John Riley's Girl (4 page)

“Oh, my gosh, that’s Olivia Ashford!”

Two women shot across the grass like arrows from a bow, welcoming smiles on their faces.

“My goodness, I can’t believe you’re here!” the one in front said. “Nobody thought you would actually come.”

Olivia smiled back, studying their faces for a moment before recognition hit her. “Casey. Sarah,” she said. “How are you?”

Casey had ridden Olivia’s school bus, Sarah had been in her homeroom.

They all hugged, then stood back to take a look at one another.

“Great. And no need to ask you that,” Sarah said.

“We are so proud of you,” Casey added. “Wow. You look so different in real life. Less serious, I mean. Who would ever have thought that you…I mean anyone from Summerville would end up on television every morning?”

Olivia smiled and steered the conversation away from herself. “So tell me what you’re doing. Are you living in Summerville?”

“Yep,” Sarah said. “Never left. I have three children, Casey has four.”

“You never married, did you?” Casey asked.

“No, I never did.”

“Well, with all the excitement in your life, who needs marriage and children?”

Olivia smiled again as the two women moved ahead in line. Their words settled over her with the implication that, despite all the opportunities her career had afforded her, she was the one who had missed out on something major.

“Olivia!”

The familiar voice sent relief flooding through her. She turned around to find Lori cutting her way through the crowd.

“Lori!” Olivia held out her hands to her old
friend. Lori took them, and they stepped into a warm hug that lasted for several long moments. Olivia’s eyes grew moist; she had not expected the lump of emotion now wedged in her chest, preventing further words.

“Gosh, it’s so good to see you,” Lori said, when they’d stepped back to get a good look at one another.

Olivia swallowed. “You look wonderful. You’ve hardly changed at all,” she said, wishing she hadn’t waited so long for this particular reunion. Seeing Lori made all the years fall away. Just like that.

“Hah, compared to you, I don’t think so.”

“No, I mean it. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“A few wrinkles here and there. But we’re supposed to call those character lines, aren’t we?”

Olivia laughed. “I guess so.”

“Obviously you got my message?”

She nodded, hoping her expression said, “No big deal.”

“Were you all right with coming out here?” Lori asked with a hopeful squint.

Olivia drew in a breath. “I guess I should ask if it’s all right that I’m here,” she said, trying to keep the words light.

“Of course it is,” Lori said, squeezing her arm while something that looked a lot like apprehension flitted across her face. “Come on, let’s find a quiet
spot where we can talk. We have so much to catch up on. It really is great to see you.”

They were headed to the side of the yard when a frantic voice from one of the tents called out, “Lori, could you come up here? We’ve got another problem with this darn drink machine!”

Lori sighed. “Don’t they know we have fifteen years worth of stuff to catch up on?”

“You go ahead,” Olivia said. “We’ve got the whole weekend. Just look for me when you’re done.”

Lori smiled and hugged her again. “Don’t go far,” she said.

J
OHN HAD NEVER
been good in crowds. Especially big ones. With almost three hundred people milling about his front yard, he found himself wishing Sunday would hurry up and get here so the whole thing would be over.

The caterer had set up camp near one of the pasture fences, now putting the finishing touches on the barbecue he’d been cooking since mid-morning. If it tasted as good as it smelled, he’d be a hit. A couple of mares had been glued to that section of fence for the past few hours, patiently waiting for the next round of sugar cubes the man had been slipping them on and off all day.

Opposite the barbecue was a DJ playing current top forty, the music persistent, but still enough in
the background that conversation was possible. John spotted Cleeve joking with Amy Bussey and Sharon Moore who were working the front table and pinning badges with senior pictures to jacket lapels and dresses.

Cleeve glanced up, and John waved him over. He wound his way through the crowd, a white Stetson on his head, his yellow shirt and Wranglers freshly pressed. He was tall and lean with long legs that made him a natural in the cutting-horse competitions he made time to attend in the summers with John. He had the kind of face that would never look its age. Women called him boyish. It made Cleeve madder than a hornet, but as the years ticked by, he was starting to believe John’s admonishment that it wasn’t such a bad tag to have hung on you.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to stand over here in the shadows all night,” Cleeve said, giving him a shoulder joust and then an elbow jab to the ribs.

