One

Geneva hated cats. She didn’t know why she had so many of them. Four had been bad enough, but now here she was sitting in the floor of her closet in the middle of the night, watching Evangeline squeeze out her third kitten. This would make seven cats altogether. Damn! She hadn’t even known the cat was pregnant.

This had to be Howard’s doing. All Geneva’s toms had been neutered, and she had always made sure none of the cats had ever gotten out, but knowing Howard, he had let them escape while she was away. That would be just like him, the passive-aggressive, undermining, conniving prick. He had hated her cats, even though they had never done anything to hurt him, ever—except for the one time Dr. Zhivago had pooped in his shoe. But that didn’t warrant letting out—or more likely, throwing out—Evangeline so she could get pregnant. No doubt the father was some ugly, scraggly tom, and Geneva would never be able to get rid of the kittens.

Kitten number four was making its appearance. It was ugly, all right. Men. They can ruin your life even after you’ve gotten rid of them.

Not that Geneva had actually “gotten rid” of Howard. As a matter of fact, it had sort of been the other way around, and his leaving had been one of the worst moments of her life. No, actually the worst moments came later. Right after he had committed the awful treachery (I think we ought to postpone the wedding, darling. Maybe call it off for awhile. You know, so we can be really sure… blah blah blah.), she had the fleeting pleasure of throwing things at him and watching them splinter around his cowardly head.

Fortunately she had had the presence of mind to throw the cheap wine glasses she had gotten free for subscribing to a romance book club and not the Waterford. And that had felt good. It also had felt good to abandon the rarefied façade she had so carefully cultivated over the past few years and unsheathe her native West Virginian tongue slashing Howard with a few modified nouns he had never heard before. She smiled at the memory. How he had cowered, throwing his arms up to protect his pretty face! Fueled by his mincing and ducking, she hadn’t stopped until she had thrown all seven glasses at him. The eighth, unfortunately, was not yet in her arsenal. It wouldn’t appear for a couple more weeks, when the next installment was due.

But the sweetness of that little episode had been short lived. After that, and for the longest time, she gulped misery with her coffee every morning and slept in the arms of misery every night. She was lost, devastated, and haunted with pain. Heartache became her constant companion.

She pondered the alliteration. Haunted by heartache. Devastated with despair. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she thought, tears trickling. No, that was overused. Waterfalls washing. Nah, the image wasn’t good. Tears tumbling. Hmm, yes, that was better. Tears tumbled down her wan, beatific face…. She nodded to herself. That image fit the situation nicely.

The pink nose of kitten number five emerged, pulling her thoughts back from the literary. Oh, God! There was something wrong with it. It was smaller than the others, and even after Evangeline had licked it thoroughly, it just laid there, barely moving. All the other kittens had already vigorously attached themselves to Evangeline’s underside, but this one remained limp and pitiful. Geneva felt her stomach heave. Oh, please don’t die, you poor little thing! She nudged the other kittens aside and tried to nuzzle the tiny creature against a choice-looking teat, but it would not suck. It shivered and gave a weak mew, and the sight made Geneva more miserable than ever. She wrung her hands, then cried, and finally threw herself on the floor and sobbed violently.

Why had Howard forsaken her? What was wrong with this kitten? It was dying, and it was all his fault! She had been the best thing that ever happened to that man! Her sobs subsided a bit as she remembered how glorious their past had been.

Four months ago her life had been perfect. She searched for a metaphor to express it: Love had alighted, folding its gossamer wings and nesting in her soul. After a lifetime of searching (and searched she had, diligently, industriously) she had finally found the perfect mate, practically made to order—the one she had constructed in her imagination years earlier. Howard Whittaker Graves III was handsome, educated, sophisticated, and wealthy. Well, she hated to admit that wealth was important, but all that stuff Howard had given her had been nice. And she really needed the new car he had promised. A BMW. Her old Mazda was getting cranky, and she didn’t know what she was going to do about getting a new one.

She watched Evangeline struggle and strain, and she watched the sick kitten shiver.

Oh, God, she prayed. Don’t let this kitten die! And help me get through this night. The prayer was sincere, one of a long string she had uttered since Howard had left her. Remembering the solace of her childhood conversations with God, she found it comforting to send her pain and her requests heavenward once again.

She had at one time been one for long and diligent daily prayer, but somewhere along the line she had abandoned this habit after she had realized that she was bright and beautiful and ambitious enough to get whatever she wanted without divine intervention. But now she was a broken vessel, and she needed all the help she could get.

Not long ago, she had prayed for Howard to be struck dead by some awful, agonizing malady (What Biblical character had died with his bowels gushing out?) but later, when she realized that she really just wanted him back, she prayed that he would come crawling, repentant, and begging for forgiveness. Neither prayer had been answered, but that didn’t stop her from taking her grievances before the Lord on a daily basis.

Kitten number six, large and greedy, had made its way into the world and managed to shove aside the runt. He latched onto the teat Geneva had tried to reserve for the little guy. She poked around to find another teat and, cradling the weak kitten, mashed his face up against it. He whimpered and coughed, then wobbled his head a little and laid it down. The other kittens pushed it aside, wiggling against Evangeline’s milk bar like the last call had been rung. Knowing that the poor thing would surely die if it didn’t get some nourishment soon, she threw on her clothes with panicky hands and rushed out to the all-night pharmacy for baby formula.

Aside from the pimply, slack-jawed cashier there were three people in the store, and Geneva reckoned there might have been enough brainpower among them to maybe pass a basic literacy class. She grabbed a canister of Babies Only Milk-Based Formula and raced to the cash register. Too late. The three intellectual giants had already beaten her there. Talking to the cashier was a ragged man with trembling hands and a week’s worth of growth on his face.

Behind him was an extraordinarily tacky looking blonde couple. Well, she thought he was blonde—his eyebrows were, anyway. His actual hair was purple and spiked into what he surely thought of as a magnificent mohawk. The girl had streaks of purple and red in her ratty do. Each of them clutched a box of condoms, and they were intensely arguing over the merits of the different brands. She wanted the pink ribbed ones, but he was adamant that they should get the ones designed for a more “natural” experience. Geneva wanted to rip out his purple troll hair spikes, and she hoped they would choose ones that would render them both sterile for life.

The sad-looking man in front of the line was having trouble coming up with enough money for the bottle of prescription pills lying on the counter.

“I’m a little short,” he said sadly, looking at his dirty cuticles.

There was silence. The girl in front of Geneva snorted and slouched, elaborately crossing her arms over her chest. The cashier looked at the man without interest.

After a long moment, Geneva groaned, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Then, when nobody responded, she spoke again. “How short are you?” she asked, too loudly. The girl with the pink condoms snickered. Geneva glared at her and asked again, but more kindly, “How short are you?” The girl snickered again, and threw over her shoulder, “Oh, I’d guess about five or six inches right now, from the looks of him.” The guy with her guffawed, and the girl looked pleased with herself.

Geneva elbowed her way to the front of the line, plunked down her formula and said, “Here, I’ll pay for it, and this, too,” and threw two twenties on the counter. The cashier gave her an idiotic stare, but rang up the sale while Geneva turned and smiled wickedly at the couple behind her. It was worth it to spend an extra $24.95 to break in front of them. Scooping up her change, she turned to go, then recoiled when the ragged man pulled at her sleeve.

“Thank you, Miss. God bless you,” he said softly, haltingly. He had tired, kind, brown eyes, with deep wrinkles radiating out like star bursts. When he smiled at her with genuine gratitude, Geneva suddenly felt her throat constrict and a vast chasm open up in her heart. The world was a cruel, cruel place. She managed a tight little smile and nod, then impulsively thrust the change she still held in her hand into his grimy one and rushed out the door before the tears began.

She was so distraught and in such a hurry that she tripped on the curb outside her apartment, ripping the bag and dropping the cardboard cylinder full of dehydrated formula on the sidewalk. As she fell, she felt the insubstantial container give way under her knee and then the soft, powdered grains impressing themselves into her kneecap.

There was a moment of pain followed by indecision. Should she go back for more? The kitten could die in the meantime, and besides, she didn’t want to run into the condom couple again. They may have figured out by now that she had broken in line in front of them. Swiftly, she searched her purse and found a small, plastic ziplock bag containing bobby pins and elastic bands and another that held the brooch she had planned to have repaired. These accessories she dumped into her purse, then she carefully scooped as much of the formula as she deemed still sterile into the bags. It was plenty for a three-ounce kitten.

By the time she made it home, the poor little fellow was off by himself in the corner, cold and shivering. With a breaking heart, Geneva mixed the formula from one of the bags, picked him up, and gently and painstakingly squeezed dropperful after dropperful into his minuscule mouth. All the while, she fumed at Howard. Here she was losing sleep over a cat that she didn’t want, and he was at home, sleeping peacefully without an inkling of the misery he had caused. And when the kitten died at sunrise, she sobbed passionately, stroking his tiny body and trying her best to comfort Evangeline. Evangeline was such a sweet, sensitive kitty. Her favorite, really, and Geneva knew the poor thing would grieve over this loss.

After a while, she realized that Evangeline was taking it pretty well, so she turned her consolations toward herself, telling herself that she hated cats anyway—but this one was exceptionally pretty—all white with black paws. He reminded her of a snowy dancer wearing black ballet shoes. And the loss of such beauty was horrible to her. It seemed that everything fine and beautiful and delicate was shattering all around her. It was not fair! Life was not fair! Only the ugly and painful seemed to survive unscathed, survive and grow and multiply, despite how carefully she crafted and nurtured the things she found beautiful. Before she knew it, she had cried herself to sleep.

She awoke to the Saturday sun streaming through cat hairs floating in the air. They refracted the light curiously, even beautifully. Her pillow was soggy from last night’s tears, and the first thing Geneva thought was that she was going to have to quit crying into it because she was sure all that salt was affecting the condition of her hair. Then she thought about Howard again, and the kitten, and began to cry anew. After awhile, she forgot why she was crying and thought only that it felt good to cry. But then she realized that it was beginning to feel less good than it had the night before. That confused her.

She rolled over and mused about how she had been betrayed, until her growling stomach drew her attention. There was, she realized, a small recompense for the broken heart in the fact that she had lost ten pounds within a month of Howard’s departure. Well, actually, a largish recompense in that, she decided. No great loss without some small gain, she thought, remembering one of her mother’s homespun expressions. No, in this case, a great loss and a great loss. Hey, that was pretty good. She could tell her mom that. She tossed cats and covers off her slender frame and smiled down at her concave stomach and her delicate, tiny wrists.

As she thought about her mother, a sudden wave of homesickness swelled and engulfed her heart. She wanted her loved ones around her right now to comfort her, and she wanted to be home among open spaces and green mountains and to feel clean wind on her face. She missed her mother’s arms and her father’s smile; indeed, she missed her whole family scattered over the mountains like stands of study hickory and fragrant spruce. At home in the dappled shade and clean sunshine, she might be able to renew herself, to gather strength from the mountains, to forget Howard, and to learn how to live all by herself, celibate, the surface of her life smooth and untroubled by the vagaries of men.

