by Lisa Wingate
A little puff of laughter pushed past my lips—a reflex action, like jerking a hand up to block an incoming object before it hits you. “Please. Like you remember me.”
He blinked, appearing surprised. “You’re making me feel old. There were only seventy-four in our graduating class, and it hasn’t been all that long.”
“Since high school? Yes it has.” And thank goodness for that. “I hardly remember anything about the year here.” Such a lie. Does anybody ever really forget high school? People like Blaine probably wanted to remember. He probably stood around at the first football game every year, recounting the glory days. Why wouldn’t he? He and his friends were always into some kind of fun—making dates for the school dance, jumping off the rocks at the Scissortail, paddling out to the island beneath Eagle Eye Bridge, or having parties in the secluded park on Blue Moon Bay.
“Huh,” he murmured contemplatively. “Well, those were some pretty bad times for your family. Guess it makes sense that it’d all be a blur.” His eyes caught mine empathically, and I felt an odd little tug. Those were some pretty bad times for your family. What I wouldn’t have given for someone, for him, to have said those words, made that observation during the horrible months after my father’s death. How many times had I walked the halls dreaming that one of those people who looked right through me would suddenly see me, suddenly smile and offer friendship when I so desperately needed it?
Just like all the rest of them, Blaine never had. It was silly for me to still be dwelling on that all these years later, sort of pathetic, even. Old wounds are the slowest to heal.
“So, how do you remember me, then?” The words were out of my mouth before I had time to think about them, and a blush tainted my cheeks. What a stupid thing to ask.
He looked me over, as if he were trying to decide how far toward honesty he should go.
Lie to me, I thought. I really don’t want to know the truth. Something about this place took me right back to high school, turned me into that insecure, lost little girl again.
He pressed a knuckle to his bottom lip. I watched it stroke back and forth while the suspense inside me built to a ridiculous degree. Somewhere outside the bubble of unfinished high-school business, there was the vague realization that my toes were freezing and the wind was slicing through my jeans as if they were curtain sheers. The smart thing would be to leave him to whatever he was doing and head to the main house for breakfast. Blaine Underhill wasn’t going to reveal any of his secrets. Not this easily.
But for some reason, I stood there waiting for his answer, rooted to the spot, like a doofus.
“Artistic. Quiet. Little bit of a temper.” He assessed, letting his hand drop and bracing it on the bottom of his hooded sweatshirt. His lips spread slowly into a grin. “Guess things have changed a little. You’re not quiet anymore.”
I couldn’t quite decide how to react. He had been generous enough to leave out dorky, introverted, generally morose, and completely lacking in fashion sense. “Meaning I’m still artistic, with a bad temper?”
“Well, Clay tells me that you’re an architect. Creative stuff.” He lifted a hand, waving it over the grounds as if to display them as Exhibit One. “And on the temper front . . . Well, you’ll notice that Roger is still in hiding after the other night.”
“I didn’t do anything to Roger,” I countered, but the words ended in a protest laugh. I could imagine the picture I’d made, keeping all of the family out in the dark, muttering idle threats against Clay’s gooberheaded dog.
“But you wanted to.”
“Roger and I have a love-hate thing. He loves to destroy my stuff, and I hate that.” I shifted from one foot to the other in an exaggerated display of petulance, and tiny needles stabbed my frozen toes. I sucked in air, then did a full-body shiver, shaking the numb foot in the air. Despite the chill, I didn’t excuse myself and head to the house.
“Cold?” Blaine stated the obvious.
“Just my feet.” Which wasn’t really true. I hadn’t ever gotten warm this morning. “I’m staying in the cottage, and that place is polar in the mornings. There’s no propane in the propane tank, and no firewood for the wood stove. I keep forgetting to bring some down from the big house during the day, and I’m not going out to the woodpile at night.” I remembered that duty from our time in the cottage. Mom would let the fire die during the day, and it was freezing when we came home in the afternoons. I’d find her lying in bed, ashen-faced and hollow-eyed under a mound of quilts, oblivious to it all. Clay was afraid to go to the woodpile when dusk was settling over the tree line, so the duty always fell to me.
