J.T. put out a hand in silent invitation, and Maggie took a seat beside Daphne. Only then did J.T. sit down again.
“We’re here for the auction,” Daphne said, when the conversation didn’t take off right away. “What about you, J.T.?”
“Same thing,” he said. His gaze was still fixed on Maggie’s face. “Thought I’d pick up a couple of horses. Maybe some cattle.”
Maybe some cattle, Maggie thought. Same old J.T. He either didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that ranching was a risky proposition these days, with so many people cutting back on red meat.
Daphne nudged Maggie hard with one elbow, though she did not look up from her menu. The message was clear enough: “Say something.”
“I’m—I’m looking for antiques—quilts, old linens, things like that,” Maggie explained, with awkward goodwill. “I’m reopening the Springwater Station as a bed-and-breakfast.”
J.T.’s eyes burned into hers. “I’m surprised,” he said. “That you came back to Springwater to live, I mean. I had you figured for a city girl.” His tone was affable enough, but the remark was meant as a jibe, and Maggie knew it. Even before their breakup, there had been fundamental differences between them; she’d thought he was rash and impetuous, and he’d accused her of being too careful. Even rigid.
Her cheeks ached with the effort to smile. Damn if she would let him get to her right off the bat like that. “People change,” she said.
“Not usually,” he replied, with flat certainty.
“Did you learn that on the mean streets of New York?” She kept her voice neutral.
“No,” he answered. “I learned it on the mean streets of Springwater.”
Daphne closed her menu with a snap. “What’s good here?” she asked, as Flo herself, a plump redhead in a pink uniform, trundled toward them. J.T. had already ordered, and Flo brought him a wide smile, along with his plate of bacon, eggs, and hash brown potatoes, fried crisp.
“What’ll it be, honey?” the older woman asked good-naturedly, turning to Maggie.
“I’ll have oatmeal,” Maggie said, for the sake of appearances. She’d been hungry a few minutes before, but now she wasn’t sure she could get so much as a bite down.
Daphne sighed, eyeing J.T.’s breakfast with longing. “Me, too,” she said, resigned.
“Don’t let your food get cold,” Maggie said, when J.T. hesitated to pick up his fork.
“By all means, eat,” Daphne added.
“That’s two oatmeals?” Flo asked. “Want any toast? Coffee?”
“Coffee, please,” Maggie said, with an agreeable nod, and Flo made a note on her pad and hurried away. The diner was jumping.
“What about Sadie?” Daphne asked.
“Sadie?” J.T. asked, leaning forward a little. He’d begun to eat, but with mannerly reluctance.
“My dog,” Maggie said.
“Ah,” he said, as though it explained a great deal, her having a dog. “No husband? No kids?”
Was he rubbing it in? Everybody in Springwater knew what every other Springwater native was doing, whether they still lived in town or not. He would have heard about her divorce, not to mention any children she’d had. Maggie smiled sweetly. “Just Sadie,” she said. “What about you?”
An expression of genuine sadness flickered in J.T.’s eyes, if only for an instant. “A son, Quinn. He’s six.”
Maggie had known about the little boy, of course, but hearing the words from J.T.’s own lips had an effect on her emotions all the same. She found herself strangely stricken, unable to contribute much to the conversation after that, and left Daphne in charge of chatting.
The coffee arrived, then the oatmeal. Maggie ordered a side of sausage links to go, for Sadie. She and Daphne settled up their bills, and J.T. attended to his.
She thought she was going to make a clean getaway, but while Daphne was using the rest room, J.T. followed Maggie out to her car and stood nearby while she fed an eager Sadie from a foam take-out box.
“Maggie,” he said, low, when she tried to ignore him.
She looked up at him, questioning.
“I think we have a few things to say to each other, don’t you?”
2
Maggie stared up at J.T. for a long moment, there in the parking lot of Flo’s Diner, trying to make sense of a perfectly simple sentence. I think we have a few things to say to each other, don’t you?
