Authors: Laurie Breton
“I’m not sure about the legal
ramifications, but she and Danny bought the house three years before we were
married, so for all intents and purposes, it’s hers. And you know, it could
get pretty cold living in a cardboard box on a downtown street corner, come
February.”
“We wouldn’t be living in a
cardboard box. You have plenty of money.”
He raised his eyebrows. “And you
know this because?”
“I didn’t just fall off the
turnip truck. You’re loaded. You’re a friggin’ rock star.”
That term had always made him
uncomfortable. Not to mention the kid had a potty mouth. “Danny was the
star. Not me. I’m just the guy who stood up on stage behind him and played
guitar.”
“And wrote and produced all his
albums. And had a successful solo career after the two of you split up.”
His eyebrows went higher. “You
make it sound like we were dating. And you seem to know a lot more about me
than I do about you.”
“You think? Considering that you
apparently didn’t even know I existed.”
Apparently?
What the hell
did she mean by apparently? Before he could ask, they reached the door to the
shed, and he decided to let it go. For now. “After lunch,” he said, swinging
it open and letting Paige and Leroy enter the house ahead of him, “I’ll show
you around the studio. You can bring your guitar with you. We can jam a
little.”
“Oh, joy,” she said.
He stepped into the kitchen, met
Casey’s eyes. “Wash your hands,” he said to Paige. She disappeared in the
direction of the bathroom, and he crossed the room to his wife. Took her in
his arms and buried his face in her hair. Only half-joking, he said, “Just
hold me.”
“Oh, come on, Flash, it can’t be
that bad.”
“It is that bad. She accused me
of being a rock star. And she hates me.”
“She’s a teenager. She’s
supposed to hate you. It’s an unwritten law of adolescence.”
“I am not a rock star. Danny was
a rock star. I am a Berklee-trained professional musician.”
“You dropped out of Berklee after
two years.”
“Everybody drops out of Berklee.
Your point is?”
“Look, I know you have a tendency
to get all hinky about stuff like this, but, well…you sort of are. A rock star,
that is.”
He looked at her in mock horror.
“
Et tu, Brute
?”
“Semantics, MacKenzie. You’re
quibbling over semantics.”
He sighed and said, “I’m taking
her out to the studio after lunch like you suggested. That’ll give you a break
from the screaming meemies. I’ll collect payment later.” He kissed her
eyelid, nudged her cheek with the tip of his nose. Cupped her chin in his hand,
tilted her head, and pretended to peer into her ear canal.
“What the hell are you doing,
MacKenzie?”
“Checking for bloodstains.”
She rolled her eyes. He couldn’t
actually see them, but he knew her well enough to know exactly what she was
doing. “You’re a lunatic,” she said.
“Yeah, but you love me anyway.”
“I do. Most of the time.” She
wound those gorgeous arms around his neck and tilted her head back and studied
him through exquisite green eyes. “Kids need structure. They respond well to
it. We just have to provide it.”
“Which could be problematic, as I
am possibly the least structured person on the planet.”
“Well, then, isn’t it a good
thing you have a regimented person like me around to offset all that loosey-goosey
stuff?”
He pressed his mouth to the line
of her jaw. “It’s a damn good thing, Sarge.”
“Don’t worry. Give it time. It’ll
get better.”
“I know what would make it
better.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You could kiss me.”
“Kissing always makes everything
better, but can you promise to behave? We have a fifteen-year-old chaperone now.
No more groping each other in the kitchen.”
He slid his mouth down the
slender curve of her neck and said, “That is a tragedy of epic proportions.”
“It is.” She leaned into him and
kissed him, sweetly, tenderly, thoroughly, with a heated, open-mouth,
full-body-contact kiss that had his engines revving in high gear until behind
them, the kid cleared her throat. He hadn’t even heard her come into the
room. He’d probably sustained hearing damage from all that noise.
His eyes popped open and looked
directly into Casey’s, mere inches away. “Busted,” he said.
