The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  Eden sighed. “Why do I even talk to you?”

  “Because I’m your best option for adult conversation at the moment.”

  “I guess it all depends on how you define ‘adult,’” Eden returned placidly. “But I was wearing this.” She gestured at her pale pink cardigan. “Polo, cardigan, jeans.”

  “Hardly a Nicki Minaj–caliber outfit, but who knows what floats his boat. But that’s a great color on you. Makes you look kind of ethereal and Nicole Kidman-y.”

  “Wow. Thanks. Gosh.” Eden was genuinely touched.

  “Which is a lot to ask of a color. So.”

  Eden snorted.

  But Avalon was staring at her as if she was piecing a puzzle together. “But I think you know it’s a great color on you . . .” Avalon said slowly. “Which is why you wore it. I bet you subconsciously wanted to make Principal Gabe stammery,” she pronounced with the triumph of Columbo announcing the killer. “Or you hoped you would.”

  That right there was why she talked to Avalon, who knew her better than she knew herself.

  Damned if she was going to admit it, though. Not even to herself.

  It might not even be true.

  She was too tired to stop to think about the nuances of those kinds of things, anyway.

  “Pshaw,” was what she said.

  “Did you just say pshaw, Grandma?”

  “I thought it was due for a revival.”

  Like her libido.

  “I’m saying you like him, like him, too.”

  Eden shrugged. “I don’t know him well enough to like him, like him. I never thought of him at all beyond the fact that he’s the principal of Annelise’s school. I don’t have time to have subconscious thoughts about anyone.”

  Even as she said that, though, something about it felt like a lie. Which forced her to acknowledge that, thanks to that hallway rescue she kept revisiting like a favorite song, awareness of Gabe Caldera had been a constant low hum in her life for a while now.

  “He’s just . . . easy on the eyes, that’s all,” she concluded with insincere offhandedness.

  “Were you flirting?”

  “I’m not sure. It kind of felt like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the Tin Man has lockjaw and Dorothy has to oil him. You could practically hear the creaking sounds as I attempted it.”

  “Did you flick your hair?”

  “Why?”

  “You always flick your hair when you’re flirting.”

  Huh. She hadn’t known this.

  “You know,” Eden said slowly, “I’m sure it’s possible he flirts with everyone. If ever a guy knew how to use his physical charm to manage a situation . . .”

  Gabe Caldera was built like a wall, maybe. And he’d felt like a wall when she’d touched his arm. She could probably hook her hands over his uplifted forearm and do pull-ups.

  But that fleeting stricken expression when she’d said she hoped never to be in his office again . . . she knew instinctively that he was not, precisely, a wall.

  Which reminded her: nascent lust was one thing. It was all well and good to bask in attention.

  Being responsible for yet another human’s feelings was another thing altogether.

  While Avalon had always been a heart-on-her-sleeve kind of girl, Eden was a cards-close-to-her-chest sort. Good with a feisty, sexy comeback and the occasional come hither stare, but a little cool, a little hard to get, a little hard to know. She sometimes thought it was because Avalon had a fools-rush-in tendency—in the family’s emotional balance sheet, someone had to offset the excess. Eden had always understood her own appeal, and she’d closely guarded her heart and nether regions even eons ago when she was dating up a storm; the few hearts she’d broken had never haunted her conscience long.

  But now, secretly, she was appalled to have broken any. Since Annelise was born, her emotions seemed permanently more tenderized, more porous and pliant. Another human’s feelings were a sacred trust. She did not gamble with them anymore, not hers, not anyone else’s.

  Besides, who had time to gamble?

  “Is he that kind of guy?” Avalon asked. “The flirts-with-everyone type?”

  Eden mulled. “I dunno. He seems like a pretty straight shooter. Flirting with everyone would be a risky game for a principal.”

  “That’s funny. Dad called him a straight shooter, too. Chatted with him at Annelise’s soccer game. Said he was a guy’s guy.”

  “Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before I started using Dad-isms.”

