Home Sweet Home (12 page)

A
ndi didn’t have to push out of Nate’s arms because he’d already let her go.

How could she have done that? How could she have so recklessly—so stupidly—kissed him?

She hadn’t been able to help herself, had been utterly incapable of standing so close to Nate without wanting to get closer. He was contentment. Comfort. Warmth. Familiarity.

But none of those things had made their relationship work in the past. Didn’t she know better than to think comfort and warmth—or incredible kisses—would make things work out for them now? Facts were facts. They were two very different people with very different goals. Just like her mother and father had been.

Andi definitely didn’t want to repeat her parents’ marriage—one person staying and waiting, one person going and doing, even as they both professed to love each other.

Now, although it was still cold in the boathouse, as they stood in their wet clothes and faced each other down, Andi couldn’t stop hearing his words on repeat in her head.

“Trust me, I don’t want to be feeling this way about you any more than you want to feel it about me.”

Every part of her was smarting, and she barely noticed the towel falling off her shoulders as the hurt, the anger, came bubbling up.

“Go ahead, Nate. I want to hear you say it this time. I want to finally hear the truth of what you really think of me.”

His face was tight. Harder than most people had ever seen it. “Don’t push me, Andi. Not here. Not now. We both need to calm down.”

Something inside her chest tightened, locking back down where it had been about to crack open. She knew Nate so well, knew how hard it was to push him past the charming, easygoing guy that he was at his core. She also knew him well enough to hit him right where it hurt.

“I’m sick and tired of being calm, of trying to pretend there isn’t a huge abyss between us, that it isn’t overflowing with all the things we aren’t saying to each other. It’s time for both us to come clean. Here. Now. We don’t leave until this is over.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Go ahead, Nate, hit me with your best shot.”

“You want my best shot, Andi? How about the fact that you betrayed me. You were the one person I knew I could count on. When everything went to hell, I knew,
knew
that you were going to be there for me. You always said we could survive anything. But when anything came, when life wasn’t just a big garden of roses, you were out of there so fast it made my head spin.”

He didn’t yell the words at her, but they were almost more powerful for the lack of volume. They might have caught her off guard, might have crushed her, if she hadn’t already covered herself in a suit of invisible armor, the same suit she’d been wearing for ten long years.

Ever since the boy she’d loved had been just one more person to tell her that she didn’t belong in his world.

“I left because you sent me away, Nate. You told me I was in the way, that you needed to focus on your sister and not a long-distance relationship. How can you blame me for going when you were the one who didn’t want me there?”

She’d only seen him look at her like this once—when he’d told her to get out of his life.

“Hell, Andi, you say you want to get it all out once and for all, but you’re not actually going to admit culpability for a damn thing, are you?”

She wasn’t eighteen anymore. She was going to stand up for herself this time. “Give me one reason to accept the blame and I’ll take it.”

“I was losing it, Andi. My dad had just shot himself in the head. I was still grieving over my mom. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to be able to take care of Madison, or if they were even going to let me keep her. You should have known all those things. You should have known I didn’t mean it when I told you to go. You should have known I was scared. You should have known I needed you. But you didn’t. You were the only person I had left that loved me, and you walked away.”

Reeling from the weight of his enormous expectations, Andi shot back, “I was eighteen years old! What did you expect from me? I loved you, and I was hurting for you so bad that it felt like my pain, too. Of course, I wanted to help you. Of course, I wanted to be there for you. But did you really think I was going to drop all of my dreams, that I was going to give up my entire life before it even began?”

Nate looked flat-out disgusted with her. “No, Andi. You’re right. None of it is your fault. It’s mine. You were never going to sink so low as to actually end up with the trailer trash you said you loved, were you? Not when you had such big plans to go take care of. Not when you had so many big dreams to go achieve.”

No. No way. She wouldn’t let him go there.

“How dare you say that. I never thought you were trailer trash.”

“You sure about that, sweetheart?”

Oh god, no, he couldn’t be calling her that now. Not when he’d once used the endearment with such love and now the word was underwritten with sarcasm.

“Don’t call me that.” And she wouldn’t let him rewrite history, either. “We were going to achieve our dreams together, Nate. You were saving money to come out to be with me in the city. You were taking classes at night. I never planned to do it without you, you knew that.”

