by Susan Wiggs
“Never really thought about it.”
“Have you ever been married, Rob?”
“No.” He didn’t bring up Lauren. They weren’t married or even engaged. They just…were. He finished his coffee, gulping it too fast. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” She bit her lip, and a troubling emotion glittered in her eyes.
“Hey, you don’t have to explain,” Rob said quickly. This was exactly why he practiced medicine in a laboratory. He didn’t have the patience and compassion to deal with people getting emotional, baring their souls.
“No, I don’t mind talking about the past, really.”
Great. Rob reminded himself that she had offered him a chance to back out. Instead, like an idiot, he’d shown up at her house. Her poor, decrepit house that smelled of baking bread and furniture polish and rang with the laughter of a little boy.
Her eyes, hazy with remembrance, looked unseeing out the window. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be melodramatic. But what happened was big stuff for a small town like Hell Creek.”
She took a sip of her coffee and visibly tried to compose herself. She had a great face, Rob thought, watching her. She had the subtle freckles and fair coloring of a natural redhead, eyes that said too much, a mouth that smiled too easily.
Agitated, she stood up, rubbing her hands up and down her arms as if she felt a sudden chill. “To make a long story short, my father died suddenly and my mother—” she glanced at the doorway and dropped her voice “—was left pretty devastated, emotionally and financially.”
Rob suddenly wished he was far away. Very far. “Twyla, are you sure you want to talk about this?”
She stopped rubbing her arms. “Does all this emotional baggage bother you?”
“No,” he lied.
“Let me know if it does, and I’ll stop.”
“You mean there’s more?”
She took a sip of coffee. “Stay tuned. Where were we? Oh, yeah. It didn’t help that my husband was dumping me right about the time of my father’s death. So much for my own plans. I couldn’t go away and leave my mother twisting in the wind. Since I already knew how to do hair, I looked for a salon to buy so we could stay together as a family. Practically overnight, I had my own business.”
“Twyla’s Tease ‘n’ Tweeze.”
A smile curved her mouth as she took a seat. “Call it a moment of mad whimsy. Mom and I were hitting the zinfandel that night.”
Family, Rob realized, was a tender trap. When he had graduated from high school, there was no one to stand in the way of his plans. No parent in need or sibling in trouble or lover making demands. He had to wonder if he would have given up his future for the sake of a family member who needed him.
Rob glanced down. In her lap, Twyla had torn a napkin to shreds. “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
She noticed the napkin and shook her head. “Don’t worry. In a town like Lightning Creek, no one has any secrets. I expect the entire membership of the Quilt Quorum knows you’re here right now.”
“And is that a problem?”
“No, not at all. But I absolve you of your obligation to go through with this reunion thing.”
“That’s what I came to talk about.”
“Good. I’m glad you agree—”
“We’re going.”
She laughed, an easy laugh that was indulgent and the slightest bit condescending. He imagined her laughing that way in her salon as her customers enumerated their husbands’ quirks.
“Rob, really. That’s a nice gesture. But I know how boring it would be for you.”
“I mean it. We’re going to your reunion.”
“Why?” She seemed astonished, vaguely suspicious. “Why are you being such a good guy about this?”
“You have something against good guys?”
“No, I’m just amazed that you’re one of them. Most rich doctors wouldn’t bother.”
“Thanks for reducing me to a stereotype,” Rob said. “Look, your little old ladies planned this thing down to the last detail. If we go through with it, maybe the town matchmakers will back off for a while.”
She sat in pensive silence. Rob wondered what it would be like to know her, to be privy to the thoughts behind her light, expressive eyes.
No, he didn’t want to know. They’d best remain polite strangers. He wouldn’t see her again after the reunion, so there was no need to mess things up with rambling heart-to-heart talks. No need to wonder what might happen if—He reeled with the thought. People complicated each other’s lives. Twyla McCabe was living proof of that. He didn’t need any part of it.
