feel the man’s stare. He knew what had happened, and he was going to say something. Oh, not to Charlie’s face, but probably within earshot of someone related to him.
It was amazing—truly—how life could turn you around in a complete one-eighty. No warning, no clues how to handle it, just here—your life isn’t what you thought.
Now what are you gonna do?
He’d always known the next step. Since he’d been a kid. He’d known the exact next step to take to get what he wanted, to do what was wanted of him. He’d always known.
Now he didn’t have a damn clue, sitting here in a cab, after some bizarre one-night stand with a goat farmer. With tattoos.
He couldn’t decide what next step to take. The only thing his mind seemed capable of doing was recognizing the smell of lemon, on her skin, in her hair.
“That’ll be twenty-eight fifty,” Dan said through a mouth of chew.
The woman dug through her purse, some fringy thing that looked completely out of place against the jeans, ratty sweatshirt and frayed tennis shoes she was wearing.
“Tell you what, Meg, you just put together a nice soap basket for wifey and we’ll call it even.”
Meg. So she had a name. Meg. A simple name for an incredibly complicated moment in his life. And now that name would probably haunt him for years to come. Lovely.
“That’ll be fourteen twenty-five.” Dan’s eyes met Charlie’s in the rearview mirror as Dan brought a bottle to his lips and spat some chew into it.
Charlie’s stomach turned and he had to close his eyes to keep from losing it completely. Still, he dug into his pants, pulled out his wallet and handed over a credit card without meeting Dan’s accusing glance.
Dan wasn’t known in New Benton for his kindness. Small-town cab work wasn’t for the faint of heart. He’d had more than one brawl with a man over cab fare, to the extent that most knew not to mess with him. He might’ve been getting on in years, but he’d as soon bash you over the head with the Louisville Slugger he kept in the passenger seat as he would offer you a smile.
But he’d called this woman Meg and offered her a barter and a smile. Charlie was beginning to think she was a fictional creature. Like some kind of siren or goddess.
It’d make this premidlife crisis a hell of a lot easier if she was. But he was too practical to even allow himself the fantasy. She had a name. She was real.
Dan returned the credit card. No receipt offered, but Charlie started to push the door open anyway.
“Oh, and, Charlie?”
Charlie raised his eyebrows at Dan’s pleasant tone. “Yeah?”
“Added tip for ya.”
Tip probably meant doubled the fare. Charlie couldn’t bring himself to care, so he nodded. He’d consider this penance. He closed the door of the taxi behind him, breathing through the dizziness and blinking against the bright sun. His car was parked in the corner lot, the Shack looking particularly worse for the wear in the daylight.
The only other car in the lot was an old truck. No, not just old. Antique. But it was more recently painted a bright blue, the words Hope Springs Farm painted in red, with an illustration of a goat.
Seriously. Alternative dimension he’d fallen into.
It wasn’t one he wanted to face. He didn’t want to look at Meg, or offer a lame goodbye or lamer apology. He wished he’d never heard her name. He only wanted to go back to his downtown apartment and find normal again.
But as mixed-up as his world was, if he had anything left in this new version of his life, it’d at least be that he was a decent person.
He was a decent person, right? Maybe he’d been a little ruthless at times, a little hard, a little unbending, but...
“Well, it was certainly an interesting turn of events,” she said.
When he looked up, she was already inching toward her truck, forcing her mouth into some approximation of an awkward smile.
“That it was,” he replied, following her lead and taking a few backward steps toward his car.
“And, um, good luck with the job thing. I’m sure you’ll land on your feet.”
“Thanks. And I’m sorry for your loss.” Odd to find it wasn’t just a rote thing to say; he meant it. She was nice enough, and loss was always hard.
“Thanks,” she replied, her voice tinged with surprise. But then she lifted her hand in a little wave and turned away from him.
He found himself watching her. The confident way she walked to her truck, the way the tasseled, beaded colorful purse shimmied and glinted in the sun. She was a conglomeration of things that didn’t make sense.
He turned to his car but then just stared at it. Funny, it didn’t seem to make much sense either. It fit the man he’d thought he was, but wasn’t anymore.
Charles Andrew Wainwright. Oldest child. Successful businessman. Always in control, always responsible and always serious.
That felt like another person. A stranger. But he didn’t know what to do with that feeling when it was who he was, who he’d always been.
So all he could do was go home and hope the feeling would pass.
* * *
MEG WORKED HERSELF to the bone. She ignored her aching muscles, her pounding headache and her rumbling stomach and worked with the soap molds until she’d lost the light.
She’d made up more than a little basket for Dan’s wife. Part embarrassment, part because Meg was one of the few people who knew Dan’s wife was going through chemo right now.
Which oddly made Meg wonder about Charlie. Charlie. So odd to hear a name after the intimacies they’d shared if not remembered.
He didn’t look like a Charlie. Of course, he didn’t look like a Charles or Chuck either. She wasn’t sure what he looked like; she only knew that watching Dan scold him in a roundabout way had made her even more curious about him.
A man who so obviously belonged in her father’s world but had been born into this one. She didn’t know people like that. Her family, the people she’d grown up with, they’d all been the same kind. They hadn’t all been bad people, though she’d desperately held on to that belief as a teenager. It just had been a world she couldn’t get comfortable in.
Cleaning up her workroom, she frowned. Was it the world, or was it her? What was it about her family that kicked her back to a place where she’d lose herself? She wanted to blame them, and she couldn’t count them blameless, but she was too old to ignore her own role in this.
Grief and pain were hard, but that was life. She could build this goat farm and build her business, and grief and pain would still touch her. But if she allowed it to fell her every time...well, things could quite easily get worse than a bender and a beyond embarrassing one-night stand.
She couldn’t let things like loss do this to her, or she’d lose so much more. What was the point, really, when she could mourn Grandma in her own way? She didn’t need the Carmichaels’ permission for grief.
She didn’t need anyone’s permission to feel or act. It was easy to forget that when Mom was so intent on crushing her like a distasteful bug. Mom would never understand that Meg was made from a different mold; she’d always hold Meg at fault for her inability to shape herself into what a proper Carmichael was supposed to look like.
Meg was too old to let that knock her down, too far into recovery, into rebuilding her life. She had to be better than this, and she would be.
Workroom clean, she grabbed the fancy basket of soaps she’d made up for Elsie and decided not to wait to deliver it. The world was dusky, but it was early yet.
She