“It’s nice to see you again, Henry. You look good.” She and her daughter turned and walked away. Halfway across the green, she looked over her shoulder at him.
“That was the most pitiful display I’ve ever seen,” Lester finally said, cackling. “I was shocked by a milking machine once when I was a boy. Knocked me off my feet. You look like I felt.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t say anything,” Henry said.
“Zap! That machine got me. Couldn’t say a word. I just opened and closed my mouth like a fish,” Lester said, and laughed some more. He lifted his cane and poked Henry in the leg.
“Zzzzzzzzppppp!”
Henry jumped in surprise. “Very funny,” he said, and started to laugh.
Evanelle and Fred sat on the rock bench circling the fountain. They waved as Sydney and Bay passed, eating ice cream. Bay had the ugly brooch Evanelle had given her pinned to her pink T-shirt, and Evanelle felt guilty. Bay was so conscientious and concerned for others’ feelings that she felt she had to wear the pin just because Evanelle gave it to her. But that wasn’t a pin for a little girl. Why on earth did Evanelle need to give her such a thing? She sighed. She might never know.
“I’m nervous,” Fred finally said, rubbing his hands on his neatly pressed shorts.
Evanelle turned to him. “You look it.”
Fred stood and paced. Evanelle stayed where she was, in the shade of the oak-leaf sculpture. Fred was hot and bothered enough for the both of them. “He said he’d be here to talk. In public. What does he think I’m going to do if we’re alone, shoot him?”
“Men. You can’t live with them, you can’t shoot them.”
“How can you be so calm? How would you feel if your husband said he’d show up and didn’t?”
“Given that he’s dead, Fred, I wouldn’t be real surprised.”
Fred sat back down. “I’m sorry.”
Evanelle patted his knee. It had been nearly a month since Fred had asked for sanctuary in her home, and he had become an unexpected bright spot to her days. The whole arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but slowly, surely, Fred was moving in. He and Evanelle had spent days going through all her old things in the attic, and Fred seemed to enjoy the stories she told. He was footing the bill to renovate the attic space, and workers with nice posteriors started showing up, which Evanelle enjoyed so much she shoved a chair to the base of the stairs just so she could sit and watch them walk up.
It all had a nice ring of domesticity to it, and Fred would say he knew he deserved better than the way James was treating him. But sometimes, when Evanelle would pass him the butter at dinner, or hand him a hammer to hold while she hung a picture on the wall, he would look at what she’d given him, then look back at her with such expectation that her heart would crack like dry wood for him. Even with all his brave words, he still secretly harbored the belief that one day Evanelle was going to give him something that would make everything all right with James.
“It’s getting late,” Fred said. “People are already putting out blankets. Maybe I missed him.”
Evanelle saw James approach before Fred did. James was a tall, handsome man. He’d always been very thin, the way moody, creative poets with long fingers and soulful eyes were thin in days of old. Evanelle had never had a bad word to say about James. No one did, really. He worked for an investment firm in Hickory and kept to himself. Fred had been his one and only confidant for over thirty years, but suddenly that had changed, and neither Fred nor anyone else in town could figure out why.
But Evanelle had her suspicions. You stick around long enough in this life and you start to understand its ebbs and flows.
There was a type of craziness caused by long-term complacency. All the Burgess women in town, who never had less than six children each, walked around in a fog until their children left home. When their youngest finally left the nest, they always did something crazy, like burn all their respectable high-neck dresses and wear too much perfume. And anyone who had been married for more than a year could testify to the surprise of coming home one day and finding that your husband had torn down a wall to make a room bigger or your wife had dyed her hair just to make you look at her differently. There were midlife crises and hot flashes. There were bad decisions. There were affairs. There was a certain point when sometimes someone said,
I’ve just had enough
.
Fred went still when he finally saw James approach.
