by Lexi Eddings
If Michael felt at all intimidated, he didn’t show it. “What have you been doing with yourself? Besides getting prettier.”
“Finishing my education and starting a career,” Heather said, trying to be all business despite the flutter in her belly. A compliment from a guy like Mike Evans didn’t count for spit. She drew on her old basketball coach’s advice. The best defense is a good offense. Time to put him on the run. “I’ve been taking care of people like your mother. She was hoping to see you before her surgery this morning, you know.”
She wished she could whale into him about how crappy it was for him to have turned up late. He ought to know how his thoughtlessness had hurt his mom. If only he could have seen Mrs. Evans’s hopeful face when she’d thought he was coming just before she was about to go under the knife. And then the way her face had changed when she’d realized he wasn’t there after all.
It made Heather’s heart ache for her.
But only last Sunday, Pastor Mark had reminded Heather and the rest of her fellow Methodists that they didn’t need to get even with those who upset them.
God was the ultimate scorekeeper.
“Remember how the apostle Paul said: ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head,’” the pastor had explained. “Think of it as a sort of heavenly hotfoot!”
Michael Evans could use a singe around the edges. So instead of tearing into the man, Heather smiled at him. Sweetly.
“You must be tired after your trip from . . . wherever it is you’ve been. Glenda, please fetch a bottled water for Michael from the break room.”
He leaned on the counter that separated them. “And here I thought you didn’t remember me.”
“A girl would be hard-pressed to forget a guy who called her Stilts.”
He nodded. “Point taken. Sorry about that. I was kind of a jerk back then.”
Only back then? Heather clamped her lips together to keep her thoughts from tumbling through them. He disappoints his mother, and then he insults me with the first words out of his mouth. How is that not still jerk-worthy?
“I shouldn’t have teased you about being tall, Heather,” he said. “But you sure make the height look worth the climb.”
She looked away, wishing his voice wasn’t so deep. It drizzled over her, rich as hot fudge on Häagen-Dazs.
“Well, if I can’t get you to smile, I better go see my mom. Maybe I’ll have better luck with her,” he said. “Since you’re taking care of her, you must know which room she’s in.”
“Mrs. Evans is in 201. End of the hall.” Heather glued her gaze to the chart in her hands. It was safer. It kept the little flutters in her belly at bay. “Don’t tire her out.”
“I wasn’t planning on making her run a five K.”
She made the mistake of looking up at him, and Michael smiled.
It was the kind of smile a smart woman hopes never to see because it turns female insides to Jell-O. It was the sort of smile that stood the world on its head. It made her want to trust him, to swallow anything he said whole without pausing to wonder how or if it would go down. His smile was full of promise.
It’s far more likely to be full of horse-hockey.
Michael had skipped town without a backward glance, deserting his family for years.
Heather didn’t understand how he could have given up so much. Granted, her relationship with her own parents was strained at best, and had been since her twin died some years ago. But at least she was still talking to her mom and dad, still trying to maintain a connection, even if it felt like they were all tiptoeing around each other most of the time. Of course, it might help if they’d decide to stay in town for longer than a few weeks at a stretch. Her parents were consumed with travel, the more exotic, the better.
Running from their grief over Jessica.
Once Heather had finished her schooling, she hadn’t felt the need to get away from Coldwater Cove for very long. Her roots were here. Her sister’s grave was here. She had a life here, even if her parents often didn’t.
Michael Evans had been in and out of trouble for years, but the final breach with his family happened after his grandmother died. Mike was suddenly gone, sliced from Coldwater Cove in one swift cut.
Heather never heard exactly why.
Now he was back. Heather told herself she didn’t care, so long as Michael’s reappearance didn’t upset her patient.
“See you ’round, Stilts,” he called over his shoulder as he moved down the hall in long-legged strides.
Yes, indeed. As long as he kept calling her “Stilts,” it would be super easy not to care that Michael Evans was back in town.
