Shore Lights (18 page)

Tommy whistled. “Man, I don't know what's with you today. Claire's home. Remember? Bad tooth.”

Aidan leaned back in his chair and dragged a hand through his hair. “Shit. I forgot all about that.” He glanced at his watch, an old Timex that Kelly had bought for him a hell of a lot of Christmases ago. “I'll get moving.”

“About time,” Tommy muttered. “If you ask me, it's time we got some more help around here.”

“Can it, Kennedy.” Aidan stood up. “I can't afford the help I've already got.”

Still muttering, Tommy Kennedy went back out to tend bar and bitch about Aidan's bad mood to anyone who would listen.

Aidan couldn't deny it. He'd been in a foul temper since he got back from the nursing home. He wasn't exactly sure what started it, but something about the photo of that damn teapot sent his mood spiraling downward, and it hadn't hit bottom yet. It was more than the fact that he'd let Kelly down. After her brief explosion of tears she'd moved on to her next project without missing a beat, leaving him, as usual, with the feeling that he'd missed a chapter somewhere along the way.

He switched on the deep fryer, then pulled the highly seasoned wings from the refrigerator while the oil heated to the proper temperature. Claire had washed, dried, then trimmed three bunches of celery yesterday. She wrapped the stalks neatly in a pair of clean dishtowels and stowed them in the veggie bin so all he had to do was whip them out once the wings were cooked and drained. They were a good team most of the time. At least when they weren't butting heads about the future of O'Malley's. They were both lead sled dogs, and everyone knew what happened when two lead sled dogs vied for the only lead position.

The bar had always been Billy's domain. Even though Claire had done most of the work, it was Billy who had made it come alive. It was Billy they came to chew the fat with, Billy they wanted to make laugh.

Billy they wanted to take to bed
.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered as he started feeding the wings into the sizzling oil. He didn't want to think about the women. Sometimes he looked at Claire's face, the deep sorrow in her light blue eyes, and the pain in his gut would come close to bringing him down. She knew. She had always known, from the first time Billy strayed. Somehow she had found a way to keep on loving him and to hold on to some of her dignity. He had never been able to figure out how she'd managed that. Her husband was out screwing every available woman between Paradise Point and Cape May while Claire went on believing they were a match made in heaven.

And maybe they were. Who was he to say? Claire and Billy had kept their marriage together through some pretty tough times, the kind of bad times Aidan wasn't sure he and Sandy could have survived. Claire said she and Billy had been soul mates and somehow she made everyone else believe it too, as if her love for him was so strong, so all-encompassing that it wiped the slate clean. He left her a small pension and an even smaller insurance policy and O'Malley's. O'Malley's had been on the skids for at least ten years at that point, a workingclass, shorefront bar in an increasingly leisure-class town. After the accident, when it became clear firefighting was no longer an option, when it became even more clear that O'Malley's was about to go under, Aidan presented Claire with a business proposition that would keep a roof over her head and give him a reason to get up in the morning.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.

On days like today he wondered why he hadn't rented a bulldozer and shoved the whole damn thing into the Atlantic.

“I've got the burgers frying up front,” Tommy called from the doorway, “but you better get those wings moving fast. The natives are getting restless.” Wings. The requisite vat of chili with chopped onions and jack cheese on top. A mountain of ribs dripping sauce.

No wonder their customers were dying off, he thought as he poured the blue cheese dressing into six small dipping bowls. They were killing them.

Irene had always made sure their restaurant, the original O'Malley's, kept up with the times, and their bottom line had reflected that. She hadn't been afraid to retire the Lobster Thermidor, even though it was Michael's signature dish. Nobody would ever have mistaken O'Malley's menu for haute cuisine, but thanks to Irene it had managed to more than hold its own with the best restaurants in the tristate area for almost twenty years.

Obviously one tough act to follow.

