by Anna Adams
“A few weeks.” The days had begun to spin by. “Hard to imagine I’ve been driving with an expired tag for that long.”
Mrs. Parker took Emma’s paperwork and credit card. “Thank goodness that old heap passed inspection. Can’t you afford a safer car? Do your parents realize what you’re driving up that hill to your grandmother’s house?”
“I doubt they’ve considered it. I’m an adult.”
Mrs. Parker ran the card and tapped on her computer keyboard. “Maybe they should be reminded of their responsibilities.”
“Mrs. Parker, you know I’m not in second grade anymore?”
“Don’t address me in that overly patient tone. I remember what year you sat in your unkempt desk with dirty little knees and flyaway hair.”
Emma ran her hands over her long, wavy dark strands. Mrs. Parker stapled a new registration sticker to a piece of paper and passed it through the opening.
“Don’t forget to put this on your tag. If I were you, I’d do it before you leave the parking lot.”
“Thanks. Excellent advice. I’m glad I got to see you, Mrs. Parker.”
“I’m here every day. I thought I’d enjoy retirement, but I took this job when boredom nearly drove me insane. A side benefit I never expected was the joy of seeing my former students.”
“Mrs. Parker, if you weren’t behind that counter, I’d hug you.”
“If I weren’t back here, I’d let you. You can imagine some of the anger we see at these windows.” She pointed to the hard plastic that climbed all the way to the ceiling. “They didn’t build these just because they’re so darned attractive, you know.”
“I was thinking they must be pointless here.” A little alarming to consider someone taking out tax rage on a retired schoolteacher. “Maybe I could come by sometime and take you to lunch before I leave town again.”
“I’d enjoy that, Emma Candler. I hear, despite the way you left town, you’ve grown up a lot more responsibly than the state of your knees and your desk predicted.”
Emma could happily have listened to more stories of her youth, but the line was still building. Emma waved her new registration in farewell and headed for the exit.
She got lost in the basement’s narrow halls. Closed spaces weren’t her favorites. Emma turned back the way she thought she’d come. She expected to see an old service elevator, newly devoted to carrying legal drivers since the licensing office had moved to the basement. She came upon a broom closet, decorated with plenty of warning signs about chemicals and fire hazards.
She might have to scream for help or oxygen. She put her hand over her mouth and turned down a different hall.
Voices. At last, she heard voices. She’d begun to think she’d dropped through a rabbit hole into a world no one else inhabited.
A turn to the left, and she stumbled into her mother, chatting with a far too handsome man, young enough to be the brother Emma’d always wanted.
Her mother laughed, running a bright pink index finger over the man’s lapel, and Emma wished she could walk through one of the walls and disappear.
Her mother had obviously been watching Marilyn Monroe movies again.
“Emma!” Pamela Candler straightened, but then tumbled back on her five-inch heels, so appropriate for a basement office in Bliss, Tennessee. “I was looking for you.”
The man righted her mom and stepped back, looking concerned that Emma might whip out a camera phone. “I’ll need that contract on my desk by Thursday morning, Pamela.”
“Sure.” She walked away from the man and toward Emma, who wished she could have resisted checking for a ring on the man’s wedding finger. Gold must be coming back into style. She watched as he entered an office.
Pamela Candler held out her arms. Emma couldn’t help remembering all that empty talk about change that her mother had mouthed at Nan’s house.
She’d never been able or willing to read her daughter’s body language. She hugged Emma, and Emma managed to pat her mother’s back, loosely, before she escaped, making a show out of retying her sneaker.
“Where have you been?” Pamela asked.
“How did you know I was here?” Emma asked at the same moment.
“One of the other clerks told me she’d seen you tracing the map to the county clerk’s office. You never were good with directions. I remember you getting lost—”
“Mother, who was that guy?”
“Just a friend. Tell me your plans for Thanksgiving.”
“A friend, Mother? You were all over him. When I think how I swallowed that story you spun me when you came to the house...”
“I have a right to friends, Emma. I spend my days in this dungeon, typing for the prosecutors or the clerks or whoever wants some little message transcribed. I eat alone most nights. I don’t make a spectacle of myself, but I’m allowed some pleasure.”
“Whatever you say.” Thank goodness she was leaving soon.
“And what about Thanksgiving?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “I may be spending it with Dad and Megan.”
“That woman who’s taken my place? You’d share a dinner table with her?”
“Mother—I don’t even have an answer for that. I like Megan. Don’t say anything bad about her to me.”
“And do you say that to her about me?”
“She never insults you.”
“Why should she? She’s enjoying living my life.”
“You threw our family away. How can you pretend you cared for Dad and me after you proved over and over that we meant nothing? Even I knew what was going on from the time I was ten.”
Emma’s voice echoed back at her from the hard, cold walls. Shame fingered its way down her spine. She stepped back, running one hand over her hair and the other, holding the registration, over her rumpled T-shirt.
