“SO, WHAT EXACTLY is a demolition hearing?” Mark asked.
Claire settled deeper into the bucket seat and clutched her hair. She’d fastened it into a ponytail as soon as she’d seen him driving up Bradford Street with the convertible top of his car open. But even with an elastic and her hand containing most of her hair, gusts of mild spring air whipped loose strands into a frenzy. By the time they reached his parents’ house, her hair would resemble a fright wig.
She didn’t care. The only impression she had to make on Mark’s parents was as their son’s non-fiancée. She could be his non-fiancée as definitively with wild hair as she could with neat hair.
His hair blew freely, the thick dark waves tossed back from his face. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses and he wore an off-white cotton sweater and jeans. He looked like someone heading to the beach, even though it was barely sixty degrees out and they were driving in the opposite direction from the ocean. Claire had chosen to wear tailored wool slacks, a silk blouse and a blazer. Glancing at his faded jeans, she realized she was grossly over-dressed.
He looked much too good in jeans, she acknowledged. Then again, she couldn’t imagine anything he wouldn’t look much too good in. Or out of.
She had to stop thinking that way. She had to accept that this relationship was going nowhere—other than to Williamstown for the day. In fact, she had to accept that it wasn’t even a relationship. It was…a practical joke.
He tilted his head slightly, reminding her that she hadn’t answered his question. “If someone wants to tear down a building,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the wind, “he has to deal with our office. Even if the building itself isn’t a landmark, we need to consider the integrity of the neighborhood. Boston’s historical architecture is one of its most important characteristics.”
“So they have to get your permission to bulldoze a building? Even if it’s an ugly old garage or something?”
“They have to go through lots of steps before they can bulldoze a building. My office is only one of the steps.”
“My mother’s going to want to discuss your work,” he warned, accelerating to pass a slower car. “My parents’ house is more than a hundred and fifty years old.”
“Really?” Claire didn’t want to love the Lavins any more than she wanted to love their son, but she might just let herself fall in love with their house. “Is it farmhouse style, or more of a town style?”
“Farmhouse. It’s small.”
“Of course.” Early nineteenth-century farmers in western Massachusetts generally didn’t build palaces for their families.
“Low ceilings, uneven floors, the whole bit. When I was a kid, I could never get my Matchbox cars to roll very far on the wood floors. The planks were too uneven.”
“So you grew up in this antique farmhouse?”
“It didn’t feel like an antique to me,” Mark said, dissatisfaction mingling with fondness in his tone. “It felt like a rattletrap. Hot in the summer, drafty in the winter. Things were always falling apart. Whenever anything broke, my mother would head out to her garden and leave my dad and me to fix it.”
“Antique houses are like that. Constantly in need of repair.”
“I live in a condo now. If anything needs repairs, I call up the association and say, ‘Fix this window,’ or ‘Rewire this outlet.’ It’s not that I can’t do the repairs myself—I learned a hell of a lot about fixing things while I was growing up. I just love the luxury of having someone else do the fixing for me.”
Claire studied him. In profile, with his sharp sunglasses and his sharper nose and chin, he looked sleek and modern. Yet she could imagine him in an old house, armed with a screwdriver and a can of putty, patching and restoring and grumbling good-naturedly the entire time.
“So, your mother gardens and your father does the repairs?” she asked.
“That about sums it up,” he said. “My mother teaches history and my father teaches political science. My mother cooks and my father does the dishes. My mother’s published four books and my father’s published five—and that really bothers my mother. She’s knocking herself out to get her fifth book finished so she can catch up to him.”
“They sound very accomplished.” Claire glanced at his jeans again—damn, but he filled them nicely—and decided she was glad to have dressed a little more elegantly for the afternoon.
“They’re down-to-earth,” Mark said, “like your mother.”
They didn’t sound like her mother. They were professors at one of the nation’s most prestigious colleges. Claire’s mother was a secretary. But she did like to garden.
“They have a dog. You aren’t allergic to dogs or anything, are you?”
“No,” she assured him.
