Simple Wishes

by Lisa Dale

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

GOING HOME IS THE LONGEST JOURNEY OF ALL... Adele Matin couldn't wait to put her lonely childhood and hometown behind her. Amid the bright lights and hustle and bustle of New York, she built a life for herself--until one terrible mistake brought it crashing down. Now Adele is running again, this time to a cottage she inherited from her mother in rural Pennsylvania. And she's about to realize that a small town has more to offer than she ever dreamed. An artist and woodworker, Jay Westvelt knows a thing or two about living in the country. Adele is intrigued by her mysterious and sexy green-eyed neighbor, a man who took care of her house and soon cares deeply for her. But even as Adele's heart begins to soften toward him, secrets from her mother's past threaten to send her fleeing back to the city. Can Jay convince her to stay with him? Only if she can learn an important truth: that happiness begins with Simple Wishes.

Release date: January 1, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

Prologue

For her twelfth birthday, a classmate gave Adele a book of New York City in photographs. The pages were thick and glossy. The binding creaked in her hands. She said thank youto her friend, and at recess, while the other students hung out in clusters near the chain-link fences of the school yard, she sat alone against the brick of the science building, where no one could see.

Black-and-white pictures captivated her with scenes of the city: stoic skyscrapers, lonely park benches, bicycles chained to street signs, a snow-covered police car, and people—so many people. They sat on wide concrete stairs, handed money to street vendors, huddled shoulder to shoulder on cramped buses, and held hands in the park. It was the people that captivated Adele the most—the pleasure of looking intimately, of judging without being judged.

After school, she brought the book home to show her mother.

Marge glanced at it, then looked away. “What are you gonna do with a book like that?” she asked. She was cutting an onion against a wooden board, each movement making her upper arm jiggle.

Adele’s palms sweated against the shiny cover. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m gonna keep it?”

She sat down at the kitchen table and ran her fingertips over the pages. Her mother set out a glass of milk and a few oven-warm cookies. Adele didn’t touch them. She stared at the pictures hard, adoring them desperately but somehow unsatisfied.

“Will you take me to New York? To the Statue of Liberty?” she asked.

“You don’t wanna go to New York,” her mother said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s dirty.” Marge mashed a clove of garlic with the back of a big spoon, and the smell bloomed warmly in the kitchen. “No place for a daughter of mine.”

“It is not dirty. Our yard is dirty. We don’t even have a real sidewalk.”

“That’s enough.” Marge wiped her hands on a towel and reached for the book. “Let me see that.” She flipped through the pages, her glasses on the tip of her nose and her chin sagging onto her chest. Adele watched her mother closely. She imagined that her father—who’d died before she could remember—would have taken her into New York to feed the pigeons, just like the photographs showed people doing.

Marge tucked the book under her arm and walked toward her bedroom.

“What are you doing?” Adele asked, following her.

“You don’t need this giving you ideas,” Marge said. The bedroom door swung shut behind her.

Adele stood there, dumbstruck. She fought the sudden urge to drag her fingers over her face, to give in to self-pity. From the moment she’d showed the book to her mother, she’d known there was a chance it would be taken away. And yet, she hadn’t been able to stop herself. She’d practically run home from school with it in her hands, knowing her mother would be in the kitchen, waiting. She had no one to blame but herself.

She should have pretended the book meant nothing.

When Marge emerged from her bedroom, the book was not in her hands. She locked the door behind her and stood so that the fading light of day cast a reddish hue on the white of her apron. Though not tall, she was a big woman, with wide shoulders and thick hips and legs. Someday, Adele might meet her eye, if she managed to grow a few more inches. Now she could only look at her own hands, clasped before her belly.

“Will you ever give it back?” she asked quietly.

“Don’t worry,” her mother said. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

Adele didn’t blink.

“Now go do your homework. I’ll call you later for dinner and cake.”

