Take the Long Way Home (12 page)

Then again, she could assume their dinner
would go smoothly—fat chance of that—and instead fret about meeting
Quinn after dinner. She was encouraged by the thought that her
cookies were tasty enough to make such a smart, accomplished,
ridiculously hot guy take an interest in her, but she already knew
her cookies were that good. They had been tasty enough to cause an
elderly tycoon to leave her the shop and a hefty chunk of start-up
money in his will, after all.

But Quinn’s intelligence, his career, his
local celebrity, and most of all his hotness intimidated Maeve.
He’d said he would take her out for a drink so she could de-stress
after her dinner with her father, but having a drink with Quinn
might cause her even more stress. What if they went to the Faulk
Street Tavern and Ashley Wright walked in, radiantly beautiful and
stylish and certain about her rightful place by Quinn’s side? What
if a song played on that antique juke box and infiltrated their
brains? What if, instead of “Take the Long Way Home,” the jukebox
played something awful, something about pain or violence instead of
a homecoming?

What if, once Saturday ended, she realized
Brogan’s Point wasn’t her home, after all? What would she do?

She would just keep going, she told herself.
She was in commit mode. She’d invested too much in the store to
decide this town couldn’t be her home. By accepting Harry’s
bequest, she’d made some sort of tacit promise to him. He thought
she needed to reconnect with her father. She would do her best.

At least her cat seemed to believe Brogan’s
Point was her home. Cookie prowled regally around the apartment,
occasionally leaping up onto a window sill to hiss at the mourning
doves and sparrows and seagulls that swooped down the alley in
search of an open trash bin to pick through. Cookie had established
squatter’s rights on the central cushion of the sofa Maeve had
bought at the Goodwill store. She’d developed a sadomasochistic
relationship with the kitchen sink, staring at the faucet until
Maeve turned it on, then swiping a paw through the flowing water,
screeching, and leaping off the counter, and then climbing back on
and staring at the faucet, watching the water flow from the spout,
swiping it, screeching and leaping.

Maeve would never have Cookie’s abundance of
attitude. She had more in common with the skittish kitten she’d
found outside the Stonehouse Tavern five years ago than with the
sleek, haughty pet who seemed so comfortable in the apartment that
Maeve sometimes thought she ought to sign the lease over to
her.

Maeve had sent Joyce home
from the shop at five-thirty, locked up, and climbed into her car
in the tiny parking lot behind the building. She’d driven to her
apartment to change into a clean pair of jeans and a soft gray
sweater, to refill Cookie’s food and water dishes, and to take a
few deep breaths before heading for her father’s house. She hoped
that by thinking of it as her father’s house, she could stop
thinking of it as
her
house, the house she’d grown up in. The house she’d
fled.

“Okay,” she announced to Cookie. “I’m
going.” Cookie lifted her head from the paw she’d been licking,
gave Maeve a languid look, then resumed her grooming.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Maeve
muttered as she slid the strap of her purse onto her shoulder and
left the apartment. The sky was a dense, dark blue with a few
smudgy clouds, left over from yesterday’s rain, blurring the moon’s
outline. The weather forecast for tomorrow was clear and sunny.
That would bode well for her store’s opening. Also for Quinn’s big
day at the football game.

Had she changed into nicer clothes for her
father, or for Quinn?

He wasn’t exactly a sharp
dresser, she thought with some relief. She really shouldn’t feel so
overwhelmed by him. Sure, he had a lot more going for him than she
had going for herself…but she had her cookies. And they both had
the song.
Take the long way
home…

The bouncy tune and the
sharp, sarcastic lyrics filled her head as she drove through
Brogan’s Point. Rush hour in the seaside town was nothing like
Seattle’s rush hour, but she had to share Atlantic Avenue with more
cars than usual, and traffic backed up at the Main Street
intersection.
It’s Dad’s home, not
mine,
she told the singer inside her head,
but he just kept insisting she was taking the long way home. He
didn’t specify whose home she was driving to, but she knew the song
was meant for her, for this moment.