His goddess of a wife offered him
a game, secretive little smile that hinted of future delights, and gave him one
last kiss for good measure. And said briskly, “Paige, the soup bowls are in
the right-hand cupboard, next to the fridge. Saltine crackers are on the shelf
in the pantry. I’ll get the spoons. Leroy’s welcome to stay, as long as he exhibits
good manners. But if he’s going to sit and beg the whole time we’re eating, you’ll
have to shut him in your room.”
These people she’d been sent to
live with were total freaks.
Earlier today, she’d gone into
the bathroom to wash her hands before lunch. When she came out, there they
were, her father and his wife, wrapped around each other and making out like a
couple of teenagers, right in the kitchen. Did people their age actually
do
that kind of thing? Certainly not her mom. Or the parents of any of her
friends. It made her ill just to think about it. And they’d acted like it was
no big deal. They’d just gone ahead with lunch, as if the sight of them like
that hadn’t done irreparable damage to her adolescent psyche. She wanted to
scream at them to get a room, but of course if they’d really wanted privacy, they
could’ve just gone upstairs.
The freak factor continued from
there. They actually had matching license plates on their cars. Hers said
C-MKNZ. His said R-MKNZ. An excess of cuteness that made Paige want to hurl.
He had a second car, an older-model Porsche 944. Shiny, black, classic. The
plates on that one said WIZARD. Hah! Ego problem, much?
After lunch, he’d given her a
guided tour of his studio. She’d pretended not to be impressed, but he had a
real honest-to-God recording studio out there in his barn in the middle of Nowhere.
The walls were lined with gold records. Paige had never seen one before,
except on TV. And there was a shelf holding a half-dozen Grammy awards. All
of them his. His and Casey’s. He said they were songwriting awards. And he
told her a little about himself, about how he’d gone to Berklee on a
scholarship, but he’d left when he met Danny Fiore and they started a band
together. Paige wasn’t about to tell him that Berklee had been her dream from
the time she was nine years old. The last thing she needed was for him to
think she was trying to follow in his footsteps. Her music was her own private
thing, totally unrelated to him. She might have inherited his musical talent,
but it went no further than that.
Tonight, they were planning to
parade her in front of the family like some exotic zoo animal. She could
hardly wait to be forced to meet aunts and uncles and cousins and try to
remember who was who. According to her stepmother, Luke and Mikey were just a
year older than she was. Maybe they’d be simpatico, although she didn’t hold
out much hope. If they’d grown up in this heinous place, they were probably
hicks who wore muddy L.L. Bean boots and had never heard of LL Cool J.
She missed her mom so much.
Her father turned the car into
the driveway of a little yellow ranch house, surrounded on three sides by cow
pasture. Paige had only been in this delightful little burg for twenty-four
hours, but already she’d seen enough cows to last her a lifetime. The driveway
was lined with pickup trucks and 4-wheel-drive vehicles. She’d seen so many of
them in the brief time she’d been in Maine that she was certain they must
multiply, like rabbits, while people slept at night. Her father gathered up
the stack of record albums his wife had been holding in her lap, and they all
piled out of the car.
They were greeted by a
dark-haired man going gray at the temples. Casey’s brother. The family
resemblance was unmistakable. Behind gold-rimmed glasses, his blue eyes were
lively. “Hey,” he said, “it’s the man with the music! About time you got
here.” He and her father exchanged some kind of complicated handshake—one of
those stupid guy things—and then he turned to her. “This must be Paige. I’m
Bill. Nice to meet you.”
She shook his outstretched hand,
then a smiling, matronly blonde rounded the corner of the house and bore down
on them like a ship at full sail. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, slipping an arm
through Paige’s. “I’m your Aunt Trish. Let me introduce you to everyone.”
Before Paige had time to blink, she
was swept away to the back yard, where Trish proceeded to introduce her to more
than a dozen people. There was her red-headed Aunt Rose, who was her father’s
sister, and her husband, Jesse Lindstrom, who was Trish’s brother. Their
infant daughter, Beth, was adorable. Next came Casey’s father and stepmother,
Will and Millie Bradley, and several neighbor couples whose names escaped her.
