Bittersweet Creek (2 page)

Romy

“S
o that's the infamous Julian who broke your heart, eh?”

I didn't care for Richard's tone of voice, and I couldn't believe I'd been stupid enough not to see the new traffic light. First, I'd been distracted by the charred shell of what had been the Merle Norman store. Then, I'd fumbled with the clutch and the brakes on Richard's car. I still couldn't really drive a manual, but Richard had insisted I drive since I knew the way home.

Home.
My heart clenched as I looked at the rows of cotton blurring together on either side of the car. His ridiculous sports car purred down the country road that led out of town to the farm where I'd grown up. Home meant fields and pastures, winding country roads.

Of all the idiots on all the roads in all the world, why did Julian have to walk in front of the car I was driving? I wasn't ready to see him. Logically, I knew I'd never make it through the entire summer without running into him, but I had hoped to prolong the inevitable for as long as possible. So much for that.

Seeing him lying on the ground had been a gut punch. First, I was afraid I'd hurt him. Then, I was hoping I'd hurt him because he'd definitely hurt me. But then those long eyelashes had fluttered and he'd trained those confused baby blues on me. Same wavy blond hair, same thin white scar on his chin—and same lost feeling when I saw him.

“Hello, earth to Rosemary!” Richard chuckled. “You okay over there?”

I summoned a smile for him. “Yeah, I'm just rattled, I guess.”

“Almost running over someone or seeing Julian?”

“Both.” The truth came out before I could stop it. I glanced over to Richard. He had the profile of a Greek god with a straight nose, strong chin, and firm lips. I'd once lost an entire twenty minutes of Western Civ comparing his profile with that of my textbook photo of Bernini's
Apollo and Daphne
. When Richard asked me out after class, I took it as a sign. No man had ever distracted me from class—not even Julian.

“I wish I'd punched him,” Richard said.

But punching wasn't his style. Like the Greeks, he placed a high premium on philosophy, logic, and reason. He tended to use words and the law as his weapons of choice.

I should, but I wasn't going to. Satterfields cleaned up their own messes. Besides, what Richard didn't know wouldn't hurt him. He was dropping me off at home then traveling back to Nashville. With just the slightest bit of cooperation from Julian, I could have everything taken care of before Richard came back for my birthday.

“Your silence implies you don't want me to punch him. Interesting.” His brown eyes bored through me as I guided the car up the hill, trying to give it enough gas to keep it from slipping out of gear.

“No, it's not that.” Truly, Julian getting beat up by Richard was a satisfying, if unlikely, image. “He's just not worth your time.”

Richard liked that answer and went back to studying the area where I'd grown up. My eyes traveled over to Wanamaker's store and I brought them right back to the road, not wanting to remember the last time I was there. But what did Richard see when he looked at that country store? Or the row of mailboxes on the corner from where an ancestor had decided he wanted his mail to go through one post office instead of another? Should I point out the houses of relatives and friends or the spot where the one-room schoolhouse had been? I couldn't find the words to tell him my mundane stories. What did he think about a place like this when he'd grown up in a mansion in suburban Nashville?

From the minute I pulled into the driveway, he stared in awe at the old farmhouse I called home. “Are you sure you can't stay for a minute? Come in and see my father? Get a drink of water? Maybe a bio break?”

He chuckled. He liked how I had picked up his more polite expression “bio break.” There was a time I might've shouted, “But dontcha need to pee?”

“You know I'm running late, and Dad will kill me if I'm not there on time and in a tux.” His hand traveled to my cheek, and his dark eyes turned serious. “I'll come back for your birthday when I can stay longer. Between that inexplicable jam just before the river and your sheriff's little production, I have to go now.”

I leaned into his palm. He was right. “Are you sure? I don't want you to get tired and end up in an accident.”

He kissed me gently. “For you, I will be a model driver. Pop the trunk, and I'll get out your suitcases.”

Gentleman that he was, Richard carried my luggage to the porch and then gave me a better kiss to remember him by.

“Be careful.” I hugged a banister on the porch and felt the peeling paint crackle beneath my fingers.

“No, you be careful,” he countered as he hung on the driver's side door.

