by Tamara Leigh
My center clinches at the news their mother has passed away.
“To his credit, J.C. made an effort, but then your family’s estate came up for sale and all that effort was put on hold.” Parker spreads his hands. “So I’m asking you what I asked him—what took him longer to deny than it should have. Are the two of you involved?”
I stare at this man whose handsome-enough face resembles his brother’s more than I thought the first time I stood before him. “I’m not sure why I feel inclined to answer a question like that, but there did seem to be something between us. However, seein’ as J.C. isn’t here, I think you can understand why it probably isn’t worth discussin’.”
“No, I can’t. Though I know I shouldn’t interfere, I think you and Jesse ought to sit down and talk this out.”
Jesse. I can’t help but like the sound of J.C.’s given name, nor silently note it better fits the man who kissed me than the man who deceived me. “Unfortunately, I don’t think your brother is interested.”
He smiles with his teeth, going up a notch on the attractive scale.
I frown. “What?”
“You said, ‘unfortunately.’ ”
“A figure of speech.” I turn away. “Now I need to get to the airport.” In and out, just like the last time, though this truly is the last time.
I hear the sigh of Parker Dirk’s chair as he rises. “I’ll see you out.”
I step from the office ahead of him, but he draws alongside and I allow him to navigate the hallways. Which is why I don’t notice we’re going the long way around until something comes into sight that we didn’t pass on the way to his office—the conference room where I first knowingly encountered J.C. And there he is again, leaning over a portfolio, assistant to his left, two women and a man to his right.
Something weak and wanting unfurls within me, and I ache all the way to my fingers that splay off my jeans, as if to take hold of something.
“I know,” Parker says near my ear. “I shouldn’t interfere.”
I look into his face and only then realize I’ve halted.
“I thought if he saw you …” He shrugs.
So it’s not that J.C. couldn’t meet with me. He wouldn’t meet with me. It’s good to know for certain. “I believe I can find my own way out.” I look one last time at J.C., and in that instant he looks around. And my heart drums. And chill bumps rise on my skin despite the heat rushing beneath it.
“Well, he’s seen me,” I mutter and turn on my heel. “Good-bye, Parker.” Grateful I’m not strapped into heels, I head back the way he led me.
I don’t care to have J.C. chase after me like a tights-wearing fairy tale prince clutching at a glass slipper and spouting “happily ever afters.” And yet I’m disappointed when I make it to the lobby uninterrupted, into the elevator, and outside onto the sidewalk where late October whispers coolly across my face. Starting to shiver, I wait for an opening in the foot traffic, then hurry out of the building’s shadow to the curb where the sunshine tipping past the noon hour warms me.
“Mission accomplished.” I scan the slow-moving vehicles caught in the congestion of lunch hour. Though it’s four hours until my flight leaves, providing plenty of time to get a bite to eat in the city, I decide to head to the airport. Doubtless, the food won’t be as appetizing, but neither is my appetite what it should be considering all I’ve eaten today is a container of Greek yogurt.
I catch sight of a taxicab and throw a hand up, but as the driver nears, I see his backseat is packed with passengers. Another cab’s not far behind. It isn’t occupied; however, the driver stares straight ahead as he passes.
“I can give you a ride,” says a voice to my right.
I swing around, and his unabbreviated name forms on my lips and carries past them on a sharply hopeful breath. “Jesse.”
From beneath the light brown hair on his brow, his eyebrows rise. But his mouth doesn’t. “If you prefer.”
Now I’m really warm. What’s wrong with me? I’m not supposed to be pleased that he came after me. But I am. Still, as I hold his green gaze, I waver between pride that will get me nowhere I want to go and gratitude that will allow me to close this chapter of my life.
“I do prefer Jesse. And, yes, I would appreciate a ride.”
“To the airport.”
I nod.
A very slight smile. “This feels familiar.” He pulls his cell phone from inside his jacket. “I’ll call for a car.”
