The Women in Joe Sullivan's Life

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I was thinking of somewhere a little quieter. Like the Velvet Turtle on MacArthur,” he suggested. Because she looked as if she would feel better as long as he kept it on a professional level, he handed her his business card. His home phone was on it. “Here’s my card.”

  Christine looked up at him. “You gonna eat on a turtle, Uncle Joe?”

  Joe’s eyes skimmed over Maggie. He knew he wanted to see more of her, a lot more of her. The article was one reason, but it wasn’t the only one. His interest had been aroused the moment he had looked at her. “If I have to.”

  Maggie closed her hand over the card he gave her. “I’ll get back to you.”

  He smiled into her eyes just before he herded the girls out. “Please do.”

  His words hung in the air long after he’d left.

  Chapter Three

  Joe sighed and pushed himself away from his desk. The wheels of his chair snagged on the carpet, bringing him to an abrupt, jolting halt like a rider atop a stubborn horse that refused to go where he directed it. It was par for the course. The article wasn’t going the way he wanted it to, either. Joe rose and shifted, realigning the wheels.

  Sitting down again, he stared at the computer screen, frowning. Holes. There were large, gaping holes in this piece. He scrubbed a hand wearily over his face. Holes big enough to drive a moving van through and still have room for a circus truck to pass alongside it.

  He reread the article he’d been working on since yesterday afternoon, scrolling down and hoping that it was actually better than he thought it was. It wasn’t. If anything, it was worse.

  He hated it. It read like an amateur piece found in some fawning, mindless magazine that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Certainly not the price of an issue. He wasn’t looking to write an exposé, he just wanted to write a piece with substance. With teeth. A piece that you came away from knowing something. Not an article that read like lightweight fluff.

  If he blew on it, it would probably float away.

  Joe leaned back in his chair and rocked slowly, thinking. He needed more. A great deal more. He needed, he thought, what Maggie McGuire was hiding. Her past. Her childhood. Herself.

  He flicked his thumb and forefinger at the white screen, discounting what was there. This was about as personal as a disposable plastic glove.

  Sounds of infighting and squabbling vibrated into the open room. Joe groaned. He attempted to ignore it as he reached for the telephone. As of yet, there’d been no answers to the ad he had placed for a nanny. Not a single one. He wondered if nannies had suddenly fallen out of fashion or if he was just running a spate of bad luck. As soon as he had a chance, he was going to have to intensify his efforts to find one. He wasn’t asking for much. Just someone with the patience of a saint and the endurance of General Schwarzkopf.

  At the very least.

  The commotion grew louder. He turned toward the doorway. “Girls, I’m working in here.”

  He’d only managed to tap out two numbers on the telephone keypad before Sandy, Christine and Jennifer came rushing into the room like the high tide, surrounding him on all three sides. For the rest of his life, he thought, they were going to outnumber him.

  Joe sighed as Christine, always grasping for center stage, scrambled onto his knee as if he were a sofa, solely there for her use. He placed his arm around her before she had a chance to grab his shirt to steady herself on his lap.

  “That wasn’t an invitation to come in,” he protested.

  Christine looked at him innocently. “What’s an in—an in—what you said?”

  Sandy stood behind his chair, her mouth drawn in a customary somber line. She didn’t laugh like the others, he thought. Two months and she still rarely smiled. She understood more than her sisters.

  Her eyes held his now. “It means he doesn’t want us.”

  The solemnity of the words jolted through him. “No,” Joe corrected her quickly, firmly.

  He placed his free hand on Sandy’s shoulder, hoping that physical contact would somehow unlock the door and allow him to get through to her. Damn, but this was all so hard, so new to him. He kept tripping himself up when he least wanted to. His niece was hurting and he didn’t know how to reach her.

  “It doesn’t mean I don’t want you. I do want you, very much. Just not here in this room while I’m working.” He searched her eyes to make certain that she understood the difference and was only half satisfied that she did. “It means I want you to be quiet.” He looked around at all three faces. “Do you know what quiet is?”

