by KG MacGregor
"I can't believe how much you know about so many different things, Carly. I bet you'd have been a success at anything you wanted to do."
"It's been a fun job for twenty years, but I have to tell you, I am getting a little tired of the transient life."
"It has to be hard to pick up and move every couple of years. But what would you do if you weren't a team leader?"
"Well, there's probably going to be an opening soon for a project coordinator. If I got that, I could live near our headquarters in Louisville most of the time, but I would have to travel to all of the sites about once or twice a year. That's a grueling job too, but at least I'd get to have a home life."
"So is that what you're looking for…a home life?"
"Not…anything in particular. I just need a change is all."
"I guess that means coming back to Leland to run the furniture store isn't in your immediate future." It was said as a joke, but Justine liked thinking that Carly might one day come back to town.
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"No, I don't think so. My cousin Perry will probably take over the store in a couple of years when Mama and Daddy retire. He's worked there ever since they bought it. He likes it. I think doing the same thing every day would make me insane."
"Well I can vouch for that." The redhead bobbed her head and rolled her eyes comically.
"Because I'm certifiable!"
They both laughed as they stood up to leave. Carly realized with disappointment that Justine had effectively managed to deflect all conversation from herself, and she was none the wiser about how Justine's well-planned life had gone so wrong. As they buckled their seatbelts for the ride home, she casually broached the subject.
"So we've spent the whole night talking about me, Justine. What have you been up to for the past twenty-five years?"
The redhead smiled softly, but Carly could tell even in the dim light of the dashboard that it was forced. Her mom had been right; this woman really needed a friend.
"I'm afraid my life has been pretty boring compared to yours. You know most of it already. I got married, had a couple of kids, got divorced. I've worked at the hospital off and on for about fifteen years." Her clipped response made it clear that she didn't wish to elaborate.
Why won't you talk to me? Carly admitted to herself that she hadn't exactly been forthcoming either, dodging Justine's question about "special people in her life" with an explanation of how her job kept her on the move. If they were going to be real friends, she needed to put her cards on the table too.
"You know, you asked me a question earlier, and I didn't exactly give you the whole answer…kind of like you just did me." Carly smirked when her companion glanced her way. "You asked me if there had ever been anyone special in my life, and I said that my job made it hard to sustain any kind of…romantic relationship, and that's true. But there have been a couple of special people in my life over the years. In Bolivia, there was a woman named Isabel; and then in South Africa, there was another named Alison."
Carly's heart skipped a beat while she waited for an acknowledgment. Several seconds passed before Justine spoke.
"So…I always wondered."
"What do you mean you wondered? You ruined me for guys with that kiss in the chemistry closet!"
After almost twenty-six years, the kiss was finally mentioned out loud.
"I…I did not! Are you…? You're pulling my leg." Justine swatted at Carly's leg when she saw the evil grin.
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"Well…it's partly true. I mean I guess I was born this way, but I might never have known if you hadn't attacked me that day."
"Carly Griffin, I did not attack you! It was mutual, as I recall." Justine squirmed a bit in the driver's seat.
"That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure you remembered it that way too."
"Why, you little sneak!" The driver relaxed visibly. "You're just doing all this to make me blush."
"But you do remember it."
"I remember…that it was…quite nice, actually."
"Yes, it was. But it obviously didn't have the same effect on you that it had on me."
"Says who?" Justine squirmed again, but gave her companion a playful smirk of her own.
"Well, well, well…now there's a story I'm going to have to hear."
"Oh, no! I haven't had nearly enough wine to tell that story."
"Why don't you pull into Pete's when we get back to Leland, and we'll remedy that?"
"Ha! You're forgetting that it's Sunday, Miss World Traveler. You can't buy alcoholic beverages on Sunday in Leland."
Now that's a real shame, Carly thought. But now that they'd laid it out there that they wanted to be friends again, she was pretty sure she'd hear the woman's tale when she was finally ready to share it.
"So why don't you tell me all about Isabel?"
"Isabel…Isabel Rosas Paz. She worked at the Labor Ministry, and we got to be friends when I first moved to Bolivia. The hotel all of us were staying in caught fire and we had to move out on account of the smoke damage. She offered to have me stay with her in her apartment."
Justine drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, growing impatient for more of the story.
"It was a small apartment." Carly grinned. "I started out on the couch in the living room.
That lasted…two or three days. Being my usual irresistible self, I was soon invited to share the bedroom."
"Your usual irresistible self, huh?"
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"Yeah, you know how it is. People can't keep their hands off me."
"I know what you're doing. You're trying to make me blush again, and I'm not going to give you the satisfaction this time, Carly Griffin." Instead, she smiled playfully. "So tell me more about Isabel. How long did you live together? What happened to her?"
