скачать книгу бесплатно
“Three?” Darla, the other waitress, finally got out, gawking at the taller man as though she wouldn’t mind clutching him to her flat little bosom like one of the front-door-size laminated menus in her arms.
“Yeah, three,” he said, and Violet more felt than heard his voice, deep, not from around here, felt it seep into her skin, through her pores…
No more romance novels for you, she thought, shrugging off two years’ worth of unused hormones, about the same time she realized Darla had seated the trio in Violet’s station because hers was all filled.
Great. Just great, she thought as Darla passed around the menus, her long face sagging with disappointment.
But a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. So, jerking her pencil out of her hair, Violet marched over to take their orders.
“Smile,” Darla hissed at her as she passed, and Violet reminded herself that her sore feet and bitching back were not these peoples’ fault. And that the grumpy approach was probably not the best way to get a tip.
Both men were slouched heavily against the padded booth backs, the girl’s face folded into the standard issue adolescent glower. Without even knowing the particulars, Violet felt a tremor of sympathy for her. Orders taken, she called them out to Maude—burgers and fries, the special, spaghetti for the girl—then asked, “So what brings you to Mulligan Falls?”
Those sharp blue eyes swung to hers, and assorted body parts quivered, remembering. Then he said, “I just bought the old Hicks Inn, up on the hill.”
And presto-chango, Mitch fell to second place on Violet’s Men Who Screwed Me Over list.
“Your food’ll be here in a sec,” the redheaded waitress said, her voice like needles as she snatched up the menus, and Rudy thought, Huh? But the needles had pricked him awake, at least enough to notice her as something other than the means by which food would eventually reach his stomach. Enough to catch the sparks of anger, of hurt, in her big, silvery-green eyes, before she wheeled around and tromped off, the diner’s overhead lights tangling in a thousand tiny ringlets the same color orange as in the wallpaper in his “new” kitchen.
Then the haze of exhaustion cleared enough for him to notice the body underneath the curls, short and curvy and compact in the pale green uniform, like one of those VW Bugs, he thought, stronger and far more crash-resistant than one might think.
“What was that all about?” Kevin asked, and Rudy shook his head, half-annoyed, half-relieved that he hadn’t imagined it.
“No idea,” he said. But after a flurry of murmurings and gasps, Rudy noticed several heads had turned in their direction.
“Dad?” Stacey whispered. “Why’s everybody looking at us?”
“Beats me, honey.”
Kevin leaned forward. “Why do I feel like we just landed in the middle of a Stephen King novel?”
Stacey sidled closer as Rudy kicked Kevin under the table.
Until three minutes ago, Rudy hadn’t had too much trouble keeping his good mood aloft. Much to their surprise—and Rudy’s profound relief—three of the upstairs bedrooms were in fairly good shape, as were the bathrooms. Yeah, the downstairs needed a lot of work, but no huge surprises. So he’d decided—especially after four hours of nonstop cleaning and inspection and plugging up unplanned critter doors—that nobody, including him, was up to canned Dinty Moore stew warmed up over a camp stove. And besides, promising Stacey any dessert she wanted might earn him enough points to see them through at least the next twenty-four hours.
So, with the U-Haul trailer unhitched, they’d piled into his edging-toward-classic-status Bronco and headed to town, “town” being Main Street, basically, five blocks long and anchored by an old-fashioned square, across from which sat Maude’s. Applebee’s, it wasn’t, but—as he explained to his sneering daughter—the sooner they started mixing with the locals, the sooner they’d stop feeling like outsiders.
“Never happen,” she’d muttered as they’d walked in. Although he already knew she had her eye on a piece of chocolate cream pie in the old-fashioned display tower on the counter.
He hadn’t counted, however, on being regarded like their ship had just cut swathes in the crop fields. Unnerving, to say the least. And frankly annoying. For God’s sake, the minute he or Kev opened their mouths it was pretty clear the Vaccaros hailed from the same good, solid working-class stock as the majority of Mulligan Falls’s residents. So what the hell?
