Once in a Blue Moon (17 page)

“Fine,” Kerrie Ann managed to reply through clenched teeth.

“We came a little earlier than usual,” Carol Barthold explained, as if that weren’t obvious. “One of the girls in Bella’s class is having a party, and I know Bella wouldn’t want to miss any of it.” Her tone was friendly, if minimally so, but her haughty eyes told a different story.
Just because you gave birth to that child, it doesn’t give you the right to ruin her life.

Kerrie Ann felt her resentment bubble over. “No, we wouldn’t want that. God forbid she should spend a few more minutes with her
mother
when she could be stuffing her face with cake and playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.”

George attempted to ward off a scene by saying with a wry chuckle, “Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey? We used to play that back in my day. Nowadays it’s clowns and pony rides and video arcades.” Behind his this-won’t-hurt-a-bit smile, his expression was tense.

“You know what? This is bullshit. I’m not gonna stand here talking to you people like I don’t know what you’re up to,” Kerrie Ann erupted. “You think you can take my daughter away from me? Bribe her with a playhouse and a kitten and a trip to Sea World so she’ll want to stay with you? I’m her mother. She belongs with
me
, not with you two bozos. Got that?”

Carol’s eyes flashed, and she drew in a sharp breath that caused her nostrils to flare. George, the more diplomatic one, turned to his wife and said, “Why don’t you wait in the car, hon? I’ll go get Bella.” The proprietary tone with which he spoke of Bella hit Kerrie Ann like a slap in the face. If she’d been carrying something heavier than a purse, she’d have smashed that smile right off his face. And now he was looking at her, saying in his carefully modulated voice, “I understand that you’re upset. But we all have to set our personal feelings aside and think about what’s best for Bella. Carol and I believe that it would be best if she remained with us. I know you don’t agree with that, which is why it’s up to the judge to decide.”

Kerrie Ann was so enraged, she was momentarily speechless. It wasn’t until Dr. Barthold was halfway across the parking lot, headed for the clinic, that she found her tongue. In the heat of anger, she called after him at the top of her lungs, “Oh yeah? Well, you can kiss my ass!”

At that exact moment she happened to look over and see Mrs. Silvestre emerging from the building, holding Bella by the hand. She paused at the entrance, staring straight at Kerrie Ann, her round face registering shock that quickly hardened into a frown of disapproval.

Ollie did his best to console Kerrie Ann on the way home. “You couldn’t help it. Who wouldn’t be pissed off if someone was trying to take away their kid?” In a harsher tone, he added, “If it had been me, it probably would’ve ended with the cops being called.”

At the image of genial Ollie being hauled off in handcuffs, Kerrie Ann let out a teary snort that fell short of a laugh. “No offense, but somehow I can’t quite picture that,” she told him.

“Oh, so you don’t think I’m tough?” He looked a little put out.

“No, I don’t, and you should be glad of it,” she shot back irritably. “There are two kinds of people in this world, Ollie. The kind like you who spread sunshine everywhere they go. And the ones like me who turn everything they touch to shit.”

Ollie guided the Willys into the left lane to avoid the traffic backed up at the exit they were approaching. “The only thing the matter with you is that you don’t believe in yourself,” he said.

She glared at him. “Give me one good reason why I should.”

“Well, for one thing, because
I
believe in you. I see how hard you’re trying. And not just with your kid. You should be proud of how far you’ve come and that you’re still hanging in there. Not everybody in your shoes could say that, I bet.”

Ollie was right about that, she grudgingly conceded. Though, like all addicts, she was never more than a slip away from falling off the wagon. “I wish I had your faith,” she said.

“It’s a little like baking a cake,” he went on. “You don’t always have to stick to the recipe. You just have to trust your instincts.”

“Even if your instincts suck?”

“Deep down you always know the right thing to do, even if you don’t always do it.”

Kerrie Ann gave in to a small smile. “You’re a smart guy, you know that?”

“I don’t know about that,” he demurred, reddening.

“You’re pretty cute, too,” she threw in.

Ollie’s blush deepened. When he blushed, it wasn’t just his cheeks; it was his whole face, from his Adam’s apple to the roots of his electrocuted hair. “Glad you think so,” he muttered, casting her a look of such pained longing that she wished she hadn’t said anything.

