“I hate them,” Bay said. “But I like the tree.”
As soon as Claire finished, she and Bay went back to the house.
“So,” Claire said, as casually as possible as they walked. “Does Tyler have a night class tonight, like last night?”
“No. Monday and Wednesday are his night classes. Why?”
“Just wondering. You know what we’re going to do today? We’re going to go through some old photos!” Claire said enthusiastically. “I want to show you what your great-grandmother looked like. She was a wonderful lady.”
“Do you have any photos of your and Mommy’s mother?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” Claire thought about what Sydney had said some time ago, about leaving the photos of their mother behind. Did she leave them in Seattle? She had seemed so panicked at the time, when she remembered that she had left them.
Claire made a mental note to ask Sydney about it.
Was a dress too much? Claire looked at herself in her bedroom mirror. Did it look like she was trying too hard? She’d never tried at all before, so she had no idea. The white dress she was wearing was the same dress she’d worn the night she met Tyler, the one Evanelle said made her look like Sophia Loren. She put a hand to her bare neck. Her hair had been longer then.
Was this stupid? She was thirty-four years old. It wasn’t as if she was sixteen, but she certainly felt that way. Probably for the first time in her life.
As she walked down the stairs that evening, her shoes made unnaturally loud clicks on the hardwood. She had almost reached the bottom when she stopped. She heard voices. Sydney and Bay were in the sitting room. She was going to have to walk past them. Okay, so what? This was a perfectly normal thing to do.
She straightened her shoulders and walked down the remaining steps. Sydney and Bay were painting their toenails. Claire was so nervous she didn’t even tell them to be careful not to get polish on the furniture or the floor.
When they didn’t look up, Claire cleared her throat. “I’m going over to Tyler’s,” she said from the archway. “I may be a while.”
“Okay,” Sydney said, still not looking up from Bay’s toes.
“Do I look okay?”
“Yes, you always—” Sydney finally looked up and saw what Claire was wearing, the way her hair was styled, the makeup on her face, the fact that she didn’t have a dish in her hands. “Oh,” she said, smiling. “Keep your feet out, Bay. I’ll be right back.”
Sydney duck-walked with her wet toenails into the foyer. “This is certainly a surprise.”
“What do I do?” Claire asked.
Sydney finger-combed Claire’s hair and tucked some strands behind one ear. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seduced a man, honestly. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seduced a man honestly. Huh. But we’re talking about Tyler here, the man who has turned my bedroom walls purple from all his midnight romps around his yard, thinking of you. It won’t be hard to do. He’s already there, he’s just waiting for you.”
“I don’t know how to do temporary.”
“Then don’t. Believe it’s permanent. Either it will be or it won’t.”
Claire sucked in a small, deep breath, like just before a shot at the doctor’s office. “That will hurt.”
“Love always hurts. That’s one thing I know you know,” Sydney said. “But it’s worth it. That’s what you don’t know. Yet.”
“Okay,” Claire said. “Here I go.”
Sydney opened the front door, but Claire just stood there, looking out into the darkening evening.
“Well,” Sydney said when Claire didn’t move, “I suggest you walk, since floating isn’t working.”
One foot in front of the other, Claire walked out the door and down the steps. She rarely wore heels, but she did that night, sandals with long thin heels, so she had to go to the sidewalk instead of walking across the yards.
When she reached his front door, she was cheered by the warm light and the soft music undulating from his open windows. He was listening to something lyrical, classical. She could imagine him relaxing, maybe with a glass of wine. What if he didn’t have wine? She should have brought wine.
She looked over at her house. If she went back there, she wouldn’t have the courage to come back. She straightened her dress and knocked on the door.
He didn’t answer.
She frowned and turned to make sure she did see his Jeep parked on the street. She had her back to the door when she felt it open. It stirred the hem of her dress and she turned back around.
“Hi, Tyler.”
He stood there, as if so shocked he couldn’t move. If he was going to leave this all up to her, they were both in trouble. Break it down into steps, she told herself, like a recipe. Take one man and one woman, put them in a bowl.
She really sucked at this.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
He hesitated and looked over his shoulder. “Well, sure. Of course,” he said, stepping back to let her enter. She walked past him, almost touching him, letting him feel the static. This was obviously the last thing he expected, because the first thing he asked was, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, then she saw her.
There was a woman, a petite redhead, sitting cross-legged on the floor, two bottles of beer on the coffee table next to her. She either meant something to Tyler or clearly wanted to. Her shoes were off and nowhere to be seen, and she was leaning forward so that the flowy V-neck of her shirt fell away from her chest slightly. She was wearing a peach-colored bra. It seemed Tyler had two females ready to seduce him that night.
How could she be so stupid? Did she really think he was just sitting here waiting on her? “Oh. You have company.” She started backing away and backed right into him. She whirled around. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Rachel is an old friend, passing through on her way to Boston from Florida. She’s staying with me a few days. Rachel, this is Claire, my next-door neighbor. She’s a caterer specializing in edible flowers. She’s incredible.” Tyler took Claire by the arm and tried to lead her farther into the living room. After a couple of seconds he had to pull his hand away quickly, flipping it back and forth as if burned. He met her eyes with a dawning understanding.
