John Riley's Girl (9 page)

“Sammy Sullivan said daddies never went this long without dating, and that it wasn’t normal.”

“And how did seven-year-old Sammy Sullivan claim to know such a thing?”

“He said his mama was talking about you, and that’s what she said.”

Red rage went over him in a wave, and he wished he could round up all the busybodies in this town and put them on a bus to somewhere where they could meddle in somebody’s business who didn’t mind. He minded. “Sometimes people talk about things they have no business talking about,” he said, careful not to let his irritation show.

“But will you?”

John looked at his daughter then, and saw the
confusion on her face. He should have known there was something other than idle curiosity behind her question. He went over to the bed, moved aside a few crayons and pulled her onto his lap. “I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know one thing. Your mama will never be replaced. Other people might come into our lives, but they’ll never replace her. Do you understand?”

Flora laid her head against his chest and looked down at her lap. “I still miss her, Daddy.”

“I know you do, baby. So do I. And that’s a good thing because it reminds us how important she was to us. She’d want us to miss her, but she wouldn’t want us to be sad too long.”

“Are you still sad?”

Laura’s words from the letter he’d read that afternoon floated up. “A part of me always will be. But it would make your mama sad if we didn’t try to be happy without her.”

“Aunt Sophia says you’ve gotta deal with your regret before you can ever be happy again.”

“And how do you know Sophia said that?” he asked, shaking his head.

“That’s what she told Uncle Hank. What’s regret?”

“Sadness for things you didn’t do, baby.”

“Do you have lots of regrets, Daddy?”

“Not too many,” he said. And then, “A few.”

“How do you make them go away?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled his daughter into the curve of his arm and hugged her tight. “I wish I did.”

A
LITTLE WHILE LATER
, John made his way out to the front yard of the house where the second night of reunion festivities was now in full swing. There was a DJ tonight, and the music was loud. It would get louder as the night wore on, he was sure. No one was dancing. Too early, he supposed. Not enough cocktails dealt out by the bartender yet to turn inhibition into courage.

He got himself a Coke and ended up in a corner of the yard next to a potted fig tree that looked about as conspicuous as he felt.

The moment she arrived, John knew it. His face went warm, and his hands started to tingle. He looked up at the front table just as every head in the crowd swiveled in the same direction.

People flowed toward her, then clustered around her. She smiled, was more than polite, but she wasn’t comfortable with the attention. He could see that from here, even with fifty yards and fifteen years between them. It was there in the rigid way she held her shoulders, the way her hand kept fluttering to the base of her throat.

John tried to look elsewhere, but his own gaze betrayed him, and he found himself taking a good long look at her. She’d worn green again tonight. A
sleeveless sweater with a rounded neck and skinny black pants. Her hair was loose, just barely glancing her shoulders.

She disappeared into the crowd, but the sight of her lifted a memory to the surface. Liv with a ponytail. It had been longer then. And sun-lightened. They’d been sitting on the grass beneath the very same oak tree under which she now stood. It was springtime, early May, and they were supposed to be doing calculus homework, but with Liv on his lap, her head on his shoulder, there had been no way he could keep his mind on anything that boring. He remembered her clothes: cut-off Levi’s, a white tank top with skinny straps and yellow flip-flops, the kind you got at the drugstore for ninety-nine cents. Her arms and legs were smooth and tan from Saturday afternoons spent on the dock at the pond behind his house. He remembered pulling the rubber band out of her hair, the way the long strands had fallen across her shoulders, spilling over his hands, the sensation the most sensual he’d ever known.

And he also remembered now, as clearly as he’d ever remembered anything, the feeling he’d had that afternoon. His sense of absolute completeness, fulfillment, the undeniable rightness of his love for her. He had thought they were forever. Eighteen years old, and he’d been totally certain that if he never achieved another thing in his life, finding Liv would be enough.

She’d come back to see him all those years ago. She’d come back, and he’d never known.

The knowledge left him feeling like a sailboat without a rudder, and just the simple act of keeping himself upright took all his concentration.

He looked around for Cleeve, but didn’t see him.

Needing a few minutes away from the crowd, he headed down to the barn to check on Nadine. She’d thrown a shoe that afternoon and was confined to her stall tonight because the farrier couldn’t come until the morning. The other horses were all out, except for Popcorn, whom he’d left in to keep the filly company.

He let himself in the barn’s side door, not bothering to flick on the aisle lights. The moon would cast enough shadow through the open Dutch doors for him to see the two horses and throw them some hay if they needed it.

