Just Like Heaven Read online

  Maggy

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  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: RE: housing

  Thanks for the FYI but I’ll check it out when I get up there the end of the month. Busy tying up loose ends down here but will call soon.

  MK

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  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: on the road

  The newlyweds are back and I’m off to Barbados for a few days with Lisa. NYC ain’t big enough for the four of us. Yet.

  Gwynnie said you just got the all clear from the MD to drive, etc. Good on you. Gwynnie also said you and the preacher are “hot and heavy.” Be happy, kid, while it lasts but I just don’t see you as the preacher’s wife . . .

  L, PNG

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  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: privacy

  If I wanted your Uncle Paul to know my updated medical

  status OR ANYTHING ELSE I’d fax him a copy. Use

  your head, Gwynnie, and ASK ME first. BTW watch

  the mail: I’m sending the key lime recipe for Joanne.

  xoxo Mom

  * * * * * *

  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: vacation!!!!

  I won’t be in again until June 1. Believe it or not, I’m taking a 2-week vacation. If you need me, the cell will be on. Otherwise have fun, work hard, and remember all gossip. xoxo Kate

  Twenty-one

  “Wait, Mom!” Kate flew out the front door and across the lawn toward the driveway. “You forgot your keyboard.”

  Maeve hit the brakes near the mailbox and rolled down her window. “Thanks, honey! I’d be lost without that.”

  Kate slipped the device through the open window and took the opportunity to hug her mother one more time.

  “I’m going to miss you.”

  “So you’ve said six times in the last hour!” Maeve gave her a return hug. “I’m only three towns away. I think we’ll be seeing each other.”

  Kate nodded and stepped away from the car. “Drive carefully. That intersection near the shop is tricky. Look both ways before you make the left onto Church; there’s a blind driveway and—”

  “I’ve been driving since I turned sixteen, Kate. I think I can manage.”

  “Of course. You’re right. I’m being silly.”

  “If you want me to stay a few more days, honey, I’d be happy to.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Kate said, although she was tempted to take her mother up on the offer. “Dr. Lombardi said it’s time, so it’s time.” Her stress test went perfectly. Her EKG was great. She was cleared to resume all normal activities.

  Including sex.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Maeve said. “Everything will turn out the way it’s supposed to.”

  Kate had to laugh. “Mom, that’s been said about everything including the Potato Famine and the Oscars telecast. What does that mean?”

  “Leap and the net will appear,” Maeve said, quoting another one of her favorite aphorisms. “If you do that, you’ll be fine.”

  Kate stood in the driveway long after Maeve’s car disappeared around the corner. If she followed her heart, she would leap into her own car, drive down to Rocky Hill, and throw herself at Father Mark Kerry’s feet.

  For the first time in her adult life, she had two weeks with nothing to do, nowhere that she had to be, nobody she had to please but herself. She could go where she wanted, when she wanted, and stay as long as she wanted.

  Mark was systematically closing down his life in New Jersey. His various responsibilities were dropping off one by one in preparation for his return to New Hampshire. They no longer talked about his future plans. They both knew that each day brought them closer to saying good-bye.

  His commitment to his old congregation ran deep. She couldn’t compete with the forces pulling him back to Greenwood. He had debts to repay, ghosts to put to rest, and until he did all of that they couldn’t possibly have a future.

  Not that she was thinking of a future. The future was dangerous territory, uncharted and littered with the broken hearts of other women wiser than Kate in the ways of love. But somehow that didn’t stop them from trying again. She had never been good at living for the moment, but it was time she threw what remained of her caution to the wind and gave it a shot. It was easy to avoid heartbreak if you never fell in love, but that was no way to live.

  Leap and the net will appear.

  Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. The time had come to make the leap.

  Change was everywhere. You could see it in the greening lawns, the flowering trees, the gardens suddenly blooming with color and life. The landscape seemed to change on a daily basis as spring finally hit its stride, and so, it seemed, did the landscape of Mark’s life.

  Spring was supposed to be about renewal, but this year spring was about good-byes and those good-byes were starting to take their toll on him. His New Jersey roots had grown deeper than he’d been willing to admit; transplanting them to New Hampshire wasn’t going to be the easy, painless transition he had envisioned when the vestry first approached him about coming back to Greenwood. Catherine’s words had hit their mark. He wasn’t the same man who had left Greenwood in search of recovery. He wasn’t the same man who was content being rector of a small-town parish, raising his kids where he had been raised, growing old with his wife with grandkids and great-grands sprouting around them like dandelions.

  Those dreams were dead, but new dreams had shaken off the ashes and managed to flourish when he wasn’t looking.

  There was a place for him here, a good place, but the timing was all wrong. Two months ago he had looked upon his return to Greenwood as both repayment of an old debt and a sweet challenge. One year or five, it didn’t matter. He would follow where it led.

  But that was before God decided to send Kate into his life and turn everything upside down.

