Annie was a play-by-the-rules kind of woman. She liked to know what they were right up front and was most comfortable sticking to them. Letting herself admit an attraction to a man to whom her sister had already staked a verbal claim did not come anywhere near playing by the rules.
Tommy was playing outside in the yard when Annie pulled up to the house a few minutes later.
“Mama!” He came running the second he saw her, and her heart lifted. “You’re back!”
“How was school?” She crossed the gravel drive, dropped down and welcomed his tumult into her arms. She hugged him hard for a few moments, then pulled back and ruffled his hair. “I believe you grew today.”
Tommy laughed. “You can’t grow in a day, Mama.”
“Oh. Well, maybe you just look taller.”
He took her hand, led her up the walkway to the side door off the kitchen, telling her what happened at school as they went.
Mrs. Parker came to the door, swung it open for them and smiled a greeting.
“Hope I haven’t held you up, Mrs. Parker.”
“Not at all,” she said, stepping back so they could all file into the house. “Tommy’s had his dinner. I made us some chicken and dumplings. Hope that was all right.”
“Of course,” Annie said, hanging her coat in the mudroom.
“We saved you a plate.”
“Thank you.”
They went into the kitchen where Mrs. Parker reached for a bowl on the counter and put it away. “I’ll be going then. Oh, let’s see, where did I put that note? There it is.” She picked up a piece of paper off the island and handed it to Annie. “Michael Russell called for you. Just after four. He asked if you could call him as soon as you have a chance. Said he would be working late at the office tonight.”
Annie’s stomach dropped. What in the world could that be about? Mike had been J.D.’s attorney in their divorce. He had been reluctant, initially, to get involved. He knew them both. Had eaten dinner at their house. He would have been much happier staying out of it. But J.D. had been persistent, and Mike had given in. To this day, he still had trouble meeting eyes with Annie when they passed on the street. He was a good attorney, and his efforts on J.D.’s part had not contributed to the size of her bank account.
She glanced at the note. Alarm jangled through her. She neutralized it with a quick, It’s probably nothing, Annie. Don’t go making a big deal out of something that isn’t.
But when it came to J.D., Annie had learned to expect the unexpected.
“Are you all right, Annie?”
She looked up to find Mrs. Parker studying her through concerned eyes.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Well, if you’re sure, then I’ll be on my way.”
Annie thanked the older woman again for picking Tommy up from school. She walked her to the door and watched until she’d gotten in her car and backed out of the driveway. She looked down at the note still clutched between her fingers.
She picked up the phone and punched in the number. A woman answered and said she would check to see if Mike was still in the office.
“Mike Russell,” he answered a few moments later.
“Mike. I got your message. What’s up?”
“Hey, Annie,” Mike said, the seriousness of his voice putting her instantly on guard. “I don’t guess there’s any reason to beat around the bush. You’re not going to like this no matter how I put it. J.D. is filing for custody of Tommy.”
Annie’s fingers went slack, and she almost dropped the receiver. “What—what did you say?”
“I’m sorry, Annie.” An audible sigh echoed across the line. “There’s nothing about divorce that’s easy. Seems like it would work out a lot better if people just stayed together.”
Annie laughed. Laughed when her heart felt as if a huge pair of pliers had just yanked it from her chest. “I assume you mean even when one of the parties doesn’t believe in fidelity.”
“Annie, I know none of this is what you wanted, and I hate to drop this on you. But he’s serious.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. He doesn’t stand a chance of getting Tommy.”
Silence from the other end.
“Does he?” she asked, less certain now.
“You’ll want to give your attorney a call.”
“Mike—” She broke off, wanting to say a thousand things at once and knowing, suddenly, that none of them mattered.
“I’m sorry, Annie.”
She put the phone back on its cradle. Emotion stormed through her: disbelief, anger, outrage.
What did J.D. think he was doing? He had ripped their life up, tossed it out the window, taken off for California with his twenty-something bride-to-be, and now he wanted her son out there, too?
Not in this lifetime!
She picked up the phone again, flipped through her Rolodex to J.D.’s L.A. number, punched it in fiercely enough to damage both finger and keypad. Voicemail picked up on the third ring.
“Hello. J.D. and I are out just now—”
Annie cut the message off. She paced the kitchen floor, then stopped and dropped her forehead onto the heel of one hand. Take a deep breath. This whole thing was nothing but ludicrous. There was no way J.D. could ever get Tommy.
Fear knifed through her with a question she’d yet to consider. Given the choice, would Tommy want to live with his father? What if he did?
Clarice. Call Clarice. She’ll put the whole thing in perspective. Where J.D. was concerned, she always did.
CLARICE WAS IN THE KITCHEN clearing out the last of the dishes in the dishwasher when the phone rang.
Just the sound of it cranked the intensity of her five-alarm headache. It had been that kind of day.
She picked up the cordless from the countertop, glanced at the number on caller ID.
Annie.
Clarice chewed her lower lip, emotions she was not proud of bubbling inside her.
