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CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d0cf8a47-0420-511f-9b83-01afac09fd80)
“I DON’T KNOW,” he said quietly, as they sat across from each other at the Bagel Stop. “I don’t know why I came back.”
Kate asked a legitimate question, one Ben wished he had a definitive answer to. He’d thought about it over and over in the two weeks since they’d gotten the news. He’d talked to his father about it only a few nights before.
“Sometimes I hate medicine,” he’d said, washing and rinsing glasses.
“Aye.” Tim slid the stemware onto its racks and cast a surveying glance around the room, crowded with patrons eating Maeve’s Thursday night special. He leaned against the back counter, something he’d have reprimanded one of his children for. The change in the senior McGuffey, the visible weakening, made Ben clamp his teeth down on his bottom lip to keep from protesting aloud.
His father, a full four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than any of his sons, laughed, a deep infectious sound that had lost none of its charm with his diminishing health. “Sometimes I think if one more person gets belligerent about the taking of his car keys, I’ll throw up my hands and let him go off and kill himself. But the truth is, he’d probably kill someone else and I’d never get over it.” He shrugged. “It’s what I do, and most days I like it much more than I don’t.”
Ben liked being a doctor, too. As his father put it, most days. He liked being able to heal, laughing with young patients, sympathizing with old ones. He liked studying and learning new things on nearly a daily basis. But he didn’t like insurance companies and the endless threat of lawsuits and having his own space in the professional building parking lot.
He thought that in particular was stupid. When one of the women who worked in their office had reached the basketball-out-front stage of her pregnancy, he’d urged her to use his parking place. She’d given him an incredulous look and said, “What, you want me to gain another twenty pounds? Waddling across the lot is the only real exercise I’m getting these days.”
Her laughing remark had made Ben consider his own fitness—or lack thereof. He’d grown up skiing, playing basketball and hiking, and while there were plenty of places in Massachusetts he could do all that, he didn’t really want to anymore. So he did cardio a couple of times a week in the rehab unit at the hospital, working up a sweat and wondering why he wasn’t happy. Sometimes, after a couple of beers on the golf course with old friends, he came close, but that only worked on the links-style course in the shadow of Wish Mountain just outside Fionnegan.
But most of what he didn’t like was centered on a single epiphanous life event, the one that had brought him back to Fionnegan.
His father’s diagnosis.
Tim McGuffey had come to America from Ireland at the age of seventeen. He’d worked as a waiter for five years until the County Mayo girl he loved could join him, then stepped behind the bar and never stepped out again. He and Maeve had bought the pub at the bottom of Wish Mountain when Morgan was little more than a baby. They worked sixteen-hour days and taught their children to dance, how to pour the best pints in the Northeast Kingdom and that Sunday mornings were for church, not sleeping late.
They emphasized to their brood of little McGuffeys that the good life was to be gained by hard work, education and the love of an equal partner. Although everyone paid their parents back the money spent on their educations, Ben never forgot that Tim wore the same suit to Morgan’s commencement from grad school that he’d worn when Patrick graduated from eighth grade. “It’s my graduation, wedding and funeral suit,” he’d said when Ben protested. He’d brushed the too-wide lapels, his eyes twinkling the way they always did. “Any day now, it’s going to be back in style. And aren’t you the lucky boy whose father never gains an ounce? Comes from clean living and good liquor.”
Ben had laughed, as Tim intended, but he still hadn’t liked it.
But most of what he didn’t like this summer of his return to Fionnegan, whether it was temporary or permanent, was that his father was dying and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. All the years of schooling, study and practice couldn’t stop the rapid downward spiral of Tim’s heart disease.
“Go home,” said his ex-wife gently ten days ago, still in the hospital from when she’d delivered her third child with the neurologist she’d married after Ben. He’d gone to see her, carrying the gift the office receptionist had picked up for him. “Go home. Spend more time with your folks—you never know how long you’ll have them. Find what you’re looking for while you’re there. You’re my favorite ex-husband and you’ve got all kinds of shadows in your eyes.” Nerissa had smiled at him, that sweet smile that had captivated him all those years ago. “Find Kate.”
Now he’d done that, all of it. And after all these years, he still wanted Kate Rafael every time he looked at her. If he was being honest with himself, he wanted her when he wasn’t looking at her, too. He liked the extra pounds she carried on her hips, the way her face had slimmed into a defined heart shape as she’d grown older. Although he couldn’t talk himself into being sorry she was single, he did regret that she didn’t have any children. She’d always wanted four. So had he, but never as much as she had.
