Take the Long Way Home

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Five

  The shop’s front door was locked, but lights glowed inside. Quinn rapped the door gently with his knuckles. At one time, he would have been able to make more noise tapping the glass with his bulky high school ring. He’d worn it religiously from the day he’d received it, two months into his senior year at Brogan’s Point High, until the disaster a year later that had sent him to the hospital, dizzy with the understanding that the life he’d been living up to that moment, the life he’d expected to keep living for the next couple of decades, was over.

  Now that he was performing surgery, a ring would only get in his way. He needed to be nimble, his surgical gloves as snug as skin on his hands.

  High school was a decade behind him. And he had to admit that the ring, with its clunky engraving flanking a garish chunk of faceted blue glass, had been pretty ugly. But the most important reason he no longer wore the ring was that Ashley had given it to him. He couldn’t afford the hundred-fifty-buck price tag, but she’d insisted that, as a star athlete and class leader, he had to have a ring. She’d bought one for herself and one for him.

  They’d almost seemed like pre-engagement rings. Back then, he and Ashley had been a capital-C Couple, destined for ’til-death-do-us-part.

  The decade between when Ashley had given him his class ring and today felt more like a century. Everything that had occurred ten years ago had been a part of some other life, happening to some other Quinn.

  Peering through the front window, he saw a shadow flicker across the glass pane, and then Maeve loomed into view, entering the store from a back room, circling the counter and crossing to the door. She wore a white apron over a long-sleeved tee and a pair of jeans. Smiling hesitantly, she tugged a clip out of her hair, letting it spill loose past her shoulders as she reached for the door, twisted a bolt, and pulled it open. “I didn’t want to leave it unlocked at this hour,” she explained before he could say hello. “I’m here all alone.”

  Oh, God. The aroma.

  He stepped inside and inhaled so deeply, his lungs felt as if they’d burst. The shop smelled like heaven. It smelled like…home.

  At one time in his life, locker rooms were his home. He’d enter one and his nose would welcome the heavy, sour smell of sweat and mud and testosterone. When he was in a locker room, he knew not just where he was but who he was. Ashley used to bathe herself in flowery scents, perfume or bath oil or whatever, and he used to want to say, “Don’t bother. I like the smell of dirty socks.”

  His being a jock wasn’t the only reason he’d always appreciated smells others might find offensive. His father was a fisherman. Quinn’s earliest memories were of his father coming home from a day, or sometimes several days, out at sea on a trawler. He’d smell of cod and the Atlantic, of rubber boots and grease. Some might consider it a bad smell, or at least a strong one, but it had been the smell of his father, the smell of a safe homecoming.

  Then, of course, Quinn’s athletic talent had taken over, and the small, shingled ranch house where the Connors family had lived filled with competing fragrances: his father’s work clothes and boots, and Quinn’s cleats, pads, and jerseys. Healthy smells, he’d always thought. Both he and his father bathed frequently, washed their hair, made use of deodorants and aftershave. But underlying those clean smells were the riper, muskier scents of manhood, of hard work and pride.

  Lately, hospital smells were his life: alcohol, iodine, pine-scented antiseptic cleaning agents. Also blood and bile, the stink of illness—although as an orthopedist, he dealt more often with injuries than with disease. But he liked the hospital smells, too. They were smells of healing, recovering, journeying back to wholeness.

  Now this: the smell of cookies baking. Not just cookies—Maeve Nolan’s cookies.

  He’d smelled baking before. His mother threw together an occasional cake or pie on birthdays and at Thanksgiving, and Ashley had made cookies for him all through high school—it was a cheerleader tradition to bake for the football players, although she’d confessed to him that her cookies were made using mixes. He’d eaten the treats she’d baked for him, though. They’d tasted fine. In those days, he’d always been trying to gain weight. Eating whatever Ashley fed him had been a good way to do that.

  The smell in Maeve Nolan’s cookie store was different. He smelled spices he couldn’t name. He smelled a rich, buttery fragrance and the dark perfume of molasses. Chocolate. Vanilla. Honey.