“Your shoes are wet,” Blaine observed, motioning to the soggy suede boots.
“I know.”
“Kind of cold for wet shoes.” He pointed at the boots again. “Suede isn’t too good around the lake. Too damp here in the winter, soaks through.”
I curled my toes to warm them. “It’s all I have with me. I wasn’t planning to be here long.”
With a backward step, he shrugged toward the lake. “C’mon.”
“Yeah, I don’t think swimming will help,” I joked, but part of me was oddly in favor of following along with whatever Blaine Underhill had in mind.
A lopsided smirk indicated that, of all things, he found me funny. Go figure. “I’ll open Dad’s hardware store for you. We can walk over the back way.”
I paused to consider the offer. Other than the dollar store, the hardware store was the only place in town that sold shoes. A nice pair of combat boots—something waterproof and fleece lined—would be pretty close to heaven right now. I might even sleep in them. I was so tired of having frozen feet.
Come to think of it, the hardware store sold heaters, too. A little electric heater would go a long way toward remedying the temperature problem in the cottage. At the rate things were going with getting Mom to agree to sign the land paperwork, I might be in town a few more days. Some woodsy garb was definitely needed. But . . . “I don’t have any money. I’d write you a check, but the dog ate my checkbook.”
“I’ve heard that excuse before.” He laughed again. “You can put it on account. I know where to find you.” He started walking backwards toward the old path that led through the woods, past the park behind the church, and across an ancient rope bridge to the back of the hardware store. I remembered that path.
The logical part of my mind conjured up reasons to say no. You don’t want to owe him anything. What are his motives here, anyway? You still don’t know why he was skulking around the barn this early in the morning.
No telling what shape that rope bridge is in by now. . . .
On the flip side, Blaine Underhill was being nice to me. There’s something irresistibly charming about having the attention of the guy you dreamed about in high school. Besides, I could imagine how displeased his stepmother would be when she arrived to open the hardware store tomorrow morning and found a big, fat charge with my name on it. I would send her a check as soon as I got back to Seattle, of course, but in the meantime there would be some guilty pleasure in knowing she would hate the idea of Blaine letting me help myself. Whenever I went into the hardware store after my dad died, she’d always stalked me like I might steal something.
“All right. Thanks.” Perhaps I could use this opportunity to ferret out a few more of Blaine’s secrets. “So why were you down by Uncle Herbert’s barn so early?” Casing the place for future repossession? Counting the canoes, perhaps? Major monetary value there. Not.
He slowed, waiting for me to waddle up beside him on my ice-block feet, before we started along the shore. “Crossed my mind that we hadn’t looked in the old barn last night, when we were hunting for your stuff. Your uncle’s old dog, Sadie, used to steal eggs from the chicken coop across the road and bury them in the center aisle. I stacked hay in that barn one summer when I was fourteen, and, man, we busted some rotten eggs in there.”
“Eeewww.” I felt like such a cynic. Blaine Underhill had gotten up this m
orning and walked all the way over here to look for my stuff? The idea was bright and alluring, like a glint of sunlight on water, as we moved from the lakeshore into the murky shadows of live oaks and winter-bare pecans. “I didn’t know you’d ever worked for my uncles.”
“Oh, sure, off and on,” he said, as we walked along the old wagon trail, leaves crunching underfoot, the fog off the lake muting every sound. “I think just about every kid in town did at one time or another. I was in shape for football that fall, I’ll tell you.”
“Was there ever a fall when you weren’t in shape for football?” I joked, then realized it sounded like gushy schoolgirl admiration. “I mean, I always figured you jocks spent all summer waiting for the season to start.”
The Underhills practically had stadium parking with their names on it. Mama B’s bearcat roar was legendary, and even Blaine’s normally dignified stepmother was an insane sports mom. She and my dad had been homecoming king and queen together, back in the day—the couple most likely to marry and produce little football stars.
