The Ranch She Left Behind (23 page)

Max chuckled, but he didn’t contradict her. She liked that. He had already gone on record as saying she had some kind of inner block that kept her from expressing her physicality—not an actual lack of coordination. She’d recognized the logic of the theory, but she honestly couldn’t think whose voice she might be hearing. Her dad was the most likely suspect, but he hadn’t paid enough attention to any of them to care whether they were good at sports, or dancing. Or juggling.

Still, she liked that Max didn’t intend to push his theory. Though he had every tool he needed to be domineering—brains, good looks, money, confidence, personal charisma—he clearly just wasn’t the bullying type.

It was a virtue tailor-made to touch Penny—or any of Johnny Wright’s daughters—deep in the heart. Dangerously deep, in fact.

They stood in silence, watching as Bree and Gray took the floor for their dance. The delicate, poignant strains of Barton’s fiddle floated in the air like a perfume, and mingled with the burble of the creek behind them. Other than that, the evening was full of a reverent silence.

Penny’s eyes stung. Bree was always beautiful, so cool and pale and elegant. But tonight she was beyond description. She was as serene and composed as ever, but there was nothing icy about her. She glowed, as if she were a sunbeam that Gray had caught and danced across the floor in his arms.

As if she were entirely made of happiness and love.

Penny sent up a prayer of thanks to whatever fates controlled these things.
Thank you,
she said with her aching heart,
for making Bree whole again.

When the dance was over, Penny took another sip of her champagne to cover her emotions. Everyone was laughing and spilling onto the floor to congratulate the couple and begin the dancing.

She saw Fanny Bronson, the bookstore owner, scan the crowd, obviously hunting for a dancing partner, and willed the woman to look anywhere but at Max. She didn’t want him to leave her side. Not yet…

“How about you?” Somehow, Penny kept her voice casual. She realized she was twirling the ribbon streamers of her wildflower headpiece like a flirtatious teenager and forced herself to stop. “I don’t guess big-deal architects in Chicago spend much time line dancing.”

“I might surprise you,” he said. “I’ll bet I’ve been to more barn dances than you have, considering you came of dancing age as a San Francisco hermit. Before I was a Chicago architect, I was a Carolina farm boy.”

She looked up at him, too surprised to pretend not to be. “You were?”

“I was. But when I mentioned that to Ellen, she nearly had a breakdown. I’ve been warned that I’m too old to line dance. Under no circumstances am I to attempt the Tush Push, or she’ll fall right down and die.”

Penny laughed. “I guess that means the Badonkadonk is off-limits, too?”

“She didn’t specifically mention it, but I’m guessing yes. She might survive if I waltzed once or twice, maybe.” He didn’t seem terribly disappointed. “Are you still heading up command central, or could you maybe keep me company at the old folks’ table?”

She felt her heart grow light. “I’m officially off duty, thank goodness. But the old folks’ table sounds terrible. What if we take a short walk?”

He hesitated a second, then nodded.

In her long, ecru gown and silly heels, she knew she couldn’t go far, but she could at least put a few yards between them and the crowd. She moved away from the creek, because everyone who wasn’t dancing had congregated there, watching the sun set on the water. Instead, she led Max in the direction of the pine stand, where the shadows were long and cool and deep hunter-green.

“So,” he said as they slowly made their way over the bumpy grass, “are you glad it’s over?”

She nodded with feeling. “I’m glad it’s
safely
over. None of the possible disasters occurred, so I can finally relax.”

“I had no idea a wedding was so dangerous.” He raised his eyebrows. “What disasters?”

Penny ticked them off on her fingers. “Let’s see. Rain, cold, foraging bears. Lost rings, torn gowns, missing clergy. Bad food, burned food, dropped food. Jane Eyre-like last-minute objections to the union.”

“Who on earth could have objected to this union? If ever a marriage seemed made in heaven…”

“Well, Bree’s obnoxious ex-boyfriend, Charlie, could have shown up. He’s apparently done it before, the sleazeball. That awful Esther Fillmore, the official Silverdell witch and part-time librarian, who thinks the Wright girls are the devil’s spawn, could have crashed. She wasn’t invited, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop her.”