  Jennifer nodded just as she accidentally knocked down his crystal paperweight. It clattered against his metal wastebasket but miraculously didn’t break. “No noise.”

  “Right. No noise.” Shifting Christine onto the top of his desk, he leaned over to pick up the paperweight. He set it back on his desk, out of the reach of Jennifer and any further accidents. “Do you think you can make no noise for a while?”

  Christine frowned and shook her head. She looked at her uncle as if he was babbling nonsense. “How can you make no noise? If you ‘make it,’ there has to be noise.”

  Joe laughed. He was going to be in big trouble once Christine began dating. “You I’m running for Congress.”

  He kissed her cheek and set Christine on the floor. He was aware of Sandy shifting farther back, making more room for her sister than the girl could possibly need.

  Christine was still mulling over her uncle’s words. She frowned, unable to come to a decision on her own. “Is that good?”

  He liked the fact that they had such open, thirsty minds, but he wished they weren’t so thirsty just now. He drew the telephone toward him again. “That depends on your point of view.”

  “View,” Christine repeated as if she was literally digesting the word. It struck a chord. “Like what we did with that lady yesterday? Maggie,” she added in case her uncle forgot.

  “That was an interview.” If he wasn’t careful, he could lose an entire day like this. While he felt that it was ultimately good for the girls that they had moved in during the summer, giving them all time to adjust to the situation, he found himself really longing for fall and school. At least then he would have a chunk of the day to himself to get his work done.

  “Look, girls, I really have to do some work here. I don’t have time to play dictionary right now.” They looked at him with wide, lustrous eyes full of questions. He cast around helplessly. “Isn’t Big Bird on somewhere?” he asked Sandy. He had a cable television hookup with at least forty available channels. One of them had to be carrying a children’s program.

  Sandy didn’t seem to hear the question. Her attention had been cornered by something else he had said. “When can we see her again?”

  Her voice was so soft, Joe almost didn’t hear her. He looked at Sandy, wondering what she was talking about. “Who?”

  “That lady,” Christine jumped in. “The one we saw yesterday. Maggie. The innerview.”

  “Interview.” That was all Maggie McGuire would need, having them descend on her en masse again. “And we’re not. At least—” he glanced at the screen and the article he was struggling with “—you’re not.”

  As if they were somehow invisibly connected, all three small, round faces drooped simultaneously. She certainly must have made one hell of an impression on them, Joe decided. She’d made one on him, as well. A lady like that…

  A lady like that was very good at being elusive and he needed more, he reminded himself. A writer was only as good as his next piece, which meant that so far, he wasn’t very good.

  “We’ll talk about this later, okay?” He reached for the telephone.

  Christine placed a hand over his, a little queen stopping a lowly subject. “But we’re not on that, Uncle Joe. You can talk to us here, silly.”

  Joe remembered all the hard times he had inadvertently given his mother while he was growing up. It was too late to make amends. Mentally, he asked her forgiveness as he struggled for p
atience. He doubted that the girls understood that they were driving him crazy.

  “I meant later. Right now, I have to talk to her. Maggie,” he put in for their benefit. “Okay with you?”

  Christine nodded. “Okay with me.”

  “Say hi!” Jennifer instructed eagerly. She grinned from ear to ear. “I like her.”

  Unable to help himself, he ruffled Jenny’s hair. She curved into his hand like a small kitten responding to warmth. “I’ll be sure to tell her that.” He laughed. The cursor continued to blink demandingly on the screen, calling his attention back to it and his call. “Sandy, can you take the girls to the family room for me?”

  The sweetness and light faded from Christine’s face as storm clouds moved in. “She’s not the boss of me.” She jerked away when Sandy placed a hand on her shoulder.

  By the time he did find a nanny for these girls, he was going to be worn-out and gray. “No, but I am and I’d like you to go to the family room for now. Turn something on. Watch TV.”

