Catch of the Day

Chapter One
FROM THE VERY first moment she had stepped aboard the Heathrow flight bound for New York, there had been no room in Rachel McCarrick’s head for any thought that didn’t begin and end with her beloved José.
Was he still standing there at the window, she wondered, wistfully imagining his aquiline nose pressed against the cool glass, his luscious lips mouthing tender words of endearment in his native tongue. And those magnificent, penetrating eyes of his! Rachel gulped back another pained breath of longing, desperate to imagine how she was ever going to get through the next few weeks of wretched separation.
“You should come with me,” she had begged him as recently as that morning while their friends Lonnie and Fonnie were driving them to the airport. Even if he had surprised her, of course, and said “Si,” it wouldn’t have dismissed the obstacles that lay waiting for her when she got back home to Santa Barbara. Specifically, her family.
“They’ll really love you once they get to know you,” she had assured him, surprised at how blithely a lie could dance off her tongue when she knew for a fact that truth lay in the opposite direction.
Her parents and her grandfather would absolutely hate José.
Maybe that was part of the attraction, her girlfriend in Paris had suggested—the wickedness of snaring a man so completely Bohemian, unwashed and unsuitable that no one would know what to do about it. In the end, Rachel confidently predicted, her family would finally let her live her own life and do exactly what she wanted. And what she wanted right now, more than anything, was to marry José Madrone and live contentedly ever after in a village unmarked on any modern map.
If José was less than enthusiastic about the idea of matrimony, Rachel had been too deliriously happy the past few months to notice. They made a beautiful couple, she thought—the slender, sun-kissed California girl with shoulder-length, light brown hair and her artist beau, a taller version of Kenny G with dreadlocks.
She could already imagine the kind of snit-fit remarks her mother would make about his free-spirited appearance and avant-garde clothing. “Does he bathe regularly, dear? Does he know how to use a comb? I thought I saw something moving in his hair...”
Conservative as they were, her parents would be far too stubborn to look beyond his statement of nonconformity and see how much talent he had...talent Rachel had taken special pride in discovering. He plays the guitar and the flute, she’d explain. He can make things out of leather. He can harvest vegetables and herd goats. And, oh yes, she’d casually add, he’s also the village midwife.
Okay, so maybe she’d leave off that last one. They’d already be in enough cardiac arrest over the issue that the love of her life didn’t own a single suit or have any employment they’d categorize as particularly gainful. Until she had a ring on her finger, there’d be no sense stressing them out that José would personally deliver the next generation of McCarricks.
Impatient to give her anxiety a rest, she leaned forward to pluck one of several fashion magazines from the side pocket of her canvas tote bag. Fashion. It was the reason she had gone to Europe in the first place, a glamorous arena in which to enhance the knowledge she had picked up in four years of college. Her mother had been especially hopeful that one of the major houses would come forth with a prestigious job, through which she could enjoy her own vicarious fantasy of being the center of everyone’s attention.
Poor Mom, she thought, averse to repeat the role of marrying Mr. Right and becoming Mrs. Nobody. Granted, Luella McCarrick still had the looks and the figure to carry off her duties as a proper society hostess. For as long as Rachel could remember, though, her mother’s eyes looked as if whoever lived behind them had turned out all the lights and moved away without anyone even noticing.
She’d never let her own eyes look that way, Rachel had long ago decided. Long-lashed and celadon green, they sparkled in a state of perpetual mischief and curiosity. It was José, though, who had added that missing, magical element of changing the way she viewed the world.
“Love makes any difficult dream possible,” he had told her.
At least she assumed that was a close enough approximation, given his grasp of English and her struggle with Castilian were pretty much equal. The fact of the matter was he could be commenting on the weather or talking about mealy bugs on the tomatoes and he could make it sound totally intoxicating and sexy.
Back in the lonely present, she absently flipped the pages and found herself looking at a full color ad for the next Antonio Banderas movie. His swarthy complexion and dark, bedroom eyes reminded her of José. And that roguish way he was standing, daring his enemies to come hither...