Blaine reached down to toss a fallen branch off the trail. “Yeah, not so much. Football wasn’t really my thing.”
“Oh, come on.” I rolled a who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding look his way. “You were the ‘pride of Moses Lake.’” My tone mimicked old Hack, the local volunteer fire chief, who’d doubled as football announcer since back when my dad was in school. My senior year, all the talk was about whether Blaine would get a football scholarship. Shortly after we’d come to town, his stepmother had cornered my father at the church door and prattled on endlessly about Blaine’s accomplishments. My father probably felt like an idiot, standing there with his own progeny, me, in a Van Halen T-shirt, my hair dyed stark black with the garish red streak I’d included as a particularly potent protest over the Moses Lake move.
“You get to a point where you figure out some things are more everyone else’s idea than your own,” Blaine said, his gaze turned upward. A whippoorwill was calling somewhere in the trees.
The conversation lulled as we walked through the picnic grounds behind the church, then slipped into the little ravine beyond it and crossed a new wooden bridge where the old rope structure had been. I found myself watching Blaine, contemplating him, wondering if he could really be so different from the image I’d always held in my mind. “So, why did you quit playing football?”
A shrug indicated that it didn’t matter now. “By my second year in college, I knew I wasn’t really fast or big enough for pro ball. The funny thing was, I didn’t feel all that disappointed about it. I was tired of waking up flat on my back on the football field, not knowing where I was. Like I said, it was never really my thing.”
I looked over at him to make sure he really was Blaine Underhill. Not that we’d ever been friends, or anything, but I had known him from afar. He’d certainly given the appearance of eating, living, sleeping, and breathing football. “Why did you play all those years, then?”
A sideways glance flicked my way, catching my gaze. I fell in for a minute, my mind slipping into the past as we climbed the hill to the hardware store. “I thought I needed to,” he answered, dismissively. “The trouble with expectations is that you feel like you have to live up to them.”
Breaking the link between us, I looked at the ground, picking my footing as we stepped over a retaining wall and reached the stairs at the back of the limestone hardware building. I led, and he followed me up, keys jingling as he fished them from his pocket.
“You know, I always admired that about you,” he said, leaning around me to unlock the door. For a moment, I was conscious of his nearness, of his breath ruffling the hair by my ear. “You didn’t seem like you cared what anybody thought.”
“Me?” A gush of warm air slid over me, pulling me inside the store. I wanted to turn and look at Blaine, to see what sort of expression went along with those words. But I didn’t. A flush crept over my cheeks, and I felt the need to deflect his compliment with a joke. “Come on. Admit it. You really didn’t even know who I was.” I added a sardonic cough, resorting to what Trish would have referred to as a defense mechanism, using self-deprecating humor to keep people at a distance.
“I knew who you were.” He was close behind me again, the two of us hemmed in by piles of boxes. Against the stillness of the building as the door fell closed, his voice was soft, intimate. I tried to brush aside the ridiculous desire to let down my guard. The temptation was almost overwhelming. Grow a spine, already, Heather. You’re here to do a job, a voice in my head insisted.
Unzipping my coat, I moved from the back hallway into the main part of the store, where things were less crowded. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Blaine’s wicked stepmother was always in it, this would have been one of my favorite buildings in town. Two stories, with cavernous ceilings, beautiful oak moldings and fixtures, and an ancient Otis freight elevator that, as far as I knew, still worked, the building whispered of the craftsmanship of early German settlers. They’d taken the time to create perfect dovetailing on the wall cabinets that held a myriad of tiny drawers filled with nuts, bolts, and plumbing supplies. In the center of the room, the open rotunda glowed with light from the tall, arched windows on the front wall. Moving into the warmth of it, I tipped back my head and gazed upward into the waterfall of light slipping through the ornate banisters.