Her mother looked as if she might cry. Emma didn’t know what to do. Pamela wasn’t like other people. She wasn’t aware anyone else had feelings.
“I’m sorry,” Emma said. “I’m not going to be here long. I have no right—”
“No, you don’t.” Pamela performed the same straightening ritual as Emma. “But now that it’s out in the air between us, we can both start over again.”
“Sure. After you dump the guy with the wedding ring. I love you, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a problem with the way you act around married men. And you will not persuade me to spend time with both of you because he’s suddenly the love of your life.”
“I can tell—” Pamela smiled, as if her facial muscles would barely move “—how much you love me.”
She always had to have the last word. Emma kept her mouth shut. Pointing out the obvious wasn’t even possible, and she was seriously tired of feeling like a judgmental, spinster cat lady without any cats.
* * *
“YOU’RE DOING FINE, Megan.” Noah handed Emma’s stepmother a tissue and switched off the ultrasound. “The baby’s measuring perfectly at thirty-three weeks. When do you see your regular OB again?”
“I don’t know why Brett insisted on an OB in Knoxville. You’ve delivered babies, haven’t you, Noah?”
“Twenty-one, since I took over the practice.” He scooted back on the stool and nodded at Lynsay to help Megan with the sheet over her belly. “A couple of patients insisted on Dr. Bragg during the first few months.”
“Change is challenging.” Megan wiped the ultrasound gel off her stomach and struggled to sit up. Lynsay helped her. “Speaking of which, how’s your funding going for the clinic?”
He’d never brought it up with her. Brett had too much influence, and they had too much history. More than one of his colleagues had suggested Noah take his ideas to another remote mountain town. Tennessee was blessed with so many.
“I haven’t persua
ded the people with money and influence to see my point of view,” Noah said.
“Ridiculous. Let one of their kids injure themselves on the mountain, and they’ll change their minds. Too late. I still can’t imagine why you won’t speak to Brett about helping.”
So Brett hadn’t mentioned he’d been in the room for more than one of Noah’s pitches, and he’d been immoveable.
“I mean, personally,” Megan said.
Noah stood, noting Baby Candler’s length and probable weight on Megan’s chart. “I’ll email these notes to Dr. Kliendt in Knoxville.”
“Thanks.” Megan slid off the table. “But you’re not listening to me. If you won’t approach Brett, talk to Emma.”
“I’ve spoken to Emma.”
“About the clinic? At last. Something constructive. Brett might listen to her.”
“Emma’s helping with the website and social media pages. That’s all I want her to do.”
* * *
“I HOPE YOU don’t mind that we’ve turned your room into a nursery.” Megan, sitting cross-legged on the floor folding baby clothes, leaned her head against the wall.
“I assume it was my room and Dad’s before me because it made a good nursery. I had no plans to move back in.” Emma used her feet to brace the changing table’s box, while she slid the pieces out. “You may wish you’d had these assembled professionally.”
“Your dad promised he’d do it, but you know how he gets with work. I’m wondering if that’s why he and the rest of the council are so stagnant. Three men and two women who hardly leave their offices to really live.” Megan reached for another freshly laundered sleeper. “I told Noah to call Brett and speak to him personally about this clinic, but I didn’t convince him.”
Emma considered the possibility that Megan would be delivering a baby while she lived in a town with no access to full medical care. “If I fight for the clinic, other than offering my services for website and media pages, I look like I’m claiming to know what’s best for a town I don’t want to live in.”
Megan slid her hands over her basketball of a belly with the reflective joy of a truly content mother-to-be. “Why don’t you want to live here?”
“I’m tempted sometimes, when I see children playing on the square, and I hear the wind playing in the leaves. When I look down from Nan’s house at a view as familiar as my own face.”
“But?”
“I loved Noah. I loved him so much there are still times I ache with the memory. I can’t come back here. When I see him, I remember, and it’s too easy to forget why I left. I even wonder if he really did love me.” She reached for a wrench from the tools they’d laid out. “And that last day, when my mom was with his dad at Nan’s—”
“I heard all about that. I never believed you pushed that man down the stairs.”
“You’re one of the few. I don’t seem to be able to change anyone’s opinion.”
“You might’ve if you’d stuck around. People saw your leaving as an admission of guilt. But if you stick around now...”
“It’s been four years, and people still believe the worst. They won’t change their minds.”
“I suggest being brazen. You do it well when you do it. I’ve seen you march across the square like you own it. Take that stance when you hear something you don’t like.”
“Since I came back, I tend to fall into my old defensive and guilty position.” She considered whacking an uncooperative screw with the wrench. “And needy. I love this mountain and my home and my dad. I miss Nan, but I turn into a person I don’t like when I’m here. I have to fight my own instincts to be the woman I am anywhere else, where no one knows me.”
“Or expects anything of you.”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore.” She didn’t want to waste precious time on an argument she’d already settled with herself.
