The Lexus’s tires crunched the gravel in front of the cottage, crouched underneath a stand of loblolly pines, before she parked alongside Mel’s new Toyota Camry. “What does Jack say?”
Quinn snorted. “Oh, like he’s going to listen to me? Whenever I ask him what’s wrong, he tells me to mind my own business.”
“So his dad and grandparents don’t know about any of this?”
“You’re kidding, right? I mean, Jack’s my best friend. And when he’s not being crazy, he’s totally cool. But I’m telling you, he’s getting on my last nerve.”
“Did you tell him you don’t like it when he’s acting like that?”
“Only like five million times. Except he only gets madder and says nobody’s forcing me to hang out with him. If I don’t like it, I can leave anytime I want.”
Blythe looked at her younger cousin’s profile, her jaw set in a way that reminded her so much of her mother Blythe almost smiled. “And what do you say when he does that?”
“Nothing. Because I know he doesn’t mean it.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Slowly, Quinn nodded. “It’s this look in his eyes, like, I don’t know. He’s daring me or something.” She looked at Blythe, a forty-year-old soul stuck in a ten-year-old body. “He’s acting like he wants to push me away, but if you ask me, I think he’s just mad. Or confused.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I’ve been there, I know.”
“And I’m guessing you haven’t told your mother.”
Another snort. “No way. Because she’d tell me to write him off, that I don’t need—” she made air quotes “—complications like that in my life. That I don’t need people like that in my life. That I’m way too young for that crap. I mean, crud. Except for one thing, hello? Was I the poster child for complications, or what? And for another, if I did leave, Jack wouldn’t have any friends.”
Not for the first time blown away by her little cousin, Blythe refocused out the windshield. “Your mom’s right, though. In a way.” Her gaze returned to the girl. “Your loyalty is commendable, but you’re still only a kid. It’s not your responsibility to fix Jack. And if there’s even a suggestion that he might hurt you—”
“Ohmigosh ! No! Never!”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, Blythe. I’m sure. And I know it’s not up to me to fix him. Doesn’t mean I can’t stick by him while he’s going through whatever he’s going through. Right?”
“Right.” Blythe reached over and gently tugged Quinn’s curls. “Your mama raised one amazing kid, you know that?”
“Which she never, ever lets me forget,” Quinn muttered, and Blythe laughed. Then she frowned.
“So, question—is there a specific reason why you’re telling me this?”
Suddenly, earnest blue eyes lanced hers. “I just thought maybe, if, you know, the opportunity presented itself, you could mention it to his dad?”
It was obvious Quinn was truly worried about her friend. And melodramatics aside, she’d never known the kid to stretch the truth so far it snapped. But honestly—what was up today with everyone asking her to intervene?
“That could be tricky, sweetie. Since, for one thing, it’s hearsay—”
“Because you didn’t hear Jack say any of this yourself?”
“Exactly. And even if I did mention it, and Jack’s dad believed me, and brought up the subject with Jack, Jack’s bound to know it came from you. That you ratted on him. And that could very possibly destroy your friendship.”
“So you won’t do it?”
Wes’s earnest, pleading hazel eyes flashed in front of her. As if on a damn screen. “I didn’t say that. But you need to be aware of the potential consequences. What this might cost you.”
“And what’s the point if the friendship’s based on a lie, anyway?”
Blythe sighed. “Have you thought about saying something to his dad yourself? Or his grandparents?”
“We don’t have that kind of relationship,” the kid said, and Blythe thought, And I do? “I mean, yeah, his grandmother is really nice and all, but it’s not like we’re ever alone, for one thing. Or that she’d take me seriously, anyway. And his dad’s never there. And when he is, he’s totally distracted.”
Tears welled up in the girl’s eyes, and Blythe felt like her heart was being crushed. “I know this sounds crazy, like I’m crazy, but I’m really scared for Jack. I’m afraid he’s going to do something boneheaded one day because he’s not thinking straight. Or he’s angry, or whatever. And I know it’s lame, putting you in the middle like that, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Blythe looked out her windshield for a moment. To have Jack’s dad, and now this kid Blythe loved more than she loved her shoes, basically ask her the same thing within twenty minutes... Brother. Even so, alerting Wes to her intuition, agreeing—even if only silently—to help Jack, didn’t translate to ratting on him. “And how do you expect me to go about this?”
“I have no idea,” Quinn said, twisting around to lug her backpack off the backseat. “That’s why you’re the grown-up.” Straightening, she scrubbed her cheek, then sniffed. “But promise you’ll do something. Okay?”
“Okay. I promise,” Blythe said. “On one condition.”
“Don’t make me tell Mom, Blythe, please—”
“Sorry, but I’m not about to put my butt on the line with this unless you do. I’ll be there with you, if you want, but this is too big to keep your mother out of the loop.”
More tears bloomed. “And if she makes me give him up?”
“We’ll work it out, sweetie. I swear. But ultimately...that’s her call.”
Quinn stared at Blythe for a long moment, then shoved open the car door and clambered out to slam the door behind her, her curls bouncing against her back as she clomped up the walk to the cottage.
