This Time, Forever

by Pamela Britton

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching Charlotte Douglas International Airport,” announced a fuzzy voice over the loudspeaker at the same time Susie caught Matt making faces at Cammie. Susie gave her son a stern look, then checked her watch. It was nearly four in the afternoon, Charlotte time, but Susie was humming with pent-up energy after being on the plane for so very long. All she wanted to do was get home and settle in with Ben.

  What felt like a lifetime later—but was probably only twenty minutes—Susie stood at the luggage carousel with Matt and Cammie waiting for their bags to appear. They were all waiting for Ben to appear, too. His text message just a moment ago had been a terse “Running late.” That, Susie had already figured out.

  “Here comes my suitcase,” she said to Matt. “Let me grab it.”

  “I can get it, Mom,” he said.

  Except the bag was nearly as tall as him, and Susie could envision an end result of both Matt and the suitcase circling on the belt.

  “Let me give you a hand,” Ben said, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

  Susie watched as both of the males in her life retrieved the suitcase together.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you,” her husband said once he’d placed the luggage next to her.

  She came forward and gave him a quick kiss. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just happy to see you now.”

  “Me, too.”

  Before he could help Cammie or Matt with their smaller suitcases, he was approached by a handful of autograph seekers. Ben was as gracious as ever, giving autographs and smiling as his picture was taken on every cell phone the group had. But as Susie looked at him, she grew a little sad. She knew it wasn’t possible for a person to visibly age over the course of two days, but it seemed to her that Ben had. The lines radiating from the corners of his eyes appeared more pronounced and the set of his shoulders didn’t have its usual military bearing.

  “Mom, we’ve got our stuff,” Cammie said from behind her.

  “Dad’s almost done,” Susie absently replied as she reached for the handle on her suitcase and extended it.

  “Ready?” Ben asked, taking her luggage from her.

  “I’m parked close by.”

  After only two more autograph stops, they were at the car. Ben had driven her SUV as opposed to his sleek sports car, which was made to accommodate neither luggage nor children. The ride home took place in silence, but more of the tired sort than the uncomfortable sort. That, Susie supposed, was progress.

  After they’d pulled down the winding drive to their home, Ben didn’t hit the button to open the garage door. Instead, he put the car in Park and sat with it idling.

  “Can we get out?” Matt asked.

  “Sure,” Ben replied.

  Before Susie could tell the kids to hang on and get their luggage, they were up and out.

  “What’s going on?” she asked Ben.

  “I have someplace I have to be tonight. Don’t expect me home until late.”

  She decided to try to keep things light. “That sounds highly mysterious. Are you moonlighting as a secret agent?”

  “Nothing that exciting. Just a business meeting,” Ben replied.

  If he’d said he had to be at the track, Susie would have accepted the statement without a second thought. After all, tomorrow was qualifying day.

  Recalling her vow to put it all out there, Susie said, “It seems odd to me that you’d have a business meeting when you’re going to be at the track tomorrow. Usually, you’re with Chris on Wednesday evening.”

  Ben gave her a level look. “Do I ask you about all the details of your day?”

  “No, but I’d be happy to share them with you, if you did.”

  “I don’t want to do that. We both deserve a level of privacy even though we’re married.” He glanced at the car’s clock. “I’m going to be late. Can we save this discussion?”

  Susie considered herself a patient woman, but she’d just been pushed one dismissal too far. And like any good Tennessee-born girl, she knew that sweetness could be a thousand times sharper than vinegar.

  “For when you get home…whenever that might be? Of course we can, honey. And you might as well just bring in all the luggage then, too. We wouldn’t want to slow you down, now would we?”

  She’d loaded the syrup heavier than Cammie did on French toast, and Ben was staring at her as though he’d never seen her before. Well, let him look! Susie exited the car and gave Ben an utterly false smile and very perky wave while sending a very different mental message: Be as stubborn and secretive as you like, Benjamin Horatio Edmonds, but I am not backing down!