He heard her before he saw her. That voice was unmistakable. He stood there in the center of the darkened aisle with his feet bolted to the floor, unable to move while something heavy and a little painful settled in his chest.

This voice was familiar, one he remembered, thought he’d forgotten and realized now that he hadn’t. This wasn’t the one she had cultivated for her TV audience. That voice belonged to a woman he did not know. This belonged to a girl he had once thought he’d known better than he knew himself.

He followed the sound.

Naddie’s stall door was slightly open. And there was Liv, standing inside with her forehead tipped against the filly’s mane, smoothing a hand across her neck and speaking to her in that voice women reserve for babies and animals, soft and crooning. The filly was nosing around her pockets, looking for carrots the same way she did with Flora.

John couldn’t make his voice work.

Liv looked up, starting at the sight of him. Naddie jumped, saw it was only him and went back to her carrot search.

“John, I…you scared me,” Liv said, her eyes wide.

“Sorry.” He folded his arms across his chest as if planting them there would make his heart stop beating so hard.

“Actually, I guess I shouldn’t be in here. I was just…” She threw a hand back toward the party. “I kind of wanted to get away for a few minutes. Regroup. Is True still here?”

The question flashed before him an image of Liv cantering bareback and bridleless on the old quarter horse he’d learned to ride on and had taught her on as well when they’d first started dating in the spring of their junior year in high school.

“He died a few years ago,” he said, swallowing hard.

Sadness washed across her face. “Oh. I’m sorry.
I guess he would have been pretty old by now. I know you must miss him.”

The words went straight to the core of him. Maybe because he knew she had loved that horse as much as he had, spoiling him with carrots and apples so that it got to the point that every time she walked in the barn, True knocked on the stall door with a front hoof until she came back to see him, treats in tow.

She stepped out of the stall now, giving Naddie a last rub on the neck. John slid the door closed behind her and hooked the latch.

They stood there in the aisle, moonshadows lighting their faces. Popcorn moved in his stall and rattled his feed bucket, no doubt looking for a last morsel of grain left over from dinner. Neither John nor Olivia said a thing, the silence between them so awkward that he didn’t know how to begin to tackle it.

“I probably shouldn’t have come down here,” she said, her voice startling in the quiet.

“Probably not,” he agreed, although not for the reasons he would have given last night at this time. She was stirring up way too many memories. Things he thought he’d forgotten. Things he’d needed to forget and did
not
want to remember now.

Even in the half dark, he could see her face go a shade paler with his response. Something between satisfaction and regret stabbed through him, and
there was nothing at all palatable in the combination. He felt mean like one of the boys on the playground who tried to yank Flora’s pigtails at recess. He wanted to qualify what he’d said, but how did he qualify fifteen years worth of hurt without baring his soul, without reopening wounds that were still just beneath the surface, wounds that had never healed?

She stepped away from him then, the movement quick and awkward. She lost her balance and banged her shoulder on the stall door. His arm shot out to steady her. He caught himself just short of touching her, making for a couple of word-defying awkward seconds. He jerked his hand back as if someone had just lit a flame under it. And they stood there, two strangers who had once known one another’s most intimate thoughts, with him thinking that there had been a time when he would have kissed that shoulder and made it better. In a moment frozen between then and now, he saw himself doing exactly that, imagined brushing his lips across the ridge of that shoulder, following line and curve to the spot just behind her left ear where he had discovered as a green seventeen-year-old boy that she had loved most to be kissed.

Did she still?

Want kicked up inside him, as overpowering as any need he had ever known. And although self-preservation shouted in his ear, he could not make himself look away. A piece of hay clung to her hair.
Sawdust speckled her pants and sandals. He reached out and brushed away the hay, the action so impulsive, that his intention never even registered until the gesture was complete.

He saw her quick intake of breath and realized she was as thrown by the lapse as he was.

“I owe you an apology for this morning.”

That he had surprised her was clear. She started to speak, stopped, and then said, “It’s all right.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

Neither of them said anything for a string of moments, the silence full as if they were both trying to figure out where they stood with one another.

Oscar, one of the barn cats, hopped off his perch above Popcorn’s stall door and sidled around Liv’s legs. She squatted down, picked up the cat and rubbed the back of its neck. The cat purred with contentment. “I didn’t come back here to hurt you, John,” Liv said.

