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“Not when—” She stopped and took a breath, lifted her strong chin. She had the strongest face of the three Cherry girls, determined and full of courage. Tucker was so grateful that the burning oil hadn’t splashed more than an inch above her jawline to change those contoured planes. She began again. “Not when all I can think about when we’re silent is that I can almost feel you wanting to call this off.”
“Call it off,” he echoed blankly, as if he didn’t know.
“Yes. Cancel. End it. Tell me it’s been a mistake. I keep waiting for you to say it, and you don’t.”
“Because I didn’t want to hurt—” Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Her eyes narrowed and she went white. “That’s why? That’s why? I thought you might not be sure about what you were feeling. Wedding jitters. I’m having them, too, and the other stuff, the sense that we’re not connecting, and I haven’t known if it was temporary— But now you’re saying— You’re telling me you knew this wasn’t right, knew it for sure, but you were just going to go ahead with it anyhow?”
“Not for sure. I was— I kept—” But he couldn’t say it. He didn’t really know, himself, what he’d been going to do. He didn’t feel as if he understood anything right now. He kept thinking about his dad, and his own determination never to do anything even remotely similar to what he had done. You had to consider your family’s happiness, not just your own. You couldn’t let your emotions blow you every which way like leaves in the wind.
She said it for him. “You were going to marry me, because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Do you have any idea how insulting that is?”
It went downhill from there.
And then, eventually, after quite a long time, with a lot of silence, some tears, some words, it came partway back up. “It’s a relief,” Lee said quietly. “I’m relieved.”
But when they got back to the house she didn’t even wait for him to kill the engine before she jumped out of the car, gabbled something he couldn’t catch and disappeared inside. By the time he reached the porch, he could hear through the open front door her feet clattering up the stairs toward the privacy of her room.
He didn’t go inside.
He couldn’t. Not yet.
He needed some space. They’d decided not to say anything to anyone else until tomorrow. “Daisy only arrived six hours ago,” Lee had said. “I don’t want to hit everyone with this news until she’s settled in a little.”
“It’s not about Daisy, is it?” he’d answered, and the words had felt like a lie in his mouth.
Was it about Daisy?
Hell, he definitely wasn’t going inside right now, because Daisy would probably be there.
He sat on the porch steps instead, hunching over to rest his elbows on his spread knees and brooding in the dark. A slew of different emotions roiled inside him, as choppy and confusing as the waves on the lake when the weather was changing.
This whole thing felt like a change in the weather, a change in the season. That unsettling feeling at the end of summer when the leaves rattled down from the trees in a sudden wind, and the temperature dropped forty degrees in an hour, only to come back up into the seventies again the next day.
He didn’t run his life on these kinds of emotions. He didn’t blow hot and cold. There’d been no place for that kind of thing after the lymphoma had finally claimed his dad eight years ago, when Tucker was just sixteen. No place, and even less motivation.
He’d had to grow up fast, with no time to waste. He’d had to put his family first. He’d needed two part-time jobs to help his mom with money. He’d been the one to sit up with her late at night while they talked about how to keep Mattie in school and whether Carla was old enough for a serious boyfriend. He knew the value of caution, and of thinking things through. He knew the honor in it, even more.
“It’s meaningless, isn’t it?” he asked the universe, on a mutter. This sense of changed destiny, of an unlooked-for miracle, it was just nonsense.
What am I asking for? A damn sign, or something?
He heard footsteps behind him.
It was her, Daisy, and his crazy heart told him that this was the sign he’d been asking for.
He turned around too eagerly, already half on his feet on the lowest porch step.
And of course it wasn’t her.
It wasn’t even Lee. It was Mary Jane.
“Oh.” The energy slumped out of him. The slump was so obvious that Mary Jane couldn’t miss it.
“Everything okay?” she asked with a lightness he didn’t buy for a moment. She knew something was wrong. Maybe she’d seen Lee disappear upstairs and close the door of her room. There was no light coming from Lee’s window, he saw. She was in there in the dark. Daisy’s room was next to hers, and from there the light shone brightly, spilling down onto the porch roof.
“Everything’s fine,” he growled, almost too low for Mary Jane to hear. She said nothing, and he let her silence prod him into saying more, still on a reluctant mutter. “Lee and I have been talking. We’ve worked it out. It’s okay.”
“Good.” It was firm, almost aggressive. She hesitated for a moment, as if she might have said something more, then turned to head back inside. She’d been waiting all evening for Alex to call, and Tucker guessed that he still hadn’t. He would be full of apologies when he finally did, and would probably bring her flowers the next time he saw her, but Tucker still wasn’t impressed by his ex-future-sister-in-law’s boyfriend.
“Mary Jane, is that you down there?” Daisy’s voice came from her window.