Stop that, her conscience chided. You can’t keep seeing José everyplace you look.
Easier said than done. For the next ten pages, there was something in every picture to remind Rachel of her swashbuckling Spaniard. Was he still standing there at the terminal, too bereft to go back to London with their friends? Was he missing her as much as she was missing him? With every agonizing tick of the clock, she was moving closer to home and farther away from where she really wanted to be.
She turned to the next page and, somewhat to her relief, came upon a vintage-looking ad in sepia that held absolutely nothing reminiscent of the man she had just left.
Old Spice.
The ad was a picture of a grinning young man, a sailor from an earlier time excitedly clutching the familiar white container of aftershave in one hand and his duffel bag in the other. The departing captain—with a beautiful woman on either arm—was winking the affirmation that Old Spice was responsible for his popularity.
Do they still make that stuff? she nearly said out loud. It was her grandfather’s signature scent, a masculine smell that he said always reminded him of the open sea and his stint in the Merchant Marine.
She thoughtfully studied the clean-shaven, boy-next-door sailor for a moment. He was sort of a D.B. Sweeney clone, she decided. Nope, he was nothing like José at all. Definitely not her type. The fact he was a sailor and probably caught all his own meals and threw them—still flopping—onto his plate didn’t endear him very much, either. Fish, per se, always reminded her of Dewey Fickett and of her parents’ outrageous expectations she was going to come home and marry him. Well, she’d dispel that scary little myth soon enough.
She just hadn’t figured out how.
She looked at her watch again, mentally calculating how long it had been since José had last held her in his arms.
“You must be anxious to get home,” remarked the plump matron in the seat next to her.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Rachel murmured, hoping the woman wasn’t going to start talking her ears off and interfering with transatlantic daydreams about Señor Madrone.
The next voice Rachel heard, though, was the English accent of the Virgin Atlantic flight attendant who had helped her stow her makeup bag in the overhead rack.
“Sorry to bother you, miss,” she said, “but I’ll need you to fasten your seatbelt. We’re preparing for departure.”
With a sigh, she cast a forlorn glance through the rain drizzled window at the Heathrow terminal where it felt like forever-ago that she and José had parted.
“Soon,” she mouthed and pressed a kissed fingertip to the glass. “Soon.”
* * * *
“IF I DIDN’T KNOW you better,” Harry quipped, “I’d say you were completely out of your mind.”
“You know me better than anyone,” Kevin retorted. “And yes, I probably am.” He could hear the familiar whistle of the wind through the cell phone at his brother’s end of the line and, for an instant, could imagine the sharp splash of salt water hitting his chin. “You’re starting to break up,” he said. “Want me to call you back tonight?”
Harry, though, was insistent on hearing how many more people had answered Kevin’s classified ad. “Any more wackos?” he asked.
“They’re all wackos.” Kevin tried to hide the frustration he hadn’t had a single serious offer since he’d first placed the notice on Monday. At the very least, he’d been expecting something like hauling hazardous material across state lines or selling a kidney. Instead, he’d been solicited for everything from fathering a child to assassinating Saddham Hussein. “Can’t a guy just make an honest fifty grand any more?” he lamented.
Harry was sympathetic. “Maybe we can come up with something else. Maybe if you just come back home...”
Kevin shook his head. They’d had this conversation too many times already and always with exactly the same result. “I can’t lose her, Harry. Not now and not to something as simple as money.”
“Look, I know what you’re saying but—”
“But nothing, Harry. You can’t say you don’t know how I feel or what I wouldn’t do to hang on to her.”
Harry muttered something that the combination of static and wind made it hard to understand. “Maybe it’s not meant to be,” he reluctantly repeated when Kevin asked him what he said.
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Kevin replied grimly, reminded in that moment of how often he addressed his brother as if Harry were the younger of them and not three years older.
“You can pretend all you want, but it doesn’t change anything. If she was really meant to be yours—”
“She is mine,” Kevin shot back. “I’m not letting anybody else get their hands on her just ’cause I can’t cough up enough cash!”
