by Ramsay, Hope
He said nothing as the memories clicked. He remembered. Miriam Randall had been the eccentric and colorful chairwoman of the Christ Church Ladies’ Auxiliary. Which made the tableau in front of him all the more surprising, because Mother tended to look down on eccentric and colorful people. He was pretty sure there had been a time when Mother would have died before being seen arm-in-arm with Miriam Randall.
The little old lady reached out and grabbed one of his hands. Her palm was dry and slightly cool. Her hands were badly flexed with the telltale swellings common to rheumatoid arthritis, but her grip was strong and her eyes were darkly bright.
“Son, I’m mighty glad you’ve come back home. And it’s just a wonderful thing that you’ve arrived right on time.”
“Well, I didn’t do much. I—”
“Oh, I’m not talking about Jane’s baby, although I suppose it was handy that you were on the scene. Oh no, I’m talking about everything else.”
Mother cocked her head. “Simon?” she said in a quavery voice.
“Yes, Mother, it’s me.” Something eased in his chest, but not all the way. Mother stood there looking uncertain and confused.
“You know,” Miz Miriam said, “you might take down your defenses, son.”
“What?”
The old woman leaned in, and Simon felt an uncanny tremor move through him. Like when kids sit in a darkened room conjuring ghosts from out of their imaginations. He went cold for a moment.
“Sometimes,” Miriam said, “it’s not the things we’ve done that lead to regrets. It’s usually all the stuff we didn’t do.”
Her words cut a swath through him, triggering memories he had locked behind a steel door. He glanced away, right into Molly Canaday’s greeny-brown eyes. She was angry at him, he knew, but in spite of that, he found kindness there. He’d always found kindness in Molly’s eyes. Even when she’d been a little girl.
Miriam turned toward Mother. “You should be proud of your boy, Charlotte. He delivered a baby right here at the Knit & Stitch not twenty minutes ago.”
“Simon?” Mother, who never showed much emotion, had tears in her eyes. Simon didn’t know what to make of that. His own insides were threatening to unravel.
Mother took a couple of steps forward and ran her hands over his shoulders. It wasn’t a real hug. Mother didn’t do that sort of thing, not even in private. But she got close enough for him to inhale the scent of the floral soap she’d always used. It was some interesting blend of lavender and herbs, and it triggered even more memories.
But like everything in Last Chance, time had moved on. She wasn’t really the Mother he remembered. That Mother would never cry in public. This Mother was like some facsimile of the real one. Or maybe just a memory-induced artifact of the past.
She backed away from him, her eyes suddenly alive and bright. “I’m so glad you’re home. Maybe you could talk to Doc Cooper and get a job at the clinic.”
He said nothing. Mother may have recognized him, but she was still living in that past he’d escaped a long time ago.
“Now, don’t you fret, Charlotte. I’m sure Simon will figure it out. It’s all about timing, you know.”
“What’s about timing, Miriam?” asked one of the other ladies, whose name Simon didn’t know.
“Well, love for starters. And marriage, too. In fact, you could say life is a matter of timing.”
All the ladies turned their attention toward Miriam, and that’s when Simon remembered that Miriam Randall had a reputation as a matchmaker. Oh, boy, he needed to get out of this shop and fast. The estrogen level was so high it was practically toxic.
“Uh, ladies,” he said in a big, announcement-type voice, “if you don’t mind, Mother and I have an appointment that—”
“I don’t remember an appointment,” Mother said. She turned toward Miriam. “Do you have some advice for Simon?”
“I do,” Miriam said, turning her bright eyes on him. “You know son, hindsight isn’t always twenty-twenty. Sometimes what you think you know can box you in. So even though something seems improbable, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a risk. Like I said, sometimes it’s not the things we do, but the things we choose not to do that make all the difference.”
Another tremor rushed through him. The old woman had just laid him bare in a couple of sentences. He needed to escape. Now.
