Take the Long Way Home (17 page)

He didn’t need their protection. No one
recognized him.

And then someone did. Two rows down, a
couple of beefy middle-aged guys in faded Red Sox caps, their
paunches overhanging their belts, stood and greeted the coach. “And
here’s the man of the hour,” one of them said, reaching over the
seats to shake Quinn’s hand. “Quinn Connor, greatest player ever to
throw a touchdown in this arena.”

“It’s an honor,” the other one said,
vigorously pumping Quinn’s hand.

Quinn wasn’t sure what to say. He was no
longer used to being treated like a celebrity. His ego had been
flattened pretty quickly in medical school. His fellow students had
been so smart, so sharp. Thank god he’d known how to work hard, how
to persevere, how to set his sights on his goal and keep going, one
yard at a time, until he reached it. He would never have been able
to keep up otherwise.

“Thanks,” he said to the men in the Red Sox
caps. Their voices had attracted the attention of more people. They
eyed Quinn, curious to see who the men were fawning over. Several
recognized him and climbed over the bleachers to shake his hand or
slap his shoulder. A few reminisced about the seventy-yard
touchdown pass he’d thrown in his first game as starting
quarterback, when he’d been a sophomore. A few mentioned other
spectacular plays, some of which Quinn himself didn’t remember.

They
remembered. He’d been that talented, that special. That
revered by these folks from his hometown. Pride gusted through
him—not the sort of pride he’d felt when he’d been handed his
stethoscope at his med school graduation, but the pride he’d felt
as a high school star, deified not just by his classmates but by
every local football fan, and a few not-so-local ones. These people
had worshiped him.

Their admiration was seductive. It gave him
a buzz.

The game began, and the
visiting team scored first. Quinn felt a pang for the hometown
crowd and hoped the Brogan’s Point team would rebound quickly. But
a part of him—a part he didn’t like—also felt a little smug. The
teams he’d played on had been so much better than the school’s
current team. They’d had so much more speed, so much tighter
execution. They’d had
him
.

Maybe he wouldn’t feel that way if people
didn’t keep coming over to him, greeting him, bumping fists with
him and reminiscing about those amazing seasons, a decade ago, when
he’d led the team to victory after victory.

Kids asked him to autograph pieces of paper.
The mother of one of his teammates told him her son was now in the
Marines, but she knew he’d be safe because he’d learned how to be
strong and courageous from Quinn. Really? Quinn had taught Steve
Kovic how to be strong and courageous?

Through it all, Ashley remained by his side,
beaming. Quite a few of the people who greeted Quinn seemed to
remember her, too. “So nice to see you both here, still together
after all these years,” the mother of another former teammate said,
then smiled warmly at Ashley. “You’re just as pretty as ever.”

Ashley responded with a bashful modesty
Quinn knew was as false as the woman’s statement was true. Ashley
was definitely as pretty as ever. Her hair was the color of
sunshine, and it curved in all the right places, just like her
body. Her lips were a muted ruby shade and her eyes looked even
larger than they were, thanks to the skillful application of
cosmetics Quinn knew must have cost a small fortune. Her
fingernails were all even and glossy with polish. Her boots might
be pretentious, but they sure looked good on her.

Her hand, her shoulder, and
her hips might have been glued to him with epoxy. She didn’t move
an inch, didn’t allow a molecule of air to come between them. “I
told you last night,” he reminded her once his former teammate’s
mother had moved on. “We
aren’t
still together.”

“I know,” Ashley said, smiling as if his
words had glided past her on a gentle breeze, leaving nothing
disturbed in its wake. “Today, people are remembering who you were.
I’m a part of who you were, Quinn. Just roll with it, okay?”

But he wasn’t the same person he’d been
then, was he? As he grinned and nodded and thanked people for
acknowledging him, he found himself wondering just who the hell he
was. In the school’s football stadium, at this game, he no longer
felt like a newly minted doctor who’d been wrung out by years of
rigorous coursework, strenuous labor, sleepless nights and
stressful days. Ashley was right: today he was Quinn Connor the
football star once more, the boy everyone looked up to in high
school. The boy every other boy wished he could be, dating the girl
every other girl wished she could be.

