of the Olsen twins,” she rasped through the closed door. “So open the door before I break it down.”
At four-foot-something, and maybe ninety pounds after a full meal, eighty-year-old Lucille Stern would be hard put to break down a doggy gate. Cass struggled to her feet, then waddled over to the bathroom door, opening it to a sight guaranteed to obliterate self-pity.
Reeking of mothballs and Joy perfume, Lucille stood with fists planted on bony hips swallowed up inside a hooker-red satin dress, complete with a mandarin collar and side slits. A tilt of her head made rhinestone earrings the size of manhole covers flash in the streak of sunlight knifing down the hall. She squinted up at Cass through stubby, mascara-clumped lashes.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetheart, but you look like hell.”
Cass was still blinking from the dress. Not to mention the rhinestones. “Gee, thanks,” she finally managed as they moved into her bedroom. “But, hey—my legs are shaved.”
The old woman fiddled with a red satin bow jutting out from the nuclear-blast-resistant whorls of short, improbably red hair. “Terrific. So we’ll tell everyone to look at your calves.” Then she turned around, jabbing one thumb over her shoulder at the open back of her dress. “This meshugah zipper and my arthritis are a lousy combination. Zip me up, there’s a dollbaby.”
“Cille.” Cass weighed her words carefully as she zipped the dress over a black lace bra. Even for Lucille, this was extreme. “You don’t think this dress is a little—” Gaudy? Flamboyant? Tacky? “—bright?”
That got a phlegmy sigh. “This is not exactly the best day of my life, you know?” Futzing again with her hair, the former Brooklynite turned, lifting disillusioned green eyes to Cass. “So I could use a little cheering up. So I’m wearing red. So what are they going to do, kick me out of the funeral home?”
Cass scraped her lip between her teeth. Alan had been Lucille’s only child, dutiful in his own way, she supposed, but not exactly a joy to his mother’s heart from what Cass had observed over the past year or so. If Lucille was mourning anything, most likely it was for a relationship that had soured long before the man’s death.
And Lucille didn’t know the half of it.
But they were tough broads, the pair of them. They’d both get through this. “No one’s kicking you out of anywhere, Cille. Not without getting by me first—”
“Mom?”
Sweeping her uncombed hair away from her face, Cass shifted her gaze to the doorway, where her son stood awkwardly attired in some friend’s sports jacket and khakis—a startling contrast to his normal uniform of frayed jeans and oversize T-shirts. What a stunner to glimpse the adult Shaun would one day be. If she didn’t strangle him first. She supposed their mother-teenage-son relationship was no more fraught with problems than usual—and probably less, if she thought about it—but there were times…
Times she wondered if he’d ever understand.
“My God!” Cille craned her neck to look up at him on her way out of the room. “The boy has ears.”
With a self-conscious grin, Shaun touched his right ear, revealed by dint of the ponytail into which he’d pulled his shoulder-length blond hair. Even though all his friends wore their hair short, he had to do things his own way. Including the trio of open-ended loops in one ear, courtesy of some galpal with a hot needle and an ice cube a few months back. The only thing keeping Cass from killing him that time was the nasty infection that had nearly done the job for her. “Cool, huh?”
“Literally,” Cass agreed, deciding to be grateful Shaun had shown no desire to pierce other body parts. Or dye his hair chartreuse. “Now that they’ve made contact with the air…what?”
Shaun had held up one hand, angling his head into the hall. When the door to Lucille’s bedroom clicked shut, Shaun turned back, fidgeting with one of the jacket’s pocket flaps. The grin had vanished, replaced with an expression of uneasy concern. “How’re you doing?”
He’d asked her that a hundred times since Alan’s death. She’d yet to be truthful. “I’m managing—”
“Dad’s here.”
“What?” She dropped, hard, onto the edge of her bed. “Why?”
A mixture of defiance and guilt flashed through all-too-familiar hound dog eyes. “I called him, yesterday morning.”
Shock jolted a million nerve endings, leaving her slightly dizzy. “You asked him to come down?”
“I…uh…” He wriggled his shoulders underneath the jacket, stuck his hand in the coat pocket. Took it out again. “I just told him what’d happened, is all. I didn’t know he was coming.”
But he obviously knew that’s what Blake would do. Cass swallowed her immediate reaction—that none of this had anything to do with her ex-husband and why the hell was he here, invading their privacy?—when she remembered that Shaun had been jockeying for his father’s attention all his life. Why should it come as any surprise, then, that he should want Blake here now? Especially when this past year had turned out to be such a colossal disappointment.
“Mom?”
Cass’s head jerked up, her heart aching for the child still hovering underneath the fragile, easily punctured surface of new adulthood. She’d done her best, had only wanted something better for him when she’d married Alan. That it hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped wasn’t anyone’s fault, but still—and again—her son had gotten the short end of the stick.
“It’s okay? That I called Dad?”
In his frown, she could still see the toddler seeking Mommy’s approval. She pushed herself off the bed and crossed to him, slipping her hand into his. How odd, she thought, to be pregnant with her second child when her first was already several inches taller than she. “Of course, honey. You…he…” Her shoulders raised, then dropped. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”
Underneath the unfamiliar clothes, the boy’s entire body let out a sigh. “Okay. Well. I think he wants to talk to you.”
Just when you think things can’t get any worse…
“Tell him I’ll be out in a minute,” she said.
They say it takes a big man to admit when he’s made a mistake. In which case, Blake thought as he sensed more than heard Cass enter the room, he should be at least twelve feet tall by now. His feigned interest in the ostentatiously large impressionistic landscape over the stone fireplace immediately abandoned, he pivoted, his breath catching in his throat.
He’d never seen her look worse.
Her gold-tipped bangs catching in her lashes with each blink, she stood at the edge of the step leading down into the brick-pavered living room, one hand propped on her lower back. Despite her above-average height, she seemed dwarfed by the tedious expanse of chalky white wall, soaring fifteen feet to the beamed ceiling overhead. A bank of clerestory windows slashed the top of the wall, choking the air with sunlight, but even so, the room seemed cold. Inhospitable.
A smile flitted over her lips, as if she wasn’t sure what was appropriate, under the circumstances. “Well. This
