Family Tree

by Susan Wiggs

“But—”

  “We’ll be done here in a few minutes,” Fletcher said. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

  Heaving a sigh, Teddy picked up his backpack and left the room.

  Fletcher turned to face Celia. She looked gorgeous and perfectly groomed, as always. Shiny yellow hair and shiny red nails, flawless veneered teeth. His trophy ex-wife. “Did you really have to say that in front of him?”

  “Teddy knows I want to move.”

  “And you’re welcome to do that. But Teddy stays with me.”

  “You know very well I’d never abandon my son,” she said.

  “Then move after he’s grown.” Yes, he thought. Move to Timbuktu.

  “He’s only ten. I don’t want to wait until he’s grown. There’s nothing for me in this town. Everything here sucks.”

  “Jesus, do you hear yourself? What brought this on?” Shit, was there another boyfriend? One who didn’t like the commute to a small Vermont town?

  “I can’t keep living like this,” Celia said.

  “Like what?” he asked. “Like someone who doesn’t want to get a job because it interferes with all that shopping and travel?”

  She sniffed. “Fletch, can’t we all move to Boston? We were happy there when we first married, right? You could join a big firm with a partner track, or—”

  “I’m not moving to Boston.” He spoke quietly, even though he felt like yelling. “Teddy’s life is here.”

  “What about my life?” she asked.

  Fletcher’s patience ran out. “What the hell do you want? You ended up with everything you said you wanted in the divorce, remember? The house, the Florida condo, both cars, shared custody, the retirement plan, half of all the assets—”

  “Don’t reduce me to a cliché. I wanted a truly meaningful life with you, Fletcher.”

  “You found meaning in shopping.”

  “Very funny. Did my happiness ever really matter to you?”

  He didn’t reply. He honestly didn’t know the answer. What he had come to understand about Celia was that she would probably never be happy. There was always something more for her to want—a better house, a country-club membership, a vacation home in South Beach, expensive jewelry, a more prestigious social life—but attaining it never brought her joy. Her anger swirled in the atmosphere like a toxin.

  She loved Teddy. That was something he’d never dispute. Everybody loved Teddy, the way everyone loved a new puppy on a sunny day. Their son was affectionate and funny and smart, the kind of kid other parents approved of and teachers complimented.

  It was particularly gratifying for Fletcher, because he himself had never been that kid. He’d been the outsider, the newcomer, the motherless boy, an object of suspicion. He never wanted Teddy to feel that kind of pain, so he’d made a commitment to raise his son in the most stable, secure place he knew—right here in Switchback. Initially, Celia had agreed, but her contentment hadn’t lasted. She always seemed to need something that hovered just out of reach.

  He reclaimed his patience with an effort. “I need to get back to the courtroom. Can we finish this discussion another time?”

  She glared at him, her beautiful sky-blue eyes turning cold. “There’s nothing to discuss. I don’t know why I thought you’d open your heart and your mind to me.”

  “My focus is Teddy. He needs us both.” Fletcher softened his tone. “If you absolutely have to live somewhere else, you’re free to do that. Just—please—find a way to stay in our son’s life.”

  Her glare turned to sadness. “You know I can’t live without Teddy.”

  “And he can’t live without his mom.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. He could see the fight go out of her as she turned toward the door. “Tell Teddy I’ll see him later, okay?”

  Fletcher took a moment to get his head back into the law. The uneven wooden floor and wavy glass windowpanes of his chambers bore testament to the age of the building, which dated back to the 1880s. His framed credentials hung on the wall, and there was a plaque with engraved nameplates of all his predecessors, men and women who had walked these floors and deliberated the law for decades. These chambers had once housed Emerson Gaines, who had gone on to serve on the Supreme Court.

  Fletcher had the distinction of being the youngest judge in the state. Some days, however, the youngest judge in the state didn’t feel so young. A lot of life had happened to him while other people his age were still revving their engines. He hadn’t planned it that way. But he hadn’t been given a choice either.

