by Janet Dailey
Not that she would willingly miss the one time a year the town really came alive. “I’m always there. But if you need me to work late Saturday, that’s no problem,” she offered. “Just let me know.”
“I was only wondering whether I’d see you there. I was thinking about going myself.”
She was glad. Despite being a much-beloved figure in the town, Carl had kept to himself since Maggie had passed away. “It’s great that you’re going, Carl. You’ll have fun. I’ll see you there.”
“You will?”
“Of course.” She laughed. “It’s not that crowded—and that hair of yours makes you easy to spot.”
He swiped a hand self-consciously over his rusty hair, which managed to defy classification as brown, blond, or red. He seemed on the verge of speaking, stopped himself, then a split second later managed, “I should probably go home now.”
“Okay,” she said.
After he’d left, she counted to three slowly and was able to pick up her mother’s call before the first ring had ended.
“What did Carl want?” Brenda asked.
She thought for a moment. “Not sure, actually.”
“Don’t be naïve. Carl is an eligible bachelor.”
“He’s also my boss.”
“You work together—there’s a difference. Remember, he and Maggie were partners, too.”
Jane shuddered. That was the problem. She had come back to Mesquite Creek to help out after Maggie’s death, not to take Maggie’s place. And she couldn’t help thinking of Carl primarily as Maggie’s husband. Besides, he’d been an adult when she’d first known him as a teenager, a fact that formed a mental barrier that kept her from imagining Carl as a romantic object. “No, Mom.” She couldn’t imagine going out with him any more than she could imagine going out with her junior high math teacher. “Just . . . no.”
“I could give you the e-mail addresses of ten women in this town who would date Carl Fenton in a heartbeat.”
Jane laughed. “Give them to Carl, not me.”
“But what would he do with them? He wants you.”
“Mom, you’re a trip. First you think that Roy is carrying a torch for me, and now you’re convinced Carl has the hots for me or something. Is there anyone else I should know about?”
“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
“Well, for one thing, for the past few years I’ve been lucky if I could scrounge up a date every six months or so. Now you’re acting as if I’m Mesquite Creek’s number-one bachelorette.”
“You could be, if you put a little effort into it.”
With that, her mother’s conversation threatened to veer down the well-worn path of if-only-you’d. If only you’d dress better . . . wear more makeup . . . take ballet . . . flirt more . . . bleach your teeth . . . It had been going on for years. “Mom . . . I’ve got to go. These pups need to get out for a walk.”
“I walked Squeak at lunch.”
Her Mom always complained about how hideous Squeak was . . . but then she always came in around noon to check on him. “Thanks.”
“How are you going to handle two dogs at once?” her mother asked.
Jane stared down at big brown eyes and two thumping tails and felt a smile tug at her lips. “It’ll be easier than juggling all the gentlemen callers you’re imagining beating down my door.”
“Well . . . but it seems like I ought to get to know the new guy a little. He’s a purebred, isn’t he?”
She smiled. Her mom was a snob even when it came to canines. “He is.”
“Could you use a hand? I just happen to have my tennies on.”
She could just imagine her mom in the breakfast room, ready to go. Sometimes she wondered if it was normal for people to communicate by phone when they lived only fifty feet apart. They both probably could have traded in their calling plans and just used walkie-talkies.
“I can always use a hand,” Jane said.
“I’ll be right over!”
The next morning, Kaylie was lying in wait for her. “Can we talk at lunch?”
“What about?”
The receptionist’s face fell. “The article? You’re the last Juliet I have to talk to . . . and frankly, I hope you have something interesting to say, because Kelli Owens and old Miss Tatum sure didn’t.”
Jane bit her lip. She’d been hoping Kaylie wouldn’t follow through with that. “Maybe that’s a sign you should write about something else.”
“Too late now. I promised The Buzz I’d have something for them tomorrow.”
“Well, okay,” Jane said reluctantly. “I have a short breather at twelve thirty. I could squeeze in a sandwich and a chat.”
“Great! And don’t forget the photographer’s going to be here at three.”
“Photographer?”
“Carl’s idea. He wants a picture of the staff. You know—one big happy family.”
That was weird. Carl had never had picture day before. Then again, he had never shown any interest in decorating before. Or come over to her house in the evening. Or asked about her future.
Jane hurried into an exam room and was brought up short by the sight of her friend Erin standing across the room from her long-lost cat, Smudge, who was draped across the stainless steel exam table.
Jane let out a whoop of surprise and joy. Erin, who ran a salon downtown, had been depressed for months because Smudge had disappeared. “When did he come home?”
Erin looked considerably less excited than Jane felt. “He showed up on my doorstep yesterday morning.” Her mouth quirked. “I hear someone showed up on your doorstep, too.”
Ignoring that topic, Jane petted Smudge and then started giving him a going-over. “Has he actually gained weight?” He’d never been small to begin with, but now he seemed even puffier and sleeker than ever. His white fur shone, and the single dark gray tabby mark on his back stood out even more.
She leaned over to the counter and read the notes Marcy had made on his chart after checking him in. “Says here he’s put on over a pound.”
