Rhymes With Cupid (16 page)

I’d been wrong about him. The Cupid doll had made that much clear. He wasn’t a player and he wasn’t a pig. He was sweet, caring, and genuine—the elusive two percent. So different from Matt Love that the two barely belonged in the same category of humankind. But then again, Patrick could have been a full-fledged and official saint and it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d already told him I didn’t date. Also, he’d made it crystal clear that his crush on me was history, and that he was interested in Dina.

Which just brought me right back to my original question: Why was he being so nice to me? Did he still think it might somehow help him to score points with Dina? Or, if that wasn’t it, did he have some kind of rare disorder? (Not scurvy, obviously, but some genetic brain disease that led to chronic niceness?) Or was he just trying to drive me crazy with guilt for having been so mean to him?

Whatever the explanation was, this couldn’t go on. I needed to find out what was up, and I couldn’t wait until Valentine’s Day to do it, either.

Chapter 16

T
he first thing I did when I got home from work that day was march into the kitchen to find the jacket Patrick had let me borrow on the night of the raccoons. I also picked up the too-big Nikes, sliding them into a plastic bag. Then I had a handful of crackers with cheese. (It was bad enough having to confront Patrick without doing it on an empty stomach.) Then I went upstairs to make sure there weren’t any cheese bits stuck between my teeth and to put on some lip gloss. Then I tied my hair back into a ponytail and looked at myself from different angles in the mirror. Then I decided the ponytail made my face look too pointy, took out the elastic, and let my hair down. Then I checked my teeth again, just to be certain.

But then . . .
then
I marched right out the front door like a girl on a mission. I was halfway down the front path, stomping through the snow, when I remembered I’d forgotten something: the opal pendant. Each day, since the afternoon I’d discovered it belonged to Patrick’s grandmother, I’d been making myself mental notes to return it. And, each day, for one reason or another, I’d convinced myself it wasn’t quite the right time. The night I’d shouted at Patrick in the backyard, I’d carefully placed it in a small wooden box I kept in my desk drawer, coiling the chain carefully before closing the lid. Now I ran back up the stairs in my boots, tracking snow across the hardwood to retrieve it.

A minute later, I was back on Patrick’s doorstep. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed the knocker and banged it three times. The red car, still in the driveway, was covered by a thin layer of snow. Patrick
had
to be home. I knocked again. The sound echoed across the empty street, and still nobody answered. I walked back up the path and looked at the upstairs windows, expecting to see the flick of a curtain closing. I knew Patrick was inside, but he was determined to avoid me. Well, too bad, I thought. I picked up the knocker again. I’d stay there all night if I needed to. I’d knock until all the other neighbors complained about the noise. I’d bang on that door until my fingers went numb and my nose started to run from the cold and the snow piled up all around me. I’d knock until the sun—

“Oh. Elyse. Good to see you again.” The door opened and Patrick’s grandfather peered out. “You’ve come back for the pickles.” He smiled and slid his reading glasses into his pocket, motioning for me to come in. “They’ve got a good crunch to them. You won’t be disappointed.” I stomped the snow off my boots and stepped into the house. Then I wiped the fog off my glasses and put them back on, looking around for signs of Patrick.

“Oh, no. I’m sure they’re really crunchy,” I said as patiently as I could manage. “But I just came to talk to Patrick about something.” My heart was beating fast and my palms were sweaty—just being in his house—just wondering how on earth I was going to begin this impossible conversation.

“Well now.” The old man glanced at his watch. “Patrick’s gone out with a friend to practice his music. I don’t expect him back anytime soon.”

“But isn’t that his car out front?” I didn’t mean for the words to come out in the accusing tone that they did, but if Patrick was hiding upstairs—if his grandfather was lying to me—I had to find out.

Mr. Connor went to the front window and looked out into the driveway. “That it is,” he said, nodding. “He must have walked. Jax doesn’t live very far from here.”

“Oh.” I gulped, feeling like a jerk yet again. What kind of person accuses a sweet old man of lying to her face? A person like me, apparently. “Right. I’ll get going then. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Quite all right,” Mr. Connor said, shuffling toward the kitchen. “You haven’t disturbed me at all. Actually, I’m glad you came by. I was just about to put the kettle on. Would you stay for a cup of tea?”

“Oh, no. Really. Thanks. I should go.”

