by Jean Stone
With a resigned sigh and no more hesitation, he reached for the phone and called John Benson's cell.
“My hero,” Benson said when he learned it was Andrew. “Love the latest entry, my boy.” John would have loved the column even if he hadn't read it. The latest issue had resulted in an increase in ad sales, and profits were returning. The “buzz” around Buzz was that “Real Women” was the reason for a good chunk of the turnaround. “Real Women” was the gimmick that no one had but Buzz. “You're one of the few people I'd actually talk to on a Saturday night.”
“Sorry,” Andrew said, sitting up in his bed and turning on the light. “Hope I'm not interrupting anything exciting.”
Benson laughed. “You were in the media long enough to know not to believe everything you hear.”
“Right. Well, the good news is, I didn't call to test your reputation. I need your help, John. I need you to run defense for me. For us. For Buzz.” He quickly gave him the overview of Second Chances, and told him about Jo's sweepstakes idea and the media blitz.
“And you want me to kill it,” John said.
“Before it gets off the ground. Before it gets past the assistant's assistant to each and every producer. Including Kevin Green.”
“Especially Kevin Green,” Benson replied. “He's been looking for a way to make me look like an ass.”
“I know.”
There was silence a moment, then John said, “I'll take care of it, Andrew. Just get back to your business of being a gay man in a woman's world. I thought you were nuts in the beginning, but I have to admit, it's working for both of us. I'll take care of Kevin. And the rest.”
“Let me know if I can do anything from this end,” Andrew said, then hung up, turned off the light, crawled back under the covers, and went to sleep as if none of this crap had ever happened.
Marion had invited Jo to have Sunday dinner with Ted, the butcher, and her. Now that their relationship was, in Marion's words, “out of the meat locker,” she was eager for her daughter to get to know the man when he was not behind the chrome-and-glass counter or adorned in a bloodstained white apron.
Just before noon Jo left her apartment and began the short drive to her childhood home, the same place where, for the past several years, Ted had apparently been hiding on and off, in and out, concealing his involvement with her mother. She thought of Andrew. As a gay man, he must know a lot about hiding relationships: Had he left a former one hidden in New York, where he was from? Could that account for why he'd been so disturbed about the prospect of a PR campaign in the city?
Like her mother and Ted, was Andrew hiding something?
Jo shook her head. She must be overtired. But by the time she'd finished organizing her contact lists last night and sending teaser e-mails that the media would receive Monday morning and preparing press releases to forward Monday afternoon, the sun had already risen over the Berkshire Hills. She'd driven home in full daylight, felt only slightly rebuffed when she realized there was no note from Jack under her door. She'd collapsed on the sofa where she'd awakened three hours later with little time to shower and find something appropriate to wear.
She settled on a powder-blue sundress and matching canvas sandals and tried not to remember that she'd bought the outfit for a luncheon cruise around Boston Harbor on which she and Brian entertained Jake and Mona Coughlin, because Brian had been trying to lure the software giant and his wife to invest with Brian's start-up firm. Jake had been a client of Jo's for several years and wasted no time in letting Brian know that he did not mix business and business. Jo had been upset for Brian at the time; now she was relieved. The Coughlins were nice people and, no matter how wealthy, would not have deserved to have lost money with Brian . . . first their cash, then the equity in their home, then the accounts receivable of their business, the money owed to them, much of which had been meant to pay printers and suppliers and had not belonged in their pockets at any time.
Of course, that would not have happened to the Coughlins, because they were not in love with Brian. They'd been too smart for that.
“Josephine,” Marion said when Jo suddenly found herself at the back door with a pint of blueberries in hand, which she'd thought to pick up at the Randalls' farm stand. “Fresh blueberries,” she said, “how thoughtful.”
Ted must already be there or Marion would not have been so formal. Perhaps she was nervous, Jo thought, stepping into the kitchen, then realizing that—good grief!—she was suddenly nervous, too. Could she look at the butcher and not think that the hands that spent most of their days trimming and slicing beef spent most of their nights caressing her mother?