Chapter 3
Finding a good man is as hard as sinking a game-winning
three-pointer just as the buzzer sounds.
No, on second thought, finding a good man is harder.
—Heather “Stilts” Walker, Long Shot Queen
of the Lady Marmot basketball team,
all-conference four years in a row
On Friday when her shift was over, Heather wished she could just kick back with a glass of sweet tea and a romance novel and put her feet up. Instead she wiggled into her one and only little black dress and shoved her tired size nines into fire-engine red pumps.
Every Labor Day weekend, a dance was held on Friday night for Coldwater alumni, regardless of when they’d graduated. The high school gym floor would be filled with octogenarians, twentysomethings, and folks from every decade of life in between. Her parents had insisted that she make an appearance.
Heather’s mom and dad served on the organizing committee this year and had spent the better part of last week decorating the gym. A red torii gate fashioned of chicken wire and papier-mâché hung over the door. Paper lotus blossoms and origami storks dangled from the beams. Ever since the Walkers had visited Japan last year, her parents had been on a Zen kick.
“Besides, darling,” her mother had said while she was twisting Heather’s arm about coming to the dance, “how will you ever meet someone if all you do is go back and forth from your dreary little job to your dreary little apartment?”
Her mother had a point, but Heather wasn’t about to acknowledge it. If it had been up to her folks, Heather would have become a trust fund brat. When she was in kindergarten, the wildcat drilling operation her dad had patched together had struck a huge oil deposit on the Walker ranch. Since then, the family had been swimming in cash and decided to diversify, snapping up most of the buildings that ringed the Square and becoming a powerful force in town. Heather could have ditched a career completely and spent her time blowing the generous stipend her dad tried to get her to take, but she wanted to make it on her own.
Besides, after her twin, Jessica, died in that senseless accident, Heather ached for her own life to mean something. There had to be more than shopping and flitting around the globe.
So she’d earned her RN through her own hard work. And she could afford the “dreary little apartment” on her hospital salary without touching the fund her parents had set up for her, thank you very much. As far as meeting someone went, as long as endless piles of Walker money followed her around, how could she ever be sure a guy was interested in her for herself, not just her burgeoning trust fund?
“There are bound to be some successful graduates returning for the reunion,” her mother had said. “I hear Skyler Sweazy is back for the weekend. He went to Harvard, remember?”
Skyler belonged to one of the other founding families in the area and had the distinction of being the first Ivy Leaguer in the county. So the fact that Heather came from money probably wouldn’t figure into the equation with him. But he’d also been her sister Jessica’s boyfriend back in high school.
So that would be kinda weird.
Heather had spent most of her adult life trying to escape the shadow of her dead sibling. Just the thought of seeing Skyler as something other than an old classmate gave her the
willies, but she promised her mom she’d show up for the dance.
Sometimes, you have to go along to get along.
Besides, one of the biggest complaints from returning alumni was that the classmates who lived in other parts of the country made more effort to attend the reunions than the ones who’d stayed in town.
There’s a reason for that.
Reunions were mostly about bragging rights—who’d landed the best job, who’d married well, whose kids were the cutest, yada, yada, yada. Heather wasn’t in a mood to make appreciative noises over pictures of someone else’s little bundles of joy.
Her goldfish clearly did not count.
But tonight was a “command performance.” After her parents had ponied up for the new mental health clinic at Bates College with a generous endowment when she’d asked them to, she couldn’t very well brush them off.
Attending the reunion dance was such a simple request.
She didn’t see them now in the milling crowd gathered in scattered clumps around the gym. However, Junior Bugtussle spied her and waved her over to join him and his wife, Darlene, by the buffet table.
“Hey there, Heather.” Junior pumped her hand with vigor. “Gotta thank you again for takin’ such good care of our boy.”
