Whiskey Island (19 page)

Casey’s gaze and attention snapped back to her sister. The comparison to her ex was uncalled-for. “Jon’s not a thing like Stan.”

Peggy was smiling. “I’m glad you noticed.” She turned away and left Casey staring after her.

12

J
on lived on a side street in Lakewood, just over the Cleveland border. The neighborhood was old, neither stylish nor rundown, but comfortable, with narrow lots and neatly kept front yards. Many of the houses had porches, but Jon’s had been enclosed years before, giving the house the appearance of hovering over the street. The aluminum siding was a fading colonial blue; the shutters were long gone, and the roof had been patched with no thought to matching shingles. There was little to set the house apart from its neighbors except that the last person to remodel it had possessed minimal skill and no talent.

Late Monday afternoon, across the street from Jon’s house, Casey hunched over her steering wheel and asked herself what she was doing there. She’d picked up Ashley at St. Brigid’s just before five and chatted with the little girl’s teacher. She had planned to take Ashley back to Whiskey Island for an early dinner, but somehow she had ended up at Jon’s.

She really wasn’t sure why she had come. She was a fun date who was always in demand, and she wasn’t used to pursuing men. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but she knew how to dress, she knew how to dance, and her expectations were low. The guys who asked her out knew that she wasn’t looking for a commitment. She didn’t need romance or expensive gifts, just somebody to laugh with.

Now she remembered that she and Jon had always laughed together. When they weren’t passionately engaged in conversation.

In the end, that was why she was sitting in her Mazda across the street from Jon’s house, wondering if she ought to march up the truncated front walk and rat-a-tat a drum tattoo on his metal storm door.

“I’m tired,” Ashley said from the back seat.

It was so unlike the little girl to whine, or even to speak in full sentences, that Casey faced her and frowned. “Maybe we ought to go right home.”

“Tired of sitting in the seat!”

Casey could hear a long day of relating to other children in Ashley’s voice. She made her decision. Ashley needed to get out of the car. Besides, a man’s true colors were sure to come out with a whimpering child in the room. “Let’s go see my friend. At least you’ll be able to stretch a little.”

Casey got out and unbuckled Ashley’s seat belt before she lifted the little girl to the ground. “Better?”

Ashley scuffed her boots in a thin patch of snow that still clung to the lawn. She seemed perfectly satisfied now that she was out of the car.

Jon’s grass was winter-brown and patchy, probably more dandelion than bluegrass. The sad-looking shrubs flanking the stoop might have come from a postseason nursery sale, two pot-bound, straggly junipers for the price of one. She wasn’t surprised—she’d seldom met a man with even the slightest interest in making a home.

As she banged out a Sousa rhythm, she peered inside at an old metal glider upholstered in rotting canvas. A bird cage—minus bird—sat beside it on a bamboo table. On the other side a ragged afghan in shades of avocado and tan hung from a wicker plant stand—minus plant.

The inner door opened, and Jon stepped onto the porch. She hadn’t been at all sure that he would be home yet. But he had already changed into faded jeans and a green T-shirt stretched across a well-developed chest. He didn’t shiver as he threw open the door and the chill wind swept over him. He was, after all, a Cleveland boy. Like the rest of them, generations of pierogies and kielbasa had permanently thickened his blood.

Casey clapped her hands on her hips, as if to say, “Give me one moment of trouble and you’re history, bud.”

Jon didn’t appear to notice. “Hey, Case. What’s up?”

“If I’m interrupting, I’ll go.”

“You just got here. Is this Ashley?”

Casey made the introductions. Over corned beef and cabbage she’d told Jon she was baby-sitting a friend’s little girl, but she was surprised he had remembered Ashley’s name. Ashley said nothing when Jon crouched down to her level and warmly greeted her. She simply looked wary.

“Would you like to come in?” he asked.

Casey tossed her hair over the hood of her wool parka. “No, let’s talk out here and freeze to death together.” He rose and held the door wider, and she took the last step up, onto the porch, nudging Ashley along in front of her. “Nice place you got.”

He grinned. “Early-Hungarian-boarding-house. It belonged to a great aunt. Her bad taste was legendary.”

