“Exactly. I don’t know what you hoped, coming back here. But you can’t have him.”
That’s what this was all about? “I know this is going to come as a surprise, but I didn’t come back to get him.”
“So you say. You Waverleys have your tricks. Don’t think I don’t know.” As she walked away, she flipped her cell phone out of her purse and started dialing. “Emma darling, I have the most delicious news,” she said.
Around five o’clock that afternoon, Sydney was going to give up for the day and leave. That’s when she saw a man in a nice gray suit at the reception desk, and she got a sinking feeling.
This day was never going to end.
Hunter John asked the receptionist something and she turned and pointed at Sydney.
He walked across the salon to her. She should have walked away to the break room, avoided him entirely, but memories kept her there. At twenty-eight, his sandy hair was thinning. A better cut would hide it. His hair was still beautiful and shiny, which meant he still had what he had when he was young, but he was losing it. He was turning into someone else.
“I heard you were working here,” Hunter John said when he reached her.
“Yes, I imagine you did.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You have lipstick on your neck.”
He rubbed his neck sheepishly. “Emma came to tell me at work.”
“So you took over your family’s business.”
“Yes.”
Matteson Enterprises was a group of mobile-home manufacturing plants about twenty minutes outside of Bascom. Sydney had worked as a receptionist in the front office the same summers Hunter John had interned there. They used to meet in his father’s office when he went to lunch, and they’d make out. Sometimes Emma would drive out when things were slow, and the three of them would sit on the stacks of lumber outside the warehouse and smoke.
What was his life like now? Did he really love Emma, or had she just gotten him with sex, as Clark women were wont to do? It was Emma, after all, who told Sydney how to give the perfect blow job. It was only years later that a man finally told Sydney she’d been doing it wrong. It suddenly occurred to Sydney that Emma had told her the wrong way to do it on purpose. Sydney had no idea Emma even liked Hunter John. And Hunter John had always said Emma was a little too high-strung for him. Sydney had never put the two together in her mind. But, then, she’d been oblivious to a lot of things back then.
“Can I have a seat?” Hunter John asked.
“Do you want me to cut your hair? I’m great at it.”
“No, I just don’t want it to look like I only stopped by to talk,” he said as he sat.
She rolled her eyes. “Heaven forbid.”
“I wanted to say a few things to you, to clear the air. It’s the right thing to do.” Hunter John always did the right thing. That’s what he’d been known for. The golden boy. The good son. “That night at the party, I didn’t know you’d be there. And neither did Emma. We were as surprised as you. Ariel hired Claire. No one knew you were working for her.”
“Don’t be naive, Hunter John. If Eliza Beaufort knew, everyone knew.”
Hunter John looked disappointed. “I’m sorry for the way it happened, but it was for the best. As you saw, I’m happily married now.”
“Good Lord,” Sydney said, “does everyone think I came back just for you?”
“Why did you come back, then?”
“Is this not my home, Hunter John? Is this not where I grew up?”
“Yes, but you never liked who you were here.”
“Neither did you.”
Hunter John sighed. Who was this person? She didn’t know him at all anymore. “I love my wife and kids. I have a great life, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I did love you once, Sydney. Breaking up with you was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
“So hard that you sought comfort in marrying Emma?”
“We married so soon because she got pregnant. Emma and I just grew close after you left. Complete serendipity.”
Sydney had to laugh. “You’re being naive again, Hunter John.”
She could tell he didn’t like hearing that. “She is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He was saying that because he gave up Sydney his life was great. She didn’t like hearing that. “Did you go to Notre Dame? Did you travel around Europe like you wanted to?”
“No. Those are old dreams.”
“Seems to me you gave up a lot of dreams.”
“I’m a Matteson. I had to do what’s best for my name.”
“And I’m a Waverley, so I get to curse you for it.”
He gave a little start, like she meant it, and it gave Sydney a curious sensation of power. But then Hunter John smiled. “Come on, you hate being a Waverley.”
“You should go,” Sydney said. Hunter John stood and reached for his wallet. “And don’t you dare leave money for a pretend haircut.”
“I’m sorry, Sydney. I can’t help who I am. Obviously, neither can you.”
As he walked away, she thought what a sad thing it was to say about herself, that she’d only ever loved one man. And that man had to be that man, one who had from the beginning relegated her to a youthful indiscretion, when she thought it would be forever.
She wished she really did know a curse.
“I was getting worried,” Claire said when Sydney came into the kitchen that evening. “Bay’s upstairs.”
Sydney opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of water. “I stayed late.”
“How was your day?”
“It was fine.” She walked over to the sink where Claire was rinsing a bowl of blueberries. “So, what are you making? Something to take to Tyler again?”
“Yes.”
Sydney picked up the bouquet of blue flowers laying on the counter by the sink and put them to her nose. “What are these?”
“Bachelor’s buttons. I’m going to sprinkle the blueberry tarts with their petals.”
“And what do they mean?”
“Bachelor’s buttons make people see sharper, helpful for finding things like misplaced keys and hidden agendas,” Claire said easily. The power came so naturally to her.