And for the first time in her life, she didn’t take her sister’s call.
ESSIE WAS STILL at the house when Jack got home after dropping Annie off. From the back door, he heard the clatter of pots and pans and followed it to the kitchen. She was standing on a ladder, wiping out one of the high-up cabinets.
“Give you a hand with that?”
She turned with a start, hand to her chest. “Land sakes! Do you want to be responsible for making an old woman fall off her ladder?”
Jack laughed. “You’re too agile for that.”
She smiled. “I was just cleaning up a bit. You had dinner?”
“Late lunch.”
“Left you something in the oven. If you get hungry later, it’ll be there.”
“Thank you, Es. You’re spoiling me, though.”
“Doesn’t hurt once in a while. I guess with the kind of work you do, you don’t get many home-cooked meals.”
“That’s a fact,” he said, opening the refrigerator and pulling out the pitcher of iced tea she made fresh every day. And there in the kitchen where he’d grown up, where he’d enjoyed countless home-cooked meals, something hit him solidly between the ribs. An absolutely recognizable feeling that he could stay. That he didn’t have to go back to his other life. A life that kept him on the road all the time, that before now had seemed like a perfectly good life.
He frowned at the intensity of the feeling, wondered at its immediate depth and breadth as if it had been forming without his awareness.
Essie got down from the ladder and closed the cabinet door. “Your father would be proud of what you’re doing.”
Jack set down the pitcher, his expression hardening. “I didn’t start this for him.”
She looked at him for a long moment, silent. “You know, son, I’m afraid you’re going to live the rest of your life with all that anger as your compass, and that would be a shame. A real shame.”
She left the kitchen then, her disappointment in him still hanging in the air.
&
nbsp; He started to call her back, but caught himself. What was the point? He did not expect her to understand. Essie had loved Jack’s father the way she would have a brother. Her loyalty to him was fierce. The way Jack saw it, Essie would have forgiven his father anything. Had forgiven him anything.
“You never knew how I came to work here, did you?”
He looked up. Essie had come back and stood in the kitchen doorway now, her usually smiling face somber. He shook his head. She wrung the bottom of the apron tied to her waist between her hands. “I got married when I was sixteen. We were poor, and this fella came along that just seemed like he was going to fix everything, for me and my family. I suspect they didn’t mind getting rid of me. I had eight brothers and sisters, and one more mouth to feed was one more mouth to feed. At first, everything was better than I ever imagined, which I guess should have been my first warning sign. We’d only been married a month when he hit me the first time.”
Jack frowned. “Ah, Es.”
She fixed her gaze on her hands as if some part of her had gone back to that place in her memory. “I was outraged, went home to my family. But they sent me right back. Wives didn’t leave their husbands. If things weren’t perfect, well not much in life was. A year after we’d gotten married, I’d already been to the emergency room four times. Each one a little worse than the other. To the point I was too embarrassed to drag myself in there again.”
She stopped, still not looking at him. He waited, sensing she needed to finish.
The grandfather clock in the living room struck nine. The kitchen faucet dripped against the stainless-steel sink. “I had taken a job over at Kinley’s as a cashier. Your father used to come in and buy that apple pie ice cream he always liked. One night, I guess I looked a sight because I could see in his eyes, he knew exactly what had happened to me. He took out a card and wrote down his name and your mother’s name with a phone number and said if I ever needed any help, all I had to do was call.”
She laughed a little, the tail end of it disappearing into a soft sob. “Do you know I actually got desperate enough to do just that? There wasn’t anybody else willing to help me, so I called one night at work, and he and your mother came and picked me up. They gave me a place to stay and a job, and the two times Joseph showed up to tell me I better get myself back home if I knew what was good for me, your daddy greeted him at the door with a shotgun. He never came back.”
“Essie, I had no idea,” Jack said, understanding for the first time in his life the strong ties this woman felt to his family.
“As sure as I’m standing here, I know I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for your father, Jack. And no, he wasn’t a saint. He had weaknesses and flaws just like the rest of us. But he was a good man. And losing your mother nearly killed him. That much I know. What they had was special.”
“Then how could he have forgotten about her so soon?”
“Oh, son, he didn’t forget. He never forgot. Daphne told me once that she knew Joshua would never love her the way he’d loved your mother. She didn’t expect him to. But she helped him through a very bad time, helped him see some light on the other end. He was grateful for that. It’s always been my feeling that if he hadn’t married Daphne, he probably would have died of heartbreak. People handle things in different ways, son. But we all do what we have to do to get by.”
She turned and left the kitchen again then, her shoulders a little hunched as if bearing the weight of all that she had just told him.
Jack stood there, feeling as if everything inside him had shifted, leaving little that was recognizable. For so long, he’d closed his mind to the man he’d once thought his father to be. Evidence of his father’s character had been relayed to him more than once since he’d come back to Macon’s Point, by Henry Sigmon, the man who’d worked for so long at C.M., and now by Essie, who had been all but a second mother to Jack.
