A Soft Place to Fall (23 page)

"How does she do that?" Annie said, shaking
her head as Gloria walked away. "She knows what I want before I
do."

"Practice," he said, glancing down at the
advertisements printed on his paper placemat.
Teeth getting you
down? Visit The Tooth Factory for 21
^st
Century Solutions.
Real romantic. Why hadn't he suggested
they go to Renaldi's in town, some place with a tablecloth and
ventilation that didn't reek of dead fish.

If she noticed, she didn't let on. She told
him a funny story about the Sorenson-Machado wedding and he laughed
when he was supposed to laugh but her words never got through.
Something was different about her. Her hair was still the same wild
mass of unruly curls. Her blue eyes were still framed by spiky
lashes and the faintest beginnings of crow's feet. She still had
the same off-center smile. He couldn't point to any one thing that
had changed but somehow everything had and he had the sense of
being left behind.

She pointed toward the window that looked out
over the dock. "Isn't that Susan leaning against the railing?"

You're dead, Susie,
he thought as he
saw a familiar face trying to pretend she had a reason to be there.
What the hell was wrong with her anyway?

"We should ask her to join us," Annie
said.

"She's probably with the kids."

"That's not a problem," Annie said. "We're
godparents to a few of them, right?"

He was about to say something incredibly
witty when he saw two more familiar faces pressed against the front
window of Cappy's. Four fists rapped on the glass.

"It's Daddy!" Willa cried out. Who knew her
voice was that piercing?

"Daddy!" Mariah, the older of the two, hooked
her pinkies in either side of her mouth and crossed her eyes. The
gesture was particularly effective coupled with the fact that her
nose was squashed flat against the window.

Annie waved at the girls. "I didn't know you
had your kids with you this weekend."

"Neither did I," he muttered.

"We might as well ask them to join us," Annie
said. "It's either that or pretend they're not out there."

"Great idea," he said, summoning up that old
bedside manner once more. "The more the merrier."

"Pull over some chairs," she said to the
newcomers as they approached, "and join us."

Hall's smile never wavered. It was part of
his training. "I'm sure our Susie has something better to do than
watch us eat dinner."

Susan looked guilty as sin.

"Hall's right," she said, leaning a hand on
Annie's shoulder as she reached over and plucked a tomato off her
sister-in-law's salad. "We're out of here. We came out for pizza
and got a little sidetracked."

Is that what they call it these days,
Susie?

"You know," said Jack, the only innocent in
the room, "I haven't had a lobster roll in a while. Why don't we
just pull up another table and those chairs Annie was talking about
and join them?"

"Look at this!" Gloria exclaimed as she
deposited more menus. "The whole family's here."

It was like trying to stop lava from rolling
downhill. Jack shoved two tables together. Susan gathered up some
chairs. The kids turned a quiet evening into a free-for-all. Not
that his kids were loud all the time. They didn't have to be. They
accomplished their goals with a few well-chosen words.

"Are you going to marry my daddy?" Willa
asked Annie. "Aunt Susan said –"

"Willa!" Susan looked like she wanted to
crawl under the table but Annie remained unruffled.

"No, I'm not," Annie said calmly. "I'm not
marrying your daddy or anybody else for that matter." She laughed
and looked over at Hall, expecting to find him laughing too at the
crazy question. Only thing was, Hall wasn't laughing. He was
sending Susan looks that would send a sane woman heading into the
witness protection plan.

"Daddy likes getting married," Mariah
confided as she nibbled the edges of a heavily sugared lemon wedge.
"Mommy says that's why he does it so much."

"And I'm going to keep doing it until I get
it right," Hall said.

Everyone laughed and the tension at the table
fell away. They all knew that kids said the damnedest things and if
you took any of their gossipy pronouncements seriously, you'd
string them up by the umbilical cord. Better to laugh and change
the subject and hope that wiser heads than yours didn't know
exactly what was going on.

#

"Awfully crowded for a Sunday night," Roberta
observed as she carefully eased her way into a parking spot in
Cappy's lot.