“You remember Ted Cappelinni?”
“Of course,” Jo said with the expected smile, though she hardly would have recognized the white-haired man who got up from the chair at Marion's kitchen table and took Jo's extended hand. He wore a white shirt, navy tie, and a blue-and-white seersucker sports jacket. His eyebrows seemed bushier than Jo remembered, and his nose seemed bigger. He seemed quite shy. “Ted the Butcher,” Jo said with a light laugh. “When I was a little girl I thought ‘the butcher' was all one word, and that it was your last name.”
He smiled and said hello, it was nice to see her again.
“Who wants lemonade?” Marion asked, and Jo said she'd love some and Ted said he would, too. After a few minutes the three took their glasses and filed out to the porch, where they sat and made small talk until the roast finished roasting and the potatoes were done. And all the while Jo tried not to wonder if love would ever again happen to her and why it should matter when she had a new purpose, new goals that were likely to succeed because Jo Lyons was behind them.
She listened patiently to the trials of being a small-town butcher, and how Ted's parents sailed off to America just before the Nazis became aggressive in Europe. When they disembarked in New York they spoke no English. They asked a street vendor where the Italians lived. “New Haven,” the man said, so that's where they spent the Great Depression, and stayed until the early forties when Ted was the newest of, by then, three children.
“Our children need country air,” Ted said his father had announced. So they piled their belongings into an old jalopy and drove north until they found a place that reminded Ted's father of his beloved Tuscany. The place was the Berkshires; the town was West Hope. None of the Cappelinnis had ever left, and most were now buried there.
When speaking of his family, Ted wasn't shy at all.
During dinner Jo told them about the progress at Second Chances and about her concept for a sweepstakes to give away Elaine's wedding.
“Will you go to New York and be on television?” Marion asked with a small wink at Ted as if to say, “See what a successful daughter I have?” and “Won't the church ladies just die?”
But Jo replied, “I'm not sure. But Lily might be the best spokesperson. A lot of people will recognize her from the society pages. She was married to a high-visibility man, you know. That will help business.”
“Well,” Marion said, “I'd like to see you on TV. I think you'd do a fine job.” Well, of course Marion would think that.
“In the old days,” Ted said, “we didn't need gimmicks to make our business work. ‘Give an honest product, make an honest living,' my father always said. Did I tell you he was a butcher, too?”
No, he hadn't said that.
“Who wants blueberries?” Marion asked before Jo had a chance to analyze whether or not Ted thought her new business was an honest way to make a living.
“Let me do it, Mom,” she said with a smile as she stood up. “Whipped cream, Ted?” Then the thought flashed through her mind of one day when she'd been a senior in high school and had stayed home because Brian said he could sneak over to see her. With Marion at work, Jo was alone. Then Brian appeared at the back door with a can of whipped cream. And right there in the kitchen—the very same kitchen—she had stretched out across the linoleum and he had squirted a dollop of cream on her right foot, then licked it off slowly, inch by
inch, toe by toe.
Jo snatched the dirty dishes from in front of Ted and her mother more quickly than she'd intended. Ted's fork dropped onto his seersucker and clattered to the floor.
“Oh,” she said, “I'm so sorry. How clumsy of me.” She could have said she was overtired, but that would bring up the business again and she didn't want to do that.
Ted stood up and brushed off his jacket. “No harm done. Let me help you with those.”
Jo glanced at her mother, who smiled wryly. Jo smiled in return as if to let Marion know that she thought Ted the Butcher was a nice man, and if her mother slept with him, that was fine with her, even though she'd rather not picture that.
Ted carried the dishes to the sink, loosened his tie, and turned back to her mother as he said, “Looks like we have more company, Marion.”
The company had turned out to be for neither Marion nor Ted. It was Frank Forbes, looking for Jo.
