It was going to be a long night.
It already was.
“So, Lyle,” Burke said, and the edge to his voice caught my attention. “Have you been married before?”
“Nope,” Lyle said.
Burke looked at him in silence for just a little longer than was comfortable. “Why is that?”
Lyle shrugged. “Never found the right girl, I guess.”
“Mm.” Burke nodded in a way that said, Bullshit, louder than words could have. What was he thinking?
“Well, you have now,” I said, sounding more chirpy than I meant to. “You hit the jackpot with Dottie.”
“Exactly,” Burke murmured.
Apparently Lyle didn’t hear that. “I sure do love her,” he said.
“Ooh, go on.” Dottie giggled.
“I think you guys will be really happy together,” I said, feeling Burke bristle beside me. He was clearly against this marriage. “In fact—”
I was interrupted, thank goodness, by the surprisingly high, reedy voice of the butler. “Asparagus amandine, roasted baby beets, and scalloped truffle potatoes—which would the lady like?”
Under normal circumstances? All of them.
Tonight? A nice hemlock salad would have really hit the spot.
A little cyanide dressing on the side. Just in case.
“Potatoes, please,” I said, thinking they would be the easiest to dish out quickly, so he could move on and the Spotlight of Service could move off me.
They had a much easier time with everyone else, and it seemed to take the same amount of time to serve the other four collectively as it had to get me to dither my way through a choice.
I was relieved when they left the room, only to have the rebounding horror of seeing them return with more platters.
“Salad of microgreens, arugula, caramelized shallots, and roasted rainbow carrot, topped with champagne vinaigrette?” she offered in a practiced voice.
“Sure.” Wouldn’t want to insult anyone. “Just a touch, though, thanks.” I watched her scoop a pile onto a salad plate I hadn’t previously noticed.
Then, of course, the pièce de résistance.
As if in schlocky slow motion, he lifted the lid of his platter to reveal my grandmother’s obnoxiously colorful Tupperware bowl, with a gleaming silver serving spoon poking out of it like found treasure buried under an old tree.
Talk about cartoons! The plastic somehow looked even more plastic, brighter than a special-edition crayon, when perched on a gleaming antique silver platter.
“Macaroni salad?” he asked, somehow with a straight face, though I swear there was a smirk in his voice.
I can’t honestly ever remember being so embarrassed in my life. “You know, I don’t think that really goes with the rest of this. I was under the impression that this was”—I looked at Dottie pointedly—“a kind of picnic or something very informal.”
“Well, honey, this is informal,” she said, then gestured acknowledgment at the servers. “Oh, I know this all seems very stuffy, but look who’s here, it’s just us. We’re family. What would be more comfortable and casual than this?”
A firing squad?
“I can think of a few things,” Burke murmured.
“What’s that, honey?” Dottie asked, straining in his direction.
“Casual and comfortable aren’t the first words that come to mind as far as describing this meal,” he said to her. “Now, you know that, Dottie.”
“Nice, Burke,” Frank said. “Make everyone feel awkward. By the way, I tried the macaroni salad in the kitchen, it’s really good.” He looked at me with utter sincerity. “Seriously, it’s really good. I love that stuff.”
Burke just scoffed. Didn’t even bother to dignify it with an answer. I remembered when he’d figured out that technique with Frank.
It drove Frank crazy.
Obviously it wasn’t fair to make like Burke was the reason everyone might be feeling awkward right now, but I didn’t know what to say to ease the situation. If anything, I was the spark in this powder keg, and the quieter I remained, the better.
The servers made their way around the table and, to my utter humiliation, everyone politely took a splat or two of macaroni salad on their plates next to the elegant entrées.
“I love macaroni salad,” Lyle even said, tucking in and looking for all the world like he really meant it. “My dad made the best, believe it or not. He’d add bacon or ham hocks.” He took a bite and kept talking. “He was a barbecue man, and all summer long he’d do all the cooking. He wouldn’t even let my mother do the dishes, he’d just rinse them off with a hose and send me and my brother in to scrub them. The ones that weren’t paper, that is. We’d just throw the paper ones away. Isn’t that convenient? Just”—he made a throwing gesture—“threw ’em away.”
“Paper plates are very convenient,” Dottie agreed.
And the conversation went on like that. Paper plates, and a particularly long detour into doilies, which Lyle had quite a lot of feelings about, surprisingly.
So I had no warning that the conversation was going to take such a bad turn until it was upon me. We were discussing the sale of the farm, that Dottie felt ready since that chapter of her life was over and that Frank felt ambivalent about it since he didn’t have the time to be a part-time farmer on the weekends.
Burke said nothing, but I felt his unhappiness pulsating from beside me.
“If there were children who could inherit it, I might think twice about it,” Dottie said, and I felt a little pinch of sadness because of course I had once expected to have the very children she was referencing.
“Well, I’m not looking at marriage and kids anytime soon,” Frank said, “and of course with Burke’s first marriage,” then he amended, “only marriage, I mean. That didn’t turn out so good, so it’s not like we’ve got any real expectation of impending heirs.”