“Would you like to take a walk?” she asked suddenly.
Caught off guard, he said, “Sure.”
They walked outside and up the sun-warmed slope at the back of the house. Bees grumbled indolently through the daisies and blue lupine and Indian paintbrush that covered the hill, but Rob found his gaze straying to Twyla.
He kept telling himself to keep his distance, but it wasn’t working. He noticed everything about her—the way the breeze lifted her hair, the fact that she wasn’t wearing any panty hose, the way her face softened when she looked down the hill and spied Brian and her mother, sorting berries on the railed back porch. There was a certain way a woman had of looking at those she loved. Rob had noticed this during his pediatric rotation. It was the most subtle, soft and tender look he could imagine. Twyla did it so naturally.
She showed him around with the mock formality of a tour guide, and he discovered a shed filled with a treasure trove of tools, a handyman’s dream. “The former owner had a woodworking shop,” she explained. “Have you ever done any woodworking?”
“Carpentry was part of the program at Lost Springs. I liked it.” Rob surprised himself with the comment. He had liked the work, but he hadn’t worked with his hands in years.
“I think the owner before him was even more interesting,” Twyla said, pointing out an abandoned chicken coop that had concealed a whiskey still in the twenties. She went on to show him a stream trickling from a crack in the rocks on the hillside and a half-buried thresher so rusted and ancient that she had planted it with morning glories and called it a yard ornament.
As he checked out the place with her, he told himself he was looking forward to getting this over with.
But as the moments wore on, soft and drowsy with the flavor of a summer afternoon, Rob felt something happening to him. Against all good sense, against the central tenet of his life’s plan, he felt drawn to her.
Drawn to this girl who grew up in a trailer park, nurtured on grand dreams that had no chance of ever coming true. This girl who dyed hair for a living.
As they walked along a beaten earth path that bordered her property, he kept trying to focus on Denver, his plans, his ambitions… Lauren. But his attention kept getting tugged in a different direction altogether. It was nuts. A basic animal attraction. Twyla had the most amazing looks. No guy with eyes in his head could help himself.
And Brian was simply an added distraction. He reminded Rob painfully of himself at six—abandoned at Lost Springs, hungry for a connection, showing up in the Spruce Room every Sunday during family hour, “just in case.”
He eyed the weary-looking, paint-thirsty house. There was something sorry and neglected about the property, an air of thwarted plans, aborted possibilities.
This was bad, he told himself. He barely knew this woman yet he wanted to know everything.
He had spent his whole life trying to forget and escape small towns, small farms, small people and their small dreams. So what was he doing back here, finding himself more concerned about Twyla’s broken porch rail than anything else in the world?
“We need a game plan,” he said, walking to his car.
“What do you mean?”
“For your reunion.”
“But I never said I’d—”
“I never asked. I’m telling you.”
“Just like a doctor,” she said
. “Arrogant.”
“Now, look. People are going to ask how we met, all that stuff. It would probably be a good idea to coordinate our stories.”
She burst out laughing. “Oh, this is so insane, and it’s going to be so much fun!”
He looked down into her laughing face, her merry eyes. “You need more fun in your life.”
“You’re beginning to sound like one of my clients.”
“Just stay away from me with your scissors.” He grinned. “I’ll be up sometime Friday on a flight to Casper. I’ll call you during the week. Mrs. Spinelli’s travel agent took care of all the bookings to Jackson.”
“Oh, God. We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?”
“Are we ever.” He hesitated. Instinct made him want to say goodbye with a kiss. Instead, he handed her a business card. “All my numbers are there.”
“Thanks. See you on Friday, then.”
As he drove away from the farm, a plume of dust obscuring the view, Rob had a feeling that he had just done something he shouldn’t have.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“SOMETHING’S WRONG,” TWYLA SAID, scowling at Sadie Kittredge’s reflection in the circular rose-tinted mirror.
