“Jack.”
“Arlie.” He nodded, his gaze not leaving hers. “I just wanted to tell you, you don’t have to clean the Dower House. I can’t believe the lawyer’s rep asked you. Well, I can, but I’m sorry she did.” His smile was so slight it almost wasn’t there. “I also can’t believe that’s the best excuse I could come up with for coming over here this late.”
She didn’t smile back. “She didn’t ask me. She asked Rent-A-Wife, which is Gianna’s business. I just help out once in a while. Unless you no longer need our services, we’ll do the job.” Angry for a reason she couldn’t name, not to mention insulted, she started to push the door shut.
“Wait.” He stopped the door with his hand around its edge. “May I come in?” He hesitated. “Please.”
It’s time for peace in all our souls. Gianna’s voice echoed gently in Arlie’s mind. She took a deep breath and stepped back, Caruso winding around her ankles. “Sure. Go ahead and have a seat. Would you like something to drink?” She made the offer grudgingly, but she wasn’t Gianna Gallagher’s daughter for nothing.
“Do you have coffee? I know it’s late for that, but it’s tasted good all day.”
Friendly. That was how he was going to play it. Let’s just pretend the past sixteen years didn’t happen. Okay, she could do that. Sure she could. “There’s an organic market on the lake. I think everyone buys coffee there now.” She went to make a fresh pot, breathing deep when she opened the coffee canister. The scent was definitely therapeutic.
He leaned on the counter between the kitchen and the dining area. “I had supper at the Anything Goes Grill on the north end. I guess it’s new? It was good.”
“It is good. It’s nicer than the Silver Moon, although the food’s about equal on the quality scale, and it has booze.” Chris’s family had opened Anything Goes within the past year. He didn’t work in the restaurant, but he spent a lot of time there. She wondered if he’d been there tonight.
Jack looked around. “Your house looks pretty. Was it nice to come back to where you lived as a little kid?”
“It was after a while. At first, until we painted everything and put down the hardwood floors, I just kept thinking of it as the house where we lived when my mother left.” She lifted cups from the cupboard.
“Do you hear from her? Your mother?”
“No. Well, yes. At Christmastime. Usually. She’s forgotten a few.”
Arlie handed him his coffee, then filled a plate with cookies and led the way back to the living room, carrying the plate and her own mug. The cat glared at her from the seat of the recliner. “I didn’t introduce Caruso, did I? She’s my roommate.”
“What a beauty she is.” Jack had always loved cats. He set his cup on the table at the end of the couch and lifted Caruso into his arms. She leaned into him, purring politely and eyeing him adoringly with bright green eyes. “I thought Russian Blues didn’t like strangers.”
“She does. Especially males.” Although the cat wasn’t crazy about Chris. She always climbed onto her perch on the front windowsill and lay with her back to the room when he was there. Arlie wasn’t so sure Caruso’s instant adoration of Jack qualified her as a good judge of character.
When they were seated, Jack sipped from his coffee, closing his eyes for a moment in appreciation. “Rent-A-Wife?” He raised an eyebrow. “Weren’t you wearing scrubs today?”
“I’m a nurse at the hospital in Sawyer. I just help at Rent-A-Wife when Gianna needs me.” He was trying to make conversation, and she had to give him points for the effort, but she didn’t know what to say to him.
He picked up the scrapbook that lay on the couch beside him. “I remember this. You made it that last summer, didn’t you?”
She nodded, and quiet settled between them as he leafed through the heavy pages. Partway into the book, he began to ask questions. She progressed from two-word answers—“Sophomore year”—to short explanations—“No, I was grounded”—to unwilling laughter when he buried his head in his hands after seeing a picture of himself in drag during the high school production of Hairspray. After that, they laughed more, argued over things that didn’t matter and played the “do you remember?” game. At some point, it was almost as though he’d never left Miniagua. Never left her.
They were on their second cups of coffee and yet another plate of cookies when Jack reached the end of the album. He fell silent, looking at the five-by-seven studio shot of the ten of them who’d driven together to the dance. The last dance.
“Do you ever talk about it?”
She looked at where the book lay open across his lap, then up at the clench of his jaw, the set of his mouth and the tragic look in the eyes behind his glasses. She set down her cup and clasped her hands between her knees. She kept her voice quiet and steady, trying to downplay the huskiness of it. “We mention it sometimes. We say ‘the accident’ because you can’t just pretend away something that changed your life to that extent. We talk about Daddy—he was Superdad, after all.” She smiled, feeling her cheeks wobble with the effort. “But we don’t play the ‘if only’ game—at least not out loud, because it would drive us crazy.”
