Little White Lies

by R. C. Matthews

  He called himself a carpenter. That was good enough for anybody.

  “So,” Brantley said, “I took the job to restore the Italianate Church in Sercey. Just thirty miles from here. Built in 1854. It’s a little gem.”

  Brantley was about to try and sell him on a job. It wasn’t the first time. In fact, after relocating Kincaid Architectural Design and Restoration to Merritt, Brantley had tried to talk Will into a partnership—something that would never happen. Brantley was a real professional and took pride in his work. Will respected him, even counted him as a friend. But a partnership meant compromise, and Will did not compromise where his work was concerned. However, he liked working with Brantley and he might be interested in this project—if it felt right.

  “It’s got a hand carved altar rail—at least what’s left of it.” Brantley gave him a challenging look. This was the kind of work Will liked best and Brantley knew it. “Their original altar furniture was destroyed in a fire and has never been replaced. They have pictures. Yep. Lots of hand carving. And they have no illusions about what that kind of work costs.”

  “I’ll have to see it.” More to the point, he had to touch it, see how the wood felt. He had to walk the property. If it gave out negative feelings, he was out. He also didn’t work for people he didn’t like. He’d once turned down a job worth tens of thousands of dollars because the property owner made his preschool son cry when the boy interrupted their meeting.

  Brantley took out his archaic day planner—a small, brown, leather notebook. Worn and weather-beaten, it looked like something Ralph Lauren would take camping to keep up with the firewood.

  “How’s next week? Tuesday, January thirteenth?” Brantley asked.

  “I can do that.” Will took out his smart phone and keyed it in. Brantley knew from experience that Will would say no more on the subject until he saw the property. He didn’t understand it, but he accepted it. Will had become close with Brantley and Lucy, but not close enough to tell them of his kinship with the wood.

  However, there was some information he needed, and there was no doubt that Brantley had said information. Due to his wife being mobbed up with a group of women who seemed to know stuff before it happened, Brantley was an information goldmine. Not that Will usually cared about such things. But he cared about this and it would be easy to get because Brantley was a talker and all you had to do was point him down a path and wind him up.

  “How’s Lucy?” Will asked. Lucy was an interior designer and Will had worked with her several times over the past few years.

  “Good.” Brantley broke into the smile of a besotted, satisfied, recently married man. Will had been at the August wedding, though it had cost him a little piece of himself. He paid a little bit every time he saw Arabelle Avery. “She’s busy. She’s been redoing Lanie Avery’s old apartment—the one she lived in above her candy shop before she married Luke and they moved to the farm.” A little frown crossed Brantley’s face. “Luke’s sister is moving into the apartment.” This was going to be easier than Will had anticipated. “Do you know Arabelle?”

  Will nodded. “We don’t go deep, but we go back.” Or they didn’t go deep, unless you counted that night two and a half years ago. And it couldn’t be counted because both times he’d seen her since, she had turned him down flat when he’d tried to see her again. She wanted nothing to do with him. Not that he had really expected she would. He took a sip of his coffee. “I heard she was in town. I thought it might just be for the holidays.”

  “No. She’s here for good, wanted to live near Luke and Lanie, I guess. It had to be a shock—losing her cousin, who was also her best friend, and getting custody of that baby all in one fell swoop. She stayed in Atlanta for a few months after getting the boy but she needed some help. I think it was just a lot, trying to take care of a baby and working as a trauma surgeon in a big hospital.”

  “When did that happen?” Will knew the answer to that but this was the part where he was winding Brantley up.

  “September,” Brantley said. “Lucy and I had just gotten back from our honeymoon. The cousin, Sheridan, and her husband, David, were flying home from the coast and their little plane went down. For a while, there was a lot of confusion and everyone thought baby Avery was with them, but he was home with the nanny. Everyone was a little surprised that they left the baby to Arabelle but, according to Luke, Sheridan’s parents are not in the best of health and David’s never really warmed to Avery because he’s adopted.”

  “Decent of them,” Will said. “Where is Arabelle working?”

  “That, I do not know,” Brantley said. “Lucy said she was starting somewhere this week. I assume the hospital.”

  “Got to be a lot different in Merritt,” Will said.

  “I guess that’s what she was going for. Seems like she’s changing her whole life to take care of her cousin’s little boy.”

