“That’s the worst part of all,” Gwynn said as Maeve watched from the sidelines. “You don’t even know what you’re missing.”
“And you do?” Kate’s voice rose despite herself. “I don’t think you could possibly have any idea how—”
“Andy and I are getting married.”
For a moment Kate thought she would need CPR for the second time that week. “Not funny.”
“She’s not trying to be funny,” Maeve said. “Surely you saw this coming.”
Saw it coming? Gwynn fell in and out of love on a regular basis. For the sake of her sanity, Kate had long ago stopped trying to keep track of the ever-changing cast of characters.
She wheeled around to face her mother. “You knew about this?”
Maeve nodded. “She told me—”
“I told Gran about it in the car today,” Gwynn said, taking charge. “I wanted to tell you the other day—remember I said we should have lunch in Princeton?—but that’s when you had your . . .” Her words trailed off.
“Had my heart attack,” Kate said, aware that her heart hurt more right this second than it had during the worst of the MI. She cast around for the right thing to say, but she wasn’t sure those words existed in her vocabulary. “I thought you were planning to start grad school in September.”
Was she imagining it or was Gwynn actually blushing? “My plans have changed.”
“Your plans have changed? When? In the last ten minutes? You’ve been accepted. You were going to share an apartment with Tanya and Britt. You were going to intern in your dad’s office next summer. Have you told him? Have you told Tan and Britt? Have you told the school yet?” She paused for breath. “Andy’s a fisherman, honey. He lives on the docks.”
“What does that have to do with anything? I love him,” Gwynn shouted, “and I don’t want to wake up one day and wish I hadn’t taken the easy way out.”
“The easy way? Going back to school isn’t the easy way, it’s the smart way. If it’s real, Andy will still be there when you graduate.”
“And he’ll still be living on the docks, right? Go ahead! Say it. You think I can do better.”
“Of course I think you—”
Maeve shot her a warning look, and for the first time in years Kate heeded her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to take it that far.”
Gwynn was poised somewhere between tears and anger, and the look in her eyes made Kate feel ashamed of herself. She had meant every word, but she wished she had found a kinder way to express it.
Thank God for Maeve.
“Gwynnie, I thought you were going to duck out for some veggie wraps. That deli across the courtyard looks promising.”
Gwynn hesitated. Maeve pushed. Kate was too upset to do anything at all except stand there as her daughter’s future crumbled around her feet.
Maeve turned to Kate. “You can have a veggie wrap, can’t you? Low cholesterol, no trans fats, it should be okay.”
Kate nodded. She would have nodded yes to a bacon-wrapped cheeseburger at that point if it meant she would gain some breathing room.
Gwynn grabbed her purse and disappeared without a word to Kate.
“I’m glad you reined it in,” Maeve said as Gwynn went in search of sustenance. “Gwynn is a free spirit. She’s also a grown woman. You have to let her find her own way.”
Kate sank down onto the bed. “If you keep saying things like that, I might have a relapse.”
“Gwynnie and I are very much alike,” Maeve went on. “Another Moonchild. That’s why I understand her.”
And that was exactly what scared her. She could see her daughter thirty years from now with a string of marriages under her belt. “She’s flighty, immature, and irresponsible.”
“She’s also highly creative, high-spirited, and searching for the right path.” Maeve poured herself a glass of water and plucked a shiny red apple from the basket near the radio. “The truth is, she’s nothing like you, honey, and that isn’t a crime.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“Look at you,” Maeve said, her Balinese dancer earrings jiggling with the movement of her head. “You had a heart attack four days ago—and an angioplasty, no less—and you act like nothing happened.”
“It was a minor heart attack,” Kate reminded her. “Angioplasties are outpatient procedures. No big deal.”
“It’s a very big deal,” Maeve persisted. “You needed CPR. Most people in your shoes would be wrestling with some major life issues right now.”
“I thought you raised me not to be like most people.”
“Quite frankly, honey, this isn’t normal. You’re in denial.”
