Meg and Jo

by Virginia Kantra

  “I remember.” Back in high school, borrowing clothes from each other’s closets, fixing each other’s hair for prom. Okay, sometimes Meg loaned me her clothes. She declared she wouldn’t be seen dead in mine. And after that time I singed her hair with the straightening wand, she refused to let me near her head.

  “Maybe you should get John to take you out,” I suggested idly. Not that there was anyplace to go in Bunyan. Not like New York. “Like a date night.”

  “Maybe. Usually we just collapse on the couch and watch This Is Us. Well, I watch. He sleeps. He works so hard.”

  “So do you,” I pointed out.

  “Anyway, I’ve never left the kids with a babysitter.”

  “Okay.” I took another sip of wine. But it seemed a shame my pretty, sociable sister couldn’t get dressed up and go out for one night. “I bet Momma would watch them if you asked her.”

  “I can’t. She’s still having that back pain. Especially at night. And now that her legs are bothering her—”

  I set down my glass. “What back pain?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No, she never said a word.” And neither did you. “How long has this been going on?”

  “I guess . . . Three weeks?”

  “Three weeks,” I repeated, stunned. Stung. Yes, I had sworn never to return to Bunyan. But Meg always kept me in touch. “Has she been to see a doctor?”

  “Dr. Bangs.” Who had been our family doctor since before I was born. “He wants her to get an MRI.”

  Wait. What? “Is she going to be all right?”

  “She says she’s fine.”

  “Right. And if she chopped off her arm, she’d tell you she had a hangnail,” I said. This past summer, when she’d gashed her shin almost to the bone on portable paddock fencing, she’d bandaged it up herself and gone back to herding goats.

  “Don’t worry,” my sister said in her warm, reassuring Meg way. “I’m here.”

  I felt a wave of love along with the teensiest surge of guilt. She was the best sister. The model daughter. “Never a minute’s trouble,” Aunt Phee liked to say. Usually with a glance at me. Not like that one, her look implied.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  “You want to come home?”

  “Ha-ha,” I said.

  Bunyan, North Carolina, could have been the setting for a Lifetime channel movie or a romance novel. Stuck in the middle of miles of farmland, past hand-lettered signs offering pine straw delivery and tarot readings, the small town clung to the bank of the Cape Fear River like a patch of daylilies, sturdy and bright. The lampposts all had flags, the front porches all had rockers and deep eaves. There was a bandstand on the river walk and a farmers’ market on Saturdays. The main street boasted a library, a bank, a struggling art gallery, and three churches. A jumble of storefronts sold postcards and ice cream and secondhand clothes, bait and paint and appliances. It was the kind of place you wanted to raise a family in or move to in retirement. A good place to come from.

  But not where I was going.

  “I’ll see you at Christmas,” I promised. “Only six weeks away.”

  “We’ll miss you at Thanksgiving.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” I said.

  But not enough to jeopardize my job, I thought as we ended the call. Not enough to disrupt my life.

  They would all have to get along without me, Meg and John, Daisy and DJ, Momma and Daddy. Beth. Amy. Even Aunt Phee and old Mr. Laurence.

  And Trey.

  My heart tripped. My decision to stay away had nothing to do with Trey.

  I scowled into my wineglass. Nothing at all.

  * * *

  Iwas fifteen the summer Trey Laurence came to live with his grandfather.

  “The boy next door,” Amy called him, which I thought was ridiculous since he lived a mile away up the road.

  Our big orange barn cat, Weasley, had gone missing the day before. Beth was making herself sick, worrying he had encountered a coyote. More likely a truck, I thought, but I’d promised her to keep an eye out when I went for my run.

  So when I saw the orange shadow slink through the gap in the hedge by the Laurence place, I was relieved. Well, relieved and annoyed, because now I was going to have to break pace, and it was going to be really hard to get my body moving again. Also, I had no idea how I was going to get the cat home. But I pushed through the bushes anyway, scratching my arms, whistling the way Beth did when she was calling the cats to feed them.

