Chapter Thirty-One
“You know, your friends are pretty great.”
Surprised, Talia turns away from her open suitcase to see Ben, sleep tousled but awake, watching her from the bed.
She smiles. “Yeah? You liked them?”
“I did.” He sits up, stretching. “What time is it?”
“About eight thirty.”
“Eight thirty! Is everyone up except me?”
“Caleb is brushing his teeth and washing up. Hayley will probably sleep till noon if we let her. And I’m going to go downstairs and find Kelly just as soon as I throw on some clothes.”
“Or you could come back to bed,” he suggests, patting the pillow beside him, looking like his old self—the Ben who was playful and flirty, even after all these years.
“Now?” She shakes her head and points at the closed bathroom door. “Caleb.”
He sighs. “Rain check?”
“Definitely.”
Ten minutes later, she’s dressed and in the sunny kitchen with Caleb, pouring coffee from a steaming carafe bearing a Post-it note in Kelly’s black Sharpie scrawl: Help yourself. Be right back.
Caleb browses nearly a dozen full-size cereal boxes they found lined up on the breakfast bar with another note: For the kiddos.
“I can’t decide, Mommy!” Caleb says. “Should I have Cocoa Pebbles or Lucky Charms?”
“How about shredded wheat? You love that.”
“Not when there’s Cocoa Pebbles and Lucky Charms. Shredded wheat is boring.”
“Good morning! And I agree.” Kelly is back, breezing in the door with a white cardboard go-cup and a white bakery box tied with string. She’s wearing a coral sundress, heeled sandals, a broad-brimmed hat, and gigantic sunglasses, looking like she belongs on a yacht on the French Riviera.
“What do you agree with?” Talia asks as Kelly sets the box on the counter and tosses her hat and sunglasses alongside it.
“That shredded wheat is boring. Caleb, I only got it because your mom claims it’s your favorite.”
“Mom!” Caleb turns an accusing look on Talia.
“You eat it every morning.”
“That’s because you only buy shredded wheat.”
“Blech.” Kelly grabs the cereal and tosses it into a garbage bin disguised in a row of lower cabinets. “I just picked up some stuff from the French bakery. There’s a fruit salad in the fridge and quiche in the oven. Or I can make chocolate chip pancakes. Do you like those, Caleb?”
“Yes!”
“No pancakes,” Talia says. “Choose your cereal.”
Caleb stands on his tiptoes, surveying the lineup of boxes. “Which kind should I have?”
“How about Caleb Crunch?” Kelly says.
“What’s that?”
“Whatever you decide. Mix a few kinds together and see what you come up with.” She hands him a bowl and measuring cups and spoons.
“Yay!” Caleb reaches for a cereal box.
Kelly smiles sweetly at Talia. “Who says Auntie Kelly doesn’t know anything about kids?”
“I just hope Auntie Kelly plans on footing his dental bills, because that’s all sugar.”
“That’s why it’s not boring.” She sips her coffee, makes a face, puts it in the microwave, punches the quick start button, and moves on as if to the next agenda at a meeting.
“So I checked the forecast, and we’d better head to the beach right after breakfast. The weather’s going to turn this afternoon. ”
“We can save the beach for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s going to be worse.”
“We don’t have to do the beach at all. There are plenty of other things we can—”
“But I want to go!” Caleb protests. “You said we could, Mommy! I want to find sharks’ teeth and build sandcastles like we used to do with Granny Nat.”
Florida. Granny. The beach. She can still see Caleb in his bucket hat, holding a plastic shovel in one chubby little fist and her mother’s hand with the other, both of them barefoot and wading in the shallow surf, leaving sets of wet footprints for an instant before the tide washed them away.
“This beach isn’t like Florida, sweetie. There are no sharks’ teeth here, and there’s really no sand.”
“But we have stones instead, and I can teach you how to skip them,” Kelly says. “And we have little fish that tickle your toes if you wade in. It’s the coolest thing. You can catch some.”
“Do I have to eat them? Because I don’t really like fish.”
She laughs. “These are just minnows. We’ll bring a glass bowl, like I always did with my dad. We’d watch them swim around and then put them back into the lake. And he taught me how to skip stones. He was always such fun at the beach.”
“Can he come with us today?”
“Oh . . . he passed away.”
“Like my granny. How did he die?”
“He had a heart attack.”
“Was he old?”
“Not old enough.”
“But old,” Talia says quickly, shooting a look at Kelly.
“Granny Nat wasn’t that old,” Caleb says, “and she didn’t have a heart attack. She—”
“You know, she was a great lady, your granny,” Kelly says.
“You knew her?”
“Of course! She was everyone’s favorite mom. The other moms were, you know, kind of like shredded wheat.”
Caleb giggles. “Boring?”
“Yes. And they all thought I was a little too, you know . . .”
“Not boring,” Talia supplies with a smile, opening the bakery box and perusing the contents.
“Right! I was not boring. I thought boring was the worst thing in the entire world.”
“I seem to recall you thought good was more boring than boring,” Talia reminds her.
“Well, isn’t it?”
“Don’t listen to Aunt Kelly, Caleb!”
“Listen to me, Caleb! I’m wise,” Kelly says, laughing. “And Natalie—that’s your granny—she liked me. She once said I reminded her of herself when she was young.”
“Did she?” Talia selects a blueberry muffin and closes the box. “I don’t remember that.”
