When Least Expected

by Allison B Hanson

  “You’re miserable. Can you do anything about that?” she asked.

  “My favorite uncle just died. Of course I’m miserable, Kel.”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about. You were miserable before Jimmy died.” That was true, but he’d thought he had been hiding it better than this.

  “Look, I’m with Meeghan now. I’m asking you to cut me some slack.”

  “Some,” she conceded and gave him a level look before she went back inside.

  She was going to be very disappointed. The truth was he didn’t know what to do to get his life back in order.

  When he’d run from Alexis, he’d thought he was doing the right thing for both of them. He’d moved into an apartment on the other side of Roanoke from where they had lived together in the hopes he wouldn’t run into her.

  After three months of working himself up to face her so they could go to counseling, as originally planned, he still couldn’t make himself do it. He knew what he would see in her pretty blue eyes.

  Compassion, understanding, hope, and more than anything . . . pain. Pain she was trying to hide from him. She was always trying to push on and be strong, and he couldn’t do it anymore.

  So without so much as a phone call to warn her, he’d called his lawyer and had them serve her the papers. The divorce went through quickly. He gave her everything. The house, the furniture, the car.

  He couldn’t stand to take one more thing from her when he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted the most. A family.

  A few minutes later, Willa came out. She was less direct than Kelly, but he could tell he wasn’t going to like what she had to say either.

  “Are you going to marry that girl? She’s told me three times how she’s going to be the next Mrs. Montgomery. Please don’t marry her. I don’t like her.”

  “I’m not marrying anyone at the moment, Will.”

  “Okay, thanks.” She sighed and looked up at the dark sky.

  “That’s it?”

  “It was sad seeing you and Lexi apart.”

  “It is sad.”

  “What happened?” she asked, trying to understand.

  “I don’t have an answer,” he said honestly.

  She nodded and didn’t say anything else, so he took the opportunity to change the subject to her classes. Soon she was off, giving him an excited description of how many times she’d had her hands inside a cadaver.

  He was almost relieved when Meeghan asked him to take her home a few minutes later.

  Meeghan had to get up early, so it was understandable, but he knew it was more about her not feeling comfortable with his family.

  This had been strange for him. When he’d started dating Alexis, his family had welcomed her with open arms. She’d fit right in and loved everyone. His family wasn’t warming up to Meeghan in the same way at all. They certainly weren’t rude or nasty to Meeghan, at least not to her face, but she didn’t seem to like anyone.

  Ian’s older sister was too nosy, his mother thought she was better than everyone, and his father was too opinionated. Willa had been spared only because she lived too far away. Most of her conclusions were somewhat true, but Alexis seemed to accept their shortcomings and love them anyway.

  While Meeghan went to the car, Ian went to say good-bye to his mother. He found her in the kitchen with Kelly, talking about him. He paused in the hall to listen.

  “It’s not right. Lex was just as close to Jimmy as the rest of us. It’s not fair that she has to deal with this on her own because he’s being so stupid,” Kelly snarled.

  “Your brother is hurting, too,” his mother said in his defense. “He’s just too stubborn to fix things so he doesn’t have to hurt so much. He still loves her. I know he does.”

  Ian swallowed and walked into the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to hear anymore. As far as defenses went, his mother’s was letting him down on many levels.

  “I’m heading out,” he said.

  “Okay, sweetie. We’ll see you tomorrow at the service. Do you mind if we have Alexis sit with us?”

  “That’s fine, Mom.”

  “Will it upset Megan?” she asked with a frown. She had pronounced her name in the traditional way, despite having been corrected by Meeghan many, many times.

  “She’ll be okay.” He wasn’t sure if Meeghan would be okay or not, but it didn’t really matter. Alexis should be allowed to sit with the family because she was family. Or at least closer to family than Meeghan.

  As he walked out to the car, he felt much older than his thirty years. He shouldn’t have to deal with things like whether his girlfriend would be upset about his wife . . . ex-wife. Ian missed Jimmy, and he missed Lexi, too.

