1 Once Upon a Lie Page 2

  “Sean’s wake.”

  “Oh, right.” Cal focused on the game while continuing the conversation. “How was that?”

  Maeve pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and put them on. “The usual. A bunch of old biddies from the neighborhood, Father Madden…”

  “He’s still around?”

  Father Madden had married them a long, long time ago and had been very disappointed to learn that the vows hadn’t “taken.” “He is. He’s doing the funeral in the morning.”

  “You going?”

  Maeve jumped to her feet as Rebecca launched one toward the goal, hitting the goalpost. A collective groan spread through the crowd. “To the funeral?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably not.”

  The baby started fussing and Cal pulled a bottle out of his cargo shorts. He handed it to Maeve. “Hold this?” He unstrapped the baby and took him out of the contraption on his chest, sitting him upright in his lap, still facing forward. The baby was obviously a soccer fan; he was more animated than Maeve had ever seen him. Cal put the bottle in the baby’s mouth and he sucked greedily. “There was never any love lost between the two of you.”

  “Me and Sean?” she asked. “You think?”

  Cal watched the game until the ref blew the whistle, signaling the end of the first quarter. “I could never figure it out. He seemed like an amiable sort.”

  They always do, Maeve thought. Instead, she shrugged in response.

  “Jack doesn’t want to go? Granted, he was your mother’s nephew, but still…”

  “Jack isn’t entirely sure who died or why. I think he’ll be fine with not attending.”

  The baby finished the bottle in record time, and Maeve braced herself for the inevitable projection of undigested formula that was bound to come her way. Cal threw the baby over his shoulder to burp him. “How’s business?”

  “Great,” Maeve lied.

  Cal gave her a sideways glance. “Still making your fortune one cupcake at a time?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’ll let me know if you need help? Especially with the wholesale thing? That’s where the money is.” The baby let out a burp that sounded as if it had started at his toes; Maeve put a little distance between herself and the baby, but the burp was unproductive. “Let me know,” he repeated.

  Never. “Of course. We’re doing great, Cal. No worries.” It was typical of most of her conversations with Cal: he knew just enough and not really enough. As a result, he was low on the list of people from whom she sought advice. She went to him only if she had to and could count on one hand how many times that had been.

  He finally got caught up enough in the game to leave her alone. Although he was now a stay-at-home father, the attorney in him had never completely disappeared. Once, she was used to his interrogations, but now she was out of practice and had to stay on her toes so that she didn’t let on the things she didn’t want him to know. The wholesale deal was done, gone the way of a larger manufacturer in Brooklyn who could produce cookies at an alarming speed and for far less money than Maeve’s two-person operation.

  She was able to cheer when Rebecca scored a goal early in the third quarter, and feel dismay when the game became a runaway for the other team in the final minutes of the fourth. Her mind was still in the Bronx, though, and back at the funeral home. She wondered just how much damage the bullet had done to Sean’s brain. Was death instant or had he lingered even a few seconds before dying? Did he know what was coming—not him, obviously—when the passenger-side door of the car had opened and someone had slid into the seat? Did he know it was the end or did he think he deserved one more chance? Did he have any regrets at all?

  She wondered about all of this, not noticing that Cal was talking to her. “Huh?”

  “A hobby,” he said, taking the baby off his shoulder.

  “For me?”

  “Yeah. You work twelve hours a day and when you’re not working, you’re taking care of the girls. Or your dad. You need a break.” He shoved the baby’s chubby legs into the carrier. “You need to do something for you.”

  “Like tennis?” It was the only thing she could think of that women her age did when they were at a loss for other things to do.

  “Sure. Like tennis.”

  Maeve mulled that over. A hobby.

  “Find something meaningful. Something that would help you relax.” He stood, pulling the baby’s feet through the holes in the carrier. “Or if it makes more sense, something that would help other people. Because if I know you, that drives you more than anything.” He was smiling, but she could sense the dig inherent in that. Doing for others and not for him. For him, that had been the downfall of her marriage.

