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“Right, because living with my dad is exactly what I want to be doing,” Max said without heat, and Patrick yearned, absolutely longed, to ask his boy what had happened to him. What was wrong. What was still hurting him so badly from the shooting last year that sent him into this tailspin. It wasn’t as though he was that different—the scar on his neck was new, sure. But he still laughed. He still made every effort to get the best of his brother. But it was as though he did those things because he was supposed to, not because he wanted to. Something had happened to leach the joy out of his boy, and he wanted to know what that was.
But if he asked, Max would probably fall on the floor in heart failure or shock. The Mitchell men didn’t ask probing questions.
So, they worked, the way they always did, instead of saying the important things. And Patrick hoped that whatever Max needed he was getting in some way.
The back door to the kitchen opened, letting in a warm breeze and a shaft of bright spring sunlight.
A woman stood in the doorway but it wasn’t Alice. The woman didn’t give off the kinetic energy that had surrounded his daughter-in-law.
Ex-daughter-in-law.
“Excuse me?” she said, stepping from the bright doorway into the kitchen. The door shut behind her and her features emerged from silhouette. “I’m looking for the chef.” She had a pretty smile that turned her plain face into something quite lovely.
“She’s not here,” Max said.
And his dumb son watched the paint dry in front of him rather than look at the pretty girl to his left.
Patrick despaired for the boy, he really did.
“She’s supposed to be here Monday,” Max said. He darted a quick look her way, then returned to the careful application of a second coat of pale cream paint on a pale cream wall, as though failure could blow up the building.
“Maybe there’s something we could do for you?” Patrick asked, stepping into the breach.
“Well, is Gabe—”
“Hello?” Gabe ducked his head out of the small office he’d built off the kitchen. “Hi!” He caught sight of the woman and Patrick knew his eldest son would appreciate how she appeared plain but somehow interesting all the same. True to form, Gabe smiled, the old charmer, and shook the woman’s hand. “I’m Gabe.”
Patrick shot Max a look that said, “That’s how you do it, nincompoop.” Max just rolled his eyes.
“I’m Daphne from Athens Organics. We talked briefly on the phone yesterday. I was hoping to meet with your chef about being a supplier for your kitchen.”
“Of course,” Gabe said, “My chef isn’t here yet, but I’m so glad you stopped by. Come on into my office.” He opened the door for her and she smiled girlishly and Max rolled his eyes again.
Silence filled the kitchen after Gabe shut the office door. Patrick watched his son paint and Max ignored him.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” Patrick asked.
“Shut up, Dad.”
“It’s the only thing that explains why you’re such an idiot around women.”
“I’m not an idiot, I’m just not…Gabe. And that’s fine by me.” He smiled, that sharp, wicked smile from the corner of his mouth. It made Patrick feel as though the boy he remembered with the temper and the laugh that could light up a room was still in there somewhere. “And it’s pretty okay by the women I have sex with, too.”
“Thank God.”
Max laughed, sort of. And Patrick’s heart leaped.
Now, he wondered. Is now the right time? The letter he’d been carrying in the front chest pocket of his work shirt felt like deadweight against his chest. At night, it sat on his bedside table and glowed with a life of its own.
He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He took a hundred bathroom breaks a day so he could sit down and reread the words he’d memorized.
The office door opened and Gabe and Daphne stepped back into the kitchen. Her color was high and her smile ready as they shook hands. Gabe walked her out the door to her car.
“Maybe he’s going to start working on those grandkids you want,” Max said, nodding in the direction his brother had gone. “It’s about time, the guy’s been thinking about a family since he could walk.”
I just want them to know love. To know love like I knew it, is that so hard? Patrick wondered. So impossible?
The subject of love was a sore one among the Mitchell men. Had been since Iris walked out on them thirty years ago.
Not that he was counting.
