Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You (v1.2) (34 page)

Shelby watched as the organ was plugged in and set up on its metal legs, as the padded bench was positioned behind it. Joseph sat down as Francis placed a thick music book—
Beginners Broadway
— on the small stand, then stood back, his beefy hands folded at his belly, a grin as wide as a carved melon on his face.

Joseph opened the book. Selected a page. Frowned. Stood up.

Francis repositioned the bench.

Joseph sat down, flexed his fingers a few times. Touched the open book.

Frowned. Stood up.

Francis repositioned the bench.

“Oh, my God,” Shelby groaned under her breath. “It’s like watching a pair of hippos in pink tutus performing
Swan Lake.”

“Nasty girl,” Uncle Alfred scolded, chuckling. “Nasty, nasty. I prefer to see them as two rather, er,
large
devotees of musical theater.”

Joseph sat down, flexed his fingers once more. Tested the organ by playing a few chords.

Frowned. Stood up.

Francis—well, it was obvious by now what Francis would do next.

“Do you think Joseph and his artistic backside will be ready before the last seating?” Shelby asked, beginning to see the humor in the thing.

“Darling, do you honestly care?” Uncle Alfred asked, then flipped a snow white towel over his left forearm as he walked off to answer yet another knock on the front door. “Ah, Quinn, my boy. Who have you here? Well, never mind. I’ve been commissioned to locate the nearest grocery establishment and purchase several dozen tomatoes. Anthony was good enough to lend me the keys to his truck, so I didn’t wish to bother him with the mention that I haven’t driven myself anywhere in twenty years. You may take over in my absence, all right?”

Shelby heard Quinn’s name and immediately found herself checking her hair, making sure no wisps had come free from the French knot she’d placed it in earlier. She had begun to brush down the front of her softest lilac Armani suit before she realized what she was doing, and deliberately stopped before Quinn could poke his head around the divider and say, “You had visitors waiting outside, Miss Smith, totally stymied by the ‘Closed’ sign on the door. I thought I’d rescue them.”

“Visitors?” A quick, panicked thought was that, since everyone knew where she was anyway, Somerton and Jeremy might have decided enough was enough and come to take her home. Or Parker. God, she hoped it wasn’t Parker.

“Miss Smith?” a young teenager Shelby didn’t recognize said as she walked around the divider to see not just him but a second boy standing in the entranceway, scrubbed, well combed, and dressed in shirts and clip-on ties. The one who spoke was carrying a bouquet of flowers.

“Yes,” she said slowly, then saw the folded papers clenched in the second boy’s hands, and remembered. “Oh, yes. It is Friday, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the one who seemed to be the appointed spokesman agreed, running a hand beneath his collar, which was too tight, and then tugging at his sleeves, which were too short. Some rather major growing had gone on since the last time either of these boys had needed to wear a white shirt, that was for certain, but they both looked so adorably uncomfortable that Shelby wanted to hug them.

“Are those for me?” she asked, pointing to the flowers.

“Yes, ma’am, they are. Me and Jimmy here, well, our moms said ladies like flowers. And we’ve got the essay, too. We both wrote it, all by ourselves.”

“Except my sister, Jen, she typed it up on her computer,”

Jimmy added, obviously having learned the lesson of honesty with a vengeance. “She says it’s pretty good.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Shelby said, taking the essay from him, tucking the flowers into the crook of her arm. “Your parents must be very proud of you both,” she told them, her throat tight. “I know I am. I’m very, very proud of you both.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy said, ducking his head. “Like Richie here said last night, we sure have learned our lesson. Especially Richie. His dad was really piss—um, really angry. He can’t go to the mall for a
month.
I’m just cutting grass. For my folks, for my aunt, and for one of our neighbors. But that’s all right,” he added hastily. “I mean, we did something wrong, ain’t that right, Richie? And we learned our lesson.”

“Boy,
did we learn our lesson,” Richie agreed heartily, then smiled a little when Quinn put out his hand and affectionately rubbed the boy’s neatly combed head. “Yeah, well, we gotta go, right, Jimmy? Gotta get home before anyone sees us.”

Jimmy grimaced and rolled his eyes. “Too late. Jen took a picture of me when I came out of the bathroom.”

