Days Like This (27 page)

Chico considered it.  Finally
said, softly, “Wow.”

“That’s what I call loyalty.  And
I feel so damn guilty.  Because sometimes, I hated him for the way he treated
Casey.  I didn’t think he deserved her.  Sometimes I wanted to smash his head
into a brick wall until I knocked some sense into him.  And now, here I am, living
off the fruits of his labor and sleeping with his wife.  It really makes me
proud.”

“You didn’t always hate him.  You
two, on stage together, you had this connection.  You drew sparks from each
other.  Everybody could see it.”

“In all the ways that mattered,
he was my brother.”

“And you have to look at it that
way, man.  Who’s to say it was loyalty that made him do it?  Maybe he was
afraid he couldn’t make it on his own, without you.  Ever think of that?”

He shrugged.  “Maybe.  But
sometimes, I feel invisible.  And it’s not a good feeling.”

“Do you think I asked you to come
on tour with us because you were an old friend and I thought you might say
yes?  I asked you because you’re the best guitarist I know.  And that has
nothing to do with Danny Fiore.  That’s pure, one hundred percent Rob
MacKenzie.  So stop stewing over meaningless trivia.  He did you a favor. 
One
flipping favor
.  And how many did you do for him?  You wrote the goddamn
music.  You played on the records.  You produced the damn things.  You toured
with him in venues that packed in fifty-thousand screaming fans.  I’d say your
karma quotient trumps his by a mile.”

“And then I ended up with his
wife.”

“The guy died, MacKenzie.  If
you’ve ever heard those little words ‘until death do us part’ you know damn
well she’s not his wife any more.  That death thing is pretty final.  You two
made it legal, right?  So she’s your wife, and Fiore has no say about it any
more.  You’re the one she’s sleeping with these days.  Be grateful.  She’s a
good woman.  Smart and kind and sexy.  You deserve her just as much as you deserve
anything else you have.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m right.  Now, do yourself a
favor.  There’s a rest stop coming up in about a half-hour.  Find yourself a
pay phone, call your old lady, and tell her you love her.”  Chico stood,
swaying slightly with the motion of the bus.  “I guarantee you’ll feel better
after.”

“Thanks.  I didn’t mean to spill
all this angst in your lap.”

“It’s the road, man.  Makes us
all a little crazy after a while.”

It wasn’t like her to be so
cranky.  What Paige had done was wrong, but it was hardly time to call in the
major crimes unit.  In truth, what the kid had done was sort of funny, in a
sick and twisted way.  Even Scotty Deverell had been having trouble keeping a
straight face at the sight of a bedraggled and sopping Lissa Norton.  Biff
Norton had, as usual, blown it all out of proportion.  His threats were
ludicrous, and if she told Rob about them, he’d probably laugh himself silly. 
So why had she lost her temper with her stepdaughter?  There was no reasonable
explanation.  She’d simply been filled with rage, a rage that came from out of
nowhere, and disappeared just as quickly. 

Rob had been gone for too damn
long.  That was the problem.  They’d been apart for more than a month, and she wasn’t
handling it well.  That explained why she was pacing her kitchen on a lovely
autumn afternoon instead of going outside and enjoying the beautiful day.  This
long-distance marriage thing was for the birds.  And to put it bluntly, it was
more than just his companionship she was missing.  As Paula had so eloquently
put it, a phone call every day did not make up for a warm man in her bed every
night.  Her hormones were obviously out of whack.  If he didn’t come back soon,
she was going to jump in her car, track him down, and drag him home.

She paused in her pacing, wheeled
around, and headed for the living room.  She moved to the stack of CDs beside
the stereo, shuffled through them and found the one she wanted. 
The Edge of
Nowhere
.  If she couldn’t have the real thing, she could at least have a
reasonable facsimile.  She popped the CD into the player and let it flow over
her, the soft tones of her husband’s voice, the weeping guitars, the
sophisticated and bluesy arrangements that were classic MacKenzie. 

