The Wishing Tree (15 page)

They made small talk for a while, catching up on their
jobs, his family, and the whereabouts of mutual friends. Ivy carefully avoided asking about his dating life—she didn’t need to know, really, since Shea had given her the basic outline. As he talked about his renovation work, she snuck glances at him, smiling at the red sauce on his chin, resisting the urge to reach across the table and wipe it off like she once would’ve.

Instead she ate about half of her meal, then signaled the waiter for a box. When she looked back, he was smiling.

“You and your boxes,” he said.

It was as if he was glad to see that not everything about her had changed. They couldn’t retrieve everything they had had together, but maybe they could find enough to hold on to.

“Mind if we stop by the house on the way back?” Michael
asked as they got back into the Jeep. “I’ve got to check on this stain I tried on the deck this afternoon. I wanted to see if I need to get more of it in the morning. It might need another coat.”

She rested her box of food on her lap and nodded. “I don’t have anywhere else to be,” she said, hoping he would take that as she meant it—that the evening by no means had to end. The sun hadn’t even set yet. The last thing she wanted to do was spend an uncomfortable evening with her mother and sister, dancing around what happened in the bridal store. The more time she spent with Michael, the less time she had to spend at home.

They sped past the ocean and she noticed the tide was out. If everything went well, they could go for a walk at
sunset, one of their favorite things to do. Well, one of the things they used to love to do.

He pulled into the drive of Mrs. McCoy’s house, the house that was now his. He got out, then turned and leaned into the Jeep. As he did, a breeze kicked up and she caught a whiff of his cologne. He always did smell good, strong and clean, not wimpy like some men. She looked into his eyes, noting how blue they were. Elliott’s were so dark brown you couldn’t tell the pupils from the irises. It was hard not to compare them.

“If you want to come in, you can. I won’t be long,” he said.

“Sure.” She sprang from the seat, eager to be alone with him—away from attentive waiters and the watchful eyes of her family. Maybe they would stay up talking late into the night. Maybe she’d make her sister
really
worry.

Michael’s cell phone rang from inside his pocket. He pulled it out and studied it. “Owen,” he said to her and answered it. She listened to the one-sided conversation.

“Yeah.” (Silence.)

“Yeah.” (A glance over at her. More silence.)

“Of course not.” (Silence.)

“Shut up, O.” Owen’s laughter was so loud, she could hear it coming through the phone.

“Yeah. At the house.” (A longer stretch of silence.)

“Huh, no need to worry about that.” (A frown followed by another glance at her.)

“Yeah, later, man.” He hung up and resumed his trek around to the back entrance, since the front entrance was covered by the scaffolding. She followed along glumly, thinking that she knew what Owen had been saying to
Michael, and what Michael had assured him of. Owen was cautioning him to be careful, and Michael was telling him that it wasn’t a problem. She pouted a little at the thought of not even being a temptation.

Inside the house you couldn’t tell that the major renovation was going on outside. Everything pretty much looked like she remembered it. The same 1970s furniture. The same lighthouse figurines cluttering the surfaces. The same smell even—part old-lady perfume, part mothballs. “What are you going to do with all this stuff?” she asked just to make conversation.

He shrugged. “Get rid of it I guess.” He smirked. “Why? You want it?”

Her eyes flickered over to the cabinet where Mrs. McCoy kept the teapot she used for their tea parties. “Maybe some of it.” She scanned the room again.

“Be right back,” Michael said, and walked outside.

Ivy crossed the dining room and opened the cabinet door, hoping that the teapot was still there. Ah yes. She breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted the white china teapot, painted with pink-and-blue flowers. She reached out and touched it, running her fingers along the surface. Pulling her hand away, she found a thick layer of dust coating her fingers. She pulled the teapot out and decided to wash it off.

She was drying it when Michael walked back in. He stopped short when he saw her. “Where did you find that?” he asked.

She pointed at the cabinet. “Where Mrs. McCoy always kept it,” she said. “It was dirty, so I decided to wash it.”

He stood and watched her, his eyes following the
movements of the towel across the surface. Finally he spoke. “You and Shea were always coming over here.”

