An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach) Page 24

  When dinner was ready, Maggie sent Daisy out to the deck to bring the others to the table. A minute later, Daisy came back inside and announced her mommy and Aunt Gracie wanted to eat on the deck.

  “Well, then, go tell your mommy and your aunt Grace they can set the table out there.”

  Maggie got out the plates, salad bowls, flatware, and napkins and placed them on the counter. She arranged the potatoes and steaks on serving platters and slid the green beans into a bowl. When Natalie, Grace, and Daisy came in, she merely pointed to the items that had to be carried outside. They each grabbed what they could, and moments later they were seated at the round table. Maggie’s hopes for a fun, carefree, lively dinner together disappeared the second she realized not only was Natalie avoiding addressing or even looking at her, but Grace had adopted her sister’s attitude. Only Daisy’s constant chatter kept the meal from being more like a wake than a family dinner.

  “Daisy, I think it’s time to start getting you ready for bed,” Natalie announced as soon as she’d finished eating.

  “I didn’t have ice cream. Nana said I could have ice cream if I ate my beans.” Daisy pointed to the empty spot on her plate, where several green beans had been lined up earlier.

  “Well, Nana doesn’t get to decide,” Natalie said sharply. “Mom, I’d appreciate it if you left it to me to decide what she can eat and when.”

  Too angry and hurt to speak, Maggie nodded without looking at her daughter and bit back her words. She and Natalie were going to have this out tonight, but not in front of Daisy.

  Natalie helped a pouting Daisy from her chair.

  “But Nana said—”

  “Nana isn’t Mommy,” Natalie snapped.

  “Mommy, you talked mean to me and to Nana. You should say you’re sorry.” Daisy’s bottom lip quivered.

  “I’m sorry. Now let’s go upstairs and get your bath.” Natalie took Daisy’s hand and led her through the back door to the kitchen.

  Maggie turned to say something to Grace, but Grace was following Natalie into the house.

  “Shame on me for having raised such brats,” Maggie grumbled. “And shame on me for not realizing it until now.”

  Maggie cleared the table, stacked the dishwasher, washed the pots and pans, and cleaned off the grill. She tried to get her emotions under control, but the anger inside her burned like hot coals, and the hurt had pierced her heart. She’d devoted so much of her life to raising her daughters, and now they’d both seemingly turned against her without explanation.

  Well, she mused as she polished off the last bit of wine in the bottle, for better or for worse, that’s probably going to change within the hour.

  She took her wine outside onto the deck, where she watched the sun drop into the harbor, determined not to give in to the feeling of dread that had engulfed her. She’d just closed her eyes and tried to think soothing thoughts when Natalie opened the door and said briskly, “Mom, would you come in here, please?”

  As if facing her executioner, Maggie rose and went into the kitchen.

  “Sword or ax?” She glanced from one daughter to the other.

  “Funny, Mom.” Natalie gestured to the barstools.

  “Mom, won’t you join us?” Maggie quipped sarcastically in her most saccharine voice. “Why, of course. I always enjoy spending time with my loving daughters.”

  Natalie sighed heavily. “You’re not funny, and you’re not making this easier. Mom, do you know someone named Polly Wakefield?”

  “Sure. She’s my mom’s aunt,” Maggie said.

  “How ’bout Claire Lloyd?” Natalie tossed out the name.

  “She’s my mom’s cousin. My second cousin, I guess.” Maggie grew more confused by the second. “But what do either of them have to do with anything?”

  Natalie went to her bag and pulled out several sheets of paper. “These are emails I received over the past few months. I think you should read them.”

  Mystified, Maggie grabbed her glasses from the counter, where she’d left them, and slid them on as she took a seat. Natalie handed her the papers, and Maggie began to read.

  Time stood still as she attempted to understand what she was reading. She read the first printed page with her mouth open, one hand on her heart as if trying to keep it from leaving her chest.

  My name is Joe Miller and I think I’m your half brother. Actually, according to the DNA results, I’m pretty positive I am.

