Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series)

by Breton, Laurie

  The envelope contained five hundred dollars.

  Casey was stunned. Five hundred dollars might as well have been a million. Intuition told her to hide it away and tell neither of the men. If she was the only one who knew of its existence, it wouldn’t be frittered away on non-essentials. When it was needed (she was somehow sure it would be when, not if), the money would be there to fall back on.

  On a cloudless morning, the three of them squeezed into the Chevy amid guitars, clothes, sleeping bags, and assorted household items, and took the expressway south. Casey looked back once at the skyline dominated by the Pru and the brand-new John Hancock tower. And then she put the past behind her and concentrated on the future. With Danny at the wheel, Rob’s arm across the back of the seat behind her, and “The Ballad of John and Yoko” on the radio, they cranked the volume and sang their way out of Boston.

  BOOK TWO

  chapter ten

  New York City

  Summer, 1978

  The apartment was in the Village, upstairs over Wong’s Tea House, where the mingled odors of soy sauce, fried pork, and strong Chinese tea drifted up the gloomy stairwell and through the open windows. The rent was exorbitant, the toilet ran steadily, and cockroaches roamed at night as though they had a lifetime lease. There was only one bedroom, so Rob slept on the couch that Casey picked up for twenty dollars at a secondhand shop. He got the best of the deal, because the bedroom window was painted shut. Casey and Danny sweated away the summer nights, while Rob lay in semi-comfort beneath an open window.

  They pooled their money in a communal fund, with Casey as the designated bookkeeper. New York was not a cheap place to live. When the first of each month came around, Casey often had to scrape to make ends meet. Some months they didn’t quite meet. At other times, when one of them had an unexpected windfall, there was money for extras, as well as money to put away for the next dry spell. Casey was a quick learner. Creative financing (also known as robbing Peter to pay Paul) became her modus operandi, and the two men, with their implicit trust in her, never questioned her judgment. If Casey said, “We can’t afford...” they both knew the issue was closed to further discussion.

  The one luxury she allowed was a telephone, because no working musician could survive without a point of contact. She bought whole-wheat flour from the natural foods store down the street and made her own bread in the antiquated oven that every so often belched clouds of black smoke. Late into the nights, they drank cheap Chianti and played their music, talked and laughed and laid out elaborate career strategies, dreamed aloud their impossible dreams.

  And during the days, they looked for work.

  ***

  Even at midday, the place smelled of beer and stale cigarette smoke. Weak sunlight filtered through the filthy windows and passed between chair legs pointed ceilingward from empty tabletops. The man behind the bar was squat and compact, his face swarthy and pock-marked beneath a thick tumble of dark hair. He deftly polished a glass and hung it in the rack over his head. “I’d like to give you kids a break,” he said, “but I got no money to pay a singer. I gotta tend bar myself ‘cause I can’t even afford a bartender.”

  “Will you please just listen to him?” she said. “We’ve been in New York for two years, and we’ve had nothing but doors slammed in our faces!”

  “Two years? Two years is nothing, lady. This is New York. Singers here are a dime a dozen.”

  “Not singers like him!” Casey said.

  He sighed and picked up his rag. “You two look like a coupla nice kids. Let me give you a word of advice. Get the hell out of New York and go on back where you came from. Show business ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Screw it,” Danny said, and picked up his guitar and stalked out of the bar.

  “Why?” Casey demanded. “Why won’t you even listen to him?”

  “I already told you, lady, I got no money to pay a singer.”

  “He’ll work for tips!”

  He paused to study the determined set of her chin. “You don’t intend to give up, do you?”

  “Not until you hear him.”

  “Okay. You win. I’ll listen to him. God knows why, because there’s no way in hell I can hire him. But the kid must have something going for him to have a gorgeous dame like you pushing this hard for him.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you!”

  “Hey!” he yelled as she raced for the door. “Just remember, I ain’t giving him a job!”

