by Liz Flaherty
“This kitchen really came out nice, didn’t it?” she said chattily, setting a bottle and glass in front of him—they’d brought dishes up from downstairs. “I mean, not for more than one or two people, but it’s a one-bedroom apartment, for heaven’s sake, and thank goodness it’s here! Jess and I’d have been at each other’s throats within hours if I’d stayed at the farm.”
“Lib.”
“Do you want something to eat?” She turned her back to open the refrigerator. “I’m sure there’s ham here. Maybe some cheese?”
“Libby.” He walked around the bar, turning her to face him. The light was brighter in here, coming from a large overhead fixture. She looked even more drawn, her eyes darker, the corners of her mouth tucked in tight. “Just stop. This is me, remember?”
She stiffened. Tucker thought if he’d hugged her then, she’d have broken into pieces in his arms. He reached around her to push the refrigerator door closed, and she flinched away from him, going over to the stainless steel sink. She picked up a sponge and ran water over it, then wiped the sink and the faucet’s already spotless surfaces.
“Tell me.” He kept his voice low. “You know the rules, even if we never wrote them down. No lies and we don’t tell each other’s secrets. It’s why we’re safe with each other. We’re always safe with each other. Right?”
She stopped moving, then looked down at the sponge in her hands. She wrung it out, twisting so hard the cratered fabric tore between her fingers. “I hide it because I’m broken and I hate being broken!” Her voice rose to nearly shrill, then dropped when she went on. “I take medication. Or I usually do. My pills are buried in that mess out there.” She swung her arm in the general direction of where Seven Pillars lay in a sharp-edged pile of pieces.
Along with her life. It was in a heap of splintery pieces, too. Tucker understood that. He’d been there the other times she’d survived the wreckage. But she’d been different then. She’d offered more comfort than she accepted. At her parents’ viewings, she’d told wonderful stories. At their funerals, she’d offered eulogies to her parents and gratitude to their friends—speaking for both Jesse and herself. She’d been everywhere, like some kind of whirling dervish, helping everyone, working until she was ready to collapse.
Because she probably would have collapsed if she’d stopped. She probably wouldn’t have known how to stop crying if she’d ever allowed herself to start. She’d have had the headache she thought was deadly even before she had.
Maybe she hadn’t been so different back then after all. He thought of her first comment today. Who can we help?
“I’m on the edge a lot.” She twisted the sponge the other way. “Sometimes I’ll read until daylight, or I’ll walk along the lake. I’ll call you and then hang up. It’s never that you have to come—it’s knowing that you would.”
“Do you ever slip over the edge?” Jack’s mother had done just that. She’d taken enough pills to make sure she’d never wake up, locked herself in the garage and started her car. She’d left her toddler asleep inside the house.
“No.” But Libby sounded doubtful. “I’ve had a few anxiety attacks that were pretty intense, and a lot of the time, I really don’t care if I wake up or not. But I never want to do anything to myself.”
He didn’t believe her—something new in their relationship. “So,” he said, “why did you stay in the carriage house after the storm was over?”
She tossed the sponge into the sink—no, threw it, so that it bounced off the tall arc of the faucet and landed neatly on the sink’s rim as if she’d aimed it there. She stood with her back to him, gripping the edge of the counter.
“It was black dark in there. No windows. I had a flashlight, but the battery only lasted long enough to get us into the room. It was black dark,” she repeated, “and silent. I couldn’t even hear Elijah and Pretty Boy breathing. And I thought we were dead. I don’t...I don’t know if it actually was silent in there or if that’s just what I heard because the pressure was gone. I thought—” She stopped on a gasp.
He stood behind her and pulled her in close, kissing the top of her head. He started to tell her it was all good, that she didn’t have to talk about it, but stopped himself; instead, he waited. Until he realized that she was crying. Even though it happened in trembling, noiseless agony, the dam of her grief had finally broken.
She turned, burying her face in his shoulder, and he held her even tighter. If pain hadn’t been such loud company in the room, he might have wanted to explore the pleasure he felt with her in his arms, but this wasn’t the time for that. He felt his own pain and anger begin to ebb—it wasn’t time for them, either. Not now. Maybe it would never be.
They stood unspeaking for a time, during which Elijah and Pretty Boy came to settle in around their feet. Tucker wasn’t that much of an animal person, even if everyone he knew seemed to have pets who loved shedding on him. But he knew the cat and dog sought to comfort the person they loved best.
That was what he wanted to do, too.
He took his handkerchief from his pocket, glad at least a few of his grandmother’s admonitions about being a gentleman had stuck with him, and pushed it into Libby’s hand.
When she spoke again, her voice was so low he could barely hear it. “I thought my mom would come and find me. I mean, if I truly was dead, I knew she would. And then I heard her voice. You remember her voice, Tuck, and how beautiful it was?”
“I remember.” His eyes burned and he clamped his teeth down on his lower lip. “What did she say when you heard her voice today?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know that I actually heard any words, just her voice, but I remembered her telling me when she was alive that I would never really be alone because she would always be with me.” Libby drew back enough to look into Tucker’s face. Her eyes were swollen, her face tear streaked.