Their waitress returned with their drinks, which she clunked in front of them, her mouth pressed tight, and Rudy saw the pinch of frustration and exhaustion in those squeezed lips. Although what that had to do with him, he had no idea. His cop senses sprang to attention, that this was someone about to blow, and he thought, I could fix, you, too.
What the freaking hell?
“Oh, and, miss?” he said, gently, “my daughter would love a piece of that chocolate pie, if you could add it to our order?”
“Sure thing,” she said, not meeting his eyes but smiling just enough at Stacey for Rudy to see through at least some of those suffocating layers of resentment.
Then one of the old biddies at the booth across the way called her over, in that imperious way people have when they think you exist solely for their comfort, complaining about her food being cold or something, and at the back of the restaurant a little boy yelled, “Mom! What’s twelve take away seven?” as the woman behind the serving counter dinged an obnoxiously loud bell and hollered, “Violet! Order up!”
He saw her—Violet—stop for a second, her back expanding with the force of her breath, before yelling, “Use your fingers!” to the boy (there were two of them, Rudy now saw, practically buried by books and things in the booth), grabbing the old lady’s plate and carrying it back to the kitchen, where she exchanged it for the three plates waiting for her.
The plates precariously balanced, she spun around again at the precise moment the youngest boy darted out of the booth and into her path. On a yelp, the waitress—Violet—stumbled, the plates leaping, flying, crashing magnificently onto the tile floor as, catching her son in her arms, she went down, too.
Rudy and Kevin were instantly out of their seats, Kevin snatching the child out of the pile of shattered plates and splattered spaghetti and scattered fries and roast beef and gravy as Rudy grabbed for the crumpled waitress.
“Leave me alone!” she cried, close to meltdown, slapping at his hands as she struggled to her knees and grabbed her chick. “Zeke! You okay? Does anything hurt?” Heedless of the spaghetti sauce and gravy clinging to her breasts, dribbled down her skirt, she frantically checked for blood and bruises. A noodle dangled from her hair; she yanked it out and tossed it on the floor, then clamped one tiny shoulder with a short-nailed hand, holding the other one three inches from the kid’s nose. “How many fingers?”
“Th-three,” the kid said, small-voiced, trembling. “I’m sorry, Mama, I had to pee! I didn’t see you!”
“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.” The boy momentarily vanished into her bosom to have a dozen kisses rained upon a crop of short blond curls. “It’s okay,” she said again. “Accidents happen, it wasn’t your fault.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rudy saw Stacey pick her way through the carnage. “If you want, I could take your little boy to the restroom and get him cleaned up,” she said, and Rudy gawked at her.
“Thank you,” Violet said, nodding, only now seeming to notice the extent of the mess, which verged on epic proportions. As Stacey led Zeke away, Violet sat back on her haunches and moaned. A tall, shapeless, hairnetted brunette in a grease-splotched apron appeared out of nowhere, bringing with her a deathly silence. Rudy glanced over his shoulder: Every eye was trained on the scene.
“This makes what, Violet?” she said. “The third time this month?”
“I know,” she said, flushing red as she began gathering the jagged pieces of earthenware, their soft clanking like screams in the deep hush. Rudy squatted to help her; she glared at him, then shrugged. “Zeke ran out in front of me—”
“And didn’t I say you could only bring the kids here while you worked as long as they weren’t a nuisance?”
“It was an accident, Maude.” The waitress kept her eyes on the floor, tense fingers clutching two neat halves of a broken plate, weariness and embarrassment stiffening her back. Kevin appeared with a gray plastic tub, started tossing the mess into it; Rudy tried to pry the broken plate from Violet’s hands, which earned him another glare. She tossed the destroyed crockery into the bin, saying, “I’ll pay for the loss. Like always.”
“I’m sorry, Violet, I really am,” the older woman said, not sorry at all. “This isn’t working out—”
“No! Maude, please!” Tears bulged in Violet’s eyes when she looked up. “I promise it won’t happen again—”
Rudy was on his feet, staring down whoever the hell this Maude was, his steady, now-we-don’t-want-any-trouble cop’s voice barely masking his irritation. “Like she said, it was an accident. So how about cutting the lady a break?”