  She found Danny outside, leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette. “Danny,” she said, “come back in. He’s agreed to listen to you.”

  Those blue eyes regarded her coldly. “Screw him,” he said, and tossed the cigarette in the gutter.

  The anger rose unexpectedly. “Is that what you want?” she said. “Is that what you really want?”

  Danny glared at her for a moment, then sighed. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  So they went back inside and he sat on a wooden bar stool beneath a lit Budweiser sign and sang Elevator Embrace, a love ballad she’d written the previous summer. When he was finished, a fly buzzed in the stillness. A lone patron at the end of the bar stared into his beer. The bartender set down his rag and came around the bar. “What’d you say your name was, kid?”

  Danny lay his guitar flat across his lap. “Fiore,” he said. “Danny Fiore.”

  “Well, Fiore, I’ll give you five bucks a night, plus whatever you get in tips. Three nights a week, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You play whatever the patrons want to hear. Any funny stuff and you’re out on your ass. Capisce?”

  Danny looked at him long and hard. And nodded. “Capisce.”

  “And you might want to thank your lady friend, here. I never woulda listened to you if it hadn’t been for her.”

  ***

  Juggling. He was always juggling.

  Two years in New York had turned Rob MacKenzie into a jack of all trades. His balancing act included the occasional fill-in gig, intermittent studio work, one part-time job parking cars, and another making deliveries for a Korean grocery. He filled in the cracks between jobs by giving guitar lessons for six bucks an hour, drawing his students from ads tacked up in Laundromats and coffee houses and on bulletin boards at Columbia and NYU. He squeezed in songwriting time in bits and pieces, and in what he jokingly referred to as his spare time, he and Casey wore holes in their shoes trudging from publisher to publisher, demo tapes and portfolio in hand, hawking their songs.

  Everywhere they went, they heard variations on the same theme: Nice hook, but it’s too commercial/Nice hook, but it’s not commercial enough. The excuses varied, but the bottom line was always the same: thanks, but no thanks.

  At least the studio work was beginning to bear fruit. He was building a reputation as an axeman who not only possessed the necessary chops but who could always be depended on to show up on time, clean and sober, and earn every penny of his pay. So even though the world wasn’t exactly beating a path to his door, enough studio work came his way to pay the bills. He was doing what he loved and getting paid for it, and in Rob MacKenzie’s book, that made him a rich man.

  It was his love life that was dismal.

  In his matter-of-fact way, Rob accepted the fact that he was no Adonis. In spite of his lanky body and his odd assortment of features, women had always found him attractive. He’d never been able to figure out what it was about him that attracted them, but he didn’t waste time dwelling on it. He was too busy enjoying, for Rob MacKenzie liked women. He liked the way they walked, the way they smelled, the silken feel of their skin. Maybe that was part of his charm: Rob not only liked women, he respected them. Most guys treated females like they were nothing more than a collection of body parts. Rob didn’t buy into that philosophy. He liked to make love to the entire woman, not just to some faceless body. As a result, he often remained friends with a woman long after any sexual relationship between them had ended.

  But in New York, he had little opportun
ity to meet women, less time to spend with them, and no privacy at home. And the women had it no better. Any woman who could afford to live alone was out of his league. So Rob MacKenzie, for the first time since he’d lost his virginity at seventeen, was going without.

  Then he met Nancy Chen.

  It was 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, and he was one of a handful of people riding the escalator down to the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. If fate hadn’t intervened, he never would have noticed the woman a few steps ahead of him. But as she stepped off the escalator, the belt to her raincoat caught in the mechanism, yanking her off balance and imprisoning her.

  Rob dropped his shopping bag and rushed to her rescue. He lost a brief tug-of-war with the escalator, whose jaws refused to release their prisoner, and in a desperate move, he yanked the belt free from its loops and let it go. While he and the woman watched in silence, the machine sucked it in, like a single strand of spaghetti, and swallowed it. Then, simultaneously, they turned to look at each other.

  And his heart hit the soles of his sneakers.

