It Began with a Crush

“For today. Listen, do you have someone to take care of you when you get home?”

She didn’t answer right away, looking for the best way to admit that she would be spending the evening on her own, either in the office itself or for brief intervals upstairs in a largely food-free apartment, listening for the bell or the phone down in the office, until she closed it up at nine-thirty.

Daisy and her staff would be too busy in the restaurant to take care of anyone but the dinner crowd, and Nickie would leave as soon as Mary Jane was back. Nickie was eighteen years old, bright and perky, efficient enough in her various tasks around the resort but not exactly a nurturing personality.

“Not really,” seemed to sum all of this up pretty well.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“I think that’s part of what’s making this headache so bad,” she admitted.

“Let me bring you back to my place and feed you, and by then hopefully your head will be better and we can work out what we’re going to do about transport for you till Friday.”

“It’s not your problem, Joe. Surely I’ve already given you enough grief.”

“We’ll work something out,” he said, quiet but firm, and she couldn’t find the words to argue any more. “Toss that cup in the back, if you want,” he added. “It’s messy enough in there already.”

But she couldn’t bring herself to do something that untidy when he was being so good, so she held on to it.

North Street was only a few minutes away. She closed her eyes for the drive, and didn’t open them until she felt him turn onto those brick strips she’d missed before. He parked in front of a detached garage, then turned to look at her. “Any better?”

“Not yet.”

“My girls might be a little noisy for you in the house. Do you want to just sit here in the minivan until the pills kick in? Come in when you’re ready. And if there’s something you’d like me to bring out to you now, just say.”

“No, it’s fine. But I will stay in the car. Thanks.”

“Juice box? Snack pack of crackers?”

“No, really.”

“Okay, then. Front door’ll be open, when you’re ready. Don’t knock, or anything. Just come in.” He closed the minivan door almost silently, and she appreciated his concern for her pounding head.

Seconds later, he’d headed for the house and she was on her own, in his minivan, in front of his garage.

The girls, he’d said. Two or more. Could be teenagers or three-year-olds, although the plastic pony did suggest the lower end of the age spectrum.

Well, she’d find out soon.

She sat, doing more of the careful breathing, trying to relax her shoulders and neck, and wondering if he could be right about the whiplash. She very much hoped not. After twenty minutes, she felt the pain letting go and the nausea subsiding, and knew it was time to go inside.

* * *

“Do you want creamy sauce, or red sauce?” Joe asked the girls.

They did their silent exchange of opinion, seeming to know from just looking at each other what they were going to choose and then announcing it in unison as usual, “Creamy!”

He hoped Mary Jane would approve. He’d thrown a couple of loaves of foil-wrapped store-bought garlic bread into the oven, grabbed a bag of cheese ravioli from the freezer, and dumped premixed and prewashed salad greens into a bowl. The girls loved cheese ravioli, and would happily have eaten it three times a week.

Well, sometimes they did.

It was an easy dinner choice for a busy man, when paired with a container of pasta sauce from the supermarket deli section, and he told himself it was a pretty healthy meal if he made a salad on the side. He just hoped there would be enough of it tonight to feed himself, Dad, the girls and Mary Jane.

Here she was.

She came quietly into the kitchen, still looking pretty washed out but a lot better than before. She had beautiful skin, fair and fine-pored. He’d noticed it before, at the garage, and it was even more obvious under the kitchen lights. She’d looked like a ghost when she was in the grip of the headache, but now there was a faint blush of pretty pink color, and her lips looked lush instead of dry. She was pretty. Not beautiful, but sweet and nice-looking in a girl-next-door way. He wouldn’t have valued looks like hers ten years ago, but now he knew better.

Woman-next-door, though, he revised. She was his own age, thirty-five.

“Pills worked?” he asked.

“Starting to.”

He shook some crackers from a packet onto a plate and said, “Maybe those’ll help, till dinner’s ready. Want a glass of juice, as well?”

“That would be lovely.”

“Glasses are up there.” He gestured with his chin as he grated Parmesan cheese. Yes, you could buy the stuff already grated, but he didn’t have an Italian last name for nothing. “Juice in the refrigerator.”

“Is there anything you’d like me to do to help?”

“No, we’re good. I’ll call the girls. They’re supposed to be setting the table. By the time they’re done, it’ll be ready. Cheese ravioli, with creamy chicken and mushroom sauce.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“Not homemade,” he warned her.

“Oh, I wasn’t expecting...” She trailed off. “I know you wouldn’t have time for that.”

He wondered what she was thinking, and whether he should give her any kind of explanation. He was a single dad, with no mother in the picture. Well, she would work it out. He hated explaining.