She was so beautiful.
“But then,” she said, resting her palms against his shoulders, “I heard your voice. And I knew it wasn’t time for me to go.”
* * *
“I DON’T BELIEVE I’ve ever had ham and cheese on rye for breakfast.” Libby frowned at her plate.
“First time for everything.” Tucker set coffee in front of her. “I plan to take credit for fixing your breakfast the day after the tornado and won’t let you forget it. Also, take a look at your watch. I know the tearoom doesn’t open until eleven, but you’ve only got a couple of hours, and the kitchen downstairs here isn’t nearly as well equipped as the one in the house was.”
She set down the sandwich. “Excuse me?”
“The plant’s closing today so people can either clean up their own damage or help their neighbors. Jack and Arlie and I will be working right out here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others showed up, too. I think it would be really bad if we didn’t have anywhere to go for lunch and coffee when we needed it. Not only that, you have people who eat at Seven Pillars every day—for a while, they’re just going to have to make do with the carriage house.”
“I wasn’t going to open for a while.” If ever. I had my run. Maybe it’s time to go another direction. “We don’t even have a name for it yet.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You need a name to cook?”
“I don’t have anything to cook with,” she objected. “Other than the makings for coffee and tea, I don’t even have beverages.”
“Then you’d better get a move on, hadn’t you?”
A few hours later, Gianna had gone to the supermarket and the bulk foods store and returned with enough supplies to keep the tearoom going for a week. Marie Williams had dropped Kendall off to help. Holly was setting tables. Libby and Neely were using both the downstairs and the upstairs kitchens and working nearly as seamlessly together as they had in Seven Pillars.
At eleven o’clock, the first of the customers came in. By e
leven thirty, the tables were full. Much of the reason for the full house was probably curiosity, but Libby didn’t care. If people hadn’t been there before, she wanted to give them reason to come back.
She avoided looking at where the house had been as much as she could, resolutely putting thoughts of her telescope, her mother’s Windsor rocking chair and her new commercial stove out of her mind.
At twelve thirty, her doctor came in for lunch. Bryce Kelly peered into her eyes, took her pulse and her blood pressure, and wrote new prescriptions for her medications. Libby asked him if this was a house call and he said no, but he wouldn’t turn down an extra-large piece of dessert. He tossed in a lecture about how she should have let Arlie write her an emergency prescription free of charge.
At one o’clock, the door opened and the Parsons family entered. At least, Alice, Mari and the baby came in—Dan and Gavin waved and went right back out. Alice plopped Carson into Libby’s arms. “Here. Take a break and give me one at the same time. What can I do to help?”
“You can cut this cake,” Holly called from the kitchen. “Libby says I cut crooked, and Neely says the pieces are too big.” She came over. “I’ll take a break, too, and sit and look at this baby for a few minutes. I just love the bald ones.”
“And we were both right, too,” Neely interjected, her laughter coming from the other room. “Don’t use up that baby before I get out there. I haven’t held one in a while.”
At the end of the day, Libby put the bank deposit into the money pouch that had started the whole wakefulness episode two nights before and sent it on its way with Neely. The Parsons family hugged Libby and Tucker goodbye and got back into their van. “We’re going far enough south that the kids have to wear sunblock, spending three days and heading back,” said Alice. “The nice thing about homeschooling is that you don’t have to be home to do it.”
“Don’t tell Charlie that,” said Tucker, although his nephew and Gavin had become fast friends while helping with cleanup that afternoon. Charlie was probably already trying to fast talk Jack and Arlie into homeschooling him.
Libby handed the baby over reluctantly. “He could stay here, you know. You’d enjoy your vacation more, and you could stop in on the way back and pick him up.”
Alice laughed and hugged her again. “You’re not equipped, and he has an unsophisticated palate. Any hint of formula and he screams like he’s being poisoned.”
“Mom, that is just gross. You have heard of TMI, right?” Gavin rolled his eyes in the way mastered by kids who’d reached middle-school age.
“We’ll stop in when we come back through,” Dan promised, latching Carson into the car seat. “We’re going fishing.”
Libby and Tucker waved as the van drove away, then Tucker said, “Are you ready?”
She hoped her eye roll was as good as Gavin’s. “I may never be ready for anything again, Llewellyn. What are you talking about?”
“You’ve avoided looking at Seven Pillars all day—easy enough to do because you were pretty busy. Are you ready to look and make decisions? Your insurance guy said to call whenever you want to talk to him.”
She wasn’t even close to ready. Ten years of her life and countless tangible memories of the twenty-four years before it had been in that house. But Tucker was there beside her just as he’d been the whole time. If she was going to face it, now was the time.
She’d known there was a large tent over the site. She’d seen the truck bring it and put it up. She hadn’t expected so much of the wreckage and the resultant rubble to have been removed. The ground she walked on was raked clear. At one side of the house lot, incongruently pristine, stood the white gazebo. Inside its railings, chairs and two round tables were arranged haphazardly, as if the people who’d worked on the property today had taken breaks there.
