Chances Are Page 16

  “Your grandpa is a very smart man,” Claire said, unable to hold back a smile.

  “What if he has to pee?” Billy asked, his dark blue eyes twinkling with mischief. “What if—”

  “I get the drift,” she said as she gathered up the huge stack of People, In Style, and Spiderman comics that covered the coffee table. It hadn’t taken her father long to figure out that Billy was his best ally when it came to getting what he wanted from his overworked, overstressed, middle-aged daughter. “Why don’t you both watch TV in my room? If Grandpa needs the bathroom, he can use mine.”

  “Can Bruno watch TV in your room, too?”

  “Only if you make sure Fluffy doesn’t start a fight with him.” Bruno, a sixty-pound bulldog with socialization problems, was the latest addition to their family. Fluffy was a six-pound calico cat who ruled their domestic universe by virtue of longevity and divine right.

  “Cool! I’m gonna go tell Grandpa.”

  Her youngest had two speeds: supersonic and warp drive, and he was halfway down the hall before she could remind him that the entire menagerie needed feeding and watering and walking.

  She tossed the magazines into a recycling bag and snagged one of Maire’s Mickey Mouse slippers from under the end table, a souvenir from—could it be Christmas? Maire had flown home from school in Ireland on her Aunt Frankie’s frequent flyer miles and brought with her the chaos only a sixteen-year-old girl knew how to create.

  There had been a time when the thought of inviting someone like Olivia or Rose or the other members of their poker game into her home would have been laughable. “Five kids!” she would say with a roll of her eyes meant to convey unleashed chaos, and everyone would laugh and nod their heads in instant understanding.

  It was an easy out, a way to keep the hum of gossip to a tolerable volume without inviting more. Her kids’ birthday parties were held at the local bowling alley or down on the beach or maybe even at Great Adventure, someplace fun and impersonal. A place where she wouldn’t be wondering if the woman smoking a Marlboro in her kitchen had spent yesterday afternoon in bed with her husband.

  She had seen the looks, heard the whispers that grew louder over the years. She would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to avoid them. Poor Claire. How humiliating. Doesn’t she have any pride?

  How many times had she asked herself the same thing? You run in to the supermarket to pick up a gallon of milk and end up wondering if the new girl on register six was your husband’s latest conquest. Or how about the time you popped into the insurance office and found yourself face-to-face with the blond-haired office manager, and your imagination raced into overdrive. And then there was the owner of the pet shop, or maybe that sweet-faced kindergarten teacher, the one with the big weepy blue eyes.

  No regrets. That was what she had told herself on a daily basis. Nobody had ever said it would be perfect between them, but for a little while it had been close to heaven. He had been her knight in shining armor, riding in on a white charger, offering her sanctuary when she had nowhere else to turn.

  It had taken Claire a long time to make peace with the life she had been handed. She had spent most of the last three years since Billy’s death looking for someone, something, to blame for the bad luck, the wrong turns, the fierce, nuclear rage that pushed the people she loved most far beyond the reach of her arms. She had blamed her parents, blamed her siblings, blamed her in-laws, blamed her husband who had died a hero’s death before they had the chance to make things right one last time.

  The O’Malleys always said that if it wasn’t for bad luck, they would have no luck at all, and in the years she had been part of the family, she had come to understand the truth of that statement. She and Billy hadn’t planned a life together. They barely knew each other when they exchanged their vows. Both of their hearts belonged to others, but fate had had other plans for them.

  Before she drew her next breath, she was twenty years down the road with five children, a mortgage, and a heart that had been broken more times than she wanted to count, in more ways than she could have imagined possible and still keep on beating.

  She was nineteen when they met. She and Charles were newly engaged, and love had made her impervious to his best pal Billy’s considerable charms. The truth was, even Billy had faded into the background next to her fiancé. Most men did. The fact that they both thought Charles hung the moon made them instant friends.

