Keeper of the Light. Diane Chamberlain

didn’t you tell me that?” “It wasn’t a night I particularly want to remember.” “But, Christ, I mean that’s weird, don’t you think? We stood right over there,” he pointed to the photographs, “and talked about her, and you never said a word.”

      She looked over at him. His heavy blond eyebrows were knitted together in a frown, and his eyes had reddened. “Aren’t there things you just can’t talk about?” she asked. He drew back from her, and she knew that, unwittingly, she had struck a nerve in him.

      “Yeah. Right.” He shook his head to whisk away whatever emotions had been stirred loose in him over the past few minutes. “Didn’t mean to jump on you. Let’s get back to work here.”

      She returned to her work, but as she cut, as she measured, she was aware of Tom’s troubled silence, and she knew that this was yet another man who had loved Annie Chase O’Neill.

      CHAPTER NINE

      “You’re coming to graduation tonight, aren’t you?” Clay looked across the table at his father, while Lacey drowned her frozen waffle in maple syrup.

      “Of course,” Alec said. “I wouldn’t miss it.” He wondered how Clay could have thought anything else, but he guessed his actions hadn’t been too predictable lately.

      “How’s the speech coming?” he asked. Clay had seemed uncharacteristically nervous the past few days, and right now he was tapping his foot on the floor beneath the table. He’d been carrying his notecards around with him, wedged into his shirt pocket or clutched in his hand. Even now the cards were perched, dog-eared and smudged, in front of his orange juice glass. Alec felt a little sorry for his son. He wished there was some way he could make it easier for him.

      “It’s fine,” Clay said. “By the way, is it okay if I have a few people over after?”

      “Sure,” Alec said, pleased. “It’s been a while since you’ve done that. I’ll disappear.”

      “Well, no, you don’t have to disappear,” Clay said quickly.

      Alec reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He set it on the table next to Clay’s cereal bowl. “Take what you need for food and whatever.”

      Clay stared at the wallet for a moment. He glanced at Lacey before he opened it and pulled out a twenty.

      “Can’t get much with that,” Alec said. He took his wallet back and handed Clay a couple more twenties. “You only graduate once.”

      Clay held the bills on the table. “You act like money’s nothing these days,” he said, carefully. Alec had the feeling both his kids thought he was losing his mind. He was not working; he was spending freely. But he wasn’t quite ready to tell them about the insurance policy. He needed to keep it to himself a while longer—a sweet, tender secret he shared with Annie.

      “You don’t need to concern yourself with finances other than your own,” Alec said.

      Clay looked around the room. “I’d better get home early today to get this place cleaned up.”

      “I’ll do it,” Lacey volunteered, surprising them both. “It’ll be your graduation present.”

      Alec spent the day with his camera on the beach at Kiss River. He was taking slides for a change, pictures he would use when he spoke to the Rotary Club in Elizabeth City next week.

      He and Clay arrived home at the same time and they barely recognized the house they walked into. It smelled of lemon oil, and whatever it was Annie used to put in the bag of the vacuum cleaner. The living room was spotless, the kitchen scrubbed and sparkling and full of color from the stained glass at the windows.

      “God,” Clay said, looking around him. “Seems a shame to have a party here. I hate to wreck the place.”

      Lacey walked into the kitchen from the laundry room, a basket of clean clothes in her arms.

      “The house looks fantastic, Lace,” Alec said.

      She set the laundry basket down and wrinkled her freckled, sunburned nose at her father. “It was getting to me,” she said.

      Alec smiled. “Yeah, it was getting to me, too. I just didn’t have the energy to do anything about it.”

      “Thanks, O’Neill,” Clay said. “You can always get a job as a maid if you flunk out of high school.”

      Alec was staring at the laundry basket. There on top, neatly folded, was Annie’s old green sweatshirt. He picked it up, the folds coming undone, the worn fabric falling over his arm.

      “You washed this?” He asked the obvious.

      Lacey nodded. “It was on your bed.”

      Alec lifted the sweatshirt to his nose and breathed in the scent of detergent. Lacey and Clay looked at one another, and he lowered the shirt to his side.

      “Your mother wore this a lot, you know?” he explained. “So when I threw her things out, I kept it as a remembrance. It still smelled like her, like that stuff she used on her hair. I should have set it aside so you didn’t get it mixed up with the dirty clothes.” He tried to laugh. “I guess I can finally get rid of it.” He looked over at the trash can in the corner of the kitchen, but slipped the sweatshirt under his arm instead.

      “It was right there with your dirty sheets,” Lacey said, her voice high. Scared and defensive. “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t laundry?”

      “It’s all right, Annie,” he said, “it’s …”

      Lacey stamped her foot, her face crimson. “I am not Annie!”

      Alec quickly played his words back to himself. Yes, he’d just called her Annie. He reached for her shoulder. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

      Lacey dodged his hand. “Next time you can do your own fucking laundry!”

      Alec watched as she ran out of the room, and in a moment they heard her light, quick steps on the stairs, followed by the slamming of her bedroom door.

      “You’ve done that a lot, you know,” Clay said quietly.

      Alec looked at his son. “Done what? Called her Annie?” He frowned, trying to think. “No, I haven’t.”

      “Ask her.” Clay nodded in the direction of the stairs. “I bet she could tell you how many times you’ve done it.”

      Alec struggled out of his suit jacket and pressed his back against the car seat. He felt perspiration on his neck, across his chest. He tried to slow down his breathing. Keep it even. Stop gulping air.

      He’d parked a little bit away from the rest of the cars in Cafferty High’s parking lot. He needed a few minutes to pull himself together before he could face people. Parents of Clay’s friends, he hadn’t seen in months. His teachers. Everyone who was going to want to talk to him and say wonderful things about his son. If he could just keep a smile on his face, say the appropriate thing at the appropriate moment. God, he was never going to make it through the next couple of hours. Damn it, Annie.

      She used to talk about seeing her kids graduate. As much as she tried to pretend that Lacey’s and Clay’s accomplishments were immaterial, she took pride in everything they did. She would have thrown a huge celebration for Clay’s graduation. She would have hooted and hollered her way through the ceremony to make sure Clay knew she was there. Annie is one intense mother, Tom Nestor had said to him once, and he was right. Annie always tried to give her children the things she had never received from her own parents.

      Her parents did not go to her graduation from the exclusive high school she’d attended in Boston. “We would have been proud to come if you’d kept your grades up,” her father had told her. “But losing your membership in the National Honor Society during your last semester of school is inexcusable.”

      Her