He makes the call, and as we stand at the curb waiting, I try not to inhale too deeply of exhaust fumes that are too overwhelming for me to determine whether or not J.C. has gone back to his cologne-wearing ways.
“Did your brother tell you why I’m here?” I finally ask.
“He briefed me when he pulled me out of my meeting.”
“You didn’t want to see me.”
He looks down. “No.”
Since that’s what I already concluded, it shouldn’t hurt.
“I’m afraid Parker thinks he knows better than I do.”
“Does he?”
J.C. slides his hands into his pockets. Above the hum and chortle and growl of traffic, the thumps and clicks and scrapes of footfalls behind and to the sides, I catch the jangle of change. “The last time Parker thought he knew better, he took it on himself to supply me with a date to our company Christmas party—a friend of a friend several times removed. It took months to convince the woman I was not flattered by her constant calls and numerous visits to my office.”
Then J.C. is as afflicted by good-intentioned kin as I am, though I’d bet my pinkies and little toes Daddy is more of a terror.
“While Parker is determined to remain a bachelor, he seems to think I won’t be complete until I settle down.”
“And you don’t want to?” I don’t mean to speak that as a question, but though I catch myself before my voice rises at the end, it comes out that way. And the jangling ceases, only its sudden absence recalling its presence.
J.C. looks past me. “Here’s the car.” To my surprise, he opens the front passenger door and gestures me inside. Guessing that means he doesn’t plan on accompanying me to the airport, I’m once more disappointed. However, a few moments later, the driver steps aside and J.C. takes his place behind the wheel. And he’s not wearing cologne.
As he negotiates the traffic sludge, he says, “Let me ask you something.”
The depth of his voice warns this isn’t just some little something. “All right?”
“Did it matter whether it was my brother you met with or me?”
I consider my thumbnail that tempts me to nibble, but I won’t. “Not to do what the family sent me to do.”
“Then returning the Calhoun land and formally apologizing aren’t your only reasons for coming?”
I draw a steadying breath. “I wanted to talk to you about what happened between us before I found out what the C stood for.”
He cuts a sideways look at me. “Why?”
“I want the truth—to know if it was real. For you.” Because, otherwise, I don’t dare let it be real for me.
“Yes, I told you it was real. It had nothing to do with your family’s land.”
Once more, my thumbnail looks mighty tasty. “It did in the beginning when you decided that two—Caleb and you—could play the game.”
“True, but let’s go back to the very beginning when a dreadlocked, barefooted woman driving a beat-up truck and wearing an impossibly stiff dress practically ran my real estate agent off the road—all over a piece of gum.”
Is he making fun of me? I sit straighter. “Had the gum Wesley tossed out her window landed any place other than my windshield, some poor creature could have choked to death.”
J.C.’s mouth curves, but he continues to direct his gaze forward as we enter the freeway. “There was something about you I liked, Bridget, but when Wesley told me you were a Pickwick, that was the end of it. Then you showed up here without the dreadlocks and looking like a professional.
Again, I was attracted to you—until you identified yourself as a Pickwick and I realized you were the one out on the pike.” He looks at me. “I wanted the property, not complications.”
“So much for what we want.”
He maneuvers the car into another lane. “I knew I was crossing a line I shouldn’t when I saw what Merriman was doing to secure the estate.”
“Courtin’ me.”
“Yes, and since I’d already crossed one line, I eventually reasoned it couldn’t hurt to cross another.”
“What was the first line you crossed?”
“My mother was always after me to let go of the past—said that if I didn’t, the quest to reclaim the Calhoun land would ruin me as it had my father. My response was always that I would try. Then a couple of years ago, she got sick. Before she died, she asked me to try harder and get back to God, and I told her I would, though I was never certain I’d gotten to Him in the first place. A month after we buried her, I started attending church and began making the necessary changes to lead the life I thought I owed her.”