  It was, of course, too good to last. Charles was killed in a traffic accident two months before they were going to be married, and his death devastated both Claire and Billy O’Malley. They loved Charles more than anyone else in the world ever could. He was the sun they revolved around, grateful for his light and warmth. Raw and aching with grief, Claire and Billy turned to each other for comfort, and that shared grief wove a powerful, if illusory, bond between them.

  When she found out she was six weeks pregnant with Charles’s baby, Billy asked her to marry him, and she accepted. Years later she wondered if it was their finest moment or the beginning of a tragedy that was still being written.

  But once the play was in motion, there was no turning back. Claire needed someone to lean on, and Billy needed a family. They had been too young, too filled with emotion to know what they were doing. They had come together at the wrong time, for all the wrong reasons, even if those reasons had seemed pure and noble. And maybe they had been. She wanted to believe that.

  There had been a lot of talk when she and Billy returned to Paradise Point as a married couple. The gossips had had a field day with their sudden marriage in the aftermath of Charles’s tragic death, and much of that gossip had to do with the paternity of the child she was carrying. But as the weeks and months passed, Charles vanished from the town’s radar screen, and the unexpected union of Claire Meehan and Billy O’Malley was no longer the number-one topic of conversation and conjecture.

  When Kathleen was born, everyone said she was the image of Billy, and the two of them fell into a silent conspiracy that was much easier than the truth. But they had never been able to fool his grandmother Irene. The day she and Billy came home from Maryland with the rings and the marriage license and the belly bump, Irene had turned her cold heart against Claire.

  At first Claire had tried to work her way back into what passed for the old woman’s affections, but when Kathleen was born to the sound of her great-grandmother’s indifference, she hardened her own heart in response. If Billy could look past Kathleen’s paternity, why couldn’t Irene do the same thing?

  Billy loved the blue-eyed little girl like one of his own. Claire saw that clearly when three more daughters arrived in quick Catholic succession, and their fate was sealed. They were a family.

  In the second decade of their marriage she made the decision that changed the course of her life. Everyone in town thought she had taken the kids down to Florida to see her parents, but the truth was she had left Billy for good. It was an impulsive decision, but then her life been a series of impulsive decisions.

  She had been waiting for the traffic light to change at the corner of Main Street where it intersected with Church, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel while she tried to figure out what she would make for dinner that night, when her gaze happened to land on Patty Hansen’s living room window.

  You don’t expect to see your husband making out with the Brownie troop leader at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning artfully framed by her Laura Ashley curtains and drapes.

  Claire was on the road to Florida by late afternoon, determined to start a new life that didn’t include sharing her husband with anyone who didn’t also share his DNA. Her parents were curious, but for once they didn’t ask too many questions. Mike and Margaret had an active social life that kept them busy, something for which Claire was intensely grateful. Besides, they had spent the first sixty-something years of their life in Paradise Point. They knew what was going on.

  The kids missed their daddy, but she made sure they quickly settled into their new ro
utine. The trick was to keep them busy so they wouldn’t ask too many questions. She couldn’t handle questions at the moment, especially not questions about why they were in Florida and Billy was still in New Jersey. Claire drove them to the beach, took them to Parrot Jungle, and one day while they were frolicking in the community pool, she fell in love.

  She had been floating through her days, trying hard not to think too much, enjoying the occasional lazy afternoon with the daughter of her parents’ next-door neighbors, a flamboyant thirty-something-year-old woman named Olivia Flynn, who was waiting out her second divorce in three years. The Flynns were New Jersey émigrés same as the Meehans, and the two families got on well together.

  Olivia was the star attraction of Del Mar Vista, Phase II, and the male residents congregated around her, eager for whatever crumb of attention she might toss their way. Claire, who had never inspired slavish male devotion, stood back in awe and enjoyed the show.

