My perception of private detectives started with film noir, those black-and-white movies narrated by an emphysemic man commenting on some babe with legs to die for. She’d open a frosted glass door and walk into a smoky, messy office, where half-opened, partially derailed venetian blinds covered grimy windows. Maybe a bottle of cheap whiskey on the desk.
Then Richard Castle came along, with his modern Scandinavia-ish desk and supple leather chairs, surrounded by three walls of bookshelves as overstuffed as deli sandwiches.
So when my GPS led me to a nondescript, vanilla-brick ranch-style house on the corner of an equally nondescript neighborhood, I double-checked the address. Maybe flying under the radar extended to his choice of office space? I was already forming assumptions about the man before I opened my door. And they were mostly on the side of glass half-empty.
On the paneled entry door was a simple brass nameplate: The Office of J.M. Tarkington. I realized I’d forgotten to check my teeth in the mirror for lipstick smudges or food that might have hitched a ride between them. I hurriedly swiped my forefinger over my front teeth and pressed the doorbell. The video-camera doorbell. The doorbell I was too busy cleaning my teeth like a cavewoman to notice.
My life had become the lyrics “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all,” from a record by Albert King. Wyatt loved blues and blues rock and sometimes listened to the song “Born Under a Bad Sign.” We’d sing that line to each other and laugh. Was God trying to tell me something even then? Was there some sort of genetic predisposition to tragedy, and our child was doomed to live under a rain cloud?
The door opened up and my preconceptions shut down. If I’d worn heels, I might have been taller than the man who opened the door and asked if I was Olivia Kavanaugh. He introduced himself as Jim and invited me in. His hair was shaved so closely it could have been blond or brown or gray. Following him, I wouldn’t have known by his slim build and clothes—a navy polo shirt and jeans that fit his body without too much attention to his butt—whether he was in his thirties or fifties.
His office was off the foyer, where a living or dining room might be in someone’s home. Mia would have whipped out fabric samples and paint-color chips before Jim had time to sit in his standard-issue desk chair behind his standard-issue desk.
Whatever he lacked in design skills, he made up for in his confident, calm, and caring manner. He asked about Cara—I’d mentioned her name when I scheduled the appointment—but not in one of those efficient ways people who know you’ve been referred were apt to do. Anyone else, hearing his warmth, might have thought Cara was his sister, not a client.
After asking if I was comfortable, he took a fresh legal pad out of his desk drawer and said, “Okay, let’s get started. Do you have the information I asked you to bring?”
I nodded and handed him a manila folder with pictures of Wyatt, a copy of the accident report, and other details he’d asked me to provide. Later, I told Mia the experience was like going to a new doctor because you have some mysterious ailment. And the doctor prods and probes, asking each time, “Does this hurt?” and “How about here?” and he’d sink his fingertips into you over and over, the same questions each time. Sometimes when he pushed, places you least suspected would be tender and sore. And still, after all that, the diagnosis was “We’ll have to run more tests.”
He promised he would check in with me weekly and told me to call if I remembered anything else or if I had questions. Before I left, he asked me if I was ready.
“Ready? For . . . ? Is there something else we need to do?”
“No, from here on it’s all me. Like I said earlier, there’s always the possibility that we may not find anything. But if I do, though I think it’s going to be more likely when I do, you have to decide beforehand if you’re ready for the answers. No judgment either way. You do what’s best for you, no matter what anyone else says. I can stop at any time.”
Driving back to the office, I reached for my worry beads that I’d left in the car. I felt like a patient who’d just been told she had a tumor.
The question of whether it was benign or malignant had already been answered. The other question was, did I want to know and live with it or did I want to risk removing it?
CHAPTER 37
Thirty minutes before Evan was scheduled to pick me up, I lowered the volume on the evening news to inform my parents that he and I were going to dinner.
“That’s great, Livvy,” said my father, his expression much like the one he wore when he first saw me in my cap and gown before college graduation.