Quinn threw back his head and laughed, then watched as Shelby stepped forward and kissed both boys on the cheek before they ran out, grinning. “That was probably worth all of it,” he said as Shelby kept her head down, pretending a great interest in the daisies in her arms. “You did good, Shelley. More kids ought to have lessons like that, and parents who care that much.”

“Uh-huh,” Shelby said, turning on her heel and heading for the service bar, grabbing a tall glass and putting the flowers into it. She still held the essay, all three pages of it, but knew she couldn’t open it right now, read it right now.

How she loved this place, this life. It was everything Jim Helfrich had said.
Real.
And tomorrow it would be a memory.

Quinn stepped up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, are you all right?”

She shook her head, the first tears spilling down her cheeks. “No. I don’t think so.”

He turned her in his arms and cupped a hand under her chin so that he could look into her eyes. Could this be the Main Line socialite? This wonderfully emotional woman who cried because two teenagers combed their hair and brought her flowers? This woman he knew he loved with an intensity that still stunned him. Loved her heart, loved her mind, loved her very human soul. “Ah, sweetheart,” he said, then pulled her close against him, cradling her head against his shoulders. “It’s all right. I promise, everything is going to be fine, just fine.”

Shelby held on, held on tight, trying to regain control of her emotions. By tomorrow she would be gone. By tomorrow she would have told Quinn everything and he would have told her… whatever he decided to tell her. By tomorrow she would be back in her old life. By tomorrow she could be alone.

And then, wonder of wonders, the exacting Joseph seemed at last to have found a comfortable positioning of his padded bench, the proper placement of his music, the correct spot for the huge brandy snifter Francis had placed on the organ in case anyone wanted to pay to have a special song played.

And then—could there be room in the day for more wonders?—as Joseph hit the first chords, Francis cleared his throat and began belting out the first few bars of “Oklahoma.”

Quinn’s arms encircled Shelby more closely as her shoulders began to shake, until he realized that she wasn’t crying anymore. She was laughing. It had started as a quiet giggle, but had rapidly grown into a full-throated laugh so full of genuine amusement that it was impossible not to laugh along with her.

Until Joseph couldn’t find a chord, and Francis had to hold a note—”O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo-o-o-kla”—for a full ten seconds until the next notes were located, at which point their laughter began to border on the very nearly hysterical.

With Shelby’s face still buried in Quinn’s shoulder, he hustled the two of them into the kitchen, where they pressed themselves against the wall and laughed like loons.

Tony merely looked up from his worktable and said, “What? You’re music critics now? Shame on you. I think they’re good. Now get out of my kitchen.” Then he lifted his cleaver and cut another cabbage neatly in half.

Brandy arrived ten minutes before the first sitting was to officially begin, and cornered Shelby in the small back room, the famous no-smoking room that was always the last to fill in a town like East Wapaneken. She was dressed in a green-and-pink-flowered dress that skimmed her ankles, her freckles standing out in relief against her white skin. “Pay me,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Pay you? Brandy, you have this backward. You pay us for your dinner. Although,” she added, grinning, “you might be eligible for a small rebate if, as I remember, your table is next to the musical entertainment for the evening.”

“Huh?” Then Brandy shook her head. “Never mind that.
Mama’s
coming. Do you hear me, Shelley?
Mama.
It’s not enough I gave up my Friday night line-dancing lessons for this, but
Mama?
God, Shel, there isn’t enough indigestion medicine in the world to get me through this. What am I going to do? Besides killing her, I mean.”

“I don’t— Wait a minute!” She grabbed Brandy’s hand and led her back to the main dining room. “Al… oh, Al,” she called out, so that her uncle, who had been admiring his reflection in the silver on his flask, turned, cocking one eyebrow at her.

“You summoned me, my dear?” he asked, then bent over Brandy’s hand. “Ah, my favorite beverage, that is,
person.
How wonderfully agitated you’re looking this evening.”

“Thanks,
Unc,
” Brandy said, winking when he stepped back, nonplussed. “Oh, relax, I’m not telling anybody.”

“Uncle Alfred, I’ve got a mission for you,” Shelby told him as she turned him around and sought out the corner table reserved for Brandy and Gary. Gary waved to her, rather like a shipwrecked sailor hoping for rescue, and Shelby’s gaze shifted to the woman sitting beside him.