“Giving it serious consideration.”

“What? You mind beating women off with a stick?”

John gave him a sideways look and rolled his eyes.

“Even as we speak, plots are being hatched in the ladies’ room as to correcting your bachelor status,” Cleeve said with a grin.

“Widower status.”

Cleeve instantly sobered. “Ah, hell, John, that was damn callous of me. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” John said, letting out a long sigh. “Don’t pay any attention to my bark. I’m not fit company for being out in public.”

“Have to say, I was kind of surprised to see you down here already. Figured I’d have to come up there and reel you out of the house.”

“Sophia took care of it for you.”

“That’s my girl,” Cleeve said, his smile back.

John shook his head and gave Cleeve a once-over. “Aren’t you lookin’ spiffy tonight? I hardly recognized you without the cow manure on your shirt.”

“Figured I might as well show some of these gals what they missed out on.”

“Since you dated half the class, I guess you better get started.”

To Cleeve, this was compliment, not insult. He laughed.

“So where’s the one you married?” John asked.

Cleeve’s smile faded. “Visiting her sister.”

At the look in his friend’s eyes, John was sorry he’d brought it up. “Then I guess you’ll have to dance with some of these other gals, huh?”

“Guess I will,” Cleeve agreed, but with less pluck than before.

“Hey, guys.” Lori Peters stepped up and gave them both a hug.

John leaned back and gave her a long look. She
had on a blue cotton sundress that picked up the color of her eyes and did nice things for her fair skin. “You look great,” he said.

Cleeve gave her a low wolf-whistle. “I’ll second.”

“You two are just used to seeing me with four kids climbing all over me,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the sign-in table where people were still filing in.

“I liked that look on you,” Cleeve said.

Lori smiled, but it was a noticeably weak attempt. “John, I need to talk to you about something.”

“You run the well dry? Somebody steal my best cow?”

“Not exactly,” she said, her teeth catching the edge of her lower lip.

Cleeve tipped his Stetson back. “Want me to va-moose?”

“You might as well hear it, too,” Lori said, throwing another uneasy glance over her shoulder. “I should have told you this earlier, this morning when I called, but I chickened out, and I know it was wrong—”

John’s gaze followed hers to the edge of the yard, and the rest of whatever Lori was saying was lost to him. The plastic cup in his hand slid from his fingers and dropped to the ground, iced tea splattering his jeans and Lori’s bare legs.

Cleeve put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it?
You look like you just saw a ghost.” And then, “Holy smoke.”

John went numb. He felt like a teenage boy again, spotting for the first time the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on, hit with an immediate blood-heating attraction that fills a boy with the absolute certainty that she is the one, and imbues in him the instant inability to speak in front of her.

His first uncensored thought? Cleeve was right.

She had turned out to be one beautiful woman.

Her hair was still long, shoulder-length and blond. His fingertips instantly ached with remembrance of it.

She was leaner than she’d been then, the bone structure in her face clearly defined with angles and hollows. Her lips were the same though, a shapely, full mouth that made his own throb with sudden memory.

But one difference was apparent. She no longer looked like the small-town girl he’d dated and loved. She looked, instead, like a woman who had made it in the world—clothes, posture, the whole picture.

“What is she doing here?” He tried to inject thunder in his voice and heard his own failure. He sounded like he’d just had the breath knocked out of him.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you.” Clearly, Lori had no idea how to handle this. She looked as if she thought he might strangle her. “I should have
told you this morning,” she said, “but I was afraid you’d say no to letting us move the reunion out here if I did.”

“And you would have been right!” The anger hit him full blast then. There was thunder in his voice now. And plenty of it. “Damn it all to hell, Lori. She can’t stay. She cannot stay,” he said, unable to bring himself to say her name because to do so would drive a knife right through the heart of the fury that was the only thing keeping his knees from buckling. “Go tell her. Now.”

