How Sweet It is

by Sophie Gunn

  Paige had let him in this morning before she left for school. Now, she was gone and he could hear Lizzie moving around upstairs. His mouth went dry, thinking about her and about how good this all was. A little more of her appeared with each step as she came down the stairs until she reached the landing and there she was, all of her, taking his breath away.

  “Morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “The newel post is wobbly,” he said. “I have to remove the bottom tread and secure the joint.”

  She came down to him and kissed his shoulder and he felt as if everything was right in his world even if he knew it wasn’t.

  “Right,” she said. “I didn’t understand a word you just said, but it sounds like just what I’d do with a wobbly jewel post.”

  “Newel post.”

  He pulled her into his arms.

  The kiss wasn’t as electric as it had been in the beginning, but it was warmer, completely comforting, absolutely perfect. “Up or down?” he asked.

  “Neither.” She pushed him away. “I need coffee. And I’ve been late to work the last two days.”

  Tay followed her into the kitchen. “Do you have any Gorilla Glue for that post?”

  “In the basement, maybe. I don’t know. It sounds like the kind of thing I’d buy with good intentions, then never use and let dry up. You want me to go get some in town?” She’d been running his errands in town for him ever since they’d run into Candy. He didn’t like it, but he liked it better than the alternative, which was Candy’s seeing him again. “Coffee?”

  “Nah. I’ll get it.” The mention of going into town made his lips go thin. “What are the chances that Candy is buying nails at the hardware store this morning?”

  He could read the compassion, but also the exasperation on her face. He wasn’t sure which was worse. “No Candy spottings. It’s been a month,” Lizzie said.

  “I saw her last week, but she didn’t see me,” he admitted. “I was driving through town and she was walking. She was alone, which depressed the hell out of me. Every time I see her, she looks thinner and thinner, even in her parka.” He sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his hands through his hair.

  This was killing him.

  Lizzie had an overwhelming desire to run to campus, find Candy Williams, and drag her to her kitchen so she could see that Tay was an okay guy who was suffering. She wanted to shout at the poor girl that he deserved her forgiveness. “I wish there was something I could do,” Lizzie said for the hundredth time.

  She went to him and sat on his lap and he put his arms around her. She felt lovely surrounded by him. “You’re a good man, Tay.”

  He kissed her hair, her cheek, her forehead, then took her mouth in his.

  She let her head fall back.

  He kissed down her neck. He reached under her sweater and sighed as he cupped her breast. He let his head fall to kiss her. “God, you’re beautiful. I would give anything to taste you right now.” The days were slipping by too quickly. They never seemed to have enough time.

  “Mmmm,” she sighed. “I could call in late to work.”

  “That sounds like a fantastic idea.”

  BZZZZZZZZ.

  They pulled apart.

  “Who fixed my doorbell?” she demanded.

  “I did,” he said. “Damn it. I can break it again. Wait—don’t go.”

  Lizzie ignored him and went to the door.

  It was Jill and she was holding a pie.

  CHAPTER

  40

  Hi. Can I come in?” Jill asked, almost sheepishly, which was so unlike her, Lizzie let her in without another word.

  “Are you okay?”

  Jill looked around the foyer. “Wow. It looks great in here.”

  Tay came into the foyer.

  “Now it looks even better.” Jill tried a weak smile, her heart obviously not in it. “Hi, Tay.”

  “Ma’am.” He nodded to Jill. “Back to work with me. I’ve got to find some glue.”

  His footsteps disappeared into the basement.

  “Oh, God, you’re so lucky,” Jill whispered to Lizzie as they went to the kitchen. “He’s a dream.”

  “A dream I’m about to wake up from. Coffee?” Lizzie asked.

  Jill sat down, plopping the pie on the table. “He’s still insisting this town isn’t big enough for him and Candy?”

  “Yep. And I can’t exactly blame him. But still. Crap!”

  “Did you ever think about going with him, Lizzie?”