I kind of heard the whole sentence, but, honestly, I really lost my focus after the first seven words or so. Marriage. It was a shock every time I thought about it. I looked at him and he must have seen the question in my eyes.
“It was brief,” he said … briefly.
It was as if everyone else in the room faded into the background. “Care to elaborate?” I asked quietly.
He very deliberately took a bite of macaroni salad and shook his head. “Nope.”
I resisted an urge to jab him with my elbow.
Some habits die hard.
Okay, so at this point, I will admit the tension around the table was getting a little thick. Clearly no one wanted to interrupt—even when people are being rude, if they’re marching forward with a strong agenda, it’s hard to jump in front of them and say, Hey, let’s just have some more macaroni salad and get along.
Got it.
But at the same time, there was no stopping this boulder from rolling through the maze in this cave, just like something from Indiana Jones. The truth had been unleashed and, while I didn’t want to be knocked over by it, I had to know it in its entirety before I could take an easy breath again.
I didn’t taste anything else I ate.
When the meal was finally over, after what seemed like hours, and everyone had gotten up from the table, I told Dottie I had to leave.
Her expression dropped. “Are you sure, honey? I was hoping maybe you’d stay to play cards!”
She meant it. She actually thought the trauma had passed, that things were better, and that we could all sit down and play a nice game of cards together. I wished I could. I wished it was that easy for me. It should have been. It had been a long time and there was no need for me to feel weird about something that had no more relevance to my day-to-day life than an old episode of Full House.
“I’ve got a lot of stuff to do,” I said, and smiled in what I hoped was a firm but inarguable way. “Thank you so much for dinner.” I started to leave but was stopped by Burke.
“I’ll walk you out to your car,” he said.
I met hi
s eyes and felt that same stupid shiver of pleasure I always felt when I met his eyes. It was immediately replaced by memory, and then resolve. “That’s really not necessary.”
“I believe you mean thank you.”
“No, I mean no.”
“There are bears out there,” he said with a hint of a smile.
“And wolves in here,” I said, unable to keep from smiling back. Arrrgh! Why was it so easy for him to disarm me? “I’d rather take my chances with the bears.” Carrying a picnic basket and wearing a dress made of salami and Snickers bars.
“I think you’ll fare all right. You’ll make it all the way into your car without incident, I guarantee it.” He put a hand to my elbow and guided me toward the door. My skin felt warm under his touch.
“Good night!” Dottie said, and I heard the subtle excitement in her voice.
“Good to meet you,” Lyle added, and there was nothing more to his tone than that.
I didn’t know where Frank was at that point, but I was glad not to be in the middle of a round two between him and Burke.
As soon as Burke and I got out into the cool night air, I shifted my arm to lose his grip. “So it’s interesting that you did get married after all,” I said, not too sharply—I was making an effort—but I was afraid my possessiveness came through in my voice.
“Jealous?”
Obviously. “Just surprised.”
“It was short-lived. But it’s not like you didn’t have a chance first.”
The gravel of the driveway crunched under our steps.
“Actually it’s a lot like I didn’t have a chance,” I said, wishing to God I were alone. There was no way this conversation could possibly end well. No way. “When it was all said and done I felt like I’d never stood a chance with you.”
“Ridiculous.”
I stopped and looked at him under the dim drive lights. “What’s the story?”
“Does it matter?”
Dread threaded through me. “Tell me.”
There was a moment of cicadas and crickets before, “You really want to hear it?”
Trepidation built in my chest like a big pile of Jenga blocks, ready to crash down unexpectedly at any moment, given one wrong move. “I’m sure I don’t.”
“Then I won’t.”
“Do.”
He shrugged. “It was ill-advised.”
I took an uneven breath. “All your marriages seem to be.”
“Lucky for my brother.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“He scored big-time, didn’t he? Got to run off with the girl he’d always had the hots for, and screw me over at the same time. You played right into his hand.”
“Are you saying he wasn’t telling me the truth?” I asked, and at that moment I could have believed whatever he said to me.
“I don’t even know exactly what he said to you. All I know is that he stopped the wedding and told you something that ended seven years of you and me together. Then you guys got in a car together and drove off to California.”
Wow, he didn’t even know where we’d gone.
Those two really didn’t talk.
If Facebook had been around at the time, I would have been checking in all over town, probably, drunkenly trying to stick it to Burke in whatever lame way I could. But it wasn’t and I hadn’t, so apparently this secret remained buried.
And I saw no reason to resurrect it.
“I notice you’re avoiding the question of your marriage,” I obfuscated. “Who was it?” I was sure he was going to say Sarah Lynn. Absolutely sure. As if somehow Burke Morrison and Sarah Lynn had gotten married and all of the town had missed it or failed to talk about it, even though other tidbits, like Jennifer Kearny’s gall bladder removal had practically made it to the front page of the local Gazette.
