Bundle of Joy (32 page)

The first time Maddy brought home an invisible friend, Rose put the entire family into group therapy so she could figure out where they had gone wrong.

When Hannah showed up with her first invisible friend, Maddy set an extra place for supper.

Still this odd yearning for her mother lingered. Rose was the last thing she thought about at night and her first thought in the morning. So much time had passed since they had last lived together under the same roof. So many things had changed. Maybe the idea of moving back home again wasn't quite as crazy as it sounded.

"Leave Seattle for Jersey?" her cousin Denise emailed her when she first got wind of Rose's offer. "Are you nuts?" What woman in her right mind would trade life in the Emerald City for a one-way ticket back to the Garden State.
Crazy
didn't begin to cover it.

"DON'T DO IT!" Her cousin Gina's warning practically leaped off the computer screen. "You're the only one of us to make it west of the Delaware River. Don't blow it now!"

The senior members of the clan also weighed in with their opinions.

"You'll make your mother so happy," Aunt Lucy IM'd her then surrendered the keyboard to Aunt Connie who added, "I don't know why you moved out there in the first place. We have coffee in New Jersey too, Madelyn."

Every morning Maddy woke up to an inbox stuffed with emails with subject headers like "Come Home Maddy" and "Don't Do It!!!" until she began to feel like she was being spammed by her own family.

The weeks passed and she was still no closer to making a decision than she had been the day Rose made the offer.

The day before Hannah started preschool Maddy was rummaging through a huge trunk of old clothes that she'd stashed in the condo's storage area when she came across the beautiful fisherman's sweater Rose had knitted for her when she started grade school. The thick cream-colored wool was still supple and lustrous and smelled only faintly from Woolite and mothballs. Large bone buttons marched smartly down the front, fitting neatly into the beautifully finished buttonholes. Rose was a perfectionist and her needlework showed it. Every stitch, every seam was meticulously crafted and designed to last. Only the pockets showed serious signs of wear, faint ghostly outlines of small fists jammed deep inside, of crayons and candy bars and half-eaten PBJs.

That sweater was probably the last gift Rose ever gave Maddy that didn't come with strings attached. Even the presents for the baby had come with warnings about the perfidy of men, about the impermanence of love, about how if Maddy had half a brain she would stop wishing on lucky stars and start pumping up her 401(k). All the things her nine-months-pregnant daughter hadn't wanted to hear.

All the things that had turned out to be painfully true.

September waned and she continued to duck Rose's demand for an answer, but the yearning for something more than they had shared before, lingered and grew stronger. In early October she packed Hannah and Priscilla into the Mustang and drove down to Oregon for her father's seventieth birthday party. He knew all about Rose's offer and Maddy's reluctance, and his take on things surprised her.

"It's time you went home," Bill Bainbridge said as they watched Hannah pretend to have fun with his neighbor's children. "You need your mother. You both do."

Maddy pondered his statement. Was that possible? She was a grown woman, the single mother of a small child. She was long past needing anyone. She was the one who wiped away Hannah's tears, the one who lingered at the bedroom door, listening to the holy sound of a sleeping child. Rose hadn't done any of those things for Maddy when she was growing up. At least not that Maddy could remember. Rose had been too busy selling pricey real estate to people with more money than brains, sure that the example she was setting for her daughter would put Maddy on course for success.

Nothing had prepared Rose for the rebellious underachiever who sprang from her womb with a mind of her own.

"It's not that I don't love Rose," she told her father as they wiped away the remnants of cake and ice cream from every surface in his kitchen. "I just think we do much better with a continent between us."

"She's reaching out to you," Bill said as he tossed a used paper towel into the trash.

"The way I reached out to her when I was pregnant with Hannah? She didn't even show up for the birth." Nothing Rose had ever done hurt Maddy more than that.

"Did you ever ask her why?"

"I don't care why. There's nothing she could say that could explain not being here."

"People act in strange ways sometimes, Maddy. Sometimes they're just not thinking clearly."

"How come you always take her side?"

"I'm not taking sides. I'm just saying maybe it's time you gave her another chance."

"Easy for you to say," Maddy grumbled as her father pulled her into a clumsy hug. She was desperate to change the subject. "You were only married to her. I'm her daughter: I'm doing life."

They both laughed but Maddy sensed Bill's heart wasn't in it. She wanted to kick herself for making such a thoughtless remark. It was no secret that her father had never quite managed to get over his first wife. He had gone on to make a successful second marriage that had ended with the death of his beloved Irma, but there was little doubt that the love of his life was the fiercely independent redhead from New Jersey who didn't believe happily ever after existed anywhere but in the movies.

"We don't get a lot of second chances in this life," Tom said when he kissed her goodbye. "Go home, Maddy. Give it a try for Hannah's sake if not your own. You won't regret it."

"Hannah and I could move in with you," she said, only half-kidding. "I'm a pretty good cook and Hannah's great company."

He smiled and shook his head. "You know your old man's hitting the road next week. I promised Irma I'd make that trip we'd been planning and it's a promise I intend to keep." Oregon to Florida and back again, with scores of stops along the way. Irma had been working on the last of the itinerary when she lost her long battle with breast cancer.

Maddy's eyes filled with tears at the memory of her stepmother. "Has it gotten any easier?"

"Nope." He glanced away toward the curb where her Mustang idled loudly. "Didn't expect it to."

"You'll stop by and see us in Seattle during your travels, won't you?"

He grinned and tugged on a lock of her hair. "Not if you're in New Jersey."

"Fat chance."

"Six months," he said as she hugged him goodbye. "Give your mother six months. What can you lose?"

