Unnecessary. Unneeded.
Her every action, word, and behavior seemed to suggest that, while she still liked him, she could manage her life without his input or assistance, thank you very much.
Surprised at the emotional devastation such a change had caused in him, Fletcher had tried to fix it.
Big mistake. Huge.
Instead of seeing his efforts as saving their relationship, Hadley accused him of trying to control her. To manipulate her.
Fletcher, confused and hurt, had changed tactics and stepped back. And in the worst kind of irony, Hadley never missed him. Up until the moment he went to her apartment and told her they were over, he thought she was just having a moment, that she’d see he was serious and run into his arms.
Instead, he’d seen how serious she was about her plan—a plan that didn’t include him. She got serious about studying business—serious enough to transfer to a different university. Serious about leaving her life with Fletcher, and all that was included in it, behind her.
Remembering all of this while driving the fire truck around the practice course, Fletcher was grateful that Nick was not a huge talker. His acceptance of Fletcher’s short answers was a relief.
Fletcher’s mom didn’t let him off so easily. When they sat down to dinner together in her kitchen that night, she steepled her fingers under her chin, her sign that she was pretending to be casual when, in fact, she was dead set on getting answers.
“Pauline told me you were on a date with Hadley while I was having my treatment,” she said. His mom wasn’t any better at being subtle now than she’d been when he was in high school.
Fletcher tried a deflection play. “Who is Pauline?”
Rose rolled her eyes. “My hair lady.”
Picking up a knife to butter his bread, Fletcher asked, “If I raise my right hand and swear that I didn’t take Hadley, last week or ever, to your hairdresser for a date, can we drop this and change the subject?”
Shaking her head, Rose laughed at him. “She saw you from her front window.”
He put his knife down and leaned across the table. In a quiet voice, he said, “Mom, do you have any idea how weird it sounds that your friends are spying out their windows so they can gossip with you about what your adult son is up to when he’s in town?”
“Well, when you say it like that…” Rose laughed again. He felt a physical load leave his shoulders at the sound of her laugh. Rose’s health had Fletcher more worried than he would admit to her. Laughter and a little harmless gossip brought the seriousness of her illness to a manageable level.
“So, is she wrong?” Rose fiddled with a pork chop, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces. Fletcher noticed how long it was between bites and worried about her appetite. Along with all the other worries.
Rose could wait him out. She’d always had that over him. He wasn’t getting out of this unless he got up from the table and left the room. And he wasn’t new here; he understood that chances were good Rose would follow him.
“Is who wrong?” Fletcher asked, knowing the answer perfectly, but stalling for a few seconds to decide how much of the story he was willing to say out loud.
He could tell she was trying not to sigh at him. Her eyebrows telegraphed her waning patience with this game. “Pauline. Is Pauline mistaken, or did you take Hadley out for lunch at Griddles?”
Leaning back in his chair, Fletcher decided to give it to her straight. “Pauline is not mistaken. I found myself in Hadley’s shop and she looked hungry. You have successfully raised a man who will not ignore a person in need of a meal. You should be very proud.” He grinned at her. She maintained a straight face and solid eye contact. He was fooling exactly no one. Sitting up straight again, he said, “Did you know Hadley has a bookstore?”
As soon as he asked it, he knew it was a silly question. As much as Rose had always adored Hadley, it was unlikely that Hadley could buy paint at the hardware store without Rose knowing about it. Especially when she likely had, at her disposal, an entire team of Paulines.
As though her response was of no consequence at all, Rose said, “Where do you think I got all the books I sent you?” She slipped a few peas on her fork and then into her mouth.
Fletcher could feel his brain ticking around this question, as though many different thoughts were leading to one common conclusion. For some reason, it was very important to him that this conclusion be reached clearly.
“Mom,” he said, sliding his plate away from him so he could put his elbows on the table. “Tell me something.”
“Anything,” she offered, making the word sound careless.
“How often did you see Hadley when I was in Montana?”