“Just a little farmwork,” I said with a shrug. “I've done most of it before.”

He arched an eyebrow as he often did when cross-examining a witness. “Call me if you need anything. I'm sure there's someone we could hire to help you with all of this.”

It was cute how he waved his hand around. He clearly had no idea what to do with this foreign place where I'd grown up. Of course, even after all this time, I had only the most rudimentary knowledge of his multi-fork world. I shook my head as he settled into the roadster, but he popped out almost immediately. “And don't turn into Elly May on me, either!”

He eased into the driver's seat then popped out again. “Now, Daisy Duke on the other hand . . .”

“Richard, git on out of here and go to Nashville!” I laughed as I said it then clamped a hand over my mouth as my country-accented words echoed back. I'd worked hard to get rid of my accent. Ten seconds on my own front porch, and it was already seeping out. I'd never hear the end of it if I went back to the inner-city high school where I worked and attempted to teach English with an accent like that. Those hungry sharks would smell blood then eat me alive.

He started the car, blowing me a kiss as he eased down the driveway.

Julian

I
wanted a beer, but I wasn't going to find one of those in Ellery.

Instead I hobbled over to Calais Café for a cup of coffee. I had too much work to do to get rip-roaring drunk even if I made a habit of getting soused, which I no longer did.

As usual, the café was full so I could either wait for a seat or see if there was someone I knew. There Ben sat, half-hidden behind his laptop. A couple of the girls from the tiny local college sneaked glances at him, tittering. Of course it would have been a modern-day
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
if they ever brought Ben home to Daddy.

“Saw you almost got flattened out there,” Ben said without even looking up.

“That's a neat trick, considering you were sitting here doing whatever it is you do.”

“Lawyering. Squealing brakes and expletives have a way of making a man look up.” He snapped his laptop closed and moved it to the side. “How you holding up, cowboy?”

“Do you have to call me that?”

“Weren't you just wearing a cowboy hat?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you own cows and ride horses?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you're a cowboy. Otherwise you would have swallowed your pride, followed Romy to Nashville, told her what a sorry, miserable son of a bitch you are, married her, made pretty babies, and saved us all from your misery.”

“Shut up, asshole.”

“So that's the best you've got when faced with the truth. I rest my case.”

“Yeah, yeah. Why did I come in here to listen to your legalese again?” I leaned back as the waitress poured my coffee and took my order.

“Probably to lick your fresh wounds after being run over by the love of your life. I keep telling you there are other fish in the sea.”

“Ellery's more of a pond,” I said.

“Well, then maybe you need to swim downstream to the Gulf, find some fish gone wild by the sea.” Ben picked up his mug and took a sip.

“Like you have?”

Ben frowned with his mug suspended in midair. I knew why Ben didn't leave. He still blamed himself for putting the grandmother who raised him in a nursing home. She only agreed on the condition she wouldn't have to leave the town where she'd grown up. So Ben had made it through law school and bought one of the pretty old houses on Crook Avenue. His grandmother's dementia prevented her from being proud of how her grandson had made something of himself, but he could be near her. Being in a small town didn't give him a lot of dating options, tittering experimental college students aside.

I kicked myself. “That was low, Ben. Sorry.”

“I'm going to strike that from the record.” He sat up straighter and grinned because he knew it annoyed me when he spoke like a television lawyer. “I think we can better conduct this conversation tonight at The Fountain. Maybe Beulah could help you forget all about this morning.”

I'd heard Beulah could make a man forget about a lot of things if she was willing, but I wasn't. “No, thanks.”

“Jay, you have watched every movie in Redbox and at least half of what Netflix streams. You need to get out and live a little because I'm getting tired of having everything we do remind you of a movie.”

I had been about to tell him that sitting in a diner booth talking about nothing kinda reminded me of the end of
Chasing Amy,
but I didn't want to prove him right. “It's karaoke night, isn't it?”

Ben grinned. He'd never met a Sinatra song he didn't like. Of course, I knew another karaoke devotee, a certain petite woman with curly black hair and enigmatic green eyes. “You've got me. I want to sing Marvin Gaye and stir up the masses.”

“Yeah, I'll go. But this time I'm not singing ‘Ebony and Ivory.' ”

“Ha! That's what you always say.”

