Plotting at the PTA (22 page)

And if he truly loved me, he would be taking me into his arms, murmuring things like, “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry, whatever it is, we’ll get through it.” He wouldn’t be worrying about my appearance and his primary question wouldn’t be about himself. No, it would be something like, “How can I help?”

He reached for me, but I backed away.

“Beth.” He let his arms drop to his sides. “Let’s go inside and get you cleaned up. Then we can talk.”

“Hide me away from the prying eyes, you mean?”

“I mean you should get inside and get cleaned up.”

He said it with a smile, but even dull-witted me could sense the hardness inside.

And it was a hard truth to realize that I’d been fooling myself—and Evan—for all these months. I’d been so blinded by Evan’s good looks, his charm, and the way he didn’t have to tally up the month’s budget in his head before going out to dinner, that I hadn’t stopped to take stock of how I really felt.

I rubbed the back of my hand, thinking.

“Beth,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

“I don’t think so, Evan.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t go around town looking like that.”

He reached out to take my hand, but I took another step backward. He hadn’t asked me if I was okay. Sure, he’d asked, “What’s the matter with you?” but that wasn’t anywhere near the same. And he hadn’t asked me if a child-oriented emergency was what had sent me staggering down the street in dishabille. That was more than I could forgive.

“Good-bye, Evan.” My voice was calm and even. There wasn’t a chance I could keep that up, so I nodded and turned away.

“What are you doing? Beth?”

His voice tugged strong at me. I shook my head and kept walking. Ten feet distant, I stopped. I hadn’t said I was sorry.

But, then again, what was there to be sorry about? Besides everything.

I walked away and didn’t look back.

Chapter 18

M
arina drained the tea mug and bumped it onto my desk. “That’s all you said? Good-bye? A perfect moment for an exit line, and you blew it completely. Why did I know that was going to happen? You should have come to me, I would have prepped you with a dozen possibilities.”

“Like what? ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a—’”

She waved off the end of my sentence. “Little pitchers,” she said, wagging her index finger at me and nodding at my office doorway. Outside of it, in the small kitchenette, Paoze and Lois were in a competitive conversation about the merits of green tea over black tea, with Paoze taking the firm lead due to his Asian heritage. I knew for a fact that he hated the green stuff, but Lois didn’t. I smiled. It was going to be an entertaining summer.

“You’re worried about a college student overhearing a quote from a classic movie?” I asked.

“When I waltzed in, and I do mean waltz, dahling.” She blew an imaginary smoke ring and tapped the end of her invisible cigarette onto a pile of shipping notices. Considerate person that she was, she picked up the nonexistent ash and brushed it into the wastebasket. “A short minute ago, there were at least three young children perusing the volumes on your lowest shelves.”

I pushed my chair back and propped my feet up on an open drawer. It was Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, and I’d decided not to enter the store from the time I left today until Tuesday morning. The knowledge was giving me a taste of that summer vacation feeling, and I was enjoying the faint flavor. “Neither Lois or Paoze would be back here if anyone was in the store.”

Marina switched from Greta Garbo to Cowgirl. It was a new persona and she hadn’t gotten it quite right. “Well, whistle me pink and call me honey. Ah didn’t know you had such surefire instincts. And if Ah may say one other thang, Ah’d like to say you don’t sound real busted up about your bust-up with that pretty boy.”

I’d been thinking the same thing. How could so many months of romance end with so little emotion? Right now, I was most concerned about telling Jenna and Oliver. Their father was picking them up straight from school, so when would I tell them they wouldn’t be seeing Evan ever again? It wasn’t news I wanted to break over the phone; I needed to be there to read their faces and give them the hugs and kisses they’d need.

And what had I been thinking, bringing a man into their lives who wouldn’t be there forever? They’d already lost their father being in their daily lives—which wasn’t strictly true, since Richard’s former job had taken him on the road four days out of five, but still—and now I was yanking Evan away from them.

Last night I’d called him. He came over after the kids had gone to bed and we’d talked and talked, but the end result was still the same.

We’d sat on the couch and he’d held my hands in his large ones. “Beth, please say you’ll think this over. I love you. I want to marry you. We can work this out, I know we can.”

It had been so tempting to fall into his arms, tempting to let myself be taken care of, tempting to convince myself that this was meant to be. All so very attractive, just like he was. Why didn’t I love him? I wanted to; I’d wanted to for months. But I was finally seeing that I didn’t love him, and if I didn’t now, after this long, why would I ever start?

I sighed. Why had I begun seeing Evan in the first place? Why hadn’t I trusted my instincts and stayed away from men until the kids were older, say, in their forties?