Mrs. Mack sat on her chair, dressed all in black, her posture hinting that she had never in her life encountered a single comfortable seat and hadn’t been expecting to find one tonight. She was thin as Brandy was pudgy, tall as Brandy was short, and if she’d smiled in the past twenty years no one could tell that by the frown on her face now, a frown that looked as if it had been chiseled in the rouged stone of her face. If she had been born a man, she probably would have become a general in somebody’s army. Hopefully not ours, Shelby thought, shuddering.

“Uncle Alfred, do you see that lady sitting beside Brandy’s friend Gary?”

Uncle Alfred, tonight affecting a monocle he’d found stuffed in his tuxedo pocket, raised the glass to one eye and looked in the direction Shelby had indicated. “Oh, dear.”

It hadn’t taken Brandy more than a second to understand what Shelby planned. “Yeah, Al, baby,
oh, dear.
And this mission Shel mentioned, if you should choose to accept it, is to keep that old bat so dotty with your attentions that she forgets to tell me how fond she always was of Gary’s old girlfriend. Along with all the other stuff the old bat goes on about,” she ended in a near grumble.

The monocle dropped from his eye to hang nearly to his waist on a thin black ribbon. “There will, of course, be recompense?”

“Name it,” Shelby said as Mrs. Mack lifted the beautiful swan-shaped napkin and peered at it as if it might not be housebroken. “Price is no object.”

“Very well, my dears. We’ll discuss my payment later. As for now—into the valley of death rode… Well, however that goes. I never was much for committing great works to memory, the exception being SlappyJack’s racing form, of course.”

“Thanks, Shel,” Brandy said as they watched Uncle Alfred lift Mrs. Mack’s hand and bow over it. “Oh, lordy, would you
look
at her? He’s sitting down—and she’s posi tively
melting!”

Joseph, or perhaps Francis, saw Uncle Alfred and Mrs. Mack, and quite naturally broke into song, quite unnaturally singing “The Impossible Dream” from
Man of La Mancha.
Then again, maybe it did fit the situation…

A few more parties drifted in, and then the rush began in earnest, Quinn standing next to Shelby as she welcomed each new group, directed them to their reserved tables.

“Fred and Hilda,” he whispered. “Ruth and Jean. The Hunsbergers, all six of them.” Then: “I’m going to spend the rest of my life sticking close to you, telling you who everyone is, aren’t I?”

“Are you?” Shelby asked him, her heart skipping more than a single beat, rather like Joseph searching for yet another chord.

“If you’ll let me, yes,” Quinn said, looking at her intently, wondering when his timing had gotten so bad. Or maybe it hadn’t. She couldn’t ask questions right now; she didn’t have the time. She had time only for answers. At the moment, that worked for him. “Well? Will you marry me?”

“Mayor Brobst, how lovely to see you this evening!” Shelby all but bellowed, mindful of the old woman’s unreliable hearing aid. “Please allow me to escort you and Mrs. Fink to your table.”

She spared a moment to look at Quinn before picking up two of the special menus and leading the ladies away. “I do remember
some
names,” she told him, then made good her escape without answering his question.

How could she answer his question? She didn’t even know if he was serious. How could he be serious? Not when there was still so much, so very, very much to talk about… not in those hopeful fifty years but now, tonight.

After seating the ladies, she motioned to George to follow her into the hallway that led to the rest rooms. He did so happily, looking eager to escape to any place where he wouldn’t see the small lectern and attached microphone where he would give his Speech at the end of this first seating, then twice more, if he didn’t drop dead first.

“What’s up?” he asked hopefully. “The microphone broke?”

“No such luck, George,” Shelby told him kindly. “Besides, your wife told me that you’re going to be terrific. You aren’t nervous, are you?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the file cards on which Quinn had written his speech. “There’s a couple of jawbreaker words in here…” He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “You know, all we wanted to do was get old lady Brobst to spring for the wall—that’s all. How did we end up doing all of this?”

“It’s my fault, George. I’m sorry,” Shelby said, patting his arm that strained the seams of his ten-year-old brown suit. “And now I’m going to make it all worse. George, I don’t want to ask this, please believe me, I
really
don’t want to ask this, but—would you really have killed the mayor?”