  Maeve’s mind was racing. “Or a combination of all three of those things.” You know what would help me relax? she thought. You shutting up. The smile never left her face.

  Cal looked as though he had hit on something. “Right! Meaningful, relaxing, and helpful to others. That sounds like the perfect combination for you.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “Now you just have to figure out what that might be.”

  Maeve looked up, her ex-husband’s handsome face backlit by the late afternoon sun. She smiled. “I’ll give it some thought, Cal.” She was glad she had left the Spanx in the car. If they’d been in her bag, handy, she might have been inclined to strangle him with them, right in front of every mother in the stands. No jury in the land would convict her, she always thought, particularly if it were truly a jury of her peers: overworked, underappreciated wives and mothers who just wanted someone to clean the toilet when it was dirty and pick up a gallon of milk when there was none. Instead, she continued smiling, thinking of how she used to ignore the way he patronized her, sometimes even finding it just short of charming, chalking it up to his concern for her. Now, though, it got under her skin the way a lot of things did, things that never used to bother her but now made her blood boil, like rude customers at the store or people who let their officiousness and position hold sway over her, making her fear the worst. People like Charlene Harrison, who couldn’t contain one old man in an assisted-living facility that was a good three miles from the river the man loved so much.

  “Hey, what are you thinking about?” Cal asked.

  Nothing. Everything. “Just all the things on my to-do list.”

  “I’ve got the girls this weekend,” he said.

  She knew. Unlike him, she never forgot where the girls needed to be or what they required to live happy lives in this little village. Her brain was full, way fuller than his, with details about everyone else’s lives. How she managed to keep everything straight, while he could barely account for himself most days, was a mystery she had yet to solve. Maybe it was like the late George Carlin used to say: Women are crazy and men are stupid. And the reason that women are crazy is because men are stupid. Maeve ran through the list of activities scheduled for the girls while in Cal’s care. “And don’t forget that Heather is grounded.”

  “She’s here now,” he said, pointing to his middle child, high up in the bleachers.

  “This doesn’t count. She’s supporting her sister,” Maeve said, although she didn’t entirely believe it. “She wants to go to a party this weekend, but she’s grounded from going.”

  Cal raised an eyebrow. “For?”

  “Unauthorized Facebook use.”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “And you don’t want to know,” she said, adjusting herself on the bleachers. It entailed putting something on Rebecca’s wall that detailed her older sister’s extensive morning toilette, inviting derision from many of Rebecca’s own classmates, not to mention Heather’s. “She doesn’t go to the party. Under any circumstances.”

  He gave her a salute. “Got it, chief.”

  She let that go, as it wouldn’t be the last time she would tell him about the grounding, nor would it be the last time he gave her a contemptuous salute. Pick your ba
ttles, she said to herself, breathing deeply. Even those that she chose to fight she might not win, so choosing carefully would be her goal. She looked up at him again.

  Why did I ever love you? she thought. She probably knew the answer to that question, but sifting through the various emotions would take time she did not have.

  CHAPTER 3

  Rebecca was still in uniform when Maeve got home, working on math at the kitchen table. Her dark head, her hair the same color as her father’s, was bent over a textbook filled with symbols that Maeve didn’t recognize from any math course she had ever taken. Fortunately for her, Rebecca had inherited her father’s good looks—his deep brown eyes, his full lips—and his aptitude for anything that required logic. Maeve could create anything from scratch but failed when it came to writing anything down that would approach a recipe, one with fractions and precise measurements.

  “What are we having for dinner?” she asked by way of greeting.

  Maeve hadn’t thought that far ahead, but one thing the Culinary Institute had taught her, besides great pastry skills, was how to turn whatever was in the refrigerator into a meal. That is, if the refrigerator held any food whatsoever, which hers didn’t.

  “Order a pizza?” Maeve asked.