  “Oh. Oh . . . oh . . . ,” Maggie whispered, too stunned to speak beyond that one simple word.

  Tears fell from her eyes, rolling down her face in a steady stream to leave their mark on the pristine sheets of paper, a mixture of pain and joy at odds within her.

  Caught completely off guard, she was oblivious to the presence of her daughters and the fact that their discovery of her deepest secret had driven a wedge between them. For a moment, knowing her son—her son!—was reaching out was more than she could process.

  “Joe. His name is Joe,” she whispered.

  Maggie’d never given him a name. In her heart, he’d always simply been my baby boy. She’d believed naming him would be the prerogative of someone else, but seeing his name in print, saying it aloud . . . somehow it sounded right to her. Joe. Joseph.

  “Mom? Oh my God, Mom. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Apparently realizing the anguish her actions had caused, Natalie reached for the emails to take them back. “I didn’t think. I didn’t know. I didn’t . . .”

  Maggie held the pages she’d read in one shaking hand, out of Natalie’s reach. Then, sobbing, she read through to the last page.

  “Mom, please . . . I’m so sorry.” Natalie began to cry. Grace observed both her mother and her sister as if watching a play.

  I have been in contact with my father. I spoke with him over the weekend. We will be getting together sometime soon, and I am beyond happy.

  Maggie felt she’d been struck by lightning.

  “What?” she yelled, the tears forgotten. “He . . . what? He knows? Son of a bitch.”

  Natalie and Grace both jumped, obviously jarred by their mother’s curse.

  “Who knows what?” Natalie dabbed at her face with a tissue.

  Maggie slammed the handful of paper onto the counter and hopped off the stool. “When I get my hands on him . . .”

  She grabbed a handful of tissues and paused to wipe off her face before tossing them into the trash, then headed out the front door, her bag over her shoulder, cursing under her breath every step of the way.

  “Wait, Mom!” Natalie raced to catch up.

  “Not now, Natalie.” Maggie was already out the door and halfway to the sidewalk and showed no sign of slowing down, muttering all the way down Cottage Street. “Brett Crawford, you have a lot to answer for . . .”

  Maggie stormed into the municipal building as if she were being chased by a demon, which in a sense she was. She forced some semblance of control as she rounded the hall toward police headquarters and took a deep breath as she opened the glass door and approached the receptionist.

  “Hey, Maggie. What’s up?” Coraline Webster asked as she hung up from a call.

  “I’d like to see Br . . . the chief. Is he still here?”

  “I think he’s still here. Let me check.” Coraline hit a button on her phone and, seconds later, said, “Chief, Maggie Flynn is here to see you. Sure.” She hung up and glanced at Maggie, clearly curious. “He said go on back.” Turning to point to the left, she added, “The chief’s office is—”

  “I’ll find it.” Maggie headed toward Brett’s office, her anger boiling over. When she saw Brett standing in his office doorway, leaning against the jamb as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if this were a social visit he’d been expecting, she almost blew.

  “Inside and close the damned door,” she growled as she drew near him.

  He took a step backward, his eyes widening, a look of confusion on his face. He stepped aside for her to enter, then did as she’d demanded. He closed the door softly.<
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  He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

  “Joseph Miller.” She threw the name at him in a fast volley.

  Brett stared at her, his face blank.

  Maggie moved closer and repeated the name, more slowly this time. “Joseph. Miller.”

  Brett continued to stare, obviously caught off guard.

  “Do I have to say it again?”

  “Ahhh . . . ,” he finally said after clearing his throat.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Known what? That I had a son?” He sat on the edge of his desk, his expression no longer confused, his eyes no longer defensive. It appeared Brett had gone on the offensive. “That’s something you’ve never let me forget.”

  “How long have you known?” She ignored his attempt to put her on the ropes. This was her showdown.

