Summer at Willow Lake

by Susan Wiggs

  She was bent over the sink, her hair falling to one side as she rinsed her mouth, when he walked in.

  “Olivia, you’re a freaking genius,” he said, opening his arms.

  She hastily wiped her mouth with a tea towel. “I am, aren’t I,” she said and walked into his arms.

  He held her for a moment, then kissed her forehead. “You need to bill my real-estate agent for everything you’ve done here.”

  Olivia froze. Her heart knew, even before her mind caught on. The awareness prickled up her spine and over her scalp. There was something in the way a man held a woman when he was about to let her go. The knowledge was in his frame and in his muscles—a tangible stiff reluctance. The air of discomfiture hovering around him was unmistakable.

  She stepped back, stared up at his handsome face. “Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re breaking up with me.”

  “What?” Her blunt observation clearly took him by surprise. “Hey, listen, babe. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The protest only underscored her conviction. She was right, and they both knew it. Many women with more powerful denial mechanisms than Olivia were able to shut out the warning sign. Not Olivia, not with her sensitive radar, not after two previous failures had left her bleeding. She was like one of those dogs trained to an electric fence. She only had to be popped twice, and then she got it.

  The Cheetos and beer formed a cold, unpleasant knot in her stomach. It isn’t going to happen again, she thought. Not even if I have to do it first. “I completely misread you,” she said. “God, what an idiot.” She took another step away from him.

  “Slow down,” he said, and the hand he laid on her arm was gentle and made her want to cry.

  “Do it fast,” she snapped at him. “Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Get it over with quick.”

  “You’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.”

  “Am I?” She folded her arms across her middle. Don’t cry, she told herself, blinking away the tears that boiled behind her contact lenses. Save the crying for later. “All right. How about telling me exactly what you intend to do after selling this apartment?”

  His gaze flirted ever so briefly with the light fixture on the ceiling, the one she’d replaced at two o’clock this afternoon. That was another symptom of man-on-the-run. He didn’t want to meet her eyes. “Something came up while I was in L.A.,” he told her, and despite his obvious discomfort with her, his face lit with enthusiasm. “They want me there, Liv.”

  She held her breath. He was supposed to say, I told them I couldn’t make a decision until I talked to you. She already knew, though. With a dry laugh of disbelief, she said, “You told them yes, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t deny it. “The firm’s going to create a new position for me.”

  “What, asshole-in-residence?”

  “Olivia, I know we talked about a future together. I’m not ruling that out. You could come with me.”

  “And do what?”

  “It’s L.A., Liv. You can do anything you want.”

  Marry you? Have your babies? She knew that wasn’t what he meant.

  “My whole life, my family, my home, my business, everything is here in New York. I put the last five years of myself into Transformations,” she said. “I built it. I’m not going to just walk away.”

  “L.A. needs a company that does what you do,” he claimed. “The market’s just as hot there as it is here. Hotter.”

  She thought about starting over from scratch, all over again. Networking, cultivating contacts, doing public relations, getting out the word of mouth. The idea exhausted her. She had finally whittled her work hours down to a manageable number, but it had taken years to get there. Starting over in L.A. would be even harder. There, her name and connections wouldn’t open any doors for her as they had in Manhattan. This can’t be happening, she thought. Not again.

  “Say you love me,” she challenged him. “Say you can’t live without me. And mean it.”

  “When did you turn into such a drama queen?”

  “You know what?” she said, shaking back her hair and squaring her shoulders, “if I loved you enough, I would do it. I wouldn’t care. I’d be packing my things right now, and gladly.”

  “What do you mean, love me enough?” he demanded.

  “To follow you anywhere. But I don’t. And that’s a very liberating notion, Rand.”

  “I don’t get you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a simple situation. You can move to L.A. with me or not. Your choice.”

  My choice, thought Olivia. Surprisingly enough, she realized she did have a choice. “All right, then,” she said, somehow getting the words past a sudden, breath-stealing agony. “Not.”

