On the Ropes (16 page)

He led Janette into the homey kitchen, and paused when she resisted his pull. With wide eyes and parted lips, she appeared to be dumbstruck by Mel’s penchant for country kitsch. Geese wearing bonnets and white frilly aprons were everywhere and in countless forms—the wallpaper border, the tea towels, the potholders, and even little ceramics perched on the windowsill. Mel hadn’t changed a thing in all the years they’d been neighbors, and probably never would.

He leaned in and whispered, “She’s like everyone’s granny.”

“Oh.” She took his hand unprompted and squeezed it. He couldn’t even begin to guess what had prompted her pensiveness. Intuitive though he was, every time he felt as though he’d put together pieces of her puzzle, a moment later, he’d realize there was a gap somewhere and the pieces weren’t mates after all.

They ascended the narrow staircase and found panting Mel leaning against the doorframe of her sewing room. As always, she wore one of the numerous cruise line tees she had on when she wasn’t on the beach paired with a pair of crisply ironed khakis. Her silver hair was pulled back into its usual bun, and she had her bifocals pushed down to the end of her button nose.

“Window’s only opened a crack, and that’s just enough for the whistling to drive me crazy!” she said. She wagged her bum foot at him. “Bob accidentally dropped his tackle box on it. I’m on pretty good painkillers, but I gotta be careful with them because they make me dizzy.”

Stephen skirted around her and walked to the window seat. He’d been in the house less than three minutes, and the wind’s whistle through that gap was about to drive him to hysterics, too. He grabbed the handle, turned it hard, and got the damned thing closed.

“I’m Melanie,” she said behind him as he reached up and pulled the top lock. “I live here with my husband Bob. We’ve been here since the dinosaurs roamed.” She laughed.

“I’m Janette. I’m…” Jan let her words trail off.

Stephen turned to see her wrenching her hands in the hallway. He knew he should leap to her rescue, but his curiosity won out. What did she consider herself in relation to him? There probably wasn’t a word for it.

“I love that your house is periwinkle,” she said.

Mel laughed again and hobbled over to her worktable. “Oh, God. Almost everybody on the beach hated it when we put up the swatches twenty years ago, but Bob went ahead with it because it made me happy.”

“That’s lovely.” Janette eased farther into the room, stopping near Mel’s overstuffed bookcase. It was filled with clothing patterns, craft books, piles of fabric and notions, and Lord knew what else. “Pastel houses are common in Bermuda.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“It’s where I say I’m from most of the time. I don’t really consider myself Bermudian, though.”

Interesting
.
Keep her talking, Mel.

Mel chuckled, and reached around her sewing machine to turn on the desk light. “That’s where I got the idea. Bob and I took a cruise to Bermuda right after we got the last of the kids out of the house. I guess when I came home, it dawned on me that the nest was empty, and I was so damn depressed, I could hardly pick my head up.”

Jan perched on the edge of a cane-back chair near the bookcase, folding her hands atop her lap.

Mel pushed her glasses up her nose and pulled what looked like a wadded up girl’s dress out of her workbasket.

“I guess, as long as I was on the ship or out poking around in the shops and seeing the sites, I didn’t think about what we were coming home to. The quiet, I mean. We’ve got four boys, and they nearly drove me to a heart attack a hundred times, but when they were all gone, I couldn’t deal with the quiet. Bob did all he could to lift my spirits. Took a long time to find anything that would reach me.”

“How did you come back around to paint color?”

“Bob said I needed to distance myself from what was making me so sad in the first place. The empty house. He’s a psychologist.” She waved a dismissive hand and rolled her eyes, but didn’t hide her smile. “He thought maybe if I had a reminder that there was still so much for me to do in life with them gone, I wouldn’t feel like the most important thing I’d done in life so far was all I was good for. He thought we should travel more. See things. Bring back new stories to tell. And he painted the house periwinkle to remind me that we’d just moved on to the
next
thing.”

“And that worked?”

Mel nodded and lined the edges of her work-in-progress beneath the sewing machine’s foot. “Right after he finished painting, I used to sit on the beach with my chair turned toward the house and just stare at it. I’d think about all the places we hadn’t been yet and count down to when we’d finally get to see them. Got me through a tough time. Probably more than you wanted to know, but there you have it.”

