Sunrise Point (17 page)

October in the mountains was chilly, often wet, and the busiest apple harvesting time all year. Tom had worn a slicker all day and was still wet to the skin. He was bone tired by the time he was able to make it to the house at five o’clock.

“There you are,” Darla said, smiling. She jumped up from the table and Duke immediately thought she intended to pet him. He wagged and went to her and she put out her hands. “Ack! No, Duke, no! Sit. Sit.” Duke tilted his head and looked confused, then forlorn. But he stopped and sat.

Then she smiled at Tom and gave her clothes a brush as if to remove his hair that wasn’t there. She was decked out in a longish gray wool skirt, yet another pair of boots he didn’t recognize, a woolly orange jacket over a silky black blouse. Damn, but the woman could certainly look good.

He touched the jacket. “Nice,” he said.

She brushed the place he had touched, though he had washed his hands in the barn. “Cashmere,” she whispered to him. “So, when are we going out? Soon?”

“I can’t think of anywhere to take you that will justify that jacket,” he said. “I need a shower…”

Maxie was busy at the sink, washing up some of her baking dishes. “Long day, Tom?” she asked.

He frowned, then almost laughed at her. No one knew better than Maxie what the harvest was like. Two things occurred to him—Nora would have been helping with the dishes even though she hadn’t dirtied them and Darla hadn’t asked him if he was tired, if he’d had a hard day. But of course he wouldn’t say that. “Give me fifteen minutes.” He looked at his watch. “It’s still early.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’ve been reading all day and I’m bored. I’m ready for a change of scenery.”

Maxie turned from the sink. “I put your books on the stairs, Darla. Tom, since you’re going up for a shower, take them upstairs for Darla.”

“Oh, no, I’ve got them,” she said.

“I can do that,” Tom said.

“I’ll…I’ll read a little while you’re showering, then I’ll carry them—”

But he was already at the foot of the stairs. He picked up a stack of books—two textbooks and a paperback. He was transfixed by the paperback, the cover of which had a sexy vampire about to plunge his teeth into the neck of a beautiful woman on it. “Hmm,” he said. “I guess in pharmacology you have to be ready for anything,” he said.

She took the books away from him. “Sometimes I have to let my brain rest for a few minutes—what I study is pretty intense.”

He put the vampire book on top. “Yeah, this looks very relaxing…” Then he watched as she went up the stairs ahead of him. He followed. He braced both hands on the door frame of the guest room, leaning in. “Fifteen minutes, Darla. Just let me get cleaned up.”

“Take your time,” she said sweetly. “I’ll go downstairs and visit with Maxie.”

Twenty minutes later Tom was back in the kitchen and when he walked in, Darla’s eyes lit up as she looked him up and down. “Look at you,” she said, smiling. He wondered how he’d managed to please her; he wasn’t as spruced up as she was. He wore black jeans, a dark sweater and camel suede jacket. Instead of work boots, of which he had several pairs, he wore his going-out boots—polished and shiny like a good marine. She stood on her tiptoes and smoothed her hands along his shoulders. “This is a very good look on you. And I swear you must be six-five in your boots.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “Maxie, I don’t know where we’re going. You and Duke okay?”

“Oh, I think we’ll manage,” she said with a laugh. “Just have fun.”

“Want me to bring you home a dessert?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You eat two for me.”

“Let’s take my car,” Darla said. “That truck of yours is so high off the ground, I’m afraid I’ll break my neck getting in and out.” She held out her keys. “Want to drive?”

“Sure.” Then with a hand on the small of her back, he escorted her to her car. “This is new,” he said. “When did you get it?”

“Oh, about six months ago. Maybe nine. I can’t remember.”

“Nice,” he said. And when he got behind the wheel, “Lots of leg room.”

“You like it? You can heat your seat. Want me to show you how?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said with a chuckle.