“Wonderful,” Mr. Connor said, “Earl Grey or orange pekoe?” Clearly he didn’t have his hearing aid in, again. “Now, I hope you don’t take honey, because I’m afraid we’re all out. But I keep a bag of butter cookies hidden in the vegetable crisper where Patrick won’t see them. He’s always worrying about my cholesterol, but I only have one every now and then.”

“I—” I started, meaning to make my excuses in a much louder voice, but then I stopped myself. After all, what was the harm in having a cup of tea with Patrick’s grandfather? It wasn’t like I had anything important to do at home by myself, except for obsessing over how nervous I was about my driving test the next day, and how anxious I was about what I was going to say to Patrick when I finally did track him down. “I love butter cookies,” I finished, instead. “And Earl Grey is great, if you’ve got it.” I took off my boots, hung up Patrick’s coat in the closet, and dumped the bag with the Nikes near the stairs before following Mr. Connor into the kitchen.

A few minutes later, over a steaming cup of Earl Grey, Mr. Connor cleared his throat. “Now,” he said, sliding the plate of cold, store-bought butter cookies toward me and lowering himself carefully onto a kitchen chair, “Elyse. I’m sure
you
can tell me. What is a subwoofer?”

“Umm . . .” I stalled, caught by surprise. I’d been figuring we might talk about the weather, or else swap stories about people we knew who had diseases. Wasn’t that what old people liked to do?

“It sounds like something to do with a submarine, or something about a dog,” Patrick’s grandfather went on, “but that can’t be right.”

“It’s a music thing,” I said. “A kind of speaker, I think.”

He slapped the table. “That would be it. The names young people think up these days.” He shook his head. “Subwoofer. That’s what Patrick and Jax were working on. For a get-together. Testing the subwoofer. It’s got something to do with a little song he’s been rehearsing, about a girl with brown eyes.” I gulped and sat up straighter. His song was about Dina—Dina and her big brown eyes. I tried not to let the pain I was feeling show on my face. “You see, he thinks I’ve always got my hearing aid switched off.” The old man pulled on one earlobe. “But I don’t miss much.”

“Mr. Connor?” I asked, leaning forward. I had to find out what was going on.

“Oh. Frank. Call me Frank.”

“Okay. Frank?” I felt weird saying it. “Can I ask you something? Is Patrick nice to everyone?”

“Well. I suppose. . . .”

“I don’t mean just nice. But, you know, really nice? Over-the-top nice? He shoveled my driveway twice this week. And he bought me those raccoon-proof straps, plus a new phone even though it was my fault the old phone broke in the first place. And that’s barely the beginning of the list. There were the free driving lessons, and he baked me cookies, and brought my groceries home, plus he fixed my furnace and our broken wardrobe.”

“Well. If he’s been doing all that, that would explain it,” Frank said.

“Explain what?”

“Why he’s been singing in the shower the last few weeks. Patrick’s like his grandmother. My late wife, Jeannie. You’ve never seen anyone who got a kick out of helping others the way she did. Buy her jewelry or take her out to a fancy restaurant and she’d thank you kindly, but give her a bake sale to plan, a Girl Scout troop to lead, or a stray cat to nurse back to health and then you’d see her in her element. Her face would light up. Her whole outlook would change. But then, that’s all of us in some ways, I suppose,” he said philosophically, blowing on his tea to cool it. “Everyone needs to be needed. Even an old man like me.”

I squeezed my mug, letting the warmth seep into my fingers.
Everyone needs to be needed.
I’d never thought about it quite that way before.

“Now, take Patrick for example,” Frank went on. “When my wife died, I lost my rudder for a while there. Who wouldn’t, after fifty-five years of marriage? But I’ve got some get-up-and-go in me yet. I could shovel the driveway and get my own meals. I do, sometimes, but other times, I let Patrick look after me. Do you know why?” he asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I let him go on. “First of all, because I like the company. You get old like me, you don’t want to be alone watching
Jeopardy!
all day. For one thing, you start to see repeats, so you know all the answers, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is the quiet in the house. Just the length of the days. But I also like having Patrick here because Patrick likes to be here. There’s something to be said for doing everything yourself—being independent. Losing that independence is the hardest thing about old age—but then again, sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone else is to accept whatever it is they’ve got to offer you.” He reached for a butter cookie and bit in, letting the crumbs fall to his plate. “Some of his music is dreadful and loud, mind you,” he added. “Even when I haven’t got my hearing aid in. But that’s a small price to pay.”

