“No, you decided you didn’t want pines. You wanted something different, you said.”
“I did?” The old man looked momentarily confused.
“You did,” Jason assured him. “But if you’ve changed your mind, and you just want pine trees here, I can send these back and put in another order.”
“What do you think?”
“I think these are going to look just fine. Especially the cryptomeria. They grow really tall and will provide nice privacy.”
“Why do I need privacy?”
“Well, you said you wanted to block the view from the river.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose those tall trees will do that.”
“They will.” Jason nodded, trying to conceal his alarm. Curtis was usually really sharp, not at all confused the way he appeared now. It wasn’t just that he claimed to not remember having ordered those particular trees, it was the look of bewilderment that gave Jason pause.
“I should keep them, then.”
“Let’s look over the bed where they’re going to be planted, and you can tell me where you’d like each of the trees to go. Why don’t we go into the house, and we’ll draw up a plan?”
“All right.” They’d taken a half-dozen steps toward the house when Curtis grabbed Jason by the arm and said, “Say, did you tell me that you bought a lot from Hal Garrity down on River Road?”
“I did. That’s home base for my business now.”
“Did you know that my Sophie is buying the old Walsh place?”
“I believe she already has.”
“Well, then, that makes you neighbors.” Curtis was beaming, as if that were a good thing. Jason supposed that under other circumstances, it would be.
“Yes, it does.”
“I suppose it would be an imposition of me to ask you to keep an eye on her.”
“Excuse me?”
“Young girl out there in that damn-near-abandoned building all by herself. Anything could happen.”
“I think Sophie can take care of herself, Curtis.”
“She thinks she can. Thinks she wants to run a damned restaurant. A restaurant! Wants to be a cook, for all that’s holy! She’s a lawyer, damn it. An Enright lawyer in St. Dennis. That means something. What the hell does it mean to be a cook?”
“I guess you need to ask her that question.”
“I already did. Know what she said? She said that cooking made her happy. I told her that she didn’t know happy until she brought her toughest case before the toughest judge in the state and went up against the nastiest opposing counsel on the Eastern Shore—and won. That’s happiness, boy.”
“Maybe for her, happiness means something else.”
“Know what she’s planning on selling in that place of hers? Quiche. Strawberry salads. Yogurt and granola. Granola. Who eats that stuff?” If Jason wasn’t mistaken, Curtis actually huffed. “This is the Chesapeake. We eat crabs and oysters and fish. How is she going to make a living cooking stuff like that?”
“She’ll do okay.”
“And the place is a dump. Have you seen it? Of course you have. You’re right next door there. I have to tell you, that’s the only consolation I have. That you’re right there if she gets into trouble.” Curtis patted Jason on the back. “Now, I got Violet to drive me out there on Sunday afternoon. That place has been boarded up for years and it needs a ton of work. She’s going to go broke fixing it up before she even opens for business.”
Jason wasn’t sure how to respond to that—the place did need a lot of work—so he made no response at all. Instead, he continued walking to the back porch and helped Curtis up the stairs. He got the man into the kitchen, where he poured them both a glass of iced tea from the pitcher Mrs. Anderson had left in the refrigerator.
“She’s a stubborn cuss, that girl is. I tried to talk some sense into her, but I was just wasting my breath.”
“She’ll do okay, Curtis. Sophie’s a smart girl, and I’m sure she has a plan. I wouldn’t worry about her too much.”
Jason kept Curtis talking until he was satisfied that the old man was himself again.
An hour later, the trees each having a designated destination, Jason was driving back up Old St. Mary’s Church Road. At the corner across from the park, he made a left, then parked the car a few doors down from Enright & Enright’s offices. He’d been disturbed by his conversation with Curtis and thought someone in the family should know. He was hoping that someone would be Sophie.
“Hello, Jason.” Violet stood just outside the door of the first office when he entered. “Nice to see you.”
“Hi.” He gave her his best smile. She was, after all, the gatekeeper.
“Are you here to see Jesse?” Before Jason could respond, she added, “He just got back to the office.”
“Ah, well, actually, I …,” Jason began.
“Hey, Jason.” Jesse stepped into the hall. “What’s up?”
“I just wanted a minute, if you have one.” Disappointed, but knowing he couldn’t very well bypass one Enright for the other, especially since the other probably wouldn’t see him anyway, Jason followed Jesse into the office. When the door was closed behind them, Jason said, “I just came from your grandfather’s place.”
“I know you’ve been doing a lot of work there for him. We were over there on Saturday, and love what you’ve done so far. He’s really excited, by the way, and that makes everyone happy. He doesn’t have a lot to do these days, so it’s good to see him interested in something.”
There was no easy way to say it, so Jason put it out there straight.
“He seems a bit confused today, Jesse.”
“What do you mean, confused?”
Jason repeated the conversation he’d had with Curtis about the trees, then added, “He seemed pretty much himself when I left, but I thought you should know. Maybe stop in on your way home.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks, Jace. We all worry about him living there by himself. If anything should happen, well, he’s pretty much on his own.” He looked across the table and asked, “Did you tell Sophie?”
