Take the Long Way Home (5 page)

She had the cookie store.

And she had the song. They both did. That
would bring them together again, even if they had to take the long
way to get there.

***

Gus lay beside Ed, her long, strong body
motionless as she slept. He ought to be thinking about her,
thinking about the sex they’d just enjoyed. He ought to be out cold
like her, lost in that sweet, deep slumber that followed
lovemaking. But he couldn’t sleep. His brain wouldn’t shut
down.

It turned out that, despite her still body
and slow, steady respiration, Gus wasn’t sleeping, either.
“Problem?” she asked, her voice thick with drowsiness.

“Maeve,” he said. Just that one syllable,
her name. His daughter. She’d been the only real problem in his
life since Sheila had died. He’d learned to live with this problem,
to go for days without even acknowledging it. Like a pebble in your
shoe, if you can’t shake it out, you get used to it, and after a
while, you develop calluses and you don’t feel it digging into your
sole anymore.

He’d lived entire days without feeling Maeve
dig into his soul. But now she was in Brogan’s Point. “How could
she come here and not tell me?”

“She was going to tell you when she was
ready,” Gus said, rolling onto her back and angling her pillow
against the headboard so she was, if not quite sitting, not quite
lying down, either.

“When would she be ready? She must have
planned this move for months. Some guy buys Torelli’s for her, and
she sweeps into town and starts a business. And she doesn’t tell
her father.”

“She would have, eventually.”

He peered at Gus. In the dark bedroom, she
was only outlines, shadows, a silhouette. Her short, fluffy hair
looked darker than it actually was, framed by the white linen of
the pillow case. Her shoulders were almost too broad, but on her
they looked feminine. She was a tall, athletic woman, a strong
woman. He loved her shoulders, almost as much as he loved her
breasts. But he was a guy. Breasts would always take priority over
shoulders in his mind.

“Eventually isn’t good enough,” he
complained.

“She was looking for you yesterday when she
came into the bar,” Gus reminded him. “She would have told you
then.”

“But I wasn’t in the bar, and she didn’t
tell me. She’s got my phone number. She’s got my address. There are
a million ways she could have reached me.”

“And she probably would have, if you hadn’t
jumped the gun.” Gus patted his arm. “She moved three thousand
miles to get here. It’s okay if you took the last step that brought
you together.”

He snorted. “You’re a bartender even when
you aren’t behind the bar. Dispensing words of wisdom.”

“Yeah. That’s me.” She must have sensed that
her wise words had consoled him, because she readjusted her pillow
and rolled onto her side, her back to him. “Invite her for dinner.
I’ll get Manny to cover for me at the bar. I’ll make a pot roast.
She can bring dessert.”

“I hope you like cookies,” Ed said. “That’s
what she’ll bring.”

“Cookies are fine,” Gus mumbled, the pillow
garbling her words.

Ed remained awake, his eyes focused on the
ceiling above the bed. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see
anything. But he could think.

And those thoughts were: cookies were fine,
but Maeve should have let him know she’d come home. She should have
come home a long time ago, and she should have let him welcome
her.

Cookie seemed to have settled into the
apartment on Atlantic Avenue more thoroughly than Maeve had. The
gray feline sauntered confidently around the small flat which
occupied the rear half of the building’s ground floor as if she’d
signed the lease herself. The apartment’s windows in the living
room, the kitchen, and the tiny bedroom overlooked the back alley,
not the ocean, and Cookie was an alley cat. She probably felt more
at home here than Maeve ever would, even if Maeve had been born and
raised in this town.

Filling Cookie’s dish with kibble, Maeve
recalled the day she’d found Cookie cowering behind the Dumpster in
the alley behind the Stoneworks Café. The kitten had been
emaciated, her fur patchy, her eyes too big for her face. Although
Lenny had been fanatical about not leaving any edible trash outside
the compost bin—because food outside the bin could attract
vermin—Maeve had carefully plucked some discarded shreds of chicken
out of the bucket she’d been lugging to the compost bin and laid
them on the ground a near the scrawny, timid cat. She couldn’t
place the chicken too close to the animal, who’d recoiled when
Maeve got within a few feet of her, so she’d set it on the
pavement, backed up to the kitchen door, and watched.

