The House On Willow Street (27 page)

She turned away with a flick of the dark red curls and gave the cakes on the counter further consideration.

Rafe was wildly entertained. He
loved
this. He hadn’t met a girl this sassy since he’d left New Zealand.

“I said hi,” he said.

The curls jiggled and she stared at him again. The green eyes raked him and she ignored him again.

“Nice day,” he went on.

This time, she turned around slowly.

“Honey,” she said, the glare ongoing, the eyes staring up at him, “I am Not. In. The. Mood. Okay? Capisce?” Her gaze swept over him again, taking in the worn work jumper and the stockman’s overalls. “Whatever ‘no’ is in your language, cowboy.”

“Vulcan,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Vulcan, that’s my language.”

The eyes narrowed. “Like Dr. Spock?”

“No, Mr. Spock. ‘Live long and prosper’ sort of thing,” he said. “Dr. Spock gave baby advice.”

“If it’s advice you’re after, I’ve got some for you: leave me alone,” she said with a smile that could strip paint from a door.

“Yes, miss, can I help you?” said the guy behind the counter, carefully ignoring the atmosphere.

“Large take-out cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso, please,” she said politely.

Rafe approved even more. None of this “skinny cappuccino” rubbish.

“Are you a tourist?” he asked. He had never seen her before, he was sure of that.

“No,” she said, “I’m an outreach worker with a care in the community center and we’re rounding up all the local weirdos with a particular emphasis on ones who chat up women in cafés.”

“Would you need handcuffs for that?” Rafe said conversationally.

The freckled girl didn’t bat an eyelid. “I’m packing heat,”
she said, patting her hip as if a gun nestled under her coat. “And if that doesn’t work, I’ve got a staple gun in my handbag. Few men are immune to the staple gun.”

“Ouch.”

“You bet.”

She whirled back again and paid for her coffee, purposefully ignoring Rafe.

“Isn’t she something else, Brian,” sighed Rafe, watching her shimmy over to the door, coffee in one hand. “I could eat her all up.”

“It would be like eating a piranha,” said Brian, who’d never had any luck with women.

“Ah, Brian, she
said
no. Inside, she was interested, I can tell.”

“Don’t know how you can tell,” said Brian. “I’ve never had a clue what women are saying. It’s all in code.”

Mara stomped out with her coffee in her hand, irritated by the man in the café. She was fed up with the male of the species: always on the hunt, even if it was only for fun. Pity Cici wasn’t here though, he was precisely
her
type: all scratchy designer stubble, messy hair and, if that cow-minding outfit was anything to go by, not the sort of man who’d worry about his clothes too much. Jack had been a regular fashion hound, keen to have the hottest jeans, the
now
watch. The guy in the café probably chose his clothes of a morning by sniffing things from the laundry basket to see what would do. Still . . .

She angled her head as she got into the car to see if he was watching her. He was. He was something, there was no doubt about it. Probably had the local girls eating out of his hand with his flirty remarks. Not her. She’d had it up to her teeth with men.

She gave him one last filthy look.

I am not interested
, she said telepathically.
The next man who gets close to me will end up with terminal injuries. Okay?

She turned on the ignition, let the talking book she’d got from the library switch on, and headed for Dublin.

Mara’s home was a two up two down in a quiet Dublin city street. The end of Furlong Hill where the Wilsons lived was home to families who’d lived there for donkey’s years, while the other end was lined with shops, bars, and the chip shop Mara had adored when she was a youngster. Even now, she judged fish and chips by the standards of Rizzoli’s and the velvety taste of Mrs. Rizzoli’s battered onions. Nobody else could compete. And curry sauce for the chips. It was funny how many of her early dates had taken place in Rizzoli’s. The lads in her secondary school hadn’t been too adventurous when it came to dating. It was either the pub—difficult to get into when they were underage—or Rizzoli’s, where you could sit at a table nursing a Fanta and sharing a single plate of chips and sausages for hours on end and Mrs. Rizzoli wouldn’t throw you out. She’d understood young love.

Mara felt the pangs of hunger as she drove past Rizzoli’s. Listening to Becky Sharpe’s adventures in
Vanity Fair
had taken her mind off both Jack and the fact that she’d only had a coffee and that bun for breakfast. For a second she thought of the man she’d met in the coffee shop. He
had
been cute, she had to admit, but she was off men.

Mara parked outside her family home, switched off
Vanity Fair
and smiled, as she always did, at the stone cladding her parents had scrimped and saved for months to install on the front of the house. It was pale gray and “classy,” as Mara’s mother like to say. Not like the O’Briens’ cladding, which
was a yellow color and entirely unsuited to Furlong Hill in Elsie Wilson’s opinion.

“They’re copying us,” Elsie had been saying for years.

Mara’s dad simply patted her arm and said, “Ah, now, Elsie, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You have great taste, that’s all. God love the O’Briens. What would they do if they didn’t have you to look up to?”