She made a sudden decision: she would go home! She would quit her job, give away her cats (well maybe not Evangeline, since she was a new mother), rent out her chic apartment, and spend the summer, perhaps the fall, among her high, clean mountains. She knew that such a respite would equip her to resume her life and her brilliant career when she returned.

As for Howard, ha! She would show him! He would no doubt realize how foolish he had been; consumed with guilt and regret for his loss, he would spend months searching for her. When he finally found her, he would throw himself at her feet and beg for forgiveness. Then she would straighten her spine, give him her strong, sure smile and tell him to take a flying leap off Buttermilk Knob.

She lay very still, considering the image, and decided that she liked that scenario much better than the one she had been mulling over since February, which placed Howard sobbing bitterly at her bedside as she lay pale and dying, her heart mortally wounded. Besides, she had relived the scene so often, embellishing it with each recounting, that she had run out of possible accoutrements and had worn it to a thin, no longer comforting, shred. She sat up with dignity. So long, little Eva. Hello Brunhilde!

Rolling to the edge of the bed, she dialed her parents’ number in Tucker, West Virginia, and waited with pounding heart, formulating the most effective salutation. Perhaps, Mom, I’ve had it in this awful city. I’m coming home! Then her mother would gasp, and say, Oh, honey! and make those nice little motherly, comforting noises that Geneva liked to hear whenever she was feeling small and wounded.

The phone rang until Geneva finally admitted that there would be no answer. And no answering machine, either. Dammit. She’d given her parents an answering machine last Christmas, but they never bothered to turn the thing on, claiming they could not figure out how to work it. But she knew they just didn’t like anything that intruded upon the serenity of their lives. Sometimes they even turned the ringer off for days at a time when they wanted to enjoy a particularly serene autumn or a spectacular thunderstorm season. Impatiently, she let it ring once more, then slammed the phone down, bitterly complaining to herself about the way events always seemed to conspire to thwart her most romantic impulses.

Still, she would not let the inspiration of the moment go wasted. Immediately, she phoned her sister who lived on a farm tucked into a mountain valley ten miles from the town where they had grown up. Her sister was more considerate, answering after two rings.

“Rachel, I’ve had it in this awful city. I’m coming home.”

Satisfied with her delivery, Geneva slipped into the kitchen and opened the cupboard door quietly. It would not do to let the cats hear her rustling around in the kitchen.

Characteristically, Rachel did not sense the drama of the moment; she did not gasp, but merely drawled into the receiver, “Well, I wondered when you’d come to your senses. What happened? Did you finally realize that you’ve made enough of a fool of yourself over that bookie?”

“He’s not a bookie. He’s a stock market analyst,” Geneva replied coldly. Rachel, like her whole family, had the tendency to belittle those professions that did not require the use of one’s hands, a tendency Geneva invariably thought terribly working class. “And yes, I have decided to come out of mourning. I’m coming home and I’m giving up men. Not necessarily in that order.”

That out, she tried to think of something noble and brave to say, but after an awkward moment, she merely burst into tears and sobbed, “Oh, Rachel, I’m sick of everything here. I don’t have any friends, and the men are all either mean or gay, and I miss everybody, and it’s already hot and sticky here, and I’m so blue I feel like throwing myself in front of a train.” She continued thus for several minutes telling various lies and slandering the city which, two years earlier, had glimmered like a beacon in the wilderness. At last, when her list of miseries and wrongs petered out, she ended her final sentence with a little sob and gasp. “Where’s Mom, anyway?”

“Geneva, you know she and Daddy went to Pennsylvania. Remember Mom has a quilt in a show there? And they’re going to visit the Jorgansonns for a while and help the Gunter’s son build his house. He’s getting married this fall. I doubt they’ll be home before July. But don’t worry, honey, come on down and stay with us. We’d love to have you, and it’s so pretty here now. The rhododendrons are really going to be fabulous this year.”

Geneva grunted in response. What had she done with the can opener? Evangeline had followed her into the kitchen and was crazily running around her ankles in anticipation of breakfast.

“You’ll feel a lot better once you get out of DC,” Rachel continued. “Besides, I could use you. I’m starting to get big now, and Wayne keeps threatening to hire someone to take care of me. Mom offered, of course, but she’s slowing down some. Gosh, don’t tell her I said that. And I don’t want her cutting her trip short to chase after all of us.”

While considering the invitation, Geneva picked up Evangeline to quiet her mewing and searched through the silverware drawer for the can opener. It would be nice to spend the summer at the farm in the high meadows where Rachel, her husband Wayne, and their two small daughters made their home. It was a farm in the picturesque rather than practical sense, although they did keep a small garden, a few sheep and chickens, and a couple of horses. Since Rachel liked to weave, the sheep were not entirely for effect. But they hired the shearing and lambing done every spring because Wayne was too busy as a general surgeon to do any real farming. Both Wayne and Rachel, however, always were on hand to help with delivering the newborn lambs, for this couple reveled in fecundity. There were always babies on the farm: chicks, ducklings, goslings, lambs, puppies. It was fitting that after six years of marriage, Rachel and Wayne already had two children and were expecting twins in four more months. It was clear they planned to fill up the big, rambling farmhouse they had just built.

No can opener. By this time the other cats had joined Evangeline and were meowing hysterically. “Get away,” she muttered, cupping her hand over the phone, “Evangeline, shut up. All of you, get way. Get away. I SAID, GET AWAY!”

“What?” came Rachel’s voice.

“Nothing. These cats are acting like starved alley cats and I can’t find the can opener.”

She finally found it and succeeded in getting the cans opened, the food in the bowls, and the bowls on the floor, suffering only one scratch on her forearm in the process.

Geneva turned her attention back to Rachel, magnanimously accepting the job of caring for her during the last part of her pregnancy. As she hung up the phone, she felt her sister’s calming influence steal over her like a rosy twilight. She breathed deeply, then, feeling profoundly selfless and resolute, she immediately set about preparing for her departure.

The first thing she did was to pull out her financial records to determine how long she could live without working, and decided that thanks to Howard’s genius concerning the intricacies of Wall Street, she could practically retire, provided she could rent her apartment to cover the mortgage and her car held out. Screw Howard. She would have bought herself a new car if he hadn’t made those noises about the BMW. She considered having the ancient Mazda serviced, but decided that it could wait until she returned home. Her experience had taught her that big city mechanics were all wolves, bent on fleecing unsuspecting women. A mechanic at home would cost about half, she reasoned in her economical way.

Mentally arranging her list of priorities, she began calling friends to see how many of them wanted a cat or two. Nobody wanted a cat, but several offered to take over her apartment, which Geneva found a little disquieting, despite the fact that she had hoped she would find a renter quickly. Of course, it pleased her that she was well known for her splendid decorating prowess. She had found this apartment a year earlier—a gutted horror just a block away from the most fashionable side of Georgetown—and had bought and refurbished it with the money and antiques Granny Morgan had left her. She had always loved showing it off, but now she was piqued that everyone seemed more enchanted by her dwelling than with her person. Although nearly all of them protested that they would hate to see her leave, they were just a shade too quick to offer to move in. She began to wonder if she could stipulate that the cats came with the apartment.

By Monday morning, she was chafing to get on the road, but she thought that the least she should do would be to give the store where she worked as a display designer a month’s notice since she knew it would be next to impossible to find someone qualified enough to do her job. When she placed her resignation on her boss’ desk with just a hint of a flourish, her thrilling heart expanded in anticipation of Sally’s anguish over her departure. But Sally’s polite speech about how much Geneva would be missed but that she would not dream of standing in her way, did not quite measure up to Geneva’s expectation. Then Sally further irritated her by ending the speech with a too casual, “By the way, are you going to sell your apartment?”

Geneva suffered greater disappointment when faced with the chore of interviewing for her replacement, she found a pile of applications on her desk for a dozen or so hopefuls who displayed an eagerness for her job that she personally found excessive and downright tacky. Then, as she discovered that some of the applicants were surprisingly talented, with excellent resumes, she secretly began to feel a little deflated, even harboring the slightest suspicion that she might have been lucky to have landed the job in the first place. The thoughts nibbled like little minnows. Would it be wise to leave after all?

She chased them away with a restless gesture. Yes. She needed this vacation. She would not abandon her resolve because of a few tremors of unfounded doubt.

That evening, she mentally checked off her list the considerable number of people she had called about relocating her cats. Joyce, a friend of her friend Carlos, who had once attended a party at Geneva’s place, would surely take one. Carlos had informed her that Joyce usually kept a menagerie. Now Geneva remembered that Joyce had made a point to compliment her on her cats’ exceptional beauty (they had all been extraordinarily well behaved that evening), so Geneva tracked down the number and prayed as she waited for Joyce to answer. Fleetingly, she hoped that all of Joyce’s cats had died during the last few weeks.

“Joyce! This is Geneva… Geneva LeNoir.” She spelled and pronounced her name in the proper French way, Le-noir, unlike everyone else in her family who always had made it one word and said “len-or.” Leave it to a bunch of hillbillies to mutilate a perfectly good French name. “Carlos’ friend… You came to a party at my place last fall? Geneva, on Taylor Street…”

There was a long pause, and then, “Oh, Yes!”

Relief washed over her and she rushed on. “Well! However have you been? Isn’t it awful the way we haven’t gotten together recently?” Well, they never actually had, but they’d said they meant to.

Joyce was equally appalled that they had let their friendship lapse for so long and (after Geneva prompted her) asked about Howard, which led to a lengthy discussion about the flawed nature of men in general and wound up some forty five minutes later with Geneva announcing her departure and asking Joyce to take a cat or two. Or several.

Joyce thought briefly, then replied, “Er… Jenny—”

“Geneva,” corrected Geneva.

“Geneva, you know I’d love to, but I just can’t take another animal. The ones I have are eating me out of house and home. I sure hate it that you’re leaving, though.” She paused one infinitesimal fraction of a second. “By the way, I might be willing to take over your apartment while you’re gone.”

For the rest of the month, Geneva packed and interviewed applicants. In her spare time she read feminist literature and shopped for new clothes—all black. She rented her apartment to a stranger at nearly twice the monthly mortgage rate, made arrangements to store her furniture, and placed ads for free cats. She called friends of friends who might be interested in having a nice cat. There were no takers.