Now here they were in their late thirties; many of their friends’ children were in high school. Dan and Penny’s eldest, Samantha, was in college already, her pretty brown eyes set on being a veterinarian. Ben didn’t know about Kate, but he’d pretty much lost the urge to procreate. He’d been amazed and somewhat horrified when Nerissa got pregnant for the third time at thirty-six, but she’d been ecstatic and so had her forty-year-old husband, so what did her childless ex know?
Ben had grown not only unsure of his goals, but selfish as well, and he didn’t want to turn his life over to someone who would always have to come first.
But now, as he and Kate finished their coffee, Ben didn’t mention the fire she’d asked about, the internal one. Tim’s story wasn’t his to tell. Not yet. Ben’s parents had insisted no one outside the family know the extent of Tim’s illness, and the McGuffeys had all agreed to keep the secret. With different degrees of sulkiness, but agreed nonetheless.
He’d sat at a table in a Boston bar with his partners and his pediatrician brother Patrick and talked about it until he was no longer sure of what he was saying. He and his priest brother Dylan had ridden bicycle trails and talked some more. Prayed. And prayed some more. Just the night before, all his siblings had waxed the hardwood floor in McGuffey’s after closing and discussed what to do. What to say. They’d laughed a lot and cried some and hugged each other hard when they said goodnight. That wasn’t something they did—except for their little sister Morgan, who hugged everybody all the time. She cried pretty easily, too, but she didn’t take it well when they brought it up.
“I’ll stay here,” Ben had said as they stood together at the back door of the bar, “as long as there’s reason for me to stay.”
And that’s what he would do. It didn’t matter whether he remained a doctor or gave ski lessons on Wish Mountain, he was there for the duration. But he couldn’t say that to Kate. Not yet.
She slid out of the booth and reached for his hand. “I need to get some sleep, Dr. McGuffey, and so do you.”
Outside, in the chilly, damp air that was springtime in Vermont, they walked toward the bed-and-breakfast. Habit meant Ben always had his cell phone, even though the signal in Fionnegan was iffy at the best of times and nonexistent at the worst. He called the emergency room to check on the condition of the student.
“He’s fine,” he told her when he’d hung up. “Maybe now his folks will listen. The nurse said they were flying in.”
“Your folks would listen, too, you know, if you think you’ve made the wrong choices somewhere along the line,” Kate suggested. “They always have.” She laughed, her eyes twinkling. “Your dad even listens with a brogue.”
“He does, doesn’t he? And I know they’d listen.” Maeve and Tim had taught their children everything they knew, and they’d listened the whole time they were teaching. Time hadn’t changed that any more than it had changed the Irish lilt of his father’s voice.
Dylan had hated the very idea of tending bar, so Maeve had taken him into the kitchen. He’d learned to cook, as Tim said, “with a bit of the same magic as his mother.” He’d worked his way through college as a chef in the same Irish restaurant in Burlington where Ben and Patrick, the oldest of the McGuffey boys, had stood behind the bar. They’d had, as Ben remembered it, a little cult following among the crowd. The restaurant owner hadn’t been happy to see them go, although he’d been pleased when their little sister, Morgan, came along while Dylan was still an undergrad. Morgan was a good bartender and her looks were a definite asset besides.
“What about you?” Ben said, embarrassed by how much of their time together had been spent talking about him. “You’ve had a few days to think about it. How’s the future looking to you?”
“Terrifying.”
He steered her around a half barrel that would be full of petunias when the danger of frost passed, or at least became less of a threat. Maybe July.
“You know what it is?” she said suddenly, looking up at him.
“No. What is it?”
“I’m one of those people that life has just happened to. I’ve never wanted anything badly enough to fight for it. I’ve waited till something came along and then I’d say, okay, I can do that. That hasn’t been bad, but it’s not enough anymore. I want to want something.”
That was, Ben realized, the same thing he wanted. No matter how much he liked medicine, no matter how good he was at it—a mentor in his residency days had once said he was gifted—he’d never loved it. He didn’t want to examine the thought that his father’s illness, by making him angry at the world of medicine, was offering him a way out of it.
But he’d be willing to bet Kate wasn’t talking about what she—or he—did for a living. Not at all.
“Passion,” he said.