  She was waiting for him on the front porch. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail. She wore jeans and a bright red sweater and old sneakers that had clearly been around a few years. She jumped up at the sound of the Honda and waved at him, and he nearly drove into the rose bushes at the look of joy on her face. He’d stopped asking himself whether he deserved this unexpected happiness. Only God knew the answer to that, and He wasn’t saying.

  She ran across the yard and jumped into the car. “Maeve’s gone, my tests were perfect, and I’ve decided the next two weeks belong to us.”

  “You’re not working mornings at the shop?”

  “Shop?” She widened her eyes. “What shop?”

  Except for Charlotte, his days were free and clear.

  “Spring Lake,” he said, as a huge smile spread across his face. “I could use a cheeseburger.”

  She gave him a look. “Ever had your cholesterol checked?”

  He started to laugh. “Been to church lately?”

  “I’ll forget the cholesterol if you forget the church.” She started to laugh. “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  The truth was, nothing was off-limits between them. No topic was too sensitive, too awkward, or too personal. They had talked about their families, their marriages. The future was the only thing they didn’t talk about. By tacit agreement, they had stopped acknowledging the fact that their time together had an expiration date, and had started living in the now.

  The rain started as they reached the highway and was coming down steady and hard by the time they exited at Spring Lake.

  “Springtime in New Jersey,” Kate said as they found parking a few blocks away from the luncheonette. “Welcome to the Dark Side.”

  “There’s probably an umbrella in here somewhere.” He dug around in the backseat but could only come up with a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, Sunday’s Newark S
tar-Ledger, three roofing tiles, a box of nails, and an impressive assortment of wrappers from every fast-food place in the state.

  “You like McDonald’s?” she asked, eyeing the wrappers.

  “You’ve got a problem with McDonald’s?”

  “I saw one just outside town. Why don’t we use the drive-through?”

  “Mickey D’s isn’t much on ambience.”

  “That’s why they call it takeout,” she said with mock patience. “We’ll take it out to the beach and eat in the car.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were parked in the lot facing the ocean, cocooned by rain and fog and the steam rising off his Big Mac with fries.

  “I’m impressed,” he said, gesturing toward her Chicken Caesar. “I wouldn’t have had the willpower.”

  “Sure you would,” she said, spearing a piece of romaine with the tines of her white plastic fork. “You had the willpower to give up drinking, didn’t you? That impresses me.”

  “One day at a time,” he said. “That’s about as much as I can control.”

  “When you come down to it, that’s about as much as any of us can control.”

  “God wants us to live in the now.”

  She put down her fork. “That’s assuming God asks anything of us.”

  “So you’re an agnostic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They both laughed at the irony of the statement.

  “I believe in something, some force, but I don’t know exactly what to call it.”

  “I wasn’t going to bring up religion again, but it’s part of me.” It colored his thinking, his actions, his daily life.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “This gives me the right to deliver one free cholesterol lecture at a time and place of my choice.”

  “Reality’s starting to make inroads, isn’t it?” He popped a fry into his mouth.

  “I noticed,” she said, pushing aside a crouton in favor of a piece of chicken. “I hate when that happens.”

  Suddenly the rain stopped. The clouds lifted. The sun—well, the sun gave it its best shot. And just like that, reality bit the dust.

  “Are you game?” he asked as he gathered up their wrappers and tossed them into the backseat with their brethren.

  She flung open the passenger-side door and jumped out. “Try and stop me.”

  It was like walking through oatmeal. They squished, slid, sank, and laughed as they struggled down to the shoreline.

  “Whose bright idea was this?” Kate demanded in her best Sopranos Jersey Girl imitation. “What were you thinking?”

  “Hey, you saw the rain,” he said. “Rain plus sand equals mud.”

  “A wiseguy in a clerical collar. We should pitch the idea to HBO.”

  “An Episcopalian mob movie? Sounds like a winner to me.”

  They held hands as they walked along, batting increasingly silly ideas back and forth, until they were laughing so hard and so loud that they had to stop and hang on to each other for support.

  Her body was warm and soft against his. Her hair smelled like flowers and sunshine. Their laughter made a quick shift into something sharper, something that felt a lot like desire.

  Reality was massing right beyond the perimeter and it was up to him to keep it at bay as long as he could.

  Three visits to Spring Lake. One drive to the Poconos. A long kiss-filled afternoon at the movies.

  Nine days and counting.

  She didn’t invite him to stay the night and he didn’t ask. Their good-night kisses were prolonged and painfully exciting, but she kept the door closed between them and refused to ask herself why.

  They rode the train into Manhattan and spent the day wandering through museums and enjoying Central Park.

  They drove into Philadelphia to visit Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

  They went to a good-bye party at Scott and Marcy’s house, shared tea and cookies with Charlotte Petruzzo, met Gwynn and Andy for linguine with clam sauce at a little Italian restaurant in Asbury Park.

  Three days and counting.

