Tuesday Night Miracles Read online

  Readers Love Kris Radish!

  ——

  “Each of your books has shown me a dozen new ways to appreciate myself, my relationships, my past, and my future. I truly thank you, Kris, for moving me beyond a cliché and into a life of my own making. You, Kris, are a gift.”

  —ANN W. A.

  “Thank you for the amazing gift of words, which often give us the courage to find our wings and soar again. Thank you from the woman I am today … but deep gratitude from that little girl I lost when I left Cuba. I have given her a rightful place in the mosaic my life is now.”

  —MARITZA P.

  “Your book has soothed my soul and helped me to feel so much better about needing and pursuing happiness and passion in my life. You named the dreams of my heart and helped me feel far less crazy! Here is to dancing in the moonlight.”

  —PATRICIA C.

  “I have read all of your books and love, love, love each and every one of them. When I think of how I want to live my life (with joy), and how I don’t want to live my life (in fear), it’s the characters in your novels who speak to me. I can’t wait to read your next book.”

  —DEBBIE S.

  “Your books make me want to find myself and experience all that I’ve been afraid to challenge in the past. They inspire me to find the true me and the meaning of my life. And of course, they make me want to run naked in the middle of the day … which I did!”

  —PAT M.

  “I began reading your novels at a crossroads in my life and needless to say, I began on the road less traveled. Your inspiring words not only accumulate into fantastic books, but begin a lifestyle full of openness and joy. I encourage any woman regardless of her background to hop on this train.”

  —SAM B.

  Tuesday Night Miracles is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2012 by Kris Radish

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53241-1

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Olga Grlic

  Cover images: esthAlto/Laurence Mouton/

  PhotoAlto Agency RM Collection/Getty Images (woman),

  Meg Takamura/IZA Stock/Getty Images (dog)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1 - Truth or Consequences

  Chapter 2 - The Green Dot

  Chapter 3 - The Red Dot

  Chapter 4 - The Blue Dot

  Chapter 5 - Hell to Pay

  Chapter 6 - Truth or Dare

  Chapter 7 - The Blue Dot

  Chapter 8 - The Green Dot

  Chapter 9 - The Red Dot

  Chapter 10 - The First Assignment

  Chapter 11 - Whiskey A-Go-Go

  Chapter 12 - Just Deserts

  Chapter 13 - The Black Dot

  Chapter 14 - The Second Assignment

  Chapter 15 - Displeasure on the Homework Highway

  Chapter 16 - Writing It Down at Dinner

  Chapter 17 - Touching the Edge of Dreams

  Chapter 18 - The Intervention Convention

  Chapter 19 - The Black Dot

  Chapter 20 - The Blue Dot

  Chapter 21 - The Green Dot

  Chapter 22 - The Red Dot

  Chapter 23 - A Shot in the Dark

  Chapter 24 - Tales from the Anger Battlefield

  Chapter 25 - The Challenges of Change

  Chapter 26 - The Green Dot

  Chapter 27 - The Black Dot

  Chapter 28 - The Red Dot

  Chapter 29 - The Blue Dot

  Chapter 30 - The Third Assignment

  Chapter 31 - Limping Toward the Exit

  Chapter 32 - A Slight Explosion in the Happy Land

  Chapter 33 - Just When You Think

  Chapter 34 - Far from the End of the Journey

  Chapter 35 - An Inch at a Time

  Chapter 36 - A Roll of the Dice

  Chapter 37 - Light in the Tunnel

  Chapter 38 - A Life on Hold

  Chapter 39 - Reflections of Change

  Chapter 40 - It Ain’t Over Until

  Chapter 41 - The Fourth Assignment

  Chapter 42 - Courage to Be Real

  Chapter 43 - Working on a Chain Gang

  Chapter 44 - Sunday Night Serenades

  Chapter 45 - Reckless Fury of the Scorned

  Chapter 46 - Tie a Yellow Ribbon

  Chapter 47 - Go Forth and Be Angry No More

  Chapter 48 - Gobble Gobble

  Chapter 49 - Reality Is a Piece of Cake

  Chapter 50 - The Green Dot

  Chapter 51 - The Red Dot

  Chapter 52 - The Blue Dot

  Chapter 53 - The Black Dot

  Chapter 54 - The Last Tuesday Night Miracle

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  1

  Truth or Consequences

  The three manila files on Olivia’s dining-room table have been opened and closed so many times that the edges are stained with coffee, several varieties of pasta sauce, more than a few red-wine streaks, and the dark imprints of each one of her tiny fingers.

  Before she grabs them this time she brushes her hands along her well-worn navy bathrobe, leaving a long white trail of pretzel salt down both sides. When she glances at herself in the hall mirror on the way to her favorite living-room chair, she laughs out loud, because the dark bathrobe that grazes her ankles and leaves her large white fluffy slippers exposed makes her look like a human-size blue penguin.