  He walked around the desk and sat on the worn brown leather seat. “He contacted me about a month ago. He’s been looking for—”

  “A month ago?” She leaned on the back of the guest chair, too amped up to sit. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I’ve been trying to let you know he’s been looking for us for months, but every damned time I tried to talk to you, you blew me off.”

  “How did he know . . . how did he find you?” She was embarrassed she couldn’t get her thoughts out in a coherent fashion, but she was angry and confused.

  “He’d done that DNA testing thing on one of those genealogical sites, and they showed a match to my sister, Jayne, who’d joined the same site. He contacted her at the end of last summer, since she was identified as an aunt. Jayne and I are the only children in our family, so it wasn’t hard for her to figure out whose son he was. I tried to tell you at the reunion he was making inquiries, but you kept walking away from me. I wanted to give you a heads-up, but I couldn’t make you listen.”

  “You could have called me.”

  “If you wouldn’t listen to me when I was standing right in front of you, why would I think you’d have picked up my call?”

  He paused, no doubt collecting his thoughts, but she wouldn’t have it. She gestured with her hand for him to continue. “Keep going. The rest of it.”

  “So Jayne asked me how she should respond, and I told her the truth.” Another pause, this one longer, but Maggie’s emotions were too jumbled for her to press him. He sighed deeply. “She asked me if she could tell him who his father was, and I said yes. Long story short, we met for coffee one morning about a week ago.”

  “You met him? You actually met him?”

  Brett nodded.

  “And . . .” Maggie gestured for him to continue, but it was obvious his emotions were getting the best of him. Tears were in the corners of his eyes, welling up like bubbles, but they didn’t fall.

  “And there was no doubt he was who he said he was.” Brett wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. “He’s built like me. He looks like me. But he has your eyes.” Brett closed his hand around a coffee mug that had been sitting on the desktop and held on to it as if it were his lifeline.

  “Did he ask about me?” she whispered.

  Brett nodded. “Yes, of course he asked about you. He wanted to know all about you. Who you were, what you were like. What you looked like.”

  “What did you tell him?” She couldn’t hold back the tears.

  “I told him you were the most beautiful girl in the world and that all my life I’d loved you with my whole heart and soul. That you were the smartest woman I’d ever met, and the kindest.”

  She rolled her eyes. As if she wanted Brett’s flattery at that moment. “I mean what did you tell him about why . . .” She couldn’t say the words: Why I gave him away. Why I walked out of the hospital, leaving him behind. Why I wasn’t brave enough . . .

  “I told him the truth. That things were different forty years ago, that there was a stigma then that doesn’t seem to exist today. I told him your parents forced you to give him up and I . . .” Brett swallowed hard. “I didn’t stand up for you, or for him. That I talked you into it, mostly because I wanted to go to Ohio State and play football and go to the pros. I told him if it had been up to you, you would have brought him home with you. You would have found a way to raise him with or without me. But I talked you out of it.” He was openly crying, something Maggie hadn’t known he was capable of.

  “Stop.” Her voice caught.

  But he went on. “I convinced you it would be better for him to grow up in a stable home with two adult parents. I made you believe there would be other babies for us. I told him the truth. I told him I was a selfish, self-centered bastard who only thought about myself and the future I wanted.”

  “In the end, it was my decision. I was the one who walked away.” She was whispering, the truth so hard to speak aloud.

  “The day you were leaving the hospital . . . remember?”

  “Please don’t . . .” Her arms wrapped around her middle like a shield against his words.

  Ignoring her protest, he continued. “You asked me, begged me, to walk down the hall with you and look at him. ‘Just look at him. He’s so tiny and so beautiful. If you see him’ . . .” His voice broke, and he made no attempt to hide his tears or the wave of regret that washed over him.

  “Please stop.” Maggie covered her face.

