JAMES PULLED INTO his parents’ driveway Saturday morning, feeling a little hungover despite the fact that he hadn’t had anything to drink. After spending Friday afternoon at the farmers’ market, he’d returned to the second half of his patrol shift which turned into a double thanks to one of the other deputies calling in sick. He’d spent the rest of the night into the wee hours patrolling the county, and stopping a handful of Slope patrons from driving tipsy.
He’d missed dinner and was hoping to pacify his parents with a quick lunch before calling Mara. He shut off the engine and stepped into the thick air.
There was no breeze this morning to sway the marigolds and black-eyed Susans in his mother’s flowerbeds, and even the New Guinea impatiens that she swore were more resistant to hot summer temperatures seemed to droop. James took the two steps leading to the wide front porch of their Victorian home and sighed when he stepped into the cool foyer. He dropped his keys in the Depression glass bowl on the table by the door.
“Anybody home?” he called but didn’t wait for an answer. They would be in the kitchen. He continued through the butler’s pantry converted into a small office, with shelves full of his father’s law enforcement awards and James’s old football trophies. His sneakers made little noise on the hardwood floors.
In the kitchen with its miles of countertops and a large butcher-block island, his mother, Anna, pulled a roast from the oven and wiped her forehead.
“Hi, sweetheart. I think we should have grilled. I’m never going to get this house cooled down from the roast,” she said. James kissed her cheek as he passed and grabbed a cold beer from the fridge.
“Trust me, we don’t want to be standing over a barbecue grill in this heat. Sorry I had to cancel last night.” Anna shrugged, not seeming too upset that he’d canceled. He took a long drink from the bottle. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Go entertain your father. He’s making me crazy,” Anna said. She hooked a strand of hair behind her ear with one hand and turned off the oven with the other. “We’ll eat in the formal dining room. I am not eating in this hot kitchen,” she said, more to herself than him. She reached for plates and glasses.
Jonathan wasn’t in the living room, so James wandered the ground floor of the big house, looking for him. He was in the solarium, reading. He’d situated the wheelchair under a potted palm, and a box fan blew cool air on his feet. This room, too, had been renovated. Now, while sunlight poured through the tinted windows, the AC unit kept the room cool and comfortable.
“Hey, Dad.”
“I didn’t hear you come in, boy,” Jonathan said, setting aside the Stephen King novel he’d been reading.
“You having hot flashes or something?” he asked, motioning to the fan. He handed a second beer to his father. “Man-o-pause, I think they call it?”
Jonathan harrumphed at that. “Not hardly. This damn cast keeps my foot and leg heated to about a hundred degrees. The fan prevents me from combusting.”
“Mom says we’re eating in the dining room instead of the kitchen. It’s a little ripe in there, thanks to a pot roast and whatever else she’s got going.”
“I told her not to go to that kind of trouble. Isn’t like you’re company.”
“Just your only son, who lives alone and eats mostly frozen dinners and pizza.” James sat in a wicker chair that made him feel like a giant. His mother was crazy about wicker but had confined most of her pieces to this one room, her favorite. Scattered around the hanging ferns, potted palms and a few other tropical plants were a white wicker sofa, two rockers and the chair James occupied.
“You know what I meant.”
James did. He’d never thought much about how Collin and Mara had grown up, not until the recent trouble with their younger sister. Now that Mara was back and he knew she’d been in therapy for the past year or so, he looked at their upbringing differently. What had seemed, when they were teens, like the perfect, permanent vacation from parental rules and restrictions now looked quite different. It made him view his own parents differently.
Not that her upbringing excused her keeping his son from him. But maybe he could stop being such a hard-ass about it.
He was twenty-eight and had been on friendly terms with Jonathan and Anna since graduating from college. Deep in his soul he knew if he needed them, they would be by his side in an instant. Mara didn’t have that, at least not from her parents. Sure, she had Gladys and, before he’d died, she’d had her grandfather, Zeke, but was that the same thing?
Anna called them into the dining room. James grabbed the handles of Jonathan’s chair and wheeled him into the room with a table big enough to seat twelve people. Only three places were set with his mother’s favorite quilted placemats and the everyday stoneware plates—not the fancier dishes she brought out for their annual holiday parties. The roast still bubbled in the pan, smelling like all the good parts of his childhood.