  “No. I like it here. I like my house, my job, my birds, my daughter, my very worstest enemies. How could I leave all this?”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “I know. But it’s more than that. It’s also that I don’t want to wander around, following a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s got to figure this out, Jill. Remember how I said I didn’t want a guy to save me? Well, I also don’t want to give up my life for a guy who’s having such a hard time saving himself. I know that sounds harsh, but I worked hard for all this. It might not be much, but it’s what I’ve got.”

  “You’re right,” Jill said. “Always right.”

  “Not always,” Lizzie pointed out.

  “Okay, I’m just going to come out and say this and then I have to go. I’m busy. I have clients.”

  Lizzie sat down. “You’re the one who came here.” Lizzie couldn’t imagine what this visit was about. It was rare of Jill to stop by out of the blue. Even rarer for her to be so fidgety.

  Jill nodded. “Right. Well. Okay. Thing is—there’s something I wanted to get out of the way.” She inhaled deeply. “We’ve been enemies for a long time.”

  “We have.”

  “Good enemies.”

  “The best,” Lizzie said, and she meant it.

  “And we promised each other to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “Right.”

  Jill sighed. “I haven’t been telling the truth.” She paused. “I also slept with Ethan.”

  Lizzie whistled under her breath. She tried to adjust to the news, but there was nothing to adjust. It rolled off her. “You know, I don’t really care. I’m pretty over Ethan. I swear, I don’t think there’s a cell in my body that wants him back.”

  “And I also—” Jill’s voice started to waver. She coughed.

  “Jilly?” Lizzie had never seen her friend so pale.

  “He also got me pregnant. I also got pregnant. I had a baby, too.”

  “Oh.” Lizzie absorbed the news, her mind darting to all the possibilities. “You left school early senior year, just after I did. With mono.”

  “Mono!” Jill laughed and then her eyes welled up with tears. She let out a yelp like an wounded animal, which brought Tay dashing into the kitchen. He retreated just as quickly as he saw the crying woman.

  “Oh, my God. Here, have some pie.” Lizzie jumped up for a knife and a plate. “When were you going to tell me this?”

  “Never.” Jill accepted the pie. She shoved a bite into her mouth. “But with Ethan coming, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I couldn’t not tell you anymore and—” She mumbled something incoherent.

  “What? I didn’t get that.”

  “I gave the baby away,” Jill said, a little too loudly. She put down her pie. “God, I hated you so much. There you were, having your baby right out in the open like it was no big deal. I couldn’t do that. Girls like me didn’t have babies when they were teenagers. I had to go to college. Get a good husband. Make money. But you didn’t care what anyone thought. I did, though. I wasn’t going to ruin my life with a baby. I had big plans. I thought, thank God I wasn’t like you. I didn’t want to ruin my life like you did. I was—”

  “Higher class?”

  Jill exhaled heavily. “I was an idiot. And Ethan coming is making it all come back to me and I’m trying really, really hard not to hate you all over again because what if he’s perfect and he gives Paige a chance at a great life and I don’t even
know where my baby is? I’ve never made a bigger mistake in my life.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments, staring at the destroyed pie while tears streamed down Jill’s face.

  “Your baby might already be in boarding school in Geneva, studying to be president,” Lizzie pointed out.

  “She might,” Jill allowed.

  “Paige has done pretty darn well without Ethan all these years. I bet wherever your baby went, she’s doing fine.”

  “The only other person who knows this is Nina,” Jill said. “I don’t want it to get around town.”

  “Nina? Why Nina?”

  “Yeah. She caught me barfing one day in the school bathroom and she was so nice to me. I told her everything and she swore secrecy.”

  “So you guys weren’t true enemies?”

  “We were secret friends.”

  Lizzie made the coffee. She had always wondered why Nina had joined the Enemy Club. She had just appeared one Wednesday and sat down at the end of the counter. Jill had noticed her and called her over. Now Lizzie understood that Jill had set the whole thing up. She handed a mug to Jill, who took it like a child. “Did Ethan know about any of this?”