"My sanity," Maddy said and they laughed, but the truth was out there and she couldn't take it back. She wanted one more chance to get things right because sometimes even the most independent woman was only a daughter at heart.

Chapter Two

Paradise Point, New Jersey – three weeks before Christmas

Rosemary DiFalco swore off men in August of 1992 and as far as she could tell, that was when Lady Luck finally sat up and took notice. All her life Rose had been waiting for her ship to come in and when it finally sailed into view she swam right out to meet it.

You didn't get anything in this world by being shy and you sure as hell didn't get anything by waiting for some man to hand it to you on a silver platter.

For longer than she could remember her mother, Fay, had rented out rooms in her ramshackle old Victorian house, sharing their living space with retired schoolteachers, penniless artists, and an assortment of hard luck cases whose only common ground was the bathroom on the second floor. When Fay died almost five years ago, she left the house to her four daughters, three of whom wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Rose, however, saw possibilities lurking behind the cracked plaster and faded carpets and she bought out her sisters' shares and settled down to the hard work of building a new life for herself at a time when she needed it most.

She took early retirement then traded in her fancy condo on Eden Lake. She cashed in her 401(k) then plowed the proceeds into the house where she had grown up, a wreck of a Victorian that just happened to boast ocean views from almost every bedroom.

The Candlelight Inn was born and Rose never looked back. To her delight, she found that she enjoyed the constant parade of guests. She loved the challenge of staying one step ahead of the needs of a nineteenth-century house with a mind of its own. Most of all, she loved the fact that the Candlelight's success had made it possible for her to offer her daughter a way out of the mess her life was in.

Anyway you looked at it, this should have been a slam dunk. Rose needed help running the place; Maddy needed a job. The perfect example of need meeting opportunity.

So why did Rose wake up every morning with the sense that she was preparing for war? She had created an oasis of peace and tranquility for her paying guests, a place people came to when they wanted to leave the stresses of the real world behind. You would think at least a tiny bit of that tranquility might spill over onto the innkeeper's family. Take this morning, for instance. Maddy had been holed up in the office working on the Inn's website for hours now. Rose hadn't seen hide nor hair of her since they'd laid out the breakfast buffet in silence. They had exchanged words late last night over something so trivial that Rose couldn't even remember what it was, yet the aftermath had left her wondering for the first time if she had made a terrible mistake inviting Maddy and Hannah to come back home.

It was painfully clear they weren't happy. Her daughter was prickly and argumentative, more reminiscent of the seventeen-year-old girl she had once been than the grown woman pictured on her driver's license. And Hannah – oh, Hannah was enough to break your heart. The delightful little girl who had entertained Rose with her songs and stories last Christmas in Seattle was now a withdrawn and painfully sad child whose smiles never quite reached her stormy blue eyes.

Rose knew that Tom and Maddy's breakup had nothing to do with her, but decades of guilt were hard to ignore. She hadn't prepared Maddy for the real world of men and women. She had taught her how to balance a checkbook, shop for the best auto loan, and make minor plumbing repairs, but she hadn't taught her the fine art of living with a man.

The truth was, she hadn't a clue herself. Rose had grown up in a world of women, with an absentee father, three sisters, and more aunts and nieces than you could shake a bra strap at, and between them all they had about as much luck at keeping a man as they had at the slot machines in Atlantic City.

Some women were lucky in love. Some were lucky in business. .One look at the bare ring fingers and flourishing IRAs of the four DiFalco sisters and you knew which way the wind blew. Lucy, the eldest, said a DiFalco woman couldn't hold onto a man if she had him Krazy Glued to her side. Over the years Rose had come to realize the truth of that statement.

In the best of times love was a puzzle Rose had never been able to unravel. She had married a wonderful man, the salt of the earth, and still hadn't been able to find a way to hold onto love for the long haul. He offered her the world and she had found herself longing for the stars. She had a beautiful daughter who was bright and talented and loving yet somehow that wasn't quite enough for Rose either. She wanted Maddy to have everything she never had, to be everything she could never be, and when Maddy had turned out to be lacking the ambition gene, Rose's disappointment knew no bounds.

Maddy was a dreamer, same as her father. She followed her heart wherever it led and she never thought to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so she could find her way safely home. Maddy's unplanned pregnancy had filled Rose with a combination of elation and dread. She hadn't known Tom Lawlor well, but she did know that he had already earned his parenting stripes and wasn't in the market to add a few more to his sleeve. He was her age, after all, and she understood him even if she didn't approve.

But not Maddy. Not her day-dreaming, foolish optimist of a daughter. She hadn't seen it coming, not even when he spelled it out for her in neon letters a foot high. She had still believed they would find a happy ending, believed it right up until the moment Tom and Lisa flew off to Vegas for one of those quickie weddings in a chapel on the Strip.

She longed to gather Maddy and Hannah up in her arms and kiss away their tears, mend their broken hearts until they were better than new.

All of the things she didn't have time to do when Maddy was a little girl.

Instead there she was, a successful sixty-two year old businesswoman with the hottest B&B between Rehoboth Beach and Martha's Vineyard, trying to summon up the guts to knock on the door to her own office and see how her daughter was getting on with the website. Rose had bearded wild bankers in their lairs, charmed free advertising out of jaded local radio stations, spun pure gold from straw. Spending five stress-free minutes with her only child should be a piece of cake.

So what if she and Maddy had exchanged words last night. It wasn't the first time and God knew it wouldn't be the last. They were mother and daughter, hardwired to get on each other's nerves. Nothing was going to change that fact, but she could make it better. She knew she could.

If she could just bring herself to knock on that door.