by Linda Seed
Lacy was so happy to see the earrings that she leaped into Brandon’s arms during the morning rush at Jitters, when the place was packed with locals filling up on their prework caffeine fixes.
By ten a.m. on the day of the hug, no fewer than four people had told Daniel about the embrace, and about how happy Lacy had looked in her ex-fiancé’s arms. Three of those reported hearing from Brandon himself, or from sources close to Brandon, that a reconciliation was imminent.
Five additional people offered Daniel condolences while he was doing errands on Main Street, consoling him by saying that at least he’d had fun while it lasted.
He didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he was pretty sure he was being played somehow, by somebody.
And he knew he didn’t want any part of it.
Lacy had just gotten home from work and was putting her grandmother’s earrings into her jewelry box, which she then tucked inside her underwear drawer for safekeeping, when her phone buzzed with a text message.
Brandon.
It was so good to see you this morning. Can we maybe have dinner and talk?
Lacy stared at the message. What was this? She sighed, thinking that she shouldn’t have hugged him. It was a stupid, impulsive thing to do, but she’d been so happy to get the earrings back that she’d acted before she’d thought.
She tapped in a response to his message:
I don’t think that’s a good idea.
A moment later, her phone buzzed again:
I don’t understand. Your mother said you were ready to try again.
Lacy’s eyes widened as she read the message. Surely she was reading it wrong. She called Brandon, and when he answered, she snapped into the phone, “What did you mean about my mother?”
So he told her about the conversation he’d had with Nancy while the woman had been on his table getting her spine realigned. “She said you’d never cheated on me with Daniel Reed. Was she wrong?”
“Well … no, but—”
“And she said that you were sorry for everything that happened. That you regretted breaking up. She said you might even go ahead with the wedding if I were to just talk to you and smooth things over.”
Lacy was so outraged that she could only sputter.
“She … I …”
“So it’s not true?”
Lacy almost felt sorry for Brandon, he sounded so crestfallen.
“No, Brandon, it’s not true. I wasn’t with Daniel while you and I were together, but I am now. My mother misled you. I’m sorry.”
“But, Lacy. I just know that if you and I could—”
“Brandon? I have to go.” She hung up on him while he was still talking.
And then she charged out of the trailer, down the stairs, across the lawn, and into her mother’s kitchen.
She found Nancy sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a book.
“Mom? What did you do?” Lacy demanded.
“Why, Lacy. What in the world …?”
“I just talked to Brandon. What. Did. You. Do?”
Nancy had always gotten along well with her daughters, particularly Lacy, who had been a happy, parent-pleasing, good-natured child. So now, the pure fury in Lacy’s face and in her voice caused Nancy to lean back in her chair, squinting like a newborn kitten still trying to acclimate to the world.
“Well, I … Lacy, I didn’t do anything.”
“Did you tell him I wanted to get back together? Did you tell him that I wanted to go ahead with the wedding? The wedding I canceled for many, many good reasons, not the least of which is that I’m in love with another man?”
Nancy, who normally wouldn’t tolerate one of her children raising their voice to her, now just appeared flustered and defensive. “Well, I might have said it was possible. But only because it seems to me that it is! You’ve taught him a lesson by breaking up, by going out with Daniel Reed right under his nose. But now he’s learned the lesson, Lacy! He’s not going to take you for granted anymore! Don’t you see, he’s ready now!”
“But I’m not! And I never will be! Not for him! Because I love Daniel, Mom, and I don’t love Brandon!”
Nancy pressed her lips into a taut line and shook her head sadly. “Oh, Lacy.”
“What, Mom?” Lacy demanded. “ ‘Oh, Lacy’ what?”
Nancy set aside the book that had been in her hand, seeming to remember for the first time that she was holding it. “Honey, you might think you’re in love with this Daniel Reed. But you can’t be. A person doesn’t break up with their fiancé and … and just immediately fall into true love with someone else!”
