Now She's Back (Smoky Mountains, Tennessee 1)

by Anna Adams

  “As I recall, no one ever knew that,” he said.

  Laughing at the same time, Celia began to cry again. “Why aren’t you angry with me? This is so much money if I lose my scholarship.”

  Noah owned up to a spurt of impatience. “It’s money I can’t afford to help you with because I work in a small town, and I have literally been paid with an apple dumpling and a side of bacon,” he said, “so you have to keep the scholarship.”

  Celia looked more frightened. “What if I can’t?”

  “I want to help,” he said, “but I can’t keep fixing everything for you and Chad and Owen. I’m going to help you help yourself.”

  “How? I would if I could.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Good grades.”

  “Dig a little deeper,” he said. “You need tutors, and you need the money to pay for them.”

  “So I need a job.”

  He nodded. “Go to your advisor at school and explain what you need. Talk to Mom. See if you can do any work for her to earn the money. Her laundry alone ought to be worth something, and I’m sure she’d rather pay you to do it than send it out.”

  “I can’t tell Mom. What if this makes her feel like a failure? What if she stops trying again?”

  “Mom doesn’t know how to stop trying now. Look at the inn. It’s successful because she doesn’t give up. She keeps finding new ways to succeed, and you can do that, too, Celia.”

  “I was fine in high school.”

  “When you didn’t go to parties and you took high school classes. College is different. Even if you aren’t the smartest girl in class anymore, you are smart enough to get help, and you still have time. This term doesn’t end until almost Christmas.”

  “I wish I could find a tutor who’d let me pay him in bacon.”

  “I ate the bacon. I save the money.” He grinned. “However scarce it may be.”

  She seemed to relax, but her smile trembled. “Thanks, Noah. I guess I could have called. I didn’t have to interrupt your dinner last night, demanding to see you and being rude to Emma.”

  “I’m tired of people I love treating Emma like she did something wrong. She just wanted more of me, and I didn’t have time for her. I loved her, but slowly she stopped believing I did because I was always with one of you. She was too young to understand.”

  “She doesn’t know what we went through.”

  “But none of us is living like that now,” he said. “It’s time we all stopped being afraid. No one can hurt us now.”

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  He came around his desk and hugged her. “I don’t want you to feel ashamed, but I don’t mind if you remember this was the day you decided to fix your own problem, and I decided to help like any brother, instead of solving the problem for you.”

  “Last night, when you asked me to leave, I thought you weren’t going to help me.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll always help you, but we both need to help ourselves. I hear someone has a problem and I snap to fix it. I need to fix my own. You deserve your scholarship in the school you chose. If you lose it, you’ll have to save until you can afford to take classes at a less expensive, less prestigious university.” He tucked her head beneath his chin. “You helped me, too, showing up like that.”

  “All crazy.”

  “A little.”

  “I’ve wasted at least a week dreaming up ways to pretend I wasn’t in trouble and I didn’t need help. I’ve felt so humiliated.”

  He’d believed he couldn’t live his own life until his family was completely safe. He had to start living.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TO TEST THE LIBRARY’S database, Emma had filled out the online application for the Fun Run Tony had organized. Then she’d paid the fee and written down the starting time. Two days later, bundled in workout gear, Emma was grateful for her running evenings with her father, but too self-conscious to be bouncing on her heels like the runners around her at the courthouse starting line.

  Neither her father nor Megan would even be on the square today. Her mother thought running was something one did only when caught in a place one should not be.

  Out of the crowd of familiar faces milling around her, no one said more than hello. No one stopped beside her.

  Strange to be a tourist in her own hometown. A group of college-aged kids, all wearing Tennessee Vols orange, came toward her, a surge of energy taking up the sidewalk. Emma had started stepping back to get out of their way, when Noah showed up, in longish shorts and a gray Vanderbilt University School of Medicine T-shirt.

  “I didn’t expect you,” he said.

  “Spur of the moment. I had to buy new clothes for it.”

  “Fetching,” he said as he and the three men around them gave her ensemble a look-see.

  She glared at the others. “I’ll probably be the first in line for an EKG before I get through a tenth of a mile.”

  “You’ll be fine. Owen tells me you’re less whiny about lifting the heavy lumber at your house than Chad—and I hear you and your dad have been running the lane between your house and his.”

  “Thank goodness Dad let me run with him, or I wouldn’t have had the nerve to show up today.” She grinned. “And Chad’s not entirely committed to our project.” She backpedaled at his sharp glance. “I don’t mean he’s not working as hard as he can, but I think he feels as if he’s doing penance, which he is, and he seems to share the Gage resistance to authority.”

  “We like life on our own terms.”

  “Until push comes to shove,” Emma said without thinking, “and then they all still come to you. Is Celia all right?”

  “She’s worked out an answer to her problems.”

  “She has?” Emma had never known him to lie. “I was stunned when you sent her away.”

  “I told you, I’m not my family’s keeper.”