  “I’m not going to the funeral tomorrow. I have to work, and I don’t like funerals,” Meeghan told him as he was driving her to her apartment.

  Who liked funerals? For a moment he thought about explaining to her how she would be going to the funeral to help him and support him during a sad time in his life, but he didn’t. She didn’t get it. Something that had been second nature to Lexi went completely over Meeghan’s head.

  He knew this thing with Meeghan wasn’t going to last forever. They didn’t have much in common, and she was too young. Not in actual age but in maturity. She was twenty-two. The age of going out every weekend to clubs with her friends. The age he had been when he and Lexi started dating.

  Alexis had been twenty then and had never seemed as young as Meeghan.

  They hadn’t gone out partying with their friends. They’d been content to watch a movie with a pizza and beer.

  He would never tell Kelly this, but she was right about everything. He was definitely an asshole. He realized it more and more every day.

  The funeral was relatively drama free. Ian gave a very emotional eulogy, and Lexi had to fight the urge to go stand next to him to offer him support as he wiped his tears. She knew how much he loved his uncle, and how much he was hurting.

  There was more family that she hadn’t seen since the divorce. They gave her dual sympathies, one for the loss of her uncle and another for her failed marriage. Most followed up with some sentiment about how they had been so sure she and Ian were going to make it. She just nodded. She had thought so, too.

  Ian managed to give her a quick, awkward hug at the gravesite before everyone started to disperse. She assumed the reason for the affection stemmed from the missing girlfriend. A quick stab of hope flared in her chest. Maybe they’d broken up? Maybe they wouldn’t be getting married? Maybe he would come home? She quickly shook the thought away and gave him a small smile.

  “Your eulogy was really touching. You did a good job. Jimmy would have appreciated it,” she told him truthfully. He simply nodded and thanked her before he walked away.

  Lexi went with Ron and Kelly to their house afterward. Their son, Aidan, had stayed at the neighbor’s, being too young to attend the service. It was nice to see him.

  “Aunt Lex, do you want to watch me play a video game?” he asked excitedly. Willa was already trapped.

  “Sure,” Lexi agreed, though she would rather have watched paint dry than watch her six-year-old nephew drive around in a bubble collecting letters to spell the word happiness. She almost couldn’t remember how to spell that word. She certainly didn’t know how to feel it.

  Thanks to Willa, Lexi was able to escape to the kitchen a few minutes later.

  “Did you notice Meeeeeeghan wasn’t at the service?” Kelly asked in her overemphasized way. It had become her joke when Aidan wasn’t around.

  “Yes. What do you think it means?” Again the hope leaped into existence, and she quickly squashed it.

  “I told him she said something snotty to you at the viewing,” Kelly admitted.

  “What? How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. I just figured.” She shrugged.

  “Kelly, you need to be nice to her. Especially because she might be your sister-in-law someday.”

  “No way.”
Kelly’s face turned grim as her body tensed.

  “She alluded,” Alexis said with a frown.

  “Alluded?”

  “Yeah. She made it sound like it was going to happen. Like they might get married.” She swallowed, trying to choke down the idea of her husband marrying another woman.

  Kelly’s eyes narrowed.

  “She told me they were getting married, too,” Willa said as she came into the kitchen. She filled a glass with water and leaned against the counter. “I asked Ian last night, and he said he wasn’t marrying anyone at the moment.”

  “At the moment?” Lexi repeated, not knowing what that meant exactly.

  “Look, even if my brother is stupid enough to marry this girl, she will never, I repeat never be my sister. You are my sister and she can just suck it.”

  “Mama said ‘suck it’!” Aidan laughed from the living room, while Kelly squeezed her eyes shut. Lexi and Willa couldn’t help but laugh, too.

  “Aidan!” she barked in her mom voice. Kelly turned back to them sadly. “I really don’t like this,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  Willa put her arm around her sister and said, “Me neither.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Lexi said. “He needs to be happy. No matter who makes him happy, we should want that.”

