by Mary McNear
“Okay, maybe I look a little younger than I actually am,” she admitted. “Because the other day, a guy in one of my classes asked me out.”
“Didn’t he see your wedding ring?” Allie asked.
Jax shook her head, and her jet-black ponytail swung back and forth. “I wasn’t wearing it. I forgot it and left it on the sink when I was washing the dishes that morning.”
“So what did you say?” Allie teased.
“I said no, of course,” Jax said, shooting her an amused look. “I told him I was married. That, actually, didn’t seem to discourage him. But when I told him how many children I had, that did the trick. He looked positively ill.”
Allie laughed, but then noticed that Caroline wasn’t laughing. “Hey, are you okay?” she asked gently. “You haven’t been saying much tonight. And you look a little . . . a little tense.”
“Oh, no. I’m fine,” Caroline said, too quickly, too blithely. Both her friends stared back at her, unimpressed. She sighed.
“Is it hard having Jack living here again?” Allie asked.
“Hard?” Caroline echoed. “I don’t know about hard. But it’s unsettling, knowing I could just bump into him at any time.”
“I bumped into him yesterday, at the hardware store,” Jax volunteered. “Jeremy says he’s in there almost every day. Buying tools, ordering supplies, asking about home repairs. I think he’s serious, Caroline, about fixing that place up.”
“We’ll see,” Caroline said skeptically. “I mean, he probably likes the novelty of it, for now, but once that wears off . . .” She shrugged. He’ll be out of here. Jack had never been one to stick around for long, not after the fun ended, anyway.
“But he’s kept his word, right? About not coming into Pearl’s?” Allie asked.
“He’s kept his word. So there’s that—but still, knowing he’s there . . . it’s making me a little crazy,” she admitted.
“What about Buster?” Jax asked. “Is it making him a little crazy, too?”
Caroline shook her head. “No, Buster’s been great, as usual.” That didn’t explain why she kept forgetting to return his phone calls. Or why, the last time she’d had dinner with him, she’d been unable to concentrate long enough to have an actual conversation with him. This hadn’t irritated Buster, but it had irritated Caroline to no end. She hated feeling this preoccupied, this unsettled. But she knew that when Jack had come back, it had been, for her, like opening an old box she thought she had stored away a long time ago. And now, now that she’d popped the lid off the box, she found that she didn’t particularly want to examine its contents.
“What about Daisy?” Jax pressed. “How’s she doing with the whole situation?”
“Daisy, believe it or not, seems happy to have him here. She’s forgiven him apparently, which is more than I can do.”
“You don’t think you could ever forgive him?” Jax asked.
“Forgive him?” Caroline said, surprised, and a little hurt that Jax could even suggest this. Jax had only been a teenager when Jack had left, but she’d been close to Caroline’s family and old enough to know how hard that time had been for Caroline. “Jax, the man left me alone to raise a child and run a business. I mean, forgiveness is all well and good in theory. But in practice? Some things can’t be forgiven.”
Jax looked penitent. “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course. It’s just . . . it’s just I’ve been in Jack’s position before. I’ve been the person who needed to be forgiven.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Caroline said gently, reaching over and patting Jax’s small hand. Because now they were all remembering a time a few years earlier when Jax and her husband, Jeremy, had separated briefly after the birth of their fourth child. Caroline had intervened then and had pleaded with Jeremy to forgive Jax, not so much for a lie Jax had told him, as for the truth she’d withheld from him.
“Jax,” she said now, “you deserved to be forgiven. And if your roles had been reversed, if there was something you needed to forgive Jeremy for, you would have done it too. It’s in your nature to be forgiving. You’re like Daisy that way. Even as we speak, in fact, Daisy is forgiving some boy who took her out on a lousy date a couple of weeks ago. She’s having him over to our apartment tonight.”
“Who is he?” Allie asked.
“His name is Will. Will Hughes,” Caroline said. “He went to high school with Daisy. He graduated a few years ahead of her.”