“Don’t try to rewrite history, Andi. You spent one month at that fancy college and you started changing. Not just your clothes, not just your friends, not just the way you talked or the things you talked about. You saw bigger things, the things your father had always taught you to want, the things you were already chasing. Fact is, you’ve never been able to stop and enjoy what you already have because you’re always looking ahead for the next thing.”

Each beat of her heart was a throb of pain. Still, Nate could say whatever he wanted to about her, but bringing her father into it was stepping over the line. Way over. “Don’t you dare talk about my father like that. Don’t you dare try to bring him into our mess just because you were intimidated by my goals and dreams.”

“Not intimidated, Andi. Just not interested.”

“Don’t lie to me, Nate. You were going to play college football in Syracuse until your mother died, and you put it off temporarily to help your father with the baby. And then it was all ripped away from you. Don’t you know how much I wanted your chances back for you? Don’t you know how much I wanted you to have the same opportunities that I did?”

All the while as she spoke, Andi waited for Nate’s expression to change, for him to bend a little bit, but clearly she was going to have to keep waiting.

“You haven’t changed at all, have you? You still think you know what’s best for everyone else, still think you know what everyone else should do. It was your plan, Andi. Always your plan. I loved you, so I figured I could bend for you, figured I’d find a way to make my dreams work around yours, figured eventually you’d bend for me, too. But you were never going to bend, were you?”

Somehow the words
I loved you
made everything he was saying even worse. “You never gave me a chance to bend, Nate. You never gave me a chance to even try to be there for you. Yes, you’re right, I didn’t insist on staying when you told me to leave. But you didn’t come after me, either. You didn’t come tell me all those things you just said about being tired and scared.”

The truth of it all finally hit her. So hard, she would have lost her breath if it hadn’t already been gone.

“I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be free, was I, Nate? You wanted to be free, too.”

“Ah,” he said quietly, more regret than she could have thought possible lying beneath that one short syllable. “So now the truth comes out. We never should have been a couple in the first place, let alone try to do it again now.”

Now that the red-hot flames of anger and resentment were gone, Andi didn’t know what to say anymore. She just felt drained.

Empty.

“But it was for the best, wasn’t it, Andi? You got to go back to bright lights, big city without a heavy chain attached to your ankle. And I was able to really settle into the town I love, a place where I can breathe clean air and listen to the birds in the trees when I wake up in the morning, the call of the loon when I’m watching the stars.”

His words were softer now, as if she’d managed to wring all the anger out of him.

She couldn’t make herself agree that it was all for the best. Not knowing what else to say to him, her heart feeling as raw and chafed as it ever had, she did what she’d done a thousand times before to try and hide her hurt and made herself shift the focus to business.

“Before we go, I have to know. Has seeing Loon Lake changed your mind about the condos?”

She felt his answer before he said it.

“No. I still think Emerald Lake is different. Special. That it’s going to mean something years from now that there were never condos on the waterfront. Even if it ends up being a little harder in the present.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said, forcing herself to nod, to keep her voice steady, even though the dam holding back her tears was finally about to break. Because there were no more excuses to be this close to Nate.

Not a single one.

For the first time ever, she knew that they were completely over.

One night
had been a mistake. A mistake she’d been unable to keep herself from making, a mistake she’d justified by saying it was business, that she had to spend the night with Nate at Loon Lake for the sake of her project.

One kiss
had been more than a mistake, though, more than a heady reminder of the innocence and excitement of young love.

One kiss
had destroyed them completely.

This time when Andi saw the light in the living room from the front porch, she was tempted to slip in the back door. One look at her was all her mother would need to see what a huge wreck the night had been.

Last night, spending time in the kitchen with Carol had been warm and comfortable. Tonight, Andi knew that same comfort, that warmth, would be the final straw in breaking apart the tenuous hold she had on herself.

Andi poked her head into the room, planning to let her mother know she was heading straight up to bed. But that promise of the comfort that had been lacking from her life for so long, too long, was so irresistible she actually found herself moving into the room instead.

“Mom, I—” she began, knowing she was on the verge of spilling it all out, when Carol looked up as if Andi had startled her.

“Oh honey, there you are.” Her mother looked sad. And a little nervous. “Could you give me your opinion on something?”

“Sure.”

