Catch a Falling Star (13 page)

• • •

“Hey.”

That was Joe.
Hey
would always be Joe. Who did not think Natalie was brave and amazing because she had survived leukemia. He thought she was amazing just for being her. Which was a pretty nice boost to the ego. Probably dangerous in large quantities.

“Ma was wondering if you’d like to come to dinner sometime. I mean, she knows we’re friends, that’s all, but she likes to meet my friends.”

“You live with your family?”

He looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah, it’s the only way I can afford college. I know it’s sort of stupid — ”

“It’s not stupid,” she said. “I’d love to meet your family.”

Natalie opened the door and beamed at Matthias. A beautiful, kind woman who was always happy to see him. Amazing how quickly he had learned to look forward to the time he spent with her.

“Ballet tonight?” she said.

“Tickets right here,” he said, patting his pocket.

Dakota came over to say hello, and he knew how to fend her off by now. Jasmine ignored him from the sofa.

“You two kids have a good time,” Brianna said, who came out of the kitchen with a book in her hand. “I would be jealous that you’re doing something fun on a Saturday but I loathe the ballet.”

Matthias supposed he rather loathed the ballet, too, but it was a thing people like him did, and Natalie was thrilled, so ballet it was. There were worse ways to spend a Saturday night than indulging Natalie.

His phone buzzed and he glanced at the number. “I’m sorry, that’s Donald, I need to talk to him.”

The conversation took only a moment and he turned back to Natalie. “Do you mind if we stop by my house before we head out to the ballet? Donald needs some documents from me for a brief he’s working on tonight.”

“Of course not. We have plenty of time.”

Tonight he’d brought the Aston Martin, because he knew it would thrill Natalie, and it did. Brianna would have rolled her eyes.
Do you know the kind of good you could do with a quarter of a million dollars?
Which he did because he gave away a lot of money. Or rather, his financial advisors did in his name because he told them to. But he still liked the Aston Martin.

“Oh my god, what is this? Is this an Aston Martin? I’ve never seen one in my life!” Natalie exclaimed, circling the car. And that was suitably gratifying, so he kissed her cheek when he opened the passenger side door for her. “I thought the Lexus was amazing,” she said.

“The Lexus is great for daily driving,” he said.

Natalie shook her head, laughing. “Brianna told me you guys drive new BMWs as your beater cars and I didn’t believe her. But it’s true.”

“The Lexus is not a BMW,” he pointed out. “Although I grant it’s in the same category. What did she mean by ‘you guys’?”

She waved a hand at him as she buckled up and he put the car into first. “You know, you rich guys.”

“Nothing wrong with money,” he said mildly.

“Oh, I like money fine,” Natalie said. “Brianna’s not like me, though. She’s like — ”

“‘Share the wealth’?” he guessed.

“No, no, it’s more like, ‘Can you imagine how exhausting it must be to live up to the burden?’ And she really means it. It’s like she can’t imagine life without the carrot. She’s all ‘What would you do if you had everything? There’d be nothing to
do
. You’d make yourself insane.’ She believes that.”

“And you don’t?”

“It probably is true for Brianna. You know? She’s very Type A.”

“And you’re not?”

“You can’t discern that for yourself?”

He considered. “I think you work hard and I think you get disappointed if you don’t succeed the way you want to. But I think that’s more to do with not wanting to let down other people than some intrinsic desire to climb mountains.”

She was quiet for a minute. Then she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “That’s probably true. God, I would hate to let Brianna down. She’s counting on me.”

“For?”

“She doesn’t say it,” Natalie said quickly. “It’s not like, ‘Natalie, you have to do well and succeed at school because I need your help paying the bills.’”

“It’d probably be easier to tell her to go to hell if she did say it.”

Natalie laughed. “Exactly. But we’re in this together, you know. Always have been. She’s sacrificed everything for me, even now, so I can go to college, and I
feel
that, you know? It’s there.”

“So you want to repay her.”

“Exactly.”

He was silent for a moment. “I don’t think you could let Brianna down no matter what you did. I think she just wants you to be happy.”

