Three Wishes (20 page)

Tom surprised her on the twenty-third by decorating her house while she was at work, turning the sour-faced Victorian old maid into something surprisingly gay.

“But I wanted to help,” was her only complaint, half-hearted at best, she was so touched by what he'd done, and even
then
she got her wish. After Tom dropped her at work the next morning, Flash ushered her right back outside.

“What are you doing?” she cried, when he wouldn't let go of her arm.

“You're taking the day off,” he said, “and don't tell me there's work to do, because we both know you don't care as much as you used to. You don't give me lists of things to do anymore. Hell, you've even stopped crapping about Stafford, though his milk still goes bad. I don't want you at work today. I want you out here.”

She was about to ask
Out where?
when she faced front and saw a grinning Tom. His truck was idling and warm. He was clearly in on the joke.

Bree went along without a fight, hiding her delight until there was just too much to contain. Tom took her into his snowy woods to cut a tree for his house, popped popcorn to string, opened packages of tinsel, little hanging doodads, and red velvet bows. When everything was in its place, he hoisted her up to place the glittery star on the top of the tree. That night, they joined the rest of the town for midnight services, and there was something extra special in that, too. Though never before terribly religious, Bree felt blessed. Sitting in church beside Tom, with all the people she knew seated nearby, she experienced the same sense of belonging she had felt with the being of light.

In other respects, too, she was aware of the being of light. She didn't know if that being was God, Jesus, Saint Peter, or another figure entirely, but sitting in that church, she felt its warmth, felt its love.

In the oddest way, Bree felt like a newborn, which was probably why she indulged herself when, returning to Tom's house after church, she found a pile of gifts for her beneath his tree. With a child's excitement, she opened every last one.

“Don't you want to save a few for morning?” he teased, laughing.

She merely shook her head and slipped off another ribbon. She had gifts for him at her house. If she had been able to wait, they might have opened their gifts together. But it was out of the question.

She opened fun gifts—a hand-carved backgammon set, books that were on her list to read, a new Garth Brooks CD. She opened practical gifts—a cashmere sweater set that she would never have splurged on herself, a scarf and mitten set, a waffle maker.

Tom saved the best for last, and then, like the star at the top of the tree, the present he handed her glittered. It was a pair of earrings that looked suspiciously like diamond studs.

She swallowed, looked up at him, swallowed again, and even then only managed an awed whisper. “These aren't . . . they look like . . . are they?”

He nodded, grinned. “Real.”

It took a long minute of trying to steady her hands before she fitted the posts into the holes in her ears, a long minute of ogling in the mirror, a long,
long
minute of hugging Tom in thanks when her throat was too knotted for speech, and a long, long,
long
time after that before they fell asleep.

 

Bree didn't need any three wishes. She decided that again on Christmas Day, and nothing in the days that followed convinced her otherwise. Tom made the week an unending celebration. He cooked a goose one night, took her to dinner at an inn outside Burlington another. On the weekend between the holidays, he drove her to Boston, where they saw
The Nutcracker,
slept at the Four Seasons, ate brunch at the Ritz, and browsed through Newbury Street shops.

Bree had been to Boston before, but never as lavishly, and never in the company of her dream man. During the drive home, she sat back, turned her head to Tom, and grinned. “I've died and gone to heaven. That's all there is to it.”

“Again?”

“Still.”

 

It did seem that way. Then came New Year's Eve and, after the champagne, a tiny pop in her bubble.

9

“D
o you believe in making New Year's resolutions?” Bree asked Tom. They were on their way home from a party thrown by the Littles. He held her hand but was quieter than usual.

“I don't know,” he said. “I used to make them when 1 was a kid. I'd resolve not to fight with my brothers, or to clean my room without being asked. By the time I got to high school, I was resolving to get better grades. By the time I got to college, better grades weren't enough. I was resolving to get A's.”

Disdain had crept into his voice. Bree hadn't heard that in a while. “What happened after that?” she asked.

“I got the A's. I got most everything I wanted without making resolutions, so I stopped.” He shot her a look. “I was arrogant as hell.”

“Was,” she echoed, satisfied to hear the past tense at last. She raised his hand and ran her mouth over the scar that had healed to a thin ridge. “So do you believe in them?”

He thought about it. “I do. They imply a willingness to grow.”

“So what are yours?”

He shot her another look. “You first.”

“I asked you.”

“I'm driving. I can't concentrate. You can. What are your New Year's resolutions?”

“Just one,” she said. “To live life to the fullest.”

She watched for his reaction. It was a small, pensive smile. “I like that.”

“And yours?”

He turned onto West Elm and cruised over the snow-crusted road to the shingle-sided bungalow. Ice crunched under the truck's tires on the drive. He pulled up under the carport.

“Tom?”

“I'm thinking.”

Bree felt a touch of unease. It was not that she didn't want him to think, just that something that was taking so long had to be heavy. She didn't have to be a genius to know that it was related to the future. New Year's resolutions always were.

