Nice to Come Home To

by Liz Flaherty

  The nurse shoved aside the cubicle curtain. “Oh, good grief,” she said, “you’ve got Sawyer’s Comedy Central going on in here, don’t you?” She made a shooing motion. “Tell them so long, because you’re off to have a nice nap.”

  Cass was already drowsy, but she remembered the loneliness she’d felt when she’d had her mastectomy. Her mother hadn’t come to the hospital even though she’d said she would; her father had been in Idaho and Damaris had been on duty. A pastor had prayed with her and held her hand on the way to the OR, but Cass hadn’t even known his name.

  Today, Luke and Arlie both walked beside the bed to the double doors, where Luke bent to kiss her gently. “See you soon,” he promised, and kissed her again.

  She smiled sleepily at him and raised her hand to wave at Arlie. “Thanks for coming.”

  That was all she knew until Kari Ross woke her.

  From her angst-ridden adolescence on, Cass had always thought love was the most beautiful word in the English language. She still thought that, she reflected sleepily later that afternoon when she was resting in her room at the farmhouse, but benign was a close second. There would be more tests, Kari had warned, but it looked good. It looked very good.

  *

  LUKE HADN’T TOLD Cass why he was making the quick trip to Pennsylvania the Monday after her procedure, other than saying he was looking at a cider press and seeing his sisters and brothers-in-law. There was no point in talking about the interview unless he decided to take the job.

  He met Dan in Hollidaysburg for lunch before touring the facility and talking to its personnel and project managers. He liked the people he talked to and was impressed with the projects the young company had already contracted. The salary and perquisites offer was even more interesting.

  “Take your time deciding,” Dan advised when he left. “I know you’re not available full time until you get your brother graduated, but you can still do some telecommuting and some traveling if you decide to go with the company. I’d like working with you again.” He extended his hand. “Sure I can’t take you to dinner?”

  The other man’s handshake was as firm as it had always been, his gaze as level. Even if Luke wasn’t eager to get back to engineering, he’d be glad to work with Dan Graham again. “No. I’m having it with my sisters and their families, and Jill’s folks are coming over from Johnstown.”

  He loved Pennsylvania, although he seldom thought about how much he missed the mountains until he came back to them. He drove past the house on Jones Street where he’d grown up, slowing enough to note that it still looked as cozy and well kept as when his parents had owned it. He remembered how hard his mother had cried when she’d handed the keys, a houseplant and a manila folder full of appliance warranties to the new owners. It had been her dream home for the twenty years they’d lived in it. He thought it probably still was.

  He drove around the block, stopping just down the street from the house to take a few pictures of it. The concrete drive where he’d taught the girls how to ride without training wheels. The big garage where he’d learned how to use tools and discovered both his interest in and talent for engineering. The window at the back of the house that had been his room. His father had replaced the window twice, but the wind had still whistled in at one of the corners. Luke wondered if it still did.

  He’d had little sympathy for his mother when she’d had to leave the house she loved. She’d lived her dream for two decades—he’d known full well he and Jill would be lucky to get through one. He remembered saying that, too, speaking stiffly in anger and making his mother cry as she’d stood at the window of her strange new kitchen, looking out at a view she neither liked nor wanted.

  On the way out to Collier and Leah’s, he called Detroit. When she answered with, “Is that my biggest boy?” he laughed. And then he apologized. When he told her why, she cried again.

  “Just remember, dreams change,” she said, when he was pulling into the long lane of his sister and brother-in-law’s farm. “Even when you lose them in hard ways, you had them. It makes the journey very worthwhile.” She hesitated, then went on. “Don’t let remembering what you’ve lost close your eyes to new dreams.”

  He parked behind Collier’s pickup and had to sit for a moment, waiting for the sudden moisture to clear from his eyes. People who’d been in the prom night wreck had made “let it go” their mostly unspoken mantra. They didn’t ignore their grief, scars and guilt, but they didn’t let the memories rule their lives, either. It was a lesson, Jack Llewellyn said, that was hard fought and nearly impossible to learn, but they’d fought it and learned it. Most of them had let go and started over.

