All the Way Home (6 page)

Rory sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Tell Mom.”

“Tell her yourself.” Molly pushes her chair back. “I’m outta here.”

“When will you be back?”

“Later” is Molly’s sullen reply as the screen door bangs shut behind her.

Rory stands in the middle of the kitchen for a moment. Then she gets her sister’s bowl from the table and puts it into the sink, absently running water into it long after the milk has swirled down the drain.

H
earing a screen door slam next door, Michelle Randall glances out the open window next to the bathroom sink.

A pretty redhead with long, untamed curls is striding quickly toward the detached garage, and Michelle can hear the impatient jingling of the car keys in her hand even from up here.

That has to be Molly’s older sister, Rory. Michelle decides that now isn’t the time to catch her and introduce herself in a neighborly fashion.

Even if the woman wasn’t clearly in such a hurry, it would take Michelle forever to lug her enormous body—not to mention Ozzie—down the steep flight of stairs in this heat. Besides, her stomach is still roiling from being sick in the toilet a few moments ago.

“Are you done frowing up, Mommy?” Ozzie asks from the floor at her feet.

She glances down and sees that he’s playing with the long-handled brush she uses to clean the toilet.

“Ozzie, no!” she shrieks, grabbing it and prying it from his chubby fingers.

He promptly bursts into tears.

“That’s yucky, sweetheart,” she says, shoving the brush back into the plastic holder behind the tank and scooping her toddler into her arms. “Come on, let’s scrub your hands.”

“No! No scrub!”

“Ozzie, stop squirming,” Michelle says sharply, struggling to keep her grasp on the little boy despite her enormous, protruding tummy.

She hoists him toward the sink, turns on the water, and reaches for the antibacterial soap. They go through a lot of that these days. Ozzie gets into everything.

Oh, Lord, what am I going to do when I have a baby to take care of, too?
she wonders, exhausted already though it’s barely nine
A.M.
She didn’t sleep more than a few hours total last night, thanks to indigestion and the baby pressing on her bladder, which meant countless trips down the hall to the bathroom.

Maybe it’s a mistake to have another one right now,
she thinks wearily. She shouldn’t have let Lou talk her into it. They have their hands full with Ozzie, who’s in the throes of the Terrible Twos, not to mention this big old house that’s under renovation and will be for what’s bound to feel like forever.

We never should have bought this place,
she tells herself
. I knew it from the start
.

Lou was the one who had stumbled across the For Sale sign one day, and insisted that they look at it even though it was obviously falling apart. He was the one who had talked her into buying this place, calling it a steal. It
was
surprisingly inexpensive for a house this size—due, no doubt, to the fact that it had stood vacant for years, and was rumored to be haunted. Aside from all that, she had thought they were taking on more house than they needed or could afford.

The renovation is going to be a slow process; they don’t have the money for most of what they want to do, even with Lou’s recent promotion at the law firm to junior partner.

Before he left for the office this morning, Lou had reminded Michelle to call John Kline, her second cousin and the architect they’re working with, and set up an appointment to discuss the family-room addition.

When Michelle suggested that they hold off until they have some money in the bank, Lou argued that they’ll need the extra space as soon as possible, with a baby on the way.

“But we can use the extra money, too,” Michelle had pointed out. Until she got pregnant, she had been planning to go back to work this fall at the elementary school where she had taught art until Ozzie was born.

But now she’s expecting the baby in late July or August, and it will be at least another year before she’ll feel like she can leave Ozzie and the new little guy in day care or with a full-time sitter. There are too many crazies out there; it’s just too hard to find someone you can trust with your children these days.

Michelle feels a pang of loss, thinking about her mother, who died only months before Ozzie was born. Mom had lived right here in town, and she would have loved spending her retirement years taking care of her grandchildren.

Lou’s mother, on the other hand, isn’t the grandmotherly type. Iris is too busy with her garden club and bridge club and God knows what else, and, besides, her winters in Clearwater Beach keep getting longer and longer.

No, Michelle can’t count on her to help out.

Of course, there’s Molly. She’s terrific with Ozzie. But she’s just a kid herself. Michelle doesn’t like to leave her alone with Ozzie at night if she can help it. The few times she has, Molly has seemed nervous about it. And just the other night, she asked Michelle if she thought the house was really haunted.

Michelle would rather not think about that possibility. She’s a grown woman, and when they bought the place, she and Lou laughed off the rumors that the house was haunted by the ghost of Emily Anghardt, the young girl who disappeared from here and presumably was murdered. But the past few nights, with Lou working late at the office, she’s found herself spooked about being alone here.

Must be the pregnancy. She’s feeling vulnerable in a lot of ways lately.

Drying Ozzie’s hands, she says, “How about if we go downstairs for a snack?”

“Snack? Yes, snack. Yummy!” he replies eagerly, and makes a beeline for the door.

“Wait for Mommy,” she calls, hurrying to catch up. She presses one hand into her aching lower back and uses the other to wipe a trickle of sweat from her forehead. The temperature is already steamy, and the sun has only been up a few hours. Weather like this is unusual in the foothills of the Adirondacks, even in late June.

“What should we have, Ozzie?” Michelle asks her son in the kitchen, surveying the contents of the cupboard. She really needs to get to the supermarket later. Things are looking pretty bare, and she just got groceries a few days ago.

“Ice cream,” Ozzie says firmly, his eyes lighting up at the prospect of his favorite treat.

“It’s too early for ice cream,” Michelle tells him. “How about a couple of crackers and peanut butter?”

She takes out a box of saltines, thinking they’ll settle her stomach. Nothing like having morning sickness the whole nine months, she thinks grimly. She reaches into the nearly empty inner waxed paper bag and pulls out a couple of crackers.

