Читать книгу Every Time We Say Goodbye - Liz Flaherty - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

JACK AND TUCKER had been best friends their whole lives before the accident. They used to say that if you could combine them to form one person, you’d have a really fine specimen of humanity. Jack, ten months older, was quiet but funny, his wit the kind that caught you unawares and had you snickering before you knew what had hit you. Tucker, on the other hand, was always “on.” He’d have you laughing the minute he walked into the room.

They were both athletic, though their skill sets in any given sport were different. Jack started wearing glasses in kindergarten, and Tucker’s hearing in his right ear was compromised enough that he had a completely charming way of holding his head when you talked to him, as though whatever you were saying was the most important thing in the world at that moment.

Jack couldn’t remember how old he was when they found out they had different mothers, only that their grandmother had taken great pains to tell them Jack had belonged to Janice, Tucker to Ellen.

Victor Llewellyn had been, by nearly everyone’s estimation, a loser. Jack, after watching Leave It to Beaver reruns, had once referred to him as a modern-day Eddie Haskell. Tucker had responded by saying that was an insult to Eddie. Ellen had sent them to their rooms, making them write “I will be respectful” five hundred times each. She’d also called them Wally and the Beave the rest of the day.

Ellen had never spoken ill of Victor, no matter how much reason she had, but both boys had known early on that being his son was more of a cross to bear than a source of familial pride. Margaret’s most scathing riposte to any disagreement from her grandsons had been “You’re just like your father.”

Sitting at the Anything Goes Grill, nursing the oatmeal stout the familiar-looking bartender had recommended, Jack wondered if they’d both ended up believing it. If that was why neither of them was married. The strongest relationship in Jack’s life was with Charlie, a fact for which he was grateful. But he would like there to be more. He’d like to fall in love with someone, maybe even share a home sometime.

Jack felt more than heard Tucker’s presence when his brother entered the bar. Even after they found out they were born of separate mothers, they’d referred to themselves as Irish twins because their birth dates were within a year of each other. Their empathy alarm system had been nearly infallible. They joked that they could never donate kidneys to each other because they’d both have failure at the same time.

Walking away from his brother, even though he’d thought it was the right thing to do, had been as hard as leaving Arlie. They’d spent more time together the past few days than they had in years—although Charlie spent summer weekends and the occasional spring break in Tennessee.

“What he’s having.”

Even the voice sounded like his own. Tucker’s hands, where they rested on the mahogany bar, could have been his. Jack knew when he looked at the man who’d come to sit beside him, he’d see his own blue eyes and straight nose mirrored. Only their mouths were different. Tucker didn’t wear glasses or a beard, either.

The stud in Tucker’s left ear was a tiny gold wishbone. Jack had bought it for him for Christmas their senior year—a few weeks after they had got their left ears pierced—because Miniagua High School’s football team had used the wishbone offense instead of the more common I formation.

“How’s your mother?”

“Fine. She wants you to bring Charlie to England.”

Maybe it had been long enough that Jack could give normal life a shot. Maybe the occasional depression and anger weren’t signs that he shared his mother’s mental illness after all. He’d never been truly angry with Charlie, had never wanted to hurt him, though he was still afraid to be alone with him that much.

Jack was ten years older than his mother had been when she died, driven by the demons of mental illness. What little he knew of her family history wasn’t encouraging, and he’d feared the inheritance of manic depression his whole life. What if he’d been wrong? What if he’d exiled himself from everyone and everything he loved for no good reason at all?

That was more than he could bear to think about. “Maybe next summer.”

“Good.” There was humor in Tucker’s voice, but it was dark. “I might even go with you. Take you right down into the remotest area of the Cotswolds and leave you there.”

Jack turned and looked at his brother. Tucker’s eyes were clear and smiling in a way Jack knew his own were not.

Tucker leaned on the bar and was silent a moment, looking down at his hands. “I get that you’re afraid you’ll inherit Janice’s mental illness. I know... I’ve always known that was one of the reasons you left. You left because you thought it would be better for Arlie. For me. For all of Miniagua, for that matter.” His gaze grabbed and held Jack’s as surely as if there was a string of invisible glue between them. “I respected your wishes. I’m not doing that this time. If a scene is what you want, that’s what you’ll get, but I’m not leaving the lake until I have a brother again, and worthless as you are at it, you’re the only one I want.”

Jack looked away, focusing on the liquor bottles reflected in the mirror behind the bar. He had to try twice to speak. The words stuck in his throat, where they’d been for all the years since he’d walked away. “I can’t be sure,” he said, sounding as though he’d swallowed a handful of pea gravel from out on South Lake Road. He drank slowly, draining the glass, and then he set it down carefully because he was afraid he’d drop it. He turned it in a slow circle on the bar napkin, keeping it within the same round wet spot.

“Can’t be sure of what?”

