I Never Thought I'd See You Again: A Novelists Inc. Anthology (34 page)

Cassie Emerson pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen to the café with a tray of warm blueberry muffins and stopped in her tracks. The door swung back with a soft whoosh behind her. She stared at the woman on the other side of the counter. “I never thought I’d see you again,” she said in a breathless whisper.

Rebecca Robbins didn’t smile, but she acknowledged Cassie’s greeting with a nod. Her gaze then swept around the café. Cassie moved forward and set the tray on the counter, her gaze following Rebecca’s. Cassie had wanted to make Katy’s Place warm and inviting, somewhere her customers could come and relax, read the paper, chat over coffee, enjoy a simple breakfast or lunch.

To that end she’d incorporated lots of warm honeyed oak in the décor, including the tables and chairs, as well as cushions in soft blues and yellows. Even though in Florida it was a bit of whimsy, on those chilly mornings in December and January, she was certain her customers would enjoy the impression of warmth provided by the gas fireplace.

The counter was a salvage piece, aged and weathered beneath a clear glossy surface. The state-of-the art espresso machine had been a huge investment, but Cassie knew it would be worth it. Her vision, her goal, was to open more small cafes like this one to honor Katy’s memory.

Rebecca’s gaze came back to her. “It looks like you’ve done quite well for yourself.” Her tone was neutral, but Cassie caught something subtle in her words. Resentment? Disgust? Hatred? Or had she imagined it? It was possible, she supposed, that Katy’s mother had come here to tell her she’d been forgiven. Hope sparked in Cassie’s heart, for she’d waited ten long years to hear those words.

“I wanted to do something to honor Katy,” she said simply.

“Hmm.” Rebecca Robbins might as well have been Switzerland. “I’d like to speak to you. Privately,” she said as the door behind her opened and two customers came in.

“Hi, John. Greg,” Cassie said to the two regulars over Rebecca’s shoulder. “I’ll be right with you.” Returning her attention to Rebecca, she said, “I close at two-thirty. I could meet you this afternoon.”

“Where?”

“Here if you’d like, or-or we could meet at my house,” Cassie suggested trying to think quickly as two more customers came in.

“Your house?”

“My husband and I bought a place. It needs work — ”

“A husband?” Rebecca seemed oblivious to the customers waiting behind her.

“Tyler,” Cassie said wondering why she felt as if she should defend the fact that she’d married.

“Fine. If you in Chicago or New York Dd give me the address, I’ll meet you there. What time?”

“Uh, three-thirty?” Cassie scribbled her address on the back of a Katy’s Place business card. “It’s off Orangewood Parkway. I can give you directions — ”

Rebecca snatched the card from her hand. “I’ll find it.” She swept out nearly colliding with yet another customer who’d been about to open the door.

Cassie forced her mind back to business, smiling and joking with the customers and her assistant, Lauren who arrived a half hour later. Throughout the day, Rebecca’s visit and the reason for it stayed on the fringes of her thoughts. What if? She couldn’t get the possibility out of her mind. What if Rebecca forgave her? What if the one thing she’d longed for since she’d been sixteen was suddenly handed to her? What if the shadow of grief and guilt she’d lived with since the accident was lifted? She almost laughed out loud at the possibility. Complete joy, which had eluded her for so long, might suddenly be within her grasp.

Once the morning rush died down, she called Tyler. She got his voice mail, which came as no surprise. Tyler worked harder than she did, driven to succeed, prove himself, and provide for her and the family they were starting. When he was home, he tackled one job after another around their fixer-upper. The last few weeks, as soon as her pregnancy had been confirmed by the doctor, he’d been concentrating on the nursery. He had seven months to make it perfect.

Cassie hummed to herself after she disconnected. Tyler, her marriage, the baby, her business, her life, were turning out the way she’d always imagined. Making peace with Katy’s mother would make everything perfect.

Lauren stayed to clean and close up so Cassie could dash home and prepare for Rebecca’s visit. The house was in a quiet residential neighborhood, and even though it still needed some TLC, it was one of the nicer homes on the block.