When halftime arrived—with the score tied at
fourteen, which improved the hometown crowd’s spirit somewhat—the
Brogan’s Point High School marching band played a few vaguely
recognizable pop tunes and then the high school song. If Ashley
hadn’t sung it last night, Quinn wouldn’t have recognized it, nor
would he have remembered that it was his cue to march down to the
field. Coach Marshall poked him in the arm to remind him that show
time had arrived, and he led Quinn him down the steps to the
striped expanse of grass, where Sanchez, Kozlowski, and Mr.
Kezerian, the high school principal, all stood on the fifty-yard
line. The crowd cheered. Quinn seesawed between basking in the
attention and wanting to flee.

Coach Marshall gave a grand oration, listing
all of Quinn’s feats. The records he’d set. The pivotal games he’d
won. The pride and glory he’d brought to the school. Sanchez and
Kozlowski held up a glass-fronted wooden case containing a jersey
with Quinn’s number twelve on it—a jersey much too pristine to have
ever been worn in a game, by Quinn or anyone else. Coach Marshall
announced that Quinn’s number was being retired. More cheers.

Quinn was handed a plaque and the
microphone. He gazed at the stands. People were standing and
applauding him. Hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. Not as many as
used to pack the luxurious stadium at the University of Michigan.
Not as many as Quinn had once dreamed of, back when a professional
football career was arguably within his reach. But to his ears, so
used to the hushed voices of medical professionals and the
mechanical beeps of respirators and heart monitors, and the oldies
soundtrack Dave Herschberg played while he was performing surgery,
the cheers were deafening.

Quinn fingered the
microphone. He gazed out at the crowds giving him a standing
ovation. Was this home? Was
he
home?
Who the hell was
he?

For that one moment, he was no longer Dr.
Connor, the guy who set bones and repaired torn ACL’s and worked
absurd hours, without sleep or balanced meals. Or cookies.

He was the star all those strangers believed
him to be.

Cookie’s stayed open until seven o’clock.
Maeve hadn’t decided on an official closing time yet. Many bakeries
closed by mid-afternoon, once they’d sold out their fresh
inventory. They’d discount whatever was left and sell it the next
day as day as day-old products. But cookies didn’t necessarily go
stale the way bread did. Maeve thought that as people learned about
the shop’s existence, they might want to stop by on their way home
from work, to grab a special treat for dessert. That would require
her to remain open later. She’d have to gauge the traffic.

On opening day, the traffic continued into
the early evening. Customers just kept trickling in.

At certain times during the day, they hadn’t
trickled. They’d flooded. Around four o’clock—right after the
homecoming game ended—so many people had descended upon the shop on
Seaview Avenue that the line had stretched outside the store and
halfway down the block. She credited Joyce’s daughter and her
friend for this. The fliers they’d distributed outside the football
field had attracted an amazing amount of business.

The buy-two-get-one-free discount had
helped, too. Cookie’s would have made more money if Maeve had
charged full price—but if she’d charged full price, fewer people
might have come in. Crowds were always a good thing. Crowds equaled
word-of-mouth. She’d learned a lot from Lenny at the Stonehouse
Café, and from Harry, and from the research she’d done online. “The
best marketing tool is a satisfied customer,” one of the sites
she’d studied had taught her.

Today, she’d sent a lot of satisfied
customers out into the world. She hoped the word-of-mouth would
bring her even more business.

She’d dismissed Joyce an hour ago and taken
care of the last stragglers herself. Joyce had been pretty punchy
by the late afternoon. Maeve and her assistant had barely had a
chance to sit down all day, and for several stretches, Joyce had
worked solo at the counter while Maeve had run more batches of
cookies through the ovens. The two of them had taken turns eating
snacks of yogurt, crackers, fruit, and broken cookies to keep their
energy level up, one of them sneaking into the back office to
refuel while the other dealt with customers.

