When she named it, there was silence at his end, a silence that stretched out between them. He cleared his throat. The joviality was gone. “You can’t possibly be serious,” he said.
“That’s my asking price, Drew. You can’t have him for a penny less.”
“That’s absurd. Totally out of the question. We’re running a small operation—”
“You and I both know that we’re sitting on a gold mine here. You’ll get your money back threefold.”
“But that kind of up-front money—”
“Listen to me,” she said, “and listen good. When you signed Danny, you were a bit player with a temporary secretary and a crummy office on 42nd Street. Look around you, Drew. Who do you think paid for the custom-made Italian suits and the diamond pinkie rings and the Moet et Chandon? Who paid for the Jaguar and the Madison Avenue office suite and the high-maintenance women? Danny did, that’s who. You owe him.”
“Casey, you’re killing me here. My neck is in the noose. I can’t agree to a deal like that.”
“Fine. There are plenty of other record companies out there. I’m sure one of them would be more than happy to pay my price.”
“Jesus, Casey—”
“Maybe I’ll just keep the damn songs.” She paused for emphasis. “Or torch them.”
“I have the originals.”
“And I have a lawyer whose suits make yours look like they came from Wal-Mart.”
“Wait!” he said. “Wait. Maybe I can work something out.”
She smiled, picturing the perpetually elegant Drew Lawrence sitting in his equally elegant office, squirming. “I thought maybe you could,” she said.
“That much money. Jesus.”
“And when will you ever again get your hands on anything this big? Don’t you understand, Drew? This is Danny’s swan song. I’m not doing this for me. I don’t need the money.” She paused, thinking of the frightened boy who had left his innocence behind in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and of the broken man who’d returned in his place. More softly, she said, “I’m doing this for him.”
“He’d be impressed. You strike a hard bargain. Whatever happened to that sweet girl I remember?”
“She grew up.”
“With a vengeance.”
“For the first time in my life, I’m holding all the cards. I’m the one calling the shots. Power, Drew. I never before realized how good it feels.”
Forty minutes later, he called her back. “Mrs. Fiore,” he said, “you’ve got your deal. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” she said, “but it wasn’t me who made this deal. It was Danny. Think of him when you open that next bottle of Moet.”
She hung up the phone and sat in the rocker for a long time, looking at his picture on the fireplace mantel. She would set aside a reasonable portion of the money for Anna Montoya. No matter what the future brought, Danny’s mother would never want for anything, ever again. The rest would go, in Danny’s name, to some organization that provided support services for Vietnam vets. Somewhere out there in the great beyond, Danny was watching, with understanding and approval. She raised her glass to his picture. “Ciao,” she said softly. “Caro mio.” And drained her glass.
She was ready now to let go.
***
With trepidation, Rob called his mom. “I’m moving back east,” he said cautiously. “Can I stay with you and Dad for a while? Just until I can find a place of my own?”
After he’d missed Christmas with the family, he wasn’t sure she was still speaking to him. But he should have known better. They probably heard her gleeful whoop in Seattle. “Patrick,” she shouted, “turn down that blasted TV and listen to me. Robbie’s coming home!”
He spent a couple of weeks tying up loose ends, then packed all his belongings and sent them east in a moving van. He took Igor, his Gibson, and a single suitcase with him in the Porsche. It took him four days to cross the country, four days of sleeping in cheap motels and subsisting on fast food and FM radio. When the Boston skyline appeared before him, he felt a sense of homecoming unlike any he’d ever known. He might be deluding himself, painting brilliant illusions and dreaming impossible dreams, but no matter what the outcome, one truth couldn’t be denied: Casey was just three hours north.
