A Measure of Happiness (4 page)

Katherine tried superimposing Zach's jawline, shadowed by beard stubble, with the faded memory of a tiny, peach-soft face that had fit in the palms of her hands. Delicate nose and pouty lips. Her son's gray eyes had stared so deeply into hers, she was convinced he was taking mental notes and memorizing her features. Worse, she was certain he was gazing straight to her soul. That could describe millions of newborns. Did that describe Zach Fitzgerald on the day he was born?

When Zach caught her staring, tears pressed behind her eyes. “Give me a moment.” Katherine dropped her gaze to Zach's job application. She took a slow breath and ran a finger down the page, even though she'd already memorized his most telling details.

His fingers were long, like hers. His muscles moved with the ease of a body accustomed to activity. His list of jobs ranged from chimney sweep to ski instructor. He'd even tried his hand at high-rise window washing, proving himself a thrill-seeking daredevil. Like another man she used to know?

Like a man Katherine was once upon a time acquainted with, back when her body had moved with ease. Back when she'd mistakenly thought a one-night, or weeklong, fling between consenting adults didn't leave any lasting marks. Before she'd made the biggest mistake of her life.

She'd thought, briefly, that any guy who, like her, lived without ties might've been the one who could tie her down. And the tarot's Wheel of Fortune card had heralded momentous change and confirmed her assumption.

No one came to the tarot without a whole host of assumptions.

The magnetic feeling of being watched raised Katherine's gaze.

“Thanks for giving me a chance,” Zach said, as though she'd already hired him for general help, a salesman assuming the sale. Above the table, his body jostled, a side effect of below-the-table leg jiggling.

Twenty-five years ago, a man named Adam had sat in the same seat, unmoving, looked into her eyes, and then, lightning-quick, worked his way into her bed.

Truth be told, it hadn't taken much work. And the bed had been his.

Actually, the bed had been owned by Holiday Inn.

“Like I said,” Zach continued, “what I lack in experience, I more than make up for in enthusiasm.”

“I'd need you for busing, restocking the bakery cases, dishwashing. . .” With each task Katherine rattled off, Zach nodded, the smile never wavering from his lips. “Cleaning toilets,” Katherine added, and Zach laughed.

Katherine kept a straight face.

“Oh, you're serious.” Zach leaned across the table. Because he was at ease with himself or eager to compare features? If Zach was her son looking for her, wouldn't he pipe up and say so? “Sorry, yeah, that's not a problem, Katherine.” Same as the stranger who'd breezed through Hidden Harbor years ago, Zach pronounced her name in three distinct syllables—
Kath-ther-ine
—the sounds lingering in his mouth.

Later that same man had told her he liked having
her
lingering in his mouth.

Next booth over and behind Zach's head, one-year-old Christopher bounced on his mother's lap and gave Katherine a wide grin, his eyes gleaming with recognition. A single dimple punctuated his left cheek. Katherine smiled back, and Christopher tried to shove his entire fist into his mouth, drooling around his chapped knuckles onto his mother's shoulder.

Zach glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, big guy,” he said to Christopher, and then turned back around. “What a cutie.”

“That he is.”

Sometimes Katherine wondered whether she'd daydreamed her pregnancy, the birth, and the man who had set the story in motion. Other times, her whole life sat on the tip of her tongue, dangerously close to release. On those rare days, she worked extra hard to keep her hands busy and her mouth shut. Over the years, she'd kept track of her son's age, imagining him a shaggy-haired boy in elementary school who favored finger paints and art class, a long-limbed runner in high school, the first in her family to earn a college degree. She had a relationship with that artistic, athletic, scholarly boy. She loved him to distraction. She would've laid down her life to save his.

Celeste came out of the kitchen, and Zach's gaze wandered across the room, his expression reminiscent of a hungry boy browsing Katherine's bakery cases and zoning in on his favorite treat. Eyes big, mouth slack, hands opening and closing.
This one. This one now.

This young man? Katherine didn't know him from Adam.