He pushed Jonathan to the table, and since his father couldn’t stand to cut, James took over. After they’d filled their plates, Jonathan asked, “How’d it go at the market yesterday?”
“Most of the west wall is back up. We’ll be able to start on the roof and install the new windows next week. It’s a good roast, Mom,” he said around a bite of food.
Anna glowed at the compliment. Her blond hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and she wore a gauzy pink shirt and those pants that cut off at the knee. Compared to his father’s athletic shorts and T-shirt and James’s own cargos and T-shirt, she looked like she might be headed out to play bridge or attend a hospital board meeting. She always looked like that. Along with keeping her home in pristine condition, cooking meals from scratch and puttering in her garden, Anna liked to look polished. “Thank you. I just threw it together after your dad said you were coming for lunch. We haven’t seen enough of you lately. This new schedule is running you in circles.”
“The work has to be done.” He took another bite. “I’m going to stop the split shifts, though.”
“Of course. It’s too much to work your job and help the rebuilding crews,” Anna said.
“You’ve put in more than your fair share of time,” Jonathan agreed.
James felt as if the ten years he’d been out of high school dropped away, and his parents were patting his back for playing a good game or passing a test. Their approval of how he spent his time was nice to have, but he didn’t need it. He’d pitched in because this was his town. His help might be missed, but now he had more than the town to think of. He couldn’t work sixteen hours a day and have time to get to know Zeke. Starting today, he would let more time go by on that front.
“The reconstruction is coming along, but I’m stopping the splits for a different reason.” Throat dry, James took a drink of water, then cleared his throat. It wasn’t as if he were eighteen, and still needed his parents’ approval. He was established in his job, had a house, was a responsible adult. Why was he so nervous about telling his parents he had a kid?
“Well, sure, have to get ready for the election,” Jonathan said. “Get the paperwork angle figured out, think about promotions for the deputies, staffing. People will want to know your plans for the—”
“It isn’t about the election, either, although I will start to lay out my plans soon. It’s, ah, did you know Mara Tyler’s back in town?”
Jonathan sighed. “I knew she wouldn’t stay away indefinitely. At coffee this morning they were talking about her getting caught shoplifting.”
“The girls at bridge were talking about it, too. Margery Harris, you remember Adam’s mother-in-law? Well, she was telling me it was something silly, like cookies and milk. What kind of grown woman shoplifts cookies?” Anna shook her head. “Seriously, who over the age of ten tries to steal cookies and milk?”
“She wasn’t stealing anything,” James said. “She’s working on a new security system for Mallard’s. She set off the alarm on purpose.” Which was more or less true. She was testing to see if there was some kind of anti-theft alert for goods being taken from the store. When nothing happened on her way out, she’d planned to go straight to Mike Mallard with her findings; getting caught on the way back in caught her off guard. CarlaAnn’s penchant for gossip and vengeance took things from there. He wanted to dispute her version of events loudly, but if he’d learned anything from their teenage pranks, it was that gossip slowed if he just didn’t talk about it.
“You sure about that, son?” Jonathan asked, cocking an eyebrow. “You know the girl was out of control when you kids were still in school.”
“Kids’ pranks don’t put her on the track to the penitentiary.” And this conversation was quickly going in the wrong direction. His parents didn’t have to like Mara, but judging her based on who she was at seventeen wasn’t fair, either. “She’s a securities and tech specialist for a big company in Tulsa. Travels all over setting up new systems.”
“Sounds like you’re getting reacquainted with her really quick,” Anna said.
Jonathan pushed his half-eaten plate of food away. “You got all this from the fifteen minutes you were questioning her in Mike Mallard’s office?”
Yep, the Slippery Rock gossip mill was definitely in fine shape. James shook his head.
“Actually, I started picking it up a few years ago when we were both in the same city for a security and law enforcement conference.” James knew he should rip off the having-a-child-with-Mara bandage quickly, but he couldn’t. Not when Jonathan and Anna still thought of her as a teenager on the verge of a criminal record. “We started hanging out whenever we were in the same cities.”
“I didn’t realize you were using that paid time for anything other than work,” Jonathan said.