  He wasn’t entirely sure that was true of Cass, and he knew—although he wasn’t one of the survivors—that it wasn’t really true of him, either.

  The long table in Leah’s big kitchen had every leaf in it and a card table added at the end and it was still crowded with her family, Rachel’s family, Luke and Jill’s parents. The food was plentiful and the conversation noisy. Luke was able to keep the attention away from himself until dessert was finished and his nieces and nephews had left the table to pretend to do their homework.

  Collier went around the table filling coffee cups. “So,” he said, “how did the interview go?”

  Everyone fell silent, waiting for Luke’s answer to a question he hadn’t had the forethought to realize would be asked. He stirred his coffee, not sure what to say and thinking he probably should have told Cass about the interview. All of these people knew, Seth and their parents knew, but he’d purposefully not told the woman he was seeing.

  It felt wrong. Probably because it was.

  “It went well,” he said finally. “They solidified the offer, which was substantial. They’re giving me time to consider it.” The words sounded stiff in his own ears. They made him feel stiff, as if he was talking about someone else, someone he didn’t actually know.

  “It would be great if you came back here,” said Leah. “I’m sure Mom and Dad will when they retire. If we could talk Seth into it, the whole family would be in the same place again.”

  “What about Cass?” Rachel asked. “What does she think of the idea?”

  His mother-in-law spoke into the silence that fell, her soft voice retaining some of the Pennsylvania Dutch she’d grown up speaking. “You are seeing someone, Luke?”

  “It is about time.” His father-in-law answered before Luke could. “And not our business, Anna.”

  “Of course it is our business.” Anna’s eyes were so much like Jill’s it was hard to look into them, but she held Luke’s gaze. “You are as much our son as if you’d been born to us. We want you to be happy. Like Dad says, it’s about time.”

  Luke nodded his head. “We are seeing each other. She is my business partner and a nice woman besides. You would like her, Anna.”

  Jill would have liked Cass, too, although she’d have envied her certain things. Her business acumen. The travel she acknowledged but never talked about—no amount of Dramamine had made any kind of travel anything other than misery to his wife. The number of books on the shelves in the room Cass had made into her office. Even, he thought with a half smile, her height.

  “Well?” said Rachel.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know about the job and I haven’t discussed it with Cass.”

  No one gasped, but he was almost certain his sisters wanted to.

  “If you ask me—” Rachel began.

  “—which he did not,” Abe finished with a nod in his wife’s direction. “Leah, is there more pie?”

  “There is.” Leah got up, waving for Collier to sit back down. “Come on, Luke. You can help me serve it—it will get you off Rachel’s inquisition list.”

  “For the moment,” Rachel muttered. When she glowered at Abe, everyone laughed. Finally, she did, too. “I like her, though. I hope you don’t hold that against her.”

  “She likes you, too.” Luke brought two plates back to the table and
set them at his in-laws’ places. “I don’t even hold that against her.”

  He spent the night at a bed-and-breakfast in Hollidaysburg, texting Cass when he woke.

  How are you feeling?

  Good. I may go to work.

  Well, this was an easy conversation.

  Don’t. See you tonight.

  After a daybreak meeting with Dan and the other managers of the firm, he stopped on his way out of town to gaze up at where Chimney Rocks stood guard on the mountain with a panoramic view of the town. He and Jill had spent a lot of time up there.

  He drove slowly through Duncansville and parked for a long moment in front of the little brick rambler where he’d lived with Jill. It was such a plain house that she’d painted the trim blue and yellow. The colors were still there, right down to the mailbox on the front stoop.

  What a happy place it had been. Spying two tricycles at the side of the house, Luke hoped it still was.

  And then he went to the cemetery beside the church he and Jill had attended all the years they’d known each other.

  She’d chosen her own resting place, taking Seth with her and explaining to him that she would have to leave him soon but that he was always in her heart. The two of them had chosen a shady spot near the back of the small churchyard, and when Luke had wanted to pay for two plots, she’d been adamant that she was flying solo.

