Then he would look in the mirror and it would all come tumbling down.
KELLY PULLED HER car into the lot behind O’Malley’s at exactly eighteen minutes after six. She had waited around the corner until Aunt Claire left for the night. The last thing she wanted was to be subjected to her godmother’s endless probing questions. And she knew there was no way Aunt Claire would let the opportunity pass without a little digging around.
If only they had taken the back way to the lake. She had been so happy, so excited, that she hadn’t even noticed the women standing on the corner until Seth said, “Isn’t that your aunt Claire?” She had peered into the side mirror and there was her aunt, squinting into the fading sunlight, her face creased in permanent lines of worry. She wanted to shout out, “It isn’t what you think, Aunt Claire!” but of course it was exactly what Claire thought, every bit of it.
They had been so careful, so cautious. They had thought of everything from condoms to timing to location. Driving out to the lake on a cold December afternoon—what girl in her right mind would pick such an inhospitable spot to make love for the first time? You would have to be crazy even to think of such a thing.
At least, that’s what Kelly and Seth had been banking on.
And it had been worth it. She felt like she could fly, like Seth had gathered up the clouds and the stars and laid them at her feet.
She peered at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She didn’t look any different. How disappointing. She had taken a giant step into the future, but she still looked like the same schoolgirl who left for class each morning. Her father didn’t suspect a thing.
And he wouldn’t. Not in a million years.
She had never lied to him before, but there was no way she was going to walk into the bar and announce she had just lost her virginity. It would be easier to announce she had just robbed the Paradise Point Savings and Loan at the corner of Main and Willow. He already thought she was seeing too much of Seth, but then he had been saying that since she was six years old. Seth had been her best friend from childhood. He was the first friend she made when they moved back to Paradise Point, and the one person in the whole world she could imagine herself growing old with.
Not that she spent a lot of time thinking about things like that, because she didn’t. Loving Seth was a fact of life, like her strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes. Her friends leapfrogged from boyfriend to boyfriend, falling in and out of love at the speed of light. But not Kelly. An Irish fortune-teller she’d visited at the annual Fireman’s Fundraising Fair had taken one look at her cards and proclaimed her an old soul who would always choose the right path. Funny how sometimes you needed to hear a stranger tell you something you always knew before you believed it was true.
She liked that phrase. Old soul. It sounded right to her. She had always felt that way, settled deep down inside, as if she had come into the world with all of the important decisions already made and her roadmap clearly marked.
Even as a tiny girl she had recognized Seth as the other half of her heart. Grandma Irene used to look at the two of them playing together and laugh, but there was something in her eyes, some flicker of recognition that Kelly had understood even then. You know, don’t you, Grandma. Because it was the same for you. The bond between Irene and Michael had been forged early and endured beyond death. Same as it would be for Kelly and Seth.
Oh, she knew better than to say something like that to anyone, but it was true just the same. They met in the schoolyard on the first day of first grade, and from that moment on their fate had been sealed. Knowing she had found the one God had meant for her to find freed Kelly to pour herself into her studies with abandon. Her life was filled with so much love—her father, her aunt, her cousins, Grandma Irene (in her own way), her beloved Seth—that she was fearless. She learned to play the piano and to dance. Her grades were the highest in the school. She was popular with students and faculty alike, and if there was even a single cloud on her horizon it was the way her father worried about her relationship with Seth.
“Why not date other boys?” he suggested every few weeks. “I worry, Kel. You’re too young to tie yourself down with the first guy who comes along.”
It wasn’t like she had asked to fall in love so young. She didn’t wake up one morning in her crib and say, “I think it’s time to meet the man of my dreams.” Her father seemed to see love as a limitation while she saw it as a door that opened onto the world. She still expected to graduate high school as valedictorian. She still expected to head off to Columbia on scholarship. She had as many dreams for her future as there were stars in the sky, and love wouldn’t get in the way of any of them, no matter what her father thought.
She loved Seth. Being with him made her feel more completely herself, made her try harder, reach higher. This afternoon, lying there in his arms, she had believed she could do anything. Be anything. Maybe even fly.
No, that wasn’t something a girl could explain to her father. Once upon a time she might have imagined going to him and telling him everything. Asking for his advice, if not his blessing. But that was a long time ago, before the Accident changed everything.
That was how she thought about it. The Accident. The day Uncle Billy died and something inside her father died right along with him. She would never forget the first time she saw him in the hospital, the day before Billy’s funeral. If the doctor hadn’t pointed to bed number three, she wouldn’t have recognized her own father. He had always been her protector, her teacher, her source of strength. To see him like that, mangled and helpless, made her want to turn and run away as fast as she could.
Nothing seemed real to her after that. If God could take away her uncle from his family, if God could turn her strong and powerful father into a shadow, then what could she count on?
Only Seth. It was Seth who had been there for her. Seth who held her when she sobbed with fear. Seth who helped her clean the house and do the shopping and understood why she had to be home with her father when life was knocking on the door and asking her to come out and play.
