by Cara Colter
With humongous effort, with a kind of negligent carelessness, David lifted one shoulder, as if he didn’t care.
Through the tears, she said a word he suspected she had never ever said before.
And she added a very emphatic you to the end of it.
And then she was gone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
KAYLA HAD NOT BEEN out of her pajamas in a long time. Weeks? Her eyes were nearly as swollen from crying as they had been from the beesting. She was afraid to look at the calendar. How many days of summer had she let slip away while she nursed this heartbreak?
“Pathetic,” she told herself. “You are pathetic.”
Bastigal, her stalwart companion, licked her tears and looked worried.
Kayla took another spoonful of the ice cream out of the big tub on the coffee table in front of her.
It was bright yellow. It did look like pee. But it tasted surprisingly good, even after consuming nearly a gallon of it, solo.
Bastigal liked it, too, and uncaring about what it said about how pathetic her life had become, she let him share the spoon with her.
She had known the truth all along. The heartbreak had been completely preventable. David was completely out of her league after all. Look at that car. And the way he dressed. And that apartment. There was a fireplace in his bathroom, for Pete’s sake.
David Blaze was straight out of a magazine spread, Kayla reminded herself glumly. He dated actresses, and ran a multimillion-dollar corporation. They still had stacks of that magazine all over town. She could not avoid his handsome mug, even when she ventured out ever so reluctantly to get dog food.
It made her mad that she had hoped. It made her even madder that David had presented himself as a regular guy who could mow the lawn and fix the door.
Who, even though he owned a zillion-dollar condo, had slept on his back grass to protect his mother.
Ten days after she had left his Yorkton condo, an ambulance had pulled up next door. She had raced to put on her shoes and get over there to see what was wrong with Mrs. Blaze, but as she had opened her front door, David had pulled up.
In a different car. Sleek and black and very, very expensive-looking. A uniformed driver had gotten out and held the back passenger-side door open for him then waited at a kind of respectful distance while David went into the house.
And she had sunk back in the shadows, realizing the ambulance had not come with its sirens on, so it was not an emergency. His mother was being transported to Graystone.
And she realized the difference in their two worlds.
Kayla realized he was this man: in the expensive suit, with the chauffeur holding open the door for him.
And yet, when he had come back out, his mother strapped to the ambulance gurney, the stricken look on his face had nearly made her go to him.
But his words that morning, brutal, had come back to her.
Isn’t this exactly what got you in trouble before? Weren’t you trying to make someone feel better who was in pain? I don’t need you to rescue me, Kayla. I don’t need you at all.
And so she had resisted the impulse to watch him from behind the sheer curtain in her living room, to see if he would even glance this way. Instead, she had turned away from the terrible tragedy of the scene unfolding next door, and gone to her couch.
And she had rarely been off it since.
The dog was a safe bet. The best bet. She had been on the right track when she had sworn devotion to her dog and her house and her business.
Would she buy More-moo? What if David was right? It was just risky business, one more hopeless rescue.
Her doorbell rang, and Kayla started, and the dog leaped off her lap and raced in crazy circles in front of the door.
She couldn’t go to the door. She was in her pajamas. She had barely combed her hair since she had come back from Toronto. She had not brushed her teeth today. And possibly not yesterday, either. She had yellow splotches down the front of her pajamas.
Then it occurred to her.
It was him. It was David. His mother was settled in Graystone. He was coming out of that terrible crisis with a new understanding of what mattered. He had come to declare the error of his ways. He had come to get down on bended knee, beg her forgiveness, perhaps ask her hand in marriage.
Her heart thudding crazily as she contemplated a world once again ripe with possibility, Kayla slid off the couch and crept to her living room window, lifted the shade a hair.
It was another bright summer day and the brightness hurt her eyes. A courier van was pulling away.
So it was a written declaration of error, a written proclamation of undying love.
She went and flung open the door and looked at the parcel that lay there in its plastic envelope. The return address, Blaze Enterprises, seemed to be blinking in neon.
She picked it up and hugged it to herself, waltzed through to the kitchen—which was a disaster of ice cream and HAL experimentation—and went to her cutlery drawer. She found a butter knife and slit open the envelope.
She pulled out a thick binder and frowned. That would be quite a lengthy apology. And declaration of love.
She flipped it over and read: More-moo, A Financial and Business Analysis.
The self-pity evaporated instantly and was replaced with furious anger. Without opening the cover of the binder, Kayla went over to her garbage can, stepped on the lever that opened the lid and tossed the whole thing in.
It landed amongst the empty cream containers.
She stared at it for a moment, and then said a word she was saying for only the second time in her life. She added a most emphatic you after it.
And then she went into her bedroom and took off the stained pajamas, and decided, after looking at the stains, that they would be best beside the Business Analysis binder in the garbage.
