Leaves (18 page)

She started playing out the progression of courses in her mind. She hadn't initially considered her sisters' husbands, but she probably should. Gardner had a thing for cauliflower; maybe she could build a side around that. Doug loved her cold watercress soup; she could do shooters of it as an intermezzo. Joey didn't have any favorites yet, but Olivia loved her caramel-stuffed bomboloni. She could do that for dessert.

Pleased with how well this was coming together, Deborah didn't immediately register that Tyler was staring at her.

“That's a cool idea,” he said once she looked at him, “but isn't it a little strange that you're going to make this dinner on a night when none of us are there?”

Deborah allowed the question to steep for a few seconds. “No,” she said slowly. “Actually, it seems completely appropriate.”

After Corrina reminded him about their eight o'clock dinner reservation at seven fifteen, Gardner had come out of his office looking a bit peeved, showered quickly, and jumped in the car with her, barely saying a word. He seemed more than agitated about needing to leave his cases for a night out with his wife. He seemed disquieted, as though his internal system was roiling. Corrina wondered if there was something especially troubling in the case that was about to go to trial. If so, he would never tell her, so the best she could do was hope that a Scotch or two might bring him back toward equilibrium.

They didn't speak much while they looked through the menu and ordered, but once that was done, and once Gardner had downed three quarters of his first drink, he took an exaggeratedly deep breath, held a hand out to her from across the table, and smiled.

“So?” he said, letting the word out as a long exhale. “How are things?”

Corrina snickered. That was as close as Gardner would ever come to an apology for sequestering himself. She caught him up a bit on the party planning, telling him about a confounding conversation she'd had with the cleaning service that afternoon, and then mentioned a coffee date she'd had afterward with her friend Terre. This was nothing more than the usual end-of-day debriefing, but it felt good to be able to speak to Gardner without feeling as though his eyes were constantly glancing over to his office.

It was also nice to have a dinner conversation that didn't include either scowls or dismissiveness from Ryan. Since the door-slamming incident, he'd been even less communicative. Tonight, he'd simply left a note on the kitchen counter while Corrina was showering that read, “I'm going.”

“By any chance,” Corrina said as their appetizers arrived, “has Ryan said anything to you about having a girlfriend?”

Gardner's mystified expression suggested that he thought the idea of a son discussing this with his father was entirely inconceivable. “No, of course not. Ryan has a girlfriend?”

“Not that he would acknowledge to me, but I saw him walking with his arm around someone a little while ago.”

“Hmm. Well, he's certainly old enough to have a girlfriend. Maybe she'll warm him up a bit.”

Corrina took a forkful of her tomato salad and thought about whether she should take this conversation any further.

“She might be warming him up more than a bit,” she said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She put down her fork and gestured with her hands. “Tyler came to see me the other day. I immediately got my defenses up because he's been such a jerk lately, but he told me something that seems more and more plausible the more I think about it.”

“What's that?”

“That Ryan and a girl snuck into Tyler's house while he was away and that he came home to find the two of them semi-naked.”

Gardner's eyes widened. “Is this girl under eighteen?”

“I have no idea. I saw her in profile once. For that matter, I don't even know if the girl I saw and the girl Tyler saw are the same person.”

Gardner looked down at his plate, pushed a bit of food around, and then dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “I don't like this. Does he understand the risks?”

“Which risks are you talking about? The pregnancy risk? The getting-your-heart-broken risk?”

“I was thinking specifically about the statutory rape charge risk.”

Corrina's nerves prickled. “That sounds like something a lawyer would mention to him. Too bad we don't know one.”

Gardner sent her a gaze intended to wither. “Don't give me any of that crap, Cor. Why don't you know more about what he's doing? Teenaged boys can screw up their lives in a millisecond.”

Corrina had the presence of mind to acknowledge their environment – and the fact that the tables on either side were very close – before she responded. “Why don't
I
know more about this? You do remember that I'm his stepmother, don't you? I assume you also remember that every time I've tried to make a decision regarding Ryan – even really little ones – you've contradicted me.”

