Джеймс Паттерсон - The 19th Christmas

Neither one of them had pushed for divorce, she for religious reasons, he because he thought she would change her mind. Fifteen years later, when Isabel finally filed, he had signed the papers and had to accept that his ex-wife’s parents were kind and that Isabel would take good care of Franny.

But had she?

What kind of woman had Franny become?

He swiveled back to face his desk and touched the phone, thinking now of other things he should have asked his all-grown-up daughter. One of them was “How will I know you?”

He just would.

Joe picked up the phone again and called Lindsay.

“Linds? I have something to tell you.”

Chapter 95

Joe dressed in a blue shirt, blue pants, and a blue-striped tie.

He brushed his teeth again, combed his hair again, ran a soft rag across his shoes. He wanted to look good for Francesca. He had never even said a proper good-bye to her. What if she hated him for some abandonment story Isabel had told her?

He shook his head. Would Isabel have done that? Yes.

Joe looked at the stiff staring back at him in the full-length mirror. He untucked his shirt, stripped off his tie, and pulled on his blue jacket. In the kitchen, Joe poured kibble into Martha’s bowl, locked up the apartment, and pressed the elevator call button.

He thought about Lindsay. She had known about Isabel and Franny since their first date, but they rarely talked about his first marriage—or hers. He was imagining the first meeting between Lindsay and Francesca when Mrs. Rose came out of her apartment across the hall.

“Wow, Joe, you look nice.”

“Thanks, Gloria. My daughter Francesca. She just called me. I haven’t seen her in a long time, not since she was this big.” He held out his hand to show someone about three feet tall.

“Oh. I didn’t know…how exciting,” she said, looking completely dumbfounded. “Have fun. Take pictures.”

Joe patted his phone in his jacket pocket, waved, and, telling himself to calm the hell down, got into the elevator. Out on the street, he unlocked his car, got behind the wheel, and drove toward the tony section of town called Pacific Heights. Even with heavy traffic, he arrived at the Drisco at a quarter to twelve.

To steady his nerves, Joe drove around the block twice, slowly, and finally parked in front of the hotel. He sat for a few minutes, awash with feelings—guilt, concern, excitement, more guilt. Should he have fought harder? Gone after Isabel with legal remedies? But he remembered how he’d felt at the time, that they’d put each other through enough stress and that being part of that had to be bad for Franny.

Joe got out of his car, took the short flight of steps to the hotel entrance, went to the front desk, and waited for a woman with four bags and several special requests to get checked in. When the clerk was finally free, Joe said, “I’m here to see Ms. Molinari.”

The clerk picked up the desk phone and listened, then said to Joe, “No answer. She must be on her way down.”

Joe walked over to the small seating area, two chairs with a round marble coffee table in between and a newspaper lying open on top of it. Joe sat down and began his habitual pattern of close observation, looking around the lobby at the flower arrangements, the gilt mirrors, the pattern of the carpet, the couple speaking to the clerk, and a man on his phone just coming in.

Five long minutes passed. Joe couldn’t relax while waiting for Francesca, so he stood up, went outside into the noontime glare, and stood next to his car, where he had a view of the lobby through the doors.

Only a minute later, a tall young woman approached the front desk. Her long hair was dark, wavy. She wore a slim-cut leather coat, a white turtleneck, a pencil skirt.

That was her. That was his daughter.

The clerk spoke with her and then pointed though the glass door.

She walked through the doorway, paused at the top of the steps, saw him, and offered a sweet two-part smile—first tentative, then a grin. She waved and came down the steps.

Joe waved back as images of Franny as a little girl flashed in front of his eyes. The slim young woman stopped an arm’s length in front of him and said, “Papa?”

“Franny.”

Joe opened his arms to her, and she went to him. He felt her shaking as he enveloped her in a hug.

He wanted to blurt out to her that he was sorry for everything, that what he regretted the most in his life, his biggest heartbreak, was that he couldn’t be close to her. He wanted to spill it all right then, explain that he had no choice but to go along with her mother’s unilateral decision, her refusal to let him be part of Franny’s life.

Instead, he put his hands on her shoulders and held her away from him. Her eyes were blue eyes, like his. She had Isabel’s nose and mouth, his hair.

“You’re beautiful, Franny. I’d know you anywhere.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and he kissed hers, but he wasn’t expecting her to kiss his other cheek in the European manner.

“I’m a mess,” he sputtered. “I can’t quite believe this is happening. That you’re here.”

“Let’s go to lunch,” she said, smiling and taking his arm. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

Chapter 96

Franny sat across the table from Joe in Spruce, a neighborhood restaurant that catered to business clientele.

The main room was soothing, softly lit, the walls lined with mohair the color of café au lait, hung with black-and-white drawings of Paris street scenes. It had seemed to Joe to be the right place to bring her—low-key, near her hotel, great food—but Franny looked uncomfortable.

He asked, “Everything okay?”

She said, “I’ve never been to a place like this.” She waved her hand around, indicating the whole of the upscale space.

He understood. She was all grown up, but she was still a kid. He said, “I should have thought more of what you’d want, Franny. I have client lunches here. It’s close to home.”

“The room is beautiful,” she said. “I love it.”

They ordered drinks, wine for Joe, a glass of tea for Franny, and as they waited for their entrées, Franny told Joe more about what had brought her to San Francisco.

“When Mama found out that she had cancer, it was too late to do anything about it. Ovarian cancer. It’s fast and deadly.”

“Franny, that must have been terrible.”

“We went over everything during her…last weeks. The loads of photos she’d taken since she graduated from Fordham. Letters from my grandparents. Baby pictures. Some pictures of you.”

Joe said, “I have so few things like that to show you, Franny. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

“How could I know what you were going to say?”

“I would have said, ‘I’ll pick you up at the airport.’”

“I know that now, Papa, but a week ago, I wasn’t sure if I would come here or even if I would call you. Mama gave me a key to a safe-deposit box in a bank in DC and said she’d left some things there for me. I went to the bank and then, while I was at the airport, I decided to postpone my flight to Rome and come to San Francisco. Spur of the moment.”

“I’m so glad you did it. Over-the-moon glad.”

“I’m jumping all around. I’m sorry, Papa. Listen, I’m my mother’s messenger. She was very sorry, too. About keeping you away. She told me that several times over the last years. She said, ‘I screwed up. I was so young. I didn’t understand about marriage.’ She said if she could do it over again, she would have behaved differently, but it took her about ten years to figure it out. By then, it was too late. This is what she told me. I was a teenager. I had friends. I was growing up Italian. I hope this doesn’t hurt, Papa, but she got married again.”