“You know—” he dipped his paintbrush into the can of paint he’d set on the top step of the ladder and watched Max for a reaction “—when you lost your mother—”
“Dad.” Max practically growled the word. “What is this new fascination with Mom? You haven’t mentioned her in years and now every time I turn around you’re bringing her up.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m living with her son, who is just as moody and muleheaded as she was.”
Max fell silent. Any reminder of being like his mother could turn him off like a light switch.
“When you lost her—”
“You make it sound like she died!” Max cried, finally setting the roller down. “Or like we misplaced her somewhere. She left. She walked away. I don’t want to talk about her. If you want to reminisce about the past, talk to Gabe.”
Gabe had given him the same reaction every time he tried talking about Iris. Patrick couldn’t blame them—Iris had walked away from them, which, as Gabe had told him, was worse than if she’d died.
She didn’t want us, Dad. She didn’t want any of us, he’d said.
It wasn’t true—entirely. She had wanted them, but there had been things happening that the boys were too young to understand or remember. They didn’t understand why Patrick didn’t just get over it. Over her.
He’d held out a thin ribbon of hope that maybe, just maybe Iris would realize she’d made a mistake and she’d forgive his. Ignore his foolish anger and pride. For years he’d held on to that ribbon. Two weeks ago she’d finally picked up her end.
CHAPTER FOUR
MONDAY MORNING Alice opened the kitchen door of the Riverview Inn and stepped into a dream. Her dream.
Doubt, second thoughts, worry that she’d somehow screw this up the way she’d screwed up Zinnia, had plagued her for the past three days, since taking the job. Uncertainty had dogged her as she drove down from Albany. But now, as she set down her bag and tried to catch her breath, worry vanished.
This kitchen was hers. Meant to be hers. It was as if Gabe had opened her head and pulled out the daydreams and plans she’d been accumulating over the years.
A south-facing window overlooking a brilliant green forest filled the room with sunshine. The pale cream walls seemed to glow in the clear morning light and the appliances sparkled, clean and unused.
Racks of pots hung from the ceiling. She reached up and carefully knocked the saucepan into a sauté pan and reflected light scattered across the far wall.
It was the most beautiful kind of chandelier.
A stainless steel table filled the bottom portion of the L-shaped room beside two big glass-front refrigerators.
In a place that was often busy and loud and filled with a sort of graceful chaos, the silence of the downtimes seemed almost healing.
A kitchen at rest, a kitchen such as this one, was a beautiful thing. A place of peace.
She ran her hand along the chopping block sitting next to the stove. The same monster slab of oak, easily ten inches thick, used to sit in their house. It had come from Gabe’s mother whose parents had been Polish butchers. Thousands of pigs had been bled on that wood, thousands of cabbages had been chopped, thousands of perogies had been rolled and formed there. Alice wanted to climb on top of it and dance.
This kitchen even smelled like a fresh start.
I will stop drinking, she promised. I will not waste this chance. She made the promise even as the remainder of last night’s wine throbbed in her skull. I will swallow my resentment and try very hard not to fight with my ex-husband.
“Hey,” Gabe said from behind her as if her promise had conjured him. She couldn’t quite face him yet. Things in her were shaken loose by the beauty of the place, by her earnest desire to deserve this fresh start.
“Executive chef,” she said, opening a door to find a small closet, lined with shelves, ready for spices and root vegetables, maple syrup and vinegars, “reporting for duty.”
“What do you think?” he asked and she finally had to look at him. For an instant she wanted to shield her eyes from the radiant brightness of him. He was clean and fresh in a wrinkled white shirt and khaki pants, his blond hair mussed by his hands, his face tanned from working outside.
He looked like a lifeguard. A Swiss Alps skirescue guy. He just needed the dog.
She felt small in comparison, dark and mean, dressed in black because it didn’t require her to think to coordinate.
“Alice?” he said, breaking in to her ugly comparisons. He ducked his head to look into her eyes and smiled. “What do you think? Recognize it?”
She realized, belatedly, that the kitchen wasn’t a coincidence. She’d told him a million times what a kitchen should look like according to her. She’d sketched the floor plan on the bare skin of his back over and over again.
