Читать книгу The Good Mum - Cathryn Parry - Страница 11
ОглавлениеASHLEY THOUGHT ABOUT Aidan long after he left. Long after two more clients—a cut and color and then a set—had come and gone.
She couldn’t shake the sense that she’d made a mistake in getting too personal with him. She really didn’t know him that well, and what if there were repercussions? He’d recognized Brandon’s school jacket, and that had unnerved her.
Her hands shaking, she stepped around Jordan, the young intern who was busily sweeping hair from Ashley’s workspace.
“Thanks,” she said to Jordan. Maybe if she distracted herself from thinking about Aidan by helping someone else, she’d be okay. “Are you a student?” she asked Jordan.
Jordan flipped her long straight hair over one shoulder and smiled boldly at Ashley. Nothing shy about her. “I graduate in June. I’m hoping Ilana hires me after I pass my state exams.”
“That’s great.” Ashley hesitated a beat. “I’ll help, if you want. I know someone who sat on the state board for years and years.”
“No, thanks. I’m good,” Jordan said. “Thanks anyway.”
“Sure.” Ashley nodded, hiding her disappointment and gathering up her purse. She was finished for the day and had no reason to stay longer, other than to try to alleviate the general feeling of uneasiness that she wanted to shake.
“You’ll get used to working here,” Sandie, the stylist who’d worked at the chair next to Ashley, murmured in her ear, causing Ashley to jump. “You just have to get past Ilana’s probationary period, and then it’ll get better.”
“It’s not easy starting over someplace new,” Ashley admitted.
“You’re very brave,” Sandie said. “I saw you earlier with Dr. Lowe.”
Had she? And what was brave about washing his hair? “He didn’t want a haircut,” she explained. “I did what I could.”
“Well, you were a hit. I overheard what he said to Ilana. You impressed him, Ashley. He’ll probably come back to you as a regular client now.”
Ashley froze. She hadn’t even considered that could happen. That was...that was...
“How did you get this job, anyway?” Sandie asked her curiously. “Because Ilana is...particular. Turnover is high at Perceptions, but the stylists who stay—well, we have a good reputation. The pay is great, and the customers are loyal.”
Ashley sat reeling, still absorbing the information. “I won an industry award last March,” she said, “for styling the models’ hair at the Museum of Art’s Pompeii exhibition party.”
“That’s great! But how would a hair stylist get involved with the Pompeii exhibition party?” Sandie asked.
“Through my younger sister.” Ashley smiled to herself. “She got me involved with the museum a few years ago. She has a big interest in archaeology.” Lisbeth, besides being a doctor, was also a history nerd. A big, lovable history nerd. “I learned to style hair for the Roman period using pictures my sister showed me. The women back then wore really intricate braids and headpieces. It was interesting. Some of the museum members commissioned period costumes for the party, and I designed the hairpieces for their outfits.”
“I could see where Ilana would be impressed with you.”
“I hope so,” Ashley murmured.
“Well...” Sandie glanced back toward her station. “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
Feeling uneasy again, Ashley clutched her purse and headed out the door to meet Brandon. As she passed the receptionist station, Kylie nodded at her. “Goodbye, Ashley. Are you coming back tomorrow?”
So uneasy.
* * *
OUTSIDE, THE SUN had lowered behind the buildings enough that it wasn’t as hot as it had been when Ashley had been outside with Aidan earlier.
She walked past the park where she’d sat with him, but she couldn’t think of that right now. Feeling shaky again, she paused to take a breath. She’d been walking so fast, so lost in thought, that she almost bumped into a woman coming toward her on the sidewalk. The woman—with a little dog in tow, pulling on his leash—frowned at Ashley as she passed.
Ashley moved to the other side of the sidewalk. Put her hand over her stomach and took a deeper breath.
Almost home. She was at the building next to theirs, which housed a liquor store on the street level. A “package store,” as they were known in New England terms, or at least, as people in her old neighborhood called them. “Packies” for short.
Her gait slowed. She couldn’t help glancing in the window at the rows of bottles. Wine, her particular weakness, would be at the back of the store. She was no connoisseur, hadn’t cared about vintages or grapes, she’d just sipped now and then to keep the edge off and to help her nerves. Shaky nerves, like she had now after her unsettling day of work. The vague sense of shame that she’d done something wrong, but wasn’t quite sure what. The anxiety that she was an inadequate person and didn’t quite know how to fix it, other than to do what she had to, which was to take care of her child. The child she’d been blessed with, a most precious person. The one person who always loved her back, and she couldn’t screw him up, not like she and her sister had been screwed up by their mom and her alcohol-and-men problems.
