Turnabout's Fair Play (26 page)

“If you can’t find a freelancer who can take it this weekend”—she sighed—“e-mail it to me along with the series continuity guide and the style sheet, and I’ll do it myself.”

“Flannery, no, you can’t. I’ll do it.”

She shook her head, as if the editor could see her through the phone. “You have your family reunion this weekend. I don’t really have any other plans.” She forced a smile to try to instill confidence and enthusiasm into her voice. “Besides, I have faith that one of the freelancers will come through for us.”

The assistant editor ended the call to go find that mythical saint, and Flannery clipped the phone to the waistband of her jeans and entered the bakery and sandwich shop. The call had made her a few minutes late, and Jamie hadn’t walked in past her, so either he was running even later, or he was already here.

He wasn’t in line to order. She walked around the different areas of the restaurant, searching for tables with only one person. There—at the round-table booth in the corner. Dark hair and beard, wearing a dark-blue T-shirt and olive cargo pants, head bent over something.

She approached the table and set her tablet computer on it—and finally looked to see what Jamie was doing.

He held the library book at such an angle that she couldn’t help but see the cover and spine:
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
by Flannery O’Connor.

Without lifting his head, he looked at her over the top edge of the book and winked.

Flannery picked up her tablet and headed for the door. Ooh—he irritated her so much. She would never forgive him for this.

A hand grabbed her elbow. “Flan, I’m sorry.” But the amusement in his voice belied his words. “Please, come back to the table.”

“I should have expected this after the whole
Fanny
thing. If anyone was going to tease me and make a big deal of my name, it was going to be you.” She allowed him to lead her back to the table, where the book now sat closed, face down—but she would say
dragged
just to make it sound more dramatic when she told the girls Sunday at coffee.

“This Flannery O’Connor was a good writer.” He rested his hand on the book. “I don’t know why you don’t want to be associated with her.”

“It’s not so much that I don’t want to be associated with her—it’s that I’m tired of
only
being associated with her. I’m my own person. But to most people I’m the one with the same name as that author they were forced to read in sophomore lit. I get it almost every time I meet someone new.
‘Flannery—oh, as in the author Flannery O’Connor?’
At least my sisters’ names are somewhat normal and not necessarily automatically linked to the authors they’re named after.” She slid into the seat and dug in her purse to pull out her wallet.

“Emily and Sylvia?”

Frowning, she glanced at him as she stood again, ready to go to the front and order her lunch. “How’d you know their names?”

“I was standing there when you went through that whole explanation with Amy Joy Samuels. And I have to say, you should be glad you got the name Flannery. It’s unusual and distinctive. Emily and Sylvia—they could be just anyone. But Flannery—it’s not every day you meet someone who not only has that name but also is unusual and distinctive enough to carry it off. People will remember meeting a Flannery but probably not an Emily or a Sylvia.” He grinned at her.

Forgiveness and pleasure warmed the cockles of her heart (whatever heart cockles were), and she followed Jamie to the counter to place her order. He let her go in front of him.

Her stomach gurgled with the demand to be fed. She knew what she wanted without looking at the board. “I’ll have the Pick Two—Mediterranean veggie sandwich and bowl of broccoli cheddar soup, with a baguette and a regular fountain drink, and go ahead and add on a toffee-chip cookie.”

She handed over her frequent-diner card, which the clerk ran through the scanner on the side of his monitor. “Welcome back…Flannery—oh, hey, I did my literary criticism thesis on Flannery O’Connor this semester. Cool.” He handed the card back to her.

Flannery looked over her shoulder at Jamie, who smirked at her. He leaned forward. “See, now he’ll go home tonight and tell his girlfriend or whoever that he met someone named Flannery today, just like Flannery O’Connor.” His breath tickled her ear and cheek, and she took and released a jagged breath. Wow—she shouldn’t be having this reaction to him.

By the time they’d fixed their drinks—Flannery needing the extra boost of caffeine and sugar in Dr Pepper, Jamie opting for iced tea—their food was ready, so they carried everything back to the table.

“What have you been up to today—besides figuring out new and not-so-unique ways of torturing me?” She cast a pointed glare at the book, now on the half-circle booth seat between them.

“After I put fresh sheets on the guest bed and vacuumed and dusted in there and cleaned the bathroom, I spent a little while studying for the entrance exam that’s required for the…school program I’m thinking about. And then I spent some time on some online job websites, seeing what’s available. And then I talked to my stepdad for a while.”

Though Flannery hadn’t known him well—and hadn’t wanted to—when she made the fateful decision to join him in the coffee shop at the airport, the difference in his tone of voice when he mentioned his stepfather spoke volumes about what his trip out to visit his mom “and her family” had done for his relationship with all of them.

“What did you talk to your stepdad about?”

He shrugged. “Jobs. Things. What I like to do. What I might want to do. The possibility that if I can’t figure it out within the next couple of months, he wants me to go out there to work for him.”

Flannery pulled most of the sliced red onion off her veggie sandwich before taking a bite. This should fill her vegetable quota for the weekend. “Sounds like you and your mom’s family are getting along better now.”

“They’re
my
family, too.” He looked at her as if she’d just insulted not just them but his grandmother, too. She refrained from reminding him those words had been his own description of them a month ago. “My parents, my brother, and my sister.” Even the beard couldn’t hide the softness, the nostalgia that stole over his features.

“So your stepdad is helping you figure out what you want to do careerwise?”