  He closed his eyes, his face a mask of anguish. “But I really didn’t want to because I was afraid you were right. If I saw him, would I be able to leave him there? Was I too much of a coward to look at my own son? But then I—”

  Coraline’s voice came through the intercom. “Chief, there’s a guy on the phone who—”

  “Take a message, please. And hold my calls.” He hit the button to turn off her voice. He cleared his voice as if to compose himself and, to Maggie, said, “When he contacted me, of course I wanted to meet him.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s . . . he’s pretty terrific, Maggie. He’s more forgiving than I ever would have expected him to be.”

  “The people who raised him . . .”

  “His parents, Maggie. Those were his parents, not us,” he said. “They were great people. Gave him everything we would have wanted him to have. Love. Stability. A happy home, a great education. He said he’d always known he was adopted but never felt he was less than their son.”

  “Bless them for . . .” Maggie began to sob, and Brett started to get up to comfort her, but she shook her head no.

  Brett backed away and waited until the worst had passed. When her sobs subsided, he said, “He wants very much to meet you.”

  “I’m afraid,” she whispered. She hadn’t wanted to appear weak in front of him, but there was no point in pretense. “I’m so afraid of what he’ll think of me, leaving him like that. I never tried to find him. I just let him go.”

  “Maggie, he knows everything. And he understands. If he’s holding a deep-seated grudge against us, he’s hiding it well. In all our conversations, there have been no recriminations, no accusations on his part. He just wanted to know who we were.” He paused before correcting himself. “Who we are.”

  “Did he tell you he found Natalie the same way he found Jayne?”

  “He did. He said he’d contacted Natalie, but her response was he must be mistaken.”

  “What did you tell him? About meeting me?”

  “I said it wasn’t my call. I didn’t know if you’d told your husband, your kids. He said Natalie hadn’t been receptive, so he decided not to pursue it with her. He didn’t want to rock the boat as far as your family is concerned.”

  Maggie opened her bag and rummaged through its contents, searching for tissues. She wiped her face and blew her nose. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t offer you any help there.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They stared at each other across the flat surface of his desk. The room was so quiet she could hear the round schoolho
use-style clock ticking off the seconds on the wall behind her.

  Maggie turned toward the door. She needed space. “Thanks for your time.”

  “If you decide you want to get in touch with him, I can . . .” He started to walk around the side of the desk, but she backed away before he could reach her.

  “I’ll let you know.” She opened the door before he could open it for her and left the office, her nerves a jumble, feeling his eyes on her back the entire way down the hall.

  She wondered how she could get past Coraline without the woman noticing her swollen eyes and red nose, but Coraline was on the phone, her back to the hall as Maggie hurried past.

  Once outside, Maggie took several long, deep breaths, trying to even out her emotions so she could think. When she realized deep breathing wasn’t helping, she walked to the corner and started up Cottage.

  But when she approached her house and saw her daughters’ cars in the driveway, she knew she wasn’t ready to continue that conversation just yet. Not sure when she might be, she headed for the beach. She kicked off her shoes and walked on the pebbly sand to the lifeguard stand. She climbed up and sat at the top, her legs drawn up to her chest, and watched the calm water of the bay ebb and flow as night began to fall, and she tried to rationally think through everything that had happened. On the one hand, she was relieved to finally know what had put the bee in Natalie’s bonnet, but at the same time, she herself was annoyed. Did her daughters really think they had a right to know everything about her past? What was it about discovering the truth that had made them both so indignant?

  Then there was Brett. She’d tried to ignore the nagging little voice that had warned her moving back to Wyndham Beach might not be such a good idea. She hadn’t been back for long, but already she’d run into him once in the general store, and another time in the post office. Both times he’d tried to speak with her, but she still wasn’t ready to hear a declaration of love when he’d never really acknowledged the reason they’d broken up so many years ago. Somewhere in her heart she’d felt there might be too much history between them for the future to hold anything that mattered, but seeing him break down had broken something inside of her, and the rancor she’d kept inside for forty years had begun to crack. She’d had no idea how much he’d suffered—he had so many regrets. Now she understood why Brett had been so persistent in his efforts to speak with her privately, away from prying eyes and ears.