Second Time Around

by Beth Kendrick

  As soon as he picked up, she got right to the point. “It’s me. How’d you find me, and what do you want?”

  “The department secretary was kind enough to share the contact information you’d given her to forward on your mail and your final paycheck. And I must say—” He paused but couldn’t hold himself back. “Paradise Found Bed-and-Breakfast? Really? Paradise Found? Milton is spinning in his grave.”

  “Did you call just to patronize me?” Cait chomped down on a pen cap.

  His tone changed instantly from mocking to mollifying. “When you left, you may remember that I mentioned the dean suspected financial irregularities with the speaker fund and the department slush fund.”

  “Vividly.” The pen cap was going to have permanent molar imprints.

  “Yes.” She heard him shuffling papers. “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  More paper shuffling, then a drawn-out sigh. “It appears that now the shadow of suspicion has fallen over me.”

  Cait spat the pen cap clear across the room. “It was you! I should have known. That’s why you put me in charge of those accounts, isn’t it? All the better to frame me!”

  “No, no, no. Let’s not fly off the handle here. First and foremost, you should know that there is no concrete proof of any wrongdoing.” Yet, his tone clearly implied.

  “But there was enough to justify strong-arming me out of my job.”

  “Be fair. You asked for a sabbatical.”

  “I see. So if I decide I want to come back next year, I’ll be welcomed with open arms.”

  Dead silence.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Thanks for calling. Bye now.”

  “Wait!” he cried.

  She froze, her index finger hovering over the disconnect button.

  “The dean has hired an auditor to investigate the allegations of financial mismanagement within the department,” Charles said.

  She drummed her fingers on the desktop. “Uh-huh.”

  “And it occurred to me that, since you don’t work at Shayland anymore, it really doesn’t matter if you misappropriated funds or not.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she sputtered. “No. Before you go any further, the answer is no. Hell no. Never gonna happen, not in this world or the next.”

  “I’m not asking you to lie,” he wheedled. “But if the auditor should happen to track you down, I’d appreciate it if you’d—”

  “The auditor won’t have to track me down; I’ll call him myself as soon as we hang up.” She searched for a new pen. “What’s his number?”

  He sniffed. “Don’t be spiteful.”

  “I’m being ethical, not to mention practical. I may be on the job market again soon. What am I supposed to say when a potential employer asks for references from Shayland?”

  “You’re looking for another professorship already?” he asked. “Guess the novel’s not going so well, hmm?”

  “I will kill you,” she hissed.

  “In all sincerity, I know how difficult it is. Believe me. I’ve been toiling on my work-in-progress for the last five years.”

  For a moment, she was too stunned to be angry. “You’re writing a novel? You never told me that.”

  “No offense, but it’s a rather bleak, modernist narrative. Evocative of Kafka, I flatter myself.” He chuckled. “Not really your cup of tea.”

  “Too literary for a lightweight like me, in other words?”

  He shifted back into his patient, pedantic mode. “Must you turn everything into a battle, Caitlin?”

  “You’re the one who’s trying to skim money off the colloquium fund and throw me under the bus!”

  “Just to be clear, there are no actual monies missing at this point. If someone has indeed been, ahem, borrowing without administrative approbation, he or she has repaid the accounts in full.”

  “Well, that’s very magnanimous of him or her. And just so you know, the novel is going swimmingly. It’s brilliant. It’s breathtaking. The New York Times reviewers are going to wet their pants over it. Suck on that, Kafka.”

  She hung up on him before he could utter another syllable and immediately dialed up the all-knowing oracle: “Hi, Penny, I just got off the phone with the department chair. He was about to give me the contact information for the auditor the department’s working with, but he had a student emergency to attend to. Is there any way you could track that down for me? … Great, I knew you could help me out. Thanks, Penny!”

