Chances Are (19 page)

Her mouth dropped open in surprise. “Get out! How would he even know about Jill?”

“Small town, big mouths,” he said, and she laughed despite herself. “If he really wanted to know the history of the town, he’d search the Hall of Records. What they want is a social history that’ll get them some ratings, and that means juicy family stories.”

“No wonder they’re spending so much time with the DiFalco sisters,” she said, and it was his turn to laugh. “What did you tell him when he asked about Jill?”

“I told him to go fuck himself and hung up,” he said, this time with no apology. “Like I’m going to sit down and tell a stranger my wife took off with my best friend. Bad enough everyone in town knows it.”

“And they told him, didn’t they?”

“Right down to her flight number,” he said with more regret than bitterness. He pushed aside his empty cup and looked her in the eyes. “Keep your guard up, Claire. He’s digging around the firehouse, looking for a hook to hang his story on. You’ve come too far to be pulled back down again for the sake of a TV show.”

She wasn’t a fool. She knew exactly what he was saying. Billy might be three years gone, but the aftershocks still had the power to knock her flat. The thought of his many indiscretions being resurrected for public consumption infuriated her.

She made to refill David’s cup, but he placed his hand across the top to stop her. “Believe me, if he’s looking for a story, he’s not going to get one from me.”

He had beautiful eyes, a deep, warm hazel with flecks of gold and navy. She had known him for years and never noticed until today. “That guy can charm military secrets out of the Pentagon. I don’t get it, but I’ve seen him do it.”

She put the pot of regular down on the warmer behind her. “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said as she wiped up a drop of coffee from the sleek surface of the bar. “I’ll make a few calls later.”

“Do it,” he said. “Promise?”

She started to make a joke, her usual wiseass default position, but the look in his eyes stopped her in her tracks. “Promise,” she said, crossing her heart with big, theatrical gestures.

“I better go,” he said. “Jason’s waiting in the car. I’m taking him for another interview at Penn.”

“I thought he got his acceptance a while ago.”

David shrugged. “A follow-up, they say, but who knows. He’s sweating bullets, poor kid.”

“Good luck,” she said. “Penn’s a big deal. They’d be lucky to have him.”

“I’ll call you about that pizza.”

“Great,” she said, smiling at him. To her surprise, she almost meant it.

They said good-bye, and he threaded his way through the crowded bar toward the exit. There was nothing special about him. He wasn’t the best-looking guy in the room or the tallest or the best built. He was reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent, mildly funny when he wanted to be, and genuinely nice. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd until he smiled, and then only if you had a fondness for loopy, lopsided smiles that didn’t originate in the office of some fancy dentist. Flip to
nice guy
in the dictionary, and there was bound to be a photo of David Fenelli, surrounded by his kids, his ex, and a golden retriever, all posed fetchingly next to the requisite minivan.

There was nothing dangerous about him. Nothing exciting. He wasn’t like Billy at all, the kind of guy who made a woman’s heart slam hard against her rib cage when he walked into a room. He was just a nice guy from the neighborhood who happened to like kids and pizza.

She turned around and found herself face-to-face with Tommy, their main bartender.

“Don’t say it,” she warned, jabbing a forefinger into his soft swell of a belly. “Don’t even think it.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” he said, eyes wide in mock innocence. “My mind’s a blank.”

“Don’t go reading anything into what you saw.” She should be awarded a medal for sidestepping that straight line he had offered her.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Then why the hell are you looking at me like that?”

His grin stretched from one side of his face to the other. “You have spinach between your teeth.”

 
BARNEY KURKOWSKI FINISHED loading the last bucket of Aidan’s world-class ten-alarm firehouse chili into the back of his Ford Explorer and closed the lid with a satisfying thunk. “They’re asking for your lamb stew again,” the veteran firefighter said to Aidan as he squinted into the bright late morning sunlight. “Why don’t you stop by the firehouse one day and give Hank a few pointers. Do us a favor and steer him away from creamed chicken.”

“I learned a hell of a long time ago you don’t give Hank Ulrich pointers about anything, Barn. Not unless you want to go home without a few of your teeth.”

“He’s mellowing,” Barney said, shielding his eyes with the back of his hand. “Al and Steve stuck one of those relaxation tapes in his locker last month. I think he’s been listening to it.”

“I partnered Hank for five years,” Aidan reminded his old friend. “It’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than a relaxation tape to cool that guy off.” Hank was one of those hot-wired types who went through life believing the world was out to get him, and in his case, he was probably right at least half the time.

“Lamb stew might do it,” Barney suggested with a grin.

“Next week,” Aidan said. “And I’ll toss in a pot roast.”

“Don’t let Sara hear you mention pot roast. My cholesterol’s up again, and she’s on the warpath.”

“Sorry, buddy. I don’t do tofu.”

“Just wait until September,” Barney warned with a twinkle in his eyes. “You’ll walk down the aisle a single carnivore, but you’ll walk back up a married vegetarian.”

Aidan was still laughing when Barney gunned his engine and headed back to the station. Back when Aidan fought fires for a living, he had acquired the title of Best Firehouse Cook in the Garden State for specialties like his Irish stew and pot roast with potato pancakes, and he had maintained that link with his old coworkers by supplying them with a few tons of food every week or two. He knew they could drop by O’Malley’s any time they wanted a bowl of stew or plate piled high with pot roast, but that wouldn’t be the same. You needed the smell of lye soap, motor oil, and damp rubber boots mixed with the sounds of rowdy male laughter and a game blaring from the radio in the corner—special ingredients that only another firefighter knew how to appreciate.

Maybe someday he would have the balls to go back into the firehouse again and take a look at the plaque they had attached to Billy’s old locker.

Then again, maybe not.