"It's an interesting story, actually…kind of happy and sad at the same time. We were both kind of surprised that things took that turn. Neither of us had ever been with anybody before–I mean if you don't count our brief groping encounter." That earned her another light smack on the thigh. "But it was just…natural, you know? She was really sweet, and funny, and cute. And Catholic, so she had the guilt thing going. We were both so deep in the closet we had to keep moth balls in our pockets."
Again, the driver squirmed uncomfortably. She could write the book on that guilt thing.
"We had a really good year together. And then it ended when my job wrapped up. I wanted her to come with me, at least back to the states for a while, but she couldn't do that. That would have been like announcing to her family that we weren't just roommates, and hell, her brothers might have killed me."
"That's so sad! So you had to leave her."
"Yeah, we traded letters a few times, but after awhile, it just sort of trailed off. Then I got back to Bolivia about eight years later and looked her up. I didn't tell her I was coming. I go the biggest kick out of walking into the Labor Ministry just out of the blue. She went crazy…jumping up and down and getting so excited. I knew from our letters that she was married and had three or four little kids, but seeing her again brought it all back…for me, anyway…not for her. I was happy for her–she got what she wanted out of life–but it was hard to accept that the door was really closed. There hadn't been anybody else in all those years in between."
"You must have really loved her."
"I did. I still do in a way. We usually trade cards every couple of years now. I think there are some people that you come to love in life that are always going to matter to you.
Isabel's one of those people for me." And you're one of those people for me, Justine Hall.
"She and I even got to be friends again, so it a good ending. She's got…let's see, at last count it was seven kids. Life worked out for her, and I'm glad she's happy."
"You were right. That is both a sweet and a sad story…but it's mostly sad. I mean, becaus
e you loved her and you had to leave her, and…you couldn't just come out and be yourself. You had to hide."
"Yeah, hiding everything was hard. It was easier with Alison, because she was out already. In fact, I met her at a gay bar in Johannesburg. We'd been seeing each other for about six months before she moved into my apartment. There was a time that I thought Alison and I might make it. When the job in South Africa ended, she got a visa to come 35
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with me to Shanghai. I even got her on with my company as a payroll clerk. That took some doing, believe me."
"You hired her to work for you?"
"Not exactly. She was part of the overall team, but not the management team. One of the other guys supervised her, so I hardly ever saw her at work. But when I say that it took some doing, what I mean is that I had to come out to my boss. I had to call in a favor, because he didn't want to approve it without somebody higher up signing off on it, and I didn't want the whole damn company to know my business."
"But you got him to do it."
"Yeah, and he pretty much read us the riot act about not letting people find out. I mean, China's a communist country. They throw you in jail for stuff like that, and we could have gotten our whole contract yanked."
"That's unbelievable."
Carly shrugged. "It's reality. But it turned out that it didn't matter in the long run. Alison hated being there. She didn't like the food, or the weather, or the crowds. She hadn't traveled much before, and she just didn't know what to expect. It was too hard for her to live there, so after just three months, she went home."
"Oh, Carly! That must have been awful."
"Well…it probably worked out better that way for everybody."
"So you didn't get your heart broken that time?"
The blonde woman chuckled. "Hardly. It probably isn't fair to Alison to say this, but she wasn't…all that lovable once she got out of her element. And we were in pretty close quarters, even for Shanghai. Our apartment was one room, eight by twelve. Every breath she blew out, I drew in. I tell you, when things aren't good anyway, living on top of each other makes them that much worse."
"Eight by twelve! I can't believe two people could live in a place that small without killing each other."
"No kidding. Anyway, after she left, I was so happy to be able to double my living space that I hardly missed her."
"Aw, I bet it hurt just the same."
"A little. I guess what really hurt was that she didn't try harder after all the hoops we had to jump through to be together…but, like I said, she got to a point where she wasn't really 36
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very lovable." As an afterthought, she added, "I probably wasn't very lovable by that time either."
"But you were still irresistible, right?"
"But of course." Carly was surprised to see that they were already on the outskirts of Leland. The drive home had taken no time at all. And Justine had shared very little about herself. "So when do we get to do this again? And I'll drive so you can drink plenty of wine. That way, I don't have to do all the talking."
Justine smiled as she turned onto Stony Ridge Road. "There really aren't many nice places to eat in Leland, you know." And she couldn't afford to be treating at a place like that on a regular basis, but she'd insisted on picking up the check tonight since it had been her invitation.
"Where we eat doesn't matter to me, Justine. I just want to go somewhere we can talk some more. It's been nice catching up."
Justine pulled into the driveway of the small frame house. "Same here, Carly. It's been a long time since I just went out and had a good time…you know, with a friend."
That news wasn't surprising. Justine hadn't spoken at all of a social life. And if there was any truth to what her mother had heard about involvement with a doctor's wife…well, most of the folks in Leland weren't going to be friends with somebody like that.
"Then let's do it again. If you can think of another nice place in Lexington, we'll go. My treat next time, though."
