“Have you been drinking?” Farrin asked.
Janie looked over at her, a light-headed expression on her face. “No. I’ve just . . . been sick today. I shouldn’t have come.”
That would have certainly made Farrin’s evening better. Ironic that they should meet up again so close to the gym, where Janie had stung her like the queen bee she’d been. Well, Janie didn’t look like the queen of much now.
”Well, if you’re okay, I’ll get back to dinner.” Farrin turned and headed for the door a second time.
“Actually, could I ask you a favor?”
Farrin suppressed the urge to yell “No” at the top of her lungs. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What?” The word cut the air with its frosty, hateful edge. So much for being detached and devoid of emotion.
“I need to go home, but I’m not sure I can make it to my car.”
“Who did you come with? I’ll go get him.” And let whoever that unfortunate soul was deal with the situation.
“I came by myself.”
Farrin thought it strange that Janie had come alone and that she didn’t look embarrassed by the fact. Of course, she could be too busy being sick.
“Brittany or Amber then?”
“No.” The urgency in the word caught Farrin off guard and winded Janie so much that she sucked in air.
So, all was not well within the Terrible Trio. A flush of pure pleasure made Farrin smile.
Without a word, she stepped next to Janie. Best to get this over with. The quicker she got Janie to her car, the sooner she didn’t have to look at her anymore.
Janie either understood her need to avoid conversation or was too weak to speak because she simply held onto Farrin’s shoulder to brace herself as they exited and headed out the side door rather than parade back through the gym.
The trek across the parking lot took an eternity. “Which car is yours?”
Janie looked up, squeezed Farrin’s shoulder harder as if her head was swimming for a moment, then pointed at a little Subaru wagon. If Farrin had picked a car out of the parking lot to be Janie’s, this would have been the last one. A wagon. But it’d been fifteen years. Janie likely had kids. Another illustration of diverging paths.
She couldn’t imagine having kids or a wagon. It’d been so long since she’d had a car that it had felt strange to drive the one from the airport. At least it was a recent model. Janie’s looked like it had some miles on it. It appeared well taken care of, but it hadn’t rolled off the assembly line yesterday.
“Are you sure?” Farrin asked.
Janie uttered a barely discernable laugh. “I’m pretty sick, but I still know my own car.”
Farrin froze. Even Janie’s weak half laugh made Farrin’s skin crawl. It brought back too many bad memories. And she didn’t see any humor in the situation, not in Janie being sick, not in fate placing her as the one who had to help Janie out in her moment of need. Maybe she’d earn cosmic brownie points for this.
Janie removed her hand from Farrin’s shoulder when they reached her car. She fumbled in her purse before pulling out a set of keys. Her hand shook as she guided the key into the lock while she placed her other hand atop her car to steady herself. She didn’t ask for further help, but Farrin didn’t turn and hurry away as the teenager inside her urged her to do. The adult held her ground.
Even in the faint light cast by the security bulbs, Farrin saw a sheen of perspiration around the edges of Janie’s face. Janie opened the car door and sank into the driver’s seat. Farrin had never seen such a look of utter relief.
“I should have stayed home,” Janie said.
“Yeah, you should have.” Why had she felt it necessary to come share her germs with everyone?
Because she was selfish. Some things never changed, no matter how much time passed.
Maybe the reunion was important to Janie. After all, for some people, high school was the pinnacle of their life and they couldn’t get past that, wanted to revisit it as often as possible.
How incredibly sad, or pathetic, as the case might be.
“Thanks for your help,” Janie said. “I’m sorry I took you away from the party.”
For most people, Farrin would likely have said it was no trouble. She didn’t want to consider that her years in the cutthroat fashion world had sucked all the humanity out of her. But tonight it was going to look like it because she couldn’t utter a word of assurance. She simply stepped out of the way of the car door, turned and walked back toward the glow of the gym.