Ashley touched the window, her hand trembling. A part of her, so raw and visceral, desperately wanted to go inside that package store. To hear the tinkling of the bell over the door. The cool feel of the bottle in her hand. The crinkling of the brown paper bag that covered it. And then, at home in her kitchen, to pop open the cork and pour the white wine into the large plastic cups that she and Brandon had used back when she’d last tasted a drink.
He’d been eight years old. Four years ago. She’d tossed those cups the day she’d come home from rehab. In her mind, she’d done the worst thing ever—she’d left her eight-year-old son for thirty days in the care of her shy younger sister who’d felt uncomfortable with children—and yet she’d also done the best thing, which had been to address her problems. Ashley had taken the steps she’d needed to take. She was a recovering alcoholic.
But why did her hand still shake? Why did she yearn to go inside?
Closing her eyes, she took a breath. And another. And another. All baby steps. All leading her away from temptation.
The only unwise part of her new life—moving into an apartment near a liquor store. But it couldn’t be helped. She’d had to make a choice between Brandon’s need to be closer to his new school and her own need to be farther away from her old addiction.
Brandon’s needs had won. Brandon’s needs would always win. As they must.
* * *
AIDAN ATE HIS meal silently, alone. His grandmother had been on her telephone for the past half hour.
First her stockbroker, then her lawyer. Then the general manager of her professional baseball team, the New England Captains. If he was lucky, Aidan thought with amusement, maybe he’d get the trifecta plus one, a ringside seat to her conversation with the head of the board at Wellness Hospital.
Finally, she hung up.
“Eighty-five years old,” he said to the legendary Vivian Sharpe. “Don’t you think you should relax and enjoy yourself for once?”
She gave him a dark look. “You know better than to say that to me.”
He set down his fork on his luncheon plate. They were at a fancy seafood restaurant that just felt odd to him, after nearly a year out of the country and living in the situation he’d been in.
He sighed. Might as well come out and say what he’d been thinking. Delicacy had never been a part of his and Gram’s relationship. “Dad mentioned in his last email that he and Mom were worried about you. He asked me to talk to you and give my opinion about the state of your, ah, mental faculties.”
And then Aidan softened the blow with the wry, comical smile that he and Gram alone liked to share. She snorted at him. He knew it was good-natured on her part, though the message surely had to sting.
She waved her hand. “I’m restructuring my estate, and William and Jane haven’t been happy about that fact. Pay no attention to their insinuations. I don’t.”
Aidan nodded. William, Aidan’s dad, was a world-renowned heart surgeon. He and Jane—Aidan’s mother, also a cardiologist—had enough money that they didn’t ever need to worry about finances again. Even so, finances were the types of conversation they loved to concern themselves with.
Heart surgeons with no hearts, Aidan thought, and not for the first time. He laughed out loud. It was darkly comical, and since he knew there was nothing he could change about it, dark humor with Gram was a fine way to cope.
“You laugh now,” Gram said, a spark in her eyes, “but William spoke to me about you, as well.”
“He isn’t worried about my finances, is he?”
“No.” She waved her hand again. But this time she met his gaze seriously. “I’m worried about you, too, Aidan, but I’m worried about your well-being.” She leaned forward and peered more closely at him. “You’ve been through a terrible situation. I wish you had come home last October when it happened. I don’t know why you stayed.”
No more humor, he thought sadly.
“How are you, Aidan? Honestly?”
“I’m fine, Gram,” he insisted.
She shook her head. “I may have been on my phone just now, but I noticed you’ve been ignoring your text messages. That isn’t fine.”
His grandmother didn’t miss a trick. Surely she’d also caught a glimpse of who the text messages were from—Fleur’s parents. Right now, he just wasn’t in a good place to speak with them. Eventually he would be. But not yet.
He gazed out the window at the view overlooking the blue Atlantic. Sailboats bobbed in the bay. In the distance was a faint smudge of land—one of the islands in the outer harbor.
“Aidan?”
He glanced at the water glass he’d been idly rubbing his finger around. “Yes, Gram?”
“It is nice to have you back. And to see you looking civilized again, even if your hair isn’t quite short enough yet.” She reached out and touched his hair.
He smiled faintly at her. “You asked them to do that for me. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Yes, I did ask them. Discreetly of course. And now you look much better. You look cared for.”
Ashley had washed it for him. “Cleaned it up,” she’d said. He could turn ninety, and he would never forget the feel of her fingers brushing his scalp. It had been one of the most sensual experiences of his life, and yet they’d both been fully clothed. Her breast near his face. The rustle of her skirt as she’d turned. The soft knock of her heels on the wooden floor. The pads of her fingers as she’d brushed a soap bubble from his brow.
“Aidan?”
Again he snapped to. Hadn’t realized he’d been daydreaming. “It’s strange to be in Boston,” he admitted.
