Chances Are (11 page)

She waited until her aunt made the left turn onto Bay Bridge Avenue, then jumped into her car. Five minutes later, she pulled into the parking lot behind the lake on the outskirts of town, where Seth was waiting for her in his brother’s Honda.

“Missed you,” he said as she slid into the passenger seat next to him.

“Good,” she said after they had kissed hello. “I missed you, too.”

“How long can you stay?”

She glanced at her watch, the one that had been her mother’s high school graduation present eighteen years ago. “Thirteen minutes.” She sighed. “How about you?”

“Eight,” he said. “I’m working two extra hours tonight.” He pumped gas three nights a week.

“You work too hard.”

“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “So do you.”

Kelly had grown up surrounded by love, but by the time her tenth birthday rolled around, she knew she would have to work hard to make her dreams come true. Firemen’s kids didn’t go to NYU or Columbia, not without a scholarship. And not without a healthy nest egg saved up from waiting tables, cleaning houses, and ringing up groceries.

“I’m not a rich kid like you,” she said, teasing him. His family struggled as hard as hers did. “I have to.”

“So do I,” he said.

It was one of the many reasons why she loved him, had loved him for as long as she could remember. He worked hard for everything he had. Paper routes as a little kid. Shoveling sidewalks in the winter and mowing lawns in the summer. When he was fifteen, he discovered he had a talent for carpentry, and these days he made a fair chunk of change doing odd jobs for people like Olivia Westmore and Rose DiFalco. “He has real talent,” Rose had commented just last week. “The work he did on the back porch was first rate.”

You would have thought he’d won a Nobel prize the way her heart had swelled with pride. It felt good when someone complimented Seth, better even than when the compliments were aimed in her direction.

His hands slid along her shoulders and down her arms, and she shivered with longing. You couldn’t turn back once you took the leap. Once you knew how it felt when skin met skin, once you understood what it meant to not know where you ended and he began—there was no way she could ever give that up. “Three minutes,” she whispered against the familiar warmth of his mouth. “I wish—”

Suddenly she was afraid she was going to cry, and she pressed her face against his chest.

“Kel?” He placed a hand under her chin, but she refused to look up at him. “What’s wrong?”

That was all it took. She couldn’t control either her tears or the words that spilled out with them.

“How late are you?” he asked when she finally managed to pull herself together long enough to breathe. He looked shaken, but his embrace never faltered.

“Two days,” she said, pulling a paper napkin from his glove box to wipe her eyes.

He balanced between hope and certainty. “You’ve been late before. Last year you were two weeks late because of the SATs.”

“Last year we weren’t sleeping together.”

“It’s not like we haven’t been careful.”

“Nothing’s foolproof,” she reminded him. “Things happen.” She fixed him with a look. “I spent the morning throwing up.”

“It was all that ice cream on an empty stomach.”

“I only had two spoonfuls.”

“You said you’ve been dieting.”

“Dieting doesn’t make you—”

“It’s a false alarm,” he said, pulling her close. “Everything will work out. Just wait and see.”

“You really think so?”

He hesitated just a half-beat too long, and in that hesitation she heard the sound of her future rushing toward her, and it wasn’t the future she had planned.

 
BILLY JR. WAS waiting for Claire at the edge of the soccer field with his best friend Ryan and Ryan’s father.

“Sorry I’m late,” Claire said while Billy gathered up his gear. “I stopped at Wawa for a gallon of milk and realized I didn’t have any money, so I had to race over to the ATM and—”

Don’t worry about it, Claire.” David Fenelli’s dark brown eyes were warm behind his glasses. “Been there, done it myself.”

Could a man be too nice? David radiated so much kindness and understanding that it was all Claire could do to keep from hitting him in the head with a soccer ball.

“Good practice?” she asked while Billy and Ryan snorted with laughter a few feet away.

“Billy had a great practice,” David said with a nod toward her youngest. “Ryan had a little trouble, but he’s making progress.”

