Shore Lights (23 page)

If Billy Jr. hadn't been standing there, watching them like they were the Williams sisters and the front hallway was center court at Wimbledon, he might have said something memorable. As it was, he placed his hand on his nephew's shoulder and said, “Let's shove off, pal,” and pretended he didn't hear Claire laughing.

 
“FOR CRYING OUT loud,” Maddy protested after Denise feigned a swoon at the sight of her sleek black trousers and high-heeled boots. “Would you guys stop acting like you've never seen me out of jeans before? You'd think I showed up here in a prom dress, the way you're all carrying on.”

Gina pretended to wave smelling salts under Denise's nose. “You clean up well, cuz,” she said with her usual wry delivery. She turned toward the other women huddled together on the street corner for warmth against the coming snowstorm. “Lipstick,” she stage-whispered. “And mascara.”

“Mascara before eight in the morning?” Pat rolled her eyes as she gathered her coat tighter around her. “The last time I had mascara on at eight in the morning it was because I didn't wash it off the night before.”

Her remark was met with whoops of laughter.

“If the kids weren't around, I could tell you a few stories about—”

“Shh!” Pat poked Delia in the ribs. “They're listening.”

The same children who had been happily annoying each other a few feet away were now solemnly—and quietly—listening to every word their mothers were saying.

“So how about those Jets,” Gina said. “Think they'll make it to the playoffs this year?”

“You have to be so careful,” Maddy said. “The one thing you don't want them to overhear—”

“Yeah,” said Pat, “and what they don't overhear, they make up and tell your mother.”

Another outburst of early morning laughter.

“Have you guys always had this much fun waiting for the school bus?” Maddy asked, trying not to let on that she'd noticed Aidan's truck pulling into a spot half a block down from where they were standing.

“Last year was terrible,” Gina said bluntly. “Maria Segretti and her mother were here every morning and every afternoon waiting for Maria's spawn of Satan. I swear to God they carried tape recorders in the pockets of their stretch pants.”

“I said three rosaries in thanks when they moved to Cherry Hill,” Delia said. “I thought we were going to have to start speaking in code.”

“I remember Maria,” Maddy said with a grimace. “She'd break that code in three minutes, then publish the text in the
Paradise Point Weekly Shopper.
”

“Honey, you don't know the half of it,” Gina said. “When I was dating Aidan, I—”

Another loud “Shh!” from Pat, who gestured over her shoulder.

Maddy tried hard not to stare at her cousin.
When I was dating Aidan
. . .

“Hoo boy!” Gina said with a loud wolf whistle. “Lookin' good, O'Malley.”

“I'll say!” Pat agreed. “You're not half bad.”

If there was anything still happening between her cousin and Aidan, they were pretty good at hiding it. Maddy didn't detect any sexual current flowing between them. He bantered with Gina the same way he bantered with Pat and Denise and the other women waiting at the corner for the school bus. And Gina flirted with everyone. Men. Women. Small children. House pets.

Whatever they'd had going between them had apparently been downgraded to a comfortable friendship.

Unless, of course, they had spent the night together.

Which, needless to say, wasn't any business of Maddy's. Her cousin was informally separated, and as far as she knew, Aidan O'Malley had never remarried.

“Maddy.” Gina snapped her fingers in front of Maddy's nose. “The man is talking to you.”

She looked up at him. “You were?”

“Yeah.” He was smiling, but uncertainty twitched at the corner of his mouth. Hmm. This was getting interesting, and interesting was the last thing she'd been expecting. He gestured toward the Macy's shopping bag at her feet. “Is that it?”

“Yep.” She inclined her head in the direction of Hannah. “Pictures.”

He looked over at Hannah, then nodded. “I know the drill.”

They locked eyes and it happened again. Everything else, her cousins, the kids, the wet and icy wind, it all dropped away as if it didn't exist, and there was only the two of them standing there on the corner, smiling at each other as if they shared a big juicy secret.

Which in a way they did, but it certainly wasn't half as big or one-tenth as juicy as Gina, Denise, and the others were starting to think.

“Don't mean to interrupt,” Denise said, eyes twinkling with mischief, “but there's a school bus about to run your asses over if you don't move in the next ten seconds.”

“Didn't Maddy almost get run over yesterday afternoon?” Pat asked, eyes wide with feigned innocence. “I think it was when she followed Aidan into the paper store.”

“You're right,” Gina said. She didn't do as good a job with innocence, feigned or otherwise. “You'd think she had her mind on something else, wouldn't you?”

Maddy mumbled something in high school Spanish that made Aidan laugh out loud.

The school bus rolled to a stop and pandemonium broke out as book bags, lunches, backpacks, permission slips, mittens, gloves, hats, scarves, and runaway caps were handed over, retrieved, signed, tucked into pockets, slung over tiny shoulders, pulled down over frozen ears. Except for Billy they were all still young enough to kiss goodbye in public without causing permanent damage to their reputations.

“Be good,” Maddy whispered in Hannah's ear. “Make sure you drink your milk. Don't swap lunches with Greta. Grandma Rose made you peanut butter with chopped raisins and celery on that bread you liked so much last time.”

Hannah's eyes swam with tears, and Maddy was afraid her own eyes were welling up, too. “You'll be home before you know it, honey.”

Hannah nodded, then boarded the bus.

“It gets easier,” Aidan said as the bus inched away from the curb. “I used to want to grab Kelly off the bus and take her back home with me.”

“Am I that obvious?”

He shrugged. “I know the signs.”

“You mean I'm going to make it to first grade?”

He pretended to study her intently. “You might even make it to third.”

“I'm going to hold you to that.”

“Well,” said Gina with a toss of her silky dark head, “I don't know about the rest of you, but I have to get to work.”