He glances at the airport exit sign and flicks his turn signal. “But then I got word your uncle was putting the Pickwick estate up for sale, and all those years of resenting your family for making our lives so hard came back to me. That was the first line—going after the Calhoun land as well as the property of those who had taken it from us. I wanted the Pickwicks to know that the trailer trash they’d made of my family had risen above them, so I bent myself toward that end, but with every Pickwick I met, I found myself questioning what I was doing. None of you was as I’d imagined all those years. Well”—his smile is light—“there is your cousin Luc and your father.”
I can’t fault him for that.
“I was most uncertain about my plans when I was with you. It was as if I’d played a bad joke on myself—reeling in a Pickwick only to find the hook was in my mouth. Knowing I was the one who put it there only made it worse, but still I put off what I knew God was calling me to do. And then you found me out. Strangely, I still felt somewhat justified with what I’d done, which is why I offered on the estate.”
“Why did you withdraw your offer?”
After a long moment, he says, “I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said—your uncle wanting to make restitution to our family all along. I realized I was the one visiting the sins of the father on the children.” He looks my way. “You said the quest for taking back my family’s property may have ruined me as it ruined my father. There was too much truth in that, and it seemed the best way to get out from under the Calhoun curse was to walk away.”
After a long pause, he says, “Do you know how hard it is to be right with God when you aren’t right with people? When you can’t forgive as you should? When you’re holding the past tighter than it’s holding you? When you think you’re better at being God than God Himself?”
I don’t believe he expects me to answer, but when I don’t, the silence stretches. “I know,” I say. “I haven’t been right with God since He took …” No, He didn’t take, though like Uncle Obe I believe my great-grandfather did take. “Well, not since He didn’t answer Easton’s prayers for healing. And like you, I’ve been holding on to the past beyond the time I should have let it go.”
“What about forgiveness?”
“That’s why I’m here, not only to return your family’s land and offer to sell the other pieces should you decide to build your golf resort, but to ask for your family’s forgiveness, for yours, and to extend mine to you, Jesse.”
He draws a long, slow breath. “I don’t need an apology. Our differences are in the past where they should have been left long ago. But I do thank you for accepting my apology.” He peers past me. “Which airline?”
Oh. I hold myself in as I tell him, and he doesn’t resume our conversation.
“Here you are.” He eases the car into the drop-off lane.
That’s it? Pride makes me reach for the door handle, but determination makes me turn to J.C. “I didn’t think I was ready for anything with you to be real, but”—I try to smile—“it was real for me too, Jesse.”
He looks momentarily away. “I’m sorry about that.”
Not what I was hoping to hear. “Why?”
He starts to say something but shakes his head.
Then what was real for him was only real for that moment in time? Ah, there’s the little piece of my heart I mislaid. And this is “the end”—no Little Golden Book riding off into the sunset for me. I open the door.
His hand on my arm stops me from stepping out, and I look around. “Nearly everything significant I’ve done in my life was to get me to where I’ve been these past months, and it was the wrong place. Do you understand, Bridget? I have a ways to go to get where I should have been all this time.”
From playing the role in which his father cast him to being simply Jesse. “I understand. I have a ways to go too. I was just thinking maybe we could get there together.” I lean in and press my mouth to his. “Bye, Jesse.”
He loosens his hold on my arm, and I step onto the sidewalk, then lean down to peer at him. “As soon as the estate is legally divided, Piper will be in touch. If you decide to purchase the other two pieces, she’ll take care of you.”
He nods.
I close the door and don’t look back. After all, I have a lot to look forward to now that I’m walking lighter with the shedding of the last of my widow’s weeds. Jesse Calhoun may not be the one on whom to reset my heart, but that doesn’t mean I’ll grow old alone. Still …
28
Saturday, November 6
At least the dress isn’t poufy, and it certainly isn’t stand-alone stiff like the one I wore to Bart and Trinity’s wedding. And I do like the color, a soft green about the shade of the underside of a dogwood leaf. It’s also a nice length, and the bodice fits decent enough—
I did it again, drifted away from this beautiful day beneath which Piper and Axel are speaking their wedding vows.
