Wishing on Willows: A Novel (7 page)

“You two know each other?” Robin asked.

“He came to the diner today and ate lunch with the mayor.”

Robin snapped her fingers. “Hey. You’re that guy Cecile was talking about. The developer who wants to build condominiums in Peaks.”

Ian rocked back on his heels, his face falling into shadow. “Word gets around fast.”

Megan leaned toward him like an uprooting tree. “How long are you staying in town?”

“Depends on how fast I can wrap things up.”

“Maybe it will take a long time.” Megan spoke in hope-drenched syllables.

Robin wanted to pull the poor girl aside and give her a lesson in subtlety. Instead, she faked a yawn. “It’s late. I should get home.” She stepped around the pair and fished out her car keys. “Have a good night.”

It took her half the drive before the puzzle piece clicked into place. The condominium man had stopped by her café twice today and both times, he hadn’t ordered anything. Robin pressed down on the gas pedal, as if the speed might carry her far away from the ominous weight sinking into the pit of her stomach.

There was never a time in my life when I didn’t play the piano. At least none my memory can recall. When most kids were focusing on the alphabet and counting to ten and staying dry overnight, I was sitting on a piano bench, feet dangling above the ground, snuggled up to my mother’s side as she wrapped us in a cocoon of beautiful music.

It was my mother’s love language.

She wrote songs for my dad. She wrote songs for my grandparents. She wrote songs for me. And at the very end, she wrote songs for Jesus. It was an odd shift, especially since we weren’t a religious family. We never went to church on Sundays. Not because we didn’t think God existed, but simply because it had never been a part of our life. My mother’s spiritual awakening in her last days wasn’t something that would comfort me until many years later.

Supposedly, she wrote me a song on my third birthday, and when she played it, I pranced around the living room in a pink tutu, flapping my arms like a butterfly. Then I climbed onto that bench and asked her to teach me.

So she did. “Chopsticks” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” eventually turned into
Für Elise
and the
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
. Her love language became my love language—the way we not only expressed our feelings, but processed them. As my mother got sicker and sicker, her music turned lighter and lighter, and mine? It became angry and dark, frantic and loud. Filled with dissonance.

Because I wasn’t ready to lose her.

She was supposed to be there for my prom and my high school graduation. She was supposed to help me pick out a college. Celebrate with me
when I got engaged. She was supposed to help me plan my wedding and gush over my dress and blot her tears when I walked down the aisle. All my life, I had counted on her being there. I never contemplated her absence. Until radiation stole her hair and chemo stole her energy and all I could do was contemplate it.

Mom didn’t try to talk me out of this dark musical period I went through. She sat and listened while I pounded out
Black Mass Sonata
and
Mozart’s Requiem
and
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
. When she finally went, I covered the piano she left to me with a black sheet and didn’t touch it for a year. I couldn’t bring myself to play, not when she wasn’t there to hear.

For a year, my love language ran dry. I thought I’d start playing once it came back. I didn’t realize it was the playing that made it flow.

Black sky and moonlight and the rise-and-fall buzz of insects filtered through the opened window in Amanda Price’s bedroom. A hint of a breeze lifted the curtains. If she tried hard enough, she might hear the heavy, even breathing of Caleb in the next room.

She lay flat on her back, hands folded behind her head, staring at the spider that slowly crept out from its hiding place and scurried across the ceiling. Her heart thudded out a heavy, monotonous beat as she turned her head and looked at the unopened envelope on her nightstand.

The minute she pulled the stack of envelopes from the mailbox and noticed the return address of the one on top, her breath had whooshed away. An hour and a half later and she wasn’t sure if it had come back. After two months of silence, two months of shoving her tattered emotions into a box, he had come back into her life.

Amanda sat up in bed and snatched the envelope. She clutched it in her hand and blinked dumbly at the familiar scrawl. Jason Ainsley. A name that was as familiar to her as the moon outside her window. A name that used to encompass her future. A name that turned sour two months ago, when he ruined everything. She hadn’t yet gathered the courage to slide her finger beneath the seal and tear open the envelope. She wasn’t sure she wanted to read what Jason had to say.

Tiny pockets of hope bubbled in her heart. What if he regretted his decision? What if this was his attempt to resuscitate their tenuous connection before it died altogether? Amanda shook her head. Part of her wanted to tear the thing into tiny pieces and throw them in the trash. The other,
bigger part knew if she did, she’d spend the rest of the night piecing them back together with tape and desperation.

The only option was to open it. To face whatever he had to say. He’d wrecked her heart two months ago. Really, how much harm could be done by a small aftershock? Before she could change her mind, she opened the envelope and removed the letter.

The slant of his writing unfurled the ache she tried hard to ignore. But the actual words stirred up anger that had been simmering beneath the ache for the past sixty days. The more she read, the more the anger grew, until she reached the end and the ache was overwhelmed.

He missed her? He hoped she would forgive him?
All my love, Jason
? She crumpled the letter and glared out her window. He had no right to say those things. He made his decision and it wasn’t her. Instead of proposing, he went to Nairobi. Not for a week, or a month, or even a year, but indefinitely. He told her he prayed. He told her not going would be an act of disobedience. Effectively stealing away any arguments or protests. Because who could fight words like those without sounding selfish and unchristian?

Well, she had prayed too. Over and over again, she’d prayed. For a man who now resided on the other side of the planet. She thought they’d be husband and wife. She thought they’d live in a house and start a family and go to church on Sundays. Instead, she was here. And he was there.

She didn’t understand it. Wanting to be Jason’s wife, wanting to have children and raise them to love the Lord … why wasn’t that a good enough plan? Why was that any less godly than missionary work?