She lifted the sliding screen and stuck her head out, her hair haloed by the lamp on the desk nearby. Tucker took the last step down off the porch, looked up at her and felt like Romeo to her Juliet.
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks, if you can believe that nonsense!
“Oh, Tucker, sorry,” she sang out breezily. “I thought it was Mary Jane.”
It was. Dragging his gaze from the upper window, he found that Mary Jane had heard her sister’s voice and had stopped on the porch. She was looking at him as if she’d read the whole Romeo-and-Juliet thing in his body language, clearer than Shakespeare’s words.
“She’s here,” he told Daisy, his voice catching roughly in his throat.
“Or if you don’t mind, Tucker, I left my hairbrush in her car. Could you grab it for me and toss it up? Is it locked, Mary Jane?” she called a little louder.
Mary Jane cleared her throat, and called back, “No, it’s open. I can get it for you.”
“But I bet Tucker can throw better than you.”
“I could bring it up to you, Daisy,” Mary Jane said tetchily, starting across the porch and down the steps. “Nobody has to throw it!”
“I got it,” Tucker said quickly. The car was parked only yards away. He found the hairbrush on the front dash and held it up for Daisy to see. “You really want me to...?”
“Sure, why not.” She reached out for it. He threw it neatly, and she caught it even more neatly, laughing.
He thought he would remember that moment for the rest of his life.
Present Day
And he did, damn it, he still remembered it.
Abandoning the crooked paving stones, he went out the side entrance to his car, parked in its designated space at the front of the private parking lot, while Daisy began to browse the display areas. He could see her as he sat in the vehicle waiting for the engine to warm, in her bright blue biker-style jacket and black pants. She walked slowly, pausing every time something caught her attention.
She stepped back to appreciate the effect of the morning sun on the splashing water of a fountain, stepped forward again to run her hand across a piece of blue-gray slate. She picked up a glazed black pot planted with miniature bamboo and set it on the slate as if testing the blend of colors, and then she put it carefully back exactly where she’d found it.
This was what had drawn him so strongly ten years ago—the intensity of her response to beauty, the creative energy that ran through her, the bright light she seemed to give off, when the darkness of his father’s illness and its aftermath had still been hanging over him.
The car engine was warm. He had no reason to still be sitting here. He had to take himself off before she noticed...except that her browsing made her oblivious, the way she’d been oblivious that very first day.
The one thing he could be proud of, possibly. He’d kept his cataclysmic thunderclap of feeling to himself.
Lee hadn’t guessed. Marshall and Denise had had no idea. They’d gotten it all wrong. Marshall had accosted him in the privacy of the resort office after all the phone calls had been made—canceling the reception, the photographer, the flowers, the guests.
“I cannot believe you’re doing this, Tucker. My incredibly brave, beautiful girl is pretending she wants it, too, but I’m not fooled. This is coming from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know that. Maybe she genuinely thinks this is a mutual decision, but I’ve seen you withdrawing over the past few weeks. You’ve frozen her out until she thinks it’s coming from her, as well. I know what a man looks like when he’s truly in love with the woman he’s going to marry. You haven’t looked that way, and if it’s because my girl is disfigured after the—”
“Marshall, she’s not—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Disfigured. He’d never said that in his head, never felt that way.
“You don’t want that word? It’s too blunt for you?” Marshall had used it as a punishment and an accusation. “You don’t like facing the truth about your own motivations?”
It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, and Tucker had come dangerously close to saying Daisy’s name but he’d managed to stop himself, and if that meant that Marshall went on thinking that it was Lee’s accident at the heart of the problem, then this was collateral damage that he couldn’t avoid.
He didn’t want Daisy dragged into this. He didn’t want any additional hurt to Lee, or a mess worse than the mess they had already.
He would wait, he had decided. He would just lay low and do nothing, and in a few months when things had died down and when he had some perspective, he would take action, seek Daisy out, see if he still felt...and if she felt...and if there was any way they could possibly...
Hadn’t happened.
He drove out of the lot, remembering the shock he’d felt when he’d run into a very bubbly Daisy at a local convenience store just a few days after the canceled wedding. Hiding his pleasure behind dark sunglasses, he’d drawled, “You’re looking happy today.”
She’d told him, “Happy and really thrilled. I’m flying out to California tomorrow to start an internship with an amazing pastry chef. The opportunity came up so fast, I haven’t had time to breathe! Someone else canceled, and it turned out I was second on the list. I can’t believe it! Um...it’s good to see you, Tucker, but I have to run.”
And that was that.
Gone.
He’d never pursued it. Why would he trust in signs that pointed in two different directions at once, when he didn’t believe in signs in the first place? Why would he chase after something his head didn’t even want? Something that might only ever have been a symptom of the deeper problem between himself and Lee? Something nobody in either family would want? Something that fate had chosen to take out of his hands?
