The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (75 page)

When Dr. Rosario caught her eye and smiled, Andie turned with a choked cry and fled.

“M
OM?”
C
LAIRE SAT
cross-legged on the floor with the phone to her ear. The living room was bare except for the cartons stacked against the wall, Matt’s toolbox, and an old carpet remnant by the door.

“Claire, honey. Is everything okay?” Millie’s anxious voice at the other end sounded faint and far away. Claire might have been calling from Tasmania.

“Everything’s fine. I was just calling to see how—”

“Do you have everything you need?”

“I haven’t finished unpacking. Most of it’s in storage until the work is done.” She spoke with forced cheer. “My contractor’s already made some inroads.” She could hear ominous creaks and thuds as Matt crawled around on the roof overhead.

Claire felt her gut clench. This was such a huge risk. What if it didn’t pan out? Though quitting her job and moving here had been easy compared to trying to make her parents understand. It was useless to explain; they refused to look beyond their own fears, leaving her to stew in her guilt—guilt that washed in and out like the tide, strewn with the flotsam of doubt and self-recrimination.

“I didn’t know you had a phone.” Millie’s tone was faintly accusatory.

“I just got it hooked up—about an hour ago.”

“Oh, I thought … never mind.”

You thought I was at Gerry’s.
Typical of Millie to imagine the worst. “Let me give you the number. Do you have a pen?”

“Somewhere in here …” Claire heard a rattling sound as her mother pawed through a drawer. There was a time she’d have had six pens on hand, but lately she’d become forgetful.

She waited what seemed an eternity while her mother found a pen and copied the number down. “As soon as I’m all set up, I’d like you and Dad to visit,” she said.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know.” Millie’s vague, drifting voice was worse somehow than recriminations. “Dr. Farland says I should take it easy.”

A tiny alarm bell went off. “Any particular reason?”

“Oh, you know him—such a stickler. It’s nothing to worry about, I’m sure, just some chest pains.”

Chest pains? The alarms were clamoring now. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Like I said, it’s probably nothing. Besides, I didn’t want to bother you. You being so busy and all.”

“I’m never too busy for something as important as that, Mom.”

Silence at the other end.

The tide rose a little higher, nudging past the high-water mark.

Claire could feel the muscles in her jaw knotting. Her dentist had told her she ground her teeth in her sleep and had recommended a bite guard.
What I need even more is to stop feeling like the bad guy,
she thought. “Mom, look, I know you’re upset with me right now,” she said gently. “But nothing’s changed. I still love you and Dad. This isn’t an either-or thing. I just felt I owed it to myself to give this a try.”

Millie sighed. “Yes, dear, you told us already.”

“I just wish there were some way to convince you.”

Another, longer silence. There was only one thing she could have said that would have satisfied her mother:
This was all a terrible mistake. I’m coming home.

Then Millie said wearily, “I’d better go. I hear Dad in the kitchen. You know how hopeless he is. Whatever he’s looking for is probably right under his nose.”

“Remember the time he hunted all over the house for his keys and it turned out they were in his pocket?” Claire clung to the slender thread connecting them over the miles.

“Which time was that? I’ve lost count.” Millie gave a weak chuckle, and for a moment they were joined by their shared history: all those memories like odds and ends in the cupboard her father was probably rummaging through right now, seemingly random and not terribly valuable until you needed something. “He always remembered what mattered, though.” There was no irony in her voice; Millie wasn’t capable of irony.

Claire closed her eyes. “Bye, Mom. Give my love to Dad.”

“I will, honey. You know we’re thinking of you.”

She hung up feeling guiltier than ever. If her mother hadn’t sounded so defeated just then, Claire could have gotten angry. Instead, she felt like a criminal.

What made it worse were her own doubts. She could have prepared a brief on all the valid reasons for moving here, but that wasn’t the same as
knowing
it was right. What she’d done, for the first time in her life, was simply follow her heart—a heart as unused to taking risks as a fledgling flying from its nest.

Even Byron, who’d always been so supportive, was having a hard time with it. Which she’d anticipated—and which was why she’d driven all the way to Palo Alto to break it to him as soon as her offer on the house had been accepted.

