“Kind of,” I said quietly. Leslie was erratic in more ways than one.
We made several cake-carrying trips and after another hour, the numbers were on the floor, and the gym was ready for Mom’s big event.
“Let’s go enjoy the festival,” Mom suggested, giving the cake-filled gym one last look as we went out through the big double doors to the field, where the whole town appeared to have gathered to enjoy the sun and fun.
My heart was heavy as we walked from booth to booth. Everything felt like a goodbye, and I wondered if it would have been a more joyful event if I’d been more sure that leaving was the right thing to do.
I looked at my neighbors and friends, and I realized again this was something I was giving up, something I was walking away from. Singletree was a small town, yes, and that came with limitations. But it was a place where I could attend the Cherry Blossom Festival with my mom and my sister, and everywhere I turned was another person I knew. It was like being part of a giant extended family, all of us united by the traditions and habits of our tiny piece of the world.
Of course there were people in Singletree I didn’t know too—and that was a also a good thing. It meant the gossip we already knew had a chance for expansion.
“Keep walking,” Mom said, as I slowed a bit near one of the vendor tables covered with pretty silver jewelry.
“No, I want—“
“Keep. Walking.” Mom hissed it this time, and I looked up at the person behind the table and figured out why my mother was hustling us past. It was Natalie Tucker, a woman about Mom’s age, who Mom had gone to school with. There was some kind of bad blood between them, but my mother had never told us what it was all about. She’d only said that the Tuckers were “not our kind” and as kids we hadn’t been allowed to play with the Tucker children. So there was a good example of some of Singletree’s citizens who I just didn’t know.
“What’s the deal with the feud again, Mom?” Amber tried. We’d been working for years to get her to tell us why the Tanners and Tuckers weren’t friendly, but whatever the reason, it went back generations and Mom’s lips were sealed.
“Let’s not spoil a perfectly lovely day,” Mom said.
And it was lovely. The sun shone down on my shoulders, warming my skin as I spent one final day in the place I loved with the people I knew loved me. It was bittersweet, and had I been in a slightly different place, I might have been able to enjoy that soft pull to stay at home, to surround myself with the familiar. I might have known there was more waiting for me in Baltimore, that all I had to do was slide behind the wheel and drive away to my new life.
Instead, I felt like I was leaving everything—and everyone—I cared about behind, and I was struggling to remember exactly why.
Don’t Question the Quokka
Cormac
For the first time in years, I was going to the Cherry Blossom Festival. Left to my own devices, I would have stayed holed up in our house, pretending that work was keeping me busy—it was April after all, and I had taxes to prepare for clients.
I’d done more thinking on the way home, or maybe it was just that the closer I got to Singletree, the more I let fear creep in around the edges of what had felt like certainty when I’d been alone in a cold hotel room. Paige had made her plans. She was leaving, and I was going to let her.
“Stop being a fucking hermit,” Callan had suggested on the phone in that pleasant brotherly way he had.
“I’m not being a hermit.”
“Yeah, good comeback.”
“Shut up.”
“You need work on this verbal sparring thing. Let’s practice at the festival.”
I sighed. I knew the girls wanted to go. Between waging epic animal wars in our living room using the twenty taxidermied beasts that now resided inside my home, they’d popped into my office to ask when we would be heading to the festival.
“I’ll let you bring your kangaroo,” my brother teased.
Frederick went almost everywhere now, and so did Mamba, the creepy little quokka.
In the end, the Virginia taxidermists were dodging a few laws, as it turned out, but they weren’t exactly the kinds of things a tax accountant needed to worry about. Technically speaking, the animals they’d picked up on the trips they’d been expensing were considered exotic and not legal for import to the United States. That was definitely true if the animals were alive, at least. I was pretty sure the same was true in the case of dead animals, but Antoine suggested I didn’t need to dig too far into the legalities in order to complete their taxes.
