A Slight Change of Plan (20 page)

He turned around and his eyes widened in surprise; then he reached out and hugged me, lifting me off my feet in the process.

“I was just thinking about you,” he said.

Gabe was watching carefully.

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. Gabe, Kate and I were college sweethearts. And in all the time I’ve been coming here, I never knew that Jeff was her son. Isn’t that wild?”

Gabe was grinning. “My favorite mom-in-law and my favorite customer. That is pretty wild. Was he stubborn and argumentative in college, Kate, or is this pigheadedness an old-age thing?”

I laughed. “Well, he was always reluctant to try new things. He had his favorites and stuck to them.”

“But when it comes to wine, there are hundreds of new tastes. Jake, I mean it, this Shiraz will change your life.”

“Go on, Jake, be daring,” I said.

Jake looked at me. “Only if you share it with me, Kate. I live only four blocks away, and it’s not too early in the evening for a glass or two. How about it?”

What? But Sandra the Beautiful… what about her? He had never answered my e-mail about her, so I had to assume she was still in his life. But I didn’t want to ask about her in front of Gabe, who I could see was bursting with curiosity already.

I glanced at my watch. “Gabe, when are you guys heading up?”

“You’ve got plenty of time,” Gabe said, moving toward the register. “The reservation is for seven thirty. In fact, Jake, would you like to join us? Jeff and I are celebrating the shop opening four years ago today. I think you were one of our first customers. We’ll be at Virgil’s because we want to lick barbecue sauce off our fingers later on. I could change the reservation.”

Jake looked at me. “Kate?” His eyes were smiling, like they used to when the two of us would be alone and he was about to suggest we take our clothes off. I actually started to blush.

“Sure, why not?” I said. There was a hot flash building. I could feel it, so I moved in front of the air-conditioning vent and prayed that Jake would take a long time paying for his wine.

No luck. It took him less than, like, three seconds to check out, and he took my arm and steered me outside, where, luckily, the outside temperature was barely ten degrees cooler than my inside temperature, so the sweat on my upper lip and down my back was perfectly understandable.

“This heat is a killer,” I said, just to cover my bases.

Jake nodded. “Yep. I’m close, though. We should be able to make it before your hair starts to frizz.”

I had to laugh. I spent a great deal of my college career trying to find ways to keep my thick Italian hair from looking like a Brillo Pad when the weather turned warm and humid.

“That is not a problem anymore. I finally found the magical combination. Funny you should remember that,” I said.

“After all the time you spent bitching about it, how could I forget?”

“That’s true. Hey, Jake? What about your girlfriend?”

He didn’t slow his pace. “She’s not my girlfriend anymore. We ended things, quite amicably, just two nights ago. I think she realized I was too old. And I realized she was too, uh—not high-maintenance. That sounds like she was a gold digger. She just liked nightlife, and dancing, and drinking in clubs.”

“I thought that’s why you went out with her in the first place, to have a good time.”

He shrugged. “True. But we were never able to agree on the definition of a good time.”

Can I tell you that my heart did a little backflip?

It only took us five minutes to get to his place, on a quiet, tree-lined street with very expensive cars lining the curb. He led me to a gorgeous four-story brownstone with twelve steps up to a red front door. He unlocked the door and held it open for me. I was a bit confused, thinking I’d have to follow him up to whatever floor was his, and then I realized I was not walking into a lobby of an apartment building—I was walking into the foyer of his home.

“You own the whole house?” I asked.

He shut the door and walked down a long, cool hallway. A Dalí, probably that print he had picked up at Sotheby’s, hung just inside the doorway. I followed him into a huge kitchen that took up the entire back of the apartment. Sliding doors opened onto a deck that in turn overlooked a tree-lined courtyard, complete with fountain.

He was arranging the wine bottles on a granite-topped island roughly the size of my entire dining room. “I really
need to change,” he said. “Do you think you can find the wineglasses?”

“Sure. Which zip code are they in?”

“To the left,” he said, and went back down the hallway.