“Now you’re telling me I shouldn’t bounce back so easily?”
“Well, it does strike me as a tad odd.” Maeve bit into the apple and chewed with great gusto. “This should be a time for reflection and renewal.”
“You reflect on it,” Kate said, wishing she had an unlisted hospital room. “Personally I can’t wait until I get home and everything gets back to normal.”
She had the feeling she was the only woman in the world with more than a passing affection for normal.
Maeve considered her for what seemed like forever. “I went wrong somewhere with you, but I can’t figure out what my mistake was.”
“Six husbands might be a good place to start.”
“That never bothered you. I married good men. You liked them all.”
“They were terrific guys, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t bother me. I would have liked it better if you’d let one of them stick around long enough to unpack.”
“You never said anything.”
“I got pregnant and married at seventeen. That should’ve been a clue.”
“There were options available to you,” Maeve reminded her. “You could have chosen a different path.”
“I was a practicing Catholic then. There were no different paths.”
“We always have choices,” Maeve said in her best New Age Guru voice, the one she used on book tours and speaking engagements. “What we don’t always have is the guts to own those choices.”
Emotional confrontations were her mother’s lifeblood. They invigorated Maeve and brought her closer to the other person and the universe.
Emotional confrontations made Kate feel as if she’d been run over by a UPS truck, and as a rule she did her best to avoid them.
She leaned back against her pillows and met Maeve’s eyes. “So she told you this afternoon?”
“I’d had my suspicions,” Maeve said. “Didn’t you?”
“Nope,” said Kate. “Not a single one. I thought he was just one of the crowd where she works.”
“She’s been seeing him for a few months.”
“Yes, but she sees lots of people. I had no idea he was special.”
“Then you haven’t been listening, Kate.”
Score one for the alpha female in the family.
“So tell me about my car,” she said, putting aside Gwynn’s earthshaking decision for the moment. “Any dents, scratches, or parking tickets I should know about?”
“Your car is fine but an odd thing happened while we were there.” Maeve put down the half-eaten apple. “Some guy was checking it out.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“He was parked right behind your car. He stayed there for ten seconds, then drove away.”
Who needed a nuclear stress test when you had family to do the job? “I stole a spot from a guy in an old blue car.”
“The plot thickens,” Maeve said. “This guy was in a beat-up blue Honda.”
“Now that’s scary. What sane person would nurse a grudge over a parking space?” A flicker of memory tickled the back of her mind, then receded. “Did you ask him what he was doing?”
“By the time we wound our way around to where you were parked, he was gone.”
“Did you see what he looked like?”
Maeve closed her eyes. For a second Kate was afraid her mother was trying to channel the guy, but then she said, “Dark hair. Maybe late thirties. Sad eyes. I could see that all the way across the parking lot.”
The hairs on the back of her neck lifted just enough to catch her attention.
. . . hold on to me . . . I won’t leave you . . .
“I think that was him.”
“Our Good Samaritan?”
“He was the only man around at the time. I was walking across the parking lot and I saw him leaning against his car, talking on his cell phone. He looked over at me and I saw he was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and I was afraid he was going to start up over the parking spot—”
“And—?” her mother prompted.
“And nothing. That’s all I can remember.” She aimed a look in Maeve’s direction. “I wish you’d managed to talk to him.”
“We don’t know this is the same man, Kate. Gwynn thought he might be a car thief sizing up your Miata.”
“And it might have been the man who saved my life.”
“And what if it isn’t? You can find out just about anything on the Internet. We don’t want some nut showing up on your doorstep.”
“I don’t think it’s some nut,” Kate said.
I want him to find me, Mom. Can you believe it? I actually want a stranger to track me down.
“It’s all part of the grand plan,” Maeve said. “If you’re meant to see him again, you will, and if you’re not, there’s nothing you can do to change your fate. It’s all been preordained.”
Was Maeve going Buddhist again? At least during Maeve’s Wicca period, there had been spells and charms designed to goose fate along a different path.
