‘That sucks.’
‘It did. And I miss her every day.’ She didn’t add that now she had a stepmother whom she’d never got along with, and whose life she’d made quite miserable. Coming to America had allowed her to leave behind a life gone bad, start anew.
‘May I ask what happened?’ Dylan knocked back some more beer.
‘She drowned. She’d dived in to the sea and hit her head on a rock and that was it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks.’ She felt guilty accepting the sympathy when she hadn’t been entirely honest.
Dylan told her all about losing his dad and now his mom and then they decided this conversation could only continue with a lot more alcohol so Cleo sneaked in and smuggled out an entire bottle of champagne and two flutes.
‘Violet won’t mind.’ She grinned as she poured out two glasses, laughing when Dylan’s overflowed all over his lap. ‘Sorry!’ In her tipsy state she almost offered to mop it up for him, but thankfully realised it was in a precarious area so she left him to do the honours before she sat down again. They were closer this time, drinking and laughing away, chattering into the night as the guests at the party inside turned up the music.
‘You’d want to be invited to this party, as a neighbour.’ Dylan sipped his champagne.
‘Too right. Or you’d be complaining about the noise.’
‘You’re shivering,’ he said. He looked around him, and when he stood up and went to the end of the porch that stretched across the front of the house Cleo couldn’t help but admire the view. Much taller than her, he was muscular and fit. He looked around her age, possibly a bit older, but where a few men in their late thirties had developed a bit of a belly or some fat around the face, he didn’t seem to have succumbed to the same fate at all. She found herself wondering whether he was single. If he wasn’t, surely he wouldn’t be sitting here with her tonight. If he was married or had a partner, he’d be with them when he’d just buried his mom.
‘Ah, found it.’ He’d lifted up the seat of the dark wooden bench at the end of the porch and came back with a blanket.
Cleo helped him open the blanket out over their legs and they clinked glasses, which she was sure they’d done already but with her fuggy head tonight, she couldn’t quite remember.
He sighed. ‘I love the start of winter. It’s my favourite season.’
‘Me too. Although fall is something I fell in love with when I first came to New York.’ She snorted. ‘I fell for fall.’
He managed to laugh so maybe he didn’t think she was totally crazy.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d better stop drinking soon.’
He smiled. ‘Tell me, why did you move from England?’
Americans could always tell. When she spoke with her dad in England he always commented on her Americanisms and the twang she was gradually picking up, but to people here she was unarguably English.
‘We have a family business.’ She kept it general. ‘My grandma died and then it became too much for my grandpa and he moved out of the city. It was an opportunity for me to do something different so I came over to New York.’ She didn’t add that the store was also a link to her mum’s past. Her mum was born and raised in Manhattan and had met Cleo’s dad when he’d holidayed in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Diana was there with her best friend, Tanya, blowing away the stress of study from a full-on few years at university, and from the moment Kenneth Jones bought Diana her first Mai Tai, she was smitten. They’d married not long after and then Cleo had come along, they’d relocated to England, and at times they’d been happy.
‘You said you fell in love with fall,’ Dylan prompted, his mouth twisting at the corners. Perhaps he was trying not to laugh at her earlier attempt at a joke.
‘I did. It’s the most glorious season of all. I love the beautiful colours, the leaves and their crunch, the nip in the air as we say goodbye to summer for another year. In England we call it autumn, but I think fall makes more sense. It tells it like it is.’
‘It certainly does. Fall is beautiful out here in Connecticut.’
‘When I was little, we’d visit my grandparents in Manhattan but at weekends we’d take long drives away from the city, we’d go leaf peeping.’
Dylan’s eyes lit up. ‘It’s one of my favourite things to do.’
‘We’d visit gardens and parks and everywhere we went I’d collect a big pile of leaves and Grandpa Joe would stand and watch me jump into them until the skies grew dark and it’d be time to head home. We went to woodlands all over, admired landscapes. It was something else.’
They talked about Grandpa Joe, where he lived now, how close she was to him. And with Dylan, Cleo found herself opening up so much she almost forgot they were at a party until Robert came and found them and dragged them back inside.
Over the thump of the music, combined with a bit of a thump in her head, Cleo chatted with other guests, but most of the time she was looking out for the tall man with broad shoulders and a captivating smile with whom she’d shared the porch swing moments ago.
When she got Robert on his own, she asked him about Dylan. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’
‘No.’ Robert shook his fingers as he tried to take piping hot sausage rolls from the baking tray and drop them into a serving dish. ‘Could you get the canapés from over there and take them into the living room please?’
