***
His anger lasted for exactly twenty-three minutes. That was how long it took him to realize that she didn’t love him any more.
If she loved him, she would have understood that he was only trying to protect her. If she loved him, she would have realized that all other women had ceased to exist from the instant he first lay eyes on her, and he was terrified of losing her. Goddamn stupid woman.
He stared morosely into his empty beer bottle and wondered what to do now. Scowling at the miniature Christmas tree that sat at one end of the bar, he signaled the barkeep for a refill. That was another thing. He hated the goddamn Christmas lights she strung all over the house like she was building a landing pad for UFO’s. He hated Christmas carols and he hated tinsel and he hated goddamn reindeer.
He took his bottle with him to the pay phone. Fishing in his pocket, he came up with a dime and dropped it into the slot. Travis deserved what he was about to get. After all, Trav was at least partially responsible for the collapse of his life; he was the one who’d introduced them.
Travis answered on the second ring, and Danny set down his beer. Without preamble, he said, “I’ve lost her.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, “Dan? Is that you?”
Bleakly, he said, “I’ve lost her, Trav.”
“Lost who?”
“My wife. Your sister.” He took a swig of beer and stared mournfully at the blinking lights on the Christmas tree. “It’s over.”
“Are you drunk, Fiore?”
“Not yet,” he said, “but I have high hopes.”
“You and Casey had a fight?”
“She doesn’t love me any more.”
Trav’s snort could be heard clearly over the telephone wires. “Fiore, you’re full of shit.”
He set down his bottle of beer. “She threw me out and told me not to come back.”
Travis sighed. “I ought to knock both your heads together. Where the hell are you?”
He picked up a pretzel from the bowl on the end of the bar and bit into it. “The Blue Goose.”
“Stay where you are, bonehead. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Trav’s voice softened. “We’ll talk about it.”
It was 11:43 p.m. when he finally let himself into the apartment. He took off his shoes and tiptoed into the kitchen. The potatoes sat on the stove untouched, a starchy, congealed mess. He scraped the ruined dinner into the rubbish and put the pans in the sink to soak, then tried to find something else to do, something else to keep him from facing her, but there was nothing left. The woman he’d married was a compulsive housekeeper.
He tiptoed into the bedroom. She was stretched out face-down on the bed, but the rigid lines of her body told him she wasn’t asleep. He undressed in the dark and crawled beneath the covers, lying stiffly on his side of the bed, taking care not to let any part of his body touch hers. The radiator valve was stuck open, and the bedroom felt like a sauna. He rolled onto his left side, then his right, flipped his pillow and pressed his face to the cool side, shoved aside the bedcovers with one leg.
In the darkness, she said, “I’ll have my things packed in the morning.”
He swallowed hard. When he spoke, his voice sounded like it had at thirteen, uncertain of where it would finally end up. “I’ll leave,” he said.
Softly, she said, “Whatever you want.”
He thought her voice sounded suspiciously shaky, but she’d turned her back to him, so he couldn’t see her face. He reached out a tentative fingertip. When it made contact with the bare flesh of her shoulder, she flinched as though she’d been burned.
“No,” he said, his heart thudding. “It’s not what I want.”
Silence. Then, softly, “What do you want?”
“I want you to forgive me for being an asshole.”
“Fool,” she said, turning to him. “There’s nothing to forgive.”
Then they were in each other’s arms and he was kissing her cheek, her eyelids, the tip of her nose. “You’re my lifeline,” he said. “If anything happened to you, I wouldn’t want to go on living.”
“Danny,” she said, “you can’t protect me by locking me up in the house. You have to trust me. You have to accept that I have a life of my own, and it doesn’t always revolve around you.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot. I have better taste than to fall in love with an idiot.”
His heart rate had slowed nearly to normal. “If you ever leave me,” he vowed, “I’ll come after you and drag you back.”
“Are you kidding? You’d have to change the locks to keep me out. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for the duration.”
He kissed her bare shoulder, her collarbone, the swell of one breast. She walked her fingertips up his chest, past his Adam’s apple, pausing at the sensitive spot just behind his ear. “Daniel Fiore,” she whispered fiercely, “I love you.”
With a tenderness that still astonished him, a tenderness he’d never known until Casey entered his life, he said, “And I love you, Mrs. Fiore.”
“But I’m not quitting the job.”
He stiffened. “You know how I feel about it.”
“I know,” she said, and touched his face tenderly. “But I’m not quitting.” She sat up, pulled the bedding snugly around her shoulders, and studied him somberly. “You have to understand, Danny. There’s a whole world out there, a world I never saw until you introduced me to it. I need to find out where I fit into that world.”
“You fit right here,” he said, wondering why he sounded so defensive. “By my side.”
“Yes,” she said. “And you fit right here by my side. But it would never occur to me to demand that you curtail your activities to suit me. You told me once that nobody had a right to tell me what to think or do. Yet here you are, trying to do that very thing.”
Danny opened his mouth to argue, then clamped it abruptly shut. “Shit,” he said.