Mel slapped her hands against the table and gasped. “Lord, where are my manners? Y’all hungry?”

Jan had good enough reflexes that she slapped her hand over her mouth before her laughter pealed out.

Stephen cleared his throat and pulled Mel’s attention away from her. “Thanks for the offer, Mel. We can’t stay long. We left Toby eating his lunch. Jan promised to play a game with him, and you know he never lets anyone forget a promise.”

“My man Toby. He’s a good little friend to have. He comes and watches the soaps with me when Bob’s out fishing. Doesn’t even complain.”

“We talking about the same Toby?
My
nephew Toby?”

“Give that boy an oatmeal raisin cookie and he’ll sit just as sweet as a ripe peach.”

“I bet he does. Meg restricts his sugar.”

“Probably because she knows everyone else is giving it to him. She’s not stupid, your sister.”

“I know. She reminds me all the time. Listen, you need anything else?”

“What’s the hurry? You just got here. Storm’s probably a good three hours away. You could sit a while. Toby won’t be mad for too long. Just tell him you were at old Mel’s. I’ll send you back with some cookies.”

“Mel—”

“It’s all right,” Jan said. “You go check on the other neighbors and scoop me up on the way back. I’m sure Bob will be back soon.”

Mel peered at her watch face. “Ten or fifteen minutes, I’d guess, if he’s not driving as slow as a baby sea turtle moves.”

Stephen mouthed over Mel’s head, “You sure?”

Jan’s only response was a slight nod. She pulled her chair closer to Mel’s worktable.

Stephen gave her shoulder a squeeze on the way out. She didn’t have to do this. Mel would probably talk until she was blue in the face, and everyone on the beach knew that about her. She was sweet as could be, but hard to keep up with.

“You sew?” Mel asked Jan as he walked into the hallway.

“No. My grandmother used to, but I don’t remember much about her beyond that.”

Stephen paused at the top of the stairs, listening.

“I used to spend the night at her place sometimes when my mother was working, and after I’d go to bed, she’d sew late into the night. I’d fall asleep to the sound of that little motor. She made the prettiest dresses for me. When I moved away, that was one of the things I missed most. No one made me anything after that.”

He blew out a breath, and started down the stairs.

When he and Meg had met Mel all those years ago, Mel had offered to make Meg something. She’d kept saying no, and Stephen had thought it was because she simply didn’t like homemade things. It wasn’t until after Toby was born that he understood why she’d said no. Mel had shipped a little baby quilt to Raleigh with Toby’s name on it, and Meg had cried.

She’d said, “It’s easier to buy something. Sometimes, it’s even cheaper that way. You don’t make stuff like this for people unless you care about them. Can you believe anyone would care that much?”

He could, but he’d always been less of a cynic than Meg.

Jan wasn’t cynical. Just broken, and the more time he spent with her, the more sure he became that fixing her wasn’t a job for one man. He needed a small army.

Janette let Stephen lead her back to the house by the hand. She clutched a plastic zipper bag full of oatmeal raisin cookies and stared at the billowing sand as they plodded up the beach. She knew Stephen had heard what she’d said to Mel about her grandmother, and she didn’t care that he had. She’d wanted him to overhear. For some reason, having him outside the conversation made it easier for her to share things. Hell, maybe Bob knew of some diagnosis for that. Stephen had never given any indication that he’d judge her for anything that had happened in her life—for the decisions she’d made—but she was used to being rejected. Maybe she feared that the next thing he learned would be the tipping point. The point where he’d change his mind about her.

Where he’d give up.

She didn’t want him to give up. She wanted to make this
easier
for him, but didn’t know how.

“Thanks for letting me sit with Mel for a while,” she said as they approached the deck stairs. Seth’s temporary patch stood out in stark contrast to the dark-colored roof, and he’d already put the ladder away.

“I think you were doing her more of a favor than I was doing
you
,” he said. “She thrives on human contact.”

Toby stood in the doorway with arms crossed, glowering at them.

