John Riley's Girl (7 page)

A couple of cars rolled by on the street just out from the parking lot. One had the window rolled down and the base notes of some rap tune kept time with the thumping of Olivia’s heart. Between John and her, a stretch of silence hung large and awkward like the wash on an old clothesline, weighed down in the middle.

“I’m really sorry about your wife, John,” Olivia said now, the words coming out in a rush, almost before she’d realized her intent to say them.

He looked as if she’d just hit him with a bucket of ice water. He glanced down at the ground, his voice hoarse when he finally said, “When something that bad happens to someone that good, it’s not easy to accept.”

Olivia’s heart hurt with the words, for the woman whose life had ended too soon, for the husband and daughter she had left behind, and selfish though it was, for the love he had obviously felt for her.

The air between them had changed for the moment, like a sudden break in a brewing storm.

“I don’t think we ever realize our humanity more
than when we can’t fix the bad things that happen to people we love,” she said softly.

“It’s a hard lesson,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and kicking at the gravel beneath his boot. “Figuring out that for the most part, we really aren’t in control of anything. At least not the big stuff.”

“You really believe that?”

He looked up and met her gaze head on. “Yeah, I really do.”

“You didn’t used to look at life that way.”

He laughed, a short, disillusion-filled laugh. “Yeah, well, I guess that’s what growing up and becoming an adult really means.”

“Is that what you’ll teach your daughter?”

Surprise widened his eyes. He started to say something, stopped, then gave her a long, steady look. “I wouldn’t do that to her childhood.”

Olivia folded her arms across her chest. She found it impossible to reconcile the John from her youth with this John. The John she had known at seventeen had been the first person ever to tell her she could do anything she wanted with her life. And to her that had been meaningful.
The world is open to you, Liv. You have everything it takes to be anything you want. It’s all inside you. All you have to do is let it out.
She heard the words clearly now, remembered one night when they’d been out to a movie Olivia had loved, and she’d confessed to him her
secret desire to write. When she was a girl, she’d kept journals, filling the pages with made-up stories and fragments of her own life as well. She’d been thirteen years old when her father had found a story she’d written about some kittens she’d discovered under an old house near where they lived. He’d had the pages in his hand one afternoon when she’d come home from school, and for one buoyant moment, she’d been sure he was going to tell her how much he liked it. Instead, he’d flung the pages across the floor and told her she’d never make straight As in school if she spent all her time going on about sentimental junk like that.

Olivia had stopped writing her short stories.

And so, the night John had told her she could be anything she wanted to be, she’d wanted to believe him. That was the John she’d missed so terribly over the years. But the man standing in front of her now bore little resemblance to that boy.

“So why exactly
did
you come back here?” John leveled at her now, his face again an unreadable mask. “I can’t imagine there would be anything in Summerville of interest to you.”

“This used to be my home, too.”

“You didn’t seem to have any trouble forgetting that,” he said.

The storm was back.

It was stunning to discover how quickly her self-proclaimed indifference could collapse beneath the
sting of his words. “Things aren’t always exactly what they seem, John.”

He took a step back. She’d surprised him. That much was clear.

Olivia clamped her mouth shut. Enough. Standing there in the middle of the Dickson’s Feed parking lot, where memories of John were piled high like cast-aside hand-me-downs, anger seeped up inside her.

John thought he had the corner on the right to be furious over something she had done to him. The irony of that was almost more than she could hold inside another second longer.
She
had done to
him. She
was the one who’d had all choice taken away from her. Who’d been swept along on the consequences of someone else’s behavior.
She
was the one still paying for those consequences today.

He thought she had run off to make a better life for herself and despised her for that. How would he feel if he knew the actual truth?

She’d come here wanting to put the past to rest. But standing in front of him now, she could not bring herself to say the words. To explain. To ask for forgiveness. The truth could only result in one thing. John would only end up blaming her as much as she blamed herself.

J
OHN KEPT TO
the speed limit on the drive back to Rolling Hills. For one crazy instant back there, he’d
wanted to go after Liv and ask her what she’d meant by that remark.
Things aren’t always exactly what they seem.

As far as the two of them were concerned, things seemed pretty clear to him.

She was sorry about Laura. He’d hardly known what to say to that or how to respond. How could he talk to her about Laura? This woman he hadn’t seen in fifteen years had been the one shadow in his marriage. Liv was the woman he had never forgotten, never gotten over, never stopped dreaming about at night when his unconscious mind took over and left him unable to shrug off the wants of his own heart. How could he talk to Liv about Laura when there were still moments he felt as if he might choke on the guilt of that?

But for a few moments, when Liv had looked at him with sympathy in her eyes, he’d felt a connection between them, a bond of empathy and a once-complete knowledge of who the other one was, what they were made of. No matter how much he might like his assessments of Liv Ashford to be true—a woman who’d decided there were bigger things in the world for her than him—he’d seen a glimpse of the Liv he had known fifteen years ago.