“You're being unnecessarily dramatic.”

“I really don't think I am. You won't even let me have my say over little things like whether he can go to a concert in the city. Why don't I know more about what Ryan is doing? Because you've sent him the very clear message that I have no parental role whatsoever.”

Gardner wiped at his mouth again, though he hadn't taken a bite since the last time. “Cor, ratchet down the angst a little.”

Corrina wanted to throw something, but she didn't want the rest of the restaurant to know she was that angry. “Okay, Gardner, I'll ratchet it down. Let's just leave it at this, okay? Your son –
your
son – might be screwing around. There are all kinds of reasons to be at least a little concerned about this, including your legal reasons. If this worries you at all, you – and only you – need to deal with it.”

With that, Corrina returned to her meal, wanting nothing more than to be done with the food and back home.

Less than an hour earlier, as they were driving to the restaurant, she'd imagined that she and Gardner would go straight up to the bedroom after they got home.

Now she just hoped he'd go back to his office.

The resonant echo of something striking her guitar's hollow body woke Maria. Her first thought was to turn toward Doug to see if he'd heard the sound as well, but his head was buried deep in his pillow; he probably hadn't moved for hours. She looked in the other direction, toward the rocking chair in the corner of the bedroom.

To find her mother rocking softly with the guitar in her lap.

Maria startled for a moment, but she found this vision surprisingly comforting. Hadn't she been hoping for a “visit” since her mother died?

“Mom?” she said softly to avoid waking her husband.

Her mother picked a few notes on the instrument. “Hello, dear.”

She fingerpicked several chord changes.

“Mom, you never played guitar.”

“I sound pretty good, though, don't I?”

She did sound good. Her touch was delicate, but even though she was playing quietly, there was a sense of dynamics.

“Have you been taking lessons in heaven?”

Mom offered a tiny grin, but no other response. Instead, she started humming a melody that complimented the chords she was playing. The melody was familiar, but Maria couldn't remember where she'd heard it before.

“That's pretty,” she said, speaking a little louder. Obviously Doug was sleeping very hard or this entire thing was a vivid dream. In either case, she didn't need to worry about waking him.

“I'm glad you think so. You should like it. After all, you wrote it.”

Mom hummed another couple of lines and Maria tried to pick it out from her many compositions.

“I did?”

“For Corrina's fourth birthday.”

As soon as Mom said that, the song sprang to Maria's mind. She'd only been writing songs for a short while and she wanted to do something special for her little sister. Corrina reacted as though Maria had presented her with a truck full of candy. She made her sing the song four times in a row, even though birthday cake was waiting, and then asked her to sing it repeatedly over the coming weeks.

This was the first time Maria had given a gift of a song, something she would do often afterward. She'd lost contact with this memory, but now that her mother had given it back to her, she remembered how good it felt to be Corrina's big sister, to be able to give her something no one else could give her.

Did Corrina remember this? If so, did she think of it as fondly as Maria was thinking of it now? When was the last time either of them mentioned it to the other?

Maria closed her eyes and sang along with her mother now, accessing the lyrics from some dusty file in her brain. By the time she got to the chorus, though, she realized she could no longer hear the guitar or her mother's humming.

She looked at the rocking chair. Her mother was no longer there. Nor was the guitar. Maria remembered that she'd put it in its case Friday afternoon.

Deborah didn't get out of bed before six in the morning very often. She especially didn't often get out of bed at that time when a beautiful and very cozy man was in there with her. For whatever reason, though, something jogged her awake at five-thirty with thoughts of Espagnole sauces. This kind of thing happened to her. Others might bolt up in the middle of the night thinking about an unpaid bill or a difficult relationship. For Deborah, it was cooking challenges. Usually, she could set such things aside after a few minutes and get back to sleep. Not now, though. Not with this particular challenge.

Deborah always kept frozen Espagnole in her freezer. This wasn't the kind of thing she mentioned to casual acquaintances, but it did come in handy because Espagnole took so long to make. It was especially useful now because she needed to find a way to put her own stamp on the sauce if she were going to put her name on it and market it to the food world.

