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In truth, not just the soda would keep him awake tonight. A strange energy seemed to be singing through his veins.
He picked up his briefcase, moved to the table and snapped it open. Neat stacks of legal briefs stared back at him, the work of a man who didn’t drink cola at night because it might keep him awake.
Did she know he was a lawyer? She hadn’t asked. Would she ask tomorrow? Would she ask him why?
And would he tell her the truth?
He had contemplated his career long and hard before choosing. He had thought about becoming a doctor, just like her old man.
The thought, unfortunately, made him squeamish. He had always been able to hide his squeamish side from Tory and Mark, who seemed to think he was tough in every respect. And in some respects he had been. He had a high threshold for pain. He liked doing things that were thrilling. He was fearless, almost stupidly so, in the face of authority.
But the day he’d cut open the frog in high school biology he’d known a career that involved blood and body parts was out. He suspected he wouldn’t even be able to handle looking at slimy tonsils. Which meant dentistry, an extremely high paying profession, was unfortunately also out. Mark’s dad had been a vet. Since Adam had never so much as owned a goldfish, and could not even pretend an interest in the plump poodles that he had seen in Mark’s father’s outer office, he knew he wasn’t going to be doing that either.
Mark’s mother had been a psychologist, also a respectable profession, but the money was not as good, and probing the secrets of the human mind when his own was so largely baffling to him left him cold.
Accounting was too dull.
And that seemed to leave law. Nice clean work, for the most part. Though he had seen some slimy things that would put a pair of infected tonsils to shame. Still, he had a good mind for it. He excelled at it. Problem solving. Thinking on his feet. Keeping track of a multitude of different things at once. Butting heads. Maintaining his personal integrity when all about him others were losing theirs. He liked it. It was constantly changing and constantly challenging.
But somehow, even though the workings of his own mind baffled him, he knew becoming a lawyer had been about her.
She had picked Mark because they were from the same world. He had known intuitively that education was the passport to her world.
Education opened doors. Bought nice things. Bought respectability.
He had sworn the next time he was ready to ask a woman to spend her life with him, she would say yes.
The problem was that woman was supposed to be Kathleen. Twice as beautiful as Tory. Ten times as sophisticated.
Tory had already had her kick at this particular can. She’d lost her chance. Picked Mark.
But now Mark was dead.
And Mark had sent him back here.
He closed the briefcase and took the letter back out of his pocket. It was getting soft from so much handling.
He closed his eyes. He really didn’t have to read it again.
Mark’s last request of him. Make Tory laugh again.
Mark. Handsome. Athletic. Quiet. Stable. A good choice if you had to make one. A sensible choice.
That was what they had both been, Tory and Mark. Sensible. He bet they didn’t drink cola at half-past eleven at night.
He took a defiant swig, and suddenly felt so tired he thought he would collapse.
He set the letter on the table, stripped off his clothes and crawled between the soft sheets.
He slept almost instantly.
Chapter Two
Adam awoke in the morning feeling disoriented. Then it came back to him. Calgary. Tory. Mark. A mission.
He groaned, sat up, stretched. He saw the can of cola that he had taken precisely one swig from, and wondered how it was possible to feel like he had a hangover. The letter was beside the cola tin. He picked it up.
Don’t read it again, he ordered himself, and then read it again.
Dear Adam:
I asked my lawyer to wait a year before sending this on to you. Tory will need time. We married before we completed university, and she needs to know she can make it on her own.
But she needs to laugh, too.
I know how much you loved her.
And I know she loved you more than me. When she picked me, even though she loved you best, I began to believe in miracles.
You know, I’ve never stopped.
She was my angel. And now, if things work the way I think they do, I’m going to be hers.
This is my last request, Adam, and only you can do it. Go home. Go to her. Make her laugh. Teach her to have fun again. Rollerblade, and ride bikes with two seats, fly kites, sit out on lawn chairs at the lake and watch for the Big Dipper and Orion to come out.
She was always a little afraid of how you grabbed life with both hands. But she knows a little more about the nature of life, now. She won’t be afraid to take what it offers her.
You were my best friend, besides her. I know why you stayed away. She was mad at you, and probably still is, but I wasn’t. I’m watching out for you. I promise.
The letter was signed, simply, love, Mark.
Every single time he read that letter, Adam felt the same lump of emotion rise in his throat. The last paragraph in particular reminded him with such aching poignancy who Mark had been. Solid. Loyal. Loving. The fact that Mark’s handwriting was wobbly with pain, like the writing of a little old man, always seemed to increase that lump in his throat to damn near grapefruit size.
“This was not a good way to start the day,” Adam told himself, getting up and putting the letter down.
But the words stayed.
I know why you stayed away. Adam wished Mark would have said why. Because he didn’t know himself. A thousand times he had almost come home. A thousand times something had stopped him. And he did not know what that something was.
Pride. Hurt. Anger. Betrayal.
He shook his head. Mark seemed to think it was something else. But then Mark could be wrong. Look at that nonsense about Tory loving him, Adam, better.
When he’d first received the letter he’d known he absolutely could not go to Tory. He had several important trials coming up. Kathleen’s sister was getting married, and he was to be master of ceremonies. He had a 1964 Harley panhead in pieces in a friend’s garage.
He couldn’t just go traipsing across the country to go Rollerblading, for God’s sake!
And then he found he couldn’t not go.
Mark’s last request.