  If Olivia Bayer could change one thing about herself, even this late in the game, it would be her stumpy legs. Forget about the bad knee, her inability to qualify for LASIK eye surgery, or the twenty other physical tragedies that manifest themselves pretty much 24/7. She wants gams long enough to let her reach the top shelf.

  Tonight the top shelf is the least of her worries. Olivia hasn’t even met the three women whose words are waiting for her inside the thin files, but she has a veteran’s suspicion that this is not going to be a walk in the park. A naked run through a land-mined street is more like it.

  “Come on, Phyllis,” she says to the gorgeous tan cocker spaniel sitting in the doorway. Phyllis would follow her mistress to the ends of the earth—and she does. “We’ve got work to do.”

  She grabs the silver half-glasses that are held together by three rubber bands, pulls down the reading light above her head, turns it on, takes a breath to steady her thoughts, and picks up the first file:

  It’s not like this happens every day. I’m sorry, okay? What gets me angry is people who don’t do what in the hell they say they’re going to do. Waiting for someone else to do something. Crooked lines that should be straight. I don’t have much time in my life to sit down and think about things like this. Obviously I’m also mad at the economy or this would never have happened.

  Good Lord.

  As Olivia moves to the next file, she reaches down and runs her palm across Phyllis’s calm back. The three pieces of paper inside are written in handwriting so large and bold, and with a hand that pressed so hard, she sees holes when she holds the pages up to the light:

  I’m really pissed at my mother,
for starters. Why now? It doesn’t take a genius to know my brothers make me furious, and if there is a step beyond furious they push me there, too. Cheapskates. Deadlines. Empty wine bottles. The Vietnam War. Is this the kind of thing you mean?

  Olivia can’t bring herself to move beyond page one in this file. She almost fears the file might rise up and slap the living hell out of her all by itself.

  The third file, the last file, has been her favorite since the beginning of this interesting mess. When she’s not in her bathrobe, Olivia calls the mess “a challenge,” but here, in her home, it’s a mess. At least this file, with its five pages of lovely cursive writing, offers a glimmer of hope. Either that or the writer has this kind of exercise already figured out:

  … so maybe it’s just that sometimes you simply forget and go too far. You know? Whoever you are, I bet you know—especially if you’re a woman. But that’s avoiding the question. I get that. So: Loud music, obviously. Men who cheat. Fad diets. Those things get me angry.

  This isn’t bad for starters. Olivia quickly reads through the other pages again until she comes to something she must have missed. How could this be? Is she reading this correctly or does she need new glasses again? Is all hope lost?

  … that doesn’t give people younger than us the right to disobey us, to cross the lines we have drawn, to disrespect our generation. Sometimes these things work both ways. Sometimes someone has to make a stand.

  She drops the third file into her lap with the other two and then pushes them all to the floor. She watches as they land on top of one another like large playing cards.

  Olivia’s done this so many times it would be impossible for her to count. Years and years of files. Years and years of the faces and then the blinding reality of the failures mixed in with the successes—sometimes too few successes.

  And now this.

  These three files and these three women and this chance—one last chance to take a moment, a series of moments, perhaps a lifetime of moments, and create a miracle. How many miracles are left? How many more times can Olivia risk it before her own miracle card expires? She thinks about all the years of white lies when she gave someone an extra chance, tried something no one had ever thought of trying before, scorched her own heart yet again when her professional skills came so close to crossing the boundary—a boundary that these three women in the files have obviously crossed. Is it even possible for a person to bring one kind of life to an end and finally start out in a new direction?

  If only she knew the answers to her own questions.

  Olivia hesitates before she touches the files again, and she makes what every colleague would call a rash decision. Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s way past time. Retirement is waving its frightening hands in front of her face, and Dr. Olivia Bayer so wants to open up her secret bag of tricks and do something she has always dreamed of doing. This could be her last chance. But can she take that chance and make a real difference in the lives of these women? These women have been pushed over the edge, and what woman hasn’t been pushed over the edge the way they have? She’s already in trouble, and this pile of folders is like a blinking neon sign that is screaming, “Danger … danger!”

  Then she bends down and randomly grabs the file with the blue dot on it. The blue dot and, yes, the red one and the green one, too, will have a name and a face tomorrow night.

  She opens the file and her eyes land on the last paragraph. The blue dot is the smallest file, the one that has but a single page of writing, and she seizes one sentence.

  “It’s not like I even have a choice.”

  “Me, either,” she whispers to Phyllis, and then closes her eyes. With her eyes closed, she misses that absolutely glorious moment when day finally surrenders and the dark line of night marches swiftly across the horizon.