My mother was needlepointing the Christmas pillow she’d started when I left for college. The one she resurrected before my wedding, after Wyatt died, and now. The guest-room closet held a library of pattern books, stacks of canvases, and miles of thread. Dad never cared about her inventory or its cost. “Cheaper than a psychiatrist,” I’d overhear him say when she’d come home with a bulging bag from Nona’s NeedleWorks. Still focusing on her needle whipping through the canvas, she asked, “What are you wearing?”
“Clothes, since we opted out of the invitation from the nudist colony.”
My dad wisely hid his face behind his newspaper, but not before I saw his lips pressed together to stifle a laugh.
“I hoped you might not put on something too . . . revealing,” she said. She looked at me. “Maybe one of those tunic tops would be flattering.”
Her words were window dressing for her real message.
“He knows I’m pregnant. And this isn’t a date, even if I wasn’t.”
She reached for her cane. I wished I had paid more attention in physics so I could calculate the distance between where I stood and its reach. Instead, she poked my dad’s newspaper with it. “Stop pretending you’re reading that and help me to our bedroom.”
“You’re going to bed now?” Dad looked at his watch. “Or are we going to bed now?” He grinned.
I groaned.
“Neither one. Don’t be ridiculous. I want to put on my makeup to be presentable when Evan gets here.”
“Scarlett, you look beautiful—”
Uh-oh. He hadn’t moved from his chair yet to help my mother.
“George, cut it. Are you going to help me or not?”
When Evan rang the doorbell almost exactly a half hour later, my father looked like a man grateful to have been relieved by a new distraction.
I sat on the sofa and watched Evan shake my father’s hand and kiss my mother on her cheek, and I listened to him slip into comfortable conversation about his parents and siblings, the club. For a minute, it felt as if I were the only one in the present, and I was witnessing a flashback playing itself out in front of me.
So much was the same. Yet, so much was different.
“This is your car?” I buckled myself in, surprised to be sitting in a small SUV with Evan behind the wheel. “I figured you for something flashy, a convertible or something Range Rover-ish.”
“Did you now?” His voice was teasing. “Are you saying this car isn’t going to up my game with you?”
“No, because we don’t have a game,” I said, making air quotes around the word game.
“Right. Not date, just dinner. I remember,” he said. “And where are we going for dinner? You nixed boiled seafood, and I didn’t make reservations anywhere, so we’re at the mercy of your palate.”
“In that case, let’s skip dinner and go straight to dessert.”
“How about Dairy Queen for Blizzards? We could order a dozen minis in different flavors,” he said.
I would never have expected to experience a twinge of fondness for Evan based on a Blizzard.
The wistful affection I heard in his voice filled a part of me that had been vacant for a long time. It was one of those moments when the issue wasn’t the issue. It wasn’t so much that he remembered how obsessed I was with Dairy Queen. It was my remembering what it felt like to be with someone who knew my history. Someone familiar.
“Y
es,” I said, a small sigh of nostalgia escaping. “One of those things I never grew out of.”
As the car turned onto Main Street, I noticed a line of white stretch limousines parked outside the church, the one I was supposed to have walked out of as Mrs. Wyatt Hammond. Instead, I had followed Wyatt’s coffin down the steps to the cemetery. My pristine white wedding gown and veil, laced with promise, replaced by an inky-black suit, my face covered by a future I’d never see.
“You know, what?” I said to Evan. “Let’s find some of those boiled shrimp you enticed me with.”
Both too hungry to endure the long drive and wait for the buffet at a casino, we stopped at Dempsey’s, a seafood restaurant and bar far enough away from town that we could avoid the locals, but close enough to satisfy our stomachs. Wyatt hadn’t been fond of seafood, so we had only eaten there together once or twice. That made being there easier for me.
