Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel (13 page)

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

“Good,” Bobby growled, and he hung up the phone.

Jax put down the phone, too, and it was only then that she realized she was shaking all over
. This can’t be good for the baby,
she thought, putting her hands protectively over her belly.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, in the quiet kitchen. And, as if in response, she felt the baby move. It was a gentle, fluttering movement, almost like a tiny pair of wings beating. And it comforted her somehow.

She crossed her arms on the table then and put her head down on them. And she remembered the afternoon, thirteen years ago, that Bobby Lewis had walked into the Butternut drugstore and changed her life forever.

Jax had just graduated from high school that June, and she was living at home, working part time at Butternut Drugs
.
She’d had no idea, at the time, what the future held for her. But she had a feeling that whatever it was, it probably wasn’t worth getting excited about.

She wasn’t going to college. That much was clear. Her math teacher, Mrs. Martin, had been impressed by her quickness with numbers and had encouraged her to apply to the state university. But she hadn’t done it. She didn’t believe in herself. And, with the exception of Mrs. Martin, no one else seemed to believe in her either. Besides, even if she could have gotten into the University of Minnesota, there was no money to pay for her to go there.

So instead, she stood behind the makeup counter at Butternut Drugs, rearranging lipsticks and waiting for something,
anything,
to happen. And then, one day, it did. Bobby Lewis came in to buy a bottle of aftershave. And he stayed to flirt with Jax.

“Is that all you do all day? Arrange those little tubes?” he asked, watching her.

“They’re called lipsticks,” Jax said, unnerved by his proximity to her. “And the middle-school girls who come in here to look at them get them all out of order,” she explained. In spite of the drugstore’s air-conditioning, her face felt suddenly warm.

“Do you ever get bored working here?” Bobby asked, leaning on the counter.

“All the time,” Jax murmured, glancing over to see if Mr. Coats, who owned the drugstore, was within earshot. He wasn’t.

“Then why don’t you put that little tube down, and you and I will walk out that door and get into my pickup,” Bobby said. “We’ll buy a six-pack of beer, go for a drive, and have some fun. What do you say?”

“I say no,” Jax practically whispered. Her face was burning now. She’d never even been kissed before. And the way Bobby was looking at her, and talking to her, made her think he wanted to do a lot more than kiss her.

“Oh, come on,” Bobby coaxed. “It’s too nice a day to be stuck inside.”

She shook her head. “I’d get fired,” she said, putting a coral-colored lipstick back in its proper slot.

“Then I’ll come back at closing,” Bobby said. “We can drive down to the lake and watch the sunset.”

“I don’t think so,” Jax said, pretending now to be absorbed in dusting the eye shadow display. There was no way she was going out with him. She didn’t know him personally, but she knew him by his reputation. And his reputation was bad.

He was a liar, she’d heard, and a cheat and a thief. At twenty, he already had a rap sheet as long as her arm. And he was supposed to be mean, too. Even Jax’s father, no saint himself, had once said that Bobby Lewis was the kind of guy who couldn’t walk by a dog without kicking it.

But unfortunately for Jax, Bobby did have a few things going for him. He was good-looking, for one thing. And he practically oozed sex appeal, for another. And, as Jax was about to discover, he could also be very persuasive when he made up his mind that he wanted something. And right then, what he wanted was Jax.

“I’m not leaving until you say yes,” he said. “And I’ve got all afternoon.”

Jax looked up. Mr. Coats was coming over. And he didn’t look happy.

“Fine, I’ll go out with you tonight. But you have to go now,” she pleaded.

“See you at six,” he said. Then he gave her a long, slow smile and left the store.

In later years, Jax often thought that getting fired that day would have been a small price to pay for not getting involved with Bobby Lewis. But the truth was, she wasn’t entirely blameless. Because if he had to twist her arm to go with him that time, she went out with him willingly enough the next time. And the time after that.

Why, she couldn’t really say. She knew he was trouble, knew it would end badly. But she was bored. And lonely. And flattered by his attention. And deep down, she didn’t really believe she deserved anyone or anything better than Bobby Lewis.

But whatever the reason, it ended exactly the way they’d both known it would end, with Bobby sweet-talking Jax out of her clothes, and her virginity, in the backseat of his pickup one night. After that, he dropped the pretense of being charming and alternated between being mean to Jax and just ignoring her.

But soon, he lost interest in her altogether. And one day, when she was at work, rearranging the lipsticks again, Jax realized she hadn’t seen him in over a week.
Good riddance,
she told herself. But at that moment, a tube of lipstick slipped through her fingers and rolled under the counter, and as she knelt to retrieve it, she realized, in a moment like a thunderclap, that she was pregnant. She didn’t know how she knew it. She hadn’t experienced any physical changes yet. It was too early for her to have even missed a period. But she knew, with absolute certainty, that she was going to have a baby.

Amazingly enough, she didn’t panic. She didn’t panic because in the same moment she knew she was pregnant, she knew something else, too. She knew that whatever happened, she was not going to let Bobby Lewis have anything to do with this child. And knowing that gave her a sense of purpose. She reached for the lipstick under the counter, stood up, and calmly put it back in its slot on the display shelf.

But one week, and one positive pregnancy test, later, Jax still had no idea how she would keep her promise to herself. She was at Butternut’s annual Fourth of July picnic, nibbling on a slice of watermelon and contemplating the enormity of her problem, when Jeremy Johnson bumped into her and spilled some punch on her sundress. He apologized profusely and went to get some napkins for her, but he stayed to talk. And her life changed again, for the second time in one month.

She could still remember every detail of that night.

“How is it that we’ve never even spoken to each other before tonight?” Jeremy asked her later, toward sunrise the next morning, as they lay on a blanket under an overturned rowboat at the town beach.

