Just Desserts (6 page)

Lizzie fell silent for a moment. “It's not like you aren't great at what you do.”

“Lots of people are great at what they do,” she reminded her daughter, “and they live their entire lives without a single Cinderella moment.”

“Karma?” Lizzie asked. “Like maybe you did something wonderful in another life and now you're being rewarded.”

“I'm Catholic,” she reminded her daughter. “I don't get rewarded until I die.”

Lizzie, who was forging a more ecumenical path between her Catholic mother and Jewish father, sighed. “Does there have to be a reason?”

“You're the logical, scientific one. I thought you believed everything that happens, happens for a reason.”

“Luck is luck,” her daughter said. “Luck doesn't need a reason. It just is.”

That was what Hayley used to say about love and look where that had gotten her.

She tried to push the negative thought from her mind for her daughter's sake.

“Your dad and I used to eat at Olive Garden all the time,” she said after Margo dropped off their entrees. “We went to the one near Aunt Fiona's old house the day I found out I was pregnant with you.”

She rarely spoke about Michael and when she did, it usually wasn't complimentary. The man had come close to ruining her life and Lizzie's with his gambling and risk-taking. It wasn't an easy thing to forget. She tried to be careful around Lizzie but unfortunately she was only human. Like it or not, the man was still her daughter's father and always would be. She needed to remember that for Lizzie's sake if not her own.

“That's when you two were happy together, right?”

“We were trying, honey.” How young Lizzie looked, how innocent and hungry for bits and pieces of her family's past. “Sometimes we were very happy. The day you were born was probably the happiest day of our lives.”

Lizzie fell quiet, directing her attention to the plate of lasagna in front of her while Hayley picked at her grilled chicken and pretended it was shrimp scampi drowning in butter and garlic. The silence between them could be a brief one or it could last for hours. The last few months had been a roller-coaster ride of emotions where Lizzie was concerned and there were times when Hayley hadn't a clue what to say or do.

“Hormones,” Michelle, her former sister-in-law had said. Michie was the mother of four teenagers and an expert on the subject. “There's nothing you can say or do to make her hear you until she's ready. Just sit back, strap yourself in, and wait for the storm to pass.”

Hayley couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more than hormones going on. Lizzie had planned to visit her father in Florida over the Christmas/Chanukah holidays but Michael had begged off, saying he had some business to take care of in the Bahamas. He said winter break wasn't good for him and then a month later he cancelled their plans for spring break. Easter and Passover raced by without acknowledgment. Eleven times he had promised his daughter—the daughter who adored him—that they would spend some time together and eleven times he had broken her heart.

Lizzie had tried to put a brave face on it, but Hayley knew she was hurting badly. Given the chance, she could happily kill Michael with her bare hands and not feel one single second of regret.

“Did you miss having a dad when you were growing up?”

The question brought Hayley up short. “You can't miss what you never had.” She aimed for bright and breezy honesty.

Lizzie didn't smile. “I mean, didn't you ever wish you could have had a dad you could talk to?”

“What makes you ask?”

“I was thinking about Grandma Jane and how she's coming home soon and I started wondering. That's all.”

“Is something wrong?”

Lizzie shrugged and looked away. Hayley followed her gaze to the table by the window where a middle-aged father and his teenage daughter were talking earnestly over plates of spaghetti and meatballs. A small event in the scheme of things but one neither of them had ever experienced.

“You're missing your dad, aren't you?”

“Not so much,” Lizzie said with a vigorous shake of her head. She looked down at her lasagna. “Maybe a little.”

“I know he e-mails you. Has he been in touch?”

“You know.” Amazing how inarticulate her straight-A child could become when it benefited her. “Sometimes he leaves comments on my blog.”

“Anything I should know about?”

She shrugged. “Just regular stuff.”

Whatever that meant. Hayley was constantly torn between wanting to keep close tabs on her daughter's creative outlet and understanding the girl's need for breathing room. It was a difficult and dangerous balancing act. She visited Lizzie's blog every few weeks just to keep an eye on things but she knew that what she saw wasn't necessarily all there was. The rest she had to take on faith.

That wasn't an easy thing for a worrier to do.

“School will be over before you know it. Grandma Connie got a great deal on tickets. She can't wait to see you in July.”

“Will Dad be there?”

“I think he's there now,” Hayley said, treading carefully. Michael wasn't known as the escape artist for nothing. “Why don't you e-mail him and ask about his plans?” If she had her way, she would hog-tie the son of a bitch to his mother's lanai until Lizzie got there, but the authorities might not take kindly to the idea.

“If you want to talk…” She said it gently, letting the words drift across the table and into her daughter's ear. These days there seemed to be dozens of invisible barriers dancing around her daughter. She never knew which of her approaches would succeed and which would be deflected. No topic was more fraught with peril than Michael Goldstein.

Lizzie broke off a piece of lasagna with the edge of her fork. “Did Grandma Jane date a lot?”

“Define ‘a lot.'”

“At all.”

“Not so you'd notice,” Hayley said. “A dinner here and there. The occasional black-tie thing.” Professional engagements for the most part. Or at least that was what Hayley had always believed.

“Didn't she ever fall in love?”

“If she did, she didn't tell me.”

“Is she gay?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So why didn't she have a baby with one of her professor friends instead of going to a sperm bank when she decided she wanted a kid?”