She showered, put on her favorite white skirt, a dusting of makeup and her big, white sun hat that only a little while ago had made her feel independent and carefree and faintly Bohemian. She kissed Bastigal goodbye, knowing it would be a struggle to get him back in the basket, and then went and wheeled her bike out of the shed.
She rode downtown.
She felt a love for Blossom Valley swell in her heart as she rode down Main Street. The July sun had gentled into the cooler days of August. The leaves on the trees hinted at changes, and the summer crowds were thinning as people headed back to the city to do their before-school shopping.
She parked her bicycle in the rack outside More-moo, and looked hard at the place. The awning looked tired and the petunias had gotten leggy.
Still, she looked beyond that. It was only cosmetic, after all. Kayla took a deep breath and setting her shoulders, she went and opened the door.
It was a screen door on squeaky hinges, and a bell croaked a raspy greeting as she entered. Inside it was dark and cool after being in the bright sun.
It smelled good, and the little old lady beaming welcome at her from behind the counter reminded her of the grandmother she had always adored.
It wasn’t as crowded as it would have been in the height of summer. She was sure that would be in the report.
But something the report wouldn’t have captured was a young family of three sitting at one of the round tables, on the wrought iron, curly-backed chairs with the round seats padded in red-checked vinyl. The baby, in a baby seat, was covered in chocolate ice cream, the whites of his eyes showing like those of a miner coming up from the coal, the mom and dad laughing at him as he yelled for more.
In the booth in the corner, a boy and a girl sat across from each other, their fingertips intertwined in the center of the table. They were so delightfully young—maybe fifteen—and a single shake, in thick glass showing above metal shaker, was between them, with two straws but they wer
e just using one, taking turns.
She recognized Mr. Bastigal, the science teacher, long since retired, nursing a coffee and looking forlornly out the window. He still looked like the spitting image of Albert Einstein. Someone had told her his wife had died last year, and he looked lost. His gaze flickered to her but without recognition. Had she known she was going to bump into him from time to time, she probably would not have named the dog after him.
All of it: the smells and the sounds and the people, the unfolding of life’s beautiful, simple vignettes filled her with a feeling.
No business report in the world could give you this: the feeling that something was just right.
Kayla walked up to the counter. The woman smiled at her as if she were a long-lost relative who had found her way, finally, home.
“I’d like to talk to someone about buying your business,” she said firmly.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
UP UNTIL NOW in his life, David Blaze had been blessedly unaware that it was possible for a human being to feel as bad as he felt.
He barely slept. And he barely ate.
Guilt gnawed at him. And it wasn’t guilt for the decision he had made about his mother. That had been a decision absolutely necessary to her health and well-being. It hadn’t really been a decision at all, the choices narrowing until there were none left.
Now that his mother was settling at Graystone, he really wondered why he had waited so long. They were set up beautifully for her care. She was safe there. And relatively happy. Plus, she was closer. He could stop in and spend a few minutes with her every day.
Sometimes they went through the memory box, and it brought him great comfort to see her fingers gently stroking the petals of that dried rose corsage, as if the details of what it meant might be lost to her, but the essence was not.
He had put in an old nozzle from a garden hose to remind her of the skating rink, and then an old photo of him and Kevin standing in that rink, looking at the camera. That photo, of them leaning with fake ferociousness on their sticks, seemed to be her favorite thing in the box.
She touched David’s younger face in the photo with such tenderness. “This is my son,” she said. Some days she remembered his name, and other days she didn’t, and she almost never made the connection it was that same son who sat beside her now. And yet by her face, David was reassured that she remembered the most important part about the skating rink, too.
The devotion that had built it.
And the boys who had skated there had known that love built it, even if they had not ever said that. The boys had loved each other, even if they had never said that, either.
And when she touched his face in that long-ago photo, he felt she remembered what was crucial, at the heart of it all, the essence.
The love.
What he felt guilty about was that he had chased Kayla away and made her feel as if it was in any way about her.
He had made her feel her ability to love and to hope were a defect of some sort, and his regret was sharp and intense, a companion that rode with him and tormented him daily.
It was just wrong. He was a man who had built his whole life and his entire career on integrity, and the lie he had said to Kayla ate at him.
He had made it sound as if he didn’t care about her. It had been for her own good, but it still didn’t sit well with him. He had a sensation of having to set it right.
His assistant, Jane, came in.
“How’s your mom today?” she asked, her face crinkled with concern.
He knew she was seeing the changes in him: weight loss, dark circles around his eyes. He had snapped at her more in the last few weeks than he had in all the years they had worked together.
She was putting it down to stress over the decisions he had made about his mother, and he was content to leave it at that. He didn’t think he could handle one more woman thinking he needed rescuing.
