Unfinished Business

by Inglath Cooper

  Just sitting there on the porch swing with Culley last night had triggered her flight instinct, and she had put her hand on the phone a half dozen times throughout the day to back out.

  Eleven years. That was the part she kept coming back to. Couldn’t seem to get past. She had spent eleven years of her life with a man she had thought she knew. Trusted. Eleven years, only to open her eyes one day and find that nothing was as she had thought it to be. She felt as if the light switch had been flipped, plunging her into total darkness so that nothing about her life was remotely recognizable. Not even her own feelings. It seemed to her that she had two choices. Stand completely still in the middle of all that darkness. Or grope around, trying to feel her way.

  Where Culley was concerned, standing still seemed like the safe choice.

  She parallel parked in front of the town municipal building. Culley pulled in behind her.

  She got out, stood for a moment while he walked toward her, smiling.

  The sight of him was like a sucker punch to the stomach. Dressed in a jacket and white shirt, khaki pants and loafers, he looked as if he’d come straight from work. His dark blond hair had a slight wave to it, and his smile was of the knee-weakening variety. In all fairness, it should have been registered.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “You look great.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Well, should we head in?”

  “Sure.”

  They walked side by side up the brick walkway to the municipal building. Not far from the entrance, voices drifted out, mingling with laughter.

  Inside, rows of tables had been set up with folding metal chairs. At the front of the room was a buffet spread, steam spiraling up from the big silver containers holding the food.

  People stood in clusters of three and four, several raising their hands at Culley and then settling surprised looks on Addy.

  He took her elbow, steered her toward a group of three, two men and a woman. He introduced them as doctors at the hospital, and they each shook her hand with inquiring gazes.

  They mingled for a while; Addy ended up knowing many of the people there, most of whom commented on how nice it was to see her with Culley.

  Except for one.

  Addy saw her coming from the other side of the room. Like a shark, her approach was smooth and easy, but you could see the fin, knew there was about to be trouble.

  Culley must have spotted her at the same time because he took a step closer and put his hand on Addy’s back.

  “Culley,” Mae said. “You did make it, after all.”

  “Hello, Mae. How’s the ankle?”

  “Much better.” She smiled up at him, deliberately, it seemed, not looking at Addy.

  “This is Addy Taylor,” Culley said, his hand moving up her back to settle on her shoulder.

  “Hello,” Mae said.

  “Hello.”

  Mae tipped her head. “Have we met before?”

  “No,” Addy said.

  “Addy and I grew up together.”

  “Oh.” Long pause. “How sweet.”

  “Actually, we weren’t very sweet,” Addy said.

  “We got in a good bit of trouble together,” Culley added, the steamy look he set on her emphasizing the double meaning behind the admission.

  Addy ran a hand under the back of her hair, the room suddenly a little warm.

  “That’s funny. You don’t look like the trouble type,” Mae said, her smile just the slightest bit forced.

  “That’s funny.” Addy returned the smile. “You do.”

  Mae blinked. The ensuing stretch of silence lingered like a standoff. As a lawyer, Addy had long ago learned the value of keeping quiet. The first to speak was usually the loser.

  “Well,” Mae said, stepping back. “So very nice to meet you, Addy.”

  “You, too,” she said.

  Mae nodded at Culley, then sailed off toward a group of men, all of whom looked openly pleased to see her.

  “Claws on my kitten,” Culley said, smiling.

  “I have no idea where that came from.”

  His smile widened.

  “That was my last game,” she said. “The next time you need someone to run interference, buy a new stick.”

  The smile became a grin. “Admit you kind of enjoyed that.”

  “Not.”

  Someone tapped a spoon on a glass and announced it was time to eat. They stood in line and filled their plates, Mae ahead of them between two older men whose expressions resembled those of big-ticket lottery winners.

  The dinner lasted an hour and a half or so. People began trickling out of the building around nine, and when Culley suggested they leave, Addy was more than ready to go. As the evening had progressed, she’d felt the increasingly curious stares from people around them, knew that by tomorrow the town grapevine would have declared them an item.

  They walked outside, stopping beside Addy’s Volvo. “Bad idea, that.”

  He leaned against the car. “Why?”

  “Because now everyone in town thinks we’re dating.”

  “And that would be horrible because—”

  “We’re not.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a lie.”

  “Culley—”

  “I know. I know. Friends.”

  He looked down at her, something too appealing in his blue gaze. “Can a friend buy you an ice cream at Meyers’s? Payback for running defense.”

  This would have been an obvious place to end the evening, steer it back onto safer tracks. But it was only ice cream, after all. Maybe she was being too much of a turtle, afraid to even peek out of her shell. “They still make their own waffle cones?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Sold.”

  Meyers’s was a couple blocks away. They headed down the sidewalk, making small talk about the dinner, the mayor’s speech halfway through the evening, during which he thanked the businesses for their role in making Harper’s Mill an attractive place to live. It was his belief that without them people would have to move elsewhere, and he wanted to make sure the town did everything it could to help facilitate their success.