And it shook him to his center.

Since the moment he’d discovered she was back in Summerville, the anger inside him had been on autopilot, taking him where it would. He didn’t like
what he was seeing in himself. Or what his anger said to the world about his respect for the woman who had loved him the way most men would be grateful to have been loved.

Laura deserved so much better than that.

The truth was she had deserved a hell of a lot better than him.

And a hell of a lot better than the illness that had taken the life from her.

With the thought, grief and guilt struck up inside him, like the sudden clanging of brass instruments, the sound in his head a stark contrast to the peaceful silence around him.

He’d failed his wife in many ways. But the failure that loomed largest was his inability to love her as a wife deserved to be loved by her husband. Because the truth was with Liv he’d found the other side of himself. Knew that she was meant for him. With Liv there had been a click, a fit, a deep satisfaction of knowing they’d been made for one another—he’d believed that with all his heart, with an almost arrogant certainty that they would spend the rest of their lives together.

But then Liv had left, and he’d felt as if someone had let the air out of his life, leaving him flat, empty, torn up with the kind of hurt a person didn’t get over.

And he hadn’t gotten over it.

This was the part he’d never admitted to himself
until now. After she’d left, he’d gone on with his life as a man must who has accepted the end of a relationship that turned out not to be what he’d thought it was. But the truth was he’d closed down a part of himself after that, simply locked it up, hung a big Access Denied sign out front.

And he’d never let Laura in, never loved her with the freedom that can only come from an unscarred heart.

This, he regretted.

This, he would change if he could. But it wasn’t in his power to change the past. The only thing he could affect was the here and now. Being angry at Liv said things he did not want said. A man with indifference in his heart didn’t act the way he’d been acting.

At the barn, John backed the truck up to the feed-room door, got out and started unloading the bags of grain. He’d just reached for the last bag, hefted it onto his shoulder when Sophia walked up.

“Hot work,” she said, handing him a glass of lemonade. “Thought you could use this.”

John took the glass, wiped his cheek on the shoulder of his shirt and said, “Thanks. It’s a little warm out here.”

Sophia hesitated, shuffled from one foot to the other, then reached in her apron pocket and pulled out a plain white envelope. She held it out to him.
“I have no idea if now’s the time for this or not, John. It feels like it might be, so I hope I’m right.”

He reached for the envelope, glanced at the front and recognized Laura’s handwriting. Alarm jolted through him. “What is it?”

“I haven’t read it,” she said, her expression serious in a way he rarely saw it. “Before she died, she asked me to give it to you when I thought you might be ready to make another life for yourself. I don’t know if you are or not, son. But it’s time you did.” She thwacked him on the shoulder, the gesture awkward, affectionate, and he could see tears in her eyes now. “I’ll be in the house if you need me.”

She left him standing there then, the envelope pressed between his thumb and forefinger like some foreign object he wasn’t even sure how to hold, much less what to do with.

A red bird flitted by, landed on a nearby white azalea, sang a note or two, then flew off again. John stood frozen to the spot. The screen door at the back of the house wheezed open, then flapped closed, the sound reverberating through him.

He looked down at the envelope. Part of him wanted to know what was inside, but another part did not.

He stuck it in his pocket, went in the barn and got Eli out of his stall. He snapped a single-tie to the halter of the two-year-old gelding, squirted him with some fly spray, then saddled him up and led
him out of the barn. Despite the warm weather, the young horse was full of himself, doing his best to jig all the way out the gravel road leading away from the barn.

They passed a field lush with orchard grass. Eli balked a little, wanting to stop and graze. John urged him on, and they soon left the tempting field behind, following an old dirt road that led to the hills on the backside of the farm. By the time they reached the top, Eli was sweating, and John’s shirt was sticking to his back. He got off, led the horse to the creek and let him have a short drink.

The temperature was just slightly cooler up here, the soft stirring of air a welcome relief from the June sun that had beat down on them most of the way up. An oak tree threw shade across the spot. John sat down on the trunk of a maple that had fallen last winter during an ice storm. He looped the reins on the jut of a broken limb and let the gelding nibble at the grass growing along the edge of the creek bank.

It was cool and peaceful here, this place John had come to often in his life, maybe his favorite on the farm. He wasn’t sure he ever came consciously, but he always seemed to wind up here whenever he had something going on inside him that needed consideration. When he was younger, it was here where he’d always seemed able to put a label on things, figure out how to fix them. As an adult, that hadn’t
always proven true. Not with Liv. And not with Laura.

He pulled the envelope out of his pocket and stared at it a full minute before turning it over and slitting the top open. He slipped the paper out, unfolded it with a good amount of trepidation and began to read.