The Chesapeake Diaries Series (70 page)

Dallas left the room as silently as she’d crept in. She
went into her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, but she knew it was futile to try to sleep. Already wide-awake, thanks to a strong cup of coffee at Grant’s and a tangle of conflicted feelings she wasn’t ready to sort out, she went into the shower, then dressed and went back downstairs as quietly as she’d gone up. She’d make a pot of coffee and go directly into the library to try to get some work done, her theory being that the more she focused on work, the less she’d try to analyze the night she’d spent in Grant’s bed. She’d just started to pour water into the coffeemaker when she heard the shuffle of slippered feet in the hall.

“My, my,” Berry said as she came into the kitchen. “Aren’t we the early bird today?”

Dallas tried to think of a quick and clever retort, but couldn’t manage either on so little sleep.

“Please don’t even try to pretend that you haven’t just gotten home. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.” Berry swept past her and went to the refrigerator for half-and-half.

Dallas was still trying to come up with a cleverly vague retort, but she had nothing. She felt her face flush and went about making coffee.

“Cat got your tongue, dear?”

“I didn’t expect to … I hadn’t planned on … that is, I …”

Berry waved away her attempts to explain. “You don’t owe me any explanations. I know how these things go. Besides, you’re an adult.”

She was smiling smugly when she added, “So, was it as good as you remembered?”

“Berry!” Dallas scolded.

“Just making conversation.” Berry was still smiling.
“I imagine it was, or you wouldn’t have stayed the night.”

“You’re impossible,” Dallas muttered. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It was supposed to be a friendly celebration, nothing more than that. I never expected—”

“Please, it’s your aunt Berry you’re talking to.”

Dallas measured coffee into the filter, then finished pouring in the water.

“I’m not trying to be coy,” she told Berry. “I really hadn’t thought that far ahead. Of course, in retrospect, maybe that was deliberate on my part.”

“The not-thinking part?”

Dallas nodded. “I always feel confused about Grant, except when I’m with him.”

“How do you feel then?”

“Comfortable. Like everything’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Berry sat at the table, her chair turned slightly so she could see the new day outside as well as her grand-niece.

“Perhaps it’s a good time to stop thinking about it and just let go, see what happens, where it goes on its own,” Berry said thoughtfully. “Sometimes we think too much about things that are really quite simple.”

“Maybe. That’s pretty much what I told Grant.” Dallas got out two of the new “Discover St. Dennis” mugs that Berry had bought at Cuppachino a few days earlier. “What would you do?”

“I very rarely give you advice, Dallas.” Berry sat with her hands folded on the edge of the table. “But since you asked …”

Dallas poured the coffee and brought both mugs to the table.

“Sometimes we make decisions that we don’t totally think through, decisions that are perhaps based on what we think we want at that particular moment, rather than on what we really need and what we want for the long run. Sometimes those decisions turn out to be more final than we’d planned.” Berry’s eyes grew moist. “It’s very rare to get a second chance. Not everyone does, you know.”

Dallas sat next to Berry and studied the older woman’s face, and tried to recall the last time she’d seen Berry near tears.

“Was there something you wished you’d had a second chance at?” Dallas asked softly.

“Water over the dam, dear.” Berry took a deep breath, and tried unsuccessfully to force a smile. “Water over the dam. And we were talking about you, not me.”

“Grant thought I’d dumped him, back then,” Dallas confessed. “He thought I just left to go home that last summer and didn’t intend on coming back. He specifically said ‘dumped,’ as if I’d meant to hurt him.”

“That bothers you.”

“It does. I never thought of it that way.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about the letter I’d gotten from the drama coach. I was thinking about trying out for the fall semester play,” Dallas replied sheepishly. “It sounds so lame now, but Grant never understood how much acting meant to me. Even back then, I
knew what I wanted, Berry. I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be just like you.”

“And it appears you are.” Berry sighed. “In more ways than you know.”

“I wanted that more than anything. Grant and I …” Dallas sought the words. “We were too young, Berry. We hadn’t really tested ourselves or found our own way back then. I never said good-bye to him, because I never really thought I was going.” She smiled wryly. “Until I went, that is.”

