Lies That Bind (2 page)

“My associate here will be picking up rents in the future,” DuClos said, the smell of his garlicky breath filling the small space. “Will you be closed over the holidays as usual?”

Maeve nodded. “As usual.” She filled the butcher-block counter with the ingredients for an order she had to fill, a bridal shower cake for sixty people. “Nice to meet you, Billy,” she said, though she didn’t really mean it. She wanted them out of her store, but couldn’t be rude. Time was ticking away. Her father’s handle on the present was slowly leaving his mind like the sunlight dwindling outside in the little swath of parking lot that she could see from the open kitchen door.

“Ma’am,” Billy said, nodding solemnly. She wondered what DuClos would have an “associate” do exactly, besides pick up the rent from the shopkeepers. She decided, just as quickly, that she didn’t want to know.

Her landlord and his lackey made no attempt to leave. “I need another loaf of bread, Maeve,” DuClos said.

More to sop up the garlic that would likely be in his dinner, Maeve thought. She went into the front of the store where Jo was gazing into the refrigerated case.

“They still in there?” she asked, her pregnant belly at odds with her lanky arms, her long neck. Pregnant now, some smells bothered Jo, and just the idea of being in an enclosed space with Sebastian DuClos made her sick to her stomach.

Maeve grabbed a loaf of bread from the counter and nodded. “Yep,” she said. “But I think they’re on their way. Stay put for now.”

Back in the kitchen, there were a few additional moments of awkward silence before the two men drifted out the back door to the noisy car that had transported them to the bakery, the assault on her nose the only thing to let her know that they had been there in the first place, that it hadn’t been just a bad dream. Maeve peeked through the small round window in the door that separated the kitchen from the front of the store.

Jo came into the kitchen to check on her friend. “So, now that they’re gone, how’s it hanging, sister?”

“Low and saggy,” Maeve replied, attempting to smile but falling short. She felt like that a lot lately, as if she couldn’t really make her mouth do what she wanted. “He’s raising my rent.”

“Rat bastard,” Jo said.

Maeve turned and pointed to a large bin of flour, about half her size. “And someone,” she said—and since it was only she and Jo that spent any time in the kitchen, that narrowed the suspects—“didn’t close the flour last night. I just noticed it. I have to dump it now.” She had been eyeing it the whole time her landlord had been in the store, willing herself to remember that when he and his associate were gone, she and Jo had ingredients to discard, something that pained her.

“Heather was here,” Jo said, trying to foist blame onto Maeve’s youngest.

Heather had been there, but Maeve knew her youngest daughter well enough to know that she didn’t touch any of the baking ingredients if she didn’t have to. A face full of flour one day when she tried to make cupcakes by herself had convinced her to let the experts—namely, her mother—do the baking. Jo peered into the bin. “Is that a bug?”

Maeve looked in. It wasn’t, but it was a bit of detritus that had likely flown in through the back door when one of them had entered that morning, a piece of a leaf from a tree stripped bare long ago. It wasn’t a ton of flour to throw out, but it was enough. She tamped down any feelings of annoyance she may have had and pulled out a big black plastic garbage bag from the box on the shelf and asked Jo to hold it open, tightening the seal around the bin so that flour didn’t fly around the work area and get into Jo’s sensitive and delicate nasal passages.

“Okay, let’s get this done,” Maeve said. “I need to see my father before dinner.”

“How is my old boyfriend, Jack?” Jo asked. She asked about him every day, and Maeve wasn’t sure why, but Jo was one of the people that Jack hadn’t forgotten.

“He’s good,” Maeve lied. He wasn’t. He was ornery, the dementia turning him into an angry approximation of his old self, complaining vociferously that he wanted out of Buena del Sol and into her house so that he could live out his final years with his only child. It wasn’t going to happen. What was more likely was that he would be moved to the full-care section of the facility and reside in a state of confused unhappiness until his hale and hearty body finally gave out. Rather than focus on the truth of the matter, Maeve turned her full attention to the flour barrel.

The task seemed beyond Jo’s capabilities as Maeve struggled to upend the bin into the garbage bag. The struggle continued as she poured the contents of the flour into the bag and Jo attempted not to breathe in a heavy dose of flying particles. By the time they had finished, Jo had a white nose and Maeve was laughing, something she hadn’t done in a long time. It felt good.