  The look of joy on Rebecca’s face at this news was out of proportion to the simple idea of a pizza for dinner. The girls had made it known that they hated most everything Maeve cooked, mostly because every meal was accompanied by two vegetables. She had learned to turn a deaf ear to their protestations, but after putting in a full day at the shop, sometimes it was hard.

  “You played great today,” Maeve said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Homework?”

  Rebecca looked at her. “What do you think?”

  Rebecca was in the homestretch, giving it all she had in order to get her GPA to where she wanted it to be, and where she wanted it to be was Vassar-ready. Maeve tried not to think about the tuition that went along with a Vassar education, hoping that Cal had been as good with his money as he claimed he had been, socking it away and making dividends that would get their oldest—the more ambitious of the two—to where she wanted to go.

  He told her not to worry, but worrying was second nature to her. Her daughters knew that better than anyone.

  Maeve kicked off her shoes and went to the sink, dealing with a pile of dishes left over from breakfast. She was surprised when Rebecca asked her how the wake was, queries into Maeve’s well-being or activities never really being part of any conversation with her teens. Was it true what people told her about a college-bound kid? Would Rebecca really start to come around and maybe like Maeve just in time to leave? Maeve found the whole concept depressing, as if her entire life revolved around hoping for the day when her daughters would see her as a comrade and not as an adversary. She hoped she was around when the day finally came. “It was a wake. With a bunch of Irish people. You know the drill,” she said. She thought back to her mother’s wake, the one that she really didn’t understand or want to be at, the old Irish ladies clucking over her, promising to take care of her, some of them—the widows—eyeing Jack as if he were a rib roast on sale at the local butcher. He had never remarried, and none of them came through on their promises.

  Maeve had been seven, the memories of her beautiful mother laid out in a stylish off-price suit that she remembered her buying in Brooklyn one fall Saturday, the casket open only from the waist up. Maeve remembered telling her father that the shoes her mother wore matched her suit perfectly and should be displayed, but his only response had been to smile sadly before breaking out into heart-wrenching sobs that no one should have had to hear, let alone a little girl who pleaded with the body in the casket to wake up.

  “But I’m sure Grandpa had a great time,” Rebecca said, showing a flash of the sense of humor she had inherited from her grandfather. “He loves wakes. Especially the ones with the open caskets.”

  “He loves any time he can get out of Buena del Sol,” Maeve said, a little tingle, fear, traveling up her spine. How far did he actually get the last time he left the facility? And where had he gone?

  “Sean seemed nice,” Rebecca said.

  Maeve focused her attention on a wineglass with a smudge of lipstick on the rim. “Yeah,” she said, as noncommittal as she could sound. Water sloshed over the edge of the glass and onto her dress. The last time they had all been together had been for the Donovans’ annual Fourth of July party a few months earlier, held under a huge white tent in the backyard of their Fieldston manse, the girls unwilling participants in the extended Conlon-Donovan reindeer games. Maeve had managed to beg off on this invitation year after year, but this year, Dolores Donovan had gotten crafty and sent an invitation directly to Jack, who had informed Maeve that they all were going because he would need a ride.

  She thought back to the day they went.

  “Why do you want to go, Dad?” Maeve had asked, not relishing the thought of seeing her cousin—really, her childhood tormentor—host a grand party for two hundred.

  Jack had listed the reasons. “Free lobster. Good whiskey.” He had hesitated before offering the last reason, the only one that made Maeve acquiesce, even though she wasn’t sure it was the best one. “And apparently, there’s a rumor going around that I’ve lost my marbles, and I can’t have that. I’ve got to show everyone that I’m still the same Jack Conlon, witty raconteur and all-around smart guy.”