She thought about leaving a basketful of kittens on Howard’s doorstep but reconsidered when she remembered he had thrown his shoe at Petrarch after he discovered the cat poop in it. She knew that Dr. Zhivago had been the culprit, for he had always shown a distinct dislike for Howard, and she was outraged that Howard could be so stupid and callous as to pick on poor, gentle Petrarch who was nothing but a gentleman all the time. Howard had known he was her favorite when he threw that shoe. That was an insult to her directly! No, Howard would probably drown them or something. So she sighed and resignedly named them. The female names she lingered over lovingly, and after days of pondering, finally settled on Simone (after deBouvier) and Scarlet (after O’Hara). The males’ names sprang, like Venus, full blown from her lips: Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe.

The next day she loaded her car and said farewell to the city as she tore up the ticket she had gotten for parking beside a fire hydrant while she ran in for one last check. “Who needs it?” she shouted defiantly, then she cranked up the car, headed for the interstate, and floored it, mindful of the fact that she was running away, sans fast-track career opportunity, sans chic apartment, sans fair-weather friends and lovers, but with nine cats. Her mind seethed with the turmoil of a woman scorned and, in general, dumped on.

But as she cleared the perimeter of the city noise and exhaust fumes, heading into the clear blue and silver June morning, her heart gave a little leap. She felt freer and happier than she had since the day Howard had finally overcome his reluctance and had asked her to marry him. And suddenly she found herself singing about freedom and pressing her small, delicate foot mercilessly down on the accelerator, saying goodbye to her sophisticated life in the city without a regret. She suddenly liked her cats again, laughing out loud when Petrarch perched on the back of her seat, draped his forelegs over her shoulder, and purred louder than the little Mazda’s engine.

As she caught sight of the first line of hazy blue mountains, Geneva repeated over and over again, “Home at last! Why did I ever leave?” And when she began the long ascent into the high country and felt the temperature drop, she breathed the air in deep gulps, as one thirsty from long labor in the fields drinks from a sweet well.

She arrived at the rich meadowland where Rachel and her family lived just as the sun was beginning its initial descent and spreading gentle fire over the warm, green land. It all looked just as she remembered: the crystalline light swirling under the big, sapphire sky; sheep grazing in the field; the horses in the pasture who were stunning examples of bad offspring of champion bloodlines. Because they were slow out of the gate and adamantly refused to jump anything higher than a gopher hill, Wayne had gotten them for a relative bargain at auction. A horse breeder would have scorned them as lazy and virtually worthless, but they were beautiful, perfect for cantering through the rolling fields Rachel had sown with wildflowers, and serving the family as beloved, pampered pets.

Geneva saw her sister as soon as she turned into the drive. Beautifully pregnant and carrying a basket of strawberries and roses from the garden, Rachel was shading her eyes and laughing at her children as they romped across the wide expanse of lawn with Sammy, their gleaming Irish setter. With their red and gold hair, the four of them looked like jewels in the gilded air. Geneva roared into the drive and leaned on the horn, scattering chickens that flurried and fussed. She bounded out of the car to catch her sister in a tremendous hug, marveling at how perfect she looked with her hair and skin glowing in the rich sun.

“Rachel, Rachel! You look just like a Renoir! No, better than that. A Titian! How wonderful to be here! Home at last! How I have missed you all! I feel as if I have come from the wars! Oh, Phoebe! Hannah! How you have grown!” She lifted each of her small nieces high into the air and squeezed them until they shrieked and choked her with their fierce little hugs.

Rachel, a serene madonna, glowed at her sister. “Geneva, darlin’. So good to have you here. You poor thing,” she added suddenly, holding her at arm’s length and frowning at her. “You look so sallow and sickly. Never mind. We’ll fatten you up and get some blood back in you. I bet you haven’t had anything decent to eat for weeks.”

This was true. Mostly diet colas and granola bars, but Geneva most certainly did not enjoy the critical observation concerning the new body for which she had suffered so much.

“Well, come on in,” Rachel continued. “You must be tired after that drive. Mama and Daddy won’t be home for a while yet, but they’re really glad about your coming home. Mam-ma can’t wait to see you, too.”

The Mam-ma to which Rachel referred was their one surviving grandmother, Hannah Morgan Turner, the only child of Granny Morgan, whose genetic and material legacy had insured Geneva’s perfect aesthetic sense and her well-furnished apartment. Now ninety years old, Mam-ma Turner, like her mother before her, had long enjoyed health, energy, and a handsome face.

Mam-ma Turner had borne nine children, all dead now save one, Gaynell, the mother of Rachel and Geneva. The others had died early, before they had produced heirs, lost to gaping black mines, to unfruitful childbed, to war, to the ravages of ignorance and disease, and one to the treachery of capricious weather high in the shadowed hills. Only Gaynell had survived, and for many years it appeared that she would be the last of Granny Morgan’s bloodline.

She, too, had been—indeed still was—considered a legendary beauty, but acquainted with sorrow and death as she was, she virtually ignored that gift to live her days along the practical lines of survival and the driving need to procreate. Her beauty had helped her to marry young and happily, and although the twenty two years with her first husband, Gerald, had been pleasant ones, she had felt eternally impoverished with the absence of sons and daughters. “What good is a pert little nose and all this yeller hair if I don’t have me any younguns to pass ‘em along to?” she had often repeated as she wandered through her empty house.

Then her husband, a union organizer among the miners, was killed during a riot over the issue of child labor practices, and two years later she remarried, not anticipating the ironic turn of events precipitated by Gerald’s death. She told herself that she might as well spin out her last years in the company of a good man and not mourn what might have been, but shortly after the new union with Ray Lenoir, Gaynell had found herself suddenly and inexplicably (she thought) pregnant. At the age of forty-five she was, after all, able to pass along the pert nose and yellow hair to her first daughter, Rachel. Geneva followed three years later, just as pert and just as golden, and proclaiming her fertility at her advanced age a miracle, Gaynell threw herself into motherhood with the same surprised delight that Abraham’s Sarah surely had with the product of her late-blooming womb.

And so, Rachel and Geneva had grown up under the wrinkled caresses of old people of the Morgan line who doted on them, who called them “little miracles,” “blessings,” “the joy of their lives.” It was no wonder that they passed through their rainbowed youths feeling they were destined to grace the world in a way that it had never seen before. They were treasures beyond price, more special than their adult cousins and their children on their father’s side. Those children had become so numerous that the Lenoir name was as familiar as redbud over the West Virginia valleys and hills.

Not only were Rachel and Geneva loved, they were also well taught—bone bred with an abiding respect for the venerable mountains and the ways of “old timers” who gave them a love for tradition and unbroken custom. Like leggy tulips standing by a support, Rachel and Geneva never stood completely alone as long as they remained near home. Thus, they unquestioningly had given themselves to the music of the green and blue mountains around them. But in her unsettled teens, Geneva listened to another distant song, for in her restless heart, she knew she would break away from the cloying sweetness of too much family love. Sensing something shimmering over the horizon, she left to find it, and when she did, she loved it, too. It was glamour, it was independence and self-expression, it was sophisticated, articulate friends who taught her how to pretend to be sleek and polished, and it made her happy.

Yet, despite her senses’ delight with her new life, Geneva’s soul soon became parched and uneasy in the blinking lights. Too often she felt the clash between cultures when she recognized that her new life existed at a solitary extreme from her upbringing, and her heart was too often fragmented with the business of trying to reconcile her past with her future. Always attuned to the rhythm of the Appalachian tongue, the safety of old custom, the comfort of rugged politeness, she became acutely aware that those ways were different, substandard, and laughable according to the values of her new world.

She did her best to conform, to strip away the wilderness that marked her upbringing, but each time she tried, she hurt as if she were stripping away her own skin—the flesh, and the sinews holding her bones together. So instead of changing on the inside, she manufactured a gleaming façade, which she layered over the surface of her vulnerable core. She changed her speech and shifted such nonessentials as her politics to mirror those of her contemporaries. The sophisticated artists, merchants, and political hangers-on in Washington, DC found her perfectly correct.

But whenever she came back to the mountains, the comfortable, downy rags of her past rushed to clothe and bind her, and she realized anew that she was irrevocably connected to the aged roots lying beneath her feet. The tears stung her eyes when she realized how long it had been since she had seen Mam-ma Turner.

“Oh, I see you brought the cats,” Rachel was saying. “Good grief. How many are there? Oh, and kittens!” She reached into the car to catch up each of the kittens, now cute and rambunctious as only kittens can be. Geneva watched her fondle them, not trying to hide her pride in them. “Well,” Rachel sighed as she set the last one down, “I guess the barn will hold them all.” She laughed, “I just hope we can keep them in mice and cat food.”

Alarm flashed in Geneva at the idea of her cats sleeping in the barn. They had been used to sleeping on pillows all of their lives. Not that Geneva had encouraged them—they always just moved into the most comfortable places without feeling the need for an invitation, but Geneva worried that since she had gotten used to hearing them purr (and nine of them going at once could take some getting used to) the silence might be maddening. Then she remembered that Wayne was allergic to cats, so she smiled and said brightly,

“Oh, great. I couldn’t stand all these cats around me in my apartment. I tried to get rid of them before I came home.”

Rachel insisted that Geneva have something to eat, then she put the children down for a nap, and the two sisters wandered through the garden bedecked with flowers and small, yellow squash, then around the rambling farmhouse. At last they ambled onto the porch, settling into the swing after Rachel had brought out a nearly-empty bottle of wine.

“I’ll join you in a glass of this if you promise not to tell Wayne. He thinks I shouldn’t drink at all, but right now I think I need it—or rather these two do,” she said, patting her rounding belly. “Every once in a while, they get into a soccer game with my spleen as the ball. Maybe this will calm them down. Put the little beggars to sleep.” She poured the wine.

Geneva giggled as she picked up her glass. “These look just like the glasses I threw at Howard the night he left.”

“Did you hit him?” Rachel asked mildly.

“Nah. Just scared the hell out of him. You should have seen him ducking! His eyes got as big as mill wheels, and he kept hollering, ‘Geneva! Control yourself!’ And I said, ‘I am controlled! If I really wanted to hit you, your nose would be paté!’”

“Guess he didn’t know you had the best fastball in the entire eighth grade.”

“If he had, he’d have gotten out a lot faster.”

They settled into the porch swing, laughing, sipping the honeyed warmth and admiring the angle of the sun, the abundant wildflowers, and the thin, sweet mountain air. They talked together as only sisters can, of common memories, and with the acceptance born of years of shared confessions. Geneva’s brooding dissipated into the flawless, living sky, and she began to forget about the last two years in DC, to nestle down into the old sense of family and place. For long moments she even forgot that she had been jilted, and when the talk turned to Howard, she found only a hollow ache where the shattering pain had once been.

“I never did know what you saw in him, anyway,” complained Rachel after listening to Geneva’s grievances concerning her ex-fiancée. “I couldn’t stand him from the beginning.”

“Oh, Rachel,” sighed her sister. “Who knows why anybody loves anybody? But I do—did—love him. He really was sweet—and romantic. He’d read poetry out loud to me, and once we read all of Romeo and Juliet together. He treated me like a goddess or something.”