The last time she’d driven to her father’s
block, she’d idled at the corner, stared down the street at the
house in the distance, and then U-turned and sped away. This time
she didn’t have that luxury. Lifting her chin and taking more deep
breaths, she cruised down the street, passing the Jorgensens’
house, the Manuzzos’, the Lauersteins’. She wondered if the same
families still lived in the tidy ranches, Cape Cods and saltbox
colonials that lined the street. Back in elementary school, she and
Lisa Manuzzo had been practically inseparable. They’d played Pogs
together, experimented with the make-up they’d filched from Lisa’s
older sister’s bedroom, and had so many sleep-overs that their
mothers bought them spare toothbrushes to keep at each other’s
houses. They’d started drifting apart in middle school—Lisa was
much more into boys than Maeve was then—but they’d remained friends
until Maeve’s mother died.

Maeve readily acknowledged
that the demise of their friendship was her fault. Lisa had said,
“You’re nuts, Maeve, you need help,” and she’d been absolutely
right. Maeve had been nuts. But she hadn’t gotten help. She hadn’t
known how to ask her father for that kind of help. If she
had
asked, he wouldn’t
have known how to give it.

A chill rippled down Maeve’s back, but she
shrugged it off. That was then. A long time ago.

Her house—her
father’s
house—hadn’t
changed much over the past ten years. The yard was a little tidier,
the yews flanking the front porch nicely shaped, the wrought-iron
hand rails on the three concrete steps up to the porch painted
white. They’d been black and scabbed with rust when Maeve had moved
out.

Her father had left the porch light on for
her, as well as the light above the garage. She pulled into the
driveway and let out a sigh.

You can do this,
she told herself, deciding to channel Cookie. Her
cat would stroll right into the house, head high, tail higher, her
sense of entitlement shimmering like an aura around her. Maeve
needed that attitude, that confidence.

She got out of her car and climbed the steps
to the porch. Her hand hovered above the doorbell for a long
minute. It seemed strange to be ringing her own doorbell—except
that it wasn’t her doorbell anymore. It wasn’t her home. She was a
visitor. A guest.

She pressed the doorbell.

Her father must have been waiting in the
entry. The door swung open before the bell had stopped chiming.
“Hi,” he said, smiling more brightly than the occasion called for.
His hair was disheveled, a dish towel hung from his belt, and his
big, beaming smile was contradicted by the flash of panic in his
eyes. “Come in. I’m so glad you’re here.”

He might be panicked, but she knew he was
speaking from his heart. He was glad she was there.

She stepped over the
threshold and looked around.
Okay.
One major hurdle overcome. She wasn’t screaming,
sobbing, or bolting back outside to her car.

She stood in the entry hall, a place so
familiar she had to pin her hands to her sides to keep from opening
the coat closet door and hanging up her jacket. If she peeked into
that closet, would she find her mother’s coats hanging from the
rod? When Maeve had left home, three and a half years after her
mother’s death, her father still hadn’t removed her mother’s
clothing from the house.

The “Home Sweet Home” needlepoint her mother
had stitched still hung in its frame on the wall next to the coat
closet, the letters forming trellises for swirling green vines and
pink and blue morning glories. The braided oval rug covering the
hardwood floor was the same rug that had been there ten years ago.
The doorway to the living room arched open to Maeve’s left, and she
forced herself to peer inside. She recognized the chairs, the
carpeting, the coffee and end tables and the textured beige drapes
framing the window. The couch was new, a cheery piece upholstered
in royal blue velour replacing the faded brown couch Maeve
remembered. Maeve’s mother had lain on that brown couch when she’d
been too weak to sit but too stubborn to stay in bed. She’d
insisted on being positioned at the center of the house, near her
family. She used to say she’d go to bed when she was ready to
die.

She hadn’t, though. She’d died on the couch.
She’d been resting there, her breath raspy, her skin pale and waxy,
tight against her skull. Fragile strands of hair had stretched
across her scalp like cobwebs, and her bony fingers had clawed at
the thin blanket Maeve had spread over her wasted body. Maeve had
sat on the floor beside her, her father on the arm of the sofa.
Maeve’s grandparents had meandered in and out of the room,
returning to the kitchen whenever their glasses of whisky needed
refilling. They’d been unable to remain sober while their beautiful
forty-year-old daughter was dying.