She tried to view the interior as Rebecca might. Would it remind Rebecca of the first home she’d made with Katy’s father? Cassie quickly ran the vacuum around the living room and dusted the end tables. She plumped the cushions on the sofa and straightened a stack of magazines.

After she changed clothes she started a pot of coffee because she remembered the one impromptu visit Rebecca had made to Cassie’s mother on a Saturday morning a few weeks after the accident. Rebecca had accepted coffee then, telling Cassie’s mother it was her one remaining vice. She also told Cassie’s mother she’d just come from an AA meeting. Cassie knew from Katy that both her parents were recovering alcoholics. Cassie also knew the affect their drinking during Katy’s childhood had on her and her siblings.

Cassie could remember the morning of Rebecca’s visit clearly. She’d stumbled into the kitchen in her pajamas, her new puppy Freddy nipping at her heels. She’d stopped short, just as she had this morning at the cafí spied Katy’s mother at the table. At Rebecca’s request, Cassie’s mother had left the two of them alone. Rebecca had told Cassie she didn’t blame her. She understood it had been an accident. Cassie hadn’t meant to kill Katy. But something about that visit had left Cassie uneasy. More than anything she’d wanted to believe Rebecca, wanted to believe she didn’t hold Katy’s death against her. But she couldn’t. Especially after her mother mentioned:before {
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.foundicon-edvo that Rebecca had expressed concern that Cassie might have turned to drugs or alcohol or even attempted suicide in the weeks after the accident.

“I told her that’s not who you are,” Cassie’s mother had said.

Cassie always wondered if Rebecca
hoped
that’s who she was. Someone who would destroy her life because her own daughter’s life had ended.

Freddy hobbled after Cassie as she hustled to get herself and her house in order. The small white dog was ten years old now, going blind and slowing down. He’d been her constant companion, a gift from her parents for her seventeenth birthday, when her whole world had been falling apart around her.

The doorbell rang and butterflies started in Cassie’s stomach, where dread and hope churned together in equal measures. She opened the door and invited Katy’s mother inside. Freddy barked and stood on his hind legs in greeting. Rebecca ignored him.

Physically, Rebecca hadn’t changed much in ten years. Her shoulder-length hair had been prematurely white even then. There were perhaps a few more lines on her face, a few more pounds on her frame, but otherwise she looked the same. She gripped a well-worn leather handbag in one hand and a teal gift bag topped with white-and-teal-striped tissue paper in the other. Had Rebecca brought a housewarming gift?

“Would you like coffee?” Cassie asked after they’d entered the living room. “I made some.”

“In a bit, perhaps.” Rebecca patted the sofa next to her. “Let’s talk first.”

Cassie took a seat sensing she’d somehow lost the advantage. This was her home. She was the hostess. Yet Rebecca acted as though the opposite were true. She’d taken command of this meeting on Cassie’s home turf.

“Tell me what’s happened in your life since I saw you last,” Rebecca invited. More neutrality. Cassie might have been on a job interview instead of chatting with the mother of her deceased best friend.

The last time she’d seen Rebecca and Henry Robbins had been in a courtroom. Rebecca had been in tears, begging the judge not to allow Cassie to drive to work or to school. Henry had stood stoically by Rebecca’s side. Cassie’s life had been almost unbearable after the accident as rumors spread through Palm River High School that Cassie had been on drugs. She’d been doing over a hundred miles an hour. She and Katie were drunk and on their way to a party. Or they’d just left one. The truth, that they’d been on their way to the bookstore and then to a late movie, somehow never surfaced.

Cassie had vowed after the term ended to never set foot in that school again, but instead to finish her year and a half at the local community college. But to do that she needed to drive. She needed to keep her job at the ice cream store to save money for college. That’s all she wanted to do. Finish high school. Save money for college. Permanently escape the sad memories Palm River held for her. Rebecca and Henry hadn’t wanted her to do any of it. Their daughter was dead. Why should Cassie be allowed to go on with her life?

Cassie had already been cited for careless driving and had her license suspended for a year. The judge had overruled the Robbins’ objections, seeing no reason why two lives should be destroyed.

Cassie there the whole time.arGr would never forget the hateful look Rebecca had given her as they’d passed by her and stepped into the elevator. Henry had just looked sad and defeated.

