“Rebecca has us sitting way at the other end of the table, but I’d love to talk shop with you at some point. I’ve got these stocks—”
Liam lifts his hand. “Not that kind of broker.”
“Oh?”
“Liam works in art. I told you that,” Charlotte says impatiently. “I’m starving. Let’s go sit down.”
I frown at Charlotte, wondering what the heck is up with her. Usually she’s an even keel kind of person, but this weekend, there’s been something slightly off about her. Like she’s flip flopping between emotions or something.
Doug chuckles and rolls his eyes my way, not at all bothered by my sister’s rudeness. “She’s hangry. Better go feed the beast.”
I open my mouth to question that, since Charlotte and food are about as close as ice cream and bacon, when my mother and her newest entourage come crowding in.
“Maggie, these are your cousins, Stephy and Wes.” She waves away my confused look and adds. “Second cousins—”
“Third removed, I think, Rebecca,” Wes says with a chuckle. “But family all the same.” He extends a hand.
“Steph has just started law school at Harvard,” my mother says triumphantly, like this is somehow proving something to me. “And Wes is a nurse!” Her eyes are full of great ideas.
“So now you want me to be a nurse?” I try to make it sound like a joke, but I know there’s an edge to my voice.
Liam extends his hand. “I’m Liam, a broker, and Maggie has just graduated with a marketing degree. She’s been working on a killer portfolio.” He laughs. “I figured since we’re comparing job profiles, I should make sure everyone is up to date.”
My mother’s eyes flash wide. She’s clearly stunned that Liam would crack a joke at her expense, as am I. It makes something warm flood though my chest, and I can’t help the smile from spreading on my lips, so wide my cheeks kind of hurt a bit. I’ve never had someone stand up for me like that, not to my mother. My father tries, but ultimately he bows to her opinion.
Happy wife, happy life, he once said to me.
I never really understood that comment until right now. I actually thought it was a load of crap, if I’m honest. But Liam’s done nothing but strive to make me happy so far this weekend, and all I want to do is give all of that happiness right back.
Huh.
“Everyone, take your seats! Check under your plates for a card!” Aunt Chrissy shouts.
There’s so much conversation that it takes a couple more bellows for everyone to hear. The room we’re in is larger than the one we ate lunch in, and the family crowd has swelled to double. Sometime after dinner, the rest of the overnight reunion guests should arrive, the total maxing out to fifty-five by then and another twenty-five added to that tomorrow and then a few more expected on Monday when the big barbecue gets underway. It’s a huge crowd and a testament to how diligently my mom and her sisters scoured the family ancestry information that my grandfather had spent a lifetime compiling. Grandpa managed to find relatives from his, Grandma’s, and even Dad’s side who never even knew they were connected to us.
The crowd scatters. Even Mom walks away, caught up in the chaos of finding everyone their seats. Perfect timing. I’d hate to think how she would have recovered from the shock of Liam defending me.
“Liam, Maggie.” Uncle Bernard waves to us. “You’re sitting next to me!” He’s midway down the table.
I wave back and start to move in his direction, Liam just ahead.
“Your mother is only expressing her love,” Dad says as he sidles up next to me, putting his arm over my shoulders with a heavy thud of weight that holds me back.
Liam looks over his shoulder, his eyes flick to my dad, and then he nods and keeps going without me.
“Is that what that is?” I laugh, a note of bitterness there. “Feels more like the weight of impossible standards to me.”
Dad squeezes my arm and kisses my forehead. “She means well…” He sighs. “But I know it’s a bit much sometimes. She wants the world to see the best of everyone.”
I cock an eyebrow but say nothing.
Dad’s expression looks pained for a second. “She wants a good life for you, for all of us, and her heart is in the right place, but I know she puts a lot of pressure on you to do things her way or at least to make things look a certain way.”
He’s uncomfortable—I can see it in the way he’s rubbing the back of his neck. It makes me wonder just how much pressure she puts on him, too.
