The Things We Do for Love (11 page)

They were in the shadow of the awning of the Blooming Rose, the boutique where Angie Workman was manager. Joel had disappeared, and Graham turned to her. Gazing down at Mary Anne, he asked, “Do you wish I was Hale?”

She flushed, embarrassed that he should ever have guessed she’d been infatuated with Jonathan Hale. Was it as obvious to Jonathan? “Of course not,” she replied, deciding not to point out that Jonathan was engaged to
Angie Workman, a reality that didn’t preclude such wishing on her part.

Studying her face, Graham didn’t believe her. She was still smitten with their useless station manager. He said, “Alas?”

“What?” she demanded, cheeks still flushed.

“Nothing.” He shook his head, turned from her, and resumed walking.

Mary Anne fell into step, deciding not to take up the tangent about Jonathan. The truth was, the station manager was interesting to her. Graham never could be, because of Cameron.

He led her back to the Lexus and unlocked and opened the passenger door for her. As he drove them back to Middleburg, he asked, “Would you like to come back to my house for a while or were you hoping for an early night?”

Thinking of Cameron, she said, “I think I should go home.”

“I meant to bring the recording of today’s show,” he said. “I have one for you at my house.”

“Am I supposed to listen to it?”

“Sometimes it helps put you on track for next time.”

This hint that what she’d done on his show hadn’t been as perfect as either of them might have wanted made her reconsider. “I’ll come and get it.”

“Now?”

“Sure. I can walk home.”

“If so, I’ll walk with you.”

Mary Anne had often admired the big white house where he lived. She liked the graceful wraparound verandas. A black garden hose was coiled near the front
door. Graham seemed to do a double take when he saw it. “Neighbor must have brought it up here,” he said.

“It’s getting cold,” she commented. Time to bring in hoses.

After a moment’s thought Graham picked up the coiled hose, seeming to examine it suspiciously. Inside, he hung it on a door near the kitchen. “Cellar,” he explained.

Mary Anne followed him into the living room, watching him turn on a light.

It was a comfortable room, attractive but unobtrusive furniture. Light-colored couch, in a pleasant pastel plaid. The curtains were filmy white. An oak coffee table. A stereo in an entertainment center. The couches and coffee table sat before the white fireplace. A fire was built, and Graham said, “Shall I light it? Do you still want to hurry home or would you like coffee? I have an espresso maker, and I have decaf.”

Mary Anne, worried about her performance that afternoon, decided that this wasn’t a romantic time and that she needn’t worry on Cameron’s behalf. Not to mention that Cameron should probably get over Graham, seeing that he was the only single man in Logan County who didn’t think she was hotter than spicy Indian.

Graham made decaf lattes, and after she’d sipped from her mug, Mary Anne stood up to examine the photos on his mantel. She recognized Briony. The older couple sitting on a porch swing must be his parents. His father had been tall, with a thick head of white hair. His mother wore a stylish light suit and heels, her white hair in a French twist, her eyes dancing mischievously.

Mary Anne returned to the couch and sat. Her purse was beside her, and she felt her cell phone vibrate. She removed the phone from her purse and looked at the number. Jonathan Hale’s mobile.

That
was interesting. Could it be something important about the station? News?

No.

She decided not to answer, put away the phone and studied the room again.

Following her eyes to a game table set with a chess board, Graham asked, “Want to play?”

“Sure. But I’m not very good at chess.”

“That’s all right,” he said with a smile. “I am.”

H
E BEAT HER TWICE
—while also teaching her several useful simple guidelines for success—and then he said, “How about a friendly wager?”

“Do I look like a fool?”

“I won’t ask anything too arduous.”

She thought of Cameron. This was all getting very messy and she could not say,
I’m sorry, my cousin has a mad crush on you, and so I’m afraid your feelings for me may wound her.

Damn it, they were already wounding Cameron.

Mary Anne said, “Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m really not—”

“Into anyone but Jonathan Hale?”

“
No
. It’s…Let’s try to be professional.”

He lifted his eyebrows, weighing what she said, then stood up with a shrug. “Professional, it is.” She saw that he’d gone to fetch a CD, the recording of her first appearance on his show.

