The freak factor continued from there. They actually had matching license plates on their cars. Hers said C-MKNZ. His said R-MKNZ. An excess of cuteness that made Paige want to hurl. He had a second car, an older-model Porsche 944. Shiny, black, classic. The plates on that one said WIZARD. Hah! Ego problem, much?
After lunch, he’d given her a guided tour of his studio. She’d pretended not to be impressed, but he had a real honest-to-God recording studio out there in his barn in the middle of Nowhere. The walls were lined with gold records. Paige had never seen one before, except on TV. And there was a shelf holding a half-dozen Grammy awards. All of them his. His and Casey’s. He said they were songwriting awards. And he told her a little about himself, about how he’d gone to Berklee on a scholarship, but he’d left when he met Danny Fiore and they started a band together. Paige wasn’t about to tell him that Berklee had been her dream from the time she was nine years old. The last thing she needed was for him to think she was trying to follow in his footsteps. Her music was her own private thing, totally unrelated to him. She might have inherited his musical talent, but it went no further than that.
Tonight, they were planning to parade her in front of the family like some exotic zoo animal. She could hardly wait to be forced to meet aunts and uncles and cousins and try to remember who was who. According to her stepmother, Luke and Mikey were just a year older than she was. Maybe they’d be simpatico, although she didn’t hold out much hope. If they’d grown up in this heinous place, they were probably hicks who wore muddy L.L. Bean boots and had never heard of LL Cool J.
She missed her mom so much.
Her father turned the car into the driveway of a little yellow ranch house, surrounded on three sides by cow pasture. Paige had only been in this delightful little burg for twenty-four hours, but already she’d seen enough cows to last her a lifetime. The driveway was lined with pickup trucks and 4-wheel-drive vehicles. She’d seen so many of them in the brief time she’d been in Maine that she was certain they must multiply, like rabbits, while people slept at night. Her father gathered up the stack of record albums his wife had been holding in her lap, and they all piled out of the car.
They were greeted by a dark-haired man going gray at the temples. Casey’s brother. The family resemblance was unmistakable. Behind gold-rimmed glasses, his blue eyes were lively. “Hey,” he said, “it’s the man with the music! About time you got here.” He and her father exchanged some kind of complicated handshake—one of those stupid guy things—and then he turned to her. “This must be Paige. I’m Bill. Nice to meet you.”
She shook his outstretched hand, then a smiling, matronly blonde rounded the corner of the house and bore down on them like a ship at full sail. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, slipping an arm through Paige’s. “I’m your Aunt Trish. Let me introduce you to everyone.”
Before Paige had time to blink, she was swept away to the back yard, where Trish proceeded to introduce her to more than a dozen people. There was her red-headed Aunt Rose, who was her father’s sister, and her husband, Jesse Lindstrom, who was Trish’s brother. Their infant daughter, Beth, was adorable. Next came Casey’s father and stepmother, Will and Millie Bradley, and several neighbor couples whose names escaped her. Then the cousins: Billy and his very pregnant wife, Alison; their toddler son, Willy; Ian and Jenny and Kristen Bradley who, like Billy, were Trish and Bill’s kids. Devon and Luke Kenneally, who were her Aunt Rose’s kids and, like infant Beth, her first cousins. And Mikey Lindstrom, who was Jesse’s son and crushingly handsome, with his father’s dark eyes, and hair so blond it was almost white.
She’d never be able to keep track of everyone; not only were there more names than she could retain at one time, but the relationships were so complicated that she finally gave up on trying. Everybody seemed to be related to everybody, although if she was interpreting it correctly, there were actually four families: the Bradleys, the MacKenzies, the Lindstroms, and the Kenneallys. They were just embarrassingly intermarried, like hillbillies from Appalachia.
If she stayed here for any length of time, eventually she’d probably figure it all out. For tonight, she would focus on the boys, with whom Trish had left her after the whirlwind of introductions. Mikey, because he was possibly the best-looking guy she’d ever seen, and Luke, because he seemed so familiar.