“Yeah, ‘something’ is right. Old worship ‘em and leave ‘em Howard. I liked that guy—Pete—the guy you dated your senior year a lot better. Wasn’t he going to be a dentist?”

Geneva groaned. “Not my type. Do you know what he gave me for my birthday? A case of Colgate and a lifetime supply of dental floss that he got free from a vendor at a dental convention. Howard sent two dozen roses, one for every year for my last birthday.”

“Well, you still have something worthwhile to remember Pete by.”

“Six miles of waxed string.”

“What about the cute guy from Norway? With the sailboat? You seemed pretty taken with him for a while,” said Rachel. “And he seemed to like you, too.”

“Oh, he was all right,” sighed Geneva. “But he wore these really stupid clothes—you know, white pants and black socks with sandals. Once we went to a nice restaurant, and he wore a tie with a knit shirt. I was embarrassed to be seen with him. And he was too short.”

“Well, Howard was no giant,” reminded Rachel.

“Yeah.” Geneva thought about his. If she wore heels, they stood at exactly the same height, so she generally had stuck to flats around him. This had always irritated her—her legs never looked quite right in flats. “But he was special to me,” said Geneva, her eyes filling with tears. Yet, even as she let the ache take hold of her, spinning her around and making her head swim, she looked slyly at Rachel and asked, “How come you didn’t like him?”

Despite Geneva’s apparent fussiness about the men she chose to let into her life, she was really only an apprentice in her ability to detect flaws in a body. Rachel had always been the master, and although Geneva had never before fully appreciated her skill since it had often been turned upon her own person, she now was glad to see how Rachel could ply her tongue to avenge her baby sister. In a few moments, she had reduced Howard to the butt of a number of vulgar and hilarious jokes.

“His lisp drove me nuts!” Rachel said.

“No! He doesn’t have a lisp!”

“Oh, yes he does. Last time we were there, he kept telling me how ‘thweet’ he thought you were. ‘Oh, you are tho thweet! Tho thpethal!’ Lord, I was glad your name wasn’t Susan. Can you imagine him calling you his ‘thweet Thuthan? Come on, Thweet, Thpecial Thuthan! Thtep down here below me on the thtair tho I won’t look tho thort!’”

“You’re kidding. I never noticed it.”

“Your brain was on hold. Fried, no doubt, from the toxic waste they call air there in the city. And didn’t you ever notice his fat rear end?”

“Well, yes, I did notice that it was a little, er—plump,” admitted Geneva. She had meant to encourage him to take up jogging or something since her master plan had always included a man with an athletic body. “I guess that’s from all that sitting around doing his Wall Street thing.”

“That’s Wall Thtreet, thweetie,” said Rachel, languidly reclining against the arm of the swing.” Thoth big invethtorth do have a tendenthy to get big atheth, don’t they? And his nose holes were big, too!”

“Nose holes!” You mean nostrils?”

“Nothtrilth, noth holth, who cares? I felt like I was looking up a horse’s nose.”

Catching Rachel’s malice, Geneva corrected, “Horth’th noth.”

“Horth’th ath,” countered Rachel.

“Biiiig horth’th ath,” said Geneva, imitating Sylvester the Cat and spraying Rachel with saliva.

“Thupendouth horth’th ath,” slobbered Rachel. “Jutht a minute. I’m going to get uth thome more wine.”

Rachel went into the house and returned with a new bottle of cold wine and six more wineglasses. “I hope you’re in the mood to do some sweeping,” she announced, “because I am going to make a toast.” She splashed a small amount in each of the eight glasses, and very solemnly, she stood and held up the first one.

“Here’s to Howard’s lithp.” She drained the glass and threw it against the side of the house, where it splintered. Then she ceremoniously handed Geneva one of the remaining glasses. She rose and lifted it. “Here’s to Howard’s fat ath,” she intoned, then drank and heaved the glass with her whole, angry self. It crashed resoundingly.

Rachel picked up two more. “Here’s to Howard’s noth holth. Both of them.” Not bothering to drink, she turned and tossed a glass over each shoulder, splashing wine against the wall and littered floor.

“Here’s to Howard’s lack of integrity.” Crash.

“Here’s to Howard’s inability to recognize a good thing when he sees it.” Crash.

“Here’s to Howard getting my cat pregnant.” Crash.

“What?”

“Never mind. You’re up.”

Rachel cleared her throat, and lifting the final glass, declaimed with dignified authority, “Here’s to the total, utter, unredeemable collapse of the stock market!” She drank and drop kicked the glass into the side of the house. They both fell into the swing, hooting and screaming until Rachel grabbed her stomach and begged to stop.

Cleaning the mess took considerably longer than it had taken to create it, but Geneva derived sublime satisfaction as she swept and dumped glass shards. She smiled broadly as she searched for missed splinters. She’d be damned before she let Howard cause her nieces to suffer cut feet.

The following morning, Geneva and Rachel took the children out to gather the eggs and feed the livestock. They watched the horses canter into the pasture, their chestnut flanks and high-bred legs flashing in the sun. Geneva longed to be astride one of them and asked Rachel about riding.

“I can’t ride,” said Rachel, “since I’ve gotten so pregnant. For the past few months, our new neighbor, a veterinarian, has been coming over to ride with Wayne a couple of times a week. But I haven’t seen him for a while. Maybe he’s been too busy. Why don’t you and Wayne go out this evening?”

So Geneva began riding every day. With the daily chores, which she found to be considerable, and the exhilarating rides and the summer splendor, she forgot about her wan, pale beauty and began looking vibrant and healthy, though she halfheartedly bemoaned the two extra pounds that had come from nowhere. She hadn’t been aware that fresh vegetables could be so fattening. But halfway into the second week, when Rachel and Geneva went to visit Mam-ma Turner, Geneva was pleased when her grandmother, after the appropriate exclamations and hugs, commented on how thin she looked. She did not mention that Geneva was pale, however, so Geneva decided to give up on wan and try for a more wholesome effect.

She put aside the black outfits she had bought in her pique and delved into Rachel’s closet for the sunny yellows and poppy reds. Looking in the mirror, she decided that she really did look better than she had three weeks ago, and she hummed to herself as she thought that if Howard could see her now, he would surely fall on his knees and sob into her skirt. He would suffer for her yet, she determined.

Yes. She felt her strength returning, returning as surely as the spring thaw fills the banks of the brook.

Two

Geneva settled into Rachel’s family as gently and easily as a leaf settling onto a peaceful stream. Once she became acclimated to the business of caring for Rachel’s family, she quickly melded into its harmony and rhythms, although she was surprised at the amount and the kind of work Rachel did. Together, the two women stripped the garden of ripened vegetables and spent day after day canning and freezing. Wayne, an earnest, cheerful bear of a man took pains to make Geneva feel welcomed and appreciated, and the girls let their Aunt Geneva know how much they loved having her with them. Every day Rachel’s serenity and her joy over the upcoming birth of her babies reminded Geneva of the importance of fundamental life. Geneva was content, but sometimes she found herself thinking about the night Howard proposed to her, and then she would sit by the window, gaze out at the hazy mountains, and sigh.

Three weeks into her visit, just when Geneva was beginning to feel that life had become one long lullaby, Dr. Zhivago came to her looking droopy and coughing badly. As she picked him up, wondering if she should find a veterinarian for him, Esmeralda limped around the corner of the barn on three paws. Blood oozed from her torn left ear. Horrified, Geneva whirled and ran into the house.

“I need a vet,” she said breathlessly to Rachel. “Dr. Zhivago sounds like he has pneumonia, and something has attacked Esmeralda and has torn her all to pieces. I knew they shouldn’t have slept in that barn, and now I don’t even know where the others are. I just hope something hasn’t carried them off. Poor babies.”

Rachel glanced out at Esmeralda and smiled, remembering how frequently Geneva forgot that she hated her cats. “Let’s see,” she said unhurriedly. “Today is Friday. John should be in. He’s just next door—that is, on the other side of the pasture. He keeps a practice in Tucker, but on Fridays he stays home and opens a clinic at his house. He’s a wonderful vet, and I daresay he’ll fix them up just fine. You may want to take the kittens, too, for a once-over. Get them wormed and vaccinated.” She paused a moment, then added mysteriously, “I think it’s time you met him anyway. He’s very eligible, and I think you’ll find him interesting.”

Geneva decidedly was not in the mood to meet any eligible men, interesting or not. All she wanted was to get her poor cats attended to. Certainly she was not in the mood to listen to any treatise on the virtues of the bachelors in the neighborhood. Hillbilly bachelors especially did not interest her. She gave Rachel a withering look, but she merely beamed her big-sister smile again and looking somehow deceitfully benign, calmly explained that while the clinic was within walking distance, it would be easier to carry two critically ill cats and five frisky ones in the car.

It took half an hour of everyone’s time to round up the kittens, but after several escape attempts, all the cats were bundled into the Mazda. At last, Geneva roared off, shouting directions to Rachel to find the other cats to make sure they were all right.

The drive lasted perhaps two minutes, but during that time, Geneva managed to invoke a surprising number of possible scenarios that placed her cats in grave danger. Her heart’s penchant for drama encouraged her to imagine tragedy, but in her practical mind, she knew they were not really as bad off as she wished they might be. Not that she really wanted them to be sick, but the novelty of returning home was beginning to wear off, and she found herself wanting something… well… kind of exciting to happen. Drifting around the farm with Rachel and the sweet children was certainly charming, and riding the Morgans each evening held its own exhilaration but that was always short-lived. Besides, her energies and artistic temperament demanded more than cooking and canning and waiting for Rachel’s babies to arrive. She needed to throw herself into something that would require all of her passionate soul and concentrated energy. So she tried very hard to imagine how grief-stricken she would be if one, or both, of her two beautiful cats died, and then she remembered that two others could be missing as well. Perhaps even now their poor carcasses had already been gnawed to bits by mountain lions. A little shiver danced up her spine as she wondered how sympathetic this “wonderful, interesting vet” would be.

The sign on the entry drive said, “John Smith, DVM.”

Whoa, thought Geneva. Prosaic name. He’ll have to be exceptional to overcome that!

She saw him as soon as she pulled into the drive so had the advantage of a good scrutiny well before she got out of the car. He was certainly good looking—tall, clean-limbed, and well muscled, with (unlike Howard) a cute rear end. She had noticed this part of his anatomy first, not because she necessarily looked, of course, but because he happened to be bending over petting some sort of an animal when she first turned into his driveway. The second thing she noticed about him (aside from the broad shoulders, the perfect chin, and the curly, honey-colored hair) was that he was wearing a cast on his right leg from foot to thigh. By the time she stopped her car, she found him interesting enough after all, so that she momentarily forgot her cats, which were at this moment contentedly licking each other’s faces.