“Well, you don’t look too thrilled about her seeing him,” Allie observed with her usual perceptiveness.
“I’m not,” Caroline said bluntly. “Daisy came home from their first date in tears. She said he hadn’t done anything wrong. She said she was just tired. But still . . .”
“You don’t believe her?” Allie frowned, knowing, as Caroline did, that if she didn’t believe Daisy, it would be a first.
“It’s not that I don’t believe her,” Caroline hedged. “I just don’t like him.” Then she amended quickly, “I mean, I don’t like what I’ve heard about him. I’ve never actually met him. But I . . . I did a little checking up on him.”
“How?” Jax asked.
Caroline took a sip of her lemonade, partly to kill time; she wasn’t particularly proud of what she was about to tell them. “I asked Jay Niles about him when he came into Pearl’s the other day. He’s the counselor at the high school,” she added, turning to Allie. “He’s been there forever. Anyway, I asked him about Will and he told me—”
“Wait, he discussed a former student with you?” Allie interrupted.
Caroline nodded, a little sheepishly.
“But isn’t that protected by some kind of confidentiality?”
“Oh, please.” Jax snorted. “There’s no confidentiality in Butternut. You should know that by now, Allie.”
“Look, I know it was wrong of me to ask,” Caroline said quickly. “And, just for the record, I’ve never done anything like that before. You know I trust Daisy implicitly. But she said something about him being a troublemaker in high school, and then there was that first date, and, I don’t know, I’ve been feeling so protective of her lately. What with Jack back in her life and all.” Jack, who was sure to disappoint Daisy in the end.
“All right, so what did Jay say Will was like in high school?” Jax asked.
“He said he had a bad attitude.”
“Oh, well. High school. Who didn’t have a bad attitude?”
“Daisy didn’t,” Caroline said.
“Well, Daisy’s perfect,” Jax said, without a trace of sarcasm. “But not everybody else is.”
“That wasn’t all he said, though. He said Will got suspended several times. He said once he almost got expelled. And he said”—this had bothered Caroline the most—“that ‘he was one of those kids who was going nowhere fast.’ I mean, what would Daisy even see in someone like that? She’s the exact opposite of that.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Allie mused. “Bad boys can be very exciting.”
“It’s true,” Jax agreed. “And then there’s this little thing that can happen between two people. It’s called chemistry, Caroline.”
Caroline nodded distractedly. She knew all about chemistry, because she and Jack had had it in spades. In the beginning, they couldn’t even be in the same room together without practically combusting. But it hadn’t been enough. If it had been, he never would have left her, three years later, high and dry.
“Or maybe it’s not just chemistry,” Allie offered. “Maybe he’s different than he was in high school. People change, you know.”
Ugh, Caroline thought. There was that word again. Change. She was actually starting to hate it.
“What’s he doing now?” Jax asked.
“Um, he’s a mechanic over at a garage in Winton,” Caroline said.
“Is he any good? Jeremy and I can always use a good mechanic.”
“I don’t know,” Caroline said honestly. “But he can’t be making much money. Daisy tells me he lives right there, in a little apart
ment, behind the garage.”
Neither Jax nor Allie had anything to say about this, and it was only later that it occurred to Caroline that both of them were either too tactful, or too polite, to point out that Will wasn’t the only person they knew of who lived at their place of work. Caroline did, too.
“Caroline, seriously,” Allie said, after a little while. “Don’t worry about it. If they really have nothing in common, this thing will probably just burn itself out over the summer.”
“Probably,” Caroline agreed. But the truth was, she didn’t feel sure of anything anymore. Since this summer had begun her whole world had begun to feel as if it was tilting, steeply, on its axis. And she felt a longing again for past summers, simpler summers, summers when an evening like this, spent with friends lounging on deck chairs in a soft, purple twilight, would have been an end in itself, and not a fleeting distraction. She didn’t know how to articulate this, though, to Allie and Jax, and it didn’t matter anyway, because at that particular moment the conversation was interrupted by Walker and Wyatt coming up the steps from the lake.
