Remember to Forget (27 page)

“Heavens, no!” Wren was instantly herself again. “You’re a guest, sweetie. You go on now. Relax.”

“Well, um . . . I’m sort of helping Trevor out.”

Bart and Wren exchanged looks, and Maggie ducked back into the dining room without explanation.

But she was barely ensconced on the ladder again when the older couple peeked in through the doorway.

Wren clapped a hand over her mouth. “For land’s sake! Look at you two!”

Trevor winked at Maggie before turning to Wren. “If you’d gone to the movies like you were supposed to, you might have come home to a
fully painted
and
plugged-in kitchen.”

Wren crowed and spun on her heels. “I’m not here,” she said over one shoulder. “You just pretend you don’t see me. For all you know, I’m sitting in the Dickinson with a big tub of popcorn in my lap. Come on, Bart. Let’s go find an old video to watch.” She grabbed her husband’s arm, and they disappeared through the archway, giggling like young lovers.

At the sound of their footsteps on the stairway in the lobby, Trevor came to the ladder and reached up to give Maggie a high-five. “Let’s pretend they never came home,” he whispered. “We can do this.”

She nodded agreement and made a show of slapping paint on the next portion of the wall. They worked in silence to the
whish whish
of Maggie’s paintbrush and the rhythmic
zip
of Trevor unrolling and tearing off the painter’s tape as he worked his way around the room.

When he finished taping the dining area, he came over to the ladder with an empty roller pan. “Hey, that’s looking good. If you don’t mind doing the trim work along the baseboard on this wall, I can start rolling where you’ve already been.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

He held out the roller pan, and she tipped the can and poured paint into the pan. They moved the ladder to the other wall, and she climbed up and went to work trimming the largest wall of the kitchen while Trevor worked the roller brush in long, even strokes on the walls Maggie had trimmed. Even as the light outside the windows faded to dusk, the kitchen began to take on a sunny glow.

Jasper sauntered into the room and swept by Maggie’s ladder. His tail knocked off a paintbrush that had been balanced across a can. Thank goodness Trevor had seen to it that the floor around the edge of the room was covered in canvas tarps. Maggie shooed the cat away again.

Half an hour later, she took a bathroom break and brought back two Cokes that someone—probably Bart—had put in the miniature refrigerator in her room.

“You want a soda?” She held out the chilled can to Trevor.

He flashed a knowing grin.

“Excuse me! A
pop
.” She dragged out the word in a hayseed drawl. “I’d like to give you a pop all right,” she mumbled under her breath but loud enough to be sure he heard.

He laughed and held out his hands in surrender.

Maybe it was time she came clean about the whole West Coast thing before she dug herself any deeper. She opened her mouth to speak, but Trevor was standing there grinning at her with that appealing sparkle in his blue gray eyes, and no words would come out. She felt heat rise to her cheeks.

He seemed not to notice and went back to work. But Maggie’s stomach churned. With her lies, she’d invented a whole new background for herself, but it was getting harder and harder to keep her stories straight. A little ditty her mother had often quoted ran around in her head.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
The words wove themselves over and under one another, until the web was tangling up her brain. She had to come clean.

But if she told the truth, what would he think of her? What would any of them think of her? There was something different about these people. She’d never met anyone as sweet as Bart and Wren Johannsen. After only a few days with them, she somehow knew that everything about them was genuine. They put on no airs. Their kindnesses weren’t performed to impress or to call in favors at some later date.

Trevor was cut from the same cloth. She had suspected his motives at first. Of course, he had every right to suspect her too. She’d used him, really, because she’d needed to get to the bus. But then he’d stayed to make sure she was safe and invited her on a picnic. She was pretty sure he had no ulterior motive for doing those things. They were purely kindnesses, helping out someone in need.

She looked over at him, and a foreign emotion flooded her being. It was a feeling she couldn’t identify, but it drenched her with possibility,
with hope. And with an emotion she dared not entertain.

Trevor seemed not to notice that her brush had stilled, that she was watching him. How could she ever be a part of the life she saw here—in the town, the inn, and in the life of the man working beside her? They had something she wanted desperately. But she didn’t have the first clue what it was. Or how to get a handle on it.

She resumed the comforting rhythm of painting, but her heart felt all out of kilter. And for once, it had nothing to do with Kevin Bryson.

Trevor stood there, waiting, as if he thought she might change her mind if he stared at her long enough.

Chapter Thirty

T
a-da!” Trevor’s shout caused Maggie to pivot on the ladder. He waved the long-handled roller in front of the finished wall with a flourish and took a courtly bow. Only the first of three walls, but it looked lovely, and already Maggie could begin to picture how the room would look when it was finished.

Would she be here to see it for herself? Or would she have moved on by then? She shook off the question and forced herself to climb out of the funk she’d been buried in. “What time is it anyway?”

Trevor wiped a paint splatter off the face of his watch. “It’s almost six o’clock. You want to call it a day?”

It was all she could do not to laugh at the puppy-dog eagerness in his paint-splotched face. It was obvious he was nowhere near ready to call it a day.

“I have nothing else to do. But if you need to go, I can clean up here.”

