Take the Long Way Home Page 4

  Filling Cookie’s dish with kibble, Maeve recalled the day she’d found Cookie cowering behind the Dumpster in the alley behind the Stoneworks Café. The kitten had been emaciated, her fur patchy, her eyes too big for her face. Although Lenny had been fanatical about not leaving any edible trash outside the compost bin—because food outside the bin could attract vermin—Maeve had carefully plucked some discarded shreds of chicken out of the bucket she’d been lugging to the compost bin and laid them on the ground a near the scrawny, timid cat. She couldn’t place the chicken too close to the animal, who’d recoiled when Maeve got within a few feet of her, so she’d set it on the pavement, backed up to the kitchen door, and watched.

  The cat had eyed her suspiciously, then crept toward the treat, one inch at a time until she could pounce on it. She’d devoured it so quickly, Maeve had been concerned that she might choke. Had she actually taken the time to chew?

  The cat hadn’t choked. And she’d been waiting for Maeve outside the kitchen door the next day, when Maeve lugged another bucket of waste to the compost bin.

  After the fourth day, Maeve had confessed to Lenny that she was feeding a stray cat in the alley. He’d reamed her out about leaving food on the ground, although she’d insisted that the food never remained there long. He’d lectured her about taking responsibility for an animal when she could barely support herself. He’d pointed out that she was sharing her home with three roommates who might not want a cat in the house, and her landlord might ban pets, and animals were needy and dirty and demanding…and then he’d paid all the veterinary bills to have the cat vaccinated and spayed, because Maeve couldn’t afford that.

  Her roommates hadn’t minded Cookie. Her landlord hadn’t cared. And Maeve had found a friend who’d seemed as lost as Maeve herself had been when she’d arrived at the Stonehouse’s front door a few years earlier, eighteen years old, despondent, and desperate for a job.

  Cookie was still shy—or, more accurately, aloof. She didn’t seem frightened of people anymore. She just didn’t want to bother with them. If she felt like being sociable, she’d do a person the huge favor of letting that person stroke her. But she didn’t need companionship, human or otherwise. She was content to climb up onto the window sill and gaze out at the alley behind the apartment while Maeve scrambled to shower, dress, and fill Cookie’s bowls with food and water.

  “Big day today,” she told Cookie as she sliced an apple and a small chunk of cheddar and tossed the pieces into a self-sealing plastic bag. She didn’t have time for more breakfast than that. She’d make a pot of coffee once she got to the shop. That would keep her going until she had some cookies to munch on. “The store’s website goes live, and I bake the first batches to make sure the ovens’ temperatures and timers are calibrated. Are you excited for me?”

  Cookie gave her a bored look.

  “Well, you ought to care,” Maeve muttered as she zipped the bag shut. “If this enterprise goes down the tubes, you may have to go back to eating Dumpster food.” She knew that wasn’t true. If the shop failed, she’d get another job. If she could find a waitressing job in Seattle, she could find one in Brogan’s Point. Now that she was twenty-eight, she could even work in a bar. Her father’s girlfriend could hire her.

  Wow. That would be pretty damned strange, she thought with a shudder.

  She wanted her cookie shop to succeed, and she was working her butt off to make that happen. She loved baking cookies. She loved the way they connected her to her mother. When she flipped through the pages of the loose-leaf notebook of cookie recipes she’d found among her mother’s things, some pages stained from a smudge of butter or cocoa left by Maeve’s mother’s own hands, she felt as if she was channeling her mother, bringing her back to life in some way. The shop had to succeed to honor Sheila Nolan.

  And the shop had to succeed to honor Harry, that modest, generous man who’d swooned over Maeve’s cookies at the Stonehouse Café, and taught her about business, and placed so much in faith in her.

  And damn it, the shop had to succeed because Maeve wanted it to. She hadn’t wanted anything in such a long time. But honestly, she’d grown tired of drifting, wandering, wanting nothing. For too long, she’d believed that if she wanted nothing, she would never be disappointed. If you have no expectations, life can’t wound you by failing to fulfill those expectations.

