Fireside

Strike three. Yeeee’re out.

Bo stepped forward, assumed his best posture. “AJ?” he said to the boy he’d never laid eyes on before. “It’s me, Bo Crutcher. Your dad.”

Three

Kim hobbled through the airport to the commuter-plane concourse. The dress, torn to within a few inches of decency, flapped around her chilled, bare legs. She hoped to catch a flight on a private carrier upstate, thus avoiding a trek into the city and a long and lurching train ride. In this, at least, fate was on her side. Pegasus Air had a seat available on a flight to Kingston that was leaving within the hour. She didn’t dare look at the charge slip of her credit card, but scribbled her signature and headed for the waiting area. Within minutes, the flight was called and the small cluster of passengers lined up to board the plane.

The route to the commuter aircraft was a long outdoor walkway with a canvas awning, currently being whipped into a frenzy by an icy, sideways wind. She was beyond exhausted, beyond feeling conspicuous in her evening wear. That didn’t, however, protect her from feeling the pure, freezing torment of the cold, lashing about her ankles and legs. Small rivers of snow eddied underfoot, chasing her to the truck-mounted stairway leading up to the dual-prop Bombardier.

She dozed during the short, bumpy flight north to the snow-clad hills of Ulster County, and jolted awake when the plane slammed down on the foreshortened runway. Blinking at the flat, gray winter scene outside the window, a fresh wave of misgivings nudged at her. Walking out on last night’s party and going straight to the airport, leaving behind a successful career, a crappy boyfriend and all her belongings, might not have been the best idea she’d ever had. Quite possibly, heading directly from the L.A. disaster to the small town where her widowed mother now lived was a bit extreme.

Still. Sometimes a girl simply had to respect her instincts, and every instinct last night had urged her to flee. Quite often, her impulses had proven to be wrong; she’d get a head full of steam over something, only to discover things weren’t so bad, after all. This time, she acknowledged, was different. Because beneath the shock and panic, the humiliation and disappointment, something else emerged—determination.

She would get through this.

Squaring her shoulders, she endured the arctic crossing of the open-air tarmac and headed into the waiting room of the tiny airport. Here was something Kim was good at—appearing calm. To the point where she actually was calm. No one would guess that she was on the verge of screaming.

The waiting room was a drafty, cavernous aluminum building that became a virtual wind tunnel every time the door opened. She set her jeweled clutch on a vacant counter. The evening bag had been a Christmas gift from Lloyd, and was worth thousands of dollars. But when she peered inside, all she could see was how small it was, how empty. It contained her remaining diamond chandelier earring, a gift from the hockey player she’d dated before Lloyd. She wouldn’t miss wearing the earrings, since they were heavy and uncomfortable. There was a lipstick and a tube of concealer, one credit card, a platinum American Express. Her driver’s license and a wad of cash she’d withdrawn from an ATM at the airport, charging it to the American Express. This would likely incur an exorbitant fee but she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. She had more immediate worries.

Gritting her teeth, she took out her phone, balking as she had earlier. Turning on the phone meant acknowledging what had happened last night. Well, ignoring the phone was not going to make her troubles go away. She set her jaw and hit the power button. As expected, there was a full queue of missed calls. She scrolled through them but didn’t listen to the messages. She knew they would be a string of rants from Lloyd and, no doubt, Lloyd’s manager, his various coaches and teammates, his parents. Good lord, the man was thirty years old and didn’t even take a piss without getting input from his parents.

She definitely wouldn’t miss that aspect of him. She wouldn’t miss any aspect of him, not even his money, his status, his looks or reputation. None of those were worth her heart. Or her self-respect.

As she glared at the tiny screen, it gave her a low-battery warning and then went blank. All the better, she thought. Except she really did need to make a call.

She looked around for a pay phone. The only one in range was a phone booth about fifty yards across the frozen tundra of the parking lot. Please, no, she thought, approaching the counter. “Excuse me,” she said to the girl working there. “Is there a pay phone indoors? My cell phone died.”

“Local call?” the girl asked, eyeing Kim’s outfit.

“Yes.”