  Most people looked forward to Friday nights. Fridays were for decompressing, kicking back, activating weekend mode. Pizza and movies. Games at the high school—football, hockey, or basketball, depending on the season. Happy hour or dinner with friends. Fletcher was not most people. He had no particular fondness for Fridays when he had to surrender his son to his ex.

  After work at court, a bunch of the guys went out for a pickup game of hoops, then pitchers of beer afterward at the Switchback Brewpub. When Teddy was with his mother, Fletcher often joined them. Then he would return home to an empty house, with the empty weekend stretching out in front of him.

  This was the arrangement he had agreed to in the divorce, and he was obligated to stick to it. Life was better since he and Celia had split up. He had a house in the village, close to Teddy’s school and to the courthouse. He’d dated, but nothing serious developed. Deep down, he probably didn’t want anything serious. He was good at a lot of things, but making a relationship last didn’t appear to be one of them.

  Court business was just wrapping up at the end of the day when Gordy Jessop rushed into the courtroom, his ill-fitting suit jacket flapping, his breath coming in agitated huffs. Despite his disheveled appearance, Gordy was a good lawyer who had built a vibrant local practice over the past few years. In the days when he’d been with a rival firm, Fletcher had gone against him plenty of times. And Gordy had handled Fletcher’s divorce.

  “It’s late, I know,” said Gordy. “Sorry, Your Honor.”

  Fletcher glanced at the clock over the courtroom door. Shoot. He didn’t want to keep his staff late on a Friday.

  “What’s up, Counselor?” he asked Gordy.

  “I’ve got a petition here to revoke a power of attorney,” said Gordy. He submitted the documents, which had been stamped by the clerk. The ink scarcely looked dry.

  Fletcher didn’t relish reading through the long sheaf of documents, but he couldn’t very well make a ruling without doing that.

  “Is it an emergency?”

  “Um, no. Not really. But it’s urgent.”

  “Have Mildred schedule it for Monday.”

  “Your Honor.” Gordy shuffled from foot to foot as though he had to take a whiz. “If you could just give it a look . . .”

  Gordy wasn’t usually this insistent. Fletcher set his jaw. He glanced down at the motion, then blinked, not sure he could trust his own eyes.

  The action was being taken on behalf of Annie Rush, FKA Annie Rush Harlow.

  Annie Rush.

  Despite the passage of time, the memories and feelings had never completely faded. Now, seeing the name on the pages of a court document, Fletcher felt weirdly self-conscious in the presence of the people lingering in the courtroom. Just the thought of her brought a flood of remembrance—dark-lashed, laughing eyes. A face that could light the world. A heart full of dreams. Joy and anger and hopelessness. And finally, surrender.

  Although his heart was beating fast, Fletcher maintained his usual demeanor of professional detachment. “What happened, Counselor?”

  “Her family—specifically her mother—needs the power of attorney revoked. It was assigned to her husband, a guy named . . .” He consulted one of the forms.

  “Martin Harlow,” Fletcher muttered.

  “Yes. Her situation has changed radically.” Gordy glanced over his shoulder at the nearly empty courtroom. The afternoon light outside the window was fading. Gordy looked back at Fletcher. Then he
leaned in, lowering his voice. “Fletcher. Annie needs you.”

  “Thank you for expediting this,” Caroline Rush said to Fletcher. “Annie doesn’t need a power of attorney anymore. Especially not—” She stopped herself from saying Martin’s name. “And for stopping by the house. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I wanted to. I’m sorry about what happened to Annie.”

  Caroline’s hand shook as she carefully placed the legal document in its folder. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief along with sadness and apprehension. Once upon a time, she had joyfully given her daughter to Martin Harlow, believing Annie’s future was secure with a husband who would love her forever. Now Caroline was taking her daughter back, and she had no idea what to believe anymore.

  “Sit down,” she said, gesturing at the kitchen table. “I just made a pot of coffee.”

  “Thanks.”

  She set down the French press along with a plate of salted maple shortbread cookies. “I don’t have the baking skills of my mother or my daughter,” she said, “but I find that if you use enough butter and maple syrup in a recipe, you don’t need much skill.”