“I’m sorry I’m late. I almost didn’t make it.” James was a little out of breath, and a fine sheen of perspiration dotted his forehead. “I was just at the house. I took a few things, but the rest is yours. I wanted to tell you that I have an apartment in Hickory now.”
Ah, Evanelle thought. That was the reason James wanted Fred to meet him here, so James would know when Fred wasn’t going to be in the house and he could take things out without having to discuss it first with Fred. One look at Fred, and Evanelle knew he’d figured that out too.
“I’m taking early retirement next year, and I’ll probably move to Florida. Or maybe Arizona. I haven’t decided yet.”
“So that’s it?” Fred asked, and Evanelle could tell there were too many things he wanted to say, all fighting to get out. Ultimately, the only thing that escaped was “That’s really it?”
“For months, I was angry. Now I’m just tired,” James said, and he leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “I’m tired of trying to show you the way. I dropped out of school for you, I came here to live with you because you didn’t know what to do. I had to tell you that it was all right for people to know you were gay. I had to drag you out of the house to show you. I had to plan the meals and what we did with our free time. I thought I was doing the right thing. I fell in love with your vulnerability in college, and when your father died and you had to leave, I was terrified you wouldn’t be able to make it on your own. It’s taken me a long time to realize that I did you a great disservice, Fred. And myself also. By trying to make you happy, I prevented you from knowing how to figure it out on your own. By trying to give you happiness, I lost my own.”
“I can do better. Just tell me—” Fred stopped, and in one terrible moment he realized that everything James said was true.
James squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then he stood. “I should be going.”
“James, please don’t,” Fred whispered, and grabbed James’s hand.
“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep telling you how to live. I’ve almost forgotten how to do it myself.” James hesitated. “Listen, that culinary instructor at Orion—Steve, the one who comes into your store and talks recipes with you—you should get to know him better. He likes you.”
Fred let his hand drop, and he looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
Without another word, James walked slowly away, so tall and thin and stiff-legged that he looked like a circus performer on stilts.
Fred was left to watch him go. “I used to overhear the checkout girls in the break room,” Fred finally said softly, to no one in particular. Evanelle wondered if he even remembered she was there. “I used to think they were such silly teenagers, believing the worst hurt in the world was when you couldn’t let go of someone who had stopped loving you. They always wanted to know
why. Why
didn’t the boy love them anymore? They said it with such anguish.”
Without another word, Fred turned and walked away.
Sydney sat alone on one of Grandma Waverley’s old quilts. Bay had made a few friends in the children’s area, and Sydney had spread a quilt near their families so Bay could play with the kids in the violet-blue dusk.
Emma was sitting in a cushioned lawn chair with some other people Sydney didn’t know. Hunter John was nowhere to be seen. Emma would sneak glances at Sydney every once in a while but otherwise made no attempt to communicate with her. It felt strange to be so close to her onetime friends, only to find them strangers now. Sydney was making new friends at the salon, but new friendships took time. History took time.
Sydney watched Bay run around the green with a sparkler, but she turned when she saw someone approach from the right.
Henry Hopkins walked to the edge of her quilt and stopped. He’d grown up to be a handsome man, lots of blond hair cut close and practical, and tight muscles in his arms. The last she clearly remembered of Henry was laughing at him with her friends when he tripped and fell in the hallway in high school. He’d been a gangly mess in his youth, but he had a quiet dignity that she appreciated so much when they were little kids. They grew apart as they grew up, and she didn’t know exactly why. She just knew she’d been horrible to him once she got everything she thought she wanted in high school. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to talk to her when she went to the Hopkinses’ table that afternoon.
“Hi,” Henry said.
Sydney couldn’t help but smile. “He speaks.”
“Do you mind if I sit here with you?”
“As if I could refuse a man who gives me free ice cream,” Sydney said, and Henry lowered himself beside her.
“I’m sorry about before,” Henry said. “I was surprised to see you.”
“I thought you were mad at me.”
Henry looked genuinely confused. “Why would I be mad?”