  Then she sat back in her chair and stared out the bedroom window. The view had barely changed since she had lived in this house as a college senior—same maple tree, same house next door, same chapel bell tower looming over the rooftops—but everything else in her world had shifted radically. The stakes were higher now, the dilemmas much thornier. And so many of her assumptions about who’d she be when she “grew up” had turned out to be laughably erroneous.

  What she needed right now, more than anything, was to sit down with Arden and have a lengthy heart-to-heart complete with laughing and crying and white wine chilled with crushed ice (because, as Arden often said, “That’s how they do it at the poshest Connecticut boarding schools. Trust me.”). Cait was very close to Anna, Brooke, and Jamie, but she and Arden had developed a special bond over the last few years.

  And now Arden was gone. Cait could alter everything else in her life, from her career to her behavior, but she couldn’t change the fact that she would never be able to share anything with her best friend again. There, ensconced in the same room that had been her refuge all those years ago, Cait finally allowed herself to absorb the full weight of her grief.

  She put her head down on the desk and cried for the first time since Arden’s funeral. Gut-wrenching, body-wracking sobs. She cried until her cheeks went numb and her nose felt raw and her wellspring of fear and sorrow ran dry.

  Then she washed her face, fixed herself a Chardonnay slushy in a ceramic coffee mug for old time’s sake, and switched on her computer.

  “Here’s to you, babe.” She hoisted her mug toward the setting sun. “No more excuses, no more extensions.”

  How did you get this scar?” Helena traced her finger along the line of pale, raised flesh that ran from MacCormick’s shoulder to his stomach.

  He shuttered his gaze. “An accident,” he said. “When I was younger.”

  “It looks like a sword wound.”

  “Does it, then? And how would a tutor incur a sword wound?”

  She rose up and tilted her head. “My question exactly. I can’t shake the conviction that you’re hiding something from me. Some dark secret—”

  “Helena, I read about epic battles; I do no’ fight them.” His tone sharper, he added, “You search for intrigue where there is none. Likely because you’ve been reading too many of those bloody novels.”

  Like a shot, she reached for the haphazard pile of her garments, unable to cover her nudity fast enough—not only because his censorious words were like a blow, but because she knew he’d turned to insults to distract her from her questions.

  She yanked her chemise over her head, then faced him. “How would such a rarefied man of letters know anything about what I read in my novels? I know you’re hiding something. If you can’t tell me the truth, I’ll be forced to assume that you’re out committing dastardly deeds each night.”

  His laugh mocked her. “You’d like me better as a highwayman, wouldn’t you? Never underestimate the appeal of a rakish masked man to a lady of virtue.”

  “I will not be put off,” she warned him as she gathered up her gown. “I will discover your secret.”

  With his brow creased in anger, he yanked on his trousers. “You stubborn chit. Unlocking my door and ransacking my belongings is no’ going to unearth any truths.”

  Helena stared at the man to whom, just moments ago, she had offered up her body and her very soul. How could she have let the fleeting pleasures of passion overrule her good judgment? “I, too, can lock myself away. I, too, can protect
myself and my own interests.”

  Threading his fingers through his hair, he exhaled a long breath. “Can you no’ just trust me?”

  “Can you not just tell me?” she countered. His reply was silence. “You ask me for trust, yet offer none in return.”

  Cait wrote for hours, until the first hint of dawn crept over the horizon. While she typed, she chipped away at her long-standing beliefs about who she ought to be and what made her worthy and what everyone else might say. So she wasn’t going to be the second coming of Willa Cather. So the National Book Award committee wouldn’t be pounding down her door. So what? At least now she could get down to work without all the self-inflicted guilt and second-guessing.

  Next step: getting over Gavin. Her mind flashed back to the question he’d asked her yesterday: Can you trust me?

  And she realized that the answer was no.

  “We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.”

  —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

  Jamie? Hello? Are you ever going to answer me or should I call 911?”