Lori shot him a look that somehow managed to convey both panic and absolute horror. “John! I can’t possibly do that. You’re blowing this out of all proportion.”

“Now wait a dadblame minute,” Cleeve began, reason in his voice. “She’s no different from anybody else here who was in our class.”

“She
is
different,” John said, hearing the steel in his own words. “Either tell her, now, Lori, or the whole weekend is off.”

“For Pete’s sake, John,” Cleeve said, “that was all a long time ago.”

“Not long enough.”

“You don’t have to talk to her!” Lori said, hands splayed in appeal. “I’ll make sure you’re never within fifty yards of one another. We can’t just ask her to leave.”

“Nobody’s askin’ you to throw down the wel
come mat for her,” Cleeve tossed out, tipping back his hat, “but you can’t kick her out.”

They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. “She isn’t welcome here! And if you won’t tell her, I’ll tell her myself.”

The Unwelcome Mat

T
HE LAST THING
Olivia wanted was to be the center of attention. She wanted to blend in, just walk around and say hello to people she hadn’t seen in nearly half a lifetime. But she had only moved a few steps past the front table since she’d arrived. There were so many people she hadn’t thought about in ages, and yet remembered as if they’d seen each other only yesterday. Tommy Radcliffe, whom she’d sat beside in ninth-grade science class and shared homework notes with. Sarah Martin from eleventh-grade P.E., the only girl to consistently beat her at the six-hundred-yard dash. Noah Dumfrey who had ridden her school bus and whom she still hadn’t forgiven for putting chewing gum in her hair in eighth grade. “I can’t believe I actually did that to someone who’s now on TV every morning!” he’d said upon seeing her, reeling her in for a hug against his now well-cushioned chest.

Most people simply looked like adult versions of
the children they had once been—some heavier, some thinner, some with gray hair, some with no hair at all. But they all looked at her differently now, with awe on their faces, as if they could no longer see the Olivia Ashford they’d known in the woman she was now.

And while it was good to see so many familiar faces, hear so many still-recognizable voices, her gaze kept skipping across the crowd. She glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock, and she still hadn’t caught a glimpse of John. If she could just get that part over with, she could relax. Seeing him was inevitable, and the longer the wait drew out, the heavier her dread became.

She envisioned the two of them circling the crowd, weaving in and out until they finally ran head on into one another. Olivia could not picture him as he would look now. Couldn’t imagine how time would have changed him. She found herself studying the face of every man who walked by.

How would she know him?

And then, suddenly, she didn’t have to wonder anymore.

Because there he was. Cutting a path through the crowd with long strides, his mouth set in a grim, no-nonsense line.

Olivia froze, shut down inside. And then her heart took off in an out-of-control gallop that would have
made her EKG reading look like a seismograph monitoring an L.A. earthquake.

Any semblance of poise she might have gained in her years as a professional broadcaster completely deserted her. She stood in front of him as vulnerable as if she were seventeen again and head over heels in love. She couldn’t smile. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

He didn’t look old.

He hadn’t gained forty pounds.

He had all his hair.

And she would have recognized him in a crowd of a thousand on the other side of the world.

To say he looked good would have been an understatement.

Living in Washington, D. C., Olivia had gotten used to men in suits. The professional man’s uniform: polished loafers, socks with crests on them, starched white shirts, hundred-dollar ties. Washington was full of men like that. That was the kind of man today’s women were supposed to find irresistible.

She never had.

And now she realized why.

Because she would forever be comparing them to John. But John Riley as a boy was quite different from John Riley as a man.

There was no questioning which one he was now.

His shoulders had gotten broader. He was more
muscular, solid, strong. The changes were unsettling, maybe because
that
John, she knew. This one, she did not. And the reality of him, standing here in front of her, felt like a kaleidoscope of then and now.

“Olivia.”

At the sound of his voice, she jumped. Olivia. Not Liv as she had once been to him. The greeting was arctic-cold, his whole demeanor one of stiff politeness as if he’d just bumped into someone he had vaguely known in first grade, but wasn’t quite sure he remembered.