“Same here,” said Denise. “Four loads of laundry, the kitchen to clean, and a trip to the pediatrician.”

“Add a post office run to your list and you'll see how my day's shaping up,” Pat chimed in.

“Not me,” said Maddy, reaching for the shopping bag that held the samovar. “I think I'll spend the morning drinking coffee at Julie's.”

“Sounds good,” said Aidan. “Let's go.”

“SIT ANYWHERE, YOU guys,” Julie called out from behind the counter. “I'll bring your coffees.”

Two of Maddy's former schoolmates were seated at the counter, perusing what looked like architectural diagrams. Kris and Jill looked up to see the identity of the new arrivals. Kris whispered something to Jill, who whispered something back.

“Hey, Maddy!” Kris said. “Hey, Aidan!”

“How's it going?” Jill asked, her gaze darting from Aidan to Maddy and back again.

Maddy waved hello. Aidan asked how the plans for the new house were going and laughed when the two women mimed sticking their heads in a matching pair of nooses.

“They're building a house?” Maddy asked as they made their way to the only empty booth.

“Over by the lake,” he said.

“Together?”

“You didn't know they were a couple?”

“I'm really out of the loop, aren't I?”

“Spend a little more time with your cousins. They'll get you caught up.”

Aidan knew everyone in the place. Hello. Hey. How ya doing. A litany of greetings. And it was the same for Maddy. She knew almost everyone by sight or lucky guess, and the ones she didn't know knew her through Rose.

“Now you know why I moved to Seattle,” she said as she folded up her coat and placed it on the bench seat next to her. The shopping bag rested at her feet. “No such thing as a private moment in this town.”

Aidan tossed his jacket on his seat and slid in opposite her. “I started dreaming about escape when I was six years old.” He placed the envelope containing the scanned photocopy on the table between them. “Almost made it, too.”

Maddy flipped through the bits and pieces of information she remembered about the younger O'Malley brother. “You went to school in Pennsylvania. Football scholarship, I think.”

“You have a good memory.”

“You and your brother were prime topics of conversation when I was growing up.” She grinned across the table at him. “Like you didn't know.” The O'Malley boys had been great-looking, a little wild, and utterly irresistible to the girls of Paradise Point.

“One of the reasons my grandmother was glad about that scholarship. Anything to get rid of me before I did something to blacken the O'Malley name.”

“When did you move back here?”

“A few weeks short of Kelly's third birthday. Claire and Billy drove up to see how we were doing and ended up taking us back home with them.”

Maddy sighed. “Sounds familiar.”

“The word was you were having a tough time back there in Portland.”

“Seattle,” she corrected him, “and it's my daughter who's having the tough time. Her father decided to marry and move down to San Diego to be near his wife's family and—” She shrugged and turned her hands palms up. “That turned Hannah's life upside down.”

“How about yours?”

“Tom and I parted a few months after Hannah was born. This—” She paused for a moment. Did she really want to answer this question? “Okay,” she said, throwing caution to the wind. “The truth won't kill me, will it? Yeah, it turned my life upside down. I didn't think it would, but it did.”

“You still loved him?”

“That's a personal question.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It is. You don't have to answer it.”

“I want to answer it. I loved him as Hannah's father. I loved him for what we'd shared. But we hadn't been lovers for a lot of years when he met Lisa.”

And you know what? I would have taken him back in a heartbeat if he'd asked me to
.

Anything to make Hannah smile again. Anything to give Hannah a family she could depend on.

“I heard he was a lot older than you.”

She leaned forward on her elbows and met his eyes. “Why don't you tell me exactly what you've heard, and I'll tell you if it's true or not.”

“You're angry.”

“No, I'm not angry at all. You asked a question. I countered with another question.”

“Fair enough.”

“So tell me what you've heard about me.”

“You're putting me on the spot.”

“Think about how I feel.” She flashed a quick smile. “It's not like I don't know Gina has a big mouth.”

“You're right,” he said as Julie approached. “The woman's plugged into every source of gossip from here to Atlantic City.”

Julie Corbin was somewhere in her late fifties. She had purchased the coffee shop twenty years ago with the money she had made on the sale of her old house. She had plunged all of the profits into the coffee shop. She had even slept in the back room for the first two years until she could afford to rent a place within walking distance. Paradise Point had been at the start of its transition from run-down seaside resort to charming seaside village when Julie began her own renovations, and in many ways her success paralleled that of the town.

“You two don't need menus, do you?” she asked. “It's not like you don't have it memorized.”

“Toasted blueberry,” Maddy said. “No butter.”

“I'll take a short stack, sausage well done, and one egg over easy.” He thought for a second. “And some OJ.”

Julie shook her head as she scribbled in her order pad. “If I ate like that I'd be the size of a double-wide.” She looked up at them, then her eyes widened as if she had suddenly realized that this was a brand-new combination. “I'll get your coffees.”

“Did you know that Julie's son was married to my cousin Denise years ago?”

“Roger?”

“No, Alex. The one who sells Mazdas in Ocean City.”

“Alex married a flight attendant and has four kids.”

“Yeah, well, it's three kids, and before that he was married to Denise.”

He shook his head. “I don't know how that one slipped by me.”

“You think I can keep track? I've given up sending wedding presents. I wait six months and if they're still together, then I start shopping.”

Julie deposited two huge mugs of coffee, a pitcher of cream, then hurried away.

Maddy watched as he tore into two packets of sugar, then dumped them into his coffee. He didn't add cream. He didn't stir.

She poured a small measure of cream into her coffee, stirred once, then wrapped her hands around the warm mug and breathed deeply.

“Heaven,” she said. “Plain ordinary coffee. You have no idea how much I've missed it.”