  “You did inherit Dad’s ass.”

  “Ha.”

  Eden was tall and lean, like her dad of yore. Dad of present day now sported a significantly more pillowy torso, which made his bear hugs even more engulfing and excellent. Avalon was built more like her mom: short and curvy.

  “Well, since you’ve been so busy, Eden, the first thing you should know is that sex has changed a lot in ten years. You may need to brush up.”

  Eden glared at her. “I hope it has levels now, like Candy Crush. I’d totally ace it.”

  “You can always fire up your Kindle and have it read instructions to you while he’s going at it.”

  “Ha ha.”

  But wait—could she?

  Suddenly the very notion of her having sex after all this time seemed akin to those people leaping from wheelchairs at Lourdes. Glorious, sure, miraculous, sure, but the probability seemed awfully low.

  The shop door jingled merrily, and they both lit up when Casey Carson walked in. She was the sunny, blond, Valkyrie-statured owner of the Truth and Beauty Salon across the street, the town expert on what women were paying to have done to their hair everywhere on their body, whether it was sleekly flattening it, streaking it in pastel shades, yanking it out by the roots, or pruning it into discreet shapes.

  “Hey, Casey,” Avalon said slyly, “is vajazzling still a thing? Asking for a friend who’s thinking of getting back into the dating scene.”

  Eden shot Avalon the kind of wrathful look that used to send Avalon running, squeaking in fear, when she was a kid.

  Avalon appeared made of sterner stuff these days, more’s the pity.

  “Only for the mistresses of kinky oligarchs.” Casey considered dedicated consumption of fashion magazines and gossip websites part of her job responsibilities. “I’ve only had one vajazzling client in the last six months. In uncertain political climates people tend to stick with the classics. A nice wedge.” She made it sound like brie. “Who wants to know?”

  Eden gave Avalon the hairy eyeball, daring her to say anything.

  “It just came up in casual conversation,” Avalon wisely chose to say.

  And yet Eden was absurdly relieved to know her nether regions were still au courant.

  “Glad I could help!” Casey said cheerily. “See you at the Chamber of Commerce mixer this week, Eden?”

  “Natch.”

  “And oh—don’t forget that Jan Pennington needs to know what your raffle entry is by the end of the week. She just called to remind me.”

  Eden sighed. “I think of nothing else.”

  Casey laughed, and a few seconds later jingled on out, the delighted bearer of a tall arrangement featuring blue thistles and calla lilies and a big waterfall spray of greenery, like something a Martian would set the table with on Martian Thanksgiving.

  Eden turned to her sister. “What did I ever do to you?”

  “Well, for one, you told me to name my Barbie ‘Toilette’ when I was eight because, and I quote, ‘it was a pretty French word.’”

  Eden slowly smiled. “That was one of my better ones.”

  Toilette had been passed on to Annelise (who rechristened her “Winter”) along with all the other off-brand Barbie-esque dolls she and Avalon had played with when they were kids (their parents had four kids and they weren’t rich), including the one she and Avalon called Scrotal Ken. Their brother Jude, a stickler for accuracy even at the age of ten, had taken umbrage at the smooth area between Ken’s legs a
nd had drawn, in ink, an anatomically detailed penis and scrotum. He’d drawn a heart on him, too, complete with valves, and had just begun drawing a pancreas when her mom bolted into the room in response to Eden’s outraged shrieking and put a stop to it.

  Eden had forgotten about Scrotal Ken until her mom excavated him from the attic and passed him on to Annelise. He was wearing pants when that happened. When Annelise inevitably decided to put different clothes on him, Eden used his confusing body art as a teaching moment: boys had different privates than girls, and that a penis on the Ken doll wasn’t dirty or bad or anything to get worked up about . . . but that her Ken doll probably ought to keep his pants on in mixed company (a good rule of thumb in life, in general), and private parts were private. And so forth.

  “So what are you going to do about him?” Avalon said.

  “Who?”

  “You know exactly who I mean.”