Celeste, on the other hand, Katherine could read like a memorized recipe. She didn't need ESP to intuit whatever had happened in New York; Celeste didn't need any romantic complications. One look at Celeste's face told Katherine she was one stressor away from a full relapse.

Over at the counter, Celeste dropped muffins into a waxed bag and rang up Mrs. Jenkins. Although the woman was barely sixty, Mrs. Jenkins wore a full-length trench coat, rain or shine, and came in twice a week for half a dozen muffins—two corn, two lemon poppy seed, and two blueberry. The door jingled, Mrs. Jenkins vacating the shop. Her clear bonnet-covered gray pin curls bounced from sight.

If the day ever came when Katherine felt inclined to cut her hair and strap on a plastic bonnet, she'd give Celeste the combination to her safe, permission to make use of the .22, bring her out back, and put her out of her misery.

Celeste sent her gaze across the shop and then came over with a blueberry muffin centered on a plate, like a crown on a cushion. “Try it, you'll like it.”

And, Katherine imagined, if she were to ask Celeste today, she'd shoot first, ask questions later.

“Did you tell Mrs. Jenkins you altered the recipe?”

“And give her a heart attack?” Celeste asked, her tone ripe with annoyance. “Of course not.”

Celeste's voice lowered and sweetened. “One bite?”

“Not now. Later, when I'm hungry,” Katherine said, even though she was pretty much always hungry. She was an emotional eater. If sales were up, she was inclined to celebrate with a slice of devil's food cake or an extra helping of apple pie. She'd polish off the leftover cannoli filling with a spoon and a grin. Way to toot her own horn, ring her bell, and tighten her waistband. A bad day? What was better to salve sadness than a good old chewy, gooey chocolate chip cookie dunked in a glass of iced milk? Some impulses were better off ignored.

Like Celeste's insistence on changing up recipes, ringing Katherine's bell, and pushing her buttons.

“Zach liked the muffin. Didn't you, Zach?” Celeste directed her question at Zach, but the little display was for Katherine alone.

Zach didn't seem to notice. Instead, he bit at his lower lip and beamed at Celeste, a guy equivalent of batting his eyelashes. A guy used to impressing girls with a wink and a nod. “Best I've ever had.”

Celeste had grown up with three older brothers who taught her how to shoot the hell out of a bull's-eye, land a punch, and hold her own against obvious come-ons. In short, she didn't impress easily.

“Damn straight,” Celeste told Katherine, and set the plate atop Zach's job application. Then Celeste headed off across the café. The wiggle in her walk was meant for Katherine's eyes but held Zach's attention until Celeste's behind, along with the rest of her, slipped into the kitchen.

Katherine set the muffin to the side and returned her finger to Zach's myriad list of odd jobs. “Well, looks like you've worked everywhere
except
bakeries.”

“I've, uh, eaten my share of my mother's cookies. Does that count?”

“Baked cookies alongside your mo-om growing up, did you?” The word
mom
lengthened and split in two equal halves and then caught in her throat.

Zach flashed a grin, but then the sides of his smile sagged. “Sure. Me and my annoying little brothers fought over the mixing bowl. Typical kid stuff.”

More than Katherine and Barry could've given her son. Three rounds of IVF had taught her how to pockmark her stomach with four shots a day of ovary-stimulating drugs, how to lie still and wait for anesthesia to hum through her veins so that a trans-vaginal ultrasound could guide a needle through the back of the vaginal walls and aspirate her follicles. All the healthy eggs fertilized in the test tubes and then withered in her body. Three rounds of IVF had tapped out her ovaries, ruined her marriage, and trampled her ability to hope.

The thing about hope? Remnants grew.

If Zach had brothers, she'd done right by him. She'd done right by letting him go.

Next booth over, baby Christopher laid his head on his mother's shoulder. The two other toddlers, Sam and Jones, sat on their mothers' laps and busied themselves with their sippy cups, throwing their heads back to get the last drops. Mere weeks past picking up the boys' first birthday cakes, their mothers nibbled the edges of their lemon bars, each of them gunning for baby number two.