But Mother had other ideas when he tried to steer her toward the door. She took a step and then looked back at Miriam. “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said. “What kind of wife should Simon be looking for?”
“The one who can change his mind,” the old woman said.
The women in the room started talking, but Simon breathed a huge sigh of relief. There wasn’t a woman alive who could change his mind about marriage.
Hours passed before Molly could extricate herself from the Knit & Stitch. Word of Jane’s delivery spread like wildfire, probably because Ruby Rhodes, the proprietor of the beauty parlor, was the new baby’s granny, and the Cut ’n Curl was the hub of all real news in town.
And then there was the surprise of the baby’s sex.
The child was not supposed to be a boy. And his arrival precipitated a run on the yarn store, not merely to see the freshly shampooed carpet where the blessed event had transpired, but mainly to buy blue yarn.
The knitters of Last Chance were in a complete dither. Pretty soon a dozen of them had congregated. They sat around the table or relaxed on the battered couch in the front of the store while they cast on projects from booties to blankets. Of course, Ricki was not that much help, except for ringing up sales and keeping Muffin, her yappy and clearly psychotic dog, from treating the skeins of cashmere as chew toys.
With all that knitting going on, of course Ricki wanted to learn, and it was in Molly’s best interests to teach her. Before she knew it, Molly was ensconced at the worktable, giving knitting lessons and answering questions about the morning’s events.
“Is he really as handsome as everyone says?” Kenzie asked.
“Who? Simon or the baby?” Molly said, feeling trapped. This is precisely what Momma wanted for her. And it was like the gods and Simon Wolfe had conspired to put Molly in her place. Although it was true that they were ringing up a lot of sales that afternoon. Heck, she was going to have to reorder more baby blue Ull superwash.
“Did you hear what Miriam Randall had to say?” Lola May asked.
“Uh, well, sort of. I mean she kind of dissed him for staying away so long, which he so deserves.”
“How can you say that? He saved Jane’s life and the baby’s, too,” Cathy Niles said.
“He didn’t save her life. He just caught the baby. Although he did that with a lot of competence and calm. Babies scare the willies out of me, but apparently they don’t bother Simon.” Molly leaned toward Ricki and pointed at her knitting. “Honey, you should be purling that row.”
“Well, I don’t want to know about his competence,” Cathy said. “I want to know what kind of woman he’s supposed to be looking for.”
“The woman who can change his mind,” Molly said.
“Huh?” All the women around the table looked up from their work.
“That’s what Miriam said. It’s not really much to go on. If you ask me, Miriam’s losing it.”
“What makes you say that?” Cathy asked. “Her forecast for Simon is probably true. He’s got to be pushing forty pretty hard, and he’s never been married. So either he’s gay or he’s just never met the woman who could change his mind.” Cathy had such a sweet faith in romance. It was sort of pitiful, really.
“Well, that’s my point,” Molly countered. “Miriam’s forecast is so vague it could be anyone. It’s hardly even advice.”
“You don’t know. It might have some deep inner meaning to Simon.”
“Right. Well, if Miriam isn’t losing it, then why did she send Savannah to deliver her forecast to me, instead of delivering it herself?” These words popped out of Molly’s
mouth before her brain caught up with them.
But Molly realized her mistake a nanosecond later. All the knitting needles and crochet hooks stopped, and every single customer looked up at her.
“Miriam gave you matchmaking advice?” Cathy said.
“Well yeah, but it came from Savannah who said she was delivering a message from Miriam, but since when does Miriam use Savannah as a messenger?”
“What did she say?” asked Lola May.
The avid look on the faces around the table made it clear that Molly wasn’t ever going to keep this a secret. Half these women were members of the Christ Church congregation, and the other half were members of the garden club. If she didn’t tell them what Savannah said, they would ask Savannah directly, and the truth would be told.
She sighed. “All right, she told me I was destined to marry someone I’d known all my life.”