  And with that, she headed for the door. She’d done well this time—this third time. But if she lingered any longer, her control might waver. She passed through the foyer, noting the artful placement of the red plum blossom plant, which added an auspicious je ne sais quoi to the entryway. It was hard to miss the irony of this beautifully composed, staged setting. She considered kicking the damn thing over, but that would be so…so un-Bellamy-like.

  She took the stairs to avoid waiting for the elevator. She had tried that the first time, with Pierce. She still remembered standing in the lobby, willing him to come bursting out the door, shouting, “Wait! I was wrong! What was I thinking?”

  It never worked that way except for people like Kate Hudson or Reese Witherspoon. People like Olivia Bellamy took the stairs.

  She didn’t even remember the taxi ride home. She blindly overpaid the cabby and, shell-shocked, climbed the stairs to her brownstone.

  “Oh, this is not good,” her neighbor, Earl, said, not bothering with hello as he stepped out into the foyer between their first-floor apartments. “You’re home way too soon.”

  A silver-haired older man who had come up through school with Olivia’s father, Anthony George Earl the Third owned the brownstone. Since his second wife had left him, he claimed Olivia was the only woman he wanted in his life. In a flurry of midlife ambition, he was taking cooking lessons. At the moment, the rich scent of coq au vin wafted from his kitchen, but it only made Olivia feel queasy. She wished she hadn’t told him she thought Rand was going to pop the question today.

  Although Earl was divorced and lived alone, he turned and called to someone in his apartment. “Our girl’s back. And it’s not good.”

  Our girl. He only referred to her like that to one person—his best friend. She scowled at Earl. “You told him?” Without waiting for a reply, she pushed past Earl and stepped into his apartment. “Daddy?”

  Philip Bellamy rose from a wing chair and opened his arms to Olivia. “The rat bastard.” He pulled her into a hug. Her father was her rock, and probably the sole reason she had survived her turbulent adolescence. She leaned against his chest, breathing in the comforting scent of his aftershave. But only for a moment. If she leaned on him too hard, she’d lose the ability to stand on her own.

  “Ah, Lolly,” he said, using the old nickname. “I’m sorry.”

  There was something phony in her father’s tone; didn’t he know she could hear it? Pulling back, she studied his face. He looked like Cary Grant, everyone had always said so because of the cleft in his chin and those killer eyes. He was—had always been—a tall, elegant man, the sort you saw at museum fund-raisers and at weekend house parties in the Hamptons.

  “What’s going on?” she asked him.

  “Does something need to be going on in order for me to visit my only child and my best friend?”

  “You never come downtown unannounced.” Olivia glared at Earl again. “I can’t believe you told him.” She also couldn’t believe both Earl and her father knew it would go badly, that she would come home upset and in need of comforting. She supposed that, this being the third time, they had learned to expect false alarms from her. “I need to check on Barkis,” she said, fumbling for her keys and stepping out into the hallway.

  She le
t herself in, and despite the blow she’d taken, Barkis was Barkis. He came bursting through his little dog door and sailed into her arms. Olivia’s parents thought the dog door was a security breach, but she deemed it necessary, given her crazy work schedule. She didn’t worry about break-ins anyway. Earl was a playwright who worked at home and had the watchdog instincts Barkis seemed to lack.

  What the little dog had in abundance was exuberance. Just the sight of her caused him to do a dance of joy. Olivia often wished she was as fabulous as her dog thought she was. She set him down to pet him, which sent him into paroxysms of ecstasy.

  Just being home lifted her spirits a little. Her apartment wasn’t all that special, but at least it was hers, filled with a profusion of color and light and texture, created in layers over the three years she’d lived here. This was as un–New York as an apartment could get, according to her mother, and that was not a compliment. It was far too warm, even dangerously cozy, painted in deep glowing autumn colors and filled with overstuffed furniture that owed more to comfort than to fashion.

