The Happiness Pact

by Liz Flaherty

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “NO KIDS?” INSIDE the town house in Sawyer where Meredith lived, Tucker looked around and raised his eyebrows. There were no toys in the small living area, no TV noise in the background, no sounds of sibling joy or its noisy opposite. “How did that happen?”

  Meredith smiled, although her eyes looked shadowed. “Their dad got an unexpected long weekend and asked if he could have them. He picked them up from school and is taking them for pizza and the movies and then to spend two nights in a motel with an indoor pool. They told me I wasn’t any fun anymore and Daddy was.” The shadow came perilously close to being tears, and she turned away abruptly.

  Charlie had played that con-the-parents game with Jack, telling his father that Uncle Tucker was the fun brother. Jack had called Tucker and asked if Charlie could come and live with him because being a dad wasn’t fun anymore. Tucker yelled, “No way!” over the phone, and they all ended up laughing.

  He didn’t think Meredith would see the humor in the story, so he didn’t tell it. “Let’s go do something,” he suggested instead, hooking her arm with a gentle hand and turning her back toward him. “Hey.” He thumbed the tears from her cheeks. “They’ll be home in a few days, Mer, and he’s a good dad. It’s not like he’s going to abscond with them.”

  “Oh, I know.” She leaned against him, and he held her, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. Her spiky hair felt odd against his lips. Not hard, exactly, but not soft and warm like Libby’s, either. Meredith was taller than average, too. When they’d gone to a wine-tasting party, she’d worn skinny high heels and they’d been eye to eye. He’d liked that. She’d been fun to dance with. She was fun to be with, for that matter. She liked football, made really good potato soup that went well with the crusty bread he bought from the Amish bakery and had nice kids. He was attracted to her.

  And yet.

  It was the and yet that got him. It was okay that he wasn’t falling in love—other than Jack and Arlie and a few friends here and there, he’d never really observed being in love as all that healthy a part of a relationship. Plus, he and Meredith had only been seeing each other for a short while. He liked her more than anyone he’d dated in a very long time. He enjoyed the kids—he’d even taken Zack with him to play basketball with Jack and Charlie at the elementary school on open gym night. They’d played for an hour, working on Charlie’s jump shot and teaching Zack how to do layups. Afterward, Tucker sat quietly with Zack at the ice cream counter in the Silver Moon and heard between the lines of the eight-year-old’s conversation how much he missed his dad.

  “I know he’s a good dad. It was husbanding he failed at.” Meredith shrugged, the movement slight against Tucker. “What would you like to do? We’ve already seen both the movies at the theater.”

  “You want to go roller-skating?”

  “What?” She pulled away from him, laughing. “I’m thirty. All I do at the rink these days is tie the kids’ skates and be ready with Band-Aids when they fall down.”

  Disappointment nudged, although he couldn’t have said why. “Pool?” he suggested. “We could go to Kokomo or even back to the Hall. The table there is regulation.”

  She shook her head. “Can we just stay here? Maybe order pizza and stream something on TV? I’m sorry. I’m in kind of a crummy mood.”

  “Sure, we can do that. It’s okay.” It wasn’t. They’d seen each other nearly every day since their first date, but they hadn’t reached that stage of comfort and conversation with each other. He didn’t know how either would bear up through an evening of inactivity.

  At first, it was okay. They wrangled, laughing over what pizza to order, then again over what to watch. The movie they finally agreed on didn’t hold Tucker’s interest, and he had to work to stay awake. Halfway through, she said, “This is crummy, isn’t it?”

  At first he thought she meant the two of them trying to make a relationship out of too little substance, but it was too early in the dating game to make that assessment. At least, according to Libby it was. He still wasn’t sure if she’d forgiven either him or her friend Allison for being completely unattracted to each other from the get-go.

  “Crummy.” He let the word percolate between them for a moment. “Why?”

  “There’s no plot. The only conflict is stupid stuff Shelby’s first-grade class could have developed. What’s her name has had so much plastic surgery she’s unrecognizable.”

