Hope Street (24 page)

He eased the pickup into the bay next to Joelle’s little hybrid. He wasn’t convinced her Prius saved them much in
fuel costs, but she’d craved one, so what the hell. As he swung out of the cab, he checked the thick, treaded soles of his work boots. He and the bond trader had traipsed all over the guy’s four-acre property, and they’d hit a few mucky areas. Bobby would leave his boots in the mudroom. He wasn’t going to track dirt into the house when Joelle had spent the morning cleaning.

Inside, he heard the muffled sound of voices in conversation, Joelle’s and a man’s. Yanking off one boot, he called out, “Hey, Jo!”

The conversation came to an abrupt halt, punctuated by the clatter of chairs scraping on the kitchen floor. “We’re in here, Bobby,” she said. She didn’t have to tell him where
here
was.

The silence spooked him. He tugged off his other boot, then left the mudroom for the kitchen.

Seeing the man standing at his table was like walking into a fist. He lost his breath, his vision briefly blurred and his muscles contracted into knots. He inhaled slowly and met the man’s gaze.

“Bobby,” Drew Foster said quietly, his right hand extended.

Bobby nearly blurted out that only family got to call him that. To the rest of the world he was Bob or Robert or Mr. DiFranco. But to say that would make him sound like a psycho. Back in Holmdell, where Foster had known him, everyone had called him Bobby or Bobby D.

He swallowed again. Joelle slipped away from Drew to stand beside Bobby, an unspoken show of support that he appreciated. He wished he’d kept his boots on. It would be easier for Bobby to kick the bastard out of his house if he was wearing shoes.

The brush of Joelle’s fingers on his elbow reminded him that he had to shake Foster’s hand. He wasn’t surprised by the softness of Foster’s palm. The guy probably never lifted anything heavier than a pencil.

“Foster,” he said brusquely, then gave a nod.

“Let me get you a cup of coffee.” Joelle broke from him and crossed to the coffeemaker. He didn’t like this—the fact that she hadn’t asked how his appointment had gone, that she hadn’t kissed his cheek, that no one was explaining the presence of Drew Foster in his kitchen, dressed in a thousand-dollar suit, with every freaking hair in place. Less hair than he’d had in high school, Bobby noted with grim satisfaction.

He wondered what Drew and Joelle had been doing before he’d arrived, and the possibilities made his stomach churn.

They couldn’t have been doing much, he tried to assure himself. Joelle was dressed for housework, and despite the cooling hum of the air conditioners, her hair was beginning to frizz into little golden springs around her face. She had on no makeup, no perfume. If Foster had hoped to seduce her, he’d caught her at the wrong time.

Bobby fought off his reflexive jealousy. Joelle had been his wife a hell of a lot longer than she’d been Foster’s girlfriend. They weren’t in high school anymore. They’d all made their choices and Joelle’s choice had been to marry Bobby. Still, his gaze drifted to her left hand, to the simple gold band she always wore on her ring finger, just to make sure it was there.

She handed him his favorite mug, filled with coffee. Claudia had given him that mug for Father’s Day a few years ago. It said Number One Dad on it—silly, but he loved it.

Claudia.

Staring at Drew Foster over the mug’s rim, Bobby felt the tension in his abdomen increase. Did Foster know about Claudia? Had Joelle told him? After all these years, did she still care enough about her old boyfriend to think he had a right to know?

His eyes never leaving Foster, Bobby moved warily toward the table. Something was bad here. Something was very bad.

“Drew has a problem,” Joelle said gently, settling into her chair. “He needs our help.”

“It’ so kay, Joelle. I’ll explain,” Foster said, resuming his own seat.

Bobby’s tension spiked. He didn’t like the intimacy between Joelle and Foster, the way they were speaking for each other. He lowered himself into a chair, his hands curling into fists. He rested them in his lap, under the table. If he had to pummel Foster, he would. But he hoped he wouldn’t have to.

“I was telling Joelle, you’ve got a lovely house. Beautiful piece of property, too—”

“You didn’t come here to talk about my house,” Bobby cut him off.

“No, I didn’t.” Foster bit his lip, then leaned forward. “You see, Bobby…I have a son. He’s twenty-five. A terrific kid, I can’t tell you—” His voice cracked.

Bobby waited him out, his fingers flexing against his denimclad thighs, his teeth clenched so tight his jaw ached.

“When Adam was sixteen, he was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia,” Foster said. “He was treated with chemotherapy and the disease went into remission. He finished high school, went to college—for more than six years he was disease free. We really believed he’d licked it. But then it returned. The chemo isn’t working this time. His only chance is a bone marrow transplant.”

