One Mountain Away (24 page)

“Then write her a letter.”

This time she turned her chair so she could really see him. “Do you think she would read it?”

“I think she
might
. She’s usually more reasonable than she was today. I’ll ask her to keep it for the moment when she’s ready to find common ground again.”

“It seems so cowardly.”

“No, it’s just a first step. If you do meet face-to-face again, Taylor’ll let you know what she thinks and how she sees what happened. It won’t be fun. But this might get you to that meeting.”

“Let me think about it. I just don’t want to make another mistake.”

“There are years ahead, Charlotte. You have time to get this right.”

Her face was in shadow from the hat brim, but she looked sadder at his words. He supposed that for somebody like Charlotte, who was used to making things happen on her own schedule, potentially waiting years, or even months, for results was particularly hard.

“It was good of you to come,” she said, but not in her lady-of-the-manor voice. She sounded sincere, as if she realized what this had cost him. “And your advice is welcome, Ethan. Let me just think about what to say and how to say it.”

“The young woman living here? I forgot her name.”

“Harmony.”

“She offered me dinner, and I haven’t had anything since breakfast. She says there’s enough for both of us.”

“You’re staying for dinner?” She sounded surprised. “You must be completely exhausted.”

“I’m hungry more than I’m tired. What say we fix that?”

She rested her fingertips on his arm. “You were born to take care of people. You spent the day taking care of your daughter and granddaughter, and now you’re worried about me?”

“Not particularly. I’m just curious what kind of dinner Harmony made you.”

She looked exhausted and her color was almost ashen, but a smile brightened her face. “She’s a vegetarian. I’m becoming one by default, but she’s a wonderful cook.”

“Taylor’s a vegetarian, too. I always leave her house with a full stomach and a yearning for pulled pork.”

“I’m so glad you said that. I’ve been dreaming about pulled pork, too.”

He laughed; she smiled again.

He told himself to be careful.

* * *

If Charlotte had known Ethan was going to stop by, she would have combed her hair, changed her blouse, done something about her face. Instead, she just removed her hat and fluffed her hair with her fingers. But maybe that was one of those unheralded benefits of divorce. She and Ethan had already proved they were unsuited. What was the point of putting best feet forward? A fresh coat of lipstick wasn’t going to change a thing.

She pulled dishes out of the refrigerator and handed them to him. Different fridge, same man, same ritual. Early in their marriage, one or both of them had tried to cook pots of this or that on weekends, so they could eat leftovers for the first part of the week. Before Taylor charged full tilt at adolescence, she’d often wandered into the kitchen to be with them, and chopped and sautéed. Charlotte had passed on some of her grandmother’s favorites, but if Taylor was a vegetarian now, it was unlikely she was making chicken and dumplings or red-eye gravy.

Anyway, who was she kidding? By the end of her marriage, the only time Charlotte had made it into the kitchen was when she had to cross through it on the way to some place more important.

“Remember your venison meat loaf?” Ethan asked.

She straightened, the last container on the counter now.

“I can’t believe
you
remember,” she said.

“I’m the one who dared you.”

“For some reason you never quite got that I’d been raised in the land of hunters. My father was usually too far gone to hold a rifle, but anybody who wanted to hunt on our land had to share their kill.”

“It was the best meat loaf I ever ate.”

For a moment she didn’t know what to say. Twenty-some years ago Ethan had brought home neatly wrapped packages of venison from a hunter friend at his firm, and for some reason he’d expected Charlotte to balk. Instead, they’d dined like royalty for the rest of the month.

She busied herself taking off lids. “Harmony wants to put in a vegetable garden. I haven’t picked a tomato or a green bean since I left home. Maybe it’s time again.”

“Tell me about her.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Who is she?”

“Just a young woman who needed a friend and a place to stay. Our paths crossed, and now she’s here.”

“Why?”

“I have the room, and she’s a joy to be around.”

“I know the economy’s a mess, but you’re not the boardinghouse type.”

“No?” Now that he’d mentioned it, she thought the idea was charming. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do with my future. I have enough bedrooms, that’s for sure. Harmony could cook and garden, and I could just enjoy all the new faces around my table.”