  So they went, Maeve second-guessing her decision the minute they walked through the door. Heather had been particularly miserable, as the keg was closely guarded by a waiter in a crisp white shirt and black pants, while Rebecca, good-natured firstborn that she was, made the best of it, bringing a summer AP assignment and availing herself of the quiet of Sean’s wood-paneled library. Jack had been in rare form, hitting the bar hard and regaling the kids of Maeve’s cousins with stories of his derring-do on the police department, stories that were only half-true, most of which had been perpetrated by someone else. Maeve had kept her distance from both Dolores and Sean, spending time with Dolores’s sister, Margie, someone Maeve remembered from the neighborhood as being one of the nicer Haggertys and the one least likely to throw an unnecessary barb her way, the Haggerty sharp tongues being their stock-in-trade.

  Margie was the one Fidelma Haggerty had pinned her hopes on, the one she hoped would go into the convent and forever be the link between the Haggerty family and the kingdom of God. Margie, an avowed atheist and, as it turned out, lesbian, had other ideas, joining the Peace Corps instead and setting out for remote parts of Africa that Maeve hadn’t even heard of. Maeve, a few years older, was long gone when she left and hadn’t seen her since they were kids, each trying to avoid her own kind of trouble. For Maeve, it was Sean. For Margie, it was her own father, a drunk and a malcontent. It wasn’t until Margie sat down next to her under the grand white tent at a table sparkling with little votives that Maeve realized how little she knew of Margie but how much she remembered liking her.

  Margie was well into her second or third glass of beer by the time Maeve sat down, her eyes shining. “I thought I could avoid this by planning a side trip to Egypt, but the revolutions put an end to that.”

  Maeve did a visual around the room and located Jack talking to some of his old cronies from the neighborhood, people that the Donovans probably invited to parties so that they could show just how far they had come from the old neighborhood to the south. “Not having fun?” she asked.

  Margie ran a hand through spiky black hair. “Remember Sesame Street? ‘One of these things is not like the others’? I think that may apply,” she said, clinking her glass against Maeve’s. “And to think that my wife actually wanted to come to this.” Maeve wasn’t sure which of them she was referring to; neither of them belonged. She had never felt comfortable among the Donovans, neither the blue-collar ones they’d been nor the upper-middle-class ones they had become. “To say that I have been a disappointment to my family would be an understatement.�
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  And apparently, there was no love lost between Dolores and Margie. “I always tell my sister that she can have all this money, send her kids to the best schools, but she’ll never have class,” Margie said, draining her beer. “Marrying a nitwit didn’t help.” She let out a soft belch. “Sorry. I know he’s your cousin.”

  Maeve waved it off. “Not a problem. ‘Nitwit’ is being kind.” She kept her eyes trained on her youngest and the keg. Her peripheral vision held Sean, who was glad-handing the men in the room, being the big macher, as her one employee, Jo, liked to say, his Rolex dangling from his wrist and catching sunlight. He caught her looking and gave her a sly wink followed by a thumbs-up in Heather’s direction. The gesture made her freeze.

  Margie was talking, but Maeve caught only part of what she was saying. “I always felt like the guy had a cruel streak. I guess that makes him well suited to Wall Street,” she said.

  “That’s what my father always says.” Maeve turned, spotting Sean making his way toward Heather.

  “My sister will overlook a lot for money. My parents, too.” She waved around the tent. “This would have sent my dad over the edge. To be the big guy in the neighborhood, even if the money wasn’t really his? That would have made him so proud,” she said, her voice tinged with disgust. “Too bad he died right after they got engaged. He didn’t get to see all of this.”

  Maeve remained silent.

  Margie’s diction was getting a little fuzzy. She smiled at Maeve. “We were a couple of terrors, huh?”

  “You and me?” Maeve asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. Maeve wondered just how much Margie had had to drink, because she had been anything but a terror. Maeve had been good and obedient and hadn’t said a word unless spoken to. “I can’t count how many times you ended up in the emergency room. You were kinda clumsy, right?”

  “I guess you could say that,” Maeve said, for lack of a better response. “Clumsy” was an adjective that Maeve wore with considerable unease.