While not in her top form, she was reasonably calm by the time she re-entered the gym to find the dishes had been cleared away, the music had re-started and several couples had migrated to the dance floor. Even though they’d graduated in the 1990s, the DJ was evidently fond of ‘80s tunes. Now, he had Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” going.
She needed something to drink. She headed for the bar at the edge of the room, only remembering it wasn’t a true “bar” when she stepped into line. Dry county. Didn’t the local officials know people needed a glass of wine or a good stiff drink every once in a while? She’d have to settle for a Coke and hope the extra sugar on top of the cheesecake, the slice of Tammie’s cake and the dipped cone didn’t make her bounce off the walls.
She listened to the lyrics of the song and almost laughed. She wondered what Jon Bon Jovi, Ritchie Sambora and the rest of the band’s members thought when they looked back at their outfits and super hairsprayed hair. Well, it had set them on the road to long-term success. She could admire that.
The irony of the song slapped her in the face when the man in front of her turned with his drink. Drew Murphy.
Could this night possibly get any worse? What had she done to deserve having the most painful night of her life replayed for her in vivid detail? Yes, she worked people hard, probably snapped sharp comments more than she realized. But were those things so awful that history had to taunt her with this gym, Janie Carlisle and Drew Murphy all in the same night? If she hadn’t ridden with Tammie and Kurt, she would calmly order and sip her drink until the glass was empty, say goodbye to Tammie and simply drive away.
And this time, she would never come back.
“Farrin,” Drew said in a surprised tone, as if he hadn’t known she was there. Considering she’d given the keynote, it’d have been a bit difficult to miss that fact.
Though how had she managed to miss him, even taller and more handsome than he’d been at eighteen? Despite the dim lighting in the gym, she knew the exact color of his dark coffee eyes. While he’d had short-cropped hair during his days as a wide receiver on the Oak Valley Bears football team, he now wore it longer. Not long as in Bon Jovi hair. No, his hairstyle spoke of freedom, a gust of wind, ease. She liked it, she liked it a lot.
Too bad he was a horse’s ass.
She broke eye contact and moved to take the spot at the drink stand he’d vacated. “Hello.” She glanced toward the bartender. “Coke please, with a twist of lemon.”
“I’m sorry I missed your speech. I hear it was good.”
So he hadn’t been there earlier. She wasn’t losing her mind after all.
“I hope so.”
“I had to work late on a case or I wouldn’t have missed it.”
Why did he care one way or the other? He’d certainly not been scrambling to lap up her every word fifteen years ago. More like burning rubber to get away from her.
“Oh.” She was just too damned exhausted to make small talk while pretending Drew had never rejected her profession of love. She took her Coke and turned back toward the table she’d shared with Tammie all evening. She uttered a “Good to see you” without much feeling and drifted away from the man who was once the boy she’d thought hung the moon, the stars and every bright, shining planet in the night sky.
As she walked toward the table, she hated how she regressed in age with each step. She knew he was watching her, and by the time she sat down, she felt sixteen and lonely again. Lonely a
nd fighting self pity because every crush she’d ever experienced had not been reciprocated. When she’d fallen for Drew Murphy, she’d felt it was more than a crush. The irrefutable evidence in her teenage mind had been that even though other crushes had come and gone, what she’d felt for Drew had been so much more. The yearning, the ache, the endless tears she’d shed.
That stupid letter she’d written to him laying her feelings bare.
With the benefit of more than a decade of adulthood behind her, she saw those intense feelings for what they were — raging hormones. Even so, that old loneliness settled in her chest.
She turned her attention to Tammie. “So, have they announced Knoxville’s Best Baker for this year?” Tammie had won the honor bestowed by the readers of the Knoxville newspaper three years running.
Tammie stared at her. “You do know who that was, don’t you?”
“Who, Drew? Yeah. He’s still recognizable, unlike some of our former classmates.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“What, Drew being here?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure. It was a long time ago. We were kids, I was a stupid one.”