“Except that I did,” Lacy said, more quietly now.
“Oh, honey. I know it seems that way right now, but it’s like I was telling Ellie MacKay at the Joslyn Center, I don’t think you—”
“You talked about this to Ellie MacKay. And Brandon. And to Josie Smith at the Cookie Crock,” Lacy said, by way of recap. “Did you tell all of them that Brandon and I are getting back together?”
“Well, it wasn’t like I told people it was a sure thing,” Nancy said, a whine in her voice. “It was more like a prediction.”
“A prediction,” Lacy said.
“Yes! And I still think I’m right!” Nancy insisted.
Lacy walked out of the kitchen with Nancy still calling after her.
“Did you know that Mom was telling everybody in town that Brandon and I are getting back together?” Lacy asked Whitney over the phone about twenty minutes later, after she’d had time to calm down.
“Well … yeah. I told her you were going to be mad.”
“Damned right I’m mad!” Lacy bellowed. She could imagine Whitney holding the phone away from her ear to avoid auditory damage.
“Look, Lacy,” Whitney said, trying to placate her. “You know Mom means well. She thinks Brandon is your key to happiness. A nice house. Kids. A retirement plan. All that.”
Lacy rubbed her eyes with one hand. “Okay, yeah. I know that. But while I was enjoying the house and the kids and the retirement plan, I’d have to be married to Brandon.”
Whitney let out a very un-Whitneylike guffaw. “Fair point,” she said. “So, are you going to forgive Mom?”
Lacy sighed. “Of course. Eventually. But not today.”
“All right, well, in the meantime, try to calm down, and tell that delicious Daniel hello from me.”
Lacy didn’t know how she felt about the lecherous tone in Whitney’s voice.
“Get your own man,” she said.
Even if Lacy had wanted to tell the delicious Daniel hello from Whitney, she wouldn’t have been able to.
Daniel wasn’t taking her calls.
He scowled at his phone as it rang, Lacy’s name on the screen, and shoved it back into his pocket.
He just couldn’t deal with this right now. Maybe ever.
Daniel had tried to work earlier in the day, but in his current state of mind, it would be hazardous to get too close to the roaring flames of his furnaces. So instead, he’d put Zzyzx in the car and had driven out to Leffingwell Landing, where he sat at a picnic table and looked out at Moonstone Beach as Z ran around in dog heaven, peeing on things and sniffing the poop of the bunnies and squirrels who had gone before.
The idea of Lacy getting back together with Brandon infected him like an illness. It wasn’t the jealousy. At least, it wasn’t entirely that. It was the idea that he’d been a fool. What had made him think that this thing with Lacy was anything more than a rebound fling, a way for her to show Brandon what he was missing? Had she been using Daniel for that purpose? Even if she hadn’t, if what she’d felt for him was real, then it was still unlikely that things between them would ever work. After all, just months ago, she’d been ready to pledge her lifelong devotion to another man.
And anyway, what she wanted out of life—marriage, a house, multiple kids—was something Brandon was more ideally suited to give her than Daniel was. Brandon had a six-figure job, probably a goddamned inv
estment portfolio and a pension. Daniel had the uncertainty of a career as an artist: a heady and dangerous mix of occasional financial bounty followed by long stretches in which he was spinning his metaphorical wheels, eating up his earlier profits and wondering if the last big sale, would, indeed, be his last big sale.
How the hell was he supposed to provide what Lacy wanted? While it was true that she was one of the least materialistic women he’d ever met, happy for the moment with little but an Airstream trailer and so few belongings she could fit them into one suitcase, it was also true that she eventually wanted multiple kids, and multiple kids had to live somewhere. They weren’t going to fit in Daniel’s small house, and they sure as hell weren’t going to fit in Lacy’s trailer.