I return my attention to where they stand three feet away at the front of the gazebo, Piper pixie-pretty in a simple white gown with elbow-length sleeves and touches of lace.
“… for better, for worse,” my cousin speaks back to her dashing Axel, “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part …”
When Axel earlier spoke those vows, I first drifted away, but not to turn morose over my parting from Easton. Rather, to thank God I didn’t feel those words like a thousand aches as I had four months ago at my brother’s wedding. I’ve truly put off my widow’s weeds, and even Bonnie, who returned from the Ukraine yesterday and whose lap was covered in Birdie when last I glanced over my shoulder, noticed. And took credit for it. I’m good with that. Now if I could just put off my longing for the man who has a long way to go—without me.
“I give you this ring,” Axel says, “as an eternal symbol of my love and commitment to you.” As he slides it onto Piper’s finger, I look down at my own against the pale green skirt and lift it at the wrist. My ring finger is now tanned beyond recognition.
Maggie gives my arm a bump from where she stands beside me in a matching dress. I frown, and she nods over her shoulder.
My gaze falls first on Uncle Obe, where he went to sit between Piper’s mother and Daisy after giving away the bride. The wedding is an even smaller affair than Bart and Trinity’s, so it requires little effort to pick out the newcomer in our midst.
Oh, Lord, he came.
I stare at him where he stands behind the rows of chairs, looking stiffly out of place. Daisy said he would come, but he didn’t. And yet, here he is, albeit late.
“By the power vested in me by the state of North Carolina—”
I share a smile with Maggie and Devyn.
“—I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
And do they kiss—so long, I wonder if Maggie might want to cover Devyn’s eyes. When the kiss ends, the minister presents the
m as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, just like, once upon a time, he presented Easton and me as Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan.
But I refuse to allow the memory to hurt me. I have no right—and no longer any reason—to reduce it to pain. For too short a time, I had something beautiful, and for too long a time, I made it ugly with anger, resentment, and fear. Better to have never loved at all than to have loved and lost is how I’ve been living, turning Tennyson’s words on their head.
Though I don’t know when, or even if, I’ll get my faith around God being my happily ever after, I do know it does no good to turn my back on Him when I don’t get my way (honorable and right as my way may seem). He was meant to be first in my life, but in bestowing that place on Easton and blaming God for my loss, I set myself up for four long, lonely years of widow’s weeds. Whether or not I’ll get another chance at the kind of love that leads to marriage vows, I have no idea, but if I do, I hope my heart will hold fast to what it’s learned.
I come back to applause and turn with Maggie and Devyn as the newly married couple step from beneath the gazebo and start down the aisle. The guests are on their feet, and as we near the front row, I step to the side and touch my uncle’s shoulder. “He’s here, Uncle Obe,” I say, loud enough for Daisy to hear. “Antonio’s here.”
The smile he wears for Piper and Axel slips into blankness, out of which confusion rises. “Who?”
“Your son, Daddy,” Daisy says.
He blinks. “An-Antonio?”
“Yes, he is.”
As I hurry to catch up with Maggie and Devyn, I congratulate myself on the relative ease with which I do so. Of course, it helps that the heels I’m wearing are of a sensible height—well, as heels go.
The reception that follows is different from Bart and Trinity’s in that I don’t feel suffocated. And neither do I feel the need to escape, though even if I wanted to steal away with Birdie and Miles for a “happily ever after” reading in the library, I doubt they’d be willing accomplices. Nor would Bonnie or Claude let me. They’ve been glued to their children since their return. In fact, Claude even budged from my parents’ back porch this morning to join Miles and me in a game of touch football. Admittedly he was all thumbs—make that toes—but he tried.