  Meyers’s Ice Cream was one of those places to go if you had an urge to send your triglycerides into the stratosphere. They stood in front of the counter, debating over an array of mouthwatering concoctions guaranteed to sabotage a diet. “You’re a doctor,” Addy said. “You should know better.”

  “Live a little.”

  Addy conceded and ordered a double scoop of Chocolate-Cashew-Crunch. Culley got plain vanilla.

  “Vanilla?” Addy asked on the way out the door.

  “Hard to beat the standard stuff when it’s done right.”

  They sat down on a bench just outside the shop, a street lamp throwing off a soft beam of light.

  Addy licked her cone. Closed her eyes and savored. “Oh, my gosh, that’s sinful.”

  “Worth every calorie, though.”

  “And then some. I’ll be adding a few miles to my run tomorrow.”

  “How many miles do you do a week?”

  “Thirty.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Masochist.”

  “It’s therapy. Give me six miles, I can usually work it out.” She licked her cone again. “Most things, anyway.”

  “Mark fall under that umbrella?”

  “A marathon wouldn’t fix that,” she said.

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Whatever happened between you two, you’re not over it, are you?”

  She fiddled with the paper around her waffle cone. “I’m over it,” she said, a little defensive even to her own ears. “I just don’t want to ever be in that place again.”

  He gave her a highly skeptical look. “So. How about that moon?”

  She followed his glance skyward. “How did you and Liz meet?”

  She’d turned the table, and the question surprised
him. Clearly. “Sophomore year in college. At a party, ironically enough. Both of us on the other side of intoxicated.” He hesitated, and then, “That was the first warning bell I ignored.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighed a heavy sigh. “No one’s told you?”

  “I overheard a little something in the drugstore yesterday. Your friend Mae.”

  “Figures. So what’d you hear?”

  “That she’s in prison.”

  “Yeah.” Silence and then, “She is.”

  “What happened?” Addy asked softly.

  He was quiet for a moment, his expression serious. “She had a head-on with another car one afternoon on the way home from the grocery store. Her blood alcohol was way over the legal limit, and Madeline was in the car.”

  “Oh, Culley,” Addy said, the breath sticking in her throat.

  “The other driver is paralyzed.”

  “How awful. Was Madeline hurt?”

  “She had a couple broken bones. Thank God for car seats.”

  “Culley. I’m so sorry. What a horrible thing.”

  He dropped his ice cream into the trash can next to the bench. “It was pretty much a nightmare. Still is, I guess.”

  “Did you know there was a problem?”

  “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. Liz always liked to have fun. In college, so did I. I went through the here-to-have-a-good-time major. When we started dating, we went to parties every night. I couldn’t tell you how most of them ended. I got my own wake-up call when my grades started looking like they belonged to someone who was not going to med school.”

  “And Liz?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “On the surface, she seemed to agree it was time to get serious. But there were nights when she would go out with the girls. They’d all get drunk, and even then, I knew something about it felt different.”

  “Did you tell her that?”

  “Yeah, but she resented my calling her on it at all. Looking back, I can superimpose my dad’s voice over her words. ‘I don’t have a problem. I’m making grades and having a little fun at night. What’s so wrong with that?’ I guess I didn’t want to see, because from here, it all seems pretty clear. How could I have missed it?”

  Addy’s heart twisted. Many, many times when they were growing up, Culley had appeared at her house late at night, his eyes darkened by emotions she could not understand. She had known that his dad drank more than he should, that he got angry, yelled and threw things. As resentful as she was of her own father’s defection, she’d thought she had it better than Culley. “I think sometimes we don’t let ourselves see the things we don’t want to see. Maybe until it’s too late.”

  She got up, dropped the remainder of her ice cream in the trash can and sat back down.

  Culley leaned against the bench, stared up at the night sky. “It was like being on this train where the brakes have failed. You know it’s doomed. That there’s only one ending. But you can’t get off. So you just keep riding until all of a sudden, the train reaches the end of the line. That crash you’ve been fearing just happens in an instant. And you think to yourself I should have been able to do something to prevent it.”

  She put her hand on his forearm and squeezed. “That’s where you’re wrong. As much as we want to, we can’t make other people’s choices for them. We can tell them how we feel, but the ultimate decision is theirs.”

  “Is that true of what happened between you and Mark?”

  Addy pulled her hand away, nodded. “And also the part about me not seeing what I apparently didn’t want to see.”

  He didn’t ask what she meant, and she was glad.

  They were quiet for a good while. Just sat there on the bench, while something that felt comfortable and familiar settled over them. It was the way it had been before. Before the first time he’d kissed her when they were kids. Before Mark. Before. When they were young and could talk to each other about anything.

