Chances Are (4 page)

“Don’t I? You were far and away the absolute worst sales-girl I ever had.”

Claire winced. “My people skills needed a little work back then.”

“You made my sister Rose look like Madeleine Albright.”

“Did I ever thank you for helping me find a new job at the bakery?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, “and so did my customers. Those were three of the longest days of my life.”

Claire laughed. It wasn’t an insult coming from Lucy. It was only the truth remembered with fondness. “Mine, too,” she said. “My mother told me I had to earn the money for my prom gown or I couldn’t go. I figured if I worked for you, I’d get a store discount. Nobody told me you needed a degree in abnormal psych to sell dresses.”

“Why do you think I hid in the workroom with my sewing machine and my dress form? It was dangerous out there on the floor.”

“The way I see it, I was lucky to make it through that third day alive.”

“I hope I still gave you the discount.”

“You did,” Claire said. “And you even lent me a gorgeous pair of satin gloves to wear with it.”

“At least that’s one story I wouldn’t mind ending up in the documentary,” Lucy said with pretend relief. “Now, if I could bribe my sisters and a few of my ex-husbands to be kind, I could breathe easy again.”

They chatted easily about the dress shop and Lucy’s dress-making skills as they approached the door of the ice cream shop. Huge hand-lettered signs adorned the windows, singing the praises of peppermint crunch, rocky road, and black cherry bonanza.

“Hand-packed cones with sprinkles,” Claire said, barely disguising her longing. “Do you think we have time?”

“Honey, if you think I came all this way to leave without a strawberry cone, then you don’t know me very well.”

Too bad Lucy wasn’t forty years younger. This was one DiFalco she would love to welcome into the family as Aidan’s new wife.

“Vanilla, sugar cone, chocolate sprinkles,” she said, fishing in her pocket for a few singles as they approached the counter.

Lucy waved off her money. “It’s the least I can do after the horror show my sisters put on for you.”

“I’ll check the back room and the bathroom. You watch the door.”

“Take your time,” Lucy said with a wicked grin. “Wouldn’t hurt the lot of them to cool their heels in the parking garage.”

TJ’s reminded Claire of Farrell’s, an ice cream parlor that had been popular back when she and Billy first married. The cheerful ragtime music. The old-fashioned soda fountain decor complete with faux newspaper clippings pasted on the walls. The wait staff was dressed in billowy white shirts, black pants, and suspenders, and they exuded such all-American wholesomeness that she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they had been pasteurized, homogenized, and stamped with a freshness date.

She stood in the archway to the main dining room and scanned the crowd. It was the usual Monday mix of elderly shoppers gathering up their energy for the return trip home, a handful of teenage girls sharing a pair of hot fudge sundaes, young mothers with rambunctious toddlers and babies still in Snugglies or waiting in the womb.

Claire felt a pang as she looked at their ripe and burgeoning bellies. She had loved being pregnant. The entire experience had agreed with her. She felt better, ate better, slept better the five times she was pregnant than at any other time in her life. Her friends had complained about feeling sexless and ugly during their pregnancies, but not Claire. She had never felt juicier or more alive. Even Billy had noticed the difference and during those months their lovemaking took on a sweet wildness she still remembered.

Sometimes late at night when the bed seemed very wide and very empty, she took out those memories, dusted them off, and tried to call up a sense of how it had felt to be touched and held and almost loved.

They had tried hard to make it work, but the odds had been against them from the start. Maybe if they had been a little older, a little smarter, they might have realized that before it was too late, but in her most honest moments, Claire knew she would make the same choices all over again.

They hadn’t had a storybook romance like Maddy and Aidan, one of those moonlight and magic experiences that made great fodder for TV shows, but it hadn’t been all bad. They had built a family together, brought five beautiful children into the world together. Despite the anger, despite the disappointments, they had been together at the end. They had been a family, a real one, imperfect and loud but real and lasting. For many reasons, that was something she would never regret.