Could she be right? Had Joshua done what he’d had to do to survive losing the love of his life?
The questions needled Jack now with something that felt undeniably like truth at its tip.
He went to the sideboard where his father had once kept his whiskey, found that it was still there. He poured himself a shot of Basil Hayden and took it outside on the back porch where he collapsed into one of the old rockers there. The chair was old and squeaked in fifty different places. The September night air was cool. The moon was just short of full, throwing light across the pasture to the left of the barn and the shadows of Ned and Sam, grazing, the days still warm enough that they spent most of it in the shade of the maple tree in the center of the field.
Jack swigged the bourbon. He’d never been much of a drinker but welcomed the burn down his throat as a change of focus from the other burn centered in his heart. He dropped his head against the back of the rocker. Closed his eyes and concentrated on the squeaking chair. But it failed to drown out the questions surfacing inside him, so he stopped rocking and let himself hear them.
Had he been too hard on his father? Refused to see that maybe his grief had been too much to bear alone?
Had he really loved Jack’s mother as Jack had once believed?
Jack had lived his adult life under the premise that love like that was little more than a fairy tale. Refusing to commit to one woman because commitments did not last, and affirmations of forever love were nothing more than hollow promises. Oh, he’d believed it could last a while. Years, even. But something always came along to change it. Or maybe it was just that people eventually allowed it to be changed.
He thought about the rift between his father and him. Of how it had grown wider with each passing year until mending it seemed an impossible thing. Jack had let his bitterness blind him to anything other than what he’d believed to be true.
He would never have the chance to fix that. The weight of the realization felt enormous to him now. And he realized suddenly that Essie was right. He didn’t want to let all the old anger at his father be the compass that determined his future.
Sitting there in the old rocker, he wished he’d found his way to this point a long time ago, that he could have put aside his stubbornness and found a way to talk to his father. That was a regret he would have to live with. And not one he was proud of.
A picture of Annie joined the hum in his head. As she’d looked that afternoon on the drive back, smiling, a little flushed from the craziness of the day.
He could not remember the last time he’d enjoyed a woman’s company as he’d enjoyed Annie’s today. There was something about being with her that felt natural and easy. One conversation flowed into another. Whether he started it, or she started it, they blended so seamlessly that it seemed as if they had known one another for years.
But then everything about his attraction to Annie was different.
The admission tripped him a little, and he was hit with the sudden sensation of falling, fast and hard.
He took another swig of his whiskey, feeling its rush, and the simultaneous unbalancing of the convictions he’d held onto for so long. It felt as if he had finally reached a place of understanding where his father was concerned. Fortuitous, that on this same day, he should wonder, too, if he had met the woman who could make him believe once and for all that real love was not a fairy tale?
CHAPTER TWELVE
AT EIGHT-FIFTEEN the next morning, Annie was pacing the floor of Eric Bailer’s office. He’d handled her divorce from J.D. A soft-spoken man with thinning brown hair, he wasn’t the stereotypical nail-’em-to-the-wall divorce attorney. For the most part, he did a lot more considering than talking, the result being that when he did say something, it usually had meaning, and people listened.
He hadn’t said a word past hello since Annie had flown into his office and given him a sixty-second rundown of the phone call she’d received from Mike Russell.
Annie had just reached the breaking point when he said, “Hmm. No doubt this isn’t a desirable development.”
“There’s no way he
could ever gain full custody, is there?”
“I try to make a practice of never saying never. It’s unlikely, true. But he could certainly make your life miserable trying.”
Annie wanted to cry. Drop to the floor right there in front of him and wail like a baby. Remorse struck her for the times when she’d felt the inconvenience of being a mother. Like the night she’d had to take Tommy with her to Walker’s to meet Jack. No, motherhood wasn’t always convenient. But nothing, nothing in her life meant more to her. Tommy was her center, her focus, the rudder that kept her upright. She could no longer even imagine her daily life without him.
J.D. couldn’t do this. Not after everything else he’d done.
But then he could. And he would use the same line of logic he’d always used to justify his behavior. He was J. D. McCabe. What more logic did he need?
ANNIE TRIED TO CALL Clarice again as soon as she got back to her office. Where was she? And why wasn’t she answering the cell phone she kept with her at all times?
She sat in the chair behind her desk, staring at the cup of coffee she had yet to touch. She felt locked up inside, as if someone had put her in an instant deep freeze.
What was she going to do?
She could not, would not let J.D. take her son away.
HE COULD HAVE dressed it up under a dozen different excuses, but the truth was there was one reason, and only one, that had Jack taking the stairs to Annie’s office in the municipal building just before eleven that morning.
He wanted to see her.
He had woken up to that reality and felt it intensify inside him with every hour since.
There was no one at the front desk, so he followed the hallway to her office, stopped in the doorway. She sat behind the desk, profile to him, her gaze on some point outside the window, or much farther away than that judging from the look on her face.
“Annie?”
She looked up, surprise widening her eyes for a moment. “Jack. I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.”
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