“Did she leave it to you?”

“To my father. My folks were planning to sell, then I decided to move back. So we made a deal. I clean and paint from top to bottom and throw out all the junk. In exchange I live here rent free until I find a place I want to buy.”

“I thought maybe this was a new form of shabby chic.”

“As a matter of fact, there were some interesting finds. Want to see?”

She didn’t, not really. Old houses were Megan’s thing. One visit to Megan’s apartment and she’d seen that her sister was trying to assemble a past from other people’s discards and “antiques.” Megan seemed obsessed with making a home, while Casey wanted no reminders of the one she’d shared with her parents as a little girl, or all the things the family had lost because of Rooney.

“Come on,” Jon urged, when she didn’t answer. “It’s fun. And Ashley will like it.”

Casey decided that looking around might be more comfortable than staring at each other over a coffee table, trying to put the pieces of their lives back in place. “Sure. Why not?”

He opened the inner door and ushered them inside. “It still smells musty. I didn’t get here in time to air it out for long before the cold weather hit. By the time I’d pried open all the windows, it was October. Aunt Magda hadn’t opened them in years. They were either painted shut or nailed in place.”

“Not one of those poor souls who seal all the cracks and keyholes with duct tape?”

“She wasn’t that bad. Just old and cautious.”

Casey sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “I smell cats.”

“You have a good sniffer. I thought that part of the smell was gone, courtesy of a crate of air freshener.”

“How many cats did she have?”

“They’d all been given away by the time I got here. The rumor is close to a dozen.”

“Yuck.”

“She gave them numbers instead of names. Said she’d probably never forget how to count, but she was so old she couldn’t vouch for anything else.”

Casey was beginning to like Aunt Magda. “Practical to a fault. Megan’s kind of woman.”

“Megan’s looking good, by the way. She seems happy enough. Is she?”

Megan had always liked Jon. In fact, sometimes Casey had thought she liked him too well. Now she remembered feeling miffed as a teenager when Jon had paid attention to her sisters instead of her.

She trailed a fingertip along a recently polished side table. Grudgingly, she had to admit the man was a pretty good housekeeper. “Megan’s happy enough, I guess. She works too hard, just like she always did. She doesn’t have much else going in her life, but she never complains.”

“I’m surprised she never married. She seems to thrive on family and taking care of people.”

“Maybe she’s had too much of both. She’s already raised one family. Who wants to raise two?”

“I always admired her. She figured out what was best for all of you, then made it happen.”

Casey thought of the tears Megan had cried over sharing Peggy with the Grogans, the despair at having to quit school, the fury when Casey had tried to make some decisions for all of them. There was a side to her sister that the rest of the world never saw.

“Well, go on in and tell me what you think,” Jon said. “Then I’ll show you the neat stuff.”

The porch had opened onto a narrow entry hall. The living room was to Casey’s right; directly in front of her, a stairwell curved to the left, with a kitchen just beyond it. She went into the living room and stopped. “Not too many traces of Aunt Magda here.”

“I had to have one room I could be comfortable in. The moment I moved in, I hauled the worst of the old furniture to the side of the road, took up the carpet, scrubbed and painted the walls and set up my own things. It’s the only room I was able to paint before the cold weather hit.”

The room was crammed with furniture, but it was surprisingly pleasant. Jon seemed to like leather, subtle plaids, dark woods. It was all very masculine and tasteful.

“We’ll do a whirlwind tour, then I’ll show you the good parts.” He leaned down to address the next question to Ashley. “Want a piggyback ride?”

The little girl’s eyes widened, and she retreated until she was hard against Casey’s legs.

Jon didn’t seem offended. He straightened. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

The rest of the house looked much like the porch. Magda might have collected cats, but not good furniture or art. Still, Casey found it odd, even touching, to view the remnants of the old lady’s life. Stacks of ancient sheet music beside a Wurlitzer spinet,
Ladies Home Journal
magazines extolling the virtues of collecting fat and scrap metal for the war effort.