“I can’t believe I’m only just now hearing of this,” he’d said, incredulous.

“It wasn’t definite until today.”

“But you were
thinking
about it.”

“Well, yes …”

They’d been in bed. She’d waited until after they’d made love, which had seemed like a good idea at the time, but had turned out to be a mistake. Byron felt tricked.

He sat up, running a hand through his hair. “Jesus, Claire, do you have any idea what this means?”

“It wasn’t a snap decision,” she’d said, swinging her legs out from under the covers and bending down in search of her clothes.

“There’s no way we’ll be able to manage on just my salary, not with this bitch of a loan I’ll be paying off.”

“That’s two years away,” she’d reminded him.

“What’s going to be different in two years?”

“A lot could happen.”

“Yeah, we could be even deeper in debt.”

She straightened, regarding him coolly. “All I’m saying is that I want to stop feeling like my life is on hold.”

“Who says it’s on hold?”

“I do, Byron.
Me.
” It was the closest she’d ever come to shouting at him. “I hate being a lawyer. And I’m sick of living down the street from my parents.”

“We’ll move, then. My uncle wants me to go in with him.”

“Is that what
you
want?” She remembered the days when Byron used to make fun of the fact that his Uncle Andrew, an orthopedic surgeon with a fancy practice in Hillsborough, lived in a minimansion and drove a Jaguar, claiming he’d rather work at an inner city clinic tending to poor people. “I thought you wanted your own practice.”

“I did … I do. But he says I should get a few years under my belt first. And … well, I’m thinking maybe he’s right.”

She was pulling her T-shirt on, and when her head emerged she found him sitting on the edge of the bed, his speckled green eyes fixed on her with an odd mixture of chagrin and defiance.

“Why am I just hearing about this?” she asked, echoing his earlier words to her.

“I was getting ready to tell you when you dropped
your
bomb.”

“Let me get this straight.” She took a deep, leveling breath. “It’s not okay for me to go after what I want, but I shouldn’t hesitate to rearrange my entire life for you.”

“I thought it’s what you wanted, too.”

He’d looked so mournful, she’d relented at once, plopping back down on the bed and winding her arms around him. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little touchy.” She didn’t have to explain; he knew how it was with her parents. “You’re right—I should have told you sooner.”

“If this is really what you want,” he said, stroking her hair, “we’ll make it work somehow.”

Byron’s dear face flashed through her mind now in a series of timed-release sequences: the little boy next door tossing pebbles up at her window to catch her attention, the gangly sixteen-year-old she’d danced with at his prom (and who later held her hair while she threw up from drinking too much of the spiked punch), the young medical student who’d watched proudly from his seat in the auditorium as she’d received her law school diploma. Byron had always been there, and would be in the days and years to come.

Claire looked about the room where she sat contemplating her future as if seeing it for the first time—its hardwood floors and beams, its solid oak doors and lintels. Kitty had once told her that the scariest thing for a woman was to take a chance on herself. “We’ll marry a man with a prison record and sixteen tattoos before taking out a small business loan,” she’d said, only half joking. But look how well it had worked out for her—a thriving business, a child she adored,
and
the man of her dreams.

She heard the clump of boots on the porch and looked up to find a huge figure silhouetted in the doorway, edged in a molten glow. Matt, back from his expedition onto the roof.

“It better be good news,” she said. “At the rate I’m going, I’ll be broke before I open for business.”

He stepped inside, thoughtfully remembering to wipe his boots on the carpet remnant. “You’ll need to replace the gutters, but the roof looks solid enough. It should last a few more years at least.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “You made my day.”

“Don’t thank me, thank the climate,” he said. “It only rains a couple of months out of the year.”

She glanced out the window. “How does it stay so green?”

He pointed toward the frosted peaks of the mountains only just visible in the distance. “All that snow has to go somewhere. Been out to the lake yet?”

“Just to drive past.”

“It’s more than half a mile deep,” he told her. “Colder than a witch’s tit, too, even in summer. Something to keep in mind next time you feel like going for a dip.”

