Days Like This (22 page)

Either way, the routine was easy
and predictable.  School every day, band practice with Luke and the boys two or
three nights a week, hanging with Lissa on the weekends, and the inescapable
Saturday-night family get-together.  She and Casey started running together,
but because the days had shortened and the sun didn’t come up until a half-hour
before the school bus arrived, on weekdays they ran in the afternoons, while it
was still daylight.  Sometimes they talked about inconsequential things.  Most
of the time, they ran in silence, but it was a relaxed silence. 

Her father’s wife was an easy
person to be with, and Paige wasn’t so stupid she didn’t realize she’d lucked
out with the hand she’d been dealt.  Her stepmother could have been a monster. 
She’d had more than one friend, back in Boston, who’d been saddled with the
Stepmother From Hell.  Other friends had steered a wide berth around their
stepfathers.  Pretty much everyone she knew back in the old neighborhood was
part of what was now referred to as a blended family.  Paige could count on the
fingers of one hand the number of kids she knew back home who still lived with
both biological parents.  Nobody stayed together.  Nobody stayed married. 
Parents changed partners like they were playing musical chairs, and it was always
the kids who paid.

Her situation was a little
different; it had always been just the two of them, and it was hard to miss
something you’d never had.  Paige had never given much thought to her lack of a
father.  But she’d witnessed enough divorces among the parents of her friends
to know how it ripped the heart out of a kid to see Dad packing his suitcases
and leaving.

So things at home, with Casey,
were low-key and calm.  School, on the other hand, was a suckfest.  In spite of
the fact that Mikey hadn’t sought her out again—or even bumped into her in the
hallway—she was still the recipient of the venomous sting of rejection, as only
a teenage girl could dish it out.  The guys were friendly enough, but the
girls—at least most of them—gave her the cold shoulder.  It was more of a
passive shunning than the active aggression she’d anticipated.  As a kid who’d
grown up on the streets of Southie and could give as good as she got in a
down-and-dirty rumble, she found them laughable.  Was this the best they could
do?  If so, then screw them.  Life was too short to waste it worrying about a
bunch of snotty girls who were so self-involved that their idea of punishment was
to deprive her of their magnificent presence.  If she wouldn’t play the game by
their rules, they’d just pick up their marbles and flounce off home.  Well,
boo-fucking-hoo. 

She didn’t need them anyway.  She
had real friends.  She had Lissa, who’d quickly become her staunch ally, and
Luke, who was fun and a little crazy and always up for hanging out.  She even
had Luke’s geeky band mates, who weren’t all that bad once she got to know
them.  Besides, once she graduated and blew this crappy town forever, she would
never again have to set eyes on any of those stupid chicks, so she just put one
foot in front of the other, focused on her schoolwork, and ignored them with
the same elaborate grace with which they ignored her.

It was the Saturday nights that
made up for all the immature high-school drama, because on Saturday nights, she
always saw Mikey.  Since her old man was away, it became Paige’s job to carry
the records while Casey did the driving.  With the advent of fall weather,
these little shindigs moved indoors, and because Trish and Bill’s house was so
tiny, the venue changed, for the foreseeable future, to the Lindstrom house.

With the stack of record albums
clutched to her chest, Paige followed Casey through the front door of her Aunt
Rose’s house.  “We’re here,” Casey called, juggling a bag of tortilla chips, a tub
of homemade salsa, a hot container of chili and a chilled bowl of tossed salad,
“and we come bearing gifts.”

Through the living room doorway,
Paige could see a group of men—Jesse Lindstrom, Will Bradley, Sr., Bill, Jr., and
Chuck Fournier, who taught U.S. History at the high school and was Paula
Fournier’s husband—all circled around Mikey, who had apparently done something worthy
of worshipful adulation at this afternoon’s football game.  She heard the words
“fifty-yard line” and “touchdown,” and Bill leaned over and gave his nephew an
affectionate whack on the back. 

“About time you got here,” Trish
said from the kitchen, scurrying to lighten Casey’s load.  “You can give the
records to Aunt Rose,” she told Paige.  “Since your uncles have defected to
football land, it looks like the women are in charge of the music tonight.”