Shady? Yeah, maybe a little. But my halo had fallen off a lot of years ago, and at this point all I wanted was to never have to visit Cahoots, Virginia again. When I’d been on my way home, my brother had pulled out every single possible pun about being in cahoots with taxidermists, so I felt like even the jokes had run their course.
“Fine. What time?”
“We need to be there for the cakewalk.”
I sucked in a breath. The cakewalk would not be good for me. The cakewalk would smell of sugar and cake, and absolutely everything about it would remind me of Paige. Except for the parts that reminded me of her mother, Lottie, and that would also remind me of Paige.
“No cakewalk.”
“Fine, I’ll take the girls to the cakewalk. We need cake. We’ll get it by walking. It’s like taking candy from a baby,” Callan said in an uncharacteristically excited voice.
“What’s your excitement over this cake?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just sounds cool.”
My brother had gotten weirdly cheerful since he and April had been together.
“Fine. You take the kids to the cake walk. I’ll stay outside eating hot dogs.”
“Solid plan,” he agreed.
An hour later, we were parking at the very back of the high school parking lot, marveling at the sheer number of people who had turned out for the festival. Music rang through the clear springtime air, and the sun beat down with April warmth, making the day feel almost perfect.
Taylor hauled Frederick along beside her, while Maddie had Mamba in a little backpack—a far better plan in my opinion. They had tried to get me to agree to bring Luke, but in the end, we’d given him a couple Milk Bones, said goodbye and left him in the back yard to enjoy the day on his own.
Life with Luke had gotten better. I didn’t burst into a sneezing fit every time he was around and for the most part, I loved the big fleabag.
In a lot of ways, I’d gone backwards emotionally since meeting Paige Tanner. I’d entered into the friendship with clear walls in place, well aware I was not emotionally equipped for anything beyond friendship. And then I’d fucked it all away, gotten swept up in how good it felt to be seen again by a woman I admired, how soft her skin was, how fucking good she smelled. By that goofy laugh of hers. And I’d forgotten everything I knew about the pain of being left behind.
And now here we were, left behind again by a woman I was beginning to admit I was probably in love with. The wound inside me had never healed, and now it was sore and painful again. It wasn’t the same as losing Linda, but it wasn’t better either.
“Corn dogs!” Maddie sang, drawing us to a little cart selling corn dogs.
“Corn dogs!” April also sang, and I shot her a questioning look.
“I love corn dogs,” she shrugged, and stepped up to buy a corn dog for each of us.
We took them to a picnic table and sat down, eating the dogs and watching what felt like the entire town moving around us.
I hated that everywhere I glanced I found myself looking for Paige.
We spent another hour wandering after our corn dogs, and I was beginning to be festivaled out, when a familiar voice came over the loudspeaker, interrupting the music.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lottie’s voice called out. “Please join us in the gymnasium for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival cakewalk!”
Callan grinned at me, and I shook my head at him, still c
onfused about why exactly the idea of free cake was so appealing to the guy.
“Let’s go, girls. Your dad sucks and doesn’t want cake.” Cal took Frederick from Taylor and shoved him at me. “You keep this guy. He can’t do the cake walk.”
“He can’t?” Taylor asked, looking between Callan and her enormous buddy.
“If it was a cake hop, then yes,” Cal said, as if this made perfect sense.
“Oh,” Taylor said, accepting this.
“No cake?” Maddie asked me, her big blue eyes looking up at me.
I squatted down to meet her gaze. “Not for me. You go get us a good one, okay?”
She nodded, though I knew she had no idea what a cakewalk was.
“I’ll text you when it’s done,” April promised, and they rushed off toward the gym, leaving me with a huge kangaroo and an empty vacuum in my chest.
I sighed, and began wandering aimlessly. After a while, I got tired of carrying Frederick around and decided to put him back in the car, so I began weaving through the parked cars in the lot.
