Chances Are (22 page)

Crystal thanked her, then raced off to relay the information to the rest of the crew.

Kelly was standing at the counter grinding coffee beans when Maddy returned to the kitchen.

“I thought you weren’t coming in tonight,” Maddy said, sidestepping Priscilla, who was lurking near the doorway. She bent down to give the puppy a quick cuddle. “Rose said you weren’t feeling well.”

“I think I had one of those twenty-four-hour bugs. I started feeling better this afternoon, so I figured I might as well.” She poured more beans into the hopper. “I thought you’d be at Aunt Claire’s poker party.”

“I will be as soon as Rose gets home.”

“I can take care of things for you if you want to go now,” Kelly offered. “I know Hannah’s bedtime drill.”

“You’re a doll,” Maddy said, as she washed her hands at the sink. “I’d take you up on it except our PBS pals just put in a special request for—” She registered the coffee grinder and the bag of beans. “Are you psychic?”

“Lucky guess.” Kelly grinned. “I see them drinking pots of the stuff at Julie’s every day.”

Maddy reached into the cupboard for the large cream pitcher and the matching sugar bowl. “They’re going to be setting up shop in my office tonight. They need an Internet connection, and the high-speed isn’t working.”

“Your office?” Kelly shouted over the racket of beans being ground into submission. “Poor you.”

“Is it just me, or are they extremely annoying?”

Kelly turned off the grinder. “It’s not you, and they are extremely annoying.” She measured four scoops of ground beans into the filter basket, then switched on the machine. The room instantly came alive with the rich, unmistakable aroma of brewing coffee.

“Have they interviewed you yet?” Kelly asked.

“Two prelims,” Maddy said, stifling a yawn. “I think I’m scheduled for the comprehensive interview sometime next week.”

“How’d you like it?”

“It’s a little scary,” Maddy said. “You go in thinking you know exactly what you’re going to say—and what you’re not going to say—and suddenly you’re spilling your guts. I was actually disappointed when we ran out of time.” She had said far more about her relationship with Rose than she had ever intended. So much so that the Witness Protection Program was beginning to sound good.

“That
is
scary,” Kelly said. “They’ll know every secret in town by the time they finish.”

“For four generations back. God only knows what juicy tidbits my aunts have served up.”

“I saw stacks and stacks of printouts in Crystal’s room when I went in to turn down the bed. Grandma Irene’s was on top.”

“Did you peek?” Maddy grinned. Aidan’s daughter was the last person on earth who would ever peek.

“I thought about it,” Kelly said with an embarrassed shrug of her slender shoulders. “I caught myself just in time.”

Being so wonderfully predictable wasn’t always a bad thing. Kelly was proof of that. People expected the best from her, and she always delivered.

“Aidan told me they had pulled every interview she ever gave to the press and it totaled over three hundred pages of clips. They could do the whole Paradise Point segment on Irene alone and have enough information left over for two sequels.”

“Grandma would’ve loved this,” Kelly said. “She knew everything there was to know about Paradise Point.”

“She put this town on the map.” Irene O’Malley had been one of the first successful female restaurant owners in the state, and as time went by, O’Malley’s became one of the most popular establishments on the shore.

“Dad never paid much attention to Grandma’s stories. I guess he’d heard them all so many times they stopped meaning anything to him, but I always listened. It was like she was sharing something special with me, a part of herself I’d never see any other way.”

Maddy was twice Kelly’s age and, if she was lucky, half as perceptive.

“I wish I’d paid more attention to my Grandma Fay’s stories. I used to zone out every time I heard the words, ‘Now, back in my day . . . ’” What she wouldn’t give to introduce Hannah to Grandma Fay. “Did you know my grandmother cooked for FDR once right here at The Candlelight?”

Kelly’s eyes widened with interest. “Back when it was a boardinghouse?”

Maddy nodded. “Rose has the clippings upstairs in a box of stuff she’s been gathering for Lassiter. Apparently FDR came through here during the 1932 presidential campaign and stopped to visit with the locals.”

“Wow,” Kelly said. “If these walls could talk.”