Bobby forced himself to keep breathing, to remain still. He felt as if he was back in ’Nam, waiting for the next explosion. Peril vibrated in the air.

Foster hadn’t come here to talk about chemotherapy any more than he’d come to talk about Bobby’s lovely house and his
beautiful piece of property. And if he didn’t get to the point soon, Bobby would bring on the next explosion himself. He’d trip a land mine, just to end the suspense.

“I don’t understand all the science,” Foster continued, “but neither my wife nor I were a good match to be a donor. None of his grandparents or cousins matched. We worked with the National Marrow Donor Program, searching for a possible match.” He studied his coffee for a long moment, then lifted his eyes to Bobby. “For some reason, a sibling makes the best donor.”

Boom.
No need for Bobby to trip an explosion. The word
sibling
had done it. He understood why Foster was here now—and anger turned his vision red, just the way the land mines in ’Nam used to.

“I always wondered—I mean, that autumn, after I’d left for college and Joelle called and told me she was, well…”

Pregnant, you piece of scum.

“I’m not sure what she told you or what you…Well, that’s between you and her. The thing was, I never heard from her again. I had no idea if she’d gone through with…” He faltered.

An abortion. Say it.

“All I heard was that she left town and never came back. I asked my parents if they had any news of her, but—” he glanced at Joelle “—they’d never been crazy about us, and I think they were relieved she was gone. I tried to talk to Joelle’ smother, too—this was years ago, Bobby, before I got married, before my son…Any way, Joelle’s mother seemed to dislike me as much as my parents disliked her. She wouldn’t give me the time of day. So I let it go—until Adam’s leukemia returned, and the doctors asked if he had a sibling.”

“He doesn’t.” This conversation was over. Bobby pushed back his chair, ready to stand, ready to pick Foster up by his fancy silk necktie and drag him out to the street.

At Bobby’s movement, Foster sat straighter and spoke faster. “I hired a detective, and he found you. He told me you had a daughter who was thirty-six-years old. I did the math, Bobby.”

Bobby shook his head.

“I realize it’s not fair, my coming to you like this,” Foster said, including Joelle in his gaze. His voice wavered. “Back in Holmdell, when—I mean, I was young, and I was a fool and—”

“Claudia is my daughter,” Bobby said, these words sharper than the last, slicing through the air.

“Of course she is. I would never—”

“You can leave now.”

Foster flattened his hands against the butcher-block surface of the table, as if clinging to it to would keep Bobby from evicting him. “All I’m asking is to have her tested, to see if she’s a match.”

“No.”

“Bobby,” Joelle murmured, reaching for his hand.

His hand fisted again and he yanked his arm away. This man, this creep, was staking a claim on Claudia, and Joelle was taking his side. Explosion after explosion rumbled inside Bobby’s skull. Could Foster really invade his home, win over his wife and steal his daughter? Could this actually be happening?

“You wouldn’t have to tell her everything.” Foster pressed him, pleading. “Just have her take a blood test. If she isn’t a match, then it’s done.”

“No.” Bobby refused to look at Joelle. If she wanted to ally herself with Foster, Bobby would fight on his own. “Claudia is my daughter. I’m her father. Now you’re asking me to tell her that everything she’s ever known, everything this whole family is about, is a lie. You’re asking me to tell her some other guy—some son of a bitch who knocked her mother up and abandoned her—is her real father.”

Foster sighed. “My son’s life hangs in the balance, so yes,” he conceded. “That’s what I’m asking you to do.”

If Bobby drank the coffee, he’d choke. If he sat in this room with Drew Foster for another minute, he’d start swinging. He shoved away from the table so hard his chair fell over when he stood and then he stormed out of the room. Behind him, he heard Joelle call his name and then Foster say, “It’s all right, Joelle…”

Oh, sure. It was all right. The two of them—Claudia’s
parents
—would figure this whole thing out once hotheaded Bobby D was out of the way.

He stalked through the mudroom to the garage and climbed in behind the wheel of his truck. He wasn’t going to drive anywhere, not without shoes. He didn’t really want to go anywhere, anyway. He just needed to get away from Foster. Foster and Joelle. Drew and JoJo, the lovebirds of Holmdell High School.

He had to breathe. Had to calm down so he could think. Had to hold himself together. Violent urges simmered inside him, but he was a better man than his father. He wasn’t going to snap.

He rested his arms on the steering wheel and his forehead on his hands. Inhale, exhale. Control.