“It was a team effort. Aaron had a close call. Good thing you got him to the hospital so quickly,” Heather said. A ruptured appendix was no joke, and Junior must have recognized it. The Bugtussles’ truck had come flying up to the emergency room door with one of the sheriff’s cruisers on its tail, sirens blaring. Junior had torn through the town’s one stoplight and across the mayor’s manicured lawn, destroying his prized pachysandra. Once the deputy realized the violations were committed, not out of malice or too much white lightning, but out of desperation, he ripped up the ticket he’d started to write and helped Junior get his boy into the ER.
Heather’s gaze swept the crowd, still looking for her parents. She couldn’t slip away from the dance until they’d seen her there. She found them across the gym floor under one of the basketball hoops. Her mother was deep in conversation with the retiring Judge Preston and the new judge who’d been appointed to replace him. Everyone was curious about Barbara Mueller, a former Oklahoma City prosecutor, and wondered how she’d adapt to life in Coldwater Cove.
Heather’s mother looked up and spied her next to the Bugtussles. She sent her a furious frown. Heather could almost hear her scathing thoughts from across the wide space.
“Why are you spending time with those ignorant hillbillies when you could take your place with the quality folk of the county?”
Heather had tried to explain to her mom that she had a totally different idea about what “quality” meant, but her mom never quite understood. If honesty and “salt-of-the-earthiness” counted—emphasis on “earthiness,” it must be admitted—then the Bugtussles had “quality” in spades. She turned back to face them.
“Aaron’s doing pretty well considering how serious that surgery could have been, but he’s not eating much,” Heather told the Bugtussles as she helped herself to some of the goodies on the buffet table. Shrimp tempura, sashimi, egg rolls, and vegetables with wasabi.
Say what you will about my folks, but they do know how to lay out an impressive spread.
“If your son eats a good breakfast tomorrow and continues to improve,” Heather said, “he could be going home by suppertime.”
“Well, don’t tell him that or he won’t never eat a bite,” Junior drawled. “He let slip to his ma that he kinda likes only having to share a room with one other kid.”
“Aaron has four younger brothers,” Darlene said, beaming.
“And the trailer ain’t got but two bedrooms, so the boys have to bunk together. Anyways, Grandma’s with the little ’uns tonight and what with Aaron well looked after at the hospital, Darlene and me thought, being as how I almost graduated, we’d come to the reunion dance.”
Junior ran a hand over his gel-slicked hair, as if to highlight the fact that the Bugtussles knew how to gussy up for an occasion. His overalls were worn, but clean, and his boots had been freshly hosed off. He must have doused himself with Old Spice. The cloud of scent swirling around him made Heather’s eyes burn.
Darlene was pretty in a windswept-prairie sort of way and would have looked fine if she’d just come as she was. Unfortunately, she’d done her best to try to look “nice.” Heather doubted even a Wizard-of-Oz-style twister could budge a single strand of Darlene’s heavily sprayed do.
“I’m glad you came,” Heather said with sincerity. Just because her parents had become world-class snobs didn’t mean she had to be. “Have you tried the food yet? My folks were on the reunion committee. They had sushi shipped in especially for the occasion.”
“Sushi, huh? Is that what that is?” Junior eyed the buffet table with suspicion. “I thought somebody done laid out a couple a trays of bait.”
“Be nice, Junior,” Darlene said, elbowing him with a quick poke to the ribs.
“Ow!” Junior rubbed his side and edged away from his wife a bit. “I’m always nice. I’m just saying, what’s wrong with havin’ them little Vienna sausages wrapped in a biscuit?” He pronounced it “Vy-Anna,” making sure the tiny wieners sounded Ozarkian instead of Austrian. “Maybe some fried okra on them fancy colored toothpicks. That’s all.”
“This here is an uptown shindig, for sure,” Darlene told him. “Stands to reason, the food needs to be way more fancier than pigs-in-a-blanket and okra on a stick.”
“Well, fancy or not, when a feller don’t know what somethin’ is, he oughter think twice about putting it in his mouth.”