She’d put her foot in it. Again. She had no business encouraging him. Unless . . .

Before she could take that thought to its inevitable conclusion, they were cut off by some asshole in a black Beamer going ninety miles an hour who nearly clipped them as he shot into the lane just ahead of them. Kerrie Ann uttered a curse, her thoughts returning to the Bartholds.

If only she’d kept her mouth shut! Mrs. Silvestre was probably filling out her report at this very minute, and Kerrie Ann knew just what it would say:
Difficulty with social interactions . . . lack of impulse control . . . needs to work on managing her anger
. She’d seen it all before on countless report cards and evaluation forms and performance reports through the years.

It was after dark by the time they rolled into Blue Moon Bay. Fifteen minutes later they were pulling up in front of Lindsay’s house. Ollie parked in the driveway and got out, walking her to the door. Kerrie Ann was opening her mouth to thank him and to apologize for being such poor company on the ride home when he did something completely unexpected and most un-Ollie-like.

He kissed her.

Kerrie Ann was so startled, she didn’t resist. Even more surprising, she found herself responding. Ollie might not be a man of the world, but he certainly knew how to kiss. His mouth closed over hers with authority, his big, capable hands cupping her head, and she found herself melting into him. It had been so long since she’d been held like this by a man . . . since she’d been touched so tenderly . . . not since Jeremiah.

This time it was Kerrie Ann’s cheeks that were on fire when they finally drew apart. “Jesus. Where the hell did
that
come from?” she murmured in a low, unsteady voice.

Smiling, Ollie replied, shaking his head, “Beats me.”

She didn’t doubt, from the look he wore, that he was as surprised as she was. “I’ll let you off this time,” she said with mock sternness. “But don’t let it happen again.”
At least not while we’re within sight of my sister.
“Or next time somebody
will
call the cops.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He took a step back, but his smile remained intact.

Moments later he was strolling back down the path, whistling a tune, his hands stuffed in his pockets and a huge grin on his face.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

O
LLIE WAS MAKING A CAKE
. Not just any cake; this would be his most magnificent creation yet. Kerrie Ann’s birthday was tomorrow, her thirtieth, and this would be his chance to show her, with something she could see and taste and savor, exactly how he felt about her.

For the first time in his twenty-four years, Ollie was in love. There had been girlfriends in the past, but they’d been mere warm-up acts, he realized now. Kerrie Ann was different than any of them—the most beautiful, exciting woman he’d ever met. She’d been places, done things, he could only imagine. Yet there was a vulnerability to her, something almost . . . bruised. Despite his own relative lack of experience, Ollie felt oddly protective of her. With Kerrie Ann, he was a knight of yore looking out for his lady love.

Until last Sunday, he’d feared his passion was doomed to go the way of all unrequited love. But then something extraordinary had happened: a kiss that, for him, had been more like a cosmic event. And she hadn’t pulled away or stiffened or made some lighthearted remark designed to fend him off. She’d kissed him back. For what had to be at least a full minute.
She’d kissed him back
. Like she was into it. Like she was into
him
.

Admittedly there had been nothing since to indicate that she saw him as more than a friend. At work she was her usual breezy, irreverent self, acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary. All she needed was more time, he told himself. Right now she was too preoccupied with her daughter to focus on anything else. He tried to see this as an opportunity rather than a setback. Simply by being there for her, helping her get through this rough patch, he would demonstrate that she could always count on him. And someday, years later, when they looked back on this, a gray-haired couple with children and grandchildren of their own, she would smile and say,
That was when I knew I loved you
.

So
, he thought,
butter
. Eight tablespoons or ten? Should he go with the cake flour or the all-purpose? Or maybe do a torte—ground nuts and only a handful of flour? Yes, he decided, a torte. Layered with shaved chocolate and whipped cream. That would make a real statement.