“I wanted something special for your father’s commemoration on Sunday. I thought I could make us scarves in his favorite color.” Andi noticed Carol’s hands were shaking as she held up the beautiful autumn-red yarn. “Do you think that’s silly?”

Guilt ripped through Andi, nearly buckling her knees, and she had to sit down on the edge of the couch facing her mother.

Here she’d been all twisted up over Nate, feeling sorry for herself, sure that no one had ever been in this much pain. But looking at her mother’s face told her just how wrong she was. Carol hadn’t just lost a boyfriend.

She’d lost her husband of over thirty years.

“No. It’s not silly, Mom. I think he’d love it.”

Finally her mother smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but at least she wasn’t crying. Andi had never been good with tears. Not hers or anyone else’s.

“I’m not quite done with this one if you’d like to put in some stitches, honey.”

Andi shook her head quickly. “I’d probably only just mess it up.” She stood back up. “I think I’m going to get these damp clothes off and take a shower before bed.”

Carol frowned. “Why are your clothes wet?

“I took Nate to Loon Lake to show him a few things. But it rained.” Andi pressed a kiss to her mother’s cheek. “Good night.”

Andi went upstairs to her bedroom and pulled out her laptop, but instead of opening it up and getting down to work, instead of blocking out everything but her goal, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother and grandmother, the store, the women in the knitting group…and an old romance that should have never been revived.

K
nowing for certain that she wasn’t going to get Nate’s vote as head of the architectural review committee, Andi dug down extra deep into researching Adirondack building laws as Thursday slid into Friday, looking for loopholes, making endless calls, and sending dozens of e-mails. Reading through Adirondack Council and Nature Conservancy meeting reports, Andi learned just how hard Nate had fought development in the Adirondacks, not just since he’d become mayor, but even before that. For some strange reason, though, he wasn’t fighting very hard against her.

Nonetheless, it was time to stop playing with what-ifs, to stop losing herself in fantasy, to stop mucking around at Lake Yarns, and to do her job.

Her real job.

The Klein Group confirmed the addition of the football field to their plans. Not surprisingly, they rejected the carousel retrofitting.

Andi felt bad for her grandmother, but again, romanticizing memories and dealing with the real world were two very different things.

She barely looked up from her computer until flashes of bright-colored light in the sky drew her to her bedroom window. Friday night fireworks at the high school football game were a town tradition, going back as far as her grandmother’s teenage years. And even though they were usually simple, inexpensive sparklers and fountains of color, they were always thrilling nonetheless.

Was Nate there? Was he out on the football field with the team, looking for her in the stands? Was he going to jump into the lake tonight after the game and think of her?

Her cheeks itched, and she brushed at them without thinking, shocked when her hand came back wet.

Nate stood on the public beach just off Main Street and watched as the members of the high school football team ran down the dock one after the other and jumped into the cold lake on a holler. Amped up from winning the game, they hardly felt the cold, Nate knew.

But even without jumping in, Nate was frozen.

Wednesday night at Loon Lake, he’d let himself hope again. Big enough that he’d said, “
Come to the game this Friday, Andi. Jump into the lake with us.
”

Of course, she hadn’t been in the stands tonight. For all he knew, she’d left town after their explosive kiss had disintegrated into a raging argument in the boathouse.

He shouldn’t still be able to taste her sweet lips, shouldn’t still be able to feel the soft imprint of them on his own lips. And he definitely shouldn’t miss her tonight.

But he did.

They’d finally told each other the truth Wednesday night. All of it. He knew now that they’d both hurt each other. Badly.

And yet, it wasn’t the accusations they’d hurled at each other that lingered. Strangely he almost felt better for what he’d gotten off his chest.

No, what grated was what he’d said to her, that their breakup had been “for the best.”

Because no matter how hard Nate had tried to convince himself that it was true, he just couldn’t.

Thirty-six hours later, after burying herself in work all of Saturday, too, Andi woke up to the Sunday she’d been dreading. The Fall Festival…and her father’s commemoration.

Her father’s official funeral in Washington, D.C., one year ago had been a blur. Although Richard Powell had actually been buried at Emerald Lake in a plot next to the one her mother would one day be in, only she and her mother and grandmother had been there to watch his casket being lowered into the ground in the graveyard behind Main Street.

Today was the day Emerald Lake would finally get a chance to celebrate his life as the town dedicated a playground in Richard Powell’s name—at the Fall Festival, her father’s favorite celebration. And now, the one-year anniversary of his passing.