“Hello,” he said, turning and standing to his full height.

Gosh, he looks kind of like the guy in the paper towel commercial, but with a friendlier mouth, Geneva thought. His eyes, Geneva noticed, were beautiful—green, as alive as fire. She stared at him for a long moment before she realized that he was waiting for her to speak. Flustered, she turned to haul out her cats.

“What’s the matter with them?” he began, then noticed Esmeralda’s ear. “Oh, I see, a torn ear. Poor girl, we’ll get you fixed up in just a minute. Let’s go into the surgery and have a look at you.” He tucked Esmeralda under his arm and strolled to the door of the house, scratching her under her chin. Geneva caught Dr. Zhivago up into her arms as the good doctor called over his (decidedly broad, Geneva thought) shoulder for her to follow.

As the veterinarian anesthetized Esmeralda’s ear and stitched her up, Geneva watched the process with interest, for the muscles in Dr. Smith’s arms had the most charming habit of rippling as he moved his hands. Howard had not had such arms. His had been thin and sinewy, capable in their way, but not flagrantly masculine as these arms were. Geneva lost herself in the contemplation of what those arms might be capable of. Inwardly, she giggled as she found she had constructed an entire trashy romance novel revolving around herself and this gorgeous body who was stitching up her cat. After a while, she began to feel a little guilty for taking such intimate liberties with a total stranger, but the guilt dissipated shortly. He was just a good-looking, good-old boy. Nobody to take seriously, and it certainly did him no harm to appreciate his beautiful physique. She smiled and dropped her eyes, feeling superior and deliciously in control.

He was speaking to her. Geneva dimly perceived that he had said something, “What is her name?”

Oh, he must be referring to the cat in his hands. “Esmeralda,” she replied after an extended moment. She really didn’t expect him to catch the connection between the cat and her namesake, but he gently stroked the cat’s head and said, “Well, Esmeralda, I have a Quasimodo around here someplace. He’s a badger, but now that you’ve got that disfigured ear, maybe you won’t be so choosy.” He dropped his voice to a loving whisper,” and you’ll still be a good mom, won’t you?”

Geneva was pleasantly surprised. She hadn’t met many people with her good taste in literature, fewer still who could recognize the literary implications of her cats’ names, and she certainly had not expected any good-old boys from the hills of West Virginia to catch on. She gave the man the benefit of her most delighted smile, but when he returned it, she found herself suddenly and inexplicably flustered. To cover her embarrassment, she asked, “What happened to your leg?’

Looking soberly at the cast, he replied, “Well, I was on an errand of mercy, chasing a runaway horse with a damsel in distress on his back. I got hold of the bridle just as we all jumped a fence and got knocked off and sort of stepped on.”

Geneva suddenly came tumbling from her own runaway high horse. Caught completely by surprise that this fellow had just described something similar to what she had just been thinking, she gasped, “Really? How awful!” But really, she meant, How wonderful! The thought of a modern paladin, risking life and limb, literally, for a woman on a runaway horse thrilled her to the ends of all her nerves. She had never met anyone in real life who had done such a thing, but ever since she had read Thundering Love last year, she had fantasized about being on a huge black stallion, wildly out of control, nearly fainting from the rush of wind, her hair streaming behind her like the subject of a pre-Raphaelite painting. She would be wearing a floating, white gown. No—something in virginal blue, in layers of silk chiffon cut on the bias, with a tight bodice that would accentuate her heaving breasts. And then from nowhere would come the thunder of galloping hooves, and a tall, broad-chested stranger would encircle her perfect waist with his muscular arm and pluck her lightly from the dangerous steed… She looked at John Smith more carefully. He certainly was shaping up to be far more interesting than she had expected.

“Well, now,” he said briskly, “Esmeralda is all fixed up, practically as good as new. I’m afraid she’ll have a bit of a nick in that ear from now on, but that will just be a part of her charm. And what’s up with this old boy?” He plucked Dr. Zhivago from Geneva’s arms and scratched him under his chin. Dr. Zhivago purred so loudly that Geneva laughed.

“This is Dr. Zhivago,” she said proudly, knowing how much this name would be appreciated by the literary veterinarian. “He has a cough, so I thought I’d bring him, too.”

The vet’s response surprised her. “Well, old chum. You can’t help your name, though I daresay you’re not much better than the original. Let’s listen to your chest here.”

Geneva was stung. “What’s wrong with his name? I like it.”

“Hmm. Actually, now that I think of it, it is a very good name, very fitting for a tom cat.”

“What do you mean?” Geneva bristled. Was he making fun of her hero, the man who epitomized the tragedy of unrequited love? She looked at Dr. Smith warily, through narrowed eyes. He could be one of those Rambo types who scoffed at tenderness in a man. If so, she’d have nothing to do with him.

He smiled again. “Dr. Zhivago was an old tom cat himself. Left a perfectly lovely wife and pretty babies and lit out after another woman. Some people think the story is romantic, but I think it’s a bunch of claptrap.”

“Oh,” said Geneva, chastened. She hadn’t exactly seen it in that light before now, but she thought rakishly that he sure had a lot of concern over names. Must be because his own was so prosaic.

“I suppose,” she said with exaggerated innocence, “that your name means something special?”

“Oh, yes. John Smith,” he said proudly and somberly. “Smith is a venerable old name, a proud family, a noble profession. We are the sons of Vulcan, the fearless handlers of the most powerful of elements: fire and steel.”

“Right,” said Geneva after a pause, wondering if the man were serious. “And what about John?”

“John, beloved of Christ. Saint, apostle, visionary. The steadfast one, but with the greatest gifts.” He sighed and shook his head. “I have been burdened with a weighty name.”

After another long pause in which Geneva decided it would not be appropriate to giggle, she gave him a sidewise glance and said with a self conscious little smile, “You sure know a lot about names. Mine’s a little different. Geneva. Geneva LeNoir,” she said, pronouncing it carefully. Of course, she was proud of her (properly pronounced) name. Not as proud as John Smith seemed to be of his, but she did like the sound of it. To her, it sounded exotic and mysterious, made more so by the fact that she had never set foot in the city for which she was named.

“Ah, Geneva.” He locked his beautiful eyes upon hers and seemed to look into their depths with what appeared to Geneva an intense longing. It made her mouth water. “Beautiful alpine city, all cool and green,” he smiled. “Clean as a glacier. I like that.”

“Oh, you’ve been there?”

“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “But it sure provokes the imagination.”

She laughed. “What about LeNoir?” she pressed, expecting a discussion about mystery and velvety darkness and midnight passion. She wanted that look again.

He wrinkled his brow. “LeNoir. Noir. Let’s see. Blackness. Dark? Hmm. Doesn’t much suit you, does it?” Then he brightened. “Well, you can change it when you get married. I believe your cat here has bronchitis.”

Geneva was torn between the desire to challenge his abrupt censuring of her name and concern over her cat. She felt more inclined to continue with the name issue, but John Smith obviously had turned his attention to Dr. Zhivago and was asking her questions about how long he had been coughing, and whether he had been out at night. He gave him a shot of antibiotics and gave her some pills to administer, then he leaned pleasantly against the counter and offered Geneva a cup of coffee.

She didn’t quite know how to respond. John Smith made her feel full of contradictory emotions. On the one hand, he seemed to personify the literary (and her own) ideal: honorable, romantic, dashing, and handsome. Yet, he had glibly insulted her twice over something that seemed trifling but in such a way as to thoroughly rile her. The worst part of it was that she couldn’t think of a single comeback to sting him as smartly as she would like. So she accepted the coffee, then looked for an opportunity to needle him, perhaps embarrass him for his impudence. She wondered how he would fare if she declared outright war.

She gave him a steely smile. “What makes you think I’m not married?” Ha! Now he would have to admit to looking at her left hand, which meant she had caught him thinking about her in a less-than-professional way. She hoped he would blush.

“I asked your sister two weeks ago,” he replied cheerily.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yep. Saw you riding one evening and fell flat in love with you first thing. The way the sunlight fell on your hair gave you a halo, and I thought you were the most wonderful thing since penicillin. I went straight to the phone and called Rachel and asked her who that beauty was riding on Fairhope. She told me all about you.” He looked straight at her and grinned.

Geneva was the one to blush. Normally she relished such compliments from men, but this man made her uncomfortable. He was too big, too handsome, too straightforward, too—everything. She realized that she was not in charge after all, and she was feeling more and more certain that she probably would not take charge today. She directed her attention to the kittens to change the subject.

“These little guys were born eight weeks ago. I brought them in for all the necessary shots and such,” she said briskly, lifting each of the kittens from the basket. “This one is Simone, and the feisty one here is Scarlet. And these are the Three Stooges. Larry and Moe, and the fat one, of course, is Curly Joe.”

John Smith laughed. “Interesting choices,” he said, then fell silent as he examined and vaccinated them. When he tried to replace them in their basket, they became uncooperative, so Geneva helped him, then closed the lid and swiftly scooted toward the car. But before she got there, Larry and Curly Joe got out, clinging precariously to the outside edge of the basket before they flopped to the ground and fled. Geneva stamped her foot and started to swear at them, but noticing Dr. Smith chuckling, she threw her head back and smiled saucily.

“I’m afraid you have just inherited two kittens, Dr. Smith, unless you want to go under the house and get them out. They’re half wild by now, because they’ve been living in Rachel’s barn since we got here.” That ought to wipe the grin off his face!

The vet remained leaning against the doorway and drawled, “Well, okay, but I hate to break up the set. Can I have Moe, too?”

Geneva tried not to gape. Was he really willing to take three of her cats? She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts so she could reply casually. He might change his mind if she followed her first impulse to squeal and jump up and down.

Apparently he misunderstood her silence, for he continued, “I need some mousers around here, and I figured you really didn’t need this many cats, especially since Esmeralda will be giving you a new batch in a week or so.”

“What?” said Geneva in a small voice? “Esmeralda?”

“Sure,” he smiled. “You mean you didn’t know?”

“No,” she said faintly. There was a silence while she counted backwards. Damn that Howard! “I always kept her in.”

“Well, I’m reasonably certain she’s pregnant. Congratulations.”

An uncomfortable image leapt into her mind. She saw herself as the victim in an Ionesco play, surrounded by cats, inundated, suffocated by cats, meowing, purring, hissing, scratching cats. Hundreds of them, burgeoning and growing bigger until they popped, spewing more cats out in every direction. “Rats,” she muttered, eyes dilated.

“Does that mean I can have Moe, too?”

“Yes,” she replied, breathing hard. “How much do I owe you?”

“Let’s call it an even swap. But this will be the last time,” he warned. “I usually don’t accept kittens in exchange for services.”

Geneva picked up Esmeralda, who was rubbing against her legs, probed her stomach gently, and she did feel the swelling there. Carefully, she pushed the cat through the half open car window and placed her beside the basket.

