The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (2 page)

She continued along, hunger mounting with each step. Tantalizing aromas drifted toward her: freshly ground coffee, baking bread, a sweet scent she would later learn was lemons. Not like the ones in supermarkets back home, which had almost no smell, these hung like Christmas ornaments from the potted trees along the curb.

She paused in front of a shop with an enormous wheel of cheese in the window. Just inside was a deli case on which platters of thick, crusty sandwiches were displayed. Her last meal had been a bag of potato chips washed down with Coke, and it took every ounce of willpower to keep from darting inside and grabbing one of those sandwiches. With an effort she moved on, past a Mexican restaurant with a garland of dried chiles on the door. It wasn’t until she reached a saddle shop with a wooden merry-go-round horse out front that she paused until her head stopped swimming.

At the first corner she crossed the street to the park. She still had no idea of where she was headed, but she had the strangest feeling of being drawn to something. In the park, wandering amid the cool embrace of ancient trees, she stopped to slip off her sneakers. The grass was soft against her soles. There were no manicured flower beds or bronze statues gazing imperiously off into the distance. Here flowers poked from clumps of ferns and tangled vines, and stone fountains murmured sweetly.

Everywhere she looked there were birds. Tanagers, jays, bluebirds, juncos. She spied a small brown bird with dull red markings on its breast. A purple finch. It was fluttering about in a birdbath, sending up drops of water that caught the sunlight like sparks. She was so entranced she didn’t notice the children playing nearby until one of them bumped into her. She caught him before he could fall, a bundle of sturdy limbs that wriggled briefly in her arms before pulling away

A small, towheaded boy peered up at her. “Hi, I’m Danny. What’s your name?”

The girl hesitated. She didn’t appear to be on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list. Still, it paid to be cautious. Her gaze fell once more on the jaunty little bird. She watched it take flight, scattering bright droplets as it disappeared into the branches of the tree overhead. “Finch,” she said without thinking. She rolled it about in her mind like a new taste on her tongue. Yes, it would do.

The boy didn’t seem to find it the least bit unusual. He held out a grubby fist, opening it to reveal an even grubbier penny. “You can have it if you want.”

She pocketed the penny with a smile. “Thanks.” Maybe it would bring her luck.

The boy darted off to rejoin his playmates.

She followed the winding path until she reached the other end of the park. Across the street, atop a shady rise, sat an old adobe mission. Pale pink with chunks of plaster missing here and there, it was topped by an arched belfry trimmed like a cake. The girl stared, transfixed, as the bells began to peal and a pair of stout wooden doors swung open. A white-gowned bride and her tuxedoed groom appeared on the sun-dappled steps, followed by a stream of wedding guests spilling out to join them.

Friends and family that she imagined for an instant were her own. She smiled even as tears filled her eyes—a brown-haired girl of medium height in frayed jeans and a faded maroon T-shirt, a girl with nowhere to go and no one to welcome her who had the oddest feeling she’d somehow arrived at her destination.

H
OW DID
I
END UP HERE?
Samantha Kiley wondered. A forty-eight-year-old woman in a peach chiffon dress watching her youngest daughter get married. Wasn’t it only a few years ago she’d walked down the same aisle, arm tucked through her father’s? Since she’d stood with her babies at the baptismal font? Time doesn’t just fly, she thought, it leaves you stranded in places you never expected to find yourself. Nearly two years since Martin’s death, yet she still had trouble thinking of herself as a widow, a status conjuring images of the old
abuelitas
garbed in black who led the candlelight procession up Calle de Navidad each Christmas Eve.

It saddened her, Martin’s not being here, but she’d made up her mind she wasn’t going to let it spoil the day. She focused instead on the poised young woman at the altar, a vision in ivory taffeta and clouds of white tulle, her honey-colored hair smoothed back in a Grace Kelly-like chignon.
My daughter…

Light streamed from the high clerestory windows flanking the nave, illuminating the altar’s carved gilt reredos. Father Reardon, striking in his black cassock and snowy surplice, had turned the page on the Song of Songs and was heading into the choppy waters of the vows. Sam reached for her handkerchief. She’d managed to keep it together throughout the readings—Byron and T. S. Eliot and a passage from Alice’s childhood favorite,
The Little Prince.
Now came the true test…

“Wesley Leyland Carpenter, do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?”