I pushed through the tiny space between a Miata and a giant Chevy truck, and there in front of me was a familiar car, one I’d seen every day in the driveway across the street. My heart sagged inside me even as I searched the car, hoping Paige would magically be sitting inside.
But now, Paige’s four door was stuffed to the gills. I circled it, peering through the windows like I could absorb some part of her by looking at all her things boxed and bagged and shoved into every spare inch of space inside her car.
She was packed.
She was really leaving.
And from the looks of it, she was leaving today.
I set the kangaroo down and stared into the empty driver’s seat for a long time.
And I realized I was an idiot. Even Frederick could see it.
I was in love with Paige Tanner. And I was going to let her leave because I was afraid to do anything about it. I was afraid of what, exactly, I asked myself.
And then, because I’d evidently already lost my mind, I asked Frederick.
“What am I so afraid of?”
The kangaroo’s slight smile looked uncertain, like maybe he didn’t know the answer either.
I tapped him on the chest as I told him. “This whole time, I’ve been afraid to get too close because what? Because she might leave me!”
Frederick gave me a sage look.
“And guess what?”
He said nothing.
“She is fucking leaving!” I shouted this at the kangaroo, drawing shocked looks from a few folks weaving through the lot toward their cars, as if they’d never seen a grown man having an argument with a stuffed kangaroo before. “She’s leaving anyway,” I told him. “She was leaving before I even met her, and I knew it, and I got involved anyway.”
Frederick gave me a look that questioned the wisdom of that decision.
“But I think I’ve been looking at it the wrong way,” I explained, and it felt like the sun got about forty times brighter as understanding finally cleared the hurt and doubt from my mind. “It’s not my job to suffer through another woman I love leaving me. It’s not up to me to soldier on and martyr myself so I can continue being a miserable sack of shit. It’s not up to me to watch another woman my children loved walk away even though I love her too.”
I took a breath, and Frederick waited for me to continue.
“It’s up to me to see if she feels the same way. It’s up to me to convince her not to go,” I told him, my voice still elevated in the excitement of my understanding.
Frederick leaned slightly toward the overstuffed car at my side, reminding me that time was short.
“Yeah, dude, I know. She’s leaving today. So I don’t have much time. Let’s go.”
And with that, I picked up my kangaroo and sprinted toward the gym.
Cakewalk Confessions
Paige
I’ve seen a few cakewalks in my day. They all go pretty much the same—people walk from number to number on the gym floor, stopping when the music stops, and then someone pulls a number from a jar and whoever is standing on that number gets to pick a cake. It’s not rocket science.
Maddie, Taylor, Callan and April were all doing the cakewalk, and as they’d come into the gym, they’d all greeted me warmly.
“Hey Paige,” April said, pulling me in for a hug. To my surprise, Maddie and Taylor both rushed over to hug me too, and Maddie had even tugged my arm until I’d squatted down low so she could show me her new friend, Mamba the quokka. She had to tell me it was a quokka—that wasn’t an animal I was very familiar with.
“You guys have lots of new friends,” I said.
Maddie nodded and grinned, but Taylor was staring at the floor. She muttered something I couldn’t hear and I leaned in closer. “What, honey?”
Taylor looked up at me then, and I couldn’t quite read the expression written in her big golden eyes, but she said quietly, “sometimes we miss our old friends.”
The look on her face told me she meant me, and my heart crumpled to the floor of my chest, dramatically affected by the words of this small girl.
“I miss you guys too,” I told her honestly.
Taylor actually moved into my arms and gave me another fierce hug, and even though I was still fighting the disappointment of not seeing Cormac with them, my whole body warmed as Taylor’s little arms wrapped my neck.
At that moment, Mom had ramped up the cake walk music and I had encouraged the girls to hurry to their numbers and begin, but I was left with the remnants of my aching heart to keep me company as the event proceeded.
I’d taken a chair at the side of the gym, the winding line of people hoping to win cakes blending together after a while as the music blared, punctuated now and then by Mom’s voice, happily giving away yet another cake.