Farrin tried to ignore the thickness of the words she spoke, the bitterness they left on her tongue. She hadn’t thought about Drew or Janie in years, but only a few hours of exposure to Oak Valley and she felt herself reliving all those old, raw feelings.
“Not stupid, just normal.”
“Whatever. Like I said, it was forever ago. I prefer to focus on the here and now. Like how Sweet Everythings is doing.”
Farrin exhaled a silent sigh of relief when Tammie let the topic of the past die and turned her comments to how she’d been thinking about expanding, perhaps opening a second location for the bakery she’d started six months out of college on a five-hundred-dollar loan and the strength of her double business and food science majors from UT. In those early days, Tammie had done nothing but keep herself up to her elbows in flour and sugar. She’d baked standard wedding and birthday cakes to fund her experimentation with new recipes. And the experiments had paid off. Now she was known throughout Knoxville as the woman with the magic touch with cakes and cookies.
“Do you still have dreams about recipes?” Farrin asked.
“Dreams?” Kurt asked.
“Yeah, this girl used to wake up in the middle of the night after having a dream about some new way to combine ingredients to come up with a cake recipe or some to-die-for frosting. I’d wake up at two or three in the morning and she’d have her little desk lamp on scribbling down thoughts on index cards.”
Kurt looked at Tammie. “You never told me that.”
“I’d forgotten about it.”
“So you don’t dream about life-size cookies anymore?”
“Oh, I still have cooking dreams, but I’m usually too tired to get up. Sometimes I remember them the next morning, sometimes I don’t.”
“Well, I’m glad you got up when you had that one about the strawberry cream cheese pound cake.”
“Me, too,” Kurt said with a light in his eyes and the hint of a laugh in his words. “Hey, why don’t you dream me a solution to getting our past-due clients to actually pay us.”
Tammie gave him a playful swat on the arm. “The day I start dreaming about people who buy shingles and tin roofing, you can just lock me up because I’ve lost my mind.”
Farrin thought Kurt’s job at a large roofing supply manufacturer sounded dreadfully boring, but she’d never say that to his face. He seemed to enjoy his job and had always appeared to be in a good mood during college and during the few times she’d seen him since then. And he was never outwardly stressed, so maybe she ought to envy him instead.
Tammie was in the middle of a story about how she was searching various neighborhoods in Knoxville’s suburbs for her second store location when Farrin sensed someone step up next to her. Tammie stopped speaking mid-sentence.
“Hey, Drew,” Marcus said. “When did you get here?”
“A few minutes ago.”
Farrin resisted the urge to move over one seat to the vacant chair beside her to put some distance between her and Drew’s hulking form.
“Farrin, would you like to dance?”
Too little, too late, pal. “No, thank you.”
No one spoke into the ensuing silence, not until Keely pulled her arm from the back of her husband’s chair. “Well, I’ll dance. Greg here refuses to get off his butt, so I’m in need of a partner.”
Keely hopped to her feet, grabbed Drew by the arm and dragged him toward the dance floor where yet another late ‘80s hair band ballad had couples dancing and remembering.
Once everyone at the table had fallen back into conversation, Tammie leaned toward Farrin. “Why didn’t you dance with Drew?”
Farrin met Tammie’s gaze, wondering how the girl who’d once threatened to rip out Drew Murphy’s eyes could ask that question. “Why should I?”
“You said you were over him.”
“I am. And if I’m over him, why in the world would I want to spend time with him?”
“He actually turned out to be a nice guy.”
“Well, hooray for him.”
“He looked really interested.”
“That would be a few years too late, wouldn’t it?”
“Better late than never?” Tammie scrunched her eyebrows and gave a little shrug.
“Not really. Listen, I’m tired. I’ve been working a lot lately and not getting enough sleep. I don’t suppose Oak Valley has gone really big time and gotten a taxi service, has it?”
“No, not sure a cabbie could make much of a living when it’s exactly one point seven miles from one side of town to the other.” Tammie pulled her purse from the back of her chair. “I’m pretty tired, too. I’ve been up since five. We can go.”
