Back to McGuffey's

by Liz Flaherty

  Another vehicle pulled in behind hers, and she frowned in consternation. She had her cell phone and she’d just seen Dan’s cruiser pass the convenience store a minute ago—he was working the night shift for another officer again—which meant he would be close if she called.

  But how close was close enough? She was virtually trapped by the SUV that had parked mere inches from her bumper. And now the driver’s door of the vehicle was opening.

  She had gotten fairly intrepid when Ben was home for the summer. They’d walked in the dark most nights, with Lucy as a doubtful protector. Kate had ridden her bike sometimes with only streetlights for company in the well-lit part of town where Kingdom Comer was. But it was different being alone in a driveway on Alcott Street. Sally was in the house, lying on one of the wide windowsills a carpenter from A Day at a Time’s registry had built in Kate’s living quarters. Even though she was on the obese side of the cat-weight charts, Sally wouldn’t instill fear in anyone, especially from the other side of double-glazed glass marred by numerous nose prints.

  Maybe Kate could bribe the perpetrators with cookies. The near-hysterical thought made her giggle, though it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.

  “Katy?”

  Even muffled by her closed windows, Ben’s voice was recognizable. Relief was so big it became a passenger in the car with her. She pushed open the door. “Ben, where did you come from?” She hugged him hard, much happier to see him than was probably good for her.

  He hugged her back, kissing the top of her head. “Boston.”

  “Come on in. I have cookies and leftover soup if you’re hungry. It’s your mom’s soup—she made enough for an army. How unusual is that?” She handed Ben the cookies and the milk, then headed toward her back door with her keys jingling in a hand that still shook.

  “Hot chocolate or coffee?” she asked when they were inside. She tossed their jackets onto the banister and took a moment to talk to Sally before she filled the cat’s bowls.

  “Chocolate sounds good.”

  She set mugs on the counter and got the cocoa mix out of the cupboard. She put the cookies on a plate on the table, except for the one that looked like Ben. “Never mind the soup. You get it all the time. I’m keeping mine.”

  “Kate.” Ben came to where she stood at the counter, looking down at her with what she was sure was an enigmatic expression even though she’d never actually thought that word before, much less used it.

  It was a long-standing family joke that Kate was as intuitive as a brick. If she got cold chills, it was time to turn on the furnace, because it had nothing to do with premonition or even emotional connection. Samantha and Mary Kate swore they wanted Kate to be their mother on date nights since, unlike Penny, she’d sleep on no matter how late they came home.

  So she was startled when foreboding raced through her, chased by gooseflesh. When he took her hands in his, she wanted to pull away.

  Ben, already tired from a workday and the trip up from Boston, wouldn’t come to her house at nine-something at night unless something in her life was about to go terribly awry.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Ben shook the hands he held as though to emphasize what he said, and a smile slipped in around his eyes. “I’m sorry if I scared you. It’s nothing terrible. But Dylan and I had a disagreement on the way to Fionnegan tonight, and I need you to answer a question.”

  Relief flowed through her again, though not as powerfully as it had in the car a little while ago. Her reputation as a brick was intact.

  “Go ahead.” She looked sideways at the pan on the stove. “Well, go ahead in a minute. The milk’s hot.”

  “I’ll get it.” Ben stepped behind her, moving his hands to her waist briefly to scoot her to one side.

  She felt the warmth of that touch all the way to her toes.

  “Don’t you have any marshmallows?” he asked, banging cupboard doors as though he lived there.

  “No,” said Kate. “But I do have some brandy my dad left here.”

  “Even better.”

  She got the bottle out of a cupboard. He hadn’t opened yet. “We can have a fire if you want to light it,” she offered. “I’m a little paranoid about having it when I’m here by myself, but it would be nice.”

  “Okay.” He smiled at her as he handed her a cup. “Katy, I was just wondering—”

  When he hesitated, Kate gazed into Ben’s face and deliberately crossed her eyes.