"Still summer weather," Claudia pointed out,
rooting through her purse for her lipstick. "This is the last
hurrah, so to speak."

She found her tube of clear red and applied
it swiftly without using a mirror. That was one of the few benefits
of being as old as she was: there were certain beauty rituals a
woman could perform in her sleep. Roberta flipped open her silver
compact and painstakingly applied her pink lipstick then carefully
brought down the shine on her aquiline nose. She shut the compact
with a loud click then laughed.

"And who are we doing this for?" Roberta
asked as they climbed from the car. "Men don't notice you once you
reach our age."

"Men stop noticing you once you reach forty,"
Claudia said. "That doesn't mean you stop caring about how you
look."

"Are we really this vain, Claudia?" Roberta
smoothed her coif with the flat of her hand.

"Yes," she said, opening the door to Cappy's
for her dearest friend. "We really are."

Time was having its way with her each and
every day, wrinkling what once was smooth, lowering what used to
sit high, playing tricks on her digestive tract she wouldn't wish
on her worst enemy. Was it so wrong to want to fight back just a
little?

Gloria waved to them from behind the counter.
"Should've known you weren't far behind, Claudia. C'mon in and join
the family."

"Over there," Roberta said, nudging her in
the side. "Susie's here with her brood, and isn't that Doctor Hall
and Annie? Well, well, well."

Something inside Claudia's chest began to
burn and it had nothing to do with the buttered roll she'd treated
herself to during the break at the seminar. Hall and Anne? How
ridiculous.

"Grandma!" Susan's youngest tackled her
before she was halfway to the table. "Tell her we can so have
dessert first."

Claudia chuckled. On her darkest days, her
grandchildren could call out the sun just for her. "Your mother
makes the rules, sweetie," she said, ruffling his hair. "Same as I
did when she was your age."

It was clear from the look on the boy's face
that he didn't believe his mother had ever been his age.. One day
she would blink her eyes and he would be walking down the aisle
like Frankie Machado this afternoon.

Hall, ever the gentleman, leaped to his feet
when he saw Claudia and Roberta approaching.

"Ladies," he greeted them, as casually as if
he'd never once held an icy speculum to their nether regions,
"you'll join us, won't you."

Roberta almost giggled as she took a seat at
the one of the tables. The woman had herself a small crush on the
middle-aged doctor, an affliction shared by half of the women in
their crowd. Their foolishness appalled Claudia. To her, he was
still the same gangly high school student who ran with Susan and
her crowd. Oh, there had been a time when Claudia had entertained
the hope that maybe he and Susan would one day get together (there
was nothing wrong with wanting a doctor in the family) but her
Susan had a mind of her own. She looked over at Jack who was
chatting amiably with one of Hall's impeccably well-groomed little
girls. Jack was a good husband and father and, on a purely selfish
level, it was grand to have a first-class auto mechanic in the
family. Her four-year-old Oldsmobile still ran like a dream and she
had her son-in-law to thank.

"I didn't know you were all meeting here for
dinner," she said, trying very hard not to single out Annie and
Hall when she said it. "What a nice surprise."

"We'd just placed our order when we saw Susan
out there on the dock," Annie said. She turned to Hall's youngest
and stroked her silky blond hair. "This is more fun than pizza,
right?"

Claudia's internal alarm system began to buzz
softly. Did Annie say "
We'd just placed our order
" or had
she imagined it?

Susan leaned over and pressed her lips close
to Claudia's ear. "Say one word and so help me, ma, you'll never
babysit again."

She pretended to peruse the laminated sheet
of paper that served as Cappy's dinner menu. If there were sparks
flying between Annie and Hall Talbot, they were invisible to her.
They seemed friendly, very comfortable with each other, and as
devoid of chemistry as two people of the opposite sex could be.
Annie chatted easily with him, the same way she did with everyone
else, although Claudia did notice that Hall's eyes kept drifting
back toward Annie in a way that seemed a tad more than platonic.
That didn't worry her. Hall was free to pursue Annie in as ardent a
fashion as he might like, just so long as Annie didn't return his
ardor in kind.