I reached for another cookie, wondering what to make of all that. So, Patrick liked helping people. But what did that make me? Just some desperate, helpless, driving-impaired charity case he’d decided to take on? Because if
that
was what he thought of me, I didn’t care if I ever saw him again.

“He’s just like Jeannie. It’s uncanny, really. I don’t think I ever saw my wife so happy as the time, early on in our marriage, when I fell off the roof and broke both my legs.” Patrick’s grandfather actually laughed at the memory. “For once, I had no choice but to let her wait on me hand and foot. But I got better at letting her do things for me as the years went on. You see those pictures over there?” He pointed at the far wall where three small landscapes were hanging, side by side. One was a painting of a lake. Another was a tree in front of a sunset, and the third was a field with a windmill in it.

“Jeannie picked those out in a gift shop one time when we traveled out west. Gave them to me for my birthday. Do you notice anything about them?”

I stood up and walked toward the paintings. They were each in a heavy gold-edged frame but, besides that, there was nothing especially remarkable about them. It was the kind of art you usually saw in badly decorated waiting rooms, or old peoples’ houses. In fact, I could remember my grandmother having some practically identical paintings in her hallway.

“They’re really nice,” I lied, not wanting to hurt Mr. Connor’s feelings.

“They are, aren’t they? But they’re crooked. That’s what I can’t help but see. Jeannie hung them up herself. I was a cabinetmaker before I retired, so I know about making things level. But she bought me those and snuck them home in her suitcase. She hung them up the night before my birthday to surprise me, and she was so proud of herself, I’ve never had the heart to straighten them. So they’ve just stayed there. For, oh, I don’t know. The last fifteen years. Crooked.”

He looked fondly at the cheesy, misaligned landscapes and I followed his gaze. Now that he mentioned it, I could see it clearly. The one on the left-hand side was almost a full inch higher up on the wall than the other two. And the middle one tilted slightly to the right. You’d have to really love somebody, I thought, to put up with fifteen years of pretending you didn’t notice something like that.

Which reminded me . . . I slid a hand into my pocket and pulled out the pendant, putting it on the table in front of him. I sat down again. “I almost forgot. I found this,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to bring it over.” He took the necklace and laid the pendant in the palm of his hand. “I thought it might be yours. Or, I mean, Jeannie’s.”

“Well. I’ll be.” Patrick’s grandfather squinted at it more closely.

“There’s an inscription on the back,” I said, in case he’d forgotten or the writing would be too small for him to see. “It says, ‘MBW took AC 23-03-1917.’”

“Where did you find this?” he asked.

“Our attic. My mom found it between some floorboards, and then the first time I was over here, I noticed your wife was wearing one just like it in your wedding photo.”

“MBW. Mabel Beth Wain. That was my mother. And AC. Arthur Connor. My father.”

So that explained the dates. It belonged to Patrick’s
great
-grandmother. It
really was
nearly a hundred years old.

“My father gave this to my mother on the occasion of their engagement. When she took him to be her husband. Jeannie wore it on our wedding day. I’m sure you’ve heard of the tradition. What is it now? Something gold, something blue . . .”

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.” I helped him out. I’d watched enough romantic comedies with my mother to know.

“That’s it. This was three of the four. Old, blue, and borrowed. She was supposed to give it back to my mother after the wedding, but she lost it. Jeannie felt just awful about that, I remember.”

“How do you think it got into our attic?”

“We were married in that house. Did Patrick tell you that?” I shook my head. “My father built it, and Jeannie and I lived there until my parents died, at which time we sold it and moved back to the old house. We had our wedding service right out there, in the backyard, under the blossoming Japanese cherry tree.”

So there
was
a blossoming Japanese cherry. But it was a tree, not a shrub, and it was in our backyard, not Patrick’s front garden. And I
hadn’t
crushed it into a pile of twigs with the car!

I glanced over at Mr. Connor as he gently twirled the chain around his pockmarked hand. I pictured Patrick’s grandmother Jeannie in her lace wedding gown, descending our staircase to meet him, reaching out for his hand to steady herself in her high heels. I saw Mr. Connor looking at her, the way he was looking at the pendant now—with tender, bleary eyes—as they were about to embark on a lifetime together.