“No. Ice cream,” Ozzie insists.

The saltines taste unpleasantly dry in this heat and Michelle eats only one, putting the rest back into the bag.

“Okay,” she says, returning the box to the cupboard. “It’s got to be ninety degrees out. Ice cream it is, Ozzie.”

M
olly nudges Rebecca’s arm and tilts her head in the direction of two boys coming out of the bait and tackle shop across from the park bench where they’re sitting.

“Look. There’s Ryan Baker,” she says.

“Oh, gee, Molly, is
he
why we’re sitting here instead of at the library?” Rebecca’s serious gray eyes look dismayed behind her owlish glasses, and she flips her long, slightly frizzy dark hair over her shoulders impatiently.

“Relax. The library doesn’t open until ten.”

“It’s ten-fifteen.”

“Oh. Well, don’t be ridiculous. How would I know he was going to be here?” Molly asks, watching as Ryan and his friend Andy Chase get on their bikes, balancing fishing poles over their shoulders.

“Maybe you overheard Jessica telling Amanda yesterday that Ryan couldn’t go with her to the mall today because he and Andy were going fishing at the park after they finish their paper routes,” Rebecca says pointedly. “I know
I
heard her. Everyone at Carvel heard her. She wants the world to know that she and Ryan are going out.”

“Oh, really? 1 didn’t hear her say that,” Molly lies, intent on Ryan, who’s skillfully peddling across the street in their direction.

She admires the way he wears his Yankees cap backward. That must be why his face is ruddy from the sun. The other day, when she bumped into him at the gas station where they were both getting air in their bike tires, she noticed that he has a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and that the tip of it is peeling from a recent sunburn.

Lately, she notices everything about Ryan Baker.

Too bad he doesn’t notice her.

Except . . .

Did he just glance in her direction as he rode his bike up over the curb onto the sidewalk a few yards away?

“Hi, Ryan!” she calls impulsively, then just as impulsively wants to crawl under the bench and hide.

Maybe he’ll think Rebecca said it,
she thinks hopefully, and glances at her friend, whose nose is buried in some dumb library book she’s about to return. It’s about cats. Rebecca loves cats. She’s wearing a pink T-shirt with a kitten’s face appliquéd below her shoulder. Molly gave it to her for her birthday last month, but now she wishes she hadn’t. It looks so juvenile.

“Hey, Molly. Hi, Rebecca,” Ryan says, slowing his bike in front of them.

Molly realizes he’s only waiting for Andy, who’s stuck on the other side of the street, waiting for traffic. Still, Ryan didn’t have to stop in front of her. He didn’t have to say hi.

No,
hey
. He’d said
hey,
in that casual way of his, around a piece of gum he’s chewing.

“Hey, Ryan,” Molly says.

“Yeah?” He backpedals, balancing his bike somehow without falling over.

She feels herself blush under his glance. “Oh . . . I just meant, hey. You know, as in ‘hi.’ ”
Which you already said, you idiot
.

He treats her to a good-natured grin. “Hi. What are you guys doing?”

“Going to the library,” Rebecca informs him, looking up from her book.

“Yeah? That’s cool.”

Yeah, right
. Molly wants to smack Rebecca for speaking up. She had planned to tell Ryan they were going to walk down to the lake, and then Ryan would tell her that was some coincidence because he and Andy were on their way to the lake, too, to go fishing, and she would look stunned, and then he would say, “Why don’t you come along?”

And then Andy and Rebecca would vanish conveniently the way things seem to happen in fantasies, and Molly would be alone with Ryan, and he would kiss her passionately and ask her to marry him
.

Or something like that.

“So what’s been going on with you this past week?” she asks lamely, praying that the traffic will keep whizzing by, tons of traffic, and Andy will be stuck across the street for at least another hour.

“You mean since school got out? Nothing,” Ryan says. “This town is beat.”

At least he didn’t mention dating Jessica.

“Yeah,” Molly agrees. “This town is beat.”

“You guys going to that party out at the Curl?”

“Party?” Molly echoes. “When?”

“Friday night.”

“At the Curl?” she echoes, just to make sure.

Ryan nods and says, “Where else?”

The Curl, Molly knows, is the crescent-shaped stretch of beach that dips out into Lake Charlotte. During the day, it’s filled with people—mostly little kids splashing in the almost landlocked shallow water between there and the shore. But at night, all the cool kids hang out on the stretch of beach, drinking beer around bonfires and doing who knows what else.

Molly was at the Curl a week ago, with Ozzie and his mother, but she has never been out there after dark.

“Yeah, we’ll be there,” she tells Ryan, who nods, then rides off with a wave as Andy catches up with him.

“Molly! We can’t go to a party at the Curl,” Rebecca says.

“Why not?”

“My parents won’t let me, for one thing.”

“So sleep over at my house. Kevin’s gone, and my mother probably won’t even ask where we’re going.” This is the first time, Molly realizes, that it’ll come in handy to have a mother who’s always so out of it.

Most of the time, it’s just embarrassing, especially with Rebecca, whose mother is, like, a total Martha Stewart, always baking cookies and doing crafts and gardening, making the Wasners’ house as homey as the Connollys’ is neglected.

“What about your sister?” Rebecca asks pointedly.

And for a moment, Molly thinks she’s talking about Carleen. She thinks Rebecca means, Won’t your mother be worried about you after what happened to your sister, even if it was ten years ago?

But then she realizes that Rebecca isn’t talking about Carleen at all. That the shadow of what happened to her oldest sister doesn’t necessarily loom over everyone else in town the way it’s hung over Molly’s family these past ten years.