Carly's Gift (5 page)

Ethan crossed his arms. “It's an intriguing question, don't you think, David?” His words were rounded instead of crisp, each of them bumping into the other in an alcohol slur.

David glanced at the bottle of wine. It was nearly empty while the original glass Ethan had poured for Carly was untouched.

“Andrea's turned into a real beauty, wouldn't you say?” Ethan went on. “Looks a lot like her mom. Except her hair. Don't know how it turned out the way it did—so straight and light colored. You should have seen her when she was a baby, the peach fuzz on her head was so blond, it was nearly white.”

Oblivious to the undercurrent that gave importance to the conversation, Eric blithely changed the subject. “Hey, Mr. Montgomery, why don't you come to the basketball game with us tomorrow? We're playing Westbend.”

“I don't think—”

“It's going to be a blowout,” Shawn added. “We beat them by twenty-six points at the Northeast Tournament last month.”

“Please come,” Andrea added enthusiastically, reaching over his shoulder to retrieve the salt and pepper shaker.

Ethan poured the last of the wine into his glass. “She's on the cheerleading squad.” He tossed the drink down. “They're just window dressing, of course, but they're damned good.”

David looked up in time to see a hurt expression flash across Andrea's face.

“I get there early so I could save you a midcourt seat,” she said, choosing to ignore her father's remark.

The last thing he wanted to do was go to a high school basketball game. “That sounds like fun,” he told her in spite of himself.

Ethan tipped his empty glass to David. “Somehow I thought you'd come if she was the one to ask.”

Four

David excused himself
from two women he'd known in high school who were in the process of telling him why his last book hadn't been as good as the others and went over to say good-bye to Andrea. “It was a great game,” he said. “I'm glad you asked me.”

The cheerleader standing next to Andrea offered a shy smile, which he returned with an acknowledging nod. Again focusing his full attention on Andrea, he told her, “If the cheerleaders had been as good in my time as you are now, I wouldn't have minded coming to these things half as much.”

A blush of pleasure colored her cheeks. “We practice almost every day.”

“Next summer we're going to compete in the state championship,” the girl standing next to Andrea told him.

“That's kind of unfair to the other squads, isn't it?”

Andrea shook her head and made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Are all writers like you?”

“How's that?”

“Always coming up with just the right thing to say?”

Andrea was her mother's daughter in more than looks. She would hold her own in the world, even in the bullshit world of Los Angeles where she'd confided to him she wanted to study acting before she took on New York. A lump formed in David's throat. She was the fresh, bursting-with-promise young woman Carly had been at fifteen, the clean canvas, the pristine page. God, what he wouldn't give to have just one of those days back, to remember what it felt like when anything was possible, to know with an adolescent certainty that he'd have the world by the tail the day his name hit the top of
The New York Times
bestseller list, to believe his and Carly's love a constant so pure it could survive without nurturing.

“I think what you're telling me is that I'm full of crap,” he answered.

She laughed. “You really do have a way with words. I'm going to have to break down and read one of your books someday.”

The other cheerleader let out a gasp. “You mean you've never read one? Oh, Andrea, you've just got to—they're fantastic. Especially the one about the woman spy. When she fell in love with the Russian guy and then got orders to kill him, I thought I'd die.”

She'd chosen his least favorite book.
Echoed Footsteps
had been his one attempt at a story that was more focused on people than plot and he'd never felt he quite pulled it off. Even his editor had expressed disappointment, telling him his readership wouldn't stay with him through too many more experiments like that one.

“Thank you,” he said. “I'm glad you liked it.”

“Are you coming back to the house for dessert?” Andrea asked, stooping to pick up her pom-poms. “Mom always bakes something to celebrate when we win.”

“And if you lose?”

She laughed. “Then whatever she's made is supposed to make us feel better.”

“I'd like to, but I have a manuscript that needs going over back at the motel,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Ethan said expansively, coming up to them. “You don't want to miss one of Carly's after-game desserts. They're an old family tradition.”

The word came out “tra-dick-shun” on a breath reeking of alcohol. David took a wary step backward, sensing that Ethan was in a confrontational mood. He'd wondered about the frequent trips to the bathroom until he'd caught sight of the silver flask in Ethan's coat pocket.

Ethan threw a playful punch at David's shoulder. “Can't skip out of a family tradition. After all, everybody always said we were just like brothers. They're still saying it. I'll bet a dozen people have come up to me tonight to tell me how good it is to see the two of us together again.” He feigned another punch. “Don't you remember how we used to share everything?” Receiving no response, he gave David a leering smile. “What was mine was yours and what was yours—”

David took hold of Ethan's arm and propelled him toward the door leaving Andrea behind. “What the fuck are you trying to prove?”

Ethan jerked his arm free. “Listen to the innocent act. You missed your calling, David. You should have been an actor.”

“You're drunk.”

“And you're a gold-plated piece of shit. You might have the rest of the world fooled with that big-time writer garbage, but you don't fool me. I've been—”

David looked up to see Andrea following them. “For Christ's sake, Ethan, keep your voice down.”

“What's the matter? 'Fraid somebody might hear what a hightailing bastard their home-town hero really is?” He taunted. “ 'Fraid they might learn how he ran out on—”

Andrea took her father's arm.
“Stop it,”
she demanded. “Everyone is looking at you.”

“What the fuck do I care?” he told her, prying her fingers from his coat.

