"Is your homework done?"
"Didn't get any."
"He did, too, Mom; I saw him working on it after school," Becky said with a nyah-nyah look at her brother. "Only he's too ashamed to admit it."
"What do you know, dip?"
"I know you turned down an invitation to be on the chess team, little bro."
"Chess sucks. I'd rather play Doom."
"What invitation—?"
The doorbell rang and Helen let out a little gasp, which brought an abrupt end to the haggling. "I'll get it," she said quickly.
Automatically she straightened her hair—aware too late that she'd done it in front of the kids—and left the room. She considered closing the door on them; it would be so, so much easier than having to go through introductions.
She let out a jittery sigh and went to answer the bell. Here she was, a so-called expert on child rearing, and the best she had to show for it was a boy who looked like something the cat dragged in, and a girl who considered black a pastel color.
Her kids were utterly typical; she knew that. And yet she'd give up half her soul to have them look—just for ten measly minutes—like the Brady Bunch. With a mental note to quiz Russ about the chess team invitation, Helen threw open the front door to the man who'd turned her life inside out and upside down in the course of one chicken vinaigrette.
"Hi," she said in a voice that was far too happy. "You're right on time. Come on in."
"Thanks," he said, stepping over the threshold. "It was touch and go whether I'd get out of there on time. And then that commute! It's beginning to wear thin. Tonight it felt like weeks."
It was a perfectly innocent remark, but Helen was in no mood for innocence. "You need to get a job in Salem," she said lightly.
"No, I need to get a house in Boston."
Suddenly she was like a kite in a tailspin. "Well, that's a more obvious option," she murmured, trying to sound impartial and hating every syllable of it.
"Problem is, the house was built for my great-great- grandfather. I can't imagine selling it."
They were at the door to the family room. "Come meet my brood," Helen said skittishly, "and then I'll fetch that book for you."
Helen led him inside. Her son was where she'd left him, attached to the remote control. "Russ, I'd like you to meet Nathaniel Byrne. His daughter, Katie, will be attending The Open Door this summer." She threw in the part about Katie to give Nat some kind of legitimacy in being there.
Nat said, "Hi, Russ, how's it goin'?"
Russ barely threw him a glance and a "Hi" before reimmersing himself in his movie. The sounds of blood-curdling screams would've drowned out more substantial chitchat, in any case.
"And this is Becky the Elder," Helen said, resolving to ship the TV to Goodwill as soon as Nat left.
Becky came forward with a bright smile and wide eyes. "Hi. I'm glad to meet you," she said in a way that made her mother proud.
And then, of course, Becky blew it. "Wow. You look just like the cover," she blurted.
"Excuse me?" he said.
"I mean ... wow. You really do."
"I subscribe to Mutual Fund Magazine," Helen explained. It wasn't a bad save. This way it looked like she understood financial planning.
"An overblown story," Nat said, embarrassed by either it or Becky or both. "Don't believe all you read."
He looked ill at ease. Helen said, "Well, I don't want to hold you up."
Hurrying him out of there was not what she wanted to do. All day long she'd been savoring the thought of the assignation—she thought of it as an assignation and not a parcel pickup—and now here she was, practically running him out of the house on a rail. And why? Because she was afraid to have him under the same roof with her kids for more than three minutes.
They're spoiled, she realized. They think they have sole possession of me. And I play right into those expectations.
Well, damnit, it was time for all three of them to do a little growing up.
She led Nat into her sitting room and got the book for him. He began flipping through it hungrily, like a man who thinks there's a simple formula for winning at blackjack. Helen didn't mind. She enjoyed watching him unobserved; enjoyed studying the way he furrowed his brow and chewed his lip in concentration. She wanted to say to him, "You're raising a three-year-old, silly, not Lazarus from the dead."
But the plain fact was, it was hard. The stakes were high. And the challenge only got harder. Ask any parent of teenagers.
"Would you like a cup of coffee while you do that?" she suddenly asked him.
"Hmm?" He looked up at her with an open, guileless gaze that made putty of her bones. "Yes. Thanks," he said, smiling. "If you have the time."