Since she didn't do all that much cooking at home, Deborah had a limited range of fresh ingredients at her disposal. She thought about taking a run to the inn – it would be much easier to test recipes there, anyway – but it was very early and there was the matter of not wanting to run out on the beautiful man in her bed. She had some dried porcini and sun-dried tomatoes in the pantry. She could do something with those. She had several good balsamic vinegars; that could take her in an interesting direction. Might as well roll up her sleeves and see where things went from here.

While she slowly thawed the frozen Espagnole in a saucepan, Deborah tried to imagine a future where making sauces was a full-time profession. Could she sell enough to make a living? Certainly she was well enough connected in the food community to have a decent profile on the food fair circuit and to get in front of the necessary distributors. She'd also built up enough of a relationship with food sites and blogs over the years that she could get attention for the product line when she was ready to launch it. After that, it was up to the consumers, and that was a tremendous unknown to her. Devising menus that drove people to her restaurant was one thing; she understood that world. Packaging things for people to use in their own homes was something else entirely.

As Deborah soaked the mushrooms and tomatoes in hot water and minced some onion, she thought about something else she hadn't considered until this moment. She wouldn't be able to experiment nightly with these sauces. Once she launched a product line, she'd have to keep making
those products
. She'd never build up an audience if the sauces she shipped the first week in December were completely different from the sauces she shipped the third week in February.

This thought caught her up short. So much so that she turned off the burner on which she'd been thawing the Espagnole and sat down. For the next several minutes, her thoughts paralyzed her. This had seemed like such a liberating idea, a way of staying true to herself without having to work in someone else's restaurant. Now, she wasn't at all sure.

“Your bed is considerably less comfortable when you're not in it with me,” Sage said, walking into the kitchen. He was wearing the jeans and polo she happily remembered removing from him last night. “Wasn't the plan to sleep in this morning?”

“I know, I'm sorry. I started making sauces.”

Sage sat next to her and reached for her hand. “That's nearly an acceptable reason to be up this early on a Sunday morning.”

“But then I stopped.”

“Really? It smells great.”

She turned to face him directly. “I don't think I can do this, Sage.”

“Every entrepreneur worries about whether they're going to be successful.”

“No, that's not it. I mean, that's an entirely different set of worries. What hit me a few minutes ago is what it would mean if I
were
successful. I had this vision of myself making gallons and gallons of brown sauce with porcini and sun-dried tomatoes every week. That isn't me. How many sauces can I realistically think about selling? Four? Five? Maybe a new one every nine months or so. How am I going to do the same thing over and over and over?”

Sage sat back. It was clear he hadn't thought of this, either. For more than a minute, the kitchen was silent. Then he brightened. “What if you did something no one else is doing? At least no one I know of. What if you had your line of four or five staple sauces, but then had a subscription program where stores could get a limited edition sauce from you every other week. You could even sell the subscription direct to consumers online. The sauces would show up every Tuesday or something and people would be lining up to get them for that night's dinner.”

Deborah found it impossible not to chuckle at Sage's enthusiasm. “Line up. Really?”

“Absolutely. Except for the people who are buying direct. They'll just be sitting by their mailboxes.”

Deborah laughed out loud now. Still, the idea was intriguing. Of course, if no one else were doing it, it could mean that it was unworkable. It was worth a try, though.

“Okay, well since you're coming up with brilliant solutions this morning, come up with this one: how am I going to start a food business in this lousy kitchen?”

Deborah looked around the room. Her appliances were rudimentary at best. This had never mattered to her because she did so little cooking at home and she always had access to a great professional kitchen.

“You're not going to do it here.”

“Yeah, I know, I can rent out a restaurant kitchen for a few hours every day, but I'm always going to feel like I'm in the way.”

“You're not going to do that, either.”

“You know that when people call me a wizard in the kitchen that they're not actually saying I'm Dumbledore or something, right?”

“You're going to use mine.”

The implications were obvious. And even though they'd only been together for a short while, the implications didn't feel wrong to Deborah in any way.