  “They’ll stay that way,” he said automatically. “Mom says.”

  “Only if you don’t ask the question,” she threatened. “I’d really like to drink this hot chocolate at some point.”

  * * *

  “LET’S GET THE fire going.” Ben wished he’d never started the conversation. He wouldn’t have thought this whole pointless discussion would have his heart beating against his ribs like the bell on an old-fashioned alarm clock. But it did.

  Tim used to have one of those clocks. He’d stand in the hall and make it go off until Ben and his brothers started getting up. Maeve would be shouting from the kitchen. Morgan would be squealing, “Stop it, Daddy,” from the bathroom they all shared, knowing she was going to have to give over the mirror to people who shaved before school. But Tim would keep the noise up until one of the boys stumbled to their bedroom door and got it open, saying, “We’re all up, Pop. Really,” even if the other two were still sound asleep.

  The memory was sweet, slowing the staccato beat of his heart. Ben knelt before the neatly laid logs in the fireplace, giving himself more time

  When the fire had flickered into a modest blaze, Ben sat on the loveseat with Kate. Sally crawled into his lap. He scratched her chin, staring into the fire. “Dylan thinks the reason we’re not together is that I’m not willing to compromise. I want to know if you believe that, too.”

  After a long silence, Kate finally said, “The truth is, when we were kids, you weren’t a very good boyfriend.” Her voice sounded as though it had an itch in it. “Your reluctance to compromise had something to do with that.”

  “I was too a good boyfriend. Well, maybe not a good one, but not all that bad, either. Sometimes.”

  “You were not, and if you’ll shut up and think about it, you’ll admit it,” she said impatiently. “Your idea of being a participant in a relationship was only being one day late for a birthday party or asking Dylan to take me to a dance because you wanted to ski or go on a night ride.”

  He couldn’t argue that, though he wanted to.

  Oh, sure he could. “Sometimes I remembered things. Sometimes I was available. I sat with you in the hospital when you had your appendix out.”

  “Because the Winter Olympics were going on and you knew as long as you were ‘taking care of me’—” she lifted her fingers in air quotes “—your dad wouldn’t be on your case about studying. You watched TV the whole time you were there.”

  Busted.

  “When I couldn’t come to your high school prom I still brought you flowers at your graduation. We went into the tavern after it was closed and danced and drank diet cherry cola toasts out of champagne glasses.” It had been a pathetic make-up effort on his part. He’d known it even then, but it was the best his twenty-year-old mind could come up with at the time. Truth was, he probably wouldn’t do much better now.

  Kate drew her knees up on the overstuffed sofa and turned so that she faced him. “I know.” She touched his cheek. “I loved that evening. I did. I still have one of the flowers pressed in—” She stopped, her eyes filling with tears. “It burned. So did my dish towel.”

  “Dish towel?” He raised an eyebrow. “I have no problem with sentiment—I’m Irish after all—but a dish towel?”

  She started, then averted her gaze, not answering. When she looked back, her always warm eyes weren’t—not at all. They were dark and challenging. “Actually, you haven’t changed that much. You think it’s okay to only be a part of Jayson’s life when it’s convenient for you. You show
ed up here tonight taking for granted that I’d be more than happy to see you and make you feel better because Dylan got you to thinking somewhere along the line you might have been—gasp!—wrong. Our friendship—which I think we’ve done a bang-up job of building—exists only on your schedule and according to your needs.”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say, but he struggled on anyway. “You’re right about some of those things. I do take for granted that you’ll always be there and be glad to see me. Because that’s how I feel about you. How I’ve always felt about you—I want you to take those things for granted. Remember when you and Tark broke up? I was so glad it was me you wanted to talk to.”

  Oh, that dish towel. He’d known she saved it. They’d even laughed about it. He didn’t know until right this minute that it hadn’t been funny to her. Not funny at all.