He clears his throat. “You like Liam a lot, huh?”
His change of subject startles me a bit. “I like him, yeah.”
“He’s good to you,” Dad continues. “Looks out for you.”
“Uh huh.” I feel a rush of guilt for letting Dad believe Liam is something more than what he is.
Dad moves his arm and turns me toward him. “You haven’t known him long, have you?” He locks those detective eyes on me, and I blush then fight not to look away. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on, Maggie?”
I sigh. I really never could keep a secret from him, and apparently I’m not going to be starting now. “He comes into the Coffee Hut. So it’s not like he’s a complete stranger.” I shrug. “I just wanted one family event that wasn’t a pick on Maggie-fest.” My throat catches, and I look down because admitting it makes me feel like the family outcast all over again.
Dad puts his finger under my chin and forces me to look up at him. “I’m proud of you, Maggie. You know that, right?”
I nod, gulping down the tightness in my throat. He’s the only one who has ever been, and while that sucks, I’m grateful for his support.
Dad’s smile fades somewhat. “Liam looks like he’s got some skeletons in his closet. So it’s better if things don’t go too far with him.”
“Liam’s a good man, Detective Chandler.”
I force a smile, but there’s a knot in my stomach because I’m thinking back to how Dad reacted to meeting Liam, and it’s making me wonder if he knows that Liam has been in jail. Or is it just that he’s being his normal detective self and suspects something without knowing what?
The smile falls from my lips. Now I don’t know if I should speak up and defend Liam or if I should let it be. If Dad doesn’t know, if it’s only a suspicion, I’ll just make things worse.
I sigh. With Dad, it’s always better to keep the “less is more” philosophy and not overshare. I’ve gotten myself in enough hot water over the years because I gave up too much information when I should have kept my mouth shut. “But all the same, it isn’t going past this weekend.”
Dad grunts. “I’m not sure that makes me feel any better what with the way you two are carrying on.”
My face heats to sun temperatures. “Come on, not like I haven’t been forced to watch you and Mom all grabby hands for, like, my entire life.” Which makes the whole “appearances mean everything” thing seem hypocritical. But I guess it’s okay to be scandalous if you’re married. “Besides, I think it’s really getting under Amelia’s skin.”
He laughs and turns me around again, shoving me a bit toward my side of the table. “Your mother looks like she’s about to blow a gasket. Go take your seat, and try to keep the grabby hands to a minimum. You might give your grandmother a heart attack.”
I laugh and want to say that I highly doubt it since Grandma probably has a naughty drawer in her bedroom by the way she’s been talking. But I keep it to myself. The last thing Dad needs to know is that Grandma is all lusty thoughts.
Liam pats the seat next to him while holding up a card. “Looks like we get to sit together this time. But there’s another game.” He points to my plate. “Better check under there for yours.”
“What is it this time?” I sit down and start to slide my plate to the side so I can retrieve my card. I wasn’t part of the planning, not all of it.
Sunday family dinners have been sporadic lately just because my life has been so chaotic. Mom has filled me in on a few things here and there, but I’m not up to speed on all the games planned for the weekend.
“Ohhhh, it’s a kind of truth or dare, you know?” Uncle Bernard says, his smile infectious. “My card says, ‘Tell a story that you’ve told no one before.’”
I sit down next to him and smile when I realize Liam is behind me, pushing my chair in. “Thank you.” No one has done that for me before, either, except for maybe my dad.
Liam nods then sits down next to me and shows me his card.
Tell a story about a time you did something unexpected.
I laugh. “Intriguing.”
“Everything so far today has been unexpected,” he says. “Should I take the dare?”
“No, sir.” Uncle Bernard is shaking his head. “That would be most unwise.” He nods toward Grandma. “She’ll be assigning the dares, and that would be something to avoid if I were you.”