“All right. But I think you need to see yourself more clearly. I’ve seen a generous woman who considers the feelings of others.” She closed her hands over her belly. “Just promise you’ll come back more often. Your father misses you. And I’ll miss you.”
Emma blinked back tears. “Thank you.”
Megan staggered to her feet and hung a blanket over the side of the crib. “I think I’ll take this one to the hospital with me.”
“Where’d you get the crib? It’s beautiful.”
“You won’t believe it when I tell you.”
Emma smiled.
“Owen,” Megan said. “Owen Gage. Although he’s known as Owen Stephenson in the gallery where I found his work in New York.”
“Gallery?”
“You don’t think that’s art?”
It looked as if someone had brought the best of the Smokies to form a crib. Beneath the spindles, etchings of lilac and rhododendron clung to waterfalls. A bear family climbed a tree, while a little boy flew his kite in a field of long, waving grass. The spindles were turned perfectly, plain columns of wood that reached to a sky etched onto a panel beneath the rail.
“It’s art, but how do you know this about Owen?”
“I ran into him there at a gallery. He asked me to keep his secret, and then later, he asked your father.”
“Why?”
“I think he’s afraid of being in a spotlight. He delivers the pieces and I’ve seen him, incognito, at his own shows.”
Emma could believe that with a spotlight, there’d be the temptation to celebrate. “Does Noah know?”
“I can’t ask him.” Megan turned, her expression fierce. “You can’t either. Unless Owen tells you, you can never tell anyone.”
“Don’t think I’d rat you and Dad out.”
* * *
EMMA RETRIEVED HER laptop from the back of her car and walked around the busy square to the yellow stone library on the far corner. Several of her clients were due updates on their websites. Plus, she had a proposal to finish and email to a prospective customer.
Since her talk with Megan, she felt different. She strode into the library and paused to appreciate the soft, cool, green-carpeted haven. She breathed in the scent of books and books and books. On the low shelves to the right, someone had spread a model airplane and a piñata and a heavy, antique metal dump truck, painted in chipped yellow.
Emma walked past display cases of rare editions of classics, like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and Murder on the Orient Express. The books shared space with drawings clearly undertaken by the children of Bliss over the years, some crayoned, some thick with finger paint. There were also shelves of trophies the town’s various sports teams had won as long ago as the early 1900s.
Tony George, the librarian, looked up from his half circle desk. “It’s been a few days,” he said. “The conference room is open if you want it.”
“I’ll use one of the desks out here.” Being alone did not appeal tonight.
“Your choice. I have a fresh pot of coffee going.”
“Even this late?” She grinned, happy to talk with an uncomplicated man. “That seals the deal. I’m staying out here where I dare not muss a book with your magical elixir.”
Logging on to the Wi-Fi, she was immediately connected to the library’s dated website. She poked around, but got lost looking for the latest calendar. Curiosity sent her to the search function, but the connection broke, and she got a blank screen with an error.
“Tony,” she said. He looked up. “Your website isn’t...” She sputtered, not really eager to toss a friendship into the wind. He’d never mentioned the accident four years ago. “I wonder if I could help you with it.”
He smirked. “I looked you up online when you got home. I got curious about your pricing when I realized you fund your travels with a business as airy-fairy as website building.”
“You know, the thing I like best about yo
u, Tony, is that we can say anything to each other and not take the insults personally.”
“Okay, perhaps a little blunt.” He held up his hands. “But I still can’t afford you. You noticed our decor?” He sent a rueful glance toward the closest glass case. “I begged every family that uses the library to empty their closets on our behalf.”
“I don’t want to charge you, Tony. I thought I could pay you back a little for the free Wi-Fi.” She glanced toward the office behind him where the coffee stand percolated all hours of the day. “And your potent brew.”
“I heard you weren’t planning to stay in town.”
“I’ll maintain it the way I maintain all my client accounts. I can work from anywhere.”
Tony lifted both brows and rubbed his palms together. “That’s more like it. What do you want to do?”
“Modernize a bit. Make it pretty.” She studied her screen, reluctant to offend. “Make it easier to use. I can’t find an updated calendar, and when I searched for a book, I got tossed out of the whole site.”
“How long would those changes take? What we have isn’t the best, but it’s something. If we were down for a while, what would the patrons do?”
“I can make a template pretty easily, and install everything you have on that. Normally, I’d only want my new work to be active, but in this case, because you don’t want to lose patrons, I’ll hook in the new elements as I finish them. You may find more people want to come in when they see what you have to offer.”
“I’ve thought that. We have classes, events—a fun run next week. And we show films.” He stacked several books in front of him. “We have a discussion group each month. I thought it might be better attended if our readers got to choose their own books, but I don’t know how to set that up.”
“We’ll do that first. Give me a list of the books you want to offer, and as soon as I have access to the code, we’ll set up a poll. Let me do a quick mockup. I have a template that might work for you. If you don’t like it, we can work up something else.”