I put my purse on one part of the island and looked around. It was a beautifully designed kitchen, with a six-burner gas stove, double ovens, three sinks, and at least fifty linear feet of granite. I wanted to be buried in that kitchen. I tiptoed back down the hall. There was a vast dining room right inside the front door, walls painted an elegant robin’s egg blue, drapes puddled on the burnished wood floor, and a table so big that my entire family, including cousins, could have had Thanksgiving dinner there, with room for a touch football game in front of the sideboard. Next came a powder room, then a walk-in closet. Who has a walk-in closet off the hall?

Back in the kitchen, I found the wineglasses. They were in the wineglass wing, between one of the sinks and the built-in wine cooler. He had one of those refrigerators where you open the door and think there’s going to be a freezer back there somewhere, but it’s all fridge. The freezer was the next full-size stainless-steel door. And that refrigerator? Another three inches deep, it could have qualified as a walk-in. It held two shelves of bottled water, an entire door of condiments, and lots of take-out containers and orange juice.

Next assignment? God was with me—I found the corkscrew in the fifth drawer I opened.

Since the Shiraz needed to breathe, I uncorked the bottle, then opened the sliders and went out on the deck.

It was hot as hell out there, with no breeze whatsoever, but the sound of the water from the fountain was lovely, so
I leaned against the railing, trying to identify some of the plantings. The courtyard was brick, with ivy growing up the tall fence that ran across the back. There were lots of ferns and big-leafed hostas, their small white flowers hanging in the still air. Then I heard Jake’s voice. I glanced up, and he was coming down the spiral staircase tucked in the corner of the deck. From his bedroom, I assumed. Or maybe just his dressing room.

He was barefoot, wearing Dockers and a linen shirt. He stood next to me, looking down at the courtyard. “Want a tour?”

“Sure.”

We went back inside and he poured two glasses of wine, then showed me around.

The house was very narrow. We went down the stairs to the ground floor, which was all living room, with small windows facing the street, but a wall of glass opening to the courtyard. There were lots of neutrals, beiges and taupes, on long couches and deep chairs, and beautiful hunting prints on the walls. All very masculine and subtle, classy without screaming expensive. He grinned like a kid when he showed me the dumbwaiter.

“Is that the coolest thing ever?” he asked, and I had to agree. Next to the dumbwaiter there was a full wet bar, so you wouldn’t have to spend too much time running up- and downstairs fixing drinks when entertaining the forty or so people who could easily fill the space.

The floor above the kitchen was the master suite: huge bedroom, equally huge bath, a book-lined office tucked in front, and a dressing room. Everything was, again, beautifully
done, elegant without being showy. Finally, two guest suites on the top floor.

Now, I’d been in a lot of really great houses in the past thirty years. After all, I’d socialized with doctors and lawyers for most of my adult life. But this house was something else.

“Pretty amazing, Jake,” I finally said when we were back in the kitchen. In the corner by the sliders was a polished round table with a leather wing chair and two wicker chairs. The perfect place for breakfast or dinner alone, but why would he need three chairs for breakfast? I didn’t ask. But it was also the perfect place to sip wine and eat a little sharp cheddar.

“Yeah. I was very lucky to find it when I did. I’m putting the White Plains house up for sale. The taxes are killing me, and I’m never there anyway. This place is where I want to be right now. Jill was always about the Upper West Side. In fact, that’s where she’s living. But this is more me, don’t you think?”

“If you say so. This super-CEO Jake is new to me, remember?”

He shook his head. “Not really. I’m still the quiet, humble guy I was back in the day.”

I snorted. “Jake, you were never quiet and humble. You always had a pretty good opinion of yourself, and weren’t afraid to tell other people about how great you were. I was the quiet and humble one.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “God, Kate, you? Quiet? In what alternate universe were you ever quiet?”

I laughed, too. “Okay, well, maybe not quiet.”

He poured us some more wine. “I can’t get over your being Jeff Everett’s mother. And then to find out he’s the same Jeff who’s Gabe’s Jeff? Wow. What’s the word? Serendipity?”

“Something like that. How do you like the wine?”

“It’s good. Of course. Gabe has never steered me wrong. The man has excellent taste.”