The counter girl indicated a phone on the wall, surrounded by scribbled-on Post-it notes. “Help yourself.”

Kim watched her own fingers punch the numbers as though they belonged to someone else. To her horror, she was shaking uncontrollably. She could barely connect her fingers with the correct number. After a couple of false starts, she finally got it right.

“Fairfield House.”

Kim frowned, momentarily disoriented. “Mom?”

“Kimberly,” her mother chirped. “Good morning, dear. How are you?”

Trust me, you do not want to know.

“You’re up early,” her mother continued.

“I’m not there,” said Kim. “I mean, I’m not in L.A. I came home on the red-eye.”

“You’re in New York?”

“I’m at the county airport, Mom.”

There was a beat of hesitation, weighted with doubt. “Well, for heaven’s sake. I had no idea you planned to fly out from L.A.”

“Can you come and pick me up?” To her dismay, Kim’s throat burned and her eyes smarted. Fatigue, she told herself. She was tired, that was all.

“I was just cleaning up after breakfast.”

Screw breakfast, Kim wanted to scream. “Mom, please. I’m really tired.”

“Of course. I’ll be there in a jiff.”

Kim wondered how long a “jiff” was. Her mom was always saying things like “in a jiff.” It used to drive Kim’s father crazy. He always thought colloquialisms were so déclassé.

“Wait, can you bring a spare coat and some snow boots?” she asked hurriedly. But it was too late. Her mother had already hung up. She wondered what her father would think of her current getup. No, she didn’t wonder. She knew. The form-fitting gown would earn his skepticism at best, but more likely disapproval, her father’s default mode.

I wish we’d had time to forgive one another, Dad, she thought.

She pulled her thoughts away from him, telling herself not to go there, not in her current state of mind. One day, she would get to work on making peace with the past, but not this morning. This morning, it was all she could do to keep from turning into a sequined Popsicle in the waiting room. She found a bench to sit on in the terminal, and started nodding off like a wino.

She jerked herself awake and glanced at the clock. It would probably take her mother another ten minutes to get here. Ten more minutes. How many things could happen in ten minutes? That was about how long it took to send a flower delivery. Or to write an email.

Or break up with a boyfriend. Or quit a job. These ten minutes, Kim thought, right here, right now, were the start of forever.

The notion made her sit up straighter. Right here, right now, she could pick a new path for her life. Leave the past behind and move ahead. People did it all the time, didn’t they? Why couldn’t she do the same?

Her mother had made a new start in Avalon, Kim reminded herself. It could be done. After the death of her husband, Penelope Fairfield van Dorn had moved to the small mountain town to live in the house where she had grown up. Kim had visited only one other time, two summers ago. Penelope claimed she preferred to meet her daughter in the city, having lunch and strolling the Upper East Side neighborhood where Kim had grown up. Penelope was certain Kim would find Avalon too uneventful and boring.

Penelope was endearingly dazzled by Kim’s work, her friends, her way of life. Just a few weeks ago at Christmas, they’d rendezvoused with Lloyd’s family in Palm Springs. Penelope had adored Lloyd, and vice versa—or so it had seemed to Kim. But after last night, she wasn’t sure she knew Lloyd Johnson at all. She did, however, know enough now to realize she never wanted to see him again. Ever.

The waiting room rang with emptiness. The girl at the counter and a couple of workers stood around, sipping coffee and acting as though they weren’t sneaking glances at Kim. On an ordinary workday, Kim might be having coffee and gossiping, too. In her line of work, gossip was more than just a way to fill the silence. Sometimes it was a mortal enemy, to be fought off like the bubonic plague. Other times, it was a means to an end, a way to get a client attention. Kim had used gossip like a power tool. She wondered what people would be saying back in L.A., at her old firm.

She just lost it, right in the middle of the party.

He always had a mean streak in him.

Then again, who knew she had that kind of fight in her?

And the breakup was so public …

People at the firm had no idea what had happened after the public part of the breakup. Lloyd had followed her to the hotel parking lot and—

Agitation drove Kim to her feet. By now, her toes were numb, so the shoes didn’t bother her so much. She went to the ladies’ room and removed the dark glasses. As a resident of Southern California, she was never without a pair of shades. This was the first time she’d used them for such a purpose, however.

