by Pamela Morsi
Tad hardly spared a glance at her. Instead, he seated himself in the chair she’d vacated. “I hope you’ve got a minute,” he said.
As he had already made himself comfortable in her little office, she could hardly refuse.
“Oh, wow, did Nina make this?” he asked, picking up the beautiful cupcake from the desk. “Do you mind? I’m starving.”
Mazy’s heart sank as Tad’s teeth sank into the top of the perfect little purple flower. The frosting stuck to his lips for a moment before disappearing forever.
Determinedly, Mazy looked at her spreadsheet. “I don’t have the delinquent loan bundle completed. But I’m working on it.”
Tad shrugged without concern as he swallowed another bite. “Next week is fine,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about Tru.”
“Tru?”
“Yeah, Paul and Bo and I are taking our kids to the App State game in Boone this weekend. I thought Tru might like to come with us.”
Mazy looked at Tad in complete disbelief.
“I’m sure he knows the other boys from school. If he doesn’t, then it’s a good opportunity to get acquainted. He’ll have a great time and it’ll give you a night off. I’m sure Latham will appreciate that.”
“We’re broken up,” Mazy said, although at that particular moment her love life seemed the least of her concerns.
“Are you? Can’t say I’m surprised. The guy is way too much milquetoast for my Mazy.”
The phrase my Mazy was one from high school, and hearing it aloud evoked a strange sense of unease. She pushed that back, too. Her relationship with Tad was not the important issue, either.
“You’re thinking to take Tru somewhere with your daughters?”
“What? The girls? No, the girls won’t be there. This is a guys thing.”
“You said ‘taking our kids.’”
“I meant Tru, of course.”
“Tad, Tru doesn’t know you’re his father. You didn’t want me to tell him and I haven’t.”
“Well, I’m rethinking that,” Tad told her. “Not about you. It’s probably good that he doesn’t hear it from you. When I think the time is right, I’ll tell him myself.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” she told him. “He’s actually said that he didn’t want to know.”
“He has to know,” Tad said. “It’s such a small town, it’s bound to come out. Best to hear it from us.”
Us wasn’t a word Mazy was that sure about. And she was experiencing a certain amount of whiplash from Tad’s previous position on the subject.
“He’s not a little kid you need to protect anymore,” Tad said. “He’s practically grown.”
“He’s tall, not grown,” Mazy protested. “He’s only fourteen. And needs as much protection as any child.”
Tad waved away her concern. “Moms always think that,” he said. “I’ll tell him myself. It would probably be better for him hearing it man-to-man, anyway.”
“No!”
Mazy’s response was a little louder than she’d intended. She immediately quieted to nearly a whisper. “Please don’t say anything to him until I talk to him. Please.”
“Okay, okay,” Tad told her. He patted her knee as if to offer reassurance. “I won’t say a thing. But I’d still like to take him to the game.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Ask him. I’ll make sure he has a good time,” Tad said. “He’s practically a grown-up guy. And guys need to hang out with guys.”
Picturing the scenario of Tru hanging out with a bunch of good old boys and their sons made Mazy kind of queasy. She remembered the guys Tad used to run with. She tried reassuring herself that Tad had changed. Maybe they all had changed.
She’d agreed to meet Karly for coffee after work, though she’d been thinking up several excuses to bow out and go home. Between concern for Tru and sadness about Eli, she knew she wouldn’t be very good company. But when the time came, she showed up.
They sat at their usual window-side table and Charlie eagerly served them their beverages in their personal mugs. The scent of fresh paint was still noticeable when Mazy walked in the door, but it was easily overpowered by the aroma of coffee when it was under her nose.
“I like the color on the walls better than I thought I would,” Karly told her.
Mazy nodded. “It lightens the place a lot. The wood was pretty, but it really made the room seem small and dark. This is nicer. It’s more of a family feeling place.”
Karly agreed.
When Mazy heaved a huge sigh, Karly looked at her questioningly. “What’s up?”
“What? Oh, nothing. The idea of family. I guess it always makes me sigh.”
Karly’s brow wrinkled. “Why is that?” she asked. “When I think ‘family’ I want to pull my hair out, but then I’ve got two rambunctious boys.”
Mazy smiled at her. “Enjoy it while you can. They’ll be grown up and in high school before you know it.”
“True, but still not a reason to sigh.”
She looked over at Karly. She had been a good friend to her these past couple of months. Mazy was grateful.
“Eli and I broke up,” she said.
Karly heaved a big sigh of her own. “I was afraid that was going to happen,” she said. “Che and I were both blown away that a guy like Eli would treat you that way.”
“I know. It’s not what you’d expect,” Mazy said. “It’s not what I’d expect. And this is not the first jerk move he’s made. I’ve come up with a lot of excuses for him lately. Deep down, he’s a good guy. He’s good to my mom. He’s good to Tru. But he’s not good to me. Not anymore.”
“It is really about the strangest thing I’ve ever heard,” Karly said.
