Days Like This
Page 35
“What about performing? You live to play guitar. You can’t give that up.”
“I don’t intend to give up playing. But I’ve had enough of the road. It was fun when we were kids—”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”
“You know what I mean. It was new and exciting. It was dreams coming true. But I’ve lived those dreams, and I’m ready to move on to a different dream. I’m almost forty years old. That’s not how I want to live any more, spending all my time on buses and planes, living out of a suitcase, sleeping in a different town every night. I am so over that. I want to be here, with you and our kids, in a house we built from the ground up, a home we can leave to the kids when we’re old and feeble.” He raised his head, took another sweeping glance at the view. “If this doesn’t tickle your fancy, we’ll find another place. This isn’t the only piece of land for sale in town. So what do you say?”
She thought about leaving behind the house she and Danny had worked so hard to turn into a home. A house that had never really been hers, but more a symbol of Danny’s rebirth. A house that had held nothing but emptiness and sorrow after he was gone, until Rob moved in and made it a real home. A house was nothing but four walls and a roof. It was the people living there who made it a home. And no matter where they lived, as long as she and Rob were together, she would be happy.
He was waiting for her response. She gazed into those beautiful green eyes that she knew so well she could carry on entire conversations with him without either of them uttering a word. She studied the tiny laugh lines that fanned out from the corners, the pale freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose. She knew every line and angle of that face, knew how it reflected his every mood, all of that knowledge embedded deep inside her, so far inside her that she was certain it had been there for millennia, across lifetimes and continents and possibly the entire solar system, and she couldn’t understand why it had taken her so many years to figure it out.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she touched him. Ran her hands up his chest, to his shoulders, and kept going. Took his face between her fingertips, drew his mouth down to hers, and kissed him. Tilted her head back and solemnly met his eyes.
Understanding warmed and softened those green eyes of his. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving slowly up and down. And said hoarsely, “Yes?”
And she gave him a radiant smile and said, “Yes!”
THE END
Author Bio
Laurie Breton started making up stories in her head when she was a small child. At the age of eight, she picked up a pen and began writing them down. Although she now uses a computer to write, she’s still addicted to a new pen and a fresh sheet of lined paper. At some point during her angsty teenage years, her incoherent scribblings morphed into love stories, and that’s what she’s been writing, in one form or another, ever since.
When she’s not writing, she can usually be found driving the back roads of Maine, looking for inspiration. Or perhaps standing on a beach at dawn, shooting a sunrise with her Canon camera. If all else fails, a day trip to Boston, where her heart resides, will usually get the juices flowing.
The mother of two grown children, Breton has two beautiful grandkids and two precious granddogs. She and her husband live in a small Maine town with a lovebird who won’t stop laying eggs and a Chihuahua/Papillon/Schipperke/Pug mix named River who pretty much runs the household.
I love to hear from readers! If you enjoyed this book, please drop me a line.
lauriebreton@gmail.com
www.lauriebreton.com
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FREE PREVIEW OF BOOK 4 IN THE JACKSON FALLS SERIES!
COMING IN 2013.
January, 1993
Jackson Falls, Maine
She hadn't been sure the fourteen-year-old Vega would make it this far. She'd bought it for a measly two hundred bucks the day that Irv's kids ran her on a rail out of Palm Beach. They'd sat her down one afternoon, announced that they were contesting the will, and given her fifteen minutes to pack up what was hers before the locksmith waiting in his panel truck in the circular drive outside the mansion changed the lock on the front door.
It wasn't what Irv would have wanted, but she was too weary, too discouraged, to fight it. They'd eventually win, anyway. She and Irv had only been married for a year. In their eyes, that was hardly long enough to justify her stealing their inheritance, and she was certain that the right attorney could easily sway the judge to their way of thinking. It didn't matter to his kids that she'd actually cared for their father, despite their age difference. In their eyes, she was a gold-digger, and that was all that mattered.
So she'd left with nothing more than two suitcases of designer clothing, a few pieces of jewelry, and seventy-five bucks in her Chanel handbag. She'd sold the bag and most of the jewelry to a small secondhand shop for a price so low it was insulting, but it was enough to cover the cost of the car and the trip to Maine.
She'd thought about stopping in Boston. Trav lived there, on a dead-end street in Chestnut Hill, and he would have let her sleep on the couch in his finished basement. But she and her older brother's wife had never seen eye to eye, and what was the point of stirring up trouble between them? So she'd given Boston a wide berth, circling around it on 495, praying she and her little Vega, which pretty much topped out at 61 mph, would survive all those crazy Boston drivers swerving around her doing ninety.