“What’s up?” he asked her, not answering about his mother, who was, in fact, having an off day.
“This just arrived by courier. I know you were waiting for it.”
David looked at the sealed envelope she handed him. The return address was from Billings and Morton, an independent laboratory. It could take weeks and even months to get this kind of information. Though he rarely used his power or wealth to circumvent the system, he had this time.
“Thanks,” he said, setting the envelope aside.
Jane turned to leave, and then turned back. “Oh, one more thing. Do you remember that ice cream parlor you asked me to do the analysis on?”
He nodded, hoping the sudden tension did not show in his face.
“The one that, in the final analysis, was about the worst investment anyone could ever make?”
He didn’t nod this time, only held his breath.
“Somebody bought it,” Jane said with a faint derisive giggle. “Can you believe that?”
Actually, he could.
“Just a sec,” she said, “I’ve got the name of the person out on my desk.”
“Never mind,” David said. “I already know.”
And he waited until she had closed the door behind herself before he contemplated the completeness of his failures when it came to Kayla McIntosh Jaffrey.
He thought, to his own detriment, he was always so colossally sure of himself. He always was sure he was doing the right thing.
Look at all those years ago, when he had backed off Kayla for Kevin, thinking it was the honorable thing between friends.
And it had been based on a total lie.
Kevin hadn’t asked Kayla to the prom by then. Someone else who had been at the campfire that night must have told him about what had happened between David and Kayla. And Kevin, ever competitive, ever with something to prove, had scooped him on the girl.
To Kevin, it had probably all been a game.
Until Kayla was pregnant.
Still, he knew that he was experiencing a miracle of sorts, that when he thought of Kevin these days, it was never with anger. It was with the quiet tolerance of knowing he had loved someone flawed, and that he had grown from it.
Once he had thought his love for Kevin had only given him the gift of cynicism. Now he saw that it had given him many gifts, but that was the one he could leave behind.
He hoped all that love that was part of his history would show him the right thing to do now. When he opened this envelope, wouldn’t he know he had done the right thing by love? David reached for the envelope, turned it over in his hands and yet could not bring himself to open it.
It was time to set everything right that had gone wrong. It was time to end the lies. There was no place in life for deceit.
The next thought came unbidden, Maybe it was time to let someone else into my world. Maybe there was less chance of making a mistake with a decision when it was not made alone, and when all parties were armed with the facts.
That thought gave him pause. He always made the final decision alone.
Why did it feel like such a relief to even be contemplating a different way?
* * *
“Bastigal, stay away from the paint. Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Kayla got down off the ladder, caught Bastigal and wiped the creamy white paint from where his tail had dipped in the open bucket. She secured the lid on the bucket and headed back up her ladder, paint brush in hand.
From her perch there, she paused and looked around.
Really, if she was going to be painting, she could have started at home. But no, she was excited about More-moo. She had kept it open until the long weekend in September, learning all she could from the outgoing owners, and giving out samples of flavors she was experimenting with. She was excited about the response.
Then she had shut it down completely to freshen up the inside and b
ring in new equipment before reopening with a brand-new menu and services. She would be reopening in October.
She could almost hear a cynical voice saying, Who comes to Blossom Valley in October? That thing happened in her heart that happened every single time David crossed her mind, which was still pathetically often.
The new copies of Lakeside Life had replaced the old, but that didn’t help as much as she had hoped it would.
Because it seemed the very streets held memories, of their younger selves, yes, but of the time they had just shared, too.
She could not look out her back window without picturing him stretched out on the back lawn at his mother’s house. She could not open the screen that did not squeak anymore without thinking of him. Or secure the latch without remembering his dark head bent over it, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration. She couldn’t get the lawn mower going at all, and that made her think of him, too.
There were streets she avoided altogether, like Peachtree Lane, where they had lain on their backs after chasing the bunny they thought was Bastigal, and she had named the stars on Orion’s belt for him.
Even on the hottest day, Kayla would not swim in the lake, because the memory of swimming with him, fully clothed, and the sense of awakening that had come with that, were painful.
When she was not busy painting or chipping fifty-year-old linoleum off the floor of her new business, she tried to stay busy so she wouldn’t think so much, fall into the trap of feeling sorry for herself.
Kayla was experimenting with all kinds of flavors of ice cream—rose petal, jalapeño jelly, nasturtium, even dark ale—but for some reason the Dandy Lion flavor seemed to be on hold.
The door jingled, and she realized she had forgotten to lock it, and even a small thing like that made her think of David, and that he would be irritated with her for giving safety such a low priority.
“Sorry,” she called from her perch on the ladder, “we’re closed.”
Bastigal began to growl, that low, throaty sound she had only heard him make on a few occasions before—mostly when she and David were getting too close to each other!