“You stay out of this,” Violet said, now standing as well, the eyes inches away, as were the breasts, like double-dip mounds of pistachio ice cream, or maybe mint, the image almost enough to neutralize a tone meant to shrink gonads in a hundred-yard radius. Too bad for her Rudy’s were the nonshrinkable variety. He may have turned in his badge and gun, but not those. “I don’t need some stranger fighting my battles for me!”
“Then let me introduce myself,” he said, extending his hand. “Rudy Vaccaro.”
For a second, he thought she might spit at him.
“Who?” Maude said.
“He bought Doris’s place,” Violet said, and something in her voice brought his head around. Then, to add to the bizarreness, Maude laughed. Rudy’s head swung back to Maude. Who was smirking.
“No, mister, I sincerely doubt she wants your help,” she said, as Stacey returned with the younger boy, who immediately plastered himself to his mother’s side. As Violet cupped the boy’s head, her boss said, “So what’s it gonna be? You gonna find somebody to babysit your brats or what?”
The waitress flushed again, the deep pink a weird contrast to the orange hair, then turned, wagging her hand at the older boy. “Get your stuff together. We’re leaving,” she said softly.
Kevin tugged Rudy’s sleeve and whispered, “Not your problem, bro, let’s get back to the table, okay? Rudy!”
Torn, Rudy frowned into his brother’s eyes. “Obviously, you hanging around is only making this harder for her,” Kevin said under his breath. “Come on.”
After a final glance at Violet as she herded her sons through the restaurant and out the back door, Rudy followed his brother and daughter back to the booth. But everyone was still staring, and he knew damn well they were the subject of at least a half-dozen whispered conversations, too.
So when the other waitress brought them their redone dinners, Rudy asked, “Okay, clearly I’m missing something. What’s my buying the Hicks place got to do with Violet?”
Her eyes banged into his. “You don’t know?”
When Rudy shook his head, the waitress said, “Then let me be the first to break it to ya…”
Chapter Two
“Let me guess,” Kevin said as they made their way back to the car. “You’re about to bust something trying to figure out what to do about this new wrinkle.”
Rudy waited until Stacey, who’d run ahead, was out of earshot before he replied, “Yeah. Nothin’ worse than being the bad guy when it’s not even your fault. I mean, if there wasn’t a will—”
“Then I would think legally you’re in the clear,” his brother said, halting in front of a gated sports equipment store. “Not that I’m any expert, but like you said, you didn’t do anything wrong. Now, what I’m wondering is, what you’re gonna do about Violet?”
Rudy frowned at him, tempted to think he’d liked his brother better when he’d been a stoner and too out of it to stick his nose in. “What makes you think I should do anything about Violet?”
Kevin chuckled. Rudy sighed. Okay, so those damn pale green eyes were burned into his brain, along with all that Icould fix you crap. Which was really stupid because maybe—maybe—Rudy could fix a house, but fixing women wasn’t part of his job description. Especially since, if memory served, women didn’t generally take kindly to being fixed.
But the more Darla, the other waitress, had yakked away about Violet’s situation, the more Rudy realized he had to do something. He’d had no idea, obviously, when he’d bought the place that the old lady had promised to leave it to Violet—
“Da-ad!” Stacey called, hopping up and down beside the car, her hands jammed inside her vest pockets. “Hello? Open the door?”
“Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, hitting the remote on his key chain. The car be-booped itself unlocked. Stacey yanked open the door and scrambled inside, slamming it shut again.
Somehow, he doubted Darla had exaggerated about Violet’s situation, even if she did have that gleam in her eye common to people taking comfort in other people’s troubles. She’d told him all about how Doris Hicks’s daughter had thrown Violet and her sons out of the house she’d believed would be hers in exchange for the eighteen months Violet had spent helping Doris to keep the inn open—an arrangement mutually beneficial for both an old woman determined to stay in her own home and a struggling young mother whose husband had taken a hike.