  But as she marched up the walk to her home’s front door…

  “Mom, I’m hungry,” Cammie called from the kitchen as soon as Susie had entered the house.

  “I’ll order us pizza for dinner,” Susie called back. Since the ordering of pizza was something that happened just about as often as Halley’s Comet came around, that should buy some peace while she made a much-needed phone call.

  “But I haven’t even had lunch, and it’s going to take forever to get pizza all the way out here,” Cammie said from closer by.

  Susie hesitated at the bottom of the oak circular staircase that led to their home’s second floor and some measure of privacy for her. The child had a point. They lived so far outside town that pizza delivery required intense negotiations. And the snack boxes she’d let Cammie and Matt purchase on the plane had been amusing for their mini-playing cards and the mystery of hummus in a tube, but they’d hardly been a meal. In fact, they’d had no real meal today at all.

  “Hang on, and we’ll go fix something. But right now, I need to run upstairs. Grab a yogurt or something…” And then Susie dashed to her room before Cammie could catch her.

  Once there, she closed the bedroom door, picked up the phone and dialed Maudie’s Down Home Diner. Blessedly, Sheila Trueblood answered the phone.

  “Sheila, it’s Susie Edmonds.”

  “Hey, Susie, how was the California vacation?”

  “Fine,” Susie replied, knowing—or at least hoping— Sheila would get the real story later. And then she moved on to the purpose of her call. “Can you help me call an emergency meeting of the Tuesday Tarts for tonight?”

  Sheila laughed. “So we’re going to be the Wednesday Wenches?”

  “Sure,” Susie said. If she were in a happier mood, she might have smiled at Sheila’s usual sharp wit. But Susie remained far from happy. “I know this is short notice, and that I’m asking a lot, but I need the counsel of wise women, and I can’t think of any wiser.”

  “You know we’re always here for each other,” Maudie’s owner replied. “How’s nine o’clock?”

  “Perfect,” Susie replied. “And I’m bringing wine.”

  Sheila snorted. “Wine? You sound frazzled enough that I’m thinking of putting out a fifth of whiskey and a bunch of shot glasses.”

  “I just might take you up on that,” Susie said grimly.

  “I’ll make the calls,” Sheila said. “You just relax, and we’ll see you in the back room at nine.”

  After she’d hung up the phone, Susie heaved a sigh of relief and flopped onto her bed. Thank heaven for tarts and wenches!

  CHAPTER SIX

  “THANKS FOR SEEING ME,” Ben said to his friend Derek Garner, whom he’d just met up with in the most unlikely of locations—the indoor pool area at a Charlotte hotel. Both men sat poolside at a glass-topped table set in a circle of potted palms. Ben almost felt like the secret agent Susie had accused him of being.

  “I wish it could be someplace with a little more decorum,” Derek said inclining his head toward the pool where a group of about ten teenagers frolicked. Ben couldn’t be precise about the number because they were moving around so quickly.

  “The location isn’t a problem,” he said to Derek. “I’m just glad to find you’re in town. Things have been crazy the past few weeks. I forgot you’d be here.”

  “You forgot
after paying for all these kids to be at the races this weekend?” his friend asked. “You do have stuff going on.”

  Derek was a former NASCAR Nationwide Series driver and more recently the founder and executive director of Green Flag Racing, a day camp and supplemental education program for at-risk urban youth in Detroit. Ben had been a financial supporter for some time, and the work Derek was doing only got better with each passing year.

  “Way too much stuff going on,” Ben agreed. “But not much anyone who I can talk to about it.”

  Though he had dozens of friends here in North Carolina, most of them were still in the business. Ben needed to talk to someone whose NASCAR days were behind him.

  “I’m here to listen,” Derek said.

  Ben cut to the chase. “How did you know when it was time for you to retire?”

  If Derek was surprised by the question, he hid it well.

  “I had things I wanted to do more than race,” he replied. He paused a beat before asking, “So I take it that the R word has popped into your head?”

  “It’s more like it was surgically implanted there.”