“Everything that could be saved or restored is in the tent,” Tucker warned. “Jess and I made choices on what was repairable and what wasn’t. I’m sorry if we were wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong. I couldn’t do it.” She stopped outside the entry flap of the tent. “I don’t even know if I can do this.”
His arm came around her, and she leaned into him, thinking she’d been doing a lot of that lately. Too much, probably, especially since her body tended to sing wherever he touched her.
She straightened. “Let’s do it. It can count as an adventure.”
It could have been worse, she thought later, getting ready for bed in the apartment over the interim tearoom. Albeit not much. Her new stove had been untouched, protected by the old chimney that had remained standing. A small safe holding important papers and her mother’s few pieces of jewelry had done its job. No dishes, tables or chairs from the dining rooms had survived, but the buffet that had sat too close to the kitchen’s swinging doors was in good shape, the punch bowls it housed unbroken.
The staircases had both been destroyed, and virtually nothing had been salvaged from upstairs, including anything to wear. Libby, who’d spent her entire adulthood avoiding shopping for clothes, was going to have to make up for it now.
Unbelievably, the stained-glass window on the front stair landing was completely intact. Wherever she lived next, she’d take that window with her.
It was the first time since that morning that she’d considered the possibility that she might not rebuild the tearoom. The knowledge that Neely would buy or lease the remaining building and property in a heartbeat and probably make a greater success of the business than Libby had lingered at the back of her mind all day.
How could it be that she was even thinking of giving up her dream? Was her life like a weird transit of Mercury that happened every ten years or so? At four, she’d wanted to be either a ballet dancer or, when she was with Tucker, a firefighter. At fourteen, she’d longed to be an astronaut. At twenty-four, she’d left the farm and bought Seven Pillars with the conviction that she would stay there forever.
Even then, she hadn’t expected her forever to be very long.
She stepped out onto the little balcony outside the bedroom, Elijah winding around her ankles, and looked out at the lake. How peaceful everything looked in the quiet of past midnight.
There she was. There was Venus, lighting Libby’s way as she always had. Standing in her temporary home wearing her borrowed clothing, with her hair still damp from being washed with borrowed shampoo, Libby remembered the conversation with Nate about taking ownership of his life. She thought she’d done that, but she hadn’t. Not really. She’d only had a long-term lease on that life she’d chosen, and it had just run out.
It was time to start over.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HE HADN’T SEEN it coming. Not in a million years.
“You wouldn’t leave the lake.” Tucker reached for Libby’s hand as they walked the cart paths at Feathermoor. They’d come to play golf, but the course had been so crowded in the late afternoon that they’d walked instead.
It had been a long week since the tornado. He’d spent part of every evening with her, helping with cleanup in the carriage house after long days in the tearoom. With each day, she seemed to slip further and further away no matter how hard he tried to bring her back.
“I might.” She looked toward the sun as if inviting its warmth. “I’ve never lived anywhere but here. Moving away would be an adventure, and you know how I feel about adventures.”
“But what would you do? Where would you go?” He knew he sounded like an overprotective father. Too bad about that. He did feel protective, but he didn’t feel at all fatherly.
“I don’t know.” She faced him, and he saw the emotional damage wrought by the past week. She was pale, the thin skin under her eyes rounded crescents of darkness. Even her hair seemed dull. He wondered if it would feel less silky under his fingers. “I can’t face any more loss. The way I see it—at least for right now—if
I don’t have anything, I can’t lose anything.”
At the park bench beside the sixth-hole tee box, he sat down, pulling her with him.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. Unable to stop himself, he stroked her hair away from her face. It was still soft. “Other than I don’t want you to go.” Unless it’s with me. But that wouldn’t work. He didn’t want to leave the lake. He still wanted the wife, kids and house.
But life had grown more complicated in this season of adventures and stolen kisses under the stars she’d shown him.
“I’m not sure I want to go, either.” She pointed. “The trees are so beautiful here. I’m glad the tornado didn’t come through Feathermoor.”
Their phones made the percolating sounds of incoming texts at the same time. Libby got to hers first. “It’s Holly and Jess inviting us to dinner at the farm.” She looked at the time. “In a half hour.”
He looked at his phone, too. “Right. Since when does Jesse Worth ever invite anyone to his house?”
Libby grinned. “Since Holly Gallagher started running roughshod over him. Isn’t it great?”
“Want to walk over? We can sneak right through the vineyard from the seventh hole.” It had been a long time since he’d been on the back forty of Worth Farm. Bordered by Cottonwood Creek, which ran through the golf course, the land was one of the prettiest locations in the area.
Boys and girls alike had ridden bicycles as fast as they could on the cow paths that led to the barn. It had been the scene of pickup baseball games, hide-and-seek, class picnics, fishing and swimming parties. Those had ended when Crystal Worth died, but Tucker and Libby had still walked back there to go swimming beneath the little waterfall or walk in the woods. She hesitated, then nodded.
The farm was L-shaped, due to the acreage that Chris Granger had bought for Sycamore Hill Vineyard and Winery. Part of the land was sloped and wooded so that neither the winery nor Jesse’s house was visible from the bottom of the L. The cow paths were still there, although they were faint. A tractor-wide lane, lined by evergreens, was an easier way to walk to the house.