She stood awkwardly, and he racked his brain for a way to make her feel more at ease. Saving both of them, Holly and Maddie bounced into the kitchen at that moment in their pony pj’s. “Is it ready yet?” Two voices with but a single thought.

“It will be, when you’ve laid the table. Mary Jane, these are my girls, Holly and Maddie.” Making the introduction, he saw them for a moment with a stranger’s eyes—a pair of dark-haired, skinny, energetic, big-eyed and heartbreakingly cute little peas in a pod, dressed in pink. “I got them in a two-for-one sale, as you can see.”

She laughed, seeming delighted by them, as most people were. The color in her cheeks grew pinker, and she bent and rested her palms on her thighs for a moment, so she could greet them at eye level. They were small for their age. “Hi, Maddie. Hi, Holly. I bet you were a bargain!”

They hadn’t been. They’d cost him a fortune in medical and legal costs over the past seven years, and he was still paying off his debts, but of course he wasn’t going to tell her that. The girls laughed at the idea that they’d been a bargain in a two-for-one sale, and he wasn’t going to tell them the truth about what they’d cost him, either.

Not yet.

Not until they were much older.

Not unless they asked.

They did ask, occasionally—a child’s version of the question. “Tell us again, Daddy. Why don’t we have a mommy?”

“Because she couldn’t take care of you.”

“Why couldn’t she take care of us?”

“Because she just couldn’t.” Because she’s a drug-addled, unrepentant mess, and her boyfriends are all dangerous. One of them put you in the hospital for a week, Maddie, and there was no way I was ever, ever letting her have either of you back after that. “And so we decided that I would take care of you on my own.”

Well, a series of judges decided. It had taken a while.

“Where is she, our mommy?”

“Far, far away.” In La La Land, and trust me you don’t want to go there.

“Is she sick? Is that why she can’t take care of us?” One time when they’d asked, he’d told them she was sick.

“Yes, she’s sick,” he had said in answer to this question ever since, because addiction on such a self-destructive level was a kind of sickness, wasn’t it?

“Isn’t she going to get better?”

“No, my sweethearts. She doesn’t want to get better. That’s the problem. If she wanted to, things might be different.”

“How could she not want to get better?”

This one defeated him, every time.

“We’ll have to wait until you’re older before I can explain all that, okay? It’s too hard to understand when you’re seven.”

Mary Jane would understand. Mary Jane might be shocked. He wasn’t going to tell her.

In the next room, at the dining table, the girls were counting pasta plates. “One for Daddy, one for Grandad, one for the lady.” A whispered consultation. They’d forgotten her name.

“Mary Jane,” he called out.

“One for Mary Jane,” Holly said.

“One for me,” said Maddie.

“And one for me,” Holly finished.

“I’m sorry, it’s going to be very hard for me to tell which one of them is which,” Mary Jane said.

“That’s okay. It’s hard for everyone, until they know them. There’s a trick, though. Maddie has a scar right at her hairline, and it makes her parting fall a slightly different way from Holly’s.”

“I’ll try to remember that!”

The ravioli had floated to the surface in its big pot of boiling water, and the pot was bubbling fiercely, about to overflow. He turned down the gas, spooned up a piece of ravioli and held it out for Mary Jane. “Want to see if this is done?”

She smiled a little hesitantly. “Okay, sure.” She stepped up to the spoon, which he held steady and level with her mouth. She blew on it, a strand of hair falling around her face and threatening to get in the way, and he realized this wasn’t what you did when you had a near-stranger to dinner, a grown woman of thirty-five, a ripe, pretty woman who’d already drawn your eye. You did not hold out a spoon of ravioli and invite her to test it. It was something he did with the girls.

And the girls didn’t blow on the spoon with such a full, kissable-looking mouth, shaped by the blowing into such a perfect kissable shape.

He veered his thoughts away from this dangerous observation so fast that if they’d been car tires, you would have heard them screeching.

But then, with insidious intent, the thoughts crept back again, against his will. Out of an old habit that he hadn’t fallen into for a while, he found himself assessing her desirability and availability as a bed partner. It was what guys did when they were players, and he’d been a player from his mid-teens until the age of twenty-six.

On both counts, Mary Jane scored a thumbs-up. She wasn’t his usual type—if he had a usual type, these days—but, as he’d noted before, she was attractive, in a quiet kind of way. She had a very nice body, trim yet curvy. And he was pretty sure he would be able to get her into bed if he tried, despite all those glaring, frozen looks she used to give him all the time in high school. There was an innocence about her, and something in her eyes. Heat and hunger. Wistfulness.

Do. Not. Go. There.