Common knowledge claimed having kids close in age guaranteed similarly close sibling relationships, the makings of a real family. Other people deserved such a blessing.

 

Other people shied away from dares.

In middle school, Zach had taken the bait of a bully and eaten a mishmash of cafeteria mystery meat, spice cake, and something icky that went crunch, just for the bragging rights. High school kids were marginally more creative, and he'd lifted the answers for his tenth-grade calculus final, even though he'd never needed to cheat for high marks. Math inherently made sense. And college? He'd dared kids to dare him.
Dare me to lock the RA in a bathroom stall, Silly String the chancellor's office, “haunt” the dorm on Halloween as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
The chains and moaning had lent a nice old-fashioned touch.

Zach wasn't a coward. So why was he acting like one? Holding his tongue when he'd waited a decade to be heard?

“You're from Arlington, Mass. How did you end up here in Hidden Harbor, Maine?” Katherine asked.

“My parents kicked me out of the house.”

“Oh?” Katherine's left hand fluttered to her neck, as though she were taking her pulse.

“Kidding! They strongly suggested I get my act together and take it on the road.”

Nearly six years ago, on Zach's eighteenth birthday, his parents had offered to give him nonidentifying information for his birth mother. But despite their support, he'd never taken the bait and grown up.

Until three weeks ago, when they'd forced his hand.

Zach squelched the urge to press his fingers to the pulse hammering his throat. He'd come home from an all-nighter to find his camp trunk and two suitcases by the front door, his mother's handwritten note slipped under the plastic of the luggage tag:
Find her.

Inside the suitcase, he'd found the nonidentifying information for his birth mother. Clue number one for his Casco Bay scavenger hunt. Nothing about his biological father.

Somehow, that had made it worse.

Katherine took a breath and leaned back. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “You're hardly a child. They must've had their reasons. Kids, adult kids, aren't supposed to live at home forever. I've been on my own since I was nineteen.”

Zach shrugged, suddenly sheepish. Some people took longer figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives. Some people came home from five years of college and a double major without a single degree, looked up old high school buddies for a round of bar golfing, and tried to relive their childhoods.

Who was he kidding? He'd never gone bar golfing in high school. “Your degrees are in criminal justice and psychology,” Katherine said. “Why do you want to work in my bakery?”

Zach shook his head. “I
attended
UMass Lowell. Never finished either degree.”

“Why not?” she asked, curious, withholding judgment. Polar opposite of his father's words when Zach had dropped out of school and materialized on his parents' doorstep: “What the hell is wrong with you, Zach?”

“I guess you could say I like to keep my options open.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure. Figure this is a good time in my life to see more of the U.S. Who knows? Maybe I'd like to become a baker. How can I know until I try it, right? I'm a hands-on kind of guy. Sitting in a classroom doesn't do it for me. I mean, how did
you
know you wanted to own a bakery?” God, he sounded like a loser. A shiftless, homeless dude who wandered the streets. Was that the way the Fitzgeralds saw him?

Was that the way he saw himself?

“Strangely enough,” Katherine said, “that's kind of how I ended up here myself.”

Two men entered the shop. Guys looked like they were in their thirties, wearing cookie-cutter suits, their shoulders hunched from desk work. While Celeste counted out change, the taller of the two guys bit into his blueberry muffin, and his shoulders notched down. “You're the best,” the customer at the register told Celeste, and his buddy nodded, crumbs slipping from his grin.

Probably the only joy in their day. They probably chewed slowly to delay getting to an office, where they crunched numbers in five-by-five cubicles inside square gray buildings. A box within a box would suffocate Zach.

He'd rather dangle over Clarendon Street or sweat it out in a bakery kitchen.

“So . . . Katherine . . . you were on a road trip, traveling around the country, when you ended up in Hidden Harbor?”

Katherine closed her eyes and shook her head. When she raised her gaze to him, she somehow managed to look both happy and sad. “I was a wanderer.”