Take the Long Way Home (11 page)

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” Her throat
clenched and she had to force the question out. She wasn’t sure if
she was asking for his advice or fishing for a compliment.

“I think it’s a great idea,” he said,
gratifying her more than she’d expected. “We always have a
patrolman stationed at the gate when there’s a game. I can tell him
to let you alone.”

“It won’t be me handing out the fliers,” she
said. “I’ll be at the shop. I was figuring I’d get some kids to
hand them out.”

“Good idea.”

Damn. His approval shouldn’t make her so
happy, but it did.

“So you’ll be officially open on
Saturday?”

“Ten a.m.”

“I’ll stop by.”

“I’ll give you a freebie,” she said.

“No need.” She heard him inhale a deep
breath. “Any chance I can get you to come for dinner before
then?”

She’d called her father for advice and it
hadn’t destroyed her. Maybe she could eat dinner in his house
without being destroyed, too. “I don’t know. Tomorrow doesn’t give
you much time to plan, and Friday’s the night before the opening.
I’ll be kind of nervous.”

“All the more reason to come. You don’t want
to be worrying about fixing dinner the night before your big
day.”

She wouldn’t have worried about fixing
dinner. She would have satisfied herself with some fruit and
cheese, or a cup of yogurt. Or her old standby, soup from a can.
“Okay,” she said. “But I can’t stay late.”

“Of course not. Listen, honey, I’ve got to
go. Come around six on Friday. We’ll see you then.”

We.
His girlfriend would be there, too. Probably not a bad thing,
Maeve thought. Gus could be a buffer. She could dilute the tension,
like ice cubes in hard liquor. And she
had
been the woman who’d put Maeve’s
father back together again. If Maeve’s life was truly in Brogan’s
Point now, Gus Naukonen was going to be a part of it.

She disconnected the call, stuffed her phone
back into her pocket, and allowed herself a brief shudder. Then she
squared her shoulders, smiled at Joyce, and said, “Let’s design a
flier.”

A gray drizzle softened the edges of the
city. Quinn huddled under the overhang, savoring the chill in the
air. At the far end of the overhang, two other residents, both in
blue scrubs like him, smoked cigarettes, their voices muted. He
pressed his cell phone to his ear and listened to the rhythmic purr
of the phone ringing on the other end.

After a few rings, a woman’s voice reached
him: “Cookie’s, how can I help you?” He recognized her voice. She’d
answered the last time he’d phoned, too—and that time she’d
identified the store as Torelli’s by mistake. She must have
rehearsed her lines since then, because she said the right name
this time.

“Hey. Is Maeve there?”

“Just a minute.”

He waited, watching tiny raindrops glisten
like dewdrops in the hair on his forearm. Then the voice he wanted
to hear reached him: “Hello?”

“Maeve. It’s Quinn.”

An SUV cruising down Cambridge Street hit a
puddle, spraying water toward the sidewalk. Quinn took a quick step
to the left and the water missed him. Years ago, he’d been able to
evade linesmen racing toward him on the field; now he evaded cars
hitting puddles. He still had the moves.

“Hi,” she said. He might be imagining it,
but her voice sounded warm and welcoming.

“Those cookies you gave me last night were
great. No, better than great. The best cookies I’ve ever eaten.”
That was no exaggeration. It had taken him nearly a half hour to
eat them. He’d nibbled them slowly, one luscious bite at a time.
Like a wine expert, he’d tasted them mindfully, trying to divine
the mix of flavors in each mouthful: sweet, spicy, crumbly,
crunchy, chewy.

“Can I put that in an advertisement?” she
asked.

“Sure. I’ll be your pitchman. Give me a
sandwich sign and I’ll march up and down Mass Avenue.”

“I’m not planning to sell my cookies in
Boston,” she said.

“Not yet. Wait until word spreads about
them. You’ll have to set up franchises. You’ll be bigger than
Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks combined.”

She laughed. Her laughter reminded him of
that tinkly little bell above the door of her shop. It reminded him
of the blended colors of her eyes, green and gray and gold. It
reminded him of her kiss.

Then again, pretty much everything reminded
him of her kiss.