He was not looking for a quick hookup, or even a longer-term connection. He wasn’t looking for anything. He’d be crazy to, despite his bouts of loneliness. He was way more cautious than he used to be, and way too committed to the girls and their future. He had too much on his plate right now. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, or hurt himself, or confuse the girls, or worry Dad.

No. Just no.

“Um, it seems cooked to me,” she said.

He took a firmer hold on himself. Mary Jane’s mouth rounding itself to blow gently on pasta was just a mouth, not a disaster. “Good. I’ll drain it, then. Garlic bread’s in the oven, if you want to grab a hot mitt and take it to the table.” After the spoon-blowing incident, asking her to help with ferrying the food didn’t seem like such a big deal. She’d already helped herself quite cheerfully to juice, as he’d invited her to do. “Girls, call Grandad.”

Dad was probably out of the shower and freshly dressed by now. He still showered at around this time every day, even when he wasn’t washing off a day of engine grease. Dad’s lifelong habits, and Mom’s, had driven Joe nuts when he was in his teens. All that routine had seemed so boring.

He’d vowed he would shake this place as soon as he could and head for California, but by the time he’d graduated high school, Mom had gotten ill and her heart would have broken if he’d left. He’d been pretty egotistical and self-absorbed back then, but he had enough good Italian sense of family to override the ego when it came to Mom.

So he’d stayed on. He’d gotten an associate degree in motor maintenance to please his parents, “So you’ll have something to fall back on if the acting thing doesn’t work out.” Although, of course, he’d secretly vowed never to need a fallback plan.

He’d worked with Dad in the garage until a year after Mom’s death and then he’d finally gone to make his fortune in Hollywood when he was twenty-two. Dad had still had Joe’s three older brothers reasonably close by—Danny an accountant in Albany, John a paramedic in Burlington and Frank a lawyer in New York City.

Thirteen years later, his brothers were still doing those same jobs in those same cities, each of them with a family, and Dad was still showering before dinner, but now the routines and the habits and the settled lives seemed precious and meaningful and good, compared to the seven years of chaos and fear and heartache and anger and relentless work that Joe had just lived through.

If he could build something like this for himself and the girls, he would feel as if he’d struck gold. He’d just spent six years busting his gut to get through a California law degree part-time, while working to support himself and the girls, and he was taking the reputedly grueling New York state bar exam at the end of July. Having barely studied in high school, he now spent more hours at his desk in a single night—every night, after the girls had gone to bed—than he would have in a month twenty years ago.

Life really was a funny thing.

Mary Jane reappeared in the kitchen doorway, having deposited the garlic bread on the dining table as instructed. She stood a little awkwardly, looking as if she was waiting to be given another task, but there was nothing more for her to do. The girls had transported the salad and the grated cheese. Joe had the big blue ceramic pasta bowl in his hands. “Sit,” he told his guest. “We’re ready to eat.”

* * *

The word Mommy wasn’t spoken.

Mary Jane kept waiting for it. Surely she would have to hear it eventually, and the context it came in would answer some questions. So far, nothing.

The girls were absolutely adorable, and she could see the slight difference in Maddie’s hairline that Joe had mentioned. She studied it, as well as both girls’ faces, to make sure she didn’t get them mixed up in the future.

What future, though? This was one evening, not the start of something.

She couldn’t quite believe that she was sitting here like this, part of a three-generation family dinner at a cheerful table in a pretty room. She liked it too much, felt it warming the frozen, rusty parts of her heart in a way that she instinctively knew was dangerous.

Before coming into the house, she’d called Daisy to let her know what was happening, and Daisy had said to take her time and not worry about a thing. She could manage fine without the cream and raspberries and cinnamon. They were part of her breakfast plan, and she’d switch the menu around. “Relax!”

So Mary Jane was relaxing. Relaxing too much. Her headache had completely gone. The meal was delicious. Mr. Capelli...Art...was warm and fatherly and comfortable. “More pasta, Mary Jane. Go on, eat!” he’d told her, and he had been incredibly understanding about the disaster with the car, while Joe made the cutest dad.

I can’t believe I’m thinking this.

About Joe Capelli!

He teased his daughters into minding their table manners, with a look in his dark eyes that was a mix of long-suffering and wry humor. Once, after Holly had said something unconsciously funny, he exchanged a glance of shared amusement with Mary Jane across the top of two dark little heads, and she heated up all over, exactly the way she would have done in high school.

He’s gorgeous, he has these darling little girls, and he’s smiling at me!

The girls were adorable and also very chatty. Not to say exhausting. She learned their birthday, the names of the friends they’d left behind in California, the hair color of their former teacher and a whole list of their favorite foods. She discovered that they were working on a novel called Happy Horse and All His Friends. She heard that they didn’t like dolls or guns.