  For the past ten years, Maeve had believed that without hope, without expectation, without want, she would be safe from pain. Her mother’s death had wounded her so badly, she didn’t think she could survive any more hurt.

  But if her cookie shop failed… Yes, it would hurt. She might be strong enough now to bear up. But she’d rather not have to find out if she could endure that kind of disappointment. She would rather not test her tolerance for pain. If the shop succeeded, she wouldn’t have to find out if she really was that strong.

  “All right, Cookie,” she said as she stuffed her snack into her tote and slung the straps over her shoulder. “I’m out of here. Lock up behind me.”

  The cat gave her a languid look, then decided that giving her left front paw a thorough cleansing with her tongue was a lot more important than paying attention the woman who’d just filled her food dish.

  Maeve left the apartment and locked up after herself. Her apartment door was just a few feet from the building’s rear exit onto the alley. Not having to climb stairs was a benefit of living on the first floor, but the only thing she’d considered when she’d signed the lease was the rent. The upstairs units were floor-through, with lovely views of the town’s long stretch of beach on the other side of Atlantic Avenue. Only the first floor had been divided into two units, and the rear unit was much cheaper than the front unit.

  The car she’d bought was old enough that she still experienced a spasm of relief whenever the engine turned over. She’d had it checked out by a mechanic before she’d bought it, and his assessment had been, “For the price you’re paying, this baby’s not bad.” She’d paid a ridiculously low price for it, though, so “not bad” was a relative thing.

  But the car started that morning, although the heat failed to kick in despite the chilly autumn air. The car’s climate control wasn’t exactly reliable, but her shop was only three miles away. Once the temperatures plummeted at the end of the year, well, she owned warm knit gloves and a muffler. If the car managed to survive a New England winter, she’d survive, too.

  Steering onto Seaview Avenue, she spotted the Cookie’s sign above the door, with its gigantic chocolate-chip-cookie O’s. It made her smile. This is mine, she thought. I don’t know if I’ve earned it, but it’s mine. “Thank you, Harry,” she whispered, her own private prayer of gratitude as she steered around the building to the empty lot at the rear.

  Later today there would be a second car parked there; Joyce was scheduled to arrive around noon. She probably didn’t need much training. She’d been a counter clerk in the same building when it had been Torelli’s. She knew how to run a cash register, how to scan credit cards, how to pluck sterile tissue paper from its dispenser box and bag cookies without touching them. She knew how to make customers happy. Besides, she was a good ten years older than Maeve. She could probably teach her boss a thing or two.

  This morning, though, the place was Maeve’s alone. Once she had her timing down, she would be arriving much earlier, getting her first batches of cookies into the oven before sunrise. The crisp round cookies could be baked in advance, but the chewy ones, and the bars and squares, would go stale sitting around for more than a day. Maeve planned to bag the stale cookies and sell them at a discount. No sense wasting them. But her profit margin was with the fresh cookies, sold at full price.

  She had barely gotten her apron tied on when the store’s phone rang. It had been functional for a few days, but today the website was live and the phone number was now public. She lifted the receiver and recited, “Good morning; you’ve reached Cookie’s.”

  “Hi,” a nasal woman’s voice bleated through
the wire. “Are you open?”

  “Our grand opening is Saturday morning, ten a.m.,” Maeve said, stifling the urge to snap that if the woman had read the website’s home page while she was making note of the phone number, she could have checked out the information about the shop’s opening, too. In bold tan letters, the grand opening’s time and date took up most of the screen.

  Evidently, that woman wasn’t the only dimwit who couldn’t absorb a clear, simple message on a website home page. By the time Maeve had her first tray of molasses-almond cookies in the oven, she’d fielded six phone calls, all from people asking when the store would be open.

  The seventh call was from her father. “Hey, Maeve,” he said, the casualness of the greeting sounding slightly forced to her.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Listen, sweetheart, I’m sure you’re very busy now, with the store opening in just a few days—” at last, someone had read the website’s home page “—so I won’t take long. Gus and I would like you to come for dinner.”

  “Come where?” she asked warily.

  “To my house.”