The cat had eyed her suspiciously, then
crept toward the treat, one inch at a time until she could pounce
on it. She’d devoured it so quickly, Maeve had been concerned that
she might choke. Had she actually taken the time to chew?

The cat hadn’t choked. And she’d been
waiting for Maeve outside the kitchen door the next day, when Maeve
lugged another bucket of waste to the compost bin.

After the fourth day, Maeve had confessed to
Lenny that she was feeding a stray cat in the alley. He’d reamed
her out about leaving food on the ground, although she’d insisted
that the food never remained there long. He’d lectured her about
taking responsibility for an animal when she could barely support
herself. He’d pointed out that she was sharing her home with three
roommates who might not want a cat in the house, and her landlord
might ban pets, and animals were needy and dirty and demanding…and
then he’d paid all the veterinary bills to have the cat vaccinated
and spayed, because Maeve couldn’t afford that.

Her roommates hadn’t minded Cookie. Her
landlord hadn’t cared. And Maeve had found a friend who’d seemed as
lost as Maeve herself had been when she’d arrived at the
Stonehouse’s front door a few years earlier, eighteen years old,
despondent, and desperate for a job.

Cookie was still shy—or, more accurately,
aloof. She didn’t seem frightened of people anymore. She just
didn’t want to bother with them. If she felt like being sociable,
she’d do a person the huge favor of letting that person stroke her.
But she didn’t need companionship, human or otherwise. She was
content to climb up onto the window sill and gaze out at the alley
behind the apartment while Maeve scrambled to shower, dress, and
fill Cookie’s bowls with food and water.

“Big day today,” she told Cookie as she
sliced an apple and a small chunk of cheddar and tossed the pieces
into a self-sealing plastic bag. She didn’t have time for more
breakfast than that. She’d make a pot of coffee once she got to the
shop. That would keep her going until she had some cookies to munch
on. “The store’s website goes live, and I bake the first batches to
make sure the ovens’ temperatures and timers are calibrated. Are
you excited for me?”

Cookie gave her a bored look.

“Well, you ought to care,” Maeve muttered as
she zipped the bag shut. “If this enterprise goes down the tubes,
you may have to go back to eating Dumpster food.” She knew that
wasn’t true. If the shop failed, she’d get another job. If she
could find a waitressing job in Seattle, she could find one in
Brogan’s Point. Now that she was twenty-eight, she could even work
in a bar. Her father’s girlfriend could hire her.

Wow. That would be pretty damned strange,
she thought with a shudder.

She wanted her cookie shop to succeed, and
she was working her butt off to make that happen. She loved baking
cookies. She loved the way they connected her to her mother. When
she flipped through the pages of the loose-leaf notebook of cookie
recipes she’d found among her mother’s things, some pages stained
from a smudge of butter or cocoa left by Maeve’s mother’s own
hands, she felt as if she was channeling her mother, bringing her
back to life in some way. The shop had to succeed to honor Sheila
Nolan.

And the shop had to succeed to honor Harry,
that modest, generous man who’d swooned over Maeve’s cookies at the
Stonehouse Café, and taught her about business, and placed so much
in faith in her.

And damn it, the shop had
to succeed because
Maeve
wanted it to. She hadn’t wanted anything in such a
long time. But honestly, she’d grown tired of drifting, wandering,
wanting nothing. For too long, she’d believed that if she wanted
nothing, she would never be disappointed. If you have no
expectations, life can’t wound you by failing to fulfill those
expectations.

For the past ten years, Maeve had believed
that without hope, without expectation, without want, she would be
safe from pain. Her mother’s death had wounded her so badly, she
didn’t think she could survive any more hurt.

But if her cookie shop failed… Yes, it would
hurt. She might be strong enough now to bear up. But she’d rather
not have to find out if she could endure that kind of
disappointment. She would rather not test her tolerance for pain.
If the shop succeeded, she wouldn’t have to find out if she really
was that strong.

“All right, Cookie,” she said as she stuffed
her snack into her tote and slung the straps over her shoulder.
“I’m out of here. Lock up behind me.”

The cat gave her a languid look, then
decided that giving her left front paw a thorough cleansing with
her tongue was a lot more important than paying attention the woman
who’d just filled her food dish.

