The Trouble with Joe

by Emilie Richards

  Lately, no one else was asking, and it didn’t appear likely anyone would in the near future. She knew every single guy in Middleton entirely too well to be interested, and anyway, when would she go out with a guy? Friday and Saturday were the busiest nights of the week at the café. She had to be here.

  What’s more, she knew she wasn’t any more than pretty. Lucy wasn’t alone in considering herself to be the plain one in her family. Put her next to her sisters Samantha and Melissa, and she faded into the background. Disconcerting but true. They had regular dates.

  Which was undoubtedly why her heart had bounced just because Adrian Rutledge had looked intrigued by her for one brief moment. How often did that happen?

  Never?

  You’re pathetic, she told herself, before stealing another look out to see how he liked his lunch.

  Hard to tell, when a man was chewing then swallowing.

  It was two o’clock before she could escape, and then not without guilt. But Shea, her assistant cook, had shown up, and Bridget was to come at four to help set the tables for dinner. Lucy could spare a couple of hours.

  Adrian had waited with apparent patience, sipping coffee and reading the weekly Middleton Courier.

  “My mother’s accident is in here,” he said, closing the newspaper and folding it when Lucy walked up.

  “Well, of course it is. I told you, everyone knows her. And we don’t have that many accidents right here in town.”

  The editor had referred to her as “the kind woman known affectionately as ‘the hat lady,’” which Lucy had thought was particularly tactful. She was glad he hadn’t mentioned that the hat lady was homeless. From his write-up, it sounded as if she might have been a respectable senior citizen who was borrowing a Safeway shopping cart to get her groceries home, rather than an indigent whose shopping cart was the next thing to a home. Adrian wouldn’t have to be embarrassed after reading the article in the Courier.

  “Where do we start?” he asked.

  “The library.” Lucy had already decided. “I know Wendy is working this afternoon. She was really fond of your mother.”

  He held open the door for her. “She’s the librarian?”

  Lucy nodded, and after suggesting they walk since the library was only three blocks away, she said, “Yes. Wendy’s from Yakima, but she married Glenn Monsey who was working for a builder over there. Our old librarian was ready to retire when Glenn decided to come home to work with his dad, who’s a contractor.”

  “I hadn’t noticed any new building.”

  Was he bored? Or sneering at her town? Just because she sometimes thought Middleton was dull didn’t mean she’d put up with an outsider saying so. Eyeing him suspiciously, she said, “They do more over in Sequim than here in town, but we have new houses, too. Plus, they do remodeling.”

  He nodded, but she wasn’t sure he’d even paid attention to what she said. His steps had slowed. “You have an attorney in town.”

  The office that had caught his attention was narrow, sandwiched between a gift-and-card shop and Middleton’s only real estate office. On the window, gold letters announced in an elegant script, Elton Weatherby, Attorney-At-Law.

  She waved through the window at Mr. Weatherby, who she happened to know was seventy-four years old. He and her grandfather had been in the same grade in school. He was thin and stooped, with a white shock of hair and a luxuriant mustache that actually curled up on the ends. He waved back.

  “I suppose he doesn’t do much but write wills,” Adrian said thoughtfully.

  “Why would you think that? Middleton’s a normal town with all the usual lawsuits and squabbles. He does quite a bit of criminal defense, although most of it might be small potatoes by your standards.”

  “Tavern brawls?”

  Lucy was pleased to find that she was starting once again to dislike Adrian Rutledge. His condescension annoyed her.

  “We have murder and rape and domestic disturbances, just like everyone else,” she said shortly, then nodded at a business on the next corner. “We’ll stop at the Hair Do later and talk to Cindy.”

  “Your sister mentioned her. She said Cindy cut my mother’s hair.”

  He always said my mother in the same, stilted way. On impulse Lucy asked, “You must have called her Mom when you were a kid.”

  Adrian glanced at her. “That was a long time ago.”

  “You just always sound so...uncomfortable. As if you don’t want to acknowledge her.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw his jaw muscles knot. After a minute he said, “But I have, haven’t I? I’m here.”

  Immediately ashamed, Lucy said, “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  They walked in silence then, Lucy nodding at passersby whom she knew. She was very conscious that everyone was noticing them, wondering where they were going and why.

  It was lowering to know that nobody would speculate, even for a minute, that Lucy Peterson had snagged herself a handsome new man. If she’d been Samantha, that’s exactly what they would be thinking. But she knew all too well what they thought about her. Poor Lucy would certainly get married someday, she was such a nice young woman and a good cook, too, but of course her husband would be a local boy, not anyone truly exciting. Because she wasn’t exciting.

  No, today they were staring because they’d heard Adrian had come to town. People were obviously dying to know why an obviously wealthy attorney’s mother had been homeless. As far as Lucy knew, she was the only person he’d talked to at all about his family history, and despite her mixed feelings about him, she would keep to herself everything he’d told her. At least until he and the hat lady were gone, and there was no reason that townspeople couldn’t gossip to their hearts’ content.