Mark passed another car, then slowed as Route 2 narrowed from four lanes to two. Claire had traveled west through the state before, but only on the Mass Pike, which remained a major highway from the New York state border all the way to Boston Harbor. Route 2 had started out as a highway, then had wandered through a few towns, then had widened into a highway again and now was back to two-lane wandering. Mark had to lower his speed to accommodate the traffic, much of which seemed to be pickup trucks and SUV’s towing boats or carrying canoes and kayaks on their roofs. “Is there a lake around here?” she asked.
“Rivers, lakes and we’re not too far from Quabbin,” he told her, naming a huge reservoir at the center of the state. “It’s finally warm enough for people to put their boats into the water.”
Since they were no longer cruising so fast, Claire could relax her grip on her ponytail. Above the roofless car stretched a clear April sky, baby blue and fresh. The air smelled clean and piney from the forests that covered the gentle hills on either side of the road. She needed to get out of the city more often, she decided.
She also needed the company of good-looking men more often. The way Mark’s wind-tousled hair fluttered in messy waves around his face softened its angles. “Tell me about your work,” she said. “What exactly does a radio station’s general manager do?”
“Everything except spin disks on the air,” he answered. “Although I could do that, too, if I had to. I got interested in radio work at college, when I took a deejay slot on the school’s station. It’s a real power trip, you know? Just you and the mike, and you get to decide what everyone has to listen to. Listeners either accept your choices or turn you off. After college, I moved into commercial radio and discovered that some program director got to decide what I should be playing. I wanted the power, so I did graduate work at Emerson College and got into radio management.”
“And now you decide what everyone has to listen to again?”
“Actually, the program director does most of that. But I have input. I deal with musicians and their reps who are trying to get their songs on the air. I also oversee the business side of the station—ad revenues, ratings, promotion, community outreach.” A loaded logging truck slowed to a crawl in front of them, but then took a wide turn off Route 2. Mark smiled and hit the gas, obviously glad for the stretch of open road before them. “Rumor has it you like Dvorak.”
Startled, Claire eyed him sharply. The rumor happened to be true; she couldn’t listen to Dvorak’s From the New World without weeping over the symphony’s transcendent beauty. Still, Mark’s knowledge of her musical taste surprised her. “Where did you hear that?”
“Rex mentioned it.”
That Mark had discussed her with Rex both flattered and unsettled her. “What else did he tell you about me?” she asked, not sure she’d like his answer.
Mark glanced her way, then turned back to the road. “Nothing much.”
Oh, hell. The creep must have told Mark all sorts of things. She scrambled through her memory, trying to recall what, other than a speeding ticket and a sour aftertaste, she’d gotten from her acquaintanceship with Rex. They’d gone out for dinner in the North End one night, but by nine o’clock Rex had been yawning and complaining that he always got tired early because he had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. to do his show. On another occasion, they’d had a blistering argument over who was the greatest rock band out of Ireland—he’d claimed it was U2 and she’d contended it was Van Morrison, and Rex had scoffed that a solo performer like Van Morrison couldn’t be compared to a rock band. She recalled a Saturday she and Rex had spent at a beach in Plymouth. They’d left early when the clouds unexpectedly opened up and drenched them, and Rex had kissed her and pawed her chest a bit in his car outside her building, his approach about as erotic as a horny high-school boy’s. Unable even to fake a response, she’d extricated herself and said she really didn’t think they should see each other anymore. Then she hadn’t heard from him until more than a week later, when his friend had phoned and said Rex was in a coma and needed her. And she’d gotten that blasted speeding ticket.
She turned to Mark and caught him glancing at her again. “Really,” he insisted. “He didn’t say anything.”
His discretion made her smile.
Route 2 grew narrower and twistier as they pushed farther west, climbing into the Berkshires. The woods on either side of the road grew thicker. A stream ran parallel to the road, tumbling over rocks and fallen trees. The gravel shoulders sprouted signs warning of deer crossings, bear crossings and a dangerous hairpin a few miles ahead. The air felt cooler, probably because of the higher altitude and the forest’s shadows.
“We’re really in the wilderness, aren’t we,” she said as they passed another Bear Crossing sign.