  Olivia had come to town to arrange a golden wedding anniversary party for her parents. Her younger brother Corin, a photographer, was off somewhere in Europe, but he had promised to make it home in time for the big day. It had been two years since Corin had been back in the States, much to his father’s loud disapproval. Brendan Flynn was a retired Teamster. The fact that his only son made his living snapping photos of worthless celebrities at opening nights and other sideshows infuriated him. No matter how many times Olivia tried to explain to Brendan that Corin did much more than snap photos of Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe partying in Cannes, it simply didn’t sink in. The work Corin had done in Bosnia had won international acclaim, but you wouldn’t know it to hear Brendan talk.

  Claire had been expecting a male version of Olivia, and in many ways she wasn’t disappointed. Corin Flynn carried the same kind of high-energy force field as his sister, a powerful magnetism that drew people to him. He shared her dark good looks, her sly sense of humor, but where Olivia saw life as an endless party, Corin knew it was anything but.

  He lived anywhere and everywhere. He only owned what he could stuff into a backpack. He made his way through the world as an observer, capturing what he could with his camera, then moving on. There was an almost palpable sense of reckless danger about him that Claire found irresistible. She always had. Looking back, it all seemed sadly inevitable.

  Night after night the three of them sat out on the lanai and talked as the moon rose high in the sky. They talked about life, about family, about sex and politics and religion. Neither one noticed when Olivia began to say good night earlier and earlier. Everyone noticed when they began to stay out later and later. Corin told Claire about the wife he had loved and lost to another man. She told him about Billy, things she had never shared with anyone on earth. They told each other their secret dreams, their deepest fears.

  And they fell in love.

  LOVE WAS A terrible thing when it came to a married woman with four children. The emotions it awoke inside Claire were as terrifying as they were exciting. This was how it felt to be happy. This was how it felt to be desired. This was how it felt to wake up in the morning with every single one of your senses alive with wonder.

  This was everything she had tried for years not to think about, not to want, not to believe existed beyond the pages of a romance novel or on the screen at her local multiplex. She tried desperately to hide her feelings, but it was like trying to lure the genie back into the bottle before she granted your third wish.

  Happiness was the one secret she couldn’t keep, no matter how hard she tried. His parents saw it on their faces. Her parents heard it in her voice, her laughter. Even her kids knew something was different, although they were still too young to be able to put a name to it.

  To this day she didn’t know who told Billy, but one afternoon she was sitting by the community pool when she heard Kathleen cry out, “Daddy’s here!” and she looked up and saw Billy walking toward her. He looked cocky and unsure at the same time, her swaggering husband wearing his vulnerability on his sleeve.

  This was a Billy O’Malley she had never met, a man she didn’t know, hadn’t imagined existed. She watched as the kids scrambled from the pool and ran toward him, wrapping him in wet chlorine hugs that left huge splotches on his jeans and T-shirt. Maire and Courtney clung to him like baby monkeys. Willow clutched his arm and sobbed, while Kathleen, always the least predictable of her brood, gazed up at him shyly, no doubt seeing the same handsome young knight in shining armor her mother had seen in him all those years ago.

  Billy met her eyes over the heads of their children, and for an instant she saw that handsome young knight, too, and she was lost. They were family. Not even love could compete with that.

  She had tried clumsily to explain it to Corin, but he couldn’t hear her over the powerful rush of love and anger that rose up between them, wiping out everything but the fact that she was leaving.

  Ten months after she returned to Paradise Point, Billy Jr. was born, and there was no more looking back at what might have been. Corin was relegated to a secret, hidden part of her heart where he had stayed until Olivia moved to Paradise Point, and the possibility of seeing him again became all too real.

  “Mom, can Grandpa and I have some of those cookies on the kitchen counter?” Billy was back, this time with Fluffy draped across his shoulders like a feline boa.

  “No,” she said, noticing a horrifying cobweb dangling from the far corner of the living room ceiling. She doubted if Rose DiFalco had ever seen anything like that in her life. “The cookies and cake are for my party.”