“Yeah. There’s…there’s a lot of stuff in my past, issues from before my father died, that I’m still trying to work through about who I am and what my life is about. Don has really been there for me with that in a way that Mom would never be able to do.” Wonderment filled his voice. Then he shrugged one shoulder. “Of course, I don’t have long to get it all figured out before I need to know what job I’m supposed to be looking for or going back to school for.”

“I’m sorry the whole thing with Cole Samuels didn’t work out. I know you’d have done a great job on that marketing campaign.” She leaned over her plate to take another bite of her sandwich, not wanting to see him preen over such a compliment.

“How’s Dustin working out for you?” His voice sounded flat—but in an
I’m-trying-not-to-sound-jealous
kind of way, not a disinterested way.

She hid her smile. “We ended up keeping it in house. Dustin couldn’t come up with anything for us that we weren’t already prepared to do. And…Jack had a few ideas that someone had shared with him at a wedding reception of all places.” She ventured a glance at him.

Yep—he looked quite pleased with himself. “I’m glad I was able to pass those ideas along before it became illegal for me to do so.” He sighed. “Now if I can just figure out what it isn’t illegal for me to do….”

“What can you imagine yourself doing?” Flannery stirred the thick, cheesy soup, but instead of lifting the spoon to her lips, she broke off a piece of the small, crusty sourdough baguette and scooped the soup up with that.

Jamie held his fork in front of him, a large piece of lettuce dangling from the end of it. “What do you mean?”

She couldn’t believe she was about to tell him this. Caylor and Zarah didn’t even know about it. “When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wasn’t like Caylor with her love of literature and writing or Zarah with her passion for history. My dad’s a football coach, and my mom’s a chief surgeon at a hospital. My sisters went into banking and computer programming. By the end of my sophomore year, I had to declare a major. So since Caylor was majoring in English, and since I liked reading and writing, I decided to major in English. But I still had no idea what I wanted to do.”

“But you figured it out by imagining yourself doing something?”

“I’m getting there—hold on.” She grinned at him to soften the rebuke of his fractious tone. “I was involved in a small-group Bible study, and when I mentioned to the leader that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, she told me I shouldn’t just pray, but I should meditate.”

Scorn joined the irritation in Jamie’s expression and body language.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I had no idea what meditation was—other than just thinking really hard about one thing, and sitting on the floor Indian style, you know, with your hands like this….” She set her hands on the table, palms up, and touched the tips of her thumbs to the tips of her middle fingers. “And doing the whole
ooohhhhmmmm
thing.”

“And that helped?” He took a huge bite of his salad. At least chewing kept him from making faces at her.

“Not because of the sitting position, and I didn’t do the
ohm
thing, either. And at first I wasn’t sure. I’d go into my room and close the door and the blinds and turn off the light and sit in the middle of the floor like that. And I’d pray. I’d ask God to show me what He wanted me to do with my life. I’d concentrate on the things I enjoyed and was good at. Reading. Writing. Helping other people improve their writing—I worked part time in the writing lab as a tutor. And after doing this a few days, instead of remembering myself doing those things in classes or the lab, I suddenly visualized myself working in an office where I was doing those things. I was reading stuff. And I was helping to fix it and make it better. I wasn’t sure what this meant. But I tried it again the next day. And in that…vision, for lack of a better word, someone handed me a manuscript and said, ‘I need you to edit this.’ Day after day, I spent time doing this—starting with prayer first, just to make sure I was focused on God and not myself; and day after day, this became not just something fun to do, but it became a passion—I wanted to be an editor.”

A somewhat-bemused expression replaced his incredulity. “That’s how you figured out what you wanted to do with your life?”

Flannery shrugged. “I call it praymagining. And it’s worked for me in a lot of situations.” Of course, she hadn’t been using it in
this
situation. Could she imagine herself
with
Jamie O’Connor? Ugh—if she was with Jamie, as in, if they ended up getting to the point where marriage was a possibility, that would mean changing her name…to Flannery
O’Connor
.

No way! That was
so
not going to happen. If it were any last name other than that, she would change hers—maybe hyphenate, so she could still display her Irish heritage and her pride in whose daughter and granddaughter she was. Just not O’Connor.

But even with her utter abhorrence of having the name she’d learned to dread hearing, she could suddenly see herself walking up the church aisle toward Jamie—who was wearing a tux just like he’d worn at Zarah’s wedding. He held out his hand toward her, and she placed hers in his. He kissed her hand, then bent forward and—

“Flannery? You okay?”

“I—yeah. I’m fine.” She swallowed hard, blinking rapidly to clear the image of Jamie leaning toward her to kiss her.

Because now that she’d visualized it—or praymagined it or whatever she wanted to call it—she wanted it to happen even more than she’d wanted to become an editor.

Chapter 19

J
amie paused on the landing at the top of the stairs and waited for Kirby McNeill to catch up with him. He hadn’t noticed in their previous encounters that the elderly man had problems with stamina, but he supposed that was to be expected in someone his age. It took Cookie almost twice as long to get up to the second floor of his townhouse as it was taking Flannery’s grandfather.

“This will be your room.” Jamie ushered Kirby into the slightly larger of the two extra bedrooms, the one he actually had set up for guests. He set Kirby’s duffel on the low chest of drawers that also served as a nightstand for the bed.

“Thank you.” Kirby sounded winded, as if having trouble catching his breath.

Jamie tried not to let his concern show. “The bathroom is the door directly across.” He stepped across the narrow hall and flipped the light switch on. “I put some extra towels out, and there are some extra toiletries in the cabinet under the sink if you need anything.”

He stepped aside so Kirby could enter the bathroom to put his shaving kit on the vanity. “This is a nice place you’ve got here. So much larger than Flannery’s apartment.”