“Ah, no. I’d just gotten here when I ran into you.”
“She’s in the back office there. Go on back and say hello. She’s been working herself like a dog today. Brooke tells me that a bunch of them went out to give her a hand at her new place, helped her clean, wash stuff up, that sort of thing. Tired as she is, I gotta admit, she’s true to her word. Showed up here at the office at two on the nose and has been working all afternoon on a bunch of cases I have coming up within the next few weeks.” Jesse lowered his voice. “I just hope she can keep it up, you know? I don’t think this is going to be as easy as she thought.”
“I’m sure she knows what’s best for her.” Jason made a point of looking at his watch. “I gotta run. Got an appointment in five minutes on the other side of town, and you know what traffic is like this time of the day. I’ll see you later.”
Jason called goodbye to Violet on his way out the door. He’d heard Sophie’s voice in the hall and couldn’t leave fast enough. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation with her in front of her brother.
He sat in the cab of his truck for a few moments. This was such a small town, there was no way to avoid running in to her, and no way to avoid having everyone in town find out about their … what to call it? Misunderstanding? Falling out? That would do, he supposed.
He drove home without thinking where he was going. Normally he’d have picked up something for dinner on the way home, but tonight he forgot. It was still early, though. He could call in someplace, maybe have something delivered. There was a stack of take-out menus in a kitchen drawer. He went through them all twice, but nothing appealed to him.
He wished things had gone differently with Sophie, but he couldn’t turn back the clock. He wished he’d been able to be happy for her that she got what she wanted, wished that he hadn’t wanted the same thing. He wished he could call her and meet her for dinner to celebrate her new venture.
Wished he could bring her back here and talk her into staying the night. Wished he could wake up in the morning and spend a little time watching her sleep.
Wished he knew how to take things back to the way they were just one short week ago.
Chapter 22
THOUGH the alarm, shrill and loud, rang inches from Sophie’s head, it took several minutes for the sound to pierce through her deep slumber. She raised a groggy hand and slapped at the offending clock until she hit the snooze button. Four days of rising at six, working in the restaurant until one, making a quick change for the office by two, and working there until seven or eight had totally worn her to a frazzle. When the alarm went off the second time, she pulled herself up, her pillow behind her, and tried to focus.
Why, she asked herself, had she ever thought this would be a good idea?
She ambled into the bathroom, then into the kitchen, where she made coffee and counted the minutes until it was ready. Through the kitchen window she could see the making of a beautiful day. She took her coffee out onto the back porch to listen to the birds. In her bare feet, she went down the steps and into the garden to see what might be growing there. Not much, she realized. A few daylilies that had yet to bloom, a few Shasta daisies that appeared to be overgrown, and a rosebush that had a lot of black spots on the few leaves that remained on its thorny branches. She made a mental note to ask Violet if she knew anything about roses, then sat on the back step to drink her coffee in the sunshine that was just making its way across the backyard.
She was still sitting and sipping when she realized it was Saturday and she couldn’t go into the restaurant until the afternoon. The exterminator had told her to keep the building closed up for at least twenty-four hours, and then, if she had to go inside, to open all the doors and windows and allow the pesticides to clear out before she spent too much time in there. She could go back to bed for a few more hours of much-needed sleep. Of course, having caffeinated herself, sleep might be hard to come by. She could go into the office early and get a leg up on the research that Jesse needed her to do for an upcoming criminal trial.
Or she could sit here and drink coffee and watch the day unfold, which seemed to be the best immediate option. It had been days since she’d been able to just sit and not think of work or Blossoms or Jason. Thinking about Jason gave her a monumental headache. She’d never been in a situation like this one. She and Christopher had never argued, had never disagreed. They were both headed in the same direction, wanted the same things, or so she’d thought. Relationships were either wrong or they were right. Most of the time, she had to admit in retrospect, they’d been wrong. If he’d been Mr. Right, wouldn’t things have worked out? Everything in her past told her that when it came to relationships, there was black and there was white, but never gray.
This situation, however, confused her. It seemed … gray. As a prosecutor whose job it had been to ferret out the truth, she was now at a bit of a loss. She tried to weigh the facts.
Jason had dumped several loads of smelly crap next to the fence that separated their properties.
Sophie had not told Jason that she’d bought the property next door; therefore he had no way of knowing that she was planning on opening a restaurant there.
Okay, she’d give him that. Score one for Jason.
However, when she told him of her plans and asked him to move the piles, he refused.
He should have moved them, shouldn’t he?
She sighed, unable to answer with any confidence.
Which left the question remaining: had she been unreasonable in expecting him to move the mulch piles?
Gray, she told herself. Totally gray.
Right now, gray was better than black or white. Gray meant maybe there was room for compromise, something else she’d learned as a prosecutor. You didn’t always get your way in court, either from the judge or from the jury. When the evidence could go either way, when she wasn’t totally convinced of a defendant’s guilt, it often made more sense to offer a plea. She’d found it harder to compromise when she was certain they had the guilty party but the evidence might not have been there to support a conviction. She preferred things to be either/or, but it didn’t always work out that way. It was puzzling that this time, she wasn’t sure who was right.