His sister Rose took him apartment hunting, but nothing they saw suited him. Over lunch at Top of the Hub, she let him have it with both barrels. “Listen, Robbie,” she said, “we’ve been looking at apartments for two weeks now, and so far, you haven’t liked a thing we’ve seen. They’re all either too big or too small, too new or too old. You don’t like the neighborhood or you don’t like the kitchen or you don’t like the color of the goddamn living room carpet! You’re my baby brother, and I love you to pieces, but my universe doesn’t revolve around finding you an apartment. Believe it or not, I have a life I could be living.”
She looked so indignant, his red-haired dynamo of a sister, that he felt ashamed. “Rosie,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You ought to be. What’s the matter with you? Mom hardly dares to say more than three words to you for fear of getting her head ripped off. Michael spent ten minutes in your company and told me that as far as he’s concerned, you should have stayed in California. You actually started a fight with Dad—”
“I offered to buy him a new car. His old one’s being held together with Juicy Fruit and Band-Aids!”
“That’s not the point. You’ve only been here for three weeks, but already you’ve managed to disrupt the whole family. You’ve got everybody walking around on eggshells. Nobody dares to say boo to you. I don’t know what’s going on, but I miss my little brother. He was a real sweet guy who always used to have a smile for everyone and something funny to say. Where the hell is he? It’s like aliens have moved in and taken over your body.”
The Charles River was white and frozen. In the distance, the red line train crawled across the Longfellow Bridge toward Cambridge on the other side. He looked at his sister. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want to know what could possibly have turned my baby brother into Godzilla on wheels.” She placed a hand on his. “You’re not sick, are you?”
He snorted. “Where the hell did you get an idea like that?”
“You know Mom. She always imagines the worst.”
“Tell her to stop worrying. I don’t have AIDS.”
When she frowned, the freckles on her forehead drew together. “Are you having a sexual identity crisis?”
“Care to try that again in English?”
She looked around furtively and leaned over the table. “Are you gay?” she whispered.
He gaped at her in astonishment, and then he laughed, a deep, rich belly laugh, his first in ages. He laughed so hard it hurt. “Jesus, Rose,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes, “you gotta stop watching Geraldo.”
“Then there’s only one thing it could be. It has to be a woman.”
“You know what? You remind me of a woman I know. Her name’s Trish. Do you suppose every family has one?” And he was off again on a gale of laughter. “You two should get together,” he said, holding onto his belly. “You’d make one hell of—” He had to stop because he was laughing so hard. “—one hell of an investigative team.” He covered his mouth with both hands, but the laughter escaped anyway. At the next table, a woman peered discreetly at them from behind her menu.
“Rob!” his sister hissed. “You’re making a scene!”
He took a couple of deep breaths and waited for the laughter to subside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just been so long since I’ve laughed. It felt so good.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t ask one.”
“I did, too. I asked you if it was a woman.”
“No, you didn’t. You said it had to be a woman. You didn’t ask if you were right.”
Beneath the freckles, her face was turning an interesting shade of pink. “Damn it, Robbie, is it or isn’t it
a woman?”
“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes, it is a woman! Are you satisfied?”
For a moment, there was dead silence as everyone within hearing distance stopped eating to stare at them. Rose closed her eyes and sank lower in her seat, her face so pale the freckles stood out in stark relief. “More like mortified,” she said. “But satisfied will probably catch up to me. I just won ten bucks.”
For the second time in as many minutes, he regarded her with astonishment. “You what?”
Her recovery from mortification was amazingly rapid. “I bet Michael ten bucks it was a woman.” She gave him an impish smile. “And I was right.”
“Gee, thanks. I love hearing that my life’s providing entertainment for the whole family.”
“What do you expect, Rob? You’ve been a monster ever since you came home.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe I should just stay in my room and hide!”
“Maybe you should!”
They glared at each other until the glares dissolved into sheepish grins. Rose shook her head. “Now that you’ve ruined my reputation to the point where I’ll never dare to show my face in this joint again, little brother,” she said, “I figure you owe me one.”
He squared his jaw. “Yeah?”
She matched his expression. “Yeah. You’re rolling in dough, and I’m in the mood to go shopping.”