“So you’re trying to make Tyler realize you’re not what he’s looking for?”
Claire smiled slightly. “No comment.”
Sydney watched Claire work for a while. “I wonder why I didn’t inherit it,” she said absently.
“Inherit what?”
“That mysterious Waverley sensibility you and Evanelle have. Grandma had it too. Did Mom?”
Claire turned off the spigot and reached for a hand towel to dry her hands. “It was hard to tell. She hated the garden, I remember that much. She wouldn’t go near it.”
“I don’t mind the garden, but I guess I’m more like Mom than anyone in the family.” Sydney grabbed a few blueberries and popped them in her mouth. “I don’t have a special thing like Mom, and Mom moved back here so you had a stable place to live and go to school, just like I did for Bay.”
“Mom didn’t move back because of me,” Claire said, as if surprised Sydney thought that. “She moved back so you could be born here.”
“She left when I was six,” Sydney said as she went to the open door to the sunroom porch and looked out. “If it weren’t for those photographs of Mom Grandma gave me, I wouldn’t even remember what she looked like. If I meant something to her, she wouldn’t have left.”
“What did you do with those photos?” Claire asked. “I’d forgotten about them.”
One moment Sydney was tilting her head and taking a deep breath of the herbs drying on the porch, the next moment she was blown out the door, transported on the wind back to Seattle. She landed in the living room of the town house, staring at the couch. She walked to it and lifted one side. There under the couch was an envelope marked Mom. It had been so long since she’d felt like looking at the photos that she’d forgotten they were there. These were photos of Lorelei’s life on the ro
ad, a life Sydney had tried to emulate for so long. She took the envelope and leafed through the stack of photos, and she found one that made her head want to explode with fear. There was her mother, maybe eighteen years old, standing in front of the Alamo. She was smiling and holding a handmade sign that read No More Bascom! North Carolina Stinks! When Sydney was a teenager, she thought it was the funniest thing. But what if David found the envelope? What if he figured it out? She heard him at the front door. She put the envelope back under the couch quickly. He was coming in. He was going to find her there.
“Sydney?”
Sydney opened her eyes with a start. She was back in Bascom. Claire was beside her, shaking her arm.
“Sydney?”
“I forgot to take them with me,” Sydney said. “The photos. I left them.”
“Are you all right?”
Sydney nodded, trying to get a hold of herself. But she had a bad feeling that David would know she’d been there. He’d know she’d been thinking about something she left behind. She’d opened a door. Even now she thought she could smell his cologne near her, as if she’d brought him back with her. “I’m fine. I was just thinking of Mom.” Sydney shrugged, trying to get rid of the tension in her shoulders. David didn’t know where the photos were.
He wouldn’t find them.
That evening Evanelle put on a short-sleeved robe over her nightgown and walked into her kitchen. She had to step around boxes full of Band-Aids and matches, rubber bands and Christmas ornament hooks. Once in the kitchen, she went searching for microwave popcorn. She pushed aside toasters in their original boxes and aspirin she’d bought in bulk.
She didn’t want any of this stuff, she didn’t even particularly like having it around. She tried to keep it all in corners and unused rooms, but some of it always managed to spill out. One day someone was going to need it, so it was better to have it around than to go looking for it at three in the morning at the all-night Wal-Mart.
She turned when she heard a knock.
Someone was at her door.
Now, this was a surprise. She didn’t get many visitors. She lived in a small neighborhood of old arts and crafts houses, an area that had become a little more fancy than when she and her husband, who had worked for the phone company, moved there. Her neighbors were mostly couples in their thirties and forties without children and commuter jobs that brought them home after dark. She’d never even spoken to her next-door neighbors, the Hansons, who moved in three years ago. But the fact that they’d told their lawn man to “keep their neighbor’s lawn neat too, for the sake of the neighborhood” spoke volumes.
But it got her lawn mowed for free, so who was she to complain.
She turned on the porch light, then opened the door. A short, square, middle-aged man with sharply cut dark-blond hair stood there. His slacks and shirt were wrinkle-free and his shoes shone like firecrackers. He had a small suitcase at his feet. “Fred!”
“Hello, Evanelle.”
“What on earth are you doing here?”
His face was drawn, but he tried to smile. “I…need a place to stay. You were the first person I thought of.”
“Well, I can see why. I’m old and you’re gay.”
“Sounds like a perfect relationship.” He was trying to be upbeat, but in the glow of the porch light he was as shiny as glass, and one small shove and he’d break into a thousand tiny pieces.
“Come in.”
Fred picked up his suitcase and entered, then stood in the living room looking like a little boy who had run away from home. Evanelle had known Fred all his life. He won the county spelling bee two years in a row, then he lost to Lorelei Waverley in the fourth grade. Evanelle had come to see Lorelei compete, and afterward she found Fred crying outside the gymnasium. She’d given him a hug, and he made her promise not to tell his father that he was so upset. His father told him he should never cry in front of other people. What would they think of him?
“Shelly came in early today. She caught me in my pajamas in my office. It’s been easier just to stay at work. I know what to do there,” Fred said. “But word is probably out now, and I can’t stay in a motel. I don’t want to give James that kind of satisfaction. Hell, I don’t even know if he’s noticed I haven’t been there. He hasn’t called to ask where I’ve been. Nothing. I don’t know what to do.”