I raise an eyebrow. If I’ve learned anything this weekend, it’s that Grandma has a secret life I know nothing about. I turn back to Liam. “I’d stick to truth but maybe not some of our unexpected but totally awesome truths, if you know what I mean.” Liam is sitting next to someone I haven’t met yet, an older lady who has a tint of blue in her hair and many gold chains weighing down her neck. “You could tell that story about how we met. You know, the one you told Charlotte.” My stomach flutters at the memory of that story. “It was nice.” More than nice.
“You liked it?”
I put my hand on his. “It was sweet.”
Liam smiles. “I’ll tell that story, then.”
“Everyone, turn to the person on your left, partner up, and decide—truth or dare?”
I shift my body to my right as Uncle Bernard shifts to his left.
“Sooooo, Uncle Bernard, you seem to know a few things about Grandma that we don’t. How about you share your little secret love story?”
Uncle Bernard glances over at Grandma, who has taken her spot at the head of the table once again.
“Oh, you don’t want to hear that story.” He turns back to look at me. “It’s time long passed now and things better left forgotten.”
I lean closer to him and show him my card. It says, Tell a story about a time you did something embarrassing. “You sure you don’t want to swap stories? This one might be scandalous.” I wink.
Uncle Bernard’s bushy eyebrows go up, and he barks a laugh. “We’d be sworn to secrecy, of course.”
I nod. “Yes, that goes without saying.”
He motions to the waiter to pour us each some wine. “Well then…” He lifts his glass to me. “I say we’ve got a deal. A story for a story.”
“I saw your grandmother first,” Uncle Bernard says after taking a long, seemingly fortifying drink from his glass. “Harold knew this, of course, but she is a bewitching woman, and I can’t blame him for pursuing her.”
Everyone is talking, a low hum of white noise, voices, clinking glasses, scraping utensils, and servers moving in and out, dishing up salad, making sure the wine is flowing. I glance down the table at Grandma, who is deeply engrossed, it seems, in a conversation with Amelia. She’s probably hearing all about Amelia’s wonderful life with her uber-successful husband and her own glorious law career with her many clients. Amelia is the epitome of golden child.
“Maggie, dear? Everything okay?” Uncle Bernard asks.
I pull my gaze away from my sister and snap myself back to the conversation, turning completely so that it’s all eyes on Uncle Bernard.
“Granddad stole her away from you?” I could believe it of my grandfather. He was a commanding man, went after what he wanted, and always succeeded. He’d built a woodworking business from the ground up, had made everything from beautiful cabinets to ornate staircases and even, a time or two, a custom house. He was a hard worker, right up until he got sick, and even then he tried to keep the business going. When he suffered a stroke, it was the beginning of the end. It shook our family hard, but the doctors prepared us, and Granddad himself wouldn’t tolerate wallowing, as he put it. He’d lived a good, long life, he’d said, and it was his time to go. Grandma had carried on his message after he lost the ability to speak in those last few days, and he would squeeze her hand to let her know he approved.
Uncle Bernard waved his hand and winked. “Your grandmother was working at the library at the time. I was in there studying, as I liked to do. Ancient history, forgotten languages, foreign countries. She would always smile at me, and her eyes would sparkle in that way…” He looks at me. “The way you have, when you smile, it goes straight to your eyes. And the blush, to die for.” He points to my cheeks, which at the mention of blush start to heat. The curse of having fair skin. “Yes, just like that. Love it!”
My salad is set in front of me and my wine topped up. “So you saw her first?” I prompted.
Uncle Bernard forks some of his salad and shoves it in his mouth. “Ah yes, I did. Every Saturday, I’d go there, as I had been since I was a child but now maybe more eagerly because she was there.” He punctuated his words with forkfuls of food and gulps of wine, smiling and waving his fork around in between. “She would hold books for me. That’s how it started, actually. She’d found a Latin text that I’d been searching for and brought it to me. She asked me if I could actually read it or if I was just trying to impress her.”