“This womanizer needs to come back in a week so I can check him again,” Dr. Smith said as he lightly gathered up Dr. Zhivago and tucked him under his arm. “Esmeralda should come, too and I’ll take out the stitches.” He walked awkwardly to the car. “Just call me Richard the Third,” he added, apologizing for his halting walk with a wink. “I’ll grow a hump next week. I bet you’d like that.”

Surprised and a little riled at his misplaced intimacy, his insinuation that he knew what she liked, and piqued about the new information concerning Esmeralda’s impending multiplication, Geneva straightened her back and said good-bye to him with as much dignity as she could muster, then used her practiced walk getting to the driver’s side. She had intended to appear regal and confident, but the effect was lost on John, who raced ahead of her as well as he was able in order to open the door for her.

What a bizarre man! He seemed so contradictory, flickering between solemnity, gallantry, lightheartedness, and what seemed like mockery. But her distrust of him vanished as he reached across her to claim Moe and gave her a radiant smile, his marvelous eyes once again turned upon hers. Geneva thought he looked as if a laurel wreath belonged on his head. His face was very close, so close she could smell his skin, clean and real. It reminded her of the smell of spring rain and a warm, dry hayloft. Geneva could swear she fibrillated. She felt herself grow warm and dizzy, then once again she blushed, angry with herself for appearing so foolish.

Violently, she cranked up the car, intending to cavalierly spin out of the drive; unfortunately, the car died before she could get her foot onto the accelerator, then it lurched drunkenly forward and died again on her next attempt. She finally got the car going, and drove rather sedately and sheepishly down the driveway, cringing in her humiliation and watching John Smith in her rear view mirror the whole way. She didn’t notice that she had veered off the drive until she had driven into the ditch flanking the main road.

It was impossible to discreetly extricate herself; with a sinking stomach and with hot chills working their way down to her fingers and toes she got out of the car and watched as John Smith hobbled toward her, his white cast swinging out in a wide arc with each step he took, his arms flailing upwards as the arc reached out and downward as it swung in again. Even in her humiliation, Geneva saw the absurdity of their situation, and she began to laugh. At first it was only a suppressed snort, but the closer John grew, the funnier he looked, with his earnest face growing larger with each ridiculously balance step, so that she began to laugh outright. She held her sides and threw back her head, and all but pointed at him as he came closer and closer.

“Laugh all you want,” he grinned at her. “Meanwhile, Esmeralda and Tomfoolery are absconding.”

Geneva whirled in time to see the cats darting off through the pasture toward home. Simone and Scarlet were trying to wriggle out the half-open window to join them. Dr. Zhivago did not look nearly as peaked as he had earlier in the morning.

John began to laugh, too, and the two people who had been strangers, awkward at their first introduction, stood gasping helplessly, pointing at each other, at the car in the ditch, and at the long-since disappeared cats. Geneva felt as if a door were opening and she was standing on the threshold of something startling new and fresh. The misty morning air hummed and danced around her, and the silvery light swarmed with energy, sweeping her up and making her feel drunk with exhilaration. There was something to this John Smith, she decided. She would get to know him better. For the moment, she had forgotten that other guy’s name.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll tow you out with my Jeep.” And then, much to her relief, for she was still embarrassed at her incompetence behind the wheel, he added gently, “That ditch is an awful problem. I’ve driven into it a couple of times myself.”

Geneva walked slowly beside John, trying not to giggle at his ungainly stride, and suddenly she felt awkward again, caring very much that she might say the right thing. So far, everything he had said to her had taken her off balance, and she was more afraid than ever of sounding foolish. All the façades she had so carefully cultivated over the years, the masks among which she instinctively could pick to impress a variety of people, had mercilessly deserted her. She did not know whether to flirt, to be coy or shy, or bold or frank. For the first time in her life she was afraid to open her mouth.

John was quiet, too. She kept giving him sideways glances, but noticed only that he seemed uncomfortable with his damaged leg. She began to feel guilty that she may have caused him to hurt it again, and then she wondered who the woman was that he had rescued. Perhaps she should not be so capable astride a horse in the future.

“I hope you didn’t hurt your leg running like that. Shouldn’t you use a crutch or something?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I guess I shouldn’t be running on it. But it’s pretty close to mended by now.”

“Just can’t keep from running after a damsel in distress, can you?”

“Like a moth to the flame.”

After John’s Jeep had pulled the car out of the ditch, he waved at her and called out the window, “See you in a week, provided you catch them.”

“Thanks,” Geneva replied. “They’re probably back at the ranch by now.” She drove off carefully, not caring to repeat her earlier attempts at a dramatic exit. All she wanted to do now was to think about the way she felt when John Smith leaned close and looked at her, smelling so warm and alive. She remembered with a smile the fact he had said he loved her.

Geneva liked the notion of men being in love with her, and in fact, had pretty much become an expert at finding ways to coax such admissions from them. She had always had admirers, usually several of them at a time, and had always enjoyed watching them jockey for position among themselves, challenging one another like boyish rivals over a rich prize. Geneva understood that the games she played with them often made her seem superficial, particularly to less beautiful women, but it had never bothered her enough to stop her from playing them. Until Howard, she had never really given her heart to any of them. Perhaps that’s why he had been so attractive—he had been so damn hard to get—and why his desertion had wounded her so severely.

Of course, this business of love at first sight was only a joke. She had learned long ago not to become too excited over such pretended gallantry. Once a gorgeous Canadian actor named Terrance had asked her to marry him immediately after they were introduced. She had been flattered, even though she knew he was jokingly referring to the green card she would be able to provide for him. She had made light of it, but secretly she had toyed with the idea of getting a real proposal from him (at that time in her more frivolous past, she had been keeping an informal tally of proposals). To that end, she had flirted outrageously with him for a week before a mutual friend gently pulled her aside and informed her that Terrance was homosexual.

Yes, she sighed, Renaissance poets may have believed in love at first sight, but modern men only make jokes about it. Still, it might be fun to see if she could make John Smith stop joking and love her, not seriously, of course, but enough for an interesting diversion while she recovered from Howard’s treachery. She began humming to herself as she drove into Rachel’s driveway.

The children were playing with the runaway cats when she arrived. Rachel came from the house with flour on her hands, her golden hair pulled up into a loose braid, and Geneva could not help but hope that she was as pretty as her older sister. Craftily, she wondered how well Rachel knew John Smith. She got out of the car smiling.

“Well, what did you think of the good doctor?” asked Rachel, barely suppressing a smirk.

“He’s exasperating, but cute, and he kept the Three Stooges,” returned Geneva. “And why didn’t you tell me the two of you have been talking about me behind my back?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to influence your first impression. I thought you might like him. Come on in the house and tell me all about it. By the way, your cats showed up five minutes ago.”

Geneva was eager to talk about John Smith, DVM, more eager still to find out more about him. She decided to get the facts straight first. “He’s not gay, by any chance, is he?” she asked offhandedly. No use turning herself inside out for a man with suspicious tendencies.

“Good grief, no! He’s been seen with half the women in the county, and the other half is lined up waiting their turn. Gosh, I thought he’d be just your type. What makes you think he’s gay?” Rachel was visibly disturbed.

“Oh, no reason. I just wondered. Lots of eligible men are.” Geneva did not wish to pursue this line of conversation and be forced to explain her folly concerning Terrance the actor. “He has a broken leg. I guess that’s why he hasn’t been riding.”

“Oh, yes, I know, but he said he hopes he can go riding with you when it’s healed, you lucky thing.”

“Well,” Geneva replied ruefully. “I guess I’ll have to work on being a little more helpless if we do.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t tell you how he broke it?”

Rachel looked at her slyly. “What did he tell you?”

“That he was rescuing some woman on a runaway and took a fence badly. Have you ever heard of anything more romantic?” For the first time, Geneva allowed her sister to see how interesting she found Dr. Smith to be.

Rachel gave her a strange smile. “Oh. Yes. That is romantic.” She looked off toward the mountains, and smiled again, murmuring, “Yes, he’s very good.” She turned conspiratorially. “Well! Why don’t we do something about getting the two of you together? Shall we hatch a plot?”

Geneva laughed. Like herself, Rachel also was an incorrigible matchmaker and schemer who had no scruples about arranging and rearranging situations and facts if it meant that somebody, particularly if that somebody happened to be one of themselves, might end up in more interesting or advantageous circumstances.

“You’re awful!” laughed Geneva. “Remember how we stalked Wayne for a month so that you could ‘accidentally on purpose’ run into him up on Jacob’s Mountain?”

“It worked,” beamed Rachel. “There’s magic on that mountain, I tell you, and I bet if we could get you up there with John… Well! Just wait until I drop these twins before you walk down the aisle. I want to look good in the pictures.”

Geneva hugged her sister, simultaneously chiding her for her unabashed attempts to manipulate Geneva into moving back home permanently. Still, she appreciated Rachel’s line of thinking; besides, after Howard, she felt she needed a boost. John Smith might prove to be rather fun.

After dinner that evening, Geneva and Wayne went for their usual sunset ride while Rachel put the children to bed. When the riders returned, Rachel was sitting at the loom, working in subtle reds.

“Hi,” she said, absorbed in the pattern. “Did you have a good ride?”

“Yes, but we missed you,” replied her husband as he rubbed her shoulders and nuzzled her hair. Geneva remembered when Rachel had decided that Wayne was “The One” and had gone to astonishing lengths to get his attention. At that time, Wayne was a shy, quiet, gangly man, not comfortable with his own body and less comfortable with women. He had just moved into the area to join a practice in Tucker, and Rachel, already attracted to him for reasons no one could fathom, had determined to marry him when she discovered how much he liked babies and horses. Rachel recruited Geneva, and together they devoted an entire summer to snaring him, although it had turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated. Wayne had been distant with Rachel, perhaps frightened by her beauty, perhaps too busy to notice that she was pursuing him.

But Rachel had honed in on him as confidently as queen to drone, and the poor man never knew Rachel’s plans for him until he was at the brink of the hive. Geneva smiled to herself. There must have been some magic up on Jacob’s mountain. Within a year after his “accidental” meeting with Rachel, Wayne had been transformed into a confident, loving husband, and he seemed to grow more contented as his family grew larger. Geneva did not want to spend her life turning out a brood of children up here in these hills, but she sure wanted what Rachel and Wayne shared. If only Howard would come to his senses…

No, it is too late for that, she decided morosely. In fact, there’s probably no one out there who will be to me what Wayne is to Rachel. The exhilaration of the morning’s meeting with John Smith turned to bitter, choking dust in her heart, and she turned her head away from the nuzzling couple, mourning for her lost future.

But early the next Friday, the day she was to return her cats to John’s office, Geneva woke, surprised at how warm and excited she felt at the prospect of seeing the handsome veterinarian again. She had spent some days lecturing herself about the irresponsibility of her unbridled dreams of the week before and had told herself that she had outgrown her infantile desire to collect men’s hearts like a string of trophies. But today those self-chastising thoughts evaporated as she washed her hair and dressed.