Out of some annoying, inherent, self-sacrificing kindness that came from growing up in the South, Farrin almost said she hated to cut short Tammie’s evening. But she couldn’t force the selfless words past her lips. She wanted to leave, and she wanted to leave now before the song ended and Tammie’s theory regarding Drew was tested. It wasn’t exactly running from the past, it was strategic avoidance of a situation she had no desire to confront. There was a difference, really. At least that’s what she told herself as she followed Tammie and Kurt toward the exit.
Farrin couldn’t banish the feeling that her past in the form of Drew was going to come running after her any minute. That was conceited, thinking she was so important that Drew would chase through a parking lot after her just for a dance. She shook her head and wondered if some sort of strange phenomena had ever occurred in Oak Valley — an asteroid strike, a visit by aliens, something along those lines — that would explain how she seemed to turn into a different person here, a younger, more insecure version she hadn’t been in years.
Well, this was the end of it. She was allowing these things to twist her mind and stomach. No longer. Already she was going through her to-do list for the next twenty-four hours. Work, sleep, speech, drive to airport, work on plane, take cab home, work some more. Hopefully, somewhere in all those segmented work sessions, her muse would deign to make an appearance. If she didn’t soon, Farrin was tempted to mentally fire her and put an ad in the Times. Wanted: one fabulously creative and prolific designer’s muse.
Farrin walked slower than Tammie and Kurt, but that was okay because she wasn’t in a talking mood. Plus, her heels were killing her feet. She wore heels all the time, but not these strappy little demons whose sole point of existence was to cause her to break both her ankles.
She scanned the lines of cars, everything from Buicks to Toyotas to Dodge Rams to minivans. One little Subaru wagon caught her eye. And then she saw the fall of white blond hair. Janie slumped half in, half out of her car. “Shit.”
“What is it?”
Farrin glanced at Tammie, who’d stopped and turned back toward her.
“Give me a minute, okay?”
“Did you forget something?”
Farrin shook her head. She looked back at Janie but still saw no movement. What if Janie had croaked right here in the parking lot? What a cap that would be to this less-than-stellar trip.
“Farrin?”
“Uh, no. Let me check on someone.”
As she neared Janie’s car, Farrin heard the click of Tammie’s heels and Kurt’s more solid footfalls behind her and waved for them to stay back without looking at them. They slowed but didn’t completely halt.
Farrin’s heart leapt into her throat when she reached the rear of Janie’s car. What if she really had died? She’d never seen a dead person before — outside of a funeral home that was. What did you do if you found a dead body?
She almost turned away and handed the task off to Kurt, but she pushed the disturbing images away. She opened her mouth to speak but started when Janie lifted her head, then yelped.
They stared at each other as the surprise ebbed away.
“Are you okay?” Farrin asked.
The sheen of sweat made Janie’s face shiny, but she rubbed her arms as if cold. Maybe Janie was coming down with the flu. And Farrin had breathed in all those germs. Great. She wondered if Janie would be the one who kept showing up in her life every few years just to make her miserable. Would she steal Farrin’s lover someday, turn her friends against her? Would Janie work at the hospital where Farrin ended up in her old age and mix up her meds, sending her to an early grave?
Janie licked her lips, which looked dry. “I’m a little sicker than I thought. I hoped if I rested for a bit, maybe the nausea would go away.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to stave off another wave. “No such luck.”
Farrin bit her tongue. She should really leave Janie to fend for herself, but damned if she didn’t look pitiful and totally spent. Her ashen face and watery eyes torpedoed the whole “paybacks are hell” attitude.
“Do you need someone to drive you home?” The people Farrin worked with could say whatever they wanted — she was too darn nice for her own good. Okay, so perhaps there was the tiniest bit of morbid curiosity about what kind of house Mommy and Daddy Carlisle had no doubt built for their precious, perfect daughter. She could live in a house as big as the county and it wouldn’t change the fact that it was still in Oak Valley.
Dress Me in Wildflowers Page 5