Herons Landing

by JoAnn Ross

  Her eyes narrowed. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “I may have offered a suggestion or two.” Hoping for a do-over, he’d decided to begin with the dinner they’d shared their last night together.

  “I’m on to you, John Mannion.” She pointed a finger at him. “You’re planning to ply me with wine and dinner, then seduce me.”

  “Only if you want to be seduced.” He hadn’t been totally honest that day two years ago when he’d blown everything up. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. “Which will it be? Fish or steak?”

  “Don’t hold your breath about the seduction,” she said. Which wasn’t exactly saying no. “I haven’t had a steak for ages,” she said. “Years, really. I couldn’t afford it while at Oxford. And of course, although it’s starting to show up on menus, it’s rare and expensive in Japan.”

  “Steak it is. I’ll start up the grill.”

  “You’ll get wet.”

  “It’s Washington,” he reminded her. “And real men grill.”

  She laughed, as he’d meant her to.

  “Besides, the deck’s covered. I’d offer you veggies, but Mike seems to have failed on that count.” He opened the cupboard next to the range. “But we do have some Froot Loops.”

  “Which don’t have any fruit in them. And aren’t eaten by anyone over the age of six,” she countered.

  “Which just shows you haven’t ever eaten breakfast with my brother,” John said. “He once used them to make a portrait of Toucan Sam that got him an A in Mrs. Kenyon’s fourth-grade art class. He did have to paint the beak before adding the glued-on stripes from crushed pieces, because Froot Loops didn’t have a black color.”

  Her laughter was as bright as starlight on the water. “I doubt he’s ever met a woman he can’t win over.”

  “Without even having to try,” John agreed.

  He remembered a time back when he’d been in high school and Mike still in middle school. They’d been roasting s’mores while camping out, and Mike had asked John if he was serious about having Sarah for his girlfriend. Because if not, he was going to make a move. John had stopped that idea in its tracks, but had given his kid brother credit for having the balls at thirteen to even consider going after a high school girl.

  He took a corkscrew from a drawer and opened a dark green bottle. “Why don’t you sit down and have some wine while I fix dinner?”

  “When did you learn to cook?”

  “Remember my senior year at UW, when I moved into that apartment with the other three guys?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, it didn’t take long to get sick of take-out Chinese, pizza and KFC. So, I got myself a couple books, watched reruns of The Galloping Gourmet and picked up enough to feed myself and the other guys, who chipped in for groceries. They also paid extra for me to cook dinner for their dates, which they could then heat up and pretend to have made themselves.” Extra money that had gone to that last Boston trip.

  “Seduction dinners,” she guessed.

  “Not for me, because you weren’t there. But I was told that more than a few women who visited considered men who cook sexy.”

  “I never learned how to cook,” she admitted. “Whenever I went into the kitchen to help Mom and Grandma Ida, I was told they had things under control, and I should go study.”

  “That was your real job,” he remembered as he poured two glasses of ruby cabernet and handed her one. “More than the ones at the Big Dipper or the cannery. Being the first Harper to go to college was a big deal.” And had, he’d always felt, put way too much pressure on those slender shoulders.

  “While I can’t cook, I’m great at setting the table,” she said. “And I feel like a new woman after that shower.”

  “I’ve always liked the woman you were. And still are,” he said truthfully. He waited for her to remind him yet again of that day. But apparently she’d decided not to ruin the easy mood they’d fallen into.

  “I love this house,” Sarah said, deciding the time had come to change the subject.

  “A Harper built it.” He reminded her what she already knew.

  Not her branch of the family, but they’d gone to school with Ben Harper, whose father had taken over Harper Construction from his father, who’d taken it over from his, and back through the generations to the town’s early days. In fact, the gray stone Honeymoon Harbor city hall featured a bronze plaque on the cornerstone bearing two names: the builder, Nathaniel Harper, and the mayor, Ronan Mannion.

  “Yet more proof that the so-called feud is ridiculous.” He repeated what he’d told her so many times over the years. “We Mannions have never supported it.”

  “That’s because you’re rich.”

  He laughed at that. “Rich is relative. I’ll bet I was the only guy in the Parker House wearing a suit from JCPenney.”

  “I couldn’t even afford to buy an outfit to fake my way in,” she countered. “I borrowed that pink dress from a girl whose father did something important on Wall Street.”

  “Lucky I didn’t rip it off you, then. I’d probably still be paying it off.” He took the steaks out, unwrapping them from the white butcher paper.

  The memory of that night, the most perfect of her life, was so deeply embedded in Sarah’s mind that she was certain that if she lived to be as old as her great-grandfather, she’d still remember every moment. Such as how his eyes had blazed like blue flames when she’d come out of the marble bathroom in her borrowed dress, feeling like a real-life Cinderella. And how his dark hands were such a contrast to the snowy white cuffs of a dress shirt so new it still had the package folds.

  And how could she ever forget him stealing her breath away in the empty elevator after dinner, pushing her against the wall, slipping his hand beneath the borrowed dress to find her already wet and ready. At the time, feeling more reckless than she had before or since, Sarah might have risked letting him take her right then and there.