Taking out the concealer, she touched up her makeup. It was a top-of-the-line product, used by professional makeup artists to cover up even the most glaring flaws. And really, this was just an extension of what she did so well in her career. She was a master of the cover-up, though usually on her clients’ behalf, not her own.

Satisfied that she looked perfectly fine, she returned to the waiting room and stood at the window, willing her mother to get here but at the same time, worrying about the road conditions. Upstate New York winters were not for the faint at heart. SUVs and cars lumbered and skidded along the state road in a steady progression. She didn’t know what kind of car her mother was driving these days. Was it a cautious little hybrid? A shiny Volkswagen bug?

It was funny, not knowing, yet oddly diverting to guess.

A safety-conscious Volvo? An economy-minded Chevrolet or a practical import? Perhaps it was the Cadillac that was approaching like a glossy beetle. Kim had no idea. It was startling—and a little disturbing—for her to realize how much she didn’t know about her mother’s life these days.

Since Kim’s father had died, her mom had gone through a radical transformation. Initially, she had been all but destroyed by the devastation and loneliness of her loss. The physical signs of grief had been starkly drawn on Penelope’s face, deepening its lines into creases of hurt and worry.

Yet the old adage about the healing power of time was true. Her mother improved as the weeks and then months passed. Penelope was still quick to say she missed her husband, but her smile was even quicker, and her natural exuberance emerged, evident in her voice and demeanor. How did that happen? Kim wondered. How did you get over a loss like that? How did you say goodbye to someone you’d loved for more than thirty years?

She really wanted to know, because she wasn’t doing so hot herself, and she and Lloyd had only been together two years.

When the daisy-yellow-and-white PT Cruiser turned off the roadway into the terminal parking lot and pulled haphazardly close to the curb, she leaned closer to the chilly window glass. Even before she could see the driver’s face, she somehow knew it would be her mother.

On the side of the car was a magnetic sign that read, Fairfield House—Your Home Away from Home.

Kim could not begin to assimilate the significance of that. At the moment, she was too tired to do anything but step out to the curb and let her mother’s arms enfold her. Grains of salted ice slipped into Kim’s peep-toe shoes. She winced and an involuntary sound came from her, part gasp, part sob. The reality of what had happened last night nearly sent her to her knees.

“Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” Her mother pulled back to look up at her.

Kimberly teetered on the verge of falling apart, right then and there, on the crusty, salt-strewn sidewalk in front of the terminal. At the same time, she gazed at her mother’s soft, kindly, clueless face and made a snap decision. Not now.

“It’s been a long night, that’s all. I’m sorry I didn’t call first,” she said. “I didn’t … This was an unplanned trip.”

“Well. This is simply a marvelous surprise.” Her mother wore an expression that seemed determinedly cheerful, yet concern shone in her eyes. “And look at you, in your evening clothes. You’ll catch your death. Where is your luggage? Did the airline lose your bags?”

“Let’s just go home, Mom.” Weariness swamped Kim like a rogue wave she couldn’t escape. “It’s freezing out here.”

“Say no more,” Penelope announced, bustling around to the driver’s seat. Kim got in, the hem of her dress dragging in the dirty slush. She yanked it into the car after her and slammed the door shut.

The tires spun as the car skated away from the curb, reminding Kim that her mother was not the world’s greatest driver. When Kim’s father was alive, they’d lived in the city and Penelope had hardly driven at all, and never in the snow. Now she had moved upstate and was learning to live her life without a husband, and that included driving. Penelope’s adjustment to it was proof that she had reserves of inner strength Kim had never guessed at. Leaning anxiously forward, Penelope nosed the car out of the airport and headed north and west, into the Catskills Wilderness, where the road narrowed to a two-lane salted track.

“I’ve left Lloyd,” Kim said, her voice calm and flat. “I quit my job. I’m—Watch the road, Mom.” A semi came at them, hogging most of the roadway.

“Yes. Of course.” The car drifted to the right. The semi’s tires spat slush across the windshield, but Penelope appeared unperturbed, simply flipping on the wipers. “Leaving Lloyd? Dear, I don’t understand. I had no idea you were having problems.”

