Back to McGuffey's. Liz Flaherty
to work a year before college, you know, because I was going to be a nurse. A four-year-degree one—I could have learned to stop fainting at the sight of blood. Really I could. And then I was going to marry Ben and have four children. You know, two boys and two girls like you did only my boys were going to be older than the girls.”
Penny Elsbury listed to one side and sat up straight on the bar stool in her kitchen. “Is it just me or is it getting really tired in here?”
Kate frowned at Penny. “I’m not tired. It must just be you.”
“And they let you go why? Nobody ever bled there, so they didn’t know about your problem.” Penny squinted at her glass, too, then gave Kate a confused look that would have been funny if Kate had been sober. Which she wasn’t exactly.
“They said they couldn’t afford me.” Kate nodded sagely. “That poverty-level salary they were paying me for six-day weeks was more than the law firm of Shyster...Schuyler...Schuyler and Lund could stand.” She set down her glass. “I don’t know what to do. I never did go to college, you know. I meant to, but I didn’t.”
“I know.” Penny nodded sadly. “Me neither.”
“And I never married Ben and had babies.” Oh, no. Three glasses of very cheap wine weren’t enough to stop that particular pain. Kate had to concentrate on holding her mouth steady and keeping her eyes from tearing up. Not marrying Ben—she could live with that. But no babies? Not nearly so easy. She wouldn’t have been insistent on four—just a couple would have been enough. Even one.
“Me neither.” Penny nodded again. She was still tilting on her stool.
“You couldn’t. You married Dan and had his babies. He wouldn’t have liked it if you’d married Ben, too,” Kate said.
“Nah, he wouldn’ta cared if I married Ben. Would you, darlin’?” Penny smiled at Dan when he came into the kitchen and steadied her on her stool.
“Probably would have. Ben’s a family practice doctor and we have more need of an orthodontist.” He kissed the back of Penny’s neck and reached across the counter for Kate’s glass. “More, Katy?”
“Please.”
Dan poured the last drops of the wine into the women’s Shrek glasses and sat on the stool beside his wife’s. “You heard he’s moving back to town? At least for the summer.”
Kate blinked. “Who?”
“Ben.”
“But he left. He practices down in Boston.”
“He says spring just isn’t the same without Vermont mud.”
She thought—albeit not clearly—of Ben McGuffey and the last day he’d been her boyfriend. They’d sat on bar stools similar to these in his father’s tavern on her twenty-fourth birthday and he’d said he didn’t think he’d be able concentrate on both her and his residency and he needed to break up. For a while.
She’d sat there sipping diet cola with a maraschino cherry garnish and a shot of grenadine in it and wondered why he didn’t hear her heart breaking. Surely it made a splintering sound, didn’t it?
“I wonder why he really wants to come back. He doesn’t like spring. He only likes it on the mountain when he can ski.” Deciding the last little bit of wine might be crossing her own personal line, she slid off her seat and went to pour herself some coffee. She filled a cup halfway and returned to the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room.
Dan shrugged. “All I know is that he’s staying the summer.”
Penny frowned at him. “You bicycle and ski with him every time he comes back to see his folks. How can you not know?”
“It’s been months since the last time he was here. Christmastime, as a matter of fact.”
Kate didn’t like thinking about Ben, about what might have been, although she’d spent an uncomfortable amount of time doing just that.
Ben had gotten married after he joined a practice in an affluent Boston suburb—she’d even sent a gift—but he and the pretty socialite had been divorced a few years later.
Kate had been engaged for a time in her mid-twenties, but had given Tark Bridger’s ring back due to a mutual lack of interest. They’d broken up in the same bar as she and Ben had, talking over Maeve McGuffey’s potato soup about a future they didn’t want to share. The next time she saw Tark, she introduced him to the woman he married six months later.
She’d been busy in the way that people were. She’d worked, gained and lost the same twenty pounds several times over the years and been inordinately proud of Penny and Dan’s children as they arrived. When she passed thirty, she started to think maybe it was time for her to get married and start a family, but no one had been around to help complete the equation. As a thirty-seventh birthday gift, her gynecologist had said if she had childbearing in mind, she’d better get to it.
Kate tried not to hear that particular ticking clock. She didn’t like to think about the babies she’d wanted and never had.
She was finding that a few glasses of wine made that a little difficult. More than a little.
She and Ben had seen each other often over the years. They always smiled, talked and exchanged looks that were at once familiar and bemused. They danced together at weddings and avoided each other’s eyes at christenings, or at least Kate avoided his. They held hands at funerals in a way that was comforting but lacking the chemistry of their youth. She thought maybe magic wasn’t meant for her at all.
“I’m a spinster, and the fact that I even use that word in conversation means I spend too much time reading historical novels.” She made the announcement to the contents of her coffee cup, overwhelmed by sadness. “And now I’m unemployed on top of it. What else can happen?”
“Now there’s a loaded question.” Penny shook her head at her. “I think the last time Dan asked that was when I told him I was pregnant for the fourth time. The washing machine heard me say it and broke down immediately.”
Kate snorted. “Washing machines don’t have ears. They might sense things, but they don’t hear them.”
“It really worries me,” said Dan, “that not only do I listen to the conversations you two have, sometimes they almost make sense to me.”
“Aunt Kate?” Dan and Penny’s second daughter, Mary Kate, stood in the kitchen doorway, the cordless phone clutched to the flat chest of the Denver Broncos pajamas she wore to upset her Patriots-fan father. Her eyes were wide and horrified. “The fire department buzzed in on call waiting. They called here figuring Mom and Dad would know where you were. I guess the lady who lived in the other half of your duplex fell asleep while she was cooking and the whole place burned down.”
Kate stared at her goddaughter, not quite comprehending. “Burned down? My house? Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am. They said it twice.”
“Come on.” Dan tossed Kate her coat and put Penny’s around her shoulders. “I’ll drive you over.”
A few minutes later, they stood at the charred remains of the saltbox house Kate had bought ten years ago. Firefighters, their faces streaked with soot, were checking the site for new flames shooting out of places still glowing hot in the darkness. The yard was a mire of mud and hopelessness.
Neighbors in pajamas hugged her, relieved to see her in one piece. The tenant who’d lived in the other half of the house had left with friends. She’d left carrying the plastic bowl of cookies something had compelled her to rescue.
Kate stood unmoving as near the rubble as the firefighters allowed. Her cat leaped from her next-door neighbor’s arms and came to stand against her legs as though to protect her.
She felt as though a block of lead was lodged in her chest. It wasn’t exactly heartbreak—everyone