  “Arabelle’s a good person.” And he meant that. Arabelle’s father was a state senator so growing up, she’d spent most of the year living in Montgomery with her family, only returning to the Avery family farm in Merritt for summers and holidays. Will had known Arabelle from their teen years, when he’d worked at the Merritt Country Club, where she swam and played tennis. She had always been kind and friendly to him, though his job had not been a plum one like caddying or lifeguarding. No. Those jobs went to the offspring of club members who wanted to earn a little extra money. Will had cleaned the pool, mowed grass, and served drinks and food to the poolside privileged. Arabelle had never once tipped him when be brought her a Coke or a chicken salad sandwich. And of all the kindnesses she had shown him, Will considered this the greatest because that tip would have embarrassed him and relegated him to her servant. He knew this to be a kindness rather than a slight because he’d seen her tip the others—though she never smiled at them the way she smiled at him. He’d never forgotten that. Over the years he’d learned it was far more productive to remember kindnesses and forget slights.

  An idea began to work across Brantley’s face. “Hey, you ought to ask Arabelle out.”

  That was one of the things Will liked best about Brantley. He came from old money and the bluest blood in the south, but he truly did not understand some basics in life. No matter how many magazines called Will an artisan, no matter how much money people were willing to pay for a handmade table, the son of a drunk and a woman who was too worn out to do much parenting did not go calling on a state senator’s daughter.

  But he was stoic about all that. No reason not to be. He’d landed in a good life.

  “Seriously,” Brantley said. “She could use some fun and you haven’t had a date in over a year.”

  “Not that you know of,” Will said. He’d gotten all he was going to get without giving something back. But that was okay. He’d found out what he wanted to know. Arabelle was back in Merritt to stay. He’d even gotten the bonus of learning where she was going to live. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like he’d be knocking on her door.

  “Seriously,” Brantley said. “Take her out.”

  Ha! If only he knew how to make that happen. But he knew how to distract Brantley. “Have you got any pictures of that church?”

  “Oh, yeah!” Brantley brightened and reached for his phone.

  • • •

  On the first morning in her new apartment, Arabelle Avery was up way earlier than she needed to be because her body hadn’t gotten the message that she didn’t do surgery at the crack of dawn anymore. She missed surgery but joining Dr. Vines’s family medicine practice suited her lifestyle better.

  She reached into her jewelry box for the plain pearl earrings that she wore almost every day, but she got distracted by the heavy gold charm bracelet that took up a lion’s share of real estate in the box.

  Her life had been chronicled by the charms on that bracelet, starting with the disc bearing her date of birth and ending with the latest, a Santa Claus that had been in her Christmas stocking a few weeks ago.

 
In between, there were miniature milestone markers for almost everything that had ever happened to her. Ballet shoes, birthday cakes, graduation caps, stethoscope—and that was just the start. On the day Arabelle was born, her grandmother had bought the bracelet and the first charm. Then Mimi made it her life’s work to fill that bracelet up until she died. It was a thousand wonders that there hadn’t been a little gold casket in the safety deposit box with Arabelle’s name on it. Since that time, Arabelle’s mother had bought most of the charms, though occasionally her brother and father got in on the act, most likely when they didn’t know what else to buy. As a weapon, the bracelet would be at least as effective as a logging chain. Maybe that had been Mimi’s intent. She had believed in empowering women and if it could be done in fourteen karat gold, all the better.

  Though she occasionally disdained it with affected boredom, Arabelle secretly loved the bracelet. She had only ever bought one charm for herself though, and she knew it would never be hung on the bracelet for the world to see. She had gotten it in Switzerland two years ago when all her family and friends thought she’d been in Kenya working with Doctors Without Borders—that is, everyone except Sheridan had thought that. Of course, if Carrie—her brother’s first wife—had been alive, she would have known too. The three of them knew everything about each other. Carrie, Sheridan, and Arabelle had had the kind of friendship that Luke’s present wife, Lanie, had with her book club friends, Missy Bragg, Tolly Scott, and Lucy Kincaid.

  But now Carrie and Sheridan were dead, along with Luke’s best friend, Jake, who had been in the car with Carrie when she crashed. Jake had been a fixture in the Avery home from Arabelle’s earliest memories and he had been her first—though mercifully short-lived—crush at thirteen.

  Lanie and the other book club girls tried hard to include Arabelle, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to embrace them. It was easier to be alone.

  Though not completely alone. There had been a price and she was glad she didn’t have to judge whether it had been worth it. She searched the bottom of the jewelry box for the little box that contained the secret charm—a tiny gold and blue enamel baby rattle.