  “If this is about retirement, I get why you’re talking to me. It’s not the kind of thing you want even whispered within the industry.”

  Ben nodded. “For sure. There’s no guarantee I’ll be with Double S Racing past this season and if the other teams think I’m considering retirement, they aren’t going to take a serious look at me.”

  “Agreed,” Derek said, then turned his attention to the pool. Using his fingers to send out an eardrum breaker of a whistle, he gained the kids’ attention. “Time to bring it down a few hundred decibels.”

  Ben was damn impressed to see that not one of the kids so much as gave him the standard teen you’re-so-boring look. Then he told the two counselors also watching the kids from poolside to get it in gear before they were all kicked to the curb.

  “That’s better,” Derek said to Ben. “So who planted this retirement thing in your head?”

  “First, I saw a couple of random posts on my fan site. Not exactly a call to retire, but more curiosity about how long I planned to continue racing. That, I could deal with. But after the California race last week, my crew chief pretty much volunteered me for retirement.”

  “Your crew chief? The new one…Chris Sampson?”

  Ben nodded. “That would be the guy. We’ve clashed from the moment Gil dropped him into the middle of my team. I can do no right, and Sampson can do no wrong. Or at least he’s that way in front of me. I’ve heard that he’s less abrasive with others, which I have to believe because otherwise he’d be walking around with two black eyes on a daily basis.”

  Derek shook his head as though he hadn’t heard right. “You haven’t…?”

  “No, we haven’t fought, but I’ve been damn tempted.”

  “Then Sampson has to be a piece of work since you’re one of the calmest guys I’ve ever met.”

  “Usually,” Ben said. “But the farther I get into this season, the less I feel like myself. The friction Sampson is causing is a big part of it. He and I could use a session at your camp to get our teamwork skills in place. That, or a boxing ring. He’s a chunk of years younger than I am, but I have life experience and a whole lot of anger on my side.”

  “Instead of twelve rounds, how about an arbitrator?” Derek asked.

  Ben laughed.

  “No, I mean it. You don’t have to hire a professional if you don’t want to, but if you sit down with a neutral third party, you might be able to work through some of this.”

  “I don’t see it happening,” Ben said.

  “Just think about it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Derek smiled. “Why don’t I think you meant that?”

  Ben laughed. “Because I’d sooner drive blindfolded than I’d go through something that sounds like marriage counseling with Chris Sampson.”

  “Consider the subject dropped,” Derek said. “But once you do retire, whenever that might be, what are your plans?”

  “That’s number one on the Beats the Heck Out of Me list. I guess it always seemed so far in the future that I didn’t need to think about it. And now here I am. Or potentially here I am.”

  “Other than driving, what do you like?” Derek asked.

  Ben hitched this thumb toward the pool. “Being around kids, teaching them…learning from them. It’s amazing what they can teach an adult about life.”

  Derek smiled. “I wish I could afford to have you on Green Flag’s staff.”

  “Not a problem. You get me whenever you want me, for free. That’s a promise.”

  Now Ben just needed to figure out who got him in exchange for a paycheck.

  A FEW MINUTES BEFORE NINE that evening, Susie entered the front door of Maudie’s Down Home Diner, carrying a bottle of red wine sheathed in a paper bag. She wasn’t a whiskey woman, as Sheila had suggested, but tonight a glass of wine certainly sounded good.

  As she walked through the diner’s currently quiet public area, chat and laughter from the back room flowed toward her. Susie said hellos to the customers she knew, waved to the waitress and moved on to her friends. At least all was right in this part of the world. In the room, she found Sheila, Mellie, Patsy, Patsy’s two daughters, Sophia and Grace, and Rue Larrabee, who had started the Tuesday Tarts’ gathering and was the owner of the Cut ’N’ Chat salon, located just a few doors down from Maudie’s.

  “So here you’ve gone and turned us into the Wednesday Wenches,” Rue said. “So long as we can still be Tuesday Tarts, too, I’m all for it. The more estrogen I’m around, the better life looks.”