Tears filled her eyes and she dragged the back of her hand across them. Life was back to normal now, or at least what passed for normal. Her father left the firehouse and took over O’Malley’s with Aunt Claire. If he wasn’t one hundred percent, at least he was a lot closer than anyone ever thought he’d be. And he told all who would listen that he had his daughter, Kelly, to thank.
She didn’t want his thanks. She hadn’t cared for him so he would sing her praises to people who didn’t matter. She wanted their old life back. She wanted them to sit down at the kitchen table and talk the way they used to, back in the days when she could tell him everything.
Most girls couldn’t really talk to their fathers, but Kelly had never had their problem. Aidan had been both parents wrapped up in one for as far back as she could remember. He had changed her diapers and applauded her first words. He had cheered her first steps, attended all of her school plays, taught her to ride a two-wheeler, throw a sinkerball, and make the world’s best lasagna. He was the one who told her about periods and tampons when she was ten years old and scared to death at the sight of blood in her panties. He had held her close and rocked her while she cried, then told her that even though she was now a young woman, it was still okay to be his little girl.
Except that she wasn’t his little girl any longer and hadn’t been for a long time.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” she said aloud as she gathered up her things. Different but okay.
“AND TOSS SOME chopped onions on that chili, will ya?” Ron Suarez called out as Aidan headed toward the kitchen.
Three bowls of chili, one with chopped onions. Two platters of wings. A meatball hero . . . if there were any meatballs left after the first two lunch waves.
Aidan shouldered his way through the swinging door and found his daughter sitting at the big worktable with her legs curled under her. Her silky hair shone with red-gold highlights as she bent over the lapto
p.
“Hey, kid. How long’ve you been here?”
Kelly stopped what she was doing and smiled up at him. She had her mother’s smile, wide open and joyous. Even after all these years the memory of Sandy could still cause his heart to ache.
“Since six-eighteen,” she said. “Sorry I was late. I—I lost track of time.”
She never screwed up. He knew he could cut her a little slack and not live to regret it, but he still had to ask.
“Claire said she saw you and Seth while she was waiting for the school bus.”
“Yeah.” She dragged her index finger across the touch pad. “She was with a whole group of DiFalco cousins.”
“I thought you had club meetings between two-thirty and four.”
High color flooded her cheeks and an ugly buzz of apprehension positioned itself between his shoulder blades. “We—uh, we needed some digital photos of the swans for the yearbook.”
The buzz eased a little. Or at least as much as it was likely to ease between now and her fortieth birthday.
“Seth’s a good kid,” he said, pulling three clean iron-ware bowls from the cabinet next to the sturdy six-burner stove that had cost more than his first car. “I like him.” His back was to her while he ladled steaming hot chili into the bowls. He heard the sound of a modem handshake, followed by the rapid click of the keyboard, but no comment from his kid. He tried again. “Tell him he did a great job fixing the back steps. If he feels like tackling it, the porch could use some shoring up.” He pulled a pan of wings from the warming oven, then dumped them on a snowy-white oval platter. “Kel, am I talking to myself here?”
“You lost the teapot!” Her voice was filled with reproach. He turned around as she slid the tip of her index finger across the touch pad again, then tapped twice. “I can’t believe it! It sold before they even reached my max bid.”
“I wasn’t fast enough,” he said, feeling lower than whale turd. “I tried to type in your high bid, but—listen, Kel, I don’t know if it was my fingers or the damn keyboard, but the next thing I knew the screen was flashing and somebody named JerseyGirl claimed the prize.”
“Why didn’t you type in the max bid first thing? Didn’t you see the box at the top of the screen?”
“Kel, I’m sorry. What more can I do? I e-mailed JerseyGirl to see if she’d sell it to me, but it was a no-go.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling. “I just wanted it so much for Grandma Irene. . . .”
“There’s got to be more of those things for sale out there. You’ll find another one.”
She shook her head. “Never,” she said mournfully. “Not in a million years.”
“What’s the big deal with this teapot? I still don’t get it.”
“I don’t know!” She burst into noisy tears. “I just want her to have it!”
What the hell was going on? Drama queen theatrics weren’t his kid’s style. After seventeen easy years was the shit about to hit the fan?
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. “Do you need to talk about anything?”
She looked up at him and cried harder.
“Talk to me, Kel,” he pleaded. “I can’t make it better if I don’t know what it is in the first place.”
“It looks just like . . . all I . . . wanted . . . you to do was . . . bid on the . . . teapot and you—”
She was sobbing like he’d told her she’d been grounded until Social Security kicked in. It struck him that she had an awful lot of emotion invested in this teapot. He had never seen her like this, wild-eyed and sobbing over a rusted hunk of metal that Grandma Irene wasn’t expecting, hadn’t asked for, and would probably ignore if Kelly presented it to her.
They used to talk about things. Back before the accident turned their lives inside out, they used to sit down at the table and hash things out. Or at least that was the way he remembered it. They talked about their day, about school, about the firehouse, about what was going on in the family. Maybe he didn’t have much in the way of paternal wisdom and advice to offer, but she had never needed any. At least not that he had ever noticed. But they were there for each other. He was part of her life same as she was part of his.
