and almost no value to anyone unable to see them. A shower, though, offered universal appeal: wash away your cares, your sins, the evidence, the damage, the residue – whatever it was you needed; she would choose a well-timed shower over a diamond any day.
As she flexed her hand, she looked at the bag of notebooks where she’d set them on the seat beside her. Opening the bag, she saw maybe a dozen blue composition books, a neat stack tied up tightly with the same all-purpose twine she’d seen, and used, everywhere on their farm when she was a kid. Twine was almost as good as duct tape for making what were meant to be temporary repairs, but which inevitably became permanent.
The notebooks looked almost new. Likely her father had found them in a recently unpacked box – leftover office supplies, unneeded in his full-time ‘retirement’. As if he was the one who’d kept the business records to begin with.
The clock on the dash read seven-forty, and Meg’s empty stomach growled in response. She would stop by KFC on her way to get her daughter from the library, where Savannah and her best friend Rachel were hanging out. Supposedly. Supposedly they had a biology project to research, but she doubted this. They could research almost anything from the computer at home. Knowing Rachel – a bubbly girl whose existence disproved the theory that blondes were the airheads – there were boys involved, and the library was just a staging ground that the girls imagined would fool their parents.
Who might the boys be? Savannah revealed so little about her life these days. Somewhere between getting her first period and her first cell phone, Savannah had morphed from a curious, somewhat needy, somewhat nerdy little girl into an introverted cipher. She was nothing like Meg had been as a teen, which was a good thing. Savannah was just as reliable, but not as caught up in all that boy–girl business. Not grafted onto the heart of a young man who would later hate her for betraying him. Not, Meg hoped, destined to live with her own heart cleaved in two.
Razor sharp, some memories were.
She pushed the past away and sat another minute in the air-conditioning, stealing just a little more time for herself before moving on to her next work shift. Food. Kid. Reports. Case studies. Thirty minutes on the Bowflex, if she could dredge up the energy – or maybe she’d just spare her arm, let it have another night off. And now that it was feeling nearly normal again, she put the car in gear and headed for the library.
Carson watched the sun easing itself closer to the low mountains, a glass of sangria in front of him on the thatch-covered outdoor bar. Val had gone to work out with Wade, her trainer, leaving him alone with his musings. He was accustomed to being alone with his musings, had produced some of his best work this way. But this afternoon, the musings were neither creative nor as positive as a man who’d just made love with a vibrant younger woman ought to be having.
Though the bar was shaded, he kept his sunglasses on, along with his ball cap – the ineffective disguise of celebrities everywhere. St Martin wasn’t as rife with fans as most stateside locales, but he’d been approached for autographs seven times already in the two days they’d been there. This, however, wasn’t the reason for his moodiness; in fact, he was having a tough time identifying what the reason was. He had no reason to be moody whatsoever: in addition to having just had sex, he’d recently won two Grammy awards, his Seattle condo was under contract for more than the asking price, his healthy parents were about to celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary, and he would soon marry a woman who didn’t hold his unseemly past against him – a woman who’d done two Sports Illustrated features, who could have pretty much any man she wanted. Maybe it was this last part that was hanging him up.
‘I know doing this is a cliché,’ he said to the bartender, a short-haired buxom brunette, ‘but let me get your opinion about something.’
‘Of course,’ she smiled, her white teeth artificially bright and even. She set a towel aside and leaned onto the bar in front of him, her V-neck blouse straining.
He sat back a little. ‘Why would a woman – young, beautiful, appealing – like yourself – what would make a woman like you want to marry a worn-out guy like me?’
‘You are the rock star, no?’
Rock star. That had been his tag for a dozen years now, and still it sounded strange to him, and wrong. He was a songwriter, a singer, front man for a band that sold out most of its venues – all of that was true. And yes, the music was rock music – though broader in scope than most, modeled after Queen and the socially conscious, always-fresh music of Sting, whom he’d met for the first time last year. Still, he didn’t see himself as a rock star, though he recognized that he lived the life of one. It was a strange disconnection, one he’d been aware of peripherally for a long time, but which had only in the last year or two come into focus. Probably the awareness was a result of his age – that midlife business his manager, Gene Delaney, said stalked men more relentlessly than band sluts. Gene had a way with words. Whatever it was, Carson felt increasingly dissatisfied with the rock-star label: it sounded shallow, two-dimensional at best. He wanted to be thicker than that. He wanted to be substantial in life, had once believed his deeply felt music would make him that way.
‘Right,’ he told the bartender. ‘I’m the rock star. Are you saying that explains it?’
‘Non,’ she said. ‘It is good, yes, mais non pas tout – it is not everything. You have a handsome face, and very good … qu’est-ce que c’est?’ She gestured to indicate his body. ‘And you are not so much an American asshole.’
He raised his eyebrows, and the bartender clarified, ‘Not to hit his woman, or make a woman service him. You are généreux, non?’
He shrugged. He supposed he was generous – he always tipped well above what was expected, news he assumed had spread to all the staff quickly. He donated to several charities, worked with Habitat for Humanity twice a year – some people might call that generous. To him it all seemed like the least he could do when he had so much money that it seemed to replicate itself.
Money management, now that was a job in itself, and he didn’t have time for it. He left that to his mom, who liked to tease him that a wife and half a dozen kids would help him put the money to use. She thought it was a shame Val had so much money of her own. ‘She’ll be too independent, Carson, mark me on that.’ When his parents came to Seattle to meet Val at New Year’s, his mom told her about a seven-bedroom Ocala estate she’d heard was for sale: ‘Plenty of space for you two and all the kids,’ she said, not even attempting to be subtle. ‘Kids?’ Val said. ‘Ocala?’
Carson told the bartender, ‘My fiancée is seventeen years younger than me – not that I mind, but shouldn’t she?’
The woman reached over and laid one manicured finger on his arm. ‘Must be your motor is good, eh?’
‘For now.’
‘Mais oui. What else is there?’
When Meg drove into the parking lot of Ocala’s main library, her headlights swept over and past her daughter sitting alone, earbuds in, on a bench near the entrance. Savannah stood, lifting her patch-covered book bag from the bench and swinging it onto her shoulder as Meg pulled to the curb.
‘Hi, honey,’ she said when Savannah climbed in, loudly enough to be heard over whatever was playing on the iPod. ‘Take those out, will you?’
Savannah pulled out the earbuds and hung the cord around her neck. ‘Is that better?’ She turned and shoved her bag and the notebooks into the backseat, then grabbed the plastic bag with the fried chicken and brought it up to the front.
‘It is,’ Meg said, making herself not react to Savannah’s rudeness. She knew it wasn’t intentional, knew from past arguments