The line crackled and went dead. Impulsively, Kevin started to re-dial. Just as his finger hit the next to last number, though, he stopped. Harry was probably just having a bad day. He’d call Harry back later tonight after he’d had a chance to put into port and grab himself a couple of beers at The Scupper Club.
The classified section still lay open where Kevin had left it on the kitchen counter. The fact his ad had been enlarged and featured as Announcement of the Week failed to lift his spirits. All the more attention he’d get from the crackpots, he speculated.
It had seemed like an ambitious idea at the time. New York—Manhattan—was where the kind of serious money was that he needed. It was also far enough away from Nantucket that no one at home would catch on to what he was doing. So far, though, his plan had failed to yield a single dime.
Maybe he was out of his mind. Passion had a funny way of making a man do desperate things.
His brother’s words echoed in his head. Maybe it’s not meant to be.
Kevin refused to believe that. Why would she have come into his life the way she did, only to be grabbed away the moment he got close? Could Fate really be that cruel?
Even his mother, romantic that she was, shared Harry’s view it was time to give up and move on. “You’ll find another,” she’d gently told him. “It’s not the end of the world if you lose her.”
Kevin, though, didn’t listen to her any more than he listened to his sibling. “If I have to sell my own soul,” he declared, “she’s worth every cent.”
The Big Apple, unfortunately, had yet to produce any buyers.
* * * *
SHE HADN’T TOLD them that she was coming home. With an equal degree of purpose, she had also managed to sidestep an entire summer’s worth of any mention she’d met the man of her dreams and was deliriously in love with him. Some things, she rationalized, had to be eased into slowly, sort of like an unheated pool during the first, iffy week of spring.
Even a generous embellishment of José’s attributes—not that she’d really have to exaggerate—would have required her to explain why he hadn’t come with her or, at the very least, declared his intentions to her family over the phone. The simple truth that his English was a smidge limited wouldn’t have sufficed with either of her upper crust parents. Her mother would quietly opine that being language-challenged was no excuse for shoddy manners. Her father and grandfather would just go ballistic about it and start focusing on his lack of a job or credit references.
No, she decided, she couldn’t bring her beloved into the picture until she was positive her family would embrace him with all the love and enthusiasm due a future son-in-law. Right now, that time frame hovered dangerously close to ‘never.’
She was getting depressed just thinking about the dismal predictability of their reaction.
A long, sudsy bath in her suite at the Plaza Hotel failed to restore either her mood or the physical ache of jet lag. Thank goodness she wasn’t hopping on another flight that evening. Tomorrow would be soon enough to collect her wits and figure out what she was going to say when she got to California.
Her appetite was still on London time and she tossed aside the room service menu with indifference. What to do, what to do...
A courtesy copy of the newspaper still lay where she’d left it, unread, on the vanity. A brief smile crossed her lips in remembrance of one of her grandfather’s quirks. No matter where he’d gone or how long he’d been there, the very first thing he always had to do when he came back home was to look at the day’s paper. “I just want to know if the country’s at war with anyone,” he’d say.
Rachel, in contrast, couldn’t have cared less what was going on in any part of the world except the dreamy, romantic one she shared with José. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how she’d tell her parents about the village José and his friends called home—a cluster of mountain pueblos abandoned during the dictatorship of Franco.
Not even a realtor’s bag of creative euphemisms like ‘rustic’, ‘fixer-upper,’ or ‘a handyman’s dream’ would have been accurate in describing the primitive settlement barely hanging onto civilization by a toenail. So what if it didn’t have electricity, running water, or any neighbors within a good twenty miles? In Rachel’s starry-eyed view, José and his friends were noble idealists fighting a forgotten cause.
Her parents wouldn’t see it that way.
Neither would her grandfather. “He sounds like a damned hippie, if you ask me,” he’d say and snort in disdain. She’d expect no less, of course, from someone who always voted Republican and thought she shouldn’t be allowed to date until she was thirty.