The John of this morning would have fired out a blustery denial of her ability to have any effect on him at all. But the John of tonight let it stand. “Liv. After you left that summer…I never knew you came back to see me.”

She looked down at the concrete floor beneath their feet and tipped a sandaled foot on end, her hands fluttering a little as if it were information she didn’t quite know what to do with. “That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, it was.” A pocket of awkward silence hung between them, and then, “So why did you, Liv?”

She shook her head, then glanced up at him, her eyes meeting his, carefully shuttered of emotion. “It was a silly impulse.”

“The same impulse that made you just decide to pick up your life and start it all over somewhere else without me?” It would have been nice to think he’d just asked that question with something close to indifference in his voice. He would have been kidding himself.

She met his gaze, a wounded look in her eyes. “All the way here, I kept telling myself that so many years had passed you would have forgotten all about me.”

“How could I forget—”
Whoa, John. Wrong turn.
He backed up and tried another direction. “You’re right. It was a long time ago. We were just kids.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She nodded.

Her lips parted as if she were about to say something, then made a seam beyond which the words couldn’t pass.

“What was it you had to have, Liv, that I couldn’t give you?”

It was a long time before she answered him. And finally, “Oh, John, it wasn’t you.”

“No. It sure wasn’t.” He took a couple of steps
back, certain that if he didn’t leave now, he’d say something he would later have cause to regret. “Stay as long as you like, Liv. The horses always like the company.”

Old Songs and Memories

A
RE THERE JUST
some people in the world whom we are destined to be hurt by again and again?

This was the question Olivia asked herself when John headed down the center aisle of the barn and out the big sliding doors.

For a few moments, they had reconnected. For a few brief seconds, something that had once been was again. It had not been the wistful yearnings of her imagination. She’d seen the shock of it on his face as well, the unexpected recognition of something he had not intended to feel.

Olivia stood there in the darkened barn trembling.

How many times had she told herself the feelings she’d had for John were those of another girl in another lifetime? They couldn’t possibly exist in any form in the here and now. But it had taken no more than hearing that he had not forgotten what had once been between them to make a mockery of her own denials.

And in all honesty, had she truly eased him out of her heart all those years ago, she’d be able to stand in front of him now without that same vital organ thumping off rhythm as though it had forgotten a pattern it had managed perfectly well for thirty-three years.

Olivia gathered up her tattered composure and headed back to the front yard where the music had gotten louder and people had begun dancing. She’d barely reached the edge of the crowd when Cleeve Harper came at her with grinning intent, his smile white enough to get him his own toothpaste commercial. He rolled out a palm. “You look like you could use a little fun, ma’am. How about dancing with a rhythmless cowboy?”

“Oh, Cleeve, I don’t know—”

“Come on,” he said, taking her hand and leading her into the throng of dancers making use of the temporary wood floor set up on the grass, a speaker in each corner.

The DJ was playing a range of old stuff. Bruce Hornsby. Prince. George Michael. Songs Olivia rarely heard on the radio anymore, but the beat made her want to dance the way the music you listened to when you were young always does.

Cleeve kept Olivia’s hand in his, twirled her around a time or two, took her by the waist and dipped her right, then left. Laughter bubbled past her
lips when he set her straight again. “You’re pretty good at this,” she said.

“Why, that’s mighty gracious of you, ma’am, but it’s just the Harper way to figure out how to please a lady,” he said, grinning at her from beneath the brim of the Stetson she’d yet to see him take off.

“So I’ve heard,” she said.

His smile widened.

They danced to songs Olivia hadn’t heard in years, and there was something about hearing them here in this setting that transported her back to the good memories. To Friday-night football games at the Summerville High stadium and sockhops afterward where she and John had danced to Duran Duran and Huey Lewis, while somewhere nearby Cleeve dipped and spun his latest crush. To Saturday nights in the Dairy Queen parking lot, sitting on the tailgate of John’s truck, the AM radio blasting a fuzzy version of Fleetwood Mac through the truck’s makeshift clothes-hanger antenna.

Cleeve was still a good dancer, light on his feet for a man his size. They bopped their way through at least ten songs, shagging to a couple, doing a few Travolta moves for the retro disco stuff. Olivia’s top clung to her back, and her hair had grown damp at the sides and at her neck. And she laughed. With nothing but sheer enjoyment of the moment. Not caring if she looked silly, just having fun. And it
felt so good, like a favorite place she hadn’t been to in a very long time.

“Well, I’ll be. Never thought I’d see that.”