“Yep,” she said. She walked over to the table and set the teapot down, dry and shiny. She sat down too and looked over at him, an invitation. Amazingly, he didn’t argue, didn’t say that he should get her home, didn’t walk back outside and make some lame excuse so he could keep his distance. He simply took the seat beside her, resting his hands on his thighs as he stared at her.

“You look like you did back then. When Owen and I would come over here to get you, to talk you into coming outside with us.” He smiled. “And to steal those cookies Mrs. McCoy always served.”

“Scones,” she said. “They weren’t cookies, they were scones.”

“Whatever. They were good.”

Mrs. McCoy used to make the best cinnamon scones. Ivy had tried many others since then, but none tasted as good as hers. Of course she kept that little bit of information from her aunt Leah. “She always made sure that you and Owen got your share.” As she said it, she could picture the two towheaded boys with impish smiles leaving a trail of scone crumbs as they dashed back outside, shooed away as she and Shea yelled in outrage, “No boys allowed!” She suspected that Mr. McCoy put them up to it. He wanted a scone too.

“Those were good times,” he said.

She nodded, her mind playing a reel of memories from this kitchen, this street, this beach. Someone had long ago erected a basketball goal on the street and there were often
neighbors involved in an informal game, pausing whenever a car drove by. Sometimes she and Shea played against Owen and Michael even though they never won “The best,” she agreed. “I was sorry they had to end.”

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “They didn’t have to end.”

He was referencing her decision to marry Elliott. But that wasn’t what she meant. For her, the magic of Sunset ended long before then. She looked over at him, wondering how to explain that. She pictured herself on that bike, circling the island in large, aimless loops, trying to make sense of this new life she found herself in, unable to escape the sadness that had gripped them all.

“Do you remember when we decided to get married?” she asked.

His wrinkled forehead told her she had shocked him. “What a question,” he said.

“Well, do you? Do you remember actually deciding to get married?” She looked away from his penetrating gaze. “Or did it get decided for us somehow?”

He glared at her. “Is that what you think?”

She glared back. “Sure. Remember how my mother and your mother started planning our wedding, right in front of us? We had only been dating three months, for pete’s sake!”

She could see their two families gathered that last summer her dad was there, all laughing and talking at once, the adults sipping cocktails while the kids calculated how long they had to be there before they could slip away. They were having dinner out on the deck. Her mother had looked over at Michael and Ivy, holding hands, and with a knowing
smile on her face, remarked about when they would get married. As Ivy stood silently, gripping Michael’s hand a bit tighter, his mother and hers had started planning their wedding. She watched while her life got decided for her—when they would get engaged (their senior year of college), where the wedding would be held (on the beach, of course), and where they would live (near his family, since his job would be working for his father), but still close enough for plenty of visits to Sunset, just a “hop, skip, and jump away,” as Michael’s mother always said.

“So what?” Michael asked. “I thought girls liked that sort of thing.”

“Well, not me. I didn’t.”

“Well,
sorry
,” he said in exaggerated fashion.

She sighed and tried again. “What I’m trying to get at is the fact that everything was so decided. You all thought you knew what my future would be—should be. I didn’t like my future being so certain.”

“I did,” he said softly.

There, too, she saw the difference between them. He wanted the safe path, the certain future. Go to college a few years. Work for his dad. Marry his childhood sweetheart. He needed—craved—that kind of stability. But something in her always longed for more, something different. More excitement. More challenge. But she couldn’t tell him that, so she changed the subject.

“It didn’t help either when my parents divorced.”

He nodded slowly. “I always suspected that was part of it. You changed after their divorce. I thought you’d eventually get over it, but …”

“I’m not sure I ever did,” she admitted. “It shook up my whole view of men. So I ran away from it—from you.”

“Out of the frying pan into the fire.”

“It appears that way, yes.” She smiled grimly at his offer of backhanded sympathy. “Did I tell you Elliott’s been tweeting to me? I cut off my old email address and phone service. I just wasn’t ready to talk to him, or hear from him. I guess he thinks if he yells his apologies to the whole Twitter universe, I’ll come running back.”

“At least he’s sorry. That’s something. Don’t you want to work on it?” He examined her closely, too closely for her liking.

“Eventually.” She waved her hand airily. Not wanting to go into detail, she rose and busied herself with putting the teapot back in the cabinet and closing the door. “I’ve had quite a day and I’m getting pretty tired, so I think I’ll just walk home,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” he said. Then added, in that new Michael way he had, “You always do.”