Dallas looked up across the table at Berry. “I guess I thought it would all work out. I thought I was coming back, do you remember?”

“For some reason, your mother chose that time to try to bond with you.” Berry added drily, “Who knows why.”

“I think she wanted to … to try to make up for not having been better than she was. She fell apart after my dad died, and she just couldn’t seem to put herself back together again. I felt sorry for her.”

“Darling girl, you were eleven years old.” Berry reached for Dallas’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “You were the one who needed consoling. That’s why I insisted on you and Wade spending that summer here with me. I knew that Roberta simply wasn’t up to comforting anyone other than herself.”

“That was your idea?”

“You were so stoic at the funeral, both of you were, that you frightened me. I couldn’t very well leave you there. Your mother was a very dependent sort. Before too long, she’d be looking to you to carry her emotionally. You were far too young for that. I thought you needed to be able to act like children who were
grieving the loss of their father, not children who were trying to hold up their mother, so I told Roberta that she needed to pack your things and bring you and Wade here.” Berry seemed to be studying Dallas’s face. “Was that the wrong thing to have done?”

“No. You’re absolutely right about Mom. She was always dependent on Dad, and after he passed, she became dependent on me. It’s just that all these years, I thought Mom sent us away because she didn’t want to be bothered with us.” Dallas smiled weakly. “I suppose in a sense, I was right.”

“Roberta has a way of sucking the life out of things.” Berry frowned. “I’m very sorry if this offends you, but if the truth were to be told, I was against their marriage from the start. Of course, Ned didn’t give a fig for what I thought, and I’m glad he ignored me, because you and Wade mean everything to me.”

“You loved my dad very much, didn’t you?”

Berry smiled. “He was a delightful child and a wonderful man. Yes, I loved him very much.”

“More than the other kids?”

“Oh, much more. Just as I’ve always loved you and Wade more than any of your cousins,” Berry told her. “My sister’s other children never meant the same to me. Sad, but true.”

“Why do you suppose that was, Berry?” Dallas tasted her coffee and found it had gone cold, but she didn’t want to break the conversation right then to refill her cup.

Berry didn’t answer immediately, but rather appeared to be weighing her answer. Finally, she merely said, “Chemistry, I suppose.”

“I wish my dad had been around to see me make
even one movie. He would have been proud of how hard I worked.”

“Oh, he sees, I suppose, from wherever it is that souls go when they leave this dimension. I’m sure he knows, and if human emotions survive this life into the next, I’m positive that he’s very, very proud of you.”

“He was proud of you, that’s for sure. He always managed to slip into conversations with new people that Beryl Townsend was his aunt.”

“Oh, I know he was, the dear boy.” Berry smiled. “When he was younger, I’d fly him out to California on his school holidays and take him around with me, and he’d just nearly burst with pride.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dallas said. “That he spent so much time with you when he was a child.”

“Oh my, yes. We had some grand times when he was a boy. He was very clever and smart and quick, and yet very sweet, too. Cody reminds me very much of Ned.”

“I’m surprised Grandmother Sylvie let him go away so much. I remember her as being very skittish about things. One time my dad’s sister, Tess, told me that neither she nor her sister had bikes when they were little because their mother was afraid they’d fall off and break an arm or a leg.”

“My sister was a nutcase about some things, it’s true enough.” Berry paused. “You do remember that Sylvie and I were identical twins, don’t you?”

Dallas nodded.

“Identical in appearance only. She was always very tentative about everything. Me?” Berry smiled. “Not so much. Tessa and Patsy were more like their mother,
but Ned was more adventurous, so it was natural that he and I would hit it off. Duncan, your grandfather, never really paid much attention to his children. In their world, the mother raised the children and the father went off to work to support them all. Things are different now, but that’s how it was in that generation.” Berry smiled again. “But Ned did so get a kick out of telling his friends about his aunt who was in the movies.”

Dallas thought she heard opportunity knocking right about then.

“Berry, do you ever think about making another film?” she asked.