31
As best as he could remember, it had been two years since Andrew had had sex with a woman, since he'd felt the soft touch of sweet flesh and the gentle rise and fall of lean legs wrapped around him and the warm, welcoming wetness of love.
He didn't know how it had happened that he and Jo Lyons wound up in the back room of the shop at the same time with the same needs and same wants on their minds. He didn't know how, but they made a bed of Sarah's velvet fabric swatches and he told Jo he'd wanted her from the first day he'd seen her and she said she'd known all along that he wasn't gay, that no man could look at her with such longing if he preferred a man.
He said what he would prefer, would be to take off her clothes, button by button, and if she wouldn't mind, he'd also prefer to savor each and every part of her awesome body slowly, so slowly, one part at a time.
One throat.
One shoulder.
One nipple that stiffened from the touch of his moist, hungry mouth.
And now, from mere inches above her, he gazed into her naked green eyes. He eyed her sleek body, trying to soak in its beauty so he would remember every curve, every hollow, the wave over her rib cage, the soft angle of her hips. He eyed her, top to bottom, then bent to her pleasure and worked with his tongue.
Quickly, she came, as if she had waited for this moment as long as he had, as if she had yearned for his heat from when she'd first seen him, too.
He toyed with her pulsations a moment longer . . . up, down, around, and . . . in. Then he rose up above her. He glanced down at his penis. Had it ever been so engorged? Had it ever felt so strong, so powerful, so much in command of itself? Never. Not even with Patty.
His strong, powerful, in-control penis then wavered with longing. Andrew smiled. Jo smiled. Then Andrew drew back and began to guide it toward her waiting fervor, toward her fire.
“Daddy?”
Andrew blinked.
“Daddy? Wake up. Mrs. Connor wants to know if we want some rhubarb.”
Thank God he'd been on his side when he'd fallen asleep on the hammock in the backyard. Thank God he'd been reading The Sunday New York Times, and that it had dropped onto his lap and now concealed the enormous erection strained against his running shorts, which Cassie could not see, but he surely could feel.
“Sure, honey,” he said. “Why don't you go help her pick some?”
Cassie raced off and Andrew sighed. He rubbed his eyes and thought about all the yard work he had yet to do, and how Sundays passed too quickly to be spent on a hammock, dreaming of a woman that he could not have.
32
Jo's first thought was that something had happened to Lily.
“She's fine,” Frank said as he stood on the other side of Marion's screen door. “But I'd like to talk to you about something. If you have a minute.”
Marion suggested they go out on the porch. Would Frank like some blueberries, too?
On the way through the kitchen, down the hall, and out onto the screened porch, Jo felt every ounce of the dinner she'd just eaten sit in her stomach like a sudden wad of fear, like the million butterflies that metamorphosed in time for the school play when she'd had the lead, like the lump that she'd felt when she'd finally told her mother she was pregnant and that Brian had left not only West Hope but also the country.
It was, of course, going to be about Brian, because why else would Frank have come there? Why else would he have tracked her down on a Sunday afternoon? . . .
“It's about Brian,” Frank said abruptly when they sat on the faded flower cushions of the wicker chairs.
The blood drained from her head, from her heart.
“R. J. Browne thinks he has found him.”
She couldn't breathe. From the moment those words passed from Frank's mouth to her ears, Jo simply forgot her humiliation and pain; she forgot her resolution to move on.
She closed her eyes. “You hired the investigator,” she said. She knew she should ask where Brian was now and if he was all right. But Jo wasn't ready to listen.
“Yes. R.J. Browne. You'd told me his name . . . and his business is in Boston . . . it seemed only logical . . .”
Logical. At least someone had remained logical when it came to Brian.
She opened her eyes and looked out to the yard, to the large oak tree where a swing had once swung, where Brian had once pushed her for hours at a time on warm summer days like that one; where they'd eaten fresh peaches and kissed the juice from each other's cheeks and laughed because they were teenagers and the gesture felt daring and grown-up and somehow quite sinful.
