“So what’s it like, living in D.C.?” John’s question echoed her thoughts.
“Trying at times. I miss all this.” She looked out the window again. “I’ve never let myself think too much about the differences. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“I remember one time when I was about seven or eight telling my dad that when I grew up I was going to move somewhere flat. That I was sick of all the hills and mountains around here. That flat was prettier. And he said he guessed that could be so, but someday I was going to realize that it didn’t really matter whether the land around me was flat or hilly, what mattered was whether it felt like home or not.”
“I think I’d have to agree with that,” she said. “Lori told me your father passed away a few years ago. I was really sorry to hear it.”
“He was a good man. He lived a good life. Tried to set the right example for me. I don’t know that we can ask for more than that.” He looked at her then, his eyes hidden behind the dark glasses. “Liv. I owe you an apology for being such a jackass the last couple of days.”
Her name on his lips, that old nickname only he had ever called her, raised goose bumps on her arms. She looked down at her lap. The truck rolled over a pothole in the road, and the stock trailer behind rattled in complaint. “John, you don’t have to—”
“No, I do.”
“Apology accepted,” she said.
They drove on for a little while, something shifting between them, the silence comfortable in a way that stirred up old feelings inside Olivia, beckoned a yearning for the way things had once been between them. She remembered how they’d be riding along in his first truck, and he would reach across and take her hand, his thumb thumping out the beat to some song on the radio.
He looked at her again, glanced down at her hand resting on the arm of her seat, and she knew, just knew somehow, that he was remembering the same thing.
She jerked her gaze back to the road and sought neutral conversation. “Is Cleeve still running his family’s dairy?” she asked too quickly.
John nodded. “Yep. He takes a lot of pride in that farm.”
“Is he married?”
“He is. Not all that happily, but married.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He’s a good man. He just hasn’t found the right woman.”
“I’m glad you two have stayed friends.” It would have been hard to explain why if he had asked, because it had something to do with her knowing that Cleeve thought of John as a brother, and he’d always made it a priority to watch out for him. To Olivia, there was something comforting about that.
“Have you had breakfast?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“There’s a little place up ahead where I stop sometimes when I’m out this way. Nothing fancy. But the coffee’s respectable, the food’s good.”
“I didn’t bring any money with me.”
“How about I pay and you can load the trailer out at Cleeve’s?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I may regret this.”
The sign came up on the left within a half-mile or so. Pearl’s. Fill Up With Good Food And Gas Before You Leave.
“The wording has been questioned more than once.” John smiled. “Pearl’s canned answer is ‘I’m not wasting good money on another sign when everybody knows what I meant.’ I think she actually printed it up and taped it to the cash register.”
Olivia pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. She was still smiling when he hit his blinker and slowed down, easing the truck and trailer into the gravel parking lot where there were enough cars to prove the sign hadn’t hurt business. John pulled into a space at the edge of the lot and cut the engine. It was amazing to be riding down this country road with him on a beautiful summer morning, laughing about Pearl’s sign. Amazing and yet right. Scary how right it felt.
“Nice morning. Any interest in eating outside?” John asked once they were out of the truck.
“Sounds great. I’ll get us a table if you’ll order for me.”
“Deal. You want to go in and take a look at the menu first?”
“No need. Just pick me out something with real fat in it,” she said.
He smiled. “You’re definitely at the right place.”
Olivia headed for the picnic tables in the grass to the side of the store, her stomach doing a muffled rumble at the aroma of bacon and eggs wafting out the front door. John had stopped just short of the entrance to talk to someone. His back was to her, and her gaze caught and hung on the sturdy width of his shoulders, the curve and indention of the muscles in the arms folded across his chest as he laughed at something the man next to him had just said.
Olivia had no idea what she was doing here. Or what had caused the change between them this morning. Normally, she would have taken the situation apart, dissected it for bits of evidence to support whichever argument seemed most likely. But this morning, she just wanted to be here. And to enjoy it while it lasted. That was enough.
John turned just then and caught her gaze, as if he’d known she was looking at him. For the life of her, she could not look away. Some well-submerged feminine instinct rallied and wanted him to know she’d been looking, that she still found him overwhelmingly attractive.
It was a moment cut away from the others surrounding it. He had taken his sunglasses off, holding them in his right hand. She was glad, because she recalled then how it was never the color of his eyes she remembered when she thought of them. It was this, the look in them when he saw her, in that initial moment before he had time to censor his response: untethered gladness, appreciation, attraction. She remembered this because no one had ever looked at her with that combination of intensity, before or since. Until now.
The moment couldn’t have lasted more than three or four seconds. And yet everything inside her shifted and moved. Like platelets in the earth whose movement permanently alters the landscape above.
Shaken, she dropped her gaze and headed for a table.
Ten minutes later, John came back out with their food in a brown paper bag. “Sorry,” he said. “They’re a little busy this morning.”