  Oh, the movie. He almost laughed, but thought once again that she wouldn’t see the humor in the situation. “It’s not great,” he admitted. “Let’s go have a drink somewhere. We shouldn’t waste an evening on a movie we don’t like. I’ll even buy.”

  “Okay,” Meredith said reluctantly, turning off the TV and standing up. “I don’t know any place to go in Sawyer, though. If it’s not kid friendly, I haven’t been there.”

  “Sawyer has places, but we can go to the Grill. It’s only five miles over to the lake.” He hoped she would go for that, because he didn’t want to stay here. Her sadness was heavy and all-consuming, filling the room with an unhappiness he couldn’t begin to penetrate.

  She nodded. “All right.” She brightened. “What about darts? Do you like to play?”

  He did. He and the Thursday night poker players often played when the cards weren’t falling right. Plus, he was glad to see her be enthusiastic—he’d have probably joined the dominoes table in the corner of the bar if she’d wanted to, and he didn’t even remember how to play.

  On the way to Anything Goes, they talked about her job and the move from a practice in an affluent suburb to a small-town one with many Amish patients. She liked it, Meredith maintained, because she loved working with Arlie, but she wasn’t completely comfortable with the differences between the two practices.

  “The rules are the same, and the laws, and I’m glad to have people call me by my first name and ask how my kids are doing, but it’s just so informal. I never expected to work in a facility that had a hitching rail and a water trough in addition to regular customer parking.”

  He nodded. “The Amish workers at Llewellyn’s Lures ride their bicycles to work or ride with one of the English. Jack asked one of the guys if we needed to add hitching rails, and Fred, who’s a supervisor, said no—they weren’t going to leave their horses standing there for eight hours. It wasn’t one of my brother’s brightest questions.”

  She laughed, the sound quiet and polite. “You don’t travel much these days, do you? Do you miss it?”

  “No. I still go on the road once a month or so, but I really like being settled here.” Although he got lonely sometimes. He’d probably gotten lonely when he lived in Tennessee and spent half his time on the road, too, but he didn’t remember it. Of course, then he hadn’t been in pursuit of the whole wife, kids and four-bedroom house dream.

  The dartboard was already in use in the Grill, and literally every table was occupied. Libby and Nate were sitting in one of the booths beside the windows overlooking the lake. Nate waved them over, and Tucker captured Meredith’s hand as they wove between the tables. He waited until she’d slid into the booth beside Libby, then sat next to Nate. “’Sup?”

  Libby pointed an accusatory finger in his direction. “You sound like Charlie.”

  Tucker grinned at her. “Only because Jack and I practiced sounding like Charlie. The kid can’t start a conversation without saying that.”

  “So that’s why Zack’s been saying it.” Meredith beamed over the discovery. “When I asked him to stop doing layups in the living room, he paused for the moment and said ‘’Sup, Mom?’ and dunked the ball right into the ficus tree.”

  Libby and Nate laughed, and Tucker did, too, but he wondered where this cheerful woman had been when they were at her house trying to watch a boring movie she’d chosen. She’d been taciturn and moody and on the verge of tears.

 
They talked about spring—surely it would come eventually—and about golf and the state high school basketball tournament. Tucker asked about Libby’s plans for remodeling the carriage house at Seven Pillars to be used for larger meetings than the tearoom could accommodate, and Nate promised her more business when the expansion took place. Meredith listened and contributed to the conversation and laughed as long and loud as everyone else when it was warranted. Or when it wasn’t—clients in the Grill weren’t picky about what they laughed at.

  All four of them left at eleven, parting in the parking lot with hugs and handshakes.

  “They’re such nice people,” Meredith said when they were in the car driving toward her house. “How long have you known them?”

  “Always.” His answer was immediate, but then he thought about it. “Well, Nate just from kindergarten. I’ve known Libby since she was twenty-seven minutes old. She was my first roommate the night we were born.” He glanced at Meredith. “Do you have friends like that?”