“I know you,” he said, studying her with eyes that she already recognized as the MacKenzie green. “From South Boston. We went to school together.”
That explained the familiarity. “So we’re cousins, and we never knew it? How’d you wind up here, at the end of the earth?”
“My mom married his dad.” He elbowed Mikey, who stood silently at his side, looking gorgeous but inexplicably grim. “So we moved here.”
“How do you stand it? Do you even have cable TV? We—I mean they—he and his wife—don’t. I can’t even watch MTV. All they have is the local channels.”
“It’s not so bad here. School’s okay. I’ve made a lot of friends, and Uncle Rob gives me private guitar lessons. I’ve started a band with a couple of the guys. There’s no cable TV this far out, but we have a satellite dish. You’re welcome to come over and watch it any time you want.”
Her interest was immediately piqued. “You have a band? A real band?”
“Well, we’re not playing anywhere yet except Tobey’s garage, but, yeah, we get together a couple times a week to practice.”
“What do you play?”
“Rock. Blues. A little of this, a little of that. You can come to practice with me sometime if you’d like.”
“I’d like. So where do people shop around here? I’m used to just hopping on the T to Downtown Crossing. How far is it to the nearest mall?”
The boys exchanged glances. “Girl stuff,” Luke said, and Mikey nodded agreement.
“There’s a few stores in town,” Mikey said. “Bookstore, five-and-ten, drugstore, shoe store. That kind of thing. The nearest mall is in Auburn, but it’s pretty small. If you’re looking for a real mall, you have to go to South Portland. It’s about a hundred miles.”
“Oh. My. God.”
Without warning, the stereo speakers on the deck started blaring some kind of bouncy pop song so ancient it might have come over on the Mayflower. Something about a girl crying at her own birthday party because her boyfriend took off with another chick. Why did she suspect it was one of the records he had brought with him? “What on God’s green earth is this dreck?” she asked.
“Something old,” Mikey said. “From when they were kids. The Sixties, I think.”
“Would that be the 1860s?”
The solid wall of ice that was his face thawed just a bit, and she saw it in those dark eyes: the beginnings of a smile. So he wasn’t always grim. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you put up with this crap every weekend?”
“We put in an appearance,” Luke said. “Greet everyone, have a burger or a hot dog, a little potato salad, make nice with the relatives. And then—”
“We escape,” Mikey said.
Casey
“So Chuck told him to take a long walk off a short pier.” Paula Fournier raised her beer bottle and grinned. “It was a beautiful moment.”
Paula upended the beer and chugged it, and they all laughed at her story. Casey glanced around the group of women. She’d missed this kind of female camaraderie. All those years she was married to Danny, she’d acutely felt its absence. She had been a woman living in a man’s world. Even after they bought the Malibu house and Katie came along and they settled into a fractured kind of normalcy, she’d still felt isolated, her life devoted exclusively to her husband, her daughter, her songwriting. His career. There had been no girlfriends, nobody to laugh or vent with about the trials and joys of marriage and motherhood. Nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with any of her neighbors.
Her best friend, her only real friend, had been Rob. She’d been friendly with his first wife—the four of them had lived together in New York during that b
rief marriage—and later on with Kitty Callahan, a singer she met on Danny’s first tour. But neither of those superficial relationships had ever developed into real friendship, and she hadn’t realized, until now, just how much she’d missed the company of other women.
She sensed Rob’s presence an instant before he slipped an arm around her from behind, took her hand in his, and fluidly danced her from side to side in time with the music playing on the stereo. “Excuse me, ladies,” her husband said, “but I need to borrow my wife for a second.”
At least one pair of eyes watched in appreciation as he spirited her away from the group and halted a few feet away, where they could speak privately. Over her shoulder, he glanced at the group of women. “I’m sorry to drag you away,” he said. “You looked like you were having fun. Listen, I can’t find Paige. Do you know where she is?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you. She’s not here. She left with the boys an hour ago.”