  2

  The Green Dot

  When Kit wakes up, she can’t remember where she is. Her last dream had her running from tree to tree dodging something, or perhaps it was someone. Now she’s lying on her back, and Kit Ferranti hasn’t slept on her back since she was a little girl.

  And that explains everything this late morning. Kit is tangled in the worn sheets of her old twin bed. The bed that sits in the last bedroom on the top floor of the house where her mother and father raised her and a mess of sons. The house that is blessedly quiet for the first time in days. The house that will undoubtedly explode with the sounds of those boys turned men, their wives, a mess of nieces and nephews, and who knows who else sometime in the next few hours.

  “Quiet, for just a bit longer, please,” she mutters, rolling over onto her right side so she can look out the long window and across the tops of the oak trees.

  She is absolutely exhausted. And riddled with such sadness that she is already wondering how she will be able to get through the long day ahead. She closes her eyes for a moment, banishing her nightmare to the back of her mind, and lets the reality of where she is, what has just happened, and what will happen next wash over her as if she is standing under a blasting shower.

  It has been four days since her mother’s funeral. Three months since Kit moved back to her childhood home to become her mother’s full-time caretaker. How many times did she hope this day and the four before it would never come? Today the family is gathering to talk about the house, a lifetime of belongings, who gets what, and what will happen next.

  She bravely swings her feet off the bed and wonders how long it will be before someone argues about something, the brothers start telling her what to do, or she breaks down yet again as she remembers how heart-wrenching it was to watch her mother die.

  “This, too, shall fly away,” she whispers, repeating the exact words her mother had said at least a million times throughout the years.

  When she raises her eyes, Kit is looking at her reflection in the long mirror that has stood against the wall since the day she was born. And she often, especially when she’s inside this house, feels like she is still a little girl.

  Kit puts her hands on her tiny chest and thinks that both of her breasts wouldn’t even equal one of her mother’s. Her mom had what one of her crazy aunts would have called “a remarkable bosom.” Kit has what her brothers still call little titties. At fifty-six years old, everyone is still waiting for her to grow—like maybe she will have a late growth spurt when she hits her next birthday. She’s just three inches over five feet tall, her weight hovers around one hundred and ten pounds, and no matter how much crap she has managed to eat during the past few months she is losing and not gaining weight. Must be the worrying—her mother was right, after all. Worry can bring you down to nothing and make you doubt everything you know about yourself.

  Maybe things will change now. Maybe she has earned some extra credit for taking a leave of absence from her job to care for her mother. Maybe her family will finally look at her in a way that will have something to do with the word respect. It’s bad enough being the only girl in a large Italian family where testosterone seems to grow like mold on plates and hang from the ceiling like streamers left over from a birthday party.

  Kit is small, she’s a girl, she married someone who wasn’t Italian, and then, to top it all off, she was able to have only one child. According to the standards of an Italian Catholic family, she should have thrown herself off the roof years ago.

  Right now it’s hard not to think of the word trouble when she thinks about her life’s relationships. Trouble with her brothers, trouble with her overbearing and also deceased father, trouble with girlfriends who thought she was brash and salty, trouble with teachers who didn’t appreciate being called assholes, trouble dating guys who were frightened the moment she opened her mouth—until Peter.

  Peter the strapping Chicago-born and -bred Irishman who could lift Kit over his head with one arm, wrestle all but one of her four brothers to the ground, and charm her mother into cooking whatever he wanted pretty much around the clock. It’s a wonder they didn’t have a frigging group-wedding ceremony.

&
nbsp; “Time to move forward!” she shouts, shaking her head to help her focus on the day ahead and to forget about the past. “This, too, shall pass, and it will be a calm and productive day.”

  She jumps to her feet, stretches, fishes around the room for clean clothes, and walks down the hall to the bathroom. Before she turns on the shower, Kit looks at herself in the mirror. “Stay positive,” she coaches herself. “You will let them know what Mom wants, be supportive—you are the one in charge today.”

  Two hours later she has managed to find the huge coffeepot her mom used for large family gatherings, located paper plates and cups, and created a list of everything she and her siblings need to discuss. After downing four cups of coffee, a long shower, and a call to her husband, she feels refreshed and ready. She knows absolutely that her mother would love that the family is going to be together, and she’s determined to stay positive about the day ahead with her often surly brothers.

  It’s amazing how they all still live in Ellington, a lively eclectic suburb not so far from downtown Chicago that it’s affected by the noise and activity, but close enough to enjoy its many benefits. There’s a knock at the door, and for the next thirty minutes Kit’s brothers and their entourage of wives and sons and daughters arrive in chronological birth order. Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark are not exactly saints in her eyes, but she’s glad to see them—well, sort of glad to see them. The house becomes loaded with their stifling maleness so fast, and the noise level accelerates so quickly, Kit feels as if she’s been sucked into the center of a tornado.