  He tasted one, and the expression on his face was gratifying. “Good to know.”

  Fletcher Wyndham hadn’t been Caroline’s favorite, back when he’d been Annie’s boyfriend. Caroline hadn’t seen the potential there. All she’d seen was an obstacle to her daughter’s future. In the eyes of a mother wanting a glorious future for her child, he was merely the son of a drifter, a kid who would probably stagnate in his blue-collar job at the garage, drink beer, and play the lottery, eventually turning soft and directionless in middle age.

  Looking at him now, she felt shame and regret. She wished she had looked deeper and seen an extraordinary young man. The fact was, she hadn’t looked at all. Her problem with Fletcher Wyndham had nothing to do with Fletcher Wyndham. Or with Annie, for that matter. It was Caroline who was the problem.

  Enough with this Fletcher kid, Caroline had said to Annie, when her daughter was teetering on the verge of changing her mind about college. Now Caroline had to admit to herself that what she was really saying was Enough with this Ethan Lickenfelt.

  Oh, she had loved that boy in his boxy white grocery truck. She’d been naive enough to believe that loving him would be enough to create a life of blissful perfection, no matter what. At eighteen, she hadn’t understood that frustration and hardship had the power to corrode even the deepest love and thwart the most yearned-for dreams.

  The divide between the life Ethan wanted and the one he’d found on Rush Mountain had ruined their marriage. They were both committed to their kids and their family, but ultimately, the strain took its toll. There were only so many lies a person could tell herself before she had to let in the truth.

  “Mrs. Rush?” Fletcher’s voice broke into her thoughts.

  She wasn’t Mrs. Rush. She wasn’t Mrs. anything. “Please call me Caroline.”

  “Caroline. I was just wondering what you thought.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t listening,” she confessed.

  “This must be really stressful for you,” he said.

  “Yes . . . but it’s not just that. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

  He frowned. “For what?”

  She sighed and pushed the plate of cookies toward him. “It’s a long-overdue apology. Really long, Fletcher, and it’s awful that I haven’t said anything until now. But I want you to know, I was wrong about you, back when you first moved to Switchback. A lot of people were wrong about you.”

  He gave a quick, slightly crooked smile. One thing Caroline had not been wrong about—the boy was stunningly good-looking. But that had been part of her problem with Fletcher. How could a guy that gorgeous possibly be trusted?

  “Don’t feel bad,” he said to her. “Now that I have a kid of my own, I get how protective a parent feels.”

  “Thank you, but that’s no excuse. I never bothered to know you, and that wasn’t fair.”

  “I imagine you were more concerned with Annie. Besides, I was probably a little shit, anyway. The longer I work at court, the more I’m convinced that most guys are at that age.”

  “When I think of the role I played in keeping you apart, I feel ashamed. None of this would have happened if I’d left the two of you alone.”

  “Believe me, you weren’t the cause of our breakup—not the first time, or the second. Annie and I managed to screw things up on our own.”

  “Good of you to say. But that Martin Harlow. He ought to be strung up by the balls.”

  “I can’t help you with that,” he said.

  “He brought her here from L.A. via medical transport, as if she were a piece of defective merchandise, can you imagine?”

  “I . . . no. I can’t.”

  “I’m grateful she’s here, though. She needs her family. Now more than ever. Her care team says it could be weeks or months before she can come home, but you know Annie. When she sets her mind to something, nothing can stop her.”

  He nodded. “That’s the Annie I knew.”

  They were quiet, sipping the last of their coffee. Caroline offered a refill, but he shook his head.

  “I heard about your divorce,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “This might be stating the obvious, but I’ll say it anyway—it happens to the best of us.”

  “After my divorce, people told me I should look at it as a chance to learn and grow.” Have I done that? she wondered. Some days, she wasn’t so sure. “It’s a big change, I know. How’s your little boy?”