  “I just want one,” he said, “and it doesn’t even have to be chocolate.”

  “I said no. Those cookies are reserved for women over the age of twenty-one.”

  “That’s not fair! They won’t even eat them. Even the skinny ones are always on diets.”

  “I’ll save you the leftovers. You can take a few to school in your lunch bag tomorrow.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  She aimed some spray cleaner in the general direction of the cobwebs, then wondered why she had ever thought wet dust would be easier to eliminate than dry dust.

  “You and Grandpa had pizza tonight,” she said. “You love pizza.”

  “Pizza’s not dessert.”

  Oh, he was her son, no doubt about it. Billy Sr. used to say she was the only woman on earth who would turn down filet mignon and shrimp cocktail for a bag of Oreos.

  “I think I saw a few ice cream sandwiches in the freezer,” she said. “That’s better than girly cookies, wouldn’t you say?”

  He gave her one of those smiles that were his father all over again and tore off full speed for the kitchen.

  She quickly ran the vacuum cleaner over the carpet, then wiped fingerprints from the coffee table with the sleeve of her sweater. The pets were all accounted for, and with a little luck Billy and her father wouldn’t turn her bedroom into a locker room. Now all she had to do was set up the card table, start the coffee, change into a pair of jeans that didn’t have peanut butter and jelly stains on the back pocket, and she would be ready.

  The doorbell rang as she was setting out the coffee cups on the sideboard. She glanced up at the clock. Nobody would dare show up a half hour early on Claire’s night. Not if they valued their lives.

  “Go away,” she said as Olivia and Rose marched right past her and headed for the living room. “The card table isn’t set up, I need to change my jeans, and—”

  “Sit down,” Olivia ordered, pointing toward the recliner near the window.

  “I don’t have time to sit down. I’m expecting company.”

  Rose at least got the joke, but Olivia walked right over it.

  “We have something to ask you,” Olivia announced.

  “Ask me standing up.” She turned around and pointed at her rear end. “Billy’s PBJ.”

  “Honey, I want you to sit down.”

  Olivia spread a magazine over the cushion of the recliner, and Claire went light-headed with fear. �
��Is something wrong? Oh, God, it’s not one of my girls, is it?” With two of them in the Army, worry was woven into the fabric of every single waking moment.

  “I told you she would think that,” Rose said to Olivia. “That’s always a mother’s first reaction.”

  “Your girls are fine.” Olivia sounded bewildered, but then she had never mothered anything more than a series of Yorkshire terriers. “We’re here to talk about you.”

  “About your future,” Rose said, taking a seat on the sofa opposite her.

  “And ours.” Olivia perched on the arm of the sofa next to Rose.

  “We have a future together?”

  “We could have,” Rose said.

  “Please tell me you’re not talking about sex.”

  “What we’re talking about is better than sex,” Rose said.

  “Damn right.” Olivia leaned toward her and whispered, “We’re talking pastry . . . English breakfast tea . . . chocolates . . .”

  “Oh God,” Claire said. “Not those scary chocolates in the shape of—”

  Olivia had one of those full-bodied laughs that women had been taught from childhood to tone down into a more ladylike chuckle. “Did you ever—” It was one of Olivia’s more remarkable anecdotes.

  “If I did,” Rose said, “I’d take it to my grave.”

  Claire was equally amazed. “I wouldn’t have thought there was enough chocolate in the state of New Jersey for that.”

  Olivia winked. “Philip was nothing if not resourceful.”

  “Be that as it may,” Rose said, “we’re not here to talk about Philip.”

  “Rosie’s right.” Olivia switched back into business mode, a transformation that never ceased to amaze Claire. Who would have guessed that behind all that cleavage beat the heart of a top-notch businesswoman? “You know about the tea shop I’m opening.”

  Claire nodded, eyes darting from Olivia to Rose as she tried to connect the dots. “Cuppa,” she said cautiously, wondering what in the world any of this had to do with her.