  “I read those books,” he said.

  “What books?” She looked up from getting the plates down from the glass-fronted cabinets.

  “Those ones you were always talking about.”

  And wasn’t that a surprise? Having grown up in the same town, having loved him, made love with him and carried on a secret romance for years, Sarah had believed she knew everything about John Mannion. Apparently she’d been wrong. “You read Jane Austen?”

  He shrugged. “There’s no TV in Nepal. The nights can be long. Reading killed the time.”

  “But why Austen?” She would’ve guessed he’d have read about Nepal for his work and Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker or Tom Clancy, who’d recently burst onto the scene. “Which ones?”

  “As for why, because I wanted to know more about you. You always talked about Austen like she was your best friend. I thought that maybe by reading them, I’d discover more about you.”

  “We’ve known each other all our lives. I doubt that there’s anything we don’t know. Well, other than the past two years,” she allowed.

  “Which we can catch up on over dinner,” he said. “I didn’t have much room in my luggage for books, so I couldn’t take them all. But I did fit in Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Which, by the way, could’ve just as easily been titled Second Chances.”

  Could that pointed look he slanted her suggest she consider giving him a second chance? The way Anne Elliot had Captain Wentworth?

  “Persuasion was published after Austen’s death.”

  “Yeah. I read that in the foreword. But it didn’t take a lit scholar to tell that it was written by an intelligent woman who’d grown older and perhaps had realized that sometimes mistakes we make when we’re young can have long-term, possibly forever consequences.”

  “I’m impressed at your insight.” It also had her wondering if he were talking about their own situation
. She’d had her life and career planned. Looking back, she hadn’t quite figured out how they’d work things out with him taking over his father’s bank as Mannions had been doing forever. But she’d believed that love would surely have found a way. And how naive had that been?

  “I may be a business/ag guy, but we had a big home library I spent a lot of years working my way through. I’ve also read Tolstoy, and for the record, Anna Karenina is a better book than War and Peace.”

  Having never made it through the latter, Sarah was in no position to question that judgment. She did wonder how they could have spent all those years together and never talked about her second love—books. Perhaps because she was so caught up in the romanticism of their situation, she’d followed the “girl rules” and mostly guided the conversation to what she thought to be John’s interests. Like sports, which she’d had to study up on, but given that he’d played basketball in both high school and college, and followed the Seattle SuperSonics and Seahawks, she’d assumed it was a topic he’d mostly want to talk about.

  “Tolstoy was one of the first non-Japanese authors allowed in the country after it opened its ports again to foreigners in the late 1800s,” she said.

  “Really?” He paused from rubbing two fat brown potatoes with olive oil and sprinkling them with coarse salt. Apparently he wasn’t kidding about having taught himself to cook. “I would have thought reading about rebellion, even one in Russia, would have been a problem for their imperial rulers.”

  “There were many Japanese back then who appreciated the social and existential ideas. Others probably wanted to read them to get a sense of how the outside world thought. It’s hard to modernize a country kept in physical or ideological isolation.”

  “Huh. Good point.” He put the potatoes in the oven, set the timer and began quartering some small brown mushrooms. Watching him wielding the knife with such skill backed up his suggestion that some women found a man cooking to be sexy. Because she was turning out to definitely be in that camp.

  “Anyway,” he said, “getting back to Austen, I gave the paperbacks to the English teacher at the school. There’s still resistance to girls learning, but she was very persuasive at getting parents to send their daughters to school. So the books proved very popular. Though I suspect if any of the men had bothered to read them and decided Elizabeth Bennet might prove a role model, they could’ve been banned.”

  “You said the Nepalese are modest, which makes sense, given their religions. But there’s no sex in Austen. And other than Willoughby kissing a lock of Marianne’s hair or Mr. Knightley almost kissing Emma’s hand, lovers never even kiss in any of the books.”

  “If there had been any ‘inappropriate’—” he made air quotes with his fingers “—displays of affection between the characters, I wouldn’t have dared try to slip the books in. But all Austen’s heroines are women who can change over time, to grow into what they’re meant to be, and encourage their legion of readers to do the same. Which isn’t exactly the message Nepalese women are accustomed to reading.

  “Angelina Salvadori, the teacher, and I tried to figure out how she could explain their behavior while not accidentally creating a feminist revolution and throwing their families and society into chaos. Which was the opposite of what we’d been sent there to do. But she and I privately talked about it a lot and decided that we’d also been sent there to open minds to new ideas, whether it was a better way to grow crops or to learn about the world outside their isolated mountain existence. So when she was discussing the books in her classroom setting, or when women or girls asked me how a man would feel about a woman who’d do such and such, we’d both try to couch our answers in a way that might help the questioner nudge her husband or father over a bit to the softer side of sexism, without causing family turmoil.”

  “That’s interesting.” She’d love to do a paper on the topic. She also couldn’t help wondering exactly how close his relationship had been with Angelina Salvadori. A name that suggested a lush, curvy Italian goddess like Sophia Loren. Which was a direct contrast to her own lack of curves and Orphan Annie hair.