Jack nodded and looked at the picture again.
“Do you talk about it?” she asked gently.
“No.”
“Do you see Tucker?”
Grief darkened his eyes and stiffened his features once again. “Not often, though we’re both here now.”
She tried to imagine her life without Holly and couldn’t. “Maybe we should talk about the accident. Gianna says it’s time to let things go.” She said the words, but she didn’t mean them. She could be polite to Jack, even friendly. But she didn’t think she could quite forgive him. At least, not yet.
“How is Gianna?”
“Wonderful. She had a heart attack three years ago—that’s why I came back here to live—but she had surgery and has done great ever since.”
“Maybe I’ll get to see her.”
Arlie didn’t ask about his grandmother’s last days or her death. She was afraid if she delved too deeply into the well-being of any of the Llewellyns, she’d never be able to come out of the morass of memory again.
But there was Jack, for the first time in nearly half her life, sitting so close she could feel the warmth of him. That same warmth she’d felt before—
Before everything changed.
“I remember screaming,” she said without meaning to. “I didn’t realize no one could hear me because my larynx was injured. I wanted to comfort Holly because her foot hurt so much. Daddy wouldn’t answer us. I couldn’t find you. That’s all I remember.” There was more. But she wouldn’t go there. Couldn’t.
The prom had been the event of the school year for high school juniors and seniors. They’d rented the ballroom at the country club, having car washes and selling magazine subscriptions and candy bars to cover the expense.
Even in a high school as small as Miniagua’s, everyone knew there would be drinking at the prom, so the parents came up with the idea of hiring vans to provide transportation to the club.
Jack’s grandparents, under the auspices of Llewellyn’s Lures, owned their own limo, but Margaret said it was needed for business. This was how Arlie, Jack, Holly and Tucker ended up riding to and from the country club in the back of a twelve-passenger church van. Jesse Worth and Linda Saylors sat in front of them with Sam’s date, Cass Gentry. Sam, Nate, and Libby Worth sat behind Arlie’s father and stepmother in the front seat.
No one was particularly comfortable, and hardly any of them fastened their seat belts around their formal clothing. Arlie’s father—who always started every drive with the words “seat belts on?”—turned an unaccustomed deaf ear to the lack of clicking buckles from the backseats.
At first the girls had been embarrassed, but had joined in with the others when
Dave Gallagher’s rumbling baritone and Gianna’s sweet soprano started singing “Dancing Queen.”
The next thing Arlie remembered was screaming.
“One time,” Arlie said, her throat aching, “Gianna came into Libby’s tearoom while I was cleaning. I had ‘Dancing Queen’ playing loud and my mop and I were dancing away. When I saw her face, it just killed me what I was doing to her. I went to shut it off, apologizing like mad all the way, and she just said, ‘Oh, no, honey, it’s like singing with your dad again,’ and turned it up some more. We danced through the whole song. I think I’ve played it a thousand times since then.”
Jack’s face was pale, his features set, and Arlie knew that whatever it had cost her to talk about that night, he’d paid a heavy price for listening, too.
“We’ve all healed,” she reminded him, keeping her voice level and quiet. She got up quickly, needing to move, not wanting to remember anything else about the accident and its aftermath. “More coffee?”
“Yes.” He followed her back to the counter. “The real reason I came here tonight was to apologize, but I don’t have any idea where to begin with you or with anyone else. I don’t know how to be back here. What to do when I run into Jesse or Libby or Holly. Do I say, ‘Gosh, guys, sorry my family’s limo came out on top when it did a head-on with the church van’? Or maybe, ‘Hey, look at the bright side—at least you lived’?”
His pain was palpable. She felt it on her skin, in the dryness of her eyes and the heavy beat of her heart.
“You were the only person who ever blamed you for the accident, Jack. Your father was driving the limo, not you, and he died, too. It wasn’t like your family didn’t suffer loss.”
She knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that they were wrong. She set the coffee carafe back on its heating unit and came to lean her elbows on the bar between them. “One person blamed you, that is,” she said quietly, holding his gaze, “but I didn’t blame you for the accident. I blamed you for leaving me.”
Copyright © 2016 by Liz Flaherty
ISBN-13: 9781488009006
A Man of Influence
Copyright © 2016 by Melinda Wooten
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