“Have you talked at all?”
“I tried. Like you said. After that first night I slept at the store, I called him. He was at work. He said he didn’t want to talk about it, that just because I finally noticed something was wrong didn’t mean I could make it right now. I told him about the wine I bought from Claire. He said I was crazy, crazy for wanting things the way they were when we were first together. I don’t understand what happened. One moment we were fine. Six months later I suddenly realize I can’t remember the last time we had a regular conversation. It’s like he’s been leaving me by degrees, and I didn’t even notice. How does a person not notice that?”
“Well, you can stay here as long as you like. But if anyone asks, I get to say my undeniable womanliness turned you straight.”
“I make terrific Belgian waffles, with a wonderful peach compote. Just tell me what you want me to cook and I’ll cook it.”
She patted his cheek. “Not that anyone will believe me.”
She showed him to the guest bedroom down the hall. There were a few boxes of first-aid kits and three kerosene heaters in the room, but she’d been keeping this room mostly clear and the bed made with fresh sheets every week for over thirty years. There was a void—which still existed, just better concealed these days—left in her home after Evanelle’s husband died. During those sad days following his death, Lorelei would spend the night with Evanelle, but she stopped as she got older and wilder. Then Claire would stay the night sometimes when she was young, but she liked to stay at home mostly. Evanelle never imagined Fred would be staying here one day. But surprises were nothing new to her. Like opening a can of mushroom soup and finding tomato instead; be grateful and eat it anyway.
Fred put his suitcase on the bed and looked around.
“I was going to make some popcorn and watch the news. Want to join me?”
“Sure,” Fred said, following her, as if glad to be told what to do. “Thank you.”
Well, isn’t this nice, Evanelle thought as they sat on the couch with a bowl of popcorn. They watched the eleven o’clock news together, and then Fred washed the popcorn bowl.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Evanelle said as she took a can of Coke from the refrigerator. She liked to open it and leave it on her bedside table and then drink it flat first thing in the morning. “The bathroom’s down the hall.”
“Wait.”
Evanelle turned around.
“Is it true that you once gave my father a spoon when you were kids? And that he used it to dig a quarter out of the dirt when he saw something shiny? And he used the quarter to go to the movies? And that’s where he met my mother?”
“It’s true that I gave him a spoon. I don’t have the power to make things all better, Fred.”
“Oh, I understand,” he said quickly, looking down and folding the dish towel in his hands. “I was just asking.”
Evanelle suddenly realized the real reason he was there.
Most people tried to avoid her because she gave them things.
Fred wanted to move in to be closer, on the off chance she was going to produce something that would make sense out of everything happening with James, that spoon that was going to help him dig out of this.
Sydney, Bay, and Claire sat on the porch that Sunday, eating extra cinnamon buns that Claire had made from her regular Sunday order to the Coffee House. It was hot and things were out of whack. Doorknobs that everyone swore were on the right side of the doors were actually on the left. Butter melted in the refrigerator. Things weren’t being said and were left to stew in the air.
“There’s Evanelle,” Sydney said, and Claire turned to see h
er coming up the sidewalk.
Evanelle walked up the steps, smiling. “Your mother had two beautiful girls. I’ll give her that. But you two don’t look so chipper.”
“It’s the first heat wave. It makes everyone cranky,” Claire said as she poured Evanelle a glass of iced tea from the pitcher she’d brought outside. “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a couple of days.”
Evanelle took the glass and sat in the wicker rocker by Claire. “I’ve had a guest.”
“Who?”
“Fred Walker is staying with me.”
“Oh,” Claire said, surprised. “Are you okay with that?”
“I’m fine with it.”
“I guess the rose geranium wine didn’t work.”
Evanelle shrugged and sipped her tea. “He never used it.”
Claire glanced over to the house next door. “Do you think Fred would let me buy it back?”
“I don’t see why not. Got another customer for it?”
“No.”
Sydney piped in and said, “She probably wants to use it on Tyler.”
Claire gave her a look, but it was only halfhearted. She was right, after all.
Evanelle put her tea down and rooted through her tote bag. “I came because I had to give you this,” she said, finally bringing out a white headband and handing it to Claire. “Fred tried to talk me out of giving it to you. He said you use combs, not headbands, that headbands were for people with short hair. He doesn’t understand. This is what I had to give you. It’s been a while since I’ve lived with a man. I forgot how stubborn they can be. They smell right nice, though.”
Sydney and Claire exchanged glances. “Evanelle, you do know Fred is gay, don’t you?” Claire asked gently.
“Of course,” she said, laughing, looking happier and lighter than Claire had seen her in ages. “But it’s nice to know that you two aren’t the only ones who like having me around. So tell me, Sydney, how is work?”
Sydney and Bay were sitting on the porch swing, and Sydney was using one bare foot to gently rock them back and forth. “I have you to thank for it. If you hadn’t given me that shirt I returned, I never would have gone into the White Door to see if they had an open booth.”