"I'll be right back," she said softly, suppressing an idiotic urge to grin.
She hurried to the kitchen and cleaned out the filter basket, then ground some beans to make coffee good enough to seduce him into seconds. Becky walked in at the height of the noise and said over it, "He is so—"
Instantly Helen stopped grinding.
''—cute!"
"Shhh," Helen hissed in horror. "For God's sakes, put a sock in it, would you?"
"Ooo, I'm sorry," Becky said, matching her mother's whisper. "He seems younger than forty. I could go out with someone like him. I really could," she said in a silky sigh.
"I think Michael is plenty old for you," Helen said, shuddering at her daughter's fantasy for more reasons than one.
"Oh, Michael." Becky compressed her lips in a pretty pout. "Michael's a boy."
"And you're a girl. You match. Besides, the earth revolved around him as recently as yesterday," said Helen, flipping the brew switch on the coffeemaker.
"And today I found out he asked Chelsea to homecoming. Do you think he'd buy a raffle ticket?" Becky asked. "Mr. Byrne, I mean?"
"Leave the poor man be."
"What's the prize?" came a voice from behind them.
Both heads swung in unison. Nat Byrne, book in hand, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, an amused smile on his face. It was anyone's guess how much he'd heard.
Becky had the decency to blush; but that didn't last long. Warming to the idea of a sale, she said promptly, "First prize is a propane barbecue and a resin patio set. Six chairs and a picnic-sized table with adjustable feet, and two little tables. And an umbrella in your choice of three colors, either solid or stripes. With a base, of course. And nothing will ever need painting!"
Nat nodded, suitably impressed. Helen pictured the plastic chairs in the exquisitely understated elegance of his brick-walled garden with its ancient vines and weeping specimen trees, and had to repress a shudder.
"Since I don't have time to paint," Nat said with a deadpan face, "I guess I'd better buy a couple of tickets. How much?"
"Five dollars each. By 'a couple,' do you mean two or do you mean three?" asked Becky, hawking shamelessly.
He smiled again. "Say, three."
He reached into his suit jacket and took out a slender billfold. Besides a Platinum credit card or two, Helen doubted that it held much. No photographs, no unfiled receipts. Just the essentials to get through situations like these.
He handed Becky a twenty. She said, "Oh, sorry, I don't have any change."
"Let's call it four tickets and we'll be even, then," he said with a wry look.
"Rebecca!" her mother said sharply. "Bring me my bag. I'll find the the change."
"Mother—we already have a deal. Thanks, Mr. Byrne. I'll get the tickets for you," Becky said, and she bounced out of the kitchen.
Nat turned to Helen and said, "Remind me to offer her a job when she graduates. She'd make a helluva broker."
"She's never been shy," Helen noted dryly.
"Is that what Russ is?"
So Nat had noticed the short shrift he'd got from her son. But then, he'd have to have been in a coma not to. Helen turned away to retrieve a couple of mugs from the cupboard. "You know how boys are at that age," she said vaguely.
"I thought I did, having been one myself," Nat answered. "But I don't remember the ... hostility."
Helen winced, then turned to him and said in an upbeat but lowered voice, "It's all a front, really. Behind that tough-guy facade is a soft little marshmallow."
She filled one mug, then set it on a wooden tray along with cream and sugar as Nat pondered her words. He surprised her with his next question: "Do you date much?"
"For goodness' sakes, why do you ask?" she said in a ridiculously carefree voice. In the meantime she misjudged the distance between the coffee decanter and the second mug, smacking the glass on the rim of the cup. The decanter didn't shatter, but the crack made it unusable. New decanter: twenty dollars. Now they were even.
"Okay, it's none of my business," he admitted. "I just thought that maybe ... you know ... he wasn't crazy about having father-age figures around. That he might have a problem with it."
"None that I know of," she said, which was true, as far as it went. She hadn't dated at all. How could she know how Russell would react? She added softly, "You're only borrowing a book, Nat."