  There had been a time when she’d had no secrets, no need to hide anything. That ended the night Luke married Lanie and her grief for Carrie resurfaced and slapped her in the face like a wave at high tide. By chance, she’d run into Will Garrett that night and when he’d offered comfort, she’d taken it. A month later, she’d found herself in Kenya pregnant, sick, and panicked. Her first thought had been to tell Will and raise her child—with or without his participation. But after learning—incorrectly, it turned out—that Will had gotten engaged, she’d gone to Switzerland. Her life was spinning out of control and she saw no reason to pull Will along for the ride. Looking back, she realized going to Switzerland had made no sense. She could have come home. Her family would have supported her. But she wasn’t making sense at the time and she could not face telling them that she had not only failed at Doctors Without Borders, she’d gotten pregnant after a one night stand. And the more she thought and the sicker she got, the more deeply she sank into despair. She was alone, helpless, hopeless, and the worst thing in the world for her baby. Sheridan, however, was desperate for a child and for a time it seemed the best thing Arabelle could do for her baby was to let her cousin adopt him. It was a decision she immediately regretted, but by then she was in too deep.

  But now she had her baby back. And the only thing harder than not telling the world that he was her biological child was the thought of having him ever find out that she had given him away like an unwanted kitten. She couldn’t stand what that might do to him.

  And that meant Will could never know. That was every kind of wrong that had ever been committed but it was the best she could do. Avery was all that mattered. She would pay the price for her mistakes by living a lie, but Avery would never pay.

  Maybe she would go to Reed’s Jewelry and have that charm put on the bracelet after all.

  But no time for that now. Happy babble emitted from the baby monitor on her dressing table, announcing that Avery was awake. He seldom woke crying, seldom cried at all. He was a sweet, serene child, a little shy but not in a fearful, debilitating way. He just liked to assess a situation before embracing it. He’d been that way from birth and she didn’t like to think about where he got that—though it certainly gave her food for thought on the whole “nature verses nurture” issue.

  She entered his room to find him sitting up in his crib, having a very serious conversation with Jiffy, his stuffed giraffe. When he saw her, he dropped the toy, smiled flirtatiously, and placed his hands over his face.

  “Pee pie, Mama,” he said, dropping his hands and speaking in a whisper. And she melted into the floor, like she did every time he called her Mama. She still felt a little guilty about that. But the child psychologist she had consulted with after David and Sheridan Avery Cooper’s plane went down had not only approved but encouraged her to gently lead him into calling her Mama. At seventeen months, Avery had been blissfully unaware that his adoptive parents were never coming home. Now, five months later, they would have faded from his memory altogether. At least that’s what Dr. Fields had said.

  “Pee pie, yourself,” she said and pushed his straight, abundant hair off his face and tried to smooth the cowlick above his right eye. Where that ash blond hair had come from she did not know, but she was grateful for it. Had he been dark-headed, like Will and herself, she might not have dared to move to Merritt.

  And she had needed to move to Merritt. Daycare and long hospital hours in a city with no family nearby had simply not been working. She knew that almost right away, but it had taken until mid-December to make the arrangements to move.

  After spending the holidays with Luke and Lanie, they had encouraged her to stay with them permanently in the Avery family farmhouse but she had declined. She liked Lanie, even loved her on some level—loved how she loved Luke, Emma, and John Luke. But it had been hard to watch her marry Luke, hard to hear Carrie’s little girl call her Mommy.

  But this apartment, located above Heavenly Confections, Lanie’s candy shop, was perfect. It was within walking distance to work, the shops, and church. Best of all, Lanie had turned the apartment across from Arabelle’s into a little home away from home for the children. Lanie had hired Judith Garth the minute word got out that she was retiring from her teaching job and was looking for a child to watch. John Luke, who was two months older than Avery, spent his days across the hall with Judith; five-year-old Emma joined them after kindergarten let out at noon. Judith had been happy to take on Avery as well, especially when she saw how good-natured he was. Not only did Avery get to be with his cousins, Lanie popped in and out from downstairs all day and Luke often walked over from his chambers in the courthouse to have lunch with them.

  And Arabelle would be able to do the same. Unlike surgeons, family practice doctors usually got to eat lunch at lunchtime.

  She lifted Avery from the crib. “Do you have wet pants?” she asked.

  “No.” He vehemently shook his head and his blue eyes went wide. The heaviness of his night diaper said otherwise.

  “I think you might,” she said, laying him on the changing table. “What do you say we get you a bath?”

  Lanie, who was a master chocolatier, came to work early to make candy and she usually turned John Luke over to Judith to bathe and dress. Arabelle could have done the same with Avery, and she might have to sometimes, but not this morning.

  She’d already missed too many baths.

  “Jiffy a dirty boy?” Avery said in his sweet soft little voice.

  “No, no, no!” Arabelle gave him a tickle under the chin, careful not to really tickle him. Tickling could be nothing short of torture for a child, no matter how well meaning the adult. All the books said so. “Avery’s the dirty boy.”

  “Avery not dirty. Avery hungry.”

  Judith was also willing to give him breakfast, but Arabelle would do that t
oo. After all, how much longer would he actually need help with the spoon?

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