One Reckless Summer (35 page)

But he tried to put it out of his mind so he could enjoy the rest of his evening—even if it kept gnawing at him beneath the surface. He’d invited Anita over for dinner—he wanted to be decent company.

By the time they finished eating, it had gotten dark out,
so
Walter suggested stepping onto his back deck. “My Jenny is an astronomer,” he said, leaning his head back to peer up into a clear night sky—but this time he left out the next comment that came to mind, that Judy had enjoyed stargazing as well. “So I know a lot more about the stars than I would if she hadn’t pretty much forced me to look through her telescope and learn all about them back when she was a girl.”

“Do you have one?” Anita asked. “A telescope? I’ve never looked through one before.”

“’
Fraid
I don’t,” he said, sorry to have sparked her interest in something only to disappoint her. “But I’m sure we could borrow Jenny’s some night if you like—once I figure out how to make her less mad at me, that is.”

To his surprise, the lady next to him responded by locking her arm through his. “That’d be nice.” And despite
himself
, he even found himself thinking maybe they could canoe over to that spot across the lake Jenny claimed was so good for stargazing. Or…maybe they could just go to the meadow at Betty and Ed’s place. Maybe Betty and Ed would
like
Anita. Once they got past her tight clothes.

“Of course, there’s plenty to look at in the sky even
without
a telescope,” he told her. Then he gazed upward in the black expanse above and spotted a constellation he’d always liked, one that was, in fact, too large to study through a telescope and
had
to be viewed with the naked eye. He pointed it out—although they both had to lean around the branches of a sprawling maple tree to get a good view. “See that real bright star just below that longest branch? If you follow it down, you see another, and farther down”—he drew a line with one finger—“another. Now look out to the sides of the center star, and you’re
lookin
’ at the Northern Cross.”

Next to him, Anita’s eyes widened, her mouth dropping open in delight. “Oh—I see it! And my—it’s so big. A big cross right up in the sky.”

Then he showed her a couple of other major points of interest that could be seen in the summer sky with the naked eye as well, a little surprised he still remembered them: the Great Square of Pegasus, and then the Teapot—and he pointed out how that particular part of the Milky Way made it appear steam was coming from the Teapot’s spout, pleased when she seemed transfixed by it.

“My, my, a man who knows about the stars,” Anita said when he was done, turning to peer up at his face. “That’s downright romantic, Officer Tolliver.”

“It is?” he asked, his stomach twisting a little, in a good way.

Then she squeezed his hand and
raised
on her toes to give him a kiss, right on the mouth. It was a small kiss, but an
incredible
kiss—it was the first kiss Walter had gotten from a woman in nearly twenty years.

“That was…real nice,” he told her. “Nicest thing to happen to me in a while.”

She winked up at him in the dark. “Play your cards right, Officer, and there might be more where that came from.”

A few days after Mick’s departure, Jenny pulled herself together.

Specifically, she got up, got dressed, and called Stan Goodman on the phone to accept the offer to teach at Destiny High. Since school started in less than two weeks, she met with him and Principal Turley that very afternoon to fill out forms and work out her class schedule, which included Advanced Placement Science, Introduction to Physics, and her favorite, Introduction to Astronomy. She came home excited that Mr. Turley seemed so pleased with her curriculum ideas—he felt that the elective classes were going to make DHS much more competitive with science programs in other, larger schools.

After leaving the Board of Education, she stopped at Destiny Properties and told Sue Ann the news. Sue Ann had looked like she might climb up on top of her desk and dance until Jenny grabbed her arm and said, “Relax already. It isn’t that big a deal.”

“Not that big a deal?” Sue Ann said. “It’s a
humongous
deal! It means our summer of hanging out together again will now also be at least an autumn, winter, and spring of hanging out, too. And it must mean that you’re, well, bouncing back…
from Mick,
” she added in a whisper so her co-workers wouldn’t hear.

Jenny kept her voice low. “Um, bouncing back—no. I’m still miserable, thanks. But I need to get back in the land of the living. And despite myself, I
have
enjoyed being home in Destiny. Somewhere along the way, I guess I realized I actually
like
it here.”

Sue Ann shrugged, looking sorry to hear that Jenny was, indeed, still suffering. “Well, I’ll take what I can get,” she said. “And if you need me to, I’ll cancel my plans with Jeff this weekend and hang out with you instead.”

“You’d cancel a carefully planned sex marathon for me?” Jenny asked, truly touched.

“Are you kidding? Of course I would. Sex comes and goes, but a best friend is forever.”

Jenny smiled softly, the most she could manage right now. “Well, lucky for you, I’m going to be knee-deep in lesson plans this weekend, so you can still break out the lingerie. But let’s organize a swimming day next week, one afternoon when you’re off work, so you can tell me all about it.”

Sue Ann tilted her head, still speaking quietly. “You don’t mind hearing about marathon sex when you’re not having any?”

Jenny shrugged. “It’ll be just like when
I
was having great sex and
you
weren’t. I’ll live vicariously.”

What she’d told Sue Ann wasn’t just her way of letting her friend off the hook—she really
would
need to spend most of the next two weeks preparing for her classes and getting mentally ready to jump back into the Destiny community in a much more prominent way.
Which would be a great distraction from her broken heart, something she sorely needed.

Because, just as she’d implied to Sue Ann, she wasn’t any less in love with Mick than she’d been a few days ago. In fact, her bones
ached
for him. Her skin longed for his touch. The only thing that had changed was that she’d quit moping around. She’d reminded herself that she hadn’t come home to Destiny looking for a man, or love, or sex—she’d come here to retreat and make some decisions. And now, finally, she’d just made a few.
Move on with your life. Take this job where you can make a difference. Stay here where you have a few people who love you—at least for a while.