Erin grunted. “All these months, I’ve been crying my eyes out because I imagined him lost and starving. He was obviously whooping it up somewhere.”
Jane listened to his heart, which sounded fine except that it was hard to hear over his loud purring. He was such a sweetie, she had a hard time not making cooing noises at him.
Her friend crossed her arms. “There’s something not right about him.”
“Well, there’s no telling what he’s been up to. I’ll run a blood test on him and check him for FIV.”
“It’s like that old movie,” Erin said. “You know—the one where the guy comes back from the war and no one knows if he’s who he says he is?”
Jane laughed. “This is Smudge.”
“Yeah, but he’s not exactly Smudge. He isn’t playful like I remember. He’s just a lump. And he won’t eat dry food. I had to break down and open a can of tuna.”
“What are you saying?”
Erin shifted and after a moment’s hesitation admitted, “I think I’ve fallen out of love with my cat.”
“Oh no,” Jane said.
“It’s true,” she insisted. “I’m over him. I’m even thinking about trying to find someone else to take him, or seeing if the animal shelter—”
“No—you will not take him there.” What was it with everyone? Had someone declared this Give Up On Your Pets Week and not informed her?
“You volunteer there,” Erin pointed out.
“I don’t care. You can’t take him there. They do their best, but it’s animal Auschwitz. You’d be dooming Smudge to die.” Or dooming Jane to owning another cat. She took in Erin’s implacable expression. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”
“How would you feel if you’d been abandoned for months and then the guy just showed back up again looking fat and happy, and with completely new appetites?”
Hmph.
“He’s a cat, not a guy,” Jane argued. “Besides, we don’t kn
ow what happened to him. Maybe his disappearance wasn’t his fault. Maybe he got snatched, and was force-fed tuna until he made a valiant escape to get back to you.”
“Oh sure—take his side,” Erin said, joking.
At least, Jane was pretty sure she was joking. There needed to be relationship counseling for pet owners. “Promise me you won’t do anything rash.”
Erin hesitated only a moment before relenting. “Okay—I’ll give him time.” She aimed a pointed look at Jane as she took two blood samples. “What about Roy?” Erin asked. “Any change in his appetites?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t call me last night.”
“I ended up at Mom’s. Roy’s return has made her a little frantic, so I let her beat me at canasta. But I’ll come by soon and fill you in on all the details about what didn’t happen.”
Erin looked disappointed. “You’ll probably soon take off for parts unknown, too.”
Jane laughed. “Not likely.”
“Why not? You never meant to live here permanently, did you?”
“No, but . . .” She was about to talk about all the things that made her heart clench up at the thought of leaving. Her parents. Her friends—primarily Erin and all the people she worked with. Even the town—a place she could have traveled through blindfolded. There was something comforting about running weekend errands and recognizing most every face she encountered. Sure, sometimes the town felt a little stifling, a trifle dull, but there was a safe feeling about it, too. “I seem to have become a Mesquite Creek lifer.”
Erin scooped up Smudge and put him in his carrier. “Well, as one lifer to another, come by the salon and let me cut your bangs. Roy could be sending you come-hither looks, but you’d miss them for all the hair in your eyes.”
The clinic was busy enough that morning that Jane managed to forget about lunch until Kaylie buttonholed her as she was staggering to the back room for a Diet Coke.
“Roy’s been calling you,” the receptionist informed her.
Jane grunted.
“Your mother, too.”
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“She wanted to know if Roy had called you.”
“Maybe I should give them each other’s numbers,” Jane mused.
Kaylie laughed. “Ready for the interview?”
They sat at a picnic table that was set up next to the dog-walking area. No one else was there, and Jane was glad for the privacy. She wouldn’t relish taking this stroll down memory lane in front of the rest of the staff. In fact, she’d rather not be taking it at all.
To begin, Kaylie read questions from a notebook she had brought with her. “What do you most remember about playing Juliet?”
Jane didn’t have to ponder that one long. “Stage fright. We gave three performances, and I was terrified the whole time.”
Kaylie twiddled her pen, unsatisfied. Jane felt as if she’d already bored her audience of one. “Yeah, everybody’s talked about stage fright already. My question is, if you were so nervous, why did you try out?”
“I didn’t. The speech teacher, Mrs. Humphrey, asked me to be the stage manager. I was really happy to do that. I loved going to all the rehearsals, figuring out what props needed to be where, and cuing the lights. Plus I ran lines with the actors. That was a blast. But then our Juliet, Lacey Butler, got sick at the last minute. And since I’d been running lines and going to all the rehearsals, I knew the part. So Roy told Mrs. Humphrey that I should do the role.”
Interest sparked in Kaylie’s eyes. “Roy McGillam asked for you to be his Juliet? Weren’t y’all going out?”
“Not really. That happened . . . well, during the show.”
“You mean you fell in love with your Romeo?”
God, that sounded so corny. “I guess we’d sort of been, you know, attracted to each other for a while before that. But, yeah, we started dating during the show, and then for the rest of senior year. Back then, we had the senior play earlier in the fall, not the spring.”
