Days Like This (46 page)

Ahead of them, on the right, she
saw a bright yellow FOR SALE sign.  Rob clicked on his blinker and slowed,
turning into a dirt driveway that was little more than two gravel tracks
winding through a field of yellowed winter grass.  He stopped the car, put the
shifter into Park, and looked at her. 

“I suppose,” she said, “you’re
going to tell me why we’re here.”

“Let’s get out.”

She stood with him in front of
the Explorer, a cold November wind whipping her hair around her face.  “There
used to be a house here,” she said.  “It belonged to the Sirois family.  I went
to school with Donald Sirois.  The house burned down a decade ago.”

“There’s twenty acres.  Mostly
open fields, with a few nice old hardwood shade trees.  A small orchard.  Lots
of room for a garden.  Jesse says the deer like it here, especially in the
fall, when the apples ripen.  Turn around.”  He took her by the shoulders,
guided her.  “Take a look at the view.”

Across the road, the land fell
sharply, a winter-yellow field that led to a deeply wooded hillside.  In the
distance, there were lakes and mountains as far as the eye could see.  “The sun
sets over there,” he said, “right behind the mountains.  At sunset, all those
lakes turn sky-blue-pink.  Imagine having that view out your window every day
for the rest of your life.”

“Why are you telling me this?” 
She was pretty sure she knew, but she wanted to hear it from him.

“Don’t you think this would be
the perfect place to build a house? 
Our
house.  One with no ghosts and
no memories.  A home where we can raise our kids.”  He took her hand in his,
wrapped his fingers around hers to take away the chill.  “I have piles of money
just sitting around.  Why not use some of it?  We could design the place
ourselves.  Build it exactly the way we want it, to suit us.  Roomy and
beautiful, but not pretentious, because we’re not pretentious people.  Lots of
warm wood and old-fashioned charm.  A modern kitchen, with every fancy gadget
you want.  A master bedroom suite with a huge soaking tub.  Maybe a wraparound
porch, where we could put a swing, like the one we have now.  Whatever you
want, just name it, and it’s yours.  I want to build this for you.  For us.  To
give us a fresh start.”

“You want me to sell the house.”

“Look, I know you love that
house, babe.  I like it, too.  But everywhere I turn, I see Danny.  If it’s
that way for me, it has to be a thousand times worse for you.  I don’t think we’ll
ever get past him as long as we stay there.”  He tugged at her hand, led her up
past the cellar hole to the half-acre of flat land behind where the house had
stood.  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  About my life, my career, where I
want to go from here.  I’m a family man now.  I have a wife and a daughter, and
a baby on the way.  I don’t want to spend my life on the road, leaving you
behind, missing birthdays and first steps and first smiles and all those little
things that only happen once.  I want to move away from performing and into the
production end of the business.  Writing and producing albums for other
artists.  With you as my partner.  Like we did for Danny.  We could build a
studio—a real studio—right here, behind the house.  Sure, we might have to
spend some of our time in New York or L.A.  But with a state-of-the-art
facility, plus our expertise, we can make them come to us.  It’s like that
Kevin Costner movie.  If I build it, they will come.”

“What about performing?  You live
to play guitar.  You can’t give that up.”

“I don’t intend to give up
playing.  But I’ve had enough of the road.  It was fun when we were kids—”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

“You know what I mean.  It was
new and exciting.  It was dreams coming true.  But I’ve lived those dreams, and
I’m ready to move on to a different dream.  I’m almost forty years old.  That’s
not how I want to live any more, spending all my time on buses and planes,
living out of a suitcase, sleeping in a different town every night.  I am
so
over that.  I want to be here, with you and our kids, in a house we built from
the ground up, a home we can leave to the kids when we’re old and feeble.”  He
raised his head, took another sweeping glance at the view.  “If this doesn’t
tickle your fancy, we’ll find another place.  This isn’t the only piece of land
for sale in town.  So what do you say?”