She smiled at him with just one side of her mouth. “Maybe this trip I’ll prove to you just how wrong you are about me.”

Before he could respond, she turned and walked out the door.

Shea was nowhere to be found the next morning. Ivy couldn’t
help but wonder what had happened after she left the bridal store. Perhaps Shea had ended up finding a dress without her. Perhaps Owen had calmed her down with his sweet, sensible ways. Perhaps the two of them had eaten dinner and Shea had restored her sense of humor over crab cakes at Elijah’s. Perhaps—and this was a reach—her sister had forgiven her.

She sat for a long time at the island sipping coffee, wondering if either her mother or sister would happen by. At one point she thought she heard her mother on the phone, the girlish giggle she’d heard before wafting through the house. She frowned into her coffee, thinking that today she would mention her mother’s secret conversations to Leah, press her to tell her what she knew. One thing she’d learned about
her mother long ago, there was precious little she didn’t tell Leah.

That had once been true of her and Shea.

Her mother entered the room just as Ivy was about to go upstairs and shower. Ivy set her cup down on the island, empty except for a fraction of an inch of milky coffee in the bottom of the cup. She watched Margot bustle around the kitchen, intent on making the single piece of wheat toast she ate each morning, whistling as she buttered the bread and slid it into the toaster oven. In her head, Ivy rehearsed different ways to bring up what happened with Shea. She wondered if her mother even knew.

“Good morning, Mom,” she ventured.

“Good morning, Ivy,” Margot replied, her voice preoccupied. She even nearly burned her toast. Ivy suspected the phone conversation she had heard was what was tying up her thoughts—and inspiring her whistling.

“Were you on the phone back there?” she tried. “I thought maybe you were talking to Shea.”

“Shea is with Owen and no—I was not talking to her.” Margot smiled. “I was taking care of some wedding business.” She looked over at Ivy meaningfully. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

Ivy took the hint and dropped the subject but didn’t leave the room yet either, even though she needed to shower and get to the bakery. In her head, she practiced broaching the subject of what had happened with Shea. She wondered if her mother knew and was just pretending not to, or if Shea hadn’t confided in her. Perhaps there hadn’t been time, or perhaps Shea didn’t want to open up to Margot either.
Ivy had definitely sensed tension between the two of them, but she had chalked it up to wedding stress. Maybe it was more than that.

“So, Shea and I didn’t find a dress yesterday,” she said.

Her mother looked up, her blue eyes locking with Ivy’s over the top of her glasses. “I heard about that,” Margot said. She returned to eating her toast standing up, the bread crunching loudly as she bit into it.

“Shea got really … upset. At me.”

Margot nodded. “Heard about that too.”

“She made me leave her there. Called Owen to come get her.”

“Shea’s been … kind of emotional lately.”

“About the wedding?”

“Of course that’s a big part of it.” Her mother put her toast on a plate and looked out the large bank of windows, studying the marsh as if she’d never seen it before. “I think that she’s also trying to make sense of your return. Seeing Michael the way you have been.” The tone of her mother’s voice was suspicious, as if Ivy were there to cheat on Elliott. When really it was the other way around.

Ivy got defensive. “I’m just resolving things, Mom. The wedding gave me a good reason to come back and … face up to what happened five years ago.”

Margot held up her hand. “I understand that. Better than you know. But Shea …” She looked back out at the marsh again as she searched for the right words. She turned back to Ivy. “Shea’s a bit of an idealist. She hasn’t been married yet. She thinks that things should go a certain way.” She raised her eyebrows. “And there’s no convincing her
otherwise.” A smile flickered across her face. “Better to let her find out for herself, kind of like someone else I know.”

Ivy swallowed. Her mother’s inflection was deserved and even expected. She’d refused to listen to anyone in the family when they warned her against moving to Asheville, against pursuing a relationship with Elliott. “He’s a stranger,” Margot had said. Then later, “Whatever you’re running from will eventually find you in Asheville just like it found you here.” Her mother had been right on both counts—but you couldn’t have told her that then. Then she believed she knew all she needed to know about Elliott. And she believed that happiness waited for her in Asheville—a happiness she’d never known at Sunset Beach. Somewhere amid the mountain peaks and artsy atmosphere of her new home, she’d find the kind of life she’d always wanted.