“It’s my usual set.” Sadie craned her neck, turning her head this way and that.
“I don’t mean your hair,” Twyla said. “I mean with this whole thing. This whole reunion thing.”
She took a rake and added some loft to Sadie’s bright, glossy curls. All week long she had been thinking about her crazy plan to go back to Hell Creek, returning like a conquering hero with a trophy doctor at her side. The problem was, she wasn’t the conquering-hero type. Or conquering heroine, for that matter.
But a long time ago, she had been. Her father had taught her to dream, and she knew there was magic in dreams. Meeting Rob, facing the challenge of going back home made her want the magic back. It made her want the fire—even at the risk of getting burned.
“Okay, so tell me what you’re thinking,” Sadie said, “and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”
“That’s why I love you so much,” Twyla said. “What I’m thinking is that I’m such a different person from the one who left Hell Creek seven years ago. I’m too old to play games like this. I shouldn’t care what they think of me.”
“You’re never too old to find validation.” Sadie worked for the county schools as a family therapist, and she was annoyingly good at what she did.
“What do I need to validate, Herr Doktor?” Twyla asked.
Sadie swiveled herself around in the chair to face her. “The choices you’ve made.”
“Honey, I don’t have time to stop for lunch, much less validate my life choices.”
“Going back is necessary closure. You’ve told me enough about the circumstances of your leaving that I understand you left a few loose ends untied.”
“That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.” The truth was, she had fled a town that had humiliated her father, left a husband who had hung her out to dry, and found herself alone with a mother so devastated by events that she couldn’t bring herself to leave the house. After a couple of glasses of wine one time, Twyla had confessed this to Sadie, whose eyes had filled with angry tears for the broken young girl Twyla had been and for the panic-stricken Gwen, who had yet to step off the porch of the old McCabe place.
“It’s not too late to cancel,” Twyla said. “I really should stay. I know Diep can do hair as well as nails, but Saturday’s always a big day at the shop, and I’ve never spent a night away from Brian—”
“You worry too much,” Diep Tran scolded, bustling past with a tray of clanking nail supplies. “I keep the salon open, your mother keep Brian, you go to Jackson with Dr. Hunk. No worries, none at all.”
“Ha. Easy for you to say.” She pumped down the swivel chair and untied Sadie’s smock, shaking it out and tossing it into a stainless steel pail. “If I really wanted validation, I’d go alone instead of leaning on Dr. Hunk.”
“Why would you want to when you have a willing hunk to lean on?” Sadie asked.
“That’s what I mean about something being wrong. He’s too willing. There’s got to be something the matter with this picture.”
“Good God, did you leave your self-esteem hanging on the back of the bathroom door this morning?” Sadie demanded. “Why can’t you simply allow the idea that a gorgeous, successful man wants to take you away for a weekend?”
Twyla would never admit it, but just hearing the words made her stomach jump with a forbidden thrill. Maybe he did find her attractive and interesting, though they had so little in common. On the other hand, maybe he was simply a responsible guy who wanted to fulfill his end of the bargain. Every time she was tempted to believe in him, she reminded herself that logic could explain his actions. Best to be practical, she told herself briskly. Hopeless romantics were just that: hopeless.
Diep checked the clock. “No appointments for half an hour. You sit, Twyla. Time to do your nails.”
“I never get my nails done,” she protested. “It interferes with my work.”
“No more working today. You take tomorrow off. Get ready for Dr. Hunk.”
“Oh, God—”
“Quit being such a baby.” Sadie pressed the small of her back, propelling her to Diep’s station. “Do as Diep says and call me tonight. I have to run.”
After Sadie left, Twyla sat down and laid her hands on the table. “Okay. I’m all yours.”
“Feet first,” Diep said sternly. “Shoes off.”
