"Come home, Miri. I need you here. Jake and Allie need you, too."
The February morning had made her skin so cold that her hot tears stung her face.
"Daddy," she whispered, staring at the Mocha sign ahead but feeling as if the ground had suddenly slanted, as if she had slipped sideways out of the world. "Is it really you?"
"The storm is coming back to Coventry, Miri. Everyone we loved is in danger. I want to help them but the only way I can do that is through you."
A hiss of static burst from the phone, a wail and shush that might have been interference or might have been wind and ice.
"I don't understand," she said softly. "What kind of-"
"Miri," he said, his voice almost lost in the static.
The line went dead. Numb, not breathing, she looked at the phone. Two words were on the screen-CALL FAILED-but there were two other words echoing in her mind, the last words she thought she had made out amid that hiss before the call had been cut off.
Come home.
ELEVEN
The lunchtime crowd that Sunday at The Vault could have been charitably described as thin. The plows had finished up their work in midmorning and the sun had done a perfect job of melting whatever ice remained on the roads. The temperature had risen above forty degrees-warm for February-and narrow little streams of snowmelt ran along the drifts and into sewer gratings. The warm-up would not last very long, especially with a more troubling storm just days away, but for the moment Coventry was a winter wonderland. People should have been out taking advantage of it, but there were fewer than fifteen customers inside The Vault.
Halfway through playing an obscure old tune by The National, TJ glanced at the clock. He hit a wrong note and sang over it, hoping nobody noticed. The hands of the clock were crawling toward one P.M. and he knew Ella must be thinking the same thing he was-where were the Faithful? They never used the phrase at the restaurant, but at home that was how they always referred to the people who rolled in between twelve and one, after the eleven o'clock Mass had gotten out. Without the Faithful, there wasn't much point in opening for lunch on Sundays.
As he sang and played he glanced around the restaurant again. He spotted Mrs. Bridges and Mr. McFarland, a pair of single oldsters who had become regulars for Sunday lunch. At their age, he figured, they didn't call each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but Ella had told him they'd both lost spouses to cancer and seemed to have a very nice thing going on Sundays-Mass, and then lunch at The Vault. Their presence reassured him that there hadn't been some church boycott of the restaurant, but that was cold comfort.
He finished the song to a smattering of polite applause from the table nearest the corner where he always set up. Everyone else in the place seemed to think the music must be coming from speakers somewhere. Up until the economy had bottomed out, Ella had done a robust Sunday-brunch business. Sometimes TJ had played and at other times he had arranged for various local musicians to come in. Jazz, blues, folk, and holiday music when the Christmas season rolled around. But people without jobs didn't go out for Sunday brunch and that wasn't going to change even if Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston got out of their graves to serenade them over Belgian waffles.
TJ glanced around and spotted his coffee on top of his amplifier. What the hell he'd been thinking by leaving it there he had no idea, but he retrieved it and took a sip. It had cooled too much to taste very good but he took another long sip anyway, then set the mug on the floor.
When he looked up, Grace had appeared beside him. She leaned against the wall, sipping pink lemonade and looking as adorable as always in black boots, leggings, a green top, and a white down vest with a faux-fur fringe on the hood. At home she still seemed like his little girl but out in public she liked to adopt a more sophisticated air. If this was what eleven years old brought, the idea of fifteen terrified him.
"Hi, sweetie," he said, strumming the guitar and adjusting the tuning. "Did you have lunch?"
"Pot pie," Grace replied, her nostrils flaring in distaste. "It's dreadful."
"You love the pot pie," he said, bristling a bit. She'd been behaving oddly since breakfast. "I hope you didn't say that to your mother."
Grace fixed a disapproving frown upon him. "Of course not. That would be rude."
"Good. I don't know what's gotten into you today, but-"
"Why do you do this?"
A shiver passed through him. He couldn't have said why, but he certainly didn't like the way she looked at him.
"Do what?"
