A Man of Influence (23 page)

“Almost,” he said softly, because her words had hit home.

“Well, you are renowned in a way.” Her lips almost moved upward
in a smile. “I've read some of your columns. And I'm sure you have fond memories
of every place you've been. But since you never let yourself fall in love with a
destination, you feel oh-so-superior when you poke fun and leave.”

Tracy had said much the same. If Tracy's accusations had
pierced the layer of protection around Chad's heart, Leona's shattered it,
breaking it into sharp shards that made it hard to breathe.

“So don't go thinking we're alike, Mr. Healy. I stay here and
show my true colors every day of the year.” She left him in the foyer.

It took Chad a few minutes to trust his legs to carry him
upstairs. He had a column to write. He'd planned his website to go live tomorrow
and he was going to keep to that schedule. Schedules were the only thing he had
left, and by going live he'd be letting the
Lampoon
know he wouldn't be defeated. He logged into the blogging program and stared at
the screen, but he couldn't type a word. He couldn't even remember what the lead
sheet had said that had sparked the
Lampoon
team's
interest in the first place.

He went down to his car and got the box from the office out of
the trunk, carrying it back upstairs. He set it on the bed and opened it up.
There was the folder with the lead sheet. It said simply: Harmony Valley, too
good to be true.

There was a picture of his parents on their thirtieth wedding
anniversary five years ago—they counted the years they'd been divorced in their
marriage total. He'd taken the picture of them sitting on their balcony
overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. They held each other close.

And there was the crumpled postmortem manifesto. Chad smoothed
out the wrinkles.

Chad is not my choice for the
job.

That's where Chad had lost it. It had been a day for painful
realities. Chad forced himself to read the rest of his father's last wishes.

Chad is a happy person, too happy for the
sardonic vulgarities often required of the Lampoon. I suggest you find a
suitable alternative by looking at former students from pompous schools
who've lied about their grade point average and other achievements on their
résumé. That's the kind of person I was. At least, until I became a father.
And then I forgot how much that role means to a child, even an adult one.
Chad should never forget.

Chad returned to the desk and stared at the screen. His father
had redeemed himself in Chad's eyes. Chad had to redeem himself, too.

He began to type.

* * *

T
HE
HARD
THING
about making amends and doing the right thing was that it often
required logistics, which Harmony Valley was sorely short of.

So Chad left town on Sunday morning and drove back to his
family's empty penthouse suite in San Francisco, full of memories both pleasant
and unpleasant, and began a campaign to win Harmony Valley and Tracy back.

He returned on Tuesday morning and began his campaign with
flyers posted on all the businesses on Main Street, including Martin's Bakery.
When he was done, he had quite a few copies left. He pushed through the door to
Martin's and stopped. The regulars were there, including Tracy. She wore a
simple T-shirt, little makeup, and her sunny blond hair looked as if she'd slept
until the last minute this morning.

There was a tablet on top of one bakery case beneath a sign
that said, “Read Today's Blog!” Someone had written a new note on the
chalkboard:
We do wedding cakes! A free pie for every
referral.
Tracy had already begun her marketing campaign.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” Eunice studied him over
the top of her black-rimmed readers. “We won't fall for your act again, buster.
Better hit the road.”

“You people are too smart to fall for the same line twice.”
Chad distributed flyers to every person in the bakery. Everyone except Tracy.
“First off, yes, I wrote the column Tracy read at the Harvest Festival.”

Tracy stood behind the counter as if afraid to move. Where was
the fierce and fearless woman who'd won his heart?

“Tracy had an advanced copy that I gave her,” Chad said.

“Thank goodness she did.” Rose shook her finger at him. “Wait.
Why were you stupid enough to give it to her?”

“Because I trusted her.” He willed Tracy to look him in the
eyes. “I still do.”

Her startled glance flew to his.

He nodded. “But I didn't publish the column she read.” He held
up the remaining flyers. “This is the travel column that was posted this
morning. Feel free to read it.”

“Read it to me, Hiro,” Mildred said.

The patrons at Martin's began to read. Hiro's low, steady voice
didn't carry beyond one table over.

“I don't understand,” Tracy said, holding out her hand for a
copy of the column. “You were convinced that was the right column for your
career.”

“That was before I realized what an empty career it was.” Chad
hugged the flyers to his chest. “That was before I decided what I wanted to do
with my life next. You were right about the story from the beginning, but I was
just too stubborn to listen. I wrote this column before I left town Sunday
morning. By Monday night, I had a new set of advertising sponsors and a new name
for my website: The Happy Bachelor Settles Down.”

Tracy's expression was stuck stiffly between wonder and
disbelief.

“I want to retire to Harmony Valley.” He'd begun the process of
selling his shares in the
Lampoon
. He'd put the
penthouse up for sale. And made other changes, too.

