Second Time Around (4 page)

Yes, indeed, Vanessa had created a life around the art of being a professional giver, an organizer extraordinaire. In return, all she asked from the recipients was a little respect, recognition, and gratitude. Until a half hour ago, she’d thought she’d received those sentiments from her father, but then the letters proved he’d been playing her. Duping her. Lying to her. It was unacceptable.

She shook her head, forcing his image away. She ran a hand over letter after letter that showcased her mother’s loving words and prayers. Words of faith that God would take care of them both and loved them both. To think that Dorian Pruitt had never given up trying to contact her daughter even when she’d received constant rejection. To think that her father had intercepted every one of those letters and sent them back.

“It wasn’t my doing!”

Her words quickly soaked into the rag rug, making her wonder if she’d even said them aloud.

No matter. She’d felt them and ached with the anguish and confusion behind them. Her unassuming, needy father had placed himself as a mighty guard between mother and daughter. A pit bull where she’d believed him to be a cuddly lapdog. He’d lied and said her mother didn’t love her anymore and wouldn’t have been able to take care of her if she did. He’d called Dorian Pruitt a loser, a woman who hadn’t appreciated what she had when she’d had it. A mean woman who’d made the two of them suffer with loss. Yes, indeed, Yardley Pruitt had spent his life making Vanessa think she’d chosen correctly by staying with him. Who needed a mother, anyway?

I
did.

Vanessa pulled the packet of letters to her chest and fell sideways onto the bed, pulling her knees close. How would things have been if she’d chosen to be a part of her mother’s free-spirited existence instead of burrowing into the safety of her father’s intractable life of black and white with no room or tolerance for gray? Her heart throbbed with a sorrow and uncertainty she hadn’t experienced in… in thirty-four…

This was ridiculous. She forced herself to sit and reached for a tissue on the bedside table. Wallowing in the could-have-beens was a waste of time. It was too late. Her mother was gone.

As she blew her nose, she noticed a ticket on the bedside table. She picked it up. It was a Time Lottery ticket. Had her mother bought one for herself, hoping to go back and live another life? Were the regrets she’d mentioned in her video so strong that she’d longed for another chance?

Vanessa made note of the date. The choosing of the three Time Lottery winners was tomorrow. Irony of ironies. Wouldn’t it be horrible if her mother was one of the winners? Talk about too late…

Vanessa placed the ticket with the letters when she noticed the name handwritten on it:
Vanessa Pruitt.

Not Dorian Pruitt.

Vanessa.

“Me?”

She stared at her name, then grabbed up the Christmas letter.

Please call me. Just one phone call. I have a gift for you that could change everything, something I thought of the other day and bought… I want you to have it, because I want you to have every chance to live a life of fulfillment and joy.

Chance.

A chance to change everything.

The Time Lottery.

Vanessa’s heart beat double time. She’d never considered buying a ticket. To do so would be to admit her life wasn’t perfect. But now. To know that her mother had wanted her to have the opportunity of a second chance…

“Oh, Mother.”

The drawing was tomorrow. As she calmed her breathing, she realized she could finally allow herself to consider the words Dudley had wanted her to think about:

If only…

Malibu

As soon as Brandy left for the day, Lane rushed into her living room and turned on her Bose stereo system. There were speakers in many rooms, and within seconds she surrounded herself with Faure’s “Dolly” Suite. Though she could tolerate silence in the daytime hours, she had trouble dealing with it in the dark. And dark was descending quickly.

How laughable. Lane Holloway. Mega movie star. Leading a glamorous life of premiers, beaded gowns, and Harry Winston jewelry. Yeah, right. If the world only knew how many evenings she spent alone with nothing to do, no place to go, and worse yet, nowhere she was
able
to go without getting pounced on by paparazzi. She couldn’t even take a walk with the assurance she’d have privacy. She was a prisoner in her home. So in order to dispel the power of the four walls, she kept them filled with light and sound.

To keep away the boogeyman.
At the thought, she moved to the kitchen and flipped on the lights. When was the last time she’d thought of that phrase? High school? She and her boyfriend Toby had loved to watch scary movies, though Toby
had
confided that his motivation stemmed more from her need to cuddle close through the scary parts rather than any great story line or fascination he had for blood and guts.

She smiled at the thought of him. She’d been thinking about him often lately. Memories of Toby had surfaced when she’d gone through the rather public breakup with Klaus. Actors… can’t live with them, can’t live with them.

Toby and his dimples. His shy way of looking over his long lashes, sticking his hands in the pockets of his jeans. And his kisses… Tomorrow was the Time Lottery drawing. Brandy had bought her a ticket, wanting her to give her life with Joseph Brannerman a second chance. She leaned on the breakfast bar and thought of the lovely Joseph with his perfect
GQ
persona, perfect manners, perfect life.

Too perfect. Lane wasn’t surprised that Brandy liked him. To the outsider, Joseph was everything the celebrity Lane Holloway could ever want or need. He was comfortable with her fame, earned a six-figure salary as a stock analyst, and could converse with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks as easily as most people chatted with their mailman.