“I know! That’s the worst thing about it. She wouldn’t ask me to do it. She doesn’t even want it, not if you asked her like that. But what am I going to do? Say, ‘Thanks for giving up your life so I could have mine, see ya?’ She’s my sister, not my mother. She never asked to take this on. She was the only one grown up enough to do it, though. It’s just … it’s not fair to her. It’s never been fair to her.”

“Life — ”

“If you say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ I am going to get mad at you,” she said fiercely.

“Thanks for the warning,” he said. “I was going to say, ‘Life is complicated.’ There are no easy answers. Not for anyone.”

She nodded. “Thank you. That’s good, you understand that.”

“I do.”

A moment later, he was turning into his drive and their conversation was apparently forgotten as she caught sight of his house. Her jaw dropped.

“
This
is where you live?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Brianna said it was huge, but she didn’t say it was palatial. Oh my god, can I see the inside?”

“Of course,” he said.

She scrambled out of the car before he could come around to open her side. He took her hand and walked with her to the front door. He keyed in his entry code and the door clicked open.

“Wicked,” she said. “Keys are so passé.”

“Keys are easier to remember,” he said. “The security company makes me change the passcode every week.”

He pushed open the door and led her inside.

“Oh my god,” she said again. “This is incredible. It’s just so beautiful.”

“Thank you,” he said. “My office is through here.”

She followed him slowly, stopping to look around. He paused, turning to watch her, her slim elegant figure moving through the space with assurance. Even gawking, she looked … right. She trailed a finger down a sideboard and he imagined her standing there, pouring a glass of wine before joining him on the sofa. She fit. She fit perfectly.

He made himself quit staring at her. He went into his office and found the file he needed. She joined him a moment later.

“The Maltese Falcon?” she said, looking at the figure on the pedestal.

“Yes.”

“You know, that so does not belong here.”

“That’s exactly what Beverly says.”

“Extra egg rolls,” Brianna announced. She had brought dinner in from the China Pearl, as she had done for every Thanksgiving since she and Natalie had been on their own.

Natalie dug into the paper bag, extracting cartons and putting them on the table. She had plates and utensils ready — Brianna had never been able to convince her that you could eat directly from the boxes and had finally stopped trying. Natalie could be as stubborn as Brianna was when she put her mind to it.

“How’s Mrs. Chen?” Natalie asked. Mrs. Chen had once held a fundraiser at the restaurant and Brianna would never patronize another Chinese restaurant as long as the China Pearl was in operation.

“Wonderful. She sent you something with mussels which she seemed convinced you’d love.”

“What are mussels?”

“Probably best to eat first, then find out,” Brianna advised. She glanced at the clock. “Oh, it’s time already!”

They brought their plates out to the living room so they could eat their dinner while watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
, also their annual Thanksgiving tradition. Keeping the dogs out of the dinner, ditto.

When they were finished, Natalie handed over a fortune cookie. “Okay, you go first. And you can’t say, ‘I’m grateful you’re in my life, Natalie’ again this year because that’s just lazy.”

“I
am
grateful. But I’ll come up with something new.” She thought about saying
I’m grateful you’ve found Mr. G,
but she wasn’t quite evolved enough to manage that, and if her voice cracked, Natalie would guess, and her stupid school-girl crush wasn’t worth making Natalie feel terrible for something as perfectly normal as falling for him.

She thought about Richard, and the house payments, and how she hadn’t been stressed about paying the bills since that windfall. “I’m weirdly grateful to Richard,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want him in my life but he sure showed up at the right time to help us out.”

She broke the cookie and read the fortune, “‘A long journey awaits you.’ Hmm. Maybe Mrs. Curtin will send me to Dallas to that museum administrators’ conference. Now you, Natalie.” She fed half the fortune cookie to Dakota and offered the other half to Jasmine, who gave her a look like she’d lost her mind. Brianna shrugged and ate it herself.

Natalie took her cookie and said, “I’m grateful you made sure I got to go to the ball. Because not only was it everything I dreamed, I met Matthias.”

Brianna swallowed against her dry throat. “You know, it’s not too late to call him up and ask him if he wants to come over and have some of your pumpkin pie.”