Why indeed. She had only asked herself the same question every day for the first eighteen years of her life.

“You know your grandmother,” she said finally. “She's a scientist. She doesn't believe in leaving anything to chance. She wanted a genius child who would be guided by logic, intellect, and the life of the higher mind and the sperm bank promised they could deliver one.” She lifted her glass of iced tea in salute. “Instead she got me.” A former wild child who loved tattoos, piercings, and boys with double-digit IQs who thought the life of the mind was something you got around to when you were too old for anything else. “I'm surprised she didn't sue the sperm bank for false advertising.”

Lizzie giggled, a sound Hayley hadn't heard in a long while.

“And you wonder why I'm a worrier,” she said, laughing along with her kid. “If your grandmother couldn't control her destiny, what chance do I have?”

Mumbai, India

John Roman Lassiter IV, professor of antiquities and dean emeritus of the Colchester School for Applied Studies, had the voice of a 1940s radio announcer: a vibrant, rich baritone that made a woman's spine tingle.

The first time Jane Maitland heard him speak she had been enduring a dinner party, engaged in conversation with Arnold Rosenblatt, the man responsible for isolating the effects of noise on indigenous populations of hualanim fish off the coast of Indonesia. A thoroughly fascinating topic and one that usually would have commanded all of her attention and intellect, but this voice, a truly mellifluous, wonderful voice, rose up from the din and ensorcelled her.

How strange to think that after a life lived in happy solitude and singular independence, the sound of a man's voice could change the landscape with the ferocity of a tsunami.

Nothing, not even motherhood, had ever swayed her from her course. She loved Hayley deeply but her inadequacies as a mother had manifested themselves early on. She had watched younger parents with their children and envied the easy intimacy they shared with their offspring. For a brief moment in time she had wondered if she had done the right thing, if her decision to raise the child alone hadn't been the ultimate manifestation of selfishness and not the gesture of deep generosity she had intended it to be.

Those early years were an experiment doomed to failure. Hayley had traveled with her to South America on a research grant, endured an endless expedition in the Bering Strait, and somehow managed to survive a harrowing storm off the coast of Cape Hatteras where Jane had been monitoring the effects of an oil spill on various marine migratory patterns.

It became abundantly clear to everyone that she couldn't mother a child alone and pursue her vocation simultaneously. Certainly not with any degree of success in either field. By the time Hayley started high school, it was obvious that the girl needed a stable, traditional school environment and Jane had turned to her sister Fiona for help.

She chose to believe her decisions had been wise and nurturing and that her willful, scattered, loving daughter had benefited from the presence of two strong women in her life rather than the absence of one man, but as the years wore on, she grew less certain.

Had she done the right thing? She wasn't sure she would ever know. So many decisions made in times of stress and uncertainty, decisions made with a kind heart and generous spirit, decisions that could never be undone. Who could say what was right and what was wrong?

She had been thinking a great deal lately about her professional legacy as well, the lifetime of knowledge that she would leave behind as a foundation for future generations. In the shadow of her eightieth year, she had expected many things to come her way: more acclaim, greater responsibility, the gathering awareness that as her time grew shorter, the decisions she made would grow in importance.

She had never expected love to be part of the equation.

But there he was, seated across from her at the breakfast table in her rented flat, reading his copy of the
Times
with his glasses perched on the end of his regal, aquiline nose, humming something soft and Mozartian while she sipped her coffee and sifted through the documents involved in their return to the States.

The swiftness of it all still had her feeling dazed. After the funding for her tour was cut off, she had been bombarded with lecture opportunities from every major university and oceanographic lab on the planet. She had settled on a four-month lecture/study appointment with a research group in southwestern Australia when a prolonged bout of indigestion sent her to see Dr. Athalye at University Hospital and the landscape of her life was thrown into sharp, uncompromising focus one last time.

She didn't want some attorney on retainer telling Hayley the things her mother should have told her a long time ago.

In a strange way there was comfort to be found in knowing her time was limited. Each minute, every hour, became more precious. You strove harder, cared more deeply, loved with an intensity that the young and healthy couldn't possibly understand.

John cried when she told him and, to her surprise, his tears unlocked her own sorrow and she cried with him. She cried for the first time in almost forty years and a feeling of deep joy washed over and around her, lifting her up higher and higher to a place a scientist would tell you couldn't possibly exist.

When he asked her to marry him, she said yes without hesitation.

He looked at her over the top of his paper and smiled. She felt like she had been smiling back at him all her life.

“Everything in order?” That voice! That mellow, dark-coffee-with-cream voice!

“For the most part. I need to confirm our flight plans but everything else is as it should be.”

“Will your daughter meet us at the airport?”

Ah, the lone cloud on the bright horizon finally appeared. “I'm having a car service pick us up, John. Lakeside is a fair distance from Newark Liberty.”

He considered her with steady gray eyes set in a tanned and lined face few women would consider handsome. His skin was rough and leathery. His eyes were surrounded by a network of lines and wrinkles that were testament to every one of his seventy-something years on this battered and aching planet. There were times when she believed, foolishly, romantically, that he could see into her soul. The thesis, of course, was wrong on many levels. Not the least of which involved the existence (or nonexistence) of a soul. But somehow she continued to believe.

“Our engagement must have come as a considerable surprise to her.”

That tangled and terrible web…