“Civilization returns on the other side of the hairpin turn,” he promised. And it did. Once they’d eased around the treacherously sharp curve, they descended into a valley of old mills and modest houses. “North Adams,” Mark informed her. “Williamstown is the next town up the road. The last town. After Williamstown, you’re out of Massachusetts.”
As they drove past the campus where Mark’s parents taught, he pointed out some of the buildings to her. “You may feel you’re in the sticks,” he said, “but there’s always something happening in a college town. Concerts, plays, lectures, visiting dignitaries. Sports, too. My parents used to take me to all the college home games—football, hockey, lacrosse. It wasn’t a bad place to grow up, although at this stage I prefer city living.”
“I imagine being one of the top five bachelors in Williamstown wouldn’t carry quite the same prestige as being one of the top five bachelors in Boston.”
He angled his head toward her, as if trying to assess whether she was teasing him. She was, sort of. But she was testing him, too, attempting to measure just how important his top-bachelor ranking was to him.
After a minute, he cracked a smile. “I always say, if you’re going to be something, you might as well be tops at it. Why be a mediocre bachelor if you can be a top-five bachelor? Why be a small-town bachelor when you can be a hub-of-the-universe bachelor?”
“The only people who think Boston is the hub of the universe are people who live in Boston,” she noted.
“And they’re right,” he said as he slowed the car and steered onto a gravel driveway.
The house at its end was charming: white clapboard with black shutters flanking the windows and a welcoming red front door. A plaque next to the door identified the year of the house’s construction as 1848. Ancient oaks, sycamores and evergreens stood sentry in the yard, and brave blades of new grass struggled to poke through the earth. “Oh, Mark! It’s fabulous!”
“Trust me, it’s a rattletrap,” he muttered, though his smile widened. He shut off the engine and they both climbed out of the car.
By the time they reached the door, Mark’s parents had it open and the yard filled with spirited canine barking. Mark’s mother had long, silver-laced black hair braided down her back and large gold hoops piercing her ears. His father looked like an older version of Mark, his thick, wavy hair streaked with gray, the lines in his face etched more deeply, but his eyes as dark and his smile as engaging. Like Mark, both his parents wore faded jeans and sweaters. Claire had to remind herself that they were both Dr. Lavin, because they looked like a couple of organic-farming hippies.
“Come in, come in!” Mark’s mother urged them, swinging the door wider and nudging a medium-size tan dog back from the threshold with her knee. “Get back, Lovey,” she scolded, then returned her attention to her son. “Mark! Give me a kiss.” He didn’t have a chance to object, because she wrapped him in a smothering embrace and pulled him down so she could kiss his cheek. As he straightened up and hugged his father, his mother gathered Claire’s hands in her own and beamed at her. “Claire! It’s such a pleasure!”
Claire found the greeting rather effusive, given that she wasn’t Mark’s fiancée or even his girlfriend. If all went well, she might emerge from this trip as his friend, period. Their drive that day was the longest time they’d ever spent in each other’s company.
But she liked being enveloped in such familial warmth. She sensed nothing phony in his parents’ behavior, nothing forced. They seemed genuinely happy to see their son and meet Claire.
“So that’s the new car,” his father said, stepping out onto the small porch and scrutinizing Mark’s sports car. “I am…” he paused, then laughed “…green with envy.”
“Go.” His mother gestured toward the vehicle. “Go play with the car.” She shooed her son and husband out to the driveway, then ushered Claire inside the cozy house.
In the Landmarks Commission office, Claire dealt almost exclusively with urban buildings. But she appreciated many of the features of the Lavin family farmhouse—the wide plank floors, the narrow halls and doorways, the multitude of fireplaces, the rippling settled glass in some of the twelve-over-twelve windows. A wood-burning stove occupied a corner of the huge farm kitchen, which was furnished with a massive table and four chairs of knotty pine. Braided rugs lay scattered across the floor. A dog’s food and water dishes sat on a mat on the floor near the sink. The dog who’d barked so enthusiastically when she and Mark had arrived wandered over to the water dish and had a drink. Claire couldn’t identify its breed, but it was the color of taffy and had floppy ears and a friendly face.
“Your house is wonderful,” Claire said.
Mark’s mother smiled. “Thanks. It keeps us busy.” She moved to a large pot on the range. When she lifted the lid, a rich aroma of fish, sherry and spices filled the air. “I hope you like seafood, because I made bouillabaisse.”
“I love it.” Claire removed her blazer because the room was so warm. “Is there anything I can do to help, Mrs. Lavin? Or is it Dr. Lavin?”
“It’s Naomi, and if you really want to help, you can tear these greens for the salad.” She lifted a wet head of romaine from the sink and handed it to Claire. “Let me get you a bowl.”
Within a minute, Claire had rolled up her sleeves and was tearing romaine leaves. Naomi busied herself slicing a loaf of French bread onto a cookie sheet and sliding it into the oven to toast. “What a perfect day for a drive,” she said cheerfully. “God knows when we’ll ever see Mark and his dad again. If Mark lets Bob take a turn behind the wheel, they might be back by nightfall—or they might not. I wouldn’t put it past them to keep driving until they hit Seattle. Little boys love their fancy wheels, don’t they?”
Mark certainly loved his fancy wheels. Claire had grown up with sisters, who’d been much more obsessive about clothing, shoes and jewelry than about cars, and her father had never seemed unduly interested in them, either. “Mrs.—I mean, Naomi?” She shook the excess water from a leaf before adding it to the salad bowl. “I hope Mark made it clear to you that we’re not getting married.”
“He explained that the report in the Boston Globe was misleading. Leave Claire alone, Lovey,” Naomi scolded the dog, who was giving Claire’s loafers a thorough sniffing.
“He’s not bothering me—or is it a she?”
“She. Her name is Lovey, and she understands English, so feel free to tell her to bug off if she’s bothering you. She obviously likes you. If she didn’t, she’d be growling. And her tail—that’s always a giveaway.” Lovey’s tail wagged like a metronome set on allegro.
“Anyway…the piece in the Boston Globe…” Claire resumed tearing romaine leaves. “It was more than misleading. It left the impression that there was something going on between Mark and me. There’s not.”
“Nonsense,” Naomi overruled her. “You’re friends. If nothing else, you’re drawn together by your victimhood, the shared embarrassment of this silly joke or whatever it is.”
“All right,” Claire conceded. “We’re friends. But we’re not engaged.”
“Whatever you say.” Naomi blithely handed her a tomato and a knife. “You can add that to the salad.”
Claire couldn’t guess what Naomi believed, what she suspected, what she hoped for. Did she want Claire to be Mark’s fiancée? Did she want her celebrated single son to get married? To a woman he scarcely knew?
Claire had claimed that she and Mark were friends. She wanted that to be true. In all honesty, she wanted to be more than friends with him. It wasn’t just because he was good company. It wasn’t only that he seemed so at home with himself. It wasn’t even because in a pair of dashing sunglasses, with the wind ripping through his hair, he was close to irresistible. It was because he was the kind of man who unflinchingly hugged and kissed his mother when he saw her.
That hadn’t seemed like a particularly bachelor-like thing to do. It seemed much more like the behavior of a man who appreciated the bonds of family.
Mark wasn’t a family man, Claire firmly reminded herself. He was a carefree guy with a hot car and a blissful lack of commitments. If not for Rex Crandall’s obnoxious stunt, Claire wouldn’t even be a blip on Mark’s radar screen. Why waste energy imagining what his future as a family man would be like? Even after kissing her, Mark had made certain she understood that she would never be a part of that future by turning tail and walking away.
By the time the bread was done toasting, the men-folk had returned from their test drive. Bob Lavin seemed as excited as a child on his birthday. “Naomi, I’m telling you—the engine is so smooth on this baby,” he babbled while Mark dropped into a chair and beckoned Lovey. He gave the dog’s ears a vigorous scratching, while the dog panted contentedly and nuzzled his knees. Every now and then, Mark would bend his head to Lovey’s and murmur something. Lovey seemed to understand him; she’d respond with a happy bark or a nod.
Claire forced herself to look away. As sexy as Mark’s smile was, as attractive as his build, as mesmerizing as his eyes, none of them were as appealing as his obvious joy while playing with his parents’ dog. He no longer seemed like a big-shot radio executive, a condo owner, a typical male infatuated with his fancy car—or a bachelor singled out for special mention in a glossy urban magazine. He seemed like a man with a heart.
Over their mid-afternoon dinner, Mark and his parents talked nonstop, doing their best to include Claire in the conversation. Naomi discussed her gardening—“I defy any animal-rights activist to explain to me why grubs don’t deserve to be killed”—and Bob discussed the recent visit to the campus of a U.N. diplomat. They talked about their students, their research, a trip they were considering taking to the Galapagos Islands in August. They asked Mark how things were going at the radio station, what fund-raisers he was organizing and what charities those fund-raisers would be supporting.
“I can’t say I’m a big fan of the music they play at WBKX,” Bob Lavin confessed to Claire. “I’m an old folkie. Bluegrass, acoustic music, that kind of thing.”
“Claire likes Dvorak,” Mark told his parents, who seemed to approve. Claire wondered why he’d mentioned her musical preferences. It wasn’t as if he needed to make his parents respect her. After today, she would never see them again.
Even knowing that, she enjoyed the meal. She ordered herself to focus on the banter and the delicious seafood stew, and tried not to think about how affectionate Mark’s parents were, and how affectionate Mark was with them. After clearing the table, Bob and Naomi gave Claire a tour of the house, the upstairs of which was even quirkier than the downstairs, full of oddly angled rooms, low doorways and crooked floors. Then all of them, including the dog, trooped out into the backyard to admire the vegetable garden Naomi had only just started planting. Then back inside for coffee and tea and a homemade apple tart served with scoops of vanilla ice cream. “How do you find the time to cook like this?” Claire asked Naomi as she rubbed her full belly. “You’re a college professor.”
“She doesn’t cook like this most of the time,” Bob explained, sending his wife a teasing look. “She doesn’t cook like this for me. Only for Mark, when he’s visiting.”
“And when he brings his friends over,” Naomi added.
“Like hell,” Mark complained. “When I was in high school, you never cooked like this for my friends.”
“When you were in high school, your friends would descend upon the kitchen like locusts and eat everything in sight. My bouillabaisse would have been wasted on them.”
“I hope you didn’t go to all this trouble just for me,” Claire said. “I’ve had a wonderful time, but…”
Naomi arched her eyebrows in a question. “But?”
Claire glanced at Mark for help, but he seemed as curious as his parents to hear what she had to say. “Well, as I said earlier, we’re not getting married.”
“Of course you aren’t,” Bob said “We understand that,” Naomi added.
“Before April Fool’s Day, Mark and I had never even heard of each other.”
“You would have heard of me if you read Boston’s Best,” Mark joked.
Ignoring him, she moved her gaze from Bob to Naomi. “You’ve made me feel so welcome here—like a part of the family. But I’m not.”
“We want you to feel welcome,” Naomi explained. “You’re Mark’s friend, so of course you’re welcome.”
“And you don’t eat like a locust,” Bob praised her, his smile uncannily like his son’s.
“When that article appeared in the Globe,” Naomi said, “we thought, well, maybe you were the one. Mark was adamant about your not being his fiancée, but we wanted to see for ourselves.”
“You didn’t believe me?” Mark looked indignant.
“It has nothing to do with believing you,” Naomi said. “It has to do with a mother’s intuition.”
“And now that you’ve seen for yourselves?” Mark pressed her.
“As you’ve said, you’re not getting married,” Naomi answered.
“You made your point,” Bob conceded.
“Okay,” Mark said, sounding mollified. Claire ought to have been mollified, too, but she couldn’t suppress her longing for things to be different. This outing hadn’t helped her to clarify her own feelings. It had only made her aware of what a decent, generous man Mark was—or could be, if he ever got tired of being a bachelor. Claire had to accept that he was a long way from tired, though. She mustn’t allow herself to think of him as a potential fiancé.
That one last balloon lingering against the ceiling of her office was bound to deflate eventually. The sooner she accepted that, the better.
In fact, she resolved, Monday morning she’d yank the damned balloon down from the ceiling, puncture it, and toss it in her trash can. Then she’d move on for good.