  “No. I never told him. Then he started dating you and I hated you both so much because he pretended I had never existed.” She paused. “I had met him at one of my father’s dinners for his students. He came up to my room, and we made out a little, and he invited me to meet him later.”

  “You little slut,” Lizzie scolded.

  “I know. We kinda had a thing going for a little while. We went on a few secret dates.” Jill shrugged. The tears were streaming, but she didn’t look as miserable. “And now, he’s coming back to you to make it right. But I can never make it right for my baby. I don’t know where she is.”

  “She?” Lizzie said. “You’re the mother of Paige’s half sister. We’re related.”

  “I couldn’t be more sorry. I feel like I let her down.” She tried to bring her sniffles under control, then she ate the last bite of her pie. Lizzie cut her another generous piece and shoveled it onto her plate. Jill pushed it aside and took the whole pie, digging in haphazardly with her fork.

  “Ethan wasn’t even that good,” Lizzie consoled her friend.

  Jill fell into a fit of sobbing. “He stank. Like, two seconds and he was done.”

  “Two seconds was a second longer than I got,” Lizzie said.

  Jill picked her wrecked face up off the table. She hiccuped. “Really?”

  “No. I’m just trying to make you feel better.” Lizzie patted Jill’s shoulder.

  Jill smiled and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Are we still best enemies?”

  “Forever. Even better, now that we’re half aunts. Is that what we are?”

  “Something like that, I guess. I hate him for coming back like this.”

  “Maybe one day soon, your daughter will come back like this.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. Galton’s awesome. No one can resist. It has a pull. And Jill, when she comes, you’ll be ready for her. You’ll be a great birth mom. The best.”

  Jill smiled. “You know, I used to wish and hope for the day Paige would leave, because whenever I saw her, I felt so much loss. But now, I want her to stay. I feel like she’s part mine.”

  “She is. You took care of us so many times.” Lizzie paused. “Are you going to tell Ethan?”

  “No. Definitely not. It’s none of his business. I just wanted to tell you. It’s been hanging over me for so many years.”

  “Okay. You sure?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” They sat for a while.

  Lizzie said, “Do you want to tell Paige?”

  “No!” Jill said.

  Lizzie was relieved. “She has a lot to deal with.”

  After Jill left, Tay peeked out of the living room.

  “I heard the whole thing,” he said.

  “Good,” Lizzie said.

  “Good? Why?” He sat down at the table.

  “Because, dummy, I always thought that she hated me because she hated me. But she hated me because of her own screwed-up life. It had nothing to do with me.”

  “Are you trying to make me stay again?” he asked. “I love it when you try to make me stay.”

  “No, if I was going to try to make you stay, I’d do this.” She went to him and kissed him until he moaned, then she walked away.

  “Hey, come back here.”

  She cleared the dishes from the table. “Not a chance. At least, not until you admit that Jill’s story was a bombshell. Tay, her hating me had nothing really to do with me and what I did. It was all about her.”

  “You’re saying that Candy doesn’t hate me for what I did?”

  “I’m saying that life is so complicated in ways we can’t possibly imagine. So don’t assume it’s the way you see it, because you could be wrong.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  The day after Thanksgiving, Lizzie and Paige and Tay went to the tree farm and chopped down the biggest silver pine they could find. They trimmed it with fourteen years of mismatched decorations.

  It looked pretty darn good.

  In fact, everything looked pretty darn good.

  For the next few weeks, they fixed and decorated the house to within an inch of its life.

  By the time Annie, Tommy, Meghan, Tay, Jill, and Paige sat down for Christmas Eve dinner, it was so perfect, it almost felt like Annie’s house. The table was laid with their mother’s orange antique tablecloth. Pumpkin-scented candles were lit on every surface. The meal had been a weeklong marathon of shopping, chopping, baking, and roasting.

