The Great Escape

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “Not going to happen. She’d bully you into giving it to her.”

  “I can stand up to Temple Renshaw.”

  He could be a world-class prick when he wanted to, like right now, with his ceramic pig missing and those leather ties twitching on top of her bare shoulders. “You couldn’t even stand up to Ted Beaudine. And he’s the nicest guy in the world, right?”

  She was a babe in the woods when it came to dealing with pricks. Her chin shot up, her small jaw jutted, but beneath her bluster, he saw the guilt she still couldn’t shake off. “What do you mean, I couldn’t stand up to him?”

  This was exactly the kind of personal conversation he’d told himself he wouldn’t have with her, but he didn’t feel like backing off. “Your aversion to getting married didn’t just hit you on your wedding day. You knew it wasn’t right long before that, but you didn’t have the guts to tell him.”

  “I didn’t know it wasn’t right!” she exclaimed.

  “Whatever gets you up in the morning.”

  “Not eggs and bacon, that’s for sure.”

  He gave her his badass sneer, but it wasn’t as effective as usual because he couldn’t take his eyes off those little leather ties. Just one tug …

  “I want my food back,” she said.

  “It’s in the trash.” He pretended to inspect a broken drawer handle, then eased away from the counter. “I’ll open the pantry whenever you want. Just don’t eat any of your crap around Temple.”

  “My crap? You’re the one who thinks Frosted Flakes are antioxidants!”

  She had that right. He jerked his head toward the refrigerator. “Help yourself to whatever’s there. We’ll be getting deliveries twice a week. The fruits and vegetables are coming later today.”

  “I don’t want her lousy organic food. I want my own.”

  He understood the feeling.

  Overhead, the treadmill began to run. He told himself not to ask, but … “You don’t happen to have any of your bread stashed away someplace, do you?”

  “A fresh loaf of cinnamon raisin where you can’t find it,” she retorted. “Eat your heart out. Oh, wait. You can’t. It’s not organic.”

  She stomped outside and slammed the door behind her.

  SHE’D LIED ABOUT THE BREAD. She also hadn’t slammed a door since she was fourteen. Both felt really good.

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t brought her yellow pad with her, and she’d promised herself she’d write for real today. She wasn’t going back in through the kitchen, so she cut around behind the house and mounted the three steps that led to the deck outside her bedroom. She’d left the sliding doors open to catch the breeze. The screen caught in the track. She gave it an extra nudge and stepped inside.

  Panda was already there.

  “I want my bedroom back,” he said as he walked out of her closet, carrying a pair of sneakers that she happened to know were a size twelve.

  “I rented this house for the summer,” she retorted. “That makes you the interloper, and I’m not leaving.”

  He crossed to the dresser. “This is my room. You can sleep upstairs.”

  And lose her private exit? No way. “I’m staying right here.”

  He tugged open the drawer that used to contain his underwear, but now held hers. He reached inside and pulled out a midnight-black thong.

  “Your things are in the bottom drawer,” she said quickly.

  He ran his thumb over the silky crotch. As his eyes caught hers, she was hit with another of those jolts of sexual electricity that proved exactly how disconnected a woman’s body could be from her brain.

  “Here’s the part I don’t get.” His big fist swallowed the thong. “Knowing the way you feel about me, why are you still here?”

  “My attachment to your house overrides my complete indifference to you,” she said with remarkable steadiness.

  “My house, not yours,” he retorted, his eyes on her right shoulder—she had no idea why. “And if you make one more change to it, you’re out, regardless of what Temple says.”

  Letting him have the last word would have been the mature thing to do, but he was still holding her thong, and she didn’t feel like being mature. “Are you offering her your complete line of services?”

  Once again, his eyes drifted to her shoulders. “What do you think?”

  She didn’t know what she thought, so she shot across the room and snatched back her thong. “I think Temple’s the kind of woman who’s not easily conned.”

  “Then you have your answer.”

  Which told her exactly nothing.