Yet another reason, Blythe thought as she backed out of the drive, why—as much as she adored her younger cousin—she couldn’t imagine doing this full time. Because the thought of facing her younger self every day made her very, very tired.
* * *
An hour and a half later—having decided that staying at Mel’s would not be wise, considering Quinn’s mood—Blythe unlocked the door to her cozy second-floor apartment over her office/studio in Alexandria, Virginia, close enough to D.C. to be convenient, far enough away to be affordable. She loved the charming, Civil War–era house she’d snatched up at a bargain price two years before, flanked on either side by its equally charming cousins on a brick-sidewalked, tree-lined street in the quaint little suburb. Heaven knows the house would be a work-in-progress forever, but as long as she made the mortgage payments at least it was her work-in-progress.
Blythe shucked off her heels and wandered into her living room—turquoise walls, original wooden floors, two huge windows partially obscured by a bodacious, modesty-preserving plane tree—where she finally checked her cell. Which had buzzed no less than four times on the drive back. She checked her voice mail—one from April, about table decorations, another from a client needing to reschedule. And one each from Mel and Wes.
Sighing, Blythe called Mel first. Who had not only flown off the handle but had apparently zipped around the block a time or six.
“I want you to tell me exactly what Quinn said about Jack. And why did she come to you, anyway, and not me?”
“Working backward, listen to yourself and I think you’ll have your answer.” Although could we hear a “Yes!” that Quinn had confided in her mom? “As for the first...what did she say?”
Mel basically reiterated what Quinn had told Blythe, that Jack’s “weirdness” was alienating the other kids at school, that she worried about him.
“Then you know as much as I do,” Blythe said. “Really. I told her she had to let you in the loop, though. For what it�
�s worth.”
“Yeah, she said that, too.” A pause. “Thank you. Of course now I have no idea what to do. I mean—should I tell her they can’t hang out anymore? Except at school, obviously. Although I suppose we could homeschool again...”
“You really think that would work?”
“It would be harder now that she’s older, but we’d manage.”
“Not talking about homeschooling, birdbrain.” When Mel sighed, Blythe said, “This was exactly what she was afraid of, Mellie. That you’d try to break up their friendship.”
“She’s only ten. And I am her mother. It’s my duty to protect her—”
“Of course it is, sweetie. But she’s also your spawn. She might obey you on the surface—”
“But make my life a living hell in the meantime?”
Blythe chuckled. “You said it, not me.”
Her cousin released another long, heavy breath. “So what should I do?”
“Oh, now you want me to be bossy?” she said, laughing, thinking back to when they were kids and her two younger cousins made no bones about how she made them nuts, ordering them around. They had no idea, of course—and neither had she, frankly—how much she thrived on that semblance of control all those years when she’d felt virtually powerless—
Her phone signaled another call coming through. She quickly checked it—Wes, again. As if Mel could read her mind, she said, “Quinn said she asked you to talk to Wes.”
“She did. In fact, he’s trying to get through now. Listen, I can’t tell you what to do. But if it makes you feel any better, I grilled Quinn pretty hard about Jack, and I didn’t hear any major alarm bells. Not as far as she’s concerned, I mean. I also didn’t get any scary vibes when I talked with him tonight. And they’re never alone, right? I mean, either you or April or his grandparents are always around—”
“I know, I know, but...” Another huge sigh. “Fine, I’ll let things ride. For now. But you’d better tell Mr. Congressman I’m keeping an eagle eye on his son, because if he hurts my kid—”
“He’s not going to do that, Mel.”
“And you know this, how?”
Not for the first time, Blythe wondered why she’d never told her cousins more about those “missing” years after they stopped coming to St. Mary’s every summer. And for several years before that, to be honest. Heaven knows there’d been plenty of opportunity to fess up, what with Mel’s producing this kid none of them had known about and April’s revelation that her first marriage had been about convenience, not passion. But how could Blythe admit that all those summers she’d lorded it over them, pretending to be the “cool” one, she’d actually been a hot mess? That she’d done some things—okay, a lot of things—she not only regretted, but would have probably resulted in Mel’s not letting her anywhere near her daughter?
Or so she’d reasoned during that testing period of their renewed relationship. Reasoning that made even less sense now than it did then. What was past, was past, and it was long past time she come clean.
Or at least start the process.
“Because I’ve been there, sweetie,” she said. “Or close enough. And I know the only person he’s a danger to right now is himself.” For now, that would do. “And I need to call Wes back, so I’ve got to go.”
She disconnected the call, redialing Wes before she chickened out, even as dread congealed like lard in the pit of her stomach.
Because as hard as it might be to reveal her tale of woe to the two women who loved her best, telling it to some man who didn’t know her at all—and for whom she had the hots, alas—would be infinitely harder. And more embarrassing. But in order to do what everyone on the damn planet seemed to want her to do, she had no choice.