He laughs a lot as he is telling his story, a bright smile never leaving his lips. No matter what happened between him and my grandfather, it’s easy to see that Uncle Bernard holds no hard feelings.
“We flirted, talked a lot, so much so that some of the patrons shushed us a time or two. Your grandmother would get such a fire in her eyes, like she wanted to tell them where to go! She never did, of course. She was too respectful for such an outburst, but I knew what she was thinking, and it was glorious. Your grandmother was always so alive, so vivacious, you know?” He sighs then shakes his head. “Harold would come and pick me up at the end of the day, after he got off his shift at the steel plant he was working at. Sometimes he’d have to come in and get me because I’d be so caught up in speaking to your grandmother that I’d forget the time. That summer was probably one of my happiest.” He pushes his plate aside and sits back in his chair. “But like all things, it came to an end, the summer, that is, and I was set to leave for Oxford.”
“Hold on, Uncle Bernard, you attended school in England?” My eyes are bugging out of my head. Granddad always talked about how lean his childhood had been, how his father and mother had scraped and saved every penny for the modest life they’d provided their sons.
“Full scholarship, yes. In engineering.”
“You must be brilliant!”
He waves my comment away with a tsk. “As I learned, book intelligence doesn’t save you from heartbreak.” He shrugs at my expression of pity. “I don’t know what I expected. Some fairytale where Margot would wait for me, perhaps. So selfish, of course.” He laughs. “There I was gallivanting all over England, having the time of my life, writing her a letter here and there. Not for the world realizing that she was already lost to me.”
“To Granddad,” I say. “He said they met in high school.”
“And they did. They were both in their final year, and he recognized her from the library. I’m not sure how their story goes, not really one I sought to know, but sometime after I left, they met and fell in love. I came back at the end of my first year and learned that they were engaged.”
“You traveled the world, didn’t you?”
Uncle Bernard nods. “I saw many things, met many people. Lots of women, too. But no one would ever replace Margot to me.”
“And you never hated them for it?”
“No, how could I? It was my fault, running off and not ever expressing my feelings, not ever letting
her know that I had fallen in love with her that summer. If I had, well, then your mother would never have been born and neither would you or your sisters so…” He shrugs. “It is as it should be.”
“Why don’t you tell her now?”
Uncle Bernard barks a laugh. “What purpose would that serve?” He shakes his head. “I suspect she knows anyway. Women, they know these things.”
I can imagine that Grandma likely does know.
“The moral of the story is to seize the day, of course,” Uncle Bernard says. “Don’t leave things unsaid and don’t put love on hold for anything, not even things that seem really important, like ego or virtues or expectations.”
He clinks our glasses before downing what’s left in his.
“So, what is your scandalous secret, then?” He pours us more wine and turns back to me. His eyes are shiny in that one-too-many-drinks kind of way. “I’ve shared, so now it’s your turn, darling.”
I feel the heat on my cheeks again and look over my shoulder at Liam. He’s deep in conversation, enjoying himself, it seems. What a great guy, doing this for me and only because I asked. I smile, my heart filling with gratitude.
I lean forward and motion for Uncle Bernard to do the same.
“Well, there was one day when Liam came into the coffee shop, uh, before we started dating, and I had on this shirt that I didn’t know was see through…”
Chapter Thirteen
Maggie
After dinner, my mother declares it a two-hour siesta break and promptly takes off with Dad in tow. Mom and Dad’s little nap excuse only fooled us kids until Charlotte was about fourteen…and then she made sure Amelia and I knew exactly what they were doing when they snuck off to their bedroom. Having not lived with them from college onward, I’m not overly surprised that they’re still at it. Despite my mother’s nitpicking ways, she and Dad are deeply, lustily in love, even after thirty-five years of marriage, which is likely why I happened at all. They hadn’t planned to have a third kid, but they never made me feel like I was a mistake, just an unexpected twist.
Keep Me Wanting Page 12
