Beauty and the Black Sheep. Jessica Bird

deal was as she glanced over at Nate. “That smells good. What are you making?”

      “Stock. I’m putting what’s left of that chicken to good use.” He turned back to a cutting board and started in on an onion. Half of the thing was reduced to a pile of perfectly cut little squares in moments. The other half he cut in long shreds. “Hey, I told the tow truck I called to move Lucille here, okay? I’ve got to figure out what’s wrong with her.”

      And he fixes cars, she thought. As well as names them.

      “Fine with me. You can put her in the barn out back.”

      “Thanks.” He picked up the fluffy white mélange, threw it in the pot and stirred.

      When Joy came downstairs with their grandmother, Frankie got a load of Grand-Em’s outfit for the day. It was a lavender satin gown, and though the thing must have been fifty years old, it still looked beautiful. Somehow, Joy managed to keep all the old gowns in good shape, spending hours with a needle patching and stitching them back together, year after year. God only knew where she got the patience.

      “You need anything?” Frankie asked Nate.

      He looked up and grinned. “Nothing you can buy me.”

      With a wink thrown to Joy, he went back to his work.

      As they left, Frankie’s mouth was set. She wasn’t sure what she resented more, his harmless flirtation or her reaction to it.

      They headed out into the sunshine to her old maroon Honda. Grand-Em, who was used to being chauffeured, was eased in the back seat and Joy sat beside her. During the drive along Lake Road, the old woman narrated landmarks, commenting on the houses she’d gone to parties in years ago. It was the same patter every time, the same names, the same dates. The speech seemed to have a calming effect on her, as if the old familiarity pulled her mind together temporarily, and Joy responded at the right intervals while Frankie drove.

      Downtown, such as it was, was built around a square of lawn that had four thick-trunked maples at each of the corners. In the center, there was a six-sided white gazebo that was a point of pride to residents. Big enough to house the twenty-piece orchestra that played there twice a summer, it was mostly used by tourists as a backdrop for pictures. Glowing in the morning sun, it stood out against the green lawn like a silvery cage.

      The Lake Road split in two around the gazebo, rejoining on the far side. Fronting the streets, were the local bank, Adirondack Trust & Savings, a drugstore known as Pills, the post office and Mickey’s Groceries. There were also some touristy shops that sold Adirondack-style trinkets, as well as a few antique stores that hiked their prices up by a factor of ten in the months between May and September. Barclay’s Liquors and the Hair Stoppe were on the far end.

      “I’m going into the bank and the post office,” Frankie said, parallel parking into an open space. “Why don’t you two wait here?”

      “Sure,” Joy murmured while craning her neck around and looking at the cars parked on either side of the road. With all the Independence weekend visitors, they were a fancier lot than the local traffic. The Jaguars, Mercedes and Audis signified that the owners of the mansions were back in residence.

      As Frankie got out, she wondered who her sister was searching for.

      

      He would be up this weekend, Joy thought. He always came for the Fourth of July.

      Grayson Bennett drove a black BMW 645Ci. Or at least that had been what he’d come in last year. Two years ago, he’d had a big, dark red Mercedes. Before that, it had been a Porsche. His first car had been an Alfa Romeo convertible.

      For a woman who didn’t care about the automotive industry in the slightest, Joy knew a hell of a lot about cars, thanks to him.

      There were a few people walking the clean, pale sidewalks and she sifted through them. Gray was easy to pick out of the crowd. He was tall, imposing and he didn’t walk places, he marched. He also tended to wear sunglasses, dark ones that played off his black hair and made him look even more intense.

      She realized that Gray would be thirty-six this year. His birthday bash, held every year at the Bennett estate, was one of the highlights of the social season although it wasn’t as if she or Frankie were invited. The Moorehouses had once mixed with the Bennetts regularly, back in Grand-Em’s day, but with the declining fortunes of Joy’s family, the two had ceased moving in the same circles.

      That didn’t mean she couldn’t picture a different scenario, however.

      A favorite daydream of hers was to imagine going to that party, dressed beautifully, floating among his guests until he noticed her and saw her as she really was. As a woman, not some child. He would take her into his arms and kiss her and then they would go off somewhere quiet together.

      In real life, their encounters were a lot less romantic. In the summer months, if she saw him around town, she’d plant herself in his path. He would stop and she’d hold her breath, willing him to remember her name. He always did. He’d smile down at her and sometimes even take off his sunglasses as he asked about her family.

      From the left, she saw a BMW approach and she leaned forward. It was the wrong kind.

      As she settled back against the seat, letting Grand-Em natter on about the opening of the town library back in 1936, she couldn’t ignore how one-sided her attraction was.

      She looked down at her bare ring finger. If she kept up the teenage fantasy, she knew she was on the winding trail to spinsterhood. She’d probably end up weird Auntie Joy who’d never married and smelled like mothballs and denatured perfume.

      Now there was a picture.

      If they could only leave White Caps and move somewhere with more people her own age, she might be able to get Gray Bennett off her mind. Maybe it wasn’t his fantastic good looks or his dark, sexy voice or those pale blue eyes.

      Maybe it was just a lack of viable alternatives.

      “Did you know that my fourth great-grandfather built that gazebo?” Grand-Em inquired. She wasn’t looking for an answer. It was an invitation for a prompting.

      “Really. Tell me about it,” Joy murmured, putting her hand down in her lap.

      “It was in 1849. There had been a terrible winter that year and the old one had collapsed because of the snow. Great Grand Pa-Pa declared the structure unsafe….”

      Grand-Em spoke with a proper intonation, her words carefully considered as if they were a gift to the listener and therefore must be chosen with respect and affection. And Joy usually found them fascinating. She loved listening to the old stories, particularly about the balls and the clothes.

      But not today.

      After nearly a decade of pining for a man she couldn’t have, Joy was struck with how pathetic her attraction to Gray was. Pinning hopeless dreams on a fantasy was like feeding yourself with chocolate. A great short-term buzz with no lasting value.