But they never mentioned their mother, and neither did Art or Joe, and it seemed a little strange. Halfway through the meal, when the girls paused for breath and another mouthful of ravioli, the two men asked her about Spruce Bay. They’d heard about the upgrading of the resort and wanted to know how that was going.

“Everything’s done, and we have the whole place up and running at full capacity,” she told them.

“So you’re filling up, on weekends?” Art asked, sounding hopeful about it.

“We’re filling up during the week as well, from now until Labor Day. Very pleased. Our website is really pulling people in. People can see how beautiful and fresh everything is after the remodel. The spa bath and solar heating for the pool has been a big hit. So have the new barbecue area and the expanded deck for the restaurant.”

“Hate to see a slow season, up here,” Art said. “So bad for the local economy. That’s good that the remodel has paid off. Helps all of us.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

Capelli Auto was indirectly as dependent on tourists as Spruce Bay, because if the people who ran the resorts and motels and restaurants weren’t making money, then they weren’t paying staff, and if staff weren’t getting paid then they would put off getting their cars fixed for as long as they could.

Ugh, but she didn’t like this train of thought, because it reminded her of her own slackness in ignoring the noise in her car. If she’d had it looked at sooner, she might not have needed the loaner car today, and if she hadn’t been driving the loaner car, she might not have rear-ended—

Change the subject, Mary Jane.

“Are you starting school here in September, girls?” she asked quickly.

They nodded. “But we’re not sure which school yet.”

“Bit of research to do, there,” Joe came in.

“And how about over the summer? What will you do? I bet you have all sorts of plans.”

“Pony camp,” they said in unison, at once. She couldn’t believe how often they did this—came out with the same phrase, in the same intonation, at exactly the same time.

“Pony camp! Wow, that’ll be great fun!”

“Well...” Joe came in again, sounding reluctant this time. “Pony camp is more aspiration than reality, at this stage. I don’t know if it’s practical.”

“Dadd-yyyy...!”

“I know. I get it. You’ve said. You really, really want to go to pony camp. But I don’t know what there is, around here. If there even is a pony camp. Maybe you could help me on that a little bit, Mary Jane. You probably need to answer guests’ questions on this stuff, right?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“So you’d know what’s out there. I know there are a couple of trail-riding places, but do they offer day camps?”

“There’s one that does, but in all honesty I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve sent guests there a couple of times and they’ve come back with complaints.” She paused, wondering if she should mention the idea she’d thought of. If she did, she would be creating a connection with Joe and his girls that it might be safer to stay away from. She said it all the same. “There is one place I’m thinking of that might work...”

For more than one reason, she wasn’t sure if she was doing the right thing. Penelope Beresford didn’t go in for advertising, but she still somehow managed to run an equestrian facility that was in high demand. She was British, a former Olympic rider and a highly regarded dressage and jumping coach, and had top-level riders coming to her regularly for intensive training. She also gave riding lessons to local people, and put on occasional two-week vacation day camps for children at her own convenience, seeming to fill them purely through word of mouth.

She didn’t offer accommodation for humans, just horses, so the visiting top-level riders usually stayed at the nearest vacation resort, which happened to be Spruce Bay. They were always very well looked after there.

Mary Jane had two of them staying in the resort’s biggest and best-equipped family-size housekeeping cottage right now, as it happened. They were a husband and wife team of professional eventing riders, they’d brought a whole string of their best horses to Penelope and would be here for a month. They’d also brought their two children, a six-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl and a nanny.

It was just possible that some kind of informal vacation day camp might be arranged out of all this, and it was also just possible that if Mary Jane pulled strings for Joe, on behalf of his girls, she might not feel quite so indebted to him and his father for the fact that she’d crashed their car today, while to punish her in return, they were giving her dinner.

Already, she felt drawn into their lives. Should she be holding back, instead?

“I’d have to ask a few questions before I’d have any details for you,” she said slowly. “Wouldn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Already done that, I’m afraid,” Joe mouthed at her on a drawl, because Holly and Maddie were looking at her as if stars shone out of her eyes.

Mary Jane winced, and mouthed back, “Sorry,” and they shared another look. His mouth tucked itself in at the corner, and the expression in his eyes was so complicated she couldn’t work it out at all but wanted to solve everything for him anyhow. Her self-control seemed to be lying in a melted pool at her feet, and there was no going back now.

She knew she was in serious trouble.

Serious, horrible, embarrassing trouble, in the space of a few hours.

Over “Cap” Capelli from high school, and two adorable seven-year-old girls.

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