The Happiness Pact

by Liz Flaherty

  “Right, and if I’d crossed the street, I’d have had to walk with Jack. He’d probably have pushed me into the lake. You know what it’s like with older brothers.”

  Yes, she did. Most of their childhood, except for a few times when he’d had to defend her pigtailed honor, Jesse had pretended she didn’t exist.

  “Did you kiss her?”

  Tuck’s expression went from smug to horrified. “No! I didn’t even know how at that age. I didn’t learn until—” He stopped, giving Libby a speculative look. “I don’t know. How do I do now?”

  She felt the heat climbing her cheeks and cursed her complexion. You’d have thought freckles would have been enough, but no, she had to blush every time she was the least bit...no, she wasn’t at all embarrassed. He was just flirting and being cute. That was all. And there was no way she was going to tell him he was probably the best kisser she’d ever known.

  But she still blushed.

  “You do okay for a beginner,” she said.

  “A beginner, huh? I’m hurt by that.”

  She pushed his arm, creating a little needed space between them. “Sure, you are. Now, moving on. Who’d you date in college?”

  “I met a girl named Sabrina my first day at Vanderbilt. She was from Idaho. Neither of us knew anybody, and we dated the whole first semester. When we went home for the holidays, she remembered she had a boyfriend, and I asked out a girl who’d come to the lake to spend Christmas with her grandparents. When we got back to school in January, Sabrina and I never went out again.” He grinned. “We are friends on Facebook, though. She married the boyfriend.”

  “The girl from the lake was related to Cass, wasn’t she?”

  “I think so.”

  Libby thought for a moment of Cass Gentry, the survivor of the wreck who left the lake the summer after it happened and never came back. No one had ever located her.

  “I wonder what happened to her,” Libby murmured, not for the first time. “Do you remember the girl’s name?”

  “Susan? Sharon? Something with an S.”

  “Last name? It wasn’t the same as Cass’s, was it?”

  “No. They were steprelatives or something. They knew each other, but it wasn’t a close relationship.”

  “So you probably don’t remember enough to find Cass.”

  He just looked at her, and she nodded. “Yeah, right,” she said. “That really didn’t deserve an answer. We’ve all looked off and on ever since she left.”

  “If she wanted to be found, she would have been. Isn’t that basically what her aunt said when we called out at the orchard the family owned? Now, who was your worst date?”

  “A summer guy from the condos over on the east side. He thought I was twenty and I thought he was twenty-two. I was eighteen and he was twenty-eight. You remember that one. You came and got me at a bar in Sawyer.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Tuck closed his eyes, snickering. “They threw us both out.”

  She pushed his arm. “Your turn.”

  By the time they were two hours into the eight-hour flight, they had rehashed their entire dating history, embellishing here and there just to keep it interesting. Then Tucker fell asleep and she watched a movie, wide-eyed and queasy. The Dramamine she’d taken in Chicago helped, though, and she kept down the three cups of tea the flight attendant gave her. Past the six-hour point in the flight, Tucker woke up and they made desultory conversation until they landed.

  When she realized Tucker was going to drive a car in a foreign country on the wrong side of the road, she wished she’d slept on the plane—she wasn’t all that sure she’d ever feel safe enough to sleep again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “DARLING!”

  No one in Lake Miniagua called anyone “darling,” but it sounded perfect when Tucker’s mother said it in her pleasant Yorkshire accent. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said, hugging him before he’d even gotten the door to the rental car closed behind him.

  “I missed you, too.” It was true. Ellen was the only parent he and Jack had, and they both loved her. She’d had a rough time when they were little—their father and grandmother had seen to that—but her life was better now, and she was happy. He hoped. “All good, Mum?”

  “All good. You?” She held his gaze, making sure he told her the truth. “And Jack. He’s as over the moon as he sounds on the telephone?”

  “He is. More so. And Charlie can’t wait to come and get even more spoiled than he is by Gianna.”

  His mother beamed. “I can’t wait to do the spoiling, too.”

