“You and I need to talk. Not me and you. I must have told you that at least a million times back in high school.”
Hoyt stared for a second. Then he laughed and shook his head. “Still dishing out the Annatude. I guess some things never change.”
Annatude. She’d forgotten about the word he’d made up back in high school. It had been their little inside joke, and she’d actually thought it was cute. For a while.
Until she’d realized that the joke was on her.
She lifted her chin. “Your grammar certainly hasn’t changed.”
Hoyt glanced at his watch and made an impatient noise. “Look, I really don’t have time for all this right now, Anna, so let’s cut to the chase. I know you don’t like me much, okay? I get that, but this isn’t about me. This is about Jess.”
He was right. She didn’t like him much. She also didn’t like being steamrolled, so she’d been prepared to dig in her heels and stand her ground.
Right up until that last sentence.
She hesitated, torn between her irritation with Hoyt and her concern for his daughter. The concern won out. “What about Jess?”
“We’ll talk about it tonight over supper.” The corner of Hoyt’s mouth twitched. “Me and you. Say, around six thirty? Don’t expect a lot of bells and whistles, though. I’m not much of a cook, but I’ll come up with something. You could bring some dessert if you want. You used to make a pretty stellar brownie if I remember right.”
That was the wrong memory for him to bring up. Remembering the long afternoons she’d spent baking those sad little I-have-a-crush-on-you brownies still made her cringe.
That clinched it. No way was she was going to Hoyt Bradley’s house for dinner. She opened her mouth to tell him so.
He must have read her expression, because he spoke before she could. “Anna, Jess is all I have. She finally talked last night after all these years, and I want—” His voice roughened, and he waited a second before continuing. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure she keeps on talking. I know this isn’t your problem, and I’m really sorry to bug you. But somehow you and this store of yours have gotten tangled up in my situation, so I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d take the time to talk with me about it. At my house. Tonight.”
Jess is all I have. Anna chewed on her lower lip. She knew what it was like to have only one person in the whole world left to love. She also knew how it felt when that person slipped away from you into a place you couldn’t access, no matter how desperately you wanted to.
She was going to kick herself for this later, but—
“Okay.”
“Please, Anna, I—” Hoyt stopped short. For once in her life, she’d thrown him off-balance. “Okay?”
“Yes. I’ll come.”
Hoyt blinked a couple of times. “I really appreciate that. I guess I’ll see you tonight.”
“Right.” They considered each other for an awkward second or two, and then Hoyt nodded and headed out of the store toward his truck.
Anna relocked the door behind him, her heart skipping nervously. Glancing up, she caught Hoyt studying her from the cab of the truck.
Their eyes connected, and she realized something. For probably the first and only time in their lives, she and Hoyt Bradley were thinking the exact same thing.
What on earth did I just get myself into?
* * *
Hoyt Bradley didn’t spook easy, and he had his dad to thank for that. When you grew up in a house with a mean drunk, you learned early to cope with stuff that made most people turn tail and run.
So it made no sense for his palms to be sweaty when he reached for the doorknob at six thirty. On the dot.
Trust Anna Delaney to be right on time.
She was waiting in the shade of his deep front porch. Maybe she was trying to make up for that crazy outfit she’d been wearing earlier because now she looked like she was headed to a job interview at a funeral home. She had on a pink blouse buttoned up to the neck and gray slacks with a knife-blade crease down each leg. Somehow she’d even wrangled her unruly mop of hair into a prissy bun.
That must have taken some doing. And as far as Hoyt was concerned, it had been a big waste of time. He’d meant what he told her back in the bookstore. Her hair looked better the other way.
Still. Hoyt glanced down at his own rumpled blue cotton shirt and jeans. All things considered, he probably could have stood a little sprucing up himself. She poked a foil-covered dish in his direction. “I brought dessert.”
She’d taken his suggestion. Maybe this was going to be easier than he’d thought. “I hope it’s those caramel brownies you used to make.” She’d once bribed him to read an entire act of Julius Caesar by allowing him one bite per page.
“Sorry. Banana pudding.”
He’d never much cared for bananas, and from that sharp twinkle in Anna’s eye, she remembered. So much for easy. “Come on in.”
She edged past him into his living room and threw a startled glance upward.
“Oh, wow.” For a second or two she seemed to have forgotten he was standing there, which made the raw admiration in her voice mean even more. “This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Well, not in somebody’s home, anyway. I feel like I just walked into a cathedral.”
He’d designed the front room of his home with a vaulted ceiling that soared into a high point. Large triangular windows brought in the blue sky and tops of the old pecan trees in his yard. The back wall of the room was mostly glass, too, showcasing the sparkling pond he’d dug out in the back field.
He always enjoyed seeing people react to it, but nobody had ever commented that it looked like a church before now.
Strange, since he’d actually patterned this space after a sanctuary he’d helped build down in Savannah several years ago. He’d liked the way that building had brought in the outdoors, spotlighting God’s creation rather than focusing on man-made curlicues. He thought he’d done a pretty fair job of copying that here.
Weird that Anna Delaney of all people would be the one who picked up on that.