Mazy nodded. “I’m not sure what happened,” she said. “But maybe it’s not all that strange. Remember my shrink back in Wilmington? She told me that I sought men who subconsciously I knew would reject me.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, maybe it’s gotten worse than that,” Mazy said. “Maybe I’m creating the behavior that I’ve been blaming men for.”
“Creating it? How on earth could you do that?”
“I don’t know, but look at the evidence,” Mazy said. “Everybody in town would say that Eli is a great guy. But when he has a relationship with me, he turns into a creep. That can’t be an accident. I’m somehow turning him into a man who rejects me.”
Karly shook her head. “I’m not sure I buy this whole scenario that this psychologist came up with. My father was a mean, angry drunk who walked out on our family and never looked back,” she pointed out. “And Che and I have managed to be pretty dadgum happy.”
Mazy smiled at her. “Well, you are obviously a whole lot more emotionally healthy than I am,” she said. “But I’m working on it. I’m trying to get better.”
Karly reached across the table and squeezed Mazy’s hand. “You are a good person, Mazy,” she said. “You were good to me in high school when it would have been smarter, socially, to keep your distance. You’ve been good to the people of this town when it would have been easy to exact some payback. You deserve to be loved and you deserve to be happy.”
“Thanks.”
“I really thought that maybe Eli was Mr. Right. I can’t understand how he got to be so Mr. Wrong.”
“Yeah, it’s been hard for me to get my head around, too,” Mazy said. “I thought it could be different for me if I steered clear of the smooth-talking players who typically treat me like this. But Eli is not one of those men. So...so I must encourage this behavior somehow. It’s like that question ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ But somehow I’ve got to break that pattern.”
“Well, you don’t break it by blaming yourself,” Karly said.
&nb
sp; “You’re right,” she agreed. “That’s what the old Mazy would have done—believe that it had to be something she did wrong and go running to him with an apology.”
“Oh, yeah,” Karly said facetiously. “Like there is any way that his running out on you at the roadhouse could be your fault.”
“Actually, that’s exactly what he said.”
“Really?”
“He said it was a deliberate payback.”
“For what?”
“He’s got some crazy idea that Tad and I are seeing each other or interested in each other or something.”
Karly, who had been raising the coffee mug to her mouth, stopped abruptly and looked over at Mazy, her eyes wide with concern.
“You’re not, are you?”
“No, of course not,” Mazy said.
“Thank God,” Karly said.
“But I don’t want you or Eli or anyone to continue to blame him for what happened with me,” Mazy said. “Having Tru was the best thing I did in my life.”
“He’s a great kid,” Karly agreed. “And Driscoll keeping his distance probably turned out to be a blessing.”
“We’ve all made mistakes,” Mazy said. “Honestly, compared to how Eli is behaving, Tad’s looking like the good guy lately.”
Karly shook her head. “No. Don’t even go there,” she said. “Driscoll is dangerous. And he’s had it in for you forever.”
Mazy waved that away. “That’s all so long ago,” she said. “He’s changed.”
Karly shook her head. “The only thing that’s changed about him is that he’s more conniving than he used to be. I do believe that people can change. That we aren’t defined forever by the mistakes we made in the past. But I’m not sure that our basic personality gets altered. You were the girl you were before your father died. I think it’s not only possible but likely that you’ll be more like that girl again. Driscoll has been a user all his life. He preys on vulnerable people. I don’t know if he could change. And even if he could, would he?”
“Good grief, Karly. That’s a hefty verdict based on some clothespins in elementary school.” Mazy gave a slight chuckle. “It almost sounds like you had as much trouble with him as I did.”
Mazy meant the statement as a joke, but the look in Karly’s eyes said otherwise.
“Oh, my God.”
Karly took a sip of her coffee. She set it down in a careful, deliberate motion and took a deep breath.
“After you left school,” she said, “things were very strange for me. Nobody talked to me. Nobody noticed me. One day Tad did. He started coming to see me at work. He told me sad, sad tales of how he and Genna were for sure breaking up over the baby you were carrying. He assured me with such sincerity that it wasn’t his. We started seeing each other on the sly.”
Mazy felt strangely cognizant. As if she were watching the events take place right before her eyes.
“You remember the story about Che picking me up on the side of the road?”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn’t just picking me up. He was rescuing me. Tad had invited me to a party. We had never gone out in public before and I thought that it meant that he was completely done with Genna and I was his new girlfriend. I spent a month’s worth of my Brandt Burger salary on that tulle dress. As it turned out, it wasn’t really appropriate for the party happening down on a sandbar at Harkin Lake. There were about a dozen people there. I was the only girl.”
“Oh, no.”
“I knew what it was and I was scared. Tad just laughed at my fear. He asked me why I thought any guy would be interested in me for anything else.”
“Oh, Karly, I’m so sorry.”
“I ran away from them. He let me go. Or maybe he thought I’d come back when I realized I was on foot, at night, twenty miles from home. When Che stopped, I thought he was one of them. When he figured out what happened to me, and once I figured out that he wasn’t a part of it...well, he turned out to be a knight in shining armor, although he was on an Indian motorcycle instead of a white horse.”
“I liked him before,” Mazy said. “I like him even better now.”