What no one realized was that Joseph was high maintenance. Mt. Everest-need-oxygen high. After he’d moved in with her, she’d never felt at ease, never felt like she could bum around in sweats and no makeup, eating crackers and Easy Cheese for dinner if the mood hit. Joseph looked exquisite at all times. Even lounging around on Sunday morning he looked like an ad for the good life.

He was too much work. And so she’d let him go, hooking up with Stefan Embers for a quick go-round—what
was
she thinking?—before living, most recently, with Klaus.
He
was not high maintenance. Low maintenance. No maintenance. No self-maintenance. Klaus was an easy-going, lazy slob. Where was her medium-man, her man in the middle of high and low maintenance? A man who had balance in his life and could help her balance hers?

Toby Bjornson.

She laughed at the thought. Toby? No way. And yet…

She opened the refrigerator. Brandy had stocked it with all sorts of healthy things bent on maintaining Lane’s size-two figure. As a teenager, she’d been able to eat whatever she wanted. If Lane never ate another salad…

An impulse formed and she moved to the pantry. Yes! She took out the bag of chocolate chips and read the back. The Toll House recipe promised her satisfaction amid the dark and lonely night.

Within seconds she had the mixer out and the ingredients ready. She didn’t have any nuts but would make do with double the chocolate chips. Using the remote, she shut off the classical music and turned on the kitchen TV. She flipped channels until she found a program to match her mood.
Dirty Dancing
was showing on a movie channel. Perfect. Memories flooded back of making cookies with Toby in her parents’ kitchen while the sound track played…

Cooking to a beat had always been her specialty.

Kansas City

John Wriggens, the chief administrator of TTC, leaned back in his chair, forming a pencil bridge between his hands. “So, Mac. Tomorrow is the day. Is everything set? Are we ready to welcome three more guinea pigs into the winner’s circle?”

Mac clenched his jaw in a way that had become too familiar. After catching Wriggens taking a bribe from the husband of one of last year’s winners, Mac had wanted to get an investigation going into Wriggens’s suitability to oversee the program. And yet, he couldn’t. On a whim, he’d agreed to overlook Wriggens’s breach by securing his own job as the public relations liaison for the Time Lottery. He had the job for as long as he wanted it. But in return, he had to deal with the moral and administrative ambiguity of John Wriggens. It was a price that alternated between doable and deplorable.

Today was the latter. Wriggens was acting as if the lottery was his baby, when in truth—as far as Mac could see—he did little to earn his six-figure salary. But Mac would endure. For the good of the cause.

He realized Wriggens had not waited for his answer but had continued to talk. He was reiterating logistical details of tomorrow’s drawing as if
he
had set things up and not Mac.

Mac resorted to a tried-and-true method to get out of Wriggens’s office as quickly as possible: He sat back and let the man ramble. He hoped he’d finish soon because he had a lunch date with Cheryl and did not want to keep the lady waiting. She was such a joy, such a burst of energy into his life as a widower. He didn’t know what he’d do without her.

Suddenly, Mac noticed silence. Wriggens was grinning at him.

Oh dear.

Wriggens leaned forward on his desk, his voice low. “Who is she, Mac?”

Mac felt the heat in his face. “She?”

“The woman who’s preventing you from fully listening to me.”

Not listening wasn’t
all
Cheryl’s fault. Mac looked at his watch. “Forgive me if I seem distracted. My mind is swimming with details.” He stood. “I really need to check to see if all the lottery tickets have arrived. We’ve ordered some extra security to oversee them being placed in the sphere for the drawing. It’s best not to risk any hint of impropriety.”

The smallest of snickers escaped Wriggens’s mouth. “My thoughts exactly, right, Mac?”

As Mac left, the back of his neck tingled.

What did Wriggens know?

Cheryl started to hand Mac a sandwich across the center console of his car, then pulled it back and offered her face for a kiss. He was glad to oblige.

She sighed extravagantly, then whispered, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

He opened the Thermos of coffee and poured. “I thought you, of all people, would be energized by the intrigue. Not many couples get to picnic in a car—in the far corner of a parking lot of an abandoned park.”

She took a bite of a sandwich, then held it out for him to taste. “The park is abandoned because it’s January and Siberian out here.”

He exchanged hot coffee for a sandwich. “Just a few more days. Once we get through the latest drawing and send-off, I’ll take you somewhere special.”

“Oh, this is special,” she said. “We’ve done special. How about public?”

He’d actually been thinking of finding an obscure little restaurant in an obscure little town where people might not be up on their latest celebrities, because both Cheryl and Phoebe Thurgood—the other Time Lottery winner to return a year ago— were
known
and had been featured periodically in updates on their post-lottery life. A photo from Phoebe’s marriage to Peter Greenfield had even been on the cover of
People,
but they’d wisely gone underground since then. Mac hoped they were finding a little wedded bliss.