Cassie cried all the way home in the car. She’d hated herself, hated her life, hated the one moment she couldn’t even remember when she’d lost control of her car and Katy had died. The highway patrol investigator had told her if she’d swerved in the other direction, she’d have been killed instead of Katy. For a long time Cassie wished she’d done exactly that.

The very least she owed Katy’s mother was an answer to her question. “I didn’t go back to Palm River my senior year. I finished out at the community college. That allowed me to start at UCF early and graduate in three years.”

“You got to go to college. How wonderful.”

Cassie heard what Rebecca didn’t say.
Katy never got the chance.

Cassie softened her tone, drawing on the well of grief she’d carried with her for ten years. “Mrs. Robbins, I’ve had the impression ever since the accident that you think I had it easy, that I didn’t mourn or miss Katy, but the truth is, I think about her every day. I’ve tried to be the kind of person she’d be proud to have as a friend.

“Tyler and I were married two years ago. We bought this place earlier this year. I always wanted to own a café. Katy and I used to talk about starting a place together.”

“Did you?”

Cassie gazed helplessly into Rebecca’s blue eyes. Katy’s eyes had been the same shade of blue, a perfect complement to her freckles and curly red hair. “She and I talked about a lot of things, made a lot of plans. We were going to go backpacking through Europe the summer after high school. We had so many dreams.”

Sadness crept into Cassie’s voice but she willed it away. Her sadness had nothing on Rebecca’s and she knew it. In Rebecca’s presence, she felt she had no right to grieve over the loss of Katy and her part in Katy’s death. Not when Rebecca’s grief was so much more righteous and deserved.

Cassie took a steadying breath. “Tyler’s father invested in the café. But it’s Katy’s place as much as it is mine.”

“That’s a lovely story. Would you like to hear mine?”

“Of course. Coffee?”

“Not just yet.” Rebecca adjusted her position slightly. “After the accident, I didn’t go back to work right away. I couldn’t. I didn’t start drinking again, but I wanted to. So did Henry. He wasn’t quite as strong as I was. Katy was his girl while Melody was more mine. He’d go out to the site of the accident, bring bouquets of flowers, sit where that tree used to be and drink straight from the bottle. He made a spectacle of himself on more than one occasion. Usually a sheriff’s deputy would respond to a complaint, pick him up and drive him home. A few days later Henry would do it all over again.”

“I’m so sorry,” Cassie said. She remembered Katy’s father as rather reserved and dignified. A successful businessman with a droll sense of humor.

Rebecca ignored Cassie’s make it out of surgeryy vo comment and continued as if her lines had been rehearsed.

“When Katy died, we’d been married for nearly twenty-five years, but that didn’t mean anything to him. He chose the bottle over me, and Melody and Jason. He didn’t work. He wouldn’t go back to AA. When our marriage fell apart, Jason and I moved in with Melody. You remember Melody, of course?”

Cassie nodded, knowing better than to interrupt. Katy’s older sister was already in college upstate at the time of the accident. Melody had been chronically ill even then with an obscure, difficult to treat disorder, but she’d been determined to finish college and go to law school.

“She never finished college. Did you know that?”

Cassie shook her head. She’d wanted to stay in touch with Katy’s family. But a family friend had informed Cassie in no uncertain terms that contact with her caused them too much pain. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with her. She’d had no choice but to abide by their wishes.

How could Cassie explain that to Rebecca now? That every Mother’s Day when she thanked God for her own mother, she thought sadly of Katy’s. How she longed to send her a card or call to tell Rebecca she was thinking of her, that she knew how much she missed Katy, because she missed her, too. On Christmas and Thanksgiving, Cassie thought of Katy’s family. Katy had talked lovingly of her aunts and uncles and cousins, of the big family gatherings every summer at her grandparents’ home in New England. She imagined them all sitting down to dinner and setting a place for Katy.

Katy’s birthday was especially hard for her, so she could only imagine what it must be like for Rebecca. No daughter to buy presents for. No party to give. No cake to bake. Yet every year, she’d remember the day her child was born. No one could ever take Katy’s place.