  His house. Her house. The house where her mother had lived—and had died. The house where her father had all but abandoned her in her darkest days. The house where she’d spiraled down into an abyss of depression and despair. The house where she’d stolen small possessions of her mother’s—her favorite tube of tawny lipstick, her teardrop pearl earrings, a pair of red high heels that would never fit Maeve, whose feet were a full size larger than her mother’s, the loose-leaf notebook filled with cookie recipes—and secreted them at the back of her closet, where her father would never find them. As if he’d even noticed they were missing. The minute the last shovel full of dirt had been tossed onto her mother’s grave, her father had gone AWOL. He’d left Maeve to sink or swim on her own, and she’d sunk.

  Now that she’d somehow succeeded in floating back up to the surface, she would have to enter that house. Eventually. Not now. Not yet.

  “When?” she asked. Maybe next week she would be ready. After Cookie’s had opened. After things had settled down. After she was able to wrap her mind around the notion that this town was once again her home.

  “Tonight? My shifts end around five-thirty, as long as no one gets murdered in the next few hours. Gus can get Manny to cover for her at the bar for a few hours. Tonight’s a slow night there—”

  “I can’t,” Maeve said. She wasn’t ready, she was too scared. But she couldn’t tell her father, a brave police detective, that she was afraid to enter his house. “I’m timing the ovens today, working out the logistics. I’ll be here late.” That wasn’t a lie.

  “Tomorrow, then. Or the day after. Pick a day.”

  She hated the pleading undertone in his voice. It made her feel guilty. But still… “Maybe after the shop opens and I’ve got a better handle on things,” she said, cringing at how lame her excuse sounded.

  Her father didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “Maeve. I want to see you. I want us to talk. We have…some stuff to work out, you know?”

  Of course she knew. Harry hadn’t just left her this shop in his will because he loved her cookies, or because he had faith in her entrepreneurial skills. He’d done it because he thought she needed to heal the wounds between her father and herself.

  He was right. She did.

  So she’d come back to Brogan’s Point. She’d quit her job at the Stonehouse Café, uprooted herself from Seattle, bought a not-bad used car, packed it with her belongings, locked a protesting Cookie in a crate on the front passenger seat with some catnip toys to keep her occupied, and driven three thousand miles. Surely she was allowed to take her time traveling the last few steps.

  “Store or no store, you still have to eat,” he said, sounding ridiculously paternal.

  “We’ll figure something out,” she told him. “I promise. Just let me get through…” The next few days. The next few minutes. “I’m beta-testing the ovens,” she said in as cheerful a voice as she could muster. “Stop by later today. I’ll let you beta-test the cookies.”

  “I’ll do that.” He sounded more cheerful, too. She wasn’t rejecting him, after all. She was just rejecting the idea of entering the house where she’d lost so much, the house she’d had to flee to save her sanity.

  The oven timer dinged. “I’ve got to go, Dad. If I don’t, the batch in the oven will char. I’ll see you this afternoon, okay?”

  “I’ll be there. Save me a cookie that isn’t burned.”

  She hung up, grabbed her mitts and slid the tray out of the oven. The cookies looked perfect.

  Two hours later, she’d baked several successful batches and eaten most of her apple. One of the mix-masters was a little sluggish, but it got the job done. Harry had bought the mixers, along with pretty much all the other appliances, pans, trays, and utensils, from Sal Torelli when he’d purchased the building. She might have chosen newer equipment, maybe different makes and models, but this shop was the proverbial gift horse, and she couldn’t complain about the condition of its teeth.

  She’d brought her scoops from Seattle, though. Once Lenny had expanded her waitressing job to include baking cookies for the café, she’d purchased different sized batter scoops to insure that the cookies would have uniformity of size. The bar pans had removable dividers which would guarantee that all her brownies and blondies were the same size, too. She’d learned a lot about quality control while working at the Stonehouse Café.

  Joyce arrived at noon, as promised. A cheerful, robust woman in her late thirties, with short, peroxide-platinum hair, a buxom figure, and a tiny nose ring, she was exactly the colleague Maeve needed. She knew the facility, knew the town, knew the clientele who used to buy pastries at Torelli’s. Hopefully, some of that clientele would return to the location to buy cookies from Maeve.