For the space of a few heartbeats, their eyes met and he knew she was remembering passion shared. He knew because that’s what he was remembering, too.
“Yes,” said Kate, and he had no idea how much time had passed. “That’s right.”
* * *
IT WAS EASY to feel at home in the bed-and-breakfast. With the passage of a few more days, Kate had taken on enough of the housekeeping duties that she no longer felt like a guest.
“How do you feel about managing the inn?” Marce squinted at her watch and then looked at Kate. “Say until the last week of August. You can move down into my rooms. The girls and I can spend the summer at the camp on Lake Willoughby Frank’s family owns. You can decide if you want to be an innkeeper when you grow up and maybe I can regain some equilibrium.”
“What if I lose all your clientele and you come back to a hovel even Lucy and Dirty Sally wouldn’t stay in?” asked Kate, loading the dishwasher with breakfast dishes. “What if I break some of this china?”
Marce grinned. “So far, you’re describing the place the way it was when Frank and I bought it, up to and including the broken dishes. That’s another part of it, by the way. Lucy needs to stay here. She’s old and she gets upset when we even take her away for a weekend. She loves us, but she loves home more.”
The temporary position would give Kate time to make a decision about her future. Time to find passion. Time to stop saying, “Schuyler and Lund,” every time the phone rang. That had triggered quite a reaction when her old boss called her after the house fire to offer his sympathy and ask if there was anything he could do. The offer stopped short of giving her job back, though.
“If it gets overwhelming, T. J. from over at Traveler’s Rest will be able to help you. He was a godsend when Frank died. It was amazing how much I didn’t know and I’d been here the whole time.” Marce still smiled, but sadness lingered in her eyes.
Kate took a deep breath. “Let’s crunch a few numbers. See if we can afford each other for the summer.”
They crunched, using the calculator on Kate’s phone and the paper napkins lying on the island, and by the time the dishwasher had stopped swooshing hot water around, they’d come to an agreement.
“I can pick the girls up at college in Burlington and we can go directly to the lake,” said Marce happily. “Going on the hope we could do business, I’ve already cleared you out a closet and a dresser in my room and made space in the bathroom for your things.” She looked pityingly at Kate’s sweatshirt. “You’ll get some soon.”
Kate picked at her faded shirt. “You talk as though I need them. You don’t think this is attractive?”
“Come on,” said Marce, laughing, “I’ll show you the living quarters.”
The bedroom, sitting room and bath had been created from the summer kitchen of the old house. They were comfortable and welcoming, opening into the three-season room accessed by the kitchen. Kate picked up a picture of Frank and Marce that sat on the bedside table. The couple sat together in a chair meant for one, and instead of smiling for the camera, they were smiling at each other.
Kate felt like crying. “Do you think you’ll ever love someone again?”
Her face softening, Marce looked at the framed snapshot in Kate’s hands. “Maybe. But not that way. I think you only get that once. On my good days, though, I remember how lucky I am to have felt that way at all. As time goes on, there are more and more good days, so it’s all right. It’s all right,” she repeated, as though trying to convince herself.
The sound of the bell on the desk in the foyer made her lift her head. “That’ll be weekend guests. Come watch me check them in. You’ll have the hang of things in no time.”
Kate watched as Marce greeted the newlywed couple from Indiana. They signed the old-fashioned guest register, then added their information to a card. On the way up the stairs, Marce told them about local attractions and explained the times and choices for breakfast. “There’s an elevator,” she added, pointing toward the end of the hall upstairs, “in case you visit Wish Mountain and find that a flight of steps is more than you can face at the end of the day. The elevator groans as though it’s on its very last lift up, but it’s well maintained and safe. We tell everyone it just makes that noise to add to the ambience of the place.”
The bell sounded from below. “Kate,” said Marce, “would you attend to that please while I show Mr. and Mrs. Fallon how to open this window without breaking any nails?”
“Of course.” Kate smiled at the guests. “Welcome to Kingdom Comer.” There, that wasn’t much different from saying, Schuyler and Lund. How may I direct your call?
But there were no guests in the foyer, only Joan n and her mother. Before Kate could inquire what they were doing there and where Joann got the blouse she was wearing, the door opened, admitting Maeve McGuffey and her daughter. Morgan was a history professor at a small private college in Fionnegan even though she still looked like the homecoming queen she’d been in high school.
