by Kara Lennox
Willow dressed carefully in a very conservative outfit, navy slacks with a short-sleeved, pinstripe blouse. She pulled her hair into a bun and made sure that no tendrils of hair escaped. She applied only a small amount of makeup. No sense giving them anything to criticize right off the bat.
She purposely arrived early at the Miracle Café and ordered some sweet tea to sip on. That way she didn’t have to search among the tables to find anyone, which would be an impossible task.
To her surprise, Nana showed up before Willow’s parents.
“Nana, I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I thought you could use some moral support, in case they start—Well, you know how they can be sometimes.”
Oh, yeah. Willow was grateful for Nana’s presence. But then she remembered she was still mad.
“So, aren’t you going to ask me about my date?”
“Er, I figured you’d tell me about it when you were ready.” Nana fidgeted with her napkin. “You got in late. You must have had a good time,” she added with false brightness.
Willow folded her arms. “Nana, how could you do that to me? How could you send me out on a date with Cal Chandler when you know how I feel about him?”
Nana gazed at her for a few silent seconds. Then she looked down into her lap. “I have no possible way to defend myself. It was a craven and cowardly act, not to mention meddlesome, for me to fake a bingo game.” She grabbed her water and gulped from it.
“You’re not getting away with this. I know all your tricks. When you don’t want to argue, you just agree with me and take all my good lines.”
“All right. If you want an argument, I’ll give you one. I did what I did precisely because I know how you feel about Cal. You still love him.”
Willow looked around worriedly to see if anyone had heard. But no one was seated near them. “I hate him,” she whispered. Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.
“There’s a fine line between love and hate,” Nana said. She paused long enough to order some tea, then waited until the waitress had left. “If you really had no lingering feelings for him, you wouldn’t feel strongly one way or another. You’d be indifferent. You’d have fallen in love three or four more times by now. I thought if you could just spend some time with him, you’d remember how happy he once made you and you’d get off your high horse.”
Willow shredded the paper from her straw, too agitated to keep her hands still. “Well, it worked out exactly as you wanted, then.”
Nana looked hopeful. “It did?”
“I had a great time. We dined, we danced, we gazed at the stars. And I was thinking, ‘Where has this wonderful man been all my life?’ And all the while, I was calling him Hank in my mind because I didn’t know his name.”
“When did you figure it out? Surely after a few minutes of conversation—”
“Nope. Didn’t catch on. Didn’t have a clue. Not even when I went to his place and saw that he kept his own private zoo. Not even when he kissed me. No spark of familiarity at all.”
Nana’s eyes got wider and wider. “Then when—”
Willow lowered her voice again. “Not until after we made love.”
Nana choked on her water.
“Yup, that’s right. I had sex with a man whose name I didn’t know.”
“But you did know him. That’s my point. Deep down, some part of you knew he was the man you loved. Otherwise, you never would have—I mean, that’s not like you at all.”
With that, all the fight went out of Willow. She sipped her tea and looked out the plate glass window onto the square. Everywhere, normal people were going about their normal business as if the world hadn’t fallen off its axis last night.
Nana took her hand. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry this all went awry. I never in a million years thought it would go as far as it did.”
“Did you know it was him, even at the wedding?” Willow had to ask.
“No, dear. I truly didn’t know it was him until he showed up at the door. Then I just couldn’t make myself go up to your bedroom and tell you because I knew you wouldn’t go out with him. You wouldn’t have even come out of your room.”
That was true enough, Willow conceded.
“I thought Cal deserved a chance. He’s a good man. I never told you this, but he still visits me when he can. He mows my grass and does fix-it projects for me.”
“He does?”
“And he’s never tried to use my fondness for him to get to you. He does things for me out of kindness. Men like that don’t grow on trees, you know.”
Willow dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. It wouldn’t do to cry, not when her parents would be there any minute. They would want to know why she was upset, and what could she possibly tell them?
“He’s not the man for me, Nana. Even if I could get past what happened. He has no ambition, no goals, no plans in life. He’s just floating along, underutilizing his brain, a big kid who doesn’t want to grow up.”
“All right, Willow. We won’t talk about it again.” She studied the menu as if she didn’t know it by heart. “What are you going to get for lunch?”
“I don’t even have time to deal with men,” Willow continued despite her grandmother’s attempt to close the conversation. “I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I agreed to go out on a date, anyway. Only five weeks until medical school, and my brain is still as scrambled as ever.”
“Whatever you say, dear.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“Agreeing with me.”
“Because you’re making perfect sense. Cal is lazy and immature, all he’s interested in is sex and you don’t have time for men anyway. What’s to argue with?”
“I never said all he was interested in was sex.”
“Well, he must have pressured you. Why else would you do that on a first date?”
“If anything, I pressured him,” she admitted. “He tried to talk me out of it.”
“Willow Marsden!”
“Yeah, I know.”
They didn’t talk any further about Cal because Dave and Marianne Marsden arrived. Though Willow didn’t immediately recognize their faces, they were the only successful, conservative bankers with matching navy suits in the place.
