“Daphne! What are you still doing here? Weren’t you supposed to meet Mel a half hour ago?”
Daphne jumped, her computer sliding off her lap. She grabbed it and checked the clock on the screen. Heavens. To stop Fran from nagging, she’d invented the date and then promptly forgotten about it.
“Oh, he texted me earlier, he had a roof to finish,” she said. “We might meet up later if he has time.”
“Time? Time? Is he dying of a terminal disease?”
Daphne raised her eyebrows, a strategy she’d developed to suppress the urge to roll her eyes. “No, and therefore he must earn a living.”
“Good for him, but not for either of us. You need to figure out if he’s your man, and if he can’t be bothered to participate in the process, especially on a Friday night, then we might as well take Frederick west.” Fran eased slowly onto the love seat.
This was new, this uncertainty that objects were solid and wouldn’t crumble or get whisked away. It pained Daphne to see Fran lose confidence in the existence of physical reality.
That was more Daphne’s territory. She could easily lose track of time and space while immersed in books and thoughts. And quite honestly, Mel-the-Love-Interest was like a character in a book to her, more alive in her imagination than in reality. To keep Fran convinced, she needed to do a better job of pretending he was real. She thumbed her screen and paused, as if reading. “He sent another text. He wants to know if I’d like to go for ice cream.”
“Again? You did that the last night. Surely, there’s something else happening in this hick town.”
Nothing that a single woman of a certain age could do. Then again, perhaps a woman of a certain age could do anything. Consider the widow in Sense and Sensibility. No longer on the marriage market, she was permitted to—Daphne reached for her laptop.
“Yes, google Spirit Lake and romance. See if anything comes up.”
It took effort but Daphne opened another window and typed what Fran suggested. A sunset picture of the lake, an old coupon special for a lakeside restaurant called Smooth Sailing, an XOX Valentines event at the library for women only. Women only? What was the point of that? She resorted to ad-libbing. “The ice-cream shop seems to be the best bet. There are many flavors for us to work through. The combinations are endless. Especially if you get a double scoop. Then you have to not only decide on the flavors but which one goes on top. Never mind the sprink—”
“Fine. Off you go. How come he never picks you up?”
Precisely the complication she’d discussed with Mel at the outset of their charade, but she hated to put him through the dress-up routine already. Perhaps she could talk him into dining with her as a reward. He certainly liked his food, and she could more easily fake a relationship in front of Fran if she could report on events that actually transpired.
“He probably doesn’t want to deal with you.” Daphne shed her laptop and books and papers and pens from her lap like a spinster with cats. This phantom dating was a royal nuisance. Just as she was getting somewhere with her book. Perhaps there was a work-around. She said, “Mel wants to know what I’m working on, so I’ll bring the laptop.”
“Honestly, Daphne,” Fran said, tightening her silk shawl about her. Feeling cold, too, was new. “He’s just saying that to be polite. Surely, you can think of something better to do.”
Daphne raised her eyebrows as high as they could go. “I’m sure I can.” She shoved the cords into the bag’s side pockets and settled its strap on her shoulder. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.”
Fran squawked, “Not like that. You’re in wrinkled rags.”
Daphne had forgotten about her tracksuit. “All right, all right, all right.”
There was something utterly depressing about dressing for a date that would never happen. She cast her eye about the few outfits wedged in beside Fran’s in the closet. She settled on her dress with the daylily pattern. It was colorful and distinctive, and if she really was dressing for Mel, she’d wear it. She threw on jewelry and fussed with her hair.
“Better,” Fran pronounced, as Daphne once again aimed to leave. “Though given your height, the flowers look true to size. And I still wouldn’t bother with the laptop, if I were you.”
“But you aren’t, and so I will.”
“He’s interested in you, not your book work,” Fran said.
“I don’t see a distinction.”
“And if you don’t change that kind of thinking, my dear,” Fran said, “we’ll soon be on our merry way westward.”
CHAPTER FIVE
HER COMPUTER BAG bumping her side with every step, Daphne headed to the library, a mere block and a half away, a useful distance to separate her from Fran. At the first intersection, she caved in to her craving for ice cream and turned to the lake. If she could snare someone into taking a picture of her and her cone, and then say Mel snapped the shot, her sham relationship would appear alive and well to Fran. Why, she was practically compelled to go.
Dark clouds churned above the water’s surface. Far out, the lake was divided between the shadow of the clouds and the sun where she stood amid the strolling traffic. No one seemed alarmed by the approaching storm. People flip-flopped past, exposing too much flesh or, in the case of those in sarongs and hijabs, not too much at all. Outside the shop, she received a text. Mel.
Would you care to go for an ice cream?
She whirled about, looking in all directions, his prescience too uncanny for it to be an accident. But there was no black baseball cap. At least none atop his head.
I’m at The Big Scoop. Where are you?
She’d barely hit Send when she was messaged, There in 5.
She should’ve twisted more curl into her hair. Gone for the daffodil earrings to set off her dress of daylilies. And did her dress make her even shorter than her not-quite-five-foot stature?