Claudia was his daughter. He was the only father she’d ever had. He’d wiped her butt, bandaged her scrapes, perched himself on tiny chairs in colorful primary-school classrooms to discuss her progress with her teachers. He’d taught her how to use a hammer and a tape measure, how to grout tile and repair dry rot and how to plant a rosebush without getting pricked by the thorns. He’d paced the floors when she’d stayed out past her curfew, and he’d paid her college tuition, and nine years ago, he’d walked her down the aisle in church and delivered her to her groom. Her children called him Grampa.

He and Joelle had a life. They had a family. They had two sons
and a daughter, a home, an understanding. They’d put it together and made it work. They’d succeeded, no thanks to Drew Foster.

And now that prick was in Bobby’s house, begging for his son’s life. An ailing son didn’t give him permission to undermine everything that made Bobby’s life worth living. His family. His children. His wife.

Drew Foster had no right. Yet Bobby knew, with a sickening certainty, that it was too late. The mines had exploded, and soon everything Bobby held dear would be nothing but rubble.

May 1970

“‘O
OH, BABY, BABY
, it’s a wild world,’” Joelle sang along with Cat Stevens as she brushed blue shadow on her eyelids. The music spilled into her bedroom from the FM radio Drew had given her for her eighteenth birthday last month. Her mother had been annoyed by the gift—“He’s been dating you since before Christmas. He should’ve bought you jewelry”—but Joelle loved the radio. The old hi-fi in the living room wasn’t a stereo, and besides, her mother hated when she played Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan or the Byrds. She even bitched about Simon and Garfunkel, who had pretty voices but rubbed her wrong. And the Beatles. “They used to be so cute, but then they got all druggy,” she complained.

With her own radio, though—the most generous gift anybody had ever given her—Joelle could listen to music in her bedroom. Druggy music, heartbreaking music, dance-till-you-drop music. Jewelry was nice, but you couldn’t sing along with a bracelet.

Joelle also couldn’t sing along with Cat Stevens while she applied her mascara. For reasons she had never figured out, she found it impossible to put on mascara without opening her mouth like a fish. She’d chosen a brown shade, because black would have looked tarty with her fair coloring. But her pale lashes were invisible without mascara on them.

She blinked a couple of times to dry the lashes, then shut her mouth and stepped back to assess her reflection in the mirror above her dresser. People were always telling her she was pretty, but she didn’t see herself that way. She’d been spared the curse of acne, thank God, but her nose was too long and her cheeks too flat, and no matter how much she tweezed her eyebrows, one was higher than the other. Her hair was naturally blond—she didn’t even have to use lemon juice in it to bring out the highlights—but without makeup, her eyes were practically invisible.

Tonight they were vivid, though—and not just because of the eye shadow and mascara. Her dress was the same blue as her eyes. She’d picked the fabric just because of the color.

She hoped no one would guess that she’d sewn her prom dress herself. The rich girls had all traveled to Cincinnati to buy their gowns, and the girls who couldn’t afford to make that trip had bought their dresses at Beldon’s, Holmdell’s local department store. Joelle couldn’t even afford the prom dresses at Beldon’s. She’d gone into the store, read the price tags and realized that the only way she’d wind up with a formal gown was if she sewed one herself. She’d chosen a dress pattern with narrow shoulder straps, a sleek bodice and an A-line skirt that flared as it descended to her ankles. It appeared homemade to her, but maybe people wouldn’t notice.

Yeah, right. And maybe they wouldn’t notice how awful her hair had come out, either. She’d set it so it would hang in fat
corkscrew curls. She’d globbed on the setting gel and drenched her hair in most of a can of her mother’s Aqua Net. But the curls hadn’t held. They sagged and drooped.

The rich girls all went to Fontaine’s beauty parlor on prom day. Their hair would be perfect. She looked like a witch.

Tears stung her eyes, but she batted them away. She couldn’t cry, not with all the mascara she’d just brushed on. Sighing, she turned her back to the mirror. She’d done the best she could. And the bottom line was that none of the rich girls, with their fancy big-city gowns and beautiful hair, was Drew Foster’s prom date. Joelle was. Drew had chosen her.

“Remember—” her mother had been coaching her ever since her first date with him “—this boy is a catch. You don’t want to lose him. He’s your route to a better life. Don’t screw up.”

In the living room, her mother chain-smoked and gossiped with their landlady, Mrs. Proski. A chubby old widow, Mrs. Proski could pass for Santa’s wife, although her chronically pink nose was caused not by arctic weather but by drinking too much sherry. Still, she was tolerable. When Joelle had been younger and her mother had had to work odd shifts at the Bank Street Diner, Mrs. Proski had been on call in case Joelle had an emergency. Mrs. Proski was always home because she didn’t have a job. She managed to make ends meet between her late husband’s pension and what she charged in rent for the first-floor flat that Joelle and her mother occupied in the duplex on Third Street.