Karly nodded. “I’m lucky,” she said. “I know that. And I know how capable Driscoll is of winning people over, even those who have good reason not to trust him. Please, be careful.”
42
Eli was getting a lot of work done. Attaching the small pieces of veneer was a slow, painstaking task. More important than the glue and razor knife was a sharp focus, an attention to detail and plenty of time. The first two Eli found himself struggling to achieve. The latter he managed to have in spades.
With his dad visiting with them in the shop most days and Clark helping out more and more, Eli suddenly found a glut of time on his hands. Hours and hours of alone time that he no longer knew how to fill. Hours and hours that he wanted to spend with Mazy but couldn’t.
He should have had a backup plan. He’d been so sure that she had fallen in love with him. He had been so perfectly horrible, that she couldn’t have helped herself. Yet, she had walked away. At the very last minute when it felt like it was too late, she had finally realized that she deserved better.
What was he supposed to do about that? As one week turned into two and there was nothing from next door but complete silence, he was at a loss as to what should be his next move.
At night he scoured the online blogs. His enthusiasm for reading the bad-boyfriend stories had completely vanished. It was no longer wild or crazy or even interesting. Eli wondered how he ever saw it as anything but pathetic. But now he needed answers about how to turn it all around.
Surely one of these couples made it. The gal stopped venting online and started making demands. The guy cleaned up his act and proved he could change. That’s how he’d assumed it worked. But the more he read, he realized that either that never happened or, if it did, people simply stopped commenting.
Eli waited. He watched her house. He paced his floor.
“I don’t understand it,” he told his father. “It seemed like such a smart plan. But it’s turned me into the biggest idiot on the planet.”
His dad’s expression never changed, but somehow Eli felt he was saying, “I told you so.”
Finally, in desperation, he tried calling one night. Mazy didn’t pick up on her cell, so he tried Beth Ann’s house phone. As soon as she heard his voice she hung up.
The next day he went down to Peggy’s Flowers and had a vase of peach roses and purple asters sent to her office. On the note he wrote simply, “I’m sorry.”
There was no response. Not even a chilly “thank you.”
He also noticed that Tru had gone quiet.
At first the teen had not seemed bothered.
“You and my mom are on the outs?”
It was more of a statement than a question.
Eli had shrugged. No matter how tempting it was, he was not about to drag Tru into the dysfunction of their love life. The kid had enough to deal with—new town, new school, new job. He sure didn’t need the stress of two crazy people trying to find happiness together.
But a few days later the sudden silence settled in. One afternoon, out of the blue, he came to work and didn’t really speak to anyone. He responded if someone spoke to him. He would chuckle at Clark’s stupid jokes. They’d started bringing Jonah down to the shop. Tru made a point to always greet him. Tru swept the floor, put up the tools. He continued to fetch and carry, lend a hand whenever requested. He calmly and cooperatively did whatever was demanded. But there was a stillness, an almost secretiveness, that was new. And it was worrying.
At any other time, Eli would have asked him what was wrong. Now he feared the boy’s answer. It was likely that Tru had realized that he and Mazy were done for. The kid had probably got his hopes up, just as Eli had. Now
he was grieving.
Eli wanted to take him aside and assure him that it would all be fine. He wouldn’t let Mazy go this time. He would do whatever it took to win her back. But “doing what it took” had been his whole strategy for the past two and a half months. He no longer knew what it would take. And it scared him to think that maybe there was nothing.
Clark had made the deal with Charlie McDee to rent the upper floor of his building for storage and showroom. The space was large enough to allow each piece to be shown to best advantage. Which made it a lot more likely to get sold.
They were in the middle of their final load when Tru showed up for work. He immediately put his back into helping to move furniture into the truck. When it was all carefully covered and strapped down, Eli motioned him into the truck.
“Let’s go.”
“Can I...can I talk to you for a minute?” Tru asked.
Eli couldn’t avoid it any longer. The poor kid was hurting. He could have put him off. They needed to get this furniture down to Main Street and unloaded before dark. But some things were even more important than schedules.
“Clark, why don’t you drive the truck,” he said. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee or something. Tru and I will walk.”
His brother glanced back, but didn’t question him. He climbed into the driver’s seat and started up the truck.
As it headed down the driveway, Eli and Tru followed on foot. The day was crisp and almost still. The bright sun overhead made it seem warmer than it felt.
Tru had his hands stuffed in his pockets and was staring straight ahead as they walked in the empty street up Sawmill Road.
Tru had asked to talk, but he now seemed hesitant. Eli wanted to get it started, get it over. He didn’t know yet how much he could explain about what had gone wrong between Mazy and himself. There wasn’t that much that a kid really needed to know about how grown-ups organized their private lives. The only thing Eli knew that he truly had to convey was that he cared about Tru. And that Tru could always trust him.
The trees along the street had dropped their leaves, the remnants bunched in piles here and there. The empty branches exposed every burl and wound. The oaks and maples, all beautifully adorned the rest of the year, were no more than naked wood in winter. That honesty somehow inspired candidness in humans within their meager shade.