Now that man who'd showed up at the flower
shop the other morning – well, he worried her. The atmosphere
between him and Annie had veritably crackled with something Claudia
didn't like one single bit. She had given Warren a good talking to
last night about keeping his nose out of her daughter-in-law's
business. Annie was fine, even if she had made a terrible mistake
when she chose to sell the house she and Kevin had lived in for
most of their marriage. If she ever – and it was something Claudia
could scarcely bear thinking about – found herself in love with
another man, it would be someone from Shelter Rock Cove, someone
who shared her history, someone who understood what was important
in life. Not some surly-looking stranger from New York.

Besides, when it came to love and romance,
men were just along for the ride. Women were the ones behind the
wheel. They decided where the romance went and how fast and when it
was time to slam on the brakes or put pedal to the metal as the
kids liked to say. She glanced over at ardent Hall and cool Annie,
and smiled to herself. As far as Claudia could tell, they were
still in separate cars.

#

Claudia, you're looking a little bit too
self-satisfied for my taste,
Annie thought as she nibbled her
side of cole slaw.

She had seen her mother-in-law's blue eyes
zeroing in on both her and Hall as she tried to assess the
situation for potential landmines. Apparently, she had decided that
Hall presented no threat to the status quo and was settling down to
enjoy her meal in peace and harmony.

I love you, Claude, but this is really none
of your business.

She glanced toward Susan who looked edgy,
guilty, and very disappointed.

Serves you right, Suze. This is what you get
for being so nosy.

She smiled at Hall who was busy cracking a
lobster claw for Willa.

It's easier this way, Hall. I'll never know
if you were really interested and you'll never know that I'm really
not.

"So, Roberta," she said, "how was the
seminar?" She would have asked Claudia but she wasn't sure her
mother-in-law was speaking to her.

Roberta cast a furtive glance at Claudia.
"Long," she said. "More information than you can absorb in such a
short time."

Hall looked up from Willa's lobster claws.
"Another seminar, ladies?" Roberta's and Claudia's penchant for
seminars and workshops was well known. "What was it this time?"

The two older women exchanged glances. How
peculiar, thought Annie. It wasn't like it was a secret or
anything.

"Informational," Claudia said. "The history
of American finance, that sort of thing."

Hall frowned. "Not that Adam Winters I saw on
television."

Claudia laughed but nobody believed her. "Now
don't you start casting aspersions, young man. My own children do
enough of that to last me a lifetime, thank you very much. Roberta
and I look at these seminars as performance art."

"You do not," Susan said. "You – ouch!" She
turned and glared at Jack. "She's my mother, Jack. I can say
whatever I want to say to her."

"Oh, no, you can't," Claudia retorted. "What
I do with my time is my business, young lady. I don't tell you how
to live your life –"

"Hah!"

" – and you don't tell me how to live mine.
That way we'll get on quite well together."

"Say something, Hall!" Susan commanded.
"You're the only one here who isn't related to her. Tell her those
so-called financial experts are bad news."

Hall seemed deep in thought.

"Don't tell me you're secretly addicted to
those seminars too," Annie said with a laugh.

"No," he said. His brow was deeply furrowed.
"Damn it. This little piece of memory has been circling around all
day and I almost grabbed it when you mentioned that seminar."

"Run through the alphabet," Roberta
suggested. "That always jogs my memory."

"It probably wasn't important," Jack said.
"If it was, you'd remember it."

"There's a brilliant statement," Susan said,
rolling her eyes. "Like you've never forgotten a birthday or
anniversary."

That kicked off a mildly amusing round of
marital banter that served to forestall further discussion of Adam
Winters and his financial wizardry.

Annie decided she would finish her lobster,
have a little ice cream, then say goodnight before Hall made a move
or Claudia said something incendiary or Susan threw herself on her
sword.

She had never been one to push her luck and
she wasn't about to start now.

#