He raised both eyebrows. “You let her go off with them?”
She reached up to straighten his collar. “Stop worrying. She’s perfectly fine. Mikey and Luke are both good kids, and Mikey’s a careful driver. He won’t let anything happen to her.” At his stricken expression, she moved her hand to the back of his neck and began to rub it. “You know how bored the kids get at these gatherings. They never stick around for long.”
“I know, but it was never my kid not sticking around before.”
“She’s fifteen. Yes, we have to keep her on a leash, but unless she gives us some reason not to trust her, we want to keep that leash relatively loose. With kids, you have to choose your battles. It’s a trade-off. Giving in on the little things helps you to build up more ammunition for the big things. And believe me, there will be big things. You just have to follow your instincts, because it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between the two. But if she wants to leave an adult party to go into town for a burger with her cousins, I don’t see any reason to tell her no.”
“We have burgers right here.”
“When did you turn into such a curmudgeon? Have you forgotten what it was like to be a kid? Did you want to hang out with your adult relatives and their friends when you were fifteen?”
He sighed. “You’re right. I know you’re right. Why is it so hard to accept?”
Still rubbing his neck, she said, “It’s a heavy responsibility you’ve taken on your shoulders, the responsibility for somebody else’s life. It’s scary. Just remember, you’re not bearing it alone. I’m right here with you, taking half the load.”
He wrapped his arms around her and she rested her cheek against the front of his shirt. “I feel eyes on us,” he said. “Why are they watching us?”
She raised her face to his. “They’re just jealous because I have the hottest date here.”
He let out a soft, choked laugh. “You are so full of shit, Fiore.”
“But I made you laugh, didn’t I?”
“You did. So what’s the real reason they’re staring at us?”
“They’re just jealous because I have the hottest date here.”
He rolled his eyes. “I am not hot.”
“Oh, stop it, Mister Broken Record. You know as well as I do that women find you attractive. And they’re curious about us. It’s natural, isn’t it? The places we’ve been, the things we’ve experienced—”
“Like starvation? And cockroaches?”
“Like winning Grammy Awards. Like playing on stage in front of fifty thousand people. Like that nasty ‘R’ word you so hate.”
“What ‘R’ word?”
“Rock star. Ring a bell?”
“Damn it, woman. Now it’s my ears that are bleeding.”
“I hate to have to break it to you, my friend, but because of these things, by the standards that plague small towns like this one, you and I are considered exotic and fascinating.”
“I don’t want to be exotic and fascinating. I just want to live my life in peace. I’m just an ordinary guy.”
“Now there is where we disagree, but I’m not going to argue over it.”
He glanced over her shoulder again. “Maybe we should give ‘em something to talk about.”
“Make up your mind, Flash. You either want to be the center of attention, or you don’t.”
“I just think we should make it clear to all of these women that I’m taken.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re wearing a wedding ring.”
“Oh, of course. I forgot. Wedding rings scare off even the most predatory of women.”
“I don’t think there are too many predators in our little group. Also, lest we forget, one of those women is your sister, one is your sister-in-law, and one is my nephew’s very pregnant wife. That leaves just three possible predators.”
“Who are all looking at me like I’m their next meal. You have to save me from a fate worse than death.”
“You’re so transparent. You’re just looking to cop a feel.”
“Every chance I get.”
Inside the house, the music changed, and Lenny Welch began singing in his sweet, plaintive tenor about getting the blues most every night. Green eyes met green eyes and held a brief, wordless conversation, and there on the grass, they began swaying together in time with the music. “They’re still watching,” he said.
“And they won’t stop until you remove your hands from my butt.”
“We’re married. I can legally feel you up any time I want.”
“This reminds me of high school. They used to have this unbending rule at school dances. If a teacher couldn’t slip a sheet of paper between a couple, they were dancing too close.”
“Hunh. Too close for what?”
“Alarming social diseases. Like syphilis. And pregnancy.”
