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Tim used to have one of those clocks. He’d stand in the hall and make it go off until Ben and his brothers started getting up. Maeve would be shouting from the kitchen. Morgan would be squealing, “Stop it, Daddy,” from the bathroom they all shared, knowing she was going to have to give over the mirror to people who shaved before school. But Tim would keep the noise up until one of the boys stumbled to their bedroom door and got it open, saying, “We’re all up, Pop. Really,” even if the other two were still sound asleep.

The memory was sweet, slowing the staccato beat of his heart. Ben knelt before the neatly laid logs in the fireplace, giving himself more time

When the fire had flickered into a modest blaze, Ben sat on the loveseat with Kate. Sally crawled into his lap. He scratched her chin, staring into the fire. “Dylan thinks the reason we’re not together is that I’m not willing to compromise. I want to know if you believe that, too.”

After a long silence, Kate finally said, “The truth is, when we were kids, you weren’t a very good boyfriend.” Her voice sounded as though it had an itch in it. “Your reluctance to compromise had something to do with that.”

“I was too a good boyfriend. Well, maybe not a good one, but not all that bad, either. Sometimes.”

“You were not, and if you’ll shut up and think about it, you’ll admit it,” she said impatiently. “Your idea of being a participant in a relationship was only being one day late for a birthday party or asking Dylan to take me to a dance because you wanted to ski or go on a night ride.”

He couldn’t argue that, though he wanted to.

Oh, sure he could. “Sometimes I remembered things. Sometimes I was available. I sat with you in the hospital when you had your appendix out.”

“Because the Winter Olympics were going on and you knew as long as you were ‘taking care of me’—” she lifted her fingers in air quotes “—your dad wouldn’t be on your case about studying. You watched TV the whole time you were there.”

Busted.

“When I couldn’t come to your high school prom I still brought you flowers at your graduation. We went into the tavern after it was closed and danced and drank diet cherry cola toasts out of champagne glasses.” It had been a pathetic make-up effort on his part. He’d known it even then, but it was the best his twenty-year-old mind could come up with at the time. Truth was, he probably wouldn’t do much better now.

Kate drew her knees up on the overstuffed sofa and turned so that she faced him. “I know.” She touched his cheek. “I loved that evening. I did. I still have one of the flowers pressed in—” She stopped, her eyes filling with tears. “It burned. So did my dish towel.”

“Dish towel?” He raised an eyebrow. “I have no problem with sentiment—I’m Irish after all—but a dish towel?”

She started, then averted her gaze, not answering. When she looked back, her always warm eyes weren’t—not at all. They were dark and challenging. “Actually, you haven’t changed that much. You think it’s okay to only be a part of Jayson’s life when it’s convenient for you. You showed up here tonight taking for granted that I’d be more than happy to see you and make you feel better because Dylan got you to thinking somewhere along the line you might have been—gasp!—wrong. Our friendship—which I think we’ve done a bang-up job of building—exists only on your schedule and according to your needs.”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say, but he struggled on anyway. “You’re right about some of those things. I do take for granted that you’ll always be there and be glad to see me. Because that’s how I feel about you. How I’ve always felt about you—I
want
you to take those things for granted. Remember when you and Tark broke up? I was so glad it was me you wanted to talk to.”

Oh,
that
dish towel.
He’d known she saved it. They’d even laughed about it. He didn’t know until right this minute that it hadn’t been funny to her. Not funny at all.

He took her cup and set it on the table. He held her hands and captured her gaze. “You’re right. I was a lousy boyfriend. And a not very good friend. I’m blowing it on all counts, huh?”

She sighed, dropping her head forward so her hair brushed his chin. He released her hands so he could push the soft tendrils aside. Keeping his fingers on the softness of her cheek, he turned his face to kiss her gently.

She smiled at him, though sadness still filled her eyes. “You may have been fairly useless on many occasions. Sometimes when I’m mad at you, I think you still are. But you were still my boyfriend. You were the one I loved.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

K
ATE
LOOKED
UP
from her desk when Ben came into A Day at a Time the following morning. She looked tired.