  Sandy nodded solemnly as she took Jenny’s hand in hers. Not wanting to be outdone, or to appear as if she had capitulated, Christine flounced out before her sisters like a drum majorette leading a small parade.

  Joe looked after them with no small measure of surprise. They were actually listening. In a way. A self-satisfied grin began to spread across his face as he settled back before the computer again.

  “How about that?” he muttered in awe. “It worked. Maybe I can get the hang of this yet.” The sound of small voices raised in a fresh argument floated back to him. He sighed. “And then again, maybe not.”

  He knew that he could rely on Christine to come running to him if any serious fighting broke out. A born informant, she enjoyed reporting on any of her sisters’ wrongdoings. It was a perverse method, but at least it kept him on top of things. The girls were all basically good, just a little hyper. Or maybe, with the exception of Sandy, a lot.

  Joe flipped through a sheaf of papers before finding the card he was looking for. Placing it on the desk in front of him, he tapped out the telephone number to Maggie’s office.

  It barely had time to ring once before Joe heard the receiver being lifted. “Ms. McGuire’s office.”

  He pictured the dour-looking secretary. Frowning, he tried his best to sound gracious. “May I speak to her, please? This is Joe Sullivan.” He heard the woman exhale loudly, as if taking the call had interrupted something of monumental importance. “It concerns our interview.”

  “Yes, I gathered that.” She paused long enough for Joe to think that the connection had been lost. “I’m sorry, but Ms. McGuire is not in at the moment.”

  Her words were said entirely without emotion. He felt that he might as well be conversing with his computer. Joe wondered if the long pause was just for his benefit, or if she had checked with Maggie to see if the woman wanted to take the call.

  Diplomatically, he forged on. “I see. And what moment will she be in?”

  “It’s difficult to say. Why don’t I send along some more brochures for you to look at?”

  He hadn’t encountered resistance like this since his college days and the time that he had worked on a “tell all” magazine for the summer. The pieces hadn’t been satisfying, but the experience had taught him to develop a tough hide. Maggie was stonewalling him. Her secretary had obviously been instructed to give him the runaround until he retreated.

  It only served to reinforce his feelings that, despite her permission, Maggie McGuire didn’t really want to be interviewed. That made him all the more interested in pursuing the interview.

  Adrenaline began to pump as he smelled a story. “Sure, why not? Let me give you my address.”

  “I’ll just direct it to your attention and forward it to the magazine,” Ada countered.

  She hung up before he had a chance to agree.

  Joe let the receiver drop back into the cradle, far from satisfied, but far from stymied. The noise in the background had died down a little. He could hear a high-pitched, nasal voice counting to ten in a singsong cadence.

  God bless public television, he thought as he tapped out the number to Magnificent Cookies’ general switchboard. When the operator answered, Joe asked to speak to Ethan McGuire.

  Every goal, he mused, had to have more than one road leading to it.

  A sixties song floated through the receiver as he waited. Joe smiled. At least they agreed on music. He had no doubts that the selection was Maggie’s. Though she had skillfully avoided answering any personal questions during the interview, he had come away with the impression that Maggie was involved in and aware of every single detail at the plant, right down to selecting the brand of paper towel used in the washrooms.

  This time, he was put directly through to Ethan. “Hello, Mr. McGuire? This is Joe Sullivan. We met briefly yesterday. I was doing an interview with your sister—”

  Ethan grinned, remembering. “The guy with the little blondes in tow.”

  “That’s me.” The last time that had been said of him, the reference had applied to blond models, not girls under four feet. How times had changed, he thought with an inward sigh.

  Maggie had told Ethan that the interview had been concluded. If so, why was Sullivan calling him? “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I didn’t have a chance to complete my interview yesterday. My niece—”

  Ethan was ahead of him. “The littlest one threw up. Yes, I know. Maggie told me. I hope that isn’t a reflection of what your niece thought of our product.”