“Speaking to my boss, I attended every conference workshop and lecture during those trips.” James took one last bite, chewed and swallowed. “Speaking to my father, I spent what little free time I had on those trips with an old friend. And now that old friend and I have a child together.”
Anna’s fork clattered to her plate, and her jaw dropped. Jonathan set his mouth in a thin line and shook his head. “That isn’t funny, James,” he said in the same lecturing voice he’d used when James was a child.
“It isn’t a joke. Zeke is fourteen months old, happy and healthy, and he’s in town with Mara. I thought you’d like to know.”
Anna looked from her husband to her son, then shook her head. “We’ve been grandparents for over a year and you didn’t bother to tell us?”
And now came the sticky part. How to reveal he hadn’t known about Zeke without that information turning them against Mara for life. Despite James’s inability to keep his lips off hers, he didn’t see a future of wedded bliss for the two of them. Still, having contentious almost-in-laws was not the way to create a stable family for their son.
“We left things on a bad note before Mara knew she was pregnant,” James said, deciding the truth was the best option in this instance. He didn’t want to lie, not to anyone, about Zeke. There were some bits of the relationship with Mara that he would keep to himself, though. Like the diamond ring collecting dust in his roll-top desk. “The point is that we’re working through all of that, and Zeke is here, and I thought you would like to meet him at some point.”
“Of course we want to meet him,” Anna said. Jonathan remained quiet.
“I’ll figure out a plan with Mara and let you know what works.”
The three of them were quiet for a long moment. James wasn’t sure what more to say. He was an adult, yet he felt like a kid lying to his parents—not the most mature move in the world, but keeping the explanation simple would be best for all of them, Mara included. His parents didn’t need to know she had walked out on him, they didn’t need to know she’d undergone therapy, and they didn’t need to know that he and Mara hadn’t completely worked things out between them.
Hell, until yesterday morning, he didn’t know she’d left Nashville because their relationship scared her. He needed to work out how he felt about that little bombshell for himself before sharing it with anyone else.
Anna stacked the plates and began clearing the table. Jonathan kept a sharp eye on James, making him feel like a fish on his father’s hook.
“Zeke and Gladys did the best they could,” Jonathan finally said, “and how Mara turned out the way she did when Collin has always been such an upstanding citizen, I can’t guess. But Mara Tyler has never been good for you.”
“She’s a friend, Dad, and I’m an adult who can choose whom and what he allows in his life.”
“She uses you.”
“She’s not using me, not now and not back then.” If anything, he had been the user. James could have ignored every prank, but a part of him wanted the excuse to be a rebel. Like Mara. He could have pushed her on the relationship front, too, but a part of him liked sneaking around. Having part of his life that wasn’t dictated by the family legacy.
“Of course she is, and of course she was. You think it’s a coincidence that a destructive girl like her befriends the sheriff’s son?”
“Technically, I was Collin’s friend. She just tagged along with us.”
“And led you all astray.”
“We weren’t sheep. We knew exactly what we were doing, just like all the other teenagers in this town have known what they were doing. I love this place, but it isn’t the most interesting way to grow up. Sometimes we needed a little excitement.”
“She painted another girl’s phone number on the water tower.”
“Because that girl dumped Aiden in a very cruel way. That, incidentally, was Adam’s idea. Mara just figured out how to do it without getting caught. Well, until your cruiser made an unexpected patrol through the park.”
“And I suppose the computer tricks were part of her planning for her future career as a security tech?”
“Actually, yeah. We boys saw something similar on an old movie and couldn’t figure out how to do it. She figured it out.”
“And now she needs a father for her child, and you’re just going to step right into that role?”
“He’s my son, Dad. Your grandson.” Now, he was getting annoyed. James wadded the napkin in his hand. He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t slam his hand against the table. He would be calm. Rational.
He would win this debate with his father.
“Says who?”
“Says his mother. The timing fits. His baby picture is almost a replica of mine—”
“You haven’t even met this kid yet?”
“She’s been in town less than a week.”
“But she’s had plenty of time to plan a grocery store heist and get you right back in her web.”
James shook his head and stood. He put his hands on the table and leaned forward. “It’s my child, Dad, and you can be a grandfather or not, but you won’t talk about Mara like this. She made a few mistakes as a kid. We all did—”
“She’s the only one who ran out of town ahead of the law.”