She didn’t understand women like Maddy who moved away from home and made new lives for themselves far away from family and friends. The thought was as alien to Claire as life without soccer would be to her son Billy. You grew where you were planted. Sure, you made adjustments, a little more light, a little less water, maybe a judicious pruning every now and then, but you managed. You did it for your parents and for your kids, and as you grew older and a little wiser, you began to realize you did it for yourself as well.

When Maddy came back home with her tail between her legs, Claire couldn’t help but wonder if that homecoming ever would have happened if Tom Lawler hadn’t walked out on Maddy and Hannah. She was willing to bet her favorite earrings that Rose DiFalco’s daughter would have stayed happily ensconced in some fancy penthouse in Seattle without a single thought for Paradise Point.

You’re being a bitch
, that small and annoying voice of clarity whispered into her ear. Her two middle girls, Willow and Courtney, joined the Army right out of high school in order to finance their college educations. How was that so very different from what Maddy had done? Sometimes the future ended up being somewhere—and with somebody—you would never know existed if you didn’t take a chance.

One of the young mothers looked up and caught Claire’s eye. They smiled at each other over the head of the woman’s noisily nursing baby, one of those magical moments of connection between perfect strangers.

Cherish every single one of these moments
, Claire wanted to tell her.
They’ll be memories before you take your next breath.

But she knew the woman would never believe her. She was young and she might even be happy and she had all the time in the world.

Just like Claire had believed a long, long time ago.

“I WANT MY mommy.” Hannah’s stubborn little chin lurched forward in a way Kelly O’Malley was quickly coming to recognize as trouble. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Kelly was smart. She was responsible. She went to Mass almost every Sunday. There was no way this could be happening. She held the door to the bathroom stall shut with her foot and wondered what she had done to tick off God so badly. There was no other reason she could come up with to explain how she had ended up puking her guts out in a john at TJ Sweet’s while her future stepsister watched and probably took notes.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” she said, closing her eyes against a rising tide of dizziness. “I guess the ice cream didn’t agree with me.”

“Ice cream doesn’t make people throw up,” Hannah observed. “Ice cream makes you better.”

“Well, this time ice cream—” She started to retch again but her stomach had long since parted company with its contents. Dry heaves were a nice change.

Hannah started to wail, big loud siren whoops of misery. If Kelly hadn’t felt so horrible, she might have joined in. Of all the stupid times to get sick, this really had to be the worst. At least none of Maddy’s scary aunts were here to see this. She could just imagine what they would have to say about it. She had no doubt that any time a female under fifty got queasy they started eyeing her waistline and whispering behind her back. The thought almost made her retch one more time, but she pulled in a deep breath and willed her stomach to calm down. It couldn’t be. Absolutely positively impossible.

Almost impossible,
a little voice whispered. The nuns had been right when they preached celibacy—if you didn’t count the Virgin Mary—as the only perfect form of birth control. Condoms, the Pill, diaphragms, and coils and creams and foams—they all failed every now and then.

Funny how you could know something but not know it at the very same time. The statistics had been drummed into her head during sex ed over the years, those tiny little percentage point margins of error that could change your life forever, but you never thought they had anything to do with you or the way you felt every time he walked into a room and gave you that special smile.

Those things happened to somebody else, some anonymous girl out there who wasn’t as smart or as careful as you were. Someone who didn’t have a full scholarship to Columbia or a game plan for the rest of her life. Seth was going to Columbia, too, which made it so perfect that it almost scared her. They would be together for the four years it took to get their undergrad degrees, then they would marry, work on their M.A.’s and somewhere in the shadowy, golden future, they would finally start a family.

Hannah’s wails turned into hiccups. The little girl looked up at her, eyes wide, and hiccuped again. Kelly couldn’t help it. She started to giggle. The whole day had been surreal. Maddy’s scary aunts. Her own aunt Claire looking like she wanted to make a break for it. Her future stepmother forced to stand there in her underwear. And now there she was, sitting on the bathroom floor at an ice cream parlor at snooty Short Hills Mall, watching Hannah go for the world hiccup record.