  She hesitated, not looking back at him, then said quietly, with pain adding shaky needles to her voice, “I used to. Just one.”

  * * *

  LIBBY KISSED NATE’S cheek and grinned at him. “See you later. I’m glad you had such a great trip to North Carolina.”

  He winked at her and stepped across the enclosed porch that sheltered the tearoom’s back door, turning back at the last second. “Don’t forget, there’s enough room for you and even Tuck at the beach house, so come on down for a few days. I’d like you to meet Mandy.”

  “I want to meet her, too, but I’m still thinking about it.”

  She did want to meet Nate’s fiancée. His engagement to the woman from North Carolina was so new and so sudden he hadn’t told anyone at the lake except Libby about it yet, but he was ecstatic. “We’ve all waited so long, it seems like, those of us from the accident,” he’d said earlier that night, before Tucker and Meredith had joined them. “Sam’s the only one who’s married. Arlie and Jack didn’t get engaged till this winter. You, Jess, Holly and me—we’ve done okay, but none of us has married or had kids. We don’t know what happened to Cass, but I’ll bet she hasn’t, either.” He’d smiled into Libby’s eyes, although the sadness in his own wasn’t hard to see. “It’s like we’re all renting our lives. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to take ownership. Mandy and I have danced around a relationship ever since we met a couple of years ago—it was time to stand still and let ourselves be caught.”

  When she got home, Libby changed into sweats, poured a glass of milk and sat on the upholstered window seat in her bedroom, looking out over the lake. She sipped slowly, willing her mind to become still. Her head ached, the throbbing slipping down her temple and through her cheekbone and jaw, ending with an eddy of swirling pain in her neck and shoulder.

  She’d thought she was having a heart attack the first time she got a tension headache a few months after her father died. Arlie had driven out to the farm and taken her to the emergency room at Sawyer Hospital. “It feels like I’m going to die.” Libby had held her head in her hands as Arlie drove too fast on Lake Road.

  Arlie shook her head. “You’re not going to die, no matter what. I’m in nursing school, remember? If I have to, I’ll pull over right here and be heroic. I know you won’t do anything to make me look bad.”

  “I’ll do my best.” But she hadn’t thought she’d live long enough to make good on that. She’d given Arlie end-of-life instructions as they drove.

  Several hours later, she’d been tested and questioned and her pain was assuaged by a healthy dose of a tranquilizer. She left the hospital carrying an appointment slip. “I’m supposed to see my own doctor tomorrow.” She hadn’t looked at Arlie, just stared through the windshield into the darkness. “They think depression is a strong possibility.”

  “Does that surprise you?” Arlie asked gently.

  Libby hesitated. “No, but it makes me afraid. What if I do what my father did? He was depressed, too. He took pills for it all our lives, and he still hung himself in the barn because he didn’t want to live without my mother.”

  “You’re not your father, and we won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “I don’t want anyone to know. You have to promise not to tell, Arlie.”

  “Let me tell Gianna. She always knows what to do.”

  That was true. It had been Gianna’s single-minded devotion and firm decisions that had held her family together after her husband died in the accident.

  “Okay.” Libby nodded, just slightly—it still hurt to move her head. “Just your mom, though. No one else.”

  “I promise. And you have to promise to ask for help if you need it.”

  Arlie had kept her vow and Libby had, too. She’d consulted a mental health specialist, who’d diagnosed both clinical depression and anxiety disorder and prescribed medication and therapy.

  The anxiety attacks that accompanied the disorder had both terrified her and planted a seed of defeatism somewhere deep inside. She read everything she could about the angry spiral created by her condition and watched with resignation for all the symptoms that could insert themselves into the coil.

  She did everything she could to make herself healthy in both mind and body, but sometimes she felt hopeless even with the medication on board. And so bone-deep lonely she thought she might die from it. She didn’t get frightened anymore, and she couldn’t have said why not, but she worried that the lack of fear had much to do with a general apathy caused by her depression.