“I get it,” he said. “Hit me where it hurts.”
She grinned. “And if you behave yourself, I might even tell you a few things you don’t know about women.”
chapter thirty-five
In February, she sold the Ferrari.
She didn’t expect it to go so quickly. She placed an ad in the Portland newspaper and promptly forgot about it until she got a call from a Westbrook attorney who wanted to know if she’d sold it yet. When she told him it was still available, he asked if he could drive up that afternoon and see it.
She sent him out to the barn alone. This was a huge step, one she wasn’t sure she was ready for. The sandy-haired attorney returned, his enthusiasm obvious. And then he asked it, the question she’d been dreading. “Why are you selling it?”
“It belonged to my late husband,” she said, amazed that the words came so easily, so naturally. “It’s been sitting for two years, and it should belong to somebody who’ll love it as much as he did.”
He thought her asking price was fair, and while his L.L. Bean boots dripped melted snow on her kitchen floor, he wrote her a check and she gave him a bill of sale, and it was done. She’d taken the first huge step with frightening ease.
The closet was more difficult.
Every item she handled had memories attached, and she removed them one at a time, letting herself feel the bittersweet emotions as she meticulously folded each shirt, each pair of pants, before placing them in a big green Hefty bag. She emptied the bureau drawers, added his ties and his belts and his shoes and his electric razor, then cleared the last of his toiletries from the bathroom medicine cabinet. She filled two huge bags, knotted them tightly, and carried them downstairs and out to the trash barrel beside the barn.
The next morning, at dawn, she burned them.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to feel, but certainly not this relief. She probed her emotions cautiously, searching for the guilt that should have been there. But it wasn’t there, only the relief and the sense that an overwhelming burden had been lifted from her shoulders.
After that, it got easier. She emptied her closet and her drawers and moved her belongings to the downstairs guest room, then gave her bedroom set to Billy and Alison. She stripped the wallpaper from the bedroom walls, painted the woodwork a warm antique white and repapered the room in dusky rose. In an antique shop she found a rose-colored brocade love seat and matching wing chairs. An oriental rug and Tiffany lamp completed the ensemble, and her former bedroom became a sitting room. And then she tackled the room across the hall.
It had windows on two sides and a strong southern exposure, but the closet was abysmally inadequate. She called Jesse and asked for the name of a good carpenter, and to her surprise, he came over and built it himself, a beautiful walk-in closet twelve feet long, with shelves for shoes and sweaters and linens. When he was done, she painted the woodwork the same antique white as the sitting room, then papered the walls in an aqua floral print and hung curtains of teal and blue.
She thought of Rob often as the weeks went by, especially on the day the new bedroom set was delivered and set up and she covered the mahogany four-poster bed with the new spread. She hadn’t relied on memory; she’d actually driven back to Bar Harbor, to the cabin where she and Rob had become lovers on a golden October afternoon, and then she had shopped around until she found a bed identical to the one where they’d first made love. She supposed that most men wouldn’t notice. But Rob would. He would notice, and he would understand.
The month of March slipped by, and one April evening as she sat on her back porch, she heard the first spring peepers. The next day she cut a half-dozen of the bright yellow daffodils that grew next to the old stone foundation of the house, put them in a jar of water, and drove to the cemetery.
Katie was here, and Mama, and Grandma and Grandpa Bradley, but it was Danny she’d come to see. She knelt in the damp grass by his gravestone and arranged the flowers in front of it. “See what I brought you, darling?” she said. “Daffodils, because I know they’re your favorite.” She sat quietly, drinking in the peacefulness of this place where he rested. Tugging at a tuft of grass near his headstone, she said, “There are some things I need to talk to you about.”
The sky was vivid blue, the air clean and clear. Toying with a blade of grass, she said, “I imagine you know about the deal I made with Drew. And why. You always needed so much to be somebody. I had to prove to you that you were. Not too shabby a deal for a bastard wop kid from Little Italy.”