  “That’s what I thought.” She stuffed her thong back in the drawer, retrieved her writing supplies, and left the same way she’d come in.

  My mother is a— So many things to choose from.

  My mother is a notoriously hard worker.

  Or maybe …

  My mother believes in hard work.

  Lucy clicked her pen.

  The United States was built on hard work.

  She tried to find a more comfortable position.

  And so was my mother.

  Lucy crumpled the paper. Her attempts at writing were going even worse than her encounter with Panda, but this time she had an empty stomach to blame it on. She abandoned her yellow pad and rode into town, where she gorged on two chili dogs and a large order of fries at Dogs ’N’ Malts, the most food she’d eaten in months, but who knew when she’d get a chance to eat again?

  When she returned to the house, she found Temple in the almost empty living room watching television, a couple of DVDs of Fat Island on the floor by her bare feet. The brown and gold loveseat where she sat was one of the few pieces of furniture left, since Lucy had transferred the better pieces to the sunroom as replacements for what she’d thrown out.

  Temple grabbed the remote and paused the television on an image of herself. “I’m just taking a fifteen-minute break.” She acted as if Lucy had caught her munching a chocolate bar. “I’ve been working out for three hours.”

  The chili dogs rumbled unpleasantly in Lucy’s overstuffed stomach. “You don’t have to explain to me.”

  “I’m not explaining. I’m—” Looking exhausted, she slumped back into the loveseat. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.” She pointed toward the frozen image of herself on screen. “See that body,” she said with such self-loathing that Lucy cringed. “I threw it away.” She hit the play button and captured her sleek screen image in the middle of a furious diatribe directed at a sweet-faced, sweat-drenched, middle-aged woman who was fighting tears.

  “There’s the door! You want to leave? Go ahead! If you don’t care, neither do I.” The veins on Temple’s slim neck popped, and her perfectly glossed mouth formed a snarl. “Get on the boat and off the island. Let everybody see what a loser you are.”

  The woman was openly crying now, but Temple continued to berate her. It was painful to watch. Even more painful to imagine what kind of desperation would drive someone to let herself be subjected to this kind of abuse.

  The woman’s tears only fueled Temple’s scorn. “Boo hoo. This is what you’ve done all your life. Cry about your problems instead of fixing them. Go on! Get off the island! There are thousands of people waiting to take your place.”

  “No!” the woman cried. “I can do it. I can do this.”

  “Then do it!”

  Temple hit the pause button as the woman began frantically pummeling a punching bag. Lucy didn’t believe self-loathing was the best form of motivation, but Temple thought differently. “Irene ran her first half marathon four months after we taped that episode,” she said proudly. “By the time I was done with her, she’d lost over a hundred pounds.”

  Lucy wondered how many of those hundred pounds Irene had been able to keep off without Temple around to scream in her face.

  “God, she looked amazing.” Temple turned off the television and stood, wincing slightly as she straightened. “The critics are always putting me down. They’ll compare me to trainers like
Jillian Michaels—say she has a heart and I don’t. I have a heart. A big one. But you don’t help people by coddling them, and I’ll match my results against hers any day.” She jerked her head toward the stairs. “I’m going to do some upper body work. From the looks of those arms, you should join me.”

  The face of the sobbing woman flashed through Lucy’s mind. “It’s not a good time for me.”

  Temple’s lip curled. “There’s never a good time for you, is there, Lucy? You can always find a reason not to take care of yourself.”

  “I take care of myself.” Maybe it was Temple’s intimidating glare, or it could have been the second chili dog, but she didn’t sound convincing. “I exercise,” she said in a firmer voice. “I don’t love to, but I do it.”

  Temple crossed her arms over her chest like a prison warden. “What kind of exercise?”

  “Push-ups. Some crunches. I walk a lot. Sometimes I run.”

  “Sometimes doesn’t cut it.”

  “In the winter, I go to the gym.” Three times a week, if she was lucky. More often twice. But hardly a week went by that she didn’t get there at least once.