Willow greeted them with dutiful hugs. Then her parents settled into their chairs.
Dave immediately flagged the waitress. “We already know what we want,” he said, never one to dillydally.
“We can’t stay too long,” Marianne said apologetically. “Minor crisis at work.”
There was always a minor crisis at work, but Willow didn’t mention that.
They made small talk until the food arrived. Dave cut small, neat bites from his broiled chicken breast, while Marianne nibbled daintily at a chef salad. Nana dug into a perfectly cooked chicken-fried steak, while Willow was trying to enjoy a hickory-smoked hamburger.
It was hard to appreciate the grilled burger, though, when she was about to get her own grilling.
“So, how’s the outpatient therapy going?” Dave asked. “You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Dad. Every day.”
“Are you seeing any progress?” Marianne asked anxiously.
“No.” That wasn’t a hundred percent true. She had shown some slight improvement in her memory. Nana said she wasn’t repeating herself as much—which she did because she sometimes couldn’t remember a conversation she’d had ten minutes earlier. And she managed to remember all the salient details of her date with Cal, the one thing she wished she could forget.
“Well, I don’t see how you can go to medical school in your condition,” Dave observed. “You’ll have to put it off a year.”
“I can’t do that,” Willow explained patiently. “I would have to reapply, and they probably wouldn’t take me again.” It wasn’t as if medical schools across the country were competing to get her.
“If you hadn’t gotten into that car with Mi
ck Dew-hurst in the first place—”
“Dad, don’t start,” Willow pleaded. “Can’t we just have a nice lunch? Does everything have to be focused on me?”
“You’re the one whose life is in a state of flux,” Dave said. “We have to get you straightened out. Anyway, you like for things to focus on you.”
“That’s not true,” she said in a bewildered voice, wondering why her father would say something like that. “And I am straightened out. I’m working on my memory. I do exercises every day. I’ve still got more than a month before school.”
“Maybe you need to take your mind off it,” Marianne said. “You could come work at the bank!”
Dave gave his wife a look that said she’d just come up with the stupidest idea ever. “She can’t work at the bank. What if she couldn’t tell the difference between Washington and Lincoln?”
“Oh, I guess you’re right. And if she couldn’t recognize our customers, they might be insulted.”
“She couldn’t anyway,” Nana said. “She’s starting her temporary job this weekend.”
Willow froze. Job? What job? How could she have forgotten something as important as a job? She discreetly checked her notebook, which she’d tucked into her purse. Oh, shoot, there it was. She’d agreed to work as a cook at Wade Hardison’s rodeo camp for a couple of weeks while his regular cook took a vacation. She did have a job.
Dave snorted. “I don’t know why you would waste your time doing something so beneath your abilities.”
She didn’t bother to explain that simple tasks were all she could handle right now. She’d been working part-time over the summer as an emergency dispatcher, but she certainly didn’t trust herself to continue that work in her current condition. She would be putting people’s lives at risk if her memory failed her at a crucial moment.
“I think working at the camp will be good for you, dear,” Nana put in. “You’ll get some fresh air, work with children—that’s something you enjoy. And it’ll take your mind off your problems. Nothing makes your problems seem small like helping other people with their problems.”
Dave snorted again. “I’d hardly call Willow’s problems small.”
Willow wasn’t really looking forward to working at the camp. It had seemed like a good idea when Nana had arranged it for her. She could cook; at least, she could handle the simple fare she imagined might be required at summer camp. And she did like kids. She had first-aid training, which might come in handy at a summer camp.
But there was just one problem. Wade Hardison’s camp and horse-breeding operation were right down the road from his older brother’s ranch. And that was a little too close to Cal Chandler for comfort.
“So,” Marianne said, briskly changing the subject. “My friend Winona Wilson said she saw you last night on the Party Barge.”
Willow’s stomach suddenly felt queasy. “I hope she didn’t think I was rude if I didn’t say hi to her.”
“Oh, no, you were apparently way across the dance floor. And dancing with a very handsome man, Winona said.”
Uh-oh, here it comes.
“So, who was it?” Dave didn’t mince words.
“Yes, I’ll admit I’m curious,” Marianne added. “I didn’t know you were dating anyone.”
“I’m not,” Willow said hastily. “He was just someone I ran into at Mick’s and Tonya’s wedding.”
Please don’t ask. Please don’t ask.
“Who?” Dave and Marianne said together.
Willow sighed. If she’d been able to come up with the name of some suitable bachelor her parents wouldn’t object to, she would have told a boldfaced lie. But her faulty memory wouldn’t cooperate.
She looked to Nana for help.
“It was that nice Cal Chandler,” Nana said.
Suddenly, it felt as if the second Ice Age had just visited the Miracle Café. Both Dave’s and Marianne’s forks froze in midair.
“Well,” her mother finally said. As if that summed it up.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Willow jumped in, forestalling the torrent of objections she knew was coming. “I thought he was someone else when I accepted the date. You know, because of the face-blind thing.” Her parents never had really understood her condition. “Then I just couldn’t back out gracefully. But don’t worry, I won’t be seeing him again.”