It kept him awake nights. He read over that blasted letter so often that the paper was wearing thin. You would think the lump in his throat would be getting smaller, but it never did.
Tory not laughing? How could that be? Tory was laughter.
Finally, he surrendered. The letter was not going to let him go. If he followed Mark’s instructions precisely, fulfilling his last wish would only involve four things. He could probably be done with it in four days. A week, tops.
And maybe the mystery in that letter would unravel.
I know why you stayed away.
“Great,” Adam muttered, “that makes one of us.”
He went and showered and dressed. What did one wear Rollerblading? He put on jeans and a white denim shirt. Everybody in Calgary wore jeans, even lawyers.
He went out the hotel door at quarter to nine. A girl with tired looking eyes, in a worn dress, stood on the corner with a basket of flowers. On impulse he bought them all, and was rewarded with a shy and lovely smile.
Really, it had nothing to do with romancing Tory, he defended himself as he hailed a cab. If she had one weakness, it was flowers, and he needed to get his foot in the door.
At first he thought she had outsmarted him and escaped, just like the little piggies who left for the fair an hour before their appointment with the big, bad wolf.
He banged on her front door, and when she didn’t come, he sauntered over to her living room window and peered in.
Somehow he had known before he looked in exactly how it would look—lace and antiques, bookcases, sunny colorful prints, scatter rugs, hardwood, wainscoting, wallpaper, framed petit point, flowers, fresh and dried, hanging and in hand-thrown pots.
Homey and charming. The kind of room in which one sat in front of the fireplace with a pipe—unlit, now that he was reformed—and an old dog at foot, the day’s newspaper in hand. It was the kind of room in which one could feel utterly content.
His own upscale condominium was furnished in a look he referred to as modern motorcycle. Black leather and chrome. Somehow homey was not the ambience he had achieved. Or yearned for either.
Until now.
He could hear the faint sound of music and followed it like a dog following a scent, off her front porch and down a narrow swatch of grass in between her house and the one next door. He came to a high fence. No gate. But the music louder.
Vivaldi. Once he wouldn’t have known. Or cared.
He glanced around to see if any of the neighbors were watching suspiciously. The street was quiet. The wall of the other house was windowless on this side.
He spit on his hands, tossed his bouquet of flowers over first, and acknowledged a funny little singing inside of him. And then he caught the top of the fence and hefted himself over it, landing with a thud that was drowned out by the music and a delicate looking shrub that he thought might have been a magnolia, though he had never heard of one growing successfully in Calgary.
He shoved a few broken branches back into place, picked up his flowers and looked around her walled yard with interest.
His offering of flowers seemed redundant.
Her backyard was like an English country garden—flowers and shrubs were everywhere, narrow stone paths going between them. He could hear the gurgle of a fountain. He glanced to his right and saw her deck.
It was a work of art, really, multilayered wooden platforms sporting potted trees and barrels of flowers and water, benches and planters.
On the top platform, connected to her house by a lovely set of French garden doors, she sat at a patio table beneath a colorful umbrella, surrounded by wicker baskets full of dried flowers and baby’s breath. She was bent over something, her pink tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, the sun on her hair turning it to flame.
He looked for a place to dump the flowers he had brought. The wilted bouquet was a ridiculous offering given the wild profusion of blossoms in her yard.
She glanced up, saw him, and froze. Then she glanced at her watch, confirming his suspicion that she would have been long gone had he waited for the appointed hour. But, by the look on her face, she had meant to be gone by now, and had gotten caught up in something, become lost in the task at hand.
He went up the stairs toward her, holding out his bouquet, a drooping peace offering.
She didn’t reach out to take it, folding her hands instead over her chest, and regarding him with wide brown eyes.
He saw she was working on an arrangement of dried flowers and what looked to be a dried corn stalk twisted into a bow shape. A glue gun was at her elbow. Given the simplicity of the items she was working with, the arrangement was nothing short of breathtaking.
“That’s very good,” he said inadequately.
She shrugged. “It’s what I do. My business.”
He sensed even this short explanation was offered to him reluctantly.
“How did you get in here?” she asked.
“I jumped the fence.”
For the slightest moment just a hint of laughter leapt in her eyes, but she doused it swiftly.
“Then you can go back out the same way.”
He ignored her. “Mark built the deck, didn’t he?”
He watched her eyes soften as she glanced around. “Yes.”
She still loved him.
Uninvited he sat down, placing the humble nosegay on the table. “He did a nice job of it.”
“You know how he loved to build things.”
“Yeah. I know.” The tree house that had been in progress since they all turned thirteen came to mind. Mark had always been the idea man. The result was a tree house that had been the envy of every boy and girl within a hundred miles. Windows with shutters, a rope ladder that wound up and down, a sturdy deck out the front door.
“Is the tree house still—?”
“Still at my mom and dad’s. Being enjoyed by the grandchildren, now. The tree house. This deck. They’re all he ever built. He never became an architect. He got sick before he completed his degree.”
“I’m sorry.” And he was. But the word grandchildren was begging for his attention. He looked around for toys, for signs. Surely he would have heard. “The kids enjoying the tree house aren’t yours, are they?”
She shook her head, looked away quickly. “My sister. Margie’s.”
He remembered her sister, Margie, only vaguely. She had been much older than them. Or so it had seemed at the time. Four or five years now wouldn’t be quite the same chasm.
“Mark got sick very shortly after we got married.”
“Aw, Tory. I didn’t know.”