  Tucker’s stepfather came from behind his wife, giving Tucker’s arm a squeeze as he passed and approached Libby. “We’re so glad you’ve come. Do call me Grant. I’m so sorry not to have met you before when Ellen came to the Colonies to see the boys, but I’m the original cowardly flyer.”

  “I’m happy to meet you.” Libby offered her hand. “Colonies? Really?”

  “Grant’s just trying to get you going.” Tucker moved back so his mother could hug Libby. “Any minute now, he’ll refer to George Washington as an upstart and the entire central United States as an uncharted wilderness.”

  “And don’t even get him started on politics,” begged Ellen. “Come in, darlings. Tea’s just ready, Libby, and then you can have a little lie-down if you like while Grant and Tucker go off and check the quality of the Guinness at the pub.”

  The house Grant and Ellen lived in belonged in a movie, with its thatched roof, wavy mullioned windows and thick whitewashed walls. “We’ll have to have the thatchers this summer,” Grant grieved, pushing open the heavy dark green front door. “Good thing I’m not in any hurry to retire—keeping this house up is more than a pension could bear.”

  By the time they’d had their tea from Ellen’s beloved bone-china cups she’d taken to the United States as a young woman and then packed up and brought back to England with her after Tucker graduated from college, Libby was barely holding her eyes open.

  “I think Libby had better go to bed, Mum. She got a grand total of twenty minutes’ sleep on the plane.”

  Libby pulled herself up straight at the sound of Tucker’s voice. “I’m so sorry. What a terrible guest I am. The tea was wonderful, and I love the cookies...biscuits, I mean. We have them at Seven Pillars, but they’re not the same.”

  Ellen laughed. “Go ahead and take her up, love. We’ll have a late supper when you and Grant come back. Or, better yet, Libby and I will walk down and join you.”

  “Come on, Lib.” Tucker picked up her purple suitcase, and walked up the stairs with her, ducking his head. “You get the married-people guest room. It has a comfortable bed. My room is the ‘boys’ room,’ complete with twin beds. I imagine she’ll put Jack and me in it forever, with a trundle or something for Charlie.” He gestured toward the end of the hall. “There’s the loo, and here you go.” He opened a door and gave her a little push inside the bedroom. “Take a nap.”

  “Oh, it’s so pretty.” She looked around the room with its low, slanted ceilings. “I hate to waste time sleeping. Maybe I could go down and visit with Ellen after I brush my teeth and change.”

  He shook his head at her. “Sleep. I’ll see you later at the pub.” By the time he’d closed the door, he thought she was already lying down.

  It was the only eight-hour flight he’d ever enjoyed, he reflected, although the one when he’d watched two Harry Potter movies with Charlie hadn’t been bad.

  When he got downstairs, the room his mother called the front room was empty. Laughter floated from the kitchen, and he followed the sound. His parents were washing up the dishes from tea, and he leaned against the thick door frame and watched them. Grant was probably ten years older than Ellen, although it didn’t show in either his looks or his demeanor. He adored his wife, and that was all Tucker and Jack had
ever cared about.

  She adored him, too, but Tucker didn’t think she always had. He thought she’d married him for companionship and because she was tired of being on her own.

  He could understand that, but he wondered almost every time he saw Meredith if that was her reason for being with him. Was he just a good-enough alternative to changing her own tires, someone who would play catch with Zack and teach Shelby to fish?

  Of course, questioning her motivation gave him an uncomfortable opportunity to look at his own. He’d been nearly as surprised as Libby when Meredith hadn’t objected to the England trip. He had thought, after the fact, that he should have invited Meredith to go first, but he’d known right away he wasn’t ready for that. He wasn’t ready for his mother to meet her.

  He and Grant walked to the pub, discussing the economy, politics, Jack’s wedding and how much a thatcher charged.

  “Was it hard when you married Mum?” Tucker asked abruptly, following his stepfather into the Blue Rooster, the establishment where he’d learned to appreciate shepherd’s pie and love Guinness.

