Coming Home (63 page)

“That’s my asking price, Drew.  You can’t have him for a penny
less.”

“That’s absurd.  Totally out of the question.  We’re running a
small operation—”

“You and I both know that we’re sitting on a gold mine here. 
You’ll get your money back threefold.”

“But that kind of up-front money—”

“Listen to me,” she said, “and listen good.  When you signed
Danny, you were a bit player with a temporary secretary and a crummy office on
42
^nd
Street.  Look around you, Drew.  Who do you think paid for the
custom-made Italian suits and the diamond pinkie rings and the
Moet et
Chandon
?  Who paid for the Jaguar and the Madison Avenue office suite and
the high-maintenance women?  Danny did, that’s who.  You owe him.”

“Casey, you’re killing me here.  My neck is in the noose.  I can’t
agree to a deal like that.”

“Fine.  There are plenty of other record companies out there.  I’m
sure one of them would be more than happy to pay my price.”

“Jesus, Casey—”

“Maybe I’ll just keep the damn songs.”  She paused for emphasis. 
“Or torch them.”

“I have the originals.”

“And I have a lawyer whose suits make yours look like they came
from Wal-Mart.”

“Wait!” he said.  “Wait.  Maybe I can work something out.”

She smiled, picturing the perpetually elegant Drew Lawrence
sitting in his equally elegant office, squirming.  “I thought maybe you could,”
she said.

“That much money.  Jesus.”

“And when will you ever again get your hands on anything this
big?  Don’t you understand, Drew?  This is Danny’s swan song.  I’m not doing
this for me.  I don’t need the money.”  She paused, thinking of the frightened
boy who had left his innocence behind in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and of
the broken man who’d returned in his place.  More softly, she said, “I’m doing
this for him.”

“He’d be impressed.  You strike a hard bargain.  Whatever happened
to that sweet girl I remember?”

“She grew up.”

“With a vengeance.”

“For the first time in my life, I’m holding all the cards.  I’m
the one calling the shots.  Power, Drew.  I never before realized how good it
feels.”

Forty minutes later, he called her back.  “Mrs. Fiore,” he said,
“you’ve got your deal.  Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” she said, “but it wasn’t me who made this deal.  It was
Danny.  Think of him when you open that next bottle of
Moet
.”

She hung up the phone and sat in the rocker for a long time,
looking at his picture on the fireplace mantel.  She would set aside a
reasonable portion of the money for Anna Montoya.  No matter what the future
brought, Danny’s mother would never want for anything, ever again.  The rest
would go, in Danny’s name, to some organization that provided support services
for Vietnam vets.  Somewhere out there in the great beyond, Danny was watching,
with understanding and approval.  She raised her glass to his picture.  “
Ciao
,”
she said softly.  “
Caro mio
.”  And drained her glass.

She was ready now to let go.

***

With trepidation, Rob called his mom.  “I’m moving back east,” he
said cautiously.  “Can I stay with you and Dad for a while?  Just until I can
find a place of my own?”

After he’d missed Christmas with the family, he wasn’t sure she
was still speaking to him.  But he should have known better.  They probably
heard her gleeful whoop in Seattle.  “Patrick,” she shouted, “turn down that
blasted TV and listen to me.  Robbie’s coming home!”

He spent a couple of weeks tying up loose ends, then packed all
his belongings and sent them east in a moving van.  He took Igor, his Gibson,
and a single suitcase with him in the Porsche.  It took him four days to cross
the country, four days of sleeping in cheap motels and subsisting on fast food
and FM radio.  When the Boston skyline appeared before him, he felt a sense of
homecoming unlike any he’d ever known.  He might be deluding himself, painting
brilliant illusions and dreaming impossible dreams, but no matter what the
outcome, one truth couldn’t be denied:  Casey was just three hours north.

His sister Rose took him apartment hunting, but nothing they saw
suited him.  Over lunch at Top of the Hub, she let him have it with both
barrels.  “Listen, Robbie,” she said, “we’ve been looking at apartments for two
weeks now, and so far, you haven’t liked a thing we’ve seen.  They’re all
either too big or too small, too new or too old.  You don’t like the
neighborhood or you don’t like the kitchen or you don’t like the color of the
goddamn living room carpet!  You’re my baby brother, and I love you to pieces,
but my universe doesn’t revolve around finding you an apartment.  Believe it or
not, I have a life I could be living.”

She looked so indignant, his red-haired dynamo of a sister, that
he felt ashamed.  “Rosie,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“You ought to be.  What’s the matter with you?  Mom hardly dares
to say more than three words to you for fear of getting her head ripped off. 
Michael spent ten minutes in your company and told me that as far as he’s
concerned, you should have stayed in California.  You actually started a fight
with Dad—”

“I offered to buy him a new car.  His old one’s being held
together with Juicy Fruit and Band-Aids!”

“That’s not the point.  You’ve only been here for three weeks, but
already you’ve managed to disrupt the whole family.  You’ve got everybody
walking around on eggshells.  Nobody dares to say boo to you.  I don’t know
what’s going on, but I miss my little brother.  He was a real sweet guy who
always used to have a smile for everyone and something funny to say.  Where the
hell is he?  It’s like aliens have moved in and taken over your body.”

The Charles River was white and frozen.  In the distance, the red
line train crawled across the Longfellow Bridge toward Cambridge on the other
side.  He looked at his sister.  “What do you want me to say?”

“I want to know what could possibly have turned my baby brother
into Godzilla on wheels.”  She placed a hand on his.  “You’re not sick, are
you?”

He snorted.  “Where the hell did you get an idea like that?”

“You know Mom.  She always imagines the worst.”

“Tell her to stop worrying.  I don’t have AIDS.”

When she frowned, the freckles on her forehead drew together. 
“Are you having a sexual identity crisis?”