She tilted her head as if she was counting. “Tough to say,” was her only reply.
“I think you could probably put a number on it if you tried,” he said, and now it was his turn to maintain eye contact.
Rose looked out the window, and Fletcher knocked on the table to regain her attention. “Mother. Focus. How often?”
Folding her arms across her chest, she leaned back in her seat, asserting some kind of casual dominance that made Fletcher proud of her even as he realized that if this turned into a contest, he would surely lose.
“I shop in her store at least once a week. It’s the best place in town to buy gifts. She has a little of everything. Did you see the jewelry displays?”
“No changing the subject. Mom. Seriously? You saw Hadley every week?” Visions of the conversations they must have had, the multitude of ways he’d been discussed, filled Fletcher’s brain. He felt dizzy.
“Well, of course. She comes to the house for lunch every now and then.” Rose looked at him with a didn’t-you-know-that expression. “Or at least she did, until she got really busy. Then your return made things feel a little awkward between us girls.” She reached across the table and patted him on the hand like a grandmother would. “But don’t worry. I’m really very glad you’re here, you know.”
“Oh, thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m glad my return and its cramp in your social calendar hasn’t put you out too much.”
Laughing, Rose squeezed his hand. “See? These are the chats I’ve missed. No one else even pretends to wonder if I have a social calendar. It’s like Dad’s here again.”
An unexpected lump rose in Fletcher’s throat. He knew his mom missed his dad all the time, but she missed him in such a joyful way—no tears lately, only happy memories that she worked into everyday conversations, resulting in the feeling that he had merely stepped out of the room and would surely return any minute.
It wasn’t the way Fletcher missed his dad at all. For him there was a gaping hole, a raw wound that would not heal. The injustice of his illness and death were a constant buzzing at the back of Fletcher’s head, continually reminding him that no matter how carefully he protected himself and his team, something could always attack from the sidelines. Cancer. Flashover. Heart disease. Backdraft. The whole world was dangerous, and every day, Fletcher carried on his shoulders the weight of protecting those he loved.
Thinking of his dad, his hero, first in line to save a life, a home, a memory, but unable to fight off his sickness, Fletcher understood once again that the job of firefighter was the right fit for him, for both of them. Discovering and attacking an enemy gave meaning and purpose to the kind of physical destruction that so often felt pointless.
And it wasn’t simply the beating back of the flames. Every part of the firefighter image appealed to him just as it had to his dad. Sacrifice was in Fletcher’s blood. He and his dad were men of such similar mettle that even their word choice was the same, resulting in Rose grinning delightedly at Fletcher for saying something that his dad might have said.
Fletcher shook himself to release the melancholy that tended to settle over him when he allowed himself to wallow in the sadness he could never express to his mom. She had done such a beautiful, thorough job of mourning the loss of her husband and then healing,
that Fletcher’s own continued sadness came with a guilt he was unable to escape. Why could he not get over the loss of his dad the way she did?
Put it away, he told himself. You didn’t come home to bring grief back into her life.
As though she could see his thoughts, Rose slid plates across the table to Fletcher. “Clear up for me, would you? I have a bet to settle with Pauline.” She winked at him and pushed out her chair.
Picking up their plates, he asked, “You made a bet? That we weren’t having lunch?”
Rose laughed as she left the room to make a phone call. “Not at all. The bet was that you’d try to change the subject at least four times. I won, by the way,” Rose said, grinning over her shoulder. “Pauline thought you’d crack sooner.”
“I’m concerned that a woman I’ve never met thinks she knows what I’ll do,” Fletcher called halfheartedly. He knew she wasn’t listening. He mumbled aloud as he rinsed the plates. “It’s bad enough that the women I do know think they have me pegged.” He raised his voice again, speaking to the empty room. “I’m a complex guy, Mom. I have fathomless depths.”
From the other room, he heard his mom’s snort. “Did you just say, ‘fathomless depths’?” He could hear her reporting on the results of the bet to Pauline, which made him eager to finish the dishes and get out of there.