  “You’re not even thirty, doofus. What are you going to do? Sit around and mourn forever?”

  Ten years later, he laughed out loud, looking down at the small marker Seth had picked because it was little like Jill and me. He put the coppery chrysanthemums he’d brought into the vases on the concrete base. “You had it right all along, didn’t you, Mrs. Rossiter?”

  Because the time had come. He didn’t think he was anywhere near to wanting either marriage or a family, but he realized it wasn’t realistic to live the rest of his life with memories as its only viable content. No matter how good they were, they were no longer enough.

  The wind rustled through the leaves on the ground, and he realized a tear was trickling down his cheek. “Oh, Jilly.” He traced the letters of her name on the granite. “I’ll always love you.”

  He knew he was being fanciful, but the breeze that dried the dampness on his face felt like a kiss. Fanciful or not, he recognized it as a kiss goodbye.

  Driving away from the old cemetery, he felt lighter, as he had when he’d finally broken down and taken the last of Jill’s clothing to the church’s thrift shop.

  When he saw Cass that night, he would tell her his family had asked about her. He’d talk about Hollidaysburg and how good it had been to grow up nestled there in the Alleghenies. He’d show her the pictures of the house on Jones Street and Chimney Rocks.

  He’d tell her about the job interview, too. He was sure she would be excited for him, although maybe not so thrilled he hadn’t mentioned it in the first place. They’d talked about how much he sometimes missed working in his field—keeping the cider press and the sorting table operational wasn’t always fulfilling—so she wouldn’t be surprised.

  In the airport bookstore, he bought a mystery by Cassandra G. Porter. He’d read some of her books, but not all. The copyright date on The Case of Daisy’s Ashes was the year before, so it was evidently one he’d missed. He always liked the settings of Lucy Garten’s dilemmas, placed as they were right in the Wabash Valley where Miniagua was. Some of the places and people in the stories sounded uncannily like ones he knew.

  The flight from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis stopped in Chicago long enough for him to eat lunch, drink two cups of coffee and read a fourth of the book. At that point, he went back to read Chapter Two again. Because the familiarity of certain parts of the story was progressing beyond uncanny to something downright weird.

  It wasn’t surprising that he saw characters in the book as people he’d seen on TV or in the movies—he figured everyone did that. Tall, slender Lucy Garten, as a matter of fact, appeared in his mind’s eye as a thirtysomething Sandra Bullock. However, Lucy’s mother, who lived in a farmhouse and helped with her daughter’s sleuthing shenanigans, looked like Zoey Durand. Her appearance included Zoey’s elegant sweep of silver hair, dark blue eyes and the floaty tops she loved to wear. She even sounded like Zoey, and she had a special name for her daughter. She called Lucy Cassiopeia.

  Back in the air, Luke read further, getting halfway through the book by the time the plane landed in Indianapolis. He closed the book, dropped it and picked it up again, pausing to stare at the photograph of the author on the inside of the back cover. It was sepia-toned and undoubtedly a terrible picture because there were no distinguishing features to be seen.

  Except one. Cassandra G. Porter’s slim right hand almost totally obscured the lower part of her face, but she wore a narrow band on her thumb. A thumb that was just slightly crooked from when Cass had broken it playing volleyball the week before the prom.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NOT WORKING WAS EXHAUSTING. By noon on Tuesday, Cass had dusted everything she could think of to dust and hauled an unconscionable number of totes labeled “Christmas decorations” down from the attic. While she was at it, she put her summer wardrobe away in the attic storage room—an act which woke her to the realization that she didn’t really have a winter wardrobe. She’d written twenty-seven words in the last chapter of her book-in-progress. When that stalled, she started to knit a baby blanket for the woman who cut her hair, only to turn the yellow yarn into a misshapen dishcloth after the first hour.

