Shore Lights (30 page)

Gina might not have made the world's best wife, but she was definitely in the running for best cousin. If you had a problem, Gina was the one you wanted on your side. She was blunt at times, painfully honest, the one most likely to say exactly the things you didn't want to hear at the exact moment you least wanted to hear them, but when she gave you her word, you really had something.

“You're gonna owe me,” Gina said. “Make sure the coffeepot's on and there's a plate of Aunt Lucy's mini chocolate cheesecakes.”

“Will you settle for freshly made chocolate chunk cookies with macadamia nuts?”

Gina moaned. “Settle? We'll be there if I have to pull the car with my teeth.”

Maddy tossed the cell phone back into her bag, then steeled herself to get out of the car. The snow was heavy and blowing in from the water, which meant huge snowdrifts were forming all over town. God only knew what it would be like come evening. Rose was going to hit the roof. Her mother was a stickler for thinking ahead, trying to imagine all possibilities before choosing a course of action. You could bet she wouldn't have parked her old car sideways across the driveway and blocked two other vehicles. And, if for some unthinkable reason she had, her battery wouldn't have dared to drop dead on her. Some things simply wouldn't happen.

Rose looked up from the cookbook she was thumbing through as Maddy stepped into the kitchen. “Do you need me to move my car?” she asked.

“It's the other way around,” Maddy said as she slipped out of her coat and tossed it in the mudroom to dry. She braced herself for the eruption and explained about the dead battery and its repercussions.

“Not to worry,” Rose said. “It isn't like we're going anywhere tonight in this weather.”

“What about Aunt Lucy?” She could hear her aunt laughing with the guests in the front room.

“She can stay in one of the empty rooms or grab a ride with Gina.”

That's it?
Maddy looked at her mother closely, searching for signs of hidden anger or impatience, and found nothing but good cheer.

“Is something wrong?” Rose asked pleasantly.

“You're taking this awfully well,” Maddy said. “I thought you'd be annoyed.”

Rose shook her head. “As long as we can get the Loewensteins and the Armaghs on the road tomorrow, I don't care if we're snowed in for a month.”

Maddy managed to suppress a shudder. A month might be taxing their newfound rapport to the breaking point, but her mother's easygoing acceptance of the unexpected was still amazing.

She poured herself some coffee. “We do still have some of those macadamia nut cookies, don't we? Gina demands them in payment for picking up Hannah at the bus stop.”

“Gina has the eating habits of a ten-year-old,” Rose said with a shake of her head.

“Yeah,” said Maddy, thinking of her sexy and curvaceous cousin. “It's really done her a lot of harm, hasn't it?”

Rose took off her reading glasses and placed them on the table next to the stack of cookbooks. “I used to feel the same way about Lucia and Toni. The boys were like bees buzzing around them. I was lucky if one of their castoffs bothered to look my way.”

Maddy's eyes widened. “You're joking. To hear Lucy tell it, you were beating them off with a stick.”

“Nothing of the sort.” Rose laughed, but it held a hint of irony. “Lucy was by far the prettiest of us all.” She looked over at Maddy. “Same as you're the prettiest of the cousins.”

Maddy's bark of laughter sent Priscilla yapping. She crouched down to pet the sleepy puppy.

She was grateful for the distraction. The prettiest of the cousins? Where on earth was that coming from? She had grown up with nothing but criticism from her mother.
Too fat . . . too thin . . . Stand up straight . . . Do something with that head of hair . . . Why on earth are you wearing all that eye makeup . . . Pink just isn't your color, Madelyn. . . .

She was the bookworm, the loner, the one who would use her spending money on a new boxed set of
Lord of the Rings
instead of the latest double-lash mascara and iridescent eye shadow. In a family of divas, there was always someone eager for the spotlight, and in one of her first acts of rebellion, Maddy decided to opt out of the competition.

“You can more than hold your own with Gina,” Rose was saying. “Don't tell me you didn't know that.”