  And since then, there had never been anyone else in her life with whom this had been true. She’d had Mark, friends, close friends like Ellen. But what she and Culley had been to one another all those years ago had been different.

  She missed it with an intensity that wound a knot in her stomach.

  And in recognizing its return, wanted to grab hold of it with both hands and never let go again.

  * * *

  “YOU LIKE HER, don’t you?”

  Culley had picked Madeline up from his mother’s house and they were back on the main road, headed home when Madeline asked the question. Culley looked at his daughter, weighing his answer. “We were friends a long time ago.”

  “You like her as more than a friend now?” she asked without looking at him.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Madeline turned to stare out her window, even though it was dark. “Does she like you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you gonna marry her?”

  The question threw him a curve. He pulled over to the side of the road, left his blinker on, turned to look at his daughter. “Hey,” he said, reaching out to turn her chin toward him. “What’s all this about?”

  She lifted a shoulder, tipped her head to one side. “I saw the way you looked at her.”

  Culley ran the back of his hand across her hair. “You know what? I don’t know what’s going to happen. But there’s one thing that’s not going to change.”

  She looked up at him, her dark eyes troubled. “What?”

  “How much I love you.”

  “How much?”

  “Hmm.” He pretended to think for a moment. It was a game they used to play. Hadn’t played in three years. “As much as all the chocolate chips in all the cookies in the whole world.”

  She smiled. “And I love you as much as all the fish in all the oceans.”

  He put his arm around her, hugged her hard. When he pulled back, there were tears in her eyes. He wiped them away with his thumbs. “You know that’s not ever going to change, right?”

  She nodded. “We better get home,” she said. “I have homework.”

  He pulled back onto the road, and she punched on a radio station. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  * * *

  ADDY WAS DOWNSTAIRS the next morning, pouring a cup of coffee when the phone rang.

  “Are you missing me enough to come back yet?” As usual, Ellen skipped the greeting.

  “I miss you, yes,” Addy said, glancing at the clock above the sink. Barely eight, but no doubt Ellen had been going strong for three hours or more.

  “And are you bored to tears?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “That have anything to do with house calls from the good doctor?”

  Addy smiled. “No.”

  “But you’ve seen him.”

  “A little.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment dripped from Ellen’s voice.

  “We both decided being friends made a lot more sense.”

  “Both decided or you decided?”

  “He agreed. Sort of.” With the assertion came a clip of memory from last night and the feel of Culley’s hand on her arm.

  “But that night in New York wasn’t about being friends, was it?”

  “That was different.”

  “How so?”

  “That was a mistake.”

  “At least you got to have some fun while you were making it.”

  “Ellen.”

  “Well, seriously, Addy, how long are you going to keep Mark in the picture?”

  “He’s not in the picture.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  “And what is the view from there?”

  “A thirty-three-year-old divorced woman scared to death of putting herself out there again.”

  “I’m out there.”

  Ellen laughed. “Yeah, out
in the boonies. But if you have to be there, at least give the good doctor a chance. Remember, careful gets you a lot of boring nights at home alone.”

  “It also keeps you from making a fool of yourself.”

  “Ah. So that’s it. Wounded pride.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Or that complicated. Addy, you’re letting Mark win, you know. That’s a lot of glory to give someone who surely doesn’t deserve it.”

  From there, they talked about work for a bit. Ellen had a few questions on some of the cases she’d taken over for her. When they were done, Addy clicked the phone off, placed it on the kitchen counter. Was Ellen right? Did Mark still have a hold on her?

  Maybe it was true. But if it was also true that people are shaped by the events in their lives, she had surely been irrevocably changed by the discovery that her perception of her marriage had no basis whatsoever in reality.

  It was time to move on. She knew this, and yet, her feet were planted in cement. Moving on meant taking a chance on her own judgment again. Getting past that picture she carried around in her head of Mark in their bed with another woman, a woman who had carried his child.

  She wanted to get over it. She just didn’t know if she ever would.

  * * *

  ADDY AND CLAIRE spent the next two days going through the accounts for the orchard, looking at where money was going out, how much was coming in. The problem lay in the fact that there was far more of the former than the latter.

  Addy could not fault her mother. It seemed that she was right. Over the years, the market had continued to tighten, competition intensifying with the availability of produce from other countries such as Mexico and Canada. Taylor Orchards had once been the primary vendor for three of the major grocery chains in Virginia and North Carolina. That was no longer the case.

  For the past decade, their share of the market pie had continued to decrease until, based on the numbers, it was clear to Addy that selling out might be the wisest choice.

  Claire said as much at the end of their second day at the kitchen table. She ran a hand through her hair and said, “There’s nothing wrong with making a graceful exit, honey. All things come to an end. That’s just part of the life cycle. No business can go on forever.”

  “But it’s been in your family since your grandma and grandpa.”

  “And it’s had a good run.” She sighed. “I’m okay with letting it go.”