Twyla knew she would get no peace unless she complied, so she took off her shoes. The pedicure, she had to admit, was pure heaven. Silky, heated lotion in the foot tub. A massage that made her shut her eyes and groan. Delicate strokes of the brush, applying a perfect seashell pink.
“Too bad it’s not a real date,” Twyla said. “I wouldn’t mind showing off my feet.”
“It is a real date. And you better show off your feet,” Diep said sternly.
“Maybe I’ll wear sandals on the flight to Jackson,” Twyla conceded.
“Maybe you go barefoot.”
Twyla bit her lip sternly, trying not to picture herself naked…with Rob Carter.
Diep finished, then plucked Twyla’s hands out of the heated gloves. “Okay, now the hands.”
There were women who drove as far as seventy miles to get their nails done by Diep Tran. When it came to nails, she had no peer. She bent industriously over Twyla’s hands, transforming the blunt, workmanlike nails into the elegant, sculptured ovals of a lady. They looked as if they belonged to someone else. To someone who traveled the world, played piano in concert, spoke French to foreign diplomats. To the woman Twyla had once had every intention of becoming.
“What you thinking, eh?” Diep asked, studying her face. “You got a sad look, Twyla.”
“I’m not sad. Just remembering the past.”
“Past is always little bit sad, for everybody.” At the age of three, Diep had made the perilous voyage in a leaky boat from Saigon to international waters, where the fleeing refugees were picked up by a Japanese freighter and left on an oil-drilling platform, then transported to a refugee camp in Indonesia. She never said much about it, but she had lost most of her family members during the migration. “You think about tomorrow, Miss Scarlett.”
Diep reached for a bottle of red glitter.
Twyla snatched her hand away. “Oh, no, you don’t. No fancy stuff.”
“Tasteful fancy stuff. Your dress is red, yes?”
“Yes, but—”
“Shoes are red?”
“Yes—”
“Then hold still and let me work.”
Twyla forced herself to relax. She had already resigned herself to taking the plunge. If she was going to become a woman of mystery this weekend, she might as well go all the way. Vanity was permissible in a woman—she had built her business on that premise. But she had always had a personal problem with it. There was probably some deep psychological reason
that she enjoyed making other women beautiful but was so ambivalent about herself. Pondering that, she couldn’t resist truly reveling in Diep’s attention.
Her reunion dress hung in a clear plastic zipper bag on the back of the office door. Mrs. Spinelli had had it shipped overnight from Neiman Marcus along with shoes and a bag, and Diep’s mother had done the alterations. Twyla knew in her heart the dress was too much, too red, too expensive, but the moment she’d put it on, she had known it was the one.
Diep used tiny brushes and even a surgeon’s blade to paint the details. When she was finished, Twyla regarded her nails with amazement. Each ring finger was tipped with a tiny, perfect depiction of the ruby slippers.
“It’s beautiful, Diep. You’re a genius.”
“You always say there is magic in the ruby slippers. Now there is magic in your hands.”
* * *
“HEY STRANGER.” LAUREN DEVANE opened the door of her town house. “Long time no see. I missed you.” She lifted up on tiptoe and kissed Rob’s cheek.
“Missed you, too,” he said automatically, loosening his tie, grateful for the end of a busy day at the lab.
She had been to something called a “trunk show” in San Francisco. He was a little afraid to ask what a trunk show was, imagining a gross anatomy class from his med school days.
“How was your flight?” he asked.
“Fine. What’s that, darling?”
He handed her the wrinkled plastic bag. “Something from Lost Springs. The auction wasn’t a total loss.”
She took out the quilt he had won in the raffle. Just the sight of it, the worn and faded pieces forming new patterns, the hand stitching picking out swirling shapes, reminded him uncomfortably of his first meeting with Twyla McCabe. He’d had a powerful reaction to her, and it had taken him by surprise.
Lauren tilted her head to one side, silky yellow hair spilling over her shoulder. “A blanket?”
“It’s a quilt. I won it in a raffle at the bachelor auction.”