What did it matter? They weren’t dating. Only...he’d asked her out for an ice cream. A question one asked the person they were dating, right? He hadn’t mentioned talking about Austen, either. Daphne slid her thumb under the strap of her bag to ease its weight. Nearly fifty, and she still couldn’t figure out if she was out on a date or not. Oh, to live in the Georgian period, where walking alongside a single man was tantamount to walking down the aisle.
Inside, the customer line was all the way to the door and Daphne had to squeeze behind a couple in their twenties, arms looped around each other as if slow dancing.
An unusual pang of envy shot through her. Long used to laughing alone at movies and eating by herself at restaurants, she shouldn’t have cared. She was just passing through town, anyway. But there, a short yard in front of her, was a couple in a bit over-the-top love—was it absolutely necessary to rub noses in public?—and, yes, it hurt that the best she could do was stage a fake relationship.
She had no one but herself to blame. She’d made the decision years ago that the single life was best for her.
She set about ignoring the couple, and was resolutely studying the menu board when Mel slid in beside her. “Know what you want?”
He didn’t have his hat on. Even when they’d had supper at Wendy’s on Monday, the start of their fake charade, the cap had stayed square on his head. The man had hair, lots of it—brown and thick with a little gray at the temples, which only accentuated his tanned, work-roughened features.
I want you. The unspoken answer—tacky but spontaneous—warmed her cheeks, her entire head. Mel frowned, probably wondering what her problem was. “Black cherry and lemon pistachio,” she blurted out the last two flavors she’d read. “You?”
His hand rose to his temple, where the beak on his cap was normally there to pull. “It’s hard enough when the choices are strawberry, vanilla and chocolate.” He squinted at the board, and in doing so, angled himself closer to her. Not so near as to be intimate, but the casual onlooke
r might think they were dating. Take that, she silently voiced to the model-ready couple. She, too, could be part of a pair.
Then his face cleared and, from seemingly out of nowhere, he produced a book. “For you. I got it from the library.”
It was a copy of Sense and Sensibility. Another edition, not her favorite. The font was all wrong, the introduction sloppy, and the paper practically transparent.
“Thank you,” she said, “for going to all the trouble.”
“No trouble,” he said, “I’d already ordered it last week, after our first conversation. It came in today but you need it more than I do. It’s also easier to give you this than to drive out to check my books in storage.”
Mel had enough books to keep in storage? Before Daphne could follow up, the girl behind the counter chirped, “Welcome to The Big Scoop. What can I get for ya?”
“A plain waffle cone. Two scoops.” She glanced at Mel. Shades of alarm waved across his face. He pulled on his imaginary cap, rubbed his chin, yanked again. “What did you say you were having?”
“You don’t have to decide on your flavor right yet,” the girl said patiently. “Just on the kind of treat. A cone, a float, a smoothie?”
“Uh...well...the same.”
“Are you sure?” Daphne said. “There is the chocolate-dipped cone, too.”
His shoulders sagged.
“Will that be all?” the girl said in that tone of high expectation.
“Yep,” Mel said and paid for both their cones.
Tickets in hand, they shuffled over to the counter where the store’s sixty-three flavors were stretched out. Mel stared at the tubs like a kid in a...well, an ice-cream shop.
“They all look good to me,” he said forlornly.
“How about this,” she said. “I brought my laptop with me because I didn’t know you were joining me. Why don’t I work and you can take all the time in the world to choose?”
Which, Daphne discovered fifteen minutes later, might very well be necessary. He broke her focus every couple of lines as he drew close while pacing the length of the counter. The servers had long ago given up asking if he was ready.
“Any luck?” she asked when he once again came within speaking range.
“I’d pick them all. How about you decide for me and then we’ll share?”
Share? Like the young nose rubbers were doing right now as they licked each other’s cones? No, no, that was definitely dating territory. Mel must mean something else. She asked, “Using two spoons?”
“Uh...yeah,” Mel said, sounding puzzled, as if no other solution existed for them.
They’d share like two people who had chosen to be in each other’s company for a short time with no expectations. Face it, Daphne Merlotte, Mel did not ask you out on a date. You just wish he had.
“Right, then. How about a scoop of pralines and another of berry blast?”
He rushed to order her suggestion.
Outside, the clouds had amassed and advanced, now only a half mile out. A sharp breeze slapped Daphne’s dress to her thighs.
“We still have a half hour before that storm arrives,” Mel said, without her having to ask, as they took their seats at a bright yellow picnic table on The Big Scoop’s patio.
They had barely taken their first licks when a child’s voice called out, “Mel!”
A cute blonde girl in pink and pigtails skipped over to them. Behind her came a younger version holding the hand of Fran’s nurse. Linda.
“Lydia,” Mel said to the little girl. “You getting ice cream, too?”
“Yes. But Gramma says I can only have one scoop.”
“That’s tough. Hello, Abby. Hello, Linda.”
In the reserve and timbre of those last two words, Daphne heard the undercurrent of a relationship.
“Hello, Mel.” An echo laden with the same understanding. A rivulet of yellow from the lemon-pistaschio ice cream ran down her fingers and she swiped at it with her napkin.
“You remember Daphne Merlotte?” Mel said.
Linda smiled stiffly at her. “Yes. I most certainly do. You’re still here?”