“Thanks,” he said simply.
Anna flushed and nodded awkwardly. She reached up a hand to tuck a straying lock of hair back into place. It flopped right back down as soon as she quit fussing with it.
Hoyt tried not to grin. For such an uptight girl, Anna sure had some wild hair. It was a glossy brown, and when she wore it down, it fell in loose spirals past her shoulders. She’d been fighting with it—and losing—as long as he’d known her.
“Where’s Jess?” Anna dug in the bag she had looped over one elbow and produced a storybook. “I brought her something.”
“She’s not here.” The immediate alarm in Anna’s expression might have been funny if there hadn’t been so much at stake. “We need to talk about some stuff she doesn’t need to overhear, so I asked Bailey Quinn to take her out to Tino’s for a pizza.” Anna still looked uneasy, so he added, “That’s okay, isn’t it?”
She hesitated but then set her bag down on the table by the door and nodded. “I guess so.” She tilted her head and sniffed. “Hoyt? Is something burning?”
He made it to the kitchen about the time the smoke alarm started going off. He opened the oven and drew out four charred lumps of garlic bread. Even by his low standards, they weren’t salvageable.
Not a good start.
“If that’s our dinner maybe we should skip right to dessert.”
Anna had followed him and was leaning against the doorframe. Bombing the bread had served one purpose at least. She didn’t look suspicious anymore. She looked amused.
“Nah, the lasagna’s okay.” Mainly because it had started out in the supermarket’s frozen foods section. “I was trying to hurry this bread along. Me and the broil setting on this oven have a love-hate thing going on. I like it because it cooks stuf
f fast, but if you forget about it—” he gestured to the smoking lumps “—charcoal.” The smoke alarm was still shrilling. “Could you hand me that broom?”
Anna picked it up. Instead of passing it to him, she upended it and poked the button on the ceiling alarm. The shrieking stopped.
When she saw him looking at her, she shrugged. “I went through a stir-fry period right after my dad died. I think I learned more about the smoke alarm in our old kitchen than I did about Chinese cooking.”
That reminded him. Avoiding her eyes, Hoyt grabbed another pot holder and picked up the hot tinfoil pan of lasagna. “I’m sorry I missed Principal Delaney’s funeral. I don’t know how it slipped by me. I was planning to go, but then I never saw the announcement about it.”
“There wasn’t one.”
“You should have announced it. I imagine pretty much everybody in town would have been there. Your dad was principal at the high school forever.”
“No. I meant there wasn’t a funeral.”
Hoyt set the steaming pan down on the table and turned to look at her. “What?”
“I mean no public one.” Anna avoided his gaze. “I just had a private memorial service. Only the minister and I were there.”
“Why?”
“Well, Dad was sick for years and toward the end he didn’t even recognize people. He was...disconnected. Nobody would’ve come.” She glanced up at him and frowned. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Hoyt realized he was staring at her with his mouth open. “Are you crazy? Everybody would have come. This whole town loved your dad.”
She looked at him skeptically. “Then why didn’t people visit him after he got sick? I mean, a few people did at first but then...” A spasm of pain crossed her face. “He didn’t always know who people were, but he liked having visitors.”
Regret settled on Hoyt’s chest like a rock. That hurt in her eyes hit really close to home. “I wondered the same thing when Marylee got sick. People I expected to come by the hospital...didn’t. Jacob Stone said it didn’t mean they didn’t care. He said that people have a hard time seeing somebody they love suffering.”
She nodded. “He said the same thing to me.” From the look on her face, she hadn’t found it much more comforting than he had.
“I should have come by to see him. I’m sorry I didn’t. Your dad was always good to me. Even after what happened senior year—”
“You know what? Let’s not get into all that.” Anna cut him off. “I’m here because you wanted to talk to me about Jess.”
All right. If Anna wanted to leave the past in the past, that was fine by him. “Okay. How about I say grace, and we’ll talk while we eat?”
They settled at the two places he’d set, and Hoyt reached across the table and took her hands in his.
He always held Jess’s hands when he said the blessing. He hadn’t thought about how inappropriate that might be from Anna’s point of view until he felt her jump. She didn’t pull away, though. Hoyt said possibly the shortest grace in the history of table blessing and released her.
She immediately put both hands in her lap. Okay, point taken. No more touching. In fact, from the look on her face, he’d better skip the small talk and get straight to the point of this visit before she ran right out the door.
He pried up a cheesy square of lasagna, set it on her plate and nudged the salad bowl in her direction. Showtime. “You know about Jess, right? How she stopped talking after her mother died?”
“Pine Valley’s a small town.” Anna frowned as she focused on transferring lettuce from the big bowl to the one by her plate. She didn’t lose a single leaf. “So, yes. I’d heard about that, and of course when she came into the store, I noticed she never said anything. Until last night.” Anna picked up her glass of sweet tea and looked at him over the rim. “Was that really the first time she’d—”
“It was.” Hoyt couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
“So is she still talking and everything?”