“Care to try that again in English?”

She looked around furtively and leaned over the table.  “Are you
gay?” she whispered.

He gaped at her in astonishment, and then he laughed, a deep, rich
belly laugh, his first in ages.  He laughed so hard it hurt.  “Jesus, Rose,” he
said, wiping tears from his eyes, “you gotta stop watching
Geraldo
.”

“Then there’s only one thing it could be.  It has to be a woman.”

“You know what?  You remind me of a woman I know.  Her name’s
Trish.  Do you suppose every family has one?”  And he was off again on a gale
of laughter.  “You two should get together,” he said, holding onto his belly. 
“You’d make one hell of—”  He had to stop because he was laughing so hard. 
“—one hell of an investigative team.”  He covered his mouth with both hands,
but the laughter escaped anyway.  At the next table, a woman peered discreetly
at them from behind her menu.

“Rob!” his sister hissed.  “You’re making a scene!”

He took a couple of deep breaths and waited for the laughter to
subside. “I’m sorry,” he said.  “It’s just been so long since I’ve laughed.  It
felt so good.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t ask one.”

“I did, too.  I asked you if it was a woman.”

“No, you didn’t.  You said it had to be a woman.  You didn’t ask
if you were right.”

Beneath the freckles, her face was turning an interesting shade of
pink.  “Damn it, Robbie, is it or isn’t it a woman?”

“Yes!” he shouted.  “Yes, it is a woman!  Are you satisfied?”

For a moment, there was dead silence as everyone within hearing
distance stopped eating to stare at them.  Rose closed her eyes and sank lower
in her seat, her face so pale the freckles stood out in stark relief.  “More
like mortified,” she said.  “But satisfied will probably catch up to me.  I
just won ten bucks.”

For the second time in as many minutes, he regarded her with
astonishment.  “You
what
?”

Her recovery from mortification was amazingly rapid.  “I bet
Michael ten bucks it was a woman.”  She gave him an impish smile.  “And I was
right.”

“Gee, thanks.  I love hearing that my life’s providing
entertainment for the whole family.”

“What do you expect, Rob?  You’ve been a monster ever since you
came home.”

“Yeah?  Well, maybe I should just stay in my room and hide!”

“Maybe you should!”

They glared at each other until the glares dissolved into sheepish
grins.  Rose shook her head.  “Now that you’ve ruined my reputation to the
point where I’ll never dare to show my face in this joint again, little
brother,” she said, “I figure you owe me one.”

He squared his jaw.  “Yeah?”

She matched his expression.  “Yeah.  You’re rolling in dough, and
I’m in the mood to go shopping.”

“I get it,” he said.  “Hit me where it hurts.”

She grinned.  “And if you behave yourself, I might even tell you a
few things you don’t know about women.”

In February, she sold the Ferrari.

She didn’t expect it to go so quickly.  She placed an ad in the
Portland newspaper and promptly forgot about it until she got a call from a
Westbrook attorney who wanted to know if she’d sold it yet.  When she told him
it was still available, he asked if he could drive up that afternoon and see
it.

She sent him out to the barn alone.  This was a huge step, one she
wasn’t sure she was ready for.  The sandy-haired attorney returned, his
enthusiasm obvious.  And then he asked it, the question she’d been dreading. 
“Why are you selling it?”

“It belonged to my late husband,” she said, amazed that the words
came so easily, so naturally.  “It’s been sitting for two years, and it should
belong to somebody who’ll love it as much as he did.”

He thought her asking price was fair, and while his L.L. Bean
boots dripped melted snow on her kitchen floor, he wrote her a check and she
gave him a bill of sale, and it was done.  She’d taken the first huge step with
frightening ease.

The closet was more difficult.

Every item she handled had memories attached, and she removed them
one at a time, letting herself feel the bittersweet emotions as she
meticulously folded each shirt, each pair of pants, before placing them in a
big green Hefty bag.  She emptied the bureau drawers, added his ties and his
belts and his shoes and his electric razor, then cleared the last of his
toiletries from the bathroom medicine cabinet.  She filled two huge bags,
knotted them tightly, and carried them downstairs and out to the trash barrel
beside the barn.

The next morning, at dawn, she burned them.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to feel, but certainly not
this relief.  She probed her emotions cautiously, searching for the guilt that
should have been there.  But it wasn’t there, only the relief and the sense
that an overwhelming burden had been lifted from her shoulders.

After that, it got easier.  She emptied her closet and her drawers
and moved her belongings to the downstairs guest room, then gave her bedroom
set to Billy and Alison.  She stripped the wallpaper from the bedroom walls,
painted the woodwork a warm antique white and repapered the room in dusky
rose.  In an antique shop she found a rose-colored brocade love seat and
matching wing chairs.  An oriental rug and Tiffany lamp completed the ensemble,
and her former bedroom became a sitting room.  And then she tackled the room
across the hall.

It had windows on two sides and a strong southern exposure, but
the closet was abysmally inadequate.  She called Jesse and asked for the name
of a good carpenter, and to her surprise, he came over and built it himself, a
beautiful walk-in closet twelve feet long, with shelves for shoes and sweaters
and linens.  When he was done, she painted the woodwork the same antique white
as the sitting room, then papered the walls in an aqua floral print and hung
curtains of teal and blue.

She thought of Rob often as the weeks went by, especially on the
day the new bedroom set was delivered and set up and she covered the mahogany
four-poster bed with the new spread.  She hadn’t relied on memory; she’d
actually driven back to Bar Harbor, to the cabin where she and Rob had become
lovers on a golden October afternoon, and then she had shopped around until she
found a bed identical to the one where they’d first made love.  She supposed that
most men wouldn’t notice.  But Rob would.  He would notice, and he would
understand.