He was embarrassed by the implicit reproach. "You're right, you're right. Too much Oedipal theory. It's your fault," he said, rallying. "You're the one who lent me the books."
She laughed at that and the moment passed. After that she took him back to her sitting room, the most private room in the house. It was Helen's sanctuary, a place where generally she was left undisturbed.
Or not. Before they had taken two sips of coffee, before they had decided on an arbitrary topic of conversation, Becky was back with the raffle tickets.
"Here they are," she said, thrusting them at him. "The drawing is in three weeks."
He took them and slid them into his wallet. "Would it be impolite to ask who benefits?" he asked gravely.
"No, it wouldn't be impolite," said Becky, giggling. She plopped down on the big tufted hassock that sat between the deep-cushioned chairs that held her mother and him.
"It's for the soccer team," she explained. "We need new uniforms and jackets and stuff ... and, like, one of the girls has a dad who owns a hardware store, and he agreed to donate the prizes. We thought it would be easier than a bake sale. Nobody knows how to bake."
"More's the pity," said Helen to her daughter's back. "It would give you something to do evenings."
But Becky wasn't taking the hint. She wanted to talk, and talk she did—about the team's record, about the team's chances, about the team's last and best game. After that she felt at ease enough to tell Nat all about the injury she suffered a year earlier when someone kicked her—absolutely accidentally—in the kidney. But now all the doctor's restrictions were off and she was back to being a goalie again. And she baby-sat when she wasn't playing soccer or meeting with the French Club or prowling the malls. She was really a very busy person.
Except tonight. Nat, having drunk his coffee, stood up at the first instant that could reasonably be considered a pause and thanked Helen for the book and for the coffee, and then beat it.
Helen was, to put it mildly, in a state. She had raised her daughter to be politer than that. She marched through the front hail back to the sitting room where Becky was sitting, still on the hassock, with her head in her hands. Becky looked up when her mother came in.
"Mom! Why didn't you stop me? It was like, I couldn't shut up. I started and then I just kept going. He made me feel so nervous! I could die. I could just. . . die." She dropped her head back onto her hands.
Preempted of her lecture, Helen said, "It's probably because we don't often have visitors who're so cute."
Becky moaned. "Do you think he heard me?"
"I think his daughter in Switzerland heard you."
"Don't say that!"
Helen ended up by feeling sorry for her inexperienced, impressionable daughter. Putting aside her own feeling of being robbed of a treat, she said, "I guarantee that he didn't notice you were acting goofy. You sounded just like any other sixteen-year-old. Just don't do it again. After all, normally you sound like an eighteen-year-old."
It was the right thing to say. Reassured that on her worst day she was still a cut above average, Becky kissed her mother and went to her room, probably to record the entire humiliation in her diary.
And later, when Helen was in her nightgown and almost asleep, Becky knocked softly on the door and came inside and sat in the dark on her mother's bed.
"So why did he come, if not for the book?" she whispered.
"He came for the book."
"No, really, Mom. You two acted like old friends."
"Friends! How could you possibly tell? We hardly got a word in edgewise."
"But when you did. You just seemed to know each other. To trust each other."
Which is exactly how Helen had felt. "I ... suppose it's because we have Katie's interests in common," she said, hedging.
"Is that how it is when you meet someone right? You feel like old friends without hardly knowing each other?"
"Becky." Helen reached for her daughter's hand in the dark, and then she sighed. "Yes, honey. That's something how it would be like."
"Is that how it was when you met Dad?"
"Oh, well, with your dad it was entirely different."
"Different, how?"
"For one thing, he was available," Helen said, smiling.
"Mr. Byrne is available."
"Mr. Byrne is in mourning."
"He didn't look in mourning. He looked perfectly normal."
"Men don't show their grief the way women do."
"Maybe they don't grieve the way women do."
"Maybe."
"Maybe they don't grieve at all."
It was a startling hypothesis from one so young.
"I suppose the cruel ones don't," Helen admitted. "The cold ones. The con-men—"
"And the murderers. The serial killers."