Sam’s gaze rested on Wes. He was a man’s man like her father: tall and well built, with a full head of hair the color of case-hardened steel and a startling streak of white down the center of his neatly trimmed black beard. The CEO of a multibillion-dollar cable network, he would provide for her daughter…never mind that Alice would bristle at the idea. More importantly, he would be good to her. That much was obvious just looking at them.

He was also fifty-four—six years older than Sam, and twenty-eight years his bride’s senior.

Because Wes was so perfect in every other way, Sam had swallowed her reservations. Even so, a voice cried in protest,
He’s old enough to be her father!
When Alice was a baby, he had been on his second tour of duty in Vietnam. When he was old she’d be a young woman still. If they had children—and Sam certainly hoped they would—Alice might very well end up raising them on her own, or with the added burden of an ailing husband.

Age isn’t everything,
she reminded herself. And Alice wasn’t exactly a simpering handmaiden. She was an accomplished woman in her own right, a TV producer with a successful talk show to her credit. She stood gazing up at Wes not as if he’d hung the moon, but as if they’d done so together.

Even so, Martin wouldn’t have approved of the match, she knew. At the very least he’d have done his best to stall it. And who knows? He might have succeeded. Alice, both girls in fact, had idolized their father. And he, in turn, had lavished on them…

…
everything he withheld from you.

The thought was startling, like a rude noise breaking the hushed stillness. Where had it come from? Hadn’t Martin been as devoted a husband as he had been a father?

Sam forced the thought from her mind. At the moment her daughter’s happiness was all that counted. And just look at her! Alice seemed to glow like the bank of votive candles lighting the painted wooden Madonna to her right, the only hint of nervousness the faintly discernible quivering of her hands. Behind her veil, her smile was like sunshine finding its way through a morning mist. Her blue eyes fixed on Wes as he responded in a clear baritone: “I do.”

Sam blinked hard, the sturdy oak pew, polished by generations of Delarosas, like a firm hand holding her upright. So far, so good. She’d managed to keep the waterworks at bay. Her gaze strayed to her eldest, who wasn’t having nearly as much success. Laura, standing alongside her sister, was holding the bouquet tilted askew in one hand while dabbing at her eyes with the other.

Dear Laura. Anything could set her off: sentimental songs and movies, old photos in family albums. No wonder her door was Mecca to every poor, starved creature for miles around. It probably hadn’t occurred to her—she was the least vain person Sam knew—that she didn’t exactly fit the part of dying swan. Tears had left her olive skin blotchy, and pills of Kleenex dotted the front of her dusty-rose chiffon sheath, a dress chosen by Alice that was as stylish as it was spectacularly unsuited to Laura’s less than willowy figure.

Sam’s heart went out to her. Not in pity. How could you feel sorry for someone as smart and talented as Laura? Certainly, she wouldn’t have been able to manage Delarosa’s without her. If only Laura’s husband had seen her for who she was, not for what she hadn’t been able to give him. Peter’s walking out on her had been a crushing blow; a year and a half since the divorce and she still wasn’t over it. Sam could only hope she would one day fall in love again and be as happy as…well, Alice and Wes.

The priest turned his gaze to Alice. “Do you, Alice Imogene Kiley, take this man…”

Moments later Wes was slipping the ring onto her finger, its four-carat diamond catching the light in a wink of such brilliance Sam didn’t have to dab at her eyes to know they were wet. Alice, in turn, slipped onto Wes’s finger the plain gold band that had been her father’s.

Father Reardon closed his book. “I now pronounce you man and wife. And what God hath joined let no man put asunder.” The light from above seemed to radiate from the billowing sleeves of his surplice as he lifted his arms in benediction. With the wry twinkle that, along with his Black-Irish good looks, had inspired some decidedly un-Catholic thoughts in a number of the female parishioners, he turned to Wes. “You may kiss the bride.”

A knot formed in Sam’s throat as she watched her new son-in-law lift Alice’s veil. Their kiss, though chaste, hinted at a passion she could only wonder at. On her own long-ago wedding day had she felt about Martin as her daughter clearly did about Wes? Her most vivid memory of that time was how young they’d been, still in college; young enough for her friends to joke that there must be a baby on the way. Three months later, when she actually
did
get pregnant, all she could remember was feeling sick to her stomach most of the time. Then, when Laura came, overwhelmed.