“She’s very protective of you. She asked me to stay and make sure you ate.”

She felt a ridiculous slap of disappointment. “So that’s why you stayed. Here I thought you were hungry.”

“She didn’t have to twist my arm.” He added in a lower voice, “Not at all, actually.”

She knew better than to ask why and risk another slap. It was enough just to hope her company was at least a part of the reason.

“This is strange, I know,” she said. “Us, together, doing what we used to do when we were married. And it’s all brand-new, at least for
me
.”

“But not for me, because I was married again in between?”

“Probably not the best thing for me to bring up.”

“My abysmal record? It’s not all that painful. I married Judy on the rebound, and she did the same. We were great friends who got married because it was convenient, at least until she decided she wanted to move back to Chicago. Now we’re distant friends who aren’t married anymore.”

“I expected you to marry a younger woman yearning for babies so you could start a second family.”

“And I expected you to find an oil tycoon to give you all the things I never did.”

She got plates down and set them in front of him. In spite of Harmony’s warning, the microwave was about to take a beating.

“We’re doing pretty well so far, Ethan, don’t you think? Even without a lot of practice. We aren’t yelling at each other, or blaming each other, or gloating. I’m sorry your marriage to Judy didn’t work out. I wanted you to be happy, even then.”

“Really?” He lifted a brow, which gave his face the devilish cast she remembered well.

“Okay, not so much.” She handed him a plate and gestured to the containers. “Not right away. But later. And maybe not happy, but I wanted you to find the things I hadn’t been able to give you. I thought you deserved that much.”

“My thoughts about you weren’t that pure.”

“No?”

“I wanted you to have everything you’d ever wanted and finally realize none of it mattered.”

She waited until that stopped tearing at her. “You always were good at expressing your feelings.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, sometimes it hurts, but I’ve missed it. I live in a world where people say one thing and mean something else. I used to think that was sophistication, and now I know it’s just another way to distance yourself. Keep everybody guessing. I never had to guess with you.”

“I think maybe we’re getting too close to recriminations, and you’ve had enough of those today.”

She began to dish up the meal. She scanned the possibilities, filled a plate and held it out to him. He looked down at it.

“You skipped the sweet potatoes,” he said.

“You don’t like them.” She paused. “Or you never did before.”

“You’ll want white wine with dinner because it’s seventy-six this afternoon. If it was seventy-four, you’d be drinking red.”

She smiled, because despite the pain of all this, she still could. “While we eat, will you tell me about Martin Architectural Design?”

“If you promise not to tell me how much more successful I can be if I just branch out.”

“I promise. It won’t even cross my mind.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

BY TUESDAY THE puppies still hadn’t arrived. In the morning Charlotte, Velvet, Harmony and Glenda went to the vet, who declared the dog to be fit as a fiddle, and the puppies ready for their journey. The women worried him more, since they were considerably more anxious. He predicted the wait would be over later that week and sent them home.

Harmony didn’t want to miss the big event, but neither did she want to lose her job. So late that afternoon she parked her car and sped toward Cuppa through the warning drops of an oncoming thunderstorm. Stella, the forty-something manager, greeted her with one eye on her watch and one hand reaching for a wad of napkins.

“You ever hear of an umbrella?” Plump no-nonsense Stella looked and acted like the mother of three she was, a little harried and a lot maternal.

Harmony grinned and mopped her cheeks. “At least I remembered to put my Cuppa shirt in my purse. I’ll change in the ladies’ room.”

“Take your time. You’re early. Warm up with a cup of something first.”

“Actually…”

Stella waited as Harmony fumbled for the right words. “I…I need to call somebody, but it’s long-distance. Could I use the phone in the office? You can take it out of my pay.”

“No problem. Keep it in the country and it doesn’t cost us anything. You go on and make your call, but take some coffee back with you.”