  He took her cup and set it on the table. He held her hands and captured her gaze. “You’re right. I was a lousy boyfriend. And a not very good friend. I’m blowing it on all counts, huh?”

  She sighed, dropping her head forward so her hair brushed his chin. He released her hands so he could push the soft tendrils aside. Keeping his fingers on the softness of her cheek, he turned his face to kiss her gently.

  She smiled at him, though sadness still filled her eyes. “You may have been fairly useless on many occasions. Sometimes when I’m mad at you, I think you still are. But you were still my boyfriend. You were the one I loved.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KATE LOOKED UP from her desk when Ben came into A Day at a Time the following morning. She looked tired.

  “I brought coffee,” he said meekly. “Dylan made a fresh pot so I could. And doughnuts. Marce had them this morning and I slipped into the kitchen and sort of...borrowed a half dozen.” Maybe if he could get Kate laughing, they could be themselves again.

  She reached for one of the commuter cups but picked up the phone as soon as it rang. “Jan? Thanks for calling back. Can you do the rest of the year at Schuyler and Lund?” She grinned at the response from the other end of the conversation. “Good. See you on the ride. And don’t get hurt—you’re the only paralegal on the registry.”

  She hung up the phone and took a sip of the coffee. “I got four hours’ sleep last night. This coffee needs to get me through the day.”

  He set the sack of doughnuts on her desk and took the client chair across from her. “I didn’t sleep much, either, but the coffee did help. So did the doughnuts.”

  She was silent. She grasped the pendant on her necklace and slid it up and down the chain. Over and over. Her eyes were foggy and sad.

  Ben wished he hadn’t picked his brother up last night. Things would have been all right between him and Kate again. Soon. But now he had a feeling they would never be all right again. And he had no one to blame but himself. No one and nothing. There was something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie, and he wished he had—no matter what doubts his brother had raised.

  She tapped some keys, her eyes on the monitor in front of her, then pushed the keyboard away and gazed unflinchingly at him. He couldn’t have looked away if he’d wanted to. And he thought maybe he did.

  “What do you think? Why don’t we just unsay last night’s conversation and go back to the way we were?” Her words sounded flat.

  The question caught him unaware, a condition he thought he might as well get used to because it was happening all the time.

  “Do you think we can do that? Forget not just last night’s conversation but the things that went before, back in McGuffey’s thirteen years ago.” He drank some coffee because his throat was dry. “Or do we try and face the things that were. You wanted to stay in Fionnegan and I didn’t. You wanted kids and I wanted a puppy—a borrowed one I could send home when I didn’t want to take care of it anymore. I wanted to be a world-class skier and was becoming a doctor. I knew myself well enough to know I’d end up taking that disillusionment out on you. I may have been twenty-six when we broke up, but I was also still that disappointed seventeen-year-old kid.”

  “I would have been supportive. You know I would.” She leaned toward him, still holding his gaze. Her hands were folded on the scarred oak surface of her desk. Her knuckles were white. “You were married to Nerissa inside of a year. Instead of blaming it on disappointment or our disagreement on things, why don’t you just clear the rest of it up with the truth?”

  He frowned and reached to stroke her hands, trying to loosen the grip they had on each other. “What truth?”

  “That you didn’t love me enough.”

  * * *

  IT HAD ALMOST felt good, saying aloud the words that had flitted through her head, weighed on her heart and inserted themselves on sporadic journal pages over the thirteen-and-change years since they’d broken up.

  Almost but not quite.

  It wasn’t a good day to not be busy in the office. It gave her too much thinking time. It stood to reason that Skip Lund stopped in just before closing time to ensure he’d have a legal assistant Monday morning. “I’d just as soon it was you,” he said when Kate told him someone would be there. “I know you don’t have a degree, but you knew the work inside and out.”

  And worked cheap, she thought but didn’t say.

  The telephone was a welcome interruption. “I need to talk to grown-ups. Let’s have supper at McGuffey’s,” said Penny when Kate picked up. “Sam’s home and Debby and Jayson are coming over. I’m ordering pizzas for all of them and Dan and I will be at the tavern about seven. What do you say?”

