John Riley's Girl (12 page)

“Thank you,” she said, and opened it to reveal a four-inch-high bacon-and-egg biscuit. “That’s a ten-miler if I ever saw one.”

John smiled. “You said lots of fat.”

Olivia took a bite and decided then and there that it would be worth every extra mile she had to run to make up for it. John had gotten the same thing, and they ate in companionable, appreciative silence while Olivia thought how nice it was to hear his laughter again, how much she had missed it, how gratifying it was to be the one to prompt it.

“I can’t remember when I enjoyed anything more than that,” she said, when she’d finished the last bite. “I guess the feminine thing to do would have been to offer you the last half of mine. But that was just too unbelievable.”

“I’ll tell Pearl you said so next time I see her.”

They sat there on the wooden seats of the old picnic table, their gazes on one another’s face. Searching. Assessing. And the look held for just a second too long in the way of a moment between two people that says This means something. Their
smiles tapered off, and the questions hanging between them were all but audible.
What happened to us? It was like this, wasn’t it? As good as we’re remembering.

John cleared his throat.

Olivia blinked and sat up straighter.

Then they got busy wadding up their biscuit wrappers, cleaning off the table, dropping the remnants of their breakfast in the nearby trash can while feelings she had thought time would have dulled into non-existence swooped through her. Wrong! They existed. Oh, they existed.

On the walk back across the parking lot, she couldn’t look at him, but knew his gaze was on her. She savored the pleasure in that, however short-lived it might be.

The silence between them strung out while they got back in the truck, hooked up seatbelts, closed doors. They were a mile down the road when John finally said, “So how did you decide to go into broadcasting? I never realized you were interested in it.”

“I wasn’t. I was doing an internship at a small station. The regular weather girl got sick one day right before going on air, and in a moment of desperation, they shoved me in front of the camera. I was so scared I thought I was literally going to have a heart attack.”

John smiled. “I bet there are a few tabloid shows that would love to have a clip of that.”

“Scary thought,” Olivia said, grimacing.

“It’s not something I’d have imagined you doing.”

“Me, either,” she admitted. “Sometimes I feel like it’s not really me doing it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Like I’m someone else in front of the camera. Just putting on the mask.”

“You make it sound easy. Like anyone could do it. I know that can’t be true.”

She lifted a shoulder. “I got better over the years. But it’s definitely one of those jobs where someone is always revving to take your place.”

“So what happened to your dream of being a writer?”

The question sent surprise skidding through her. He had remembered. He was the only person in her life she’d ever voiced that dream to. With the question came an echo of her father’s voice.
No point in letting your dreams get bigger than you are, girl. Just means you’ll end up bitter and disappointed.
She wondered now, from the perspective of an adult, if that was what had happened to her father. If he’d just never gone after his own dreams for fear of failure, and had spent the rest of his life in bitterness.

To John, she simply said, “I feel lucky to have been given the opportunities I’ve been given. It
seems ungrateful to be disappointed about not doing something I probably wouldn’t have been any good at, anyway.”

“I think you would have been damn good,” he said. “I’ve always thought the best writers are the ones who open their hearts and show the world what’s inside. That was something I always knew you could do.”

His words warmed her, filled her with the kind of concentrated happiness a person knows can never last, so pure is its intensity. A mile or two more of Lanford County countryside rolled by, and all Olivia could think was how surreal this entire morning had been. As if someone had picked the two of them up out of their lives and set them down in a scene where their past did not exist, their future did not matter.

Maybe it didn’t.

Was such a thing possible?

Circles

I
F SOMEONE
had told John three days ago that he would be riding down Route 121 East with Liv Ashford in the seat beside him, he would have said it was about as likely as him waking up that morning with wings and flying himself off to Mars.

So he would have been wrong.

And here he was trying to reconcile the importance of what he had learned last night with the fact that he had no idea how to talk to her about it. After all, he had gone inside her old house, uninvited, snooped around and read those letters, which he didn’t regret because of what they had brought to light. But he did feel guilty for the act itself.

Should he talk to her about it? Was it actually any of his business now? Would she welcome what she might very well consider meddling on his part?

No ready answer came to him. Doubt kept him silent for now.

They had no sooner pulled into the gravel drive-
way outside Cleeve’s enormous dairy barn than Cleeve himself was striding out the big center door with a grin on his face just about half the size of the opening. “Didn’t tell me you were bringing company.”

“Kind of last-minute,” John said.

“Hey, Cleeve,” Liv said, sliding out of the truck.

“Hey, dancing queen,” he teased.

“Hah,” she said. “Only because you dragged me out there!”

“Looked like she was havin’ fun, didn’t it, John?”

“That’s your kettle of fish, ole’ boy, lassoing women onto the dance floor,” John said and then added, “Ernie picked your truck up first thing. Said to tell you he’d call you after he got it in the shop and figured out what was wrong with it. You gonna buy a Dodge next time?”

“Right after Ford goes out of business.”

Liv smiled. “I see you two haven’t settled that argument yet.”

John shook his head and found himself smiling back. “Not yet. Aren’t you going to offer Liv the grand tour, Cleeve?”