He glanced at his battered Timex and muttered an Anglo-Saxon expression that was nearly as old as his watch. Already pushing noon, and he still hadn’t managed to haul his sorry ass in to work. Claire and Tommy opened up today, but he liked to get in by eleven at the latest, as much for himself as for the business. After the warehouse accident he had learned how easy it was to let go, to let the days slip away one by one until the weeks and months were nothing but a blur of nothingness. He missed the old routines, the discipline required in his old job, and had tried to move some of it into his new life.

He needed to go back into the house, grab his car keys, his wallet, and his files, then get moving before the rest of the day got away from him.

Kelly looked up from the cup of hot tea she was nursing when he entered the kitchen. Her wavy blond hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and there were dark smudges under her big blue eyes. She wore the sweatpants/T-shirt combination she always wore when she felt lousy, and she was hunched over the mug like it was a life-giving hearth fire in the middle of a blizzard.

“You’re not going to school today?” Aidan asked as he grabbed his car keys from the top of the microwave.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, cupping her hands around the cup.

“I thought I heard you wandering around last night.” He gathered up a sheaf of papers from the shelf near the door and stuffed them into a large brown envelope marked
File.

“Sorry if I kept you up.”

“You didn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep, either.” His late-night visit to Maddy had left him frustrated, agitated, lonely for the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, for all the things he had been dreaming of since the day he met her.

Kelly took a sip of tea, then put the cup back down.

“You’re shivering,” he said. “Better put on a sweater.”

“I’m okay.”

He placed the palm of his hand against her forehead, the way he had done a thousand times over the last seventeen years. “You don’t have a fever.”

She pulled away from him. “I said I’m fine.”

She wasn’t. That much was clear. But no sane parent argued semantics with a teenager.

“So what is it?”

“Nothing.”

“A cold?”

She shook her head.

“Something wrong at school?”

She made a face.

“Everything okay with Columbia and the scholarship?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Did you and Seth—”

“No!” She swung around in her chair and looked up at him with reproachful eyes. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

This was an old argument he didn’t feel like revisiting. He liked Seth, and she knew it. What he didn’t like was how serious things were. She knew that, too. “If it isn’t school and it isn’t Seth, then what is it?”

She pushed back from the table, then ran from the room in a frenzy of sobs designed to break the hardest heart, leaving Aidan standing there wondering where the hell he’d gone wrong.

Definition of an optimist: the parent of a teenager who actually believed his kid would tell him what was wrong.

He wanted to do what he had always done when she was unhappy: scoop her up into his arms and hold her tight until he had absorbed all of her sadness and made her world right again. When was the last time he had had that magic? He couldn’t remember. One day she’s your little girl, and the next thing you know, she’s a secretive, lovely young woman whose face comes alive at the sight of a boy who was still in diapers the day before yesterday, and all you can do is step back and watch it all happen.

No matter how much he sometimes wanted to, he couldn’t turn back the clock. The little girl he had shielded from harm was only a memory, and in her place was a beautiful stranger who lived a life beyond these four walls that he would never fully know. He had done his job well. She didn’t need him anymore. In another few months she would walk out that door and into a whole new world that didn’t have room for him.

That was the way it should be. The way it was supposed to be. Kids grew up. They moved on. They went to school. They started careers. They married and had kids of their own, and the whole process started all over again. This was part of the cycle of life, the wheel spinning slowly, gathering speed as the years went on, until it was nothing but a blur of shapes and color and dreams.

He had a choice. He could march down the hall, rap on her door, and demand an explanation for the restless night, the teary eyes, the refusal to go to school. He was her father. She was still a minor. He had the right to some answers.

Or he could take a deep breath and give her a little room. Clearly whatever it was, wasn’t life-threatening. She didn’t have a fever. There were no broken bones. Kids like Kelly were under a hell of a lot of pressure to succeed. When a lot was expected of you, a lot was taken. Nobody worked harder or achieved more than his daughter. If she needed a day to get off the treadmill and rest, she could have it.

She had earned that and more.

 
KELLY LAY FACEDOWN on her bed, listening for her father’s footsteps. There was no way he would ever in a million years let her get away with running out of the room like that. Not without an explanation. She hadn’t meant to go running out of the room like that, but lately it seemed she was doing a lot of things she didn’t mean to do. Give him two or three more minutes, and he was bound to knock on her door, determined to find out what was wrong. She longed for him to demand some answers, force her to tell him what was really going on, and at the same time she prayed he would leave her alone.

How could she tell him she thought she was pregnant? It would kill him. All these years he had tried to impress upon her the importance of setting goals, of education, trying to make sure she understood that sometimes you had to choose between what seemed right at the moment and what was right for the long haul.

The distinction had seemed murky at best when she was younger, a vague litany of dos and don’ts that sounded more like a Sunday school sermon than anything that could help her in the real world.

Well, now she got it.

It wasn’t like she and Seth had taken foolish chances, because they hadn’t. They always used protection.

And they loved each other. Shouldn’t that count for something? She wasn’t screwing around with every guy who came along. If there really was a God up there watching over everyone, how could he let her end up in such a mess?

Look what happened to Maddy. Nobody’s safe.
Maddy was in her thirties, a grown woman who had been living with a man old enough to be her father, and that didn’t stop that one lone sperm from zeroing in on its target. If it could happen to someone as smart and experienced as Maddy . . .

She waited, barely breathing, for her father to knock on her door. All her life she had taken her problems to him, and he had always managed to make things better. Okay, so maybe things hadn’t been so great after the accident, but she knew he was there for her, and that meant the world.

He knew she wasn’t a little girl any longer. That was why he was so hard on Seth all the time, making him uncomfortable every chance he got. She understood that. It was all part of letting go. But now here she was with the biggest problem of her life, and the one person who could help her was the one person she couldn’t tell.