Once Upon a Lie Read Free Page B

Heather’s. “She doesn’t go to the party. Under any circumstances.”
    He gave her a salute. “Got it, chief.”
    She let that go, as it wouldn’t be the last time she would tell him about the grounding, nor would it be the last time he gave her a contemptuous salute. Pick your battles, she said to herself, breathing deeply. Even those that she chose to fight she might not win, so choosing carefully would be her goal. She looked up at him again.
    Why did I ever love you? she thought. She probably knew the answer to that question, but sifting through the various emotions would take time she did not have.

 
    CHAPTER 3
    Rebecca was still in uniform when Maeve got home, working on math at the kitchen table. Her dark head, her hair the same color as her father’s, was bent over a textbook filled with symbols that Maeve didn’t recognize from any math course she had ever taken. Fortunately for her, Rebecca had inherited her father’s good looks—his deep brown eyes, his full lips—and his aptitude for anything that required logic. Maeve could create anything from scratch but failed when it came to writing anything down that would approach a recipe, one with fractions and precise measurements.
    “What are we having for dinner?” she asked by way of greeting.
    Maeve hadn’t thought that far ahead, but one thing the Culinary Institute had taught her, besides great pastry skills, was how to turn whatever was in the refrigerator into a meal. That is, if the refrigerator held any food whatsoever, which hers didn’t.
    “Order a pizza?” Maeve asked.
    The look of joy on Rebecca’s face at this news was out of proportion to the simple idea of a pizza for dinner. The girls had made it known that they hated most everything Maeve cooked, mostly because every meal was accompanied by two vegetables. She had learned to turn a deaf ear to their protestations, but after putting in a full day at the shop, sometimes it was hard.
    “You played great today,” Maeve said.
    “Thanks.”
    “Homework?”
    Rebecca looked at her. “What do you think?”
    Rebecca was in the homestretch, giving it all she had in order to get her GPA to where she wanted it to be, and where she wanted it to be was Vassar-ready. Maeve tried not to think about the tuition that went along with a Vassar education, hoping that Cal had been as good with his money as he claimed he had been, socking it away and making dividends that would get their oldest—the more ambitious of the two—to where she wanted to go.
    He told her not to worry, but worrying was second nature to her. Her daughters knew that better than anyone.
    Maeve kicked off her shoes and went to the sink, dealing with a pile of dishes left over from breakfast. She was surprised when Rebecca asked her how the wake was, queries into Maeve’s well-being or activities never really being part of any conversation with her teens. Was it true what people told her about a college-bound kid? Would Rebecca really start to come around and maybe like Maeve just in time to leave? Maeve found the whole concept depressing, as if her entire life revolved around hoping for the day when her daughters would see her as a comrade and not as an adversary. She hoped she was around when the day finally came. “It was a wake. With a bunch of Irish people. You know the drill,” she said. She thought back to her mother’s wake, the one that she really didn’t understand or want to be at, the old Irish ladies clucking over her, promising to take care of her, some of them—the widows—eyeing Jack as if he were a rib roast on sale at the local butcher. He had never remarried, and none of them came through on their promises.
    Maeve had been seven, the memories of her beautiful mother laid out in a stylish off-price suit that she remembered her buying in Brooklyn one fall Saturday, the casket open only from the waist up. Maeve remembered telling her father that the shoes her mother wore matched her suit perfectly and