“No, Mom,” Maddy said in a surprisingly steady voice. “I didn't know it at all.”

 
ROSE REGRETTED THE words the moment she uttered them. They felt strange on her tongue, unfamiliar. No wonder. How could Maddy know how lovely she was when her own mother had taken thirty-two years to tell her? A child gained her first sense of self from her parents, and how Rose had failed her. Bill had doted upon his daughter, and when they divorced the change in Maddy had been alarming. Her happy child had turned moody and quiet, much like dear Hannah was today, and nothing Rose said or did seemed to reach her. But a word of praise from Bill, a note of encouragement, and Maddy walked on air for days.

Guilt and shame nipped at the back of Rose's neck as she remembered the times she withheld praise for fear of spoiling her child, when she criticized rather than encouraged because criticism had spurred her on to greater achievement while encouragement turned into nothing but white noise.

But Maddy isn't you, Rosie
. Bill had said it many times over the years, and Lucy, too. Why was it so hard to understand that her daughter was a separate being with needs Rose didn't have to share in order to respect?

Her daughter's eyes were filled with tears as she busied herself doing something or other to Priscilla's collar. She looked as vulnerable as Hannah at that moment, and almost as young. This was the time when Maddy usually fled the scene, leaving Rose feeling simultaneously relieved and frustrated and more than a little bit angry. But this time, to Rose's surprise, her daughter didn't run. She stayed, bent low over the poodle puppy, her back arched in a line so graceful it almost brought Rose herself to tears.

She could see the years rolling back until they were in the kitchen of the house on Lighthouse Lane. Rose and Bill had fallen in love with the place the first second they saw it. Small, cozy, with a view of the beach, and a manageable monthly rent. They would be happy there. Bill would forget about his farm and the life he had left behind in Oregon, and Rose—well, no point thinking about it. All the things that had been wrong between them were every bit as wrong in the sweet house on Lighthouse Lane as they had been in Oregon before that.

The marriage ended not long after they moved in, but the love was still going strong almost thirty years later. No man had ever loved her more than Bill Bainbridge had. No man ever could. She had given him her heart, and nothing, not divorce or distance or their very separate lives, had changed her feelings for him.

Had she ever told Maddy any of that? She wasn't sure. Sometimes it seemed as if life had swept them along in its raging current, and they had been too busy keeping their heads above water to take time to get to know each other. An odd thought, that love required time to grow, but it was true. She could see it right now in her daughter's face. They had grown closer in this single afternoon than in the ten years that had come before.

You fell in love with your child the first moment she was placed in your arms, still slick with birth fluids, squalling at the indignity of the process, cold and hungry and yours. Oh, pride of ownership was a dangerous thing in the land of mothers and daughters. You fed her and dressed her, you bathed her and played with her. You were her morning sun and evening star, and then one day you look at her and see a stranger looking back. A woman who doesn't like you. A woman you don't understand. A woman who wants to get as far away from you as possible just as fast as she can.

In a way you don't blame her. There had been times when you were grateful for every mile that separated you, every river and mountain.

But through it all, through the distance and the anger and the years, the bond remained strong and the love, even stronger.

Even if you couldn't find the words to tell her so.

 
GINA EXPLODED INTO the kitchen a few minutes after three o'clock. “Cookies!” she cried, to the delight of her brood and Hannah. “Cookies before I die!”

She feigned a swoon at the entrance to the mudroom, which sent Priscilla into a frenzy of yipping and tail-wagging.

Rose, laughing, looked at Maddy. “Has Priscilla—?”

“Oh, no!” Maddy leaped over a prone Gina and grabbed for her coat and the dog's leash. “C'mon with us,” she said, kissing her daughter soundly on the cheek. “I'll show you how to make a perfect snowball while Miss Pris does her thing.”

Hannah didn't seem to think very much of the idea, but she was a good girl and she went with her mother, ignoring the smoochy, butt-kissing noises her cousins were making.

“Boys are stupid,” she said as she clung to Maddy's hand on the slippery steps.