That stopped James short. He knew from the start that the rumor mill almost immediately attached Mara’s name to the school bus incident—it was part of the reason she left so early for college—but he hadn’t known his father planned to arrest her.
“She wasn’t responsible for that.”
“Of course she was. Letting the air out of those bus tires was exactly a Mara Tyler thing to do, and she used you to do it.” Jonathan folded his arms across his chest as if that statement was the end of it.
That stopped James for a moment. How much did his father know about that night? Although Jonathan was a straight-arrowed officer, to James’s knowledge, his father had also been a fair officer. If Jonathan knew he was in the bus garage that night, though... Could he have been part of the reason so much of the talk about that prank turned to Mara? Was that why, when she left town, the case went cold? So that, in accusing Mara Tyler, Jonathan could protect his own son?
“Dad—” he began, but Jonathan cut him off.
“That’s it, son. We’re going in circles. It’s time to end this.”
They were nowhere near the end, and it was time for his father to stop treating James as if he had no idea how to make a decision. He’d done everything his parents wanted as a kid. Played football, got the grades, won a scholarship, went into law enforcement. “You know?”
Jonathan turned his attention to the tablecloth, picking at something James couldn’t see on the fabric.
“I did it voluntarily.”
Jonathan shook his head. “You were a kid—”
“I was eighteen, a year older than her. If I was a kid, what was she?” James paced to the end of the table and back.
“Trouble.”
“She had nothing to do with the tires, Dad. That was all me.”
Jonathan slammed his fist against the table. “She had everything to do with it. Without her there would have been no water tower, no misconnected computers—”
“All she wanted to do was leave the lights on to run down the batteries so the buses wouldn’t start. No buses, no bus routes, no school. Instead of the underclass students finishing their last week of classes after graduation, they’d be out early, along with the actual graduating.” James still couldn’t put into words exactly why he’d taken things further.
Why it had seemed, standing in the dark parking lot with Mara, that if at that moment he didn’t do one thing that was absolutely against the rules, he would lose himself. He’d needed a single moment when he wasn’t the heir apparent to the Slippery Rock Sheriff’s Department, when he wasn’t on his way to college as the only one in their group who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and didn’t skip school. He’d gone along with the other pranks without truly taking part, and when Levi, Collin, Adam and Aiden skipped their graduation night plans, he’d felt as if he was losing something. He’d wanted, once before he turned himself into the law-abiding citizen who would become sheriff, to be like every other teenager in the world.
And so when Mara turned on the bus lights, he started letting the air out of the tires, not realizing the bus weight would ruin the tire rims. He’d deflated only three of those big tires when Mara stopped him and dragged him out of the parking lot. If she hadn’t, the school would have lost all fifteen of the buses instead of only two.
“Well, that isn’t what she did, is it?”
“Actually, the lights are exactly what she did. The tires were all on me.”
Jonathan clenched his jaw. “No.”
“Yes. I did it. I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not going to let you blame Mara for something she didn’t do. We both made mistakes when we were younger, but we’re adults now, and we have a baby, and we’re going to do whatever we have to do to make sure that child has a good life with two parents. If you’re on board with that, welcome to the party. If you aren’t, it’s really a shame.”
James walked out of the house feeling as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He loved his family, but what was going on between him and Mara was only between them.
* * *
A BELL TINKLED over the entrance of The Good Cuppa as Mara pushed open the door and stepped inside. At just after noon on Saturday morning, the coffee shop clientele was more a trickle than a bustle, but then, most people were playing on the lake by now or running whatever errands brought them into town. She’d been after good coffee. After searching Gran’s pantry shelves, she’d found a handful of items that she would like to have on hand. A bag of coffee beans and a grinder were two of those items because, after only a day at the orchard, she knew ground and canned coffee from the grocery store was not going to be enough. With the meat loaf and veggies prepped for dinner, she’d taken the quick trip into town.
She surveyed the old bookshelf filled with whole bags of different roasts, finally deciding on a Brazilian blend. For all of Collin’s interest in farm-to-table foods, he hadn’t yet caught on that coffee in a can on a grocery store shelf was mildly flavored hot water rather than real coffee.