“I’m sorry. I really have to go. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“You weren’t—” Tyler said, but she was already out the door.
“Claire?” Sydney called. She was halfway up the staircase before Sydney made it out of the sitting room. “Claire?”
She stopped and turned. “Rachel.”
Sydney looked up at her, confused. “What?”
“He was with Rachel,” Claire said. “They have history. They have a bond. She’s staying with him. She was looking me over like competition. I’ve seen it before. Women do it to you all the time.”
Sydney looked flabbergasted and indignant, which, when Claire thought about it later after she had calmed down, was nice. Her sister was mad on her behalf. “He had another woman over there?”
Claire thought of those photographs of her grandmother with a series of smitten boys. “I don’t need a photo of a man looking at me as if he loves me. I’m fine. Aren’t I fine?”
“You really want me to answer that right now?”
Claire put her hand to her forehead. She was still so hot. This was unbearable. “I don’t know how to do this. Maybe I’ll just go out to the garden and every once in a while he can come by and we won’t talk about it afterward but the apple tree will thank him, like last time.”
“You’ve lost me.”
Claire let her hand fall to her side. “I feel like a fool.”
“That, dear sister, is step one.”
“Do you think you could write it down? I have the recipe all wrong,” she said, and turned to walk up the steps. “I’m going to take a bath.”
“You just took one this afternoon.”
“I smell like desperation.”
Sydney chuckled. “You’ll be fine.”
Claire changed out of her dress and put on her old seersucker robe. She was looking for her slippers when her bedroom door opened.
She could only stare, dumbfounded, as Tyler entered and ominously closed the door behind him. She grabbed the lapels of her robe, which was ridiculous, considering what she’d just gone over to his house to do.
“Why did you change out of that dress? I love that dress. But I like the robe too.” His eyes slid down her body. “Why did you come to see me tonight, Claire?”
“Please forget it.”
He shook his head. “I’m through forgetting. I remember everything about you. I can’t help it.”
They stared at each other. Take one man and one foolish woman and put them in a bowl. This wasn’t going to work.
“You’re thinking too much again,” Tyler said. “So this is your bedroom. I’ve wondered which one was yours. I should have guessed it was the turret room.” He walked around, and she had to force herself to stay where she was, not to run to him and take the photo he’d lifted from the bureau, not to tell him to leave the books stacked by the window seat alone, that she had a particular order to them. She’d been about to share her body with this man, and she couldn’t even share her room? Maybe with some preparation, time to shove her shoes under the bed, to take the stained coffee cup off the nightstand.
“Isn’t Rachel waiting for you?” she asked anxiously when he peered into her open closet.
He turned to face her. She was across the room, in the corner where she’d last kicked her slippers. “Rachel is just a friend.”
“You have history.”
“We used to be a couple, when I first moved to Florida to teach. It lasted about a year. We didn’t work out as lovers, but we remained friends.”
“How is that possible? After all you’ve been through?”
“I don’t know. It just is.” He walked toward her. She could have sworn chairs and rugs moved out of his way to make his path easier. “Did you want to talk? Did you want to ask me to dinner or a movie?”
She was literally backed into a corner. He came up close to her, doing that not-quite-touching thing he was so good at, like she was able to feel him without actually feeling him, like she was imagining him somehow. “If I have to say it, I will die,” she whispered. “Right here. I’ll fall to the floor, dead from embarrassment.”
“The garden?”
She nodded.
His hands went to her shoulders, and his fingers snaked in under the collar. “Not so easy to forget, is it?”
“No.”
The robe slid off her shoulders and would have fallen off completely had she not still had a hold of the lapels. “Your skin is hot,” he whispered. “You could have blown me over with a whistle when I felt how hot you were at my house.”
He kissed her and pulled her away from the corner. He then backed her toward her bed, devouring her. Take one man, one foolish woman, put them in a bowl and stir. Her head was spinning, her thoughts dizzy. She felt like she was falling, then she actually was. The back of her knees hit the bed and she fell back. Her robe opened and Tyler was there, breaking the kiss only long enough to take off his shirt so that their bare chests touched.
He knew. He remembered how she needed that kind of body-to-body touch, how she needed someone to absorb what she had too much of.
“We can’t do this here,” she whispered. “Not with Sydney and Bay downstairs.”
He kissed her hard. “Give me ten minutes to get rid of Rachel.”
“You can’t get rid of Rachel.”
“But she’s going to be here three days.” They stared at each other, and he finally took a deep breath and rolled beside her. She was going to close her robe, because how could she just lie there with her robe open? But he stopped her by sliding his hand over her chest and cupping one of her breasts. It felt so secure, so right. Mine. “Expectation can be nice too, I guess,” he said. “Three whole days of expectation.”
“Three whole days,” she repeated.
“What changed your mind?” he said, moving to his side and dipping his head, putting his mouth where his hand had been.
She grabbed his hair in one hand and squeezed her eyes shut. How could she want something this much, something she didn’t even understand? “I should let people in. If they leave, they leave. If I break, I break. It happens to everyone. Right?”
