Then she remembered her own teen years. She and Mama had engaged in daily knockdown, drag-out fights about everything from skirt length to heel height to curfews. Nothing Mama said had ever been right. Certainly her advice about sex, love, and drugs had fallen on deaf ears.
Maybe that had been Angie’s mistake. She’d wanted so much to solve Lauren’s problem, but perhaps that wasn’t what the teenager wanted from her.
Next time, Angie vowed, she would just listen.
SIXTEEN
Date night was a huge success. It seemed that many of the West Enders, young and old, had been looking for an excuse to go out for dinner and a movie. The weather had probably helped. This had been a gray and dismal November, and with Thanksgiving just around the corner, it didn’t look like it would improve much. There wasn’t a lot to do in a town like this on a cold and rainy night.
Angie moved from table to table, talking to their guests, making sure that Rosa and the new waitress, Carla, were getting the job done. She refilled water, delivered bread, and bused many of the tables herself.
Mama’s specials had been especially good tonight. They’d run out of the risotto with mussels and saffron by eight, and it looked like the salmon over angel-hair pasta with roasted tomatoes and artichoke heart aioli wouldn’t last another hour. It was surprising how good this success felt.
Angie had given that some thought lately. Ever since she’d seen Conlan, in fact. After all, she had a lot of time to think. In a small town, a single woman with no children and no romantic prospects had plenty of thinking time.
Once she began to contemplate her life, she couldn’t seem to stop. She thought about the choice she’d made, so long ago, before she’d even been old enough to understand what truly mattered.
At sixteen she’d decided to be Someone. Perhaps because she’d grown up in a big family in a small town, or maybe because her father’s adoration and respect meant so much to her. Even now she wasn’t sure what had shaped her choices. She knew only that she’d longed for a different, faster, more sophisticated life. UCLA had been the beginning. No one else in her high school class had gone to college so far away; once there, she’d studied things that set her even farther apart from her high school friends and her family. Russian literature. Art history. Eastern religions. Philosophy. All of that learning had made her aware of the bigness of the world. She’d wanted to seize it all, experience it. And once you strapped yourself into a race car and roared onto the fast track, you forgot to slow down and see the scenery. Everything was a blur except the finish line.
Then she’d met Conlan.
She’d loved him so much. Enough to vow before God that she’d love no other man in this lifetime.
She wasn’t sure when it had started to be too little, that love, when exactly she’d started to judge her life by what it lacked, but that had been the end result. It was ironic, really; love had set them in search of a child, and that search had depleted their ability to stay in love.
If only loss had brought them together instead of pulling them apart.
If only they’d been stronger.
These were the things she should have said to him at the theater. Instead, she’d acted like a silly teenager with an unreciprocated crush on the quarterback.
She was still thinking about it when the restaurant closed, so she poured herself a glass of wine and sat down by the fire. It was quiet in the restaurant now that everyone had gone. She saw no reason to go home. Here, she was comfortable. There, it was too easy to go down the dark road of feeling alone.
Alone.
She took a sip of wine, told herself the shiver she’d just felt had been caused by the fire’s heat.
The kitchen door swung open. Mira walked into the dining room, looking tired.
“I thought you’d gone home,” Angie said, pushing a chair toward her sister.
“I walked Mama out to her car. While we were standing in the rain, she decided to tell me that my teenage daughter is dressing like a hooker.” She sank into the chair. “I’ll take a glass of that wine.”
Angie poured a glass, handed it to her sister. “All teenagers dress like that these days.”
“That’s what I told Mama. Her answer was, You better tell Sarah that she is advertising a product she is too young to sell. Oh. And that Papa would be spinning in his grave.”
“Ah. The big guns.”
Mira smiled tiredly, sipped her wine. “You don’t look too happy, either.”
She sighed. “I’m in trouble, Mira. Ever since I saw Conlan again—”
“You’ve been in trouble since the day you two split up. Everybody knows that except you.”
“I miss him,” Angie admitted quietly.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Do?”
“To get him back.”
Just the sound of it hurt. “That train has left the station, Mira. It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late until you’re dead. Remember Kent John? When he dumped you, you waged a campaign that was for the record books.”