At the counter, a petite teenager operated the cash register. She had dark hair and eyes, and her name tag read Copper.
“I’ll have an iced caramel coffee, extra ice. And this, too,” she said, putting the bag of coffee on the counter.
“Watch her,” said a man with a gravelly voice from behind her. “I hear she’s already been in trouble with the law.”
Mara whirled, ready to take on whoever was there, but stopped short. The man sitting at the little table near the fireplace had filled out from high school. His shoulders seemed broader and the voice was definitely deeper, but those hazel eyes could only belong to a Buchanan. And there was only one Buchanan man under the age of thirty in town.
“Adam,” she said, smiling. “I thought you were still in the hospital.”
“Yeah, well, I tortured the doctors and nurses enough that they kicked me out early.” He tapped his hands against the arms of the wheelchair. “I just didn’t get far before they threw me in one of these.”
The barista passed Mara her cup. She took it and the bag of coffee, and went to Adam’s table in the corner. She put her arms around his shoulders and hugged him tightly.
“It’s so good to see you.”
He didn’t hug her back, and that was unlike Adam. He’d always been the touchy-feely type. It threw her off, and Mara stepped back.
“Do you want to sit?” Mara shook her head. “I mean, you’re sitting, but do you want me to sit with you?”
Adam smiled, but the grin didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Sure, I can spare a few minutes.”
“I don’t want to keep you—”
“It was a joke,” he said and shrugged. “A bad one. I don’t have anywhere to be, and a little company would be better than sitting here and staring at the walls while I wait for Jenny to finish up at Shanna’s Dress Shop. She’s helping her mom pick out a dress for the second marriage of one of the bridge ladies.”
“Margery is still playing with the Tuesday night bridge ladies?”
“And they’ve expanded to Sunday afternoons, Saturday mornings and Thursday afternoons.” Adam rolled his eyes, and for the first time seemed like the man she remembered. “How long are you in town?”
“A few weeks, maybe. I’m working on the new security system at Mallard’s, and after that...” She shrugged. “We’ll see.”
They fell silent. Mara watched as the clock on the wall counted off the slowest minute of her life. What could she say to Adam? She hadn’t seen him since high school. She knew he was injured but didn’t realize he was in a wheelchair. Did that mean he was paralyzed? Sheriff Calhoun used a wheelchair because of broken bones, but Adam didn’t appear to have a cast on either leg. Should she ask him about the chair? Talk as if it was normal? She settled for taking another drink of the iced coffee.
“You can ask,” he said, and she thought she caught a bit of defiance in his voice.
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk about it.”
“It’s kind of the elephant in the room at this point—or it will be until I get out of the chair.”
“How long are you in the chair? I mean, is it permanent?”
“Depends on how long it takes to get the dog.”
Mara felt as if she were missing something. “What does a dog have to do with paralysis?”
“I’m not paralyzed. I have the chair because my hip and knee need surgery, but until they get my head figured out, I’m not a candidate.”
“What’s wrong with your head?”
“Traumatic brain injury. Bricks from the old Methodist church bell tower hit me during the tornado. I had three seizures in the hospital, so they tell me I’m now epileptic.” Adam circled his index fingers on the vinyl of his chair. “I’m on the wait list for a service dog. They supposedly detect abnormal brain activity like seizures so I can get to a safe place before I collapse. Once the dog gets here, and once the docs are confident in the medication regimen to control the seizures, I’ll have the surgeries on my leg and be out of the chair.”
“I didn’t know,” Mara said, and the words felt woefully inadequate.
“Could be worse. The bricks could have severed my spine instead of just putting me on the seizures list.”
She reached across the table, taking his hand in hers. “I’m so sorry.”
Adam nodded, and she thought it might have been the saddest nod she had ever seen. “Me, too.”
The bell over the door tinkled again, and Mara saw James enter. He wore cargo shorts, a T-shirt and old Nikes. The uniform she’d seen him in earlier in the week made his shoulders appear wider and his hips leaner, but the casual clothes brought out the country boy in him. She’d always found that country boy to be irresistible.
James pushed his aviator sunglasses on top of his head and looked around. He spotted her with Adam and frowned. Then he took a closer look, and Mara thought his face paled a bit. With his attention on their table, he crossed to the counter and placed his order—black coffee—and waited for the teen to pour it into a travel cup.
