley informs his sister, as if she didn’t know.
“So? She still had eyes,” Curran points out.
“You mean she doesn’t have eyes now?”
“She’s dead, Riley!”
“So dead people don’t have eyes? Do worms eat them, or what?”
Heart pounding, Kathleen pushes back her chair. The wooden legs make a scraping noise on the tile; the bickering boys abruptly fall silent.
“Are you okay, Mom?” Jen asks, her voice laced with concern.
“I just have a headache. I’m going upstairs to lie down.”
She walks into the hall and up the stairs on wobbly legs. She can hear Jen admonishing her brothers.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“You’re the one who brought up her mom,” Curran protests.
“So? I didn’t say worms were eating her eyes.”
“Neither did I. That was Riley.”
“Enough,” Matt cuts in sternly. “Finish eating. I’m going to go see if Mom’s okay.”
No. Wishing he would just stay away from her right now, Kathleen goes into the master bedroom and sinks onto the bed, rubbing her temples. She doesn’t want to talk about this with Matt. She just wants him—wants everything—to go away.
But his footsteps are treading up the steps, and she hears the door creak behind her as he slips into the room. He comes to sit beside her on the bed. His weight slopes the mattress so that she has to brace her feet against the floor to avoid sliding into him. She doesn’t want to touch him now, or be touched. She only wants to be alone, damn it.
“You okay, Kathleen?”
“No.”
She swallows hard, still massaging her temples. His hand settles on the small of her back; it’s all she can do not to flinch.
“We said we were going to tell her,” Matt points out. “Remember?”
“We said when she was older.”
“I think it’s time. She’s old enough if she’s asking questions. We said that if she ever started—”
Kiss Her Goodbye Page 10
