Yawning, I head to the kitchen for coffee and realize that Abigail the martyr has scored a serious point by brewing the last of the coffee and then draining the pot. I wouldn’t be surprised if she dumped it down the drain, just to get back at me.
I need coffee. I want breakfast. And I don’t want to be the one to make it.
Never since the day I got married have I gone out for breakfast, but this seems like the perfect day to start. In a town the size of Colville, there are approximately three options for Sunday breakfast, if I discount McDonald’s, and I am not wasting this adventure on fast food. Feeling thoroughly rebellious, I choose the Acorn Saloon, an establishment Val has informed me serves an excellent breakfast.
Of course, given my almost DUI, if anybody sees me not only skipping church on a Sunday morning but also walking into a bar, my reputation as an alcoholic reprobate will be assured. For once in my life, I don’t care. I am a woman who has dragged a mattress out onto her front lawn in plain sight of a notoriously gossipy neighbor. I’m done worrying about the weight of public opinion.
Besides, if I ask, “What would Lacey do?” clearly she would say yes to the promise of a deliciously greasy fried breakfast without worrying what people think. Fine, then. Hopefully Lacey likes coffee and chicken-fried steak, because that’s what I’m after.
When I step through the door, I’m surprised to see tables and booths occupied by groups of ordinary-looking senior citizens rather than an evil den full of drunks fallen asleep at the bar. A pleasant-looking man shoots pool at a table in the corner. The music is low-key country and western. I seat myself at an empty four-top, and a waitress brings me a menu and coffee, offering a friendly smile and asking no intrusive questions.
I’ve come armed with a notebook, my phone, and the newspaper, and settle down to work searching real estate listings while I wait for my food to be served. Bernie wants to take me house hunting, but I want to do some window-shopping before subjecting my still-tentative preferences to her boisterous personality.
“What’s a nice woman like you doing in a place like this?” a familiar voice says.
I startle, my elbow bumping my freshly filled cup of coffee and sending scalding liquid across the table.
“Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” Lance grabs napkins from a neighboring booth and tries to stem the flood.
The waitress arrives as if by magic, mopping up coffee with a rag. “Don’t you worry, honey. Happens all the time. I’ll get you a refill.”
“Mind if I join you?” Lance slides into a chair without waiting for my permission. I’ve been playing scenarios over and over in my mind about how it will be when I next see him, but I never could have dreamed up a moment like this. “I’ve never seen you in here before, and I’m here nearly every Sunday,” he says.
I stare at him in dismay. He probably thinks I knew this somehow. That I’m stalking him because he slept with me. The familiar heat rises to my cheeks along with a little thrill of anger. I have just as much right to eat here as anybody else.
“We were out of coffee,” I say with dignity.
“Tragic day for coffee, then.” Lance doesn’t sound annoyed. If anything, he looks happy to see me. And there are other available tables. My heart rate picks up a little.
“I confess that I didn’t feel like cooking. And I’m house hunting.”
The waitress appears at this moment with more coffee and my breakfast, which smells amazing. I slide my coffee-soaked notebook off to the side and breathe in the warm comfort smells of fried meat and gravy, crispy hash browns, toast.
“What about you, honey?” the waitress asks Lance. “The usual?”
“Maybe I’ll be adventurous and have what she’s having.”
She laughs as she fills his cup. “You got it. Coming right up.”
Her hand rests briefly on his shoulder. Is that a hint of jealousy in the smile she turns on me? I remind myself to be careful. Lance and I are friends; the sex was Darcy and Lacey and has nothing to do with romance.
He wraps both hands around his coffee cup and drinks. “Ahh, that’s amazing. Coffee and breakfast.”
“You don’t cook?” I ask.
One eyebrow lifts. “I do. But not on Sunday morning.” He takes another swallow of coffee. Sets down the cup. “I’ll admit that I’m surprised to see you here. I figured you’d be at church.”
