Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Two
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Part Four
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Part Five
Chapter Sixty-three
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This one is for Mom,
who I like to believe was reading over my shoulder
Love is a promise,
love is a souvenir,
once given never forgotten,
never let it disappear.
—JOHN LENNON
Prologue
Do, for love, what you would not do.
August 1989
WHAT SHE WAS DOING WAS WRONG. BUT THEN, EVERYTHING WAS WRONG, wasn’t it?
She was sneaking out to see Carson, even though in thirteen hours she’d be another man’s wife. Brian’s wife. Brian’s wife. No matter how she phrased the words, they hardly made sense to her, even now. They belonged to someone else’s reality. It was as if she, Meg Powell, would cease to exist at the end of the wedding ceremony, becoming some unfamiliar woman called Mrs. Brian Hamilton. But maybe it was better that way.
She left her house in the dark and traced the familiar path through the pastures, toward the lake and the groves and Carson’s house. The sun would rise before much longer, and her sisters would wake, excited—Meg’s wedding day! Her parents would find her note saying she’d gone for a walk and wouldn’t be concerned. They’d know she’d be back in plenty of time; she was nothing if not reliable and responsible. A model daughter. Their deliverance.
And she was glad to be those things. If only she could shut down the Meg who still longed for the future she’d sacrificed. This visit to Carson was meant to do that, to shut it down. This part of her mission was appropriate, at least; this was the part she would explain to him. If she knew Carson—and after sixteen years of best-friendship, she knew only herself better—he would accept the partial truth without suspecting there was anything more to it.
She wanted so much to tell him the truth about the rest, to explain why she was marrying Brian. But besides jeopardizing everything, it would make him want to try to fix things. If that had been possible, there would not now be a breathtaking four-thousand-dollar wedding gown waiting in her bedroom like a fairy tale in progress. The thought of it hanging from her closet door, specter-like, made her shudder; she’d read enough fairy tales to know they didn’t always end happily.
Carson lived in a converted shed on his parents’ Florida citrus farm. The McKay farm adjoined her family’s horse farm, sharing an east-west line of wood posts and barbed wire. The fence kept the horses out of the groves but had never been a serious obstacle for Meg or her three younger sisters or Carson. When she was seven or eight years old, they’d found a wooden ladder and sawed it in half, then propped the halves on opposite sides of a post to make their passage easy. Meg wasn’t surprised, now, to see the ladder gone. Climbing the barbed wire, she took care not to get a cut she’d be hard pressed to explain tonight.
Fifteen minutes later she emerged from the shadows of the orange grove and stopped. In the light of the setting moon she could see the shed, its white clapboard siding and dark windows, a hundred yards to the left of the main house. She and Carson had spent most of his senior year working with his father to renovate it, creating two downstairs rooms and an upstairs bedroom loft. They’d called the shed their love nest, not only because they first made love there but also because they meant for it to become their home. Not for always, just for starters. The plan had been to eventually build a new house on the far side of his farm. On the wooded hillside where, as children, they’d hung a tire swing for themselves and her sisters. Where, years later, they had spread an old horse blanket and gone as far as they dared without protection.
This morning, she was purposely—some might say selfishly—no better prepared.
Though the day would grow hot later, the moist air and light breeze chilled her by the time she reached his door. Her feet were wet inside white canvas sneakers, her thighs hardly covered by cut-off denim shorts. She was braless beneath Carson’s John Deere T-shirt, could feel her nipples pulled in tight and small. Her gold chain, his gift to her on her nineteenth birthday two years earlier, lay cool against her damp skin.
She hesitated before putting her hand on his doorknob, imagining what Brian would do if he knew she had come here, imagining her parents’ disappointment and distress if she spoiled the plan, imagining that she might hate herself even more, later—and then she turned the knob.
The door was unlocked, as she’d known it would be. No need to lock your doors out here; everything of value was kept outside the house. In the implement shed was a new pair of mortgaged tractors that had cost upward of $80,000 apiece. In the barn was a treasured Thoroughbred bay—Carolyn McKay’s “hobby” that helped make up for being unable to have more children after Carson. Meg knew the details of the McKays’ lives intimately. But when she left here later this morning, she would do everything possible to forget them.
She stepped inside and eased the door closed, wanting Carson’s first awareness of her to be when she slid beneath his covers. She stood and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The place still smelled slightly of cut pine and stained wood and curry, one of Carson’s favorite flavors.