She went upstairs, her goose bumps rising, because the kitchen was the only warm room in the house. The smell of Marge’s cooking drifted up the stairs, snuck under Adele’s closed bedroom door, and saturated the air with the scent of simmering vegetables, spices, and meat. Her stomach growled. She sat down at her desk to work.

Later, she would forget all about the book, about New York. Years would pass before she would remember—and when she did, the smell of glossy pages and the romance of black-and-white sidewalks would rise up out of her memory as if it were coming from the marrow of her bones.

But now, she simply did her homework, agonizing over every curling letter of every word she wrote, and she waited for her mother to call her downstairs to eat. She had no expectation that Marge would make up for the theft of her pictures. And yet, deep down, she would hold her to the promise just the same.

Chapter One

Adele dropped her overstuffed duffel bags on the gravel driveway.

The cottage stood before her, nearly unchanged by the many years that had passed since she last saw it. It reminded her of a toadstool: squat, stout, and brown. The brick and gray siding was unfaded. The bay windows that faced Notch Lane were intact. The shingles weren’t peeling off, and the door wasn’t flapping in the breeze like in some spaghetti western. Adele could imagine her mother inflicting her will on the place from beyond the grave: Don’t you dare get dirty, house. Don’t you dare crumble on me.

There was no way around it. Her life had forced this moment.

She had nowhere else to go.

And yet, with her key dangling near the handle, she hesitated to open the door. The house was a black hole of bad energy, a place from which no light could escape. She felt herself begin to tremble—not the shallow kind of shaking that comes from sleeping the wrong way on an arm or ankle but the kind of vibration that resonates all the way from the core. God help her, for the first time in a long time, she was afraid. Uncertain. What was she going to do with her life? The woods around her seemed to grow and grow until she felt as small as a buoy on a big, lonely ocean.

Her mother’s cottage. Grumble Knot, she’d called it. Home sweet home.

The nape of her neck itched as she pushed her way inside.

“Who the hell are you?”

The question broke the silence like a gunshot, and Adele jumped out of her skin. In the center of the large brown room was a teenage girl, whose deep frown and squared shoulders indicated she was ready for a fight. Two scruffy black knots of hair perched in symmetry behind her ears. She was bone-thin beneath her corduroy jacket and carpenter’s jeans, but her skin was beautiful, nearly luminous against flashing almond-shaped eyes.

“I should ask you the same question,” Adele said, willing herself not to be intimidated by this scrap of a teenager. The girl winced, skittish as a white-tailed deer. She glanced toward the door, making no effort to reply.

“What are you doing in here?” Adele demanded, louder this time. She felt no sense of ownership over her mother’s glum, forgotten cottage, and if it had burned to the ground a year ago, she probably wouldn’t have cared. But now she couldn’t let it be used as a haven for misbehaving teenagers. Not if she planned to stay. “Tell me what you were doing.”

“I wasn’t doing anything. I was just tidying up the place. For you.”

“Right.” Adele looked around the cottage’s main room, part kitchen, part living room, part dining room. She doubted the teenager had anything to do with Grumble Knot’s relatively clean state. She sniffed the air and glanced at the dirty ashtray and menthols on the short-legged coffee table. “And does tidying up involve smoking cigarettes?”

“It’s not your business if I smoke,” the girl snapped, her eyes bright with challenge.

“It is if you do it in my house.”

“Ugh. You sound like my mom.”

“If you have a key, give it to me. Now.” Adele cringed at the sound of her own voice, so superior, so implacable. She sounded like her mother. Like she was conjuring her ghost.

She forced herself to soften. “Look, my name is Adele. This place is mine. And I’ve come to stay for a few weeks. So I’ll need my key back, if you have one.”

The girl’s lips pressed into a thin white line. Adele could see her hesitating, though they both knew she had little choice but to comply. “Well . . .”

“KAYLEIGH?” A man’s voice. The sound of footsteps crunching up the gravel driveway. “Kayleigh, you better NOT be in that cottage again,” the voice warned, booming.