Women.
Chapter 8
Hadley clipped the leash to Edison’s collar. “Come on, you big teddy bear,” she said, pulling him out the door. Edison was a mutt of gargantuan proportions: part Bernese, part Saint Bernard, but mostly undefinable and accidental blends of breeds. He was well trained in sleeping in a spot of sunlight on her apartment floor and sniffing strangers to uncomfortable degrees, and she was crazy about him.
The irony of a woman of Hadley’s petite size walking a dog that could be mistaken for livestock was not lost on her. Many evenings, she heard innocently flirty comments about “who is taking who for a walk?” and wished she dared tell the sweet old men it was “who is taking whom.” Instead, she let Edison yank her arms out of their sockets as he nosed his way into every neighborhood trash can and around the base of every tree.
Tonight, Hadley turned west on Juniper Street and walked toward the new city park. “New” was what this park had been called for several decades before Hadley was born, and it always amused her to look at the splintering wooden play structures that no reasonably new park would stand for.
Slipping Edison’s leash over the handle of the warped and wobbly teeter-totter, she sat down and pushed herself up off the ground and let herself gently back down.
She looked around, saw no one was nearby, and told Edison what good exercise this was. “See, my quads are burning after only a few reps. This is way better than doing squats in the gym. Besides,” she said, looking adoringly into his grinning face, “this way I can hang out with you. Nobody would ever let you into a gym.” She leaned closer and scratched him under his chin. “Or a bookstore, am I right?” She winked at him, and he slobbered on her arm.
Edison, she was certain, was as sweet as a dog could be, but he wasn’t going to win any prizes for his grace and decorum. Or his intelligence. He was a good boy, sure enough, but he was not subtle. His visits to the bookshop generally ended in his being tied to a doorknob in the back while Hadley put pieces of whatever he’d broken in a box, either for repair (if she was lucky) or for the garbage man (far more often).
So her two loves were incompatible. She could live with that. Edison’s blundering wasn’t going to keep her from taking him to the shop, and the delicate things in the shop weren’t going to jump out of the dog’s way. These were the facts of Hadley’s life, and she understood them. She accepted them. To the degree that she could, she celebrated them.
Throwing a truly disgusting tennis ball across the park to Edison gave her a few minutes to focus on how she felt about her lunch with Fletcher. On the one hand, he treated her carefully, like a new acquaintance or the friend of a friend. He was polite, but then Fletch had always been polite.
Hadley picked up the ball Edison spat on the grass and threw it, wiping her hands on her jeans. On the other hand, the way he’d touched her face… it was a whole lot like picking up where they had left off, when he dumped her after she told him she was moving away to finish her degree in Columbus.
With that thought, she whipped the slimy ball between a couple of towering oak trees and watched Edison lumber toward it.
Would it have killed him to offer to transfer, too? Didn’t every school have an engineering program? Couldn’t he have taken any number of hints? But he had ended things between them, just stopped all their forward progress with a few words. Then she was gone, and soon he ran off to be a park ranger or something, probably never to think of her again until he wound up knocking her over in the Greensburg fire station.
The way he’d looked at her, his expression full of surprise and concern and, if her eyes had not deceived her, a little bit of good old-fashioned magnetic attraction, had stayed with her for days after that first crash (and the second, and the third). It was like the universe was conspiring to bring them together or something equally insane.
Lucky for her, Fletcher had been all too eager to tell her everything he didn’t like about her store. Good thing he’d managed to only notice what was wrong. A couple of well-placed compliments might have made Hadley float away to a second-chance-romance fantasy. Good thing she had Savanna to keep her firmly focused on reality. Savanna, the voice of reason.
Savanna who loved the gossip privileges of working an information/dispatch line.
Savanna who worked in a fire station and, for reasons that remained a mystery to Hadley, despised alpha males, the paradox of which both amused Hadley and worried her.