“Yes. Well, I’m taking a break from church. Possibly permanently. Time will tell.” I take a bite of my hash browns, trying to think what to say next. We know next to nothing about each other; most of our interactions have centered around the Lacey-and-Darcy connection. I want to slide under the table and stay there. Another kind of blanket fort. Another kind of escape.
He touches my arm lightly, with the tips of his fingers, which short-circuits the conversation topics I’ve been outlining in my mind.
“Heard you had a yard sale.”
My whole body goes hot. What has he heard and what must he think? The fact that the impromptu yard sale happened the morning after he and I engaged in what amounts to stranger sex is not going to escape his notice.
“It was a moving sale,” I blurt. “Also, I had no idea that you would be here for breakfast. Also, if I’m going to buy a new house, there is no time like the present.”
He looks confused. “I can sit somewhere else if you’d rather?”
I take a breath. “I just don’t want you to think I came here because I thought you’d be here. I had no way of knowing.”
“Well,” he says. “So much for my babe-magnet status. If you don’t mind, I would love to eat breakfast with you and discuss your house hunt.”
The comment and the smile that goes with it ease my embarrassment, and I find myself smiling back. “That would actually be lovely. I could use a little male input and advice. I’ve never house hunted before.”
“I could even drive you and offer my perspective first hand. Or be driven, if you prefer.”
“I’m sure you have better things to do with your time.”
“Honestly? Not a thing. You’d be saving me from spending the morning cleaning my apartment.”
His apartment doesn’t need cleaning, it needs cluttering. And living in. And maybe more lovemaking.
“I’d love to be driven.”
“Well, then. Cool. Do you have a plan of attack?”
His food arrives, and I share my list of possible houses while we eat.
The waitress brings one check. “Anything else for you two?”
I’m embarrassed all over again. “We forgot to ask for separate checks,” I tell her. “We’re not actually together.”
Lance pulls out his wallet. “We did eat together. And we are together in a thespian sort of a way. So it’s only fair if I pay.”
“More research?” Lacey again, taking control of my mouth, my eyes, even my hand, which brushes his wrist with soft fingertips.
“Call me a research junkie.” He looks into my eyes and smiles, his voice a caress.
A wild and crazy freedom fills me. Here I am, eating breakfast in a bar while almost everybody I know is at church, and I haven’t been struck dead yet. What’s more, I am eating breakfast in a bar with an attractive man who has once taken me home to bed, and is now offering to drive me around to look for houses in which to start my new life.
Chapter Nineteen
A few hours later, the exhilaration has fled.
“There’s just nothing to even say about this.” I gaze out the windshield at a house that does, as promised, have a large and spacious yard and a rustic, homey appearance. But said yard is at the moment a sea of mud, and five large pigs root around at the center of it, a dozen bedraggled chickens scratch around the edges, and the odor wafting into my car will most likely linger on my clothing long after I am dead.
“The tree is nice,” Lance says, referencing an ancient oak that spreads its branches out over the roof.
I look at it dubiously. It’s likely to drop a limb at any moment,
and the roof of this house does not look capable of withstanding a puff of wind, let alone a falling tree branch. No, there is nothing redeeming about this house at all. I’d held out high hopes for it. It’s small, out of town, fits my budget. None of the others have been right, either, and I feel like a balloon that’s been blown up five times, emptied, and left flabby and deformed, neither big and round nor smooth and new. Worse, I’m at the end of my list.
“Well, that’s it, then,” I say. “Home, James. I will make an appointment with Bernie.”
“You sure? You could become a pig farmer. They’re very intelligent, really. I’m sure they’d love to be rescued from their current existence.”
“Cleaned up and brought into the house, you mean?” I wonder, very briefly, whether Moses would warm up to a pig.
“What else was available in the listings?”
“Nothing of interest.”
He’s quiet for a minute, watching the pigs.
“You have a perfectly nice house,” he says. “Why the move?”
Honesty. My new philosophy. “My life inside that house was not as perfectly nice as everybody thinks. I need a clear break.”