  “Teddy’s fantastic. Confused about the situation, but I’m keeping things as stable as I can for him. Bought a place on Henley Street—the old Webster house. The remodel was a major project. Teddy likes being close to school.”

  Caroline felt another wave of regret. Fletcher seemed like a good man. Why had she never bothered to get to know him? “And what about you? Do you like it?”

  He grinned. “After doing all that remodeling, I’m never moving.”

  8

  Then

  We’re moving,” said Fletcher’s dad, dropping a bomb into the middle of his senior year of high school.

  “Again?” Fletcher set aside his civics textbook and glared up at his father. The TV was blaring the news that never seemed to cease—the whole country was trying to figure out how to wage war against a terrorist group called the Taliban. Last September 11, the world had been turned inside out by the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. A couple of Fletcher’s buddies had already made commitments to enlist in the military as soon as school ended. Now, with his father’s sudden announcement, Fletcher contemplated enlisting. “I’m not going with you,” he stated.

  “You don’t have a choice. I need you, son. And you’re gonna love this,” Dad said, his eyes lighting the way they did when he was convinced he was onto something.

  Fletcher wasn’t convinced of anything. He glared at the TV, which showed soldiers being moved around the desert in lumbering transport vehicles. “When?” he demanded.

  “After Christmas break.”

  “Shit, Dad.” He looked around the little bungalow. Same shabby furniture they had schlepped from place to place, different house. He’d been okay with living in Dover, where they’d been since last summer. School here didn’t suck. He was looking at the home stretch toward graduation and thinking about what to do after. “Shit,” he said again.

  “Knock it off. This is a sweet deal. I bought myself a business up in Vermont—”

  “Vermont?” Fletcher flashed on images of maple trees and snow. Endless acres of snow. And . . . what else? Ben & Jerry’s. Cheddar and Cabot cheese. Autumn leaves. Shit.

  Moving was the story of his life with his dad. Fletcher tried to count on his fingers the number of moves they had made. Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, one of the Carolinas—he scarcely remembered which one—Indiana, Delaware . . . He ran out of fingers. And now this. Freaking Vermont.

  His father was fo
rever chasing after the next big thing that would put them on Easy Street. The trouble was, nothing ever panned out, because his ideas were nutty. He had once started a business turning urns of ashes into underwater reefs. He’d bought into a theme park for grown-ups featuring heavy equipment. Then there had been that herd of goats for rent to clear brush, the pizza delivery on an Italian scooter with speakers blaring Andrea Bocelli . . . If an idea was weird and doomed to fail, his dad embraced it.

  “This time,” Dad said, the way he always did, “things are going to be different. You’ll see.”

  “Sure I will,” said Fletcher. The idea of slogging through another move in pursuit of another nutty idea made his head hurt.

  “I got a line on a car repair garage from a guy who’s retiring and selling everything. The deal comes with a ready-made clientele, all the equipment and inventory we need, ready to go. This is the only garage for miles. It’s a no-brainer,” his dad said.

  Meaning, thought Fletcher, if you had no brain, you’d think it was a good deal.

  “And there’s a major bonus,” Dad went on. “Scooters.”

  “Scooters. You mean like motorbikes?” That piqued Fletcher’s interest. Just a little.

  “You betcha. Thanks to some obscure import-export law, Vermont is the best place to import a vintage scooter. I handle the paperwork, and we collect a nice chunk of the fee. It’s a super deal. And I got this amazing espresso machine, a commercial one from Italy, too. We can set up an espresso bar right in the garage.”

  “Cool,” Fletcher said. “Let’s add a massage table. ‘Sanford’s Garage, Scooter Works, Espresso, and Massage.’”

  “And a nail salon,” Dad added. “Chicks love nail salons, right?”

  “You would know.”

  “Quit being a smart-ass.”

  Fletcher knew he could argue until he ran out of words, but he also knew it would be pointless to bring up the myriad objections and pitfalls. His dad always had a ready answer for everything, even if the answer was wrong.

  “If I change schools now, I might not be able to graduate on time.” Holy crap. That would truly suck.