“I’m taking it slowly. Once you put something in the trash it’s gone forever, and I don’t want to remove all traces of Aunt Magda. She deserves better. I’ve thrown out most of the real junk and sold a few things worth selling. But this is what I probably won’t part with, the things I wanted to show Ashley.” They were upstairs by now, and Jon threw open the door to a third tiny bedroom and the smell of mothballs and old roses. “Watch your step. The carpet’s coming loose at the threshold.”

Casey followed him in, pulling Ashley along behind her, and he flicked on the overhead light.

She stepped forward, astonished. The room was a doll nursery furnished in Victorian era wicker. A bassinet threaded with fading ribbons held a trio of antique baby dolls; an exquisite rocking chair cushioned in velvet held two more. A child’s hand-carved rocking horse sat still and silent in the corner, with a tiny cowboy in leather chaps and Stetson astride. Three china dolls with the faces of miniature adults and clothes of taffeta and lace sat primly on a shelf beside the closet.

There were others, too, a little boy with a Dutch bob and a gap-toothed grin, a sassy-faced doll nearly as tall as Ashley leaning in the corner. Casey didn’t know she’d been clasping her hands until her fingers began to go numb.

John read the expression on her face before he glanced down at Ashley to see her reaction. She was staring wide-eyed.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Jon said. “The first time I saw this, I felt like I’d walked into a doll museum. Neither of my parents knows much about how she acquired them. My father’s family came from farms in Hungary. The women worked in service, the men in the rolling mills. Magda was ninety when she died, and she’d never had any job that paid more than a pittance. For most of her life she cleaned and took in ironing. These things were expensive, even in their day.”

“More expensive now. Priceless. She must have spent every extra penny she had.”

“There’s an old woman at the end of the block who was Magda’s best friend. She remembers Magda showing her the dolls one day and saying they were her children.”

“Cats and dolls.” It seemed unutterably sad. “Poor old gal.”

“I wouldn’t feel badly for her. My mother says that Magda had more than a few offers of marriage but turned down every one of them. She claimed that if she was going to cook and clean for her living, she was going to get paid for it.”

“A real romantic, your aunt.”

He smiled, and the room seemed warmer. “Maybe she felt the same way about children as she did about husbands. That’s why she kept dolls and cats.”

“What are you going to do with all this? You said you were planning to keep them, but why?”

He had been standing beside the closet, fingering the hem of a doll’s dress. Now he turned. “A man isn’t supposed to be interested in history?”

“I know you’ve always been interested in history, but the men I know aren’t thrilled about dolls.”

“Not masculine enough, huh?”

As a matter of fact, it suddenly seemed particularly masculine to Casey. The room and its china bisque inhabitants seemed only to make Jon more of a man. Obviously he was comfortable enough with himself not to care what anyone else thought about him.

He gestured to encompass the room. “I like the idea of my own children inheriting this piece of their past. I like the idea of talking to them about the way things used to be, how children played with marbles and hoops instead of computers. How every doll doesn’t come equipped with size 38 boobs and a wardrobe of sequined evening dresses.”

“Hey, leave Barbie out of this.” Casey couldn’t help but smile. “I never realized what a sentimental guy you are. I used to tell you how much I wanted children someday and you’d roll your eyes.”

“Case, I was a teenage boy. I had the drill down pat.”

“I guess.”

“And you were a teenage girl. Only you really did love children. You always said you’d work with them someday, that you were going to devote your life to making sure that the world’s children got everything they deserved, that no one had to suffer from hunger or abuse.”

She was suddenly cold. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “You remember too much. God, it’s like finding a tape recorder and a stash of old cassettes.”

“How about something to eat?” His gaze flicked down to the little girl, who was still staring wide-eyed. “Are you and Ashley hungry?”

“She had a late snack at school, and I’m all right for now.”

“How about something to drink? Coke? Juice?”

“Sure.”

He lifted the doll whose dress he’d fingered and held it out to the little girl. “Would you like to play with her, Ashley? I think she gets lonely sitting on the shelf.”

Ashley frowned, but she broke her silence. “She has friends.”

Jon nodded solemnly. “It’s a well-known fact that dolls get tired of each other’s company. They need people to hold them and play with them.”