Chances Are (12 page)

“Seriously, if you and Ryan have room for some scrambled eggs and bacon, I’d—”

“I promised him pizza, but I wouldn’t mind a rain check.”

Say it, Claire. Go on. You know you want to.
“I wouldn’t mind one either.” His eyes widened behind his glasses, and she felt that familiar heat rising once again to her cheeks. “I mean, maybe next time you and Ryan go for pizza, Billy and I could join you.”

Fenelli really had a good smile, kind of loopy and ironic all at the same time. It wasn’t a devastating smile or a sexy smile but still . . .

“Maybe next time Billy and Ryan could stay home, and we’ll go for pizza.”

“I’d like that.”
You would? I didn’t think you had it in you, Claire.

They stood there staring at each other for what seemed like a semester or two. It took Ryan’s plaintive wail of “Daaaaad!” wafting across the front yard to end the moment.

“See you at the bus stop,” David said as he turned to leave.

“Thanks for bringing the book over.”

“Maybe we can work in that pizza next week.”

“Sounds great.”

He smiled.

She smiled back.

He jogged across the lawn to his car.

She waved good-bye.

Okay, so it wasn’t
Love Story
, but for Paradise Point, it wasn’t half bad. Not bad at all.

 
OLIVIA WESTMORE, ELEGANT owner of Le Papier, sat at Rose’s kitchen table making notes on a beautiful pad of pale pink watermarked notepaper better suited for letters to the Queen of England.

“A fountain pen?” Rose couldn’t help the note of incredulity that crept into her voice. “I didn’t think anyone still used fountain pens.”

“This is a 1950s-era Duofold,” Olivia said proudly. “I usually keep it at home, but I was feeling reckless today.”

“It probably cost more than your Jimmy Choos.”

Olivia glanced down at her pricey footwear and shrugged. “And worth every penny.”

“You really are a shameless hedonist, aren’t you?”

“Damn right,” Olivia said with a wicked smile. “Not much point to life if you don’t enjoy the things around you.”

“I know there’s a flaw in your logic,” Rose said as she pulled a container of boeuf bourguignonne from the freezer. “When I figure it out, I’ll get back to you.”

“Oh, don’t play innocent,” Olivia said, capping her pen and placing it on the tabletop. “I’ve seen those silky robes of yours and the bath oils. You’re not a stranger to worldly pleasures, Rosie.”

Rose didn’t deny it. She loved fine wine, beautiful music, delicious food, soft and sumptuous fabrics that caressed her skin. It was those very inclinations that had helped her shape the fantasy world that The Candlelight Inn offered to her guests. Her eye for beauty combined with her head for business had turned her mother’s tumbledown Victorian into a highly acclaimed moneymaker.

Now, if only the same thing would happen with Cuppa, she would be a very happy woman.

“So what did you come up with?” she asked Olivia, gesturing toward the pad of notes. “I’ll need all the details I can get to make the presentation to Maddy.”

“She’s your daughter,” Olivia said, “not your contracts attorney. Tell her it’s a great opportunity, and she’s the right one to manage it.”

“She’s also an accountant,” Rose reminded her. “She’ll want facts and figures.”

Maddy was slightly fey and charmingly unpredictable, but like it or not, she had inherited her mother’s business acumen. She would want to know cost projections, zoning laws, overhead.

Olivia read her the lists she had pulled together while Rose busied herself getting supper ready. Her mind, however, refused to focus on what her friend was saying. Her thoughts bounced from the way Maddy had looked surrounded by wedding gowns to the sound of Hannah’s laughter in the backyard to how much she wanted them to stay in Paradise Point forever.

Rose wasn’t fanciful by nature. That was one of the many differences between her and her daughter. Maddy had always been given to outrageous flights of fantasy that left Rose scratching her head in dismay. But when it came to her beloved Candlelight Inn, Rose could show her daughter a thing or two. The house wasn’t just a house to Rose. It lived and breathed and had opinions, not all of which she shared. Every creaking board, every gleaming window, every single dust-free inch of the old Victorian wonder vibrated with a life—and a story—of its own.