* * *
The next night, Wes took the Metro—only two stops—then walked in the drenching spring rain to the hole-in-the-wall Italian joint Blythe had suggested. Far enough away from the Capitol not to be crawling with interns, she’d said with a weary laugh. The kind of perpetually crowded, noisy place where nobody would pay attention to them. Not that paparazzi-haunting was much of an issue for him. Outside of his district, nobody knew Wes Phillips from squat. Hell, few people on the Hill even knew who he was. Which was fine with him. He was here to make a difference—clichéd though the concept might be—not to gain notoriety.
Even if he was beginning to realize that it was virtually impossible to make that difference while remaining under the radar.
Garlic-laced warmth blasted him when he pushed open the door, easing the knot in his chest. He immediately spotted Blythe, seated in a booth near the back and perusing the menu, a glass of red wine in her right hand. She glanced up at his approach, the dim lighting softening her features. But not the nervousness in her eyes.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, slinging his wet raincoat on the hook at the end of the booth.
“You’re not. My appointment finished up early and I didn’t want to go back home.”
He slid across the red vinyl seat opposite her, shoving his sopping umbrella into the far corner. “Home being...?”
“Alexandria.”
“Apartment?”
“House. Small,” she added, holding her other hand a mere four or so inches away from the wineglass. “But since I work out of it, I can take a lot of the expenses off my taxes.”
“Very wise,” Wes said, his gaze flicking over the menu, even though he already knew what he wanted...ah, yes, there it was. “How’s the lasagna?” he asked, as he tried to shove aside the weirdness of sitting with a woman in a restaurant. A woman who was not Kym.
“To die for,” the not-Kym three feet in front of him said. “As is everything else. Trust me, you can’t go wrong with anything on the menu—”
“Miss Blythe!” A tiny, heavily accented waiter shuffled over to lay a generously laden breadbasket in front of them, his white apron tied practically underneath his armpits. A huge smile shoved his enormous ears into another dimension. “Is it really you?”
“Gianni!” Laughing, she opened her arms, half standing to give the old guy a hug. “I can’t believe you’re still here! How are you?”
Still grinning, Gianni shrugged. “Eh, you know me, I don’t complain. But I was just saying to Frankie, how we hadn’t seen you in a while.”
He shifted, shouting, over the tangle of conversation, clattering dishes and a faint thread of tacky Italian music, “Frankie! Look who’s here!” A moment later Blythe was exchanging hugs with a second, somewhat younger waiter with dyed black hair. Blythe quickly introduced Wes as a “client,” then they ordered their dinners and both waiters vanished into the packed restaurant, allowing the pleasant din to settle back around them.
“I’m beginning to see why you recommended the place,” Wes said, choosing a piece of garlic bread from the basket.
Blythe ripped apart a breadstick, dunking the doughy end in the saucer of warm, basil-laced olive oil between them. “And you haven’t even tasted the food yet.”
“How’d you find it?”
“My ex and I used to come here a lot,” she said with a slight shrug, taking another bite of the breadstick. “So I stayed away for a while. After we split, I mean. Tonight...I don’t know. Just felt like time to come back. Part of my own twelve-step program to stop letting my past push me around.”
Their food arrived—his lasagna, her chicken Marsala. Wes watched her dig in to her food as she’d done at the Howard Johnson’s that morning. “You should tell me where they hold meetings,” he mumbled, his fork slicing through layers of tender pasta and tomato-sauce-infused cheeses. When her eyes cut to his, he sighed, then lowered his gaze back to his plate. “There are still places I can’t bring myself to go back to. TV shows I can’t watch, music I can’t listen to...”
At her silence, he lifted his gaze to hers again, to find so much sy
mpathy there his chest constricted. Not pity, though. Compassion. Understanding. “I can imagine,” she said, then took a sip of her wine. “Be kind to yourself, though. Don’t let other people make you feel like you have to rush things to make them feel better.”
Wes smiled. “She said, vehemently.”
“Sorry. Sore spot.”
“Your marriage?”
“The disaster formerly known as, yes. Although the pain...it’s different of course. For me, the reminders made me more angry than sad. At myself, more than anything.”
“Why yourself?” At her hesitation, Wes waved his fork and refocused on his food. Which was more than living up to her praises. “Sorry, I know we’re here to talk about my son, not you—”
“No, it’s okay.” Blythe sagged against the booth seat, the wine in her hand—the key to her openness, maybe? “Because it’s all of a piece, isn’t it? The reminders pissed me off because I kept making the same mistakes. Kept handing over my trust to somebody else instead of keeping it right here.” She gently knocked her fist against her chest, then shook her head. “Never again,” she said with a tiny snort, then leaned forward to take another bite.
“Never again, what?”
“What? Oh. Give someone that kind of power over me.”
“I take it by ‘someone,’ you mean ‘a man.’”
“Pretty much, yeah. If I don’t let anyone in, they can’t very well walk out on me, can they? So how is it?” she said, nodding toward his plate.
In style, in manner, Blythe couldn’t have been more different from Kym. But although Wes didn’t know Blythe well, he’d seen and heard enough to suspect that, like Kym, Blythe wasn’t inclined to ration her heart. Except now he suspected that repeated abuse of her giving nature had bruised that heart, lacerated her trust. And realizing that, it took Wes several seconds before his jaw muscles relaxed enough for him to speak.
The Marriage Campaign Page 6