Multiple kids needed clothes and food and health insurance; they needed braces and college educations. Daniel’s bank account was flush now because of the Eden job, but he couldn’t count on such a state of affairs continuing. His unstable income was fine for just him; he’d never had a problem with scaling back on his expenses as needed. He didn’t require a hell of a lot.
But multiple kids would, collectively, be a money-burning machine, and he wasn’t sure he could keep such a machine running.
But Brandon could.
Hell, if he were Lacy, he’d probably choose Brandon. If you could ignore the fact that that the guy was an insufferable shitbag, he was practically perfect.
She should have told Daniel, though. If she was dumping him and going back to the insufferable shitbag, she should have just said so.
Zzyzx caught sight of a squirrel that was munching on some kind of greenery about ten feet away from the picnic table where Daniel sat. Daniel would have expected the dog to go off in hot, barking pursuit, but instead Z sat down on his haunches and let out a quiet and tentative woof.
Daniel understood the feeling of having something right in front of you and not knowing what the hell to do with it.
“You’re a wuss, too,” Daniel told the dog. “Ah, come here.”
He patted his lap, and Z obligingly jumped up onto him. Daniel held the dog and rubbed him behind his oddly shaped, fuzzy ears as they both felt the ocean breeze and watched the white surf.
It was good to have somebody who understood you, who was there to comfort you when you needed it.
Though Daniel suspected that Z would throw him over for Lacy in a hot minute, given the chance.
“Et tu, Z,” he said, rubbing the dog’s ears. “Et tu.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“He’s ghosting me. I’m being ghosted.”
Lacy and Kate were working out side by side on stair climbers at the gym. At seven a.m., before the beginning of the workday, the place was moderately busy with people of various sizes, ages, and descriptions plodding along on the treadmills or toiling away at the elliptical machines. Wall-mounted TVs showed a variety of offerings ranging from CNN to ESPN to the morning talk shows. In the background, the sound system played Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” at a volume that was barely audible above the whirring of the fitness machines.
“He can’t be ghosting you,” Kate said. A fine sheen of sweat shimmered across her skin, and she wiped at her face with a small white towel.
“I’ve left four phone messages and sent five texts over the last two days,” Lacy said. “He’s definitely ghosting me. Who does that? We’re adults. We’re not in middle school, for God’s sake.”
“Huh,” Kate said. Having finished her warm-up, she shifted her stair climber to a higher setting. “Well, if your mother told Brandon you wanted to get back together, she probably told other people the same thing.”
“I know! She pretty much admitted it!” Lacy gestured with her hands so emphatically that she almost lost her balance on the machine.
“Plus, there was the hug.”
“God, the hug.” Lacy shook her head in disgust.
“I’m sure at least half the people in Jitters that day spread the word about the hug to Daniel. So now, he’s got rumors of you desperate to reunite with Brandon, and he’s got eyewitness accounts of you pretty much leaping into Brandon’s arms.”
Lacy felt almost sick with guilt, but what did she have to feel guilty about? She hadn’t done anything wrong. And she could tell Daniel that she hadn’t done anything wrong, if only he would pick up the goddamned phone.
“He’s being an idiot,” she grumbled. “Why can’t he just ask me? Why does he have to … to ignore me like some offended teenager? Why can’t we talk like human beings?”
As her indignation rose, so did her level of exertion on the stair climber. She began to breathe heavily, and sweat dripped into her eyes. She took a long drink from her water bottle without breaking stride.
“Why, indeed,” Kate said.
“And this is after the hot studio sex!” Lacy said. “Who ghosts somebody after hot studio sex?”
“You could always go to his place,” Kate suggested. “Talk to him face to face.”
Lacy had been thinking the same thing for the past two days. But she hadn’t done it, and wasn’t going to do it, because she shouldn’t have to. She shouldn’t have to defend herself for something she didn’t do.
“Screw that,” Lacy said, summing up her feelings with eloquence.
“Well, okay,” Kate said.