Most of the staff had worked at that restaurant so long, they probably had served our parents when they came to eat with their parents. I watched Evan as he bantered with the waitress, who was giving him a hard time for not ordering a locally brewed beer. He winked at me once during their conversation, which told me he never intended to order the beer he asked her for. I think she knew it, too, but it was great entertainment for both of them.
I was amused and annoyed. Hunger made me grumpy, but sitting across from Evan made me squirmy. In high school, Evan, hot, and cute were inexorably linked. I’d replace cute with attractive, charming, self-assured, and tempting. The man you’d want to ask how he likes his eggs for breakfast, minutes into your first date. Then again, he could lapse into arrogant, demanding, condescending, and egotistical. The last four characterized the Evan I knew in college and law school. I was still uncertain about this new version.
We split a seafood platter for two, Evan making sure he gave me most of the shrimp, and I gave him all the oysters. One of those idiosyncrasies we already knew about each other.
“I’m at an unfair disadvantage here.” I pointed my fork at him. “I spotted that ready-to-pounce focus in your eyes. Don’t start lawyering me with semantics and telling me things like ‘unfair disadvantage is redundant,’ okay?”
“Why would I do that? Isn’t telling you what you already know redundant?” He maintained his wide-eyed innocence as he speared another hush puppy and chewed thoughtfully.
I knew Evan well enough to avoid the trap of being distracted by his verbal sparring. A pastime he pursued if he suspected discomfort awaited him at the other end of the question.
“That diversion isn’t going to derail me. As I said, I’m at a disadvantage because you and the entire town know why my wedding didn’t happen. Your brother told me you were engaged. And now you’re not. Explain.”
He ate a few bites of coleslaw, finished his beer, and said, “You want the unedited version?”
I didn’t detect anger or sadness in his voice. He sounded like the waitress asking if I wanted fries or a baked potato. “The CliffsNotes version will do.” I’d had enough emotional drama. I didn’t want more.
“Quinn and I met my last year in law school. She wasn’t the least bit intimidated by my oppositional, rude, and contentious self. In a crazy way, she liked it. Even prodded me into it sometimes. I found out later. I reminded her of her father. Not only was she intelligent and crazy beautiful, she was rich.” He was stealing the French fries off my plate as he talked. “What’s not to love?” A hint of a smile edged his lips.
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m waiting to hear.”
“Point, Kavanaugh,” Evan said and wrote a number one in the air as if on a scoreboard. “I didn’t know about the money that followed her until I met her parents. Old money. The kind that people don’t talk about, but their daughters are Mardi Gras queens, and their sons become captains of industry. Their house was on the Tchefuncte River at the end of a mile-long driveway through the woods. Anyone on the road would never know what was back there. I guess that was the point. They modeled the house after Twelve Oaks Plantation from Gone with the Wind.”
“Get out,” I said with savage disbelief. “And this is the edited version? Can we hurry this up? Dairy Queen is calling.”
“Bottom line? Quinn wanted to play law, not practice. She’s a trust fund baby, with enough for her own babies. But before I slipped that engagement ring on her finger, we talked about building our own lives without relying on family, about children, what we valued . . . It turned out to be blahblahblah. When her parents presented us with a monthlong honeymoon in Europe as part of our wedding gift, I should’ve suspected that I’d never be able to support the lifestyle she’d known since she was old enough to teethe on a silver rattle.”
“Then it was about the money? Or the lack of it?” I picked through the platter hoping to find a fried shrimp buried under the fish, stuffed crabs, and fried crawfish.
“Probably the beginning of the end.” He handed me two shrimp on a napkin. “After a year in a law office, I was miserable. How could I have known that I’d love learning about law, love the challenge of it, the logic, and even creativity it required, but hate being an attorney? The stress of billable hours, working late and waking up early, depositions . . .”
He stopped, raised his empty beer bottle to catch the attention of our waitress, and, for the first time since we’d both been back, I glimpsed a shade of disappointment.