A look of pure panic passed over the girl’s face, her eyes wide and her mouth a distressed O. She began to scramble, grabbing for her cigarettes and then lunging around the coffee table, toward the back door. “Shit, shit, shit.”

When she paused on the threshold of the back door, the look on her face had changed: Very suddenly, Adele saw how young she was, how desperate and pleading. Kayleigh’s expression touched something in her, some vague memory she couldn’t quite place. She’d been that young—that vulnerable—once.

“You never saw me. Please? I was never here.”

She didn’t have time to answer. The girl ducked out the back, just seconds before an older, grandfatherly man arrived at the front door. His blazing white hair fell in a rumpled wave across his forehead, and his suspenders yielded to the bulk of a big belly and a flannel shirt. Adele’s brain spun with exhausted disbelief. Already she’d had more visitors here in five minutes than she’d had in Brooklyn all month. To think she’d worried about being lonely.

“If you’re here to rob the place, you can forget it,” he said. He made his way into the room, lumbering more than walking.

Adele stepped back. “Oh no, I’m not a burglar. I’m the owner.”

“Oh? What’s your name?”

“Adele Matin.”

“You a relative to Marge?”

“She was my mother.”

“Adele’s your real name?” he asked.

“No,” she said, her chest tightening. She hadn’t said her real name, the name her mother had given her, aloud in years. Adele had become so real to her, so real and right, that it had been absorbed and ingrained even in her memories of childhood. She was Adele now, through and through. “It’s what I’m called.”

“Your mom would have hated that.”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Adele said, letting him know that it wasn’t up for discussion.

The old man nodded, but there were signs of disapproval in his face. “You got no power, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

“You’ll have to call the electric company for that. As for the water, cottage is on a well—cleanest, clearest water you’ll ever taste. It’s just a matter of someone a bit more spry than me going in the crawl space to get it running.”

Adele said nothing. She had no idea how to turn the water on.

“Well, let me get you some candles at least,” he said. “Gets dark early in the woods around here, on account of the leaves.”

“Thanks. Thank you.”

He walked toward her, and she could almost swear she heard his knees creaking. He held out his hand. His smile made his eyes wrinkle at the corners; they were the same clear blue as an autumn sky. Together with the gleam of his thick white hair and the seemingly permanent flush of his cheeks, it was hard to imagine he harbored any bad intentions. Adele was entirely charmed.

“I’m Al Lopresti.”

She shook his hand, and some of the tension between them waned. “Nice to meet you.”

The man shifted his weight, put his hand on the countertop, and leaned heavily against it. He exhaled loudly, as if he were uncomfortable or in pain.

“Do you want to sit?” she asked. The question felt odd, because the cottage was not her home. This man was probably more familiar with the place than she was. Had he been the one keeping the place tidy all these years? she wondered.

“I’m fine.” He straightened up. He crossed his arms and looked silently around the room, his eyes searching for something, taking things in. Adele watched him, and her hackles rose. Was he prying? She hated prying. She cleared her throat.

At last he said, “What you eatin’ for dinner?”

She tried to relax. He’d probably been looking around the cottage to see if she’d brought any food. She hadn’t.

“Come on over and eat with the wife and me,” he said. “You like Korean?”

“Are you kidding?”

His lower lip jutted out as if he were actually considering the question. For a moment, Adele could see what an adorable little boy he must have been—a giddy-eyed towhead with an impish grin. Much of the child still remained in the older man.

“I’ve never had Korean before,” she said, bewildered. Where on earth did they get Korean in the mountains?

“Good. We’re two houses over—the white one with the stone angel in front.”

“Well, I’m not sure,” she said. “I have a lot of things to do here. . . .” Her voice trailed off. Instinct told her to turn down Al’s invitation; she didn’t want to get too involved with people here in the hills. But reason, in the form of her growling stomach, reminded her that she’d had nothing since breakfast. She would get a headache soon if she didn’t eat.