“You weren’t there.”
“Where were you, Mommy?”
“Probably at play practice—she was always starring in some play. Or, oh, you were probably out with Paul,” Kelly says.
“Who’s Paul?”
“Just an old friend,” Talia tells Caleb.
Paul Liccione. Her first love. Last she knew, he was married with children and living in the Pacific Northwest. They follow each other’s social media.
Kelly continues her story. “And I was out with an old friend of mine who . . . let’s just say we had a fight.
Anyway, I saw Natalie’s car at the Landing, so I walked over there, and she gave me coffee and a ride home after she finished her shift.
I remember it like it was yesterday. She said she liked that I was a straight shooter.
Most people did not appreciate that quality,” she adds with a chuckle. “I could be a bit much, right, Talia?”
“You were the gutsiest girl I ever knew. Still are.”
“That daughter of yours would give me a run for my money.”
“True.” Talia peels the fluted paper from her blueberry muffin. “I’m glad my mom was there for you when you needed her.”
“Oh, she was. I could never talk to my mother about stuff like that. She was way too perfect for bad boys and messy breakups. But your mom?”
“Definitely imperfect.”
“In the best way. That night, she gave me a little pep talk about how it’s way better to be single and take care of yourself than get stuck with some loser. I got the feeling she was mostly talking about your dad.”
Talia sets down her coffee and muffin.
“Wow. Really? She never wanted to talk to me about him.”
“That’s understandable. I mean, he was your dad.”
“Birth father is more accurate. A dad is someone who’s there.”
“You’re right. That was her point. You don’t want to be with a guy you can’t count on. Maybe she was talking about bad boyfriends in general.”
Talia nods, telling herself that her mother wouldn’t have shared more about her father with Kelly than she’d ever told Talia. She was good at girl talk with Talia’s friends, and she was obviously just trying to help Kelly get over the jerk who’d hurt her that night.
Talia’s birth father fell into the “jerk” category.
Natalie met him when she was sixteen, and he was a few years older.
It was a summer fling. When fall came, he went back to college, and they lost touch—until Natalie tracked him down to tell him she was pregnant.
He wanted nothing to do with her or the baby.
After that, Natalie wanted nothing to do with him. Talia didn’t either.
Not when she was growing up.
“I’ve been wondering about him lately,” she tells Kelly.
“You should find him.”
“How? She never even told me his name, or where he was from.”
“When I put my DNA sample into that genealogical website to see if I’d inherited the Alzheimer gene, it gave me biological connections too.”
“It would only work if my father gave his DNA, though.”
“Not necessarily. If someone connected to him did, you’d see that. You’d be able to build out a family tree and figure out who he was.”
“How likely is it that someone connected to him did it, though?”
“Come on, Talia. Pretty much everyone I know has done one of these things.”
She nods. Pretty much everyone she knows has done it as well.
“Maybe I will,” she says, and sets down her coffee. “If we’re going to the beach after breakfast, I should let Ben know, and Hayley needs to get up and get moving. She takes forever to get ready.”
“Ah, just like her mom,” Kelly says.
“Not true!” Talia says.
“Well, it was true when you were . . . How old is Hayley? Thirteen? Fourteen?”
“Twelve,” Talia says. “And I didn’t—”
“Come on, do you know how many times Midge and Caroline and I had to wait around while you tried on a million outfits and did your hair?”
“I did not!”
“Sure, you did! You put on a full face of makeup just to go ride bikes!”
Talia laughs, throwing up her hands in protest. “Well, you never knew who you were going to run into.”
“Pretty much just Melvin Warner.”
“Melvin . . .”
“The old guy who worked at the Shell station where we used to—”
“Oh! With the vending machine and the Crystal Pepsi!”
“Crystal Pepsi!” Kelly says the two words in unison, and they laugh.
Then Caleb asks, “Who’s Caroline?”
Talia’s laughter evaporates.
“She was our friend,” Kelly tells him. “Like Midge.”
“Is she coming over tonight for dinner?”
“Midge? Yes, she’ll be here.”
“No, Caroline.”
Kelly looks at Talia.
“Caroline is . . . she’s . . . not alive anymore,” Talia tells her son.
“Like Granny?”
“Like that.”
“She was an old friend?”
“Yes. Another old friend of ours.”
“Did she have a heart attack, then? Like Kelly’s dad? That happens to old people.”
“Oh, Caroline wasn’t old when she died,” Kelly says.
“How old was she?”
Kelly says nothing.
Caleb turns to Talia. “Mommy? Was she a little girl?”
“No, not a little girl. She was an older girl.”
“What happened to her?”
“She, uh . . .” Talia can’t tell him the terrible truth. Nor can she tell him the lie they lived with for all those years when everyone thought she’d drowned in the lake, because that will be it for their beach day. Or any beach day, ever, because he’s Caleb.
Kelly speaks up. “You know, I can’t remember what happened. It was such a long time ago.”
“It was,” Talia agrees. “I can’t remember either.”
“But—”
“Hey, you know what I think that Caleb Crunch needs?” Kelly asks, going to a cabinet. “Sprinkles.”
“You mean like ice cream sprinkles?”
“Yep. Talia, you’d better go wake Hayley. We’ll have the Caleb Crunch ready to serve for breakfast.”
Talia shoots her a grateful look and hurries from the room.