Love Potion #9 (32 page)

 

* * *

 

Lilith was watching a pair of tanned and busy children splash in the pink pool on Saturday afternoon when Andrea popped out through the kitchen door.

There was a chorus of joyous greetings for Nana - who just happened to have picked up some licorice twisters in the course of her shopping - before the children dashed back to the pool. Andrea dropped down beside Lilith with a sigh of satisfaction, and poured herself a glass of pink lemonade.

“Mitch is on the roof,” Lilith supplied.

Andrea rolled her eyes. “Honestly, he never stops.”

Lilith smiled at the affection in the older woman's tone. “Are you all ready for your trip?”

Andrea smiled in turn. “Oh yes. Ten o'clock tomorrow morning. I can hardly wait.” She turned suddenly and looked steadily at Lilith. “I have to thank you, Lilith, both for reading my fortune and for agreeing to watch the children.”

“I'm looking forward to it,” Lilith confessed.

“I know.” Andrea sipped her drink and wiped the faint sheen of perspiration from her brow. “But Mitch trusts you, too. That's not a small thing after what he's been through.” She put the glass down and turned it in the wet circle it made on the wood, her tone suspiciously idle. “I don't suppose he's told you much about it?”

Lilith's attention was instantly snared. “Just that Janice left when Jen was a baby.”

Andrea shook her head. “And that's not half of it.” She looked at Lilith again. “Am I wrong, or is this something you'd like to know?”

“I don't want to pry,” Lilith said carefully.

Andrea grinned. “But you're itching to know - and you know as well as I do that getting the story out of Mitch will be like pulling teeth.”

Lilith couldn't completely stop her smile. “He is a bit reticent.”

“Gun-shy,” Andrea affirmed, taking another long sip of lemonade. “And rightly so. But even if he won't talk about it, I will.” She patted Lilith's hand. “You see, Lilith, I think this may help you understand him a bit better. I may not have your gift for seeing lovematches, but I still have eyes in my head. And you're the first woman that Mitch has taken notice of in a long time. That can't be insignificant.”

Lilith smiled, hugging the details to herself. It was true love, no doubt about it.

Andrea took a deep breath. “Now I have to admit that I never liked Janice. Not from the first moment I met her. There was something calculating about that girl, something that got my back up. And I don't care for vanity, frankly. But no one else saw it, and since I was new to the family, I kept my mouth shut.”

“New to the family?”

“Well, Mitch is my stepson. I don't have any children of my own. Mitch's father, Nate, was my third husband and oh, what a man he was! But I'm getting out of order here. You see, first there was Bernard, a wonderful man. He was so trim and athletic, so clever and handsome. I moved to Toronto from Montreal to marry him. We were very happy, but he died quite young. A skiing accident, which was fairly rare in those days.”

“I'm sorry, Andrea.”

The older woman smiled. “So was I. We had such good fun.” She shook her head. “It took me a long time to get out in the world again. By the time I met Walter, it was too late for me to have children. And Walter, well, he was so elegant, it was hard to imagine that he could have fit children into his life anyway.” Andrea shrugged. “Walter was a lawyer, and we knew Nate and Eliza as vague social acquaintances. We'd pass at parties and so forth. Pleasant people, I was always struck by how much in love they obviously were.”

“It was about a year after Walter died when I heard through the grapevine that Eliza had died suddenly of an aneurism. It was disappointing news - they were such a happy couple that I had a hard time imagining Nate on his own, even though I didn't know him that well. They were always so inseparable, you know?”

Lilith nodded.

“I found out later that Nate had a nearly impossible time with the concept himself. I'm sure he blamed himself more than he ever admitted to me. Nate believed he could fix anything, that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. It must have appalled him to have the love of his life swept away from him so suddenly and irrevocably. He missed her terribly.”

“Yet you married him.”

Andrea patted Lilith's hand again. “Oh, don't be getting misty-eyed for me. I loved Nate and he loved me, but it's different each time. The part of his heart that he had given to Eliza was hers forever - the part he shared with me was something she had probably never seen. It might have been a part of him that came to light only when he lost her.”