It should have been easy to respond; instead, she felt as if she’d just tumbled headlong into the eye of a whirlwind, and thereby lost all faculty for language. Awkwardly, she rummaged for Sadie’s leash and affixed it to the dog’s collar. The beagle, having already gobbled down her breakfast, jumped eagerly to the ground, ready to do other business.
J.T. took the leash. “Maggie,” he insisted, his voice deep and grave.
Maggie plundered her jacket pocket for a packet containing an antibacterial wipe and a small plastic capsule with a blue plastic bag inside. “For do-do,” she explained stupidly, and wished, in the next moment, that she could vanish in the cool morning air, like the mingling vapors of their breaths.
J.T. grinned. “Relax, McCaffrey,” he said. “This is no big deal. I just want to apologize, that’s all.”
She blinked, amazed. She’d known J.T. Wainwright for most of her life, though after his parents were divorced, when he was in fifth grade, he hadn’t been around as much, dividing his time between the ranch at Springwater and his mother’s new home in Las Vegas. J.T. had never shown a propensity for saying he was sorry— about anything. “Apologize?”
He leaned in close and whispered his answer. “I’d define the word for you, McCaffrey, but I’m afraid you’d feel compelled to explain the meaning of ‘do-do’ in retaliation.”
She laughed, in spite of her dazed state, and punched him lightly in the chest with the knuckles of her right hand, the way she’d done when they were kids, arguing over a play on the softball field, or who got to use what fishing pole. “It would serve you right if I did.”
Sadie pulled J.T. across the parking lot toward a clump of shrubbery, and Maggie followed. “Probably,” J.T. agreed, averting his gaze, with a wry expression, when Sadie squatted, tail pointed straight up like a flagpole. “I’m sorry, McCaffrey,” he said. “For everything.”
Maggie snapped open the blue bag, a responsible dog owner attending to her duties. “Spoiling my wedding, you mean?” Not to mention dumping me at Christmas before that, and taking the heart right out of me.
“Did I spoil it?”
“Yes,” Maggie said, but she couldn’t quite make herself meet his eyes. “Well,” she amended, when the silence lengthened, “it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. But if it had been the right thing to do, you would have a lot to be sorry for, buster.”
J.T. laughed, though there was a note of sorrow in the sound. Maggie stooped, used the bag, tied it neatly, and made for the nearest trash bin, trailed by dog and man. After disposing of the evidence, she opened the packet and wiped her hands with the little square of moist paper inside. “I acted like an idiot,” he said.
“True,” she replied, tossing the wipe into the garbage after the poop bag. “At least twice.”
“Twice?” He looked genuinely puzzled.
“Have you forgotten what happened over Christmas vacation, J.T.?” Odd, even after all that time, how much it hurt just to remember. They’d made so many plans together, dreamed so many dreams, and J.T. had dashed them all, just like that, on some kind of whim. “You said we’d grown apart, that we ought to see other people. I believe you were dating a cocktail waitress in Vegas at the time—or was it a showgirl?”
J.T. thrust out a long sigh. “I thought I was doing the noble thing,” he said. “I figured you deserved better than me, and I was probably right about that. Problem was, I couldn’t forget you, even when we were both married to other people.”
“None of this matters now, anyway,” Maggie said, trying to sound nonchalant. As if saying it made it so.
His expression darkened a little, but only briefly. “The hell it doesn’t,” he said. “We had something together, McCaffrey. Something good. Something important.”
They had returned to Maggie’s Pathfinder, and Sadie jumped obediently into the area behind the rear seat. J.T. ruffled the dog’s velvety ears before lowering the hatch. Inside, Sadie yelped and pushed her nose against the window, making smudges on the glass.
Daphne was taking her time crossing the parking lot toward them, and Maggie was glad to see her, though she knew her friend wouldn’t arrive in time to save her from having to answer J.T.’s mild challenge.
“Sex,” Maggie insisted, in a fierce whisper. “That was what we had going for us, J.T. Sex, and nothing more.” Liar, accused a voice hidden in the shadows of her heart. You loved him as much as any woman has ever loved a man. Maybe that’s the whole problem—you never stopped.