“You know that with your job, you are in the perfect position to catch yourself a man,” Hadley often joked to Savanna, prompting her friend to cross her fingers and pretend to spit on the floor three times in some mongrel version of voodoo curse prevention.
“Heaven forbid,” Savanna said, channeling her Romani grandmother (or so she said; Hadley was never certain if the whole thing wasn’t invented for effect). “This I need?” she glanced around the fire station office. “A musclebound jerk with a hero complex, so secure in his superiority that it never even crosses his mind to check his own biases?” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Thanks anyway.”
In her insistence that no self-respecting woman should date a fireman, occasionally Savanna might have protested too much.
“I can’t actually conceive of a more antifeminist position than as fire-girlfriend.” When she would begin this line of attack, she always pointed a finger at Hadley. “It’s like everything our foremothers fought for is wasted. Every step forward is followed by a leap back. You’re walking a dangerous line, sis,” she’d say.
Hadley had objected that she was walking no such line, but Savanna was relentless. It didn’t matter that Hadley wasn’t actively dating anyone, much less a firefighter, Savanna had constantly reminded her that giving in to these alpha males was as much a historical and humanitarian regression as repealing the Nineteenth Amendment.
After a year or so of such strange one-sided arguments, Hadley gave up the fight and simply nodded when Savanna started her rants. Without Hadley asking any direct questions, she learned over the months that Savanna’s dad had been a typical alpha-male and something of a jerk. Hadley began to understand that by surrounding herself with firefighters, Savanna was both trying to gather evidence in support of her bias and—in a way that felt odd but sweet to Hadley—redeem her dad. Maybe if there was a tough guy who was also good and decent, Savanna would be able to forgive her dad for whatever he’d done that was damaging, or at least disappointing.
Hadley couldn’t tell how Savanna’s weird quest was shaping up. Things had changed very little since Fletcher returned to town. Savanna took an immediate dislike to him, and Savanna’s dislikes were seldom subtle.
At th
e thought of “seldom subtle,” Edison smacked into the backs of Hadley’s legs and took them out from under her. She landed in a tangle with her dog, grateful that she was alone in the park.
Or not. A voice came to her through many pounds of dog. “You need rescuing?”
Fletcher Gates? Here? Now?
Even though she could hear the gentle laugh in Fletcher’s voice, she felt annoyed that he would see her in such an undignified situation so many times since returning to town. Her instinct was to leap up and brush the grass and leaves and dog slobber off herself, but she resisted. She wrapped her arms around Edison and peered out over his huge, hairy brown shoulder.
“I’d thank you for the offer, but I’m not sure you could help. If this animal intended me harm, you couldn’t save me.”
Fletcher looked unconvinced. “He’s that dangerous, huh?” He held out a hand to Edison, and the traitorous dog just about licked his fingers off. “Oh, yeah. I can see that he’s a real threat.”
Hadley sat up straighter as Edison nudged his way into every inch of Fletcher’s personal space. “Well, obviously he wouldn’t hurt me,” she said. “But one word and you’d be history, pal.”
Fletcher sat on the grass beside Hadley. Edison snuffled his way into Fletcher’s lap. “What’s the kill order?” he asked, his voice as casual is if this were a question everyone asked each other. “Attack? No, that’s too common for you. Um, how about this?” He looked at Edison. “Antagonize,” he said, pointing at Hadley. Obviously nothing happened, and Hadley managed not to laugh. It would only encourage him.
Fletcher was not defeated by his failure. He tried again. “Irritate.” Edison licked the side of Fletcher’s head.
Fletcher leaned in toward the dog and spoke in a tone of someone offering a deal. “Come on big guy. Show me what you’ve got.” He sharpened his voice. “Provoke.”
Hadley let out a little snort. Shoot. Keep it together, she told herself. If she burst out into one of her giggling fits, she may never stop. She’d rather Fletcher not see that again. Maybe after all these years he’d forgotten how undignified it was.
Falling for a Former Flame: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love) Page 7