On days when she was very lucky, her ex-husband Bill was there, too. He liked the little aerie on the third floor, the tower room with the antique iron bed and patchwork quilt. Twice last month she watched the sun rise over the ocean from that bed, head nestled against his graying chest, and thanked God for letting her live long enough to find her way back home to the first and only man she had ever loved.

Maddy seemed delighted that her parents had rekindled their love after so many years, while Hannah, bless her heart, accepted it all as perfectly right and logical.

Maybe you had to be a little crazy to believe in love. Love didn’t play by the rules. Love defied logic. It didn’t come when you called or slink away when you were done with it. Love was occasionally fickle and sometimes, but not often enough, it was forever. Every time she looked into Bill Bainbridge’s faded blue eyes, she felt the same sense of wonder she had felt forty years ago when he first asked her to marry him.

And she saw that same sense of wonder in Maddy’s eyes when she looked at Aidan, as if her daughter couldn’t quite believe her own good fortune. What a joy it was to see Maddy with a man who loved her the way she deserved to be loved. The sight of the two of them together made Rose’s heart ache with happiness. There was a certain sweetness about them, a sense of completion that went beyond the sparks they generated every time their eyes met. The whole town agreed that Aidan O’Malley was as head-over-heels as any man they had ever seen in their lives. “Do you see the way he looks at our girl?” Lucy had asked with a sigh the other night. “I swear I could see the moon and the stars in his eyes.”

Life flew by so fast. Maddy was still too young to understand just how quickly these precious days with Hannah and Aidan would disappear. One moment you were a young woman with a baby in your arms, and the next time you blinked, your mother was looking back at you from your mirror, and she was telling you that you were running out of time. Next month she would celebrate the fifth anniversary of her successful battle with breast cancer. Five years had come and gone since the doctor gave her the “all clear”—five years she wouldn’t have had if God had decided differently. Five years that were lived with her daughter and granddaughter thousands of miles away, building memories that didn’t include the people who loved them the most.

Maybe that was why she had this sudden, unexpected determination to give Maddy a wedding day to remember. She had missed the birth of her only grandchild, something she would always regret. Maddy had been deeply hurt by her absence, and the rift between them had grown wider and deeper as a result. Not even the truth, that she had been undergoing grueling chemotherapy treatments at the time and a cross-country trip would have been beyond her endurance, could explain away the fact that she hadn’t been there when her baby gave birth to a baby of her own. She had waited too long to explain, and the years apart had already done their damage.

Sometimes she felt like she would always be playing catch-up where Maddy was concerned, struggling for the right thing to say and the right time to say it, but never quite succeeding. They had lost so many years to distance. Rose had seen to the emotional distance; by the time Maddy moved across the country to Seattle, she was only making it visible.

You couldn’t build a lifetime of memories on a two-week visit every year, two weeks that usually ended in tears and recriminations. A wedding would be something they could share, a grand and beautiful event built upon a foundation of love and hope. The memories would be good ones, precious ones, that would weave their lives together indelibly in a way so far only genetics had been able to accomplish. Life was so painfully short. If they didn’t start banking memories now, it would one day be too late.

“Rose.” Olivia’s voice cut into her thoughts. “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”

“Not a single one,” she admitted.

She put the saucepan on the stove and lit the burner beneath it. The sounds of Hannah’s laughter and Priscilla’s excited barking drifted toward her from the backyard. What a precious gift this time together had been.

“Second thoughts?” Olivia asked. “If you’ve changed your mind, we’ll just shake hands and part as friends. We haven’t signed any papers yet, Rose.”

“No second thoughts,” she said firmly. “I want to do this. It’s a great opportunity, and I believe it will be a big success.”

“But—?”

“I don’t think Maddy will go for it. We had a blow-up at Saks this afternoon about wedding dresses. She’ll see this as just another attempt at trying to control her life.”

“There are worse things.”

“Working with Claire might be one of them.”

“They’re both big girls, Rosie. They’ll reach an accommodation.”

“They’re going to be family. This might—”

“Don’t micromanage. We’ll supply the opportunity. They’ll decide if they can handle it.”

“Stay for supper,” Rose urged. “Call Sunny and tell her to close up shop for the day. That way we can ask Maddy together.”

