mention it sometimes. We say ‘the accident’ because you can’t just pretend away something that changed your life to that extent. We talk about Daddy—he was Superdad, after all.” She smiled, feeling her cheeks wobble with the effort. “But we don’t play the ‘if only’ game—at least not out loud, because it would drive us crazy.”
Jack nodded and looked at the picture again.
“Do you talk about it?” she asked gently.
“No.”
“Do you see Tucker?”
Grief darkened his eyes and stiffened his features once again. “Not often, though we’re both here now.”
She tried to imagine her life without Holly and couldn’t. “Maybe we should talk about the accident. Gianna says it’s time to let things go.” She said the words, but she didn’t mean them. She could be polite to Jack, even friendly. But she didn’t think she could quite forgive him. At least, not yet.
“How is Gianna?”
“Wonderful. She had a heart attack three years ago—that’s why I came back here to live—but she had surgery and has done great ever since.”
“Maybe I’ll get to see her.”
Arlie didn’t ask about his grandmother’s last days or her death. She was afraid if she delved too deeply into the well-being of any of the Llewellyns, she’d never be able to come out of the morass of memory again.
But there was Jack, for the first time in nearly half her life, sitting so close she could feel the warmth of him. That same warmth she’d felt before—
Before everything changed.
“I remember screaming,” she said without meaning to. “I didn’t realize no one could hear me because my larynx was injured. I wanted to comfort Holly because her foot hurt so much. Daddy wouldn’t answer us. I couldn’t find you. That’s all I remember.” There was more. But she wouldn’t go there. Couldn’t.
The prom had been the event of the school year for high school juniors and seniors. They’d rented the ballroom at the country club, having car washes and selling magazine subscriptions and candy bars to cover the expense.
Even in a high school as small as Miniagua’s, everyone knew there would be drinking at the prom, so the parents came up with the idea of hiring vans to provide transportation to the club.
Jack’s grandparents, under the auspices of Llewellyn’s Lures, owned their own limo, but Margaret said it was needed for business. This was how Arlie, Jack, Holly and Tucker ended up riding to and from the country club in the back of a twelve-passenger church van. Jesse Worth and Linda Saylors sat in front of them with Sam’s date, Cass Gentry. Sam, Nate, and Libby Worth sat behind Arlie’s father and stepmother in the front seat.
No one was particularly comfortable, and hardly any of them fastened their seat belts around their formal clothing. Arlie’s father—who always started every drive with the words “seat belts on?”—turned an unaccustomed deaf ear to the lack of clicking buckles from the backseats.
At first the girls had been embarrassed, but had joined in with the others when Dave Gallagher’s rumbling baritone and Gianna’s sweet soprano started singing “Dancing Queen.”
The next thing Arlie remembered was screaming.
“One time,” Arlie said, her throat aching, “Gianna came into Libby’s tearoom while I was cleaning. I had ‘Dancing Queen’ playing loud and my mop and I were dancing away. When I saw her face, it just killed me what I was doing to her. I went to shut it off, apologizing like mad all the way, and she just said, ‘Oh, no, honey, it’s like singing with your dad again,’ and turned it up some more. We danced through the whole song. I think I’ve played it a thousand times since then.”
Jack’s face was pale, his features set, and Arlie knew that whatever it had cost her to talk about that night, he’d paid a heavy price for listening, too.
“We’ve all healed,” she reminded him, keeping her voice level and quiet. She got up quickly, needing to move, not wanting to remember anything else about the accident and its aftermath. “More coffee?”
“Yes.” He followed her back to the counter. “The real reason I came here tonight was to apologize, but I don’t have any idea where to begin with you or with anyone else. I don’t know how to be back here. What to do when I run into Jesse or Libby or Holly. Do I say, ‘Gosh, guys, sorry my family’s limo came out on top when it did a head-on with the church van’? Or maybe, ‘Hey, look at the bright side—at least you lived’?”
His pain was palpable. She felt it on her skin, in the dryness of her eyes and the heavy beat of her heart.
“You were the only person who ever blamed you for the accident, Jack. Your father was driving the limo, not you, and he died, too. It wasn’t like your family didn’t suffer loss.”
She knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that they were wrong. She set the coffee carafe back on its heating unit and came to lean her elbows on the bar between them. “One person blamed you, that is,” she said quietly, holding his gaze, “but I didn’t blame you for the accident. I blamed you for leaving me.”
LAKE MINIAGUA WAS a small community. Most of its businesses and many of its residences were named with the titles of Cole Porter songs. The prolific songwriter had grown up in nearby Peru. The Anything Goes Grill and the Silver Moon Café were the primary restaurants. A salon and spa called It’s De-Lovely was near Rent-A-Wife, Gianna Gallagher’s business. Nate’s golf course was Feathermoor. The greenhouse was Old-Fashioned Garden. The Sea Chantey Convenience Store and Bait Shop and Through Thick and Thin Barbershop filled Main Street storefronts. Even some of the wine bottles Jack had seen at Anything Goes had names like The Beguine and Midsummer Night.
On the other side of the lake, near the fishing huts and Hoosier Hills Cabins and Campground, there was a second convenience store, a Laundromat and a usually closed pizza parlor—Miniagua’s abortive attempt at a strip mall.
At the end of the business district, before the bridge that led to the golf course, the old drugstore and sundry shop sat empty. Out for a morning run, Jack slowed as he passed the brick building, looking at it with eyes both contemplative and assessing.
He thought of the evening before. Of being in the same room with Arlie and wanting to stay and stay and stay. Of talking and laughing and drinking coffee that tasted like home.
They’d talked about the past and—to a lesser degree—about the present. Jack knew Arlie worked in a nearby hospital as a nurse but that her heart was with midwifery, even if she had little opportunity to practice those skills since returning to the lake. He knew and disliked—even though he had no right to even have an opinion—that she’d dated Chris Granger for two years. She’d said she loved quilting and cooking and working with Holly on choreography for the marching band.
He’d told her he loved woodworking more than anything else he’d ever done and that even though he’d lived and worked in several states, he liked the Northeast Kingdom and thought he’d stay there for at least the foreseeable future.
But he hadn’t told her about the twelve-year-old who was the real reason Jack made Vermont his home and had done things like buy life insurance and stuff a college fund with conservative investments. The boy who’d made him understand, finally, why he’d survived the prom-night accident. Whose grandparents would drive him down from South Bend for tomorrow’s funeral.
The geeky young genius who’d made him a father.
He hadn’t mentioned Charlie. Not even once.
* * *
ARLIE HATED FUNERALS, especially when she was only there because it was the polite thing to do. She’d loved Jack Llewellyn with all her heart