“Maybe I will. Thanks.”

Al smiled, kneaded his hands together as if he might say something else, then nodded and turned away. Adele was left standing next to the sink in the kitchen area. Beyond the small curtainless window that faced the road, the leaves showed almost no signs of autumn. But any day now, they would turn overnight; it happened like that in early September in the mountains. She’d forgotten, until now.

She looked around the dim, lonely space. Like the exterior, the decorating scheme took its cues from the colors of fungus: browns, yellows, creams, all muted and sallow. A cramped, galleyesque kitchen opened up into the cottage’s single main room, where overstuffed furniture sat sedate and faded, collecting dust. The oval table in the eating area still sported a dreadful display of fake sunflowers. Over the couch, her mother had hung a painting of wild mustangs running across a windswept plain.

It was exactly as her mother had left it. Marge’s sister Christine—Adele’s aunt—had been made executrix of Marge’s will. Marge had left Grumble Knot—the land, the building, and all of its contents—to Adele. And as far as Adele knew, Christine hadn’t changed a thing. The little cottage was exactly as her mother had left it. Over the years, Adele had flirted with the idea of selling the place—for extra money. Yet, she simply hadn’t been able to talk herself into parting with it, telling herself the cottage was the plan B that she never planned to use. Until today.

Now that she was alone again, she didn’t know what to do. Unpack? Clean? Look around? At all once, she was useless. Hopeless. Purposeless. She was a thirty-one-year-old woman standing in the middle of her dead mother’s cottage, with no job, no real friends, no prospects, and a laughable education.

New York City had chewed her up and spit her out. Her job, her apartment, her life—all of it had been incinerated the night she decided to crawl into the wrong man’s bed. What a fool she’d been—to get comfortable and let her guard down. Next time, she would know better.

She put her hands on her hips and pulled herself up straight.

She’d reinvented herself once before, when she’d left her whole life behind at seventeen to make a new life for herself in a city of strangers. She’d done it then; she could do it now. She still had that kind of strength in her, somewhere.

Chapter Two

By the time she reached the door of Al’s house, her heart was beating hard. Who knew what terrible things Marge had told these people about her. Ungrateful, she might have said. Irresponsible. Self-centered. She may have used the word abandoned, as in, My daughter abandoned me. How could you defend yourself against the words of a dead woman? Adele promised herself that if the Loprestis made her uncomfortable, she would simply leave. Eating was less important than self-preservation.

As promised, she recognized Al’s place by a small cement angel that stood prayerfully beside a tall silver flagpole. The house had a more lived-in look than the other cabins: new white siding, potted red geraniums, and violet curtains in the large front window. On the tree at the base of the driveway was a diamond road sign proclaiming if you can read this, you’re in range.

And yet, when the door opened, she thought she had the wrong house.

Staring through the screen door, and through the thickest pair of pink plastic glasses Adele had ever seen, was a tiny Asian woman. Korean, if Adele knew anything about it. When the woman smiled, the big round apples of her cheeks pressed flat against her glasses. Garlic, ginger, and sesame wafted into the cooling evening air.

“Adele? Yes Annyeonghaseyo.” She opened the door. Her housedress ended just below her knees, patterned with Victorian cabbage roses and butterflies. Little feet looked even littler in white nursing-style shoes. “Welcome, welcome,” she said, bowing slightly again and again, almost a nervous reaction. “I’m Beatrice Lopresti.”

Adele could hear traces of an accent poking through the woman’s otherwise smooth English; she pronounced her name in three syllables: Bea-uh-treece.

“Thanks for having me.”

“Marge’s daughter will always be welcome in my home,” Beatrice said, bowing again.

Adele’s stomach flipped. Not only had Beatrice known her mother, but she obviously had some respect for her as well. Logically, respect for Marge meant disrespect for Marge’s wayward daughter.