“Fresh blueberries,” came Marion's voice as the screen door banged and she delivered two porcelain bowls filled with ripe berries and a cloud of whipped cream. Jo said “Thank you” and set the bowl down. She could not eat then, maybe never again.
“He's in Montreaux,” Frank continued once Marion had left them alone again. “It's a small town in Switzerland. On a lake.”
Jo had never been to Switzerland and had no idea why Brian would have gone there. Had he ever mentioned a secret longing to be in Europe? Had it been one of his dreams that she'd failed to take seriously . . . that she'd failed to provide?
“Jo,” Frank said slowly, “Brian's not alone.”
Her eyelids dropped again, as if shutting off her vision would shut off the world, would shut out the pain that was about to crash down on her once again—Brian-pain, she'd come to refer to it; his own special brand of searing, stabbing hurt that had started after college and had never completely left.
“Brian has never liked being alone.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were referring to a child or a dog.
Frank ate his blueberries most likely out of politeness than out of desire. Of the two brothers, why had Jo been attracted to the bad one, the misfit, the rebel?
“What else did the investigator say?” she asked in flat, monotone syllables.
“Browne went with his friend, a woman named Faye. Apparently Faye engaged Brian's companion in conversation out by the pool. The woman said they were planning to settle in Switzerland, even if it meant becoming expatriates of America, that it would be okay because there was no place like Switzerland on the face of the earth. She said that Brian was into investments and . . .” At that point Frank paused, not that he needed to. Something in the hesitant, anguished tone of his voice had already warned Jo what was coming next. “. . . and that they'd only been married for a few weeks.”
The small cry that Jo heard must have come from somewhere else, from a bird who had broken his wing, out in the large oak. But suddenly Frank Forbes leaned close to her and took her hand and asked if she was okay, and Jo knew then that the cry had been hers.
“The bastard,” she said. “The hideous bastard.” She supposed it was a word she had needed to use to describe Brian Forbes for a very long time. She had needed to admit that he really was a bastard, a self-centered, vile bastard. The blood returned to her head with feverish heat. “That bastard,” she said.
Frank lowered his head. “I'm sorry, Jo,” he said. “I a
m so sorry.”
They sat for a moment, Jo holding back a string of curses she would have liked to have spewed out in rapid-fire shots. She settled on “bastard”—plain, simple, “bastard.”
“Lily said she'll be home,” Frank said, “if you'd like to talk, if you need a friend.”
Lily. So Frank had told her, as well. Well, Jo supposed, why not? Lily, after all, had chosen the sensible brother, the one who was kind and considerate and loving and everything that Brian was not.
She didn't go to Lily. Instead, Jo went home. In the past she'd have gone to her office, convinced herself there was work to be done, choked back her tears and immersed herself in the computer and all the possibilities that it held for becoming successful, for proving to herself that just because she couldn't pick the right men didn't mean she was a loser at life.
But if she went to the office she'd have to see Lily, and the last thing Jo wanted was anyone hovering. Not Lily or Sarah or even sweet Andrew if he were there, which he might very well be because Lily might have called him. He had, after all, quickly become a part of their new mismatched family of the hurt and the hurting and the still-hanging-on. Hell, Lily might even call Elaine, who of course would show up because Elaine was on the down side of a relationship, too, even though hers had been by choice.
Jo dragged herself into her apartment, fell onto the couch, and wished she could vomit the roast and the potatoes along with the secretive smiles that had bounced back and forth between Ted and Marion during dinner, like badminton birdies, all light and atwitter. Secretive, lover-smiles that Jo recognized because she'd had them with Brian, hadn't she? She'd had them as late as Mrs. Dotson's Valentine's Day party in the building in Boston when the picture had been taken that she'd given to the police and didn't care if she ever saw again.
It was then Jo realized she hated all men, starting with her father, who had been the first to leave. It did not matter that Jo never knew the real reasons, only those slanted by Marion's reality:
