Abby Neal was all smiles as she let herself in through the back screen door and saw John reading the sports section at the kitchen counter. A sleepy Shelby lifted her head only briefly off of John’s foot, thumped her tail twice, and proceeded to go back to sleep on the cool linoleum.
“Win big tonight?” he asked.
“Three dollars and Helen’s recipe for rum cake,” she proudly proclaimed. “I should make some of it for us over the weekend.”
John whistled. “Three dollars, hmm? I should put you on a plane for Vegas and you could parlay it into enough to buy a Winnebago…”
“Oh honestly! Can you picture me squandering my life’s savings away in Sin City?”
No, he reflected, but then again it was just as hard for him to picture a girl like Kate Toscano there, either. He glanced over at the kitchen clock. She and Jimmy and whoever were probably eating their dinner by now.
“How’d it go with your dad?” she asked. “And do you want some coffee?”
“Stubborn as ever and coffee sounds great.” He debated a second about ratting his dad out but decided that she may as well know. “He was out of his wheelchair again when I got home.”
Abby ran a hand through her short salt and pepper hair. “That man!” she groaned in mild exasperation as she pulled open the silverware drawer for a spoon. “I swear we’re going to have to put a bell on him!”
“Yeah, like it’d help any.”
“Still…”
On the one hand, they both knew it was good that he had the willpower, and obstinate pride, to want to get back to living a normal life quickly instead of having to rely so heavily on his wife and son to take care of him. Too many times, the doctor had told them, he had seen stroke victims who ignored their therapy, wallowed in self-pity, and settled into a lethargic half-life that made it even harder on their loved ones. On the other hand, however, was their mutual, unspoken worry that he’d end up doing himself a lot more harm by falling if he rushed things.
“He didn’t try to get the mail, too, did he?” Abby asked, remarking that the new carrier on the route couldn’t seem to get his deliveries done while it was still daylight and that she’d had to leave that afternoon before it arrived.
“Afraid so.” John gently dislodged his bare foot from under Shelby’s head and got up to go pull two coffee mugs out of the cupboard. “By the way,”
“Hmm?”
“I understand you and dad think I need to better myself.”
“Come again?”
“Nice try, Mom, but he told me the brochures were your idea.”
“Oh that,” Abby nonchalantly replied. “So, they came already?”
John folded his arms and cast her a stern look.
“Well, it wouldn’t hurt you to at least think about it,” she said, defending her decision to take the initiative and send away for them for his own good. “People go back to college all the time, you know.”
“People who want to do something different from what they’re already doing.”
“Or make more money at it,” she pointed out. “There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.”
“Look, we’ve talked about it before. Until Dad’s back on his feet again and you’re able to quit your job,” explained John.
“I happen to like working,” she archly insisted. “It gives me something to do during the day.”
All right, so maybe he couldn’t argue with her on that score. When she’d retired from the factory as a bookkeeper after 25 years, it had taken her only a scant four months to ask her former boss if she could please have her old job back. John always wondered if the coincidence of his father retiring around the same time from his job as a security guard had anything to do with her sudden renewed interest in wanting to get out of the house.
By and large, of course, there was an old-shoe sort of comfort level between his parents that John not only admired but also deemed a rarity in a country where half of all marriages ended in divorce. Since his dad’s stroke, they seemed to have grown even closer as a couple despite the emotional and physical toll he knew that the extra workload had to be taking on his mother.
In the earlier years, just before Jeremy came along, it had been an entirely different story punctuated by late-night fights and stony silences which invariably lasted for a few days thereafter. John recalled many a time that he had anxiously gone to his older brother Mitch’s bedroom to ask if the latter thought their parents were going to break up.
“If they do,” Mitch always told him, “I’m gonna stay here with Mom and you have to go live with Dad.”
“How come you get Mom?” John wanted to know, even if he fervently hoped the fighting downstairs never actually came to that.
“’Cause she’s a better cook and I’m staying where the food is!”
Though it was hard to fault his older sibling’s logic, it bothered him that, as brothers, they didn’t seem to share the same level of concern about the future of their family. Not until he got older was he finally able to understand the reason why.
Mitch, plain and simple, was a self-centered jerk.
Abby had finished pouring the coffee and handed him a mug across the counter. “Did I tell you Mitch called us this morning?” she said.
“Wow,” John replied sarcastically, “has it been a year already?”
Abby swatted him with a napkin. “Be nice. You know he’s got a busy life.”
Too busy, John remembered, to come home and stay for more than an afternoon when their dad was first hospitalized. “So, what did he want?” Calling out of the blue to say “hi” and chat was far from Mitch’s style.
“Well,” she mischievously drew out the suspense of what had prompted her lobbyist son to call them from Washington, D.C. “It seems that he and Mindy have been talking lately about settling down.”