  Common sense told him she was all wrong for him. Nancy was the elder daughter of a wealthy Park Avenue cardiologist, in her junior year of pre-med at Columbia, and, as she explained to him over coffee, she didn’t have time for dating. Besides, her parents disapproved of interracial marriage, and Nancy, being a dutiful daughter, had promised to date only Chinese boys. She explained regretfully that although she found him attractive, anything more than a platonic relationship between them was out of the question.

  He didn’t hear a word she said.

  She was the most exquisite creature he’d ever seen, and he wanted to spend the next thousand years studying the graceful movements of her hands, the sway of her black hair, framing her face in a silken curtain, the trembling of her full lower lip when she gazed at him from beneath sooty lashes.

  But it wasn’t meant to be. She was already late for dinner, and her parents would be worried. She thanked him politely for the coffee and for rescuing her from the clutches of the Bloomingdale’s monster, shook his hand, and walked out of his life.

  He watched her disappear into the rush hour crowd jamming the Lexington Avenue sidewalk. And then he did what any red-blooded American male would have done.

  He followed her.

  ***

  Early morning fog swirled around Manhattan’s upper east side, and Rob tried to look inconspicuous as he leaned against a lamp post a few doors down from Nancy Chen’s apartment building. But in this neighborhood, inconspicuous was impossible, and if the doorman saw him, he’d have the NYPD on his ass and some big-time explaining to do.

  A blue-haired matron in a full-length fox fur appeared out of the fog with some kind of leggy dog on a leash. Like Cassius, the dog had that lean and hungry look. Translated, that meant he probably ate scrawny young guitar players for breakfast. The dog bared his teeth. The woman paused, and Rob saw a momentary flash of fear on her face. He smiled his most engaging smile, and she sniffed, averted her eyes, and hurried past.

  So much for charming the local gentry.

  Nancy emerged from her building, wearing a leather coat that screamed affluent and carrying a red canvas bag large enough to hold the Statue of Liberty in case she got a sudden urge to tote it around. She greeted the doorman and strode briskly in Rob’s direction, and he stepped away from the lamp post and planted himself squarely in her path.

  She nearly collided with him. Conflicting emotions flitted across her face. It was dismay that remained. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you.”

  She shot a glance over her shoulder. “How did you find out where I live?”

  For a smidgen of a second, he felt guilty. But it passed. “I followed you home the other night,” he said.

  Her eyes widened. “If we are seen together,” she said, “there will be trouble. Meet me at the bus stop around the corner.”

  In the anonymity of the crowd waiting for the bus, nobody gave them a second glance. “Why are you following me?” she asked. “I told you I don’t date white boys.”

  “Who’s talking about dating? Can’t we just be friends?”

  “I can see it in your eyes,” she said. “You want to be more than friends.”

  The bus chugged up in a cloud of exhaust fumes. The door opened, and the line of people began to crawl. “What difference does it make,” he said, “what your parents think? You’re over eighteen. It’s your life.”

  Nancy dropped her fare into the slot and moved on, and the line came to a halt while Rob scrounged in his pockets for change. “Move it, bud,” some guy behind him said. “You think we got all day?” The hair on the back of his neck stood up, but he ignored the gibe, dropped his money into the slot and plunked into the empty seat beside Nancy. “If you really wanted to see me,” he said, “you could.”

  “I am Chinese,” she said. “I was raised to honor my elders, for they have more wisdom than I.”

  “Are you telling me you’re not capable of making your own decisions?”

  “It isn’t a matter of capability. It is a matter of honor and respect.”

  “Well, I happen to honor and respect you. Doesn’t that count?”

  “I’m afraid,” she said, “that what you feel for me has little to do with honor and respect, and more to do with hormones.” She stood up. “Excuse me,” she said, swaying as the bus came to an abrupt halt. “This is my stop.”

  He chased her down the aisle of the bus. When they reached the sidewalk, she took off at a pace so brisk he had to sprint to catch up with her. “At least let me carry your bag,” he said.