If he said Sarah Lynn, or any name I knew, I would have to go get one of the ceremonial pistols off the wall of the library and hope to god it had a bullet in it, or at least enough gunpowder residue to make some sort of impact. Was that even possible? Probably not. In all likelihood, Burke would report something surprising and upsetting and I’d go into the library, take a pistol down, hold it to my temple and pull the trigger for an anticlimactic click, and then have to simply clock myself with it and wake up on the sofa with a bag of Dottie’s frozen peas on my head.
At the very least, I could give myself credit for thinking ahead and bracing myself, as strongly as possible, for whatever he was going to say.
“No one you know,” he said.
“So she has no name?” I couldn’t help being snarky. None of this was my right to know, so I didn’t know why I was being so ugly about it, but I couldn’t shut up. “Or is that her name? Was she foreign? Nooneyouknow. I don’t know—that’s not Italian, right?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “So who was it?”
Now I needed to know. This was out there, it existed whether I wanted it to or not, and I couldn’t make it not true simply by not thinking about it. At this point, I couldn’t imagine going home with only the memory of his no one you know to comfort me. Technically he could have said that about Sarah Lynn, because I didn’t really even know her, I just disliked her on sight and on principle.
So this could well be someone I was familiar with—whether anyone else would characterize that as knowing her or not—thus, the potential for further anguish was alive and well as far as I was concerned.
Though, to be honest, the potential for anguish was always alive and well where Burke was concerned, which was why I’d worked so damn hard to get him out of my head for so long.
Now I couldn’t let it go. I was a dog on a meaty bone.
“Perry Watkins.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Perry Watkins.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
He laughed. “I told you that.”
“You married someone named Perry? Are you serious? Isn’t that a guy’s name?”
He shook his head. “Not in this case, no.”
“Where did you meet her? How long did you know her? How long were you married?”
I saw his smile flash. “I thought you didn’t care.”
“I don’t,” I lied. “What did she look like?”
“Small, dark-haired, dark-eyed. You’d say she looked like Audrey Hepburn and I’d disagree and we’d probably have an argument about it, but there’s your point of reference.”
I almost laughed. We never agreed on celebrity look-alikes. That was a weird thing about us. We would be able to knock heads over whether or not someone looked like Jon Bon Jovi or Dave Chappelle. But I was both touched and saddened by the fact that he knew me well enough to know who I’d think she looked like.
On the other hand, I didn’t like that she was an adorable little bright-eyed pixie with a waist the circumference of string cheese and a big white smile, which was how I was picturing her now.
But this was all crazy. It wasn’t my right to care about this at all. “Well, you’ve always had good taste.”
“If bad sense.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s not a mistake I’ll be making again,” he said, hooking his thumbs on his belt loops. “Getting married, I mean.”
And, yes, I had left him at the altar. Yes, I had rejected him. Yes, the choice had been mine and I’d chosen not to be with him.
I knew all of that.
So why did it bug me to hear him say that?
It had to be some strange, leftover impulse deep inside. Some part of me that hadn’t gotten the news that the relationship had run its course and long since passed.
“That’s what you say now,” I said anyway, I suppose trying to goose him into some openness.
“Nope. I’m a lone wolf. A pack of one.” He was always quoting movies, I think because he knew it drove me crazy. “I don’t need anyone else.”
And there it was again, that pang of hurt that he didn’t want me, even though I’d been the one to end it.
&nb
sp; “Whatever,” I said. Childish.
He laughed. “Why does that bug you?”
“It doesn’t. I have no stake in what you do.”
“That’s right. Someday you’ll find a decent guy and go with him.”
“I don’t want anyone,” I said, parroting him even though I hadn’t set out to. “I’m a lone wolf too.”
“You’re no wolf.” He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me close. He hesitated only for a split second before kissing me. Mouth open, tongue warm and familiar against mine. Funny how something like that comes back to you. We’d done this a million times in our lifetimes and it never, ever got old. For all the times I might have been annoyed with him or straight-up livid with him or tired or sick, there had never been one time I didn’t feel like kissing him. There had never been a time when his mouth on mine didn’t send a thrill straight from my heart right down to my core.
Immediately I wanted him. I wanted more. I wanted everything. And I mean immediately. There was no stopping to think, to assess, to consider the pros and cons. It was probably all cons, but in this moment I didn’t care because that’s what his kiss did to me.
It was a chemical reaction.
I cupped his face with my hands, skidding my thumbs across his high cheekbones, like I’d done countless times before. The shadow of his beard was a little rough against my skin. I could remember coming home, red-faced and raw and happy after making out with him for hours in the back of his old Chevy.
Everything about this was wonderfully familiar, like a favorite dessert, even while everything in my head was screaming for me to stop. It was madness, this complete lack of control. Before tonight, the last time I’d seen him was, literally, stomping out of the church in a filthy wedding dress with gum on my ass. That had been his last view of me.
Now, after a couple of hours of sniping back and forth like children, over issues we either should have solved years ago or never revisited at all, I was wrapped up in his arms, lips locked, standing on the driveway to a property I’d once thought I would never see again.
Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger Page 12