Ryan looked like he would rather be in the orthodontist’s chair than standing there while two adults talked about him, and Claire’s maternal heart went out to him.

“I’ve kept you long enough,” Claire said, gesturing for Billy to get into the car. “Thanks for waiting.”

David brushed her gratitude aside. “Listen,” he said, watching as Billy fastened his seat belt, “we’re planning to pick up pizza tonight. Why don’t you join us?”

She hadn’t seen it coming. The last time he asked her to go bowling with them her early warning system had noted the faint beads of sweat that popped out on his brow before he spoke, which gave her just long enough to make up a believable excuse.

“Pizza sounds great,” she said, aware of the intense scrutiny coming from Billy and Ryan, “but—”

“I know,” David said. “Mondays are tough. Maybe another time.”

He really was too nice. No wonder his wife left him. Didn’t he know nice guys ended up alone?

“I’d like that,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say that. She definitely hadn’t expected to mean it.

David held her gaze a moment longer than usual, and she felt her cheeks flood with heat. “I’m going to hold you to it, Claire.”

She mumbled something incoherent in response, feeling more like a clumsy fourteen-year-old than a woman of forty.

“Your face is red,” Billy observed as she slid behind the wheel. “Are you mad at Ryan’s dad?”

“I’m not mad at anyone.” She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Red didn’t begin to describe it. She looked like she was about to spontaneously combust.

“Grandma’s face used to get red all the time,” Billy continued. “She said it was changes that did it.”

“Menopause,” Claire corrected, “and I’m too young for that.”

Apparently that was too much information for her son, because he leaned forward and fiddled with the radio dial until he settled on WFAN, the all-sports station he loved, and Claire breathed an audible sigh of relief. She’d rather listen to a detailed analysis of the Mets’ chances than face more questions.

“Turn up the volume,” she said to Billy. “I want to hear what they say about plans for Old-Timers’ Day.”

Billy shot her a curious look but upped the volume so high she couldn’t hear herself think.

Which, of course, was exactly the point.

Ten minutes later, she pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, mercifully ending a spirited on-air discussion of somebody named Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

Billy blinked like he was coming out of a trance and said, “You forgot to get Grandpa.”

“Grandpa’s home today,” she said. “It’s—” She rested her forehead against the steering wheel and groaned. “You’re right. I forgot Grandpa.” She looked over at her son. “Do you remember where he is today?”

Billy nodded. “The senior center.”

She tossed him her cell phone. “Press number six, and tell Grandpa we’re on our way.”

She retraced the path back to town, made a left at the church, then whipped into the parking lot adjacent to the renovated barn that now served as a gathering place for Paradise Point’s senior citizens. She pulled in between an aged Volvo and a spiffy new Mazda Miata with handicapped plates.

“Where did Grandpa say he’d meet us?”

“In front.”

Her father had the annoying habit of running even later than she did. “Go in and tell him we’re waiting.”

Billy was out of the car like a shot, bounding across the sandy grass and into the center in the time it would have taken her to unbuckle her seat belt. Her father had been living with them for the last few months while he decided where he would settle, much to his grandson’s delight.

Mike Meehan had been widowed for almost five years and had spent the last three of them making extended visits to his offspring while they tried to convince him he had to finally settle down someplace. Florida. California. Upstate New York. Minnesota. Nothing seemed right to him, not until he came to visit Claire in Paradise Point.

She was glad he had found his way back to his old hometown, but the past six months had been stressful to say the least. Mike was a robust seventy-five, a former fisherman with a powerful build and personality to match. He had an opinion about everything that went on in her house, from where she kept the tea bags to Billy’s spelling tests to why she didn’t buy out Aidan and run the bar herself.

And to make matters worse, he had a better social life than she did. Many of his old cronies were still alive and living in town or nearby, and just like the old days, Mike Meehan was at the center of the fun. The senior center had become the equivalent of a high school hangout, and Mike was the captain of the football team and class president all wrapped up in one geriatric package.