Maeve left the apartment and locked up after
herself. Her apartment door was just a few feet from the building’s
rear exit onto the alley. Not having to climb stairs was a benefit
of living on the first floor, but the only thing she’d considered
when she’d signed the lease was the rent. The upstairs units were
floor-through, with lovely views of the town’s long stretch of
beach on the other side of Atlantic Avenue. Only the first floor
had been divided into two units, and the rear unit was much cheaper
than the front unit.

The car she’d bought was old enough that she
still experienced a spasm of relief whenever the engine turned
over. She’d had it checked out by a mechanic before she’d bought
it, and his assessment had been, “For the price you’re paying, this
baby’s not bad.” She’d paid a ridiculously low price for it,
though, so “not bad” was a relative thing.

But the car started that morning, although
the heat failed to kick in despite the chilly autumn air. The car’s
climate control wasn’t exactly reliable, but her shop was only
three miles away. Once the temperatures plummeted at the end of the
year, well, she owned warm knit gloves and a muffler. If the car
managed to survive a New England winter, she’d survive, too.

Steering onto Seaview
Avenue, she spotted the Cookie’s sign above the door, with its
gigantic chocolate-chip-cookie O’s. It made her smile.
This is mine,
she
thought.
I don’t know if I’ve earned it,
but it’s mine.
“Thank you, Harry,” she
whispered, her own private prayer of gratitude as she steered
around the building to the empty lot at the rear.

Later today there would be a second car
parked there; Joyce was scheduled to arrive around noon. She
probably didn’t need much training. She’d been a counter clerk in
the same building when it had been Torelli’s. She knew how to run a
cash register, how to scan credit cards, how to pluck sterile
tissue paper from its dispenser box and bag cookies without
touching them. She knew how to make customers happy. Besides, she
was a good ten years older than Maeve. She could probably teach her
boss a thing or two.

This morning, though, the place was Maeve’s
alone. Once she had her timing down, she would be arriving much
earlier, getting her first batches of cookies into the oven before
sunrise. The crisp round cookies could be baked in advance, but the
chewy ones, and the bars and squares, would go stale sitting around
for more than a day. Maeve planned to bag the stale cookies and
sell them at a discount. No sense wasting them. But her profit
margin was with the fresh cookies, sold at full price.

She had barely gotten her apron tied on when
the store’s phone rang. It had been functional for a few days, but
today the website was live and the phone number was now public. She
lifted the receiver and recited, “Good morning; you’ve reached
Cookie’s.”

“Hi,” a nasal woman’s voice bleated through
the wire. “Are you open?”

“Our grand opening is Saturday morning, ten
a.m.,” Maeve said, stifling the urge to snap that if the woman had
read the website’s home page while she was making note of the phone
number, she could have checked out the information about the shop’s
opening, too. In bold tan letters, the grand opening’s time and
date took up most of the screen.

Evidently, that woman wasn’t the only dimwit
who couldn’t absorb a clear, simple message on a website home page.
By the time Maeve had her first tray of molasses-almond cookies in
the oven, she’d fielded six phone calls, all from people asking
when the store would be open.

The seventh call was from her father. “Hey,
Maeve,” he said, the casualness of the greeting sounding slightly
forced to her.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Listen, sweetheart, I’m sure you’re very
busy now, with the store opening in just a few days—” at last,
someone had read the website’s home page “—so I won’t take long.
Gus and I would like you to come for dinner.”

“Come where?” she asked warily.

“To my house.”

His house.
Her
house. The house
where her mother had lived—and had died. The house where her father
had all but abandoned her in her darkest days. The house where
she’d spiraled down into an abyss of depression and despair. The
house where she’d stolen small possessions of her mother’s—her
favorite tube of tawny lipstick, her teardrop pearl earrings, a
pair of red high heels that would never fit Maeve, whose feet were
a full size larger than her mother’s, the loose-leaf notebook
filled with cookie recipes—and secreted them at the back of her
closet, where her father would never find them. As if he’d even
noticed they were missing. The minute the last shovel full of dirt
had been tossed onto her mother’s grave, her father had gone AWOL.
He’d left Maeve to sink or swim on her own, and she’d
sunk.