But she’d never been able to stop missing Sunset. When she looked at the mountain peaks, she wanted to see the vast ocean. When she gathered with new friends for dinner, she wanted to gather with people who’d known her all her life. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her life in Asheville—she’d been quite happy there. It was that she’d wanted all of this too. She wanted her future to include her past. Part of being back at Sunset was figuring out if the two could mutually coexist.

“Shea wants to wear my wedding dress,” her mother said, her tone turning businesslike. She took Ivy’s coffee cup, rinsed it, then popped it into the dishwasher. “I’ve begged her to let it go. That’s why I sent you out shopping with her yesterday. I had hoped that either she would find something she liked or she’d find the courage to ask you
about the dress.” Her mother eyed Ivy, gauging her reaction. That wedding dress was a sore subject, and they both knew it. “Since she found neither a replacement nor the courage to ask you, I told her that I would ask you. She’s … afraid to bring it up with you. She knew it would make you uncomfortable.”

“Is that why she got so angry yesterday? She’s mad that I have your wedding dress?”

Margot walked around and sat beside Ivy at the island, resting her hand on Ivy’s knee. “She’s just … mad. I don’t really totally understand why, and I suspect that the two of you will, at some point, have to talk about it before either of you can move on.” Her mother squeezed her knee. “I think you coming back here to help out with your sister’s wedding was very brave. It’s something that I never thought I’d have again—both my girls, together, planning a wedding. It’s so wonderful that we’re all together.” Margot’s smile was radiant. She looked every bit like the mother of the bride.

Ivy resisted the urge to point out that they weren’t exactly all together—her father was conspicuously absent, and she and Shea weren’t speaking. “It is nice, us back together,” she agreed dutifully. In her mind she was already trying to remember where she’d stored that wedding dress. Was it the attic? Or the back of her closet?

She stood up and patted her mom’s shoulder. “I’ll see if Elliott can find the dress,” she lied. In truth, she’d ask April to ask Elliott. “But now I’d better get to the bakery,” she said. “I told Leah I’d help her get ready for a cake tasting for a prospective bride and groom.”

Her mom snickered. “It’s all hands on deck for that one.
Apparently the mother of the bride is quite a case. Very demanding. Very particular.” Margot smiled. “Don’t even say what you’re thinking.” She winked at Ivy, a small acknowledgment that she might be a wee bit over-controlling with Shea’s wedding too.

Ivy smiled. Then she left her mother and headed upstairs. Closing her bedroom door, she dialed the number that was as familiar to her as her own. When April answered she said, “I need your help,” instead of hello.

April teased, “What now?” as though she was put out by Ivy’s request. But they both knew different. They both knew April would do whatever Ivy needed. That was just the kind of friend she was. And as expected, April promised she would do exactly what Ivy asked. Ivy hung up the phone, happy that there was one person in her life she could count on.

As she showered and dressed, her thoughts drifted back to the first time she met April, on her second trip to the mountains—a trip she’d told her family and Michael was for a job interview but was really to see Elliott, who’d she’d kept up with daily since her solo ski trip. Their attraction had only grown as they communicated via daily email and phone calls. She’d even found herself being less careful about keeping it from Michael. It was almost like she wanted to be caught, wanted to confess to him what was going on. The problem was even she wasn’t sure what that was.

So when Elliott begged her to come back for a second visit, she agreed. The trip, she was certain, would help her find out what really existed between her and Elliott. She would either resolve to love him or leave him behind.
Though she knew the right answer, she found herself hoping for the wrong one. In the weeks leading up to her departure, she’d found it hard to look Michael in the eye.

Being a gentleman, Elliott had arranged for her to stay with his cousin, a girl named April who he promised was “a lot of fun—the sister I never had.” Desperate for the time with him, she readily agreed, though she doubted she’d warm to his cousin. When she arrived at April’s cabin that first evening, she asked April one simple question, “What do I need to know about your cousin?” And that had been all it took. Three hours and many mugs of coffee later, the two young women had become friends.