“Ten years later...” he muttered to himself as he drove.
Ten years later, incredibly, he’d felt exactly the same. Thunderclap. Across a crowded landscape display. Changing everything.
Magic.
Chemistry.
Whatever you wanted to call it.
It was just as strong, and he distrusted it just as much. He’d hidden it manfully during their brief meeting today, and he didn’t think she’d guessed. He hoped she hadn’t, because his beliefs and his morals were still the same, and this feeling about Daisy wasn’t something he believed in or wanted to pursue.
Not with his legacy of experience, and not with his current situation the way it was.
You see, there was a little thing called a marriage certificate, and call him old-fashioned, but, no matter what the circumstances, he didn’t think a man should go after one woman when he was already legally wed to someone else.
Chapter Four
“So I saw your half brother today,” Tucker’s mother, Nancy, told him that night.
She’d called him to see if he could come over and fix a leak in the U-bend pipe beneath the kitchen sink and change the lightbulb at the top of the stairs. At sixty-one years old, she was pretty good about most of that stuff.
He was proud of her, actually. She mowed her own lawn, changed all the lightbulbs she could reach, paid her bills on time. He’d in fact forbidden her to change the one at the top of the stairs, since it involved climbing onto a chair and leaning precariously into space.
With a trim, energetic figure and hair she’d allowed to remain its natural silvery gray, she could have married again if she’d wanted to, Tucker was certain, and yet to his knowledge she’d never come close. A couple times he’d almost asked her about it—“Did you love Dad that much?” Or maybe, “Did Dad scar you that badly?” But in the end he’d stayed silent.
“Oh, you did?” he said to her carefully now, about Jonah.
“He’s working at Third Central, the branch on the corner of Maple and Twenty-second Street, and I had checks to deposit,” Mom explained. “I don’t usually go to that branch, but I had a delivery down that way.” She had her own business as a florist now, having started in that field as a sales assistant after his dad became ill. “He’s looking so grown-up, I guess he’d be twenty-one by now.”
“About that, I think.”
“He didn’t recognize me.” She added, “Or if he did, he was pretending, the same way I was.”
There wasn’t much else to say. Jonah had been three years old at their dad’s funeral, a difficult imp of a kid who didn’t understand what was happening. Tucker’s mom had been horrified that Andrea would bring him. How could she do this? she’d said over and over. How could she do this?
She’d been devastated at Andrea’s presence, exhausted by the effort of dealing with it. Jonah crying and struggling in his mother’s arms had been the last straw on top of more previous last straws than Tucker could count.
His mom had found out about his dad’s affair three months after she’d learned about his cancer. Three months after that, she’d found out that the woman involved was eight months pregnant with Dad’s child.
But the order she’d found out about it wasn’t the order in which it had all happened. Dad had known he was ill months before he’d told his family, and he’d started the affair almost immediately “as a reaction.” The justification he’d used still made Tucker queasy with anger. I had to follow my guiding star. I had to go with how I felt. Me, not anyone else. I had to live life to the full, while I still had the chance.
That’s not how you react, Dad. Cancer is supposed to bring you closer to the people who love you, not send you off on a self-absorbed wild-goose chase for your lost youth.
Yeah.
What did you say about all that, eighteen years after Dad was gone?
“It’s not Jonah’s fault,” Mom said, as she’d said before, and it was true.
She’d talked a lot, at one time, about getting to know him. “He looks so much like you and Mattie when you were that age, Tucker.”
But it was impossible. There was still too much anger and mess, no possibility of any forgiveness between Andrea Lewers and his mom. His mom blamed Andrea for the affair because she couldn’t cope with blaming his dad. Andrea blamed his mom for shutting her out and dismissing her grief because somehow she’d loved his dad, too.
In the end, Tucker had steered his mother away from the idea of making any kind of connection with his half brother, and so they barely knew him. They knew him from a distance because Mom hadn’t been able to stop herself from keeping track of him.
“You didn’t go to that branch because you knew he was working there, did you?” Tucker accused gently.
She looked at him and sighed. “No, I didn’t. I’ve been so good about that these past couple years. No, it was a total coincidence. You’re right in what you’ve always said. Too much mess, and Jonah himself doesn’t need to be dumped in it.”
“I really think that’s the only way to go.” He felt a wash of relief on realizing that he didn’t have to argue the case.
“Speaking of mess, though...” his mom said.
“Yeah? Are we?”
She took a breath, a certain very mothery kind of breath. “Emma called a couple days ago, and we had a talk.”
“Oh, you did?” His wariness kicked in.
When his mom brought Emma into the conversation, the result was rarely a relaxing chat. Her manner turned plaintive, and she couldn’t hold herself back. “Tucker, I don’t think she wants this divorce, and I don’t understand why the two of you haven’t tried harder.”