This was all he had ever wanted, a woman just like this—sophisticated, accomplished, beautiful and already set up in life. A woman who would bring pride to his name, to his family. Darla was established and came from a good, strong, close family.

And yet it felt all wrong.

All the way to Arcata she told him about her current course of study, about drug trials and experiments and the FDA and the DEA and how people in her position had to be cognizant of the laws. As she had done before, she segued into the bonus perks after major sales and contracts, not to mention the generous expense account for the wining and dining of doctors and hospital administrators, as if these were the really important parts of her job. “That’s one of the best parts,” she admitted. “Entertaining my clients. And I’m good at it—I have one of the best client lists in the company, and I haven’t been there that long.”

“But what if Bob had lived?” he asked before he could stop himself. “You wouldn’t have been able to stay in one place long.”

“We’d been married less than a year,” she said. “Before he deployed.”

And it occurred to him, there was no Marine base in the Denver area. “How did you meet?” he asked.

She gave a heavy sigh, as if she’d rather not talk about it. Possibly the memories were still painful. “He was on leave, skiing with friends. I met him in Vail.”

“But he wasn’t stationed around there… .”

“No. But I traveled so often anyway, it was easy to go to him. Like all the time. I can work from home a lot as long as I have a phone and laptop, so I sometimes spent several days in a week with him.”

“But you lived in Denver?”

“Why are you asking this? Did he complain about this?”

Tom felt the icy wedge of her voice. He reached over and took her hand. “Never,” he said. “I just never thought of it before, and I wondered.”

“I was willing to move, to change jobs or companies, but Bob said it wasn’t fair—he’d just be deploying soon anyway. He didn’t want me to give up a good thing when in the end I was just going to sit alone, waiting, worrying…”

And Tom thought—
he is a much better person than I am.
If Tom fell in love and got married, he wouldn’t want his wife in another state. If he was newly married and about to deploy in a few months, he wouldn’t be happy about his wife not being around. Proving that he’d really screwed up by directing the conversation to her dead husband, she fell silent. He wasn’t sure what was worse, the silence or the conversation about drug trials and expense accounts. Finally he pulled into the square in Arcata and found a parking place.

“The only sushi place I know about is crappy and, I guessed, probably beneath your standards. How do you feel about Mediterranean?”

“Wonderful!” she said, beaming, quiet mood gone. And she held her place in the car until he came around and opened her door for her.

Darla seemed pleased with his choice of restaurant; she appeared to be back to her bright-eyed self. After they’d ordered drinks, an appetizer and their entrees, she reached across the table and took one of his hands. “Thank you, Tom, for being such a good host, good date.”

“I am?”

“You really are.” She laughed. “I look forward to these weekends with you. I hope you’re enjoying them as much as I am.”

“Totally.”

“I researched your orchard last week, in between other assignments for my class. It’s very well-known, you know.”

“Is it? Well-known to whom?”

“That’s what I love most about you—you’re so modest,” she said. “You have a laptop—search Cavanaugh Apples on Google sometime. The foodie sites love you. You’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Is there anything I don’t know about myself that I should know?” he asked.

The drinks came, the stuffed grape leaves. And Darla laughed at him. “I’m not sure. Do you know you have forty acres and two hundred and fifty trees with roughly twenty-eight types of apples? You’ve been the primary supplier in the county for twenty years. And most of your forty acres are still undeveloped and what’s considered to be prime real estate. And you have a very successful local cider business going on there. Cavanaugh is leading the pack in cider. You have quite a successful business.”

“Well, Maxie does,” he clarified.

“I was under the impression it was a family business,” she said, sipping her wine.

“It seems to be—it’s been in the family a long time. I had to make a choice between the Marine Corps and the orchard. Maxie can’t run it alone forever. Afghanistan helped me make the choice pretty easily.”

She sipped her wine thoughtfully. “Have you ever considered selling it?”