  But none of them could concentrate on tonight with tomorrow looming. Especially Lizzie. Her focus, however, had shifted from what would happen with Ethan when he came to what would happen to Tay when he left.

  He still held firm to his plan that he had to leave this town. Lizzie couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “What kind of car do you think he’ll come in?” Paige asked as she speared another piece of turkey for her plate. When Paige got nervous, she talked too much. Not getting caught up in her manic flow wasn’t easy.

  “Santa rides a sleigh,” Lizzie said. “He doesn’t drive.” She poured herself more red wine. Then poured some for Tay.

  Paige kicked her under the table. “Not Santa. God, Mom. Him.”

  “Jesus?” Annie asked. “He’s the true meaning of Christmas, you know. I’m pretty sure he floats in a cloud surrounded by little naked cherubs.” She was feeding Meghan mashed-up sweet potato, most of which was ending up on her face.

  “You all know who I mean,” Paige said, exasperated.

  “A plain Chevy rental,” Tommy said. “He’ll pick it up at the airport. All his Rolls-Royces are back home at his mansion, after all, being waxed by his slaves.”

  Paige practically swooned. “You think?”

  Lizzie shook her head. “No. I think slaves are frowned upon in Switzerland.” She took another swig of red. Tay moved the wine down the table, out of her reach.

  She pouted, but didn’t protest. If she got too tipsy, she might say the wrong thing to Paige, and that would start everything rolling downhill.

  “If he’s smart, he’s going to come in a bulletproof limo,” Jill said.

  Lizzie patted her hand. Jill had stopped crying every time they discussed Ethan. Now she mostly expressed a desire for painful revenge. She’d even offered to buy Lizzie and Paige plane tickets to Disney World, so they wouldn’t have to be here when Ethan showed up.

  Lizzie said, “He’s going to ride in on a magic carpet, honey. All the men who grant wishes do that.” She looked across the table at Tay.

  “Careful what you wish for,” he said.

  “Oh, I know exactly what I wish for,” she said.

  “Gross!” Paige said. “Cut it out, you guys. They’ve been gross like this for months,” Paige complained. “Pass the yams so I can eat them and then vomit.”
r />   After dinner, Annie and Tommy left with Meghan, and Paige went upstairs to text-message her friends. Jill took off for her aunt’s house in Albany, where she was going to spend Christmas Day with her sister, whom she fought with, her brood of nephews and nieces, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  Lizzie walked Tay to the porch.

  “My house is perfect,” she said. Tay had wrapped tiny white lights around the porch columns. The lights blinked like crystals of melting snow. “We had the first Christmas Eve dinner ever without the leaf on the dining room table collapsing.”

  “Easy fix,” Tay said. He had on a coat and she didn’t, so he pushed her up against the railing, put his hands in his pockets, and wrapped them both in his coat so they were face to face, body to body.

  “And all the burners worked on the stove.”

  “No problem. Just a few replacement parts.” He pushed against her.

  “I can’t believe you even fixed the squeaking of the dining room floor.”

  “Joist work is easier than people think.”

  “Why don’t you stay tonight?” She pushed back against him. “Why don’t you stay forever?”

  “You and Paige should be together tomorrow on Christmas Day. Just the two of you,” he said into her neck.

  “The four of us, if you count White and Dune.” The animals hadn’t been back to Tay’s cabin at the lake in weeks. Would he take them with him? She wasn’t up for asking, the night was too perfect. “Five if you count Ethan,” she added.

  “Merry Christmas, Lizzie.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  Tay held her tight and she put her head on his warm shoulder.

  “So you’re going to spend Christmas alone tomorrow?” Lizzie asked him.

  “I like it that way.”

  “You want to be alone because you think Candy is alone. She might not be, you know. She might be with friends. Or grandparents. She might be off in the Caribbean, having the time of her life. Assumptions, Tay…”

  “I want to be alone because it feels right. I’m not leaving until Ethan comes and goes,” Tay said. He pulled a tiny package out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I almost forgot. For under the tree.”