As Ollie began assembling ingredients, the torte took shape in his mind. This was how he worked: a glimmer of an idea, a bagful of tricks, an array of ingredients that through some process he wasn’t always aware of (to him, recipes were like riffs to a jazz musician) magically alchemized into what emerged from the kitchen later on. Then he would marvel at his creation, hesitant to take credit for something that seemed to have more or less taken shape on its own. Through the years he’d had his share of failures, but he didn’t dwell on those.
Every haul has its share of garbage fish
, his dad always said. You just had to be patient and wait for the big one, like he was doing with Kerrie Ann.

He’d finished toasting the hazelnuts and was using an old dish towel to rub off the skins when his mom walked in. Her gaze swept the countertop, scattered with bowls and utensils and ingredients, before dropping to the hazelnut skins scattered in a fine layer over the worn linoleum. Her mouth stretched in a wry smile even as she released a sigh of resignation. Frieda “Freddie” Oliveira had long since become accustomed to having her kitchen commandeered by her youngest son and finding it topsy-turvy, as much flour and sugar on the floor as in whatever he was making. Her only rule was that he clean up afterward. After thirty years of running a business that had her on her feet all day, the last thing she wanted when she got home was to spend her downtime with a mop and a broom.

Which didn’t change the fact that she had a soft spot for her youngest. “Need a hand with that?” she asked.

Ollie looked up at her with his smile that could melt a polar ice cap. “I’m good, Ma. Why don’t you take a load off? I’ll make you a cup of tea. Just let me finish this and I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Tea would be lovely.” She reached for the kettle herself, but Ollie shooed her away.

“Sit,” he ordered.

Smiling, she pushed back a wisp of curly red hair dulled by age to the color of old copper as she settled into a chair at the kitchen table—one that had come off an old steamer and had seen more turbulence in the decades of feeding her noisy brood than when sailing the seven seas. “You’re getting to be awfully bossy,” she said, eyeing him with affection.

Ollie grinned at her as he swept a handful of crackling skins into the garbage. “I had a good teacher.” It was a family joke that Freddie couldn’t walk past an empty chair without telling it what to do.

She laughed. “I’ll own that.” She’d had to run a tight ship with such a large brood, though her discipline had always been meted out with equal measures of hugs and kisses. “Though Lord knows where you get your knack for baking—it certainly wasn’t from me.” Freddie was a “decent enough cook,” in her own words, but she had neither the time nor the inclination for baking. “Or your dad.” She clucked and shook her head. “The one time I let him loose in the kitchen, right after Tee was born, he nearly set it on fire trying to fry chicken.”

“Sounds like something Tee would do,” he said of his eldest sister, Theresa, who was famously accident-prone.

“Well, you know what they say: The apple never falls far from the tree.”

If that was true, Ollie wondered which tree he’d fallen from. Physically he was a mixture of both his parents, but in every other respect he might have been an alien dropped into this occasionally riotous but otherwise perfectly normal family. For one thing, he was the first in a long line of Oliveira men who preferred dry land to being out at sea. Even though his three elder brothers—a plumber, police officer, and sales rep, respectively—hadn’t gone into the family business, they loved to fish in their time off. His sisters, too—Caty had once landed a thirty-pound snapper off their dad’s boat, and Theresa, who lived in Idaho with her husband and kids, had taken up fly-fishing. Ollie was the only one in the family who disliked everything to do with fish except when it came to eating it.

Regardless, each weekday morning he was up before dawn to help unload the day’s catch before making the rounds in the family van to the wholesale accounts. By the time he arrived at the book café, showered and dressed in clean clothes, he’d already put in half a day’s work.

“She must be pretty special,” observed his mom as she followed his movements about the kitchen. She had a knowing look on her face, even though he’d told her nothing about Kerrie Ann other than he enjoyed working with her. Either there was some truth in Freddie’s claim, while he and his siblings were growing up, that she knew what they were up to even when she wasn’t there to see it, or she had gotten an earful from Lindsay.

“Yeah, well, I told Linds I’d bring dessert. And since it’s a birthday party and all . . .” He did his best to downplay it. All his mom knew was that Lindsay was having a little birthday gathering at her house on Sunday, to which he’d been invited. On the stove, the kettle began to hiss. He switched off the burner and poured boiling water into the teapot.

“I’m sure it’ll make quite an impression.” A simple remark, but worlds were contained therein.