“Not all the time,” Maddy said, praying they wouldn't fall on their heads. “I think the snow makes them stupid.”

Hannah giggled at the idea. “They're stupid when it rains, too.”

“Sometimes,” Maddy agreed, “but I think they're quite smart when it's cloudy.”

Hannah considered the idea. “No,” she said firmly, a tiny spark of her old self peeking through. “They're only smart when it's sunshiny outside.”

Maddy cleared a huge circle in the snow and placed Priscilla down in the middle of it. “Go ahead,” she urged the shivering puppy. “We're freezing, too.”

Priscilla sniffed the pristine white surface, then sniffed again. She looked up at Maddy and Hannah with a puzzled expression in her big brown eyes.

“She can't find the smell,” Hannah said. “She needs to go where others dogs go.”

Maddy almost toppled over into a drift in surprise. “How do you know about that, honey?”

“Billy O'Malley told us on the bus,” she said, dragging her toe through a pile of snow. “That's why they sniff each other's bottoms.”

Am I really having this conversation?
Maddy stared down at her cherubic daughter and wondered if the next thing on the agenda was a lesson in sex education.

“Actually, honey, one of the reasons they sniff each other is so they can identify their friends and family.”

“Why can't they just look?”

“I guess because lots of dogs look alike.”

“Why can't they ask each other?”

“Because dogs can't talk.”

“Yes, they can,” Hannah said with great certainty. “But they speak dog so we can't understand them.”

“Did Billy tell you that?”

“I told me.”

Maddy was delighted to see a glimmer of Hannah's wonderful imagination after so long. “You might not want to tell Grandma Rose that dogs talk to each other.”

“I already did.”

Maddy's stomach did a double-twist. “You did?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she already knew.”

Literal-minded Rose DiFalco, who had declared her entire life a No-Whimsey Zone? “Did she say how she knew?”

“Yes,” said Hannah. “She said Priscilla told her.”

“YOU LIE!” GINA popped another piece of chocolate chunk-macadamia nut cookie into her mouth. “Aunt Rose actually said that?”

Maddy grinned at her cousin and poured herself another cup of tea. “Your aunt,
my
mother, the redoubtable Rose DiFalco, actually said Priscilla talked to her.”

Gina whooped with laughter. “Aunt Rose speaks dog! I can't believe it!”

“Not just dog,” Maddy corrected her. “Poodle.”

“Well, la-di-da.” Gina wiped her mouth with the Christmas napkin next to her plate. “You know I don't believe a word you're saying.”

Maddy crossed her heart with a teaspoon. “I swear on Priscilla it's true.”

“I'd ask if Hell froze over, but it's cold enough out there to do it without Rose's help.” Gina looked toward the kitchen door. “Any munchkins around?”

“They're up in the attic with Rose and Lucy looking for the Christmas stockings.”

“Remember when Grandma Fay was alive? How many hours did we spend up there looking for those stockings? I was pissed when I turned fourteen and she told me I was too old to pretend I still believed in Santa.”

Maddy laughed. “Remember the gingerbread men she used to hide exactly where she knew we'd find them?” Perfect gingerbread men with bow ties and big buttons and a grandchild's name written across each one in royal frosting.

“I miss Fay,” Gina said. “I don't think the family's been the same since she died.”

“I know,” Maddy said. “I keep expecting to see her coming down the stairs in that red dress she loved.”

Gina's face lit up. “The one with the shoes she had dyed to match.”

“And her hair! Who else in Paradise Point had a grandmother who dyed her hair to match her outfits?”

Gina peered over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “I think our Rosie is on her way. That Light Auburn number forty-three is getting real close to Lucy Ricardo territory.”

Maddy laughed and poked her cousin in the arm. “Shh! You know she loves your colorist. As soon as Mamie—”

“Dies?”

Maddy poked her again. “—retires, she'll be back with you on a weekly basis.”

“And not a moment too soon,” Gina murmured. “What worked for Grandma Fay doesn't exactly work for Aunt Rose.”