Crazy in Love (33 page)

“Luanne Rice touches the deepest, most tender corners of the heart.”

—Tami Hoag, author of
Dust to Dust

“Pure gold.”

—
Library Journal

COMING IN PAPERBACK
APRIL 2006

Angels
All Over
Town

by

LUANNE RICE

Coveted by fans, long unavailable, and coming soon in trade paperback for the first time,
Angels All Over Town
is
New York Times
bestselling author Luanne Rice’s dazzling, delightful debut novel, a timeless story of love, sisterhood, and the hope that emerges even out of heartbreak—and a treasure for readers everywhere who have made her a star.

“The Cavan sisters are an inseparable trio. The complexity of their relationship will be appreciated by anyone who comes from a family of sisters.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Miss Rice writes as naturally as she breathes.” —Brendan Gill

“Breezy, romantic, and entertaining.”—
Booklist

Angels All Over Town

On Sale April 2006

1

THE PROBLEM WAS NOT THAT I BELIEVED IN
ghosts. I did not believe in ghosts, but I was visited by one. I could not deny it. When I least expected to, I would see my father, solid of body, curly of hair, in true corporeal splendor, even though he had died months earlier. Once I saw him across the floor at the Rose Room in the Algonquin Hotel. I spotted him from behind. He was dining with two other men, and his graying golden-brown hair looked as springy as ever. I made no attempt to speak to him. I sat in my seat, not eating my chef’s salad, watching his familiar movements: the way he drank his martini, smoked his cigarette, gestured expansively. I guessed that he was trying to sell some land to his table companions. I had no doubt that he would pick up the tab.

The next time I saw him was at the apartment I shared with my sisters in Newport. It was a small, dingy, second-floor walk-up, made cool by a breeze off the harbor. One close August morning Lily and Margaret had left for the boatyard where they worked, and I had just finished another cup of coffee. I grabbed an old
Redbook
and headed for the bathroom. There I found my father, seated on the toilet, reading the
New York
Daily News
.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, backing out and slamming the door behind me.

“Hang on a sec, I’m almost through,” he called. My heart was racing, but from embarrassment, not shock. I did not ask myself how my father, a man who had died wearing two colostomy bags, could be taking a normal shit. Nor did I wonder why he was reading the
Daily News
, a tabloid he had considered vulgar in life, and which, besides, was not readily available in Newport. I just sat at the kitchen table and waited.

Presently he flushed the toilet and opened the door. He wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of faded madras shorts. Now, that detail shocked me: he had pale, bony, freckled legs covered with curly reddish hair, and I had
never
seen him wear shorts.

“Sweetheart,” he said, opening his arms to embrace me.

I raced toward him and gave him a huge hug. “Dad, are you real?” I asked, feeling queer for asking: he felt solid and sweaty.

“Yes, sweetheart, I am. Unfortunately, I can’t stay long.” He checked his watch, a cheap Bulova, the one he had worn ever since I could remember.

“Tell me everything. What has it been like?”

We sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. Lily’s plastic birth-control Pilpac was open beside the pepper shaker, and I tried to surreptitiously glide it under a napkin. My father waved his hand.

“Don’t bother doing that,” he said. “I’ve seen it already. That’s the sheer hell of it. I can see everything, the good along with the bad, and I can’t tell you a damn thing about what to do.”

Instantly my mind was flooded with images of things, the good along with the bad, that I had done since he had died. Alastair “Boom-Boom” Brady’s face kept swimming to the forefront, and I kept blinking my eyes to push it away.

“That puke you’re thinking of now, for instance. What is he, Australian?”

“Yes, he’s a sailor. He’s the bowman on a famous racer.”

“I don’t give a goddamn if he won the America’s Cup, for godsakes. He’s no good. You’re a fine actress, even if it is for a soap opera. If you aren’t going to have respect for yourself . . .” He patted his breast pocket and removed a pack of L&Ms. He glanced around, and I handed him a matchbox from the Candy Store. Examining the logo, one gilded mermaid with two graceful tails, he lit his cigarette and handed the matchbox back to me. “And you should stay away from that place. The Candy Store. A bunch of guys with their hands in the cookie jar.”

I fought to keep my mind blank. “Mom’s good,” I said.

“I know. I like the way she finished the living room. Tell her the beam’s sagging, though. She’d better get a brace. In fact, have her call Creighton Albermarle—he owes me money. He’ll do a good job.”

“What do you mean, the beam’s sagging? Is there any danger?” Just before my father died, he and my mother began renovating our summer cottage on Long Island Sound, converting the old screened porch into part of the living room, replacing the screens with huge Thermopane windows, removing the wall that had separated the porch from the living room, leaving one beam to bear the weight of the house. My mother lived alone there, year round now, painting watercolors. My father’s words frightened me; I thought I had noticed a slight bow myself.

“Nothing immediate, my angel. But have her take care of it before winter. I don’t like the thought of snow on the roof.”

“Dad, can I tell her I’ve seen you?”