Olivia followed Cleeve’s gaze to where John was being pulled onto the dance floor by an attractive woman with dark-brown hair. She tipped her head back and saw surprise on Cleeve’s face. “What?”

“John dancing.” He glanced that way again.

“He used to like to dance.” The words were out before she ever realized her intention of saying them. “I mean—”

“Yep, he did.”

Neither of them said anything for half a song.

“What made you leave here the way you did, Olivia?” Cleeve finally asked, the words coming out in a rush. “Without telling anyone, I mean?”

“It was complicated, Cleeve.”

“I reckon it was, but you had some good friends here. It was kind of hard to understand why you would just up and run off that way.”

Something about the earnestness in Cleeve’s eyes made her want him to know it hadn’t been her choice. All these years, and the people she had cared about here thought she’d decided there were better things out there for her than what this town had to offer. What else
could
they have thought? Another stanza of song played by before she found the words to say, “It wasn’t something I ever intended to do,
Cleeve, and I missed everyone so much at times I thought I might actually die from it.”

He looked down at her, as serious as she’d ever seen him, and there was understanding in his eyes, despite her flimsy explanation. “What you and John had then was something that doesn’t come along all that often. Even an old farm boy like me could see that. It nearly tore him in half when you left here, Olivia.”

She chose her words carefully, wanted them to mean something, but felt even before she said them the lack of conviction behind them. “We were little more than kids then, Cleeve. And I think at that age we just have a special talent for believing we feel things more deeply than the rest of the world.”

“Well, that may be. But I know what I saw. What you two had was the real thing. At least as real as I’ve ever seen.”

Cleeve braked them to a jolting halt in the middle of the dance floor. John and the woman dancing with him stood at a startled standstill beside them.

“Olivia, you remember Racine Delaney?” Cleeve waved a hand between the two of them.

“Pagans Delaney,” the woman said. “Hello, Olivia.”

And then Olivia did remember, only the Racine of today barely resembled the Racine Pagans Olivia had known in high school. She remembered her as
plain with thick glasses. The woman standing in front of her was beautiful.

“Hello, Racine,” she said, trying not to show her surprise. “You look wonderful.”

“Thank you,” Racine said, looking startled by the compliment in the way of a woman who doesn’t believe it true of herself.

“Y’all mind if we switch for a little while?” Cleeve’s voice boomed near Olivia’s ear, the tone as reasonable as if he’d just asked if he could get her a glass of iced tea.

Good manners carried on a silent but visible war across the planes of John’s face.

Cleeve didn’t bother waiting for an answer. He handed Olivia over to John, then whirled Racine off across the floor, her squeal of delight trailing behind like exhaust fumes.

“We don’t have to do this,” Olivia said, any poise she might have thought herself in possession of vanishing in a poof of awkwardness.

“We’d be a little conspicuous not to at this point.”

He pulled her into his arms then, as if he’d made up his mind at that very second. She toppled forward into him. Air whooshed from her chest in a gasp. She followed his lead in a slow circle, her heart pounding in her ears. Surely he could hear it? She tried putting her thoughts in another place—what was the title of this song? Were those bushes at the
corner of the house rhododendrons? Anything to dispel the awful embarrassment of knowing John would rather be anywhere else in the world than on this dance floor with her.

“You think he planned that?” she finally found the voice to ask.

“Knowing Cleeve? He’s always been into outlaw justice.” The words held tolerance instead of a reprimand.

“I guess knowing him as long as you have, you’ve had a lot of experience with it.”

“Remember the time he lifted those English tests from Mrs. Smith’s briefcase because he hadn’t had time to study?”

Olivia smiled. “How many days did it take her to find them?”

“Three. Cleeve got an A+, and he’ll swear to this day that he never looked at the questions.”

Olivia laughed, surprising herself and John, as well, if the widening of his eyes was anything to go by. She should be angry with Cleeve, at the very least, outdone. But any anger she might have summoned collapsed altogether beneath the reality of circling this floor in John’s arms, a place she had never imagined being again.

A couple behind them skirted by too close, and John pulled her in so that there was barely a hand’s width between them. Olivia felt, suddenly, as if she had been sensitized to everything about him. The
faint remnant of whatever soap he’d showered with earlier. The slight sheen of moisture on his neck at the opening of his shirt. The brush of stiff denim against the softer fabric of her linen pants. The awareness was both painful and pleasurable at once.

The song changed. Olivia was sure he would step back, let her go.

But he didn’t.