  Temple flicked her hand toward Lucy’s body as if it were spoiled meat. “Are you really satisfied with the results you’re getting?”

  Lucy thought about it. “I sort of am.”

  “You’re lying to yourself.”

  “I don’t think so. Would I like to be a little firmer? What woman wouldn’t? But I keep at it. A little here, a little there. Do I obsess about it? Not really.”

  “Every woman in this country obsesses about her body. You can’t live in our society without obsessing.”

  It occurred to Lucy that she was so screwed up about so many other things—what she owed her family, what she owed herself, and how she was supposed to balance the two—that she didn’t have time for serious body-image issues. “I’m not into heavy workouts. I guess I have my own exercise philosophy. The ‘Good Enough’ approach.”

  Temple looked as though Lucy had cockroaches crawling over her, and even though Lucy knew it was useless to explain, she gave it a try. “I believe exercise is important, but I’m not training for a triathlon, just for general fitness. And when I make exercise drudgery, I stop altogether.”

  “You should force yourself.”

  “I’m pretty happy being weak-willed.” Lucy considered suggesting that Temple might not be quite so miserable if she tried a little more of the “Good Enough” approach. The Evil Queen’s weight gain couldn’t be accidental, and the social worker inside Lucy wondered what had happened to make Temple lose that iron self-control.

  But Temple couldn’t comprehend Lucy’s laid-back attitude, and Lucy took advantage of her temporary speechlessness to switch the subject. “I have a twelve-year-old friend who tends to pop up here uninvited.”

  Temple’s eyes widened in alarm. “That can’t happen.”

  “Without an electric fence surrounding the property, it’ll be hard to keep him out. I told him I have a girlfriend visiting, so if he shows up, he won’t think it’s strange that you’re here.”

  “You don’t understand! No one can see me!”

  “I doubt that he’s part of your fan base.”

  “Panda!” Temple screeched. “Panda, get in here.”

  Panda took all kinds of time wandering in.

  Temple jabbed her hand at Lucy. “I can’t deal with this now. Take care of it!” She stormed out and pounded up the stairs two at a time.

  Instead of addressing the subject at hand, Panda gazed around at the living room. “What happened to my furniture?”

  “What furniture?”

  “The furniture that used to be in here.”

  “Describe it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘describe it’?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Describe the furniture that used to be in here.”

  “A couch. Some chairs. Where is it?”

  “What color was the couch?”

  He gritted his teeth. “It was a couch. It was couch-colored. What did you do with it?”

  “If you told me what it looked like,” she said with exaggerated patience, “I might remember.”

  “It looked like a couch!” he exclaimed.

  “You don’t remember,” she said triumphantly. “You don’t have a clue what anything in this room looked like. What anything in this house looks like. None of this means anything to you.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I know I had a couch and now it’s gone.”

  “It’s not gone. It’s in the sunroom. Along with some chairs and a couple of other things you wouldn’t recognize. You don’t care about this house, and you don’t deserve it.”

  “Tough. It’s mine. And I want my pig back.”

  That stopped her. “Your pig?”

  “The pig that was in the kitchen.”

  “That ugly pig with the waiter’s apron and the missing ear?”

  “The ear isn’t missing. It’s only chipped.”

  That stunned her. “You remember the chip in that stupid pig’s ear, but you don’t know what color your couch is?”

  “I’m more into the ceramic arts.”

  “Panda!” Temple shrieked from upstairs. “Come spot me.”

  Viper gazed toward the stairs. “It’s fascinating,” she said, “how well you’ve adapted to being Temple Renshaw’s bitch.”

  He stalked toward the hallway. “That pig had better be back where it was the next time I walk in the kitchen, or you’ll never see your food again.”

  “Your pig is ugly!” she shouted after him.

  “So’s your mother,” he shot back, which made her furious. Not really at him. More at herself. Because she almost laughed.