A siren rent the night, just as Mary Anne’s phone vibrated again.

Frowning, she checked the number. Jacqueline Billingham.

I
T WAS A MILD HEART ATTACK
. No significant damage to the heart, the physician told Mary Anne. For the present, however, Nanna would remain in the hospital under observation. But they might send her to Charleston to see a cardiac specialist there.

Mary Anne was able to see her grandmother briefly, though Nanna was asleep. Lucille was knitting in the waiting room and talking with Cameron’s mother, Louise, but after Mary Anne arrived she decided to go home, since she wasn’t needed there.

“Does Cameron know?” Mary Anne asked.

“Yes. She was here, but she’s gone now,” her aunt replied. “She was called to substitute on the phone line at the women’s resource center. I wish she wouldn’t do that. Those are all such unsavory people.”

Mary Anne studied Cameron’s mother, who was very like her own. Both dressed in slacks and cardigans and polo shirts from JCPenney. Both were unpretentious, well-mannered and good as gold. Neither of them liked to acknowledge that bad things happened in the world—to anyone—or that a family member, for instance, might do something immoral. That her daughter defended women who sometimes had children by several different
men from men who were sometimes alcoholics or drug users was all deeply disturbing to Louise—though not least because of her concern for her daughter’s safety.

“Does my mom know?” Mary Anne asked now.

“No. I suppose I should call her.” Louise started to take out her cell phone.

“I will,” Mary Anne assured her.

Mary Anne returned to her grandmother’s house to call her mother and let her know about Nanna’s condition. As she made the call, she looked at the roses on the telephone table and plucked the card from among them.
Thinking of you—with news for you
.
J.

She found herself thinking the initial almost pretentious. Oh, well, he occasionally signed notes at the station that way. What was the “news”? Her heart skipped a little. Would he…Would any betrothed man send roses in such a way to a woman who wasn’t his fiancé? Could he have broken his engagement to Angie?

Her mother said, “Oh, dear. I suppose I must call Caroline.”

The third Billingham sister. “I can, if you like,” said Mary Anne, preoccupied.

Her mother appeared not to have heard her. “Now, Mary Anne, I don’t want you bringing up that business.”

It took a moment for Mary Anne to comprehend what “business” her mother meant. The “business” was the Billingham trait of never acknowledging or discussing unpleasantness. The last time their families had assembled Mary Anne and Cameron had decided to have an “intervention,” speaking to Mary Anne’s father about his alcoholism and womanizing and how it affected the entire family. Her father’s repentance had displayed all its usual
maudlin religiosity. And any improvement had been quite temporary. Louise and Katherine Billingham had been offended even if their younger sister had been supportive.

Mary Anne’s mother continued, “None of us wants to upset Nanna.”

The intervention had excluded Mary Anne’s grandmother, so this was ridiculous. “I live with Nanna and I certainly don’t plan to upset her for any reason. No more do I mean to bring up Dad’s habits,” Mary Anne said, tight-lipped.

When she hung up the phone, she was annoyed and not looking forward to seeing her family. Her parents and Aunt Caroline would soon descend upon the Middleburg house.

Uneasily, she thought of Graham Corbett, whom she’d promised to call in the morning with a report. Well, she’d done her best to discourage him. But sometime soon she was going to have to talk to Cameron. She must let her cousin know how Graham was behaving.

Something very uncomfortable occurred to her. That things would somehow be
easier
if Cameron gave her permission to date Graham.

I don’t want to get involved with him. What am I thinking? Jonathan Hale just sent me roses.

And had “news.”

Again, she thought of her family’s imminent arrival.

She should feel proud of her parents, eager for people to meet them.

Yet she didn’t feel that way. Her mother was a good person, genuinely good, but so obsessively scrupulous about everything that Mary Anne had grown up with a deep sense of her own inner wickedness, a feeling that
had only begun to lessen with age, when she’d found herself behaving like the person her mother and Nanna wanted her to be.

Yes, she wasn’t crazy about the idea of Jonathan Hale—or Graham Corbett, for that matter—meeting her family.

H
ER CELL PHONE AWOKE
her the next morning at eight. “Hello?” she answered sleepily, fearing new bad news about Nanna.