  “You’re such a fine designer,” her mother often said. “What happened here?”

  Plants in colorful pots bloomed on every window-sill—not the spare, sleek-tongued tropicals that indicated taste and sophistication, but Boston ferns and African violets, primroses and geraniums. The back garden surrounding the tiny flagstone-paved patio was no different, its candy-colored blooms brightening the brick privacy wall on all three sides. Sometimes she sat out here and pretended the rush of traffic was the sound of a river, that she lived in a place with room for her piano and all her favorite things, in a setting of green trees and open space. As her relationship with Rand progressed, children entered the picture, tumbling into her fantasy in laughing profusion. Three or four of them, at least. So much for that, she thought. Right dream, wrong guy.

  Her father and Earl barged in and went to the not-very-well-stocked liquor cabinet. “What’ll it be?” asked Earl.

  “Campari and soda,” her father said. “Rocks.”

  “I was talking to Olivia.”

  “She’ll have the same.” Her father lifted one eyebrow, looking young and mischievous, and Olivia was grateful for once that he was not a sentimental man. If he offered sympathy right now, she might just melt. She nodded, forcing a wan smile, then looked around the apartment. If things had gone the way she’d anticipated today, this would be a much different moment. She’d be looking at her place through new eyes and feeling bittersweet, because she would soon be moving on with her life, planning a future with Rand Whitney. Instead, she saw the place where she would probably live forever, turning into an odd spinster.

  Olivia and her father sat down at the bistro table by the window overlooking the garden and sipped their aperitifs. Earl managed to rustle up a tray of pita triangles and hummus.

  Olivia had no appetite. She felt like a survivor of some disaster, shocky and tender, assessing her injuries. “I’m an idiot,” she said, the ice clinking in her glass as she set it on the wrought-iron table.

  “You’re a sweetheart. What’s-his-name is a world-class heel,” her father said.

  She shut her eyes. “God, why do I do this to myself?”

  “Because you’re a…” Always careful with words, her father paused to find the right ones.

  “Three-time loser,” Olivia suggested.

  “I was going to say hopeless romantic.” He smiled at her fondly.

  She knocked back the rest of her drink. “I guess you’re half-right. I’m hopeless.”

  “Oh, now it starts,” Earl said. “Let me take out my violin.”

  “Come on. Don’t I get to wallow for at least one night?”

  “Not over him,” her father said.

  “He’s not worth it,” said Earl. “No more than Pierce or Richard was worth it.” He spoke the names of her previous two failures with exaggerated disdain.

  “Here’s the thing about broken hearts,” Philip said. “You can always survive them. Always. No matter how deep the hurt, the capacity to heal and move on is even stronger.”

  She wondered if he was talking about his divorce from her mother, all those years ago. “Thanks, guys,” she said. “The whole you’re-too-good-for-him-anyway routine worked once. Maybe twice. This is the third time, and I have to consider that the fault might be with me. I mean, what are the odds of meeting three rat bastards in a row?”

  “Honey, this is Manhattan,” her father said. “The place is crawling with them.”

  “Quit blaming yourself,” Earl advised. “You’ll give yourself a complex.”

  She reached down and scratched Barkis behind the ears, one of his favorite spots. “I think I already have a complex.”

  “No,” said Earl, “you have issues. There’s a difference.”

  “And one of those issues is that you mistake your need for love for actually being in love,” her father observed. He watched a lot of Dr. Phil.

  “Oh, good one,” Earl said, and they high-fived one another across the table.

  “Hello? Breaking heart here,” Olivia reminded them. “You’re supposed to be helping me, not practicing armchair psychology.”

  Both her father and Earl grew serious. “You want to go first, or me?” Earl asked.

  Her father fed another tidbit to the dog. Olivia noticed he wasn’t eating or drinking, and felt guilty for upsetting him. “Take it away, maestro,” he said to Earl.