“Sounds terrible,” he said, obviously amused.

“She is. And…well, I guess the only other possible problem might have been old Grayson, Gray’s cranky millionaire grandfather. He’s not big on keeping his peace at the best of times. He thinks his money gives him carte blanche to be rude.”

They’d reached the edge of the stand of trees, as well as the geographical limits of good manners. They were still in sight, but not quite within earshot. She leaned back against the smooth, papery bark of an aspen that was trying to hold its own among the larger pines. She gazed at the wedding scene, now at a discreet distance, like a pretty film they were watching.

There was Grayson, as if her comments had made him materialize. He was actually on the dance floor, cane and all, with his housekeeper at his side. Penny couldn’t help smiling, thinking how transformed the old guy was. Just being near the kind of love Gray and Bree had was good for people, apparently.

“For a while there, old Grayson was adamantly against the relationship,” she explained to Max. “He felt sure his playboy grandson would break Bree’s heart.”

“I wouldn’t put any money on that bet.” Max glanced down at Penny, his eyes tilted with a smile. “Would you? What does your crystal ball, the camera, say?”

She made a mock-offended huffing sound. “Look, Mr. Thorpe, I know you think I’m crazy, but pictures really do show—”

“I don’t think you’re crazy.” To her surprise, his eyes sobered, and his voice dropped out of the teasing register. “After we talked the other day, I went home and looked at some of my own wedding pictures. The signs were there. All the ones you mentioned. And then some.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He had never told her that his marriage hadn’t been happy. He’d said only that his wife had died.

She ran her fingertips over the aspen bark, buying time. “But you and your wife didn’t divorce.”

“Only because she died—a freak thing, a brain aneurysm. I’d already retained a lawyer, and he was in the process of drawing up a settlement offer. If she’d lived, divorce was inevitable.”

Why?
That was the question Penny always wanted to ask couples like that. If the relationship had been wrong from the start, so wrong the truth seeped out through the wedding photographs, why had they married in the first place?

“Lydia was pregnant,” he said, as if he’d read Penny’s thoughts. But when she looked at him, she could tell he was merely following his own inner trail. And logic had led him there, to the heart of the labyrinth.
Why?
Why had he married a woman he didn’t love?

“I was shocked to see how obvious it was, in the pictures, that we weren’t in love. I was so determined to make it work, I think I had convinced myself that I did love her. I figured I must. What kind of man doesn’t love the mother of his child?”

Penny could have answered that.
All kinds.
A million million men around the world faced this same dilemma. People couldn’t summon love the way they’d summon a waiter, merely because it was time to pay the bill.

At least, she could have said, he didn’t
kill
his unloved, unsatisfactory wife.

But what Max needed right now was someone who would listen to him while he asked himself these questions—not someone who would try to provide facile, simplistic answers.

“We limped along for several years. For Ellen’s sake. But then—” his face changed suddenly “—some things happened, and I grew a lot less patient. I guess I just stopped trying. So Lydia found someone who
would
try. A couple of someones, actually. She was a very beautiful woman.”

Of course she was. And Ellen would someday look just like her, no doubt. Penny wondered whether that affected Max’s feelings toward his daughter. But then she remembered the misery on his face when Ellen had been crying over her impaled ear, and she was certain that it didn’t.

She knew what it looked like when a man did not love his daughters. And she also knew what it looked like when a man
did,
if only the way she might recognize a positive by having seen its negative.

“When I discovered she was cheating, I wasn’t even angry.” He took a deep breath. “I thought she wanted out, and I was more relieved than anything else.”

He paused. But Penny didn’t speak, so he went on, as she’d hoped he would.

“She didn’t want out, though. She’d only taken lovers because she thought that, if I got jealous enough, if I feared losing her, I might wake up and appreciate what I had.”