It’s hard to stay in love, she thought, with a baby crying and the PG&E meter ticking and
Joy of Cooking
wedged between
Logic I
and
Poets of the Romantic Age.
A different kind of flame burns, low and steady like a pilot light, when you’ve slept alongside the same man for years.

But all that was behind her now. Life without Martin had settled into a pattern. She had her house and business, the music festival committee. There wasn’t room for the kind of passion she’d yearned for when young.

The realization brought a trace of melancholy that was quickly dispelled by the Bach cantata now echoing through the church, accompanied by the joyous pealing of
campanario
bells. As she rose to her feet, Sam felt as if she were being literally borne upward. She caught the eye of the best man, Wes’s son, with his blond hair to his shoulders and silver stud in one ear, and thought she saw a touch of irony in the glance he shot her. Ian was only a few years older than Alice. What must he think of all this?

Sam fell into step behind him. Laura and the three bridesmaids, old friends of Alice’s, marched ahead of them in a rose-colored column with the bride and groom leading the way. Sam smiled into the blur of beaming faces on either side of her. The church, eternally cool, its hand-hewn timbers imbued over the ages with the scent of smoke and incense, seemed to fold about her like a pair of tired wings.

The church doors swung open, flooding the aisle with sunshine. There was a moment, a single moment before anyone caught up to them, when Alice and Wes stood poised on the steps outside, a fairy-tale prince and princess framed by the arched doorway as if by the gilt edges of a book. Sam’s throat tightened. She thought,
Is there really such a thing as happily ever after?

Then she was outside, taking her place in the receiving line, extending her hand and cheek to the guests who spilled from the church like excited children from school. Her sister and brother-in-law, Audrey and Grant, with their two college-age sons, Joey and Craig. Her brother, Ray, and his wife, Dolores, all the way from Dallas. Ray and Dolores’s two married daughters, followed by elderly Uncle Pernell and Aunt Florine, clutching as tightly to each other as to their respective canes.

Wes’s parents, both hale and hearty, with the deep tans of avid golfers, stood to her right—an uncomfortable reminder that her own hadn’t lived to see this day. She pictured them as they’d looked in the photo taken on their last anniversary: a tall, thickset man with a balding crown stooping into the camera’s range, his cheek pressed to that of his petite, white-haired wife. What would they have thought of this unlikely match?

Sam’s best friend stepped up to give her a Chanel-scented squeeze. In her wide-brimmed straw hat and fitted emerald suit Gerry Fitzgerald seemed straight out of a forties movie. No one who didn’t know her would ever have guessed she was a former nun.

“You’re holding up well,” she said.

“Am I?” Sam drew back with a self-conscious little laugh.

“When it’s my turn, they’ll have to issue a flood warning.” That wouldn’t be for a while, they both knew. Gerry’s daughter, the oldest of her two children, was only fifteen.

Sam’s gaze strayed toward Alice, warmly embracing her bridegroom’s much stouter older brother, who could have passed for Wes’s father. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“I could swear I was looking at you on your wedding day.”

A long-ago image flashed through Sam’s head: a pretty, dark-haired college girl, much too young to be getting married, wearing her mother’s satin wedding gown taken in at the waist. She smiled. “I’m glad one of us remembers that far back.”

“We’re not
that
old.” Gerry shook her head, green eyes sparkling with laughter. With her ex-husband and string of lovers, she liked to joke that she was
disgracefully
aging.

“Old,” Sam said with a wry, downward glance, “is a corsage without a man to pin it on.”

Gerry cast a meaningful look at Tom Kemp, in line behind her. “I can think of someone who’d be more than happy to take on the job,” she murmured.

Sam felt her face grow warm, then her husband’s former partner was stepping up to kiss her cheek. He stood at least a head taller than Sam, who was tall herself, his shoulders slightly stooped from accommodating to a world that wasn’t custom-built. A nice-looking man smelling faintly of aftershave, with twin crescents of newly shorn scalp where his square black glasses hooked over his ears. Sunlight skated off their lenses as he drew back to smile at her.