Of course he had every right to run his business from his own property—as much right as she had. But she couldn’t sacrifice her restaurant so that he could open a plant shop. Did he think that if he left those smelly old piles there long enough, she’d give in and slap a sale sign on the building?
The only sign that was going to be hung was the one that Ellie was painting with the name, Blossoms, on it.
So, stalemate.
How annoying that their individual dreams had gotten in the way of what might have been! Being with Jason had felt so right, so magically, fairy-tale right, that it felt wrong that things had turned out the way they had. Where, she wondered, had the magic gone? Why couldn’t he have been Mr. Right? It had started to seem as if he might very well be.
Sophie took a sip of coffee, found it had long since gone cold, and poured it over the side of the step into the grass.
Interesting, she thought, that she hadn’t deliberated this much when her relationship with Christopher ended. That, to her, had been an easy call. He cheated on her. Off with his head. Yes, it had hurt, but there, the boundaries had been clear. She’d cut that tie and never looked back. Never wondered if there’d been room for compromise, or if she’d done the right thing; never asked herself, What if …?
So why, she asked herself now, had it been easier to walk away from Chris—after they’d been together for almost two years—than it was to walk away from Jason, after so short a time?
It had never occurred to her to fight for Chris. She’d let Anita have him without hesitation. So why was she replaying the scene with Jason over and over in her mind?
Maybe, a small voice inside her whispered, because Chris hadn’t been worth fighting for, and maybe Jason was.
She thought back to last Saturday morning, when she woke to find he’d risen before her, that moment when she reached for him and found only empty space, the sudden sense of loss she’d felt when she thought he’d gone, left her bed without even saying goodbye. The smile she’d felt welling up inside when he’d walked out of the bathroom to kiss her and tell her he’d see her later at …
Oh, shit. Ellie’s carriage house. The historical society. Saturday.
Today was Saturday.
Sophie scrambled to get into the house and upstairs, where she threw on a pair of cropped pants and a worn-thin short-sleeved sweatshirt. She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge on her way out the door. A glance at the clock told her she was already late. Where had the time gone?
She had to park three houses down from Ellie’s on Bay View Road, but was relieved to see a few others arriving late as well. She tried to slip unnoticed into the crowd that was milling around the carriage house, and she thought she’d succeeded until Jason looked up from the window he was working on and said, “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
“I’m not a quitter,” she told him.
“Good. How ’bout washing the panes in the windows so I can paint them? Paper towels and window cleaner are on the table over by Grace.”
“Fine.” She winced when the word came out of her mouth. She hadn’t meant it to sound so strident. She took a deep breath. “Aren’t the panes loose? I don’t want to knock them out of the frames.”
“Just go easy. I’ve already secured them with joint compound but it may still be setting up on the two side windows, so do them last.”
“All right.”
She gathered up the paper towels and the bottle of cleaner and tried to get away from Grace with only a polite exchange. But Grace being Grace, she wanted the details of Sophie’s plans for the restaurant. After promising to meet later in the week for photos and an article for Grace’s paper, Sophie moved on to her task.
Go
ing from one window to the next, she sprayed the panes and rubbed until the glass was clear. When she finished, she picked up the discarded paper towels and tossed them into a trash can just outside the carriage house.
She turned in the doorway to look back at Jason, who was leaning over, pouring pale green paint into a tray. The gray tank top he wore stretched across the muscles of his shoulders and when he stood and raised the paintbrush, his biceps seemed to ripple. She remembered those arms and the way they’d wrapped around her, remembered how those shoulders had felt when she ran her hands over them. The bolt of heat that flashed through her weakened her knees.
Maybe things weren’t so gray after all.
His eyes on his granddaughter, Curtis stepped into the carriage house and followed her line of sight. Ah, yes. There was Jason. Pleased by what he perceived to be a sign that things were developing nicely between them, as he’d hoped, he called to Sophie.
“There you are.” He walked toward her, leaning heavily on his cane. “How’s your project coming along?”
“It’s … I guess it’s all right.” She seemed surprised—and perhaps not particularly pleased—to see him.
“Good, good.”
“Hey, Curtis,” Jason greeted him. “You sign up to help yet?”
“I doubt anyone would want my help,” Curtis replied. “I just stopped in to see this lamp lens that I’ve been hearing about.”
Jason turned and pointed to the huge glass lens that still sat in the middle of the carriage house floor. “There it is.”
“Well, now, would you look at that? How did that work, do you suppose?” Curtis walked around the lens as if inspecting it.
Jason explained the process to him as he had explained it the weekend before.
“Fancy that.” Curtis looked directly at Sophie, hoping to pull her into the conversation. “I remember when the lighthouse stood out there, almost right on the beach. I remember when a storm back in, oh, I think it might have been ’forty-six, brought it crashing down. Heard it all the way over on Bancock Street.”
At the River’s Edge Page 28
