Chapter Eleven
“HEY, BOSS.” TOMMY rapped on the door, then stepped inside before Aidan had a chance to open his mouth. “You gonna hole up back here all day or are you gonna start the wings?”
Aidan looked up from the laptop. “Where’s Claire? I thought she was taking the lunch crowd today.”
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.
FOR A SECOND Maddy didn’t recognize the name. She was so deeply engrossed in trying to back herself out of the mess she’d made with the film clip that FireGuy’s message languished in her in box with the offers of barn-yard frolics, work-at-home schemes, and six chain letters from one of her idiot cousins who really should know better.
She was about to reach for the phone and call her old office mate Stanley for help when FireGuy’s subject line caught her eye.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said irritably as she clicked on the message. “Give it up already. I won, you lost. It’s over.”
TO: JerseyGirl@njshore.com
FROM: FireGuy@njshore.com
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: one last shot
You probably think I’m stalking you at this point, but I’m not. $500 for the samovar, sight unseen.
That could buy a lot of Barbies for your little girl.
Think about it. That’s all I’m asking.
TO: FireGuy@njshore.net
FROM: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Re: one last shot
No. Absolutely not. Go away. Find your own samovar.
TO: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
FROM: FireGuy@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: one last shot
Have you seen it yet? Maybe you’ll hate it.
TO: FireGuy@njshore.net
FROM: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: one last shot
Came, saw, polished. It’s tucked away at the bottom of my mother’s closet until Christmas. My kid’s going to love it.
TO: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
FROM: FireGuy@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: Re: one last shot
I found a picture today that I think you should see. It would explain a lot. You name the place and the time and I’ll meet you there.
TO: FireGuy@njshore.net
FROM: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: one last shot
Meet you? You must be kidding. Scan the photo and send it to my e-mail address.
TO: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
FROM: FireGuy@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: one last shot
I don’t have a scanner, and even if I did I think this would be better in person. You don’t even have to bring the samovar with you.
TO: FireGuy@njshore.net
FROM: JerseyGirl@njshore.net
DATE: 5 December
SUBJECT: Certifiable
The last thing on the face of this earth that I would do is a) meet you anywhere and b) bring the samovar if I did.
On second thought, keep the scan and lose my e-mail address.
She hit Send.
Live and learn. Another example of a nice guy morphing into a jerk without help from Industrial Light and Magic. All that talk about his perfect daughter and the hundred-year-old grandmother who just had to have that teapot under her Christmas tree, and it was just some kind of con to either snag the samovar or a quickie on the beach.
“Jerk,” Maddy said, exiting her e-mail program.
And she wasn’t just talking about FireGuy.
“MY KIDS DON’T know how lucky they are,” Gina said as they waited for the school bus to deliver their kids to the corner of Main Street and Paradise Point Lane. “They still think they can do anything they set their minds to.”
“My kid thinks all she has to do is show up for a handful of ballet lessons, and she’ll be playing Clara in The Nutcracker next Christmas.” Pat rolled her eyes skyward. “Wait until she finds out she can’t dance.”
The laughter was loud but not unkind. They had all seen Pat’s oldest at the last recital, a girl who invariably danced right when the rest of the chorus danced left.
If you stacked their unrealized dreams one atop the other, they would reach the tip of the steeple at Our Lady of Lourdes around the corner. Gina wanted to be the next Vidal Sassoon and Denise wanted to be Picasso. Delia sang Friday nights at Franco’s-by-the-Sea and dreamed of being the next Diana Krall. All but Maddy had wanted children.
“What did you want to be?” Gina asked while they shivered against the fierce wind off the ocean. Once again the smell of snow was in the air, heavy with dampness and salt and promise.
Maddy busied herself adjusting Priscilla’s tiny collar. “Me? I wanted to grow up to be Madonna. Same as every other girl in South Jersey.”
They laughed just the way they were supposed to, but Gina wasn’t buying it.
“Really,” her cousin persisted. “What did you want to be? An actress? A dog trainer?” More laughter. Priscilla was beginning to get a reputation as a problem child. “I could tell you what every single one of us here daydreamed about and longed for, but when it comes to you, I haven’t a clue.”
