A Man of Influence (24 page)

Gianna glanced at her watch, then poured the last of the red into their glasses. “We've buried our dead and gone on with our lives. Jack and Tucker are here to do the same thing. Miniagua is home to them just like it is to the rest of us. It's time for peace in all our souls.” She firmed her voice and met Arlie's eyes, her dark gaze compassionate. “If you think you can welcome them back, then I know I can.”

Holly nodded. “Me, too.”

Arlie didn't think she was ready for that. Cleaning the Dower House was one thing. Seeing Jack from across the street without losing her lunch had been entirely doable. Getting friendly with the Llewellyns was something else entirely.

“I'll try.” Arlie stared back into the eyes that still held hers. “I promise I'll try.”

Once dinner was over and they were standing in the driveway of Christensen's Cove, Gianna's house, saying good-night, Holly offered Arlie a ride. She shook her head. “I need some air. And maybe to think some.”

“Don't
over
think it, sis.” Holly hugged her hard.

Arlie nodded. “See you in the morning.”

The evening was warm for mid-October. A full moon danced on the water, and Arlie could hear people chatting on their porches and docks, hanging on to all the comfortable outdoors time they could. Sometimes during the day, Lake Miniagua looked big, but in the evening it seemed to shrink, its streets becoming the bumpy and narrow throughways they actually were. People rode by on bicycles, calling out greetings as they passed. Golf carts whizzed along in near silence. Teenagers walked close together in couples and groups, both sibilance and new huskiness in their hushed laughter. The playground above the beach was deserted, although Arlie thought if she listened hard, she could hear echoes of the past ringing through it. But maybe that was just the rustle of dry leaves as they scuttled across the ground in the breeze.

Arlie's father had built the house she lived in, though he'd sold it when he and Gianna married. The red Cape Cod sat at the end of a narrow inlet that had been dubbed Gallagher's Foot. When Arlie bought the house three years ago, she painted Gallagher's Big Toe on the mailbox. The name had shrunk to “the Toe” and stuck.

When she'd opened the garage door the first time after she took possession of the house, she found a scrap of a kitten curled up in an old Easter basket. Jesse Worth, a veterinarian whose office was halfway between Miniagua and Sawyer, had said it wasn't old enough to leave its mother. He'd given Arlie enough eyedroppers and a recipe for formula to keep it alive.

The kitten, whose meow was so loud Gianna had christened her Caruso despite her gender, now weighed fifteen pounds and owned Arlie, body and soul. Caruso was not amused that her housemate was so late coming home, but a couple of treats accompanied by an intense chin-scratch and belly-rub helped matters considerably.

After showering, putting on a faded Ball State University sweatshirt and black flannel pajama pants, and wrapping her tumble of red hair in a towel, Arlie lifted a scrapbook from one of the bookshelves that flanked the gas fireplace. She clicked the fireplace's remote, then sat in the recliner, drawing a quilt over her legs—warmth had receded fast once darkness fell. Caruso settled in beside her, her purr a companionable roar in the cozy room.

“What do you think, Caruso?” The book of memories was her first effort, put together when she was trying to get her mind and hands to work together after the accident. Holly had replaced cheering and dancing with writing after losing her leg in the accident. Arlie had learned to scrapbook in lieu of singing and playing the piano and clarinet when neither her throat nor her hands returned to what they had been previously.

She'd been seventeen when she put together the first album, the one with covers in their school colors, so she shouldn't have been surprised that the first picture was of her and Jack. She shouldn't have been, but she was. Every single time.

She jumped when the doorbell rang. It wasn't that late—just after nine—but visitors in Miniagua usually phoned or texted first and came by before dark unless it was summertime, when everyone was sitting outside anyway.

The cat accompanied her to the door, her ringed tail at stiff attention, and Arlie bent to pet her. “You're such a good girl. It's probably some of the senior class selling magazine subscriptions—that and car washes are the only way they get the prom paid for. Did you want to go with me if they ask me to chaperone? You saw that picture when Jack and I went. You and I would be at least that cute.”

Caruso leaned against her legs when they reached the entryway. Arlie turned on the porch light, the wattage guaranteed to blind whomever was on the porch, and pulled open the door.