And he missed it. While he had been battling back from grief and injury, she had been growing up, and somewhere along the way she had stopped needing him.
Suddenly it hit him. The drive with Seth. Getting back late. All of this hysteria. It had nothing to do with the teapot. She and Seth had probably had themselves a whopper of a fight and had broken up and his not-so-little girl was experiencing her very first broken heart. He watched as she blew her nose into a paper towel without missing a single hiccupping sob. She was the six-year-old who had overheard the truth about Santa in her aunt Claire’s kitchen. The eleven-year-old whose best friend had moved away. And somehow, mixed in with the ghosts of those familiar children, was a woman he had yet to meet. The woman she was on her way to becoming. She was trapped right there in the middle, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to hurry up the process.
Or make it stop.
Chapter Seven
THE CANDLELIGHT INN came by its name honestly. No matter the season, each of the 147 windows boasted an electric candle that blazed to life each evening at dusk. The effect was never more magical than it was at Christmastime when the candles were joined by lush wreaths of spruce and pine that hung from each of the windows that faced Main Street. The wreaths were accentuated by plush red velvet bows and pinecones faintly dusted with silvered snow. Garlands of fragrant pine and glossy mistletoe outlined the front porch and the enormous front door, softening the sharp edges and accentuating the gingerbread swoops and curves. Rose’s competitors up the street had strung thousands of tiny twinkling white lights around windows and along eaves until the stately Victorians looked like they belonged on the Vegas Strip, but not Rose. She let the candles work their magic on the house and chose, instead, to turn the two bare oak trees in the front yard into works of art. Every inch of trunk, every centimeter of branch, every millimeter of twig glittered with fairy lights.
Maddy’s heart leaped as she saw the guarded look of delight in her daughter’s eyes. She and Rose exchanged glances in the winter-dark front yard, and for a moment the world felt more right than it had in a very long time. They stood together on the porch and watched quietly as Hannah told Priscilla how those magical trees would help Santa Claus find them at their new address. Maddy stiffened as her daughter talked, knowing her mother’s dim view of Santa Claus, but Rose surprised her and simply smiled.
“Thanks,” Maddy said as they went back into the house a few minutes later.
Rose’s eyebrows lifted behind her glasses. “For what?”
She glanced toward Hannah and lowered her voice. “The Santa thing. Thanks for understanding.”
“You thought I wouldn’t?”
Why hadn’t she been smart enough to let the moment play itself out without comment? “I know how you feel about . . . those things.”
“Maddy,” her mother said, “I don’t think you know how I feel about anything.”
Maddy watched as Rose pushed open the swinging doors and disappeared down the hallway.
“Where’s Grandma?” Hannah asked, clutching Priscilla to her chest. “Is she mad?”
There were times when honesty was vastly overrated. “Grandma had something to do,” she said in a lame attempt at evasion. Rose was probably searching for her Maddy Doll right now.
And a box of straight pins.
She held out her hand to Hannah. “Bathtime, kiddo.”
“You said I could watch Aladdin.”
“We watched the pretty twinkling lights instead.”
“You promised!”
“You can watch Aladdin tomorrow.”
“No! I want to watch him tonight.”
She glanced at the clock. “How about you take your bath and then we’ll see if there’s time to watch a little Aladdin.”
&nb
sp; Hannah considered her words, then put her hand in Maddy’s.
“Priscilla can’t climb the stairs,” Hannah reminded Maddy, who bent down to scoop up their extremely spoiled little dog.
“I don’t see why Priscilla can’t carry us upstairs,” Maddy said as they made their way to the third floor.
Hannah found that idea quite funny. The sound of her giggle set off little explosions of delight inside Maddy’s chest. They talked about Christmas trees and twinkly lights and how Santa managed to get so much done in one night with just a few elves to help him out. Maddy added a little lavender oil to Hannah’s bath water, and the soothing scent worked its bedtime magic on the little girl. Hannah settled for an Aladdin bedtime story and the promise of the videotape tomorrow.
“Did you say your prayers?” she asked Hannah just before she turned out the light.
Hannah nodded. “I prayed for you and Daddy and Grandma Rose and Aunt Lucy and—” She stopped, her small brow furrowed. “I can’t remember.”
“That’s okay, honey,” Maddy said, kissing her daughter’s forehead. “I can’t remember all of the aunts, either.”
Hannah’s eyes fluttered closed. Her dark lashes brushed against cheeks still baby round. She was so small, so vulnerable to every decision both good and bad that Maddy made. Maddy still remembered how it felt to be a child, to be small and powerless in a world you were too young to influence or understand. Her parents’ divorce had thrown her world into chaos, much the same way Tom’s marriage had done to Hannah. The thought that she had contributed to her little girl’s distress made her sick at heart.
Maybe she shouldn’t have given up so easily. Tom’s roots were in Washington State. His children and grandchildren lived in the Seattle area. His friends and colleagues were spread along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. He would never be happy in San Diego. At least not permanently. Why, he had probably already had his fill of sunshine and sandy beaches and was beginning to think longingly of towering pines and the Space Needle. She should have waited. She should have stayed put, bided her time, listened to her little girl and not her mother.
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