“I brought coffee,” he said meekly. “Dylan made a fresh pot so I could. And doughnuts. Marce had them this morning and I slipped into the kitchen and sort of...borrowed a half dozen.” Maybe if he could get Kate laughing, they could be themselves again.

She reached for one of the commuter cups but picked up the phone as soon as it rang. “Jan? Thanks for calling back. Can you do the rest of the year at Schuyler and Lund?” She grinned at the response from the other end of the conversation. “Good. See you on the ride. And don’t get hurt—you’re the only paralegal on the registry.”

She hung up the phone and took a sip of the coffee. “I got four hours’ sleep last night. This coffee needs to get me through the day.”

He set the sack of doughnuts on her desk and took the client chair across from her. “I didn’t sleep much, either, but the coffee did help. So did the doughnuts.”

She was silent. She grasped the pendant on her necklace and slid it up and down the chain. Over and over. Her eyes were foggy and sad.

Ben wished he hadn’t picked his brother up last night. Things would have been all right between him and Kate again. Soon. But now he had a feeling they would never be all right again. And he had no one to blame but himself. No one and nothing. There was something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie, and he wished he had—no matter what doubts his brother had raised.

She tapped some keys, her eyes on the monitor in front of her, then pushed the keyboard away and gazed unflinchingly at him. He couldn’t have looked away if he’d wanted to. And he thought maybe he did.

“What do you think? Why don’t we just unsay last night’s conversation and go back to the way we were?” Her words sounded flat.

The question caught him unaware, a condition he thought he might as well get used to because it was happening all the time.

“Do you think we can do that? Forget not just last night’s conversation but the things that went before, back in McGuffey’s thirteen years ago.” He drank some coffee because his throat was dry. “Or do we try and face the things that were. You wanted to stay in Fionnegan and I didn’t. You wanted kids and I wanted a puppy—a borrowed one I could send home when I didn’t want to take care of it anymore. I wanted to be a world-class skier and was becoming a doctor. I knew myself well enough to know I’d end up taking that disillusionment out on you. I may have been twenty-six when we broke up, but I was also still that disappointed seventeen-year-old kid.”

“I would have been supportive. You know I would.” She leaned toward him, still holding his gaze. Her hands were folded on the scarred oak surface of her desk. Her knuckles were white. “You were married to Nerissa inside of a year. Instead of blaming it on disappointment or our disagreement on things, why don’t you just clear the rest of it up with the truth?”

He frowned and reached to stroke her hands, trying to loosen the grip they had on each other. “What truth?”

“That you didn’t love me enough.”

* * *

I
T
HAD
ALMOST
felt good, saying aloud the words that had flitted through her head, weighed on her heart and inserted themselves on sporadic journal pages over the thirteen-and-change years since they’d broken up.

Almost but not quite.

It wasn’t a good day to not be busy in the office. It gave her too much thinking time. It stood to reason that Skip Lund stopped in just before closing time to ensure he’d have a legal assistant Monday morning. “I’d just as soon it was you,” he said when Kate told him someone would be there. “I know you don’t have a degree, but you knew the work inside and out.”

And worked cheap,
she thought but didn’t say.

The telephone was a welcome interruption. “I need to talk to grown-ups. Let’s have supper at McGuffey’s,” said Penny when Kate picked up. “Sam’s home and Debby and Jayson are coming over. I’m ordering pizzas for all of them and Dan and I will be at the tavern about seven. What do you say?”

“Sounds good.” And it did. Regardless of what was said—or not—the McGuffeys were friends. All of them. The tavern was one of her favorite places. She wasn’t going to give that up no matter how things ended with Ben. “I need some exercise. If I walk over, can I get a ride home?”

“Sure.”

It was dark when she was ready to leave for the tavern at six-thirty, which wasn’t a surprise. The several inches of snow was. Going home from work meant walking down the short hall to her living quarters, so even though she’d known it was snowing, she hadn’t paid attention to how much.

No one who came into the office had mentioned that her steps needed to have the snow removed from them, but they did. Even though the office was closed on weekends, leaving the snow around its entrance wasn’t an option.