  She was a little sore from the biopsy, but not enough to induce her to take a pain pill or remember instructions to take it easy. When she tried to get Misty to play, the cat leaped onto the windowsill and turned around three times before falling asleep with her back to the room. After watching two episodes of Zoey’s favorite television drama, Cass no longer cared what happened to its protagonists.

  Zoey and Damaris went out to dinner and were going on to the book club at the library. Royce went to the lake clubhouse with a group of friends to help decorate for the winter formal. Cass, who often enjoyed being alone, wasn’t enjoying it at all. At eight o’clock, when Luke texted that he would be there in five minutes, she brushed her teeth and her hair and was waiting on the porch when he pulled up.

  “How was your trip?” she called as he walked toward her. “How’s your family?”

  “It was fine. They’re fine. They said to tell you hello and that you should come along next time.” When she came down to him, he bent his head to kiss her, pulling her close with an arm around her waist. “How’s your recuperation coming?”

  “I’m all done with that. I don’t have time.” She drew back, searching his face for whatever was wrong. Because something was. She could feel it as certainly as she could November’s threatening temperature drop.

  He was smiling, but the expression stopped before it reached his eyes. This was what Tony had looked like in the last weeks they’d lived together, when they’d both been giving the marriage its last chance. If she was honest about it, this is what she’d seen in the mirror then, too.

  She wasn’t ready to see it again. She’d known from the first that she and Luke weren’t a forever couple. She’d not only known it; she’d reminded herself of it on a daily basis. But she wasn’t ready for it to end, for the interest to fade away the way interest always did. She wasn’t ready for the blank expression in his eyes.

  When she’d gotten sick during the long winding-down days of her marriage, Tony had offered to stay, to give it another try even if it was only for the duration of her surgery and treatment. She’d turned him down, not wanting to be anyone’s responsibility. Life with her parents had taught her she was better on her own than with someone who didn’t really want her.

  But she didn’t want to be on her own now. Later, maybe, especially if the word benign became wishful thinking instead of fact. She’d be stronger then because she’d have to be. She would have time to remind herself often enough t
hat falling in love was foolish for someone like her. Someone who did better on her own.

  Because she did. At the end of the day she always did.

  “You know,” she said, “you were right about me not going back to work today. I’m not sure I’ll be ready tomorrow, either.” She rested her loosely fisted hand on her left breast, where the tactile sensations were still different than they used to be. Sometimes in the deep of the night when sleep eluded her, she wondered if that was just one more thing she’d lost forever.

  But she couldn’t think about that now. There was raw new pain working its way to the surface that she was going to have to deal with. She squeezed her fingers, tightening the fist until her nails bit into her palm.

  “I think I probably need some more sleep. I’m sorry—”

  He caught her hand in his, turning Nana’s old wedding band around on her crooked thumb. “Volleyball?” he said.

  She frowned, bewildered. Hadn’t she told him that? “Yes. Right before prom. It was swollen up like a sausage. Everyone kept looking at it, or at least I thought they did. You’re pretty full of yourself when you’re seventeen.” She smiled, willing him to return it, with the expression lighting his eyes, too. Maybe his withdrawal was in her imagination. Maybe he—“We both have walking, talking and complaining evidence of that living with us every day.”

  “We do.” But he didn’t smile.

  She shivered, regretting she’d come outside without a jacket on over her flannel shirt. “Do you want to come in?” She forgot she’d told him she was tired and needed more sleep. All she knew was that she was cold and that she didn’t want him to leave. Not with that look in his eyes.

  Without waiting to see if he followed, she pulled her hand from his and went back up on the porch. Not until she opened the door did she look back.

  He still stood at the bottom of the porch steps and he still wasn’t smiling.

  “Luke?” She opened the door, then turned back, half in and half out of the kitchen. “You have to tell me what’s wrong.” She firmed her mouth so that it wouldn’t tremble, and straightened away from where she’d leaned against the doorjamb. She wasn’t going to beg. He could tell her or not. “Whatever you decide to do, I’m going in the house. It’s cold out here. You’re welcome to come inside or you’re welcome to leave. Your choice.”