When she could see, she crossed the wide front room to the stairs that divided it from the kitchen. Grabbing the railing, she pushed off her sneakers and began climbing the stairs. A tread creaked underfoot and she paused, waiting, her heart loud in her ears, then went on. By the eighth step she could see into the dark loft. She stopped and listened for the
sound of Carson’s even breathing. Though they’d spent only a few nights together as adults, they had slept over at each other’s homes innumerable times as children. She knew the sound of his sleeping self almost as well as she did her sister Kara’s. Before Brian and his unexpected proposal eighteen months earlier, Carson had been the son her parents never had, and she had been Carolyn and Jim’s adopted daughter.
Straining to hear Carson, the only sound she could make out was the low hum of his refrigerator, and then the chirpee-chirpee-chirpee of a cardinal in a nearby tree, announcing the sun’s progress. She climbed the remaining steps, cringing at another creak, then stopped, trying to make out his form on the bed at the far side of the room.
“Does this mean you changed your mind?”
Meg jumped as if stung. There was Carson, sitting in the love seat they’d once hauled away from a bankrupt orange grower’s estate sale. She couldn’t quite see his expression, but she could hear in his voice that he was wide awake.
With all her heart, she wished she could say yes, her presence meant exactly what he guessed. But softly she said, “No.”
“Then why are you—?”
“Shh,” she said, going to him and reaching for his hand. “Come here.”
He stood, and before he could speak again, she kissed him hard, kissed him until she felt dizzy and brave and determined not to chicken out. She put his hands on the hem of her shirt and, with her hands on his, helped him draw it over her head. In another moment, they were undressed and lying on top of his sheets, the pale light painting them moonlit blue.
One last time. She would savor every touch, every sensation, the fullness of his lips, his squared jaw, the dark stubble as it rubbed her neck and grazed her breasts. She would not forget one moment of this, would always look back and remember how making love with him transported her. She would keep the memory like a priceless, irreplaceable jewel. She would remember how he pressed into her as if his life, their lives, depended on it, as if he could secure eternity.
Afterward, Carson lay on his side watching her, twisting a strand of her coppery hair. “What other proof do you need?” he asked. His eyes shone with determination and hope, and she had to look away. Her first loyalty was to her family; how could it be otherwise? She had to marry Brian for their sake, was resigned to it, would do it and would try to never second-guess herself afterward; this she had already vowed.
“I know how it seems,” she said, “but that’s exactly why it can never work. We’re too intense. That’s what this proves.” The lie, same as she’d told him a year and a half before, tasted bitter. Love that had grown from childhood friendship and adolescent curiosity, that had now withstood so many long months of complete separation, could never be a damaging, undesirable thing—and yet that was the story she was selling.
He sat up and looked away. “I should’ve made you leave as soon as I heard you open the door.”
“No,” she said, touching his back. “We needed to do this, so we can put our past to rest.” This much at least was true, she thought.
He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes narrowed. “You think this, one last quick fuck, is going to do it?” he spat, making her flinch. “You thought you could come here and offer something you knew I couldn’t resist, and then marry Hamilton with a clear conscience? You are unbelievable.” He lunged out of bed and pulled on his jeans, keeping his back to her.
The matter of her guilty conscience—and God knew it was guilty—was balanced by the good she was doing her sisters, her parents. What he said was exactly what she’d thought, and what she would do. She stood up and pulled on her shirt, absorbing his anger, deserving it. Then she reached up and unhooked her gold chain from her neck.
“I never took this off,” she told him as she draped it around his, hooked it, then smoothed his wavy brown hair, filing away yet another last sense of him.
“Not even when he—”
“Not even then.”
Carson turned and looked down at her. “Does he know I gave it to you?”
She nodded.
“Then he’s as stupid as I am,” he said, moving away from her to the window, to a view of endless rows of orange trees lit emerald by the early sun.
She loved that view, the way the Earth always looked newborn there in the rising mist. But by this evening, the view would be as lost to her as if she’d left the planet. Brian’s apartment windows did not look out on this, the kind of life she was born to. She would be a businessman’s wife. The man she would see on all her future mornings would not be this rangy one, whose long fingers were equally capable of picking fruit or strumming a guitar—or holding her hand or feeding her pizza or braiding her hair. Once she left here, she would never touch Carson again.
Never. Oh dear God, how, how could she have let this happen?
Her longing to take back her bargain with the Hamiltons surged, so strong it threatened to undo her. She could take it all back, reclaim her life as her own…. If Carson would push her just a little, if he tried to persuade her, if he assured her that everything he didn’t even know was wrong would somehow turn out all right, she would come back to him.
But he stayed at the window, his heart already closing to her, and the moment passed.
She finished dressing, engulfed by regret but still daring to hope she would take a part of him with her, if God or fate allowed. Then she went to him and touched his arm.