Exhausted from two almost sleepless nights—sleeping left her brain, her soul, too vulnerable to Nate’s accusations—Andi knew she needed to put on a good face.

It was another day of putting on the perfect dress as armor, the perfect makeup and hair and jewelry and shoes.

As if any of that could prevent her—or protect her—from feeling. And hurting.

A knock sounded at her door. “It’s time, honey.”

Andi took a deep breath and opened up her bedroom door, only to be immediately confronted with her mother’s concerned gaze, the very gaze she’d been running from for the past two days. Longer if she was being honest.

“Here’s the scarf I made for you.”

Andi didn’t realize her hand was shaking until she reached for the red scarf. “Thanks. It looks great. Perfect for fall.”

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right today, honey? I don’t want you to give the speech if you don’t feel up to it.” Carol almost seemed to grow taller, stronger before Andi’s eyes. “I can do it.”

“No, Mom. Of course, I’ll give my speech.”

She couldn’t possibly let her mother suffer through giving the speech at his commemoration.

“This is what I do. I’ll be fine.”

Only, thirty minutes later when they were standing beneath the
EMERALD LAKE FALL FESTIVAL
sign, Andi realized that no speech she’d ever given as a management consultant had ever been this personal. This difficult.

As a little girl, Andi had loved the Fall Festival. Every year, the town green was transformed into an autumn wonderland. From morning until late into the night there was food and fun, laughter and music, a hundred lanterns hanging from the large gazebo in the center of the waterfront park, the lights blinking and swaying in time to the beat of the band.

Andi was never sure which booth she was going to stop at first, her wad of dollar bills jammed into the pocket of her jeans. She always bought one of Mrs. Johnson’s mini–berry pies while they were still warm. A slightly burned tongue was worth the way the berries exploded one after the other in her mouth, only to be chased down by the sweet brown sugar on top. But what next? Should she go play one of the festival games, like dunking the football coach in the tub of warm water? Should she let the music from the band in the gazebo pull her in until she was breathless from dancing with her friends?

But then in the end, the decision was easy. Because the best thing about the Fall Festival was simple. Her father was always there, regardless of how busy he was in Washington, D.C.

For Andi, there was nothing better than holding his hand, large and warm around her smaller one, as they stood together in the middle of the park. Even if the rest of her friends were off running around, calling to her to join them, even if the band was playing her favorite song, she was happy just to stand there beside him as he talked to the other adults about boring things.

Throughout the day, Andi would pop in and out of the Lake Yarns booth to bring her mother and grandmother food, something warm to drink, sometimes to even help the littler kids with their first knit stitches when they needed another set of knowledgeable hands. But mostly, she would stick by her father’s side as long as he would let her, until his discussions grew more serious and he inevitably started working for his constituents again.

That was when she’d find Nate. Her best friend—and then boyfriend—would make her laugh and dance and feel loved.

“It really is lovely for the town to dedicate the new playground in your father’s memory.”

“He would have loved it,” Andi agreed, unable to mask the scratch of emotion behind her words when being at the Fall Festival without her father—and without Nate waiting in the wings—felt so wrong.

Carol drew Andi into her arms as they waited for Evelyn, who had come from the store, to slowly walk across the green to join them. It made Andi’s chest even tighter to notice that her grandmother already had the red scarf on.

Evelyn reached for Andi’s hand on one side and Carol’s on the other. “Shall we?”

Andi was amazed by how much stronger she felt from just the simple touch of her grandmother’s hand.

After getting Carol and Evelyn seated on the gazebo stage, Andi closed her eyes and took a deep breath to steady herself. A heartbeat before she turned to step up to the podium, she felt a hand on her arm.

Nate’s heat hit her first, his innate strength second. But it was the hurt and the love that were all mixed up together whenever she looked at him—whenever she even thought about him—that hit her hardest of all.

“I’m going to be right behind you if you need me.”

“You’re here?”

She couldn’t believe Nate was waiting for her. That after everything they’d said and done to each other,
he was here anyway.

“Of course I am, Andi,” he said gently. “Where else would I be?”

Andi wanted to fall into his arms, to have him hold her and know that he was never going to let her go.

Instead, she forced herself to move away and walk up to the microphone.