  “But you always took care of them,” she said, raising her hands in front of her as an older man backed nearly onto her feet.

  “Old habits,” Noah said. “I helped Celia find her answers, but I didn’t make her problem disappear.”

  “I think a brother’s allowed to help with advice, or a migraine,” she said. “Owen’s a big fan of his compress.”

  “He told you about that?”

  “I never wanted you to abandon your family. I just never understood how much they needed you.” And she’d felt as if she’d needed him so much more because he’d been unavailable to her.

  The photographer from the local paper was waiting at the starting line, taking photos. Family members and friendly groups had dressed alike to run together. An actor from the most popular comedy on television strolled up in bike shorts and a sweatshirt, with sunglasses doing nothing to hide his identity.

  Emma edged away from the publicity, startled to find Noah still at her side.

  “You should have your photo taken,” she said. “And maybe mention something about the clinic. In fact, you should ask Tony how he organized this—it’s his run.”

  “I can’t afford to pay for an event like this.” He pointed toward the stand above the starting line. “They’re getting ready. We’re about to go.”

  “I’m shamefully glad it’s only a 5K.”

  “With balloons and clowns at the end,” he said, laughing. “I passed through them at the finish line on the other side of the square and thought of you.”

  “Clowns?” She grinned ruefully. “I may finish this race by bolting into the coffee shop.”

  At that moment, Tony took the microphone.

  “We’re happy to see so many of our citizens and our most welcome guests in town taking part today. I want to thank you for helping the Bliss Peak Library. We need your money, and we’ll use it well. Now, I’ll wish you all a great ru
n. We have EMTs along the route, and somewhere here, Dr. Gage is running.”

  Heads craned, and a couple of Chad’s friends behind them pointed. Noah raised his hand and got a fun-run ovation for taking part.

  “If you fall in a hole or a bear runs out of the woods and grabs you, yell for help.” Tony lifted a flag. “Everyone ready?”

  Cheers nearly deafened Emma. She laughed out loud, and Noah turned to look into her eyes, his own strangely melted with warmth.

  “Okay,” Tony let the flag drop. “Go!”

  With more cheers and laughter and bodies bumping into each other, the runners followed the marked path, away from the square, up the mountain. Emma might have joked about being in bad shape, but with every step, she was determined to keep up with Noah.

  He was older than she was and so had always been a few grades ahead or in college, so her unnatural compulsion to do well in school hadn’t affected her relationship with him. She’d never been jealous, except of the time he gave so freely to anyone else who said “I need you.”

  But today, with even stronger hints of winter arriving early to frost the air, and the laughter of neighbors surrounding them, she wanted to do well. She wanted him to see her as a person who wouldn’t collapse in a heap if she tried to run three miles up Bliss Peak, which the locals always called the Peak of Bliss.

  “Maybe we’ll pick up Owen,” Noah said.

  “He considered running?”

  Noah was too polite to mention her gasps between words. She started counting her footfalls. One, two, three, four, and timing her breathing with them. When they passed Emma’s driveway, she was so focused on her progress she only heard the slap of one shoe and then the other against the ground.

  They were close to the plateau. She kept counting. A few hundred more feet and then they’d be heading downhill. She could easily run another mile downhill.

  “You can do it,” Owen’s voice said as he came up beside her. “Why are you so worried you won’t make it?”

  “How did you know?” She was competitive. Noah hadn’t left her behind, though he wasn’t breathing hard at all.

  “You’re so focused. The only time I’ve seen that look on your face, you were standing at the top of the ladder passing me shingles.”

  “You do roofing, too?” Noah asked. “Where did you learn?”

  “I started on my own, thinking we could patch Emma’s roof. When we had to replace the whole thing, I subcontracted.”

  The brothers had always competed. Owen obviously assumed Noah was implying he couldn’t do the job.

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way,” Emma said.

  “What way?” Noah asked.

  “‘Are you sure you won’t turn Emma’s house into a leaking sieve?’” Owen supplied for him.

  “I didn’t mean that, but I thought shingles had to be laid a certain way.”

  “And I know how to do that.” Owen glanced back as if wishing he’d kept his place behind them somewhere.

  “You’re overreacting, brother,” Noah said. “Next time you need someone to pass you shingles, call me.”

  Emma and Owen stared at him. She felt Owen’s gaze veer back to her. Fortunately, if she was blushing now, no one on earth would be able to tell. A little bit of exercise turned her face an unattractive shade of traffic-light-red.

  “Heights and clowns. My twin kryptonites,” she said, forced to grin as Owen laughed at her with real enjoyment.

  Noah changed the subject, but not without looking from one to the other of them with a hint of strange suspicion. “Did you know Mom was roofing?” he asked his brother.

  Owen laughed. “I told her to stay off the roof. If she doesn’t trust me, I’ll hire someone else for her.”

  “Don’t say things like that, Owen. Your mother doesn’t doubt you.”

  “Everyone doubts me, Emma.” He backed off, and she might have imagined the rest. “I doubt me.”