“Uh-oh.” Marina was back to being Marina. “I know that look. You’re feeling guilty about something. Let me guess. Hmm.” She lined the tips of her fingers over her eyebrows. “Hmm. I say Beth feels guilty about . . . her children. Yes, that’s it!” She held out her hand, palm up. “Prize for the winner, please.”

I gave her a bookmark.

“Thank you, thank you.” She waved it above her head like a trophy. “Now, don’t you feel guilty about ending it with Evan. He wasn’t right for you and I’m glad you finally saw the truth of it before I had to show it to you.”

I looked at her. “You never did like him, did you?”

Her new bookmark became an airplane. It flew high and then low as she said, “What I didn’t like is how you were around him. You weren’t yourself, my sweet. You were the person he wanted you to be.”

And that, in a nutshell, was why I wasn’t going to weep into my pillow that night.

We sat there for a moment, quiet with our own thoughts, until Marina sailed the bookmark into her purse and snapped her fingers. “Say, did you know Richard is going to Italy this fall?”

“Yes, can you believe it? All those years I wanted to go abroad, now he decides to get up and go.”

“Did he say who he’s going with?”

I frowned. I hadn’t once thought about that.

“Aha. I see he didn’t. He’s going with”—she leaned forward—“with a friend.” When my expression didn’t change significantly, she added, “You know, a
friend
. A girlfriend. From his new office.”

My emotions tumbled around in a tangling whirl. Anger, pain, sorrow . . . but once the tumbling slowed, I found the that primary emotion was surprise. And pleasure. Because now I didn’t have to suffer any guilt about his long commute.

“So, a good thing, yes?” Marina asked. “Yes. I see it. Now, what were you thinking about back there a minute ago when you got the long face?”

“Actually, I was thinking about relationships. About . . .” If I hemmed and hawed for the right amount of time, she might believe I was trying to come up with the right words, not that I was trying to slide out of her question. “About how they can end in such different ways. About Kelly and her boyfriend. Remember? Everybody said they were the perfect couple. Made for each other. And then he dumps her, and she dies.”

“Worst ending of all.” Marina went away somewhere, so far that I had no idea where she’d gone. Before I could pose a gentle question, she shook her head, tossing a pink scrunchie to the floor and setting her hair loose. “What do you know about him? Kelly’s boyfriend, what’s-his-name.”

“Keith Mathieson.”

She made rolling motions with her hands. “More. I know you have more.”

“Are you saying I hold back?” She just looked at me. “Okay, okay. He’s part owner of an insurance company on the other side of Madison. Lives in Madison, too.”

“Married?” Marina asked. “Kids?”

I shook my head. “That’s all I know.” When I’d called Barb to ask, she was eager enough, but when it came down to facts, she hadn’t known much. She’d gone on and on about how he hadn’t even had the decency to show up to Kelly’s funeral, how the bouquet of four dozen roses had been nice, but why hadn’t he at least come to the visitation?

Since the answer to that was easy—fear—I was sure she’d been asking a rhetorical question. Most of the town thought Kelly had killed herself because of Keith; facing the accusing eyes must have seemed an impossibility to an eighteen-year-old.

Poor kid. Who among us would have that kind of moral fiber? Although . . . I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to think of Oliver as Keith. Would I have made Oliver go to his dead girlfriend’s funeral? If he’d begged me, tears streaming down his face, would I have relented and let him stay home?

Not a chance.

“This has got to be your shortest list ever.” Marina held up an imaginary pad of paper. “The title of this list is, Beth’s Minimalist Information About the Boyfriend.”

“It’s all I have.” I’d talked to a few other people about Keith, but he seemed to have dropped out of life in Rynwood altogether. His parents had retired to Florida a few years ago, and his only sibling, a brother, had lived in Colorado since college.

Odd, to think that a family could have been raised in this town and then moved off, no traces left behind. How easy it was to be washed away from a place you’d lived. So easy to be forgotten after you were gone.

“Quit that,” Marina said. “You’re getting that sad-looking face again and it’s just too nice a day. Come on.” She jumped out of her chair.

I stayed put. “Where?”

“You know where Keith Mathieson works, don’t you?”

“Why?”

She gave a martyred sigh. “For a smart woman, sometimes you can be dumb as a box of rocks.”

“Marina, I am not going to barge into that man’s office and start asking him questions about Kelly.”

“Why not?”

I gaped at her. There were so many answers to that question that they jammed up the speech center of my brain.

“First off,” she said, “you’ve been asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. You should have started with the boyfriend.” She shook her head sadly. “Why you didn’t get me in on this earlier, I do not know.”

I did, but I didn’t want to say why. Because it was all wrapped up with Gus. Because I hadn’t wanted to push at that pain and Marina would have insisted on helping me clear up whatever it was, and what if even Marina couldn’t find the old Gus? Maybe he was gone forever, and I really, really, didn’t want to think about that.