Lacy climbed stair after stair to nowhere, and the more she thought about what was going on with Daniel, the more she felt a deep despair welling up in the center of her chest. She brought the machine to a stop, and tears blurred her vision.
“Is this it? Is this really it? I thought …”
“What, honey?” Kate brought her own machine to a stop and stepped off so she could stand next to Lacy. She put a hand on Lacy’s arm and looked up into a face clouded with despair.
“I love him. And I thought maybe … I thought he loved me. Even though he wouldn’t say it.” Lacy dabbed at her eyes with her towel.
“Oh, sweetie.” Kate rubbed Lacy’s arm. “Men are assholes. Some are assholes all of the time, and some are assholes part of the time. But men who are never assholes are like unicorns or Santa Claus. They don’t exist.”
Lacy smirked and shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”
“But it seems like Daniel’s asshole quotient is pretty low overall,” Kate went on.
That was true enough. But if he didn’t trust her enough to dismiss rumors for what they were—just small-town gossip—then he had just enough asshole in him that she thought it might be a deal breaker.
“She’s not going back to him, you know. She hugged him because he gave her back some earrings that had a lot of sentimental value, that she thought she’d lost. And the rest of it? The talk that she wants him back? Her mother spread that around. Lacy had nothing to do with it.”
Gen was standing in the front room of the Porter Gallery, her hands on her hips, confronting Daniel about his standoff with Lacy. Daniel had just come to drop off some glass pieces to be shown at the gallery. He’d neither expected nor wanted an intervention regarding his love life.
He hadn’t even had a chance to put down the box he was holding before Gen started in on him. Her stern, form-fitting black dress and her wild red hair, along with the scowl on her face, made him feel like he was being reprimanded by the headmistress at a boarding school run by really hot nuns.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he lied. “Can I just put this down? It’s damned heavy.”
“Fine,” she said, somewhat grudgingly.
He put the box down, thinking that he should have just stayed home. But it wasn’t like he could avoid Lacy and her friends forever. Cambria wasn’t big enough.
His defensiveness over her tone and the way she was confronting him had blocked out the content of what she’d said. Now, without the burden of the box, and having had a moment for things to sink in, it started to hit him.
“Wait. What? Her mother did what?”
Gen sighed, her patience wearing thin.
“Lacy’s mother had a hard time with the engagement being canceled. She had some idea in her head that Lacy and Brandon would work things out and get back together. So, she started spreading rumors that they were getting back together. Either because it was a ploy to somehow make it happen, or because she really believed it. I’m not sure which.”
“Ah … okay.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “But then, why’s she throwing herself at him at Jitters, if it was all her mother’s deal?”
Gen rolled her eyes, still standing in her confrontational, avenging Sister Mary pose.
“I told you. Lacy had lost some earrings that belonged to her grandmother. She was upset about it, because they meant a lot to her. Brandon found them and gave them back. She threw herself at him because she was happy about the earrings. That’s it.”
He was still having a hard time making sense of everything. But he did seem to remember something about some earrings, and Lacy being sad about them.
All of that made him start to feel like maybe he’d gotten everything horribly wrong. That and the Sister Mary thing made him defensive.
“Well … why the hell didn’t she tell me all of that?”
“Because you wouldn’t answer your phone, you idiot! And you wouldn’t answer her texts! What was she supposed to do, send a message by carrier pigeon?!” She reached out and smacked him on the arm, hard.
“Hey!” He rubbed his arm, not because it hurt, but because it was easier to play the victim if she thought it did.
“She’s really hurt, you know,” Gen said.
Daniel tried to recalibrate his thoughts, given the new information. It made sense that Nancy would be working behind the scenes to get Lacy and Brandon back together, given her coldness toward Daniel at Thanksgiving. And the earring thing was plausible, too, he guessed.
But he’d picked up so much forward momentum in his conviction that Lacy had thrown him over that it was hard to slow down the speeding train of his indignation and bring the thing to a stop.
“But … she could have come to the house to see me. She could have—”