“Ply her with Chardonnay and carbohydrates, and then go in for the kill.”

“If you’re here, she’ll be more inclined to see it as a business deal, not some Machiavellian scheme to get her into a Vera Wang in front of six hundred of her nearest and dearest.”

“You’re not going to have one of those nasty
Mommy Dearest
spats, are you?”

Rose tossed a dish towel in her friend’s direction. “Call Sunny,” she ordered, “and I’ll set another place for dinner.”

And say a prayer to St. Jude, patron of impossible causes, while she was at it.

“OH NO,” MADDY said as Aidan swung into the tiny parking lot behind The Candlelight. “Rose called in reinforcements.”

Olivia Westmore’s sleek Jaguar was parked next to Maddy’s proud but battered Mustang. Rose and the chic owner of the only successful stationery store in Jersey Shore history had struck up a business friendship that had unexpectedly turned personal. They were an unlikely combination. Olivia was in her late thirties or early forties, statuesque and voluptuous, many times married. It was said her cleavage could shelter a family of five. She was flamboyant, wildly romantic, a woman with the heart of an earth mother hidden behind a high-maintenance exterior.

Rose, of course, was none of those things. Maddy’s mother was a relentlessly practical woman. If she couldn’t see it, touch it, or deposit it in her bank account, it didn’t exist. She believed firmly in hard work and common sense, and that big boobs just got in the way.

Maddy definitely agreed with her on that last one.

“I don’t think Liv is the type to take sides in family squabbles,” Aidan said as he shifted into neutral.

“Oh, Rose is too sly for that. She probably invited Olivia over for supper and suggested she bring along her portfolio of wedding invitations for after-dinner entertainment.” She brightened suddenly. “Why don’t you come in with me?” she suggested. “If she can bring in reinforcements, so can I.”

“Hell, no,” he said, kissing her soundly. “Tommy has the night off, Claire doesn’t do school nights anymore, and all of a sudden Leo says he wants quality time with his wife.”

“That’s what I get for falling in love with a barkeep.”

“Say it again.”

“Barkeep.”

“The love part.”

She grinned and pressed a kiss to the side of his neck. “For such a big guy, you’re awfully sentimental.”

“About you I am.”

“You’re sure I can’t convince you to stay for supper?”

“Rosie and Olivia in the same room? I don’t have the balls.”

“That’s pretty much what Dad said the last time he came to visit. He hid out on the dunes during poker night.”

“Bill’s a smart man. After we’re married, I’ll be out there with him.”

They kissed again, then broke apart when Hannah popped out the kitchen door, with Priscilla right behind her, and somersaulted off the bottom step.

“That kid’s going to be in the circus someday,” Aidan said as Hannah launched herself into a saggy cartwheel. “Every time I look at her she’s upside down.”

“She somersaulted across a nest of Vera Wangs this morning. I saw what was left of my 401K going up in smoke.”

“Vera Wangs?”

“You have a lot to learn, O’Malley. Vera Wang bridal gowns.” She quoted him a price range.

“That’s a down payment on a house.”

“Now you see why I have to straighten Rosie out on this. I wouldn’t spend that on a dress even if PBS was footing the bill.”

Hannah held Priscilla up to the passenger-side window. The poodle lapped at the glass as Hannah dissolved in a giggling fit.

“Welcome back to age five,” Maddy said as a river of puppy drool ran down the window. “Sure you want to go through it again?”

He winced as the drool made tracks through the road dust. “I can do it if you can.”

They both came with daughters, family complications, a lifetime’s worth of unruly, messy personal history that stuck to everything it touched like foam packing peanuts. Their eyes met, and they started to laugh at the wonder and absurdity of finding love in the midst of real life. Hannah, thinking they were laughing at her antics, got even sillier on the other side of the car door. When she tried to balance Priscilla on her head, Maddy knew it was time to stop being Aidan’s fiancée and go back to being Hannah’s mother.

Hannah was bouncing off the walls with energy, a sure sign Rose had indulged her with some of Aunt Lucy’s famous oatmeal cookies—on top of ice cream at lunch, no less.