“Oh, no. I can stay all night.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I’m good for a couple more hours anyway.”

“Great!”

“How about a bite to eat first?”

“I am kind of hungry, now that you mention it.”

She went and got the sandwiches from the fridge in her room. They were starting to be a little on the soggy side, but they’d do. Trevor gathered chairs around a table in the lobby, and they sat down across from each other.

Maggie watched him wolf down three of the half dozen little sandwiches Wren had made her for the bus. She’d counted those sandwiches as “security” against hunger, intending to make them last several days. But tonight she was happy to share them with Trevor, and she watched him wolf them down without a twinge of anxiety over where her next meals might come from.

She ate two of them and offered Trevor the last one. He accepted with a grin. A few minutes later he put the last bite in his mouth, brushed the crumbs from his hands, and pushed back from the table. “Ready?”

“Ready when you are.”

He followed her to the kitchen and helped her refill the roller pan from her bucket. For the next two hours they worked. And they talked. Mostly Trevor talked. And she preferred it that way. He regaled her with the colorful history of the unincorporated town of Clayburn and his boyhood stories of growing up here. Trevor’s childhood had been one Maggie could only imagine—one full of love and a whole town of supportive mentors. His memories were built around simple adventures that she could sense grew more precious with every recall. His telling of his one and only climb to the top of the Clayburn water tower with two of his buddies the summer he turned ten had her rolling with laughter.

“But scared as we were climbing those eighty-seven rungs to the top, we didn’t know the meaning of fear until we got up there and looked down to see our mothers glaring at us from the ground. We seriously considered camping out up there . . . until Mom told us the police were on the way.”

A faraway look shadowed his smile, but Maggie watched him shake it off and turn to her, a winsome spark lighting his eyes. “So, can Meg Anders top the water-tower story? What was it like growing up in California?”

She shook her head, her mind whirling. “Can’t top that.” But Trevor’s story had reminded her of a story she hadn’t thought of in a long time—maybe since it happened. Her mom . . . trying to teach her how to make pancakes. She smiled, unspooling her memory for Trevor. “I read the recipe wrong and only used half a cup of flour when it called for two cups. I didn’t know the batter wasn’t supposed to be thin as glue.”

“Oops,” Trevor said, obviously knowing where this was headed.

“They came off the griddle thin as cardboard and full of holes—like lace. Mom picked one up and saw that I was about to cry from humiliation. So she announced that I’d just made a lovely batch of
crepes
.”

“Those fancy French pancakes?”

She nodded. “She spread orange marmalade on them, rolled them up, sprinkled them with powdered sugar, and you know what? They were pretty good.”

“That was quick thinking on your mom’s part.”

Maggie swallowed over the lump in her throat. Why had she spent so much time dwelling only on the times after they’d put Mom in the hospital? She laughed as a new memory rose to the surface. “Mom made some jam once that never jelled. She opened a jar and it was like syrup. She said, ‘We need to make some of your famous crepes to pour this over, Magg—’” She caught herself and dropped her voice. Trevor seemed not to notice, so she hurried on. “We made crepes every Saturday morning after that. Mom called them
faux crepes
and made us all speak with
thick French accents while we ate them.” She lifted her chin and demonstrated. “Jennifuh, dahling, would you pahss the cr-r-repes,
s’il vous plait
.” She trilled her
r
s and struck a haughty pose.

Trevor roared, and his laughter washed through Maggie, filling up a place inside her that had been empty and dry.

Her story reminded him of another, and he launched into his tale. They traded memory after memory, and by the time the clock in the lobby chimed nine o’clock, Maggie had quit worrying that she would slip up and say something that would give her charade away.

By ten, when the noisy guests came in and sat out in the lobby laughing and talking, Maggie and Trevor were having their own party in the kitchen.

All three walls of the kitchenette area were painted, and they had a good start on the wall the archway was on. Maggie had figured out a design for a border in her head and she could hardly wait to start sketching it out on paper to show Wren.

“Is there anyplace in town to buy art supplies? My fingers are itching to hold a paintbrush,” she told Trevor when they talked about the border again.

He chuckled and pointed to the wide paint-caked brush in her hand. “You can
say
that after tonight?”

She laughed. “I was thinking of something a mite smaller . . . and a mite more artistic.”

“I doubt Alco has the kind of paints you need, but we’ll find them. I might even have some stuff in the print shop that would work.”

As a burst of laughter wafted from the lobby, Trevor checked his watch. “I don’t know about you, but I’m plumb tuckered out. What do you say we move the appliances back and call it a day? I think Bart and Wren are down for the count.”

They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the couple since they’d gone up to their apartment earlier to watch a movie. Maggie smiled, picturing them together on the love seat in their little living room sawing logs
while a soundtrack droned in the background. She made a mental note to set her alarm so she’d be up when Wren came down in the morning. She could hardly wait to see the look on the sweet woman’s face when she saw how much they’d accomplished. She and Wren would be able to fix breakfast for the guests in a nice, neat kitchen. They’d still have to move the tables out to the lobby to serve the meal, but a few more work nights like this one and the dining room would be finished too. Maggie couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt such a sense of accomplishment.