John Riley's Girl (8 page)

His hand let go of the letter. It fell to his side.

His wife’s voice echoed from the pages, and the first thing he felt was a well of sadness so deep it couldn’t possibly have a bottom. Laura. Lord, life was unfair. Whatever had brought them together, kept them together, the world was less without her in it.

His heart throbbed. He didn’t fight it, didn’t try to push it away, but instead let the pain play out, absorbing at the same time, the realization that Liv had come back all those years ago.

Laura had been afraid to tell him.

Liv had come back.

Why?

And how could Laura not have told him? He let that question take root and waited to see if
anger would rise up. How could he blame Laura for what she had done?

The truth was, he couldn’t.

They had married fast. Some had said too fast. And when they’d met during those first months at the University of Virginia, he had been in such a fog that he wasn’t sure what his exact reasons for asking her to marry him were. He just knew they’d had something to do with trying to find a way to pull the plug on the awful hurt that had not subsided in him since Liv had left Summerville. He had never intended to hurt Laura. He knew that much. He’d been too young and too green to see far enough ahead to realize all the ramifications of an impulsiveness that had been based on his own selfish desire to forget Liv.

But even now, from a perspective shaped by fifteen years of separate lives and a good woman who had loved him, he couldn’t say that he would not have changed his life had he been here the day she had knocked on his door.

He picked up the letter, looked at the familiar handwriting again.

God help him, he should be able to, but he couldn’t say it.

Comparisons

O
LIVIA TOOK HER TIME
driving out to Lori’s, leaving the town limits and heading out into the county, stretches of rain-blessed cornfields blending into hay fields ready for the next cutting. On the left just ahead was a country store with white clapboard and a red tin roof and two gray-haired men on a bench out front quenching their thirst with small-bottle Cokes.

Wired with a thousand different feelings, Olivia wasn’t sure which to tackle first. Her cheeks still burned from the scene with John at the feed store.
He can only hurt you if you let him, Olivia.

Two more days and she would be gone. They would never see each other again. She lifted her right hand from the wheel. It was still shaking.

One thing was clear. John could barely stand the sight of her.

She blinked, trying to focus on the Virginia countryside rolling by. She knew this road well. The old
house where she’d grown up sat off this road, the turn just ahead on the right. She glanced in her rearview mirror. No cars behind her. She let up on the accelerator, her heart doubling its rhythm. The gravel road was still there, although vines and bushes had narrowed it to little more than a car’s width.

Should she go look? See if the old house was still standing?

But then what was the point? There was nothing there but memories whose edges had at least been dulled, if not obliterated, with time and distance.

What good would come from seeing the old house again?

Olivia pressed the accelerator to the floor, leaving the driveway behind and letting the BMW flirt with the upper end of the speed limit.

Her phone rang. Caller ID showed Michael’s cell number.

“Hey. Just wondering if you were having a good time.”

“Yes,” she said, not elaborating. “In fact, are you sure you want to come all the way down here? Not obligatory.”

“You went with me to that bore-you-to-tears black-tie thing a few weeks ago. I owe you.”

“Where are you?”

“Actually, I’m still in the city. We’ve got a big meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning. Last-
minute. Appearance mandatory. Would it be a very big deal if I didn’t come until the afternoon?”

“No,” she said. “You really don’t have to come at all, Michael. Being dateless won’t kill me.”

“There are two places where showing up without a date is like twin root canals: Weddings and reunions,” he said, a smile in his voice.

She let it go then and refused to ask herself if letting Michael off the hook had anything to do with John. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Just ahead, a small green sign—Gibson Road—marked the turn to Lori’s house. Olivia followed the tree-lined road a half-mile or so, and there at the end was an all-American setting—a house very much like the house Lori had grown up in and exactly what she’d always said she wanted. It was old, maybe turn-of-the-century, a white two-story with large windows and dark green shutters. It had recently been repainted. The front porch held two hanging swings, both of which were currently occupied by four children, three with dark hair like Sam’s, one with red like Lori’s. Each of them could have been in an advertisement for Gap Kids. They were every bit as beautiful as Lori had described them.

Olivia stopped her car under a tree heavy with green apples. At the sight of her, the children all clamored out of the swings and scrambled into the house, yelling, “Mama, mama, somebody’s here!”

Olivia got out of the car, feeling as out of place as a piece of contemporary furniture in the middle of a room done in American country. A flagstone sidewalk led to the front-porch steps. The door swung open again, and Sam stepped outside, a smile on his face. “Hey, Olivia.”