Beatrice stepped back and squinted. “I thought you would look different.”

Adele self-consciously glanced at her feet. Where her mother’s hair had been a halo of frizzled brown, Adele’s was a long, smooth Ochre Shadows #5. Where her mother’s eyes had been a watery blue, Adele loved her hazel irises. Where her mother’s face had been naturally pale with translucent lashes and brows, Adele’s skin was freshly powdered, dark eyeliner and mascara bringing out the oval shape of her face, her high cheekbones. She attributed almost none of her physical features to her mother—with the exception of her full curves and the extra five or six pounds she could never seem to lose.

“You are quite pretty,” Beatrice said. “Nice skin. And not too large a nose.”

Adele resisted the urge to laugh. “I must look more like my father.”

“Well, I look more like my mother,” Al bellowed, smiling broadly as he walked toward them. His tuft of white hair had been combed smoothly to the side, and he’d shaved. The red flannel shirt he’d worn earlier had been replaced by green flannel. He put an arm around his wife, and the effect was like a polar bear standing beside a penguin. “I got my mother’s eyes, mother’s nose, and mother’s mustache,” he said.

Adele laughed while Beatrice ducked out of the room, presumably to go to the kitchen. Adele didn’t see any obvious resentment in the way Beatrice had treated her, but she was on her guard nevertheless.

“Welcome to the Lucky Moon,” Al said, putting a hand on her arm. “We named the place that because it’s white. And because it’s auspicious, Beatrice says. As lucky as a full moon. How do you like that?”

Al chatted easily while he led her from room to room. The house was immaculate. Magazines were stored neatly next to leather armchairs. Mints sparkled like jewels in a little bowl on the glass coffee table. Photos of smiling people, Korean and not, hung on every wall and perched on every end table. Al picked up a picture of a girl in a black lacquer frame.

“My granddaughter, Kayleigh,” he said, handing it to her. Adele kept her face unreadable as she recognized familiar dark eyes. Today in Adele’s cottage, Kayleigh’s whole body had exuded toughness. But in the picture, she was sitting peacefully on a rock wall in front of a huge overlook. Behind her, the mountains turned from green to gray to blue before they blended with the sky.

“We come up here just for the weekends mostly,” Al said. “Though sometimes we come during the week. Kayleigh comes up too. When she can.”

“You don’t live here year-round?”

“Nope. We have a house in Phillipsburg. Only one who lives here year-round is Hermit Jay. He’s in Tarpaper, the cabin closest to yours. You can’t see his place now—it’s set pretty far back from the road—but in the winter when the leaves drop, you can probably make out his front door. Met him yet?”

She said she hadn’t as Al pulled out a chair for her. The kitchen was pleasantly warm and aromatic. Bowls of rice took their place beside little plates of anchovies. Slices of French bread were laid out next to smashed red potatoes and gimchi.

“Do you enjoy stir-fry?” Beatrice asked. “This is tteokbokki.”

Adele looked into a bowl filled with bits of mushrooms, carrots, cucumbers, and bamboo shoots.

“If you don’t like it, we’ve got frozen pizza,” Al said.

“No, this is great.”

Beatrice served them, filling her own plate last. She bowed her head in prayer, quietly and to herself, before she started to eat. Al didn’t seem to notice.

“So what brings you up to the mountains?” he asked.

Adele swallowed a mushroom. She wondered, Was there something about her that gave away her secret, like a telltale scar might give away an escaped fugitive? Did she have some nervous, unconscious tic or some accidental pinch in her voice that proclaimed I screwed up my life?

Maybe she was reading too much into the question. She was feeling a little defensive. Confessing the truth to the Loprestis would be like confessing it to her mother, as if Marge were eavesdropping behind a wall, waiting to jump out and say, I told you so.

Adele stuck out her chin. “As it happens, I quit my job.”

“Really? What did you do?”

“I managed an art gallery.”