She thought about leaving behind
the house she and Danny had worked so hard to turn into a home.  A house that
had never really been hers, but more a symbol of Danny’s rebirth.  A house that
had held nothing but emptiness and sorrow after he was gone, until Rob moved in
and made it a real home.  A house was nothing but four walls and a roof.  It
was the people living there who made it a home.  And no matter where they
lived, as long as she and Rob were together, she would be happy.

He was waiting for her response. 
She gazed into those beautiful green eyes that she knew so well she could carry
on entire conversations with him without either of them uttering a word.  She
studied the tiny laugh lines that fanned out from the corners, the pale
freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose.  She knew every line and
angle of that face, knew how it reflected his every mood, all of that knowledge
embedded deep inside her, so far inside her that she was certain it had been
there for millennia, across lifetimes and continents and possibly the entire
solar system, and she couldn’t understand why it had taken her so many years to
figure it out.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she
touched him.  Ran her hands up his chest, to his shoulders, and kept going. 
Took his face between her fingertips, drew his mouth down to hers, and kissed
him.  Tilted her head back and solemnly met his eyes.

Understanding warmed and softened
those green eyes of his.  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving slowly up and
down.  And said hoarsely, “Yes?”

And she gave him a radiant smile
and said, “Yes!”

Laurie Breton started making up stories in her head when she
was a small child.  At the age of eight, she picked up a pen and began writing
them down.  Although she now uses a computer to write, she’s still addicted to
a new pen and a fresh sheet of lined paper.  At some point during her angsty
teenage years, her incoherent scribblings morphed into love stories, and that’s
what she’s been writing, in one form or another, ever since. 

When she’s not writing, she can usually be found driving the
back roads of Maine, looking for inspiration.  Or perhaps standing on a beach
at dawn, shooting a sunrise with her Canon camera.  If all else fails, a day
trip to Boston, where her heart resides, will usually get the juices flowing.

The mother of two grown children, Breton has two beautiful
grandkids and two precious granddogs.  She and her husband live in a small
Maine town with a lovebird who won’t stop laying eggs and a
Chihuahua/Papillon/Schipperke/Pug mix named River who pretty much runs the
household.

I
love to hear from readers!  If you enjoyed this book, please drop me a line.

[email protected]

www.lauriebreton.com

www.facebook.com/LaurieBretonBooks

January, 1993

Jackson Falls, Maine

She hadn't been sure the fourteen-year-old Vega would make
it this far.  She'd bought it for a measly two hundred bucks the day that Irv's
kids ran her on a rail out of Palm Beach.  They'd sat her down one afternoon,
announced that they were contesting the will, and given her fifteen minutes to
pack up what was hers before the locksmith waiting in his panel truck in the
circular drive outside the mansion changed the lock on the front door.

It wasn't what Irv would have wanted, but she was too weary,
too discouraged, to fight it.  They'd eventually win, anyway.  She and Irv had
only been married for a year.  In their eyes, that was hardly long enough to
justify her stealing their inheritance, and she was certain that the right
attorney could easily sway the judge to their way of thinking.  It didn't
matter to his kids that she'd actually cared for their father, despite their
age difference.  In their eyes, she was a gold-digger, and that was all that
mattered.

So she'd left with nothing more than two suitcases of
designer clothing, a few pieces of jewelry, and seventy-five bucks in her
Chanel handbag.  She'd sold the bag and most of the jewelry to a small
secondhand shop for a price so low it was insulting, but it was enough to cover
the cost of the car and the trip to Maine.

She'd thought about stopping in Boston.  Trav lived there,
on a dead-end street in Chestnut Hill, and he would have let her sleep on the
couch in his finished basement.  But she and her older brother's wife had never
seen eye to eye, and what was the point of stirring up trouble between them? 
So she'd given Boston a wide berth, circling around it on 495, praying she and
her little Vega, which pretty much topped out at 61 mph, would survive all
those crazy Boston drivers swerving around her doing ninety.