“Hi, Sam. I don’t think I’ve ever seen prettier children.”

“We’re a little prejudiced, but we’ve decided to keep them.” His smile widened. “Come on in. Lori’s just upstairs putting on the finishing touches. She said to send you up. Second room on the left.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Like the outside, Lori’s was the kind of house that felt lived in, the walls done in soothing earth tones of gold and cinnamon and taupe. Olivia went upstairs, stopping at a bedroom where Lori sat at a vanity running a brush through her hair, four children under the age of seven anchored to her sides with what looked like a sudden bout of shyness. Emotion capsized inside Olivia. Wistfulness? Envy?

“Hi,” Lori said, catching sight of Olivia in the mirror and smiling. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Me, too.” Olivia tipped a shoulder against the doorframe.

“Let me introduce you.” Lori pointed, starting with the smallest child. “Christopher, Mark, Rachel and Ashley. Say hello to Miss Ashford.”

“Hi.” “Hewwo,” came a chorus of curious greetings.

“Hello,” Olivia said. “It’s very nice to meet all of you.”

“Would you guys mind letting Mommy have a minute to talk with Olivia? How about if you go on downstairs with Daddy? We’ll be down in a few minutes and make some lunch.”

They filed out of the bedroom, their footsteps reluctant. At the top of the stairs, they thundered down in a race to see who would get to the bottom first.

“They’re adorable.”

Lori smiled. “Thank you. Some days I don’t know what to do with them, and others I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

“You’re obviously doing something right. They look like very happy children.”

“That’s the ultimate compliment to me,” she said. “Raising children is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. There’s no manual, no handbook, no four-year degree. So many nights I go to bed wondering if I should have handled something differently.”

“But you had such a good go-by,” Olivia said. “Your parents probably taught you more than you’ll ever realize about doing the right thing.”

“Here, sit down.” Lori patted the chair beside her vanity. “I hope I didn’t sound like a total cornball
last night when I was talking about what’s important to me these days.”

“I assure you that’s the last thing I thought.” Olivia looked down, adding, “Actually, I was more than a little jealous.”

Lori could not have looked more surprised. “With the life you have? How could you be jealous of me?”

Olivia met her friend’s disbelieving gaze. “I don’t have what you have,” she said, feeling the truth of her own words even as she said them. In this house, her own life felt suddenly thin.

“But Olivia, your life must be so glamorous and exciting! All those beautiful clothes you wear, getting to look like a million dollars all the time! I can only imagine.”

“They’re just clothes,” Olivia said. And then, surprising herself, added, “Sometimes I feel like it doesn’t really matter whether it’s me sitting in front of the camera or not. It’s as if that’s just this person I’ve created to do the job, and there’s not much of the real me showing through.”

Lori looked startled by the confession. “Is it something you want to keep doing?”

“I always thought so. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I hope I’m not sounding ungrateful. I’ve been given some wonderful opportunities.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course.”

“Why haven’t you ever gotten married?”

Olivia shrugged with what she hoped passed as nonchalance. “I think I just ended up not being the marrying kind.”

“You were once,” Lori said pointedly. And then with a smile, “Back when you were John Riley’s girl.”

Just the words made Olivia’s chest tighten and ache. There had been a time when that was all she wanted to be. “That was a long time ago.”

“But you’re still the same person.”

“In some ways. In most ways, I think I’m very different. And most of the time, I’m pretty happy with the way things are,” Olivia said, but the words did not sound convincing.

“I always pictured you with children. You and John. It was just one of those things I couldn’t imagine being any other way.”

“How can you really know what you want at that age?” Olivia managed, and even to her ears, her voice did not sound like her own.

“Some things, I think you just know.” Lori picked up a pot of foundation and ran her thumb across the top. “John is a proud man. Maybe you didn’t realize what it did to him when you left.”

The words held no trace of criticism, but all the same, Olivia heard the conviction behind them. “We were teenagers, Lori. He moved on pretty quickly.”

This time, it was Lori who seemed to have trouble finding words. She put the lid back on her makeup. Picked up a hairbrush. Put it back down. “I don’t really feel comfortable talking about this with everything that’s happened, but there were a lot of rumors floating around when he married Laura. A lot of people thought he married her to get over you.”

The words hit like hammer strikes against some soft, vulnerable spot deep inside Olivia. She swallowed, then blinked hard. Was it possible that he had
not
gotten over her so quickly? That all this time she might have been wrong in thinking that his heart had never ached for her even a little?