  “You were too good for him,” Kelly said and shook her head.

  That wasn’t true.

  Ian had been a wonderful husband, always there when she needed him. Always noticing the stupid little things, like when she got her hair cut or bought a new dress. He was a husband her friends had always been jealous of. Right until he wasn’t her husband anymore.

  She’d scared him off. She’d realized it immediately after he moved out, and she’d tried to tone down the crazy, obsessed, must-be-a-mother complex so she could be the doting wife again, but she never got the chance. She had lost herself in all the scientific insanity, and then she’d lost him, too.

  Chapter 2

  After seeing Willa off at the airport, Lexi went back to work the day after Jimmy’s funeral. Solving high school students’ problems seemed like an easier task when faced with dealing with her own.

  Roslyn, the other guidance counselor, came into Lexi’s office when she was done for the day.

  “You want to go get a drink? My sister needs some girl time. You look like you could use some, too. Nichole said she would meet us there when she gets done with her shift at the clinic.” Roslyn was always in a good mood lately. She was getting married next summer, to Lexi’s divorce attorney. One person’s divorce had been another person’s engagement. Alexis was a bit envious of her friend’s excitement, but she tried hard to be happy for her. Or at least act the part. Nichole was engaged, too, though she had been for years, with no plans to move that along in sight.

  “Sure,” Lexi said, though helping Riley through a painful divorce or hearing about wedding plans didn’t seem like gobs of fun. At least there would be alcohol, and everyone would be so focused on cheering up Riley that they wouldn’t notice it had never worked when they tried it on Lexi six months earlier.

  The bar was full, as usual. She ordered a Corona and a rum and coke before she realized she wouldn’t need the Corona. That was Ian’s drink. Damn. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she forced them away.

  Without dwelling on it, she glanced around the bar to see another person drinking a Corona. She asked the bartender to give the bottle to him as she scurried off to her seat, where Riley was already telling them what dastardly deed Evan had done to her that week.

  It did sound awful. They had a baby, so there was child support and visitation to consider. Plus, she had been working part-time at a jewelry store, and now Evan wanted her to support herself so he could move on with the girl he had been fooling around with before they split up.

  Lexi knew she had it easy, but she was still in too much pain to make anyone feel better about anything so she sat back.

  “Thanks for the drink,” someone said behind her.

  She turned to see a handsome guy who didn’t look old enough to drink the bottle of Corona he was holding up.

  “Oh! You’re welcome. I ordered it by mistake and saw you already had one.” She shrugged it off to end the exchange, but it didn’t work.

  “Is that a line? I’m fairly new to older women hitting on me at a bar,” he said.

  “Older women? I’m only twenty-eight,” she said, bridling at the insinuation that she was . . . older.

  He smiled at her innocently.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-one, ma’am,” he answered, like any polite Virginian male in the presence of an . . . older woman. Damn it.

  “Yes. Well, I’m not hitting on you. Run along back to the bar and enjoy your second legal beer. Just a heads up, though; when the older women do start hitting on you, don’t mention that they’re older.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And don’t call them—never mind.” She couldn’t solve his problems any more than she could solve her own. She turned her focus on Riley.

  “I don’t understand how he thinks he’s going to be any better off paying for daycare while you work full-time. It’s actually cheaper if you stay home to raise his child and just work part-time while his mama watches Luca in the afternoon,” Roslyn said.

  “That’s what I pointed out, but this girl has him all tied up by the hoo-ha.”

  Lexi covered her grin at Riley’s comment.

  “His mother has offered to watch Luca whenever I need her. She’s been great about this whole thing. She’s taken my side as much as the mother of a demon can,” Riley said with a straight face.

  “And you have me,” Roslyn said.