“Mary Anne. It’s Jonathan.”

“Thank you for the flowers,” she said. “They’re lovely.”

“As are you,” he replied. “And I have something to tell you. I wanted you to be the first to know. Angie and I have broken off our engagement.”

Mary Anne’s heart struck one hard note, then raced. How could this be happening? After everything she’d tried, even the desperation of the love potion? And he wanted
her
to be the first to know?

She knew how she
should
feel—ecstatic. But that wasn’t how she felt. The Billingham side of her knew that breaking up someone’s engagement was just a hair on the right side of home-wrecking, and she felt her character had been branded. She could have guessed beforehand that if the event occurred she would have these misgivings. Hadn’t Clare Cureux warned her? But she’d never believed it would happen, had never even believed that the love potion would work—and then the wrong person had drunk it.

But if his attachment to Angie was this shallow…

“I’m surprised,” she finally managed to say. “Was this a mutual thing?”

His silence seemed a kind of hedging. “No. But I realized I’d gotten into it too quickly and should break things off before we went any further.”

Mary Anne told herself that
she
wasn’t the reason behind this breakup, and that if Jonathan was so unsure—well, it must be for the best. “Is Angie all right?” she asked.

“Sure. Sure.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.

She told him about Nanna and he asked if there was anything he could do, then asked if she was free that evening.

“Maybe,” she said, trying not to think about the fact her parents would be in town. “What did you have in mind?”

“Cooking dinner for you.”

That meant she would go to
his
house. “If I don’t need to be with my grandmother, I’d like that,” she said. As she hung up, she wondered why Clare Cureux had been so insistent about the right person drinking the love potion. Clearly, Jonathan was becoming attracted to her
without
benefit of the potion. She must simply forget about the love potion. She only wished she could persuade Cameron and everyone else who knew about it—a list that now seemed to include at least one of Clare Cureux’s children—to do the same.

M
ARY
A
NNE’S FIRST
excursion of the day was to the hospital to see Nanna. She met Cameron there. After each had visited briefly with their grandmother, they stopped in Grounds for Friendship, Stratton Street’s coffeehouse. They ordered espressos and when they were seated at a table in the corner near the front window Mary Anne wasted no time in telling her cousin of Jonathan and Angie’s broken engagement.

Cameron exclaimed, “You’re kidding. Did he say why?”

“Not really, but we have a date tonight.”

Cameron seemed pleased by this, yet she still asked, “How did your date with Graham go?”

Mary Anne could understand all the feeling behind the question. She wanted to reassure her cousin yet believed that there was no point in reassuring her. Graham was interested in Mary Anne, not Cameron. So rather than deceive Cameron, she shrugged. “It was fine.” It was on the tip of her tongue to say,
He doesn’t do anything for me.
Yet this wasn’t precisely true. Instead, she said, “I don’t want to be with anyone famous and while, as he says, he’s not Brad Pitt, I still don’t like it.”

“It’s not like he can help it, Mary Anne,” Cameron pointed out.

“It’s not like
I
can help how I feel about it, either.” But was that true? Graham
wasn’t
a movie star or a teen idol. More importantly, he wasn’t an alcoholic like her father. He seemed a moderate person. Well, except, apparently, when his wife had died. Jonathan’s description of Graham’s behavior had sounded so like the kind of thing her father did without reason at least once a year.

“So you’re still not attracted to him?” Cameron asked.

Mary Anne wanted to say that she wasn’t—but that wouldn’t have been true.

Cameron seemed to read her hesitation. “Look, if you’re interested in him, go for it. It’s not like your turning him down is going to make him go for me.”

Having received this release to do as she pleased, Mary Anne said, “With Jonathan free, nothing’s likely to happen between Graham and me.”

Cameron nodded thoughtfully. “It doesn’t speak to
the effectiveness of Clare’s love potions, does it? Though it
does
seem to be working on Graham.”

Mary Anne was exasperated abruptly. “How can you think it worked? They’re ridiculous.”

“I don’t think they are,” Cameron said, looking as if she wished she could agree with Mary Anne. “Paul swears that every time one has been used, the people have ended up together.”