His fingers tap on the steering wheel, restless, a complicated rhythm. “I get that. I moved out of mine. After the divorce.”
He turns the key in the starter and pulls out onto the road. The camaraderie we seemed to have over breakfast has evaporated, and he’s clearly making some kind of point about our relationship. He hasn’t touched me once. Not to help me in or out of the car, although he opened the door for me. Not a casual hand on my shoulder, or my knee. And now he’s even keeping his eyes to himself.
This is good, I tell myself. Exactly as it should be. I’m not ready for a relationship. So why do I keep wishing he’d pull the car over to the side of the road and kiss me?
My new say-yes philosophy is yielding certain complications. This afternoon I’ll have to be Lacey, and Lance will be Darcy, and he’ll kiss me—only it won’t be me he’s kissing, it will be Lacey. And after that I’ll go home and have to face Abigail. If she was mad this morning, she’ll be worse after hours of people asking questions about her delinquent mother.
Lance drives in silence. I let my arm hang out the window, playing with the air currents and letting the fragrance of springtime wash away the smell of pig. Fields stretch on either side of the car. Little by little, I begin to relax and feel a tiny bit better. Who knows? Maybe what I want is still out there somewhere.
“Why can’t I find a house like that one?”
I point at a neat two-story house set back from the road, partially screened by evergreens. Tall trees line the driveway, and there’s a beautiful big maple spreading sheltering branches toward a roof that looks like it could withstand a dropped limb or two. A front porch, covered by a small balcony, hosts a two-person swing. Behind the house, on the other side of a boundary set up by fruit trees, lies a large field. The house is white, the roof is green. It’s a dream house.
Lance slows. “You like it?”
“I love it.”
“Well, good. Now we have a better idea of what you’re looking for. Uh-oh. Just what we don’t need.” He pulls off to the right and rolls to a stop as a cloud of dust signals a pickup speeding down the gravel road toward us. When it draws even with us, the truck slows and stops. The driver rolls down his window and grins.
He’s a tall, sturdy man, face half buried in a curly blond beard. “Hey, man!” he says. “Thought you were taking the day off. What are you doing out here?”
“Just out for a drive. What about you?”
“Found the cows in the back pasture; just driving around looking for where they got out.” The bearded man peers through the window at me. “Well, I’ll be. Am I experiencing delusions or is that a woman?”
“Don’t mind Gil,” Lance says. “He’s socially challenged. We suspect he was dropped on his head as a baby.”
“Are you going to introduce me?” the man asks.
“Gil, this is Liz. Liz, my brother, Gil.”
“Just randomly driving in this part of the world?” Gil asks, leaning down to get a better look at me.
The tension radiating off Lance makes me nervous, and I start to babble. “House hunting. Me, I mean. Not us. Lance is just playing chauffeur.”
“Did you like it?” Gil asks, indicating the little white house with a wave of his hand.
I blink at him, confused.
“She’s looking to buy,” Lance says stiffly.
“You didn’t even show it to her? Come on, man, we need somebody in there.”
“What are we talking about?” I glance from one face to the other.
“That house right there,” Gil says. “I own it, and it just happens to be available. Shitty renters, once again. Just moved out. No notice. Be happy to show it to you.”
“Liz has stuff to do. We were headed back to town.” Lance eases my car into a slow roll.
Gil backs up to keep pace. “Rosie will have my head if you don’t bring your friend over for brunch.”
“We just had breakfast.”
“Oh ho!” Gil gives me another look, meaningful in a new way, and my face flushes as I see what he’s thinking.
“We met, coincidentally, and happened to have breakfast. At a restaurant.” Lance’s voice is clipped. “And now we are heading back to town.”
“I let you go, and Rosie will kill us both.”
“Only if you tell her.”
Lance is making this decision for me. Not consulting me. It’s shades of Thomas all over again, and my soul rises in a hot rebellion. I lean across the seat so I can look Gil directly in the face.
“Is the house really for rent?”
The corners of his eyes crinkle. “It is.”