“Shawn and Eric can see you,” she said.

They were the magic words. Ethan stopped struggling. He made a show of straightening his coat, and for a second, David thought it was over. Then Ethan glanced at him, his eyes filled with loathing, and David saw how wrong he had been.

“You're not getting away with it anymore,” Ethan said, his voice low and menacing. “We can settle this at my house tonight or at your dad's memorial service in front of God and the whole goddamned town. Take your pick.”

Andrea gasped. “Daddy, why are you fighting with Mr. Montgomery?”

David looked past Ethan and saw Carly approaching. Intuitively, he knew that if he was still around when she reached them, Ethan would begin his tirade all over again. He glanced at Andrea. She looked as if she were praying for the floor to open up and swallow her.

“I'll be there,” he told Ethan, then turned and left, ignoring the questioning look Carly sent him as they passed.

Needing time alone to think about the confrontation with Ethan, David aimed his rental car for the nearest town exit, not caring where he was going, only that he get away for a while. Ten minutes later, he recognized an achingly familiar landmark and pulled off the main road onto a narrow country lane. Memories assailed him as he steered the Jeep around axle-breaking potholes and through weeds as tall as the windows.

He rounded the final curve, stopped the car, and flicked the headlights on high. Half a lifetime faded as he stared at the ghostly apparition. Lender's Mill was precisely the way he remembered it, not larger or smaller or, amazingly, any more decrepit. When he'd dropped out of college and started his wanderings, he had held on to the memory of this place like a talisman, putting himself to sleep at night by going over every inch of the century-old building. He'd heard of prisoners of war doing similar things to maintain their sanity.

Seeing the mill again brought memories so pure, so powerful, and so touchingly innocent, they overwhelmed him.

He and Ethan had been nine the summer they discovered the mill, Carly an insistent, tag-along seven. In the beginning they'd used it as their fort, spending afternoons and summers fighting off Indian attacks to make the frontier safe for settlers. Carly was the scout, sent on all the reconnaissance and supply missions. He and Ethan had convinced her it was because she was the smallest and the logical one to sneak through the enemy lines, but in reality it was because her mother baked cookies and theirs didn't.

The mill was also where Ethan had gone when he was twelve and decided to run away from home. They'd all wound up in trouble for that one. When he and Carly made their blood vows to Ethan that they would tell no one where he had gone, they'd had no idea how far it would lead.

Carly's father was the town sheriff and a first-class hard ass when it came to dealing with kids. He'd hauled the two of them down to the station and grilled them for over an hour before giving in and putting a missing-child bulletin on the wire. After he ordered his deputy to organize a search-and-rescue team to comb the woods surrounding the town, he took Carly aside and told her she wouldn't be able to sit down for a week if he discovered she knew something she wasn't telling.

When they found Ethan's hiding place at the mill, not only did Carly's father make good on his promise, he confined her to the house for the rest of the summer. Ethan was put to work cleaning the offices and bathrooms at his father's factory. David couldn't remember the punishment that had been leveled at him. Whatever it was, it was forgotten a few days later when the doctor informed his mother that she had cancer and likely wouldn't see another Christmas.

She'd seen four more, none of them good.

The mill was also where he and Carly had made love the first time. The abrupt transition from friend to lover had taken them both by surprise. Although they'd often tried, neither was ever able to pinpoint exactly when their feelings changed. The closest David could come was the day he saw Carly at the movie arguing with Billy Webster about copping a feel and realized he no longer wanted to teach Carly how to defend herself, he wanted to be the one doing the defending.

Ethan bitterly resented the change in their relationship, insisting that Carly was just looking for a ticket out of Baxter and that David just wanted someone convenient to stick it to while he was still in town. The three of them eventually became friends again, but it was never the same.

In hindsight, David understood the real reason Ethan had been upset wasn't the disruption of the friendships, it was that he'd fallen in love with Carly himself.

David opened the car door and started to get out. He had one foot on the ground before the futility of what he was doing hit him. What possible good could come of seeing the room where he and Carly had fumbled in their virginity, where they had lain in each other's arms and talked of the time he would be a writer and she a painter, of the studios they would build in their house, hers full of light, his with a fireplace, of the walks they would take along the Thames, the Seine and the Volga, of the children they would have when they were old and settled?

With renewed purpose, he turned the car around and headed back to town. He would listen to what Ethan had to say and then, when his father's memorial service was over, he would be on his way out of town, leaving Baxter and all that it represented behind him forever.

Carly reached up to pull her hair free from under the collar of the cardigan she'd just put on. The set-back thermostat had shut off the heater fifteen minutes ago and the house was already starting to get cold. Ethan had insisted she stay up with him, saying that David had promised to stop by and it would be impolite of her not to be there to greet him. She'd agreed, unwilling to take the chance that it was alcohol and not Ethan doing the talking. She cringed to think what could happen if David and Ethan were ever left alone.

“There he is,” Ethan said triumphantly as a car pulled into the driveway and its headlights swept across the front window. At the sound of footsteps on the walkway, he drained his drink, got up from the recliner, went to the front door, and opened it with a flourish before David could knock.

“So glad you could make it,” Ethan said, indicating with a broad sweep of his arm that David should come inside.

David hesitated. Ethan had obviously continued to drink after he left the game. “Why don't you tell me what this is about before I come in? I'm tired, and if it can wait, I'd just as soon make it another time.”