by Sara Arden
“I’d like to think that she knows that.” He hung his head. “She’s really pissed at me.”
“So am I.” Betsy sighed and deflated. “But I still love you.”
“We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“So Jack actually went to the support group?”
Betsy nodded. “I dropped him off and watched him go inside.”
“You were checking up on him to see if he was really going to go.”
A hot blush stained her cheeks. “Well, yes.”
“If he told you he’d go, you know he would. He doesn’t lie.”
Except that one time that he did.
She’d never get that image of him out of her head. Jack sitting in the shaft of sunlight, his fingers curled around—
“Hey, Bets?” Caleb cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know where you just went in your head, but it was a bad place and you don’t need to go there again. Jack’s going to be fine. He has you. He has me. No matter what, even if I beat him senseless, he’s still family. And he knows it.”
“Does he?”
“I shouldn’t be doing this, but since you shared some info about India with me, I’ll tell you. I saw him yesterday and we talked. He came over to the house and sanded some trim with me over lunch.”
“Sanding some trim? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Betsy quoted Jack from the last Sunday dinner when he’d been teasing Caleb and India.
“Very funny, Bets. If you weren’t such a girl, I’d think you were a man.”
“Anyway, back to the important stuff. You. Jack. Trim?”
“He said he was pretty sure you saved his life, and before you pounce and rattle me like a maraca trying to find out what else he said, that was it. He said he wasn’t ready to talk about it more than just that.”
“Well, he saved mine. So it’s only fair.”
“I told him that, too. But if your accounts are in the clear, do you still want to be with him?”
“Why? Did he say something?” Betsy realized she sounded as if she were still in high school.
“Didn’t I just say he didn’t have anything else to say on the matter? I’m asking because I want to know. I need to know.”
“Oh whatever. You can’t drop a statement like that on me and not expect to get a reaction.”
“Betsy!” Lula called from the door. “There’s a call for you.”
Her first thought was that something had happened to Jack. She dashed downstairs.
“Hello?” If it wasn’t Jack, she hoped it was her dad. She missed him when he was away. She didn’t worry, because that would only drive her crazy.
“Betsy?” A voice with a light French accent was on the other end of the line. A voice she hadn’t heard in a very long time.
Marcel.
So many things flooded back over her. The elation when she discovered her interest had been returned by the blue-eyed Frenchman. The first time he made her truffles. The look on his face when she told him she was leaving Paris—absolute disdain and disgust. Both at her and her small-town life.
“How are you?” she finally managed to ask.
“Very well, chérie. Very well. I am back in New York for the week and I would like to see you.”
He’d like to see her? Yes, because she just had that kind of money sitting around and a clear schedule. More important, why did he want to see her? When they’d broken up, he said he couldn’t associate with failure. And that she was. Betsy had become the laughingstock. Everyone in the culinary community knew the story of the stupid American ingenue and the death cap bordelaise. “Come to Kansas if you really want to see me,” she said.
“If I must. I have something very important to tell you. I want to do it in person.” His voice was filled with excitement.
“We could Skype.”
“No, no. In person, it must be. When can you come?” He sounded so excited.
Just like him not to listen. “I told you, I can’t. I’ve got responsibilities here. I have my own shop now.” Why had she told him that? He’d find a way to belittle her accomplishment, damn her with faint praise. Then the joy she found in her little shop would be tainted. She’d be reminded every day how it wasn’t good enough. How she wasn’t good enough. Betsy hung up the phone before he could say another word.
The phone rang again almost instantly.
With her heard thundering in her chest, she answered it.
“Chérie, I think we were disconnected.”
Yeah, because I hung up on you. “That must’ve been what happened.”
“Everything is going to change for you. I have such wonderful news.”
She was curious, even though she knew whatever he had to say was always painted with the impossible. Like now. Come to New York, as if people like her could just do that with no thought for anything or anyone else.
“I mean it, Marcel. If it’s so important that you can’t do it on the phone or Skype, then you have to come here.” Oh what was she saying? She didn’t want him to come here. She didn’t want to see him again no matter what his news was. He could tell her he’d laid a golden egg and it hatched twin diamond ducks and that still didn’t warrant his presence.
“Oui. That is just like you. So demanding of your own way.” He sighed as if she were a child to be indulged. “I will come.”
No! What had she done? She opened her mouth to tell him not to, and he’d hung up. Betsy had enough on her plate without dealing with Marcel’s presence. Maybe she could have Caleb arrest him as soon as he crossed the county line?
“Who was that?” Caleb asked from behind her.
“Marcel.”
“The stain in the NYC pictures?”
“Yes. That’s the one.”
“What did he want?”
“For me to go to New York because he’s in town.”
“I hope you told him to take a flying fu—”
“Language!” their mother yelled from the kitchen. Sometimes it was as if she had supersonic hearing.
For a brief moment, Betsy wondered if her mother had heard her encounter with Jack. That was too horrible a possibility to even consider. “I said no, but then he said he had some news that he wanted to tell me in person. And stupid me, I told him if he wanted to tell me in person he’d just have to come here. So he is.”