“Losing you changed him. He grew up overnight. He got serious about life. It was like he didn’t have the heart to be young and frivolous. He didn’t hang out with the rest of us anymore.”

Olivia had no idea what to say. All these years, she had pictured something so entirely different. Imagined that John had met Laura, fallen head over heels in love with her and forgotten that he’d ever known Olivia. The possibility that it might not have happened exactly that way lit a flame in her heart, a gentle
whoof
of hope, unsummoned, maybe even unwelcome, but there, nonetheless. “I saw him earlier over at Dickson’s,” she said, her voice again a rusty replica of itself.

“And let me guess, he wasn’t wearing his welcome hat?”

That, at least, got a half smile out of Olivia. “It was actually pretty awful.”

Lori sighed. “I have no idea whether the two of you will ever be friends, Olivia, but I do know John. He’s a good man. People have different ways of showing hurt.”

Olivia weighed her old friend’s assertion. Was it possible that John’s anger had begun with hurt? The thought brought with it implications she would never have considered under the chill of his gaze earlier that morning.

But she wondered on into the afternoon when they went downstairs to have lunch at the round maple table in the center of Lori’s kitchen. Grilled cheese sandwiches for the children, a Caesar salad for the big folks. It was the loudest, messiest lunch she’d ever had as an adult. And it was also the best, one she knew she would remember for a long time to come. Because there at that table, in full, living color was exactly what was missing from her own life.

U
NDER ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES
, John was a ten-minute man. Five to shower, three to shave, one and a half to brush his teeth, a few seconds to comb his hair. Tonight, however, he’d broken all records, standing under the faucet until his skin started to shrivel and the hot water had lost its bravado.

The goose bumps finally won out, and he reached
for a towel, dried off and cracked the bathroom door to check on Flora who was sitting on his bed, a sketch pad on her lap and an assortment of crayons spread out around her. “You all right in there?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said without glancing up. John watched her for a moment and then smiled at the intensity on his daughter’s face. She was into her crayons in a major way, and she loved to sit on his bed and draw while he got ready.

He thought maybe Flora felt closer to her mother in a room Laura had decorated with heavy yellow and rose floral drapes, a thick down comforter with matching duvet and chunky pillows atop a four-poster bed found at an estate auction in Wythe County. After Laura died, John had wanted to move out of the room, but that would have been one more change for Flora to accept along with everything else. He just hadn’t had the heart to do it.

John finished shaving, swatted a comb across his hair and went into the bedroom for a shirt. He had changed three times and was about to go for another one when Flora said, “Daddy, why do you keep changing clothes?”

Halfway out of the shirt, John stopped, considered fudging the truth, then reminded himself he couldn’t preach honesty as a virtue to his daughter if he didn’t practice it himself. “It’s called a delaying tactic, sweet pea.”

“What’s a d’laying tactic?” she asked without
lifting her gaze from the pad pinned beneath a red crayon.

“It’s when you find reasons to put off doing something you don’t want to do.”

She looked up, her small face scrunched in a frown. “Like when I can’t find my shoes because I don’t want to go to school?”

“Like that.”

“Oh. I like that shirt. Blue’s my favorite color, you know.”

“Then blue it is.” He rebuttoned the shirt he’d been about to take off. Yesterday, her favorite color had been green, but he didn’t bother to contradict her. It was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. He wasn’t about to discourage it.

At seven, Flora was a walking encyclopedia of questions.
Daddy, why do cows lie down when it rains? Daddy, why are stop signs red?
She’d thrown him some stumpers, that was for sure. But it was also one of his favorite parts of being a father, trying to find answers for his daughter, even when he didn’t always have them for himself.

He glanced at his watch. It was seven-thirty, and he had thought of at least a thousand excuses not to go tonight, some of them pretty good, too. But none of them held water under scrutiny of any duration. And as soon as Cleeve got here, he’d be dragging him out of the house by his blue shirt collar, anyway.

Through the open bedroom window, John could already hear the music thumping out its bass beat, keeping pretty good rhythm with the headache he’d tossed a couple Advil at that afternoon and still hadn’t managed to shake.

“Daddy?”

“What, sweet pea?” Just the tone told him there was a doozy coming.

“Are you ever going to go out on a date?”

John stared at his daughter’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, then swung around to face her, the razor he’d been about to put back in the wall cabinet falling from his hand and making a loud, clattering noise in the sink. “What?”