Penny wanted to touch him, to offer just a simple gesture of understanding, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to risk closing off the flow of words.

He put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think Lydia ever accepted the truth. Right up to the very end, I think she clung to the hope that I’d change my mind.”

He stared at the fairy lights and flower garlands in front of them. He was silent a long time. Then he turned to Penny, a half smile on his lips. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this.”

She raised her shoulders. “Maybe because I didn’t know her. It’s easier to confess things to strangers.”

His brow furrowed slightly. “Strangers?”

“Well, you know what I mean. People who aren’t…aren’t part of your normal life. You don’t have to live with the consequences of what you tell them, because they’re temporary—they’re just…”

She flushed, remembering what he’d said the other night. He knew he would end up merely a memory for Penny, and his only concern was that he didn’t want to be a
bad
memory. “They’re just passing through. Or, in this case, you are.”

He seemed to be studying her face, squinting, as if the shadows made reading it difficult.

“Maybe,” he said finally. “Or maybe it’s because you’re easy to talk to. Because you listen without judging. Because you have a good moral compass and a kind heart.”

She had to look away. The intensity of his gaze on her skin was almost like a physical burn. “I don’t think very many people would judge you harshly, Max. It’s a sad story, but it is also sadly common.”

As she stared toward the dance floor, she caught another glimpse of Ellen. She and Alec were working hard at their beginner’s version of the electric slide, but they kept bumping into each other and then collapsing into laughter.

“Does Ellen know? That you and her mom were probably going to split up?”

He shook his head. He had followed her gaze and was watching his daughter, too. “We decided it would be better not to tell her, and then, after Lydia died, there didn’t seem to be any point.”

Penny still knew it was probably best if she didn’t volunteer anything. She didn’t know Lydia—and what she knew of Max was too isolated, too separate from his normal life, to be considered a true picture.

But she did know something about children who were frightened and hopelessly confused.

“I think you ought to consider telling her,” she said. “Kids always know when something is wrong. They know if something, or someone, in the family is on the verge of collapse. But if no one will tell them exactly what the problem is, then they fear everything. There’s no safe harbor. No load-bearing wall can be trusted to protect you from the disaster you know is coming.”

She realized that, halfway through that speech, she had switched from
they
to
you.
If she’d gone on another sentence or two, she would have been saying
I
and
me.

But she didn’t really care. At the very least, he already knew the basic facts of her family’s history, because she, herself, had told him. At worst, he’d get an earful from awful Esther Fillmore.

Heck, even Millicent Starling could have provided some of the juicier details.

The gossips especially loved the bit about how Penny had attended her mother’s funeral in her blue party dress that was still stained with her mother’s blood.

“And you have no idea what other people might have said to her already.” Penny wished she could make him see how likely this scenario actually was. One of Ellen’s friends had probably spotted her mom with another man, or heard gossip that Max always took the long way home.

“One day, at school,” she said, “a friend of mine called me an ‘accident’ baby, because I was so much younger than Rowena and Bree. So I came home and asked our housekeeper if that was true.”

He was watching her carefully. “What did she say?”

“She laughed so hard she almost dropped the cake batter she was stirring. She told me I wasn’t an accident baby at all. Instead, I was what she liked to call a ‘padlock baby.’ I was the padlock on the stable door that made sure the frisky filly didn’t get away.”

“Good God.” He frowned, hard. “I hope your parents fired her.”

“They didn’t know.” She put her hand on his arm gently. “That’s my point, Max. You won’t know, because she won’t tell you. If you want to make sure she understands, you’ll have to tell her yourself.”

* * *

E
LLEN
WAS
HAVING
so much fun she felt like crying when Dad said it was time to go home. She loved it here. She loved the creek in the moonlight, the old guys playing cowboy music, all the people line dancing and laughing and acting like idiots.

She only calmed down when Alec reminded her that she would be coming back for camp next week, and then for the “camp-in,” a sleepover for all the Bell River day camp kids that they held in the big barn. Her dad had actually agreed to it—without any fuss at all.