“No. I’m not the sort to retire, then unretire. Retire, unretire.” Berry flipped her hand back and forth. “Tiring for everyone, and yes, lest you ask, the pun was intended.”

“But what if a fabulous role was offered to you? Would you consider it?”

“I doubt it. How many fabulous roles do you think there are for a woman of my …” Berry paused before adding, “Experience?”

“But what if there was one …? What if there was a role that was so fabulous that no one but you could play it? Hypothetically.”

Berry narrowed her eyes. “What role are we talking about? Hypothetically.”

“Rosemarie.”

“Pretty Maids’
Rosemarie?”

Dallas nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“Are you asking me if I’d take the role if it were to be offered to me?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t worked in a very long time, and when I left Hollywood, it was with the intention of never going back.” Berry tapped her fingers on the side of her cup and gazed out the window. “Have you changed your mind, Dallas? About playing Charlotte, I mean.”

“No. As much as you are Rosemarie, I am decidedly not Charlotte. Besides, I have someone else in mind for that part.”

“May I ask who?”

“Laura Fielding.”

“Laura Fielding?” Berry frowned. “That little bleached-blond tart who can’t seem to keep her clothes on?
That
Laura Fielding? The one who made all those films where she—”

“She’s not a ‘tart,’ Berry.” Dallas sighed. She supposed “tart” was preferable to the increasingly popular “ho,” which seemed to pop up just about everywhere these days. “Laura’s been badly cast for years, but she has great talent. I worked with her early on, and I think she’d be perfect as Charlotte.”

“But she has such a dreary reputation.”

“So because she made some career mistakes in the past—and don’t get me wrong, I agree, she’s made some beauts—she should never be given the chance to show what she’s capable of doing?”

“You really believe in her that strongly?”

“I do.”

“I suppose then you should ask her to read for the part, when the time comes.”

“Will you read for Rosemarie?” Dallas held her breath.

“I don’t know. Suppose I’ve lost my touch?” Berry shuddered at the thought. “I’d hate to be one of those has-beens who makes an effort at a comeback, falls flat on their face, and has everyone shaking their heads and saying things like, ‘Dear me, and she used to be so great,’ or, ‘She should have stayed in retirement,’ or … well, you know the things that are said. I don’t want such talk going around about me.”

“Impossible. That could never happen to you. You haven’t lost a thing.”

“I just don’t know. It isn’t something I’ve thought about. I realize that’s not the answer you want, but it’s the only one I can give you right now.”

“Fair enough. But I would ask you to do me a favor and give real consideration to the idea. Promise?”

“All right. I’ll think about it. I’ll consider it.”

“That’s all I’m asking.” Dallas stood and kissed her great-aunt on the forehead. “More coffee, Berry?”

“A spot to warm this up would be nice.”

Dallas took both cups to the counter, where the coffeepot stood. After she refilled both and returned to the table, Berry said, “May I ask how you left things with Grant? Or is that intrusive?”

“I don’t know how we left it. Not really. I don’t know how I feel.” Dallas sat and took a sip of her coffee.

“Of course you do.” Berry waved a dismissive hand.

“Look, Berry, there goes your great blue heron.” Dallas directed Berry’s gaze out toward the river.

“Lovely. Don’t change the subject.”

“What if we got involved again and it didn’t work
out again? What if he thought I dumped him again? What if—”

Berry cut her off. “What if you both manned up—pardon the expression—and admitted how you feel about each other?”

“What if one of us cares more about the other?” Dallas said slowly. “What if someone gets hurt again?”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Dallas, what if Godzilla rises out of the Bay and plays ‘terrorize the tourists’ at the festival this weekend?” Berry threw up her hands. “What if aliens landed next door on the roof of the Considines’ barn?”

“I see you’re not taking this very seriously.”

“I’m not the one thinking up knuckleheaded reasons for not taking advantage of this most precious opportunity. You and Grant lost out once before. Now, in all fairness, you were very young, but from what I can see, neither of you ever really got over it. Excuses are for cowards, dear. Be brave enough to go for it.”

“Well, I guess you told me.”

“I suppose I did.” Berry sat back with a satisfied smile.