  Naturally, Weasley ignored me, streaking toward the antebellum-style house.

  I jogged up a long gravel drive through an avenue of trees like a dirt-scratch farmer come to beg a favor at the Big House, growing hotter and sweatier and more exasperated by the minute. Damn cat. If I hadn’t promised Bethie . . . I whistled again, following the flick of the cat’s tail as it rounded a corner of the porch.

  And there, sitting on the back steps, was a boy scratching our cat under the chin.

  I stopped, eyeing him warily. He was about my age, with dark curly hair and faintly golden skin.

  He looked up at me and smiled. “It’s not a dog, you know. It won’t come when you whistle.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s my cat.”

  “I’ve been feeding it.”

  I noticed the open can of tuna on the ground beside him. “Which explains why Weasley hasn’t come home for two days.”

  “Weasley, huh?” The cat leaned into his fingers. “Ron, I presume.”

  A fellow Harry Potter fan. “Well, he’s definitely not a Ginny. Eighty percent of orange cats are male.”

  He raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement.

  I uncrossed my arms. “I’m Jo March. I live down the road.”

  He nodded. “I see you sometimes. You and your sisters. I’m Trey.”

  Trey. Theodore Laurence III.

  I’d heard of him, of course. In the country, you might not see your neighbors every day, but you talk about them plenty. Even I knew about old Mr. Laurence’s son, who ran off to Miami and married a club singer. He’d died a couple months ago, along with his Cuban-born wife—a boating accident, the gossips said.

  “You’re old Mr. Laurence’s grandson,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never known anybody before whose parents had died. Our dad was in Iraq. If something happened to him, it would be like the sun had gone out of our sky, but our lives would basically go on as usual, anchored in our routine orbits by our mother’s steady gravity.

  “Sorry about your folks,” I said.

  He nodded once, shortly, his black-lashed gaze sliding away.

  “Well . . .” I shifted my weight from foot to foot. “It was nice, uh, meeting you. I gotta run.” Like, literally.

  He uncurled from his seat on the porch. He was taller than me, strong and lean. “What are you, in training or something?”

  I stuck out my chin. “Yeah, actually. I’m on the cross-country team.”

  “What’s your time?”

  “Twenty-three minutes.” Give or take a minute.

  “Pretty good.” His smile flashed, exposing nice white teeth. “For a girl.”

  I grinned back. “Whatever. I don’t see you running.”

  His dark eyes met mine. “Maybe you will.”

  We stood a minute, awkwardly. Something about the way he was looking at me in my sports bra and running shorts made my face get even hotter.

  “So.” I refastened my ponytail. My hair was thick and curly like my father’s, either my best or worst feature, depending on my mood and the humidity. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “What about old Weasley here?”

  I looked at the cat hunkered down at the tuna. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not like I can
carry him home with me. At least now I can tell Beth not to worry.”

  “Beth. Is that your sister?”

  “My middle sister, yeah.”

  He nodded again.

  With a little wave, I turned and loped away, aware of him watching behind me.

  I finished my run—four miles in twenty-nine minutes with time out for the cat, not bad—thumped up our front steps and into the house. Meg was in the kitchen making a salad while Amy set the table.

  I grabbed a pitcher of water from the fridge.

  Amy wrinkled her nose. “Get away. You smell.”

  I ignored her. “Guess what? I just met our new neighbor.”

  “You mean Trey?” Meg asked. “Seriously, Jo, you should take a shower before dinner.”

  “Oh my God, he’s so gorgeous.” Amy sighed dramatically. “Like Edward Cullen.”

  “Language,” Meg said. The Reverend Ashton March’s girls did not take the name of the good Lord in vain. Leastways, not when anybody could hear.

  I lowered the pitcher. “Wait, you saw him?”

  Trey’s hair was black, not bronze. But I could see how my Twilight-obsessed little sister could compare him to a sparkly vampire. There was that golden skin. That tall, lean build. Those almost black eyes, like he was hungry for something.