Andrea shrugged. “He could probably say the same thing about me. But if we didn't change over the course of our lives, well, we wouldn't be learning much from life, would we?”

She paused for a moment, then frowned slightly. “It shakes your universe to lose a great love, and I saw evidence of that in Nate. He was determined to live for the moment, to savor every bite the world offered. It was three years after Eliza's death that we crossed paths at a charity dance and it is some commentary on the man's charm that I didn't dance one dance that night.”

“You said you love to dance,” Lilith said with a chuckle and Andrea grinned.

“Oh, Lilith, it was absolutely wonderful. Like it was destined to be. Nate made me laugh at some silly joke, I looked into his eyes and I saw the way they twinkled. Something happened in that moment, something magical, and I knew before we said another word that I was going to see a lot of Nate Davison from that point on.” She smiled into her lemonade. “He had a way of making you feel as though you were the very center of the universe, or at least of his universe, that you were the sun and the moon and the stars.”

Lilith could certainly see the same tendencies in Nate's son.

“And I liked him very much.” Andrea licked her lips and studied her glass. “I have to admit that there were times when I wished I had met Nate sooner, but then, neither of us would have been the people we were at that ball on that night.” She shrugged. “And maybe then, there would have been no spark. I don't know.”

Andrea took a deep breath. “I do know that I loved Nate right through to the bone, that we could talk and talk about nothing or about everything. I loved how we had champagne in bed just because it was Tuesday, how we made love anywhere we felt like it.” She grinned in recollection and Lilith smiled with her.

“I loved how he brought flowers and never really stopped courting me. You see,” Andrea smiled sadly, “I had learned how fleeting the good moments can be, too. We took every single moment we had and made them count, we lived those five years with an intensity that most people don't match in the sum of their whole lives.”

“It sounds wonderful.”

Andrea sobered, her gaze on the children. “It
was
.”

Then she swallowed a gulp of lemonade and Lilith let Andrea take a minute to compose herself.

“I'm telling you this, Lilith, so you understand the world Mitch was raised in. He knew nothing but love and harmony as a child, of giving and laughing, of perfect partnership and love everlasting. Nate and Eliza were smitten on sight, as the story went, and were together virtually from that moment on. They were
happy
. Mitch grew up believing that was how all marriages were - he never knew any different. He never realized that he was used to a Rolls Royce until he found himself in a much more basic model.”

“With Janice?”

“With Janice.” Andrea looked as grim as Mitch could. “I have no doubt that Mitch swept her off her feet, that she felt like she was the center of the universe. Mitch is a great deal like his father and he had learned so much of love and giving in that household. The difference was that Janice only
took
and Mitch only
gave
.”

“Over time, that kind of deficit gets difficult to manage. It's like buying everything on credit cards and never paying the balance, just the minimum payment. The debt mounts and mounts, until your whole life collapses around you like a house of cards.”

Andrea looked Lilith in the eye. “Love shouldn't be that way and neither should marriage.”

She sipped her lemonade. “I find hard to believe that Nate never saw the truth, but maybe he just didn't want to notice it. Or maybe he didn't want to comment on it. He was a tremendously loyal man - it would be like him to believe that since marriage was forever, that time would put the balance back in Mitch's marriage.”

Andrea frowned. “But I never believed it and I never liked that Janice. You could see the hunger in her eyes - she'd gobble up the whole world for herself given half a chance. And by the time I came along, she was getting miserable. The Queen of the May did not have the exclusive attention of her courtier and she didn't like it one bit. But she wasn't overt about it - maybe only another woman would see the signs. And Mitch, of course - she made sure he never missed it.”

Now Lilith was intrigued. “What do you mean?”

“I remember a dinner party thrown for an old friend of Mitch's - a friend who just happened to be a woman. Charming girl, you could see at a glance that she and Mitch would never be more than friends. She was going to Europe for some plum job, destined to be gone for a decade. Her parents were great friends of Nate's, but had moved to a condo and didn't have the space, so we hosted a black-tie farewell party.”