Kate hugged Maeve and then Morgan. “How do you do it? Is it hard teaching students who want to take you out after class?”
“I got Mom’s bones.” Morgan beamed at her mother. “And you know the rest—clean living and good liquor.”
They shared a laugh, and Kate took a longer look at Maeve. The green eyes her son had inherited still sparkled, but she looked tired. Older. Kate shook her head at her. “You’re working too hard, aren’t you?”
Maeve waved a dismissive hand. “Working’s good for the soul—just gets a bit hard on the body from time to time.”
“Go on into the parlor,” Marce invited from the stairway. “Here we are, Kate. Now you can see how we handle parties. This is obviously an afternoon one, confined to the east parlor and the dining room—unless someone gets a bit rowdy. Penny’s catering it, so everyone will have gained ten pounds or so by the time they leave.”
“That’s odd. She didn’t say anything when we talked last night,” Kate said, following the guests toward the parlor.
The room, a well-lit expanse of cushy blue carpet, chintz slipcovers and lap-size quilts tossed over the backs of chairs, was full. More to the point, it was full of women Kate knew, all holding glasses and most of them laughing.
“Well,” she said, feeling a little more hurt than she’d have cared to admit, “is this a meeting of the Fionnegan Women’s Club? More to the point, wouldn’t I have known about it if it existed?” She wanted to ask why she hadn’t been invited but was afraid she might not like the answer.
Penny crossed the room to hug her. “We thought about telling you, but you’re not nearly well dressed enough to join.” She gestured at the crop pants and matching blouse she was wearing. “Joann handed this down to me after owning it only two years, making me the walking dress code for this group.”
Meg Palmer, a paralegal from Schuyler and Lund, stood. “We decided that since you’d given roughly four hundred wedding and baby gifts over the years, it was your turn to have a shower. And since none of us can face that sweatshirt for one more day, we elected to make it a clothing shower.”
Joann pinched Kate’s sleeve, wrinkling her nose. “Wasn’t this sweatshirt Penny’s in high school?”
“No, actually it was Dan’s. Penny’s all had baby spit-up stains on them. But the jeans were yours somewhere near the end of the last decade. They should pass muster.” Kate narrowed her eyes at the insurance agent. “And if you want to keep collecting insurance premiums from me, you won’t remind me that the reason you gave them away was that they were two sizes too big for you.”
“Sit down, Kate, and open your presents,” Marce urged, walking around the room with a bottle of white and a bottle of red wine, refilling glasses. “After Friday, when I leave you here, you won’t have that much sitting-down time.”
Kate sat in the chair offered to her, then gasped with delight when Penny and Joann brought in armloads of gifts, dumping them unceremoniously on the floor in front of her.
“Open mine first!” Penny sat on the floor with the gift bags and brightly wrapped packages and rooted until she found a box festooned with ribbons and covered in Christmas paper. “Michael wrapped it,” she explained.
The present contained a pair of pajamas “for slumber parties,” a bottle of wine “also for slumber parties and you’ll always know it was from me because it was really cheap,” and a pretty green blouse: “Dan picked it out. It wasn’t even on sale!” Also in the package were two Blue Onion cups and saucers “for after the slumber party” and a replica of their senior year T-shirt from twenty years ago—“Skip Lund still had his and his wife was glad to get rid of it.”
Kate pulled her sweatshirt off over her head and donned the only-slightly-too-big T-shirt. “This is better than having my job back.” That wasn’t quite true, but close enough.
Midway through the gift-opening, Marce ran to answer the door and came back with a huge express mail parcel. “It’s from your mom and Sarah,” she explained. “They called this morning to say it was on the way. I was hoping it would make it.” She produced a box knife. “Be careful with this. We’ve seen you cut things before.”
Kate sat on the floor and opened the box carefully. “Sarah must have taped this,” she said, slicing through three layers of packing tape. “Mom’s more the ‘a piece and a promise’ type.” When Kate opened the flaps of the box, a soft aah went round the room.
Kate stared at the contents of the gift for a moment in silence, holding her eyes wide and taking deep breaths. Finally, she covered her face with her hands, tears flowing inexorably between her fingers. Penny slid off the couch to sit beside her and put her arms around her.
The box contained two quilts. Not new, but beautiful and handmade. One was a Double Wedding Ring pattern, made from hundreds of scraps of fabric on a cream-colored background. The other quilt was a blue-and-white Irish Chain, nearly identical to the one that had been on her bed when the house burned. It had been the first one she’d ever bought, when she’d still thought that things with Ben were going to last forever.
