All She Ever Wanted (42 page)

Fiona wept and wept. Eleanor climbed onto her lap looking bewildered and afraid. “Don’t cry, Mommy,” she said over and over. “Don’t cry.” They were both weeping when Leonard came home from school.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in alarm. Fiona saw the fear in his eyes as he gazed at her disheveled clothing and bloodied forehead. “Are you hurt, Mommy?” He was only seven years old, too young to be her strength and support, but she saw his willingness to try, and it touched her.

“I’m all right, Leonard. It’s just a scratch. Come here.” She reached to pull him close to her, and all three of them huddled together on the couch as she told him the truth. “Your father died, darling. Do you understand what that means?” He shook his head. Fiona wasn’t sure she understood it, either. She didn’t want to understand. But in telling her children, the painful reality gripped her heart at last.

“It means… it means that he’ll never come back to us. We’ll never see him again. He’s gone… forever.”

“Can we find a new daddy?” Eleanor asked in a shaky voice. Fiona couldn’t reply. She hugged her children closer, weeping until all her tears were gone.

She slept on the couch that first night, knowing she would never find rest in the bed they’d once shared. She didn’t change out of her clothes, unable to go into the closet where Arthur’s spare shirts were hanging. When she opened the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink to get headache powders the next morning, she saw the razor and toothbrush Arthur kept in the apartment, and his favorite tooth powder. She began to tremble, not with grief but with anger.

Death hadn’t taken him—he’d embraced it himself. He was a coward. The newspapers said that a lot of men had lost everything they had, yet only a few had resorted to suicide. She still would have loved him even if all his money was gone, but he hadn’t given Fiona that choice. He’d ruined her life by never making an honest woman of her, and now he’d ruined their children’s lives with the terrible legacies of bankruptcy and suicide. Arthur had abandoned them, just as Rory had abandoned Fiona’s mother and sisters. What would they do now?

Fiona could barely function as her emotions spiraled downward in an endless cycle of anger and fear and grief.
How could you leave us, Arthur? How could you?
she asked over and over. Charles voiced his sorrow every time Fiona went in or out—which wasn’t often. “I’m just so sorry about Mr. Bartlett, ma’am. He was a decent man.” She didn’t know how to respond.

When Mrs. Murphy arrived on cleaning day, she had tears in her eyes.

“I read in the papers about Mr. Bartlett, ma’am. I’m so sorry. He was always very kind to me.” Fiona stared at her woodenly, her arms tightly crossed to keep Mrs. Murphy from embracing her. Fiona knew she would lose the slender grip on her composure if anyone hugged her.

“I can’t pay you, Mrs. Murphy,” she said coldly. “You may as well go home.”

“But… I need this job. I don’t know how I’ll find work—”

“And I don’t know how the children and I are going to live!” she shouted. Mrs. Murphy was immediately contrite.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m… I’m so sorry.”

Fiona looked away. “I know. And I’m sorry for yelling.” Neither of them knew what else to say.

“Well… good-bye, then,” Mrs. Murphy said. She bent to embrace Eleanor, who was waiting for a hug. “Good luck to you.” She quietly closed the door behind her.

Fiona lived in a haze for a month, somehow managing to send Leonard to school each morning, fixing haphazard meals for the children, eating very little herself. She knew she couldn’t succumb to grief forever; she would have to let it go soon and decide how she would make a living for herself and the children. But she couldn’t seem to muster the energy or the courage to move on.

Then the landlord knocked on her door on a cold, gray day near the end of November. “I’m very sorry about Mr. Bartlett, ma’am. I read about him in the paper.”

Fiona nodded mutely. Everybody had read about it. Everybody in the world, it seemed, knew that her children’s father, the man she loved, had put a gun to his head and killed himself after going bankrupt. The landlord exhaled and looked down at the floor, as if what he was about to say was very difficult.

“I’m sorry to trouble you at a time like this, ma’am… but I’ll be needing the rent payment on the first of December. I let last month’s rent go by because your—because Mr. Bartlett paid me the first and last months in advance. But December’s is due, you see. I wouldn’t bother you if I could help it. Mr. Bartlett was a real good man.”

“Can you give me a week?” she asked hoarsely.