Oh, you’re baaaad, she hummed to herself, thinking about how much fun it was going to be to flirt with the guy down the road. She actively calculated the strength of her arsenal as she rounded the cats into her car. She knew John liked her hair, so she would show up early, while the sun was still low enough to shine straight through it and show off all the gold. Confident of her beauty, she now wondered what it would take to make John think she was witty and bright as well. She went through her memory for jokes about animals, weighing them, determining which ones were clean enough to tell.

As she slipped behind the wheel, Rachel gave her a wink and a smile and said with mock innocence, “He likes spunky women.”

“What are you grinning about?”

“Just thinking about Jacob’s mountain.”

“Rachel, you cut that out. You know I have no intentions of luring that poor man up there. What would I do with him after I caught him? Can you see a country veterinarian in Washington, DC?”

“I’m sure you’d think of something. You always were able to manage dichotomies. And duplicities,” she muttered under her breath.

“I heard that!” yelled Geneva out the window as she cranked up the car.

When she arrived at John’s house, Geneva found a note on the door stating that he had been called out and would be back by eight o’clock. Since it was nearly that time now, she decided to wait for him. She glanced back at the cats lolling in the back seat preparing themselves for a nap, then she got out of the car, leaving the windows down so they could enjoy the cool. She wandered around the yard, admiring the pearly morning, the dew-laden Black-Eyed Susans, and the blue chicory growing with exuberance along the fencerow. She breathed the flavor of the honeysuckle, then peeked into the outbuildings, the office, and then, after a half-moment’s struggle with her conscience, decided to check out the main house where John obviously lived.

There was a large window that might look into the living room, but it was high, and enormous holly bushes grew densely in front of it. Undaunted, Geneva mounted the porch steps, then swung her legs over the railing. She stood on the outer edge of the porch, hung on to the rail, and leaned out far enough to peep through the window.

The view was both more and less than she expected. She had thought she would see something of some masculine luxury, like a lazy boy recliner and a big television, but this room was spare and minimally furnished with Shaker furniture and a sisal rug on the hardwood floor. A plain bookcase brimming with books stood against one wall; two simple prints of English hunting dogs graced another wall. There was one large potted schefflera in the south window, but nothing more. There were no curtains. It was a nice beginning, she decided, clean and unpretentious, but much too Spartan, and it needed softening. Some sort of window treatments and more furniture—maybe a better bookcase. Pillows, an oriental rug for more warmth… Geneva became lost in what she would do to make the room more attractive and interesting. Slowly, insidiously, a Master Plan began to take shape in her head.

She tried to push it away, telling herself that the last thing in the world she wanted was to be the wife of a hillbilly veterinarian, but no sooner did she find the two halves of her mind in agreement over this than she began remembering John’s eyes and wishing that the man they belonged to belonged to her. Finally, she gave up the battle and allowed herself to indulge in the game of Siamese Twins, which she often played whenever she felt twinges of homesickness.

In the Siamese Twins game, Geneva fantasized that she was two people with different bodies but whose minds were interconnected. One of them could be home among her restful green hills; the other would go about her daily work and continue her climb in social and artistic circles in the city. Each could enjoy the experiences of the other, and they even occasionally might change places. They were so identical that no one could tell them apart. The country twin would go to the city for a bit of excitement; the city twin would come home to rest and ride and enjoy solitude among the craggy rocks. Geneva delighted in the game, frequently diverting her mind to it no matter where she happened to be, but particularly in traffic and in crowded elevators, and although she knew she was silly to indulge in such an impossible fantasy, it often seemed to be the only thing to keep her going the days she felt overwhelmed by the suffocating noise of the city.

Today she imagined that she was the country twin who happened to be married to a handsome veterinarian who read sonnets aloud to her in the evenings after they had returned from a thrilling ride on half-wild horses. They would make love in front of the fireplace, and her hair, the same color as the flames, would splay out over the carpet, and the scent of jasmine and sweet olive would perfume that air. She would…

Suddenly, she heard a car turn into the driveway. Panic rose up like a hot hand and grabbed her stomach, jolting her so violently that Geneva lost her grip on the rail and fell to the soft, damp earth. Falling through the holly, she caught her elbow on something hard and pointed on the way down. With pain searing her arm, a moment or two passed while she gasped and writhed on the muddy ground before she managed to collect herself enough to scramble behind the bush. She crouched there watching John’s Jeep approach. As the immediate pain began to subside, her mind clicked into focus. First she thanked God that she had worn a green shirt, then she pulled her bright hair back, tucking it into her collar. With a pounding heart, she made herself as small as she could and focused her attention on the man who stood barely ten feet away.

John was looking at her car, then he turned and surveyed the yard area calling, “Ms. LeNoir?” Geneva hunkered down lower, underarms stinging from sweat screaming to get out through the antiperspirant, and watched him hobble directly toward her. She held her breath momentarily, releasing it carefully only when he seemed to change his mind and walked back to her car. After he circled it once, he looked up again, searching the horizon.

“Ms. LeNoir? Geneva? Are you around here?” Geneva prayed, shutting her eyes tightly and promising all manner of things to the Almighty if He would just get her out of this mess. She pushed away the fog threatening to cloud her mind long enough to formulate a plan, then she sat back and waited for a miracle.

It happened. John walked around the side of the house. As he passed out of view, Geneva made her break, ignoring the claws of the holly in her hair and across her face. After a moment of panic, she cleared the bushes and dashed for the car. Breathing hard, she yanked open the car door, grabbed the sleeping Dr. Zhivago, then ran madly toward the open field. She ran as low and as fast as she could while looking over her shoulder for sight of John. By the time he came into view again, she had made it about twenty-five yards, well into an exuberant thicket of brambles. Immediately she turned and stood, then casually began making her way back toward him.

“There you are!” he called. “I thought that was your car.” He hobbled toward her, then stopped, surprise and shock in his face. Fearing the worst, she looked down at herself to ascertain what kind of damage she had sustained to cause his reaction. It was not a pretty sight: a large tear had left a hole in the arm of her shirt; blood oozed from her elbow, and her hands were scratched and dirty. Her pale linen shorts were caked with dirt, and more blood ran down from the scratches on her legs. Slowly she became aware that she was gasping for breath and that her heart was pounding. She gave a little moan when she realized that she was also sweating.

“Good grief, what happened to you?” exclaimed John. Geneva concluded that her face must look awful, too. Frantically she searched her brain for a way to make the lie convincing.

“Dr. Zhivago got away from me and took out toward home. I, uh, chased him, and, uh, tripped. I think I must have landed on something hard,” she concluded lamely, looking woefully at her wounded elbow.

“Oh, you poor thing,” said John, but his eyes showed admiration. “But I’ll be darned if you didn’t catch the cat and hang onto him. You’ve really got spunk.” He beamed at her with frank pleasure. “Come on, let me help you into the house and see if there’s anything I can do. Here. He can find his own way home, and we’ll look at him later.” He lifted Dr. Zhivago from her arms and set him down, then he took her good arm and gently led her toward his house. When Geneva realized how close a call she’d had, she began to tremble. Black spots swam before her eyes; she felt so dizzy that she stumbled through the long, golden grass.

“Careful. Goodness, you’re awfully pale. Does it hurt bad?” John looked at her compassionately.

She managed a weak smile. Thank God for the injury. It explained her distress. “It does hurt some. I guess I feel a little lightheaded.”

“Do you think you can make it back to the house? You can lie down there, and I’ll take a look at the arm.” He tried to put an arm around her waist, but his bulky cast came between them and prevented them from walking. Then he tried to support her from the other side, but she winced when he touched her injured arm.

“Aren’t we a pair,” he laughed. I think the least you could do is tear up the other arm. How am I supposed to rescue if you if I can’t get near you?”

Geneva began to recover. There was no suspicion in his wonderful green eyes, and she realized that an unparalleled opportunity shimmered before her. If John liked spunk, he’d get it. She put on her brave face and said cheerfully, but with a hint of expressed pain, “We’ll just hobble back together. I can make it—it’s just a few scratches.”

As John took her hand, she became aware of his scent again and felt a sudden and powerful desire to bury her face in his neck and hair. The country twin relaxed. She began to enjoy this moment of victory as she felt her smooth palm press against John’s work-rough one.

But her smug confidence splintered when, just as they negotiated the steps to the porch, she glanced off to the right where she had fallen. There, halfway between the porch and the ground, was a nail sticking out of the wood siding. On that nail was a square of bright green linen, exactly the same shade of Geneva’s shirt. She stumbled again.

“Hang on, we’re almost there,” said John, carefully guiding her through the front door. “Let’s go into the kitchen. You can sit down and we can take a look at that arm, wash it off a bit.”

In the kitchen, he gave her a drink of cold water and sat down to see to her elbow, but when he touched her, his hands, so capable and gentle with the cats, suddenly shook and looked too big and cumbersome upon her slender arm. He tried, awkwardly, to push the snug sleeve of her shirt up above her elbow, and after one unsuccessful attempt, his face clouded. “I’m just bumbling here,” he said sadly. I can cut it off just above your elbow here, or if you like, I can give you a shirt to put on—that is, if you think you can get this off by yourself.

Geneva hesitated to consider her options. What she really wanted was a shower and a mirror. It was embarrassing to have all this sweat, grime, and blood all over her, and she knew she looked frightful. On the other hand, her elbow really did hurt enough to make her dread the prospect of driving the half mile back to Rachel’s house. If she could get John to drive her back, that would get her home and keep him away from his house, or more precisely, from the sight of the green linen fragment stuck to his house.

“This is my favorite shirt,” she lied. “I’d like to mend it if possible, but I don’t think I can get it off by myself. Would you mind driving me back to Rachel’s house?

“Of course. I should have thought of that. I could call Wayne to meet us, and he can look at your arm. Are you strong enough to walk?”

“Certainly,” she said brightly, giving him her hand and letting him guide her back out the door. She carefully diverted his attention as they passed the fateful nail.

Rachel gasped when she saw Geneva’s disheveled appearance. “Geneva! What happened?”

John answered for her. “She chased Dr. Zhivago through the field and fell on something. Looks like she’s hurt her elbow pretty badly.”

Noting her scratched face and legs, Rachel queried, “What did you land in, a blackberry thicket?” but Geneva stopped her with a grimace. There was an old family joke Geneva did not particularly want to hear at this moment. It concerned one Fourth of July family picnic when Geneva was learning to water-ski and had planned a dramatic landing by holding onto the tow rope until the last moment so she could glide right onto shore for a dry landing. Unfortunately, she forgot to let go of the rope until she had skied well inland and through a blackberry thicket. Ever since that day, everyone in the whole damn clan had joked about her being accident prone. Every time she showed up with a Band-Aid on her knee, they asked her how she liked her blackberries.

