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Apparently he had honed sarcasm to an art.
“I’m sorry I insinuated I was Mama Freda.”
“Insinuated,” he said silkily. “So much more palat able than lying.”
“I had to get by the guard dog who answers your phone!”
“No, you didn’t. I got your messages.”
“Except the one about needing to speak to you personally?”
“Nothing to talk about.” His voice was chilly. “I’ve got all the information you gave. A Mother’s Day Gala in celebration of Mama Freda’s lifetime of good work. A combination of her eightieth birthday and Mother’s Day. Fund-raiser for all her good causes. She knows about the gala and the fund-raiser but has no idea it’s honoring her. Under no circumstances is she to find out.”
Lucy wondered if she should be pleased that he had obviously paid very close attention to the content of those messages.
Actually, the fund-raiser was for Lucy’s good cause, but Mama Freda was at the very heart of her dream.
At the worst point of her life, she had gone to Mama Freda, and those strong arms had folded around her.
“When your pain feels too great to bear, liebling, then you must stop thinking of yourself and think of another.”
Mama had carried the dream with Lucy, encouraging her, keeping the fire going when it had flickered to a tiny ember and nearly gone out.
Now, wasn’t it the loveliest of ironies that Mama was one of the ones who would benefit from her own advice?
“Second Sunday of May,” he said, his tone bored, dismissive, “black-tie dinner at the Lindstrom Beach Yacht Club.”
She heard disdain in his voice and guessed the reason. “Oh, so that’s the sticking point. I’ve already had a hundred people confirm, and I’m expecting a few more to trickle in over the next week. It’s the only place big enough to handle that kind of a crowd.”
“I remember when I wasn’t good enough to get a job busing tables there.”
“Get real. You never applied for a job busing tables at the yacht club.”
Even in his youth, Mac, in his secondhand jeans, one of a string of foster children who had found refuge at Mama’s, had carried himself like a king, bristling with pride and an ingrained sense of himself. He took offense at the slightest provocation.
And then hid it behind that charming smile.
“After graduation you had a job with the town, digging ditches for the new sewer system.”
“Not the most noble work, but honest,” he said. “And real.”
So, who are you to be telling me to get real? He didn’t say it, but he could have.
Noble or not, she could remember the ridged edges of the sleek muscles, how she had loved to touch him, feel his wiry strength underneath her fingertips.
He mistook her silence for judgment. “It runs in my family. My dad was a ditchdigger, too. They had a nickname for him. Digger Dan.”
She felt the shock of that. She had known Mac since he had come to live in the house next door. He was fourteen, a year older than she was. When their paths crossed, he had tormented and teased her, interpreting the fact she was always tongue-tied in his presence as an example of her family’s snobbery, rather than seeing it for what it was.
Intrigue. Awe. Temptation. She had never met anyone like Mac. Not before or since. Ruggedly independent. Bold. Unfettered by convention. Fearless. She remembered seeing him glide by her house, only fourteen, solo in a canoe heavily laden with camping gear.
She would see his campfire burning bright against the night on the other side of the lake. It was called the wild side of the lake because it was undeveloped crown land, thickly forested.
Sometimes Mac would spend the whole weekend over there. Alone.
She couldn’t even imagine that. Being alone over there with the bears.
The week she had won the spelling bee he had been kicked out of school for swearing.
She got a little Ford compact for her sixteenth birthday, while he bought an old convertible and stripped the engine in the driveway, then stood down her father when he complained. While she was painting her toenails, he was painstakingly building his own cedar-strip canoe in Mama’s yard.
But never once, even in that summer when she had loved him, right after her own graduation from high school, had Mac revealed a single detail about his life before he had arrived in foster care in Lindstrom Beach.
Was it the fact that he had so obviously risen above those roots that made him reveal that his father had been nicknamed Digger Dan? Or had he changed?
She squashed that thing inside her that felt ridiculously and horribly like hope by saying, proudly, “I don’t really care if you come to the gala or not.”
She told herself she was becoming hardened to rejection. All the people who really mattered to Mama—except him—had said they would come. But her own mother had said she would be in Africa on safari at that time and many people from Lucy’s “old” life, her highschool days, had not answered yet. Those who had, had answered no.
There was silence from Mac, and Lucy allowed herself pleasure that she had caught him off guard.
“And I am sorry about messing up your Mother’s Day.”
“What do you mean, my Mother’s Day?” His voice was guarded.
That had always been the problem with Mac. The insurmountable flaw. He wouldn’t let anyone touch the part of him that felt.
“I chose Mother’s Day because it was symbolic. Even though Mama Freda has never been a biological mother, she has been a mother to so many. She epitomizes what motherhood is.”
That was not the full truth. The full truth was that Lucy found Mother’s Day to be unbearably painful. And she was following Mama Freda’s own recipe for dealing with pain.
“I don’t care what Day you chose!”
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s all coming back now,” he said sardonically.
“Having a conversation with you is like crossing a minefield.”
“You feel as if Mother’s Day belongs to you and Mama Freda. And I’ve stolen it.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” he said, a chill in his voice warning her to stop, but she wasn’t going to. Lucy was getting to him and part of her liked it, because it had always been hard to get to Mac Hudson.
It might seem as if you were, but then that devil-may- care grin materialized, saying Gotcha, because I don’t really care.