As she settled in and buckled her seat belt, Kim realized the story was too long and complicated and her brain too fried with fatigue and trouble to explain everything, so she went with the digest version.

“We had a huge falling-out at a party last night,” she said. “Double whammy—he both dumped me and fired me. It got … kind of loud and ugly, so I went straight to the airport with only the clothes on my back, and this little evening bag.” She touched her sunglasses, but decided to leave them on.

“It’s a lovely bag,” her mother commented, glancing over.

Kim flashed on the wolf-fur guy in the airport, handing it to her. How had he known it was a Judith Leiber? Was he gay? Judging by the way he’d hit on her, no. “Lloyd gave it to me for Christmas,” she told her mother.

“I bet you could sell it on eBay.” Her mother turned up the car’s heater.

Kim savored the hot air blasting from the vents. “Anyway, sorry I didn’t call first. I wasn’t really thinking clearly.”

“And now? Regrets?” her mother asked gently.

“No. Not yet, anyway. So here I am.”

“For good?”

“For the time being.” Kim knew she was in a state of shock. She had suffered a trauma. She’d been the victim of a very public attack. For all she knew, her breakup could be playing on YouTube right this moment.

People did recover from things like this. She’d lived in L.A. long enough to see people suffer career meltdowns, only to rise again. These things happened. People got over them. She would get over this. But she just couldn’t imagine how.

“This move is permanent, Mom,” she heard herself say, and realized the decision had been made somewhere in the sky over the midwest. Maybe she hadn’t even been fully conscious of making it but now spoken aloud, it sounded like the only good decision she’d made in a long time. “The firm will let me go first thing Monday morning.”

“Nonsense. You’ve been the best publicist on the West Coast, and I’m sure everyone at your firm knows that.”

“Mom. It’s Lloyd Johnson. Of the Lakers. Biggest client who ever walked through the doors of the Will Ketcham Group. It’s their business to give him everything he demands. If he wanted the walls of the office painted plaid, it would be done the next day. Firing me is no bigger deal than changing bottled-water vendors.”

“Wouldn’t they opt to keep you on, just not working with Lloyd?”

“Not a chance. If their most important client wants me gone—and believe me, he does—then I’m gone. I’m a good publicist, but I’m not irreplaceable. Not in their eyes, anyway.” Or Lloyd’s.

“Well. In that case, it’s their loss. They’ve done themselves out of an enormously talented publicist.”

Kim attempted a smile. “Thanks, Mom. I wish everyone in my life was as loyal as you.”

“What about all your things?” her mother asked.

“My stuff’s in storage, remember? I told you about that.” Just before Christmas, she had given up her apartment. “Lloyd and I were staying at the Heritage Arms in Century City while he house hunted. The plan was to move in together. I thought everything would be wonderful. Am I terminally stupid?”

“No. Just a romantic at heart.”

Was she? Romantic? Kim pondered the suggestion. She’d always considered herself a savvy businesswoman. Yet there was some truth in her mother’s statement. Because not quite hidden beneath Kim’s facade was a heart that believed in foolish things, like falling in love and staying that way forever, trusting the secrets of your soul to your best friend and lover. Like planning a future based on faith alone rather than expecting promises and guarantees.

So much for her romantic heart.

“Mom,” she said, “I am so done with athletes.”

“Sweetheart, you’ll never be done with athletes. They’re your passion.”

“Ha,” said Kimberly. “They’re not all alike. But it’s been so long since I’ve had a client who wasn’t a complete ass—er, jerk—”

“You can say asshole, dear.”

For the first time since last night’s debacle, Kim felt the stirrings of a smile. “Mom.”

“Sometimes there’s simply no polite way to put it.”

Kim studied her French manicure. “When I first started out, I loved it. I worked with boys who needed me. Lately all I’ve been doing is concocting lies and spin to cover up for clients who can’t behave. I’ve started to hate what I do. I persuade the media and fans that being good at a sport is a free pass for bad behavior. It wasn’t what I signed up for, and I’m tired of it.”