  “Was what hard?” Grant’s eyebrows, a bushy mixture of blond and silver, rose over the small lenses of his glasses. “Everything about marriage is hard, lad, except for making the vows in the first place. That’s easy, when you’re head over heels for someone. It’s the day-to-day part that separates the doers from the talkers.” He raised two fingers to the landlord behind the bar. “Guinness, Will, for my American boy and me.”

  “Mum was the walking wounded when you and she got together. My dad had made her life miserable the whole time, and when she finally came back to England, it was with no job, no money and no family left here.”

  “But she got a job. She was the best nurse I ever had working for me, and you know your mum—she made family of everyone in Hylton’s Notch. She doesn’t hold grudges against your dad, either. She has you and Jack and Charlie, and she has lifelong friends from the States—do you know she and Arlie’s mother do that Skype business on the computer for at least an hour every Sunday? They have the wedding planned right down to the last flower in the aisle of the church.”

  Tucker laughed. “That’s probably a good thing, since Jack and Arlie aren’t all that interested in the wedding.”

  Grant laughed, too. He nodded his thanks when the pints of Guinness were set before them, then led the way to a booth against the wall. “This’ll be a good seat when the ladies join us for supper.”

  “That’s if Libby wakes up before morning. She was pretty zonked.”

  “She seems to be a lovely young lady. Your mother was thrilled she was coming with you.” Grant sipped from his glass, wiping the froth from his mustache with a paper napkin. “Is she the reason you’re asking about marriage?”

  “No.” Although the denial didn’t come as quickly as it should have. “I’ve just been thinking about it. I’d like to be married, to have a family, but falling in love doesn’t seem to be something that happens on demand. I don’t think—” He hesitated, embarrassed and worried he would offend this man who’d been nothing but kind to him in all the time he’d known him. “I don’t think you and Mum were in love when you got together, but you certainly are now, so I’m kind of hoping it happens that way for me.” He shrugged. “I’m blaming Jack. Being married and a father never got important to me until lately.”

  “I see.” Grant hesitated. “I was a goner by the second time she came into the office to work. It took her longer, and she told me straight off that she had no interest in falling in love with anyone, especially a persnickety old doctor who loses his glasses and is set in his ways. She insisted on keeping her own last name.” His voice thickened a bit, and he took off the glasses to wipe them carefully on his handkerchief before meeting Tucker’s gaze again with a smile. “But it has worked out rather famously, hasn’t it?”

  “It has,” Tucker agreed, raising his glass to clink against the other man’s. “To you both.”

  He thought about Meredith, as they talked about football and cricket and how things were going with Llewellyn’s Lures and Grant’s practice. She wouldn’t like this little backwater village, with its narrow streets and cramped little houses. He remembered asking, on his first trip here after Ellen and Grant had married, what there was to do at night. His stepfather had looked surprised, then said, “You just do more of what you do in the daytime, and sometimes you do it at the Blue Rooster.”

  He was getting ready to remind Grant of that conversation when the door opened and his mother came in with Libby. She didn’t see him—she was too busy looking around the room. She left Ellen’s side and stood at the bar to watch the landlord build a Guinness. “My goodness,” Tucker heard her say, “I think I’ve brewed pots of tea that didn’t take that long.”

  The man behind the bar chuckled, handing the glass to his customer. “The tea probably didn’t do quite as much to warm your insides then, either, did it?”

  She laughed, the sound ringing out so that other patrons turned to see where the sound had come from. “Probably not.”

  The landlord looked as captivated as Tucker felt. “Would you like a pint, miss, to be sitting down with?”

  “I would. Thank you so much.”

  While she waited, she spoke to the barmaid and to the farmer nursing his ale at the bar beside where she stood. She asked a question about the glasses and listened eagerly to the patient answer. Then she asked if many Americans visited Hylton’s Notch and was rewarded by a mutter of, “Too many by a far piece,” from a man at the end of the bar.

  She smiled at him anyway, and he looked a little as if he didn’t know what had hit him.

  Tucker, getting up to let her slide into the booth beside him when she had her drink, knew exactly how he felt.