I drank deeply from my coffee. If Ben noticed I hadn't been to The Fountain in six months, he wasn't mentioning it. He'd been there the night I busted up the only tavern in a ten-mile radius. Fortunately, Bill, the proprietor of the establishment, was a forgiving sort. Well, that and I'd started paying him back for the damage I'd done.

Might be good to have a beer, though. Just to see who'd show up.

Romy

T
he front door was locked. I started to knock loudly, but I could see Daddy reading the paper in the kitchen, ignoring me. He had to know I was outside.

Walking around to the back of the farmhouse, I trailed my fingers along the rough pebbled surface of the green shingle siding Granddaddy Satterfield had chosen. He had loved that stuff because it meant he never had to paint again. Granny had thought it the ugliest thing she'd ever seen, but she'd secretly loved it, too, because it gave her something to complain about until the very day she died.

Mercutio, the guard cat, sat on the back step, tail switching. He meowed at the sight of me and started kneading the edge of the concrete stairs, what my granny used to call “making biscuits.” I reached down to pat the scruffy gray Persian with the scrunched-up face. “You know you're not supposed to go into the house. Daddy
claims
he's allergic to you.”

He mewed piteously and purred as he leaned his head into my hand. My fingers came away wet and warm. His ear was missing a chunk and still bleeding. “Did you get into a fight again?”

I relented and let the cat in as far as the closed-in back porch, bile rising in my throat. Damned McElroy dogs. For as long as I could remember, we Satterfields had owned cats: barn cats, pet cats, and many an adopted throwaway like Mercutio. The McElroys, on the other hand, always had dogs, usually mean ones. I poured out some food for the cat then looked at his ear a little closer. Not as bad as I had first thought, but it still wasn't pretty.

And Len had told
me
to stay out of trouble. Maybe he needed to go talk to the McElroys and tell them to do a better job of tying up their dogs.

I heaved my shoulder into the heavy door that led from the back porch to the kitchen, prepared to tell Daddy about poor Mercutio, but he addressed me first. “Couldn't even make it twenty-four hours, could you?”

My eyes darted to the cordless phone on the table beside his wheelchair where he sat hiding behind the
Ellery Gazette
. He looked like a weird papier-mâché project with only a Memphis Redbirds hat showing above the paper and his full-length leg cast jutting from underneath.

“I got distracted by how the Merle Norman building had burned, didn't see the light, and accidentally ran over Julian.”

He folded the paper with as much rustle as he could and my own eyes stared back at me, green Satterfield eyes that squinted with scrutiny. “When you drive, you aren't supposed to be looking at buildings. You're supposed to be looking at the road.”

It was hard to look away when the world snatched another piece of your mother, but he wouldn't know that. He wasn't there in the Merle Norman that smelled of mulberries on the day my mother held my hand while they pierced my ears. It was one of the last things we'd done together, and now the place was gone forever.

Shaking away my melancholy, I got a glass from the cabinet and went to the sink. Knowing he was right didn't lessen the sting. Just once, would it hurt him to say, “Good job. Next time hit the McElroy boy straight on—that'll teach him to look where he's going”?

Yeah, right.

My head pounded. It was too much. It was all just too much.

Well, Starbucks wasn't happening anytime soon out here in the boonies. And good luck finding anything alcoholic in this dry county—especially something other than a contraband beer.

Resigned, I took a gulp of water and looked through the window to the flat patch of land Daddy'd once told me he'd give me for a wedding present. A house would be pretty on that sloping hill. Of course, it would have been much smaller than Richard's mansion, and the cows were the only ones with a gated community out here. He kept telling me his cavernous house needed a woman's touch, and he had just the woman in mind.

“Rosemary.” My father said the word softly, almost like he used to say it to my mother, for whom I was named.

I turned to face him because I couldn't not turn around, not when he spoke like that. “What, Daddy?”

“Just be more careful.”

I nodded, not sure if he was talking about traffic laws or staying out of Julian's way. I could promise him I would be more careful on the first. As to the second, I was going to have to speak with Julian McElroy whether either one of us liked it or not. And it'd probably be best not to ask him for a divorce on the same day I ran him over.