“Oh, now that’s unfortunate.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Her mother didn’t answer as she turned onto the street where she lived. King Street was a wide, stately boulevard divided by swaths of tall maple and chestnut trees. Well over a hundred years old, the grand homes had been built by railroad barons, bankers and shipping magnates of a bygone era. Each house was a masterpiece of gilded-age splendor, surrounded by fences of wrought iron or stone. Nowadays, some of them belonged to people who were obsessed with preserving them. Others had fallen into disrepair, and a few—like Fairfield House—had been in the same family for generations.

Penelope navigated down a long, fence-lined lane and steered the car into the driveway, causing the back end to fishtail around the curve.

Kim regarded the house, one of the largest and best-known historic properties in town, with her mouth agape. “Mom?”

“I’ve made some changes around the place,” her mother said.

“I can see that.” It was not the stately house-at-the-end-of-the-lane she remembered from her girlhood.

“Isn’t it wonderful, dear? We finished painting it at the end of summer. I meant to send you pictures, but I haven’t quite figured out how to send them in email.

What do you think?”

There were no words. The actual structure had not changed. The vast grounds, though currently blanketed in record amounts of snow, did not appear much different, either, except that some of the larger shrubberies appeared to have been sculpted into topiary shapes.

The house itself was a different story. The Fairfield House Kim remembered, the one where her grandparents had lived, had been an understated white with neat black trim. Now it was painted with colors not found in nature. With colors not found anywhere except maybe on Barbie’s dream house, or in a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

Kim blinked, but the image didn’t go away. She couldn’t take her eyes off the garishly painted house. The house, with its rotunda, turrets and gables, stood out like a wedding cake frosted in DayGlo colors. The carriage house and garden gazebo also wore shades of lavender and fuchsia, stark against the white snow.

Maybe it was an undercoat. Sometimes the primer coat came in weird colors, didn’t it? “Sorry, Mom, did you say you’d finished painting it?”

“Yes, finally. It took the Hornets all summer.” Her mother parked under the elaborate porte cochère that arched above the driveway at the side entrance. The gleaming coral trim was offset by lime sherbet, with sky blue on the domed roof of the arch.

“The Hornets painted the house,” Kim echoed.

“Indeed, they did. The players are always in need of work, after all. And a fine job they did, too.”

The Hornets were Avalon’s very own baseball team, a professional club affiliated with the Can-Am League. The entire community had embraced the team when it had arrived a few years before, transforming the sleepy lakeside hamlet into a legitimate baseball town. The fact that the league operated on a tight budget meant that local boosters were vital. Families offered jobs, room and board, and sometimes even moral support to the players.

“Mom, isn’t there some neighborhood covenant against bright colors?”

“Certainly not,” Penelope said. “Or if there is, no one’s ever told me about it.”

Kim entered the house. The dizzying kaleidoscope of colors was not limited to the outside. The walls of the entryway, and the curved stairway sweeping up through the center of the house, were all as crayon bright as the outside.

Her mother hung her coat in the hall closet. “The colors are a bit over the top, don’t you think?”

“A bit.”

“I simply thought, if I’m going to go crazy with color, I should go big.”

Kim summoned up a smile. “Words to live by.”

“To be perfectly honest, it was a matter of economics,” her mother said. “These are discontinued colors, so the paint cost me next to nothing. I simply used a little of this, a little of that … and I encouraged the painters to be creative.”

There were probably worse color schemes than those created by baseball players, but at the moment, Kim couldn’t think of any.

“Speaking of going big, are you sure you’re done with Lloyd?” her mother asked.

That, of course, was Kim’s chief function—to make Lloyd and all her clients seem nice. Personable. Worthy of their insanely huge salaries. Sometimes she did her job so well, it became impossible to separate the media-trained persona from the real man. Maybe that was why she hadn’t seen the incident with Lloyd coming. She’d started to believe the hype she herself had created.

“Kimberly?” Her mother’s voice startled her.

“Absolutely,” she said. “This is for good.” In that instant, she felt a dull blow of shock, an echo of last night, and she began to tremble.

“You’re as white as a ghost.” Her mother took her arm, making her sit on the hall bench. “Do you need something?”