  Joe wondered if everyone in Maggie’s family finished sentences for the people they talked with. “I think it was more a case of her liking your product too much. But in any event, I’m trying to reach Ms. McGuire, and—”

  “You can’t.” It wasn’t a question.

  Ethan knew that yesterday had been an aberration for his sister. When Sullivan had left and she had come to see him about the financial projections, she had looked immensely relieved, as if she had been through some sort of emotional ordeal.

  He knew that was because of what she hadn’t said rather than what she had. The whole thing mystified him. Ethan would have thought that Maggie would have been proud of the fact that she had managed to surmount her past and make something of herself. Of all of them, actually. There was no doubt that they were all where they were because of her efforts more than their own.

  Instead, she was ashamed of it. She never said so in so many words, but she didn’t have to. The fact that she didn’t want to talk about their past, their roots, even with him, told Ethan that he was right.

  “No, I can’t. Your sister is quite a dynamic woman, and I’d like to do her justice in this article. In order to do that, I’m going to need more time with her. Her secretary tells me she’s unavailable.” Joe paused. The man could very well tell him to go to hell, but he didn’t think he would. It was only a hunch, but his hunches were usually right. “Do you know where I can reach her?”

  It was time, Ethan thought, that he took a little initiative himself. If the tables had been turned, he was certain that it would have been what Maggie would have done for him—whether or not he liked it. Maggie needed to divest herself of this cloak she had wrapped around their past. And Sullivan was the man to convince her to do it. It had been something Maggie had said that convinced him.

  “She’s at home today. Doing some work.” He refrained from adding that Maggie was experimenting with a new mixture that she was hoping to put on the market in about a year. Maggie always tried things out first. “My sister does her best work at home, away from distractions.”

  That didn’t surprise him. “I promise not to distract her for long. Is there a number where I can reach her?”

  Ethan knew that he was going out on a limb and all but sawing it off behind himself, but there came a time when he had to use his own judgment instead of falling back on everything Maggie wanted. “Yes, let me give you her number.”

  It wasn’t healthy for her t
o be as wrapped up in her work as she was, to the exclusion of everything else. She’d sacrificed her childhood for his benefit. His and Adam’s and Richie’s. He didn’t want to see her lose the best years of her adult life sitting behind a desk and hovering over a stove, cut off from the mainstream of life. Cut off from the most important parts. It was time that his sister started living some semblance of a normal life.

  There was something about Joe Sullivan that Ethan found likable and trustworthy. A man who brought his nieces along on an interview because he had no place to leave them couldn’t be all bad.

  Joe hadn’t expected to get this lucky without really digging. “I’d appreciate that a great deal.” He flipped over one of the papers on his desk. As he reached for a pen, he heard something crash in the family room. It didn’t sound loud enough to be the television set. Joe hoped that it wasn’t anything he had gotten attached to.

  Ethan gave him Maggie’s number. He sincerely hoped that she would forgive him in time. This was for her own good. He couldn’t remember when Maggie had seen a man socially, and while this one was only looking to complete an interview, something told Ethan that there might be more at play here, given a gentle nudge.

  He could nudge with the best of them.

  Joe felt a wide smile spread over his lips. “I’m in your debt.”

  Ethan laughed. “I just might have to take you up on that debt if Maggie goes after my scalp for giving this to you.”

  “I always protect my sources,” Joe promised, amused. He looked at the numbers he’d written down, making sure he could read them later. His handwriting tended to be barely legible when he wrote quickly. Joe darkened a seven to distinguish it from the number one beside it. “Doesn’t like to talk about herself much, does she.”

  That was putting it mildly, Ethan thought. “I take it that’s a sign of your ability to understate.”

  “That’s a sign of my pussyfooting around an issue until I understand it better.” Joe scribbled another note as it occurred to him. “Would you mind if I interview you about her?”