“We know this was supposed to be a clothing shower,” said the note written in her mother’s scrawled handwriting, “but Sarah and I decided we just wanted you to be warm and safe, no matter how you were dressed.”
When the party ended two hours later, Kate had enough underwear to get through a week, enough church clothes for three Sundays, and enough outfits to change clothes every day from Monday through Friday as long as she wore the black pants twice and didn’t spill anything on herself. There was a pair of yoga pants, sweats, sandals and a new pair of walking shoes with a card inside the box that read, “Meet you on the porch at eight o’clock—bagels are on you.”
Her hairstylist gave her a supply of hair and skin products and the nail technician who’d gone to school on money Kate loaned her had given her ten appointments, free of charge. Tark Bridger and his wife had sent a gift card from Louisa’s Garret, the bookstore over on Alcott Street, a thoughtful gesture that made her eyes water.
As she opened presents and laughed with the roomful of women, something stirred in the back of her mind, creating an emotional itch she knew she’d end up scratching at some point. Is this all there is of my turn? Have the bridal and baby showers Meg mentioned passed me by?
The thought was painful, and she wondered if it was like a new phone or having the gas cap in a different place on a car—just something she’d have to get used to.
She sipped from the glass of punch beside her, thinking how much time she’d spent at events like this. Playing games engineered for the guest of honor to win, hoping the gift she’d chosen would be a cause for happiness. It wasn’t till now, surrounded by her friends, that she truly believed the gift didn’t matter—it was the thoughts of the giver.
“You know,” she said, holding a silk scarf against her cheek, “I think I’m pretty rich.” And as for that itch, well, she could live with that.
Penny helped carry the bounty back to Marce’s room. “You don’t have any excuses now,” she said, slipping clothes onto the satin-covered padded hangers Morgan had included with her gift.
“Excuses for what?” said Kate, hanging a peach-colored blouse beside brown crop pants and admiring the effect.
“For starting a new life. You lost your job and now you have one. You lost your home and now you have one. You lost your clothes and now you have some. You even got a new roommate for Dirty Sally, since she prefers Lucy to you.”
“I don’t want a new life.” Kate hung up a dress, arranging a matching jacket over it. “I just want the old one back.”
“No, you don’t.” Penny caught and held her gaze. “You’re starting over, girlfriend. Do it right.”
* * *
SHE LOOKED DIFFERENT. Watching Kate step off the back porch to join him, Ben wasn’t sure how she’d changed, but she had. Her brown eyes looked brighter somehow, her hair shinier. Tendrils that escaped her ponytail fell about her face in perky golden-brown commas. The fact that she wasn’t wearing Dan’s old sweatshirt didn’t hurt matters at all. He wondered if that had anything to do with the women that had filled the bed-and-breakfast that afternoon. He’d gone into the kitchen to beg a cup of coffee, but had left empty-handed when he heard the noise from the rest of the house.
He returned her smile. “Good day?”
She fell into step beside him. “Real good,” she said, and held up one foot, giving it a little spin. “See my new shoes? Aren’t they pretty? How about you? Have you settled your future yet? Is it doctor or ski bum? Or maybe a bartender like those guys in that old Tom Cruise movie, Cocktail?”
He tugged at her ponytail but was silent for a half block. The only sounds were the soft ones of their rubber-soled shoes and Lucy’s toenails against the sidewalk. When he spoke, he heard the hesitancy in his own words. “Everything I said before is true, but the first and most important reason I’m here for the summer is that my dad—” He stopped, reminding himself of his promise to his parents to not talk about Tim’s illness outside the family.
But for years, Kate had been inside the family. She’d had her own toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom, her own pillow on the spare twin bed in Morgan’s room. Tim had taught her to dance and Maeve had shared the magic of Irish cooking with her. Kate and Dylan had been so close Ben had suffered a few bouts of jealousy, no less painful for being silent—they were still close as far as he knew and the thought of it still made him resentful. She’d been a bridesmaid when Patrick and Wendy got married. If it hadn’t been for Ben’s idiocy thirteen years ago—but, no, there was no way of knowing that.
“Your dad?” Kate prompted, drawing Lucy to a stop before they crossed the street. “Don’t tell me he’s going to take a vacation and you came home to help in the bar. Tim never takes a vacation.”