“I don’t get it,” Paige said. 
“Why are a bunch of grown men so excited about high school football?”

“Are you kidding?  In a small
town like this, what else do they have to obsess over?  High school sports are
practically a religion around here.”

“Ugh.  Spare me.”  She might not
be a girly girl, but she barely knew the difference between a touchdown and a
rubdown.  Sports were not high on her priority list.  As a matter of fact,
sports were nowhere near her priority list.  Maybe it was time to rethink that,
since Mikey Lindstrom was captain of the football team, as well as its star
quarterback.

Trish patted her arm.  “Amen,
sister!”

“Just set the records on the
table,” Rose said, closing the oven door and setting the timer.  She tossed
down her potholders, gathered her wayward curls into a quasi-ponytail that she
secured with a rubber band, and crossed the room to take a quick look at the
albums.  “Hey!” she protested, picking up a Doors album and flipping it over to
check the back.  “This is mine!  I’ve wondered for years where it went to. 
That little shit stole it from me!”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the
law,” Casey said, opening a drawer and rummaging through its contents until she
found salad tongs.  “How do you know it’s yours?  It’s ancient.  He could have
picked it up at a yard sale.”

“Possibly the fact that it says ROSE
MACKENZIE on the back, in big black letters?  Larcenous little twit.”

“He’s had that album for as long
as I’ve known him, but I refuse to become an accessory after the fact.  When he
gets back, you can have him arrested.”

“I wonder what else of mine he
has?” Rose muttered as she continued working her way through the stack,
absently mouthing the lyrics to
Love Me Two Times
.

Casey returned to the table,
uncovered the salad, and rested the tongs against the lip of the bowl.  “How
are you holding out, hon?” Trish asked her.

“Me?  I’m fine.  It’ll only be
three weeks.  And Paige is good company.  We get along just fine, don’t we, sweetie?”

“Yes,” Paige said automatically,
without even having to think about it.  A couple of nights ago, they’d eaten
dinner in the living room—grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup—and watched
The King and I
.  Paige had never seen it before, but it was Casey’s
favorite movie.  The plot line was hokey, its depiction of Asian people racist
and demeaning, but the chemistry between the lead characters was tangible, and
the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein just blew her away.

“Besides,” Casey said, taking a
chip from the bag and dipping it, “he calls me almost every day.”

“A phone call every day,” Paula Fournier
drawled, “does not make up for the absence of a warm man in your bed every
night.”

“Truer words have not been spoken.”

“Please,” Rose said.  “Don’t turn
my stomach.  That’s my baby brother you’re talking about.  I don’t want to
think about him warming any woman’s bed.”  She threw an arm loosely around
Paige’s shoulders.  “Am I right, Kemosabe, or am I right?”

Talk about racist and demeaning. 
Paige grinned.  “You’re right, Tonto.”

“Hah!”  Her aunt ruffled Paige’s
hair in enthusiastic approval.  “I rest my case.”

“You can’t rest any case,” Paula said
dryly.  “I’m the lawyer around here.  Only I can rest cases.”

Rose released her niece, picked
up a tortilla chip, and flicked it at her friend.  “Bite me.”

The camaraderie, the joking, the ease
with which these women fit together, was something new in Paige’s experience.  Her
mom had been a loner, had never had many female friends.  Aside from Meg, who’d
disappeared from their lives years ago, there had been just Lorraine from
downstairs and a couple of ladies who worked at the Financial District bank where
Sandy processed mortgages.  But those friendships had been superficial, based
on proximity and convenience instead of shared interests or lifestyles.  None
of her mother’s friends had been like these women, who were so loosey-goosey
and comfortable together, throwing insults at each other without fear of
repercussion, digging into each other’s private lives, and talking openly about
sex and husbands and kids and the joys of small-town life.  Although she was
too young to have any dog in this fight, she still got a charge out of
listening to their conversation.  Being included in their circle made her feel
like an adult, one of the gang, accepted in a way the girls at school had
refused to accept her.