John lifted a brow. “And this differs from living together how, exactly?” If his memory served, the pair had been casually cohabiting in a Georgetown rowhouse for four years already, maybe even five.
Abby scoffed at his flip remark. “He meant legally,” she said. “Although I think maybe a fall wedding is more Mindy’s idea than his. She’s a nice girl, don’t you think?”
“Well, having only seen her picture on Christmas cards,” John replied.
“You think your father might be well enough to travel by then?”
“Travel where?”
Mindy’s family, she explained, all lived in Silver Spring, Maryland so it only made sense to have the wedding and reception there.
“Why can’t they have the wedding here?” John retorted. “It’ll be much easier for Dad.”
Abby rolled her eyes. “Can’t you just be happy that your brother’s finally doing this?” she said.
“Let me finish my coffee and I’ll go do cartwheels down the Boardwalk.”
“The funny thing is, though,” she mused aloud, ignoring her son’s remark. “I always thought you’d be the first one to give me a daughter-in-law.”
“Translation; give you grandchildren.”
“That, too,” she said, brightening at the prospect that Mitch and Mindy might already be thinking about accommodating her not-so-secret wish. “Just think,” she continued as she sipped her coffee, “that would make you an uncle.”
In spite of his resolve not to give Kate Toscano any more thought than he already had his mother’s comment triggered the image of her once again.
“So, guess who I drove to the airport today?” he said.
“I don’t know, dear. Who?”
“Remember Kate Toscano?”
A puzzled look flitted across Abby’s face. “Kate Toscano was here in town?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well now, isn’t that the strangest thing,” she absently murmured.
“What’s strange?”
Abby set down her cup. “When I was driving through town yesterday, I could have sworn I saw a girl who looked just like her.”
John shrugged. “Probably because it was.”
She shook her head. “The thing about it was that I thought it couldn’t be her, because there was a little boy with her.”
“Her nephew, Jimmy,” he said in the preface to relating the tragedy that had brought Kate back to Avalon Bay.
“Funny we didn’t hear anything about it,” she pondered for a moment. “Then again, Lydia’s always been kind of close-mouthed.” She turned her attention back to the topic of the little boy. “You said he has some kind of learning problems?”
“Autism,” he replied, admitting that he didn’t really know that much about it, but that Kate told him she had already phoned a couple of experts back home that she was going to take him to.
“And home is?”
“Las Vegas.”
Abby scowled. “That’s kind of a strange place to be raising a child, don’t you think? All that hustle and noise and goodness knows what else?” That she had never actually been within the Vegas city limits herself was no obstacle to repeating what she’d heard from various friends who had.
John pointed out that there were probably a lot of places that were much stranger, discreetly omitting any mention of Kate’s reference to her sister’s nomad lifestyle and the instability it must have imposed on an already confused little boy. “I’m sure they’ll do just fine,” he said. “Kate’s always had a good head on her shoulders.”
“Well, it’s too bad she couldn’t have talked to Gabrielle while she was here.”
“Gabrielle?”
“Helen’s daughter?” Abby went on to explain that the girl had worked at a school for autistic children in South Carolina and was now back in Avalon Bay with the idea of starting a similar facility of her own. “She’s very smart, very pretty…did I happen to mention that she’s also newly divorced?”
Evening had fallen on the West coast but the sparkling city light show Kate had hoped to show her nephew would need to wait. After only three bites of spaghetti, a couple of spoonfuls of instant chocolate pudding and a partial glass of milk, the little lad was yawning wide enough to turn himself inside out.
“Maybe we’ve done enough for one day,” she announced, scooting back her chair and standing up, held out her hand to him.
He yawned again and reached for Mr. Ollie who had been invited to join them at the dining table. With a squeak of spontaneity, he now plopped the bear on top of his head like a funny-looking four-legged beret and proceeded to follow her into the spare bedroom without it once falling off.
“Sweet dreams, angel,” she whispered a few minutes later as she tucked him in and kissed his forehead. Nearly asleep, he really did look like a contented little cherub and she found herself wistfully thinking that maybe this wasn’t going to be so difficult after all, especially once she talked to someone who knew the ropes and could give her advice.
As she started toward the kitchen to clean up, her glance fell on the phone and she realized she hadn’t called her mother back as she’d promised. Considering it was almost 10:30 on the East coast, of course, it was unlikely the older woman would still be up and puttering around. She’d call her in the morning.
She had just finished rinsing off the first plate to put in the dishwasher when there was a sharp rap on the front door. Puzzled, she crossed to answer, safe in the knowledge that the combination of coded key cards and judicious doormen at the luxury high-rise permitted access only to residents and their invited guests.
“Hey, gorgeous,” her visitor said as he winked and gallantly offered her a single long-stemmed red rose. “Ready to do the town?”