He could have led her from the dance floor now. They’d danced one song. Maybe that had been necessary in order not to create a spectacle in front of a group of people who knew their history. But it would be hard to make that the rationale for the second song. If one were rationalizing, that was. In that moment, Olivia made a conscious decision not to.

The song playing was an old Bryan Adams song. Olivia froze for a moment, long enough to lose the rhythm of the music. John paused and let her catch the next beat without otherwise acknowledging she was off. It was the song that had thrown her. A song to which she had once known every word. And along with the refrain came a flash of John and her parked in a pasture off the dirt road that wound away from the back of his house. The night was black, not a star visible through the dusty windshield of his old truck. A warm breeze tiptoed through the rolled-down windows. A horse whinnied from one of the nearby fields. Another one answered.

And there wasn’t another person in the world. Just the two of them on that old vinyl bench seat, her head on his shoulder, his arm tucking her into him. The intensity of her feelings for him had been overwhelming. She remembered this clearly, how they had filled her up, and like helium, made her feel as if she could float. Until she met John, Olivia had never known that sense of absolute security. With him, she felt completely safe. It didn’t matter that she would be yelled at when she got home.
What were you doing out so late? Giving people something to talk about, I guess. I’m not gonna have any daughter of mine give me reason to be ashamed to show my face in town.

She’d heard the words so many times that she just knew to expect them. But somehow she had been able to forget their ugliness when she and John were together. With John she had been able to see ahead to the future. To know that things wouldn’t always be the way they were. That they would make a life together where no one ever shouted or slammed doors. Or hit their daughters.

She closed her eyes and willed her thoughts in a different direction, swallowing back the hurt that had resurfaced with it.

“You remember this song?”

She looked up at him, feeling off-balance.

“I guess we must have played it until the tape literally wore out.”

She was surprised he remembered, yes. Because this wasn’t the same John whose visible resentment had flattened her at Dickson’s that morning. This was the John of old. She heard it in his voice. Something squeezed at Olivia’s heart and filled her with gratitude for his reappearance. She’d thought him gone to her forever. Just a glimpse of him, even temporarily, was an unexpected gift.

“I’d find one song I liked, and that was it. I had to hear it over and over.”

“I liked it, too.” He looked down at her, his voice low and easy, a softness in his eyes that pulled at something deep within her. Her cheeks were suddenly warm, too warm, and her mind filled with images of the two of them, of the first time they’d made love in the back of John’s truck, the ridges of the metal bed pressing into her back through the blankets beneath them, his warm hands on her skin, the stars as their ceiling and this song in the background.

The memory was as intimate as memories get, and the fact that they were remembering it together, here on this dance floor with more than two hundred people around them made it all the more piercing.

John’s arm tightened around her waist, the adjustment slight enough to make her wonder if it had been her imagination, if he himself was aware of it. They danced there among classmates who had mar
ried years before and were still together, among others who had renewed old friendships, old attractions.

But for Olivia, for the duration of that song, it was just the two of them, dancing alone under the stars.

D
ID THEY HAVE
any idea how right they looked together?

From the vantage point of Cleeve Harper’s arms, Racine decided there was something about the two of them that seemed predetermined long ago. John Riley and Olivia Ashford just fit, they complemented one another the way a man and woman should.

The recognition of it hit her with a little stab of envy. It was a shame they couldn’t see what the rest of the world saw.

“You’re a good dancer.”

She glanced up to find Cleeve looking down at her with an odd expression in his eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re pretty good at railroading a girl onto the dance floor yourself.”

“A man does what he must,” he said, smiling.

Racine sighed. If she knew what was good for her, she’d let him find another partner after this song ended. But for reasons she’d be the first to admit weren’t in her best self-interest, she ignored the voice of common sense, and they danced on a while longer. Cleeve told her silly jokes with corny punch
lines in his boisterous voice. And Racine laughed. The kind of laughter that made her stomach hurt. She hadn’t done a lot of laughing the last few years. Doing so now with Cleeve felt like taking up exercise after years of being sedentary.

The music slowed down, and Cleeve drew her in a little closer. Attraction swirled inside her, and she wished, just for a moment, that this was real, that they were both free to pursue it.

Cleeve told her about the alfalfa he’d baled that afternoon, the prettiest he’d had in a couple of years. Racine asked questions, basic stuff—how do you know when it’s ready to cut? Do you really get up at three-thirty every morning to milk the cows? She’d always loved the idea of living on a farm, of having animals to take care of, fields to walk in.