Tracy scoffed. “You're too young to retire.”

If anyone else heard their conversation, they didn't react.

He brought out his most reliable smile, the one the Bunko
ladies had loved. “I've already had a midlife crisis, I don't know why I can't
retire.”

“Hey,” the mayor said. “This column is nice. This column should
get picked up by a big city newspaper for sure.”

“It's funny. I like to hear about Roxie and her chickens.”
Despite her black framed readers, Eunice held the column close to her nose. “And
look! There's a mention of Mama and her Horseradish-Doodles.”

“I like how you reference squirrel jerky and living off the
land,” Rutgar rumbled from the back.

“From the first time I saw you, Tracy, you made me smile. And
somewhere along the way, I learned a thing or two from you.” Chad couldn't stop
smiling at Tracy. He moved closer to the counter, close enough to take one of
her hands in his. “How to be fearless and how to be kind. How to be just plain
Chad.”

“You aren't really going to retire, are you?” Blue eyes wide,
Tracy searched his face for some clue.

“For a while. Maybe I'll get restless and write some travel
columns about the nice, joyous discoveries that can be found in the most
surprising of places.” He leaned over the counter and touched the hair over her
scar. “Of course, I'd need a travel companion, someone who's willing to keep me
honest and point out the unique, sweet character of a place.”

She leaned forward until her lips were within kissing distance.
“Who did you have in mind?”

“Eunice.” He grinned.

The room erupted with laughter. They'd all been shamelessly
eavesdropping.

Chad didn't mind at all. “And maybe...sometimes... I'd find
room in my minivan for my wife and kids to come along.”

“Minivan?” Tracy glanced outside the window. “You went from a
sports car to a minivan?”

“Well, sweetheart, if you expected me to buy a truck and fill
it with tools, you are sadly mistaken. If I accompany Flynn and the guys on
their rounds, it'll be as an assistant lugging the tool box.” He gave her a
gentle tug, so that they were back in the shared space in the middle of the
counter. He was a long way from winning her over forever, but he felt his empty
places being filled already. With Tracy by his side, he'd have days filled with
smiles and laughter and jokes. “Wouldn't you rather load a minivan with our
kids?”

She answered him with a kiss that was far too short, because
everyone in Martin's, and everyone they called to Martin's, wanted to celebrate
the newest couple in Harmony Valley.

After Mildred and Hiro, that is.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from
EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE
by Liz Flaherty.

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Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Liz Flaherty

CHAPTER ONE

I
T
HAD
BEEN
sixteen years since he'd seen Arlie Gallagher. And three months and four days. Not that he was counting.

But he knew, as he stepped out of the rental SUV he'd parked in front of the Come On In hardware store, that the woman standing in front of the tearoom across the street was indeed Arlie. She was dressed in turquoise scrubs and wearing sunglasses that covered half her small, heart-shaped face, but he recognized her compact build, riot of red curls and hey-world-it's-me movements as though he'd seen her only yesterday. He thought the woman with her, whose dark hair was a perfect foil for the rich copper of Arlie's, was her stepsister, Holly. He couldn't look away long enough to be sure.

The coward in him urged him to hustle into the hardware before Arlie looked across Miniagua's gravelly Main Street and saw him. But that would have meant looking away.

Which he couldn't have done under penalty of, well, death, he guessed, because that was something he knew. He'd looked away from her once, actually walked away from her, and dying would have been a whole lot easier.

He closed the car door firmly. Sounds carried on the breeze from the lake, and Arlie looked up, meeting his eyes. She raised her arm, then dropped it with the wave unfinished. Her smile, that wide, generous expression that grew like one of those sped-up videos of a rose blooming, started but faded before the rose made it out of bud stage.

He still couldn't look away. He couldn't breathe, either, so he just drank in the sight of her. This must be what a person would feel like if he came in from the desert after not having anything to drink for, say, sixteen years. That first glass of water would be wonderful. It would be life-affirming and fresh and would end way too soon.

The brunette, whose brisk, loose walk didn't give away the fact that her left foot was prosthetic, nodded in his direction. She didn't smile, though, and he didn't either, just lifted his chin and let it drop. When the women went into the Seven Pillars Tearoom, he was finally able to turn and walk toward the hardware store's front door. Mostly without seeing where he was going.

He and his half brother, Tucker, had been raised on the estate that filled a chunk of the frontage property on the south end of Lake Miniagua's six hundred acres, but Jack Llewellyn seldom came back. When he did, he paid his stiff respects to his grandmother and stood silent and stoic sentinel for an hour in the cemetery beside the Miniagua Community Church. He'd learned to move quickly on these visits, making it on the afternoon flight home so that by midnight, he'd be relaxing in front of the TV with a beer. He wouldn't have seen anyone but Margaret Llewellyn and her household staff.