  “And me,” Lexi piped up. She loved Luca, even if she sometimes found herself pretending he was her own for the few hours she babysat. She knew it was unhealthy, and maybe even crazy, but it gave her a few hours of happiness in her otherwise suck-filled life.

  “Hey, Lex, who was that cutie you were just talking to? Are you taking him home?” Riley hinted.

  “Um, no. He called me an older woman.”

  “Where is he? I’ll beat the diapers off him,” Roslyn threatened playfully. “Maybe someone a little more skilled?” she suggested as she looked around the bar.

  “None for me, thanks. I’m still healing.” After having the scabs ripped off and rubbed raw at the sight of Ian, she felt like she was completely starting over in the healing process. She didn’t say that. Tonight was about Riley.

  “Damn it, Lex, if you’re still healing after signing papers six months ago, what the hell hope do I have?” Riley frowned at her drink.

  “It’s different for everyone,” she encouraged lamely.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t have kids with him,” Riley said. Her words speared through Lexi with intense pain, but she’d gotten better at masking it. She simply smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah. Lucky, I guess.”

  Nichole came up to the table with a huge smile on her face. “Guess what?” she said as she sat down.

  “What?” the rest of them said in unison.

  “Dennis and I finally set a date. We’re getting married in October!”

  That was just great. Lexi forced a giant smile on her face and hugged her friend. “I couldn’t be happier for you,” she said, while Riley sniffled.

  Somehow Lexi made it through the weekend and the next week. Kelly stopped by on Wednesday under the guise of needing to borrow something in order to check on her.

  She was fine. Or as fine as she ever was.

  Alexis knew Thursday was going to be a little rough, because she’d usually had dinner plans with Uncle Jimmy on Thursdays. So instead of cooking she looked through photo albums and had an ugly cry over a bowl of SpaghettiOs.

  By Friday, she was thrilled to take Kelly up on her offer of drinks at her place—anything not to be alone with her thoughts and canned pasta.

  Aidan was staying at his grandmother’s, so Ke
lly made them a pitcher of margaritas. They were on their third glass and into the laughing-at-nothing stage of drunkenness when there was a knock at the back door, followed by a familiar voice.

  “Hello? It’s me,” Ian called. Lexi tensed.

  “Oh, shit!” Kelly said, giggling like they’d just gotten caught by their parents.

  Ian walked into the kitchen with Meeghan behind him. His eyes widened for a second before he put on a mask of indifference. Meeghan glared at Lexi from over his shoulder. The alcohol gave her the courage to glare back. She was happy to see Meeghan look away first.

  “Hey, little brother. Hey, Meeeghan.” Thank God she only added one extra e, not the usual six or so. Lexi laughed because it was the only thing she could do.

  “This is nice,” Ian said with a look of disapproval.

  “What?” Kelly snapped. “We’re adults. My son isn’t home so we can get shit-faced if we want. Our uncle just died and . . .” Kelly waved her hand between Ian and Lexi to silently tell him the other reason they were drunk.

  “I came to borrow the key to Jimmy’s garage. The guy from the auction house contacted me and wants to take a walk-through tomorrow.”

  “Sure.” Kelly was still snickering as she got up and went to her cabinet, where a million keys rattled as she opened the door. She squinted at the selection, and Ian met Lexi’s stare briefly. He bit his bottom lip and looked away, seeming incredibly uncomfortable.

  “Good,” she said out loud by accident. “Sorry.” She made an eraser mark in the air in front of her and took another sip from the excessively large glass. It wasn’t that she wanted to wish anything bad on Ian. But he was a great guy who deserved better than the girl behind him, who couldn’t stop giving Lexi the stink eye.

  Kelly came back with three keys, handing him all of them.

  “It’s one of these, I think.” She laughed. “If not, come back.”

  Ian sighed and put the keys in his pocket. He turned to leave, then stopped and looked right at Alexis. It was his stern, no-nonsense look.

  “You’re staying here tonight, right? You’re not planning to drive anywhere?” He had equal amounts of question and command in his voice.