“It’s amazing,” she said, her joy in finding her dream brought to life turning to cold resentment. Of course he would take this for himself, too. “You know that.”
“I practically have the floor plan tattooed on my back.” He grinned and the reminder of their intimacies, casually uttered out loud, chilled her to the bone. “When the time came to design the kitchen, I just remembered everything you taught me.”
It was a compliment, probably a sincere one, but she didn’t want compliments.
This is not mine, she told herself, ripping the dream from her clenched fists. I am hired help. I am a bit player. She had no business coveting the butcher’s block, imagining years of early mornings in this kitchen, planning menus.
There is nothing I want, she reminded herself. There is nothing I need.
She forced cold distance into her head and her heart and when she looked at the beautiful kitchen, the chandelier of pots and pans, she just saw things. Inanimate objects that had no relationship to her, that cost her nothing and only represented a way to get out of debt and move on with her life.
They were tools. That’s all. Gabe, this kitchen, the whole inn, they were a means to an end.
“I think we better get to work if you want to open in a month,” she said, cold as ice.
“But did you see the view?” Gabe pointed to the window. “Come on, we can have coffee and take a walk around the grounds. We have a capacity of one hundred guests between the cottages and the lodge, which we’re hoping—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I just want to work, Gabe. That’s all.”
For a moment she thought he might ask her what was wrong. Instead, true to form, he nodded in that definitive way that always indicated he was biting his tongue. “Okay. Come on into the office and we’ll talk—”
“Get your hands off me!” someone yelled, and both Gabe and Alice whirled to the doorway leading to the dining room. They stood like deer in headlights while the swinging door banged open and Max and a teenage boy plowed into the kitchen. “Didn’t you hear what I said!” The kid, practically drowning in oversize black clothes, yelled.
“Yep. And I’m not touching you.”
“Good, don’t start.”
Alice nearly stepped back, as though the kid were a rabid dog.
“Here he is,” Max said and from the corner of her eye she saw Gabe’s mouth fall open.
“You’re kidding me,” he said.
“Nope.” Max shook his head. “This is Cameron.”
“Cut that out, man,” Cameron said, jerking himself away from Max. “The name is Chaz.”
“Chaz makes you sound like an idiot,” Max said. “Your name is Cameron.”
“Hi, Max,” Alice said, pleased to see her former brother-in-law. The best things about Gabe were his brother and father, both as emotionally retarded as Gabe, but at least they didn’t try to pretend otherwise.
“Hey, Alice,” Max said with a quick grin. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too.” She meant it. “How you keeping?”
“Starving,” he said. “We’ve been living on toast and freeze-dried noodles around here.”
Alice shuddered and Max’s grin stretched into a smile. He looked thin, painfully so, and wounded in some dark way, as if all the intensity that had illuminated him was banked, burning out.
“What the hell am I doing here, man?” Cameron, or whatever his name was, asked. “This is an afterschool program.”
“Not when you’ve got a day off school. Then it’s an all-day program.” Max answered.
“This your love-child you never told us about?” Alice asked Max, falling into their old give-and-take.
“This dude ain’t my father,” Cameron answered for him.
“Gabe didn’t tell you?” Max asked, his dark eyebrows hitting his hairline, and Alice suddenly felt a serious lack of information.
“Tell me what?” She crossed her arms over her chest, just in case Gabe misinterpreted her tone as happy.
It took a moment, but Gabe finally issued a response. He looked at her, put on his game face and said, “He’s your staff.”
“Bullshit!” the kid yelled.
Alice laughed. “I’m with him.”
Gabe winced and remained silent, which could mean only one thing. Alice’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head.
“You’re kidding.” She turned to Max, who only shrugged.
She finally focused on the kid, whose eyes met hers briefly. “I got nothing to kid about,” he said, looking as unhappy as she felt.
She shook her head. “I can work alone until I get proper staff.”