This time, he didn't get off that easily. Not only would he not get back to Vermont today, he wouldn't make it tomorrow, either. From the looks of his grandmother's will and her estate, he'd be in Indiana for a good long time settling the estate.

That meant he'd have to see all those people whose lives had been irrevocably changed the night his father drove drunk and failed to stay to the outside on one of the tight curves on Country Club Road. Jack might have to try to explain things for which he had no justification. Things like why he'd left.

He'd known he would see Arlie, whose heart he had broken, but he had wanted—no, needed—time to prepare himself. Sometimes if he was ready, if he tightened his jaw and focused on other matters—any other matters—he could think about her with barely a twinge of the hurt he'd caused them both. Sometimes.

But that was before he saw her across the street. More than a twinge, the pain that ripped sharp and unexpected down the center of him nearly brought him to his knees.

The bell over the hardware store's door rang when he stepped inside. Sam Phillipy's voice, the deepest, truest bass the high school choir had ever heard, came from the back of the hardware store. “Can I help you?”

Jack had to catch his breath yet again. Why hadn't he thought about it longer before coming into the store? Before coming down to Miniagua's two-block business district at all? He should have known Sam would be here, should have been ready to face the only man who'd ever been as close to him as his brother. There had never been a better friend than Sam Phillipy. Or a worse one than Jack Llewellyn.

“I'll need a remodeling crew. I figured this would be a good place to start looking.” Jack sauntered back, striving for casual. Hard to do on legs that still felt shaky.

The old wooden floors echoed with the same hollow sound as they had in high school days. He could almost hear the dribbling of basketballs on the boards. It was an indicator of just how small Miniagua was, he reflected, that teenage boys had hung out in the hardware store.

Sam met him in the middle of the store beside the endcap of paint colors. They sized each other up much as they had more than twenty years ago. Sam looked good even with a patch over his left eye. Lasting damage from the prom-night wreck. Jack had to stop himself from flinching. “Sam.”

“Jack.” Sam nodded, not offering his hand. “My condolences on your family's loss.” If there was a sneer in his voice, Jack couldn't hear it, but there was no warmth in his old friend's expression, either. Nor even a hint of welcome.

“Thank you.” Jack shuffled his feet on the worn floor, feeling as he had that first day he'd come to school at Lake Miniagua, the only eighth grader in high-dollar khakis and Italian loafers. Sam had greeted him then, walking through a gaggle of lakers with an outstretched hand and an offer to share his locker. The move had been both curiously adult and a harbinger of what was to come—they'd shared a locker until the day they graduated.

“When is your grandmother's funeral?” Sam poured coffee for them both, handed Jack a cup and lifted the pot in invitation to the pair of Amish farmers who were examining the harness that hung across the back wall. They came forward for refills, then went back to the wall.

Jack wasn't sure why Sam had given him the drink but was grateful nonetheless. Maybe the motivation had been pity because Jack was once again wearing designer clothing in a Levi's-and-T-shirt kind of place. It had been bad enough being the overdressed new kid at thirteen—it was worse at thirty-four. But he'd gone from a business meeting straight to the airport. His assistant had met him there with a suitcase. “Tomorrow at two.”

“Will you be staying on? How about Tuck?”

“Looks like we both will.” Jack drank deeply. Sam definitely knew his way around a coffeepot. “At least until we can sell the plant and figure out what to do with the Hall.” He smiled without humor. “Know anyone who wants a ten-thousand-square-foot albatross?”

Sam shook his head. “So, you're selling the plant?” His face was tight, his knuckles white on the curve of his cup.

Jack nodded, then remembered that Sam's father, Paul, was the production supervisor and had been since the boys had been kids. “Your father's job will be safe, unless he's ready to retire. There's no need to worry about that.”

“I'm not worried. He won't be, either, I imagine, but those other fifty-some people who work there—they might have some concern.” Sam's voice was mild, but the look in his good eye was anything but.

Irritation crawled along Jack's hairline, and he tightened his jaw. He'd bought and sold a handful of businesses since he'd graduated from Notre Dame. He'd made himself a success by flipping companies the way those guys on television flipped houses, and he hadn't done it by causing irreparable harm to labor. Didn't Sam know that?

No, of course he didn't. Why would he?

“We'll do what we can to protect all the jobs.”

“Well.” Sam nodded abruptly. “That's good. Did you say you were looking for a remodeling crew?”

“A couple of them, probably. If we are going to sell the alba...the house, it needs to become more like a home and less like a museum.”

“Are you and Tucker living in it?”