“Neither have I,” Maddy said, and for once there was no laughter. “I always wondered what I’d be when I grew up. The trouble is, I’m grown up and I’m still wondering.”
“Rose was always bragging about what a great accountant you are,” Pat offered, neatly sidestepping Denise’s warning nudge.
“Nobody dreams about being a bean counter,” Maddy said.
“Come on,” said Denise, “admit it, Mad: you wanted to be a ballerina.”
Maddy assumed fifth position, which looked fairly comical in her L. L. Bean boots. If she had a quarter for every time well-placed laughter had saved her butt, she wouldn’t have to work for her mother.
Pat launched into a story about her mercifully brief career as a receptionist at the Mangano Funeral Home, whose motto was “We help your loved ones rest well,” and before long nobody remembered that Maddy had never really answered Gina’s question.
Give me another twenty or thirty years, Gina. I might have an answer for you by then.
Conversation rose and fell with a rhythm born of familiarity. They knew each other’s history. They knew who and when and how many times. They either were family, had been family, or would be family next time around. Only Maddy remained outside the circle. They loved her and she loved them, but they didn’t know her. Maybe they never had. She had spent all of her summers growing up with her father and Irma in Oregon, far away from the beach parties and clambakes and sultry nights at Wildwood, sheltered from parental eyes.
And even now, they knew she wasn’t here to stay, that this was just a resting place while she tried to figure out what to do next. Paradise Point was home to them in a way it never had been for Maddy and probably never could be. They never fought its hold on their hearts, while Maddy had been planning her escape almost from the day she was born.
The fifteen years she had spent on the other side of the country trying to fit in were only bits and pieces of gossip to her cousins, tidbits gleaned from scribbled postcards and conversations between their mothers and aunts. She had worked hard to lose her Jersey girl accent and her decidedly East Coast ways, but even after she had turned herself into the perfect Seattle citizen, she knew she would never really belong.
But her cousins didn’t know that and neither did Rose. They thought she had fled to the West Coast, shedding her accent and outlook somewhere over the Rockies and never looking back.
She had wanted to love Seattle. She had wanted to settle in and feel her roots growing deep and long. She was her father’s daughter, after all, and Bill was a man who couldn’t be happy anywhere east of the Rockies. She had friends, a good job, a nice apartment. And for a long time she had Tom. A man whose history was happily entangled with the explosive growth of the Seattle economy and outlook. He opened doors to a Seattle Maddy hadn’t known existed. She met the right people, some of the wrong people, and everyone in between, and still she felt as if she was only passing through.
Puget Sound was beautiful, but it wasn’t the Jersey shore. The harbors and seaside towns were quaint and picturesque, but they couldn’t compare to the scrappy little survivor of a town where she had grown up. She missed the briny smell of the ocean creeping through her windows on sunny autumn mornings. When Hannah was still nursing, Maddy used to sit in a rocking chair near her bedroom window and watch the play of lights against the darkness of the water, and she would find herself longing for Paradise Point. By that time she knew that she would be raising Hannah alone, that once again the mystery of a happy family life had managed to give her the slip.
It wasn’t as easy as she had believed it would be. If the one you loved didn’t love you in the same way, with the same depth of emotion, if that person didn’t share your hopes and dreams, you might as well get used to the fact that you were in it alone even if you kept right on believing in happy endings until he went off and found one of his own.
“Is Claire coming to pick up Billy Jr.?” Denise asked nobody in particular.
“Doesn’t look like it.” Delia inclined her head toward the opposite side of the street. “Looks like Aidan’s on school-bus duty again.”
He had just turned the corner from Church to Main, limping slightly but without the cane Maddy had seen him with that morning. He had a large brown envelope tucked under his arm.
“So he doesn’t need his cane all the time,” she said to Denise as she untangled Priscilla’s leash from around her ankles.
“No,” said Denise, her gaze assessing as she looked from Aidan across the street to Maddy. “It’s been a long haul for him. He’s lucky he can walk at all.”
Maddy watched him as he paused for a moment in front of the print shop, then disappeared inside. What would he be doing in a fancy print shop that specialized in frou-frou invitations and personalized stationery heavy on pink and fuchsia? Sure they had faxes and copy machines and scanners, but—
Wait a minute! Was it possible? Could Aidan O’Malley be FireGuy?