But that acceptance was a
double-edged sword.  The older female cousins were all away at college.  Alison,
in her last trimester of pregnancy, wasn’t feeling well, so she and Billy had
decided to lay low and stay home tonight.  Luke blew through the kitchen with
his usual manic charm, greeted everyone, snagged a plate of food, and headed
out for a date with some new girl.  Mikey and the rest of the men wandered into
the kitchen for food, then retreated back to the living room to talk football.

So she was stuck with the women. 
It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that it meant she didn’t get any time
alone with Mikey.  When they did cross paths, he was polite but distant.  Almost
as though he was deliberately avoiding her.  But she couldn’t imagine why he’d
do that.  He’d been friendly enough that day they’d run into each other in the
cafeteria, had even eaten food from her tray.  She’d thought they were becoming
friends.  Now, he seemed less like a friend than a good-looking stranger.

If her mom were still around,
Paige could have gone to her for advice.  Sandy had dated a number of different
men over the years.  She would know exactly what to say, what to do.  But Sandy
was gone, and Paige wasn’t about to ask Casey for relationship advice.  Mikey
was the woman’s nephew, which made asking her for advice on how to snag his
interest icky on a number of levels.  Besides, Casey had been married to her
first husband for more than a decade before she married Rob MacKenzie.  Based
on what Paige had picked up here and there, it didn’t seem as though there’d
been anybody else in between.  So what kind of meaningful dating advice could the
woman give?  She’d spent most of her adult life as a married woman.

It looked like she was on her own
with this one.

***

She’d never even heard the term
“five-and-ten” until she moved to this delightful burg.  It was a sort of
department store that sold a wide variety of cheap plastic crap.  The building
was ancient, with crooked wooden floors, the merchandise so dusty it made her
sneeze.  The whole place smelled like popcorn because, to her amazement, there
was a working popcorn machine located near the cash register.  It popped corn
all day, and you could buy the stuff, hot and buttered, for ninety-nine cents a
bag and eat it while you shopped.

“So,” Lissa said, rummaging
through a bin of eye shadow, “why the sudden interest in football?”

“No particular reason.”  Paige
fingered a crummy plastic rain hat that looked like it belonged on someone’s
great-granny.  These people here in East Nowhere had a stunning sense of
style.  “I just thought I should broaden my horizons.”

“Right.  I don’t suppose it would
have anything to do with a certain quarterback?”

“Give me a break, Lissa.”  She
eyed her friend coolly.  “Even if it did—and I’m not saying it does—what would
be the point?  He’d be too busy scoring touchdowns to even know I was at the
game.” 

“Do you think this color would
look good on me?”  Lissa held up a packet of burgundy eye shadow and struck a
pose.

“I suppose that depends.  Are you
deliberately trying to look like one of the Undead?”

Lissa tossed it back in the bin
and kept searching.  “Maybe purple would be better.  So if he won’t even know
you’re there, why are you bothering to go?”

Paige picked up a bottle of
perfume, uncapped it, and took a whiff.  “Look, are you with me on this or
not?  It’s a simple sociological experiment.  I want to breathe in the scent of
high school athletics and see if I get carried away with hometown fervor.”

“You’re so weird.  Has anybody
ever told you that?”

Thinking of her newly-discovered
family, she said, “I’m pretty sure it’s a MacKenzie trait.”

“So what do you think?  Green or
blue?”

She set the perfume back on the
shelf and, studying both colors, decided that neither really went well with
Lissa’s dark eyes.  Something in a taupe would work better.  “Either one is
fine,” she said.

Lissa hesitated for a moment. 
Glanced up at the security mirror suspended from a ceiling beam.  And slipped
the packet of green eye shadow into her pocket.

“What the hell are you doing?”
Paige said.

Lissa widened her eyes with
exaggerated innocence and said, “What?”

“You know what.  Are you crazy,
or are you just looking to get an early start on building your criminal
record?”

“Oh, stop being such a
goody-goody.  I do it all the time.  They won’t even miss it.”  Lissa glanced
around, reached into the bin again, and pulled out a tube of eyeliner.

“It doesn’t matter if they miss
it, Lissa, it’s against the law.”

“Are you for real?  You’re just a
big chicken.”  The eyeliner disappeared into the same pocket as the eye shadow. 
Smugly, she said, “I bet you don’t even dare.”