Flirting With Pete: A Novel (11 page)

Stationery offered a golden opportunity. Had Casey been in Connie’s shoes, leaving her home and its contents to a child she’d never known, she would have left a note here.

Both piles were neatly arranged, but neither of the top sheets had the slightest markings on them.

Disheartened, she closed that drawer, opened the one above it, and found half a dozen small mesh boxes. One held elastic bands, another erasers, a third Post-it pads. The rest brimmed with Callard & Bowser butterscotch candy.

The candies gave Casey a start. She loved butterscotch candies— had been a chain eater in grad school, so much so that she had cracked several molars because of her habit of biting rather than sucking. So she wasn’t very good at proper candy eating either, but Connie couldn’t have known that. She might have imagined he had filled the little boxes with her in mind, if, given all else, it hadn’t been improbable.

She reached for a candy, thought twice, pulled her hand back.

Closing that drawer, she opened the shallow center one. Half a dozen Bic pens lay in a slim pen tray— and that did her heart good. She hated Bic pens, never
ever
used them. The pen she used was a Mont Blanc. It had been a gift from her mother.

Feeling redeemed, comforted to think she had thwarted Connie in this one thing, at least, she opened the drawer farther. Behind the pen tray lay a wooden ruler, and behind that a manila envelope.

When she pulled it out, her pulse quickened. A “C” was scrawled on the front, definitely by his hand. C was for Cornelius, but she didn’t know why he would have put his own initial on the front. C was also for Casey.

Heart pounding, she unfolded the clasp, opened the envelope, and pulled out a wad of typed papers that were held together by a binder clip.
Flirting with Pete,
she read front and center, and beneath it, in smaller letters,
A Journal
.

Flirting with Pete. A Journal.

Casey flipped through the papers under the top one. They were double-spaced, full sheets, each one numbered. She returned to the first.

Flirting with Pete. A Journal.

C was for Casey. The same something that told her that was true drove her on.

Removing the binder, she laid the papers on the desk, turned the cover sheet aside, and began to read.

Little Falls

The Friday morning fog was so thick that Jenny Clyde couldn’t see much more than a smear of scrub grass to her right, a swath of rutted road to her left, and the scuffed rubber tips of her own worn sneakers taking her steadily on into town. Drifting left, she saw less grass than road. Left a little more, and the grass disappeared.

Holding steady in the middle of the road, she focused straight ahead, blotting out all but the mottled gray of the tar and the hovering white mist. Fog was a late summer staple in Little Falls. Wedged in a gully between two high peaks, the town got caught in the war between warm days and cool nights. Jenny had always imagined clouds caught in that war just hit the slopes, slid down to the bottom, and lay there helpless and spent.

Not that she minded the fog. It let her pretend that the town was protective, forgiving, and kind. It buffered her from the cold hard facts of her life.

A car approached, a muted hum at first, then a gargle that grew more distinct the closer it came. Jenny didn’t budge from the middle of the road. The gargle became a rough sputter. She walked on. It came louder and nearer… louder and nearer… louder and nearer… louder and nearer…

At the very last minute, she trotted out of harm’s way.

Tugging her baseball cap lower, she tucked in her chin, slipped her hands in her jeans pockets, and did her best to shrink from sight. But Merle Little saw her. He saw her at much the same spot most every day, as he drove home for mid-morning coffee with his wife.

“Keep out of the road, MaryBeth Clyde!” he bellowed through the car window, seconds before he was swallowed back up by the fog.

Jenny raised her head. “Hey, Mr. Little,” she might have said had he slowed, “how are you today?”

“Fair to middlin’,” old Merle might have answered had he been a more compassionate sort, “and you, Jenny? My, but you’re looking pretty today.”

She might have smiled sweetly or blushed. She might have even thanked him for the compliment and pretended it was earned. She certainly would have waved when he drove off, because that was the friendly thing to do to someone you had known all your life— someone whose family had founded the town— someone who lived right on your very own street, even if he resented that fact and wished it were otherwise.

She walked on. The Booths’ mongrels barked, though she couldn’t see them through the fog. Nor could she see the rusted hinge on the Johnsons’ front gate up ahead, or the flowers blooming in the Farinas’ yard, but she knew those things were there. She could hear the first and smell the last.