  “There’s really not that much to say,” Earl told her, “except that you didn’t love Rand. Or the others. You only think Rand was special because he seemed so perfect for you.”

  “He’s moving to L.A.,” she confessed. “He never even checked to see if that would be all right with me. He just expected me to go along.” She felt her chest expand, and knew she was inches from tears—because it was true that she didn’t love Rand enough…but she had loved him a little.

  “You’re…what, twenty-seven years old?” Earl continued. “You’re a baby. An emotional newborn. You haven’t even scratched the surface of what love is.”

  Her father nodded. “You never got past the early-crush phase. You were strolling in Central Park and fixing candlelit meals for each other, and he was parading you in front of his friends. That’s not love, not the kind you deserve. That’s like…a warm-up exercise.”

  “How do you know that, Dad?” she demanded, crushed that he had managed to sum up her entire relationship with Rand so handily. Then she caught the look on her father’s face, and backed off. Even though her love life was always under the microscope, her parents’ marriage and divorce were protected by a conspiracy of silence.

  “There’s a kind of love that has the power to save you, to get you through life,” her father said. “It’s like breathing. You have to do it or you’ll die. And when it’s over, your soul starts to bleed, Livvy. There’s no pain in the world like it, I swear. If you were feeling that now, you wouldn’t be able to sit up straight or have a coherent conversation.”

  She met her father’s gaze. He so rarely spoke to Olivia about matters of the heart, so she was inclined to listen. His words grabbed at something deep inside her. To love like that…it was impossible. It was frightening. “Why would anyone want that?”

  “It’s what living is about. It’s the reason you go through life. Not because you’re compatible or you look good together or your mothers attended Mary-mount at the same time.”

  Clearly, these two had studied and discussed Rand Whitney’s résumé.

  “I still feel like crap,” she said, knowing somehow that they were right.

  “Of course you do,” her father said. “And you’re entitled to feel that way for a day or two. But don’t mistake that feeling for grief over lost love. You can’t lose what you never had in the first place.” He swirled his glass, the ice clinking against the crystal.

  Olivia rested her chin in her hand. “Thanks for being so great, Dad.”

  “He’s the mother you never had.” Earl made no sec
ret of his dislike for Pamela Lightsey Bellamy, who still used her married name, years after the divorce.

  “Hey,” Philip warned.

  “Well, it’s true,” Earl said.

  Olivia drank the rest of her Campari and gave the ice to a thirsty-looking African violet. “So now what?”

  “Now we have coq au vin for dinner, and you’ll probably have more vin than coq, but that’s okay,” Earl said.

  “Mom is going to hate this,” she said. “She had high hopes for Rand. I can just hear her now—‘What did you do to run him off?’”

  “Pamela has always been such a lovely woman,” said Earl. “Are you sure you’re an only child? Maybe she ate the others when they were young.”

  Olivia grinned over the rim of the highball glass. “She would never do that. Mom has too much fun messing with people’s heads. I bet she’d like to have ten of me if she could.”

  It had taken Olivia’s entire adolescence to finally lose the weight that had made her such a target for bullies, and gain the approval of her mother. Ironically but not surprisingly, all it had taken was the loss of forty or sixty pounds, depending on how much she was lying to herself. Once the slender, chic Olivia emerged from her cocoon of obesity, Pamela had a whole new set of ambitions for her only daughter. It never occurred to Pamela to wonder why Olivia had only found success in losing weight when she left home for college.

  “I wish there were ten of you,” Earl said loyally, clinking his glass to hers. “You’re adorable, and it never would have worked out with Rand Whitney anyway.”

  “Still, it would have been fun if she was married to a Whitney,” her father mused.

  “Bullshit. She’d be so busy with charity fund-raisers and gallery openings, we’d never see her. Plus, she’d be an alcoholic in a few years, and where’s the fun in that?”

  “I don’t believe you guys,” said Olivia. “If you were so convinced I’d be miserable with Rand, why didn’t you tell me months ago?”