She gazed up into the towering elm that had somehow escaped the fatal blight that had attacked so many of its fellows. “I suppose,” she said, “you know about Rob, too. I took my marriage vows very seriously, Danny. I loved you desperately, and I was always faithful to you, even when I knew that my feelings for Rob had gone miles beyond platonic.” Her voice softened. “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss you.”
She plucked at a blade of grass, caught it and rolled it between her fingers. “But I have to move on now,” she said, tearing at the slender green stalk. “You’re gone, but Rob’s here, and I love him, Danny, I love him so much it hurts. I’ve always loved both of you. My feelings for him simply deepened into something neither of us expected.” She dropped the blade of grass, shoved up the sleeves of her sweater, and leaned back to better see the brilliant blue of the April sky. “He’s a good man,” she said. “And if it’s not too late, I’m going to marry him.”
Still gazing at the sky, she said, “I know you loved us both. I’d feel better if we had your blessing.”
She stayed there for a long time in the spring sunshine, waiting patiently for his answer. When it came, she stood up slowly, her knees wet from the squishy ground. She bent and removed a single daffodil from the jar and lay it across her daughter’s grave.
And held her head high as she walked back to her car.
***
When she dialed Rob’s number, a woman answered. Stricken, Casey broke the connection. What did you expect? she chastised herself. Did you think a man like Rob MacKenzie would stay celibate forever? Did you expect him to sit around waiting for you?
But of course, that was exactly what she’d thought. She had obviously been mistaken. Six months had gone by, six months in which he hadn’t even attempted to contact her. That should have told her something.
She agonized for hours before she worked up the courage to try again. This time, when the young woman answered, she took a deep breath and asked for Rob. “Sorry,” the woman said. “Wrong number.” And hung up.
Casey stared in disbelief at the bleating receiver. Again, slowly and meticul
ously this time, she dialed Rob’s number. Again, the woman answered, and this time she sounded irritated. “Look, lady,” she said, “I told you before there’s no Rob here.”
“Wait!” Casey said. “Please don’t hang up. I’m calling long distance.”
Something of her desperation must have gotten through, because the woman’s voice softened. “I’ve only had this number for a couple of weeks,” she said. “Looks like your friend moved and forgot to tell you. Men!”
It didn’t make sense. Rob wouldn’t have moved. He loved the Hotel California. Maybe, for some reason, he’d had his number changed. To avoid overzealous fans.
Or to avoid her.
Directory Assistance was no help at all. Nor was Rob’s answering service. “Mr. MacKenzie stopped using us in January,” Judy Rossiter told her. “He paid his bill in full and we haven’t heard from him since.”
She pondered the meaning of all this. Was this Rob’s idea of retaliation, forcing her to track him down? Or was his disappearing act a message to her that they really had nothing more to say to each other? Maybe, just maybe, she’d pushed him too far this time.
She tried Marty Bonner next. Marty had been Rob’s agent for five years. He would certainly know where Rob was.
Except that Marty didn’t. Coolly, he said, “Mr. MacKenzie and I are no longer associated.”
“Marty? What on earth are you talking about?”
“He fired me, Casey, three months ago. Just like that. Said it had been great working with me, but he needed to make some changes in his life, and he couldn’t do it in L.A. Very unprofessional behavior, if you ask me. He said he was leaving town, but he didn’t say where he was going, and I didn’t ask.” Marty paused. “Hell, I figured if anyone knew where he was, it would be you.”
She’d hit a dead end. If Rob had really left Los Angeles, he could be anywhere between Tijuana and Bangkok. If he didn’t want to be found, finding him would be next to impossible.
Unless...
It was a long shot, but if he’d made some kind of permanent move, he must have gotten around to telling his mother by now. And if he hadn’t, Rob mailed money home to his parents on a regular basis. Those envelopes had to be postmarked.
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 45