Tom reached for the door handle. Bree reached for his arm.

He stared at the steering wheel, his lower teeth clenching his upper lip, then sighed. “My New Year's resolution is to figure out my life.”

She caught her breath. He caught her hand.

“That came out wrong,” he said. “I don't need to figure out you and me. It's the rest that's murky. I need to decide what's fitting in where.”

It had been only a matter of time, Bree knew. Living in the here and now couldn't last forever. But it had been nice. She had been able to accept diamond earrings from Tom as a simple gift of love, had been able to live day to day without any expectation beyond seeing him after work. She had been perfectly content,
more
than content, living for the moment. Doing that, she had been free of disappointment.

Now, suddenly, she was afraid. For the first time in weeks, she wondered if Tom would leave town.

He opened the truck's door, drew her across the seat and out after him, and threw an arm around her shoulders as they walked into the house. They dropped their jackets in the kitchen.

Bree followed him into the family room and watched while he started a fire. When the kindling caught and the flames spread, she turned to the bookshelves lining the walls. Her gaze went straight to the books Tom had written. They were six in a row in an unobtrusive spot, off to the side and higher than eye level, and should have been lost among hundreds of other books. But they weren't. From the day he had put them there, she had been acutely aware of their presence.

“Do you want to write?” she asked.

He was hunkered down, stoking the flames with his back to her. “I don't know. I've been rereading what I've already written. The early ones aren't bad.”

She folded her arms around her middle. “Do you have new ideas?”

“At first I didn't. But that's changed. Right now, ideas are the easy part. If I pick up a newspaper, I get ideas.”

“What's the hard part? The writing?”

“No. Writing was never a problem for me.”

“So what's the hard part?”

“What comes after.”

Ahh. His nemesis. “Fame.”

He dusted his palms on his jeans and pushed himself to his feet. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he looked at her. “I'm not sure I can trust myself to handle it well.”

“Kind of like an alcoholic in a room with a bottle?”

“Kind of like that, and anyway, I don't know if I want to write. I know I can. I just don't know if I want to.”

“How do you decide?”

He scratched his head. “Beats me.” He left his hand on his head. “You want to live life to the fullest. Well, so do I. There are times when I feel like I'm already doing that. I'd say nine-tenths of my life is that way, that happy. Then there's the one-tenth that says my father was right. I have skills that I'm wasting.” He crossed to where she stood and hung his arms over her shoulders. “The thing is, I can't sit around here each day while you go to work. It isn't right.”

“I don't mind,” Bree insisted, afraid, so afraid. “I like working at the diner. Besides, I don't need fancy things. You could have given me beach stones instead of diamonds, and I'd have loved them just as well. If it's a matter of money—”

“It isn't. It's the principle of the thing.”

A man of principle was one to admire, she reasoned, though it did little to ease her fear. What eased her fear was thinking of the being of light, which loved her and wouldn't let anything bad happen. And then there were her three wishes. If they were real, she would use one of those in a heartbeat to keep Tom.

 

Two weeks into January, Tom went to New York. He had made a lunch date with his agent and a dinner date with the lawyers with whom he had once practiced. Bree saw the sense in it. She knew that he needed to mend fences before he could decide if he liked what was inside. That didn't mean she wasn't jittery from the moment she learned he was going.

Tom insisted that she drive the truck while he was gone. “I don't trust your old car,” he said, which annoyed her no end.

“Then let me buy a new one. You keep talking me out of it.”

“You don't need a new one. You have the truck.”

“It's
your
truck,” she said. “I want
my
truck.” She hated thinking that way. But wasn't he going to
his
New York, while she stayed behind in
her
Vermont? Weren't they from different worlds, after all? And hadn't she done just fine for herself before he came along? She resented the idea that she had become suddenly dependent, resented the idea that she had given so much of herself to a man who might, just might, throw it back in her face. “I can negotiate a deal on a car. I've done it before.”

“Wait,” he begged. “We'll go together when I get back.”

Thinking of his return began to make her feel better.

Seeing him dressed in a suit, ready to leave, didn't. She stared at him for so long that he looked down at himself. He touched his tie, brushed his lapels, checked his fly.

Then he looked back at her and read her thoughts. “Weird, huh? I'm a stranger to me, too.”

From the neck up he was fine. His hair was neatly combed, though longer, she wagered, than it had ever been when he had worn this suit. Add that to the slim line of the scar on his cheekbone, and he was the man she knew and loved. From the collar down was the problem.

“You look stuffy,” she said, when what she was really thinking was that between that longer-than-lawyerly hair, the prominent scar, the suit and the stunning body beneath it and
everything
about his face, from his eyes to his straight nose to his squared chin, he would stop traffic, which meant that God only knew what possibilities lay open to him in New York, but in any case he would
never
come back.

“Two days, Bree. That's all.”