  “He stopped by while you were gone,” Meg said. “To drop off Beth’s cat.”

  “Oh.” I felt oddly deflated at having my big news scooped. “Well, good.”

  It wasn’t like Trey was my exclusive property or anything.

  But the following Monday at school I discovered that we were in the same grade. We took the same classes—Mrs. Ferguson for AP English, Mr. Clark for chemistry—even if Trey never exerted himself the way I did. “Suck-up,” he’d tease when he came over to our house to study. “Slacker,” I’d retort. We both went out for the school play, both ran cross-country in fall and track in spring. We were friends.

  Which was why it was such a mistake to complicate our relationship with sex.

  I saw that now. Why couldn’t Trey?

  CHAPTER 2

  Meg

  When we got married, I promised John—I promised myself, really—I wouldn’t go running to Momma with every little thing. I didn’t want John thinking I depended on my mother for advice. Anyway, we both agreed a married couple should solve their own problems.

  Not that we were having problems. Every day I told myself how lucky I was to be living the life I’d always wanted. The life my parents had.

  I buckled the twins into the big white Ford Explorer John insisted we needed. They looked adorable in their car seats, all dressed up in matching red-and-white outfits like little Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

  “Juice,” DJ said.

  I kissed his smooth head. “Not now, honey.” Even the lidded cups with straws I used in the car were no guarantee he wouldn’t dribble all over his tiny jacket. “We’re going to the fire station.”

  Daisy bounced in her car seat. “See Santa!”

  “That’s right.” I adjusted the barrette holding down her hair, suppressing a sigh over the loss of her pretty baby curls. “Santa will be there.”

  Along with half the population of Bunyan. Every November, the volunteer fire department and rescue squad held a fund-raiser with free blood pressure checks and a Fire Safety House and Santa riding in on a shiny red fire truck. The early visit gave parents a jump on their children’s wish lists and the local merchants a jump on the mall.

  When we were first married, we’d gone together. John and me. Not to see Santa, of course. But on weekends when he didn’t have a wrestling tournament—or a meet or a practice on Saturday morning—we wandered the stalls at the farmers’ market, holding hands and sampling cider. Part of the community. Everybody knew and liked the Caswell Cougars’ wrestling coach.

  I’d always known I wanted a family, to share the kind of love my parents had. When I binge-watched Pride and Prejudice with my sisters growing up, we all accepted that book-loving Jo was destined for Darcy. But that was okay. One day, I knew, my Bingley would come. I waited patiently while my girlfriends from high school all paired off, while my sorority sisters went out to bars and created online dating profiles, fell in love, and got engaged. In the two years after college, I bought six bridesmaids’ dresses with matching shoes, shopped for shower gifts and wedding presents, organized bridal luncheons and bachelorette weekends in Myrtle Beach and Charleston.

  And then John walked into my life. Into the bank, actually, where I was working as a loan officer. One look at him—those warm, brown eyes in that comfortably handsome face, that too-short hair with the adorable cowlick—and everything else faded to gray while Shania Twain sang “From This Moment On” with all the violins. It was love at first sight.

  “No such thing,” Jo scoffed when I called to tell her. “It’s a biological construct. Chemical attraction to promote pair bonding.”

  For an English major, she could be awfully dense sometimes. I knew better. This was the man I was going to marry.

  After I got pregnant, he quit teaching and went to work for Mr. Laurence at his big car dealership. I missed our time together, the lazy Sunday afternoons, the long Christmas break. The evenings when he used to come home without stress bunching his jaw and shoulders.

  But we couldn’t raise a family on his teacher’s salary, John had explained earnestly. And one of us needed to be home full-time with the twins.

  Well. I knew how his own mother had struggled to make ends meet. I remembered how our lives had changed after Daddy gave up his congregation. Like most parents, we made sacrifices.

  Not that my staying home was a sacrifice.

  In the car, I sang. “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go . . .” Daisy chirped along. DJ kicked his feet in time to the music. Love for them squeezed my chest so tight I could scarcely breathe.