From the rapturous look on Kaylie’s face, she could tell that Kaylie didn’t care if the play happened in November, May, or Whenevuary. The story was now all about sex. “So basically, Roy was swoonworthy even back then?”
“Oh yeah. He always was, from first grade on. I’d always thought he was too cool for me. I’d always been a geeky study wart. I was really shocked when I figured out that he liked me.”
“When was that?”
Jane tried not to blush. “Well, we had to kiss onstage a couple of times. The first time was in rehearsal, and even though I really wasn’t that experienced, I knew it wasn’t a playacting kind of kiss.”
“That’s so sweet. What else do you remember?”
Encouraged, Jane rambled on with a few more anecdotes. She talked more about Roy, and dating Roy, and the friction it caused because their mothers had been rivals for homecoming queen. And she mentioned a few incidents involving other people in the cast, like the time Jared had a costume malfunction and the crotch of his leggings kept falling around his knees, to the point that he toppled off the edge of the stage one night.
“But the audience just thought it was part of the fight scene,” she explained, remembering too late that some of this might find its way into print. She didn’t want to embarrass Jared. “He really did a great job.”
“So you and Roy kept going out after the play, right?”
“All through college. We broke up just after we graduated. I mean, we didn’t really break up, but we went separate ways—him to Seattle, me to vet school at College Station.”
“Star-crossed lovers,” Kaylie said.
“There was never any big scene. No poison or daggers.”
“So you two never really fell out of love?”
“No, not really. I mean—there was never a breakup.”
“And neither one of you has married?”
“No.” Jane’s brows knit as she watched Kaylie scribbling on her pad. “But we’re definitely not involved now. That’s clear, right?”
“Oh sure.”
“I probably shouldn’t have rambled on so much about Roy. Everybody has their experience with young love, right?”
“Exactly.” Kaylie smiled brightly at her. “Thanks so much for talking to me, Jane. This has given me a lot to work with.”
Jane tilted her head doubtfully. “It has?”
“Definitely.”
Jane wasn’t so sure that was a good thing.
Chapter Four
When Jane got home from work on Saturday afternoon, she changed into shorts and sandals and walked to the convenience store near her house on her way downtown. Driving anywhere today was ill-advised. Disgruntled locals spoke of the Jam with a double meaning, since it was the only time of year Mesquite Creek ever had a problem with traffic.
The Jam was a family-friendly event—which in Mesquite Creek meant that alcohol would not be sold. Which in turn meant that everybody brought their own. Jeff Sims, the owner of the Quik Stop, was probably the happiest person in town that day. He took note of Jane’s six-pack with a grin.
“Meeting your sweetheart at the Jam?” he asked.
She laughed. “Not unless I manage to scrounge one up while I’m there. You know I’m footloose and fancy-free.”
“I might, but The Buzz don’t.”
She looked down at the papers stacked in the wire rack by the counter. There was a picture of a new police vehicle taking up most of the front page, but right above the fold she glimpsed the headline “Star-Crossed Juliet Haunted by What Might Have Been.” Next to the words was a smaller picture, very familiar to anyone who’d been in Mesquite Creek High School during the past fourteen years, of her and Roy, their mouths centimeters apart. Beneath the picture was her truncated quote, “We never fell out of love.”
“Oh no,” she said, taking a copy.
Jeff added it to her total. “And here all these years I thought you’d dumped the guy. I don’t see why a pr
etty thing like you should pine away half her life.”
“I haven’t been!” She skimmed and realized that the article made it sound as if she’d been doing exactly that. Her quotes were familiar to her, but they seemed to have been put through a filter that shifted their meaning from what she’d intended when she’d spoken them.
“I’m going to strangle Kaylie.”
“Why? If Roy reads this, maybe he’ll see you’re still in love with him.”
“But that’s just what I don’t want.”
What a nuisance. She dreaded going to the Jam now. This stupid article would be fresh on everyone’s minds.
“Have you sold many of these today?” she asked Jeff.
“Yep. Lots of people looking at that article. There’s the bit with you and Roy, but it continues on page six, where there’s another picture of old Miss Tatum as Juliet back in the fifties.” He whistled. “Man, she was hot. Who knew?”
Jane paid for her things and left the Quik Stop, catching herself casting furtive glances around to see if anyone was coming before scurrying to the sidewalk.
She was acting so ridiculous. Over what? Just a little article. Who read The Buzz anymore, anyway? And, despite what Jeff said, who really cared?
Her phone rang, and she pulled it out of her purse. “Hi, Mom.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Just now. I’m on my way to the Jam.”
“You’re going?”
Jane laughed. “Yes.” Somehow, her mother’s horrified overreaction shrank her own down to a bearable feeling of rueful amusement.
“I don’t know what made you go on like that in front of a newspaper reporter. You’re usually so much more diplomatic.”
She made it sound as if Jane gave interviews all the time.
“It was just Kaylie, from work, and I don’t remember saying half those things. Or I don’t remember them sounding so . . . pathetic.”
“Why don’t you come over to the house? I’ll break out the Mamma Mia! DVD and some chardonnay and you can forget all about it.”
As plans went, it wasn’t a bad one. If she wanted to hide away and let people assume the newspaper story was true.