Maddy faked a violent shudder. “If these walls could talk, I’d be on my way back to Seattle. Rosie and I fought a lot of battles in this house. I think my old room still echoes with some of them.”

“The PBS crew is really wired about the wedding.” Kelly wiped out the grinder with a damp cloth, then dried it carefully. “You’d think nobody in town had ever gotten married before.”

“Tommy Kennedy told me some of those smart alecks at O’Malley’s are taking odds on whether or not your dad and I make it to our first anniversary.” She stifled another yawn. “I told him to put fifty on
you bet we will
for me.”

Kelly grinned. “Crystal did another preinterview with me last week, and all she could talk about was how many times your aunts and cousins have been married. Your family is legendary.”

“You’d think our last name was Gabor.”

Kelly frowned. “Who?”

Nothing like an outdated celebrity reference to remind you of the passage of time. “Ancient Hollywood history, Kel. Hand me the cream, would you please?”

Kelly pulled a new quart of half-and-half from the fridge and handed it to Maddy. “Crystal and the others are all so skinny. I can’t believe they use cream.”

How long would it be before Hannah started worrying about calories and cellulite? The thought of what lay ahead made Maddy terribly sad. She had spent much of her own life trying to diet and exercise herself into someone else’s ideal of beauty and would trade five years of her life for the chance to save Hannah from the same fate.

“I wish you’d seen them at lunch. You would’ve thought they were coming off a five-day fast.”

“I wish I could eat like that and stay so thin.”

“You’ve lost a little weight lately, haven’t you?” Maddy said carefully.

Kelly beamed an enormous smile at her. “You can see it?”

Maddy nodded. “Don’t lose any more,” she cautioned. “Don’t get too thin.”

“There’s such a thing as too thin?”

“Did you take a close look at Crystal? You can count her ribs through her T-shirt.”

“So?”

“So you’re beautiful exactly the way you are. Don’t mess with perfection.”

“You sound like my father.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s always telling me to stop dieting.”

“Listen to the man. He knows what he’s talking about.”

Crystal popped up in the doorway, and Maddy and Kelly both jumped in guilty surprise.

“Do you think we could have some popcorn?” Crystal asked. “Cheese popcorn if you have it. Ray the camerman’s not into refined sugar. Thanks!” She disappeared back down the hallway to Maddy’s office.

Kelly rolled her eyes in mock dismay. “I’d put a padlock on the fridge tonight if I were you.”

“The heck with the fridge,” Maddy said with a guilty laugh. “I’d like to put a padlock on the front door.”

“Better not let Mrs. DiFalco hear you say that.”

“I know. That was very uninnkeeperish of me.”

“I hear you’re not going to be an innkeeper much longer,” Kelly said as she arranged cups and saucers on an enormous wooden tray.

“What?”

“I heard you’re going to manage that tea shop Ms. Westmore’s opening up.”

Maddy looked up from pouring cream into the pitchers. “Where did you hear that?”

Kelly’s cheeks turned red. “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said. “At least, not exactly. I dropped something off in Aunt Claire’s mailbox on my way here, and Mrs. DiFalco was there and she—”

“Talks kind of loud,” she said. “I warned her about it. One day we won’t have any family secrets left.”

Kelly leaned against the kitchen counter and fiddled with the fringed end of the dish towel. “Is Aunt Claire really going to leave O’Malley’s?”

“I don’t know, Kel. Rose and Olivia are talking to her about it right now.” And taking an awfully long time, come to think about it. Her mother was supposed to be home by seven to watch Hannah and the inn so Maddy could claim her seat at the poker table.

“Does my dad know?”

“I told him last night, then swore him to secrecy. Rose wasn’t too thrilled with me. It was supposed to be hush-hush until they spoke with your aunt.”

“Are you excited about running a tea shop?”

“Yes, I am.” At last! Her first genuine smile of the day. “They’re going to put me in the back where I can’t upset the paying customers. It’s a match made in heaven.”

“What about your radio show? I thought—”

“So did I,” Maddy said, “but it doesn’t look like my big break is going to happen anytime soon.”