She stepped back inside to add boots, gloves and another layer of fleece to the jeans and sweater she was wearing and got her brand-new snow shovel from the utility closet.

Shoveling snow was not one of her favorite parts of being single, although she remembered that her mother had been the snow shoveler, too, when Kate and Sarah were kids. That had been their parents’ division of labor—their father had mowed the lawn, cleaned the gutters and removed mice from their traps. He was also the better cook of the partnership, but the girls had learned early not to mention that to their mother. They’d also gotten very good at shoveling snow.

The white stuff, fluffy and dry, was still falling and even the sound of passing cars was muted in its depths. Kate didn’t hear footfalls, so when someone muttered, “I thought so,” and took the shovel from her hands, she screamed and pushed the perpetrator as hard as she could. She moved to run into the house but tripped over the long legs and large feet of the person she’d knocked over.

“I know you’re mad at me, but violence is a new thing for you.” Ben’s muttered voice reached her ears.

“I’m not mad at you.” Their legs were tangled, and no matter how she moved, they stayed that way. “We’ve had a twenty-some-year soap opera going on, is all, and it’s time to change channels.”

“How can you say that?” He went still but kept his arms around her, his legs pinning hers. “I’ve only been married once and you haven’t had more than seven or eight affairs with other people’s husbands. That anyone knows about, that is, and I won’t tell about the others.”

She fought the giggle that rose up in her throat and lost. She had to stop moving long enough to get her breath back. “Don’t forget, tall guy, I have elbows.” And she used one.

“Oof!” He grunted and laughed at the same time. “What channel would you change to, anyway?”

And then he was kissing her, and soap opera or no, she was kissing him back.

The muted
whap
of a snowball in the middle of her back was a timely interruption, and they drew apart, sitting in the snow and sharing a smile as Jayson’s excited laughter preceded him across the yard.

“Ben, you’re home! I missed you. I’m going to ride tomorrow. Ten miles!”

“Ten miles!” Ben got to his feet, hauling Kate behind him, and steadied them both when Jayson slid into them. He hugged the boy’s shoulders. “But I don’t think there’s going to be a ride, buddy. Too much snow.”

“I’ve tried explaining that. It’s not working.” Debby followed her brother’s footsteps across the snow. “I called the organizers and they said there’ll be a hike even if there isn’t a ride, though not the whole ten miles.”

“We’re having pizza,” Jayson announced. “With Josh and Michael.” He looked smug, the expression laughable on his wide face. “I’m eating lots.”

“Not if we don’t get moving, you’re not.” Debby gave him an affectionate push. “See you two tomorrow.”

“Bye, guys.” Everyone was “guys” to Jayson. He waved cheerily and trudged away with his sister. “Don’t forget, Ben,” he called. “Ten miles!”

“I’ll be there.” Ben waved at him, then reached for the shovel. He made short work of getting the snow off the steps, then handed the scoop to Kate. “I don’t know where you keep it. Are you ready to go to the tavern? I thought I’d walk you over.”

“All right.” She carried the shovel around and leaned it against the house on the back porch.

She was still thinking of that kiss. She wished she was sophisticated enough to define its meaning. Common sense told her they were adults—they could kiss each other if they wanted—but she’d never outgrown the need for affection to mean something.

Not just something, but something special.

When she rejoined him on the sidewalk, Ben took her hand. They started walking toward the tavern, without talking at first, though even silence between them held warmth.

“It rained quite a bit this week, so there will be ice under that snow on the trail,” she commented. “It will be risky even for experienced hikers. It worries me that Jayson will be there.”

“Me, too, though I’m glad he won’t be riding ten miles. I’ll keep him with me so Debby can enjoy the hike.” Ben tugged her closer, putting his arm around her shoulders. “You want to walk with us, short woman, if you can keep up?”

“I’ll walk with you, but isn’t it more like I’ll walk with Jayson because you can’t slow down enough?”

He was silent, steering her around the mountain of snow already collected at the corner of Alcott Street and Main. “I can now,” he said finally. “It’s no fun walking faster than everyone else when you’re always walking alone.”