“Hey, it’s the big three-oh. Gotta go all out for that, right?” Ollie spoke blithely despite the ripple of unease in his belly as he fetched a mug from the cupboard over the sink.

His mom smiled and nodded. “Thirty? Is that all? I would’ve guessed older.”

Uh-oh, here we go
, he thought.

Freddie sighed. “Well, she seems like a nice enough girl.” It had been the universal statement through the years about any of his or his brother’s girlfriends who, for whatever reason, hadn’t met with her approval.

Ollie poured the tea, keeping a close watch on his mom as he set the steaming mug on the table in front of her. Her expression was neutral, but the grooves on either side of her wide mouth had deepened. She was probably wondering just how serious he was about this woman for whom he was baking a cake on a Saturday night when other men his age were out having fun.

“She
is
nice,” he replied somewhat defensively. “Actually, we have a lot in common.”

“Is that so?” A subtle lift of the brow, nothing more.

Recklessly he plowed on, “Yeah, she’s cool. She gets me, you know?”

“Really? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

An edge crept into Ollie’s voice. “How do you know? You only met her the one time.” A few weeks ago when Freddie had stopped in at the store to pick up a book she’d ordered.

Freddie replied in the same mild tone, “I only meant that you come from such different backgrounds.”

“Well, she can’t help how she was brought up, can she?” He set the sugar bowl down on the table, hard enough to rattle the lid.

“No, I don’t suppose she can.” Freddie appeared to consider this as she helped herself to a spoonful of sugar, slowly stirring it into her tea. “But, son, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that most people can’t escape their upbringing. I’m not saying she doesn’t have her good qualities, but from what Lindsay tells me, she’s seen more than her fair share of trouble.”

Ollie felt the muscles in his shoulders tighten. Damn Lindsay. Why couldn’t she have kept her mouth shut? “That’s all behind her,” he said in a gruff, clipped voice.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked, lifting the steaming mug to her lips.

He searched for the words to make her understand. It was important that he get this right. “Have you forgotten what I was like in high school? You and Dad didn’t write me off. You gave me a chance to redeem myself. Shouldn’t Kerrie Ann be given that same chance?”

“I haven’t forgotten.” Freddie’s pale blue eyes locked with his over the rim of her mug. “But you were sixteen, and all you needed was a kick in the behind to set you straight. It’s not as simple as that for some. There are people who struggle all their lives and never get it right.”

His mother’s words nagged at him long after she’d finished her tea and headed to bed.

“Oh, Ollie, it’s magnificent!” declared Lindsay the following evening when she pried open the cake box to reveal what Ollie believed to be his finest creation yet: four layers filled with orange-flavored whipped cream and glazed with bittersweet chocolate sprinkled with chopped nuts. “You really outdid yourself this time.”

“You sure there ain’t a naked lady in there waiting to pop out?” Miss Honi leaned in for a closer look.

“Do we have to wait until after supper to have a piece?” joked Grant, who earned a playful slap on the wrist from Lindsay when he extended a finger to sample the chocolate glaze.

The only one who was speechless was the birthday girl herself. Kerrie Ann stared at the torte as if she’d never seen anything like it, while Ollie did his best not to stare at her. She’d never looked more beautiful. She was wearing black velveteen jeans and a bell-sleeved, midnight-blue top made of some semitransparent fabric shot through with gold threads that floated around her with each movement and through which he could see just the barest hint of a black brassiere. On each arm was a stack of colored bracelets set with tiny mirrored discs that jingled and flashed. He noticed her makeup was more toned-down than usual, allowing her prettiness to shine through, and that the pink streaks in her hair had faded to reveal more of its natural color—a pale strawberry blond. She smelled of some citrusy scent.

He adopted a nonchalant pose, but his mind and heart were racing.
Does she think it’s too much? Am I coming on too strong? Should I have gotten her a nice card and a bottle of cologne instead?

“I’ve never had anyone make me a birthday cake before,” she said at last. Gone was the tough-girl expression she often wore. She looked soft and vulnerable, like that day he’d taken her to visit her little girl. In that moment he caught a glimpse of the little girl she herself had once been, a sad and lonely one for whom birthdays had probably been celebrated with a minimum of fuss. She turned to Ollie. “You didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”