  Except Noah heard it, too. Concern blanched his face as he watched his brother fall off the pace, and the crowd closed in between them.

  “We need to go back. He shouldn’t feel like that.” Emma searched the bobbing heads behind them.

  “Let it go.” Noah’s hand on her waist was like a bolt of lightning. Awareness threaded through her tired limbs, a pleasant heat that alarmed her as much as the idea of falling because she wasn’t coordinated enough to run with a man touching her.

  “I can’t let it go,” she said, and she didn’t entirely mean Owen’s self-doubt.

  “He wouldn’t have stopped racing with us if he wanted to discuss his feelings.”

  Emma eased away from him and started counting again. Better to count than to consider why he was different this morning. “Last one to the coffee shop pays,” she said.

  “You should run more races.”

  “I should so I can take memories of this beautiful place with me,” she said, lifting her face to the branches that dripped rain from branches crossing over the trail. “Do you still love Bliss, Noah?”

  “More than any other place,” he said, and the easy feeling between them tarnished a little. “But maybe I haven’t been far enough from here. You know I wanted to go with you four years ago. I wanted to catch a train in London and look up again to find myself in France. To see soccer in a stadium in Madrid.”

  “To ski in Switzerland.” She laughed breathlessly. “On the baby slopes, surrounded by two-year-olds,” she said. “But I thought of you—that you’d make a better show for the good, old US of A than I did.”

  He wove around a friend of Nan’s who waved dainty fingers as they ran past her and her husband. “Not that it’s too late,” he said. “I’m not chained here. I can go where I want.”

  “After you win the fight for the clinic?” she asked. “Because there was nothing keeping you from going anywhere else in the world before you took over Dr. Bragg’s practice.”

  “There’s always something,” he said with an edge. “My brothers, Celia. Mom, having her own roofing emergencies.”

  “Or the possibility that your dad might try to get in touch again,” Emma said, trying to learn more about Noah than he was willing to share.

  His jaw hardened, and he had to breathe deeply for the first time since they’d begun their run. “He only gets in touch with me,” Noah said. “He’d better stay away from everyone else.”

  * * *

  ABOUT A WEEK LATER, Noah parked beside Emma’s car in the graveled lot his mother had created with her bare hands and a backhoe early in the inn’s life. They must be working on the clinic information. His mother seemed strangely slow at getting the hang of the clinic website. He didn’t believe Emma had set it up poorly.

  And Emma seemed to have set up an office at the table that fit snugly into the bay window in the dining room. He’d started looked forward to seeing her. The little room, scene of so many family ambushes, was now bright and new and colorful. For a moment, he watched Emma wrangle with questions his mother kept leaving her on slips of paper towel and cooking parchment and napkins.

  He stepped over the railroad tie border at the edge of the yard, and trod through the long, thick winter grass. When he reached for the rusty screen door, a tried and true Southern feature, according to his mother, he caught the rise and fall of voices from inside.

  “I’ll write out answers to your questions, Suzannah,” he heard Emma say. “But you won’t ever need to make changes like these.”

  “Am I taking up too much of your time? I just don’t want to let Noah down.”

  He knew that tone in his mother’s voice. She’d never been an impressive manipulator.

  “You’re trying to make opportunities for Noah to run into me. No wonder you always tell me to hang around and use your table to finish my own work. We should start meeting at the lib
rary again.”

  “I can’t be away from here that long this close to November.”

  “Don’t make him hate me again,” Emma said. “I want him to forgive me. I want to leave this place as his friend again. Knowing I had to face him kept me from coming home.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “That you make up a household disaster every time I come.”

  “I can’t help when a toilet breaks or—wait a minute. That’s not a nice thing to suggest, Emma. You hurt my son. Why would I want you to hurt him again?”

  “Because you think your problems kept us apart the first time.”

  Noah yanked the screen door open. It screamed on its hinges, a perfect alarm to stop the two women from saying any more.

  He crossed the sleeping porch and entered the kitchen. Emma looked up first with the blush that always exposed her vulnerable moments.

  Transparent and temporary. He refused to believe her awareness of him meant anything more than a simple physical response between two people who’d once been close, but were no more.

  His mother was a study in defiance.

  “Where’s the new heating element?” he asked. “I’ll fix your dryer, but I have to be back at the office in an hour and a half.”

  “Everyone’s testy today.” Suzannah stood immediately and brought him a glass of tea. “This is not my famous sweet tea,” she said in a pointed aside. “Although you could use a little sugar.”

  He took the glass, managing not to crush it in his hand. His mother remained pointedly oblivious.

  “I need to go find that element,” she said, her voice muffled as she climbed the kitchen stairs. “I bought it at the hardware store when I was in Chattanooga last week. Emma, I found an amazing fabric store there. I’m refurbishing a couple of my grandmother’s sofas. If you need something like that, I can take you with me next time I go.”

  “I’m not staying long enough to upholster.”

  Two mismatched chairs down and across from Emma, he could observe to his heart’s content. Only, his heart was not content.