Of course, while her
father
counted as one of those people, she was still mad as hell at him, and she wasn’t sure she’d get over that anytime soon. Even though he came over that very evening with pork chops for the grill and a heartfelt apology.

“I had a dream about your mother last night,” he told her.

She sat at the picnic table on the patio, despite the persisting heat, and grudgingly listened to him. “Oh?” It didn’t surprise her—given the shrine, she suspected he dreamed about her mom all the time.

“In the dream, I was sitting on the glider on my front porch, and she walked right up and sat down beside me. And she said…that maybe we expected too much from you, put too many demands on you, and that it was hard to be perfect all the time. She said I had to let you find your own way. And it seemed…so
real,
like she was really there with me.”

That part actually took Jenny aback. Because she’d had dreams like that about her mother, too, dreams that seemed realer than real—but she hadn’t had one for a long time now. Yet the message that her mother had delivered in this dream to her dad was…well, enough to make her wonder if somehow it
was
real, if her mom had looked down from somewhere above and seen into her heart—and was trying to make her dad see now, too.

And just then, Jenny remembered that recent night when she’d been thinking about Mick, and love, and trying to convince herself she wasn’t in it, and how she’d heard her mother’s voice in her mind—and now, combined with her father’s dream, the very recollection sent a cold chill rippling down her spine despite the suffocating heat.

That was when her dad turned from the grill to face her, a big two-pronged fork in hand. “I know this doesn’t make up for what I did,
Jennygirl
, but I know I was wrong, and I truly am sorry for causing you so much hurt. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

Jenny considered the words slowly, truly absorbing them. Her father sounded more like the dad she knew and loved than he had in weeks, and she could feel his sincerity, could feel his yearning to get back to the closeness they usually shared.

Her reply came from the heart. “I accept your apology, Dad.” Then she took a deep breath and tried to say the rest. “And I’m trying to forgive you. But it might take a while. I know you can’t understand this, but Mick was…the most amazing thing to ever happen to me. Everything before him, even Terrence, just…paled in comparison to the way he made me feel. So, yeah, like you said, maybe he
wasn’t
the guy I thought if he left so easily, but on the other hand, you put him in an awful position, and he’d been under a tremendous strain all summer, and his brother just died a painful, horrible death, and Mick had to bury him with his own bare hands, so…I’m just not sure it’s fair to judge him by that one choice.”

“You’re right,” he said without missing a beat, shocking her. “And I wish like hell I could take that back, Jenny.”

“Me, too.”

Her dad looked even more troubled now and let out a sigh. “I reckon when you called me and said you’d taken the job and decided to stay, I thought it meant you were feeling better, and getting over him. But you’re not, are you?”

She shook her head. “Taking the job and feeling better are two different things. And as for getting over Mick, I’m honestly not sure that I…ever will.”

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked, looking nearly as glum as she felt.

“As long as you don’t let the pork chops burn.”

He flinched, turned,
then
flipped the chops on the grill. After which he put down his fork and crossed the patio toward her.

Despite her anger at him, putting her arms around her father’s neck provided a familiar comfort she needed, so she hugged him tight and felt a little safer in the world, like the dad she’d known and loved all these years was back.

After he returned to the grill, taking up his big fork once more, he said, “
Somethin
’ else I should tell you about.”

“What’s that?”

“I, uh, started
seein
’ a woman.”

At this, Jenny nearly fainted. “Wait—I didn’t hear you correctly. It sounded like you said you’d started seeing a woman.”

He turned to look at her. “I did. I mean, I am.”

Her jaw dropped. Talk about a miracle. “Wow.”

“Is that…okay with you?”

“It’s…more than okay, Dad—it’s great. It was even my suggestion if I recall.”

He nodded in concession. “
S’pose
it was at that. Anyhow, her name is Anita, and she, uh, owns the Dew Drop Inn.”

Jenny’s jaw dropped still further. “Seriously?”

“Does that bother you? Me dating somebody who owns a bar?”

“Me?
No. I’m just surprised it doesn’t bother
you
.”

“Well, about that,” he said. “Anita ain’t the sort of woman—on the outside—who you might expect me to like. But she’s got a real good heart, and I think once you get to know her a little that you’ll like her, too.”

The irony of the whole thing, that her father was dating a woman who apparently didn’t meet normal Destiny standards, nearly made her burst into tears—but she didn’t. She was done crying. She just said, “I’m sure I will. I think you’d have felt that way about Mick, too.”

That night, around dusk, Jenny finished off her day by canoeing across the lake and taking her telescope up onto the rocks that had first lured her onto Mick’s property. It felt strange to be walking back up that hill knowing he was nowhere around, and it reminded her—all too vividly—of that first night, of the unexpected, hot, urgent sex they’d shared. He’d been a stranger then, but it was almost hard to remember that, to think of him that way now.

As night fell around her, though, as the stars came out, as always, it made Jenny feel a little more at peace. She still hurt inside, but all those stars twinkling up above her reminded her how much more was going on out there, and that she was but an infinitesimal speck on a tiny blue planet on the edge of a galaxy that was one of trillions. And it would all be okay. She would survive this. It still hurt—it hurt so bad that it felt like something was clawing at her insides—but she would survive anyway.

And it was just as she was about to go searching for some deep-space objects that she glanced up in time to see a falling star go trailing downward, appearing to land on some distant hillside. Of course, she knew there was no such thing as a falling star, that what she’d just seen was actually a meteor, a piece of rock that had entered the earth’s atmosphere and was burning up as it fell.

But the little girl inside her that had once believed in fairy tales and wishes upon stars quickly remembered that when you saw a falling star you were supposed to make a wish on it. And her first thought was to wish that she would get over Mick, that she would be strong and happy without him.