“Still you and James, huh?” Adam asked, dragging her attention off the cop at the counter and back to the man at her table.
“Still?” she asked, and hated the squeak in her voice.
“We might have been idiot teenage boys, but we weren’t blind idiot teenage boys. Other than Collin, I think we all knew you and James were hung up on each other.”
Mara blinked. “I wasn’t.” He’d been her friend back then. The attraction started later.
“You turned down every guy in school.”
“That doesn’t make me hung up on him,” she said, motioning toward James with her thumb.
“It does when you spent all those date nights with James watching old movies or swimming at the lake.”
Mara started to protest but then stopped. From the time the school accelerated her ahead a grade when she was fourteen, she had spent a lot of time with James and without the other guys. Collin hadn’t dated, but he’d spent most of his time working the orchard with Granddad. Adam and his brother, Aiden, had both had a string of girlfriends, as had Levi. It had seemed normal to spend time with James. But looking back on it now, after they’d spent three years having a long-distance, fling-style relationship, maybe that hadn’t been so normal.
“We were just friends.” Then. And now they weren’t friends, but they were parents. Parents who didn’t have a future together, and one of whom couldn’t stop thinking about the other’s hot mouth. Probably just residual attraction from not sleeping together for two years; they’d always done the sleeping-together thing well. She had no doubt James had been practicing his skills on someone since Nashville, but she hadn’t. Two years was a long time to go with no sex. She sat a bit straighter in her chair when James turned toward them.
Adam shrugged and, when James approached, made room for him at the small table.
“When did they release you?” James asked.
“Yesterday evening,” Adam said.
James sat between them, and the hair on her arms prickled. He smelled good, like soap and sunshine, and although he sat a few inches from her, she swore she could feel his heat. He sipped his coffee and looked out the window. Adam fiddled with his empty mug. Mara watched the two of them, who always had so much to say to one another when they’d all been kids. Strain etched a line between James’s eyebrows. Adam bit his lower lip.
“The Cardinals are playing like crap,” James said after a long moment.
“Royals, too,” Adam replied.
Neither mentioned the chair in which Adam sat. Mara knew she hadn’t handled the wheelchair thing well, but at least she had addressed it. Considering his father’s injuries, James should have been used to wheelchairs, albeit not seeing one of his best friends in one. It wasn’t as if mentioning the chair could cause James to need one, too.
“At least the weather is hot and miserable,” Mara said sarcastically, hoping to pull them into more normal conversation.
“Hottest summer on record, at least so far,” James agreed, still keeping his attention focused outside the coffee shop rather than at their table.
“Need rain or the farmers won’t have a good harvest,” Adam added. Then he turned his attention to Mara. “How are the new trees at the orchard holding up under the heat?”
Mara blinked. “Are you kidding me?”
“What?” they said in unison.
She focused her attention on Adam. “Not five minutes ago you told me it was the elephant in the room.”
“What’s the elephant in the room?” James asked, as if he had no idea what she was talking about. Mara didn’t buy that for a second, not when he was looking everywhere except at Adam.
Before she could answer, a woman Mara didn’t recognize walked into the coffee shop. She had long, curly brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and wore lime-green capris and a white-and-green polka-dot tank top. She spotted their table and made a beeline in their direction.
“Hey, James,” she said when she reached them. “Or is it Sheriff Calhoun already?”
“Acting, only. Until the election,” he said, “Hey, Jenny.”
She grasped the handles of Adam’s wheelchair. So this was Jenny. She was the perfect match for Adam, Mara thought, or at least the Adam she remembered. The boy she’d known was happy-go-lucky, and this woman’s open expression, her bouncy walk, and the way she spoke to James, was bubbly.
“I’m Mara,” she said, reaching across the table to shake Jenny’s hand. “Mara Tyler.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” she said with a smile that lit up her face. “I was a year behind you in school. Well, until you accelerated, and then it was two. We didn’t have any classes together, though.”
Mara tried to place Jenny in the halls of Slippery Rock High but couldn’t. “I don’t remember.”
“Why would you? You were busy with the Sailor Five,” she said, mentioning the nickname the local media used for James, Adam, Aiden, Collin and Levi. “The rest of us were just background noise.” But she didn’t sound angry or annoyed at that.