  Bunyan had grown in layers, like an onion. At the center was the historic district full of retired lawyers and B and Bs, within walking distance of the church, the library, and the waterfront. Then the gated communities, springing up like cattails along the river with their boat slips and golf course memberships, where my friend Sallie Moffat lived. Our neighborhood was beyond that, on the road out of town, a neat subdivision bulldozed in between the trailers and old tobacco barns quietly going to ruin under veils of kudzu.

  The parking lot was full of shoppers in town for the farmers’ market. But I found a spot two streets over, down by the waterfront. Slinging my giant mommy bag over my shoulder, I lifted Daisy out of her car seat (“I walk, Mommy!” she insisted), buckled DJ into the stroller, and handed him his blanket. Picking up and moving things—bags of groceries, stacks of mail, scattered toys, the kids . . . That was my day. Actually, that pretty much summed up my life since Daisy and DJ were born. Two and a half years ago, two minutes apart.

  In the delivery room—before DJ was whisked away, before my tummy was stitched and stapled—the nurse held each baby close to my face so I could touch them with one hand, kissing their precious, pink, squishy cheeks while they cried. I’d cried, too, tears of relief and joy and exhaustion. Even John’s beautiful brown eyes were wet. This is it, I’d thought then, overwhelmed with love. Marveling at their tiny fingernails, their adorable pursed lips, the delicate fringe of their eyelashes. This is everything. Finally, like my sisters, I had found my calling. Not a writer like Jo or an artist like Amy or a musician like Beth. I was born to be a mom. Like our mom.

  We made our way along the river walk. Daisy skipped beside me in her sparkly shoes, mostly listening to my admonitions to stay out of puddles and off the grass. The sound of her giggles lifted my heart. Last night’s rain had washed the sky to sparkling blue. The furled masts of sailboats stood out against the bright sky. The white steeples of Bunyan Baptist and First Methodist Church rose over the town. W
here Daddy used to preach before he went to war. Before we moved to the farm, back when we had money.

  I held Daisy’s hand crossing the street; levered the stroller over a storm drain and onto the curb. The back wheels caught. I was stuck like a rock in a stream of holiday shoppers, couples strolling hand in hand, parents with their children in tow or riding on their fathers’ shoulders.

  Not a problem. I yanked. Nothing.

  There was a time when I would have looked around for help. When guys leaped forward to open my door or motioned me to go ahead in the checkout line or at intersections. Now? Not so much. I was a mom now. It was like the stroller had some magic power that rendered me invisible to men.

  I set my teeth and shoved.

  A strong hand gripped the front of the stroller and lifted. The wheels cleared the curb. I looked up, smiling my thanks.

  A man—a young man with a short, reddish beard—smiled back. “Heya, Meg. Meg March, right?”

  I straightened, flustered. “I . . . Yes? I mean, no. It’s Meg Brooke now.”

  “From the bank, right?”

  I tugged at my sagging T-shirt. Smoothed my hair. He was very cute. And vaguely familiar, which in a town the size of Bunyan was no surprise. “Yes?”

  He gave a short, satisfied nod. “I thought so. It’s Carl,” he said. “Carl Stewart.”

  “The sweet potato guy.” I remembered now. His family owned a farm on the other side of town. “You applied for a loan.”

  Carl had graduated from NC State a few years ago, full of plans to convert the farm to an organic operation. He’d started implementing organic practices right away. But because of regulations, his produce couldn’t be certified as organic for three full years. He’d needed a bridge loan to meet expenses until then.

  “And got it, thanks to you.”

  I flushed a little with pleasure. “You got it because you qualified.”

  “After you went to bat for me.”

  “All part of the job.” My favorite part, actually—guiding applicants through the loan process, making sure they had the best shot at getting the credit they needed to upgrade operations or expand their businesses. The loan business wasn’t all about assessing risk. It was helping people realize their dreams. “So, how’s the organic farm business going?”