She was right, of course. Casey was always right. It was one of the things he loved most about her, that unshakable, infallible judgment. He let out a hard breath and lay there staring at the ceiling, torn between his innate sense of fairness and the roiling terror that clutched him low in the belly at the thought that anything might ever happen to her. While he understood intellectually that she was right, that still didn’t mean he had to like it.
A subtle shift in the balance of their relationship was happening right in front of his eyes. The backbone of steel that he’d always suspected his wife of possessing had just been displayed in living, breathing Technicolor. The woman he’d married had asserted her independence, and if he wanted to hold onto her, he would have to swallow his pride—and his fears—and let her have her way.
Even if it killed him.
***
In the end, they compromised. Danny agreed to keep his fears to himself, and Casey agreed to keep him continually apprised of her comings and goings. It wasn’t a flawless arrangement, and not the one Danny would have chosen, but it was better than nothing.
But they missed having dinner together every night. One Thursday evening, he showed up at the hospital with two corned beef sandwiches in a paper bag. After that, they became a fixture in the hospital cafeteria three nights a week. They would find a table in a quiet corner, and each night he would bring her something different to eat while they filled each other in on the day’s events.
The job at St. Peter’s opened new horizons for her. She had so much love to give, and the children there needed it so badly. She took care of their needs, read stories to them, rocked them to sleep in her arms. She experienced the joys and heartbreaks of motherhood vicariously, because she couldn’t experience them firsthand.
Not until their life stabilized could she and Danny even think about having children. Not until Danny had achieved some measure of the success he was working so hard to attain. It was a given, something she’d understood from the beginning, and if at times it was a bitter pill to swallow, she reminded h
erself how impossible it would be to have a child, given their current lifestyle.
And she poured out all her pent-up motherlove on the children at St. Peter’s.
***
It was Rob’s idea to cut a record.
Danny was skeptical. “Unless you have some powerful connections,” he said, “that’s a good way to lose your shirt.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.” Rob leaned back and rested a bony ankle on his knee. “We rent studio time, press five hundred discs, and split the cost. We try to recoup our investment by selling ‘em at our gigs. And we push the local stations for airplay. What could be simpler?”
Dryly, Danny said, “Robbing the Bank of Boston in broad daylight?”
“You can’t think of it as a profit-making venture. We’d be doing it for exposure, not for money.”
He had hit Danny’s weak spot, and they both knew it. Danny considered his suggestion. “How would we push it with the radio stations?” he said. “I don’t have time to do promo work.”
“I do,” Casey said, and both men looked at her in surprise. “Well,” she argued, “why not? I’m as involved as any of you. It’s my music you’re playing.”
“She has a point,” Rob said.
Danny looked skeptical. “You don’t know anything about publicity.”
“How hard can it be?”
So they hired an out-of-work sax player and obtained the free services of a rhythm guitarist who owed Travis a favor, and they went into the studio and made a record. They used one of Casey and Rob’s driving rockers, Heart of Darkness, as the A side, backing it with a cover of Woman, Woman, a ballad made popular a few years earlier by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Two inherently different songs, each showing a different facet of Danny’s potent vocal talent.
Weeks later, when the boxes of white-jacketed black vinyl 45’s finally arrived, Casey opened the first box and, with a reverence bordering on awe, withdrew a gleaming disc from its protective cover. She turned it over in her hands, studied each shiny groove, each minute imperfection in its surface. Heart thundering, she read the fine print beneath the title: Fiore/MacKenzie. In that instant, the six-inch slab of vinyl she held in her hands became more than just a demo record cut by the boys in the band. The disc held her words, her music. She had crossed some invisible border between the hopeful and the determined, the amateur and the professional.
She had become a songwriter.
chapter seven
Casey Bradley Fiore had found a new love.
His name was Benito Patricio Juarez, but everybody just called him Benny. Benny had a full head of shining black curls, dark eyes set deep in an angel’s face, and a seductive smile that could soften the heart of the hardest woman. He also had acute lymphocytic leukemia.
He was four years old, and the light of her life.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been warned. The nurses, the other aides, the doctors had warned her not to get emotionally involved with the patients. “They’ll break your heart,” she’d heard more than once. But how could she not love Benny, who never complained, but always had a wide smile for everyone? She tried not to play favorites, but it was useless. Benny was special, and she was head over heels in love with him. She brought him gifts: a coloring book and crayons, a bright green stuffed aardvark, a wall poster of his personal hero, Spiderman.
Benny’s prognosis wasn’t good. The doctors had already attempted unsuccessful radiation treatments. The next step would be chemotherapy. Long before she’d come to work at St. Peter’s, Casey had been acquainted with chemotherapy and its side effects. She had watched helplessly as her mother grew weak and wretchedly sick, unable to keep anything down, wasting away to a skeleton and losing all her lustrous black hair. Since coming to St. Peter’s and seeing numerous children subjected to the ravages of chemo, Casey had begun to question how a supposedly benevolent team of doctors could put a small child through such torture. There had to be other, less caustic options.