“Are you stuck?” Marina grinned and held out her hand. “Because I can help you up out of that chair.”

I grabbed hold of her wrist and let her pull me upright. “Maybe I was stuck, just a little.”

“That’s all right.” She thumped me on the back. “What are friends for?”

Unexpected tears blurred my vision. I reached down to open the desk drawer that held my purse and rubbed the wetness away. “Apparently they’re for making me do things that I don’t want to do.”

“Exactly!” Marina stuck her finger in the air. “You make me write thank you notes and I get you out of your chair. Even trade, yes?”

Once again she’d summarized our relationship in twenty-five words or less. “Even trade,” I agreed.

“Well, then.” She jingled her car keys. “No time like the present. Shall I drive?”

“Let’s take two cars.”

She lifted her eyebrows, but I got out my own car keys and ignored her look of reproach.

Because I had a plan.

* * *

Keith Mathieson’s office was in one of those soulless strip malls. Someone had done their best to add character to the space, but no matter how many planters you placed around the doors and no matter how tidily you trimmed the shrubs, a strip mall was a strip mall and there was no disguising the fact.

Marina and I parked out of sight along a side street. As we’d arranged, she stayed put while I got out and scoped out the businesses all in a row. Party store, dollar store, pharmacy, Keith’s insurance office, Chinese restaurant.

I walked into the party store, rummaged in a cooler for a couple of sodas, grabbed some chips, and surreptitiously studied the staff. Behind the counter, a thirty-something manager-type chatted with a kid who must have been eighteen to work in a store like this, even though he didn’t look old enough to have taken driver’s training.

When I’d almost memorized the brand names of beef jerky hanging on a rack, the teenager went to the back of the store and I went up to the counter.

“This it?” the manager asked, ringing up my purchases, no movement wasted.

I upgraded his status from manager to owner. “All set,” I said. “Say”—I pointed out the plate glass window in a very vague direction—“is that Keith Mathieson’s car?”

“Piece of crap silver Toyota? Yeah, that’s Keith’s. Must be twenty years old if it’s a day.” He asked if I wanted a bag. “Told him five years ago to get something a man wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen driving. A pickup, or an SUV even, but he said he’d drive that Toyota until it couldn’t be saved. Rust bucket city, you know? Hey, lady! Don’t forget your change!”

I retraced my steps and pointed out Keith’s car to Marina.

“Huh,” she said. “You’d think an insurance agent would make enough money to buy himself a new car at least every decade. Ready?” She started her car, grinning. “Can’t believe you came up with this idea all by yourself.”

Marina drove into the lot’s first entrance. I took the second entrance, enacting the plan I’d formulated after spending five minutes with Google’s satellite imagery. The parking lot was big enough to have a row of parking spaces down the middle, and I’d leapt to the conclusion that a store owner would park in that row. Spaces against the building for customers, farthest spaces for staff, spaces in the middle for owners. And there was Keith’s car, smack dab in the middle of the lot.

I stopped my car next to his rear bumper; Marina parked hers next to his front bumper. I turned off the ignition with satisfaction. He’d have to talk to me now.

Two minutes ticked past. Marina leaned out her car window. “Is it five o’clock yet?”

“Almost.”

Thirty seconds later, she asked, “Is it five o’clock yet?”

“Patience is a virtue.”

“Says you.” She turned her car radio to an oldies station, pushed back her seat, and put her feet up on the steering wheel. We sat through “Paperback Writer,” “Time for Me to Fly,” “Build Me Up Buttercup,” and were halfway through “Stairway to Heaven” when the front door of the insurance company opened.

“Is that him?” Marina asked.

“Shhh!”

We watched as a man about my age turned around to lock the door, apparently oblivious to the car situation in front of him. Maybe that wasn’t Keith, maybe it was his partner or—

The man tugged the handle on the front door then turned to face us. He stood stock-still for an instant, then headed our way.

“That’s him.” Marina grinned. “This should be fun.”

I watched Keith walk toward us with a fast, stiff-legged gait. He wore his hair just a little longer than any other male insurance agent I’d ever met. His khaki pants, white shirt, and navy blue blazer were so classic that they were almost trendy again.

Fun? I wasn’t so sure. Marina, with her inherent longings for excitement in her life, was in her element, watching the oncoming stranger with gleeful anticipation. I was watching him with the stomach-twisting dread of incipient confrontation.

He reached Marina first. “Excuse me, but that’s my car you’re blocking.”

“Keith Mathieson?” She arched an eyebrow.

“Yeah.” He looked at her, at me, then back at her. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Ask her.” Marina nodded in my direction. “This is all her idea.”