“Hello, John.” She folded her arms across her chest to hide her shaking hands. The urge to flee was nearly irresistible. All of a sudden, she felt like a country girl who’d never been farther than twenty-five miles outside Summerville, who had grown up in a four-room house and gotten her new clothes from the church’s Helping Hand closet.

“Mind if I ask what you’re doing here?” The question was clipped, his anger barely concealed.

Olivia’s stomach did a roller-coaster plummet at the recognition of it. She locked her knees and forced herself to return his scrutiny.

People were staring. She felt their curious gazes. Heard the whispers. She willed her voice toward something close to indifference when she said, “The same thing as everyone else in our class.”

“Everyone else is welcome here.”

The words snagged her like barbed wire, cutting through the skin and refusing to let go, their harshness in opposition to the boy she had once known, a boy whose eyes had looked at her as if she were every good thing he’d ever imagined. A flash of memory hit her. The two of them up on Lookout Mountain, lying on their backs in the bed of his old pickup, a quilt beneath them, staring up at the stars and holding hands. Her head was on his shoulder. Amazing that with all the time that had passed since then, she still remembered the depth of the security she’d felt there.
I want us to have four children, Liv. At least four. That way they’ll never grow up lonely. Days like Christmas will be loud and out of control. I like out of control.

Had he really said words like that to her, this man with undiluted disapproval in his eyes?

It didn’t seem possible.

She hated herself, suddenly, for the inability to forget, as he so obviously had. There was no doubt that he had put away all the good memories and had no interest in revisiting any of them.

He stood, arms folded across his chest, waiting for her to respond.

Her lips moved although she had no idea what words they were going to form. “I have every right to be here at this reunion, John,” she said, keeping her voice low. “But this is your home, and I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable by coming here.”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” he said, the denial instant. “Surprised. I never imagined you’d have that much nerve.”

His directness toppled her poise. “I didn’t know the reunion had been moved until this afternoon—”

“But you still came.”

Again, the words fired at her like missiles with computer-targeted aim. She felt under assault. Countless times, she had imagined what it would be like to see him again. What she would say. How she would feel. None of her scenarios had ever depicted John angry. Indifferent, yes. But not angry. He had married someone else within six months of her leaving here. Why would a man who had forgotten her that quickly have an ounce of anger inside him?

“Just as long as you know this,” he said, before she could manage to respond. “Your being here makes no difference whatsoever to me. Let’s just make sure we let this be both hello and goodbye, okay?”

And with that, he left her standing there, cutting his way back through the hovering crowd of slack-jawed classmates who had sidled in close enough not to miss a word.

J
OHN GRABBED
a glass from the cabinet above the kitchen sink, flipped the tap on, then downed several swallows of cold water. He set the glass down on the counter, braced his hands on the sink’s edge,
head down, yanking air into his lungs. Over the years, he’d done some serious speculating about what it would be like to see Liv again. None of his scenarios had ever even hinted at the reality of it, at the fact that standing there in front of her, close enough to touch her, close enough to see confusion in her eyes, was like having someone drive a semi straight through the wall of his chest.

He’d expected to be protected by his own indifference, had wrapped himself up in it. Liv hadn’t spoken five words before the edges unraveled, leaving him completely vulnerable, and it would be a long time before he thawed out again.

“What on earth are you doing in here when there’s a party going on outside?”

John looked over his shoulder. Sophia stood in the kitchen doorway, the frown on her face the same one she’d been giving him for suspicious behavior since he was ten years old. When John’s mother had died, Sophia, his father’s sister, had come to live with them. Since Laura’s death, she had also become so important to Flora that John couldn’t imagine either of them getting along without her. “Just biding time, Sophia,” he said.

“You planning to stand there all weekend?”

“Might.”

“Then you won’t be setting your sights on Most Sociable, I take it.”

“I had about all I could handle,” he said, ignoring her smile.

“So what are you going to do about the rest of the weekend?”

“The view from here looks pretty good.”

Sophia chuckled and pulled a clean apron from one of the cabinet drawers, gave it a shake and tied it around her waist. “So she did come then?” She reached for a dishtowel and began drying the few bowls that had been left to drain in the sink. The question came totally without fanfare, as if she had just asked him whether he’d remembered to pick up some milk when he’d run into town earlier that afternoon.