“So what you’re telling me, in your delightful roundabout way, is that we’re in danger of getting detention.”
“Exactly. And since we’re already in deep trouble anyway—” She tilted her head back, took his face between her palms, and kissed him until every nerve ending in her body was on red alert and both of them were breathing heavily. She drew back, studied his eyes, gone a soft, smoky gray. And said, “Now see what you started.”
He waggled his eyebrows and said, “We could go home early and finish it.”
“I think not.” Toying with the top button on his shirt, she said, “I’d suggest you go find something to keep yourself amused. Try not to break anything or injure yourself. When your daughter gets back, we’ll think about going home. If I determine that you’ve behaved properly, you might get to finish what you started. If not…”
“It’s off with my head.”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I can safely say that if you misbehave, you won’t be getting any tonight.”
“Guess I’d better walk the straight and narrow, then.”
“If you’re hoping to get lucky tonight, then yes, you’d better.”
“Got it, Sarge.” He clicked his heels together and saluted smartly.
“Glad we have that clarified. Now can I go back to what I was doing?”
“Only if I get to stand here and watch you walk away.”
She gave him a secretive little smile. “Letch.”
“And damn proud of it.”
She planted another quick kiss on the corner of his mouth, stepped out of his arms, and walked away without a backward glance.
But because she knew he was watching, she added a little extra sashay to her walk.
Paige
Comfortably buzzed.
That was the only way to describe how she felt. She wasn’t stupid enough to get really drunk. She knew enough to eat something first, knew she needed to pace herself, knew when it was time to stop, but she hadn’t reached that point yet. She took another swig from the bottle of Jim Beam that Luke had pilfered from his stepfather’s liquor cabinet, then handed it to him, lying beside her on the blanket at the edge of the old granite quarry. From this vantage point, wi
th the massive quarry in front of her, all that wide-open treeless space, the night sky was like a wide swath of velvet, hung heavily with stars. She’d never seen so many stars in her life, dancing across the heavens, melting into a band of white that Mikey said was the Milky Way. He’d pointed out various constellations, and when she’d asked him how he knew all this, he’d said his dad had taught him, years ago, when he was just a little boy.
Luke drank from the bottle and handed it back to her. She offered it to Mikey, sitting on her other side, but he declined. Earlier, both boys had stripped down to their skivvies and taken a swim. Mikey said the quarry was a hundred feet deep, and there were any number of things at the bottom, including a car that somebody had pushed over the edge a couple of decades ago. It was rumored that there were even a couple of skeletons down there, but Paige suspected that was nothing more than a ghost story manufactured by some horny teenage boy in the hopes of scaring his pansy-ass girlfriend into letting him get a little closer than she ordinarily would.
Paige was not a pansy-ass girl, and ghost stories didn’t scare her. To be truthful, not much scared her, but on the other hand, she didn’t have a death wish. Since she wasn’t that good a swimmer, while the boys dove and splashed, she’d stayed on the blanket, clutching the bottle and studying the stars, swatting at the occasional mosquito, enjoying the warm summer night.
She had never been a religious person. She wasn’t even sure if she believed in heaven or hell. But lying here, gazing up at that vast, star-spangled sky, she couldn’t help wondering if her mom was up there somewhere, looking down on her. If so, Sandy wasn’t pleased to see her fifteen-year-old daughter drinking whiskey straight from the bottle. She might not be surprised, but she definitely wouldn’t be pleased.
Paige took another sip. It burned all the way down, but left a comfortable warmth in her belly when it was done. She handed the bottle back to Luke. He was an okay kid, laid back and carefree and fun. Mikey, on the other hand, was an enigma. She couldn’t quite figure him out. He seemed so serious, appeared to have no interest in drinking or smoking or partying. Although, now that she thought about it, he hadn’t been the least bit fazed by her seeing him in his underwear, so he couldn’t be quite the stick-in-the-mud that he seemed.
Days Like This Page 8