“And this one was made by my beautiful daughter Paige, completely from scratch!”
Yep, Betty Crocker and me. We made them all from scratch. I smiled at the man who was carrying away the cake toward where his family sat at a far table.
Cakewalks are not quick affairs, and this one allowed plenty of time for me to zone out and reflect on everything. And that wasn’t good. I’d spent way too much time in the past couple weeks reflecting on my life. I needed action. I needed to just move forward and see what happened. As soon as the last cake was sent home, I decided, I was going to get in my car and go.
“Hey!” Someone called as they passed me while the music played, and I looked up to find Leslie walking in the line of people doing the cakewalk.
I laughed—we’d lost her earlier around the cotton candy stand, and she looked like she was having a great time. I waved, and just as I was settling back into my seat, the music stopped abruptly. People scrambled to numbers on the floor, and I waited for the cake number to be called.
Instead, I heard a voice that sent shivers racing through my body.
“Hi folks. Um. Sorry to interrupt. I just …” Cormac trailed off, sounding nervous. “Is uh, is Paige Tanner here?”
I felt the blood rush to my face. What was happening?
“Yes dear,” Mom’s voice. “But before you do … whatever you’re doing here, can you at least pick a number so someone can win a cake?”
“Paige is here?” Cormac clarified.
Mom did not take the cakewalk lightly. “Pick. A. Number. Please.”
I got to my feet and watched Cormac dip a hand into Mom’s fishbowl, pulling out a folded piece of paper. The huge kangaroo—Frederick, I think his name was—was beside him.
“Twenty-seven?” he said into the microphone.
Taylor began jumping up and down and shrieking, “I won! Thank you Daddy! I won!”
“Hey!” The guy behind her called out. “Is this thing rigged? The guy gets up there with some crazy stuffed bear and calls his own kid? I want the next shot at the microphone.”
“No,” Cormac said, sounding serious suddenly. “And it’s a kangaroo. Look, I’
m really sorry to interrupt, and no, I didn’t just come up here to give my kid a cake.”
“I don’t get a cake?” Taylor was halfway up to the cake table, but now she stopped and her mouth dropped open.
Mom grabbed the microphone back. “Of course you do, sweetheart. Sir, the cakewalk is absolutely not rigged. But Cormac,” she turned to Cormac. “This is really very irregular. Could you please do whatever it is you and this kangaroo are doing here so we can get on with the cakewalk?”
“Er. Yeah, sorry.” Cormac seemed to suddenly realize he was standing on a platform with a kangaroo in front of a huge crowd and holding a microphone. Though clearly nervous, he still had a commanding presence in the front of the room, and though my mind was whirling wildly, it didn’t stop me from appreciating the broad spread of his shoulders beneath the crisp blue shirt he wore, the way the dark jeans hugged his fit hips. And those glowing eyes had power over me, even from across the room.
He scanned the crowd, and his gaze landed on me and stayed.
“Paige,” he said, almost a whisper. “I’m so glad you haven’t left yet.”
What was he doing? I shook my head as my blood rushed so loudly I could barely hear. I wasn’t sure what was required of me in this situation. I’d never been addressed by a kangaroo-bearing man during a cakewalk.
“I know you’re planning to leave. I know that’s been the plan all along.”
“So let her go and let’s get cake!” The same angry man called from the cakewalk line.
Callan left his own place in the line and moved to where the grumpy man was standing to lean into him and whisper something in his ear. I didn’t hear what Callan said, but whatever it was must have been persuasive. The man called out, “I’m very sorry. Please, go on.”
Cormac nodded at the man. “Thank you. I will, because this is important, and it’s probably my last chance to say it. I’m sorry to interrupt, but maybe some of you know Paige Tanner here.”
A few people looked my way, and some even clapped.
“She’s a local, born and raised here in Singletree. She takes care of a lot of you, I bet, and your families.”
Second Chance Spring Page 20