He could only imagine how blindsided she must’ve felt. Just like he’d been when Stacey’s mother had said, “Forget this,” leaving a rookie cop with a colicky six-month-old and a hole in his heart the size of the Grand Canyon. But at least Rudy’d had a safety net, in that huge extended family. There’d always been a home for his daughter, even if not one he’d envisioned.
He pulled up in front of the inn, shrouded in darkness save for the moonlight and the anemic ghosts of a half-dozen or so wussy, solar-powered yard lights standing lethargic sentry along the disintegrating walk. Armed with a flashlight, Stacey shot out of the car—bathroom call, Rudy was guessing. Kevin, however, stayed put, staring at Rudy’s profile. Noting, no doubt, that Rudy hadn’t killed the engine. Then he chuckled.
“I’ll start a fire, how’s that?”
Slamming the door shut behind him, Kevin started up the walk, warbling some country song Rudy didn’t recognize.
And Rudy drove back into the winter night, hoping maybe to put a fire or two out.
Rubbing her bottom—still tingling from the ice-cold toilet seat—Stacey crept back to the even colder, totally dark front room, where she found her uncle kneeling in front of the woodstove wedged into the fireplace. By the puny beam of his flashlight, he was trying to coax some kindling to catch fire. Stacey shuddered. Like it wasn’t creepy enough in here in the daylight. Sure, she’d gone camping and stuff, but this was different. Maybe because she’d wanted to go camping and she so didn’t want to be here.
“Wh-where’s Dad?” she said through chattering teeth.
“He had something he needed to do,” Uncle Kev said between puffs to the kindling. “He’ll be back soon.”
Stacey rolled her eyes, even though that was so juvenile. But honestly, why was it so hard for grown-ups to just be up-front with you?
“It’s so cold in here,” she said, rubbing her arms. She’d ripped off her coat when she’d run inside earlier, but now she found it again in the weak, fluttering light and shrugged back into it. Yeah, freezing to death was real high on her list. And without electricity or phone service or broadband or anything she couldn’t even log on and check her e-mail and stuff. What was the point of giving her a new laptop for Christmas—a bribe, she knew, for destroying her life—if she couldn’t even use it?
Tears pricked at her eyes, but she blinked them back. No way was she going to let her dad and Uncle Kev think she was some dumb little crybaby. Not that she had any idea yet how to convince Dad that moving here had been, like, the lamest move ever, but acting like a whiny brat—tempting though it was—wasn’t going to do it. Probably.
“It’ll warm up pretty quick now,” Uncle Kev said, sitting back to admire his handiwork through the open stove doors. Stacey glanced around, shuddering again. Nothing like dancing shadows to up the creep factor. She inched closer to her uncle, now sitting on a superthick, unrolled sleeping bag in front of the fire. Grinning up at her, he patted the space beside him.
She sighed and joined him, cross-legged, elbows on her knees, chin sunk in her palms. One of those heavy silences fell between them, the kind right before the adult says something Really Important.
What now? Stacey thought as her eyes slid to the side of his face. The flames made him look older, she decided. More serious, maybe. Not like the goofball who usually hung out in her youngest uncle’s body. Objectively speaking—a phrase she’d picked up from a book or something—she’d have to say that Uncle Kev was the best-looking of the five brothers. Her grandparents had only had one girl, her aunt Mia, who was marrying this superrich dude in Connecticut the following summer and had asked Stacey to be her junior bridesmaid—
“I know you’re pretty unhappy about this move,” Uncle Kev finally said, interrupting Stacey’s daydream about dresses and shoes and stuff.
“Let’s see,” she said, her chin still propped in her hands as she again stared into the hissing, sputtering fire. “I had to leave all my friends, start in a new school in the middle of the year, I’m guessing there’s no mall within five hundred miles, and this house is like, totally disgusting.”
“Okay, the leaving your friends and new school in the middle of the year—yeah, those really blow. But I happen to know there’s something even better than a regular mall, not ten miles away.”
“Like what?”
“A two-hundred-store outlet mall.”
“Yeah, right. Dad taking me to an outlet mall? Get real.”