  Maeve’s store should not smell like home to him. But he couldn’t shake idea that it was home. This smell—the complex of sweet and bitter aromas, the warmth of it, the mouth-watering glory of it—this was home.

  Damn. Just breathing here turned him on.

  It had to be the smell that was making him hard. It couldn’t be Maeve. Today, like yesterday, she had a blotch of flour on her chin. She was taller than average, kind of thin, her shoulders slumped and her freshly liberated hair limp around a face that exuded weariness more than delight at seeing him. Then again, why should she be delighted to see him? He wasn’t sure why he was here, either.

  Except...it was home.

  “Why don’t you wash up, and then we can grab a bite,” he suggested gently.

  “Am I a mess?” The smile that flashed across her face was like lightning—fleeting but blindingly bright. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  She vanished into the back room, leaving him to explore the shop. She’d made some changes since he’d been there yesterday. More prices were listed on the whiteboard behind the counter. The shelves inside the glass cases were decorated with lacy white paper. A napkin dispenser stood on the counter near the register, and another one, along with linen-lined straw baskets filled with sugar packets and stirrers, occupied a small table against the wall.

  He’d enjoyed the coffee she had given him yesterday. Everyone thought Riley’s served the best coffee in town, but Maeve might give the diner its first real local competition among caffeine addicts.

  She returned to the front of the store much sooner than he’d expected. Ashley would have taken at least fifteen minutes, styling her hair, touching up her make-up, whatever it was that women spent so much time doing when they were in the bathroom. Maeve had washed her face—the flour was gone and her cheeks appeared damp. She hadn’t applied any make-up, though, and her hair, while nominally neater, just hung there, framing her face with straight strands of pale brown and dark blond. Her apron was gone and she carried a canvas tote bag. Her jeans sagged slightly at the knees, and her leather sneakers were scuffed and worn. She’d donned a hoodie that might have once been navy blue but was now faded to gray, the zipper drawn halfway up. “I’m done,” she announced, another lightning-bright smile flashing across her face. “It’s been a long day.”

  A long day for him, too. He’d started his shift at six a.m. By seven, he’d been in the ER, setting the broken radius of a nine-year-old who’d fallen off her bike on her way to school, then doing rounds, then assisting in two knee replacements. Meetings, more rounds, another pass through the ER to examine an X-ray and tape a broken toe, and admitting a middle school kid who’d suffered a nasty fracture of his femur during a Pop Warner practice. Football was a crazy, dangerous sport, he’d thought as he’d explained to the kid how, once the swelling decreased a little, he would perform surgery to bolt the bone together. If Quinn had a son, he’d steer him toward baseball, basketball, or soccer. Hell, even ice hockey was safer than football.

  Maeve’s shop, with its divine atmosphere, seemed like the safest place on earth. He could happily skip dinner and remain there, getting high on the smell. But he’d invited Maeve to eat with him, so he ought to offer her some food. “It’s kind of late for a big dinner,” he said as he held the door open for her. Its bell sounded far too cheerful for this late hour, when both he and Maeve were dragging butt from their long, demanding days. “How does a lobster roll at the Lobster Shack sound to you?”

  “Great,” she said, hesitating in the doorway. “My car is parked in
back.”

  “Let’s take my car,” he said. His Subaru was a battered old clunker, but as long as he was street-parking in Boston, he wasn’t going to invest in anything fancier. If she didn’t like it, that was her problem.

  He had the feeling Maeve wouldn’t care how new or elegant his car was. Her father didn’t own a bunch of automobile dealerships. She wasn’t Ashley.

  He had to stop thinking about Ashley, comparing the two women. One wore make-up, one didn’t. One was into pricy vehicles, and the other, he suspected, didn’t give a shit about cars, as long as they got her where she needed to go. He wasn’t with the rich, chic lady tonight—and probably never would be again. He was with the shy, decidedly un-chic lady. The high school whack-job. The woman who filled her shop with an aroma that could make a strong man fall to his knees and weep in ecstasy.

  He chuckled to himself at that image. Maeve shot him a quick, puzzled look, then settled into the passenger seat of his car and let him shut the door for her.