“To me, yeah. Just a little bit at first, but more and more. Only me, though. Not anybody else so far.” Hoyt tried using the salad tongs and ended up dumping about half the lettuce on the table. How did Anna manage these things? “But talking at all is a big step forward, according to her doctor. Today she asked me for some syrup for her pancakes. That probably happens every day in other people’s houses, but it felt like Christmas morning over here, you know?”
Anna’s expression softened. “I can imagine. I’m so glad she’s all right, Hoyt. I felt awful about locking her in. I still can’t believe I did that.”
“Trust me. If there was ever a time when God took somebody’s goof-up and turned it into gold, this was it. I called her therapist after I left the bookstore last night and told her about the whole thing. Dr. Mills thinks that maybe it was the trauma of being locked in combined with the relief of me coming to find her that finally encouraged her to talk. So since your mistake might turn out to be an answer to some pretty desperate prayers, I don’t think I’d waste much time feeling bad about it, if I were you.”
Anna studied him, a forkful of lasagna halfway to her lips, her expression unreadable. “I’m so glad,” she repeated finally.
He probably wasn’t going to get a better opening than that, so he’d better get this moving along. “Me, too. I just hope it lasts.”
“What do you mean?”
He hated to say this out loud. He didn’t even like thinking it. “Dr. Mills says that usually once kids like Jess—kids with selective mutism, the docs call them—start speaking, that’s it. They keep on talking. But Jess’s case has never been typical.” As he repeated the therapist’s words, he felt that familiar lump forming in his stomach. “So Dr. Mills can’t say for sure what’s going to happen. But the longer we keep her talking and the more people she starts to talk to, the more likely it is that this will be permanent.” Hoyt paused, fumbling for the best way to say what he needed to say next.
He should’ve known he wouldn’t have to spell things out for Anna Delaney.
“I’m assuming I’m here because there’s some way you think I can help.” Anna set down her fork and looked him in the eye. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble. I’ll help Jess in any way I possibly can.” Just as Hoyt relaxed with relief, Anna went on. “I just hope this doesn’t have anything to do with my plans to close the bookstore.”
His heart sank. “As a matter of fact, it does. Jess talked because of your dad’s store, Anna. The therapist thinks it’s all wrapped up with Marylee taking her there so much when she was little.”
“But Jess was so young when Marylee died, Hoyt. How could she even remember that?”
“I asked the same thing, but the therapist said that on some level, she can. Dr. Mills said this goes down deep for Jess. That’s why it’s been such a challenge. But Jess is finally talking again, and that’s all tied up with your store. If Pages closes right now, especially after I promised her it wouldn’t, it could throw everything sideways.”
Anna looked unhappy, but she shook her head. “I’m really sorry, Hoyt, but there’s nothing I can do. Trust me, I’ve already tried everything to keep the store going. A blue-collar town like Pine Valley just isn’t capable of supporting an independent bookstore.”
“Your father seemed to do all right.”
Anna’s eyes flashed. He must have touched a nerve there. “My father devoted most of a good retirement pension and all his savings to keeping Pages afloat. What assets he left had to be sold off to pay his medical bills. There’s no money to subsidize the bookstore now.”
“Look, I get it. When I inherited Bradley Builders from my own dad, it was circling the drain. But I built it back up, and it more than pays its way now.” He leaned forward, holding her eyes with his own, willing her to believe him. “Maybe I could help you do the same thing with your place.”
/> “You run a construction business, though. It’s totally different, don’t you think?”
Now it was Hoyt’s turn to feel irritated. “I think business is business, Anna.”
She studied him, her dark brows pulled together thoughtfully. “Where did you learn what to do to save your father’s company? You never took any business classes back in high school. Did you go to night classes over at Fairmont Technical?”
Hoyt could see where this was going...the same direction things always went with Anna Delaney. Schooling. Books. Classrooms. Those were the only things she’d ever put much stock in.
“I learned on the job, by making mistakes and then having to figure out how to fix them.” He could see her drawing back. His desperation made him reckless, and he pushed harder. “It’s the best way to learn anything, if you ask me. Way better than reading some book.”
He regretted the words the instant they were out of his mouth. You never insulted books in front of a Delaney. Anna’s frown darkened, and he hurried on. “Look, things may not even be that bad. I talked to Trisha, and from what she said, your main issue seems to be that you’ve got no reach. You’re basically selling to the same few people over and over again. You need to work on reconnecting with your customer base.”
“You talked to Trisha Saunders about me?”
From the tone in Anna’s voice, he was guessing he’d made another wrong step somewhere. This conversation was like walking through a minefield blindfolded. “Well, yeah. She owns the business right next door, so I knew she’d have a handle on how well the location works for foot traffic. And last night Jess said something about Trish wanting to close the bookstore. So, sure. I went and talked to her to get a feel for why you’re having problems.”
“I see.” Anna set down her fork with a clink. She took her paper napkin out of her lap and refolded it beside her plate. “And did Trish offer you some valuable critiques about my business practices?”
Mainly what Trisha had offered were more of those flirty smiles she’d been aiming in his direction since Marylee died and a few snarky digs about the run-down condition of Anna’s building. Hoyt had pieced together the rest of it on his own.
Hometown Hope Page 3