The music that Rob MacKenzie created
transported her to another place, some rich and vivid Shangri-La.  He was an
amazing composer, light years beyond her meager talents.  She could always come
up with a catchy melody and solid lyrics.  What Rob did was turn simplicity into
symphony.  His arranging skills were second to none.  He knew instinctively
where to add strings, where to add horns, where to weave in a countermelody
that brilliantly complemented the lead melody.  He was the one who took their
vague scribblings and turned them into hit songs.  She’d never been able to
figure out how he did it.  He jokingly referred to his gift as auditory
hallucinations, and sometimes she wondered if that was really so far from the
truth. 

He’d written this, his first solo
album, without her, in a cabin somewhere in the wilds of Oregon, after he’d
walked away from his long-time partnership with Danny. 
The Edge of Nowhere
,
both the song and the album, had perfectly captured his state of mind at the
time, as he took faltering steps into the unknown to find out whether he had
the chops to carry a solo career.

As if there’d ever been any
question about that.

She’d already made her own
escape.  After Katie died and her marriage fell apart, she’d moved east,
putting three thousand miles between herself and Danny Fiore.  While Rob was
searching for himself in that remote cabin on a pristine lake in Oregon, Casey had
rented a tiny two-bedroom apartment in the North End of Boston, where she began
her own journey of self-discovery.

He’d brought her the finished
album on her thirtieth birthday, and sold her on the jazzy concept he’d been
contemplating for his second solo offering.  She took the bait, and they began
working together on that second album.  For a time, they’d worked on opposite
coasts, connected by telephone and fax machine.  Until one day, he packed his
guitar and his cat, flew east, and moved into her guest room.

Living together had felt natural
to both of them; after all, they’d lived together the entire time they were in
New York.  In hindsight, she realized that people probably believed they were
together.  A couple.  But it wasn’t like that.  They worked together, they
played together, they ran together.  He was her best friend, and although she
loved him—she’d always loved him—their relationship was strictly platonic.

Then he’d kissed her on that
beach in Nassau, and everything had changed between them.

Kissed was, in reality, a vast
understatement.  Ravished would be more accurate.  There hadn’t been one iota
of civilized behavior in the kisses he’d laid on her, standing in the frothing
surf on a moonlit Bahamian beach, both of them semi-drunk on alcohol and
thoroughly intoxicated on each other.  It had been wonderful, and terrible, and
heady, and impossible, the most exciting moment of her life.  Until he
remembered that in spite of a lengthy marital separation, she was still legally
wed to Danny.  Because somewhere beneath the raging barbarian with plundering
lips and wandering hands lived a gentleman who’d been raised properly by a
mother who’d managed to instill strong moral standards in nine little
MacKenzies, he had backstepped and apologized for crossing the line.

The ensuing battle had been a
doozy.  Not their worst, not by a long shot.  But a doozy nevertheless.

The next day, he’d done his best
to convince her that it was the tropical setting, combined with the booze and
the lengthy bout of celibacy on both their parts, that had been responsible for
their lapse in judgment.  And he’d told her it was time to get off the fence: 
Either divorce Danny and move on with her life, or give her marriage another
try.

Even in her deep denial, she’d
recognized the subtext of his message.  As long as she was still tied to Danny,
Rob MacKenzie wasn’t willing to take that giant step forward with her.  If she
severed the tie, the next move would be up to her.

Rob, of course, was right.  She
couldn’t continue indefinitely to live in limbo.  She and Danny were still
legally wed.  She still wore her wedding ring, had never taken it off, even though
they hadn’t spoken since she’d walked out the door ten months earlier.  One way
or the other, the situation needed to be resolved. 

For days, she’d vacillated. 
She’d thought about what she had with Danny, and what she might have with Rob
if she was brave enough to take that leap of faith.  She considered their
steadfast friendship, his checkered past and his disastrous history with
women.  Her own disastrous history with Danny.  And wasn’t sure she had the
courage to do what her heart was urging.

So she’d called Danny and asked
him to fly to Boston.  Just to talk.  To find resolution to a situation they’d
left hanging for nearly a year.

He’d arrived bearing flowers,
stunningly handsome in a charcoal tweed jacket, neatly pressed jeans, and a
shirt that precisely matched the color of his eyes.  He took her breath away. 
He’d always taken her breath away.  He was the most beautiful man she’d ever
seen. 