“But you love the radio program. You can’t quit.”

“Who said anything about quitting? I can broadcast from Cuppa. It’s only once a week. Rose and Olivia think it will be great publicity for the shop.”

“You can’t give up on your dreams,” Kelly said with surprising force. “Just because something unexpected comes your way doesn’t mean you stop reaching for the things you really want.”

“I’m not giving up my dreams, Kel, but I’m not independently wealthy, and neither is your dad. I have to think about the future—Hannah’s future in particular—and this was too good an opportunity to let slip by.”

“I thought Hannah’s father was rich.”

“Tom is very comfortable,” she said carefully, “and he has provided well for Hannah, but that has nothing to do with me or my responsibilities.”

“You lived with him for a long time, didn’t you?”

Where was Crystal the Tattooed Wonder when you needed her? “We split a few months after Hannah was born.”

Kelly looked down, but not before Maddy saw the look in her eyes. She thought she was pregnant. Any woman who had ever been late knew that look of fear and wonderment in the girl’s eyes.

“Would you have married Hannah’s father?” The question broke what was quickly becoming an uncomfortable silence. “I mean, if he had wanted children.”

“Tom already had children,” Maddy was quick to point out. “Grown children and grandchildren. He felt he was too old and settled in his ways to start again.”

“So you decided to do it on your own.”

“There was no decision involved,” Maddy said simply. “I wanted Hannah from the second I knew she was on her way.”

“So you never thought about—”

“Not having her? No, I never did.” She had been one of the lucky ones, old enough and settled enough to be able to embrace motherhood as a wonderful, if unexpected, adventure. Even Tom’s decision to split with her, as devastating as it had been, hadn’t caused her to rethink her position. The one thing she had been sure of was that she wanted the baby.

“Do you ever wish things had been different?”

“For a long time I did. I kept wishing Tom would change his mind and Hannah could have her daddy with her every single day, but it wasn’t in the cards.” She glanced at the engagement ring on her finger and smiled. “Now I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Kelly nodded thoughtfully, and Maddy wondered what was going through her head. How on earth did you explain your first real love to the daughter of the man you were going to marry? How did you explain to a fiercely intelligent, deeply romantic young woman that even though life didn’t always work out quite the way you thought it would, it mostly worked out exactly the way it should if you gave it time?

When you were seventeen you believed love conquered everything. By the time you were thirty-three, you had learned that love conquered everything but itself. Only time could do that.

Claire would probably have had a better, more maternal answer. One that managed to be truthful and tactful at the same time, an answer perfectly tailored for the delicate sensibilities of a seventeen-year-old heart. They were only a few years apart in age, but the difference in parental experience was wide.

The coffee machine pinged to let them know it had finished brewing, and Maddy quickly poured the hot liquid into two insulated carafes while Kelly continued fidgeting with the fringe on the dish towel. Clearly she had something on her mind, a prospect that filled Maddy with apprehension. It could be as simple as wanting to make sure Maddy was good enough for Aidan or, as she suspected, as complicated as an unexpected pregnancy, and it was obvious that her answers were being considered very carefully.

I’m not ready for this,
Maddy thought as Kelly worried the fringe. Hannah was barely five. She had counted on a good eight or nine years before the questions started turning dicey. This was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool in the middle of the night when all you knew how to do was the dead man’s float. She was terrified of saying too much or too little or not the right things. This sudden leap toward intimacy had her off balance and feeling very uncertain of exactly what was expected of her role as a quasi-friend/future stepmother.

She was grateful for the distraction when Crystal popped up in the doorway one more time and asked if there was any cheesecake left over from dinner and asked if maybe they could add a platter of sandwiches while they were at it.

“Can you spell
expense account?
” Maddy grumbled as soon as the girl was out of earshot. “Maybe we should just send them down to—” She stopped abruptly. “Kelly, what’s wrong?”

The words had barely left her mouth when Aidan’s daughter sagged against the sink and would have hit the floor if Maddy hadn’t grabbed her by the shoulders and managed to lead her safely to a chair.