“I wasn’t very nice to you in high school. I’m sorry. We were such good friends when we were little.”
“I was never mad at you. Even today, I can’t pass a set of monkey bars and not think of you.”
“Ah, yes,” Sydney said. “I’ve had many men tell me that.”
He laughed. She laughed. All was right. He met her eyes after they’d quieted, then said, “So, you’re back.”
“I’m back.”
“I’m glad.”
Sydney shook her head. This was an unexpected turn to her day. “You are, quite possibly, the first person to actually say that to me.”
“Well, the best things are worth waiting for.”
“You don’t stay for the fireworks?” Tyler asked as Claire was boxing up the empty wine bottles. He’d come up behind her, but she didn’t turn around. She was too embarrassed to. If she turned around, she would become that deeply disturbed woman who couldn’t handle a man being interested in her. As long as she kept her back to him she was the old Claire, the self-contained one, the one she knew before Tyler introduced himself and Sydney moved in.
Sydney and Bay had already spread out a quilt, waiting for it to finally get dark enough for the fireworks. Claire noticed earlier that Henry Hopkins had joined them, and she was still trying to get her mind around it. Henry Hopkins liked her sister.
Why did it bother her? Why did Fred helping Evanelle bother her?
Her edges were crumbling like border walls, and she was feeling terribly unprotected. The worst possible time to deal with Tyler.
“I’ve seen this show before,” she said, her back still to him. “It ends with a bang.”
“Now you’ve ruined it for me. Can I help you?”
She stacked the boxes and took two of them, planning to get the other two on her second trip. “No.”
“Right,” Tyler said, picking up the boxes. “So I’ll just grab this.”
He followed her across the green to her van, which she’d parked on the street. She could feel his stare on the back of her neck. She never realized how vulnerable short hair could make a person. It exposed places that were hidden before, her neck, the slope of her shoulders, the rise of her breasts.
“What are you afraid of, Claire?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
When they reached the van, she unlocked the back and put her boxes in. Tyler came up beside her and set his boxes beside hers. “Are you afraid of me?”
“Of course I’m not afraid of you,” she scoffed.
“Are you afraid of love?”
“Oh, the arrogance,” she said as she strapped the boxes in to keep the bottles from breaking as she drove. “I refuse your advances so it must be because I’m afraid of love.”
“Are you afraid of a kiss?”
“No one in their right mind is afraid of a kiss.” She closed the back of the van and turned around, finding him closer than she expected. Too close. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, sucking in her breath, her back plastered against the van as he stepped closer still.
“It’s just a kiss,” he said, moving in, and she didn’t think it was possible for him to be so close and not actually touch her. “Nothing to be afraid of, right?”
He put one hand on the van, near her shoulder, leaning in. She could leave, of course. Just scoot away and turn her back on him again. But then he lowered his head, and up close she could see the tiny spiderweb lines around his eyes, and it looked as if his ear had been pierced at one time. Those things told stories about him, storyteller’s stories, spinning yarns, lulling her into listening. She didn’t want to know so much about him, but one tiny bit of curiosity and she was done for.
Slowly his lips touched hers, and there was a tingling, warm, like cinnamon oil. So this was all there was to it? This wasn’t so bad. Then his head tilted slightly and there was this
friction
. It came out of nowhere, streaking through her body. Her lips parted when she gasped in surprise, and that’s when things really got out of control. He deepened his kiss, his tongue darting into her mouth, and a million crazy images raced through her mind. They didn’t come from her, they were images from him—nakedness and legs twining, holding hands, having breakfast, growing old. What was this mad magic? Oh, God, but it felt so good. Her hands were suddenly everywhere, touching, grabbing, pulling him closer. He was pressing her against the van, the force of his body nearly suspending her in air. It was too much, she was surely going to die, yet the thought of stopping, of actually breaking contact with this man, this beautiful man, was heartbreaking.