A few minutes later, steaming hot chocolate in hand, Harmony stared at the telephone. The office was really just a storeroom, and it smelled like the coffee beans piled in bags in the corner. A battered metal desk was shoved against a wall, and the top was scattered with papers weighted in place by a photo of Stella’s preteen sons, an industrial-size stapler and a telephone with an intercom and two outside lines. Harmony lowered herself to an equally battered desk chair and considered what to do.

Her father bowled on Tuesday nights in a Chamber of Commerce league. He wore a royal-blue shirt with the name of his insurance agency emblazoned in bright red and yellow letters, and once he had knocked Harmony’s mother to the floor because she hadn’t noticed a button was missing when she’d carefully ironed the shirt that morning.

Janine Stoddard never went to watch him bowl. Harmony’s father claimed she made him nervous, plus the wives of his teammates were bad influences. They drank beer and wore too much makeup, and every one of them made jokes at her husband’s expense. The lone woman on his team was even worse, although her sins were undocumented. Harmony suspected the woman, another agent, probably talked back to the men, a behavior her own mother might find perplexing or, worse, encouraging.

When Harmony was living at home her father had never returned after work to change. He always changed at the office and went directly to the bowling alley, stopping first to pick up Buddy, Harmony’s brother, after football practice, in the days when Buddy was still in high school. Tuesday nights had been the highlight of Harmony’s week. Without her father or brother to supervise her, she and her mother had cooked whatever they wanted for dinner and watched whatever they wanted on television.

She had no idea if her father still followed the same routine, although she did know, from searching the internet, that he was still bowling on the Chamber league. Even though Buddy was no longer alive to cheer him, most likely her father still didn’t invite her mother to watch. And really, if her mother wasn’t at home, what was the harm in letting the telephone disturb the silence?

A utilitarian clock ticking loudly on the wall insisted Harmony’s shift was about to start. She lifted the receiver and punched buttons until the telephone was ringing in a Topeka suburb, in a house so scrubbed and sterilized that nothing, not germ, not human, could happily live here.

The phone rang three times before Harmony heard a familiar tentative voice.

Harmony gripped the receiver the way she might grip a life preserver in a choppy sea. “Mom? It’s Harmony.”

“Harmony?”

“How are you?” Harmony asked. “Are you alone?”

“Not for long,” her mother said, as if she was preparing to be interrupted.

“Daddy’s not bowling tonight?”

“He comes home…to change now. The restroom at work…” Her voice trailed off.

Harmony guessed. The restroom wasn’t clean enough, or it had a mirror that showed too clearly the expanding paunch or receding hairline. Whatever the reason, she couldn’t have cared less.

“Mom, I’d better tell you quickly, then. I’m…” She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “I’m going to have a baby. You’re going to be a grandmother.”

Silence greeted the announcement.

“I’m not married,” Harmony went on, getting the worst over quickly. “The baby’s father and I broke up. But I’m going to have the baby, and I’m going to be a good mother. You could come here to be with us, Mom. You really could. You could help with the baby, and I’d take care of you both. We could rent a little apartment—”

“Oh, Harmony, what have you done?”

Harmony swallowed a sob, and no answer occurred to her except the obvious.

“Your father…your father will never forgive you.”

“I don’t care. Why should I? He’s a bad man, Mom. You know it. Deep inside you can feel it, I know you can. I got out of there to start a whole different life, and you can, too.”

Her mother continued as if Harmony hadn’t spoken. “You can’t visit now.” Then she began to cry.

“Mom, I wasn’t going to visit. I’m never coming back there. I want you to come
here,
where you’ll be safe, where he won’t be able to hit you anymore.”

Janine Stoddard didn’t seem to hear. “Your father… He’ll never understand this. You can’t come home now, Harmony. Don’t you see? And if he finds out the truth and knows you’ve been calling… You can’t call anymore, either. He asks me every night if I’ve heard from you, and I have to lie to him whenever I have. If he finds out…”

Harmony didn’t know which of her sins might enrage her father the most. That she’d dared to call? That she was having a baby out of wedlock? That she’d tried to convince her mother to leave Kansas? That she hated him so much that if she ever saw him lift his hand in anger again, she might well kill him?