Laughter exploded around the table. “Well,” Cathy said after catching her breath, “that’s not exactly a very startling marital fortune, is it? I mean, everyone knows you and Les are going to get married one of these days. We’re just waiting for Les to get around to making you change your mind.”
Molly stood up. “Ladies, I hate to disappoint you, but I am not going to marry Leslie Hayes. But I am going to go next door and see about doing my laundry.”
Molly escaped the Knit & Stitch with the laughter of her mother’s best customers still ringing in her ears. Well, they could laugh all they wanted, but Molly was not marrying Les. In fact, she wasn’t marrying anyone if she had her way. She was too busy trying to build a business to be sidetracked by romance.
Besides, she was a dunce at romance. Sex was okay, but romance was kind of icky.
She strolled into the Wash-O-Rama and started looking for the laundry she’d abandoned this morning. She eventually found it in three of those rolly metal baskets supplied by the Laundromat. It was her lucky day. She’d busted a window with a baseball bat, witnessed a birth, and no one had stolen her abandoned dirty clothes.
She rolled the laundry over to a bank of washing machines and started to fill them.
“You aren’t going to wash the jeans with the whites, are you? If you do, that handkerchief I loaned you will end up blue and that would be embarrassing for you.”
She looked up from the hankie she was holding to find its owner standing a few feet inside the Wash-O-Rama. He had changed clothes, no doubt because of the blood from this morning’s events. But the jeans still fit perfectly and the sleeves of the blue oxford cloth shirt were turned up over his muscular forearms.
“Are you about to give me a lesson in laundry?”
The apostrophes at the corner of his mouth curled. And that was so annoying because she wanted to punch him in his handsome face, except that he had a winning smile, had tamed a toddler, and had delivered Jane’s baby. So he clearly wasn’t evil.
“Do you need a lesson in laundry?” he asked.
She looked away. Why was he here? “Don’t you have someplace to be, like forcing people from their jobs or something?”
Her barb hit the mark. She knew because he compressed his lips as if he were holding in some wicked comeback. For an instant, she wished he would just say whatever nasty thing he’d trapped in his mouth. But he didn’t.
He paused and drew in a breath. And for an instant, it seemed as if he was actually capable of achieving all that transcendence crap Momma was always talking about, right after she’d finished meditating. It was a pretty neat trick. Molly sincerely wished she could figure out a way to keep her cool like that.
When he spoke again, there was no emotion in his voice. “My uncle Ryan closed the dealership. Not me. There was nothing I could do to stop it.” She wondered what emotions, besides being ticked off, he was trying to control.
He strolled into the Wash-O-Rama and began removing her clothes from the washing machines.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m ensuring that you don’t turn this underwear blue.” He held up a pair of her lacy bikini underpants. They looked very tiny in his big hands.
Uh-oh, no one was supposed to know about that underwear. “Those aren’t mine,” she said quickly. She could have sworn someone had just taken a blowtorch to her face.
He twirled the panties around one of his long, elegant fingers. “Excuse me but aren’t you the only girl living at your house these days?”
“They belong to Allen’s skanky girlfriend.” It was the best lie she could think of on short notice.
He studied the panties. “They’re La Perla. Not exactly the kind skanky women buy. And not the kind of panties you should wash in the same load as blue jeans.”
“Okay, so his girlfriend isn’t a skank. And I’m sort of amazed you even know they’re La Perla.”
His lips quirked just a little as he picked up another pair of panties. These were a really pale shade of pink. “These belong to the skank, too?”
She nodded. And if she’d been made out of wood, her nose would have gotten a few inches longer. He put the panties in a pile in one of the baskets. “You don’t machine-wash stuff like that unless your washer has a delicate cycle. You might let your brother know that for future reference.”
He continued pulling out clothes and sorting them by colors, dropping each new pair of panties and her bras into a pile by itself.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, after about a minute of this odd humiliation.
He looked up. “Settling my father’s estate.”
“No, I mean here, at the Wash-O-Rama?”
“I came to collect my laundry.”
“So your mother doesn’t have a laundry in that mansion of hers?”