“Sure, sure. But then you have to pay me or… or move out, okay? Please don’t make me throw you out in the street. I’d really hate to do that to you, with the children and all.”

“Come back in a week,” she said, closing the door.

Chapter
30

F
iona counted the money in her hatbox and realized that it would disappear in six months if she used it to pay the rent. She gathered up all the jewelry Arthur had given her over the years and stuffed it into her purse, remembering a pawnshop she’d passed on one of their trips to the park. But as soon as she rounded the corner, holding Eleanor’s hand, she saw long lines of desperate, well-to-do customers overflowing the pawnshop doors and spilling out into the street. She pushed closer and heard the owner shouting, “That’s all I can give you! It doesn’t matter what it’s worth, there aren’t any buyers!” Fiona clutched her purse tightly and walked home again, wondering where she could go, what she should do.

Her last hours with Arthur had played endlessly in her mind for the past few weeks like a well-worn phonograph record: how he’d paced the floor, sipping scotch; how he’d rested his cheek against her hair as they’d held on to each other; how he’d gazed at her with sorrowful eyes and said,
“I love you, Fiona.”
But as she walked home from the pawnshop, feeling distraught, she recalled what else he had said—and how unlike Arthur it had seemed at the time:
“My car is parked downstairs. I think you should drive up to the Poconos. … Just you and the children.”

Did he know, then, what he would do? Had he deliberately reminded her of a secluded place where she and the children could find refuge? Fiona suddenly decided to drive to Deer Falls—if for no other reason than that Arthur had wanted her to go. She made sandwiches and threw some clothes into a suitcase for each of them, along with the children’s favorite books and toys. As soon as Leonard arrived home from school, she bundled everyone into the car.

By the time they reached Arthur’s cabin in Deer Falls, they were all exhausted. Fiona had never driven that far in her life, and her arms ached from wrestling with the huge car’s steering wheel. Eleanor, who was used to the city’s bright lights, was terrified of the murky woods. Neither child had ever been out of the city before, and both were much too frightened to go near the frigid lake. Neither of them wanted to use the outhouse.

“I want to go home,” Eleanor bawled. Fiona rocked her in her arms, too tired to explain that “home” wouldn’t be theirs much longer.

“So do I, darling,” she murmured. But where was home? They couldn’t stay here. The cabin was too small for the three of them and too rustic to live in for very long. What would they do when her money ran out?

Fiona built a fire, feeding it with wood Leonard hauled from the stack outside. But in spite of their hard work, the cabin still felt cold and damp. They ate their sandwiches by lantern light. The cabin had only one bed, so they all huddled in it together that night. The children finally slept, but Fiona didn’t.

For a long time she replayed all the memories of her visits here with Arthur, remembering how safe and contented she’d felt as she lay in the bed beside him, listening to the forest sounds outside. But the reality of her current predicament kept crowding out those memories, along with the conviction that God was finally punishing her for her sins.
Punish me, then,
she prayed,
not my children
.

“I want to go home, Mommy,” Eleanor wept as soon as she awoke. Fiona packed the car to return to New York. But foremost in her mind was the thought that only a few days remained until they would be evicted from their apartment.

She drove slowly through the town of Deer Falls, remembering how peaceful and quaint it had seemed when she’d visited here with Arthur. If only she and the children could settle in a place like this, a place where they could be anonymous, where her past would be forgotten. Halfway down Main Street, Fiona noticed a vacant shop with a
For Rent
sign hanging in the window. On impulse, she pulled the Cadillac to a halt beside the curb in front of it. The apartment on the second floor had a
For Rent
sign in it, as well.

“Why are we stopping here, Mommy?” Leonard asked. “Who lives here?”

“Nobody darling,” she said. “We’re just going to take a peek inside, all right?”

The children followed hesitantly as she got out of the car and pressed her forehead to the glass, peering into the store’s front window. An idea was already starting to form in Fiona’s mind. She could make this store into a hat shop using the money she had saved. Maybe she could sell thread and notions and dry goods, too.

She led the children around to the back of the building, and they climbed a set of wooden stairs to a small porch on the second floor. The apartment looked uninhabited, so Fiona peered inside those windows, too. She glimpsed a small kitchen and several other rooms beyond.