  Eden felt a twinge, breathless, delicious and scary, when she thought about “him.” An ancient sensation. She’d have to go back to her teenage years for the last time she’d felt that sort of thing.

  “Oh, nothing. I’m too busy for anything like that. I hardly ever see him anyway, and then only in passing. Forget everything I just said. I was just . . . I guess I was just making conversation just now.”

  Eden let the word anyway slip out on a yawn, just for that extra frisson of faux nonchalance.

  She resumed sorting and filing the day’s flower orders and idly reviewed the little messages that went with them—“Happy Birthday,” “I’m sorry,” “Congratulations on the promotion!” with great satisfaction. She loved being part of everyone’s happy occasions as much as she loved prospering. She paused when she came to one that said simply, “You. Me. Forever.”

  Normally those words would have slipped right past her awareness like so much scenery on the highway, nothing more than part of the bookkeeping that kept the shop running. This time they snagged in a teeny little pothole.

  A pothole lasered there, if she had to hazard a guess, by the charm of Gabe Caldera.

  Forever. She didn’t use that word much. Days, even weeks seemed to go by in a seeming eyeblink, and if the notion of a husband so much as flitted into her mind, it met the same fate as any flies that managed to find their way into the Misty Cat Tavern, slaughtered by the fan blades of her schedule. Her life had a sort of ceaseless momentum. They were good, she and Leesy.

  And sleeping with a guy like Annelise’s father was meant to be like skydiving or walking around topless at Burning Man—something one did once, for the experience, a memory to sock away and whip out when she wanted to shock her grandchildren. He’d been gentle but intense, intelligent enough to startle even her brainiac self a couple of times, and full of the misty philosophical bullshit that had passed for wisdom back in college and had once been her catnip, and which she now viewed with great suspicion. They’d spent about three hours in soulful conversation and one hour boinking.

  He was long gone by the time that pink plus sign showed up on the stick. And she did, out of a sense of moral obligation, try to get word to him. But she’d never heard back.

  Which was actually more than fine with her. Because instead of turning her life into a shambles, that pink plus sign was shockingly sobering. And she realized instantly that while he might not be the last person on earth she’d choose to father any of her children, he certainly wasn’t anywhere near the first, either. And as time went on and the more real Annelise became to her, the less real he became.

  Until it was often easy to forget he’d ever existed at all.

  Turning up suddenly pregnant was uproar enough in her family and the town at large, without telling anyone who the father was. She’d never regretted her decision to keep it a secret. Her priority was Leesy’s happiness, and part of that was making sure she grew up in peace and safety.

  She’d explained the dad thing this way to Annelise when she was six: “Leesy, you know how there are lots of different kinds of flowers in the shop? And some flowers have a lot of petals, and other flowers have just a few, and some are just kind of floppy, like poppies, but they’re all pretty and they’re all exactly perfect in their own way? That’s how families are. Some have dads, some don’t. Some families have one dad, some have two dads—you know, like Matt and Darius at Canyon Collectibles? Some don’t have a dad, but they have cousins and uncles and things. Families are made up of different parts, but no kind of family is better than another kind.”

  “So a family is like a bouquet?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly right.”

  “And sometimes you can all of a sudden add a new flower to your bouquet, like Rosemary at the Angel’s Nest, when the foster girl lived with her.”

  When Annelise said things like this—blindsiding in their depth and sweetness and innocent soulfulness—Eden’s reflex was to turn to someone and say, Do you see how freaking cool she is? Fresh deliveries of love and awe arrived pretty much daily in nearly unsustainable quantities. It seemed as though someone else ought to bear witness to the wondrous evolution of Annelise Harwood, to be a mutual memory archivist.

  “Boys must be the stinkiest flowers,” Annelise had added thoughtfully. “They’re . . . collieflowers!”

  She was really funny, too.

  When had the need to share become an ache?

  You. Me. Forever.

  She smacked that order slip on the counter a little too abruptly. She suddenly realized that it had been quiet for a long time.