“It was hard to keep them in line,” Mara joked.
“I can imagine. This one,” she said, tapping Adam’s shoulder, “keeps me running 24/7. Even now.” She shot a look at the wheelchair, and a flicker of sadness showed on her face for a moment. “Speaking of, we’re supposed to be at your mother’s for lunch and still have to pick up the boys from swim practice. See you all later?” she asked, but she was already pulling the wheelchair away from the table.
“I can manage,” Adam said, and his voice wasn’t bubbly or even moderately friendly. It was straight-up annoyed.
“I was only trying to help,” Jenny said, knitting her eyebrows. Adam pushed the wheels and rocketed the chair forward, not waiting for her. Jenny watched him for a moment, then offered a half wave to Mara and James as she hurried after him. “We’ll see you later,” she said at the door. She held it open while Adam wheeled through it, and the two of them disappeared down the street.
“That was uncomfortable,” James said after a long minute.
“Ya think?” Mara asked. “What was with all the avoidance?”
“I wasn’t avoiding anything.”
“You barely said ten words to a guy who, until a few weeks ago, you had a standing weekly dart game with. A guy you grew up with. One of the Sailor Five.”
James sipped his coffee. “He barely said ten words to me.” His voice was all defensive and wounded pride.
Mara shook her head. “He was sitting in a wheelchair, not on top of a bomb.”
“I didn’t know he was out of the hospital or that he’d be here.”
“Because if you had, you wouldn’t have spoken to him like you might catch whatever it is that landed him in the chair? Newsflash, James. Wheelchairs aren’t contagious. Neither is the traumatic brain injury that put him, for now, in that chair.”
“He’s not paralyzed, though, right? I’ve asked Jenny fifty times, but she always skips over the question. His parents are holding things together at the cabinet shop but they’re not talking about it, either.”
“Traumatic brain injury, causing epilepsy. And a hip and knee that are going to need surgery.”
The relief that flooded James’s face annoyed Mara even more.
“For once the town grapevine didn’t get the story right,” he said.
She put her hand on his arm, and that was a mistake, because the little flame of attraction she’d been trying to ignore since he walked in the coffee shop flared into a full-blown wildfire. Mara moved her hand away. “There’s something going on there. Seizures and surgery aren’t paralysis, and that’s wonderful, but that man isn’t the Adam I remember.”
“Yeah. It’s not the Adam I played darts with a few weeks ago, either.” James sipped his coffee, still looking uncomfortable. “What are you doing in town?”
“Getting groceries for Gran and real coffee for me.” She gently shook the to-go cup in her hand.
“Do you want to walk for a bit?” He angled his head toward the barista, who was paying more attention to the nail file in her hands than their conversation. “Copper isn’t part of the gossip mill, but you never know who might walk in. We could talk. About Zeke.”
Mara nodded. Outside, she put the bag of coffee into the front seat of her SUV, then walked down the street with James. She could hear hammering and sawing from the crews working on the building that housed Buchanan Cabinetry a couple of buildings away. James turned them toward the marina, taking her hand as they crossed the street. Once they were back on the sidewalk, he released her. Mara wanted his hand back. She shook her head. It was silly, missing the feel of his hand when there were so many bigger issues between them.
“Why aren’t you on duty?”
“Pulled a double last night. I’m off until Monday morning, when my call sheet will hopefully not include another call to Wilson DeVries.” She shot him a questioning look. “You remember the old guy who attends all the football games?”
“He always bought wrapping paper from me.”
“You and every other kid who knocked on his door. One of his maples fell in the tornado. So far, he’s being, ah, persnickety about clean up.”
“Persnickety?” Mara giggled at his use of the word, which did seem to fit the older gentleman who hooted and hollered at football games, but who was very particular about the kind of wrapping paper he purchased.
“It’s an official cop word. Like ‘bamboozle’ or ‘heist.’”
“And ‘cockamamie’?” she asked.
“That one, too. Anyway, I’m off duty and I was going to head out to the orchard. So we can talk.”
“If you were on duty right now, would you be walking with me?”
“Depends. Where would we be walking from and why?” He said the words lightly, but still Mara wondered.