“You left for college the summer before my freshman year in high school,” Jax pointed out.

“I never should have left,” Jeremy said, kissing her. “I should have just stayed here and waited for you to grow up.”

“I wish you had,” Jax said, kissing him back. “But the truth is, you never would have looked twice at me.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, frowning.

“Because it’s true. You and I are from two different worlds,” she said.
Your family lives in a clapboard house on Main Street. Mine lives in a trailer in the woods. Your parents own the hardware store. My parents are the town drunks. You went to college. I got pregnant
.

“Look, I don’t know about different worlds,” Jeremy said, raising himself up on one elbow. “But I do know one thing. Spilling that drink on you tonight was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

“You did that on purpose?”

“Of course.”

“Why?” She was fascinated.

“Because I was watching you. And I knew I had to talk to you.”

Jax was skeptical.

“It’s true,” Jeremy said. “I saw you, and I thought there was something so . . . so beautiful about you. Complicated, but beautiful. You seemed like this weird combination of fragile and strong. It’s hard to put into words. But I knew I needed to find out more about you. Everything about you, really.”

Jax thought about what he’d said. She didn’t really believe she was beautiful. Or interesting, for that matter. But talking to Jeremy tonight, she could
almost
believe she was both of those things.

“When I did start talking to you,” Jeremy said, “I wasn’t disappointed. I felt like I could talk to you all night.”

Jax smiled then. “Okay. But no more talking now. At least not for a little while.” And she pulled him down beside her.

Several minutes later, Jeremy untangled himself from her. By this time, they were both partially undressed. Jeremy in his blue jeans, and Jax in a polka-dot bra and underwear.

“Jax,” Jeremy said, breathing hard. “Look, I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting this to happen. I don’t have any, um . . . protection with me. So I think we should stop. Or at least slow down.” But as he said this his eyes traveled over her body, and he swallowed, hard.

“Or we could just take off the rest of our clothes,” Jax said, surprised by her own boldness. She wriggled out of her bra and underwear.

It was almost cavelike under the overturned rowboat, but Jax’s bare, creamy skin glowed softly in what little light there was.

Jeremy couldn’t take his eyes off her. “Jax,” he said, shaking his head. But he kissed her again. And again. They made love right as the sun rose over Butternut Lake.

In later years, Jax often replayed this scene in her head, and she had to admit it didn’t reflect very well on her. But at the time, her actions hadn’t been deliberately calculating or dishonest. Lying there beside Jeremy that night, her attraction to him was real. So was her impatience for their lovemaking to begin. She couldn’t have faked that, even if she’d wanted to. She didn’t know how to. What’s more, the lovemaking that followed was as intense, and as pleasurable, as anything Jax could have imagined possible. That part, at least, wasn’t a lie.

And there was never a moment that night when she’d said to herself,
I’ll spend the night with Jeremy. And then I’ll tell him I’m pregnant with his child.
But she couldn’t deny, either, that she’d known that Jeremy would make an infinitely better husband and father than Bobby ever would have, and that that knowledge may have played an unconscious role in her actions that night.

In any case, a couple of weeks later, Jax told Jeremy she was pregnant. And he proposed to her immediately, without any hesitation. By this time, they were spending every waking minute together, and Jax loved him like crazy. She was pretty sure he loved her the same way, too.

So they got married, bought a house with a small down payment borrowed from Jeremy’s parents, and took over the hardware store. And when Joy was born, looking blessedly like Jax, everything fell into place so perfectly that Jax had to believe that this was the way it was meant to be.

Which wasn’t to say that she didn’t feel guilty about the lie at the center of their lives. She did. She knew what she’d done was wrong. And she knew if Jeremy ever found out about it, it would destroy their life together. But as the years passed and their family grew, the stakes got higher.

So Jax did the only thing she could do. She loved Jeremy and her daughters in the best way she knew how to. And she told herself that it was better for her to live with her lie than for all of them to live with the truth. And most of the time, she believed this. It was the days she didn’t believe it that were the hardest.

And Bobby? She never even told him she was pregnant. She didn’t need to. That summer, before she even started to show, he was arrested for robbing a liquor store and sent to state prison. And Jax, secretly relieved, had thought that was the end of it. Until she’d gotten his letter that spring, telling her he was getting out of prison and he wanted to meet his daughter. How he knew that Joy was his, Jax had no idea. He’d probably heard that she’d had a baby, done the math, and made a lucky guess. And he’d waited to get in touch with her until he’d known he was getting out. After all, there was nothing she could do for him while he was inside.

Jax sighed now, sitting in her quiet kitchen, and she thought about Joy at the breakfast table that morning. She’d been impossible. Complaining about having to clean her room. Provoking her sisters. Ignoring her mother’s pleas for peace. But Jax had caught her, between bites of her French toast, with a soft, wistful expression on her face that told Jax that even as Joy was sitting at the kitchen table with her family, in her mind, she was a million miles away. Daydreaming, probably, of something less ordinary than her ordinary life.

But the funny thing was that it was this ordinary life, in an ordinary house, with an ordinary family, that Jax was determined to protect. Because for Jax, ordinariness was a privilege she’d been denied as a child. And now, she would do anything to keep Bobby from taking it away from Joy. And not just taking it away from Joy, either. But taking it away from all five of them. No, make that all
six
of them, Jax thought, as the baby moved again.

CHAPTER 12

C
aroline was flipping the sign on the front door of Pearl’s from Open to Closed when she saw a man standing on the sidewalk, reading the menu posted in the window. He wasn’t from Butternut, obviously. If he was, he’d already know her menu by heart.