“The dryer is busted. Apparently it’s been broken for some time. Daddy was using a clothesline. I guess he didn’t want to be seen in a Laundromat.”
“And in contrast, you seem well acquainted with them. Do you always sort other people’s clothes?”
“I’m sorting your clothes because I need to apologize to you.”
Whoa. Hang on. That was a surprise. “Uh, yeah, you do need to apologize for a bunch of things. But which things were you thinking about?”
He continued to sort her laundry as he spoke. “I rented the building you wanted. And I’m sorry your boyfriend lost his job.”
“Les is not my boyfriend. He’s my partner.”
Simon nodded. “Sorry. I just got the impression from everyone that—”
“Les is not my boyfriend.”
“Okay. I stand corrected. And like I said, I’m sorry I leased the building you wanted, but it’s only short-term.”
“Whatever,” she said.
All she could think about was how her life had become one great big mess. It was like Simon arrived in town and her luck went south. It might have been cathartic to unload on him, but it would have solved nothing. Instead, she tried to be mindful, the way Momma was always talking about. She hadn’t actually read One Minute Meditations, but trying to be aware of her feelings gave her just a little bit of control over them.
“You have change for the machines?” he asked.
She dug in the pocket of her sweatpants and hauled out a mess of quarters she’d gotten from Flo at the Kountry Kitchen, after the excitement this morning. He took them from her hand, his fingers brushing over her palm for an instant. The touch was brief but it kind of lingered on her skin. And for some inexplicable reason, she curled her fingers up in a fist in order to capture and hold the sensation.
Why did this man unsettle her so deeply?
She folded her arms across her chest and leaned her hip on one of the empty washers. The silence became awkward as he methodically started each of the machines. The quiet room suddenly roared with the sound of rushing water.
“So I heard you’re thinking about selling your momma’s house.”
“She can’t live on her own.” There was a sadness in his words that Molly hadn’t been expecting. A little bit of her anger evaporated. His life
had taken a big left turn last week, too. He’d lost his father, and it wasn’t Simon’s fault that Ira was dead. Ira had done that to himself, by smoking too much and not getting enough exercise.
She needed to remember that kindness was the opposite of anger. And she’d been battling her anger for years. So maybe instead of standing there stewing about it and trying to meditate on it, she could just do what Momma was always telling her to do.
Just be nice.
“If you’re looking for help with your momma,” she said, “there’s the senior center in Allenberg. You should talk to Shevon Darnell. She’s the one who organizes the Purly Girls meetings every week. Your daddy used to bring Charlotte to the meetings by car, but most of the girls come on the senior center bus.”
He looked up at her then, his deep brown eyes going liquid. Vulnerability flickered across his face and vanished almost immediately. And then he turned his back on her and headed down the row of dryers, towing a rolling basket behind him. She watched him for a long time as he took his clothes out of the dryer and carefully folded each item.
She wanted to dislike him. She wanted to be angry at him. But the picture folks were painting of him—as some kind of callous, insensitive idiot—was wrong. She’d watched him play with Junior. She’d seen the way he’d been with Jane. She’d heard his heartfelt apology. Maybe Bubba had been right about him. He wasn’t like Ryan Polk, even if he had that unmistakable Polk family look about him.
And she had to admit that watching him fold laundry was turning her on. Probably because she was so laundry-challenged. That had to be it. Didn’t it?
She didn’t wait around to explore those hot tingly feelings for more than a moment. Instead, she escaped the Wash-O-Rama and returned to the Knit & Stitch, where she allowed herself to be sidetracked into teaching Ricki how to make increases and decreases.
When she finally returned to the Laundromat a couple of hours later, she found her laundry neatly folded in her laundry baskets.
With all her lacy, unwashed panties piled on the top.
CHAPTER
10
It was almost seven o’clock by the time Molly finally got home from the Knit & Stitch, the Wash-O-Rama, and the grocery store. She was exhausted, both physically and mentally.