“Her godmother’s resting in town for a few days,” Mel said. “I’m showing her off. Er, around.”
“That’s nice,” Linda said in an artificial tone that implied it wasn’t. She turned to Daphne. “And how’s your godmother doing?”
Another cold trickle of ice cream rolled across Daphne’s knuckles. “As well as can be expected.”
Lydia pulled on Linda’s free hand. “Come on, Gramma. Hurry, before it rains.”
“I better go,” Linda said. She did, without another word to them, guiding her granddaughters inside.
Mel held out a pink taster spoon to Daphne. “Wanna try my berry blast?”
He spoke as if nothing had happened, and she was happy to play along. She took the spoon and scraped off a purply curl.
“So,” Mel said to his ice cream, “I suppose you’re wondering about her and me.”
“It’s really none of my business.”
“We were going together and then we broke up.”
“Oh. She was the one...?”
Mel expertly skimmed the edge of his scoops with his tongue, damming any creamy overflow. He certainly knew his way around an ice-cream cone. “She broke up with me at Tim Hortons. Just before the accident.”
Daphne had bit into her waffle cone and it now came away with a dollop of ice cream, and she had to use her hand to corral the mess into her mouth. Managing all that gave her time to sort through what Mel had just said, and to remember Linda’s reasons for the breakup. Linda’s barely disguised disapproval of Daphne now made sense.
“She thinks you’re settling again by going out with me,” Daphne said. She spooned out a bit of her lemon-pistachio scoop and handed it to him. “Fran and I crashed your breakup. You met me, and in the blink of an eye, you’re over Linda and on to me.”
Mel took the spoon. “Both you and I know that’s not what’s happening, and what Linda thinks about me is—” Mel gouged out a chunk of Daphne’s scoop for himself this time “—irrelevant.”
Daphne had heard the undercurrent of their words, however. “You do care what she thinks.”
“You’re saying I’m just going along with this scheme to get over Linda?”
“No! I mean, not using me per se...” Ice cream was now overflowing the banks of her cone—the green, yellow and pink streams were everywhere. She wiped already-wet napkins over the mess.
“Once you get to that stage, napkins won’t work,” he said. “You’ve got to bear down from the top.”
Yes, he clearly had more experience in these matters. And not a pound to show for it. She bore down. Mel had mostly cone left and he crunched down on it. Done, he wiped his mouth.
She tapped her chin to indicate a spot he’d missed.
“Here,” she said, handing him a spoon. “Help me out here.” He drove the spoon into a spot where her tongue had been. Oh. Well, he didn’t seem bothered. And anyway, they had kissed, and he was no worse the wear.
“Thing is, Linda’s husband died a year ago,” Mel said as he dug out a spoonful of half-melted black cherry. “Four months later, she takes up with me. Probably too soon. If anyone settled, it was her.”
“That’s not true. No one is settling for you.”
“You are,” he said. “I happened to be the only one sitting on your couch when you needed a way to make Fran stay, so you had no choice.”
It hadn’t seemed that way to her. She had caught a lemon he had thrown to her, and suddenly she’d seen—felt—a possibility. A way out. A way...to more. “I maintain standards,” Daphne said. “And your former paramour strikes me as upholding rather high ones herself.”
“Have you ever noticed,” Mel said quietly, “you get all highfalutin with your talk so
metimes?”
She swallowed. A piece of waffle cone stuck inside her throat. She swallowed twice more before it dislodged. “My objective—I was merely attempting—I was just trying to say that Linda and I wouldn’t be with you if we didn’t want to be. I mean, not as a couple, in our case. We both know that despite all appearances to the contrary, you and I aren’t together. I understand you not making that clear to Linda, if only because you want to assert your masculinity—”
“I don’t need to assert nothing,” Mel said, his sudden grammatical devolvement indicating his irritation. “And I’m not settling by having an ice cream with you.”
She wanted to believe him. “I see,” Daphne said. “You’re spending time with a new friend until she moves on.”
“Right,” Mel said.
Cold wind skidded across Daphne’s bare shoulders. “In other words, settling.”
A silly, irrational part of her hoped he’d deny her. Instead, he gathered up the spoons and napkins in preparation for leaving. “We’re about to get rained on,” he said, “I’ll drive you back to the RV.”
She’d made her point, enough said. She pulled out her phone. “Can we take a picture for Fran?”
He let her take a shot of them with the storm clouds behind them. Their heads were tilted together and their smiles were soft. They could easily pass for a couple falling in love.
* * *
LINDA DIDN’T MOVE from her cushioned chair inside her deck gazebo when Tom Baxter stepped into the yard. From the lift of his shoulders, she could tell he’d spotted her right away, despite the screen curtaining her on all sides. Nothing much got past him. Back in high school, he’d noticed her attraction to him, shook his head and guided her over to Craig before she’d even fully comprehended he’d rejected her.
He mounted the short steps to the deck and paused at the closed screen entrance.
“Come in,” she said, because she’d no reason to keep him out. He stepped in and zippered the screen shut behind him. That was Tom. Closed gates and zippered screens. Nothing left undone.
Coming Home to You Page 6