  “Sounds good.” And it did. Regardless of what was said—or not—the McGuffeys were friends. All of them. The tavern was one of her favorite places. She wasn’t going to give that up no matter how things ended with Ben. “I need some exercise. If I walk over, can I get a ride home?”

  “Sure.”

  It was dark when she was ready to leave for the tavern at six-thirty, which wasn’t a surprise. The several inches of snow was. Going home from work meant walking down the short hall to her living quarters, so even though she’d known it was snowing, she hadn’t paid attention to how much.

  No one who came into the office had mentioned that her steps needed to have the snow removed from them, but they did. Even though the office was closed on weekends, leaving the snow around its entrance wasn’t an option.

  She stepped back inside to add boots, gloves and another layer of fleece to the jeans and sweater she was wearing and got her brand-new snow shovel from the utility closet.

  Shoveling snow was not one of her favorite parts of being single, although she remembered that her mother had been the snow shoveler, too, when Kate and Sarah were kids. That had been their parents’ division of labor—their father had mowed the lawn, cleaned the gutters and removed mice from their traps. He was also the better cook of the partnership, but the girls had learned early not to mention that to their mother. They’d also gotten very good at shoveling snow.

  The white stuff, fluffy and dry, was still falling and even the sound of passing cars was muted in its depths. Kate didn’t hear footfalls, so when someone muttered, “I thought so,” and took the shovel from her hands, she screamed and pushed the perpetrator as hard as she could. She moved to run into the house but tripped over the long legs and large feet of the person she’d knocked over.

  “I know you’re mad at me, but violence is a new thing for you.” Ben’s muttered voice reached her ears.

  “I’m not mad at you.” Their legs were tangled, and no matter how she moved, they stayed that way. “We’ve had a twenty-some-year soap opera going on, is all, and it’s time to change channels.”

  “How can you say that?” He went still but kept his arms around her, his legs pinning hers. “I’ve only been married once and you haven’t had more than seven or eight affairs with other people’s husbands. That anyone knows about, that is, and I won’t tell about the others.”

  She fought the giggle that rose up in her throat and lost. She had
to stop moving long enough to get her breath back. “Don’t forget, tall guy, I have elbows.” And she used one.

  “Oof!” He grunted and laughed at the same time. “What channel would you change to, anyway?”

  And then he was kissing her, and soap opera or no, she was kissing him back.

  The muted whap of a snowball in the middle of her back was a timely interruption, and they drew apart, sitting in the snow and sharing a smile as Jayson’s excited laughter preceded him across the yard.

  “Ben, you’re home! I missed you. I’m going to ride tomorrow. Ten miles!”

  “Ten miles!” Ben got to his feet, hauling Kate behind him, and steadied them both when Jayson slid into them. He hugged the boy’s shoulders. “But I don’t think there’s going to be a ride, buddy. Too much snow.”

  “I’ve tried explaining that. It’s not working.” Debby followed her brother’s footsteps across the snow. “I called the organizers and they said there’ll be a hike even if there isn’t a ride, though not the whole ten miles.”

  “We’re having pizza,” Jayson announced. “With Josh and Michael.” He looked smug, the expression laughable on his wide face. “I’m eating lots.”

  “Not if we don’t get moving, you’re not.” Debby gave him an affectionate push. “See you two tomorrow.”

  “Bye, guys.” Everyone was “guys” to Jayson. He waved cheerily and trudged away with his sister. “Don’t forget, Ben,” he called. “Ten miles!”

  “I’ll be there.” Ben waved at him, then reached for the shovel. He made short work of getting the snow off the steps, then handed the scoop to Kate. “I don’t know where you keep it. Are you ready to go to the tavern? I thought I’d walk you over.”

  “All right.” She carried the shovel around and leaned it against the house on the back porch.