“That I don’t have it, too. What if I’d married Arlie and then hurt her or any kids we had or offed myself? What if you got married and I decided I didn’t like you or the girl you married anymore? What then? Charlie wasn’t supposed to be part of my life at all, and instead he is my life and I’m scared out of my mind that I’ll hurt him.”

His throat closed. He wasn’t sure if he could say the words that had to come next. “My mother took her own life, Tuck. She took enough pills to do the job three times over. Dad and I fought the night of the prom, the night he died, and he told me she tried to take me with her. She took me into the closed garage with her and started the car. He said it was too bad she’d failed at that. I knew even when he said it that he was drunk and didn’t mean it, but I was mad. I didn’t take the keys of the limo. Do you understand now? I could have stopped him from taking the car that night and I didn’t. I didn’t.”

* * *

“YOU PROMISED.”

Arlie followed Holly to Gianna’s dinner table, carrying a platter full of garlic bread. “A good sister wouldn’t hold me to it.”

Holly set the silverware beside the plates with a clatter. “No, ma’am, you’re right. A good sister would let you drive that van until it dies some night in a snowstorm out there in the cornfields between Miniagua and Sawyer. There you’d be with a dead cell phone and nothing in the car except cleaning rags and a mop bucket. We’d find you frozen stiff the next morning. You’d probably leave a note. You know, saying something like, ‘You were right, Holly. I should have kept my promise.’ There’d be tears frozen solid on your cold, hard cheeks.” She smiled beatifically. “What do you think?”

Arlie stared at her. “What a flair you have for the dramatic and the absurd. It’s no wonder you write books.”

“And what an alarming capacity you have for burying your head in the sand. A replacement van, no more than three years old and with four good tires on it, or I’m going to announce to the whole world that your name is really Arletta Marquetta Brigetta.”

“It’s not!” Arlie threw a piece of bread at her. “Gianna, she’s telling lies.”

“You two need to straighten up.” Gianna brought the chicken marsala to the table, laughter making her dark eyes twinkle. “But I’m with Holly on this one. I don’t want you driving that van anymore. Worry’s starting to give me lines and we’re just not having that. Everyone knows you girls were born while I was still in elementary school.”

Arlie poured ice water into glasses, deliberately sloshing Holly’s over the top. “Can the business afford another van?”

“It can.” Gianna’s voice was firm. “And shame on me for not having seen to it before this.”

“But I’m the only one who drives the old one. And it’s just been so loyal. I hate to shuffle it off to the salvage yard like it was nothing but a corroded bunch of metal.” Arlie put the water pitcher on the counter, holding it against Holly’s arm to make her squeal.

“It is a corroded bunch of metal.” Holly waited for Gianna to sit, then slid into her chair. “That hole in the driver’s-side floor is big enough you could drag your foot on the ground to stop the car the next time the brakes quit on you.”

“See?” Arlie pointed her fork at her. “That could really come in handy.”

“Girls.” With infinite patience, Gianna grabbed both their hands, nodded a stern and unspoken order for them to clasp each other’s as well and bowed her head for grace.

“How’s Chris?” Holly speared a chunk of tomato out of Arlie’s salad. “Is he off to California for the winter pretty soon?”

“I think so.”

“Does Jack know you and he are seeing each other?”

“I think he does. But why should he care?” Although Arlie had to admit—to herself, at least—that it would be kind of nice if he cared. There was nothing unnatural about that, was there? Didn’t everyone want old boyfriends they hadn’t seen in half their lifetimes to care about new boyfriends? Even if the new ones weren’t quite the real thing.

“Mollie saw Jack and Tucker together when she was tending bar at Anything Goes yesterday. She said it looked a little tense, but there was no shouting or bloodshed. When they left, they hugged.”

“Did she talk to them?” asked Arlie. She was hungry—her growling stomach was proof of that—but she wasn’t at all sure she could swallow food. Shades of adolescence, when being in love had completely decimated her appetite. She sipped from her water glass instead, sighing with pleasure at the taste of the fruit-infused liquid.

“Tucker talked for a while after Jack left. She said he was just as nice and funny as he always was. Jack was a big tipper—Mollie thought he left twice as much as the bar bill was.” Holly lifted a hand to forestall Gianna’s reproof. “I know, Mama. That comes down on the wrong side of snoopy, but there you go.”

“He always was a big tipper,” Arlie remembered. His grandmother had told him tipping was both unnecessary and a certain way to encourage “laborers” to work less and complain more, so he’d overcompensated for her parsimony. It was one of the things Arlie loved about him.

“I think we should invite them for Thanksgiving supper.” Gianna put another helping of chicken on Arlie’s plate even though she wasn’t finished with the first one. There was a reason she was consistently twenty pounds overweight, and Gianna Gallagher was it. “We always have dinner at St. Paul’s when we help with the community meal, but it would be kind of fun to have a supper party later in the day.” Pink washed her cheeks. “I thought I’d invite Max.”