He jerked away. “You better go,” he said, turning. His face was closed now, too. This shouldn’t upset her—she had it coming, all his anger, all his venom, the chill of such a blank look—and yet she was cut through by it.
“Okay.” She would not let herself cry.
“But here—let me give you this.” He put his hand on her cheek and leaned in, kissed her with slow deliberation, kissed her with such passion and grace that she could no longer hold back her tears. Then he pushed her away and said, “Guess I’ll see you in hell.”
One
REMINDERS. MEG DIDN’T NEED MORE OF THEM, BUT THAT’S WHAT SHE GOT when her father let her into his new apartment at the Horizon Center for Seniors Wednesday evening. He held out a plastic grocery bag.
“What’s in there?”
“Notebooks, from your mother’s desk,” he said. “Take ’em now, before I forget.”
He did more and more of that lately, forgetting. Idiopathic short-term memory loss was his doctor’s name for his condition, which right now was more an irritation than an issue. Idiopathic, meaning there was no particular explanation. Idiopathic was an apt term for Spencer Powell, a man who lived entirely according to his whims.
Meg took the bag and set it on the dining table along with her purse. This would be a short visit, coming at the end of her twelve-hour day. Hospital rounds at seven AM, two morning deliveries, a candy-bar lunch, and then four hours of back-to-back patients at her practice—women stressing about episiotomies, C-section pain, stretch marks, unending fetal hiccups, heavy periods, lack of sex drive, fear of labor. And still four hours to go before she was likely to hit the sheets for five. An exhausting grind at times, but she loved her work. The ideal of it, at least.
“So how was today?” she asked, taking the clip out of her shoulder-length hair and shaking it loose. “Are you finding your way around all right?”
“Colorful place,” he said, leading her to the living room. He sat in his recliner—why did old men seem always to have one, fraying and squeaky, with which they wouldn’t part? “Pair o’ guys over in wing C got a great system for winning on the dogs.”
The greyhounds, he meant. “Is that right?” she asked, looking him over. He looked spry as ever, and his eyes had regained the smile she’d never seen dimmed before last fall. His hair, once the brightest copper, had gone full silver, making him seem more distinguished somehow, silver being more valuable. Distinguished, but no less wild than before—a man whose mind was always a step ahead of his sense. His diabetes was in check, but since her mother had died suddenly sev
en months earlier, Meg felt compelled to watch him closely. She was looking for signs of failing health, diabetic danger signals: swollen ankles, extra fluid in the face, unusual behaviors. All his behaviors were unusual, though, so that part was difficult.
The other difficult thing was how he kept confronting her with random pieces of her mother’s life. A pitted chrome teapot. Stiff and faded blue doilies from their old dining hutch. Rose-scented bath powder, in a round cardboard container with a round puff inside. Last week, a paper bag of pinecones dipped in glitter-thick wax. Trivia from a life forever altered by the sudden seizure of Anna Powell’s heart, like a car’s engine after driving too long without oil.
“Yeah, those boys said they win more’n they lose, so what’s not to like about that? Hey—my left kidney’s acting up again. Steady pain, kinda dull, mostly. What d’ya s’pose that’s about?”
“Call Dr. Aimes,” she said, as she always did when he brought up anything relating to his kidneys. “Tomorrow. Don’t wait.” He looked all right—but then, she’d thought her mother had too. What a good doctor she was; she should’ve seen the signs of runaway hypertension, should’ve known a massive heart attack was pending. She never should have taken her mother’s word that she was doing fine on the blood pressure medication, nothing to worry about at all.
Her father frowned in annoyance, as he always did when she wouldn’t diagnose him. “What good are you?”
“If you go into labor, I’ll be glad to help out. Otherwise, tell Dr. Aimes.” She would remind him again when she called tomorrow.
His apartment was modest—one bedroom, one bath, a combined dining–living area, and a kitchen—but comfortable, furnished mostly with new things. He’d sold the business, Powell’s Breeding and Boarding, along with the house and all the property, in order to move here. She didn’t know the financial details because he’d insisted on handling that part of things himself. But he assured her he could afford to “modernize” a little, as he’d put it.
Meg looked around, glad to not see much of her mother here. Memories were like spinning blades: dangerous at close range. Her mother’s empty swivel rocker, placed alongside the recliner, would take some getting used to. If her father would just stop regurgitating things from the farm—or send them to her sisters, all of whom wisely lived out of state—she might be able to get comfortable with the new order. Was that his strategy, too? Was he giving things away so that he didn’t have to be reminded of his loss every time he opened a closet or a drawer? He certainly wasn’t much for facing the past, himself. The past was where all his failures lived.
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