He knew he ought to be playing another song, but it wasn't as if the dozen people in the restaurant were paying much attention.
Grace gestured toward empty tables. "This. I just don't know why you bother."
"Hey. That's enough of that." He clicked off his microphone and gave her a withering look. "You know exactly why I'm here."
"Enlighten me."
Enlighten her? He wanted to slap her face. If he had been the kind of man who would ever strike a child, he'd have done just that. On the other hand, he couldn't deny that in the middle of his anger was a tiny spot of pride. What eleven-year-old used the word enlighten in a sentence? Grace could probably even spell it properly. Had Ella had that kind of vocabulary in the fourth grade? TJ surely hadn't.
He took her arm, not hard enough to hurt but firmly enough to let her know he meant business. Her lips made a thin line but she did not complain or try to pull away as he drew her nearer, lowering his voice to a whisper.
"I get it, okay?" he said. "Things have been tense. Maybe your mom and I have been at each other's throats a little, but we love each other and we love you. If we're fighting, that doesn't mean you have to choose sides and it damn well doesn't mean you have to act out to get attention."
"I'm not acting out."
"You're being rude and condescending to your parents and you're only eleven years old. That's not okay. Wouldn't be okay if you were twenty or forty, either. We're doing our best for you and for us as a family."
TJ glanced around to make sure no one had taken an interest in the whispers being traded in the corner. "They're lean times, kid, but not so lean that you didn't get the whole outfit you've got on for Christmas. I'm here playing because live music is something we can offer that most local restaurants can't afford right now. We can't afford to have anyone else do it, so here I am."
"It's supposed to bring in customers," Grace said, her eyes gleaming in the sunlight coming in the window behind them, the same rich chocolate brown as her mother's.
"Exactly," TJ said.
"Does it seem to you that it's working?" the little girl said, sighing as if she were a teacher about to give up on her student.
TJ flinched. Another ripple went through him but this wasn't anger; it felt more like embarrassment. He worked his jaw, tamping down the urge to snap at her.
"We're doing everything we know how to do," he whispered. "It'll turn around."
The Vault had cut back its hours so that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays and open for lunch only on the weekends. The landlord had cut the rent considerably, knowing that the chances of getting another restaurant into the space in difficult times were slim.
"Will it?" Grace asked, sipping her pink lemonade.
"I just said it would," TJ barked.
A clink of silverware brought him around. He blinked and saw that half-a-dozen heads had turned and some of the customers were observing them now. He swore inwardly. Most of these people were regulars. They couldn't afford to scare even one of them away.
"Listen," he said, bending to get his coffee mug. "Do me a favor, all right? Go and get your dad a fresh cup of coffee."
He held the cup out to her. For a moment Grace looked at it with disdain that bordered on a sneer and then, reluctantly, she took it from him with her free hand.
"Sure," she said, starting to turn away.
TJ clicked his microphone back on.
"But … Dad?"
He glanced at her.
"She doesn't appreciate it," Grace said, tossing her head to get her hair out of her eyes. "You realize that, don't you? You're like the band that kept playing while the Titanic went down. You're doing all you can to keep her dream alive, but she never spares a moment to wonder what happened to your dreams."
The microphone probably hadn't picked up what Grace had said, but it would catch his voice for sure. It took him a second or two of numb astonishment to react, and then he reached up to click the mic off again, but Grace was already walking away.
"This place is doomed," she said.
She smiled, then, but it didn't reach her eyes. They were grim and knowing, not cruel but brutally cold.
That is not an eleven-year-old, he thought. And then he gave a dry, humorless laugh, knowing that must be what every parent thought at one point or another.
As he started into another song, his anger turned to worry. The ugliness between him and Ella had begun to tear their daughter up inside. What she'd said had some truth in it, and that hurt, but it hurt far worse for him to think of what they were doing to her childhood.
Something had to change, for Grace's sake. He hoped that his marriage could be healed, but he thought the status quo would be even worse for Grace's psyche than divorce.