Mara’s mother had never been entirely convinced by this line of thought. The latest addition to the Wilson frontispiece were a couple of bay trees in pots. Elsie had got her husband to nail down the pots, just to be on the safe side. Then she had watched through narrowed eyes as the O’Briens suddenly decided that bay trees were the fashion.

Grabbing her handbag, Mara wriggled out of the car.

Number 71 was as gloriously unchanged and comforting as ever. The moment you were inside the door, there was the aroma of something cooking. In the hall was a pretty arrangement of crimson winter roses on the small hall table that Elsie had carefully covered with decoupage many years before. Mara knew her mother would have got the roses cheap from a flower seller in town at the end of the day, but she’d arranged them beautifully with bits of greenery from her own garden. Not having any money had never stood in the way of Elsie making their home beautiful. For a second, Mara wanted to cry. Standing here in her childhood home, the pain of Jack’s defection and wedding hit her anew.

Home was where you came to cry.

Mara had never told her parents that she and Jack were going to be married. But she’d been so sure that they would end up together, and that sureness had seeped into every conversation she’d had with her parents over the past year or so.

Jack had been to 71 Furlong Hill to meet her parents and
little brother. They’d even slept together in Mara’s old bedroom—an unprecedented event in the Wilson household. It was immaterial that Mara was thirty-three and her boyfriend was thirty-eight. No, it was the principle of having a single daughter sleep with her boyfriend under the Wilson family roof.

Elsie went to daily Mass and liked to say the rosary once a week. She never pushed religion upon her family, but they all understood Elsie’s devotion to the Virgin Mary. Letting Jack stay over had been a huge concession on her part.

And now Mara was back home, boyfriendless, having slept with said man and with her heart broken to boot. Great result, thought Mara. She was glad she’d decided to go to Avalon for a while before coming home: she’d have burst into floods of tears if she’d come here first. Here, Jack’s defection felt worse than ever.

She could hear the hum of the television from the sitting room. When Jack had been there, she’d seen the disapproval in his eyes at the amount of time her family spent in front of the box. Meals were often eaten on trays on their laps while watching the soaps. The Wilsons didn’t go to the theater or frequent art galleries. They didn’t do any of the things that Jack’s family did.

He’d said nothing, except that her father was “salt of the earth.”

Mara had once been to his family home in Galway—modern, detached, with a lawn cut by a smiling man from Slovakia—where there was always someone around for dinner, where the walls were lined with books and where someone would play on the piano after dinner or else a conversation would start up about a show they’d all seen, a book tipped to win the Booker, a new play.

“Nobody can ever better the genius of Synge’s
Playboy
of the Western World
,” Jack’s mother might say when she’d had her single martini with an olive in it.

A martini. Mara had stared openmouthed the first time she saw the martini jug and the way everyone had just the one. Her father liked a glass of Guinness of an evening, but he’d never have it at home. He’d have it in Fagan’s down the road, where he went with his pals to talk about the racing or the state of the country and how it had all been different in their day.

Her mother didn’t drink, having taken the pledge when she was twelve. She was proud of her Pioneer pin: a sign of abstinence.

Mara was sorry she hadn’t taken a pledge and got herself a Man Abstinence pin.

“I saw enough of what drink does to people,” was all Elsie would say. But she didn’t mind Mara opening a bottle of wine for Jack when he was there, and never said a word about the new wineglasses coming into the Wilson home. They were bigger and more delicate than the ones Elsie kept in the good china cupboard, which were exactly like the ones they had for events in the bingo hall, where Elsie might have an orange juice.

With shame, Mara remembered feeling that her family were somehow inadequate beside Jack’s. No martinis before dinner, no talk of books and plays, no proper wineglasses.

How stupid and disloyal she’d been. Her family were wonderful, while Jack had turned out to be a complete fake.

She pushed open the sitting-room door.

“Mara, my love!” Her mother got to her feet and in a second, Mara was in the familiar and comforting embrace.

Elsie smelled of Blue Grass perfume, the only scent she’d ever worn. “I like it. Why would I want anything else?” she always said.

“I sat down to watch Dr. Phil and he was talking about family—how’s that for coincidence?”

“Oh, Mum,” said Mara tremulously. “It’s lovely to be home.”

That evening, there were many conversations about Jack, Tawhnee and what had gone wrong. Opinion was mixed in the Wilson household about whether Jack was a cheating, conniving pig (Mara’s father), or an innocent man hijacked by a sultry beauty (Mara’s mother). Mara found herself trying to keep the peace between the two warring factions. She abandoned the effort when her brother Stephen mentioned that he’d met Tawhnee on a trip to Galway, where he’d joined Mara’s work crowd in the pub. He thought she was “hot.”

“How can you say she’s hot?” demanded Mara, vexed. “She ruined my life!”

Avalon had dulled the pain for her: here, it was as fresh as ever.

“Exactly my point,” said Elsie, who was bending over the oven, checking on her scones. Nothing like a bit of home baking to mend pain.