“Would you sell it?”
The men exchange glances. “Get my lout of a brother to drive you up to our place, and we’ll discuss,” Gil says. “I’m headed back that way myself.”
Lance makes a U-turn and follows his brother’s truck. I sneak glances his way in my peripheral vision, but his face is unreadable, the entire surface of him gone as smooth and impenetrable as glass. It seems impossible that the two of us have been naked together, our bodies intimate. We might as well be occupying different planets.
“The family farm,” he explains as we turn onto a well-graveled driveway about a mile down the road from the white house. “Gil and my sister, Rosie, run it together. He’s divorced, she’s widowed, so they just teamed up and moved into the old house together. Makes it easier for them than driving in, especially in the summer.”
“But you drive in?”
“Yeah, kind of a pain in the ass during harvest, but I prefer my own place.”
We park in front of a sprawling ranch-style house, between a Jeep Cherokee and a Subaru station wagon. Gil pulls the truck in on the other side of the wagon.
A border collie dashes down off the porch, barking, tail wagging with enthusiasm. He presents himself to Lance for exuberant petting before he turns more politely to me. I let him sniff my hands. He licks me. I know little of dogs, but I’m pretty sure the tail wagging and the licking are not meant to be threatening. I pat his nose and stroke his ears.
“Are we friends now?”
“Beetle loves everybody,” Gil says. “He’s not exactly a guard dog.”
“Beetle?”
“Don’t ask. Come on.”
He walks up the steps onto the porch, opens the door, and vanishes inside. Lance stalks along beside me. He holds the door open and gestures me in. I hang back, looking up at him, uncertain.
“They won’t eat you,” he says.
“It’s not them I’m worried about,” I mutter as I brush past him and into a space that reminds me of the cloakroom in elementary school. Coats and jackets hang on hooks on the wall. Rubber mats hold a row of muddy boots. The floor itself is spotlessly clean.
“You’ll need to leave your shoes here if you want to be on the right side of Rosie.
” Lance slips off his tennis shoes and sets them neatly on a mat. “And trust me, you want to be on the good side of Rosie.”
A woman appears in the mudroom doorway. She’s shorter than Lance, and considerably rounder, but she looks like him all the same. On her, the blue eyes are sharper, the smile lines deeper.
“Don’t you listen to him,” she says. “I’m the nice one in the family. Kindhearted, easygoing—”
“Ha ha,” Lance says. “Also the comedian.” But he gives her a hug that is more affectionate than his words.
“Somebody has to keep all of you men in line,” she says. “Are you going to introduce me?” Her smile is warm and inclusive, as if she’s known me as long as she’s known her brother, as if me dropping in, unannounced, is perfectly normal and a delightful occurrence.
“Liz, meet my sister, Rosie. Gil thinks he runs this establishment, but Rosie is the real boss.”
I’ve already followed Lance’s example with my shoes, and he picks them up and sets them by his own. They look companionable and compatible sitting there together.
“Well, come in, come in. You’ll eat, of course.”
“Really just dropped in to say hi,” Lance protests. “Like I told Gil, we already ate.”
Rosie makes a dismissive motion with her hand. “Hours ago, surely. Come on. The boys have already set you places.”
We follow her down a short hallway that ends in an enormous kitchen, bright with the light from big windows. Gil stands by a gas stove, spatula in hand, watching pancakes on a griddle.
Lance gestures at the big table that takes up half of the kitchen. Four boys are engaged in wolfing down pancakes. “Those rapscallions all belong to Gil. Meet Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mo.”
“For real?” I ask.
“I’m Mo for real,” the smallest boy says with his mouth full. He’s not exactly small, just the least manlike. His face is still smooth, his voice hasn’t changed yet. “So Uncle Lance nicknamed the others to match.”
“Have a seat.” Lance pulls out a chair for me beside the biggest boy, at the end of the table, and then sits down in the empty chair across from me.
“I don’t want to impose,” I say, hesitating.
A Borrowed Life Page 16
