Chances Are (43 page)

Claire beeped the horn and pulled over to the curb. Kathleen’s face lit up when she saw them, and she dashed over to the car and jumped into the backseat.

“I thought you were catching the six-twenty-two back to Manhattan,” Claire said as her daughter buckled her seat belt.

“Kelly promised me last night that she’d drive me to the station. She was supposed to pick me up at five-fifteen, but she never showed up.”

“You called her?”

“I tried. I got the machine at home and her cell just rang through.”

“You should have called me. I would’ve come right back.”

“I did,” Kathleen said. “Your phone was switched off.”

“I turned it off at the hospital and forgot to turn it back on.” She shifted into gear and made a quick U-turn. “We have fourteen minutes, guys. Think we can do it?”

“Yeah!” Billy pumped the air. “Hit it, Ma!”

“I’m really pissed,” Kathleen grumbled as they raced along Main Street toward the train station two towns away. “I can’t believe she screwed me like this.”

“Do you think you might be overreacting just a bit?” Claire asked over her shoulder.

“It’s just that it’s Kelly, you know what I mean? You expect other people to screw up, but not her.”

There was something about the statement that struck a nerve with Claire, but it vanished before she could examine it. She smiled at her daughter in the rearview mirror.

“Pull that seat belt tighter, honey, because I have some news you are not going to believe.”

 
“MIKE’S GOING TO shack up with Mrs. Fairstein?” Aidan looked suitably shocked when Claire and Billy dropped by to grab some take-out chili for their supper and share the latest news. “When the hell did that happen?”

Claire glanced at her watch. “About two hours ago. Lilly phoned to tell me he said yes.” She laughed. “Actually, he said, ‘Hell, yes!’”

“Lot of changes going on around here,” he said, loading some corn chips into a container for Billy. “You need a score-card to keep up with them.”

“Is that a dig? Because if you’re talking about Cuppa, you can just—”

“Down, Red,” he said. “I was talking about myself. Maddy and I decided to move up the wedding date.”

She did a good job of faking happiness. He had to give her that. “So when’s the new Big Day going to be?”

“July twenty-first. She’s going to run it by Rose tonight.”

“That’ll register at least a five on the Richter scale,” Claire said.

“What’s the Richter scale?” Billy asked, looking up from Aidan’s computer, where he had been playing something that involved street-fighting dinosaurs.

“It measures earthquakes,” Aidan told him and laughed when the kid’s eyes almost bugged out of his head.

“We’re going to have an earthquake?” Billy asked. “Cool!”

Claire launched into an explanation of sarcasm, irony, and metaphor that Aidan saw whizzing over his nephew’s head like a convoy of paper airplanes.

“What your mother’s trying to say is that when Rose hears about this, she’s going to yell loud enough to rock the town.”

“You’re good at this,” Claire said dryly. “Ever think of trying parenthood?”

“Now that’s the sister-in-law I know and love: never met a zinger she didn’t like.”

“I don’t think Olivia’s going to be too thrilled when she hears the news. That means Maddy will be useless the first month Cuppa’s open.”

“Women have been known to work and plan a wedding,” he said.

“You two are going on a honeymoon, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“Well, unless you’re staying in beautiful downtown Paradise Point, that’ll leave me holding the tea bag until she gets back.”

“So you’re saying July isn’t a good idea?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just pointing out a few things you might’ve missed.”

“Don’t blame Maddy for this. It was my idea.”

“I’m not blaming anyone, Aidan. It’s just that it’s typical of—” She clamped her lips together in a tight line.

“Typical of what?” Like he didn’t know what she had been about to say. Flighty, unpredictable Maddy Bainbridge . . .

She shook her head and changed the subject. “Speaking of parenthood, what’s with Kelly? She said she’d take Kathleen to the train station, and she never showed up.”

“I haven’t seen her since we got back. She stayed at The Candlelight last night. I suppose she’s still there.”

Claire gave him one of those raised-eyebrow looks. “Didn’t you try to call her?”