  Susie laughed, and even that simple action lightened her mood.

  “Since you’re swimming in estrogen at the salon, it has to be looking pretty darned rosy,” she said.

  “And don’t forget that testosterone, either,” Sheila said. “From where I’m sitting, you’ve been looking nearly delirious ever since the Tarts bought you Andrew in that bachelor auction.”

  Andrew Clark was now Rue’s fiancé. The tarts had been in a frenzy of wedding planning since Rue had shared the news.

  The stylist tipped back her head and let loose a laugh as big as her heart. “You might have bought him, but after that, the work was all mine!”

  “I’d say the work was more his, the way you were backpedaling from him,” Patsy added in.

  As Susie listened to the loving banter, she took a corkscrew from the table Sheila always stocked with treats for nights such as this. After trimming away the bottle’s foil, she twisted in the corkscrew and began to carefully draw the cork out.

  “Bless it all!” she snapped when the cork did the exact same thing.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophia asked.

  Susie held out the corkscrew. “I came off half corked.”

  Her friends laughed, and Sophia rose to join her at the treats table.

  “Let me see that, and you go sit down,” the younger woman said.

  Susie was happy to hand over the wine. She took her usual spot right next to Patsy on the loveseat and settled in.

  “And speaking of romance,” Patsy said to Sheila, who was kicked back in a fat armchair, a glass of whiskey, neat, in her hand. “What’s going on with you and Gil Sizemore?”

  “What do you mean, what’s going on? I’ve told you all over and over, he’s a diner customer just like any other,” Sheila replied in a tone Susie would almost peg as alarmed.

  “Oh, I’ll agree he’s a customer, but most of your customers don’t look at you the way he does.”

  “And just how do you think the man looks at me?” Sheila asked.

  “Judging by what I saw at lunch today, he looks at you like you’re the best thing since sweet tea,” Patsy said.

  “He does not!”

  “I don’t know, Sheila. Mom’s right,” Sophia said as she poured Susie’s wine into one of the diner’s tumblers.

  “I’ve caught him looking your way a time or two, and I�
��d have to agree the man’s sweet on you.”

  “I’d advise both of you to skip the wine,” Sheila replied. “You’re already not seeing clearly. Gil is a valued customer and nothing more. Just because a man says hello and might talk to a woman for a while doesn’t mean he’s sweet on her.”

  “It does if he watches her every time she’s not looking,” Susie said after thanking Sophia for the wine she’d brought her.

  “Not you, too?” Sheila said. “I’m beginning to think it’s something in the water in this town. Do all of you have vision problems? Gil Sizemore could not possibly be checking me out.”

  “I can guarantee my vision’s 20/20, or I wouldn’t be working on any of your heads, and I’ve got to say I’ve seen you watching Gil, too, Sheila,” Rue announced.

  The diner owner had blushed as red as her fiery hair. “I have not! Gil Sizemore isn’t my type at all. He’s all smooth and glossy and polished. He might as well have been dipped into varnish!”

  “Un-huh. Right,” Rue said, one perfectly plucked eyebrow arched with skepticism.

  “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much,” Susie added.

  Sophia handed Patsy a glass of wine, then took a seat in the chair next to Sheila’s. “I’m going to stay out of this since my mom told me to mind my own business, but if I were to jump in…” she added with her perpetually serious expression in place, “I’d have to agree.”

  “Thanks for almost staying out of it,” Sheila said to her friend in a teasing voice. “It’s a good thing I adore you, isn’t it?”

  Sophia smiled in return.

  “And not just to save myself from further speculation, but because she’s the reason we’re here tonight, would you like to tell us what’s happened, Susie?”

  With all this talk of crushes and new love, it felt more than a little odd to be talking about what she feared was fading love, but Susie had no place else to turn.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any good place to start this,” she said. “I’ve always kept my own counsel when it comes to my marriage. Ben’s been my very best friend since the day we met, and I’ve always been able to talk to him.”