  “I’m quite capable of carrying it myself.” She paused in front of a brick building with a wide granite staircase. “My first class begins in five minutes,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I must say good-bye now.”

  As a stream of college students flowed around them, he said, “I’m not giving up this easy. I’m Irish. I don’t know when to quit.”

  A flicker of a smile lit her face. “Good-bye, Rob MacKenzie,” she said. “It has been very nice knowing you.”

  And without a backward glance, she walked away.

  ***

  Danny raced through the Hotel Montpelier’s service entrance, buttoning the shirt he’d changed on the uptown bus. Tucking it into his pants, he stopped to examine his reflection in the huge stainless steel refrigerator. Using the refrigerator as a mirror, he ran a comb through his hair and tied the black bow tie that completed his stunning ensemble.

  The kitchen was in its usual chaos. Enrico, the head chef, saw him with the comb and began wailing about sanitation. In Italian, Danny told him to kiss ass, and the older man stomped off, muttering that it hadn’t been this way when he was a boy in Firenze. Leon, the young black guy who bused tables to pay his way through law school, swung through the double doors from the dining room. “Where you been, man?” he asked in that molasses drawl. “You better watch out for Emile. He’s gunning for your lily-white ass.”

  “Great.” He grimaced at his reflection. “Will I pass muster?”

  “You’ll do, Fiore. But Emile’s some ripped. He’s looking to have your head on a silver platter.”

  The petite, effeminate Emile Lafonde had been blessed with the personality of a scorpion, and he was the bane of Danny’s existence. Emile was a monster, and this was the third time in two weeks that Danny had been late. The odds were not stacking up in his favor. “Wish me luck,” he said, and swung through the doors into the dining room.

  Emile saw him instantly. The little man stiffened, drew himself up to his full five-three, and picked his way distastefully through the maze of tables. Hoping to avoid him, Danny snatched up a tablecloth and a pair of place settings and began to set up the nearest empty table. But Emile was not to be deterred. “Ah, Mr. Fiore,” he said to Danny’s back. “You decided to grace us with your presence.”

  “I put in my time.” It killed him, having to kowtow to the little asshole, but he d
idn’t relish the idea of going home and explaining to Casey why he no longer had a job.

  “You are an embarrassment to this establishment.” The maitre d’ sniffed and rubbed his hands together, as if trying to rid them of the very essence of Daniel Fiore. “This is the last time, Mr. Fiore. Next time you can’t be bothered to arrive on time, don’t bother coming at all.”

  It was amazing how Emile’s accent dissipated in direct proportion to his escalating anger. Rumor said that he’d been born and raised in Detroit, and had been no closer to Europe than a travel brochure or two. But because it was his ass on the line, Danny capitulated. “Yes, sir, Mr. Lafonde,” he said stiffly. “It won’t happen again.”

  Emile spun on his heel and stalked back to his station. “Prick,” Danny said to his back. Across the room, Leon caught his eye and they exchanged a quick, irreverent grin. Then the dining room began to fill, and he no longer had time to think about Emile.

  The Montpelier was one of the most exclusive hotels in Manhattan, catering to the rich and the super-rich, and it was not uncommon to see well-known politicians, best-selling authors, and stars of stage and screen dining there. The men wore Armani suits and the women reeked of diamonds and Chanel No. 5, and although the cynical side of him thought it was bullshit, he was still hick enough to be impressed when John Travolta or Teddy Kennedy walked in.

  Tonight, there were no celebrities, just the usual upper-crust types who looked through him as though he were invisible. At least the men looked through him. The women were another story. Most of them had hungry eyes, and they watched him with a ferocity that was as frightening as it was comical. He was used to it by now and paid them little attention. Although they looked and smelled heavenly, underneath the surface most of them were middle-aged and desperate. Not a one could hold a candle to his wife. Why go out for hamburger when you had sirloin at home?