  The morning before Mark’s house sale closed, they went to Professor Armitage’s house to sign a consent form for the documents to be shipped to another expert in Boston. Maeve, looking radiant and happy in a crimson silk wrapper, opened the door. She kissed them both and ushered them into the dim foyer.

  It was one thing to know that your mother was dating a notoriously foul-tempered history professor. It was another to see her rosy in the afterglow of love.

  “Chester has a class this morning. He asked if I minded staying around until you came by.” She gave both of them a big hug. “As if I’d mind seeing you two!”

  Kate made a show of checking out her mother’s state of dishabille. “Should I start calling him Daddy?”

  Maeve threw back her head and laughed. “We’re not at that point yet,” she said, “but I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  “The eternal optimist,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I believe love is possible,” her mother said, “even if sometimes the signs point to the contrary.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” Kate said to Mark, pretending to cover his ears with her hands. “My mother owns property in Fantasyland.”

  “Life is short,” Maeve said. “If you’re lucky enough to have a choice, why not choose happiness?”

  Kate and Mark exchanged looks as Maeve went in search of the letter of permission that needed Kate’s signature.

  Choose happiness.

  It sounded so simple when Maeve said it. Given a choice, who wouldn’t choose to be happy?

  So why was it so hard to do?

  Maeve got a little weepy when they said good-bye. She hugged Mark hard and kissed him on the cheek, rubbing the red lipstick smudge away with the pad of her thumb. “Words can’t possibly express my gratitude to you,” she said, “or my affection.”

  Kate, who hadn’t had a crying episode for almost four days, wept all the way down the front steps, across the yard, and down the driveway to her Miata.

  “I really thought I was over this,” she said as she wiped her eyes with a paper napkin. “Leave it to Maeve to turn me back into a crying machine.”

  They stopped for lunch at a health-food restaurant in Princeton, and for the first time they didn’t talk much at all. She wasn’t sure if it was her mother’s words that had triggered the descent into silence or the fact that very soon they would be saying good-bye.

  But there was no denying the fact that they had finally run out of words.

  The closing on Mark’s house was set for two p.m. at his lawyer’s office in Plainsboro. The Wygrens and Bev the real estate agent showed up at noon for the walk-through as Mark finished packing the last of his things into the U-Haul attached to the back of his Honda. Most of his furniture had been thrift-shop finds that he had donated to a women’s shelter in town. The remaining few pieces he offered to the Wygrens, who had gratefully accepted them. Papers were signed. Checks were written. People shook hands and wished each other well.

  At five p.m. he handed over the keys to the happy couple and headed north on Route 1. His original plan had included a quick bite to eat and then driving straight through to New Hampshire with two days to spare before he was set to take over.

  But that was before Kate.

  Choose happiness, Maeve had said, but he wasn’t sure he remembered how.

  They tried, they really did, but it was hard to relax and enjoy the dinner Kate had prepared for them with that pink elephant sitting in the middle of the room.

  Their time together was running out and instead of savoring every minute, every second, they were acting as if they couldn’t wait for it to be over.

  When had they become so ill at ease with each other? Kate wondered as they carried their plates into the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. Their easy camaraderie, the almost otherworldly sense of connection—how could it vanish overnight?

  The doctor had warned her that this
would happen. One morning she would wake up to find that while she was sleeping life had resumed its normal dimensions. All of those beautiful Technicolor emotions would have muted into pastel and it would be as if the heart attack and the weeks that followed had happened to somebody else.

  She just hadn’t expected it to happen now, when their time was running out.

  The funny thing was that her emotions were still vivid Technicolor reds and blues and greens, sparkling golds and shimmering silvers. Mark was the one who had changed.

  He seemed distant, almost a stranger, and she sleep-walked through the motions of making coffee, serving dessert, like a robot in a bad science fiction movie.

  By ten o’clock they had run out of things to say to each other. The dishes were neatly stacked in the dishwasher. The pots were scrubbed and put away. The candles on the table outside had been extinguished, and so it seemed had the last flicker of warmth between them.

  When he stood up to say good night, she heard his words before he uttered them. His house was sold. He’d said all of his good-byes. Why spend the night in a motel when he could spend it on the road and be in Greenwood by daylight?

  Just because he’d saved her life didn’t mean she was entitled to the rest of his.

  “It’s late,” he said. “I should—”

  Choose happiness . . . choose happiness . . .

  “Stay.” She reached out and took his hand. “You should stay with me tonight.”

  Now the choice was his.

  Twenty-two

  They never made it beyond the hallway. The words had barely escaped Kate’s mouth when they crashed together in a clumsy, ardent, wild explosion of heat and longing that stripped them both of everything but the need to touch and be touched.

  Her hands slid under his sweater. His fingers unbuttoned her shirt. The shock of flesh against flesh was painful, sweet, breathtakingly erotic.

  They undressed each other clumsily, hungrily, never taking their eyes off each other. Sweater, shirt, jeans, skirt, shoes, everything piled together on the floor. Forgotten like the world beyond the front door.