“I really hope that even if he offers you the Holy Grail you say no.”
“Why is that?” She cocked her head to the side.
“Because when you came back from Paris, you weren’t the same. It was more than the mushrooms.”
“Well, yeah. I drop-kicked all my dreams into a steaming pile of buffalo crap. Of course I’m not the same. Whatever Marcel has to say, it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late. Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to tell Jack? Kind of hard to convince someone else of something that you don’t believe yourself, isn’t it?”
“The internship was a onetime thing.”
“There are other chefs to study under. Other people with gifts as wonderful and other people who’ve made mistakes. What if he’s found some way for you to have your dream?”
“I thought you just said even if he offered me the Holy Grail—”
“I changed my mind. If you can live your dream, you should. Glory was never what you wanted.”
What about Jack? She wasn’t thinking about her dreams of a career, of living in Paris, of going back to NYC or seeing and experiencing the world. She just wanted to hide herself and Jack away from all of it in the safe cocoon of his bed. “I doubt he’s done anything for me. Although I can’t think why he would come here to tell me anything. There’s nothing that could be that important. I was never that important to him.”
“Stop with the woe is me. So what if you weren’t? He can be a means to an end, and as long as you remember that’s all he is, what does it matter what he thought of you or said to you?”
“I don’t know what my dreams are now,” she confessed.
“You should always be dreaming, Betsy. Mom told us that every night of our lives, that we should always dream awake.”
“What about the shop?” she offered weakly. “Say he did have some amazing opportunity. I can’t just leave my business.”
“What about it? We can cover that—India, Mom and I. If you want it, we can make it happen. You’ve been so busy trying to take care of everyone else, you’ve forgotten to take care of you. I thought maybe this thing with Jack was you taking care of you, but he’s another crusade.”
“He’s not!”
“Maybe you don’t know it yet, but he is.”
“I was in love with him long before he lost his leg.”
“Are you in love with him still? Or the idea of him?”
Betsy didn’t like how the question made her feel. Unsure and awkward, itchy like bugs on her skin. “We’re getting to know each other again. So I can’t answer that the way you want me to. I love him, of course. He is family. But...” She couldn’t put it into words and she wasn’t quite ready to do so, either.
Caleb put his hands on her shoulders. “Betsy, you’re one of the kindest, most loving people I know. That said, you’re also used to getting what you want. Make sure that what you’re doing isn’t just finally getting that toy that never showed up under the tree. That you’re not replacing Paris with Jack.”
“How do you go from punching him in the face to protecting him from me?”
“I don’t know. Talent?”
She rolled her eyes. “Can you please just stay out of it?”
“No.”
It seemed the storm had passed, and Betsy knew it would. She knew what Caleb had done had been because he cared about her, but he wasn’t helping. She wished she and Jack could escape it all and just be Jack and Betsy without all the entanglement and meddling from other people.
Even if they were people she loved.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JACK DIDN’T LIKE the smell of the place.
It was sterile and smelled...institutional. That had a flavor, too. It was like bleach and mold—a strange and unnatural combination.
Jack inhaled the scent of Betsy’s cookies. They wiped away everything bad. There was a table at the far corner of the wall with coffee, some store-bought cookies and a pitcher of water. Nothing looked very appetizing. He didn’t want to put the cookies on the table; he wanted to hold them close like a security blanket.
They reminded him of why he wanted to be here.
Jack took a cookie out of the box and bit into it. He couldn’t taste the pumpkin, but the little Red Hots smile on the face burned his tongue. It was spicy.
He took another bite.
It seemed right somehow that this moment would taste like cinnamon—sharp but still palatable. He didn’t know if he could say it was pleasant yet. Threaded through with the rest of the cookie, and dulled by the texture, it was something that met two needs. Jack could do this.
He snatched two more cookies from the box before sacrificing the rest on the table.
“You’re going to be popular,” a voice said from behind him.
He turned to see a kid who couldn’t be any older than a minute. He looked impossibly young, but lean and hungry as if he knew what it was like to starve. As if he could glut himself on the world and still, he’d never be sated. Even with his youth, there was something haunted in his eyes. Jack recognized it because he’d seen it in the mirror.
“Why is that?” Jack asked.
“All of the guys love to see those boxes from Sweet Thing.”
Jack’s first instinct was to put his fist through the kid’s face. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that the kid meant Betsy’s shop, not Betsy herself. He couldn’t know that was his nickname for Betsy. God, but he had to get a handle on this rage thing.
He wasn’t normally a jealous man. He wasn’t wired that way. Betsy had become something holy to him, and he knew she wasn’t. She was a flesh-and-blood woman the same as he was simply a man.
“I almost ate them all myself,” he managed to say.
“I would have.” The kid grabbed one. “I’m O’Neil.”
“McConnell.” He shook the kid’s hand that wasn’t full of cookie.
“You’re the guy they gave the medal to.”
“Yeah, that’s me.” What else was he supposed to say to that? All of that made him uncomfortable. He’d done his duty and his job; it was nothing special.
“Miss Sweet Thing herself was there that day, wasn’t she?”