"Now we're talking nonsense. My point is, Mr. Byrne came by because he wants to be a better father. Not because—"
"Of you? I think he came by because of you."
"Well, you think wrong. Go to bed, honey. I'm beat.
Chapter 12
It was just as she feared: He never looked better.
Peaches Bartholemew, dressed to kill in a suit of rust silk, smiled and waved and then said to Katie, "Here comes Daddy, sweetheart!"
She released Katie's hand as Nathaniel Byrne emerged into the SWISS AIR boarding area, and the child went running into her father's outstretched arms. He scooped her up in a high-flying arc before hugging her to him. She squealed with pleasure as he laughed and called her funny names like Katie-Bobbaroo and Little Swiss Miss.
Someone's got her clutches in him, Peaches decided as she walked up to her employer. He looked happier, younger, altogether more lively than the day he'd left Zurich three weeks earlier.
She hardly had to ask herself who it might be.
"You're looking fit," she said as they got close. She managed to position herself so that he couldn't shake her hand. But her cheek was available to be kissed and that's what he did, quite without awkwardness, which made her think, again, that he was feeling much more at ease than before.
Still grinning, he said, "You look pretty darn spiffy yourself. That color suits you."
As well it should. Peaches had spent a great deal of time and money in the couture shops of Zurich, outfitting herself for the coming campaign. Her shell of blue silk, in a shade that flattered the rust, had been shipped from Paris expressly for her.
She blushed prettily and said, "I spent a little mad money during my stay here. I hope you don't mind lugging the extra parcels back with us on Sunday."
"Not at all," he said, but his attention was on his daughter. "Are you having a good time at Nana's?"
"Sometimes I am," Katie said dutifully. She studied the well-loved teddy bear that she clutched in one arm. "But sometimes I'm sad."
"Oh? Katie-bear, sad? That's not right."
"Because I want
to come home."
She laid her head on her father's shoulder in an inexpressibly poignant way. The effect it had on him was profound. He sighed deeply and laid his hand on his daughter's cheek, and smoothed the brown curls that had tumbled over her forehead. "And that's where we're going, darling," he said, kissing her soft pink cheek. "Home. As soon as we get you packed."
With his free hand he slung his carry-on bag over his shoulder, and they fell in with the rest of the smartly dressed passengers moving through the pristine international airport.
Nat had a hundred different questions for his daughter; but Katie would not be drawn out about her vacation at Nana's. Her answers, when they came, were in languid monosyllables.
Nat turned to Peaches and said over his daughter's droopy head, "She's over the flu, no?"
"Definitely. No temperature, no symptoms. She was running around like a monkey all morning long," Peaches added in a lie. "I expect she's worn herself out, that's all."
Or maybe she's tired after the nightmares about witches all night.
"So how are things back in Salem? You've been busy?" Peaches said, changing the subject.
"Yeah, the usual," he said, obviously distracted. "Sweetie?" he murmured, cocking his head to meet his daughter's averted gaze. "Are you all right?"
Katie shrugged uncertainly.
He laid the palm of his hand against her forehead. "You feel okay. Hmmm. Do you think if we stopped for an ice cream, that it would perk us all up?"
Katie sighed and said, "Maay-be."
Reassured, he smiled and said, "I think maybe it would, too." He turned and winked at Peaches, convinced that he'd managed to turn his daughter's spirits around.
Peaches smiled back. He was so naive.
****
Three days without him. Presumably it could be done. On Friday night Helen worked late at home. On Saturday morning, she cleaned out her closet and made Russ and Becky do the same. On Saturday afternoon she boxed everything up for the Salvation Army and made a list of it all for her accountant. On Sunday afternoon she went antiquing on Pickering Wharf and came home with a set of silver butter knives and, for her aunt Mary, a pair of Victorian needlepoint pillows. On Sunday evening she dragged the kids off to a restaurant with their great-aunt to celebrate her seventy-fourth birthday. On Sunday night she drank a tall glass of warm milk to help her fall asleep quickly, so that she'd be all rested for Monday.
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