Three Days on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)

by Anna DeStefano

  “Mallory says he’s been blaming himself all this time, while no one’s known that it’s been more than the same shock the rest of us are dealing with.”

  Sam’s eyes were stinging, but she was too tired to cry.

  “I should have known…” she said. It had been one of the many things eating at her while she talked with Brian outside the conference room. “I should have been there more at home, listening to him, so he didn’t feel so alone.”

  She should have known something was wrong, the way he was avoiding talking to her. She should have known it was more than just her moving out. They’d been so close, and he’d pulled away so completely. But she hadn’t wanted to push herself on Cade, or demand that he forgive her for the changes she’d forced on their family.

  “Don’t do that to yourself.” Julia shoved off the bed. “You’ve needed to be here, taking care of yourself—and you still managed to be home every morning and afternoon for your boys. Don’t value yourself and your well-being less than you do everyone else’s, even your family’s. You need to take care of yourself, or there won’t be anything left for the rest of the people in your life.”

  She stared down at Sam, still in her workday uniform. Her eyes were alive with something darker than their normal hazel-green. She was a different woman than most people in Chandlerville knew. Most of their friends and neighbors saw only a former PTA president, a coach’s wife, a homemaker and hostess, and a selfless representative on the school board.

  Sam wasn’t most people.

  “You first,” she said, sitting up, thinking it was high time for Julia to talk about some things she’d rather not talk about. “Why don’t you and your boys stand up to Walter and figure out what the hell’s going on with him, before he gets worse? Why don’t you focus on your own family as much as you’re killing yourself to save Chandlerville’s soul? Don’t you have another school board hearing tonight about the shooting, like there’s been a hearing every other Monday night for a month and a half? Why don’t you not go to that for a change? You say no one’s listening to anyone at those things anyway. Sitting through them is making you crazy. Why don’t you stay here instead and deal with the husband who’s making you crazy? Do that for yourself, and maybe then you can tell me to stop feeling like a failure as a wife and mother for leaving my husband and sons, while I have a slow nervous breakdown.”

  Sam was as shocked as her friend by her tirade, but it was too late to take the words back. Her nerves were shot. She was strung out from being at school, even if she’d managed to help Nate and maybe even Cade a little. She hated herself for every harsh truth she’d spewed at Brian, when he’d rushed back from Atlanta and stayed half the morning to support her and their son. But none of that was an excuse for deflecting her own problems by pointing her finger at someone who’d opened her home and her heart to Sam so unconditionally.

  Julia started to say something. Her jaw clamped closed again, so hard her teeth clunked. Then she sank back onto the bed, her shoulders drooping.

  “Walter doesn’t realize what he’s doing when he’s drunk,” she said. “He’s never been like this before. I don’t think he even realizes how much he’s drinking.”

  “And that makes it okay?” Sam was sick of seeing the Davis family suffering, while Julia hoped this would all just go away. “He was so drunk he hit you a few nights ago.”

  “He never hit me! It was just a little shove, when he was trying to get by me.”

  “You almost took a header downstairs to your basement.”

  “I caught myself. And I’m still not sure I didn’t slip on the tread at the top.”

  “I’m sure.” Sam felt like a weasel. But she was glad they were discussing this finally. She was afraid for her friends—Julia and Walter both—if things didn’t change. “You two might still seem like the perfect couple to everyone else. But I’ve lived here for three months. Your husband is a wonderful man, but he needs help. He’s never been like this before. Something is wrong, Julia, and you can’t keep letting him hold whatever it is inside. If he won’t let you or the boys help him, then there are other ways. You could—”

  “What? Get him to go to treatment? Therapy? How’s that kind of thing working for you and Brian?” Her friend shook her head. “Walter won’t go. He’s as resistant to something like that as Brian has always been. Both of them think the world is black-and-white, and there’s no sense talking about the stuff in between. They can handle it all on their own, because they always have. But boys terrorizing each other until one of them is dead, one in the hospital, and another in jail… Three sweet boys, Sam. It’s tearing Walter up. I don’t know why it’s hitting him so much harder than the rest of us. He won’t talk about the shooting at all, except to say that he can’t believe it happened, and what good is helping kids the way we always have, if we can’t protect them from things that mess them up so badly that they turn on each other?”

  “None of us can believe it.”

  Sam thought of Cade and her son’s confusion and insistence that he was to blame.

  “When I moved in here,” Sam said to her friend, “who’d have thought we’d both end up in the same place?”

  “Lonely?” Julia asked, nudging Sam’s shoulder with her own.

  Sam nodded, nudging back. “But never alone.”

  She thought of how charmed the lives on Mimosa Lane had seemed to her when she and Brian had first moved here. And how quaintly the national media had painted Chandlerville, as if it were a modern-day Mayberry. In reality, most of the families they knew had two parents who worked, many of them all the way downtown like Brian and Walter and the Turners. Or mom and dad were divorced or struggling with the same complex family problems as people anywhere else in the country.

  Ideal lives and ideal places like Mimosa Lane had their own cracks and dents and rusted-out chips that took away from the good stuff. Especially when no one wanted to confront the bad things in their midst, until it was too late to deal with them.