It made her biweekly poker party with the girls look pretty anemic.

“Took you long enough,” her father said as he settled himself into the passenger seat. “Billy said you forgot your old man.”

“Thanks, pal,” she muttered to Billy’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t exactly forget you, Dad. I just lost track of the days.”

“You’re—what? Forty? What the hell are you going to be like when you’re my age?”

“Dead,” she said. “You and the rest of the family will have worn me into an early grave.”

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “That’s just what your mother would’ve said, God rest her soul. Said I had enough energy for five men and a midget.”

“Dad!” She slipped easily into maternal reproach mode. “The politically correct term is little person.”

“Little person? What the hell’s a little person? We called ’em midgets when I was growing up, and they’re midgets now. Scotty Henderson’s brother was maybe three feet tall, and he’d break your kneecap if you tried to call him a little person.”

“Dad.” She added an extra note of sternness to her tone. “Times change. We have to be mindful of Billy and help him to be respectful of others.”

“Who’s being disrespectful? People are what they are. You can call a dog a cat, but it still lifts its leg to pee.”

“Priscilla doesn’t lift her leg,” Billy piped up from the backseat. “Hannah says she just stands there and pees on her paws.”

“Enough pee talk,” Claire said. “All I’m saying is that if someone wants to be referred to as a small person, then that’s what we should do.”

“Next midget I see, I’m going to ask him what he wants to be called.”

“You do that, Dad, but don’t come crying to me if you end up with a busted kneecap.”

Not for the first time, Claire found herself longing for a nice quiet secluded convent. Maybe that was what she should do. To hell with O’Malley’s. She could open a convent for the Sisters of the Celibate Poor.

She pulled the car into the driveway for the second time in thirty minutes and shut off the engine.

“Eggs for supper,” she announced as they trooped through the back door into the kitchen, “and I don’t want to hear any complaints.”

“Aw, Ma—”

“I’ll make you a jelly omelet.” She turned to her father, who was leaning against the door to the laundry room while he kicked off his shoes. “And don’t start about your cholesterol. I’ll make yours with Egg Beaters.”

There were dogs to let out, cats to feed, laundry to start, eggs to scramble, nerves to unfrazzle. Too bad Billy was still at an impressionable age. She felt like saying screw the eggs and sitting out on the back step with a pack of cigarettes and a Bud Light, but she was trying to set a good example.

Her father whistled for the dogs, and she was almost trampled by the canine stampede as they converged from various points in the house and flung themselves out the door into the yard. Billy, with a little urging, popped the tops on a quartet of Fancy Feast and upended the contents onto four small white plates.

She was on her way upstairs to change into her usual uniform of jeans and T-shirt when the front doorbell rang.

David Fenelli stood on the top step with a schoolbook clutched in his right hand.

She fought down the urge to smooth down her hair.

“Sorry to interrupt your supper, Claire, but Billy left his spelling book in the backseat. Knowing how much our kids love homework, I figured I’d better get it over here.”

“That’s sweet of you, David. You didn’t have to go out of your way. I would’ve come by to pick it up.”

“If I’d known that, I would’ve told you to pick it up at Romano’s over a pepperoni and mushroom.”

“Who’re you talking to out there?” her father bellowed from the kitchen. “If that’s Barney, don’t let him in. I’m not talking to that welsher!”

“It’s not Barney,” Claire hollered back. “It’s Ryan’s father.”

“Ask him if he wants some eggs.”

She met David’s eyes. “You don’t want eggs, do you?”

He shook his head. “No eggs.”

“Thanks, Dad. They already ate.” She lowered her volume. “He’s not really my father,” she said. “I found him wandering in front of the senior center and took pity on him.”

“That’s where I found mine, too. In fact, are you sure it’s not the same guy?”

Some of the day’s tensions mysteriously vanished as they laughed.

“Listen,” he said, his gaze holding hers, “I don’t want to keep you from your eggs.”