Then the cousins: Billy and his very pregnant wife, Alison; their toddler son,
Willy; Ian and Jenny and Kristen Bradley who, like Billy, were Trish and Bill’s
kids. Devon and Luke Kenneally, who were her Aunt Rose’s kids and, like infant
Beth, her first cousins. And Mikey Lindstrom, who was Jesse’s son and
crushingly handsome, with his father’s dark eyes, and hair so blond it was
almost white.
She’d never be able to keep track
of everyone; not only were there more names than she could retain at one time,
but the relationships were so complicated that she finally gave up on trying. Everybody
seemed to be related to everybody, although if she was interpreting it correctly,
there were actually four families: the Bradleys, the MacKenzies, the
Lindstroms, and the Kenneallys. They were just embarrassingly intermarried,
like hillbillies from Appalachia.
If she stayed here for any length
of time, eventually she’d probably figure it all out. For tonight, she would
focus on the boys, with whom Trish had left her after the whirlwind of
introductions. Mikey, because he was possibly the best-looking guy she’d ever seen,
and Luke, because he seemed so familiar.
“I know you,” he said, studying
her with eyes that she already recognized as the MacKenzie green. “From South
Boston. We went to school together.”
That explained the familiarity.
“So we’re cousins, and we never knew it? How’d you wind up here, at the end of
the earth?”
“My mom married his dad.” He
elbowed Mikey, who stood silently at his side, looking gorgeous but inexplicably
grim. “So we moved here.”
“How do you stand it? Do you
even have cable TV? We—I mean they—
he
and his wife—don’t. I can’t even
watch MTV. All they have is the local channels.”
“It’s not so bad here. School’s
okay. I’ve made a lot of friends, and Uncle Rob gives me private guitar
lessons. I’ve started a band with a couple of the guys. There’s no cable TV
this far out, but we have a satellite dish. You’re welcome to come over and
watch it any time you want.”
Her interest was immediately
piqued. “You have a band? A real band?”
“Well, we’re not playing anywhere
yet except Tobey’s garage, but, yeah, we get together a couple times a week to
practice.”
“What do you play?”
“Rock. Blues. A little of this,
a little of that. You can come to practice with me sometime if you’d like.”
“I’d like. So where do people
shop around here? I’m used to just hopping on the T to Downtown Crossing. How
far is it to the nearest mall?”
The boys exchanged glances.
“Girl stuff,” Luke said, and Mikey nodded agreement.
“There’s a few stores in town,”
Mikey said. “Bookstore, five-and-ten, drugstore, shoe store. That kind of
thing. The nearest mall is in Auburn, but it’s pretty small. If you’re
looking for a real mall, you have to go to South Portland. It’s about a
hundred miles.”
“Oh. My. God.”
Without warning, the stereo
speakers on the deck started blaring some kind of bouncy pop song so ancient it
might have come over on the Mayflower. Something about a girl crying at her
own birthday party because her boyfriend took off with another chick. Why did
she suspect it was one of the records
he
had brought with him? “What on
God’s green earth is this dreck?” she asked.
“Something old,” Mikey said.
“From when they were kids. The Sixties, I think.”
“Would that be the 1860s?”
The solid wall of ice that was
his face thawed just a bit, and she saw it in those dark eyes: the beginnings
of a smile. So he wasn’t always grim. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that
you put up with this crap every weekend?”
“We put in an appearance,” Luke
said. “Greet everyone, have a burger or a hot dog, a little potato salad, make
nice with the relatives. And then—”
“We escape,” Mikey said.
“So Chuck told him to take a long
walk off a short pier.” Paula Fournier raised her beer bottle and grinned.
“It was a beautiful moment.”
Paula upended the beer and
chugged it, and they all laughed at her story. Casey glanced around the group
of women. She’d missed this kind of female camaraderie. All those years she
was married to Danny, she’d acutely felt its absence. She had been a woman
living in a man’s world. Even after they bought the Malibu house and Katie
came along and they settled into a fractured kind of normalcy, she’d still felt
isolated, her life devoted exclusively to her husband, her daughter, her
songwriting. His career. There had been no girlfriends, nobody to laugh or
vent with about the trials and joys of marriage and motherhood. Nothing more
than a nodding acquaintance with any of her neighbors.