“Some people would say, no matter what was happening in town, walking with me would be part of your job.” James tilted his head as she spoke. “So you can ensure that I don’t make off with one of these boats, for instance.”
“You never stole a boat.”
“But I did steal milk and cookies.”
“I thought you said that was a test.”
“What I say and what people say about me are usually two very different things.” They stepped from the cobblestone sidewalk to the wood of the marina dock. Not that she wanted to talk about what people said about her. For the most part, she didn’t care. She’d realized long ago that certain people in town liked gossip. And if they had to embellish a bit to make it more salacious, so be it. For a while, she had done her damnedest to keep people talking about the present so they wouldn’t be tempted to speculate about the Tyler kids’ past.
As long as the people who cared about her knew the difference, she was okay. She shot a glance at James. Until a few days ago, she’d hoped he might be one of those people. Now she wasn’t as certain. And it was completely her fault.
“I’m sorry. For everything I’ve done where you’re concerned over these past two years. If I could do it all again...” Part of her wanted to say she would do it differently, but that wasn’t necessarily true. She had needed to confront all those demons surrounding her childhood. If she had told James about her pregnancy immediately, she probably would have kept shoving all that stuff into the deep recesses of her mind, insisting to herself that the past didn’t matter. “What I did was selfish, and it hurt you, and I’m sorry for that.”
James was quiet for a long moment. Together they turned down a long section of dock, this one leading farther out into the lake. Their footsteps were quiet along the wooden boards, the water lapping gently against the pilings, and a few boats skimmed across the water farther out. A light breeze blew across the water, making the heat bearable, and the sky was the clearest blue, reflecting in the still water farther out. She had missed the quiet beauty of Slippery Rock. The back of her hand brushed against his. She had missed him. So very much.
“You know, I’ve seen both oceans, the Rocky Mountains, all of the Great Lakes. Nothing is quite as beautiful to me as this man-made lake.”
“Because this is home,” he said, and it was as if his voice touched her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and a shiver ran down her spine. “I get it,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the lake. “I told my parents about Zeke at lunch today, and it was as if the past ten years hadn’t happened. I was eighteen again, telling them I was—I don’t know—failing chemistry or something.”
“You were never failing chemistry.”
James chuckled and bumped his shoulder against hers. “You know what I mean. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t want to be mad at you. Not now. We were friends for a long time before we were...anything else. We’re adults now, and we have a child, but we can be friends again.”
Mara swallowed. Friends. Not when the friendliest of touches between them made her senses go into overdrive. “What about—” She’d been on the verge of mentioning the kissing, but James spoke before she could say it.
“Zeke? I want to meet him. Get to know him.” They turned another corner and walked toward the shoreline. “You said you didn’t need money from me, but you know me. I need to help out that way, so we’ll figure out custody and holidays and child support. We can figure out the co-parenting thing as we go along.”
“Right, right.” Mara forced the words from her throat. “We’re friends. We’ll figure it out.” The words tasted bad in her mouth, and she sipped her iced coffee, hoping it would drown out the bitterness of the word friend. The drink, too, left a bitter taste in her mouth. She tossed the cup in a trash can bungee-tied to one of the dock pilings.
“I’d like to come by the orchard this afternoon, if that’s alright?”
Which meant dropping another bombshell on her family this afternoon. Well, Amanda might not be talking to her right now, but Collin and Gran had been accepting of the baby news. It stood to reason they would accept the fact that James was the baby daddy. This way they’d know she hadn’t procreated with a drugged-out rock star or something. She’d procreated with the most responsible man in all of Wall County. Possibly all of Missouri. A man who always took his responsibilities seriously.
“Sure,” she said. “Why don’t you come for supper, around five thirty?”
They’d reached the edge of the dock. James held her hand again as she crossed onto the cobblestone sidewalk. Mara ordered her hand not to shake at his touch and her insides to stop flopping around like the fish people caught on lazy Sunday afternoons.
James nodded and offered a wave as he turned toward his Jeep.
“Well, I guess that went well,” she said to no one. He hadn’t kissed her in anger or exasperation. He’d told her they could be friends. He wanted to take responsibility for his child.
So why did it feel as if she had lost something important between holding his hand as they crossed the street earlier and him walking away now that they were back on solid ground?