“Quinn didn’t want to be the wife of a small-town golf pro. Her father offered to set me and Quinn up in our own practice, shift me into a general counsel position at his consulting business, enough money to take six months off so we could travel while I decided what I wanted to do in the legal profession . . . You probably can connect the dots without my detailing the rest of the drama.”
“I’m sorry you had to experience all that to discover what really mattered to you.” I pushed my plate away to leave room for dessert. “If you had walked through one of those doors Quinn’s father wanted you to open, the end result would have been the same. It sounds like you and Quinn had enough in common to attract you to one another. But it’s those life-changing decisions that expose the truth about what we value.”
Evan nodded. “Sometimes being an adult is highly overrated, isn’t it?” He smiled. “And on that note, I’ll pay the bill, and off we go to Blizzard Land.”
The two of us sat in his car outside Dairy Queen, scooping bites of each other’s ice cream and reminiscing. We laughed. Genuine, bellyaching laughter. I’d forgotten that tear-wiping, side-splitting experience of being left nearly breathless.
He insisted on walking me to the front door when we reached my parents’ house. “I don’t care if it’s a gated community. That doesn’t excuse me from being a polite man who wouldn’t drop his date off at the curb like—”
“This isn’t a date,” I said, digging in the bowels of my purse for my keys. Hoping to find them soon because the close proximity to Evan made me uncomfortable. In a jelly-kneed, body-humming way. He was waking feelings in me that I’d buried with Wyatt, and when they tried to break ground, I’d stomp on them until they surrendered.
“Okay, if that makes you feel better,” he said. “Then can we have another one of these non-date dates again?”
“Found them.” I jiggled my keys as evidence. I forced myself to look at Evan and not try to hide my face when I said, “I’m pregnant. Maybe there are reality-television shows where single pregnant women are dating. I’m not auditioning for one of those.”
“Then you’re saying if you weren’t pregnant, we could call this a date?”
This time, I turned to open the door. “No. Can’t we just be two friends catching up, entertaining one another, and leave it at that?”
“Sure.” He tousled my hair, his hand lingering on the back of my neck. “I had a great time. Good night, Livvy.”
I watched him walk to his car, then I closed the front door behind me. As I expected, my parents had gone to bed. Further proof this was not a date. I wanted
to remember to tell Evan that the next time I saw him.
I changed, finished the face-washing, teeth-brushing, hair-combing routine, and slipped between clean sheets, the lavender scent still fresh. I turned off the lamp, rolled on my side, and tucked my hands under the pillow. I missed those nights falling asleep in Wyatt’s arms, his breathing soft and measured, the warmth of his body stretched out next to me.
It had been months since Wyatt died, months before the baby would be born, and then how many months before I felt a man’s lips pressed against mine? Or a man’s embrace, so close that I could press my hand to his chest and feel his heart beat?
I reached for my worry beads on the nightstand, letting the hot tears roll down my face and onto the pillow. Remembering what I’d told Evan about life-changing decisions exposing the truth about what we value. Wyatt’s decision robbed him of life. What did that reveal?
For now, it would reveal nothing. I’d boxed it away. Shoved it into a dark corner of my heart. Along with those two baby gifts.
CHAPTER 38
I was already running late for work when Ruthie called from the Bellagio and told me she’d hit the jackpot on a slot machine. “When those quarters started dumping out, they sounded all kinds of happy. I won over two hundred dollars. Might break even before the day’s over.” She laughed. “Don’t tell your mother, because she’ll text me the story about Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple. I told her last time we took this trip that I tithe on the gross of what I win, not the net.”
A sudden rush of loud voices in the background made it hard for me to hear her. “Are you still there?”
She must have walked away because all was quiet when she answered. “I’m here. A couple left the hotel having hissy fits about spending too much money and leaving early. They should’ve decided their limit before they got here . . . But I didn’t call to talk about them.” She sighed and then said, “Your mother called me about your date with Evan.”
Since You've Been Gone Page 18