By the end of the trip, April had grown to feel like family. Which had been good, considering what came next. It had been April Ivy ran to after the big blowup with her family, April who made her more coffee and offered her listening ear as Ivy sorted through what it meant to leave everything she’d believed about her certain future to pursue an unknown, uncertain one. The one thing she’d needed to know back then was that Elliott would be in that future. The rest would take care of itself, she’d believed. What a fool she’d been.

Her thoughts stayed with her as she finished getting ready and drove to the bakery. Pushing them aside, she breezed through the display area into the kitchen, where she could hear Leah singing along to her oldies station on the little radio she kept back there. She thought about Leah’s line of questions the last time she’d been there, pressing her to tell the details of her love story with Elliott. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it and hoped that Leah didn’t ask her this time to continue her story.

She was relieved to find Leah busy setting up the cake tasting for the bride and her mother, too distracted to ask questions. She waved Ivy over and started throwing out instructions. The two worked in companionable, welcome silence, with no mention of Elliott’s name. Ivy cubed the cakes, mounding the samples on plates: red velvet, magnolia vanilla, chocolate fudge, caramel, and lemon. Leah spooned a variety of frostings into retro-colored bowls with colorful spoons for scooping out dollops onto the cake cubes: buttercream, white wedding, and whipped, and the fillings: cream cheese, and raspberry. She was glad they didn’t have time to talk, but she couldn’t keep the love songs that Leah played from bringing up memories of times shared between her and her husband. Much as she tried to push Elliott to the back of her mind, he had a way of elbowing his way back up to the front. She couldn’t help but think that he would love knowing that.

When they were done setting up the table, they took stock of their work, making sure every detail was attended to in preparation for the tasting. The idea was that the customers would build their own custom cake with Leah’s subtle, expert guidance. Ivy’s favorite combination was the chocolate fudge topped with whipped-cream icing, a combination Leah’s customers had dubbed the Ho Ho Wedding Cake. But Leah’s bestseller was the lemon paired with a raspberry filling and topped with the white wedding icing, a combination that had been dubbed by satisfied customers as the Pink Lemonade Cake because it really did taste like pink lemonade. No matter what customers chose, they were always satisfied. Leah made sure of that.

They stood back and complimented each other on a job well done. Leah wiped her hands on an apron that looked like it belonged in an exhibit about the American homemaker, circa 1950. Bright red cherries dotted blue fabric, with a rickrack trim circling the edges. Ivy wished she had her camera—she’d snap a picture. She felt a little pang at the thought of who she’d show it to first. Elliott had always liked Leah, his respect for her growing when she’d defied the rest of the family and come to the party April threw them after they got married. If she showed him that picture, he’d laugh. He’d say, “That’s so Leah.” Because it was. She tamped down the pang of missing him, focusing on the work to distract her. Satisfied that the display was ready—and ahead of schedule at that—Leah walked over to the computer across the room and turned it on. “Come over here,” she directed Ivy. “I’ve got something that a young person like you should be interested in.”

Ivy blanched as the homepage for Twitter filled the computer screen, her heart racing as Leah watched it load with a smile. Her background was hot pink with cupcakes peeking out from behind the text boxes. She watched as Leah sat down and typed in a tweet about a tasting being ready, listing off the choices the customers would be sampling. She turned proudly to Ivy. “Lester says this is the way to get in touch with new clients.” She pointed proudly to the number of followers. “Look how many people are following me already!” Leah had only a couple dozen followers, but from the look on her face, it might as well have been millions.

She rested her hand on her aunt’s shoulder. “You are so cutting edge, Aunt Leah.” She could feel her heart resuming
its normal pace. She’d been so worried Leah was going to show her Elliott’s tweets, tell her to reconsider or something inane like that. Instead she was just happy about her own foray into social media. Ivy exhaled her relief.

“You spend much time on Twitter?” Leah asked. “It’s so addictive.” She turned her attention back to the screen, scrolling through her news feed as she half-paid attention to Ivy’s response.

“I did some,” Ivy lied. “But just for business. You know, real estate connections and that type of thing. Now that I’m not doing that anymore …” She let her voice trail off intentionally so that Leah would assume she had lost all interest in Twitter when in fact she’d been on just that morning, checking on Elliott because she couldn’t resist knowing what he was saying and, more and more, who was following him and what
they
were saying. It seemed a lot of women wanted to hear the kind of apology he was issuing, wanted to be pursued the way he was pursuing her.