“Hey,” Walker said, as the two of them hurried across the deck to the cabin’s sliding glass door. “I’m sorry. I know we’re not supposed to be here. We took the new boat out for a test drive, and we got a little carried away. We’re going out for pizza right now. And we’ll stay out for as long as you need us to. Right, Wyatt?”
“Right,” Wyatt said, grinning a hello at Caroline. She’d become close to him the summer he and Allie had moved to Butternut. The timing had been perfect, actually, with Caroline missing Daisy, who’d just left for college, and Wyatt missing his friends from back home in Eden Prairie.
“Hey, it’s okay, you two,” Allie said. “I’m sure Caroline and Jax are willing to tolerate your presence for a few minutes.”
“Absolutely,” Caroline agreed, and when Wyatt came over to her, she gave him a hug and a kiss, though she was careful to not rumple his curly brown hair the way she had when he was five. Wyatt said hello to Jax, too, and Walker asked Allie solicitously if there was anything he could do for her before they left.
Allie smiled and shook her head. “I have everything I need,” she said, tipping her face up to him. And as he bent down to kiss her, brushing her honey-colored hair off her suntanned face, Caroline felt a little stab of jealousy. Jealousy because the kiss Walker gave Allie was so much more than a polite, husbandly kiss. It was gentle, yes, but it was sensual, too. Sensual in a way that made Caroline think that the six months Allie had told her it had taken her and Walker to conceive their child had not exactly been a hardship for either one of them.
Caroline looked away, ashamed of herself for feeling envious of Allie. Allie, who’d had so much sadness in her life, deserved all the happiness she’d found now. Besides, who was she to be feeling sorry for herself when it came to love and lovemaking? She had Buster, didn’t she? And he wasn’t just kind, and loyal; he was the tenderest, and most considerate, of lovers. Still, she thought, as she sipped her lemonade, there was Buster’s tendency to regiment everything in his life, including the time he spent with her. And she heard Jack, maddening, infuriating Jack, teasing her about her and Buster’s dating schedule: Don’t you two ever see each other on a Tuesday or a Thursday?
After Walker and Wyatt left, Allie and Jax and Caroline started talking again, though it was mainly Allie and Jax who talked and Caroline who listened, or sort of listened, as she lapsed in and out of attention. They were talking about Allie buying the Pine Cone Gallery, where she’d worked for the past three years, from the woman who owned it. The sale would be complete this summer, and Allie was excited about the changes she wanted to make and the new artists whose work she wanted to show.
“Should we have dinner?” Allie asked after a little while, when the dusky sky had gotten a shade darker and the first pinpricks of stars had become visible.
“Not quite yet,” Jax said. “It’s so pretty out here right now. Did you know there’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight? The best time to see it, apparently, is going to be around two thirty A.M.”
“Really? Well, there’s no way I can stay up that late,” Allie said. “Nine o’clock feels like a stretch to me now.”
“I might be up then,” Jax said, repositioning herself on her deck chair. “If my back keeps me awake.”
“Your back? What’s wrong with your back?” Allie asked.
“Nothing,” Jax said, a little guiltily. “It just hurts like hell.”
“Jax,” Allie said sternly, “are you still carrying Jenna around everywhere you go? Because you know you can’t do that anymore. She’s three now, and she’s getting heavy.”
“Oh, no. That’s not the problem,” Jax said. “It’s not Jenna. It’s Jeremy.”
“You haven’t been carrying him around too, have you?”
“No,” Jax replied, laughing. And then she glanced over her shoulder, and into the cabin, to make sure Walker and Wyatt were truly gone. “It’s just . . . Jeremy and I had sex on the kitchen floor last night. And I think I might have bruised something or pulled something.”
“Is this something you do often, Jax?” Caroline asked, feeling a little envious.
