The House on Honeysuckle Lane by Mary McDonough Page A

basics, but I never paid attention. Help!” The woman was the daughter of a frequent client, and a good one at that, so Daniel had put on his apron and gone to the woman’s rescue.
    It wasn’t something he did often, give private lessons on the basics of cooking and baking, and he didn’t advertise such services, but on occasion someone like this young woman approached him, desperate for knowledge. They were prepared to pay well, and without exception these private students were eager and attentive learners. With a business to grow and two children to raise and someday send to college, Daniel wasn’t picky about how he earned his money. Besides, he’d discovered that he enjoyed the teaching experience. It was less physically taxing than catering parties for fifty or more people, and the look of pride on a student’s face when he or she managed the first medium boiled egg or apple pie or classic white sauce was ample payment of another kind.
    On the subject of teaching, Daniel thought as he came up on the high school he and his sisters had attended. He remembered his high school years as if they had only just taken place. On the very first day of his freshman year, Emma, a junior, had declared that she would look out for him. She briefed him on what teachers gave less homework than others and what food to avoid in the cafeteria and what other kids to stay away from because they were bad news. And she had gone about it all discreetly, so Daniel hadn’t felt he was being coddled in public. No teenaged boy wanted his big sister hovering over him, threatening his burgeoning masculinity and very fragile male ego.
    Those four years had been happy ones overall. He had done well in his classes, played a fairly important role on the junior and then varsity soccer team, and kissed his first girlfriend by the time he was a sophomore. That she dumped him a month later hardly mattered because two weeks after that another girl caught his eye. Thinking back on his mildly lothario days, Daniel felt a surge of paternal protectiveness. There was no way he was going to let his daughter date until she was at least sixteen. And as for Marco, well, he was going to get a very stern lecture about responsibility and respect for women the moment he hit puberty.
    Daniel’s attention was briefly caught by what he thought was Emma’s car just turning into the parking lot of the one Chinese restaurant in town. But another glance told him that the car was an older model Lexus, not Emma’s. Good, he thought. That means she’s likely at the house, getting down to business. Daniel still couldn’t shake his irritation, the feeling that his sisters were simply going through the motions, not really caring the way he did about the family’s belongings, the Audubon prints their father had treasured, the Bullock desk that had been in the Carlyle family for almost two hundred years. Those things were important; in fact, they were more than just things . They had meaning. They deserved respect, and only partly because they had been respected by Cliff and Caro. They were . . . they were visible manifestations of continuity.
    An ambulance from Oliver’s Well Emergency Corp was coming up behind him, sirens screaming, lights flashing, and Daniel quickly pulled the car to the side of the road. At least they had been spared that at the end, he thought, easing back into traffic, the mad dash to the hospital. Caro had died at home, peacefully, in the surroundings she loved, unlike her husband, who had passed away in the ER. Caro had been with her husband at the end; Daniel had been there, too. When the attending doctor pronounced Cliff dead, Caro had asked Daniel to give her a moment alone with her husband. And when a few minutes later his mother had come out of the cubicle where his father was already growing cold, Daniel had seen a profound change. He had known right then and there that Caro Reynolds would not be