But she had an agenda.  A plan. 
Talking points, all laid out neatly in her head. 

And then she’d looked into those
blue eyes, and all her talking points vaporized, and there was nothing but
Danny.  Instead of talking, she’d ended up in bed with her estranged husband.

It was a colossally stupid move
on her part.  But she’d been making colossally stupid moves where Danny was
concerned since the first time she set eyes on him.  In her defense, they’d
been married for thirteen years, and they’d loved each other obsessively. 
They’d shared, and lost, a child.  In so many ways, she still loved him.  Maybe
not in the way she’d once loved him, but she couldn’t simply erase her feelings
for this man she’d fallen in love with at first sight when she was just
eighteen years old.

The sex didn’t resolve their
differences.  It didn’t resolve anything, beyond the welcome physical release
after a year of celibacy.  But they talked afterward, and she realized that
Danny had changed.  That while she’d been finding herself, he’d done some
growing of his own.  And he was still her husband.  He wanted her back.  He was
safe and comfortable and familiar, and those blue eyes of his were so sincere
when he told her how much he loved her, how much he’d missed her.

And she was a coward.

The truth had eluded her then,
but she saw it so clearly now that it took her breath away.  She’d been
crippled by fear, knife-sharp and devastating.  Fear of the unknown, fear of
losing the one solid thing in her life.  If she took Danny back, and they
didn’t make it, at least she could say she’d given it her all.  Life would go
on.  She’d already proven to herself that she could live without him.

It was Rob she couldn’t live
without.

In hindsight, her distorted logic
was difficult to understand, but at the time, in her state of utter denial, it
had made sense.  If she started a sexual relationship with Rob MacKenzie, and
that relationship crashed and burned—and Rob had a lengthy history of
crash-and-burn relationships—she would lose him forever.  If she was forced to
choose between having half of MacKenzie and having none of him, that was really
no choice at all.  She’d always believed that her marriage to Danny was the
most significant relationship in her life.  But she’d been wrong.  Her most
significant, most solid and enduring relationship, the one she’d been able to
depend on for her entire adult life, was her friendship with Rob.  They shared
a connection she’d never experienced with any other living soul.  Above all
else, she needed to save that friendship, that connection, even if saving it
meant going back to Danny.  Because to lose it would rip her heart from her
chest.

Her heart had been ripped from
her chest anyway, as she’d stood at the doorway to her guest room, watching
MacKenzie pack what little he’d brought with him from California.  A couple of
suitcases stuffed with wrinkled clothes.  The briefcase where he’d tucked all
the sheet music for that second album on which they’d spent so many hours
collaborating.  His guitar and his cat.  A bag of cat food, another bag of
kitty litter.

She’d helped him carry his
belongings down that steep, narrow staircase to the taxi that waited at the
curb.  He crammed it all into the back seat of the cab, and then he turned to
her, standing forlorn and shattered on the sidewalk.  “Are you sure?” he’d
said.  “Are you absolutely, one hundred percent certain that this is what you
want?”

For the first time in their
lives, she’d lied to him.  Because she wasn’t sure.  Not at all.  She’d
believed she was making the right decision.  But if it was right, why did it
feel like this?  Why did
she
feel like this? 

“Yes,” she said.

Green eyes gazed somberly into
green eyes, and then he nodded.

Heart thudding, she said, “Tell
me we’re okay.  Please tell me we’re okay.”

He brushed his knuckles across
her cheek and stepped forward to take her in his arms.  “Are you kidding?  You
and I, sweetheart, will always be okay.”

Why was it that he smelled so
wonderful?  She pressed her face to his chest and clung to him.  “Then you’re
not mad at me?”

His arms tightened around her and
he buried his face in her hair.  “How could I be mad at you?  You did exactly
what I told you to do.  You stopped waffling and made a choice.  What I am is
proud of you.”

He released her then, and without
looking back, he climbed into the cab and shut the door.  And as the taxi
carrying Rob MacKenzie away from her slowly navigated perpetually-clogged
Hanover Street, Casey Fiore stood on the sidewalk, arms crossed against a raw
March afternoon, and watched until he was out of sight.  Fighting the urge to
run after him, call him back, tell him she’d made a mistake.