Hannah hiccuped one more time, then started giggling, too, and the next thing Kelly knew, the two of them were holding on to each other, laughing until their sides ached.

“I have to go,” Hannah said when the laughter subsided. “Right now!”

“So go,” Kelly said, starting to laugh again. “We’re in the john!”

“No,” said Hannah, that stubborn jaw beginning to wobble. “You can’t be here when I go.”

Kelly pulled herself to her feet and brushed off the back of her denim skirt. “Do you need any help?”

Hannah shook her head. “Go!”

“I’ll be right outside,” Kelly said, opening the door to the stall. “Shout out if you need me.”

Hannah pushed the door closed behind her, and Kelly couldn’t help grinning when she heard the little girl fumbling with the lock.

“Leave it unlocked, Hannah,” she advised. “I’ll make sure nobody comes in.”

She held the door closed with her hand and rested her forehead against the cool painted surface. At least the room wasn’t spinning any longer. That was an improvement over the amusement park ride it had turned into a few seconds after she wolfed down some ice cream. The stuff should have a warning label on it. At least if you’d been starving yourself the last few weeks so you could wear that scrumptious strapless gown to the senior prom. That was probably the reason she had been sick. All that cold ice cream on an empty stomach would upset anyone’s digestion.

She heard the sound of paper rustling behind the door to the stall, followed by the snap of an elastic waist and mumbling. Hannah had recently turned five. Was that old enough to take care of things without help? She wished she could remember what had been within her abilities at that age, but it was so long ago that the details were a blur.

“Everything okay?” she called out.

Hannah’s response was drowned out by the sound of the toilet flushing, which Kelly decided to take as a yes.

A minute later Hannah pulled at the door. Kelly let go, and the two of them trooped over to the wall of sinks, where Kelly lifted the child up so she could wash her hands.

“Soap,” Hannah said, waving her fingers. “I need more.”

Kelly gave the dispenser another push, and a ribbon of golden soap settled in the palm of Hannah’s hand.

“We’d better hurry,” she said, holding Hannah once again so she could reach the stream of hot air from the hand-drying machine. “Your mom will be sending out a search party for us.”

“I didn’t eat my ice cream,” Hannah pointed out with the relentless logic of a five-year-old. “It’s still out there.”

“It’s probably melted. You can have ice cream with lunch.”

She made it a point never to lie to a child. Kids might not be able to remember where they put their schoolbooks, but they never forgot it when an adult lied to them. They had to stop for lunch. There was no way they would drive all the way back down to Paradise Point on empty stomachs—not with her Aunt Claire in the group—and every restaurant in New Jersey offered ice cream for dessert.

Hannah tugged at her wrist. “I wanna go now.”

She rinsed her face at the sink, then made Hannah laugh as she angled her face to catch a blast of air from the hand-drying machine.

“So this is where the party is.” Aunt Claire popped up in the doorway, a curious expression on her face. “We were getting worried.”

“Did you see my ice cream?” Hannah asked. “I didn’t finish.”

“You didn’t? Wow! My girls always finished their ice cream.” Aunt Claire’s gaze traveled from Hannah to Kelly. “How come?”

“Kelly had to throw up, and she made me go with her.”

Aunt Claire had a way of looking at you that made you feel like she knew what you were thinking before you thought it. As a little girl, she had seen her aunt turn that lethal look on her own kids many times, and it had always made her grateful she didn’t have any deep, dark secrets to hide. She wished she could say the same thing now.

“Kel?” Her aunt could pack more into one word than anyone she had ever met.

“No big deal,” she said. “The ice cream hit me funny.”

Claire placed a palm against her forehead and looked deep into her eyes. Kelly wanted desperately to look away, but she couldn’t. Her aunt’s touch was as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. Claire had always been there, right at the center of Kelly’s life for as long as she could remember. Claire’s door had always been open to Kelly and her dad. There had always been a place for them at the table, even during those times when Claire’s own family life was turned upside down.