“Who?” John asked, neutralizing his expression.

“You know good and well who.”

As much as John loved Sophia, he did not, at that moment, appreciate her uncanny ability to cut to the heart of things. He avoided her gaze, glaring, instead, at the row of pink sponge curlers on the left side of her head. “I told her she wasn’t welcome here.”

Sophia uttered something that sounded like a snort and flapped her dishtowel. “John Crawford Riley! Where are your manners? You were not raised like that.”

“She showed up at this house uninvited,” he dug in.

“She
was
invited,” Sophia reasoned. “She’s a
member of this class just like you were. And if you were indifferent to the girl, you wouldn’t care whether she was here or not.” For emphasis, she plunked a just-dried cup in the cabinet above her head.

John gave her sponge curlers another glare. It was hard to argue with Sophia on this subject. She was, after all, the one who had found him in his room, spilling tears all over Liv’s picture after she’d left Summerville. He wasn’t going to fool her. Nor was he going to give her the satisfaction of saying she was right.

“But I suppose you could make her believe you care if you had a mind to.” She put down the towel and turned to look at him.

John shot her another narrow-eyed glare. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you hide out in the house all weekend, it’s going to be pretty clear to everybody that you never got over her.”

Something exploded inside him. “If you think I’ve given her a second thought in all these years—”

“You were a good husband, John,” Sophia interrupted in a quiet, firm voice. “I’m not accusing you of anything. But I know what that girl once meant to you. And now here she is on this farm again. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about her. You’re human, aren’t you?”

“She wasn’t who I thought she was.”

Sophia untied her apron and put it away. She reached for a glass from the cabinet by the sink, filled it with water from the faucet. “This weekend could be a bridge in your life, John Riley, maybe even make you want to live again. You just think about that.” She left the kitchen.

John glared at her retreating shoulders. He had every right to mind the fact that Liv Ashford would just show up here after the way she had left and never called, never written. It had been years before he’d even heard where she was living. Someone had seen her on a local news channel in Johnson City, and the rumor had spread through Summerville until it had reached him one afternoon when he’d been in the hardware store with Laura buying a new light fixture for the back porch. Lenny Nelson had no way of knowing what the information would do to John, no way of guessing he might as well have stuck a knife inside him. John had paid for the light fixture, smiled and said, “Oh, really, well, that’s great!” while Laura listened with mild interest, and his heart was being torn right out of his chest.

It wasn’t the first or the last time he had questioned whether emotional infidelity was any less wrong than physical.

How many times had Laura said “I love you,” and he’d tried to say it back with the same conviction? How did he explain the regret he felt now for
not having given her the same kind of love she had given him, uncluttered by something that could have been, that never was? He still lay awake at night, cursing himself for not making their marriage what it should have been.

And yet, Laura had never made it an issue between them. She had been aware that there had been someone else not long before she’d come into his life, although she hadn’t found out about Liv until after they were married. She’d run across a shoebox of old letters one day while cleaning out the attic. They were letters from Liv, which he’d had no business keeping but hadn’t been able to throw away. Liv had written him notes in school, putting them in places where he would find them throughout the day, in his science book, his locker, the front seat of his truck. Some of them had been no more than a line long:
Hey, just thinking about you!
And some of them longer:
So that’s what it’s like to be kissed by someone you want to spend the rest of your life with. Highly recommended.

He could still remember so many of them line by line.

He remembered the look in Laura’s eyes when she’d admitted to reading them—understanding tinted with sadness and resignation, and awareness that what had come before her would always be between them.

It had been almost two years since Laura had
died. If he could give her nothing else, he would make sure that everyone at this damned reunion knew he had loved her. That she had been his wife. The mother of his daughter. The one who counted.

He owed her that much.

And Sophia was right about one thing. He wasn’t going to prove any of that by standing up here acting like he cared whether Liv Ashford had waltzed herself back into town or not.

So he yanked open the back door with enough force to make the old hinges groan and headed outside.