"Or maybe we could just… you want to come to my house for dinner one night?"
"I'd like that, but only if you let me bring dinner. You treated tonight so it's my turn."
"That's silly."
"Pizza."
"Vegetarian."
"Extra cheese."
"On half."
"And wine…lots of wine." Now that she knew what it took, Carly wanted to loosen that tongue.
"You got yourself a deal. What about Wednesday, around eight?"
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"I'll be there." The blonde was almost giddy as she opened the door. "Red or white?"
"Red. And you better not let me drink too much. I have to be at work the next morning."
"That's going to depend on whether I get the whole story, Miss Hall. That's what you said."
Justine smirked. "Thanks again for going with me."
"My pleasure." Carly waited for the car to back out, waving one last time at the pretty redhead. While she wished she had learned more about Justine tonight, she was glad that their first meeting had been mostly lighthearted and fun. They were opening up with one another just fine, and it was just a matter of time before all the mysteries were revealed.
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Chapter 4
"Saturday…Saturday was a good day." In fact, the whole week had been pretty good, Justine realized as she recounted all that had transpired since her last session. "Trey came by at seven-thirty in the morning and we went running up at Prince Lake. We did about eight miles up that logging trail, and we talked about stuff. I think it's really starting to hit him how much things are going to change next year when he goes off to school."
"Tell me what was good about that, Justine…that time with Trey."
The redhead smiled wistfully as she recalled the feeling. "I just…I don't know, he was talking about how hard it was going to be to be away from Melissa next year. She's going to Georgetown, and he's worried she'll meet somebody else and not be happy with him anymore. He even said he'd been thinking about going to Georgetown instead, but I think I've talked him out of that. JT'll have a cow if he doesn't go to UK."
"It's a big transition for him."
"Yeah…underneath all that bravado, he's so insecure about that girl. He's always been worried about what she'd think, ever since they were in the eighth grade. To be honest, I'd like to see him meet somebody else at college. I just hate to see him so serious about somebody at seventeen when he has no idea what else is out there." In Justine's mind, Melissa Chandler had always held too much sway over her son's decisions. "Anyway, it was really nice to have him talk to me about stuff like that. It made me feel like his mother."
"You are his mother, Justine." Valerie's smile seemed to be congratulatory, as though she were extremely pleased with her client's revelation. "But I know what you mean. You deserve a real pat on the back for that, don't you think?"
Justine looked at her quizzically.
"You just told me that you went running with your seventeen-year-old son–eight miles.
How many mothers can say that?"
It was true. Just three years ago, Justine couldn't have imagined this kind of lifestyle for herself. She'd envied her friends who had given birth and returned almost instantly to their trim figures. Her first pregnancy had added thirty extra pounds, and Emmy had left her with thirty more. She had tried to get into the fitness club scene…the aerobics, the spinning, the jazzercise. But she'd had no success when her kids were little, and after the divorce, her day-to-day responsibilities had grown to encompass all of her time. Only when her children had gone to live with JT had she finally begun to make the time for herself. In fact, the Wellness Center was part of the plan to put more routine in her daily life, a plan designed to keep her from wallowing in her depression.
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"So what else happ
ened this week?" Justine had already been through the Thanksgiving tale with her mother and sister's family. All in all, that had gone better than expected.
"JT dropped Emmy off on Saturday afternoon and we looked through all the catalogs for Christmas gifts. I took her out to Goody's and bought her some jeans and a top. I get the feeling she's having a little trouble with J2, but I don't think it's anything serious. She's just being a teenager, trying to look out for her turf and all."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, Emmy's always been pretty good about doing her part when it comes to chores and such. But I think she feels like she's being called on to do a little more than her share around the house because she's a girl."
"I can see where that would cause a problem."
"Yeah, but she doesn't want to make waves, because that causes problems for her father.
And she doesn't want to make trouble for Trey, but she's disappointed in him for not stepping up to help her out."
"So you talked to her about it?"
The redhead shrugged and sighed. "No, mostly I just listened."
Valerie knew how hard it was for the mother to hold her tongue when her daughter talked. One of their problems together had been her overbearing nature, always feeling like she needed to give her daughter advice on everything from how she should dress to who should be her friends. "Did that go okay?"
"I guess. She asked me a couple of questions, and I made a suggestion or two, but I said I had faith in her to handle it. And I told her I'd talk to JT if she wanted me to, but that otherwise, I wouldn't say anything. And that's what she wanted…for me not to say anything."
"So it was a good day. You got to spend time with both of the kids." Valerie was pleased to hear that Justine had not only gotten through the holiday without a lot of stress, she'd actually had a pretty fulfilling week. The more time she spent with Trey and Emmy, the happier she was. And with all the activities around the holiday, it looked like Justine hadn't worried too much about what had been bothering her so much last week–