  The drive to the Lobster Shack took only a couple of minutes. They could have walked there, if it hadn’t been so late and the moon had been a little brighter.

  The restaurant, a squat, rough-hewn structure on one of the docks, was nearly empty at this hour on a weeknight. The hostess waved at the vacant tables and told them to take their pick. Maeve glanced at Quinn, allowing him to choose. He headed for a table against a wall near the back, telling himself he hadn’t selected the out-of-the-way table out of a desire to remain unnoticed. If someone came into the restaurant and recognized him, and word got back to Ashley that he was having dinner with Maeve Nolan, so what? For one thing, Ashley had no claim on him. For another, it wasn’t as if he and Maeve were involved or anything. Spur-of-the-moment lobster rolls at the Lobster Shack at nine-thirty p.m. didn’t qualify as a date.

  If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to say why he’d asked Maeve to see him tonight or what exactly was going on between them, other than “Take the Long Way Home.” As soon as the old rock song had started playing at the Faulk Street Tavern a couple of days ago, he’d felt drawn to her, connected to her in some way. He couldn’t explain it, and right now, as tired and hungry as he was, he didn’t want to. He just wanted to eat something and see if he could coax another electrifying smile out of her.

  They ordered lobster rolls, and he asked for a beer. “Just an iced tea,” she said when he suggested she reward herself for a hard day’s labor with something a little stronger. “Three sips of beer and I’ll fall asleep.”

  “What were you doing in the shop all day?”

  “Testing the machinery. Testing the timing. Making sure everything will bake properly.”

  “You’ve got a bunch of home-made cookies stashed somewhere? The display cases were empty. If they hadn’t been, I probably would have suggested we skip the lobster rolls and pig out on dessert.”

  A faint half-smile crossed her lips. “I’ve got some cookies I can give you if you’d like, when you take me back to get my car. Tomorrow I’ll start baking inventory for good, but today was just a series of test runs.” That was probably the most words she’d ever said to him at one time. When the subject was her store, she came alive. “My father stopped by during the afternoon and took some cookies with him. He said he was going to share them with his buddies at work, but I bet he ate them all himself.”

  Her smile widened. When Maeve gave herself over fully to a smile, Quinn’s temperature rose ten degrees. He smiled back at her, enjoying the warmth, enjoying the twitch in his groin. As exhausted as he was, certain parts of him seemed wide awake in Maeve’s company.

  “Your dad’s a cop, right?”

  Her eyebrows fluttered in surprise. “A police detective, yes. How did you know that?”

  “Everyone in high school knew your dad was a cop. Didn’t you ever wonder why no one ever offered you a joint?”

  She shrugged and unfolded her paper napkin. “I assumed it was because I pretty much stuck to myself.”

  That was a nice way of saying she’d been an outcast. But then, maybe she hadn’t felt like an outcast. Maybe she’d felt that being alone was her choice, not the result of everyone steering clear of her.

  “We were all terrified that if we drank or lit a spliff in front of you, your dad would find out and arrest us. Or, in my case, get me kicked off the football team.”

  Her eyebrows popped up again. “Terrified? You were terrified of me?”

  The waitress arrived with their drinks and a plastic basket filled with rolls. Their lobster rolls would come with bread, and Quinn ate a lot less now than he used to. Maeve, on the other hand, could use a few more pounds on her bony frame. Clearly, she wasn’t eating enough of her cookies. A roll slathered in butter might help.

  She only sipped her iced tea, her eyes steady on him, the gold in her multicolored irises glinting like metal fibers.

  He gazed back at her. Yeah, he’d been terrified of her in high school, the way kids were always terrified of anyone who was different from them. He hadn’t given her much thought back then, but on the rare occasions he did, it was to figure out ways to avoid her. She was odd, a freak. To a shallow, self-involved guy determined to maintain his position at the top of the school’s social pyramid, anyone who strayed from the normal posed a threat.

  “You were kind of scary,” he allowed, hoping she wouldn’t be insulted.