“Home,” Gram amended.
Was it? Outside the windows near the street, Boston whizzed by. The buildings were familiar; the shops and restaurants in the same places with some facades and names changed. Always, though, the throngs of students—college kids—at the crosswalks.
“How do you feel?” she asked again.
He closed his eyes, ran his palms over his newly smooth hair.
“Honestly, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.” He’d spent his childhood here, had gone to college and done his residency here. Now he’d been gone for a year, and it felt like a foreign country.
Gram rummaged inside her tote and pulled out a stack of mail secured with a rubber band. “Your mail. I suppose now that you’re back, I’ll no longer need to handle it for you.”
She’d done the job well for him. Periodically, he’d received an email from her assistant, detailing bills paid on his behalf, invitations answered and declined. “Thank you,” he said.
She waved her hand. “You may stay at my townhouse tonight, if you’d like. I had the guest suite made up for you.”
“I still have my condo.” The words came out gruffly.
There was a pause. She was being circumspect, his formidable grandmother, who had a big heart and who loved him with all of it. “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, you do, Aidan.”
His condo was filled with Fleur’s presence, of course. With her things and her memories. He’d toyed with the idea of turning his back on it, selling it as is. Hiring someone to empty it and never going inside again.
“You’re welcome to stay with me tonight,” Gram said again. “In the morning I’m stopping by St. Bartholomew’s School for a meeting of the board. It would be nice if you came along.”
He looked at her sharply. Of course, he’d suspected back at the hair salon that there might be some angle with St. Bartholomew’s somewhere. With his grandmother, nothing was coincidental.
“Why did you really bring me to that hair salon today?” he asked. “Tell me the truth, Gram.”
She smiled at him. “To bring you back into civilization with me. Even if she didn’t cut it, Ashley did a nice job.”
Gram was lying. Feeling sad, he took his napkin off his lap and placed it on the table. “How do you know Ashley? Be honest.”
“I’ve spoken to her only once before.”
“In what capacity?”
Gram folded her hands over her purse and looked him squarely in the eye. “Her son, Brandon, is the best fundraiser for the Sunshine Club we’ve ever had.”
Aidan swallowed his shock. The answer was cold and businesslike, even for her.
Yet the Sunshine Club was his grandmother’s pet project—her fundraising arm for children’s cancer research. The Sunshine Club was Gram’s baby. She’d started it decades ago after her youngest child—an uncle Aidan had never known—had died of childhood leukemia. Gram often said that if Luke had been born today, with all the advances in medicine, then he would have lived.
Few people outside the family even knew of Luke, or of Gram’s continuing grief. She kept it that way on purpose. Gram had a soft heart, though she preferred to show the world the sharp, hardened exterior she’d developed through her business and charitable pursuits.
“Did you meet Brandon through the Sunshine Club, as well?” he asked. “I understand he’s also a leukemia survivor.”
“Initially, yes.” Gram paused. “My staff supervises him and handles all communication between his mother and the organization. Prior to Brandon, we’d used baseball stars—from the Captains—as our television fundraisers. But quite by accident, Brandon stepped in. And he proved to be much more effective than any of them were.”
“How so?”
She smiled at him. “Brandon is very good on television. He’s a natural showman.”
Aidan thought of the studious-looking kid in the St. Bartholomew’s blazer. Brandon had looked like an average twelve-year-old to Aidan. He shook his head. “I don’t know that I would have gone on television and asked people for money at that age,” he murmured.
When Ashley had first mentioned Brandon wanting to be a pediatric oncologist, Aidan hadn’t really believed her. To his cynical mind, it had seemed like more of a parent’s dream than a kid’s dream.
“You would have done it for the chance to be a ball boy for the Captains,” Gram said matter-of-factly.
Aidan sat up straighter. “Ashley’s son is a ball boy for the New England Captains?”
“Oh, yes.” His grandmother nodded. “It was the price I paid for keeping him happy.”
Aidan completely understood the “happy” part—he would have killed for the opportunity to be a Captains ball boy at Brandon’s age. Any kid of Aidan’s acquaintance would have.
Rubbing his tired head, Aidan sat back. “So why all the subterfuge? Why didn’t you just introduce Ashley and me? Simple and easy. Say, ‘Aidan, meet Ashley. Maybe you’d like to give her some advice on her son’s school’?”
Gram snorted. “You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do, do you?” Then she pulled back. “It’s...a delicate situation,” she said carefully. “I had to proceed with caution. I do need your help, Aidan. You’re the only person I know who can help—the best person—and yet I needed to know that you could work with Ashley on your own terms. If I’d been too early, pushing you to meet her, to sit with her, to talk about her son—do you think you would have lasted five minutes?”