“I swung by home to see if she was there and left a note. She knows where to find me.”

Claire tapped her front teeth with the nail on her right index finger. “It’s not like her to just drop out like this.”

“Drop out? She blew a trip to the train station. What’s the big deal?”

“I don’t know that it is a big deal,” she said. “All I know is it’s not like her, and it worries me.”

It worried him, too. The nagging sense that something was wrong had been with him for weeks now. “She’s been a little edgy lately. I tried to get her to talk to me this week.”

“Any luck?”

“She burst into tears and ran from the room.”

“Kelly did that?” Claire sounded shocked.

“She was crying like it was the end of the world.”

“Maybe she and Seth are having troubles.”

“Nope. Sorry to say they’re tight as ever.”

“School?”

“Still pulling
A
s.” He frowned. “She hasn’t been feeling too great. Some kind of stomach thing. That’s probably what it is.”

“Maybe she’s pregnant.”

Claire’s words hit him like rocket mortar. “What the hell are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I said it. I’m worried about her, too, Aidan. Something isn’t right, and the signs are pointing one way.”

“Bullshit.”

“Lower your voice. The kid’s listening.”

“Like you haven’t said worse.”

“I’ve reformed.” She had the grace to look embarrassed. “At least around home.”

“Why would you think she’s—” He had trouble getting the word out.

“Gut instinct. Mother’s intuition.” She shrugged. “The fact that she puked her guts out Monday afternoon at the mall.”

“What?”

“I thought I told you that night.”

“You told me she didn’t feel well.”

“It was more than that. Hannah was with her. Apparently she had a major encounter with the porcelain receptacle.”

“Jesus.” This was worse than rocket mortar. He didn’t want to think about his daughter and Seth. She was still only five years old, wasn’t she? The sweet, innocent baby girl who thought he was a hero. “Kelly’s too smart for that.”

“I was too smart for that, too,” she reminded him. “And so was Maddy. Even smart people make mistakes.”

“I’m not buying it. This is a kid who makes lists of lists. She brings back her library books a day early. She rewinds tapes before she returns them to the video store. That’s not the type of kid who ends up pregnant.”

She gave him a look that was too close to pity for his liking, and for the first time he was scared.

 
“I’LL CLOSE UP,” Aidan said to Owen hours later as the last of the regulars waved good-bye.

“I don’t mind doing it.”

“Go home and get some sleep. You did double duty all weekend. You deserve it.”

Owen didn’t even try to stifle his yawn. “Is Tommy opening in the morning?”

“Last I heard. If he doesn’t, I have his back. We won’t need you until four.”

Owen thanked him and took off, leaving Aidan alone with his increasingly troubled thoughts.

It was too late to phone Maddy, but he needed to touch base with her, to reassure himself that he hadn’t dreamed last night, hadn’t imagined the things they did or the promises they had made to each other. He sent her an X-rated E-mail, then followed it quickly with a mushy, sentimental poem meant to make her laugh. She hadn’t responded yet, but he imagined things were pretty chaotic at The Candlelight, especially if she had broken the news of the new wedding date to Rose.

He had spoken briefly to Kelly around ten o’clock. She was home and fine, hunkered down over some schoolwork. A normal Sunday night. He asked her about Kathleen and the train station, and she said she’d been so busy at The Candlelight that she totally forgot.

Last week he wouldn’t have thought twice about any of it, but tonight it only added to the growing sense that something wasn’t right.

He locked up the place a little before midnight and headed for home. As he pulled into the driveway, he noted that the porch light needed to be replaced and added it to his mental to-do list. Kelly’s room was dark, but the small table lamp on the desk in the living room was lit, and that was where he found his daughter, asleep over a stack of photographs.