But it wasn’t her job to question. Her job was to see to the comfort and cleanliness of the children on the cancer ward. No more and no less. The doctors, those white-coated gods whose pronouncements could mean the difference between life and death, were the decision-makers. She was nothing more than a part-time aide whose only training had come from nursing her mother through terminal cancer. She had no ties to Benny, except those of one heart to another, and Benny’s mother, a slatternly woman of twenty with a sixth-grade education and limited comprehension of what was happening to her son, had given the doctors carte blanche in his treatment.
“Stay out of it,” Danny warned her. “You stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong, and I guarantee that you won’t be thanked.”
“But his mother doesn’t understand. Nobody’s told her that she has alternatives.”
“And she won’t appreciate you telling her. Sweetheart, listen to me. If there’s one thing these people have left, it’s their pride. You can’t just step in and take it away from them. You don’t have the right.”
“But, Danny, he’s just a baby. How can the doctors put him through that and still sleep at night?”
“They’re just doing their job. They’ve taken an oath to do everything in their power to cure him.”
“But at what cost?”
He didn’t answer. There really wasn’t an answer.
***
The letter arrived on a bright and breezy morning. The mailman was filling the boxes in the entryway when Casey returned from the corner store. “Good morning, Phil!” she greeted him. “How’s your wife today?”
“Feeling much better, thanks. Lousy time of year to get the flu.”
“There’s no good time of year to get the flu. Give her my best.”
“I’ll do that. Here you go.” He handed her a stack of mail, topped by a lilac-colored envelope. “Got a special one for you today.”
Even without a return address, there was no mistaking her sister’s girly handwriting in garish purple ink. Eager for news from home, she let herself into her apartment, dropped the rest of the mail on the kitchen table, and tore open the envelope.
Dear Casey,
This isn’t the kind of news I wanted to give you over the phone, so I thought I should write instead. It will probably come as a shock, but Jesse and I are getting married in three weeks. I know you’re probably thinking that I’m too young, but I’m ready for this. I love Jesse, and he loves me. Once we’re married, he’ll be moving in here. It seemed ridiculous for us to take an apartment when Dad has this huge house sitting virtually empty. Dad is thrilled that we’ll be staying with him. He’s always thought of Jesse as a son. Before you ask about school, I took a double load this term so I could graduate a year early. So I’ll be free to stay home and keep house for Dad and Jesse. Since you left, I’ve been learning to cook, and the good news is that Jesse’s been eating my cooking for months, and he’s still willing to marry me. So I must be doing something right.
I have a favor to ask. Would it be all right with you if I wore Mama’s wedding dress? I know that by rights, as the eldest daughter, it’s yours. But since you’re already married, I thought that maybe you wouldn’t care if I wore it instead. It would mean so much to me, to have a piece of Mama with me on my wedding day.
There is one other thing, and I’m not sure how you’ll take this. But I’m hoping you’ll understand, and be happy for us. You’re probably wondering why we’re rushing, why we didn’t just get engaged and wait for a year or two. We would have done that, but circumstances made it difficult. You see, I’m sort of pregnant. The pregnancy wasn’t planned, believe me. I never expected to be settling down and starting a family at seventeen, but once the initial shock wore off, I was excited. We’re both excited. This baby may have been a surprise, but he (or she) will definitely be loved.
I hope and pray that you’ll give us your blessing.
Colleen
Somewhere in the process of reading her sister’s letter—possibl
y upon reaching that loaded word, pregnant—Casey’s expanding dismay morphed into something darker, something fierce and brutal, something with sharp teeth that sank into her throat and strangled her breathing. She held the piece of lilac-scented stationery in her hands, staring at it until the words blurred in front of her eyes. She didn’t realize she was crying until a fat tear landed on the paper and smudged her sister’s name.
The tears took her by surprise. As a pragmatic person, she’d always taken what life handed her and dealt with it. She made decisions and followed through without regrets. Tears were not generally part of her repertoire.
Yet here they were, these damning and betraying tears, clouding her vision and coloring her perspective, even as she recognized that fierce and brutal thing holding her in its grip as jealousy. How was it possible that she could be jealous of her sister? There was nothing romantic about having a baby at seventeen. Nor did she begrudge her sister the man Colleen was about to marry. She’d had her chance with Jesse, and she’d walked away with her head held high. Even though she thought this impending marriage between two mismatched souls was a dreadful mistake that would rapidly unravel, still she wished them happiness. And if Colleen and Jesse were able to find even a fraction of the happiness she’d discovered with Danny, their union might actually survive. There was nothing to be jealous of. Her own life was fulfilling. Satisfying. She was married to a man she adored. She had her songwriting, and her job at the hospital. She had good friends, a renewed relationship with her brother, a small but charming Beacon Hill apartment she’d decorated herself. She had the city of Boston sprawled at her feet, and a future that was wide open. Her life was charmed.
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 7