  She laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He sipped his beer. The old Quinn would have assured her that he was. He would have smoothed out the moment, sidestepping the treacherous path of honesty. But he was a better person now, or at least he was trying to be. “I didn’t really know you in high school,” he said, stating the obvious. “But you were…different. You were the Other. Just by being different, you were a challenge to all of us who were trying so hard not to be different.”

  Her smile faded, her expression growing reflective as she leaned back in her chair and regarded him. She said nothing.

  “What?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Just…you’re kind of deeper than I expected.”

  Okay. She was doing honesty, too. This dinner could wind up being disastrous, or very interesting. Possibly both. “You thought I was a dumb jock?”

  “Well…yes.” Her smile softened the insult.

  He smiled, too. “I was a jock. Not as dumb as I came across.” Another sip of beer. “Not as dumb as I thought I was.”

  The waitress arrived with their orders—long, thick cylinders of toasted bread heaped with mountains of chunky lobster salad, baskets of French fries glistening with salt and oil, and bowls of cole slaw. Maeve’s eyes widened with delight as she surveyed the feast. “I am so hungry,” she said, then popped a fry into her mouth, chewed, and sighed happily.

  He suppressed a laugh. In all the years he’d known Ashley, he had never once heard her admit to being hungry. She was always foisting half her meal on him, urging him to eat her fries, passing him chunks of her sandwich. He’d appreciated her slim figure, but he’d always suspected there was something more than weight-watching behind her refusal to acknowledge her hunger. It was as if she thought admitting she wanted to eat was unladylike, or unclassy, or unattractive.

  Maeve wrapped her hands around her sandwich and lifted it off the plate. Chunks of lobster spilled out of the bread as she took a bite. She chewed, swallowed, and released another contented sigh. “So,” she said, “tell me how smart you are.”

  It almost sounded like a dare. If she’d thought he was dumb, he’d thought she was meek. Obviously, they’d both been mistaken. “I’m a doctor,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound boastful.

  She looked impressed. He shouldn’t have been so pleased by that. “I didn’t know doctors worked such lousy hours. Aren’t you supposed to be on a golf course?”

  He chuckled and dug into his lobster roll. “I’m a resident in orthopedics at Mass General. The hours are better than last year, when I was a first-year intern. But they still suck.”


  “I always figured you’d be playing football professionally,” she said.

  “A lot of people figured that,” he agreed. “At one time, I did, too.” He washed down a few fries with a swallow of beer. “Fate, in the form of a three hundred twenty pound tackle, had other plans for me.”

  She shook her head. “A tackle? Those are the guys who knock people over, right? I don’t know much about football.”

  He found her ignorance refreshing. “Lots of people knock lots of people over in football. This particular tackle knocked me over. Fifth game of the season at Michigan. First game I’d started. I was a freshman, but our starting quarterback was having a lousy season, so the coach thought he’d shake things up by putting me in. I was having a decent game until I got sacked.” At her perplexed look, he clarified. “That’s when someone from the other team knocks the quarterback over. This tackle dislocated my patella—my kneecap—and broke my tibia. That’s the shin bone.”

  She winced. “It must have been painful.”

  “It didn’t hurt too bad. God bless morphine.” He ate some more. “I was out for the season, but after my leg healed, I could have gone back to playing. The doctors, though, and the nurses, the therapists—they were such amazing people. I was in awe of them, in a way I’d never been in awe of athletes. They worked miracles. They did something meaningful. I decided I wanted to do something meaningful, too.”

  “That’s quite a turnaround,” she said.

  “It was crazy.” He smiled, remembering how crazy everyone had thought it was. He’d had to start enrolling in real classes, not the easy-A courses designed for football players. He’d had to bust his ass studying. He’d had to give up his athletic scholarship at the University of Michigan, although he’d managed to change his legal residency to Ann Arbor so he could pay in-state tuition, and fortunately, he’d qualified for need-based financial aid.

  His parents had been shocked. His father, especially, had taken enormous pride in Quinn’s gridiron prowess, and both his parents had assumed he would wind up earning millions of dollars in the NFL. They’d supported him in his decision to change direction, but to this day, they still didn’t understand it.