No. Of course he wouldn’t have. And he hated to be manipulated.
Yet here he was again, put in that situation by people close to him.
Even Gram. And it hurt.
She leaned over the table and put her hand on his “I know how hard it was for you at St. Bartholomew’s. It wasn’t a happy place for you, and I did the best I could to give you support there.”
Yes, she had. His enrollment had been his parents’ insistence.
He raised his head. He had to ask the question, because he had to know. “Did you pull strings to get Brandon admitted to St. Bartholomew?”
She sighed. “Yes. Though it pained me to do it.” She blotted her lips with her napkin, and put it down on her plate. “His aunt was looking at schools in New Hampshire for him, appealing for scholarships. I couldn’t risk losing him at the Sunshine Club.”
“St. Bartholomew’s is academically rigorous,” he said quietly. “Can Brandon handle that?”
She gave him a sad, serious look. “Come with me tomorrow, and we’ll find out.”
With a sinking heart, Aidan did a quick calculation. The kid would be in his first week of his first year at St. Bartholomew’s. Preliminary academic testing results would be coming back soon. Maybe Gram had some inside information.
“Is there a chance Brandon will be asked to leave?” he asked his grandmother.
“My influence is limited.” She held up her hands. “I can recommend a student for admission, but I can’t keep a failing student enrolled.” She shook her head. “You know how it is there.”
Aidan did. All too well. The school prided themselves on being academically rigorous, among the best in the world. They would keep a lagging student on for the first term, but then at the winter break, they would show Brandon the door, if necessary.
Ashley would be crushed, he thought.
He sat for a moment, thinking about that. He didn’t want to picture how upset she would be.
“There’s another reason I keep Ashley LaValley at arm’s length,” Gram said carefully, “You should know this.” And Aidan glanced up, suddenly alert.
“She went through alcohol rehabilitation four years ago,” his grandmother said grimly. “Her childhood was difficult from what I understand—an alcoholic mother, as well—and in such cases, I find it best to keep a certain distance.”
His mouth hung open. He could feel it.
But his shock was soon replaced with anger. Wasn’t that narrow-minded of her to think that way?
“You could have mentored Ashley all these years,” he pointed out. “Instead of expecting me to mentor Brandon now.”
Gram gave him a faint smile. “That’s one of the things I love most about you, Aidan. You have a kind heart.” She glanced at his phone. “Perhaps now you might return Albert Sanborne’s text messages?”
Point taken. “Since you seem to know everything,” he said drily, “why don’t you tell me what Fleur’s father wants?”
“Actually, we’re all assuming—hoping—that you’ll be staying in town long enough to help organize the one-year memorial service for Fleur.”
He shook his head. He hadn’t even considered there would be such a thing. She’d passed away last October—eleven months ago. There had been a small, private funeral, of course, and though he hadn’t attended—he was still in Afghanistan—Gram had.
He was grateful to her for that even now.
“Aidan? Give the word, and I’ll handle it for you.”
“No, thank you,” he replied.
“It’s not a problem for me to do so.”
“I said no.”
“Would you like me to arrange a room for you in one of my vacant apartments?” she pressed.
“No, I have a condo.”
“Very well. And if you’d like your position back at the hospital—”
“No,” he said icily.
“Or a position consulting with the Captains?”
Gritting his teeth, he stood. He’d just spent a year in a war zone, performing amputations on children; he certainly didn’t feel like coming back to tape sprained ankles for professional baseball players.
“Take all the time you need,” she said softly. “Think about what I’ve said.”
He didn’t need time to think, he needed space to think.
As he walked to the men’s room, he couldn’t help thinking that Gram was perfectly fine. He was the one with the head problems.
Or maybe they were heart problems. He wasn’t sure anymore.
* * *
IN THE END, Aidan stayed with Gram in her spare bedroom. He’d gone back to his condo, but the doorman had handed him a stack of messages.
One from a reporter. Another from the hospital, his former employer. Yet another from Fleur’s father, Albert, writing this time instead of calling “just in case your phone isn’t working here yet.”
His head pounding, Aidan had left it all and walked out to the street, where he’d hailed a random taxi and directed it to Beacon Hill.
His grandmother opened the door in person. She knew enough to hand him a cup of tea and just let him go to sleep.
The next morning, he was still feeling jet-lagged when his grandmother’s housemaid opened the bedroom curtains and brought in a tray of watery coffee and toast.
And then he was stepping into his grandmother’s town car again, being driven by Rocco toward the Back Bay and St. Bartholomew’s School.
He’d discovered that he was curious to see what his grandmother was going to do next. He had a sinking feeling that it might not be in Ashley’s best interests. Or in his.