“No,” Jax said. “Definitely not, not with four inquisitive girls in the house. But the three oldest were sleeping over at friends’ houses last night, and Jenna was asleep upstairs, and Jeremy was drying the dinner dishes for me and . . . well, one thing led to another.”
“And you two couldn’t even wait long enough to get to a bed?” Caroline asked.
“Well, we could have waited long enough, I guess. But we didn’t want to.”
And now Caroline was more than a little envious. Because she could remember that feeling. That feeling of not being able to wait even one-tenth of one second longer to be with someone. But she hadn’t had that feeling with Buster, she realized, her disloyalty making her face feel suddenly hot—she’d had it with Jack.
“I think I’m going to need another lemonade,” she said, standing up abruptly.
“Kitchen counter,” Allie said.
When she got back with her lemonade a minute later, still feeling warm, and strange, Allie was saying, “We’ve done that before, the whole sex-on-the-kitchen-floor thing. Not recently, though. And I’m guessing not for another six months, at least.”
“Caroline, what’s wrong?” Jax asked, studying her. “And don’t say ‘you’re fine.’ Because we don’t believe you.”
“But I am fine,” Caroline insisted, sitting back down on her deck chair. “It’s just . . . it’s just that it’s not like that for Buster and me. The ‘not being able to wait’ part.” Then she added quickly, loyally, “I mean, it’s nice, and it’s pleasant. It’s even a little exciting, sometimes. But mostly”—Caroline finished a little forlornly—“our being together, it’s just . . . comfortable, I guess you’d say.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Allie said gently. “You two care about each other, Caroline. That’s what counts.”
“I know,” Caroline said. “But you and Walker, and Jax and Jeremy, you have both. You care about each other, and you have sex on the kitchen floor.”
“And I have a back that’s killing me,” Jax reminded her, smiling.
“Maybe.” Caroline sighed. “But you can always take some Advil for that, can’t you?”
Will, who’d never been early for anything in his life before, was five minutes early for his date with Daisy that night. He parked his pickup on Main Street outside of Pearl’s, then he walked around the corner to the side entrance to the building and rang the doorbell. A moment later, she was there, opening the door for him, slightly breathless, and prettier somehow than he’d remembered her being. He always felt that way when he saw her again. When it came to Daisy, he decided, his imagination failed him every time.
“Hi, come on up,” she said, smiling, and as they went up the stairs he stole a sideways look at her. There was no sundress tonight, the way there had been at the beach, on
ly a cotton blouse with little blue flowers on it (flowers that matched the color of her eyes) and a pair of slightly faded blue jeans. Her hair, which had been straight and shiny on that last date, was loose and tousled on her shoulders now. He liked it that way, he decided, a little messy. It made him want to make it messier.
But when they got to the door to the apartment, which Daisy had left open, he had another, less pleasant thought. What if Daisy’s mom was home tonight? Will’s avoidance of commitment in general, and of dating in particular, meant that he’d never had to meet a girl’s parents before. And now that he might have to, he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect.
Daisy noticed him glancing around the apartment. “My mom’s not here,” she said, amused. “She’s at a girls’ night out. So you’re off the hook, for now.”
“I guess so,” he said, relieved.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
“Sure. What are you having?”
“Diet Coke. But we have regular, too.”
“I’ll have one of those.” He followed Daisy into a bright kitchen with lemon yellow walls and black-and-white-checked flooring. She took a Coke and a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, handed him his can, and popped hers open. She started to say something then, but her cell phone, which was sitting on the kitchen counter, rang, and Daisy picked it up and frowned at the display.
“I need to take this,” she said apologetically.
“That’s fine,” he said.
She answered it. “Hi, Jessica,” she said. She listened for a long time, with what Will could see was forced patience. “Jessica, hold on one second.” Daisy put the phone down and said to Will softly, “I’m sorry. I have to talk to my friend.” She added, with an apologetic little shrug, “Boyfriend trouble.”