“Richard Powell wasn’t born in Emerald Lake. He came to town by way of a local girl.”

Andi turned and smiled at her mother and saw that her eyes were already wet, although no tears had spilled down her cheeks yet.

Steeling herself to make it through her speech in one intact nonsniffling piece, just like she’d promised her mother that she would, Andi continued, “But he loved Emerald Lake as much as any born-and-bred local.”

“Come,” Evelyn said to her daughter and granddaughter when the commemoration was over and people had finished paying their respects. “Let’s see who we can hook with our needles and yarn in our booth.”

No question, Evelyn knew both Carol and Andi needed to lose themselves in something right now. Knitting would help them the way it had always helped her. Knitting had always soothed her, even when she’d been an eighteen-year-old girl who hadn’t known her own heart or mind any more than her granddaughter—and that boy she’d always been so in love with—did.

But Andi simply shook her head. “I’ll be over in a bit, Grandma,” she said before heading off by herself, away from the crowds.

Carol stayed right where she was, staring down at the beautiful plaque Nate had given her from the town.
In memory of Richard M. Powell.

“I want him back, Mom.”

“I know, honey. Of course you do.”

When Carol finally looked up, there were fresh tears in her eyes. “Not just for me, but because Andi needs her father. She’s always needed him.” One tear slid down across her cheek, then another. “I know she’s seen Nate a couple of times since coming home. Something must have happened between them, but she won’t talk to me. And I don’t know how to ask. We see each other in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the store, but she won’t tell me what’s bothering her.”

“It’s not you, honey.” Evelyn patted her daughter’s hand. “Andi doesn’t know how to put into words what she’s feeling yet.”

“If her father was here, she’d feel safe enough to confide in him.”

Evelyn shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t think she would.”

Not when Andi’s father—and the things he’d taught his daughter to believe in—were an integral part of her struggle.

Richard Powell had been a good man, although not always the world’s best father or husband, Evelyn thought with a narrowing of her eyes. Too busy, too often gone saving strangers to see much of his own family. And yet, when he did find the time to come home, he made every minute fun and exciting. That charisma, that honest love for life, was what had made his reelections almost a given. Richard Powell had been a man who was impossible to resist.

Evelyn knew firsthand about those kind of men. Both she and Carol had fallen for men who, rationally, they should have stayed away from. Men it didn’t make any sense to love. Men whose love came with as much pain as pleasure.

It made perfect sense that Andi would follow in their footsteps.

She was one of them, after all. Three peas in a pod whether her granddaughter ever realized it as the truth.

“She’ll come to you,” Evelyn predicted. “When it’s time.”

A few minutes later they were settled into their booth, and as children and adults made their way over to knit and laugh, Evelyn was glad to see the lines of fatigue, of grief and confusion eventually settle out of Carol’s face.

Periodically Evelyn scanned the festival grounds for her granddaughter, because even though she truly believed the three of them were, at their cores, strong and unbreakable, she also knew that it might take Andi a little while to find that well of strength and learn how to draw from it.

Just as it had taken Evelyn some time to find it for herself so many years ago.

Andi was halfway across the park when a man she didn’t know stopped her. “Are you the one bringing those condos into town?”

Her brain couldn’t compute the man’s words, not when she was lost in thoughts of her father. Her body couldn’t keep up, either, and she stumbled to a halt as she said, “Excuse me?”

The man repeated himself. “You’re in charge of the condos, right?”

Stunned that someone was actually bringing this up—at her father’s commemoration of all places—it was all she could do just to nod.

“You’re going to have a fight on your hands, you know.”

She rubbed her hands over her eyes. “If this is about the carousel—”

“I don’t give a damn about the carousel.” The woman beside him looked deeply uncomfortable. “This place is meant to be forever wild.”

Andi had spent enough time poring over building restrictions to know that he was talking about the congressional meeting at which the fourteenth amendment, the Forever Wild clause, was created. Concern for the importance of the watershed was one of the driving forces for creating the Adirondack Park.

Trying to get her brain to start functioning again, Andi said, “I’m just as concerned about protecting the water sources as you are, and I can assure you that the proposed development will not in any way alter it.”

“You don’t live here anymore, do you?”

She had to shake her head. “No, but—”

“Then if you’ll excuse me for being perfectly frank, you are not anywhere near as concerned as I am.”