  “Japan was mostly closed off under the shogun rule from the mid-1600s until the mid-1800s, when officials decided they needed to integrate more Western business ideas and foster creativity that had stalled since exiling foreigners.”

  “Their dark ages.”

  “Exactly. Austen was a hard sell because she’s such a nuanced writer and readers couldn’t understand or accept her thoughts on marriages, proposals and courtships, because it was so different from their own culture. Over time, some popular Japanese writers who admired her work began pointing out that her stories revolved on decision, using sense and logic, and finding happiness by keeping to one’s morals.”

  “Which clicked,” he guessed.

  “That helped.” Sarah couldn’t believe she was discussing all of this with him. The Girl Rules, she decided, had been very, very wrong. “At any rate, she really took off in the 1950s, when a prestigious publisher put out a translation as an educational novel and ‘the best social novel in the world.’ They also changed the dialogue to expressions more familiar to Japanese understanding that managed to maintain Austen’s witty spirit without changing the novel’s flow.”

  “And now, thanks to you, she undoubtedly has a lot more Japanese readers,” he said. “Making publishers and booksellers very happy.”

  “It also helped that more and more Japanese are forgoing the traditional arranged marriage to marry for love these days,” she said, trying to sound casual even as her heart swelled at the compliment. She’d heard that from colleagues, but had never expected to hear it from John.

  How, she wondered now, had she expected to spend an entire marriage talking about sports and guy stuff? That also had her wondering what her parents talked about when they were alone. Surely more than her father’s fishing business and her mother’s need to get ahead.

  Male-female relationships, as Jane Austen was always pointing out, could be very complicated.

  “I’m afraid to ask, when we’re starting to get along so well, but what did you personally think of the books?”

  “That Anne Elliot reminded me most of you. Which is why she was my favorite of Austen’s heroines.”

  Sarah was surprised. Her own students usually preferred outspoken, wry Lizzie Bennet. While he viewed her as Austen’s malleable old-maid heroine? Though Anne did eventually end up with the man she’d been persuaded not to marry. Not unlike John and her situation. Not that they’d ended up together. But yet.

  “The rain’s stopped,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “Want to take our wine outside while the potatoes roast and I grill the steaks?”

  “I’d like that. Let me just run upstairs and get a jacket.” Spring nights could be cool once the sun went down. Not that they’d seen much sun today.

  While he took the steaks out to the covered deck that overlooked the sea, she ran upstairs, retrieved a lightweight fleece jacket from her suitcase. She stopped in the bathroom, fluffed out her hair, which had nearly dried, rubbed some concealer beneath her eyes, brushed a bit of color on her cheeks and put on some light pinky-beige lipstick. She considered spritzing scent—Beautiful—which had been all the rage in Japan probably due to the commercials all centered around a bride looking, and of course smelling, beautiful on her wedding day.

  Deciding she didn’t want John to get the idea that she was angling for a seduction or a wedding, Sarah put the small bottle she’d bought for her mother at the duty-free shop back in her bag. Then forced herself not to run back down the stairs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HE’D TURNED ON a deck heater along with a patio light for the grilling. The moon was a slim crescent occasionally breaking through the rain clouds reflected in a shimmering line in the water.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she asked as the grill warmed.

  �
��Sure.” He was seated beside her, long legs stretched out in front of him.

  “Why Anne?”

  “Oh, that.” He looked out over the ocean and took a drink of wine as if composing his thoughts.

  “I read Pride and Prejudice first, and I saw a lot of you in Elizabeth Bennet. She was intelligent, didn’t hesitate to speak her mind and was unrelentingly independent. Enough that she was willing to turn down a proposal that would have set her up for life.”

  Her parents had raised her to be independent, and Sarah was proud of that. However, she’d discovered that total independence could have a flip side: if you weren’t willing to open up a little, you could end up lonely. She had casual friends who were mostly fellow teachers, and was friendly enough with her Japanese landlady, whose apartment below hers smelled of mysterious herbs and who once brewed her a noxious concoction of tea that nevertheless cured her of a miserable case of flu. But she hadn’t had anyone with whom she could share her private thoughts, dreams and, more and more recently, her dilemma.

  “But then I read Persuasion, and Anne reminded me of you because, despite your dazzling ballerina years, and your unrelenting energy and drive, you tend to tone down the fire I know you have burning inside you. Sometimes enough that you can seem almost removed.”

  Wow. He really had studied those books.

  “You’re also one tough cookie with an iron will.”

  “Meaning I’m stubborn.”

  “In a good way,” he assured her as he put the steaks on the grill. “Usually.” His magnetic blue eyes met hers. And held. “Promise me you won’t get mad.”

  “Between the wine and the rain, I’m too mellow to get angry about anything,” she assured him.

  “The one thing I saw in Anne that I’ve watched you do for years is that you’re willing to put others’ happiness above your own. Especially when it involves family.”

  Again true. “Are you implying that being selfish is a good thing?”