“Sure thing.” He hooked an arm through Liv’s and led her off toward the barn, motioning for John to follow.

“I remember when we came here on that field trip in tenth grade,” Liv said. “You had baby ev
erything. Calves. Rabbits. Chicks. And we got to drink milk fresh from the cow. Was that barn here before?” she asked, pointing at the one to their right.

“My dad and I just built it a couple years ago,” Cleeve said, and John knew he was pleased she had noticed. As far as Cleeve was concerned, anybody who showed an appreciation for farm life went directly to the head of the class. John watched Cleeve work his charm with Liv, guiding her from one thing to another—showing her the new milking system they’d been using for the past year, which had increased their production by twenty percent, proud of what he did here in a way that John both understood and appreciated. And while Cleeve talked, he tried to make sense of the events that had taken place this morning, get a rein on the feelings that seemed to be taking on a force of their own inside him.

In the past twelve hours, everything he’d believed to be true had been turned upside down. No more than half a day ago, he’d been able to look at Liv with a semi-neutral eye, keeping himself afloat on the rock-solid raft of anger he’d built as a life-saving device so many years ago.

And maybe there was a certain comfort in that. That anger at Liv made it easy to bury anything else he might have ever felt for her. All those feelings had been submerged beneath the silt of his resent
ment. He’d never imagined they would ever surface again.

But he had been wrong. Because, like the arrowheads Flora loved to look for in the pastures on their farm, they had made their way back up through the dirt, so that if you knew what you were looking for, they were recognizable.

And he recognized these feelings—he felt a not small stab of terror for their renewal. Because who was he kidding? If it had been possible to die of heartbreak, he would have done so fifteen years ago. He could admit that much now, at least to himself.

How was it that life could send you rolling along on the same straight path just long enough that you got complacent and thought you knew where you were going to end up? For him, that destination had been spending the rest of his life alone. A week ago, he could not have conceived of wanting again, needing again. It was as if he’d gone numb after Laura died, his guilt over the things he should have done, hadn’t done, leaving a blank hole inside him.

And then Liv came back. And he’d read those letters last night and understood that he had not known everything there was to know about her and why she’d left this town. All the supports on which he’d rested his anger had fallen out from beneath him, and he was left with feelings of an altogether different kind—the renewal of old emotion and attraction for what remained of the girl he had known.
And the ignition of something new for the woman she was now.

Liv’s laughter brought him back to the moment. And the sound of it caused John’s heart to knot up.

As had happened all those years before, he felt the shift inside him, the beginning of feelings that were not within his control. He wanted to stop them and knew a wave of panic at his inability to do so. At the sure and certain knowledge that just because they had a past did not mean they could have a future. And surely, a person could not survive that kind of loss twice in one lifetime.

A
FTER
C
LEEVE HAD FINISHED
giving Olivia a tour of the farm, he directed them to the front yard of the white farmhouse. They sat under an old maple tree, and he served them iced tea he swore he’d made himself. It was good, and they gave him credit. For Olivia, it was wonderful to listen to John and Cleeve banter back and forth just as they always had, two men who were more brothers than friends.

And being there with them brought back a lot of good memories. Mr. Hawkins, their physics teacher, who wore a white shirt and khaki pants every day, the belt cinched somewhere just below his chest so that the hem of his trousers barely met the tops of his socks. The spring day the three of them had talked Lori into playing hooky and had spent it on the dock at John’s pond and how Mr. Richmond, the
high-school principal, had driven out there and found them and had made them clean blackboards after school for a week.

And they remembered how Cleeve ate three strawberry popsicles and two ice cream sandwiches every day for lunch, no matter how many times his mother threatened not to give him lunch money if he didn’t start ordering the hot plate.

Cleeve shook his head now and pinched his waist-line. “Can you imagine me eating five ice creams a day and being able to get away with it? My onetime furnace metabolism is now a campfire.”

“Welcome to your mid-thirties,” John said.

“I’m not mid yet,” Cleeve protested.

Olivia laughed. And they talked for a while longer about the stuff that wasn’t uncomfortable, that didn’t get too close to the time when she’d left. They stepped around the subject like a wall in the middle of the road that was easier to skirt by than to try to climb over.

Finally, John looked at his watch and said, “Better get those calves loaded so we can head back.”

Olivia couldn’t believe how quickly the hours had slipped by, sitting there in Cleeve’s yard talking about old times with two people who had been such an integral part of her life that she once couldn’t have imagined them not being there. They would always have the bond of beginnings in common. Her friends here in Summerville were different than any
of the others she’d made in various places over the years. Lori and Cleeve were her first friends. John, her first love. And being here this weekend had made her see that there was something about those relationships that could never quite be duplicated. They’d been formed in a time of such openness, innocence, a space in life when the heart was so willing and able to let others in, when it hadn’t yet been bruised by rejection or any of the other hard knocks waiting ahead in the curves of life’s road.

Whatever the reason, she realized the value of them. And she didn’t want to let them slip away again.