He grinned then, a wide, easy grin that lifted his hazel eyes and made creases in his pale cheeks. He had a lean face and a long, straight nose. The Cavan nose. I had it myself. When I was young I once looked in a mirror and called my nose long. “Aristocratic,” my father had corrected, only partly pretending to be angry.

“Telling people could be a problem, couldn’t it?” he said now. “They’ll wonder why I don’t stay.”

“Why don’t you stay?” I asked.

His face went sad. My father’s expression could run through emotions the way a flutist plays scales. “I just can’t, Una,” he said.

“But you’ll come back?”

“If I can.”

I stared at him, thinking that he needed another haircut. The day before he died, I had given him a bad haircut. He was lying in his hospital bed, weak and shrunken from cancer, and his thick, curly hair made his head itch. “They won’t get me a barber,” he had said. So I had picked up a pair of scissors, the crooked kind used by nurses to cut bandages, and chopped off all his hair. The remaining tufts sticking out on his skull, combined with his wide, darting eyes, had made him look like an owl.

“Whooo!” he said to me now. Then he rose, hugged me hard, and left through the front door.

I RAN DOWN
Brewer Street to The Yard. Lily was making fast a long white ketch to a floating dock. Boom-Boom stood at the bow, a line in his heavy hands. He called my name, making it sound like “Ina” in his Australian accent, but I ignored him. “You have got to come with me,” I said to Lily. “Where’s Margo?”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

“You’ve got to come now.”

Lily gauged the situation. She knew I didn’t often make demands unless they were urgent. Throwing the remaining united line to Boom-Boom, she walked along the dock with me. We found Margaret driving the Travelift, a huge apparatus used for moving huge boats. “Margo!” Lily called. “Come on down.”

Lily was our middle sister, two years younger than I, but she had seniority over Margaret at the boatyard as well as in our family. Margaret hurried across the hot asphalt parking lot, and we went into a ramshackle shed at the far end of The Yard.

“Una has big business,” Lily explained.

“You won’t believe this,” I said. I remember twisting my hands, trying to find a clear way to tell them what had happened. I settled on directness. “I saw Dad.”

“When?” Lily asked, her voice giving nothing away.

“Today—ten minutes ago. He looks great. He misses us all.” I looked into both my sisters’ faces. Lily’s eyebrows were arched, her mouth thin and set. Margo ducked her head, patting the pockets of her khaki shorts for cigarettes. They both had wild yellow hair, unlike mine, which was reddish. The sun shined through the open windows behind them, lighting their heads like halos. I tried to breathe more steadily. “He was in the bathroom, reading the paper. I didn’t buy the
Daily News
, and I know you two didn’t, so how else would it be there? It’s right on the floor, soaking wet because he dropped it on the bathmat.” I gave Margo a dirty look because she was notorious for forgetting to hang up her wet bath things.

“Dad hates scandal sheets,” Margo said.

“He used to, but apparently he likes them now.”

“What did he say?” Lily asked.

“Okay. He said—” I laughed. “Typical. Guess what he said about Boom-Boom?”

“‘Stay away from that no-good punk,’ ” Lily said.

“‘Puke.’ He said ‘no-good puke.’ ”

“That
is
typical,” Margo agreed.

“He also said that the Candy Store is bad, and also that Mom should get the beam fixed.”

“No kidding. The house is ready to collapse,” Lily said.

“What else?” Margo asked.

“That’s about it. We just sat and talked.”

I noticed, of course, the looks my sisters exchanged. I couldn’t blame them for not truly believing me, no matter how badly I wanted them to; I hadn’t told them about the time at the Algonquin for that precise reason. But this time seemed more compelling. Our father had appeared to me in our apartment.

“Listen,” Lily said. “We’d better get back to work. You can finish telling us about it later.”

I walked back up Brewer Street’s small hill, disappointed that they hadn’t felt more inclined to keep open minds. My day stretched emptily ahead, until five that evening, when they would come home. All three of us were on leaves of sorts. They from Brown University, where they were both graduate students in the Art History Department, and I from my role as Delilah Grant on
Beyond the Bridge,
a soap opera that filmed five days a week, with occasional weeks off during which we were supposed to make public appearances at shopping malls and guest spots on game shows. But my character had disappeared for the summer. In September she would reappear, fleeing to Lake Huron, to an isolated cabin where she could forget a painful episode with her long-term lover, and where a psychopathic fur trapper would eventually corner her.

It had seemed like a perfect time to reunite with Lily and Margo. Our father had died in January; except for the two weeks surrounding his death when we had converged on our mother’s house in Connecticut, we hadn’t lived together for eight years. Presence is everything.

I used to say texture is everything, while Lily and Margo would say color is everything. We would have fantastic debates. Driving past the marsh at Black Hall, I would say the texture of the cattails and grasses, spiky and tubular, was the most beautiful. Margo and Lily would argue for the color: the shades of blue, green, and gold. (Although they preferred wilder colors with evocative names: apricot, persimmon, tea rose, vermilion, emerald, azure.) We invented names for our preferences. The color school was Karsky (named for a boy Margo had known in high school), and the texture school was Schlumberger (pronounced
shlum-bear-zhay,
an extremely textural name).