Sage leaned toward her. “Come on, you know you've been lusting after my kitchen from the minute you saw it.”

“You do have a great kitchen,” Deborah said, kissing him. “But that is definitely not what I'm lusting after right now.”

Tyler was walking to the park to take some more shots when he saw Ryan coming toward him from the other direction. The kid was walking with his eyes toward the pavement and didn't seem to notice Tyler, even as they got within twenty feet of one another.

“I'm sure the ants appreciate that you're trying not to step on them,” Tyler said.

Ryan looked up, immediately registering discomfort when he realized who was talking to him. “Oh, hey.”

“Did Corrina mention that I came by looking for you the other day?”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't
think
so?”

Ryan looked down at the ground again, and then off to the distance. “I try not to listen too much to what Corrina says.”

“Fair enough. That strategy never worked for me. How's it going for you?”

Ryan shrugged in response.

The park was maybe a hundred yards in the distance. Tyler gestured in that direction. “Come on, let's go sit for a few minutes.”

“I really have to be somewhere.”

“Pretend that you don't.”

Making his reluctance apparent, Ryan followed Tyler to a bench and sat on the end opposite.

“We need to talk about last Sunday,” Tyler said, turning to face his nephew.

Ryan's expression tightened. “Not if you don't want to.”

“Yeah, we do. First of all, how did you get in?”

“The window in your office wasn't locked.”

“How did you know that?”

“I tried a few other windows first.”

Tyler made a note to himself to latch all the windows shut when he got home. “What made you think this was a good idea?”

Ryan studiously avoided eye contact. “I thought you'd be cool with it.”

The response seemed ludicrous to Tyler on so many levels. “You did? I didn't think you thought I was
cool
with anything anymore. And what part did you think I'd be cool with? The breaking into my house part? The screwing around with a girl in my bedroom part? The running out without a word when I came in part?”

“Look, I was wrong. About all of it. I'm sorry – is that what you want me to say?”

The response was standard-issue teenaged bluster. However, Tyler saw something behind it that he hadn't seen from his nephew in months: genuine emotion. There was just a hint of it, but it was noticeable.

“Ryan, what the hell is going on?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm guessing it's not nothing.”

Ryan glared at him as though he was going to snap, but then he pulled back. A long silence ensued, but Tyler refused to stop looking at him.

“Everything is weird, okay?” Ryan said. When Tyler didn't respond, he continued. “The only conversations I have with my father are about ‘staying focused' and ‘staying on track' and crap like that. Meanwhile, I think I was nine the last time he asked me how my day was. Corrina's trying to give me this ‘I'm your friend' garbage, but then she sells me out to my dad. Nobody in this whole family gets me. I just have a feeling my mother would have gotten me if she were still around.”

Tyler inched a bit closer. “She probably would have. But, you know, I thought I got you, too. How come you stopped checking in with me?”

“Because you started to sound like
them
.”

“Because I disagreed with you?”

“Because you started going into a ‘teenagers suck' rant.”

Tyler tried to remember enough of the conversation to call up a quote from it and then realized that this wasn't the point. “You thought that was a ‘teenagers suck' rant? It was definitely a ‘
some
teenagers suck' rant, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't talking about everyone.”

“Certainly sounded like it.”

“I think you might have missed the point of that exchange, Rye. I was trying to have an adult-level debate with you about something that mattered to both of us.”

Ryan locked eyes with him for a second and then looked off again. “Maybe I don't know what those are like.”

“Then we should talk more often.”

“Yeah. Maybe we should.”

Neither of them said anything for a short while. Tyler watched a little girl and boy playing soccer together, the girl stopping play regularly to tell the boy what he was doing wrong.

“So, who's the girl you were with?” Tyler finally said.

“Her name is Amy.”

“You into her?”

“Yeah, I think I am.”

Tyler turned away from the soccer siblings and looked back at his nephew. “She's kind of a babe.”

Ryan's eyes widened and he guffawed. It was easily the most unguarded gesture Tyler had seen from him in months. “You were checking out my girlfriend.”