“So,” he said, “I’m on call in the ER
tonight. It’ll probably be a busy night. Bad weather means car
accidents, and car accidents mean broken bones. But I’m getting
sprung Friday night, and I’m off through the whole weekend. I was
hoping we could do another late-night run to the Lobster Shack on
Friday.”

“I can’t,” she said.

He refused to be discouraged. “Doesn’t have
to be Lobster Shack. We could go someplace else.”

“I’m having dinner Friday night with my
father,” she said, the bell-like tinkle gone from her tone.

Another car cruised by, and he once again
skip-stepped sideways to avoid getting splashed. “You don’t sound
too excited about that.”

“It’s going to be stressful,” she
predicted.

“Maybe we could meet afterward and do
something stress-free. Grab a drink or something.”

“I’d like that.” Over the dull din of
traffic and rain, he heard her sigh. “But I can’t make a late night
of it. Saturday is my grand opening. I’ve got to get up really
early to bake the final batches of cookies before ten a.m.”

“No problem. I’ve got a big day Saturday,
too.”

“Right.” Now she sounded subdued. He wished
he could see her. Did she know how expressive her face was when she
spoke, how much her eyes told him?

“So…I can get to Brogan’s Point by around
nine on Friday. How does that work for you?”

“Fine.”

“Where should I pick you up?”

Another pause, and she gave him an address
on Atlantic Avenue. He patted his pocket for something to write on
but came up empty. “Why don’t you text your address to me?” he
suggested, and recited his cell number. He doubted her store phone
would have caller ID.

“Okay.” She repeated his number back to
him.

“That’s it.” He pictured her, her hair
pulled back, her slim body protected by an apron, a smudge of flour
powdering her cheek as she wrote down his number on one of her
Cookie’s bags, or a Cookie’s napkin, or the inside of her wrist. He
recalled her hands, her slender fingers ending in clipped,
unpolished nails. No fancy manicure, no long claws and flashy
enamel. Like a surgeon, she had hands that worked, not hands that
were pampered and elegant.

“I’ll see you Friday, then,” he said.

“Okay. I’ve got to go. ’Bye, Quinn.”

“Good-bye.” He had to go, too. The smokers
at the other end of the doorway had finished their cigarettes and
headed back indoors. The duration of a cigarette seemed to be the
standard by which residents, even those who didn’t smoke, measured
their breaks. If things were calm, you might be able to take a
two-smoke break. When the place was hopping, though, the length of
a break rarely exceeded the time it took to smoke one
cigarette.

He’d taken one-cigarette’s worth of break,
and he ought to get back to work. But he lingered outside, standing
in the shadowed doorway, inhaling the cool, fresh air and staring
at the cell phone in his palm. After a minute, it dinged and the
text-message light flashed. He swiped the screen, and there was her
address. And her cell phone number.

Grinning, he wiped a raindrop from his cheek
and headed back inside.

***

Gus spotted Ed as soon as he swung open the
door and stepped inside. He ran a hand through his rain-damp hair
and smiled at her. With a nod, she reached for a mug and carried it
to the coffee maker. Three-thirty was his usual time to stop by for
a cup of coffee, if he wasn’t off somewhere chasing a perp or
solving a case, or in Salem testifying in court.

By the time he reached the bar, she had the
mug filled and waiting for him. He leaned over the polished wood to
brush her lips with a quick kiss. She wasn’t a big fan of public
displays of affection, but the few customers scattered around the
room in the middle of a sleepy, drizzly Wednesday were busy talking
or staring into their drinks. She doubted anyone noticed.

Ed settled onto a bar stool and grinned. “I
got Maeve to agree to come for dinner.”

“Really?” That was a major accomplishment.
She knew how hard he was struggling to stitch the frayed threads of
his relationship with his daughter back together. “When?”

“Friday night.”

Gus raised her eyebrows. “Then you’ll be on
your own.”

His grin faded. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t be there on Friday. It’ll be too
busy here. All the TGIF people.”

“You could take an hour off,” he said, his
tone pleading.

But she couldn’t take an hour off, not on a
Friday evening. She couldn’t leave Manny to cover the bar by
himself. “Sorry. Can you change the date?”