Somehow she wasn't surprised when she saw Jack standing on the other side of the threshold.

His hair, curly and unmanageable when he was a boy, was straight now, still blond but streaked with brown. She'd always accused him of wearing tinted contacts because his eyes were such a bright blue. They were still spectacular, still fringed by thick lashes, but the blue had darkened and he wore glasses with wire frames. His face had been a boy's when she saw him last, with all the softness of adolescence in it, but now his cheekbones were sharper, his jaw more square and covered with a well-trimmed beard. His build was lean, still broad shouldered and flat stomached, but more spare somehow than sixteen years before.

He wore jeans and a leather jacket that hung open over a faded blue cotton sweater. An earring glinted in his left ear, and she wondered for a suspended moment if it was the same one with his birthstone that she'd bought him for his September birthday. She'd given it to him early, before he left for college, and then she'd never seen him again.

“Jack.”

“Arlie.” He nodded, his gaze not leaving hers. “I just wanted to tell you, you don't have to clean the Dower House. I can't believe the lawyer's rep asked you. Well, I can, but I'm sorry she did.” His smile was so slight it almost wasn't there. “I also can't believe that's the best excuse I could come up with for coming over here this late.”

She didn't smile back. “She didn't ask me. She asked Rent-A-Wife, which is Gianna's business. I just help out once in a while. Unless you no longer need our services, we'll do the job.” Angry for a reason she couldn't name, not to mention insulted, she started to push the door shut.

“Wait.” He stopped the door with his hand around its edge. “May I come in?” He hesitated. “Please.”

It's time for peace in all our souls.
Gianna's voice echoed gently in Arlie's mind. She took a deep breath and stepped back, Caruso winding around her ankles. “Sure. Go ahead and have a seat. Would you like something to drink?” She made the offer grudgingly, but she wasn't Gianna Gallagher's daughter for nothing.

“Do you have coffee? I know it's late for that, but it's tasted good all day.”

Friendly. That was how he was going to play it.
Let's just pretend the past sixteen years didn't happen.
Okay, she could do that. Sure she could. “There's an organic market on the lake. I think everyone buys coffee there now.” She went to make a fresh pot, breathing deep when she opened the coffee canister. The scent was definitely therapeutic.

He leaned on the counter between the kitchen and the dining area. “I had supper at the Anything Goes Grill on the north end. I guess it's new? It was good.”

“It is good. It's nicer than the Silver Moon, although the food's about equal on the quality scale, and it has booze.” Chris's family had opened Anything Goes within the past year. He didn't work in the restaurant, but he spent a lot of time there. She wondered if he'd been there tonight.

Jack looked around. “Your house looks pretty. Was it nice to come back to where you lived as a little kid?”

“It was after a while. At first, until we painted everything and put down the hardwood floors, I just kept thinking of it as the house where we lived when my mother left.” She lifted cups from the cupboard.

“Do you hear from her? Your mother?”

“No. Well, yes. At Christmastime. Usually. She's forgotten a few.”

Arlie handed him his coffee, then filled a plate with cookies and led the way back to the living room, carrying the plate and her own mug. The cat glared at her from the seat of the recliner. “I didn't introduce Caruso, did I? She's my roommate.”

“What a beauty she is.” Jack had always loved cats. He set his cup on the table at the end of the couch and lifted Caruso into his arms. She leaned into him, purring politely and eyeing him adoringly with bright green eyes. “I thought Russian Blues didn't like strangers.”

“She does. Especially males.” Although the cat wasn't crazy about Chris. She always climbed onto her perch on the front windowsill and lay with her back to the room when he was there. Arlie wasn't so sure Caruso's instant adoration of Jack qualified her as a good judge of character.

When they were seated, Jack sipped from his coffee, closing his eyes for a moment in appreciation. “Rent-A-Wife?” He raised an eyebrow. “Weren't you wearing scrubs today?”

“I'm a nurse at the hospital in Sawyer. I just help at Rent-A-Wife when Gianna needs me.” He was trying to make conversation, and she had to give him points for the effort, but she didn't know what to say to him.