“Shhhhh,” she might have warned whatever children she’d had. “Keep your voices low. Old man Farina has a temper. It won’t do any good to rile him up.”

“But he can’t come after us, Mama,” one of the children might have pointed out, “he can’t
walk
.”

“He can so,” another might have argued. “He has canes. He hit Joey Battle with one, even after Deputy Dan told him not to do it. How come he did that, Mama, after Deputy Dan said no?”

Because some people are bad,
Jenny might have answered if she’d had children, and all the while she would have been hugging the baby to her hip— a sweet, silk-haired powdery little girl, so warm, so clingy with the love and need Jenny craved that Jenny would have been hard put to set her down for so much as a nap.
Some people don’t care what’s the law and what isn’t. Some people don’t listen to Deputy Dan, not to one word.

The fog shifted to give a glimpse of September-green birch leaves and peeling white bark. In another two weeks, those leaves would turn yellow. By then, Jenny mused, she might be gone.

As the fog closed in again, she imagined a different town beyond it. She imagined something like New York City, with tall buildings, long avenues, and no one knowing where she’d come from, who she’d been, or what she’d done, and if not New York, then someplace in Wyoming, with the kind of wide-open spaces that went on and on and on. She could get lost there, too. First, though, she had to escape Little Falls.

She drifted left again, closing her eyes now, timing the slap of her sneakers on the tar to the whap-whap-whap of Essie Bunch’s rag rug against the veranda rail just beyond the fog. She moved left again, then left even more, until she guessed she was in the middle of the road, and on she walked. Her mind’s eye counted satellite dishes, her ear caught Sally Jessy Raphael’s voice coming from the Websters’ open window,
The Price Is Right
from the Cleegs’, QVC from Myra Ellenbogen’s. The nearer she got to town, the closer the houses were to each other. She heard muffled voices, the flap of a flag on its pole, the buzz of a saw making firewood for the cool September nights ahead.

The sounds were very real. Yet when she opened her eyes, the swirl of the fog suggested something unearthly— like the Pearly Gates, which was a dream if ever there was one. Jenny Clyde wasn’t going to heaven, that was for sure.

Another car materialized deep in the fog. Its engine was smoother, newer, more intent. The crackle of its tires on the broken pavement suggested a slower speed. This car was cruising. She knew the sound of it. This car belonged to Dan O’Keefe.

Jenny continued on down the middle of the road a little longer… a little longer… a little longer… a little longer…

She jogged to the side seconds before the Jeep emerged from the fog. Not surprisingly, it came abreast of her and drew to a stop.

“Jenny Clyde,” the deputy scolded, “I saw you there.”

She shrugged and focused on the tail of the Jeep. The fog played around it, little white imps first on the fender, then the window, then the roof rack.

“You take chances when you do that,” he went on in a voice that held a genuine concern she didn’t often hear. He didn’t get that caring from his father. Edmund O’Keefe was hard. Maybe he
had
to be hard, being police chief and all. But Dan was different. “One day someone won’t see you,” he said.

“I move away in time.”

“Sure you do, because you know just who’s driving which car and how fast he’ll be coming, but one day there’ll be a car you don’t expect. You’ll wait just a little too long and— wham!— it’ll toss you right up in the air, and Lord knows where you’ll land. Listen up, Jenny Clyde. You’re playing Russian roulette, here.”

“No,” Jenny said factually, “if I was playing Russian roulette, I’d cover my ears.”

“God in heaven, don’t even
think
of doing that,” he scolded. He rubbed his shoulder. “So. This is the week.”

Her shrug was lopsided this time. One shoulder refused to go along with the nonchalance that the rest of her tried to express.

“Are you okay with it?” he asked.

Fixing her eyes on the ground, she smiled. “Why wouldn’t I be? He’s my father.”

“Why doesn’t that make me feel better?”

She tried to think positively. “I’m looking forward to seeing him. I kept the house up, just like he asked, so everything’s the way it was when he left. I mean, I did some things, like get a new furnace when the old one couldn’t be fixed and rebuilt the roof where the big oak fell, but I didn’t have any choice about those changes, and, anyway, I got his permission, so he won’t be mad.” Darden Clyde mad was a nightmare. Jenny knew.