She held up the cookie bag, and his eyes went round as saucers.

He looked behind him, as if for Meg, then scrambled away. He probably didn’t want to be seen anywhere in the vicinity of those cookies before he ate them.

She laughed. “That nephew of yours…”

“He’s one of a kind, that’s for damn sure.”

“That’s probably putting it mildly. All the children I knew after I’d moved were very subdued.”

They paused near the door. Neither made any movements to open it. Stephen fixed that old-soul gaze on her, and she read the tacit dare in it. It said,
Tell me something
.

She blew out a breath and pressed her face against his chest.

His arms closed around her and he tucked his chin atop her head.

“I think it had more to do with the people my father and his wife associated with and the school I was enrolled in. They were all very like-minded. Strict. Children were expected to behave like little adults. Exploration and curiosity were often things to be punished for. I wasn’t a perfect child, but I… I tried hard.”

She often wondered what kind of woman she would have grown up to be if she’d been with her always-smiling mother—a woman who made silly faces in the mirror while she brushed her teeth and wore neon-bright eye shadow on the days she didn’t have to work.

Jan would probably be more comfortable with herself and more willing to take risks.

More willing to love.

“And you’ll remember that when you have your own children,” Stephen said after a while. “You’ll remember that children have their own personalities and that it’s wrong to get in the way of them. Even when those kids are wild and nervous. Or when they say scandalous things.”

Of course Stephen would understand. He grew up very differently, and he probably had a lot to say about how Meg handled Toby’s ferociousness.

“I wish I had come sooner,” Jan said, her face still against his soft shirt.

He didn’t say anything in response to that difficult confession. He just rocked her, and squeezed her tighter.

She had to take risks. Had to
try
to connect, because if she didn’t try this time, she’d regret it. She’d lose her shot at the only man she’d ever wanted to
tell something
to.

“Will… Will you come with me? To see my mother, I mean.”

She didn’t even have time to hold her breath, because he responded, “Of course I will,” immediately.

“You don’t have to feel obligated, but I’d be less frightened if someone I trusted went with me.”

“I
am
obligated. That’s the way it works when you want to be with someone.”

“Stephen, I—”

“Excuse me,” a voice from the beach called out. “I’ve got a delivery for Stephen Scott. You him?”

“Fuck,” Stephen whispered.

“What’s wrong?” Jan pulled back from him and looked over the deck railing.

“Courier,” he muttered.

The stranger pounded up the stairs, extending a document mailer to Stephen.

Stephen took it, sighing, along with the man’s stylus and tablet. “Where did this ship from?”

“I think whatever it is was printed off at the law firm just up the road and they dispatched me to bring it out here.”

“That is shady as shit.” He signed the tablet and thrust it back at the courier.

“I’m just doing my job, man.”

“And I’m on vacation away from mine. Apparently my firm is having a difficult time understanding that.”

The courier waved and took off.

“What is it?” Janette asked. Whatever it was couldn’t have been good. She’d never seen Stephen wearing that expression before. As a matter of course, he kept his demeanor pleasant, but the scowl he bore at the moment projected his distaste.

Stephen shrugged. “Corporation bullshit. Probably some account that isn’t even mine.” He flung the parcel at the table and pulled the glass door open. “They do this shit every time I leave town. We all went to law school, and yet they act like I’m the only one capable of parsing that bullshit.”

“Are you just going to leave it out there?”

“Yep. Maybe it’ll blow away so I can say
oops
,
my bad
, and mean it. Or else I’ll find a really fucking big bottle, shove it in there, and toss it back to sea along with a Post-it note outlining the terms of my resignation.”

“Stephen…” Meg said from the kitchen island. There was a note of warning in her voice. “What is it that you always tell me about burning bridges?”

“To leave absolutely no trace of them.”

“Stephen!”

Seth went outside, fetched the parcel, tossed it into the laundry room, and returned to the sofa.

“Is it something you could do quickly?” Jan asked. She’d just secured his promise that he’d go with her to visit her mother, so of course, something had to get in the way of that.

“Sweetheart, they wouldn’t send it if it wasn’t at least eight billable hours of work. But, don’t worry. I’m not doing it.”