  BREE WAS CLOSING THE FARM stand for the night when the white pickup slowed, then stopped. The lettering across the door read JENSEN’S HERB FARM.

  It was nearly dark, and she’d just finished packing up the last of her unsold honey in the cardboard carton she’d propped in the wheelbarrow. She’d been up since before six, trying to finish weeding Myra’s overgrown garden, she’d forgotten to eat again, and she was bone-tired. Still, there were a few good things about today. She’d sold eighteen jars of honey along with some strawberries and asparagus that had survived the neglect. She also almost had a friend, not that she believed someone as famous as Lucy would ever be a real friend, but still, it was nice.

  Toby had done his customary disappearing act, but as the truck door opened, he came racing down the drive. “Big Mike!”

  She barely avoided dropping the jars as Mike Moody climbed out. After such a grueling day, this was too much. She still couldn’t quite reconcile his current good looks with the fat, acne-faced teenager she remembered. If she didn’t know better, she’d have pegged him as an amiable soccer dad instead of a crass, loudmouth sneak.

  He grinned and waved at Toby. “Hey, kid. I brought you something.”

  “What?” Toby cried as Mike walked around to the back of the truck.

  “What do you think?” Mike swung down the tailgate and, in a single effortless motion, pulled off a shiny silver mountain bike.

  Classic Mike Moody. She knew exactly how this would play out.

  Toby stared at the bike as if it would disappear the moment he looked away. She wanted to forbid him to take it, but of course she couldn’t. Mike’s ambush had made that impossible.

  Toby’s voice grew small, uncertain, unable to comprehend that something so wonderful was happening to him. “For me?”

  Bree blinked her eyes against a sting of tears. He’d received a gift he hadn’t needed to fight for. A gift she couldn’t have given him.

  As Toby reached out to touch the handlebars, Bree understood what Toby couldn’t. The bike wasn’t being offered out of affection but as a way for Mike to horn in where he didn’t belong. He’d done the same thing when they were kids. Shown up with bags of Skittles and Lemonheads—entrance tickets to the group that wanted to exclude him.

&nb
sp; “Brand-new,” Mike said. “I saw it when I was on the mainland yesterday and thought to myself, now who could use a great bike like that? Only one name came to mind.”

  “Me,” Toby said on a long, soft breath. His lips were parted, his eyes so focused on the bike that nothing else existed. He looked exactly as David used to look when something he regarded as amazing happened. She ached with the pain of remembrance.

  Mike pulled some tools from the truck bed and they worked together—man to man—to adjust the seat height. She was so angry she felt sick. She wanted to be the one giving David’s son a bicycle. She wanted to be the one who made Toby’s world brighter, not this master manipulator with his overpowering cologne, designer logos, and oily charm.

  Toby mounted the bike. As his spindly legs found the pedals, Mike pointed down the drive. “It’s too dark to ride on the road tonight. Give it a spin in the driveway, then try it out on the path in the woods.”

  “Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot!” Toby took off.

  Mike still hadn’t acknowledged her. Only after he’d slammed the tailgate did he look in her direction. She turned away and stacked the last of the honey into a carton.

  “I brought you something, too, Bree,” he said from behind her. “To help with your business.”

  “I don’t want anything.” She grabbed the wheelbarrow and began pushing it through the scrubby grass. She needed to fix the doors on the storage shed behind the farm stand so she didn’t have to keep hauling everything back and forth twice a day.

  “You don’t know what it is.”

  “And I don’t care.” The front wheel caught in a rut, the honey jars rattled, and she barely prevented it all from overturning.

  “You don’t believe in second chances, do you, Bree?”

  As a kid, he’d always been whiny when anyone challenged him, but now his voice had a calmness she didn’t like. “What I believe is that a leopard doesn’t change its spots.” She struggled to get the wheel out of the rut. “I want you to stop using Toby to try to get to me.”

  He pushed her aside, took the handles, and steered the wheelbarrow toward the driveway. “Myra said your ex-husband left you for an eighteen-year-old.”