“How would you like to live here?” she asked, turning to Eleanor and Leonard.

“I want to live in our own apartment,” Eleanor said, pouting. “Can we go home now?”

“I have to go to school,” Leonard added. His eyes were as wide and sad as Arthur’s had been but a much lighter shade of brown.

“Listen, my darlings,” she began, crouching beside them. “We can’t stay in our apartment anymore. Your father is dead, and—” Grief choked off her words. It was a moment before she could finish. “And we have to find another place to live.” They gazed up at her, their eyes mirroring her own sorrow. She knew they didn’t mourn for their father—he’d been a stranger to them—but they instinctively felt her sadness, and perhaps some of her fear.

“I think this would be a really grand place for us to live,” she said. “Let’s just go and see how much it costs, okay? Maybe it’s all a pipe dream after all.”

The
For Rent
sign listed the name of a local real estate agency where she could get more information. Fiona loaded the kids into the car again and drove the few short blocks to the address. Inside, an older woman with graying hair sat behind a counter talking to a portly man with shiny, black hair and a dapper three-piece suit. He appeared to be younger than Arthur by at least ten years, olive-skinned, foreign-looking. Fiona had seen a lot of immigrants when she lived on the Lower East Side, and she guessed that he might be Italian. He looked up when Fiona entered, and she saw his eyes travel over her from head to toe as if undressing her in his mind. The smile he gave her when he reached her face again made her uneasy.

“May I help you?” the woman asked.

“I’m interested in the shop and apartment for lease on Main Street. Could you please tell me what the monthly rent might be?”

“I’d be glad to help you,” the man said. He stepped forward, extending his hand. “Lorenzo Messina. I happen to own the place.” He held on to Fiona’s hand a moment longer than necessary. Her uneasiness grew.

“My name is Fiona—” She started to say Quinn, then changed her mind. “Bartlett. Fiona Bartlett. These are my children, Leonard and Eleanor.”

“Just three of you will be renting?” He was a handsome man in spite of the extra weight he carried on his medium frame. She could tell by his swaggering self-confidence that he was probably used to having women swoon over his good looks.

“Yes, just the three of us. I’m a widow. My husband, Arthur, passed away recently.”

“Sorry to hear that, Mrs. Bartlett. Come on, I can show you around the place—you’ll probably want to have a look inside before you decide.” He rested his hand on her back to guide her out, and she shivered involuntarily, missing Arthur’s warm, loving touch.

“Well, perhaps you should tell me how much you’re asking first, so I don’t waste your time, Mr. Messina.”

“Don’t you worry about that just yet,” he said with a grin. “Let’s take a look-see, okay? I’m willing to negotiate.”

“All right… Thank you.” She tried to push aside her growing unease as she followed his car back to Main Street, telling herself it was just her own inexperience with men that made her uncomfortable, along with the rawness of her grief.

Mr. Messina unlocked the front door and took Fiona on a tour through the store. As soon as she saw the place, she immediately began planning how she could make it into a hat shop. There was an oak counter and glass-fronted cases where she could display her designs, and a small work area in the rear where she could view the front door while she cut and sewed her creations.

“What kind of a shop are you thinking of starting?” he asked as she looked around.

“A millinery shop—I make hats.” She saw a peculiar expression cross his face before he disguised it behind one of his dazzling smiles.

“Good for you. Deer Falls doesn’t have one of those. You’ll have a corner on the market.”

He was being polite and pleasant to her, but something about him seemed wrong. He acted too citified for a small town like Deer Falls, his clothing and air of sophistication out of place here. “Have you lived in Deer Falls all your life, Mr. Messina?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t live here year’round,” he said, laughing. “I have several business interests here, and a vacation place I come to. You were lucky to catch me in the office today. Most of my business enterprises are based in Philadelphia. Where are you from?”

“Manhattan… well, Ireland originally.”

“I thought so from your accent. You have a nice voice. Come on, I’ll show you upstairs.” He led her up a back staircase to the apartment. It was much smaller than Fiona’s apartment in New York—the children would have to share a bedroom—but it had electricity and modern plumbing and plenty of light streaming through the tall, second-story windows. Fiona was certain that she could make it cozy and pleasant for the three of them.