“Except in decorating for the mature crowd.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Who decorated your place?”

“A woman I was seeing for a while. Right after Jill. She called herself the rebound woman, and warned me it wouldn’t last. I didn’t believe her, of course. I thought she was going to make me happy again, but after a year, I could see she was right. She was a great Band-Aid, though. After I bought this place, I ran into her at a fund-raiser, and she was just starting her decorating business. I gave her carte blanche, and this was her first big job. She had some trade magazine in here, doing a spread. She’s pretty successful now. I was glad to help her out.” He’d been staring out the window, and as I watched his face, I could see the sadness there, something I hadn’t noticed before. He glanced over and caught me staring. We both smiled.

“How’s the job hunt?”

I shrugged. “The main problem is, I don’t know what I want to do. I just know I have to do something before I chew my foot off from boredom. I started volunteering at a center for homeless people down in Newark. Giving tax advice, believe it or not. Yesterday was my first day, and it was amazing. These were people who had nothing, but still wanted to make sure they had done everything possible to ensure the IRS wouldn’t be mad at them. Complete opposite of what I
had been doing. I had to really think about their problems, and the solutions, and had to be creative and flexible. It was great. Just the exercise I needed for my brain. If I could find a job like that, I’d be thrilled.”

“Can you turn it into a paying position?”

I shook my head. “No. This guy is privately funded, and I’m sure he’s on a shoestring. I’ll find something.” I glanced at my watch. If we were walking, we had to start now, and I wanted to walk. I wanted to wind my way slowly uptown with Jake, my arm casually in his, shoulders bumping. I wanted his head to lean down to mine as we spoke, to see the flash of his smile. “Are you ready to head out?”

He nodded and cleared the table while I went to the bathroom—of course—and when we hit the street, the air was cooler, so we walked, talking, and were only a few minutes late to Virgil’s.

They were at a big corner table upstairs, and Jeff shook Jake’s hand, then hugged me, whispering in my ear. “This is your college Jake? Who broke your heart?”

Oh, dear. That’s right, he’d found out the whole Jake story. I nodded and gave him a very fake smile.

“Not a word, Jeff. No discussion of this situation whatsoever. Got it?”

He raised his eyebrows and threw up his hands, signaling defeat. I knew tomorrow he’d be calling me first thing, asking all sorts of questions and making several suggestions. But for tonight, I was going to enjoy the food and Jake and the knowledge that sometime in the next year, I’d be a grandmother.

We stayed a long time. Jake and I were the oldest people at the table, and the only straight people. We spent a lot of
time laughing. We spent a lot of time drinking. He walked me to the Port Authority again, and when my bus pulled up he said, very casually, “So, next time, why don’t I come over to Jersey?”

Next time?

I was so friggin’ cool: “Sure.”

I waved as I got on the bus, still cool.

Next time!

C
HAPTER
N
INE

F
riday morning, I had three texts in a row from Tom.

Missed you last night.

Busy later?

How about a drink?

Can I tell you? Right then, I felt guilty. I had really wanted to make things work with Tom. I thought we had a future together. I’d thought that, given time, we’d be pretty good.

But Jake Windom wanted a next time. And I wanted a next time, too.

Alisa noticed me staring miserably at my cell phone, and sat beside me on the couch.

“What?”

“I’m starting to like Tom.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“And even though he was pretty freaked out last weekend, I think he’s starting to like me, too.”

“I don’t see why that’s making you look so unhappy.”

“Remember Jake?”

“Jake, the love of your life?”

I winced. “Yes. Well, we saw each other again last night. He’s one of Gabe’s best customers, and he was in the store yesterday, so I went to his place and had some wine, and then he came to dinner, and I had a great time.”

“Your Jake knows Gabe? Oh, Kate, this is the world telling you something. Do not ignore this message.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Excuse me, Miss Science Brain of America. But since when do you advise listening to the cosmos? I thought everything had to be backed up with at least a fragment of reality.”

“Not when it comes to the heart, Kate. I mean it. Call Laura; she’ll tell you the same thing.”

“I know she will. The two of you are like dueling cupids buzzing around my head. What about Tom?”