“Honestly, I don’t know.” People always say “honestly” when they are being anything but, and I was no exception.
Henry’s bright blue eyes held mine. “Caroline thinks of Rabble Point as home. That’s why I brought her back here. Through all the years of moving and deployments, all I ever thought about was her. Wherever she and the girls were, that was home. I was an angry, sullen young man. Caroline, with her common sense and her generous heart, turned me into a better human being. Everything I have in my life, I have because of her. I would do anything in my power to make her happy. Anything.”
I wondered as I walked toward the Caprice: Anything?
*
I saw Fran’s car parked at the curbside when I pulled up at Walker’s Art Supplies and Frame Shop. I hoped that meant both Fran and Barry were in the store.
The little bell tinkled as I walked in. Barry was at work on a painting in the far corner of the store. Fran was behind the cash register. She looked up as soon as I entered, while Barry continued to work. I cleared my throat loudly. When he didn’t turn around, I shouted, “Barry!” just a little too loud.
“What? What? Julia, you scared me.”
“I’d like to speak with you both.”
Fran stepped quickly from behind the counter. “Certainly, dear. What’s the matter?”
I walked to the high framing table and waited for Barry to join us. He reluctantly scraped the knife he was using to apply the thick paint on his palate, then put it down.
“I went to Guilford, Connecticut, yesterday,” I said. Better to get straight to it. Both of them looked at me expectantly, like they knew that couldn’t be all my news. “I know about the fire.”
Barry stepped closer to Fran, though he didn’t touch her. “That was such a tragic part of our lives,” he said. “We try not to dwell on it.”
Fran shook her head in agreement. “Not a happy time.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure it was very stressful. Even more stressful for you, Fran, because you were pregnant when it happened. Quinn is Michael Smith’s daughter.”
Fran sat heavily on a stool. “How did you guess?”
“It took a long time,” I admitted. “Something bugged me about that yacht club photo. It wasn’t until I saw Quinn here in the store on Wednesday that I saw the resemblance and the pieces fell into place.”
“If you’d known Michael when he was younger, you’d see it even more clearly,” Barry said.
“Does Michael know about Quinn?” I asked.
Fran shook her head. “I was living in Maine. Michael was in Connecticut. We’d been drifting apart for a while, but our bond had been so strong, and our relationship gone on for so long, neither of us had the strength to break it. Or so I thought.” She paused, gathering herself. “I planned to tell him I was pregnant that New Year’s weekend. Instead, I watched him spend the evening flirting with a drunken Sheila. As we drove back from Madeleine and Howell’s house to his apartment in New Haven, Michael told me it was over. I was so upset, I made him take me straight to the train station. I was on the first train to Boston at four that morning. I didn’t hear about the fire until Michael called me the next day.”
“Yet you still didn’t tell him about the pregnancy.”
“No. His parents had never accepted me, the cleaner’s daughter, in all the years we’d been together. I’d always feared he’d cave in to their pressure and settle with someone more appropriate. Sheila was back in his life and available. I could imagine what his parents were going to say when they found out I was expecting. Poor girl traps rich guy by getting knocked up. Why would I put myself in that situation?
“I couldn’t stay here in town, either. My mother had been expecting disaster the whole time I was with Michael. She predicted—well, exactly what happened is what she predicted. That he would marry a college-educated girl who knew what fork to use at a dinner party and I would end up alone and pregnant. So I did what any other self-respecting person did at the time. I joined a commune.”
Fran smiled, and the mood in the room lightened. “What idiots we were. We were going back to the land—in a place with more rocks than soil in the ground and the shortest growing season ever. Still, it was a good place for Quinnie to spend her early years. Lots of fresh air and a house full of caring adults and children to play with. It took the sting out of being the only child of a single mother.”
“But, how did Barry . . . ?”