“Look, O’Neil. If you want to keep your face, don’t talk about my girl.”
He held up his hands. “Whoa, I didn’t know. None of us did. All the guys are going to be heartbroken to hear it. Good for you, man.”
Dick-broken was more like it, his brain growled. He realized that he might have spoken out of line. Betsy had never agreed to be his. Jack was in a support group for PTSD, for fuck’s sake. He wasn’t fit for a relationship.
Nevertheless, she’s mine. He’d deal with that later.
He stuffed another cookie in his mouth and wandered over to the circle of chairs. That sensation where his skin was too tight and itchy was back, like a swarm of bugs crawling all over him.
Jack tried to find a seat where he wouldn’t have his back to a door, or exposed. There was no such luck. He just knew he was going to have some freak-out before this was over.
“Looking for somewhere to sit so you’re not exposed? Yeah. Not so much. We just have to trust each other to watch everyone’s back. I think that’s part of it,” O’Neil said. “Sometimes the new guys sit on the floor against the far wall.”
No, he wasn’t going to do this. He knew where he was. He was home. He could sit down like a regular person and have a conversation.
Couldn’t he?
Everyone took their seats and nodded to each other in silent acknowledgment. Jack searched all of their faces and in each one, he saw a brother. No matter how age had marked them, or youth still smiled on them, no matter anything else about them, what bonded them all together was in their eyes. A soul-deep wound that festered.
Jack was immediately comforted by the fact that he wasn’t alone, but he ached for his brothers, too. He didn’t wish his pain, or terror, on anyone. Not even to know he wasn’t alone in the dark.
An older man wearing jeans and a polo shirt sat down in a chair that seemed to have been left open for him. He wore a tag on his shirt that read Volunteer.
“I see we have a new face tonight.” He held out his hand for Jack to shake. He had a firm grip, solid. “I’m Andrew.”
“Jack.”
“Glad you’re here, Jack. Wait for me after group and we’ll talk, if you like.”
Jack nodded.
Andrew addressed the rest of the group. “So, last time we were listening to O’Neil’s story. Is everyone okay with picking up where we left off?”
O’Neil swallowed hard, but he lifted his shoulders and straightened his spine. “It wasn’t a good week. Sharma took the baby and left. I can’t blame her. If I could leave me, too, I would.”
They waited, quiet and still, for him to continue. A heavy weight settled over the room, like a blanket, a shroud...the lid of a coffin.
“The storm. Lightning struck the house and it was a trigger. I took her and Caty downstairs and I wouldn’t let them leave. It wasn’t the storm outside, it was insurgents. They were trying to kill us and no matter what she said to me, I wouldn’t believe we were home, safe. She got a restraining order and because of the gun
, I can’t see my daughter. I’m going to lose my job. I’m an M.P. I wanted to go into civilian law enforcement when I get out in June, and that’s not going to happen.”
“I thought we agreed you were going to store your personal weapons for now?” Andrew asked him gently.
“I couldn’t. I just couldn’t leave them unprotected.”
Andrew nodded. “But didn’t we decide together, as a group, that Sharma and Caty would be safer?”
“I couldn’t.”
Jack could see his own pain, his own fear reflected in the boy’s eyes.
Andrew seemed to sense that O’Neil needed a breather. “What about everyone else? How did you come through the storm?”
It wasn’t just Jack. These men around him were all strong men, all brave men, and they’d feared the storm, as well. That knowledge was both a blade and a balm.
Another man spoke. “I did okay. My wife and I spent the night in the basement watching eighties movies with a bottle of rum.”
“That’s really good, Bobby.”
A bottle of rum is really good?
Jack’s incredulity must’ve shown on his face, because the guy spoke again. “I know, right? That is good. A year ago, I would’ve been sloppy drunk by myself with my weapon in hand and I might not have made it through the night.”
“What about you, Jack? You’re here. You might as well jump in with both feet,” Andrew said.
“It never gets any easier to share. You just have to do it,” O’Neil added.
Jack took a deep breath, filling his lungs and concentrating on that sensation of feeling full, of feeling alive. He didn’t want to share those intimate moments with Betsy. Those were his—only his. Especially because these guys knew who she was and had talked about her. “That’s me every Saturday morning,” he confessed.
No one said anything and there was no judgment on the faces that watched him, no pity. Just empathy and understanding.
“I, uh, I’m supposed to be dead. I lost my leg to an IED. When the device was launched into our camp, I was prepared to die to save my brothers. Only I didn’t die. After a bright flash and pain like I’ve never felt before, a burn so hot it was cold, I woke up in Ramstein with a limb I don’t have still burning and a nurse whispering in my ear to remember my promise.” Jack breathed again, focused on the act of inhaling, exhaling. Normal functions of life. “I was sure fate had screwed up. It’s okay for me to be a name on a wall somewhere. It’s okay to have given my life for something bigger than me, but I’m still alive with no life to live. I’m on medical discharge, my career taken from me. I’m no use to anyone. So every Saturday morning, my .357 and I give fate a chance to fix its mistake.”