J.T. glanced toward Daphne, who was practically dragging her feet. He rested his strong rancher’s hands on his hips. “The sex didn’t start until the summer after we graduated high school,” he argued quietly. “But we—you and me, Maggie— we go back a lot further than that.”
Maggie couldn’t deny his assertion. She’d fallen for J.T. almost as soon as she’d known the difference between boys and girls—in some ways, it was as if she’d always loved him, throughout time and eternity—and every time she thought she was over him, he came back to Springwater and Maggie found herself right back at square one. He’d changed, of course, after his father was murdered, when he was just thirteen—who wouldn’t have?—but Maggie’s feelings for him had grown rather than diminished. So had her misgivings, however, especially after he put his uncle in the hospital one sultry summer evening. While it was true that Jenson had seriously injured his wife, J.T.’s aunt, in a drunken rage earlier in the evening, that didn’t justify J.T.’s using his fists the way he had.
To everyone’s amazement, Janeen had stayed with her husband, and together they’d taken over the ranch after Jack Wainwright died. Despite his history with Clive Jenson, J.T. had still come to visit whenever he could, but of course he and Clive were at permanent odds after that falling-out. By the time Maggie went off to college at Northwestern, J.T. had a countywide reputation for fighting, among other things, and poor Janeen was at her wit’s end. After Maggie’s marriage to Connor, J.T. had returned to Las Vegas and enrolled in junior college. Everyone in the old hometown had marveled at the irony when news filtered back that he was majoring in criminal justice, and when he went to work for the NYPD as a rookie, after two years of school and more training at the police academy, there was rampant amazement back in Montana. Just last year, his Aunt Janeen had passed away, following a long bout with breast cancer and, according to Maggie’s mother, Clive had not been seen more than a few times since around the time the initial diagnosis was made.
“O.K.,” Maggie said, having stalled as long as she could “you’re right. We go way back.”
“You could explain,” he suggested mildly.
She swallowed.
“I was scared. Are you satisfied? You were wild, always in some kind of scrape. You had a terrible temper, and a lot of people thought you were either going to get killed or wind up behind bars someplace—”
He looked as though she’d struck him. “Surely you didn’t think I’d ever hit you,” he murmured.
Maggie sighed gustily. “Of course I didn’t think you’d hit me,” she said. I could never have loved you, if I’d believed that for an instant. She made a new start. “Connor, if you will recall, had just finished medical school. He had a future, a plan for his life. You figure it out.”
J.T.’s eyes shot fire, and though the expression on his mouth resembled a smile, it fell short of full wattage. “So you married him.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, brimming with quiet scorn. “Because he was predictable. Because he was boring.”
“There are worse things,” Maggie snapped, “than being boring!”
He folded his arms, rocked back on his heels, looked cocky. “Not many,” he said.
She stubbornly refused to take the bait.
“It didn’t last,” he said, more gently. As if she didn’t know.
“No,” she said, on a long sigh. It was still an enormous disappointment to her that she hadn’t been able to make the marriage work. Emotionally, she’d been somewhat adrift ever since the divorce.
J.T. responded with a sigh of his own. “I’m sorry about that, Maggie. I know you wanted a home and family, like the one you grew up in.”
For a moment, she was choked up. She swallowed hard and blinked. Then she managed a game little smile and an offhand shrug. “The world didn’t end,” she heard herself say.
J.T. frowned pensively, as though troubled. “Didn’t it?” he asked, so quietly that she wondered, even a second later, if she’d only imagined his words.
Daphne, unable to delay her progress any longer, had arrived finally. She stood nervously near the passenger door grinning foolishly and wringing her hands a little.
J.T., always the first to recover in any awkward situation, smiled, touched his hat brim to acknowledge her, then spoke once more to Maggie. “I think it’s great that you’re restoring the Station,” he said, as though they were casual acquaintances, with no history beyond the simplest hellos, how-are-yous, and good-byes. “I’d like to stop by and see it one of these days.”
Maggie found herself caught up in yet another storm of emotion. “O.K.,” she said lamely, almost croaking the word.