C
LEEVE STOOD
in the driveway and threw up a hand as John pulled the loaded trailer out onto the state road in front of the farm.

If that didn’t beat all. Seeing those two pull up together this morning was just about the last thing he’d have expected. Nice, though. And when was the last time he’d seen a look like that in John’s eyes? Way too long.

Cleeve had loved Laura. She’d been a good woman who had adored John. But Cleeve knew, as only a man’s best friend can know, that a part of John’s heart had remained permanently closed to her. It wasn’t her fault. When Olivia had left here that summer, a part of John had left with her.

Maybe a person could only feel that kind of love once in his life.

Cleeve sent a wishful glance at the house where it seemed as though he spent more and more of his nights alone. It didn’t feel like a home to him anymore. He’d grown up there and had thought of it as the place where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. When his mom and dad had given it to him a few years ago, buying themselves a house in town where they could have a little more social life and enjoy their retirement, Cleeve had welcomed the gift.

What had ever made him think Macy could feel the same about this old place? To her, it was more like a prison, a place to escape from. Which she did with more and more frequency.

What was wrong with him that he couldn’t find a woman who thought he was okay as he was? He’d be the first to admit there wasn’t anything extraordinary about him, but he was beginning to wonder if he was missing something about himself. Three marriages now, two that hadn’t worked, and another that was fast on its way to burning out.

He had sworn this was the last time. If this one didn’t make it, he was switching to confirmed bachelorhood. But he didn’t like being alone. And he wanted children—so badly sometimes it was like a pain inside him that stayed on constant simmer.

I sure do like compliments.

Racine’s voice. Lord, she was pretty. And there was no doubt in his mind he was attracted to her. Dancing with her last night had been the most fun he’d had in way longer than he could remember.

But falling for another woman wasn’t going to fix anything. He would be jumping from one fire into another. Relationships never started out bad. It was just the opposite. Things were so good on the front end that down the road seemed too far to even bother looking.

Well, his third marriage wasn’t over yet. He’d like to think he had it in him to give it his best shot. When Macy got home from seeing her sister Sunday, they would sit down and figure out how to make things work better. Surely, two responsible adults ought to be able to do that.

T
HEY DROVE
the first ten minutes in complete silence. Not uncomfortable, but heavy, as if they both had a lot of questions which they were trying to wrestle into answers.

For Olivia, one continued to persist until she could no longer stand not knowing. “Why did you ask me to go with you today, John?”

He didn’t answer right away. And she could tell just by the way the silence grew even heavier that there was a reason. “There’s something I need to say to you, Liv,” he said finally.

She went still; her heart fluttered and missed a beat. “What is it?”

He flipped the signal and pulled the truck off the road. He took off his sunglasses. “I’m going to ask your forgiveness for this before I even say what I’m about to say. Because what I did was wrong.” His voice was serious, his eyes at once apologetic and intent.

She didn’t say anything; she couldn’t seem to find her voice.

“I went out to your house last night. On my way back from taking Cleeve home, I saw you pulling out of the driveway. I drove in there on some crazy notion that maybe I could figure out what happened to us, Liv. And I found some old letters you’d written to me.”

Olivia sat back in the seat, all the air gone from her lungs in a single whoosh. She blinked hard. Then she remembered the letters she’d hidden long ago. Letters she’d written to John knowing she could never actually give them to him. “You…read them?”

“I shouldn’t have. I know that. I’ve tried to find the words to say this all day, but…why didn’t you tell me, Liv?”

Olivia had no idea what to think, what to feel, what to say. Everything inside her had gone still, numb, as if a step in any direction might set off an arsenal of mines.

“It doesn’t matter now, Liv.” He turned in the seat, reached out and pressed the palm of his hand to her cheek. “It’s long over. I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I should have figured it out. All those times you had bruises. How could I have missed it?”

“Don’t, John,” Olivia whispered, even as she remembered dates with him when she’d been terrified he would notice. Tears welled in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks, as unwelcome now as they were inevitable. And the old shame was there, too, like a second skin that would always be a part of her. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Why not?”

“I was embarrassed. Ashamed. Sure there must be something wrong with me.”

“Liv.” Her name held a thousand layers of emotion, and she knew he would have given anything to change what had been.

He reached out, popped up her armrest and pulled her to him, across the seat and into his arms. Her cheek found his chest, and she could hear his heart beating hard and fast, almost angry-sounding. Her tears left a wet spot on his shirt, and she felt safe and protected as she had not felt once in all the years since they had parted.

The diesel engine of the truck rumbled in neutral. The calves moved around in the trailer behind them, restless. The sun, high in the sky, shone through the
windshield and centered its warmth on the two of them, locked in an embrace that conveyed things words simply could not. Comfort, sorrow, regret.

And as far from the reality of their lives as this day was, Olivia chose not to pull away, not to deny that here was a place, a man, whose very familiarity, even with the passage of so many years, made her heart ache with remembrance. They’d been boy and girl the last time they’d held each other this way. But even then, with youthful hormones to cloud all reason, Olivia had sensed the rightness of her place in his arms, had known it would feel the same down the road when they were man and woman. That she would always belong here.