  The library was a block off the main street, built just four years back. When Lucy was growing up, the library had been on the second story of an aging granite-block municipal building, which meant it wasn’t accessible to anyone who couldn’t climb the stairs. The room, cold in winter and hot in the summer, had only been about six hundred square feet. Since the new building opened, the collection had tripled and the library even had a meeting room for public use. The land it stood on was donated, and every cent spent on raising the building had been donated. Middleton was proud of its library. If Adrian sneered, Lucy was prepared to turn around and head right back to the café. She wouldn’t waste another second on him.

  But when they walked in he actually looked mildly impressed. “Wouldn’t have thought you had the population to support a library this size.”

  Before she could answer, Wendy spotted them from the information desk. She rose to her feet as they approached. “Lucy! I never see you on Saturdays!”

  “I brought the hat lady’s son to meet you. I was hoping you’d have a few minutes to talk about her. Wendy Monsey, this is Adrian Rutledge.”

  They shook hands, Wendy looking him over with interest, and she suggested they go to her office. The fact that she had an office was one of the things she appreciated most about the new library.

  Wendy was about Lucy’s age, beanpole tall and skinny, with curly dark hair that tended to frizz during the incessantly rainy winter. They’d become friends right away when Glenn brought her home to Middleton. Wendy had a master’s degree from the University of Washington and had been working in the Yakima public library system before coming here. She was energetic, and enthusiastic, and full of ideas.

  Her office wasn’t very big, and she had to lift bags of books—“Donations,” she explained—from one of the chairs before they could sit.

  Lucy wished the limited space didn’t force her to sit quite so close to Adrian. Their shoulders brushed as they faced Wendy across her desk.

  “I understand you let my mother check out books even though she didn’t have an address,” Adrian said.

  �
�She was probably my favorite patron,” Wendy explained. “I set aside books for her, and when she brought them back we’d talk about them. Not that many people have the time or interest in doing that. I mean, half the patrons only come in here when they need a book on writing résumés, or an automobile repair manual. Or they read nothing but mysteries, or check out only gardening books, or...”

  Lucy’s cheeks warmed just a little. She had a couple of gardening books checked out most of the time. She especially enjoyed the ones with lots of gorgeous photographs.

  “What did she read?” Adrian asked, leaning forward slightly. “I’ve tried to imagine how a woman who thought she was an impoverished young lady of good breeding and small fortune in Regency England coped with modern life all around her.”

  Lucy looked at him sharply. Had he actually read Jane Austen? She wouldn’t have expected that.

  “She had all these supposed identities, but she was still herself, too. I don’t know how to explain.”

  Lucy agreed, “It’s as if the identity of the day was only on the surface. She’d choose different hats, and her accent would change, and even her mannerisms, but...she was always the hat lady. I could talk about gardens with her no matter whether she was Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth Taylor. Queen Elizabeth never missed a garage sale any more than Eliza Doolittle would. Something essential stayed the same.”

  Wendy nodded. “And she actually lived in the here and now. But only sort of. She didn’t read, oh, about politics or terrorism or anything really current. I’m not even sure how much she understood local politics or the school bond issues. She liked to read fiction and poetry and biographies. Anything Arthurian, although she always said The Once and Future King was the best. She did love mysteries, mostly the old ones. Josephine Tey, and Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, especially after he met Harriet Vane. Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon.”

  They could both see his bewilderment.

  “I hooked her on some modern authors, too, though. Elizabeth George—”

  “That figures,” he muttered.

  Wendy laughed. “She probably was more willing to try the books because of the author’s name. But she liked Martha Grimes and P. D. James, too. Oh, and Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael mysteries, although I guess we can’t exactly call Ellis Peters modern.” She talked about how gifted his mother was at finding the tiniest of plot flaws, and how when she really loved a book she’d bring it back with passages marked. “She’d read them aloud. She did it so beautifully, as if she were on stage. I could see how much pleasure she took in language.”

  Adrian stirred. “She read aloud to me when I was little.” His voice was strange, as though the memories weren’t entirely welcome. “Even later, when I was reading myself. At first, books just a little beyond me, like The Wind in the Willows. Once I was eight or nine, I’d have died before I told anyone else, but she still read a chapter to me most nights. By then, it was stuff that was way beyond my reading level. Those books by Mary Renault about Theseus.”

  “The King Must Die,” the librarian murmured.

  “Yeah. I loved those. When she left—” he cleared his throat. “We finished The Hobbit the night before I left to visit my grandparents. She said we’d start The Fellowship of the Ring when I got home.”

  Heart jumping into her throat, Lucy swung to face him. “She had it! Just that one! I thought it was strange, because I didn’t find the other two. It’s only a paperback, and the pages are yellowing, the way older paperbacks always are. But...she must have kept it.”

  “She’d...already bought it. I remember thinking how fat it was and wondering how long it would take us to read it. But I really liked The Hobbit, so I was okay with the idea.”

  “Did you ever read The Lord of the Rings?” Lucy asked softly.

  “No.” His voice was harsh. “Skipped the movies, too.”