“Every Mother’s Day,” she reminded him quietly, “you outdo yourself. A stretch limo picks her up. She flies somewhere to meet you. Last year Engelbert Humperdinck in concert in New York. She wore the corsage until it turned brown. She talked about it for days after. Where you took her. What you ate. Don’t tell me it’s not your day. And that you’re not annoyed that I chose it.”
“Whatever.”
“Oh! I recognize that tone of voice! Even after all this time! Mr. Don’t-Even-Think-You-Know-Me.”
“You don’t. I’ll put a check in the mail for whatever cause she has taken up. I think you’ll find it very generous.”
“I’m sure Mama will be pleased by the check. She probably will hardly even notice your absence, since all the others are coming. Every single one. Mama Freda has fostered twenty-three kids over the years. Ross Chillington is clearing his filming schedule. Michael Boylston works in Thailand and he’s coming. Reed Patterson is leaving football training camp in Florida to be here.”
“All those wayward boys saved by Mama Freda.” His voice was silky and unimpressed.
“She’s made a difference in the world!”
“Lucy—”
She hated it that her name on his lips made her feel more frazzled, hated it that she could remember leaning toward him, quivering with wanting.
“I’m not interested in being part of Lindstrom Beach’s version of a TV reality show. What are you planning after your black-tie dinner? No, wait. Let me guess. Each of Mama’s foster children will stand up and give a testimonial about being redeemed by her love.”
Ouch. That was a little too close to what she did have planned. Did he have to make it sound cheap and smarmy instead of uplifting and inspirational?
“Mac—”
“Nobody calls me Mac anymore,” he said, a little harshly.
“What do they call you?” She couldn’t imagine him being called anything else.
“Mr. Hudson,” he said coolly.
She doubted that very much since, she could still hear a raucous partylike atmosphere unfolding behind him.
It occurred to her she would like to hang up on him. And she was going to, very shortly.
“Okay, then, Mr. Hudson,” she snapped, “I’ve already told you I don’t care if you don’t come. I know it’s way too much to ask of you to take a break from your important and busy schedule to honor the woman who took you in and pulled you back from the brink of disaster. Way too much.”
Silence.
“Still, I know how deeply you care about her. I know it’s you who has been paying some of her bills.”
He sucked in his breath, annoyed that she knew that.
She pushed on. “Aside from your Mother’s Day tradition, I know you took her to Paris for her seventyfifth birthday.”
“Lucy, I’m dripping water on the floor and shivering, so if you could hurry this along.”
She really had thought she could get through her life without seeing him again. It had been a blessing that he came back to Lindstrom Beach rarely, and when he had, she had been away.
Because how could she look at him without remembering? But then hadn’t she discovered you could remember, regardless?
Once, a long, long time ago, she had tried, with a desperation so keen she could almost taste its bitterness on her tongue, to pry his secrets from him. Lying on the sand in the dark, the lake’s night-blackened waters lapping quietly, the embers of their fire burning down, she had asked him to tell her how he had ended up in foster care at Mama Freda’s.
“I killed a man,” he whispered, and then into her shocked silence, he had laughed that laugh that was so charming and distracting and sensual, that laugh that hid everything he really was, and added, “With my bare hands.”
And then he had tried to divert her with his kisses that burned hotter than the fire.
But he had been unable to give her the gift she needed most: his trust in her.
And that was the real reason she had told him she could never love a boy like him. Because, even in her youth, she had recognized that he held back something essential of himself from her, when she had held back nothing.
If he had chosen to think she was a snob looking down her nose at the likes of him, after all the time they had spent together that summer, then that was his problem.
Still, just thinking of those forbidden kisses of so many years ago sent an unwanted shiver down her spine. The truth was nobody wanted Mac to come back here less than she did.
“I didn’t phone about Mama’s party. I guess I thought I would tell you this when you came. But since you’re not going to—”
“Tell me what?”
She had to keep on track, or she would be swamped by these memories.
“Mac—” she remembered, too late, he didn’t want to be called that and plunged on “—something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“You knew Mama Freda lost her driver’s license, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“She had a little accident in the winter. Nothing serious. She slid through a stop sign and took out Mary-Beth McQueen’s fence and rose bed.”
“Ha. I doubt if that was an accident. She aimed.”
For a moment, something was shared between them. The rivalry between Mama and Mary-Beth when it came to roses was legendary. But the moment was a flicker, nothing more.
All business again, he said, “But you said it wasn’t serious?”
“Nonetheless, she had to see a doctor and be retested. They revoked her license.”
“I’ll set her up an account at Ferdinand’s Taxi.”
“I don’t mind driving her. I like it actually. My concern was that before the retesting I don’t think she’d been to a doctor in twenty years.”
“Thirty,” he said. “She had her ‘elixir.’”
Lucy was sure she heard him shudder. It was funny to think of him being petrified of a little homemade potion. The Mac of her memory had been devil-maycare and terrifyingly fearless. From the picture on his website, that much had not changed.
“I guess the elixir isn’t working for her anymore,” Lucy said carefully. “I drive her now. She’s had three doctors’ appointments in the last month.”
“What’s wrong?”
“According to her, nothing.”
Silence. She understood the silence. He was wondering why Mama Freda hadn’t told him about the driver’s license, the doctor’s appointments. He was guessing, correctly, that she would not want him to worry.