I remembered standing in this very spot with my father, long before I was old enough to understand why the woman behind the counter always snorted and headed for the stock room when we came in. I was holding my father’s hand, watching the shadows play over the well-worn wooden shelves, waiting for Dad to take me on the elevator. I was certain that he would. He knew all of the building’s secrets. He’d worked there as a teenager.
I wasn’t aware then that, until my mother swept through town one summer, my dad had been engaged to one of the girls he worked with. He was going to marry her as soon as he graduated from college, but my mother stole him away from his hometown sweetheart, Claire Anne, and from the rest of the town. A few years later, my father’s jilted fiancée had married Blaine’s father, the recently-widowed owner of the hardware store, the bank, and a huge ranch outside town. Mr. Underhill was twelve years Claire Anne’s senior, but he had more money than my father could ever hope to accumulate.
“Are the clothes and shoes still upstairs?” Emotion cracked my voice, and I cleared my throat, wiggling out of my coat. I felt Blaine’s hand grasping the hood, helping me slip free. His fingers brushed the wispy hair on the back of my neck and sent an electric tingle down my back. I stiffened against it.
The coat swished softly as he tossed it over the long, glass-front counter along the west wall. “Same as always,” he said, and I had the sense that he was talking about me, rather than the store. For a moment, I wanted to be not the same, not the reserved, walled-off girl he expected. I couldn’t do that, of course. I had to remember why I was here. Business. Just business. And a pair of shoes.
I started up the stairs, watching from the corner of my eye as he set his keys on the counter, slipped off his coat and laid it over mine, then followed. Beneath the low, eight-foot ceilings of the upper balcony, the space felt cozy, steeped in languid morning light.
“What’ll it be?” He swept a hand toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves, crowded with shoe boxes, some of which looked to have been there since slightly after the turn of the century. “We got your steel toes, your stacked heels, your Mary Janes, flip-flops, wool socks, boat shoes, whites, browns, and blues. What’s your pleasure?”
My mind jumped back in time again. I remembered Blaine’s grandfather repeating the same singsong sales pitch when my father had brought me in for a pair of pink wading shoes with little cartoon fish on the toes. Looking up at Blaine now, I could see a bit of his grandfather in him. They had the same warm, brown eyes and slightly lopsided smile. What would it be like to have your present and your past so closely interwoven, a tapestry in which threads didn’t begin or end but meshed so
completely that there was no way to know where one ended and another began? Clay and I never had ties to anyone or anywhere. There were the issues between Dad’s family and my mother, and Mom’s mother and father were divorced and remarried; the family an odd mishmash.
I was jealous of Blaine. In truth, it wasn’t the first time.
He grabbed a box from an upper shelf, blew off the dust, and pulled out a cowboy boot that must have been there since the days of Hee Haw. It had a silver eagle emblazoned in the vamp, and a ghastly long, pointed toe. “How ’bout some cricket killers?” He fanned a brow and gave the one-sided grin of a snake-oil salesman. “I can get you a discount. These are closeouts.”
“From what year?” A chuckle-snort pressed from me. Very unladylike. I slapped a hand over my nose.
Blaine studied the boot, straight, brown brows drawing together in the center. “Not sure. Give ’em a try. They might grow on you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He sighed, indicating that I was difficult to please. I remembered now why every girl in high-school chemistry class had been gaga over him. He was charmingly goofy up close. His attention was like a flame you couldn’t help wanting to stare into. “Come on, live a little,” he urged, extending the boots my way. “When are you ever gonna get the chance to slip your feet into fine footwear like this again?”
“This side of the Grand Ole Opry, you mean?” Even as I said it, I was reaching for the boots, consumed with the odd notion that if I didn’t put them on, I’d be sealing my fate as a mindless gerbil running endlessly on the same, boring wheel—missing some weird, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: The chance to wear silver cricket-killer cowboy boots on the second story of a hardware store.
Kicking off my bedraggled footwear, I pulled on the garish boots, stood up, and walked the length of the balcony, feeling like Dolly Parton—on the lower half, anyway.