“Ow, this hurts, Rachel,” she said, trying to elicit enough sympathy so that Rachel would stop with the blackberry bit. “Would you help me into the house?”

Once in the bathroom, Geneva took one look into the mirror and wailed softly, “Oh, Rachel, I look like an ad for World Vision. Some impression I must be making on John!” Her golden hair was streaked with cobwebs and mud, and her face was pale, dirty, and covered with scratches. There was a network of dried blood on her once-beautiful legs.

“You’ll look better once you’re cleaned up and you get some makeup on. Besides, those welts will clear up by tomorrow. But what on earth happened?” Rachel asked as she peeled off Geneva’s shirt.

Geneva told the whole miserable story in whispered gasps, ending it with, “So you’ve got to get over there and get that piece of my shirt off that nail while John’s over here.”

“Geneva, I can’t do that,” hissed Rachel. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m seven months pregnant with twins! I’m not supposed to walk fast, let alone run over and climb behind some bushes to rescue a little bitty piece of your shirt. If you couldn’t get out of there without tearing yourself all to pieces, how do you expect me to get this through?” She slapped at her belly.

“Okay, okay. Maybe I can run back over there if you can keep him occupied.”

“Geneva, you’re crazy. If he catches you sneaking across the field, he’ll really think something’s up. You’ve led him to believe that your elbow is all busted up.”

“Well, what can I do?” whispered Geneva, turning on the bath water. “If he sees it, he’ll figure it out. Oh, Rachel, why didn’t I tell him I was chasing the cat off the porch?”

“Why didn’t you refrain from peeping into his house in the first place? Geneva, you’re awful.”

“No worse than you.” Irritated and humiliated, Geneva fought back. “You remember the time you stole the ‘Dear John’ letter of out of Jimmy Kramer’s mailbox when you changed your mind after you mailed it?”

“That was my letter. I was only getting it back,” flared Rachel.

“It was a federal offense,” retorted Geneva.

Rachel got prissy. “Well, you should talk. I remember the time you picked Carole Summerland’s locker so you could put a snake in there just because she wouldn’t admit to having fouled you in a basketball game, and you got a technical because you stomped on her foot.”

“I was fourteen years old, Rachel, and we lost the championship because of that technical, which you and I both know I didn’t deserve. Besides, you sure put your share of frogs and snakes in people’s beds,” hissed Geneva, remembering a few slithery reptiles between her own cool sheets on summer nights. She finished stripping and stepped into the tub.

“All right, Geneva,” sighed Rachel. “You finish your bath, and I’ll drive over there while you keep John busy. You can manage that, can’t you? And if I miscarry right there in the holly bushes, it’ll be all your fault.”

“Oh, never mind,” grumbled Geneva, trying to lather her hair with one hand. “Maybe I can sneak over there tonight when no one can see me, that is, if he doesn’t notice it before then. I couldn’t stand the guilt of premature twins.”

Rachel put her hands into the suds, scouring Geneva’s head with her nails. “How bad is your elbow anyway? Can’t you lift your arm?”

There was a knock on the door. “Is everything all right? Do you think I should call Wayne?” came John’s voice.

“Oh, gosh, hurry, up,” said Rachel. “Here you are, supposed to have a broken elbow, and you’re taking a beauty bath, having your hair done.”

“Rachel, tell him not to call Wayne,” whispered Geneva through gritted teeth.

“How’s the arm?” John asked, the anxiety evident in his voice.

“Just a minute, John,” called Rachel sweetly. “We’re checking it out now.” She turned to Geneva and lowered her voice. “Let me see your elbow,” she whispered, grabbing Geneva’s arm and twisting it around to look at it. Geneva shrieked with pain.

Just outside the door, John responded, “I’m going to call him.”

“No!” came Rachel’s quick reply. “I don’t think he needs to come. Just a minute, and we’ll let you look at it.” She prodded gently at the injured elbow. Geneva winced.

“Geneva, it does look pretty bad. It’s still bleeding, too. You’ll probably have to get stitches. Do you think it might be broken?”

“I don’t think so, but I hope it’s sprained at least. The way I carried on, I hope it’s everything short of broken, or John will think I’m an awful wimp.”

John’s anxious voice came through the door again, “Rachel? Geneva? How is it?”

“We’ll be right out, John,” called Rachel. “Geneva’s getting cleaned up. I think we might ought to get some stitches, though.”

Geneva finished her bath quickly, but insisted on putting on some makeup before she faced John again. The scratches and welts on her face refused to be concealed, however, so she gave up and came out for Rachel and the animal doctor to prod at her arm and murmur together over it. John thought it might be chipped, but Rachel believed it was only sprained. They agreed, however, that it needed stitches, so they bandaged the area, then John insisted on driving her to the hospital.

As they made their way down the front steps, she gave one last, appealing glance at Rachel, who, suddenly experiencing a change of heart, sidled up to her sister to whisper, “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of everything while you’re gone.”

“I love you, Rachel,” sighed Geneva.

John behaved very nicely while Geneva was admitted to the hospital, opening doors for her, looking concerned and appropriately ruffled. He insisted on staying with her as they wheeled her into the emergency room, pretending to be an important person in her life, and then he sat by her bed and stroked her head, told her jokes, compared injuries, and made up funny stories she could tell people about how she hurt her arm.

“Of course you don’t want to tell anyone you tripped while chasing a cat,” he insisted. “You won’t get any fun out of that. You could tell them you were tangling with a mountain lion, or how about you got in a fight with a guy in a pool hall who wouldn’t pay up his bet with you.”

Geneva giggled, feeling a little cocky. “I’m going to say I fell off your front porch, and then I’ll sue the pants off you,” she said recklessly. “Where’s a lawyer when you need one?”

John brightened, then laughed suddenly and leaned toward her, his eyes dancing as if he was about to tell her a secret. Geneva bit her lip, wondering if he had caught on to her deception. But before he could speak, Wayne walked in with his best friend, Joe Fuller, the plastic surgeon Geneva knew well. He and his beautiful wife had been to the house for dinner a couple of weeks earlier. Joe was amusing, but overbearing, with something of a God complex. Geneva thought she liked him, provided he really was kidding, as he seemed to be every time he opened his mouth. He had a licentious tongue, which she found both funny and obnoxious.

“Hi, Geneva. What have you done to yourself?” asked Wayne. “Rachel says you busted up your elbow pretty badly and will need stitches. I brought Joe just in case.”

“Yes, only the best will do when it comes to your delectable elbow, you gorgeous piece of work. If it has to be violated with stitches, best to let me be the one.”

Geneva groaned. “Oh, Lord, will somebody shut this guy up? The last thing I need is for you to be coming on to me when I’m in pain.”

“Don’t look at me,” replied Wayne. “I can’t do a thing with him, and he keeps trying to seduce Rachel right in front of me. You wouldn’t know the guy was married to the most gorgeous woman in the universe.”

“You leave my gorgeous wife out of this, Wayne,” said Joe mildly. “This is just my bedside manner.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” replied Wayne.

“Oh, tsk tsk tsk,” murmured Joe as he peered at Geneva’s elbow with a magnifying glass. “But it looks clean.” He let the magnifying glass rove over Geneva’s upper arm, then across her shoulder and toward her breasts. Geneva slapped his hand away.

“Cut that out! Are you going to stitch me up or leer at me?”

“Can’t I do both? I do my best work leering.”

Geneva looked at John with mock pleading. “Can’t you do something? You’re bigger than he is.”

Joe snatched a scalpel off a tray and brandished it. “Don’t even think about it. I’m so quick with this scalpel that you won’t know what’s been altered until it’s too late. Now stand back and watch me ply my most excellent trade. Geneva, too bad stitches in this elbow are all you need. I’m wasted here.”

John crossed his arms. “Sorry, Geneva. Last time I tangled with him, he threatened to turn me into Miss America,” he said, shuddering and putting his hand to his forehead in mock horror. “It was horrible. I spent six months in therapy over it.”

As it turned out, Geneva’s arm was very badly sprained, thank goodness, and Joe put in eight tiny, neat stitches. She also had to get a tetanus shot. Joe offered to do the deed, claiming that his offer had nothing to do with getting a glimpse of her “beautiful peach of a behind.” She bore it all bravely, with a pale smile and an occasional witticism. John never left her side, praising her stoicism and her cheerfulness, and when they were left alone again, Geneva caught him looking at her strangely, as if he wanted to say something but felt too shy. She felt her confidence building, and before the morning was out and they were returning to the mountain, she felt that she had evened the score between them. If he had won the first round at their initial meeting, she certainly had won this one. She sat back and smiled up at the white, sudsy clouds floating in the perfectly blue sky. It was going to be in interesting game.

When they returned that afternoon, Geneva’s car sat quietly in the driveway, and Rachel was relaxing serenely on the front porch, sipping iced tea, surrounded by all of Geneva’s cats. She and Wayne were waiting for them and had already prepared a lunch of fresh gazpacho and turkey sandwiches. Geneva sat down ravenously, happy in the knowledge that John surely liked her, and after lunch her smile brightened considerably when Rachel pulled her into the kitchen conspiratorially, to flourish a small, green fragment of fabric. Geneva hugged her sister, her eyes sparkling with mirth, then she returned to the dining room to flirt with John.

After a delightful hour, Wayne went back to work and John prepared to leave as well, explaining that he should get back to his clinic. He asked Geneva to walk with him to his car, and as she matched her stride to his, she hoped he would take the opportunity to ask her out. After all, she felt that after what she had been through today, she deserved a romantic evening. Unfortunately, John’s mind suddenly seemed to be turned to his patients.

“I know your arm is hurting,” he said, “so I need to get out of here. But I intend to come over tomorrow and check on your cats.”

Geneva started to protest that her elbow did not hurt nearly as much as he imagined, but she bit her tongue. Better to let him see how bravely she bore her suffering. So she cradled her arm and smiled wanly. “Would you do that? That’s awfully sweet of you.”

“It’s the least I can do, considering you hurt yourself in my field.”

“You mean wrestling with your mountain lion, in your pool hall.”

“Which happens to be on my front porch.”

“OK. You come check my cats and I won’t sue you. But watch it from now on, buddy. I don’t cotton to mountain lions running loose in the pool halls I frequent. Runs down the reputation of the joint.”

“It was an accident, ma’am. From now on, I’ll make sure Wild Joe and the other critters don’t try to hustle you. They didn’t know you was quality folk.”

“You do that,” she laughed, then thanked him again for rescuing her and walked slowly into the house. She had him figured out, she thought triumphantly. He likes smart, spunky women, and she had already impressed him. From now on, she would play this role to the hilt, and consequently, play this good looking rube like a fiddle. She bet herself that tomorrow he would ask her for a date.