  And exhaustion. She loved being “good old Lib.” She liked that her friends counted on her, that she never thought she wasn’t loved, that nearly every day held a good time within its hours. But keeping the secret wore her out. Pretending she’d rather be alone when she wouldn’t. Pretending the job she used to love and still liked a lot was still enough. Pretending loving other people’s kids was enough when her heart fairly screamed that she wanted to love a few of her own. Pretending she’d rather be in like than in love any old day because she wanted adventure more than steadfastness.

  But she couldn’t take the chance. She couldn’t subject anyone else to the person she was underneath her Pollyanna exterior. What if she had a child and turned on it because she couldn’t stand its crying? What if she fell in love with a man and turned on him because he couldn’t love her back? How could he love her back, damaged as she was? And if he did...if by some unbelievable miracle he actually did, what if she took the path her father had and ruined other lives besides her own in the process?

  It was easier to bear the headaches, the heartaches, the anxiety attacks and the regrets of secrecy than hang the millstone she carried around the neck of someone she loved.

  Because what if she had a daughter who blamed herself?

  It always came back to that, Libby realized as she sat unmoving in the window seat. She understood how parents felt about their children—she’d seen it in her mother, in Gianna and Dave Gallagher, in Sam and Penny Phillipy, and in Jack. She knew beyond all doubt that if she had a child she’d love it that much, and she ached right to the center of her soul to experience that love. But the monster that was depression wasn’t something she could bear to pass on.

  The moon shone on Lake Miniagua below her, and she fancied she could hear the slap of lapping waves on the shore. It was a comforting sound, reminding her of her mother rubbing her back and telling her boys were indeed terrible people but that they kept life interesting.

  “If you’re ever alone—” her mother’s beautiful, musical voice had been raspy near the end “—remember that you’re not really. I’m always with you. When you talk to Venus, you’ll be talking to me.”

  Libby breathed deeply there in her safe place in the window, willing away the headache while trying to keep the memory close for just long enough to ease her heart and push back the viper. She’d
even given her depression its own name with lots of imaginative synonyms. Viper. Beast. Monster.

  “Please,” she whispered when yet another pain snaked up her temple. She searched the sky until she found the planet that was her talisman. “Please.”

  Her cell phone made the popping sound that signaled a text, and she picked it up. Hope you’re awake. Coming up.

  Tucker knew the combination to the downstairs lock, so she wasn’t surprised when he tapped lightly on the apartment door, then let himself in. “Yo, Lib.”

  “I’m in here.” She couldn’t muster the strength to get up, to smile and make cracks about him coming to her bedroom in the middle of the night. Although...what was he doing in her bedroom in the middle of the night? “Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” He crossed the room to her, lean and loose limbed in jeans and one of the cashmere sweaters he was fond of wearing. This one was the same blue as his eyes, and if he hadn’t been her best friend and if she’d felt better, she’d have gone weak in the knees. He looked that handsome.

  He stroked his hand through her hair, and she flinched in spite of herself when the pain twinged along in the wake of his fingers. He went still and sat on the edge of the window seat, pushing her legs aside to make room. “I don’t know,” he said again. “There is something wrong—I can tell that just by looking at you. However, since you are a girl in spite of everything I tried to teach you while we were growing up and I am a typical male, I don’t have a clue what it is.”

  She laughed. “I’m fine, Tuck. Really, I am. You want some hot chocolate?”

  “It’d be good. Why don’t I make it?”

  “That would be nice.” She waved him away. “I’ll wash my face and meet you in the kitchen.”

  She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water. She took a couple of pain relievers, hoping the pain would ebb, then ran a brush through her hair.

  Brown. Everything was brown. Her hair, her freckles, the sweats she’d put on because they were the first ones she’d come to in the drawer. Her eyes, usually clear and dark gray, looked muddy. No wonder she was alone—she was so lacking in color she disappeared right into the woodwork.