“Junior, I’ve watched you stuff your face for the last twelve years or so. Don’t nothing make you think once, let alone twice. I swear you’d eat the putty out of the winders when you’re sharp-set.” Darlene rolled her eyes at her husband and turned back to Heather. “When do you think they’ll get the fiddle player and caller going?”
The Bugtussles were obviously expecting a different sort of dance.
“I think the big band is playing tonight,” Heather said. A local crew of instrumentalists got together to play standards at the Opera House on the Town Square once a month. They weren’t exactly Benny Goodman’s orchestra, but they had fun making music and made sure their audience had fun, too. Even recent grads, who might be expected to be more at home at a rap concert, didn’t seem to mind trying a fox-trot for the reunion dance. As part of the phys ed program at the end of their senior year, everyone who graduated from Coldwater High learned a little ballroom.
Unfortunately, Junior and Darlene hadn’t made it to that particular finish line.
“Well, shucks. Bet they don’t play nothing we can square-dance to,” Junior said morosely. “Come on, Darlene. Let’s get us some grub then.”
“Be sure to try that sushi stuff, Junior,” his wife said, tugging at his elbow. “Just because you ain’t never tried it don’t mean you won’t like it.”
“I ain’t never shot myself in the foot but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to try that neither.”
With a smile, Heather watched the Bugtussles move down the buffet line. Then a different male cologne overpowered Junior’s Old Spice. This new scent was like a civet cat stalking her from a musky jungle. With a low note of stale Febreze.
“Hope the music starts soon,” came a voice from behind her to go along with the cologne. “I bet you remember how to do a good West Coast swing, Heather.”
She turned to find Skyler Sweazy, her sister’s old flame. Too much Axe spray aside, he looked like a GQ cover model in skinny-cut khaki Dockers and a navy Izod polo shirt. She wondered if he had his brows waxed back East. Not so much as a nose hair was out of place.
He must spend hours in front of a mirror.
Skyler had always struck her as being self-absorbed. In that respect, he hadn’t changed much since she’d seen him last. Heather thought a good-looking guy who didn’t know it was always more attractive than one wh
o knew he turned female heads.
Still, Jessica had been wild about the guy, so there must be something to him.
Skyler grinned at her, displaying a set of blindingly white teeth.
If those aren’t veneers, I’ll eat my goldfish.
“How could I forget?” Heather said. “Mrs. Kady spent the better part of that last semester in gym class making sure we could all dance.”
Skyler stretched his spine, standing as tall as he could, but Heather still topped him by a couple of inches. She and Jessica had been fraternal twins. Her sister had been much shorter, the crown of her head reaching only to Skyler’s shoulder height. Everyone said they made the perfect couple.
Maybe if I were in flats . . .
She wiped that thought away. It was something straight from her mother’s playbook. Marcia Walker was all about women making unreasonable accommodations for the men in their lives. It sometimes seemed as if she were more an extension of Heather’s father than a person in her own right. Over Skyler’s shoulder, Heather caught sight of her mom, smiling and giving her a surreptitious “thumbs-up.” She’d obviously steered Jessica’s old boyfriend over to her.
Nuts to that. Heather adjusted her posture to ramrod perfection. If Skyler’s neck hurt from looking up to her, so be it.
“What have you been up to since you left town?” she asked pleasantly. It wasn’t his fault he’d fallen into her mother’s nefarious plans.
“Making partner at Dunham and Howe in Cambridge, Mass.,” Skyler said with no hint of his former Okie drawl. He hadn’t quite mastered a Bostonian accent yet, but he dropped plenty of r’s in the attempt. “And in record time, too.”
“Well, good for you, Skyler.”
“Got that right.” Now he sounded more like the boy she’d known. “Nothing worse than being beholden to family money.”
That set her back a step. His family was easily as wealthy as hers. The Sweazys had made their money in cattle back when Oklahoma was still a territory. Later, they’d branched out into trucking and shipping, both domestic and international, to bring their beef to market. The fact that Skyler didn’t want to be folded into the family business raised him a notch or two in her eyes.