  “I need to speak with you, Brian,” Whilleby said before Brian could make it to his office after returning to Whilleby & Marshal around one o’clock.

  He thought about continuing to walk, as if he hadn’t heard the voice of doom beckoning him to the pit of despair. He felt a careless smile consume his expression. He let his thoughts wander to Cade’s favorite movie, where “the pit of despair” was one of his favorite scenes.

  Since the boys were old enough to care, Saturday nights had been movie nights. The whole family would pile into the media room in the basement that had, over the years, morphed into a playroom that often resembled bedlam. Kids’ stuff stayed strewn everywhere, no matter how much Sam sorted and organized. On any given weekend day, there used to be five to ten of the boys’ friends over to play foosball and air hockey and video games and LEGOs, blaring music through the surround sound speakers and watching ridiculous kid TV shows and movies that seemed selected to drive adults from the basement. Until someone, usually Brian, ventured down again to clear everyone out because it was dinnertime.

  But like the boys playing all afternoon with friends, Saturday movie nights were gone now. So was his family being silly and easy with one another, no matter what else was going on in their lives. Since the shooting, he and Sam had lost twelve Saturdays, all while Brian had been stewing over how unfairly she’d been treating him, stalking her at night but not confronting her until this morning, waiting around for her to come to her senses.

  “Brian?” Whilleby asked. Brian had started walking again—toward his office and not his senior partner. “I have a pressing business matter I need to discuss with you.”

  Brian already knew what the pressing matter was—he was off the Kelsey project.

  Jefferson had left a voice mail on Brian’s cell, saying how disappointed he and Ginger were to hear about the change. They understood his personal situation and sympathized with his decision to step away from their redesign so another associate could finish the plans Brian had pour
ed his creative heart and soul into before the shooting. But they were disappointed.

  And Brian had been… relieved when he’d heard the news.

  Standing outside the school listening to his phone messages after talking with Kristen about Cade, his disappointing clients had paled in comparison to his worry for Cade and Sam and his marriage. The design work that had annoyed him more than it had inspired him lately didn’t rate a second thought now. Maybe it never had.

  He’d made being indispensable at W&M a primary focus since he’d uprooted his family and moved them to the Deep South. He’d been lucky to have landed this opportunity. And yet he’d secretly seen working here as something he’d had to settle for, when he still dreamed of striking out on his own to do the more environmentally conscious projects he’d been pursuing in New York.

  Sam and the boys had needed so much of his time, he’d reasoned with himself, there was no way he could put enough into a start-up venture. So he’d given up on running his own shop, and he’d patted himself on the back for the sacrifice. Only now his family was falling apart, regardless.

  From the start, Whilleby & Marshal’s brand of conservative, upscale, mostly corporate design hadn’t satisfied him. But he made good money. And over the years he’d used his crazy schedule at the office as an excuse not to look too closely at what was happening to the people he’d done all of this for.

  “Mr. Perry!” his senior partner bellowed.

  The shocking sound of the understated man’s anger, his use of Brian’s last name, caused several associates to poke their heads out of their offices to see who was about to get his ass fired. Their attention swiveled from the senior partner to Brian. One by one, they ducked back into their own spaces.

  Brian gazed into Whilleby’s furious features—at least as furious as Brian had ever witnessed. The man’s complexion was blotched with red, and he was scrutinizing Brian as if he’d never seen him before. Whilleby’s mouth was so firmly closed, a white line had formed around the man’s lips.

  “I need to speak with you now.” Whilleby was the partner who’d hired Brian away from the small New York firm that had given him his start right out of school. Back then, the man had seen a bright future in Brian’s cutting-edge designs and commitment to environmentally friendly solutions. “We need to discuss your recent performance.”

  “No,” Brian said, a piece of who he’d once been clicking back into place—the recklessly driven young man who’d married an equally committed schoolteacher named Samantha, both of them fresh out of graduate school. Together they were going to take on the world and make it a better place for the children they’d dreamed of having. “You really don’t, sir. I understand completely whom I’ve been letting down all this time.”

  He walked into his own office, closing and locking the door to ensure his privacy. Heading around his desk, he looked down at the schematics for the Kelsey project he’d left spread out the night before. The family’s high-end choices were in line with the firm’s upscale rep. Hardly any of it reflected Brian’s instincts for giving the Kelseys what they wanted in a unique, modern way no one else could have designed for them.

  Because Jefferson was such a high-profile catch for the firm, Whilleby had micromanaged the proposal from the moment Brian pitched it to the partners. His touch was everywhere, drowning out Brian’s aesthetics. Brian had lost control of his vision, telling himself it was the price he had to pay to support his family. He’d been making similar concessions, practically from the moment he’d first joined the firm and realized that cutting-edge and environmentally friendly were things Whilleby liked a lot better in the firm’s press release about Brian’s background, than the partner did in Brian’s day-to-day work.

  Control.

  When was the last time Brian had really felt it, reached for it with confidence and fought for it, knowing he had a shot in hell of coming out on top?