No surprise that the old couch was gone.
Maeve didn’t blame her father for getting rid of it.

“Come into the kitchen,” he urged her,
wiping his hands on the towel and striding down the hall. “I’m
struggling.”

She tore her eyes from the living room, a
place still steeped in sorrow despite the new couch, and followed
him down the hall. “Why are you struggling?”

“I can’t cook worth a damn. You know
that.”

She entered the kitchen, which was a mess.
Her father’s mess didn’t at all resemble the messes she and her
mother used to make when they’d baked cookies together. Their
messes had been sugary, festive with colorful icing and sprinkles
and copper cookie-cutters shaped like flowers and snowmen. Their
messes had incorporated big ceramic mixing bowls and cookie sheets,
spatulas and cooling racks.

His mess was a man’s mess: a pot of boiling
water, its lid rattling and bouncing as steam escaped. Another pot
filled with spaghetti sauce, rivulets of red dripping down the
sides. A package of frozen meatballs lying on the counter. A head
of romaine lettuce resting by the sink, the counter shiny where
water had splattered.

“Gus told me I should buy a rotisserie
chicken at the supermarket,” he confessed. “But I wanted to make
something from scratch. I thought spaghetti would be easy.”

“It
is
easy,” Maeve said, shrugging off
her jacket and draping it over the back of a chair at the table.
She glanced into the pot of sauce and gave it a stir. “Do you have
any oregano or dried basil?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He rummaged through a
cabinet. “Isn’t that already in the sauce?”

“If the sauce came out of a jar, it needs
more oregano and basil. And garlic powder.” She pulled a long-tined
cooking fork from the utensil drawer—he hadn’t rearranged the
drawers, and she found the tool right away—and twirled it through
the pasta, separating the strands.

“How about you take care of the stuff on the
stove, and I’ll make the salad?” he suggested.

Better to stay busy than to let her memories
of baking with her mother overwhelm her. “Go ahead,” she said.
“I’ll get this cooked.”

She was happy for the distraction, arranging
the meatballs on a plate and heating them in the microwave,
locating the colander in the cabinet where her mother had always
stored it, adding herbs and spices to the sauce. She would hardly
call opening a jar of spaghetti sauce and microwaving meatballs
“making something from scratch,” but it was a step more ambitious
than serving a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket.

And her father hadn’t been lying when he’d
said he couldn’t cook worth a damn. After her mother had gotten
sick, they’d lived on take-out—pizza, Chinese, deli sandwiches.
Once she’d died, Maeve had prepared dinner when she’d gotten home
from school. But half the time, the ingredients she needed weren’t
there, and she hadn’t had a driver’s license, so she couldn’t drive
to the store to buy them. Even if she could, her father was often
too drunk and depressed to eat, so what was the point of knocking
herself out? That was when she’d converted to the canned-soup
diet.

She hadn’t dared to bake
cookies then. Once she’d found her mother’s cookbook, she’d stashed
it in her closet, along with the few other belongings of her
mother’s that she’d taken. She wasn’t a thief by nature, but she’d
been afraid of what her father might do if he discovered that she’d
touched her mother’s things.
He
hadn’t touched them, at least not then. It was no
wonder she half-expected to find her mother’s coats in the closet
in the entry if she looked inside that evening.

What Maeve’s mother hadn’t taught her about
cooking she’d learned working at the Stonehouse Café. She’d hired
on as a dishwasher, and in time she’d moved up to food prep. She’d
waitressed. She’d seated patrons and run their checks. Lenny liked
to keep his staff lean and flexible, which meant she sometimes
found herself both cooking and serving on the same shift. Then,
once she’d introduced her cookies to the menu, he’d started paying
her bonuses to prepare batches of cookies for him to sell.

She knew her way around a
kitchen. That she knew her way around
this
kitchen was a bit
unnerving.