Amanda flopped back in her bed and searched for the spider, but it was no longer there. She sighed. This wasn’t supposed to be her life. She wasn’t supposed to be an accountant in Peaks, living with her brother’s wife and their adorable son. She uncrumpled the letter and stared at Jason’s new e-mail address he had scrawled at the bottom of the page. She wished more than anything he hadn’t shared it with her.

A steady stream of people filed into the doors of Grace Assembly, an unpretentious brick church nestled behind a line of towering oaks, a fortress of protection from the neighboring Piggly Wiggly. Ian held his breath captive and eyed the steeple, his insides tightening with every inch skyward.

Over the past year, his church attendance had been spotty at best. Partly because he had a hard time interacting with a congregation of people who didn’t understand what went wrong. Partly because shame was a powerful thing. The imprisoned air escaped. He brought his forehead to the steering wheel and stared into his lap. He could do this. It was only an hour and nobody knew him here. It was the perfect time to start going back.

Somebody rapped on his window.

“Ian? Is that you?” The pane of glass muffled the words, but the voice was familiar enough. He looked up and came face to face with Mayor Ford, bushy brows knitted together. Ian opened the door and stepped into the sunlight.

“You looked like you were sleeping in there.”

“No, I was just … praying.”

“I didn’t know you were a churchgoing man. What a pleasant surprise.” Mayor Ford wrapped his arm around a woman who resembled a contemporary Aunt Bee. “This is my wife, Elaine. Elaine, this is the fellow I was telling you about. The man who’s going to help us bring this town back to life.”

Ian shook her hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Ford.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, young man.”

“My wife is quite the woman, Ian. She’s been the president of the high school’s PTA for the past”—Mayor Ford puffed up his cheeks and scratched his ear—“what has it been? Twelve years now?”

Elaine nodded.

“Believe it or not, we’ve had three kids pass through this school system. Condos bringing in the taxpayers—well, you know what that means.” He offered his elbow to his wife and turned toward the church. “More revenue for the school district. You’ll make winners out of all of us.”

Ian fell into step behind the mayor and his wife.
Winners out of all of us.
He needed to nail this project. McKay Development and Construction depended on it and so did he. Saving the company was his second chance—to do something right, to start over, to see the pride return to his father’s eyes. A winner once again. Clutching onto that hope, he followed Mayor Ford through the congested lobby to the sanctuary.

The man shook hands with several people before ushering his wife into one of the pews. Ian pulled at his collar and sat while Mayor Ford removed a Bible from the hymnal rack and handed it over. The book sat in Ian’s palm, weighted with words he knew. Words he clung to. Words that were all too easy to forget.

“Elaine and I usually eat brunch at Val’s after church. Harry makes one killer stack of hot cakes. Care to join us?”

Ian ran his finger down the Bible’s spine. “I’d love to.”

Piano music filled the sanctuary. The familiar melody pricked his ears. He looked up from the book and found Robin Price sitting behind the piano, bathed in light in the center of the stage, radiating so much warmth and peace Ian wanted to take some for himself. With closed eyes, she leaned toward the microphone and started to sing, her voice every bit as captivating as her music.

The congregation rose to their feet and joined, but Ian couldn’t stand. He stayed seated, and like a deep massage against all-too-tender muscles, the lyrics dug into his knotted-up soul, reminding him of a truth that had become entirely too slippery. God’s grace was big enough. For him. And for Cheryl.

When the service ended, he found himself outside in the late-morning brightness, shaking hands with half the congregation, the most recent being a gray-haired string bean of a man named Brian O’Malley and a barrel-chested gentleman named Darrell Maddocks. Apparently, Mayor Ford enjoyed introducing people.

“We hear you’ve got some plans for our town,” Darrell said after taking back his meaty paw. “Chuck mentioned something about meeting soon to discuss the specifics. Brian and I are both council members.”

Ian looked to the mayor. “Oh?”

A man tried to squeeze his way between O’Malley and another group congregating nearby, but Mayor Ford called out to him. “Evan, it’s been a while. How’s farm life treating you? And that pretty young wife of yours?”

The man—Evan—stopped his maneuvering. Mayor Ford had him cornered. “Doing great. She’s getting our little one right now.”

“Enjoy these days while you can. They slip by so quickly.”

“I can believe it.”

“I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine, Ian McKay. Ian, this is Evan Price. Excellent mechanic. You ever have any car troubles while you’re here, Evan can fix it right up.”

Ian doubted his car would give him any problems, but he shook Evan’s hand anyway.

“Ian’s in town on business,” the mayor said. “His father owns McKay Development and Construction.”

Evan seemed to study him from the corner of his eye. “A developer, huh?”

The niggling familiarity plaguing Ian upon their introduction clicked into place. Price. The same last name as Robin’s. “Are you by any chance related to the owner of Willow Tree?”

Evan opened his mouth to answer, but before any words could escape, a flash of brown hair and a small body sporting an electric-blue cast catapulted itself into the man’s arms. He absorbed the brunt of the impact with a grunt and tossed the small boy into the air. Evan tickled his ribs and the boy squirmed and laughed.

Ian pulled his gaze away from the father-son duo and spotted Robin quickly approaching, wearing the same frazzled expression she’d worn outside Sybil’s yesterday morning. “Caleb, you cannot run off like that.” She caught sight of Ian and stopped.

“Robin, excellent.” Mayor Ford folded his hands. “Allow me to introduce a new friend of mine, Ian McKay. Ian, this is Robin Price and her son, Caleb.”

“We’ve already met,” Robin said. “He came to my café last night.”

The mayor’s eyes widened. “Already? Well, you sure get right to work, don’t you?”

Ian cleared his throat and shook his head, but it was too late. Robin glanced around the small gathering, her smile confused. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” Her words came out soft as she turned to Mayor Ford, whose bald head had gone vermillion.