  “It smells fabulous in here. You’ve been baking, huh. Ooh, nice cappuccino machine,” Joyce said as she admired Maeve’s recent acquisition. “And I see you got a new cash register, too. I pleaded with Sal to update his machine so we could accept debit cards, but he was a cash-and-credit kind of guy. How are the ovens working for you?”

  Maeve handed her one of the molasses-almond cookies. “Try this.”

  Joyce bit into the cookie, closed her eyes and groaned. “Oh, my God. That’s amazing!”

  “Then I guess the ovens are working.”

  The phone rang. After tossing Joyce an apron identical to her own, embossed with the Cookie’s logo—the O’s replaced by chocolate chip cookies—Maeve answered the phone. “When is your store opening?” the caller asked.

  Unlike Joyce’s groan, Maeve’s was not the result of having bitten into a scrumptious cookie. For the tenth time that day, she told her caller Cookie’s would be open for business Saturday at ten. “Next time the phone rings,” she told Joyce, “you’re answering it.”

  As it happened, Joyce did answer it the next time it rang. She was in the front, arranging decorative paper doilies on the shelves inside the glass showcases while Maeve was in the kitchen, sliding a small batch of butterscotch blondies into the oven. Through the open door connecting the two work spaces, she heard Joyce say, “Good afternoon, you’ve reached Torelli’s—oops, I mean Cookie’s! My bad!”

  All right, so she wasn’t perfect. She was close enough.

  “Sure, let me see if she’s available,” Maeve heard Joyce say.

  She cringed. Was it her father again, nagging her about dinner? Or maybe his girlfriend, Gus, hoping could succeed where Maeve’s father had failed?

  Maeve set the oven timer, then took the handset Joyce handed her through the open door. “Hello?” she said, not bothering to filter her annoyance from her tone.

  “Maeve,” a familiar voice, deep and supremely male, said. “Hi. It’s Quinn Connor.”

  Quinn. She pictured him the way he’d looked yesterday in the shop, sipping coffee, telling her he’d like to hear about her long way home. Quinn, with his black hair and pale eyes, h
is tall, athletic physique. His sheer beauty.

  Yesterday, and now today. Why was he interested in her? What did he really want?

  Probably what he really wanted was to find out when Cookie’s was going to open. But he wasn’t asking. Belatedly, she realized he was waiting for her to speak. “Hi,” she said, then felt like an idiot.

  “I’m working right now, but… This is kind of crazy, but I thought maybe we could get together later tonight and grab a bite to eat.”

  “I’m working, too,” she said, then heard herself echo her father. “I guess I do have to eat, though.”

  “It would be late,” he added. “I’m on until eight tonight. I could get to Brogan’s Point by nine.”

  He was “on” doing what? Where would he be coming from? She knew nothing about him, other than who he’d been ten years ago.

  Yet…his blue, blue eyes. His easy smile. All that charisma emanating from him, as enticing as the aromas emanating from the ovens… “I’ll still be at the shop then, if you want to stop by,” she said. Just as well that she’d be working late into the evening. She didn’t want him viewing her barely furnished apartment with its alley view. Cookie might not welcome him, either. She tended to be skittish around men, especially tall men. Quinn was tall.

  “Great. I’ll head up once my shift is done, and we’ll—whoa. Gotta run. I’ll see you later.” A click, and the line went dead.

  We’ll what? What will we do?

  Had Quinn Connor—the Quinn Connor, golden boy, gridiron star, king of Brogan’s Point High School—just asked Maeve out for dinner? What about Ashley, his golden-girl queen? And…what about Maeve? She was no golden girl, no star. Not an ounce of royalty in her entire body. She was just part of the scenery.

  Just part of the scenery? Where did that thought come from? A song lyric, she realized. From the song at the Faulk Street Tavern.

  Pressing the “off” button on the handset, she shook her head. The oven timer dinged, but all she heard was that song. Take the long way home. Take the long way home.