They both looked toward the door at the sound of a familiar laugh. It was Gwynn, aglow with excitement. “You won’t believe who I found wandering the halls!” She poked her head back out into the hall. “It’s okay. She’s awake.”
Ed Bannister stood in the doorway, barely visible behind an armful of more larkspur and wisteria than Kate had ever seen any place short of a botanic garden in paradise.
On a surprise scale of one to ten, the appearance of her ex-husband with her favorite blooms was off the chart.
“Ed!” Maeve leaped to her feet. She had always had a soft spot for her former son-in-law. “It’s been too long.”
Ed handed Gwynn the flowers, then enveloped Maeve in a bear hug. “I read your latest on the plane, Mae.” He mimed wiping sweat from his brow. “Nobody warned me you were X-rated these days.”
Maeve laughed as she hugged him back. “A healthy sex life promotes a healthy life,” she said, “and that isn’t limited to people under sixty-five.”
Maeve’s current book promoted the sexual, social, and psychological benefits of Tantric sex for the senior citizen. Kate was proud of Maeve’s success, but there were times she wished her mother wrote under a pseudonym.
“How cool is this?” Gwynn said, clearly delighted with the impromptu family reunion. “The elevator doors opened and there he was, wandering the halls looking for Mom.”
Gwynn was an unapologetic daddy’s girl. Kate braced herself for the pangs of jealousy that usually followed one of these father/daughter get-togethers, but this time she felt only regret that they hadn’t been able to make it all turn out the way their daughter obviously still wanted it to.
“We’re going to need two vases for all of these,” Gwynn said, then dashed off with the flowers to the utility room down the hall.
“I thought you were in the outback,” Kate said to her ex-husband. She could still see the teenage boy she had married in the grown man who stood before her, and probably always would. Once, a very long time ago, she had believed she would grow old with him.
“Marie tracked me down through the bush pilot who flew me in.” He had met and married Marie a few months after their divorce became final.
Poor Gwynn. Romantic impetuosity ran in both sides of the family.
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“Of course he did,” Maeve piped up. “We’re family.”
“We
were
family,” Kate reminded her mother. Thirteen years was a long time to be divorced.
“You share a child together. That makes you family, no matter what the courts say.”
For a woman who had danced through a half-dozen marriages and more engagements than anyone cared to count, Maeve retained an old-fashioned reverence for the institution that was as charming as it was illogical.
“Sit.” Kate gestured toward a chair near the window. “You look exhausted.”
“Good idea.” Ed stifled a yawn. “I came straight from the airport.”
“I’m going to strangle our daughter. What did she say to Marie anyway that pulled you out of the outback?” Gwynn could turn a root canal into major neurosurgery. Kate could just imagine what she could do with a heart attack.
He looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “She said you had a heart attack. I didn’t need more than that.”
“I’m fine, Ed. Stop looking at me like I’m going to disappear.”
He didn’t crack a smile. “Gwynn said you flatlined and a stranger gave you CPR in the parking lot.”
“That’s the story, but I don’t remember the details.”
They said he held on to me when I thought I was going to slip away and he didn’t let go . . .
“You should call and take him out to dinner when you’re back on your feet,” Ed said. “There aren’t many Good Samaritans out there. They deserve a little recognition.”
“I wish I could, but I don’t know his name.”
Maeve looked up from her knitting. “Kate thinks he was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt.”
“A Deadhead?” Ed threw back his head and laughed. “I’d pay good money to see Kate with a Deadhead.”
“You make me sound a little judgmental.” Kate’s feelings were seriously wounded. “I wouldn’t judge a man by his T-shirt.”
Her ex-hippie mother couldn’t resist. “Honey, you came out of the womb with a scorecard in your hand and God help anyone who doesn’t measure up.”
She considered the source. This was Maeve French talking, the woman who made her living with her imagination, a copy of the
Kama Sutra
, and a deck of tarot cards.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Maeve said, waving a bejeweled hand in the air. “You are a formidable woman, but somebody has to tell you the truth.”