  An image of Sam running from him at the park that morning flashed through his mind. He relived the soft sound of her and Cade talking on the patio back in January, when Brian had felt excluded from their special moment, but had shrugged it off. And then there was today at school, hearing his son crying in a closet along with a friend about the guilt and shame they’d been silently enduring for months, while Brian had thought everything would eventually right itself, as long as he kept himself and everyone else under control—meanwhile Cade was cutting class and flunking his courses, and Brian had had no clue.

  And it felt as if he couldn’t stop any of it now.

  Flashes of memories and personal failures rushed through him with a roar that sounded like the explosion of buildings, of families, of a marriage. He braced his palms on top of the desk and the Kelsey papers, fighting to keep it together the way he had for so long, so he could give his family what they needed. What he needed—a safe and happy life that no one could steal away again.

  Except he hadn’t helped a single one of the people he loved, or even given his best to the career he’d once thrived in. He’d been going through the motions for years and tuning out the warning signs that he was failing, while snapshots of the life he’d been meant to live lingered in the back of his mind.

  We’re fine… he’d said over and over to himself and his wife.

  Suddenly he was the one roaring, the sound deafening and coming from somewhere inside Brian he hadn’t touched since that day in New York when he’d raced to reach Sam, after she’d finally made it out of Manhattan to Queens with her shocked, horrified students. That was the last day, the last time he could remember feeling totally alive and wanting anything except for that horrible day to never have happened to them at all.

  What’s the point, Brian? I’m never going to be the Sam you want me to be again…

  I don’t know how to feel what you want me to…

  If you don’t know how to break, and I can’t go back to being the way I was… then what are we doing…

  “Goddamn it!”

  He swept his arms wide.

  The Kelsey papers flew, along with his conservative desk set, the blotter, family photos Sam had lovingly framed for him, and the cold dregs of the coffee he hadn’t finished drinking last night.

  She was right.

  Sam was right.

  The world he’d so carefully navigated all this time, the unfulfilled choices he’d congratulated himself for making the best of, had been more about protecting himself than he’d wanted to admit. He and his family had been living a half-life of his making. They didn’t talk about important things. They didn’t face problems together, not even what had happened in January. Despite his hopeful words and positive attitude about the life they’d made in Chandlerville, he’d given up somewhere along the way—on himself and Sam.

  A part of him had resented that she never really seemed to get better, no matter what he did. He’d been exhausted the morning of the bake sale, and hoping desperately for a break. So instead of listening to his wife and getting her to tell him how she was truly feeling, he’d been secretly glad for the silence that had grown between them over the years. He’d turned away from that window and the sound of her opening her heart to their son. He’d wanted to put that “big day” behind them and finally move on. He hadn’t wanted to deal with all the reasons behind her continued nerves and fears.

  The long-ago New York day he thought they’d turned their backs on was still testing him and Sam. The Chandler shooting was still testing them. And just when they’d needed to be at their best as a couple and as parents, everything had fallen apart.

  He’d yelled at his wife for giving up. But Sam had had the courage to start over and demand more from their lives. She’d found the strength to reach their son again today and get Cade to open up a little.

  Don’t try to talk right now, honey, he remembered himself saying in the ER after the shooting. You’re not making any sense…

  “Goddamn it to hell!” he whispered.

  How did he make this right?

  He had
to make this right.

  It couldn’t be too late for his marriage. His family. Fear and shock flooded him, powerful emotions he’d never let himself feel as bravely as his wife had, each and every day she’d found a way to keep going.

  Thinking only of her and the sacrifice she’d made that morning—hurting herself by going back to school and staying for as long as she had, because Nate and Cade had needed her—Brian sat and pulled out the keyboard tray for his computer. With a click of his mouse and a few keystrokes, he logged into the firm’s e-mail system and then his account.

  He directed the message to Whilleby, copying the other partners. His fingers began typing the message before the thoughts could fully form in his mind. He could feel the perspiration coating his upper body, soaking into his crisply starched shirt.

  This wasn’t smart.

  It wasn’t responsible.

  He was damaging the professional relationships that had been the backbone, the secure core of his and Sam’s move to Atlanta. But this was exactly what he needed to do for his family. He’d known it since speaking with Kristen, and since trying outside that conference room, and failing for the second time that morning, to speak calmly with his wife about their future.

  It had taken him long enough, but Brian could feel himself accepting the truth that he hadn’t been okay for a long time.

  Now all he had to figure out was how to win back his wife, so he and the woman he loved could finally begin healing together.

  Chapter Ten

  “I’d like to see my wife,” Sam heard Brian say. “Could you get her for me?”

  Julia had left Sam to rest, while she prepared whatever she needed to for one of the fabulous dinners she cooked each night for her family, whether Walter or the boys turned up for the meal these days or not. Sam hadn’t been able to nap, her mind refusing to settle.

  She’d needed to regain enough energy somehow to be there when her boys got off the bus. She’d promised herself she’d find a way to approach Brian when he got home from work. She wanted to apologize for not giving him a chance at the school. She wanted to listen to what he had to say. She wanted this to work, the hesitant step toward reconciling he seemed to sincerely want to take.