She hugged him, then grinned up at him. “We
are
changing channels. We just went from a soap opera to a Rodgers and Hammerstein movie, and there wasn’t even any singing.” She breathed in his scent, capturing the sensation soap and spearmint and outdoors always gave her.

She had meant what she said that morning—he hadn’t loved her enough. Sometimes. There were other times, though, when she’d been the one who loved less. When he’d talked about living in Boston and she’d remained silent. When he’d enthused about the Olympics and she’d only wanted them to be over so they could go on with their lives.

No, he hadn’t always been a good boyfriend. Sometimes he’d been truly terrible. But what about her? Had she really been the one who kept the puzzle pieces together or had she dropped as many as she picked up?

“That’s not a good thing.” He held the door of McGuffey’s for her. “I’ve heard us sing. It’s not pretty.”

“You don’t think we’re ready to go on the road?” she asked, raising her arm in response to Penny’s enthusiastic wave from across the room where they always sat.

He snorted, following her past the tables to the booth on the wall. “In a train car, maybe, and not one usually reserved for passengers.”

Ten minutes later, they were eating the thick Irish stew Maeve reserved for weekends. Penny groaned with delight after the first spoonful. “How many times have we eaten this?” she said, reaching for a thick slab of soda bread.

“You mean since we started paying for it or the hundred or so times while we were in high school that Maeve fed us whenever we passed through?” Dan sipped from his Guinness. “Our kids don’t know what they’ve missed—they never got to wash glasses for their food.” He laughed, tipping his glass toward Ben. “I think your dad had us washing clean ones half the time, just so we wouldn’t develop the idea we deserved something for nothing.”

Ben nodded. “He probably did. He bought some plastic ones when Jayson started coming in with me. Tim McGuffey never served so much as a glass of water in plastic, but they’re still back there for when Jayson comes in and needs to be entertained. Patrick’s kids used them when they were here. Sophie washed them, and while she was at it, the bar and the floor behind it.” His face softened when he talked about his niece. “Not that they needed it.”

Dylan came in while they ate, pulling a chair to the end of the table. Ben raised an eyebrow in his younger brother’s direction. “Did you invite him?” he asked the table at large.

“No, but I would have.” Dan reached to shake hands with Dylan. “He knows too much about us to snub him.”

Dylan smiled his thanks when the waitress brought him a bowl of stew and a glass of milk.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Ben. “I was going to save shoveling Mom’s steps for you, but it was getting late.”

“I was checking on the trail. The snow wouldn’t be that big of a deal except that there’s ice under it in so many places, so they made the final decision that it will be five kilometers. The participants will ride, run, or walk at their own risk and the entry fees will be refunded to anyone who doesn’t want to do it. Donations will be just as they were before—at the giver’s discretion as to how much or how little or if they give at all.”

Kate high-fived Penny. “It’ll be fun. At least if it’s a walk, we’ll finish up the same day as everyone else.”

“The Chain and Sprocket has already rented out all the fat bikes they have and sold all the studded tires they had in stock, so the diehards will still be riding.” Dylan shook his head. “I thought about borrowing those chain things the mail carrier wears on his shoes, but he said he needed them.”

Kate shook her head. “Selfish of him.”

He shrugged. “That’s what I thought.” Dylan then turned his attention to his brother. “Are we all right after last night’s little talk?”

Ben nodded. “We are.”

“No ‘Tura Lura Lura’ either?”

“Not unless you and Mom sing it.”

The brothers grinned at each other, their affection nearly a palpable thing. When Ben turned to Kate, she laid down her spoon and wiped her mouth with a napkin. His eyes weren’t laughing. There was no dimple slash in his cheek. “But are we all right?”

She didn’t know what to say. Adolescent devotion and young-adult commitment had gotten them well into their twenties. Friendship had been enough for a summer. But she thought things were different now. It wasn’t too late for passion. For family. For forever.

But wanting that wouldn’t make it so.

A Day at a Time wasn’t the answer to everything, but maybe it was a start. Both the business and the way of making a life. “Yes,” she said, “we’re all right. Or we will be.”