She looked incredibly young with her head resting on her arms and her buttery yellow curls tumbling this way and that. She wore his moth-eaten old black sweater, the one with the hole in the right elbow, and sweatpants. Her feet were bare and propped up on a stack of books. For a second he was a young and terrified father, alone with a squalling, needy infant with feet so tiny they could both fit in the palm of his hand with room left over. Where had the years gone? In a few months she would be out of his house forever. Had he taught her everything she would need to walk this world? Had he taught her anything at all, or had she always been far ahead of him in the things that really mattered?

His gaze fell on the stacks of photos scattered across the tabletop, and his heart seemed to stop beating for an instant as the ghosts of his family filled the room. Grandma Irene and Grandpa Michael, smiling up at him from the front door of the original O’Malley’s before the Hurricane of ’52 tore it apart. His parents in their Sunday best at his First Communion. Billy Jr.—but wait, that wasn’t his nephew grinning at him in black and white, that was his brother Billy on his ninth birthday, all freckles and scabbed knees and enough energy to power most of New Jersey.

They were all there. Aunts and uncles he barely remembered. Favorite dogs. The cat Billy had rescued from the creek behind the church.

And Sandy.

There she was, his first love, cradling their newborn baby daughter. She was only a kid herself at the time, young and wide-eyed and in love. Same as he had been. The head-over-heels, forever kind of love people prayed for but rarely found. Everybody had said the odds were against them, but for a little while they had proved them all wrong. Sure they were too young and too poor and too unprepared for what it meant to be parents when they were still kids themselves, but somehow they’d managed. Or they would have managed if fate had been kinder to them and—

“Dad?” Kelly’s voice was soft, almost apologetic. “You’re looking at Mom’s picture?”

“Hey, sleepyhead, where did you find this? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

She yawned and wiped the sleep from her eyes. “Mrs. DiFalco gave me a box of photos from her attic. Can you believe how amazing they are?”

He picked up the photo of Sandy and looked at it under the lamplight. “This was taken just before you were baptized. It had been raining on and off all day, and your mother was fussing over you, worrying you were going to catch cold, even though it was ninety degrees outside.”

“I wish—” She stopped and lowered her head. “You know.”

“Yeah, I know.” He had wished it, too, over the years. “I’m lucky, though. I see your mother every time you smile.”

She looked at him with those old-soul eyes of hers. He had always joked she had been born knowing everything she needed to know and had been teaching him ever since. “Doesn’t that make you sad?”

“Knowing that your mother lives on through you? No, that doesn’t make me sad, Kel. It makes me—” He struggled for the right word to convey a concept so profound it humbled him. “Grateful,” he said at last. “It makes me feel grateful.”

She made a small noise and looked away.

“Don’t go crying on me, Kel. These are good memories.”

Her arms were wrapped tightly across her chest in classic defensive posture.

“Kel, you haven’t been yourself all week. Claire—”

She spun around and flashed him her mother’s smile, derailing his train of thought. “Wow, I completely forgot! Did you and Maddy have a great time?”

“Great enough that we’re moving up the wedding to July.”

“July? Wow!”

“You’re okay with that?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be? I really like Maddy, and Hannah’s a doll.”

He started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“You never disappoint me, Kel. I must’ve done something damn good in another life to rate a daughter like you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“You’ve earned them. A man couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong. I’ve made lots of mistakes, really bad mistakes.”

His gut twisted into a sailor’s knot.

“I’m listening,” he said. “You know you can tell me anything.”
God, if you’re listening, if you remember my name, help me know the right thing to say.

The look in her eyes was very old and very sad. “I’m not a little girl anymore,” she said. “I can’t run to Daddy with every problem.”

“You have a problem?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Claire’s worried about you, sweetheart. She said you were sick to your stomach last week at Short Hills.”
She’s a great kid, God. She deserves all the good luck you can send her way.

“Great,” she exploded. “I suppose she told you I was . . . bulimic or something.”

“Are you?”

“No!” She pulled a childish face. “Yuk!”

“So what happened?”

Silence had never sounded so loud as he waited for her answer.

“Sometimes I get sick when my period starts. That’s all.”