“See you,” J.T. replied. Then, turning, he walked away, got into a blue late-model pickup truck, and drove off toward the auction.
After a few moments of collecting herself Maggie climbed into the Pathfinder alongside Daphne, started the ignition, and sat there, trembling.
“Mags?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to drive? You seem a little—well—shaky.”
If she’d been alone, Maggie would have rested her forehead against the steering wheel and taken deep breaths until she felt more composed. J.T. had rattled her, just by being J.T., and a lot of old emotions, ones she’d thought had been long since laid to permanent rest, were rising to the surface. “I’m perfectly fine,” she lied.
“Right,” Daphne agreed, and shook her head in affectionate amazement.
At the sale, held on a rundown ranch a few miles out of town, Maggie tried to concentrate on household goods, but her gaze kept straying to J.T., who was leaning against a corral fence a hundred yards away, apparently oblivious to her presence, bidding on livestock. He’d bought at least five head of cattle before Maggie stopped trying to keep count.
“Your father,” Kathleen McCaffrey said briskly, the next day, arranging a bouquet of pink peonies in a crockery pitcher, “has lost his mind. I do believe he’s having one of those middle-of-thefence crises people talk about.”
Maggie was on her way to the Station, the back of her vehicle loaded with tissue-wrapped sheets, tablecloths, and the like, bought at the previous day’s sale. She’d stopped by the big house to invite her mother to join her for lunch around noon; they’d have sandwiches and salads and admire the elegant old linens together. Both of them loved antiques of any kind, especially ones from the era when Springwater was first settled.
She sighed. “Mom, Dad’s a lot of things, but he’s not crazy.”
“Isn’t he?” Kathleen asked, in arch tones. She was a tall woman, still beautiful, with a perfect complexion and rich Maureen O’Hara–red hair. Her eyes were a vivid shade of green, and they flashed with the heat of her legendary Irish temper. “He’s been threatening to buy one of those motor homes and take to the road.”
Maggie felt the pit of her stomach drop a centimeter or two. Her parents had been on the warpath for some time, that was nothing new, but if one of them picked up stakes and left, they might never resolve their differences. Of course, they’d shown no signs of doing that anyway. “When did he decid
e this?”
Kathleen fluffed the peonies, even though they didn’t require fluffing. They were perfect, pretty enough to grace the cover of one of Martha Stewart’s mail order catalogs. “I believe he’s been mulling over the idea since before he sold the lumberyard and retired,” she said, with a little sniff. Obviously, Reece McCaffrey had not troubled to mention these longtime ruminations to his wife until very recently. “He showed me a sales flyer. Maggie, the thing is as long as a boxcar, and better suited to one of those rock-and-roll bands—the Graceful Dead, or somebody like that.” Kathleen pursed her full lips in disdain, though there was a bruised look in her eyes. “He was never a very good driver, you know. He’s bound to kill himself, just trying to merge with the traffic on some freeway!”
So Kathleen did still care for her husband. Maggie couldn’t help being pleased, despite the unpleasant image of her father wiping out himself and three lanes of traffic after barreling up an on-ramp at his usual rate of travel, at roughly the speed of email. “I see,” she said carefully.
“The old fool,” Kathleen said.
There seemed to be no point in defending Reece, in reminding Kathleen that he had worked hard all his life running the lumberyard, putting three children through college and one, Simon, through medical school as well. He’d always yearned to travel, Reece had; Maggie knew that and so did everyone else in the family. He’d just never had the time, the spare funds, or the opportunity. “Why don’t you go along with him?” Maggie ventured to ask. “It would be good for both of you to get away.”
Kathleen sighed as deeply as if Maggie had suggested she join a convent in India or make a long pilgrimage in bare feet. “I’ve just sold another painting on eBay,” she said. “It was the last one I had. I can’t leave now.”
Kathleen, a self-trained folk artist, painted in colorful acrylics, sometimes on canvas, sometimes on wood panels or heavy paper. Some of her offerings were the size of postage stamps, while others were so big they had to be hauled away in trucks. All of them, without fail, followed the same theme: pears.
Springwater Wedding Page 3