He lifted his head to look in her eyes. “You think I’m going to leave?”
“There can’t be this forever.”
“Why do you think that?”
“No one I know has ever had this forever.”
“I think of the future all the time. All my life I’ve chased dreams of what could be. For the first time in my life, I’ve actually caught one.” He kissed her again before grabbing his shirt and standing. “I’ll give you one day at a time, Claire. But remember, I’m thousands of days ahead already.”
It was Fred’s first night in the attic, and Evanelle could hear him moving around upstairs. It was nice, knowing someone was around, making small busy noises like mice. The thing about ghosts was that they didn’t make a sound. And she’d been living with the silent ghost of her husband for long enough to know.
She wondered if she was being hypocritical, encouraging Fred to move on. It wasn’t as if Evanelle had moved on, really. Maybe it was different when the one you loved died, as opposed to the one you loved simply leaving you. Or maybe it was the same thing. It probably felt like the same thing, anyway.
All of a sudden, Evanelle sat up.
Damn.
She needed to give someone something. She thought about it a moment. It was Fred. She had to give Fred something.
She turned on the light by her bed and reached for her robe. She walked into the hall, then paused, figuring out where to go. The two other bedrooms downstairs were now neatly organized with filing cabinets and nice wooden storage shelves for all her things.
Left.
The second bedroom.
She flipped the switch, went to the filing cabinets, and opened the drawer marked G. In the drawer she found gloves, a geode, and grass seeds neatly categorized under their proper headings. Under the heading Gadget, there was a reference note Fred had put there that said, See also Tools. It was trouble he needn’t have gone to. If she needed a tool, she went right to the tool. But Fred still hadn’t gotten his mind around how exactly it worked. Well, hell, neither had she.
Under Gadget, she found what she needed. It was a gizmo still in its store packaging, a kitchen instrument called a mango splitter, purportedly making cutting around the seed of a mango easier.
She wondered how he was going to take this. He had initially moved in because he’d hoped she would give him something that would help him with James. Was he disappointed in her for not producing that hallowed thing? Now, after all this time, she was going to give him something, and it had nothing to do with James. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe he would take it as a sign that he was doing the right thing, moving on.
Or maybe he would think he just needed to eat more mangoes.
She heard the soft chirp of Fred’s cell phone upstairs. He had said he didn’t want to use her phone, in case she needed to call someone to tell them that she was coming over with something they needed, which made her feel good, like he thought of her as a superhero.
She knocked once on the door to the attic, then walked up the stairs. When she reached the top step, she saw Fred in his leather reading chair near the corner cupboard that housed his television. An antiques magazine was on the leather ottoman in front of him. The area still smelled like fresh paint.
“Right, right,” he was saying into the phone. He saw her and waved her in. “Do the best you can. Thanks for calling.” He hung up.
“Did I interrupt something?”
“No. It was just business. A delayed order.” He put the phone down and stood. “What bri
ngs you up here? Are you all right? Can’t sleep? Do you want me to cook something for you?”
“No, I’m fine.” She held out the package. “I needed to give this to you.”
CHAPTER
12
Sometimes Henry wished he could fly, because he couldn’t run fast enough. A couple of nights a week, Henry would get out of bed, quietly so he wouldn’t wake his grandfather, and he would simply run. On the night he turned twenty-one he ran all the way to the base of the Appalachians, heading into Asheville. Being that age suddenly gave him a burst of energy, and he knew he had to do something with it or else he would explode. It took him six hours to get back home. His grandfather had been waiting on the porch for him that morning, and Henry told him that he’d been sleepwalking. He doubted his grandfather would understand. There were times when Henry couldn’t wait to be old, like his grandfather, but there were times also that his body was alive and jumping with youth, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
He didn’t tell Claire that day they all went to the reservoir, but he’d never been there before either. He’d never done those things other kids his age had done. He was too busy with the dairy and dating older women who knew what they wanted. Being with Sydney made him feel young, but it also made him feel a little sick, like he’d eaten too much and he could never run enough to make the feeling go away.
Tonight he stopped by the edge of the field, his feet wet and his ankles scratched from the thorns of the wild roses that bloomed in the bramble next to the highway. The lights of a car came at him from the road and he ducked into the grass as it passed, not wanting anyone to see that he was out there at two in the morning in only his boxer shorts.
He didn’t get up, even after the sound of the car disappeared. He stared up at the moon, which looked like a giant hole in the sky, letting light through from the other side. He took deep breaths of the wet grass and warm roses and the black pavement from the highway that was still so hot from the summer sun that it melted at the edges and smelled like fire.
He imagined himself kissing Sydney, putting his hands in her hair. She always smelled mysteriously female, like the salon where she worked. He liked that smell. He always had. Women were amazing creatures. Amber, the receptionist where Sydney worked, was pretty and smelled the same way. She was interested in him too, but Sydney always stopped just short of encouraging him to go out with her when he sometimes met Sydney at the White Door. Sydney didn’t feel passion for him, but maybe she did feel a little possessive of him. He wondered if there was any shame to hoping she would grow to love him. He could feel this lust enough for them both.