by Mary McNear
“No,” he said quietly. “Not from your perspective, it isn’t.” He paused then and seemed to struggle with something. “But what will you do, Caroline, when Pearl’s is . . . is gone?”
She flinched at those words. Because no matter how much that place had felt like an albatross hanging around her neck for the last several years, she still loved it, of course. How could she not? She’d spent so much of her life there, had so many memories there. Not all of them were good, of course, but many of them were. And it tore at her heart now, thinking about Pearl’s belonging to someone else—or, worse yet, ceasing to exist altogether.
“Butternut without Pearl’s,” Jack said out loud, as if reading her mind. “I can’t picture it. And I’m not sure anyone else in town can either.”
She didn’t say anything. What was there, really, to say? There wasn’t a single person who’d grown up in that town who hadn’t spun on the red leather stools at the counter, memorized the menu inside and out, and ordered the Butternut Burger five hundred times over.
But Jack, apparently, was less worried about her customers than he was about her. “What will you do, Caroline,” he persisted, “if you have to . . . let it all go?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, quickly. “I can always waitress. Or manage a restaurant.”
“But could you work for someone else? You’ve never done that before.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” she said, with a nonchalance she didn’t really feel.
“And where would you live?”
“Oh, some place,” she said vaguely. “Frankie rents a apartment over the Laundromat, and I was thinking about doing the same thing. But they’re tearing that building down; he’ll have to find a new place to live now, too.”
Jack sighed, and Caroline watched him as he picked up a little plastic creamer and, peeling the lid off it, poured it into his cup of coffee. The coffee would be lousy, Caroline knew, and ice cold to boot. Jack seemed lost in thought, though, as he stirred it distractedly, and Caroline was free to look at him, really look at him, and marvel once again at how much she liked looking at him, even in her current mood. God, he was something else. Even under the cafeteria’s fluorescent lighting, and even with a day’s growth of beard, and a line of worry between his eyes, he looked better than any man had a right to look. And as she watched him take a sip of his coffee, she wondered, if he’d been just a little less good-looking, would any of what had happened between them still have happened? Would they, for instance, have had the daughter who right now was lying upstairs in a hospital bed?
No, she decided, Jack’s looks had only been part of the draw. His charm had been the rest, his charm and his all-the-time-in-the-world smile that she’d never been able to resist. That smile was nowhere in evidence today, she realized, as Jack put his cup of coffee down and started to systematically shred his paper napkin. No, he didn’t look like he was even close to smiling. He looked . . . he looked angry, she realized with surprise. “Jack, that’s not fair,” she said, her own temper flaring.
“What’s not fair?” he asked, looking up at her, and leaving a little pile of pulverized paper napkin on his tray.
“You’re being angry at me. You promised you wouldn’t judge me.”
“I’m not judging you. And I’m not angry at you either. I’m angry at myself.”
“Why?” she asked, taken aback.
“Because it all makes sense to me now, Caroline,” he said, leaning closer. His voice was quiet, but urgent. “I’ve known since the first time I saw you at Pearl’s, at the beginning of the summer, that there was something wrong. I saw it—the exhaustion, the stress, the worry—but at the same time, I didn’t see it. Instead, I saw what I wanted to see, which was that you were still the same woman I’d fallen in love with. And you are. In so many ways, you are. But in one important way you’re not. Because the woman I fell in love with wasn’t carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, and she didn’t feel as alone as you feel now, as alone as you’ve felt for a long, long time. The woman I fell in love with actually thought, crazily enough, that she’d found someone in her life who would help her, and support her, and—”
“Jack, stop,” Caroline said, stunned to discover that there were tears in her eyes. “Just stop, all right? I mean, what’s the point of dredging all of that up now? What happened, happened. We both did our best.”
“You did your best. I did . . . I did something less than my best.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, blinking back the tears that still wanted to come pouring out. “None of that matters now. Can’t you see that? What matters now is Daisy. And we need to be there for her, again, in a little while, and we can’t bring all of this”—she waved her hand between the two of them—“with us.”
“You’re right,” Jack agreed.
And Caroline took a deep breath, relieved that the urge to cry had passed, though in its place was an aching sadness that didn’t feel much better.
“You go ahead upstairs without me, all right?” Jack said now. “There’s something I need to do first.”
Caroline nodded, uncertainly. He wasn’t going to have a drink, was he?
But he caught the expression on her face and shook his head. “I’m not going to a bar, Caroline. There’s someone I need to see.”
She nodded, embarrassed that her thoughts had been so transparent. “That’s fine, Jack,” she said. “I’ll hold the fort down here.” She stood up, and, taking her tray with her, she started to leave the table. But Jack stopped her.
“Caroline?”
“Yes?”
“Could I . . . could I see the bank documents?”
“Which ones?” she frowned.
“All of them, anything having to do with the loan.”
“Why?” she asked, genuinely perplexed.
“Because I might have an idea you haven’t had yet, a fresh perspective on the situation.”
She wavered.
“Look, it can’t hurt, can it?” he said. “Just let me take a look at them, all right?”
“All right,” she said finally. “But I’ve read the fine print, Jack.”