Arlie exchanged an amused glance with Holly. Although Max Harrison, who was the high school principal, had been part of Gianna’s life for several years, she’d always kept the relationship private. The girls had been invited to dinner at her house when he was there a few times, but that was as far as it had gone. They still called him Mr. Harrison and had great difficulty drinking wine in his presence.

“That would be nice,” said Holly. “I’ll call Tuck. You can ask Jack, Arlie.”

“I won’t be seeing him.” Saying it sent regret skipping haphazardly across her thoughts. She laid down her fork. She was thirty-three years old, for heaven’s sake. She was a registered nurse-midwife who owned her own home and even her own lawn mower—which, admittedly, she’d been unable to start by herself since the day she brought it home from Sam’s Hardware. Regardless of that, she was in charge of her own destiny. “Well,” she said, “maybe.”

* * *

“I DID SOME looking around and found you one.” The owner of the only automobile dealership in Sawyer sounded excited over the phone. “It’s a great deal, Arlie. The business went under before the new-car smell was out of it. You won’t even have to paint over anything.”

“I’ll come in and look at it tomorrow,” she promised. “I’m waiting for deliveries today and can’t get away till everything’s here and arranged.” It was one of the Rent-A-Wife jobs she liked least, because there was too much sit-and-wait time involved, but it was her day off at the hospital and she didn’t want Gianna moving furniture and appliances.

Besides, the deliveries were for the Dower House and she liked being there. She’d cleaned it again after Penny Phillipy worked her magic and Jack repaired damaged wood trim and floorboards. The house smelled like fresh paint overlaid with lemon oil, paste wax and window cleaner. New carpet had been laid upstairs and area rugs had been put in place, ranging from room-size in the living room to a braided oval where the kitchen table and chairs would go.

Three boxes of books were open on the floor in the little library, and she and the puppy shelved them while they waited, although the puppy wasn’t much help. Arlie dusted the volumes as she went, grinning because it was obvious Jack still loved reading Westerns. His Louis L’Amour collection was shabby, falling open to favorite places in the same manner as her own beloved copies of Pride and Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables. The Zane Grey books her father had given him were even worse, the book-club bindings long worn off the edges of the covers, the gilt titles faded away from the spines.

She’d lost track of how many rainy-day dates they’d spent sitting on the floor of the used book store in Sawyer. Jack’s interest in carpentry had been born one Saturday when he helped the store’s owner unpack a crate of books on woodworking.

“That will drive your grandmother crazy,” Arlie had said when he purchased a stack of the almost-new volumes.

He’d shrugged. “She’ll never see them. As long as we show up for dinner and don’t wear jeans when she has company, she doesn’t care what we do.”

That was true. He and Tucker had spent as much time as they could in Ellen Curtis’s little yellow rental house on the other side of the lake, but they’d lived in Llewellyn Hall with their grandparents and their father.

Jack still had the carpentry books, though they were much the worse for wear. Arlie placed them at eye level on the shelf.

The puppy, named Walter Mittens because his feet were all white but called Wally because Holly kept referring to him as “Holly’s little Wally,” wore himself out running to the front door every time he heard a noise. Since it was late autumn and the wind was blowing the last of the leaves from the sycamores, oaks and maples on the grounds of Llewellyn Hall, he heard many noises.

Arlie arranged the new living room furniture while the deliveryman assembled the beds in the master suite and the bedroom that would be Charlie’s. It was telling that Jack bought everything new for the Dower House. Even lamps and tables came from a store in Kokomo. She hadn’t asked him about it—she knew without him saying so that he wanted no part of the Llewellyn legacy.

The new furnishings were comfortable and warm. The couch and chairs were upholstered in pewter gray and navy, with sudden startling flashes of dark red lending vibrancy to the setting. The tables were walnut, with rounded corners and scooped drawer pulls. The dining table and its six chairs, she noted with a snort of laughter, exactly matched the ones she had at the Toe.

Although the appliances had worked, he’d replaced them all. The old ones had been transferred directly to the house Habitat for Humanity was refurbishing in Sawyer.

She wondered, although she didn’t want to, how long he intended to stay. If Llewellyn’s Lures or the Hall sold right away, this would all be a waste.

She’d just finished making the beds and was following Wally down the stairs when the puppy hurled himself down the last three steps and at the front door, yelping wildly.

“You know,” she said mildly, bending to pick him up, “if you’re going to be a yapper, we need to talk about it. Hasn’t Caruso convinced you yet that hers is the only loud voice allowed in the house?”

The door opened then, and Wally leaped with neither caution nor compunction from her arms to Jack’s.

“Whoa!” The case holding Jack’s notebook computer slid to the floor as he caught Wally in flight. “Your mother has absolutely no control over you,” he said, stroking the wiggling puppy. “I see obedience school in your future.”

His attention went from Wally to Arlie. She felt warm, as though he was touching her. “Everything get delivered?”