“So you’ll make new friends, Stace. Friends with moms who love nothing better than goin’ to outlet malls. And the house isn’t gonna be disgusting forever, because your dad and I are gonna get it all fixed up, get rid of the sucky carpet and wallpaper… You’ll see,” he said, nudging her with his shoulder. “It’ll be great. So you think you could just, you know…give it a chance? Because this is really important to your dad.”
Stacey sighed, wishing the fire was one of those Harry Potter things that sent you someplace else. In her case, back to her grandparents’ nice, warm house in Springfield. Of course, they weren’t gonna be around all the time anymore, she knew that. That’s one of the reasons she couldn’t stay behind, because they were gonna do some traveling and wouldn’t be there to take care of her. And her aunts’ and uncles’ houses were too full of their own kids, and maybe she could’ve gone to live with Aunt Mia, but then she would’ve still had to go to a different school….
“I just don’t get why things couldn’t stay the way they were,” she said, still staring. “Why we couldn’t stay where we were.”
“Because your dad was unhappy, Stace,” Kev said softly, and Stacey’s eyes shot to his. Yeah, okay, her uncle was definitely a hottie. Objectively speaking. Her dad was okay-looking, she supposed, but nothing like Kevin. Women went stupid when they saw Kevin. Okay, so sometimes women went all zombie around her dad, too, but that’s probably because he was so freaking big he scared ’em.
She looked back at the fire. “He never said anything to me about being unhappy.”
“No. He wouldn’t. And he’d kill me if he knew I was saying any of this to you, so you gotta promise to keep your yap shut, okay?” When she nodded, secretly thrilled to be part of a conspiracy, Kev said, “The thing is, from the minute you were born, everybody’s been hot to give your dad advice on how to raise you, what he should and shouldn’t do, stuff like that. He finally got tired of all the interference. Well, actually, he’s been tired of it for a long time. He just couldn’t do anything about it before now.”
Stacey felt her brow knot. “Interference?”
“You know, not being able to make his own decisions. About you. If you want my take on it, I think he was afraid of losing you. That it was getting harder and harder for the two of you to have your own thing, you know?”
“That’s nuts,” she said, her jaw crunching from her holding it in her hands. “Nothing’s ever gonna come between Dad and me.” This was one of those things she simply knew, the way she knew she’d never, ever like Brussels sprouts. “And anyway,” she added, still crunching, “so why couldn’t he just, I don’t know, get us our own apartment or something in Springfield?”
“Because sometimes a person can’t figure out who they really are until they break free of everything they’ve known before. Am I making any sense?”
Not really. But another thrill made her shiver, that Kev thought she was mature enough to handle what he was telling her. Not that she liked it, necessarily, but you can’t have everything.
She sat up straight to look at him. “Is that why you left home?”
“Basically, yeah. But some of the stuff I was into… Trust me, Stace, you don’t wanna know. I was a mess. Your dad, though—he’s always been solid as a rock. Dependable. Selfless. Always puttin’ everybody else first. Like you. No matter what, it’s always been about you. You first, then everybody else, then—maybe—him.”
He got up to stoke the fire, setting off a miniature fireworks display before he shut the doors with a screechy clang. Then he straightened, his hands in his pockets. It was finally beginning to warm up a little, enough for Stacey to open her coat. She wondered where her uncle was going with this.
“That’s kinda the point I’m trying to make,” he said, “in my own convoluted way—that on the surface, this might seem to be all about him. Except…” He sort of laughed. “Except your dad’s not capable of making anything all about him. So this whole crazy scheme—it’s about you, kid. You and him. See?”
But before she could say anything, her uncle’s cell rang—thank God they at least could get a signal out here—and he excused himself to answer it. Stacey wondered if it was a girlfriend. As cute as he was? He probably had girls up the wazoo. As opposed to Dad, who never had any. At least, not that Stacey was aware of. Thank God. She used to watch these movies or read books where the kids were all about trying to get their single father or mother hooked up with somebody, and Stacey had always thought, Why? Because she and Dad were fine, just the two of them. There was no way anybody else would ever fit in.