He devoured the stuffed grape leaves; Darla was apparently satisfied with one bite, half remaining on her plate. Funny, he was getting used to that—how she barely ate. “It was going to eventually come down to that, unless I made the decision to come home and run it. Maxie won’t retire till she’s on her last legs, but I’m not oblivious to the fact that she’s getting older. And a little slower, though not mentally,” he stressed. “We had a major showdown about the ladder last year. Junior, our foreman, brought to my attention that she’d fallen a couple of times. Even though she hadn’t been hurt, he could smell disaster coming and had no influence in convincing her to get an employee to climb the ladder if there was something she wanted done.” He laughed to himself. “Maxie’s been up on tripod ladders since she was just a kid, pregnant with my dad. She doesn’t really think she needs to slow down. And it probably keeps her young.”

“It’s a shame,” Darla said. “She deserves a much more relaxing retirement!”

“Like?” Tom asked, taking on the rest of the grape leaves.

“Like a low-maintenance home where people do all the hard stuff for you. In a nice place, like near the ocean. Where there are lots of people and activities and life is finally about fun rather than back-breaking work. But if anything should go wrong, like a fall or illness, there are trained professionals nearby. At the orchard, if Maxie falls off a ladder, it’s only you or Junior to help her. Or if she, God forbid, had a stroke…”

He stopped chewing and stared at her. He had never thought of that. In this place, in the country, people got old on their land and, unless they moved away to live with their children or grandchildren, they often died on their land. If they had an accident or got sick, their family took care of them.

Darla picked up the last piece of her stuffed grape leaves and popped it in her mouth. “We put my grandmother in assisted living last year. She didn’t think she wanted to go, but now she loves it. She’s the community poker champ, can you beat that? And it’s in a really beautiful Colorado Springs valley with glorious views, near enough we can visit her and bring her to visit us for weekends, where there are walking trails and all kinds of fun things for the residents to do. She’s so grateful now.”

“Is she,” Tom said in passing. Many things about Darla made him wonder. And then at the risk of slowing the conversation again he said, “I have such a hard time picturing you as the wife of a career marine… .”

To his surprise, Darla laughed. “Career marine? What gave you that idea?”

“Well, Bob gave me that idea when he said that was his intention… .”

“Was,”
she stressed. “When we got married he had pretty much given up that idea. I had a job all lined up for him—my dad has a golf buddy with a soft water conditioner manufacturing plant who wanted to add to his management team and Bob, being a smart, decorated marine, was perfect. Good salary, too.”

Tom wondered if Bob just talked about a career in the Corps in front of his boys to encourage them when in fact he was planning to exit and get a civilian job in a factory. But Bob didn’t seem like that kind of guy.

And the dinner arrived.

“Oh, my God,” Darla said, looking down at her Greek salad. “Have you ever seen so much food?”

Tom knew there would be a doggie bag, and not for Duke. But that was after he had a satisfactory taste of Darla’s uneaten dinner.

She lifted her fork, poised over her salad, and asked, “So, Tom, if you sold your orchard and looked for another line of work, what would you do?”

Tom had chicken kabobs—looked wonderful. He stabbed his fork into a wonderful cube of chicken and said, “Just out of curiosity, what do you have lined up for me?”

She laughed merrily. “You’re so funny.” She lifted one lovely light brown brow. “Well, there’s that manufacturing job, still open…”

He didn’t find that particularly funny. “There is nothing else I want to do.”

“But it’s exhausting,” she counseled.

“And if it ever becomes too much work at the harvest or the planting, there are lots of people around here looking for work. But if Maxie can last seventy-four years, I can last longer.”

“You could actually invest the money you earn from the sale of the orchard, watch it grow, take care of Maxie in high style
and
begin another career.”

He chewed and noticed that she grinned excitedly. What had her parents invested in that smile? It was simply beautiful. He was also curious about her breasts, so large and high and delicious-looking—he wondered if he would touch them and find them not real. That wouldn’t be an issue if he was in love, but he was beginning to realize he was not even close to in love. Still, he was curious.