“Well! Janice came in a dress that nearly spilled her breasts onto the table. They were fine enough breasts, though we all really didn't want to see them. But she couldn't risk sharing Mitch's attention, even for an hour. And that wasn't the worst of it.

“Janice was so jealous that Mitch might pay attention to something other than herself, that she never left him alone that night. She ran her hands all over him, she pinched his butt when we went in to dinner, she was hanging on him every minute. It was terribly embarrassing. I spread a rumor that she was drunk.” Andrea shrugged. “What else was I going to do? People were noticing.”

“I sat them opposite each other at dinner, to deliberately give Mitch a bit of breathing room, and his friend by his side so they would
some
chance to talk. Yet during the meal I couldn't help but notice that Mitch was looking particularly uncomfortable. He was very quiet and he had that beleaguered look.”

Lilith smiled. “I know that one.”

Andrea nodded sagely. “So, I went to check on dessert - completely unnecessarily, of course, we had excellent staff - and just happened to walk down that side of the table.” She straightened indignantly. “Janice had her toes in Mitch's lap! I could see his napkin moving, as no doubt did everyone else on that side of the table. I could have smacked her silly! And do you know what happened later?”

Lilith shook her head.

“They stayed the night. Of course, we had plenty of room, and gave them the spare room with ensuite. I
thought
they were going to need some privacy, after that performance! I thought I heard arguing, but then remembered what it was like being young and hot to trot.” Andrea smiled. “I shut the door to our suite and didn't pay much attention.” Her smile faded. “But in the morning, Mitch was asleep in his father's study, still in his tux.”

Andrea looked Lilith in the eye. “She didn't
want
him. She was only teasing him to keep him from giving his attention to somebody else. That's just how she was. Mitch never knew I saw him there, for he took pains to slip back upstairs and emerge as though he had been in that bedroom all night.” Andrea grimaced. “Loyal to the end. Janice might have been pulling his chain, but he wasn't going to give anyone any reason to malign her.” She took a swig of lemonade. “I never told Nate.”

“Why not? Maybe he would have talked to Mitch.”

Andrea shook her head. “If you think Mitch is reticent about emotional matters, you should have seen Nate. And Nate was a consummate family man, too. Divorce really wasn't in his personal vocabulary, even though he was a lawyer. It would have broken his heart to know what was going on there - and even I only had a glimpse of it.”

She stared into her glass and smiled slightly. “But you have to wonder if there is some kind of divine plan. You see, Nate died while Janice was pregnant with Jason. He was very pleased about the pregnancy, with the prospect of a grandchild. And Mitch was relieved and excited, too. People have this great faith that the presence of children alone can mend gaping rifts in relationships, but it just isn't so.” Andrea sipped. “If things are bad, the arrival of a bundle of joy makes things worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's not easy having little ones underfoot. They're demanding, they don't sleep for nice eight hour stretches, they can't do anything for themselves. They're a lot of work, particularly at the beginning, and when couples get frazzled and tired, even the most healthy relationship will show strains.”

Andrea sighed. “I'm glad that Nate missed all of that, I wish Mitch could have. Even the last trimester after Nate died was rotten business. It would have broken Nate's heart to hear Janice's tirades about how fat she was getting, never mind her refusal to eat properly for the sake of the baby. She nearly made Mitch crazy, but then, she had his undivided attention that way, which was probably the only thing she wanted.”

“That's hardly fair to the baby,” Lilith said softly, thinking of how Mitch would have worried.

“No, it's not. I fret myself silly. Yet someone somewhere blessed them with a perfect little boy, despite all the foolish things Janice had done during those nine months. She was very lucky, but she didn't see it that way. Not at all. When I visited at the hospital, I watched Janice.” Andrea swallowed. “I saw her malice when Mitch showed us his son, there's nothing else you could call it. Mitch was so delighted, so tickled with this little boy - and fairly so! - that he never saw Janice's expression when she realized she was always going to have to share. I was very afraid that there was going to be trouble.”