• • •

Matthias had never been invited to someone’s house for pumpkin pie before. He’d spent the afternoon at Donald’s house, where he often ended up on holidays, but he was on his way home when Natalie called. So he simply reconfigured his route and drove to her house, pulling in behind Brianna’s new Toyota in the driveway.

When he knocked, he could hear Brianna scolding the dogs for racing toward the door (he could hear them galloping down the hall), and when Natalie opened the door, there were only well-behaved dogs sitting patiently in the living room.

He kissed her cheek and she took his hand and said, “
Miracle on 34th Street
is next.”

“I’m a sucker for old-fashioned Christmas movies,” he said.

“You missed
It’s a Wonderful Life
,” Natalie said. “Which is too bad because I’m not sitting through it again even though Brianna has it on DVD.”

“Hello, Mr. G,” Brianna said brightly, coming into the hall. “Come in to the kitchen, where you won’t have to fight off dogs to eat your dessert. Did you have a good Thanksgiving?”

“Yes,” he said. He and Natalie followed her into the kitchen. “Better now,” he added fondly, looking down at Natalie.

Brianna poured coffee for herself, lifted the pot in his direction, waited for his nod, and poured a second cup. She brought the mugs over to the table, then indicated that Matthias should sit down. She went to the cupboard and brought out the sugar bowl for him.

“Thanksgiving is the start of Natalie officially going nuts,” Brianna said, going back to the cupboard and getting down plates. “She makes the pumpkin pie in the morning, and then by afternoon she starts up the Christmas cookie factory.”

“So I like to bake,” Natalie said, extracting a knife and serving utensil from a drawer. “And who doesn’t love a bunch of cookies for a present.”

“It’s true that Mrs. Curtin nearly fired me last year till she realized it would mean no seven-layer bars, Russian teacakes, or spritz ever again.”

“I don’t think she comes as near to firing you as often as you think she does,” Natalie said, opening the refrigerator door. “But I’m glad my contribution to the cause has not gone unnoticed. Where’s the whipped cream?”

“It’s in there somewhere. Try behind the milk.”

Natalie scooped whipped cream on top of the pie slices, then ferried dessert plates and forks over to the table and sat down next to Matthias.

“Last year Natalie tried to convince me that French silk was a worthy dessert for Thanksgiving,” Brianna said, “but the pie is the only traditional thing about our Thanksgiving, so I begged her to keep making the pumpkin.”

Matthias took a bite of the pie. Creamy, faintly spiced, delicious.

“You wouldn’t think someone as young as Brianna is would be so stuck in her ways,” Natalie said.

“Sadly, I am not able to replicate Natalie’s feats in the kitchen so I am wholly dependent on her mercy,” Brianna said. “The other day I came home to what I thought were chocolate chip cookies and they turned out have toffee chunks in them.”

“They were delicious.”

“I agree, I’m just saying when a person expects chocolate chips, she expects chocolate chips.”

“I’ll start labeling the cookie jar.”

“If Brianna doesn’t bake, where’d you learn?” Matthias asked Natalie, thinking about making chocolate chip cookies, or toffee bit cookies maybe, with her. That felt good.

“Mrs. Bauer. Next door,” Natalie said. “She’s always said, ‘I don’t have a daughter of my own to pass these recipes on to.’”

“Whereas she’s always yelling at me to get off the lawn,” said Brianna. “Natalie and I have a serious difference of opinion about Mrs. Bauer.”

“That’s because I’m an angel.”

“Another direct quote from Mrs. Bauer,” Brianna explained to Matthias. “Whereas I am clearly the redheaded stepchild.”

She didn’t seem too upset by that, if you went by the way she grinned, but Matthias supposed there was something in what she was saying, that people automatically granted Natalie special dispensation. The wonder of it was that Natalie had turned out to be so generous and kind and warm and not spoiled and entitled. Probably fighting for her life had something to do with that. Sometimes when he thought about what she’d gone through — it didn’t bear thinking about. He was just grateful she had survived, and come into his life.

“Seconds?” Brianna asked and when Natalie and Matthias refused, she cleared the table. Then she smiled at them and announced, “I’m going to take the dogs for a walk. I’ll be back in an hour if you need to get any cuddling in before the weekend.”

Natalie turned pink but Matthias just smiled. Brianna was a good sport.