  She looked up.

  Avalon was frowning at her.

  “Have you been frowning at me this entire time?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Avalon said. After a moment. Apparently after reviewing the options for things she could have said, Avalon had opted to be sensitive.

  And this was almost worse, because when Avalon decided to be delicate, it meant she considered Eden’s feelings raw and unwieldy and unpredictable indeed. Which only made Eden realize that from the perspective of men, her game, such as it was, did feel sort of wobbly from disuse. Practically atrophied.

  “Well, I better get going,” Avalon finally said. “Come on up to Devil’s Leap when you get a chance. I think our donkey is arriving today!”

  And with those enticing words and a wave of her hand, Avalon jingled out the door.

  Chapter 3

  As it so happened, a half hour later Eden and Annelise were roaring up Main Street to Devil’s Leap as if her flower van was a wartime ambulance.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you needed trifold poster board to finish your report tonight?” she fretted.

  Actual Aztec mothers had probably asked rhetorical questions much like this. Because there was only one possible answer. Which was: “Sorry. I forgot.”

  Annelise was bummed. She genuinely suffered wounded pride when she screwed up. But she did forget things, now and again. To bring her lunch to school, at least once a month, for instance.

  Eden sighed. “Never mind.”

  She took a deep breath and rummaged around in her psyche, trying to whip up a little cheer. “We’re lucky that Auntie Avalon has some leftover trifold poster board. You’re usually so good about remembering I’m just surprised, is all. I know you’ll remember next time. It just takes practice.”

  This wasn’t the least bit certain, but Annelise shifted in her seat, thumped her heels a few times, more cheerfully. She was definitely more resilient than Eden had ever been. Eden had always known how to indulge in a strategic, self-flagellating brood.

  “Becky Gordimer today said her dad hightailed it out of town four years ago and her mom hasn’t seen him since,” Annelise said suddenly.

  Eden tensed. “Huh,” she said brightly. “How about that.”

  She took the next corner at Jamboree Street a little sharply.

  Annelise sometimes came at questions about her dad sideways, out of the blue, with a delicacy that was both funny and poignant. She was alrea
dy so aware of the nuances of people’s feelings.

  “Mom, what does that mean, hightailed?”

  “Hmm . . . well, maybe it means running with your tail in the air to catch the wind, like a sailboat. You know, like when Peace and Love takes a fright and his tail gets all big and poofy? Like that.”

  Annelise burst out laughing. “That is hilARious. ’Cause he was scared? Like a cartoon!”

  “Pretty much.” Eden was always a little extra kind to the Gordimer kids to offset the terrible father, known more for keeping a stool warm at the Plugged Nickel than their house warm in the winter, and because there always seemed to be something dripping from their noses and fingers, and she felt a little guilty for thinking them charmless. Eden was a loving mother. She wasn’t Mother Teresa.

  “We can Google hightailed to find out for sure when we get home, Leesy.”

  “Excellent!” Annelise loved to know things, and once she knew it, boy, was it in the memory banks. “Guess Mr. Gordimer wasn’t her destiny.”

  “Destiny” was a new and beloved concept, too. Where she’d picked it up, Eden wasn’t entirely certain, but Annelise was captivated by the drama and romance of it.

  “Guess not, sweet cheeks.”

  Eden flipped the left turn on the road that led up to Devil’s Leap.

  The Lumineers were singing “Ophelia” on the radio. Usually Annelise liked to sing along to that one. The fact that she wasn’t meant she was still mulling something.

  “Is that what happened to my dad? Did he hightail it?”

  Eden’s heart twinged. Oh, crap.

  Annelise was trying to sound casual, but a little worry had crept through.

  “Um . . . well, not precisely. He didn’t leave because he was scared. Not at all. He just left town quickly because he had a . . . previous appointment.”

  “Oh.”

  “Appointments” were boring things or things to be dreaded, in Annelise’s book, involving dentists and doctors, and it was pretty much guaranteed to be a topic ender.