He picked up the scrapbook that lay on the couch beside him. “I remember this. You made it that last summer, didn't you?”

She nodded, and quiet settled between them as he leafed through the heavy pages. Partway into the book, he began to ask questions. She progressed from two-word answers—“Sophomore year”—to short explanations—“No, I was grounded”—to unwilling laughter when he buried his head in his hands after seeing a picture of himself in drag during the high school production of
Hairspray
. After that, they laughed more, argued over things that didn't matter and played the “do you remember?” game. At some point, it was almost as though he'd never left Miniagua. Never left her.

They were on their second cups of coffee and yet another plate of cookies when Jack reached the end of the album. He fell silent, looking at the five-by-seven studio shot of the ten of them who'd driven together to the dance. The last dance.

“Do you ever talk about it?”

She looked at where the book lay open across his lap, then up at the clench of his jaw, the set of his mouth and the tragic look in the eyes behind his glasses. She set down her cup and clasped her hands between her knees. She kept her voice quiet and steady, trying to downplay the huskiness of it. “We mention it sometimes. We say ‘the accident' because you can't just pretend away something that changed your life to that extent. We talk about Daddy—he was Superdad, after all.” She smiled, feeling her cheeks wobble with the effort. “But we don't play the ‘if only' game—at least not out loud, because it would drive us crazy.”

Jack nodded and looked at the picture again.

“Do
you
talk about it?” she asked gently.

“No.”

“Do you see Tucker?”

Grief darkened his eyes and stiffened his features once again. “Not often, though we're both here now.”

She tried to imagine her life without Holly and couldn't. “Maybe
we
should talk about the accident. Gianna says it's time to let things go.” She said the words, but she didn't mean them. She could be polite to Jack, even friendly. But she didn't think she could quite forgive him. At least, not yet.

“How is Gianna?”

“Wonderful. She had a heart attack three years ago—that's why I came back here to live—but she had surgery and has done great ever since.”

“Maybe I'll get to see her.”

Arlie didn't ask about his grandmother's last days or her death. She was afraid if she delved too deeply into the well-being of any of the Llewellyns, she'd never be able to come out of the morass of memory again.

But there was Jack, for the first time in nearly half her life, sitting so close she could feel the warmth of him. That same warmth she'd felt before—

Before everything changed.

“I remember screaming,” she said without meaning to. “I didn't realize no one could hear me because my larynx was injured. I wanted to comfort Holly because her foot hurt so much. Daddy wouldn't answer us. I couldn't find you. That's all I remember.” There was more. But she wouldn't go there. Couldn't.

The prom had been the event of the school year for high school juniors and seniors. They'd rented the ballroom at the country club, having car washes and selling magazine subscriptions and candy bars to cover the expense.

Even in a high school as small as Miniagua's, everyone knew there would be drinking at the prom, so the parents came up with the idea of hiring vans to provide transportation to the club.

Jack's grandparents, under the auspices of Llewellyn's Lures, owned their own limo, but Margaret said it was needed for business. This was how Arlie, Jack, Holly and Tucker ended up riding to and from the country club in the back of a twelve-passenger church van. Jesse Worth and Linda Saylors sat in front of them with Sam's date, Cass Gentry. Sam, Nate, and Libby Worth sat behind Arlie's father and stepmother in the front seat.

No one was particularly comfortable, and hardly any of them fastened their seat belts around their formal clothing. Arlie's father—who always started every drive with the words “seat belts on?”—turned an unaccustomed deaf ear to the lack of clicking buckles from the backseats.

At first the girls had been embarrassed, but had joined in with the others when Dave Gallagher's rumbling baritone and Gianna's sweet soprano started singing “Dancing Queen.”

The next thing Arlie remembered was screaming.

“One time,” Arlie said, her throat aching, “Gianna came into Libby's tearoom while I was cleaning. I had ‘Dancing Queen' playing loud and my mop and I were dancing away. When I saw her face, it just killed me what I was doing to her. I went to shut it off, apologizing like mad all the way, and she just said, ‘Oh, no, honey, it's like singing with your dad again,' and turned it up some more. We danced through the whole song. I think I've played it a thousand times since then.”