Dave wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I should hope not.”
Nana dropped her fork into her plate. It rattled loudly, causing several other people in the restaurant to look over. “Oh, would you two get over it!”
“Get over it?” Marianne repeated. “Are we supposed to forget the fact that Cal Chandler—”
“Just stop right there,” Willow said. “We are not discussing this, not again. Nana is right. It’s ancient history, and we all need to forget it and move on.”
“Anyway,” Nana said tightly, “I should think you owe Cal your gratitude. He gave you the perfect excuse to keep your precious Willow home with you.”
Dave’s face paled. “Excuse me, Mother?”
“You couldn’t stand the fact that she was flying from the nest. You’d spent the last eighteen years doting on your only child, controlling every aspect of her existence, and you couldn’t face life without her. So you used her youthful indiscretion as an excuse to keep her under your thumb a little longer.”
Willow stared first at her grandmother, then at her parents, not quite believing what she’d just heard. She’d never seen Nana take her gloves off like this before.
Dave threw his napkin onto the table. “That is the most ridiculous—” But he stopped when Marianne squeezed his arm.
“You know, Clea,” Marianne said quietly, “there might be just the tiniest bit of truth in what you just said.” She looked at Willow. “We do love you so much. Maybe too much. It was hard for us, imagining you all the way out in California with no one to turn to if you got into trouble….”
“So you did the one thing that was sure to turn Willow against you,” Clea said.
“In retrospect, it doesn’t seem as if we handled things very well,” Dave grumbled. He put his napkin back in his lap and resumed eating.
The table went silent for the next few minutes. Willow couldn’t eat any more of her burger, so she sipped her tea. Was it possible her grandmother was right? Had her parents flipped out and forbade her to go to Stanford partly because they would have been lonely without her?
Chapter Five
“This is the best breakfast I ever ate.”
That enthusiastic proclamation had come from a thin African-American boy with a scar by his left ear. Sitting on a camp stool by the small morning fire enjoying her own breakfast, Willow quickly shuffled through files in her mental computer, struggling to identify the speaker by his jumble of physical features.
After a moment she smiled. Damon, that was his name. More often than not, her mental computer tossed out some irrelevant piece of information when she asked it nicely for a name.
But some, like Damon, she remembered more easily than others. The ten-year-old had been caught breaking into his neighbor’s house to steal anything that could be pawned. He’d spent the first week of camp bragging about his various exploits. Now that they were into the second week, he spent more time talking about his horse, Danny, than the street gangs back home.
Though Willow had been apprehensive about working as a cook at the Hardison Rodeo Camp, she was glad now she was here. It was amazing to watch the transformations taking place in these kids, some of whom had never seen a horse before. And, as Nana had pointed out, seeing and hearing about the problems these children faced—and sometimes that meant just getting enough to eat—made her feel better about her own situation.
In fact, sometimes she felt downright small and petty for fretting so much about her cognitive difficulties, annoying as those might be.
She had seen no sign of Cal, thank goodness, though he worked just down the road. She wanted to talk to him at some point, but not until
she’d straightened out in her mind whether she could stop blaming him for the disastrous events of that long-ago summer.
“Can I have seconds?” Damon asked.
“Please,” Willow added, then smiled. “Yes, of course you may have seconds.”
The breakfast Damon was so happy about was the same one they’d eaten almost every morning—biscuit dough stuck on the end of a stick and cooked over the open fire. When it was done, you pulled it off the stick and filled it with jelly and butter. It was something Willow had learned in Girl Scouts. She also fixed the campers scrambled eggs and bacon.
One by one, the kids finished and brought their plates to the picnic table, scraping them into the trash and stacking them neatly. Anyone who didn’t follow the procedure might get stuck washing dishes, so they’d learned the routine pretty quickly.
They drifted off to the corral, where horses of various sizes milled around, awaiting their temporary masters. Wade was going to let a couple of the older boys—and one determined girl—try bull riding. The bull was gentle as a lamb and the kids would be well padded, but they were excited.
Two college-aged counselors would work with the younger kids on their roping skills.
Willow hummed to herself as she banked the campfire. Now that she knew her own routine, she found the tasks pleasant and undemanding. Her thoughts drifted, as they often did, to her evening with Cal and her conflicted feelings about it.
Once Nana had convinced her that Cal really hadn’t known of her disability, her anger toward him had cooled considerably. He’d been as much a victim of circumstances as she. He hadn’t brought up the past, but neither had she. She’d done her level best to conceal her cognitive problems from him. If she’d just admitted she didn’t know who he was from the very beginning, the whole thing never would have happened. So she was as much to blame as anyone.
But it had happened. And while her unreliable memory managed to conceal from her important things like the date of her next doctor’s appointment or what she’d just read in the morning paper, it supplied her with the memory of every moment of her date with Cal with unerring accuracy.
She wished for the hundredth time that the man she’d been so ga-ga over that night could be anyone but Cal.