Since Joelle and her mother didn’t own a camera, Mrs. Proski had brought hers downstairs so she could take photos of Joelle and Drew before they left for the prom. Unfortunately Joelle’s hair was going to look like crap in all the photos.

“‘Ooh, baby, baby…’” she sang, then held her lips still so she
could dab some pale pink lipstick on them. Through the closed door she heard the doorbell ring.

Her mother hollered, “Joelle! He’s here!” She sounded more excited than Joelle felt. But then, her mother didn’t have to impress anyone tonight. She didn’t have to have magnificent hair and a stunning dress. No rich kids from the Hill were going to be checking her out and issuing her a failing grade.

She examined her reflection for one final minute, then pulled her sling-back sandals from their box and slipped her feet into them. She so rarely wore heels that she felt a bit wobbly, even though they were only two inches high. She practiced pacing the room—or as close as she could get to pacing, since her bedroom was so small she could move only two steps in each direction—but that was enough to get her balance and grow used to the flow of the dress.

“Never mind,” her mother shouted through her shut door. “It’s just Bobby.”

Her tension escaped her in a long breath that ended in a laugh. She swung the door open to see Bobby DiFranco swaggering down the hall to her room. In a pair of torn jeans, a T-shirt with a fist stenciled across it and over that a faded, fraying army shirt, his long, dark hair splayed out from his face like a lion’s mane and his scuffed boots green with grass stains, he was clearly not dressed for the prom.

“Far out, JoJo.” He let out a low whistle as he swept into her room. “You look great.”

“Really?” Feeling a bit more secure in her sandals, she pirouetted for him. “I look okay?”

“I’m speechless.” He pressed his hands to his chest. “I’m in love.”

“Don’t you be slowing her down,” Joelle’s mother yelled from the living room. “She’s got to get ready for Drew.”

Joelle and Bobby shared a scowl, then snickered. They’d been friends since childhood. Bobby knew Joelle’s mother nearly as well as Joelle did—and he knew Wanda Webber didn’t put much value on her daughter’s friendship with him. Wanda was placing all her bets on Drew Foster, the young man from the Hill who’d taken a liking to her daughter. Drew was Joelle’s ticket out of Tubtown—the neighborhood of Holmdell where she and Bobby and all the other poor slobs lived. Everyone called it Tubtown because of the large number of bathtubs planted vertical in people’s front yards, with little statues of the Virgin Mary inside them to create shrines. Mrs. Proski hadn’t erected a bathtub shrine in front of the duplex where she and the Webbers lived, but she kept a rusting washtub planted with geraniums near the front porch, her idea of decorative landscaping.

Bobby was just another Tubtown boy on the fast track to nowhere. Why Joelle wasted any time on him was a mystery to her mother, one Joelle had long ago quite trying to explain to her.

“You think people will figure out I sewed the dress?” she asked him.

“If they do, they’ll be throwing money at you and begging you to sew dresses for them.”

Snorting in disbelief, Joelle stalked back to the mirror and frowned. “My hair looks gross.”

“Are you kidding? It looks—” he sighed “—wonderful.” He touched one of the wayward curls. “Feels kinda sticky, though.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much hair spray I used.”

He shrugged, then sprawled out on her bed. “It looks great, really. You look like a flower child.”

“I don’t want to look like a flower child.” She located her white leatherette purse and gathered everything she needed to stuff into it: lipstick, her keys, a couple of dollars, a few neatly
folded tissues. “I want to look like a princess.” The kind of princess who belonged on the arm of a prince like Drew Foster.

“Don’t expect me to call you Your Highness,” Bobby teased. “Your heinie, maybe.”

Joelle wrinkled her nose at him. If she’d hoped he would help calm her bristling nerves, she’d hoped wrong. He’d come here to give her a hard time, to tease her as if he were an irritating brother.

She decided to tease him right back. “You should be going to the prom, too,” she said, turning back to her dresser and zipping the purse shut. She dabbed a little Jean Naté behind her ears. “You should have asked Margie.”

Bobby snorted. “Thirty bucks for the tickets. Another thirty to rent a tux. Then I’d have to buy her a corsage. And find a car. I couldn’t drive her to the prom in my truck.”

“Do you think she would have cared how you drove her? She’s your girlfriend. You should have asked her. I bet she would have loved to go.”

“Proms aren’t for Tubtown kids.”

“I’m a Tubtown kid and I’m going.”

“Because you’re in with the Hill kids. They’ll all be decked out in their fancy threads, acting stuck-up and pretending they’re cool. That’s not for me.” He shrugged. “I’ll do something with Margie tonight. Maybe we’ll catch a movie.
Easy Rider
is still playing at the Bijou.”

“You’ve seen it already,” Joelle reminded him.

“So we’ll see it again. Or we’ll go to the lake or something.”

The lake was where people went to make out. Joelle didn’t know if Bobby and Margie were having sex, but she suspected they were. She sometimes believed she was the only high-school senior in Tubtown—in all of Holmdell, probably—who was still a virgin.

She imagined that everyone at school assumed she was putting out for Drew. Why else would a boy like him, who had money and good looks and was heading to an Ivy League college in September, be dating someone like her?

Because he loved her; that was why. Because he thoughts he was nice and fun to be with and she wasn’t snobby like the other Hill girls. That was what he told her, anyway. And since she wasn’t putting out for him, she figured he must be speaking the truth.

Someday she’d make love with him. But she hadn’t yet. She loved him with all her heart, yet she couldn’t say with absolute certainty that he loved her. She supposed most girls who put out didn’t care all that much whether or not they were in love, but Joelle was old-fashioned. She wanted to be sure Drew was hers as much as she was his.

Bobby broke into her thoughts. “Listen, Jo, do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Mrs. Proski is taking pictures of you and Foster, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Have her snap a picture of just you alone, for me. You never looked this good before, and you’ll probably never look this good again—”

Pretending to be insulted, Joelle spun around and threw her purse at him.

Bobby laughed and batted it away. “I want to remember what you looked like the night you were a princess. And I don’t want Foster’s ugly mug in the picture.”

“Drew Foster isn’t ugly.” She knew that was nothing more than Bobby’s teasing, but she wasn’t in the mood to be teased tonight. She was anxious—about whether she was truly pretty enough to belong with Drew, whether she was even remotely classy enough to fit in at the prom. Whether after the dance he
would drive her to the lake. Whether he’d expect her to go all the way with him because he’d spent so much money on the tickets and flowers and his tux. Whether he would still want her to be his girlfriend tomorrow.

Any other time, she’d welcome Bobby’s taunting and give as good as she got. But not tonight.

Bobby seemed to sense that. His smile lost its sneering edge and he pushed himself off the bed. “You’re gonna have a good time,” he assured her. “Remember, JoJo, you’re better than they are.”

“No, I’m not.” In front of anyone else, she would have hidden her insecurity. But not Bobby. They went back too far, knew each other too well.

She was aware that the Hill kids tolerated her only because she was Drew’s girlfriend, not because they thought highly of her. She didn’t wear the right brand of jeans, didn’t take all the honors classes, didn’t participate in glee club or cheerleaders or student government. The rich girls treated her pleasantly only out of respect for Drew—which was why, when she wasn’t with him, she hung out with Bobby and the other Tubtown kids she’d grown up with. Some of them had stopped being friendly to her once she’d started going with Drew, though. They thought she was stuck-up.

She wasn’t. At least Bobby recognized that.

The doorbell rang again. “Drew’s here,” Wanda bellowed.

Joelle didn’t miss the flicker of disapproval on Bobby’s face. He resented the Hill kids because they viewed him as trash. Joelle insisted that Drew wasn’t like the others, but Bobby considered him just another spoiled, arrogant rich boy. If only he knew Drew the way she did, he’d realize how wrong he was.

She and Bobby emerged from her bedroom and met up with Drew in the hallway. He had asked her what color her dress was and he’d rented a tux to match—powder blue, his shirt white
with blue-trimmed ruffles down the front and his cummerbund and bow tie a slightly darker, satiny blue, the same color as her dress.

Unlike her hair, his was perfect, parted on the side and slicked smooth across the crown of his head. He kept it relatively short—because it was easier, he claimed, but she suspected he just didn’t want anyone to mistake him for a hippie.

“You look beautiful,” he said, then glanced at Bobby. “Bobby D.”

“Foster,” Bobby responded curtly.

Staring at her two favorite guys in the whole world, Joelle had to stifle a laugh. One clean-cut, polished and elegant, the other scruffy and defiant. They were so different, and she loved them both. But Drew was easier on her nerves. He never seemed to struggle. He never suffered a moment’s doubt. He understood what he wanted from life, and he knew how to get it. He wore his good fortune as if it were a comfortable pair of shoes.

Good fortune had never favored Bobby DiFranco. Maybe that was why he wore scuffed old boots.