Maeve’s father had been in twice, once by
himself in the morning, when business had still been light, and a
second time, accompanied by Gus Naukonen, shortly after lunch, when
Cookie’s had been teeming with customers. The tall, lanky,
bartender had tried one of the molasses-almond cookies and told
Maeve’s father that Maeve was now her favorite Nolan. After his
first visit, her father had passed out fliers to his colleagues on
the police force, and cops had wandered in, singly or in pairs,
throughout the day. “Who says cops only eat doughnuts?” one
patrolman had joked. “I’m switching to cookies.”

The food critic from the local newspaper had
dropped by, too. She’d mooched several free cookies, insisting she
had to taste more than one flavor in order to assess the enterprise
fairly. But she’d rhapsodized about the cookies and promised a rave
review in her next column.

Maeve ought to be happy.

She
was
happy. The opening was everything
she could have dreamed. If only Harry were alive, she could tell
him what she’d accomplished. It was entirely his doing, after all.
He’d bought her the store. He’d pushed her to return to Brogan’s
Point and start her own venture, and his bequest had made the whole
thing possible. His wisdom and generosity, his friendship, his
faith in her… She was more indebted to him than she could
measure.

A tear leaked from her eye, and she wiped it
away with a Cookie’s napkin. In the past ten years, she’d hardly
ever cried, and now, all of a sudden, she was turning into a
veritable sob machine. First last night, and again today, she’d
succumbed to weeping.

She was exhausted. She missed Harry. As she
twisted the lock in the door and silenced the bell, which had been
serenading her with its festive jingling all day long, she told
herself her crying was just a release. She’d been running non-stop
since four a.m., and now her body was letting go.

But her tears were more than just a result
of weariness combined with jagged spikes of adrenaline. They were
also a result of sadness. Of disappointment. Of…damn it,
heartbreak.

Quinn hadn’t come.

When the crowds had surged into the store
after the homecoming game, she’d tried not to watch for him. In
truth, she was too busy serving customers and replenishing stock to
glance at the door each time the bell tinkled announcing a new
arrival. She knew the four o’clock deluge was due to the game’s
ending, since many of those customers were chattering about this
play and that score. Given how little Maeve understood football,
they might as well have been speaking a foreign language. But she
listened for a phrase she might recognize—specifically, the phrase
“Quinn Connor.” She hadn’t heard it break through the din of “Three
chocolate-chip cookies!” and “Can I have one of these and three of
those—no, I mean, two of these, one of those, two of those…” and
“Do you have any cocoa?”

She should add cocoa to the menu. Maybe hot
cider, too, on these brisk autumn days.

But cocoa and cider weren’t important right
now. What was important—far more painfully important than she
wanted it to be—was that Quinn had promised to come, and he
hadn’t.

She’d been crazy to think he would. Who was
she kidding? Last night was…whatever it was. A moment of need. A
spasm of passion. A bout of insanity.

He was King Quinn, the gorgeous hotshot who
excelled at everything he tried, who’d once saved games and now
saved lives—or at least saved fractured bones and torn tendons. She
was Maeve Nolan, the weirdo who’d staggered through her adolescence
trapped within a dark cage of pain and anger, and who’d cleared out
of Brogan’s Point as soon as she could, hoping never to return.

How could she think this town was her
home?

How could she think Quinn’s arms were home?
Last night she’d believed they were. Last night…

Last night she’d been an idiot. And now she
was an idiot with tears streaking down her face.

If she were still in Seattle, she could have
chugged a bottle of wine with Lacey, the housemate she’d been
closest to, and they could have cried together, cursing Quinn in
particular and men in general. That had been their break-up
ritual—Lacey had hooked up a lot more often than Maeve, and endured
a lot more break-ups, but Maeve had always been happy to share wine
and swearing with her.

Last night hadn’t been just a hook-up,
though, at least not to Maeve. She’d honestly believed something
special had existed between her and Brogan’s Point’s golden boy,
that they’d connected in a unique way. She’d felt she could trust
him. Unlike Lacey, she wasn’t the sort of woman who made a habit of
falling into bed with a man she’d known only a few days. But ever
since that song had played at the Faulk Street Tavern, creating a
mysterious, magical bond between her and Quinn…