When she rebuilt the place after the Hurricane of '52 that took Michael's life and destroyed the original structure, the new O'Malley's, while well received, never quite regained the same stature. The food was still superb. The menu remained varied and slightly unpredictable. The interior was homelike without being homespun. It had everything you would think a shore-town restaurant needed for success, but somehow it never regained that special place in its customers' hearts that it had held before. When Michael died, he took the magic with him.

The parallel wasn't lost on Aidan. The old-timers came to O'Malley's out of loyalty to Billy's memory. Some of them had been coming to O'Malley's back when Michael was alive and the place had been awash with laughter and good times and those ridiculous teapots of Irene's dangling from the rafters and crowding every shelf.

The lunch crowd came because it was close to the little office complex that had opened behind the grocery store. It wouldn't be long before they tired of ribs and chicken wings and found someplace else to spend the noon hour. They did a brisk business with construction crews, but a run of bad weather or a job brought in on time could blow a hole a mile wide in O'Malley's bottom line. They counted on the tourist trade between Memorial Day and Labor Day to keep them in the black, and more and more lately, Aidan had begun to sense that the changes in town would leave them behind if they didn't figure out a way to change with them before it was too late.

 
MADDY HAD A fat book on Flash spread across her lap and another one on Bryce balanced between her knees and the edge of her desk. She had been hunkered down over the computer since just before lunch, blind and deaf to everything but the sudden burning need to put together the world's best Web site.

And do it within the next three weeks.

She had put in a phone call to her friend Devon in Seattle with a plea for long-distance tutoring on Flash. She had e-mailed two of her old classmates, the computer nerds who went on to make big bucks following their dreams, and offered them each a weekend at the Candlelight Inn if they could help her work out her audio problems and the trouble with the mini-movie. Rose was right: people were turning to their computers for everything these days, from filling prescriptions to planning a wedding. One of her cousins had bought a house in Pennsylvania without ever setting foot on the property. Her realtor had sent her the URL of a two-story colonial, and Vicky had taken a virtual tour of every single room, including a peek inside the closets and behind the shower curtain.

If Rose was going to attract visitors from beyond New York and D.C., this was one of the ways to do it, although, after taking a look at the reservations book, Maddy wondered when Rose thought she was going to be able to accommodate more guests. The place was booked solid through the following spring, with only the month of January empty for scheduled downtime for repairs.

The thought of an endless stream of strangers wandering up and down the halls in the middle of the night made Maddy want to lie down and take a nap, but that was the nature of the B&B beast. It was clear that Rose absolutely thrived on the constant flow of visitors. Maddy couldn't remember a time when her mother looked happier or more relaxed.

Or when she had worked harder.

At a time when most women her age were moving to Florida to bake in the sun and catch the early-bird specials at the corner restaurant, Rose had not only embarked on a new career, she had made a smashing success of it. She was well respected by the community. She held a position of trust and power on the local small-business advisory board. She had been there for Grandma Fay when Grandma Fay needed her. She was there for her sisters.

And when the bottom dropped out of Maddy's life, Rose opened her arms wide and welcomed Maddy back home.

The fumes from Grandma Fay's top-secret cleaning fluid must have done something to her brain. Maybe that was how it would have happened on Walton Mountain, but Paradise Point was a whole other story. Rose presented a business opportunity to Maddy. A simple seventy-thirty split that would help Maddy regain her financial footing within a year. And when Maddy resisted the stone-cold logic of the offer, Rose pulled out the heavy artillery and aimed the maternal guilt gun her way and she was done for.

Oh, no, you don't. Don't go romanticizing Rose DiFalco
. She hadn't been one for sentimental gestures when Maddy was a little girl with a nervous stutter and a passionate need for chocolate. She hadn't morphed into a cookie-baking granny when Hannah was born. She hadn't even managed to fit a visit to Seattle to see the newborn into her busy schedule. If she'd ever wondered where she rated on Rosie's Hit Parade, that single gesture (or lack of one) told her all she needed to know. So there was no earthly reason for her to suddenly turn treacly now that Maddy was a big girl without the nervous stutter who was more passionate these days about chocolate because it was a lot easier to find (and a whole lot more reliable) than love.