“That was a lot more work than necessary,” Jo said. Maeve tied up the kitchen garbage and put it into the bag with the flour.

“Can you carry that outside for me?” Maeve asked, going into the front of the store to make sure they were ready to close. On the counter, the place where Maeve did most of her work, its surface littered with spatulas, piping bags, and cupcake holders, her phone trilled. It was Angelle, the nurse from Buena del Sol who visited Jack every day in his apartment.

“He’s gone, Miss Conlon.” There was a hitch in the woman’s voice, a small hiccup of grief. “I’m so sorry.”

CHAPTER 3

Maeve went through the motions at the wake, the funeral, and the burial, greeting the mourners and, in many cases, consoling them. But she was Irish-American and one thing she knew how to do was make plans to send a loved one to the “great beyond.”

And how to throw a mean after party.

When it came to what was eaten after a good, old-fashioned Irish Catholic sendoff, one had to pull out all of the stops for the mourners. To some, it was more important than the actual funeral Mass, though Maeve wasn’t one of those people. Still, she felt as if she had to have something nice.

They expected it. It was required. And she was sure that Jack Conlon would haunt her until the day she died if she didn’t send him off with a culinary bang.

With that in mind, she booked Mickey’s, a watering hole not far from her house where she knew the owner. Mickey guaranteed her that he would kick out the drunks who sat at the bar in the middle of the day and provide a buffet befitting Maeve’s father and his appetites.

There was Jack’s favorite shepherd’s pie, steam rising from atop the layer of mashed potatoes; a pasta dish; and chicken Francaise, a dish that Jack referred to as “fricassee,” even though a fricassee was something completely different. Maeve smiled as she put a piece of chicken on her plate, thinking of her father, adding some vegetables and turning to find a seat in the main dining area where Conlon mourners had taken all of the seats. The six tables that she had reserved were filled with friends and family, none looking terribly sad now that the funeral and burial were out of the way; a couple looked like they were well into their second or third Stellas, the DPW guys in particular. That helped the sadness of the morning wither away like the dead leaves that clogged the gutters outside the old village establishment. Who could blame them, these people who had come to pay their respects? Free food and booze. It took an iron will to turn down either, not to mention both.

Jack would have been thrilled at the turnout overall but would have also noted who hadn’t shown up, whispering in a voice that everyone would have been able to hear, “Don’t let my dying interfere with your bocce game, De Luca!” or “I’ve only died, but that hair appointment needs to be kept, Bernice!”

Maybe if she kept this running commentary in her head, she’d be able to keep a little piece of him alive and the hole that had opened in her heart would be filled with his memory.

He had died in his sleep, just like he prayed for every day, and Maeve took a bit of comfort, knowing that he had drifted off, never to awaken.

Before she sat down, Mimi Devereaux, Jack’s “main squeeze” at the home, as he had referred to her, stopped her. “So sorry for your loss, Maeve.” She had on a feather boa and thick orangey-red lipstick that Maeve felt sure had gone out of style around the time of Pearl Harbor.

“Thank you, Mrs. Devereaux,” she said, her eyes locked in on the smear of lipstick that adorned the woman’s prominent front teeth. Look away, she cautioned herself, but she couldn’t. It was a cosmetics train wreck.

“I just wanted to know, dear. How long do you think it will take to move your father’s things out of the apartment?” she asked.

This isn’t happening. This woman isn’t asking me so that she can have someone else move in, Maeve thought. “Soon,” Maeve said. I’ll squeeze that in between getting ready for Christmas and the other life events that are sure to come up in the next few weeks, she thought. “Why do you ask?”

“My dear friend, Stanley Cummerbund, is on the waiting list. Next in line for a place!” she said, clapping her hands together excitedly. “And he’d love to move in right away.”

“Well, I’ll get right on that,” Maeve said. “As long as you and Mr. Cummerbund are happy, I’m happy,” she said, a smile on her face that belied the anger bubbling beneath her placid surface. She looked up at the ceiling. You hear this, Dad? She’s already moved on. I told you she was a hussy, that you’d never find a woman as good as Mom. My mother was a saint.

“Oh, wonderful, dear.” Mrs. Devereaux smiled widely and Maeve took in the lipstick on just about every tooth in the woman’s mouth. “I won’t make any promises but I’ll let him know that it will be soon.”