  “She never did, either.” Wendy sounded extraordinarily sad. “I suggested them once. She said no, she was waiting.”

  His hands tightened on the arms of the chair. Lucy saw his knuckles go white. “Waiting? Did she say for what?”

  Wendy shook her head. “Her voice trailed off and she looked so bewildered and unhappy I started talking about something else as if I hadn’t noticed.”

  They sat silent for a moment.

  Lucy and Adrian left shortly thereafter. They had reached the sidewalk when he stopped suddenly. “Can you give me a minute?”

  A wrought-iron bench had been placed there for library patrons waiting for a ride. He sank onto it as if his knees had given out.

  “Of course.” Watching him worriedly, she sat, too.

  He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head. He’d obviously been more shaken by talking about his mother than she’d realized.

  A little shocked that he was letting her see him so agitated, Lucy waited.

  After a minute, Adrian sighed and straightened. “I’ve forgotten so much.”

  “Most of us put away things from our childhood.”

  “I’d come pretty close to putting it all away.” He didn’t look at her. “Dad didn’t talk about her. He didn’t like it when I tried. Without a sister or brother...”

  “You had no one to...to help you keep her alive.”

  “My grandparents, of course. But after that summer I only flew up there a couple of times for shorter visits. I think Dad would have cut Maman and Grandpère off all together if they hadn’t been insistent.”

  Her heart wrung, Lucy said, “But you do remember. You just...haven’t let yourself.”

  “Yeah. I suppose that’s it.” He turned his head at last, his attempt at a smile wry and far from happy. “You’re dunking me in the deep end.”

  “If you’d rather not—”

  “No, you’re right. I’m here. Later, I’ll regret it if I don’t talk to people who knew her. Especially if—”

  His mother died without ever opening her eyes and knowing him.

  “She knew she had a son,” Lucy told him. “She mentioned you several times. As if you were so wound into a memory she couldn’t forget you. And then she’d get this look on her face.” She fell silent for a moment. “I thought... I assumed her little boy had died. So I never pressed her.”

  “You thought her grief was what derailed her.”

  “Um...something like that.”

  His eyes narrowed. “And that made you even madder, when you discovered I was alive and well.”

  She couldn’t seem to look away from him. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Maybe.”

  Once again his mouth twisted and Adrian turned his head abruptly to stare across the street again. “I can’t even blame you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “About?”

  “Misjudging you.”

  He met her gaze again, his face unreadable. “Are you so sure yet that you did?”

  Lucy nodded, the movement jerky. “Pretty sure.”

  After a moment of searching her face, he said, “Thank you for that, then.” He stood and held out a hand. “I know you don’t have all afternoon. Shall we move on?”

  Lucy stared at his hand, absurdly afraid that, if she laid hers in it, she would be sorry. Touching him might be dangerous to her peace of mind.

  But of course she had no choice, unless she wanted to insult him, so she took his hand and let him pull her to her feet.

  His grip was firm and warm and strong, his hand big enough to entirely engulf hers. Once she was standing, facing him, he seemed reluctant to release her. When he did, her fingers curled into a fist and she tucked her hand behind her back.

  “I am running out of time,” she said, trying to sound unaffected. “I was thinking, why don’t I introduce you to Cindy and leave you to talk to her? And then you might go up to S
afeway and ask for the manager. George did more for your mother than anyone. You haven’t run into him at the hospital, have you? I know he’d be glad to talk to you.”

  A couple of vertical lines appeared between Adrian’s dark eyebrows. “When will I see you again?”

  He sounded...perturbed. As though he would miss her.

  I’m in trouble, she thought dizzily, and knew she wasn’t smart enough to keep herself out of it.

  Before she could think better of it, Lucy heard herself say, “We could go to church tomorrow. Was your mother Catholic? She seemed drawn to Saint Mary’s.”

  “She was raised in the Catholic church.” His face tightened. “I have a vague memory of going to church with her sometimes when I was little. My father didn’t approve.”

  Of course he wouldn’t have, Lucy thought uncharitably. For the first time in her life, she was glad someone was dead.

  Adrian studied her. “Do you mind going to a service at Saint Mary’s?”

  Lucy shook her head.

  “What time?”

  “Let’s go to the second service at nine. That way Father Joseph might have time afterward to talk to us.”

  At some point they had started walking without her realizing.

  When Adrian said nothing, she stole a look at him. “I have your mother’s things at home. Maybe after church you can come and get them.” In a rush she finished, “I can make us lunch.”

  “Is the café not open tomorrow?”

  “No. It’s closed on Sunday and Monday. For my sanity.”

  They’d reached the main street and had to pause while cars passed before crossing. Once there was a break, he put a hand on her back as if the protective gesture was as natural to him as breathing.

  “That sounds good,” he said, stopping on the sidewalk in front of the Hair Do to meet her eyes. “Thank you, Lucy Peterson. For everything.”

  Flustered, she argued, “It’s...not so much.”

  “Yes. It is.” He held open the door to the hair salon. “After you.”