“Tuck is. I'm in the Dower House.” He looked at his watch. Not that he cared what time it was, but it was hard maintaining eye contact with Sam, as hard as it had been seeing the redhead across the street. “I'll check back with you, all right?” He set down his cup and headed toward the front door of the store, needing air, needing something to ease the grief of being back in this place he'd loved so much and being completely alone.

Sam's voice followed him. “I'll check around.” He cleared his throat. “I'll see you at the funeral.”

Jack stopped, turning around to meet Sam's gaze. “That's very kind of you.” He knew the words were stilted, but he meant them.

“Your grandmother was a customer. Not that she ever came in the store, but she'd call and tell me what she wanted and I'd take it out there. And she was your grandmother. We were best friends in high school—all the way through. You walked away and the truth is I don't like you very much right now, but on some level we're still best friends.”

Jack smiled, but the expression felt cold on his face. He doubted if it looked any warmer than it felt. “Really.”

“Yup.” Sam sketched him a wave. “When you drive down Country Club Road, those little crosses that are all rough and the paint's worn off? They're the only sign that the accident ever happened. The road's been repaved, even widened a little. They couldn't do anything to straighten out the curves, but it's a lot safer than it was then. Other than those of us who were in the wreck and our families, people have forgotten. The scars have healed. I don't know why you saw fit to leave the way you did. I may never know why. But you're back now, at least for a while, and it's time for the exile to end. It's been long enough.”

“Long enough?” Jack kept his voice mild, maintained the smile, but everything inside him tightened. “For the Gallaghers and the Benteens? The Worths and Linda Saylors's parents? For you, Sam?”

Sam hesitated, lifting his free hand to straighten the patch that suited his face so well it was as though it had always been there. “Maybe not. I don't know.” He sighed. “The accident wasn't your fault. No one blames you for it.”

“I know.” Not that he believed it for a New York minute, but maybe if he said it often enough, he would. Maybe.

* * *

“S
ERIOUSLY
. R
ENT
-A-W
IFE
IS
cleaning the Dower House and I drew the short straw? No one will be there while I'm working, right?” Arlie Gallagher filled her plate with a little more spaghetti than was probably good for her, but her stepmother was the best cook on the lake. “You told them that everyone should be out of the house so I can get the job done quickly?”

“Yes, I told them that.” Holly, her six-months-younger stepsister, followed her, filling her own plate as full as Arlie's.

Gianna Gallagher topped off their wineglasses and waited for the daughters she'd raised more alone than not to join her at the table. “I'm glad you girls are here.” She swirled the liquid in her glass and took a drink. “I don't get lonely much—there's no time—but mealtime's when I miss your dad the most.”

“We should come for dinner more often.” Arlie covered her stepmother's hand with her own and smiled into her eyes. “It would be a struggle, but I could eat your cooking occasionally as opposed to standing over the kitchen sink scarfing a Hot Pocket. Goodness knows, Holly could use some more pasta, too.”

“No, I couldn't.” Holly shook her head. “If I gain more than ten pounds, my foot doesn't fit right and I have to get a new socket.” She rapped the side of her prosthetic ankle, a result of the accident that had claimed her stepfather's life.

Gianna squeezed Arlie's fingers. “I wanted to talk to you both before you started hearing things. Lakers may blame the summer people for starting rumors, but the truth is that gossip travels even faster in the wintertime when people are bored.”

“What is it, Mama?” Holly spun her pasta expertly onto her fork.

“The Llewellyns.”

Arlie laid down her fork again, her appetite gone. “We're cleaning the Dower House as requested, Gianna. We already know Jack's coming back for a while. He won't stay—he never stays.” The words made her stomach twist, the way it had when she'd seen him on the street today.

She leaned back in Gianna's comfortable dining room chair and sipped wine, enjoying the immediate comfort of it. Sycamore Hill's red was extra good this year. Not that she could tell the difference, but Chris Granger's family owned the local winery and he said it was.

Gianna hesitated. “Apparently the estate is very complicated. I don't pretend to know what all's involved—the beauty-shop grapevine's intel wasn't that in-depth—and both boys will be coming back here to stay for a time.” Gianna's eyes softened on Arlie. “Will you be okay with it?”

After the accident, there had been so much pain between them they couldn't seem to get through it. When he left for college, he never came back. It still hurt to think about it, though not as badly as it had then.
Nothing
hurt as much as it had then, but seeing him across the street today had opened the old wounds.

If Arlie gave the word, her stepmother was completely capable of telling Jack Llewellyn the streets of Miniagua weren't big enough for him and her daughter both and he needed to find his way back out of town.

She sipped her wine, enjoyed its warmth, then drained her glass. “It's not as though I've spent the last sixteen years in mourning. I've lived half my life since then. I have a career, my own house, and Chris is a sort-of boyfriend. I can deal with seeing Jack.”

It sounded good, she thought, but her stepmother didn't look entirely convinced.