“I know. But you’ll still get all the papers together for me? By, say, early this week?”
“Why not?” she said, turning away again. After all, Jack was right; it couldn’t hurt. It couldn’t help, either. But it couldn’t hurt.
CHAPTER 20
When Will walked into Daisy’s hospital room that evening and saw her wearing a hospital gown and propped up on pillows on a hospital bed, he felt a jolt of fear. Even by Daisy’s standards she was pale, and her blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue. As soon as she saw him, though, her whole face lit up and she looked better, much better. “Will, you came,” she said, sitting up.
“Of course I came,” he said, and as he walked over to her bedside he felt a rush of protectiveness for her. She looked so fragile somehow, so helpless in that gown, and in that bed.
“How did you even know I was here?” she asked as he leaned over and kissed her, very carefully, on the cheek.
“Your dad came over to the garage,” he said, pulling a chair over to sit down on.
“He did?” she said, her eyes widening with surprise. “He didn’t tell me he was going to do that. I would have called you, Will, but I didn’t have my cell phone. I was hoping that after my parents left I could use the phone at the nurses’ station. But I’m so glad I didn’t need to. I have to thank my dad later.”
“So do I. But, Daisy, when I opened the door to my apartment, and I saw him standing there, I swear to God, I think my heart stopped beating. I knew he wouldn’t be there unless something was wrong. And when he told me you were in the hospital . . .” He paused, unable to put the way he’d felt into words. “Just, just promise me you won’t do something like this again, okay?” he said.
“I won’t. I promise,” Daisy said, looking faintly amused. “I mean, I only had that one appendix.”
; “You know what I mean,” Will said seriously.
“I do, Will. And I swear, no more medical emergencies. Now, are you going to give me the flowers you brought or not?”
Will looked down at the flowers in his hands, which he’d completely forgotten. He gave them to Daisy.
“They’re so pretty,” she said admiringly.
“There wasn’t much of a selection in the hospital gift shop,” he said. “I’ll do better next time.”
“Next time, Will? Is bringing me flowers going to become a regular occurrence?” she asked, smiling and looking so much like herself again that Will felt his stomach begin to unclench.
“Daisy, if it’ll make you happy,” he said. “I’ll bring you flowers every single day.”
He took the flower arrangement from her then and put it down on her bedside table. There was another arrangement there, too, as well as a teddy bear. A “get well soon” Mylar balloon was floating in the corner of the room.
He reached for one of her hands and held it in both of his, then worried that it felt cold.
“Do you want me to ask the nurse for another blanket?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m fine. But, Will, did you see my mom when you got here?” she asked.
He nodded. “She’s in the visitors’ lounge.” He didn’t tell Daisy about the icy reception he’d gotten from her.
“She’s really mad, Will.” She sighed. “She said we needed to talk later, which is always a bad sign. I think . . . I think she’s going to blame you for this somehow. Which is ridiculous, obviously. And do you know what else is ridiculous?” she added indignantly. “The fact that I’m old enough to drive, and vote and drink and gamble and own a firearm but, according to her, apparently, I’m still not old enough to spend the night with my boyfriend.”
Will didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to take sides, especially since he thought her mom’s anger at him was not entirely unjustified. He’d known there was something wrong with Daisy on the drive back. He should have pushed her harder to tell him what it was. In fact, he should have taken her straight to a hospital. Yes, she’d gotten to one eventually, but what if she hadn’t gotten to one in time? No sooner did he have that thought, though, than he dismissed it. It was too terrible for him to even contemplate.
Still, he wondered, why hadn’t Daisy told him she was in so much pain? He asked her that now.
But she didn’t answer him right away. She just looked down at the hand he wasn’t holding, the one lying on top of the bed covers. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I guess because I didn’t want to ruin everything. It was so perfect, up to that point, anyway.”
He smiled at her and squeezed the hand he was holding. “You’re right. It was perfect. But trust me, there was nothing you could have done to ruin it. But what happened to you, Daisy, after I left you at Pearl’s?”
“Well, I went up to the apartment, and as soon as I walked into the kitchen—where my mother was obviously planning some kind of intervention—I fainted. By the time I came to, they’d called an ambulance. It brought me here, and the ER physician examined me, and I got a blood test and a CT scan. And then they took me into surgery, and that was it. The surgeon did my appendectomy with something called a laparoscope, which means he only had to make a tiny incision. And I only have to spend a day in the hospital, too. I can probably leave tomorrow afternoon.”
“That’s good,” he said, smiling. But there it was again, that unsettling feeling that things could have turned out differently.
“Hey, what happened to your arm?” Daisy asked then.
“Oh, that,” he said, looking at the bandage he’d put on his cut after he’d gotten back from his father’s. “It’s just a scratch.”
“It doesn’t look like just a scratch,” she said, reaching out to finger the bandage gently. Then she chuckled softly.
“What’s so funny?”
“You and me,” Daisy said. “We spend one night together, and I’m in the hospital and you . . . you don’t look like you’re doing much better, Will. I mean, there’s your arm, and your jeans, too. What happened to them?”
He looked down. He hadn’t changed out of his ripped jeans yet. They’d gotten caught on the barbed wire too. Looking back at her, he had to laugh. “You’re right, Daisy,” he said. “That was quite a night.”
Daisy smiled at him then, a lovely smile, and, letting go of his hand, she moved over on the hospital bed and patted the now empty space beside her. “Come here,” she said, a familiar, and reassuring, light returning to her blue eyes.
He looked at the open door to her room and hesitated.
“Please?” she asked, patting the bed again. “Just for a second. Nobody’s going to come in. I promise.”
He sighed, stood up warily, and sat down on the very edge of her bed, keeping his feet firmly on the floor.
“Oh, come on,” she said, moving over a little farther. He wavered, then slid over next to her, and propped his feet up on the bed. But he kept an eye on the door.
“Now kiss me,” she said.
“Daisy,” he started to object, so she kissed him instead. Soon enough, he was kissing her back and marveling, for the hundredth time, at the softness of her lips. After a minute, though, he felt the tempo of the kiss begin to change, and he pulled away.
“We should stop now,” he said.
Daisy nodded, a little groggily. “You’re probably right,” she said. “They gave me something for the pain, and I think it’s making my head feel a little fuzzy.”
“I’ll let you rest then,” he said, starting to get up, but she grabbed his hand.
“I’ll rest after you leave,” she said. “I promise. But can we stay like this? Just for a few more minutes?”
“Okay,” he said, taking her hand in both of his and kneading it between his fingers. She settled back on the pillows and turned to look at him. And watching her lying there, he felt it again, that almost primal urge to protect her, that gut-level determination to guard her against any danger. He could do that, too, he thought. He was sure of it. A few hours ago, of course, he’d been sprawled out over the hood of his truck, barely able to draw in a single breath, but now he felt his whole body flooding with strength. He could keep Daisy safe, if he could just be with her, every second of every day . . . But therein lay the problem. He couldn’t. And with that realization came a bottomless, terrifying fear, a fear that something could happen to her, something he couldn’t anticipate or control.
And that wasn’t all Will was worried about. A letter had been waiting for him when he’d gotten back to his apartment, the letter that would take him away from her more suddenly than he’d anticipated, but that would also give him a chance at a future with her. But he couldn’t tell her about it now. She was too fragile. He’d have to wait until she was stronger.
“Daisy, promise me something, okay?” he said suddenly.
“Okay,” she said.
“Promise me you’ll be careful.”
She smiled a little tiredly. “Will, I am careful. It’s in my nature to be careful. You know that.”
“I do know that. Just don’t . . . don’t take any risks.”
She looked amused. “You mean, like jumping out of airplanes?”
“No, I mean, like when you’re doing everyday things. When you’re back at college and you’re crossing the street, or riding your bike to class, or walking home from the library at night—just be careful, all right?”
Daisy was silent. They never talked about her going back to college, at least, not if they could possibly help it. Finally, she said, “You don’t need to worry about me, Will, okay. My idea of risky behavior is studying too hard. Or drinking too many caffeinated beverages.”
He smiled at her, slightly mollified, and then he lifted his hand to her cheek and stroked it gently. “I love you, Daisy,” he said. And when he heard himself say it, he was as surprised as she was. He hadn’t even known he was going to say those words until they were alrea
dy out of his mouth.
Daisy looked at him wonderingly, her pale complexion transfused with a soft blush. “I love you, too, Will.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Will said quietly, “I’ve never said that to anyone before.”
“You mean, you’ve never said that to anyone you weren’t related to,” Daisy clarified.
But Will shook his head. “No. I mean I’ve never said that to anyone.”
CHAPTER 21
That’s funny. I don’t remember the service here being this slow.”
“Jack?” Caroline said in surprise, looking up from the industrial coffee machine she was shoveling coffee grounds into. It was closing time, Pearl’s was empty, and, left to her own devices, she’d been deep in thought. “How long have you been waiting there?” she asked, putting down the plastic scoop and wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“Not that long.” Jack rested his elbows on the counter. “And don’t worry. I’m not staying; I haven’t forgotten our agreement.”
“Our agreement?” she repeated, coming over to him.
“I’m not allowed in here, remember?” he said, his blue eyes amused.
“Oh, that,” Caroline said, with a tiny shrug. “I hope we’ve gotten beyond that, Jack.”
“Have we?” he asked, suddenly serious, and because Caroline didn’t know how to answer that question, she busied herself with pouring him an iced tea.
“Have you been up to the apartment to see Daisy?” she asked, setting the glass down in front of him.
He nodded, sipping his drink. “She looks so much better, Caroline. She’s finally starting to get some color back in her face.”
“She is, isn’t she?”
“She says she’s ready to come back to work again.”
Caroline frowned. “I don’t know about that, Jack. It’s only been five days since she came home from the hospital.”
“Well, it looks like five days is all it’s taken for a serious case of cabin fever to set in.”
“Maybe,” Caroline murmured, reaching reflexively for a dishcloth to wipe down the counter and noticing for the first time that Jack had put the folder she’d given him earlier in the week—the one with all the financial documents in it—on the counter beside him.