 
AIDAN FILLED BIG earthenware bowls with chili, flipped burgers, cooked up another two batches of ribs and wings, and did it all with probably the worst display of bad humor that O'Malley's had seen since the day Claire pitched Hank Finnegan out the door for trashing the Devils.

“If you're looking to cut down on our workload,” Tommy said after the early crowd dispersed, “you're on the right track.” He lit a cigarette and took a long lung-filling drag. “Maybe you should think about taking a vacation.”

“Shove it,” Aidan said, slamming cups and bowls into the mammoth dishwasher.

“Yeah, that sweet talk'll bring in the crowds.” Tommy was one of those guys who refused to be insulted.

“Don't you have a bar to tend?” He emptied a slug of detergent into the dishwasher, then flipped the door closed. The deep rumble of its motor filled the air.

“You've been acting like an asshole since you rolled in here this morning. What's the deal?” Tommy took another long drag on his cigarette. “You're worse than Adam Chandler on a bad day.”

“Who the hell is Adam Chandler?”

Tommy shot him an I-don't-believe-it look. “
All My Children,
” he said, as if that would explain everything.

Aidan knew better than to pursue it. One wrong question and he'd be treated to an hour-long discourse on the lives and loves of Susan Lucci. “Nothing personal,” he said. “I stopped by the nursing home and—”

Tommy raised a hand. “Say no more. That could do it to the best of us. My mother-in-law was in Shore View for two years before she died. Toward the end I would've sold a kidney to keep from having to drag my ass in there.” He looked carefully at Aidan's face, then apparently decided to live dangerously. “So how was she? I haven't seen Irene in—how long? A year, maybe three. She doing okay?”

“For a woman who's one hundred and one years old, she's doing great.”

Tommy laughed. “That about says it all, doesn't it?”

Aidan felt the familiar stab of loneliness in the center of his chest. “That about says nothing. She spent the afternoon shooting the shit with some kid from Seton Hall, but when I showed up, she turned her head to the wall and pretended she was asleep.”

“Cold,” said Tommy, shaking his head. “Real cold.”

“Yeah,” said Aidan. “I tell Kelly all the time that it's nothing personal. Grandma's old, you've got to make allowances for her.” He leaned against the table and glanced out the window. “Then I remember she wasn't always old.”

“She put a roof over your heads,” Tommy reminded him. “That's more than my old lady did.”

Tommy's mother had abandoned her fatherless family when Tommy was six years old.

“One good thing,” Aidan said, reaching into the breast pocket of his work shirt. “The kid from Seton Hall had a fistful of clippings about the original O'Malley's. She even had some photos I'd never seen before.”

“Shit,” said Tommy. “I forgot to tell you.” His shar-pei face lit up with a smile. “I found another one of the original O's tucked away with those old-fashioned glasses we don't use anymore.”

“Where is it?”

“Kelly took the one we had hanging, but I found another one in the file cabinet, so I fixed that little loop thing on the back and hung it up.”

Two minutes later Aidan had the framed photo and the photocopy lined up together on the counter. They were slightly different angles taken of the same scene. The samovar, barely visible in the framed photo, was front and center in the photocopy.

Aidan booted up the laptop and connected the modem to the phone line. Moments later he was staring at the teapot Kelly had had her heart set on. The word SOLD was angled across the scan in big bold red letters, but there was no denying that rusty kettle was the long-lost twin of the one that had held pride of place at O'Malley's all those years ago.

He knew what Claire would say.
Don't be an ass. You're as bad as your daughter. Nothing short of a heart transplant will make that woman love you. If you want to waste your money, drive up to Atlantic City. At least there you've got a fighting chance
.

He loved Claire. He respected her judgment in most things. But this time she was wrong. That teapot was meant for Irene, and he was going to make it happen.