“I’m afraid I won’t have much time for that.”

“Too busy baking cakes?” He stroked his mustache, tugging at its ends as if to keep from smiling. For some reason he seemed to find the idea of a tearoom amusing.

“Don’t knock it. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried my chocolate cake.”

“That how you stay so skinny, by making the rest of us fat?”

Matt wasn’t fat, just big. He reminded her of the friendly giant on the old
Captain Kangaroo
show. Not her type, though. His hair was too bushy and his mustache needed trimming. And look at those hands—like shovels.

He must have picked up on her thoughts because all at once she became aware of his gaze. Her cheeks warmed and she dropped her eyes. There was a tiny hole in a pocket of his jeans where she caught the glint of a key poking through.

She could hardly believe she’d known him only a matter of weeks. It felt longer. Probably because he’d been here every day pulling up rotten boards, ripping out old wiring, crawling about underneath the house in search of dry rot and termites (apparently he didn’t trust engineers’ reports). Yesterday he’d met with an inspector from the health department. Everything had to be up to code if she was to be licensed for food service.

“I used to get paid to fatten people’s wallets,” she told him.

“That so?”

“I was a lawyer. Technically, I still am. Tax and estate, intergenerational trusts, that kind of thing.”

“Intergenerational trusts, that’s what they’re calling it these days?”

“Don’t look at me—I didn’t make it up. One of the reasons I left was because I got sick of all the pretension.”

“A lawyer, huh?” He gazed at her with new respect, not for her profession—she suspected he held a pretty dim view of lawyers—but for her courage in chucking it all. “How come you never mentioned it before?”

Claire shrugged. “It never came up.”

She started to get up off the floor, but Matt was already bending down with his hand extended. She grasped hold of it, feeling its dry heat and the calluses ridged along his palm. For a split second she was a little girl again, her child’s hand engulfed by her father’s, feeling the same sense of safety, the absolute assuredness that all was right with the world.

“I’ll bet you could use a cold beer,” she said, remembering that it was hot up on the roof. Almost in the same instant she recalled that the elderly Frigidaire that’d come with the house had been hauled off to the dump this morning. The new one wouldn’t be delivered until later in the day.

Matt shrugged. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

She retrieved two bottles of Evian from the grocery sack on the floor.

He cracked his open and took a gulp. The creases on his throat were penciled in with the dirt from crawling around on the roof, from which his Adam’s apple stuck out like a polished knob. He lowered the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Thanks. That hit the spot.”

She asked, “Anything besides the gutters?”

“Hornet’s nest. I took care of it.”

“Without getting stung?” She was amazed.

He patted his shirt pocket, from which a cigarette pack bulged. “I smoked ’em out.”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t. Gave it up last year.” Which didn’t explain the cigarettes. But she was learning that with Matt it was best not to ask too many questions; if you were patient, he’d eventually get around to telling you whatever it was you wanted to know.

“I’ll remember that next time I run into any hornets’ nests.” She took a sip of her water and smiled. “I wonder if it would work as well on the proverbial kind.”

“Your family giving you a hard time?”

He must have gotten the picture when she’d introduced Gerry as her birth mother that hers wasn’t exactly conventional. “Let’s just say my parents aren’t too happy with me right now.” She didn’t know why she was telling him. Maybe because she had no one else to talk to. And Matt was a good listener.

“Why is that?” he asked.

“They didn’t want me to move.”

“We all have to go sometime.”

She watched him stroll over to the window, where he leaned into the sill. The sunlight at his back sent his shadow angling over the scuffed oak floorboards.

“How would you feel if it were
your
kids?” she asked a bit testily.

Matt had two, a boy and a girl. That first day, after the tour of the house, he’d pulled out his wallet, worn to the thinness of a wood chip and curved to the shape of his rear end, producing photos of a little boy around eight, with his father’s brown eyes and reddish hair, and a girl with dark brown pigtails who couldn’t have been more than five. Since then he’d brought them by a few times, usually when he was dropping something off. They always stayed in the truck. Matt didn’t like their being around sharp tools unless he was supervising.