And here she was, back in this shithole town, the one place she'd sworn she'd never return to. But she was out of money and excuses, and home was the one place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in. On this fifty-degree January afternoon, driving through downtown in a fourteen-year-old Chevy with a mud-splattered windshield because she’d run out of washer fluid two hundred miles back, she could smell the faint sulphur odor from the paper mill downriver. There was no denying the fact that she was one hell of a long way from the moneyed fragrance of Palm Beach.
The Vega was running on fumes, and she was down to her last twenty-dollar-bill. Colleen downshifted and wheeled into the Big Apple convenience store, where she pumped five bucks worth of fuel into her gas tank and cleaned her windshield with a fistful of snow. She'd gone to high school with the guy working the cash register. Sonny Somebody-or-other. She kept her sunglasses on and her eyes lowered as they completed their transaction, hoping he wouldn't recognize her and want to chat. Small talk had never been her strongest suit, and what was there to talk about anyway?
Him: What have you been up to since the last time I saw you?
Her: Oh, nothing much, except that I just buried my sixty-year-old third husband.
Meadowbrook Road was a quagmire. It always was at this time of year. The town maintained the unpaved road, or so they claimed, but between January thaw and mid-April, it mostly consisted of deep, muddy ruts and frost heaves. Easily navigable in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Not so much in a Chevy Vega with summer tires that had spent its entire pathetic life in southern Florida and was skittish as a newborn colt on these snowy Maine roads.
John Anderson was singing Straight Tequila Night on the dashboard radio when she passed the old Abercrombie place, perched atop a small hill. She’d heard, through the grapevine, that her sister had lived in the Gothic Revival farmhouse for a time before selling it to their nephew Billy when Casey and her second husband had built a new home on Ridge Road. Although he’d been a huge part of Casey’s life for nearly two decades, Colleen had never met her sister’s new husband, and she was mildly curious. The late, great Danny Fiore would be a hard act to follow. The irony of it struck her: She’d always been jealous of her older sister, had always coveted whatever Casey had that she didn’t. It was really true that you had to be careful what you wished for. She and Casey had never had much in common. She’d certainly never expected that when they finally did share something, it would be the mantle of widowhood.
She took McKellar’s Hill at a snail’s pace, let out a sigh of relief when
she reached the bottom and saw the river ahead of her, its frozen surface dark in spots, slushy from the thaw. Another quarter-mile, and then, on her right, a broad expanse of snowy fields with broken, yellowed corn stalks poking up here and there through the pitted snow. Beyond that, wooden fence posts marked the pasture where Dad’s Holsteins grazed. In the distance loomed the weathered nineteenth-century barn where hay was stored, flanked by the low-roofed addition, circa 1952, that housed the milking parlor and the cattle stalls. Two blue Harvestore silos stood sentinel, and as she drew closer, the old farmhouse hove into view, smoke rising from its chimney, its clapboards in need of a fresh coat of paint.
She passed the mailbox, clicked her blinker, and turned in at the sign that read MEADOWBROOK FARM ~ REGISTERED HOLSTEINS. A cluster of chickens scattered as she came to a stop beside the ominously tilted utility pole at the center of the yard, directly behind the red Farmall tractor her father had owned since the beginning of time. For a moment, she just sat there gazing across a muddy, slushy barnyard, the steering wheel vibrating beneath her hands and dread filling every crevice of her heart. Dad didn’t know she was coming. She hadn’t been able to muster the courage to call for fear that he’d hang up on her. Or worse, tell her not to bother. She hadn’t been the favored child to begin with; she could only imagine how far she’d fallen from grace since the day she walked out on Jesse and her nine-year-old son.
But if there was one thing she’d learned in the past decade, it was that running only got you so far. Sooner or later, everybody had to face the music. So she shut off her ignition. The Vega sputtered and died. She opened her door, swung around, and planted her Ferragamos flat on the muddy ground.
And for the first time in nine years, Colleen Bradley Lindstrom Davis Berkowitz stood on Maine soil. She took a hard, deep breath, one that drew in the scent of mud season overlaid with the sharp tang of wood smoke and the faint aroma of cow manure. And then she shut the door and marched resolutely toward the house.
The black sheep of the Bradley clan had returned to the fold.
Table of Contents
Copyright
OTHER BOOKS BY LAURIE BRETON
Days Like This (Jackson Falls Series)
Author Bio
PREVIEW OF BOOK 4 IN THE JACKSON FALLS