  Jamie’s eyes popped open. Her mouth tasted sour and her bare feet were freezing. She rolled onto her side and saw the comforter on the carpet. Thirty-two years old and she still kicked off her covers.

  “Jamie!” Anna’s voice sounded a bit panicked, and Jamie wondered how many times her housemate had already called her. “Sarah Richmond just called and said she’s running late for your meeting, but she’ll be here in about an hour.”

  According to the digital clock on the desk, Jamie had napped away the entire afternoon, but she felt more exhausted than when she’d first crawled into bed. “Mmmph.”

  “Hark! Do I hear signs of life?”

  “Mmmph.”

  “It’s about time. Dinner’s ready.”

  Jamie grabbed the comforter and nestled back against the wall. “Go ahead and eat without me.”

  “Would you like me to keep your plate warm?”

  “No thanks, that’s okay. I’m not feeling very well.”

  “Still? Do you think maybe you should see a doctor?”

  “I’m fine,” Jamie insisted. “I appreciate your concern, but truly, I’m fine.”

  “If you say so.” The floorboards creaked as Anna shifted her weight out in the hallway. “It’s just, you know, you’ve been sequestered in there since Wednesday, and we’re starting to get a leetle concerned.”

  “I’m just, uh, hungover.”

  “For forty-eight consecutive hours?”

  “I had a lot to drink.”

  “Liar. I’ll bring up some grilled cheese and soup and leave it outside your door. You don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to, but you have to eat something.”

  Jamie tucked her cold toes into a warm fold in the blanket. “Yes, Mom.”

  “And if you want to chat or watch a marathon of those horrifying medical documentaries you love so much, we’re all here for you.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Anna paused. “We love you, Jame.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Jamie held her breath until she heard footsteps retreating down the stairs, then relaxed and let her eyes flutter closed. To this day, she could never say the word “Mom” without a heavy dollop of sarcasm, probably because her own mother had prided herself on being the antithesis of maternal. Charlene Burton was a ballsy blonde with an infectious laugh and a keen capacity for enjoyment. She worked lots of different jobs and dated lots of different men, and the only constant in her life was her restlessness. Jamie had once sat down and figured out that they’d moved nine times between the day she started kindergarten and her high school graduation. Being the perennial new girl had taught her a lot about how to survive socially—she’d simply brazen her way into the popular cliques by showing no fear and “willing” herself cool.

  Charlene treated her young daughter as an adult, and Jamie had been allowed to eat what she wanted, stay up reading until dawn, and dress herself as she pleased. Radical haircuts and multiple body piercings wouldn’t have shocked her mother, so Jamie never bothered. As she drifted into the choppy waters of adolescence, Charlene made it clear that Jamie could experiment to her heart’s content with cigarettes, beer, and boys, as long as she took responsibility for her own actions. “Don’t ever say I didn’t give you your freedom,” Charlene would say. “I’m your mother, not your warden.”

  Jamie’s father, Dale, had also been willing to grant Jamie lots of freedom, to the point that he barely made contact over the years. He and Charlene had never married, and though Charlene swore he’d been present at Jamie’s first birthday party, when Jamie asked to see the photographs, Charlene brushed her off with, “Don’t live in the past, honey.” Dale got married to another woman when Jamie was four; he and his wife had a son and two daughters. Every December, the family sent Jamie a Christmas card along with a posed family snapshot. Dale’s wife Melinda was the daughter of a fishing boat captain, and Dale joined up with the crew, spending weeks at a time out at sea. When the boat docked, Dale didn’t have a lot of free time to call or write to Jamie. He had to make up for lost time with his “real family.” (That’s how Charlene had put it, anyway: “Munchkin, trust me, you don’t want any part of that white picket fence bullshit. Sure, it looks swell in the Sears portrait studio, but wouldn’t you rather be a woman of the world? We’ve got choices in life, you and me, just remember that.”) Charlene didn’t believe in sending holiday cards. She dismissed it as depressing and suburban, and the one year Jamie decided to do it herself, she got as far as buying foil-embossed cards and a book of stamps before realizing that she had no one to send to.