“Look, even if that were true,” Mary Anne said, “history argues against it. Probably the most famous love-potion-gone-wrong story in the world is that of Tristan and Isolde and
they
didn’t end up together, not in the way you mean. They both ended up dead, but I hardly think that’s the same thing.

“In all of life, people end up married to the ‘wrong’ people.” She held up two fingers of each hand to put quotes around wrong. “Life just isn’t something that can be manipulated with love potions—human feelings certainly can’t be.”

“I wish I believed that,” Cameron said wryly.

Understanding, Mary Anne said, “He used to flirt with me before the potion, Cameron. You can’t blame the love potion for what he’s doing.”

“No. I’d like to blame it for what you’re doing,” Cameron said.

Mary Anne’s espresso was halfway to her lips. She lowered the cup. “What is it I’m doing?”

“Encouraging him?”

“You just told me I could!”

“I know. What I mean is, I think you’re falling for him, too,” Cameron explained.

“That is
not
happening,” Mary Anne assured her. “I
don’t positively dislike him the way I used to, but he’s still too much of a celebrity for me and it appears he has been known to act like my father on occasion.” She didn’t mention the circumstances of the occasion—the sudden death of his young wife.

“Well, time will tell,” Cameron remarked, with less than her usual optimism.

Mary Anne wanted to say something to make things right between them, but only time could cure Cameron of her infatuation with Graham Corbett. She settled for, “What I’m looking forward to is seeing Jonathan tonight and finding out all about him and Angie.”

W
HEN SHE RETURNED
to Nanna’s house, the car in the driveway was not Nanna’s—which Lucille always garaged, in any case—but a vintage aqua Thunderbird. Mary Anne knew the car and experienced a whole host of feelings as she parked at the curb in front of the house. She had always liked Aunt Caroline, and when she was young she’d wished Caroline had been her mother. But Aunt Caroline’s arrival presaged the arrival of Mary Anne’s own parents, something to which she wasn’t looking forward.

As she slung her purse over her shoulder and stepped away from her car, the front door of the house opened and the familiar figure came out, all voluptuous angles and high heels and French twist and artfully applied makeup and exuberance. In her arms was a white Maltese as perfectly groomed as she was. “Hi, chicken!” called Aunt Caroline, in her unforgettable husky sandpaper voice, nearly running down the front steps.

Mary Anne hurried to hug Caroline, who was as tall
as she was, and to give a pat to the dog. “Hello, Paris. How are you, little sweetie?”

“Good as gold. Did I tell you she won her major? She’s a champion now. Breeders were thrilled, of course.”

“That’s great,” Mary Anne said. If her grandmother had been at home, she would have disapproved of the dog’s presence, worried and complained but allowed it. Mary Anne could never see the problem. Paris was so clean and well-behaved she was hardly a dog at all.

Caroline was fifty, Mary Anne knew, and as always she looked good. Her suit was a 1940s style silk shantung thing in an earthy, unnamable greenish brown, and her body might have been poured into it. Only one thing showed her age. Though her makeup was impeccable, her hair almost platinum in its twist, her skin showed her to be the smoker she was. Even now, she clutched a cigarette and lighter.

“Mary Anne, you’re prettier every time I see you.”

“You, too, Aunt Caroline.”

Her aunt made a sound like, “Pshaw!” Then she said, “I was just coming out for a smoke, but I think I need my coat.”

Mary Anne gave her a gentle shake. “You need to stop.”

“Chicken, it’s just one of my real pleasures.”

Throughout Mary Anne’s childhood, Aunt Caroline had breezed into the family home once a year, bringing Mary Anne the beautiful dolls her mother had said were too expensive and refused to buy her. It was Caroline who had taken Mary Anne shopping in Orlando for the kind of clothes her mother thought were too sexy. It was Caroline who had made Mary Anne want to see more of the world. Caroline, lucratively widowed once and then divorced three times, the latter a fact Mary Anne had never heard Nanna mention. She’d felt her own mother’s
disapproval of the first divorce, heard the sighs over the second, seen her lips tighten at news of the third. Nanna never mentioned her youngest daughter’s marital status.