“It’s been six years,” Dan remarked.

Six years, two months, and fourteen days, Jenny thought.

“And you’re all right with his coming back?”

“Fine.” What else could she say?

“Are you sure?”

She wasn’t sure at all, but her choices sucked. When she let herself think about them, she got sick to her stomach, and her mind started fighting with itself— stay, run, stay, run— until her bones locked, just locked in place. So she didn’t often think about those choices. It was easier to look into the fog and think happier thoughts.

“I’m going to the dance tonight,” she told the deputy.

“Are you, now? Well, that’s a good idea. You haven’t been to a town dance in years.”

“I’m buying a new dress to wear.”

“Another good idea.”

“At Miss Jane’s. Something pretty. I do know how to dance.”

“I’ll bet you do, Jenny.”

She took a step toward the Jeep, raked her upper lip with her teeth, focused on the spot where a prominent vein on the underside of the deputy’s forearm hit the lowered window, and murmured, “He doesn’t know I’ve been using the name Jenny. I don’t think he’d like it. I mean, it’s my middle name and all, but he liked MaryBeth, that being my mother’s name—” which was precisely why she hated it, why the sound of it brought a sharp pang to her stomach. But a sharp pang was better than what she would suffer if she made Darden mad. “So maybe you could go back to calling me MaryBeth from now on, just in case?”

When Dan didn’t answer, she dared a glance at his face. What she saw there did nothing for her peace of mind. He knew a whole lot more than most about what had happened to send Darden away six years, two months, and fourteen days ago, and what he didn’t know for sure, he had guessed.

She shook her head in a second’s pleading, then averted her eyes.

“Jenny fits you better,” he said.

His gentleness made her want to cry. Instead, she just shrugged, both shoulders this time.

“Jenny— MaryBeth— you really ought to get out of town before he comes back.”

She dug the side of her sneaker into the cracked tar at the road’s edge.

“Take a new name and start a new life someplace far away from here. I understood why you didn’t do it back then, being just eighteen and having no one to help, but you’re twenty-four now. You have work experience. There are restaurants all over the place that’d be glad to hire as trusty a waitress as you. He’d never be able to find you. You need to get away. He’s a mean man, Jenny.”

Dan wasn’t saying anything Jenny hadn’t told herself hundreds of times,
thousands
of times. The security she had felt when her father had first gone away had dwindled to nothing over the past few weeks. She was a bundle of nerves, when she let herself think about it.

So she didn’t. Instead, resuming her trek through the fog into town, she thought about the dress she was going to buy. It had been hanging in Miss Jane’s window for most of the summer, looking right out at her in a way that said,
I was made for you, Jenny Clyde
. With tiny flowers on a burgundy background, it had short sleeves, a scoop neck, and an empire waist. It hit mid-calf on the mannequin. If it hit the same length on Jenny, it would cover the scars on her legs. If not, she could wear dark tights.

She might wear dark tights anyway. Meg Ryan had worn dark tights with a nearly identical dress in a picture Jenny had seen. Not that Jenny had Meg Ryan’s looks, her smile, or her spunk. Not that Jenny could
bear
having people stare at her, like they stared at Meg Ryan. Jenny was a most, most, most private person.

Tonight, though, things were going to happen. Tonight, she was going to meet someone as handsome as the Sexiest Man Alive. He would be passing through town on his way to a place where he had a good job and a fine home, and he was going to fall for her so hard he would be begging her to run away with him before the week was done, and she would. She wouldn’t give it a second thought. He was the one she had been waiting for all this time.

As she turned the corner onto Main Street, the fog thinned to reveal the awnings that, in the name of urban renewal, the town had voted to install the March before. They were deep green with large white letters marking, in order, the hardware store, drugstore, newspaper office, five-and-dime, and bakery on one side of the street, and the grocery store, garden center, luncheonette, ice-cream store, and dress shop on the other.

Jenny didn’t know about urban renewal. She didn’t know what effect awnings would have if everything else stayed the same. The cars that were parked angled-in were the same cars that parked in the same spots at the same time each morning. The same people shopped in the same stores. The same people sat on the same wood benches. The same people stared at her when she passed by.