“It was nice just sitting out here,” she said, her former bravado now gone altogether. She kept her gaze focused just short of his, chattering on about how good the food smelled, how warm the sun already was, and then she stopped, hearing herself.
Olivia had never been one to chatter.
John wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking at her with an intensity that melted something deep inside her. “Hope you like this,” he said, glancing down then and pulling out of the bag some bundles wrapped in white paper.
“If it tastes as good as it smells—”
John handed Olivia one bundle, along with a plastic cup of orange juice.
“Thank you,” she said, and opened it to reveal a four-inch-high bacon-and-egg biscuit. “That’s a ten-miler if I ever saw one.”
John smiled. “You said lots of fat.”
Olivia took a bite and decided then and there that it would be worth every extra mile she had to run to make up for it. John had gotten the same thing, and they ate in companionable, appreciative silence while Olivia thought how nice it was to hear his laughter again, how much she had missed it, how gratifying it was to be the one to prompt it.
“I can’t remember when I enjoyed anything more than that,” she said, when she’d finished the last bite. “I guess the feminine thing to do would have been to offer you the last half of mine. But that was just too unbelievable.”
“I’ll tell Pearl you said so next time I see her.”
They sat there on the wooden seats of the old picnic table, their gazes on one another’s face. Searching. Assessing. And the look held for just a second too long in the way of a moment between two people that says This means something. Their smiles tapered off, and the questions hanging between them were all but audible. What happened to us? It was like this, wasn’t it? As good as we’re remembering.
<
br /> John cleared his throat.
Olivia blinked and sat up straighter.
Then they got busy wadding up their biscuit wrappers, cleaning off the table, dropping the remnants of their breakfast in the nearby trash can while feelings she had thought time would have dulled into non-existence swooped through her. Wrong! They existed. Oh, they existed.
On the walk back across the parking lot, she couldn’t look at him, but knew his gaze was on her. She savored the pleasure in that, however short-lived it might be.
The silence between them strung out while they got back in the truck, hooked up seatbelts, closed doors. They were a mile down the road when John finally said, “So how did you decide to go into broadcasting? I never realized you were interested in it.”
“I wasn’t. I was doing an internship at a small station. The regular weather girl got sick one day right before going on air, and in a moment of desperation, they shoved me in front of the camera. I was so scared I thought I was literally going to have a heart attack.”
John smiled. “I bet there are a few tabloid shows that would love to have a clip of that.”
“Scary thought,” Olivia said, grimacing.
“It’s not something I’d have imagined you doing.”
“Me, either,” she admitted. “Sometimes I feel like it’s not really me doing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like I’m someone else in front of the camera. Just putting on the mask.”
“You make it sound easy. Like anyone could do it. I know that can’t be true.”
She lifted a shoulder. “I got better over the years. But it’s definitely one of those jobs where someone is always revving to take your place.”
“So what happened to your dream of being a writer?”
The question sent surprise skidding through her. He had remembered. He was the only person in her life she’d ever voiced that dream to. With the question came an echo of her father’s voice. No point in letting your dreams get bigger than you are, girl. Just means you’ll end up bitter and disappointed. She wondered now, from the perspective of an adult, if that was what had happened to her father. If he’d just never gone after his own dreams for fear of failure, and had spent the rest of his life in bitterness.
To John, she simply said, “I feel lucky to have been given the opportunities I’ve been given. It seems ungrateful to be disappointed about not doing something I probably wouldn’t have been any good at, anyway.”
“I think you would have been damn good,” he said. “I’ve always thought the best writers are the ones who open their hearts and show the world what’s inside. That was something I always knew you could do.”
His words warmed her, filled her with the kind of concentrated happiness a person knows can never last, so pure is its intensity. A mile or two more of Lanford County countryside rolled by, and all Olivia could think was how surreal this entire morning had been. As if someone had picked the two of them up out of their lives and set them down in a scene where their past did not exist, their future did not matter.
Maybe it didn’t.
Was such a thing possible?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Circles
IF SOMEONE had told John three days ago that he would be riding down Route 121 East with Liv Ashford in the seat beside him, he would have said it was about as likely as him waking up that morning with wings and flying himself off to Mars.
So he would have been wrong.
And here he was trying to reconcile the importance of what he had learned last night with the fact that he had no idea how to talk to her about it. After all, he had gone inside her old house, uninvited, snooped around and read those letters, which he didn’t regret because of what they had brought to light. But he did feel guilty for the act itself.
Should he talk to her about it? Was it actually any of his business now? Would she welcome what she might very well consider meddling on his part?
No ready answer came to him. Doubt kept him silent for now.
They had no sooner pulled into the gravel drive-way outside Cleeve’s enormous dairy barn than Cleeve himself was striding out the big center door with a grin on his face just about half the size of the opening. “Didn’t tell me you were bringing company.”
“Kind of last-minute,” John said.