Maeve detached herself from the old woman and made her way through the dining room, careful not to stop and talk to anyone who wanted to order a cake, move into her father’s recently vacated apartment, or discuss current events. She just didn’t have the energy.

Margie Haggerty waved enthusiastically, the underside of her arm flapping with the effort. Maeve made a mental note to wave to herself in the mirror when she got home; if that’s what middle age looked like, she had better get on the stick, and fast. “Here! Maeve, come sit here,” Maeve’s old neighbor from the Bronx beckoned, the chief mourner in her sights.

Mickey’s was small and Maeve couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t seen Margie, which is how she found herself sandwiched between Margie and her older sister, Dolores, who was encased—because, really, that was the only word for it—in a dark blue pantsuit that was surely from the Hillary Clinton collection at Nordstrom. They had been neighbors a long time ago when they were all younger, and while Maeve would have said they were also “more innocent” back then, it wasn’t really true.

Dolores, six years older, had never been innocent, and Margie’s innocence was still in question. And Maeve’s innocence had been stolen early on by the man Dolores eventually married—Maeve’s first cousin—but he was dead now and Maeve didn’t have to worry about him anymore.

Maeve looked at her plate, piled high with food. She was starving. When had she eaten last? She couldn’t remember and it didn’t matter. She dove into the shepherd’s pie, hoping that by concentrating on eating, she wouldn’t have to talk to Margie or Dolores. She looked over and smiled at her daughters, seated with their father and his wife, otherwise known as Mrs. Callahan #2, at a table tucked into a far corner.

“Very nice of you to come,” Maeve said, managing to add a smile to the sentiment. There was a sordid history between the two families, though Maeve wasn’t sure how much the sisters knew of it. That Dolores’s husband, Sean, had abused Maeve. That their father, a drunk, had run Maeve’s mother down in a hit-and-run, something that had remained a mystery until recently for Maeve. That Martin Haggerty had left her mother to bleed to death on a Bronx avenue, never telling a soul until he was near death about what he had done.

Margie clasped Maeve’s hand in her own freckled one. “We wouldn’t have missed it, Maeve. We … I … loved your father.” She even managed to produce a tear or two. “He was a kind man.”

“Yes, he was,” Maeve said. “Contrary to…” But she bit her tongue, remembering their serpent-tongued mother. But then again, Fidelma Haggerty hadn’t had a nice word to say about anyone; she hadn’t reserved her vitriol for just Jack. “How are things, Margie?” Maeve asked.

“Everything is great,” she started, keeping an eye on her sister; Maeve had her back to Dolores and wasn’t troubled in the least by not showing good manners in this case. Dolores was well on her way to getting sloshed and Maeve didn’t even like her when she was sober, so it was downhill from here.

It was only the feeling of a cold splash on her leg that interrupted Maeve’s concentration. Beside her, Dolores had upended her glass of Chardonnay onto Maeve’s skirt, soaking it through.

“Sorry,” Dolores slurred. Instead of helping Maeve clean it up, she motioned to the waitress busing the tables. “Another wine, please,” she called out.

Maeve blotted her skirt the best she could with her napkin and another one, slightly used, from the now-empty space across from her. Nothing like a drunk woman at a somber event to clear a room or diminish her once-ferocious appetite. She pushed her plate away and focused on a wormhole in the knotty pine paneling, a blackboard hanging on it touting the
homemade desserts from The Comfort Zone!
and took a deep breath. Just how long were these things supposed to go? She looked at Margie, the safer and more sober of the two sisters, but it was Dolores who wanted her attention. Her wine had been delivered and the glass was almost empty.

Margie leaned in close to Maeve. “It was Sean’s death,” she said, her voice so low that Maeve could hardly hear her. “She’s been drinking ever since. It’s becoming a problem.”

Maeve didn’t respond. It wasn’t becoming a problem; clearly it was already a problem. Dolores had married Sean Donovan; there had to have been massive amounts of alcohol involved, his wealth and success notwithstanding.

Sean’s was the last funeral she had attended before her father’s. She hadn’t expected them to happen so close together but she was starting to figure out that life didn’t happen the way you planned it. Mrs. Callahan #2 was a testament to that fact.