  * * *

  THE BED UPSTAIRS in the cottage was comfortable. Libby had rested well during her earlier siesta. But when she slipped between the sheets after their return from the Blue Rooster, sleep eluded her.

  Being exhausted made depression worse—the doctor and her therapist had both told her that—so she tried to avoid it as much as someone who owned a business could. She didn’t usually take naps, but she did allow downtime while she worked. She never baked immediately after closing the tearoom. She usually slept enough at night, especially at this time of year when the enemy seemed able to take two steps to her every one in its pursuit of her.

  But other than the twenty minutes or so, she hadn’t rested on the plane. She hadn’t slept much the night before the flight, either, when she vacillated about whether it really was okay to take such a major trip with Tucker. She wasn’t worried about her reputation—she was an adult, after all—but she worried about Meredith’s reaction regardless of the other woman’s phone call. And then she worried because Tucker didn’t seem at all concerned.

  She’d taken her medication, but maybe it had been too little, too late. The anxiety dragged at her, scraping her skin and making her itch. She finally got up and went to the bathroom at the end of the hall. She drank some water and swallowed another pill. Maybe. Later, after sleeping fitfully for a while, she wasn’t positive it had gone down. It was tempting to take another just in case, but she knew better than that, so she hunkered down between sheets gone wrinkled and damp with her distress, and tried to sleep again.

  It was a dream. She knew that even while it was happening, but she still couldn’t wake from it. No amount of urging Crystal to eat could stop her mother from dying. Trying to shout, “Dave, watch out! Watch out!” from a throat closed by horror couldn’t undo the collision on Country Club Road that had cost three lives. She couldn’t stop herself from walking into the barn and finding her father. In the dream, the events didn’t happen over a period of a few years; instead, she walked through doors that led from one tragedy to the next.

  Again. And again. And yet again.

  “Lib?
” She didn’t know where the voice came from or even whose it was, but it was as calming as her mother’s had been. “Wake up, honey.”

  She woke, but she didn’t want to open her eyes. “Sometimes when I dream,” she whispered, searching for memories that would make being awake bearable, “she’s still alive, singing ‘Coat of Many Colors’ while she cooks. And Dad’s going out to milk, calling all the cows by name. ‘So, Cherry,’ he’ll say. ‘So, Billie Jo and Arletta.’ They all come so he can scratch their necks while he fastens the stanchions.”

  “Libby?” She felt herself being lifted into a sitting position, and the mattress sank as someone sat beside her on the bed, pulling her close with a bare, muscled arm. A bristly chin brushed her temple lightly, and she knew whose it was. She knew and trusted Tucker’s scent and touch more than anyone’s in the world.

  But she still didn’t want to open her eyes. “Sometimes I can warn Dave before the wreck happens, too, you know? I yell, ‘Watch out! Watch out!’ and I’m fast enough that he can swerve to the side even on that skinny, curvy road.”

  Beside her, holding her, Tucker drew a deep breath. And then a couple more. “We all do it,” he said quietly, his mouth near her cheek so that the words were like a caress. “Jack dreams that he and Dad didn’t fight before the prom so the old man didn’t get drunk and cause the accident. Holly dreams she still has both her feet. Arlie can still sing. Sam has both eyes. I can hear out of my left ear. Nate’s not held together with thumbtacks and cotter pins, so he’s on the pro golf tour. Gianna and Dave got to grow old together. Linda’s folks probably dream she didn’t go to the prom at all, that she’d been able to grow up and have a family of her own. Somewhere, Cass probably hides from it in her own way, too—I imagine that’s why we’ve never been able to find her.”

  So Libby wasn’t alone. She wasn’t the only one who still mourned. “Gianna says we have to let go,” she murmured, then repeated the words when he ducked his head closer, not able to hear her.

  “I know, and she’s right, but she knows we all still have bad times. She has them, too.” He nuzzled Libby’s already-messy hair. “Hey, Mum swears by hot milk. You want some with chocolate and maybe a little of Mollie’s additive in it?”