  Jamie kept writing to her father, though. Not very often—she had some pride, after all—but she mailed him copies of her report cards at the end of every semester. She wanted him to see the columns of A’s, to marvel at her mastery of words and numbers and abstract ideas. But he never commented on her GPA. “Don’t have unrealistic expectations of your father,” Charlene chided when Jamie sulked about this. “Honey, he probably has no idea what precalculus even is. School was never important to him.” Jamie decided that school wasn’t important to her, either. All you had to do was read and remember. That wasn’t so hard.

  Then, one sweltering Saturday in July when Jamie walked back to their current crappy rental house (Jersey shore) from her current crappy job (scooping ice cream for tourists) to shower and slather on too much makeup before heading out with her current crappy boyfriend (a college sophomore/ tortured aspiring songwriter named Brent), she’d opened the mailbox to find a thin white envelope from her father. Enclosed was a newspaper clipping announcing a scholarship to some snooty college for “promising students who represent the first generation in their families to attend college.” Her father had scribbled a note in the margin: Thought of you.

  “That’s it?” Jamie had said aloud, turning the scrap of newsprint over and over. But here was irrefutable proof that her father did think about her. So she spent the next six weeks before her senior year of high school working on her Thurwell College scholarship application. She lost patience with Brent’s ballads of existential woe and dedicated all her spare time to writing and rewriting her application essay.

  A few months later, she received the official approval from the scholarship committee: fifty percent tuition reimbursement, provided she kept her GPA high and her disciplinary record spotless. Her teachers were thrilled; her mother told everyone that “we Burton girls are brainy and beautiful, and don’t you forget it.” Jamie overnighted a copy of her acceptance letter to her father, but he never wrote back.

  So she stopped contacting her dad and headed off to college, where she caught the attention of another very powerful man. She captivated him, Terry confessed. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was irresistible. This time, she was going to win out over the “real family.”

  Except she didn’t. Terry gradually stopped talking about leaving his wife, and then he stopped returning J
amie’s calls, and when she tearfully asked him if he still loved her, he’d stroked her hair and said, “If anyone finds out about us, Jamie, anyone at all, I’ll lose my job and you’ll lose your scholarship. I can always find another job, but you … This is for your own good, sweetheart. This is for the best.”

  Six months later, Jamie graduated with a B.A. in English, an impressive collection of student loans, and a secret that gnawed at her conscience for the next decade.

  She heard Anna’s voice at the door again. “I’ve got your tray and I’m leaving it right here by the door.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, and please tell Sarah that I got the wedding cake topper her mom sent from Vermont.”

  “Will do.”

  “Although I have to tell you, I’m a little nervous to take it out of the box, let alone stick it on top of a layer cake. I get the impression her mom spent about a thousand bucks on it.”

  Jamie tried to muster enough energy to yell back. “Her mom thinks any wedding-related item worth less than a thousand bucks is tacky crap from the dollar store.”

  “Got it.” Anna went quiet for so long that Jamie thought she might have left. But then she piped up with, “And Jame? Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to get you out of seclusion and back to being our take-no-prisoners woman of the world.”

  Jamie sat bolt upright when she heard that phrase, which resonated all the way back to her childhood. Twenty years later, and here she was—another sassy, brassy woman of the world ready to give up and move on as soon as the going got rough. Just like my mother.

  Galvanized, she swung her frigid feet onto the floor. “I’m up.”

  Now this is the way to plan a wedding: doing shots in a bar with my event planner.” Sarah Richmond slid into the wooden booth, her cabled cashmere sweater and diamond earrings striking a jarring contrast to the neon-lit ambiance of Thurwell’s Pine Street Pub.

  “One shot,” Jamie reminded her. “And you better stick to half a shot, if our last planning session was any indication.”