“Are you kidding? If I suggest changing the
date, she’ll change it to sometime in November. I got her to agree
to come. I’m not giving her the chance to back out.”

“Then you’ll have dinner with her yourself.
That might be for the best, anyway.” Gus didn’t have to repair her
relationship with Maeve. They didn’t have a relationship to repair.
She’d met the girl once. She cared for Maeve because Maeve was Ed’s
daughter, but the Nolan family difficulties, the wounds and the
scars, were theirs alone. As a bartender, Gus had long ago learned
that she could not fix other people’s problems. She could listen,
she could console, and she could occasionally point someone in the
right direction. But she was no therapist. If some patrons thought
she was, that was because she was an excellent bartender. She knew
enough to keep her mouth shut and her customers’ glasses full.
Usually, the act of talking and unburdening themselves was enough
to help them find their own answers and solutions.

Ed wasn’t drinking anything harder than
coffee, and his problem with Maeve was not going to be solved over
the bar. He’d hurt his daughter—not deliberately, not with evil in
his heart, but because he’d been hurting so badly himself. She’d
fled. Now, ten years later, she’d come back. How they learned to be
a family once more was up to them.

“I can’t cook for shit,” Ed
muttered, focusing on the one thing he’d undoubtedly thought
Gus
could
fix—an
edible dinner for his daughter.

“Pick up one of those rotisserie chickens at
Shaw’s. And a tub of mashed potatoes, and a deli salad.”

“I finally get my daughter to agree to come
for dinner, and I’m going to serve her a meal that was cooked in a
supermarket?”

As opposed to a meal that Gus had cooked.
She loved Ed, but he could be a little dense sometimes. “If you’d
rather cook something for her yourself,” she said pointedly, “then
take off from work early and go home and cook.” If Gus had done the
cooking, that was what she would have had to do.

He sighed. “She’s so thin,” he murmured.
“She should eat some potatoes. I don’t know if she will,
though.”

“You know, Ed…” She gave his hand a gentle
pat. “She didn’t accept your invitation for the cuisine.”

Ed gave her a long, stark stare. Then he
nodded. “Yeah.” He sighed again, looking pensive, even a little
afraid. Her big, strong police detective, a guy who went
head-to-head with criminals on a regular basis, was actually scared
about having dinner alone with his daughter. He didn’t want Gus
there so she could be some sort of domestic hostess, preparing a
feast. He wanted her there to help him connect with Maeve, to
provide a buffer or a bridge. To pick up the pieces if he and Maeve
both wound up shattered.

She’d do that for him if she could. She’d do
it much more willingly than she’d cook dinner for him. But she
couldn’t do it on Friday.

So he would have to do it himself. He’d have
to man up and be the father he hadn’t been for his daughter so many
years ago. Damage had been done, but Maeve had come back to
Brogan’s Point, and she had agreed to have dinner with him. It was
time for them both to heal.

Maeve was nervous. She could think of
several reasons why, but she couldn’t decide which of those reasons
was making her itch and twitch as if tiny anxiety bugs were nipping
at her heart.

Everything in the shop was ready for
tomorrow. With Joyce’s help, she’d designed and printed a hundred
fliers announcing Cookie’s grand opening and offering a
buy-two-get-one-free promotion to attract first-day customers.
Joyce’s twelve-year-old daughter and two of her friends agreed to
hand out the fliers at the high school football stadium before the
homecoming game in exchange for ten dollars apiece, plus free
cookies.

Maeve had posted her commercial license and
inspection notice on the wall. She’d contacted the Brogan’s Point
weekly newspaper and invited a reporter to report on the store’s
opening, and she’d bought a month’s worth of ads in the paper in
the hope that this would encourage the reporter to say nice things
about her establishment. She’d completed the price board, stocked
up on beverages, checked and double-checked her inventory and
mapped out which special cookies she’d be adding to her standard
offerings each day for the first week. She’d set the alarm on her
phone to wake her up at four a.m. Saturday morning, so she could
get to the shop and bake batches that would be fresh and chewy once
the doors opened.

Millions of things could still go wrong, and
she would be justified in fretting about all those millions of
things. Or she could assume everything related to the store’s
opening would go perfectly—which left her free to fret about her
dinner with her father that evening, instead.