She’d landed a job running the register when she was seventeen, and when her associates left one by one to go pursue their dreams to be artists or actors or whatever, she’d simply stepped in to take their places until she became a manager.

“Why’d you quit?” Al asked.

“A coworker and I had a difference of opinion.” No need to mention the threats, the restraining orders, the ex-boyfriend, or the fact that she’d been kicked out of her own apartment and none of her “friends” were willing to help. “I’m actually glad to get out of the city for a while,” Adele continued.

But it was a lie. She’d liked her job at the art gallery. Already she missed the smell of a newly oiled hardwood floor and the afternoon light that slanted through the large shop windows and never failed to make her instantly sleepy. Though it wasn’t rocket science, it was steady work—just the right amount of challenge and comfort. While other employees came and went, she was content with her once-a-year raise and ever-increasing self-directedness. She’d made a life for herself. By herself.

Until she’d lost everything.

“Well,” said Al, “you seem like a smart girl. You’ll get work soon enough.”

Adele pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. It had been a long time since she’d been called a girl. Maybe from Al’s perspective, she was. She didn’t correct him.

They chatted for a while, Al doing most of the talking and making the occasional quip about Beatrice’s cooking. He talked happily, easily—with a rough-around-the-edges charm. He told off-color jokes with punch lines that Adele saw coming from miles away, while Beatrice rolled her eyes. Though Al was cheerful, Adele could tell he was uncomfortable now and again by the way he shifted in his seat and the way his eyes glazed over, a look there and gone, as brief as passing clouds.

Beatrice, on the other hand, was largely silent, except to ask, “You have a sweetheart?”

Once again, Adele was taken aback. “Oh . . . no.”

“Why not?”

“Please . . .” Adele laughed.

“You don’t want to get married, make a family?” Beatrice asked.

Her heart gave a low, terrified thump. Pain she hadn’t felt in years. She tried to speak but was utterly without words.

“Come on, now.” Al thumped the table with a meaty fist. “Come on and leave the girl alone, wife. How about getting an old man coffee sometime today?”

Beatrice ignored him and turned back to Adele. “You see? You see how much fun to be married?”

Adele bristled and looked away. Fundamentally, she couldn’t accept the image of an old, white, male gun owner barking orders at a slightly younger Korean woman who prayed silently when no one was looking. Beatrice’s handiwork was all over the house—in the tidiness of the living room, the smell of citrus in the mudroom, the impressive presentation of dinner—all while Al had cheerfully amused his guest (and himself) like he was the star of the show and his wife was the tech crew.

“Fine, I’ll get your coffee,” Beatrice said, standing. Al stopped her with a hand on her arm and flashed his most charming smile. She sighed and bent to kiss his cheek. When she walked toward the other end of the kitchen, Adele could see she was hiding a grin behind her hand.

Puzzling that some women don’t mind being treated like hired help, Adele thought. But it wasn’t her place to judge. Not tonight. If unsought memories of her mother had made her more cynical than usual, that was her problem—not the Loprestis. Tonight she would only allow herself to feel grateful. The food was excellent, the conversation interesting, and, for the moment, Adele was getting by.

It was more than she could have hoped for. It was enough.

WHEN THE TABLE was cleared and the coffee mugs had been drained, Al looked markedly more tired. He told Beatrice to put a bag together with some food, a flashlight, and matches, and asked Adele if she had a book to read. If she didn’t, he might be able to find something. Adele followed him into the long, rectangular living room and picked out a biography of President Truman. Beatrice rummaged through cabinets for supplies.

At the back door, Adele took a deep breath of night air, which was refreshing after the cozy, almost stuffy heat of the Loprestis’ cabin. Al had already said so long and was making his way back to the interior of the house, but Beatrice was standing in the doorway, holding it half open, as if there were some unfinished business between them. Katydids and crickets made the air shimmer with sound, but beneath the nighttime music, there was only the cool, thick silence of the forest.. . .