And here she was, back in this shithole town, the one place
she'd sworn she'd never return to.  But she was out of money and excuses, and
home was the one place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you
in.  On this fifty-degree January afternoon, driving through downtown in a
fourteen-year-old Chevy with a mud-splattered windshield because she’d run out
of washer fluid two hundred miles back, she could smell the faint sulphur odor
from the paper mill downriver.  There was no denying the fact that she was one
hell of a long way from the moneyed fragrance of Palm Beach.

The Vega was running on fumes, and she was down to her last
twenty-dollar-bill.  Colleen downshifted and wheeled into the Big Apple
convenience store, where she pumped five bucks worth of fuel into her gas tank
and cleaned her windshield with a fistful of snow.  She'd gone to high school
with the guy working the cash register.  Sonny Somebody-or-other.  She kept her
sunglasses on and her eyes lowered as they completed their transaction, hoping
he wouldn't recognize her and want to chat.  Small talk had never been her
strongest suit, and what was there to talk about anyway? 

Him:  What have you been up to since the last time I saw
you? 

Her:  Oh, nothing much, except that I just buried my
sixty-year-old third husband.

Meadowbrook Road was a quagmire.  It always was at this time
of year.  The town maintained the unpaved road, or so they claimed, but between
January thaw and mid-April, it mostly consisted of deep, muddy ruts and frost
heaves.  Easily navigable in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.  Not so much in a
Chevy Vega with summer tires that had spent its entire pathetic life in
southern Florida and was skittish as a newborn colt on these snowy Maine roads.

John Anderson was singing
Straight Tequila Night
on
the dashboard radio when she passed the old Abercrombie place, perched atop a
small hill.  She’d heard, through the grapevine, that her sister had lived in
the Gothic Revival farmhouse for a time before selling it to their nephew Billy
when Casey and her second husband had built a new home on Ridge Road.  Although
he’d been a huge part of Casey’s life for nearly two decades, Colleen had never
met her sister’s new husband, and she was mildly curious.  The late, great
Danny Fiore would be a hard act to follow.  The irony of it struck her:  She’d
always been jealous of her older sister, had always coveted whatever Casey had
that she didn’t.  It was really true that you had to be careful what you wished
for.  She and Casey had never had much in common.  She’d certainly never
expected that when they finally did share something, it would be the mantle of
widowhood.

She took McKellar’s Hill at a snail’s pace, let out a sigh
of relief when she reached the bottom and saw the river ahead of her, its
frozen surface dark in spots, slushy from the thaw.  Another quarter-mile, and
then, on her right, a broad expanse of snowy fields with broken, yellowed corn
stalks poking up here and there through the pitted snow.  Beyond that, wooden
fence posts marked the pasture where Dad’s Holsteins grazed.  In the distance
loomed the weathered nineteenth-century barn where hay was stored, flanked by
the low-roofed addition, circa 1952, that housed the milking parlor and the
cattle stalls.  Two blue Harvestore silos stood sentinel, and as she drew
closer, the old farmhouse hove into view, smoke rising from its chimney, its
clapboards in need of a fresh coat of paint.

She passed the mailbox, clicked her blinker, and turned in
at the sign that read MEADOWBROOK FARM ~ REGISTERED HOLSTEINS.  A cluster of
chickens scattered as she came to a stop beside the ominously tilted utility
pole at the center of the yard, directly behind the red Farmall tractor her
father had owned since the beginning of time.  For a moment, she just sat there
gazing across a muddy, slushy barnyard, the steering wheel vibrating beneath
her hands and dread filling every crevice of her heart.  Dad didn’t know she
was coming.  She hadn’t been able to muster the courage to call for fear that
he’d hang up on her.  Or worse, tell her not to bother.  She hadn’t been the
favored child to begin with; she could only imagine how far she’d fallen from
grace since the day she walked out on Jesse and her nine-year-old son.

But if there was one thing she’d learned in the past decade,
it was that running only got you so far.  Sooner or later, everybody had to
face the music.  So she shut off her ignition.  The Vega sputtered and died. 
She opened her door, swung around, and planted her Ferragamos flat on the muddy
ground.