“Hey, Cleeve,” Liv said, sliding out of the truck.
“Hey, dancing queen,” he teased.
“Hah,” she said. “Only because you dragged me out there!”
“Looked like she was havin’ fun, didn’t it, John?”
“That’s your kettle of fish, ole’ boy, lassoing women onto the dance floor,” John said and then added, “Ernie picked your truck up first thing. Said to tell you he’d call you after he got it in the shop and figured out what was wrong with it. You gonna buy a Dodge next time?”
“Right after Ford goes out of business.”
Liv smiled. “I see you two haven’t settled that argument yet.”
John shook his head and found himself smiling back. “Not yet. Aren’t you going to offer Liv the grand tour, Cleeve?”
“Sure thing.” He hooked an arm through Liv’s and led her off toward the barn, motioning for John to follow.
“I remember when we came here on that field trip in tenth grade,” Liv said. “You had baby everything. Calves. Rabbits. Chicks. And we got to drink milk fresh from the cow. Was that barn here before?” she asked, pointing at the one to their right.
“My dad and I just built it a couple years ago,” Cleeve said, and John knew he was pleased she had noticed. As far as Cleeve was concerned, anybody who showed an appreciation for farm life went directly to the head of the class. John watched Cleeve work his charm with Liv, guiding her from one thing to another—showing her the new milking system they’d been using for the past year, which had increased their production by twenty percent, proud of what he did here in a way that John both understood and appreciated. And while Cleeve talked, he tried to make sense of the events that had taken place this morning, get a rein on the feelings that seemed to be taking on a force of their own inside him.
In the past twelve hours, everything he’d believed to be true had been turned upside down. No more than half a day ago, he’d been able to look at Liv with a semi-neutral eye, keeping himself afloat on the rock-solid raft of anger he’d built as a life-saving device so many years ago.
And maybe there was a certain comfort in that. That anger at Liv made it easy to bury anything else he might have ever felt for her. All those feelings had been submerged beneath the silt of his resentment. He’d never imagined they would ever surface again.
But he had been wrong. Because, like the arrowheads Flora loved to look for in the pastures on their farm, they had made their way back up through the dirt, so that if you knew what you were looking for, they were recognizable.
And he recognized these feelings—he felt a not small stab of terror for their renewal. Because who was he kidding? If it had been possible to die of heartbreak, he would have done so fifteen years ago. He could admit that much now, at least to himself.
How was it that life could send you rolling along on the same straight path just long enough that you got complacent and thought you knew where you were going to end up? For him, that destination had been spending the rest of his life alone. A week ago, he could not have conceived of wanting again, needing again. It was as if he’d gone numb after Laura died, his guilt over the things he should have done, hadn’t done, leaving a blank hole inside him.
And then Liv came back. And he’d read those letters last night and understood that he had not known everything there was to know about her and why she’d left this town. All the supports on which he’d rested his anger had fallen out from beneath him, and he was left with feelings of an altogether different kind—the renewal of old emotion and attraction for what remained of the girl he had known. And the ignition of something new for the woman she was now.
&
nbsp; Liv’s laughter brought him back to the moment. And the sound of it caused John’s heart to knot up.
As had happened all those years before, he felt the shift inside him, the beginning of feelings that were not within his control. He wanted to stop them and knew a wave of panic at his inability to do so. At the sure and certain knowledge that just because they had a past did not mean they could have a future. And surely, a person could not survive that kind of loss twice in one lifetime.
AFTER CLEEVE HAD FINISHED giving Olivia a tour of the farm, he directed them to the front yard of the white farmhouse. They sat under an old maple tree, and he served them iced tea he swore he’d made himself. It was good, and they gave him credit. For Olivia, it was wonderful to listen to John and Cleeve banter back and forth just as they always had, two men who were more brothers than friends.
And being there with them brought back a lot of good memories. Mr. Hawkins, their physics teacher, who wore a white shirt and khaki pants every day, the belt cinched somewhere just below his chest so that the hem of his trousers barely met the tops of his socks. The spring day the three of them had talked Lori into playing hooky and had spent it on the dock at John’s pond and how Mr. Richmond, the high-school principal, had driven out there and found them and had made them clean blackboards after school for a week.
And they remembered how Cleeve ate three strawberry popsicles and two ice cream sandwiches every day for lunch, no matter how many times his mother threatened not to give him lunch money if he didn’t start ordering the hot plate.
Cleeve shook his head now and pinched his waist-line. “Can you imagine me eating five ice creams a day and being able to get away with it? My onetime furnace metabolism is now a campfire.”
“Welcome to your mid-thirties,” John said.
“I’m not mid yet,” Cleeve protested.
Olivia laughed. And they talked for a while longer about the stuff that wasn’t uncomfortable, that didn’t get too close to the time when she’d left. They stepped around the subject like a wall in the middle of the road that was easier to skirt by than to try to climb over.
John Riley's Girl Page 13
