Every Time We Say Goodbye. Liz Flaherty
just been so loyal. I hate to shuffle it off to the salvage yard like it was nothing but a corroded bunch of metal.” Arlie put the water pitcher on the counter, holding it against Holly’s arm to make her squeal.
“It is a corroded bunch of metal.” Holly waited for Gianna to sit, then slid into her chair. “That hole in the driver’s-side floor is big enough you could drag your foot on the ground to stop the car the next time the brakes quit on you.”
“See?” Arlie pointed her fork at her. “That could really come in handy.”
“Girls.” With infinite patience, Gianna grabbed both their hands, nodded a stern and unspoken order for them to clasp each other’s as well and bowed her head for grace.
“How’s Chris?” Holly speared a chunk of tomato out of Arlie’s salad. “Is he off to California for the winter pretty soon?”
“I think so.”
“Does Jack know you and he are seeing each other?”
“I think he does. But why should he care?” Although Arlie had to admit—to herself, at least—that it would be kind of nice if he cared. There was nothing unnatural about that, was there? Didn’t everyone want old boyfriends they hadn’t seen in half their lifetimes to care about new boyfriends? Even if the new ones weren’t quite the real thing.
“Mollie saw Jack and Tucker together when she was tending bar at Anything Goes yesterday. She said it looked a little tense, but there was no shouting or bloodshed. When they left, they hugged.”
“Did she talk to them?” asked Arlie. She was hungry—her growling stomach was proof of that—but she wasn’t at all sure she could swallow food. Shades of adolescence, when being in love had completely decimated her appetite. She sipped from her water glass instead, sighing with pleasure at the taste of the fruit-infused liquid.
“Tucker talked for a while after Jack left. She said he was just as nice and funny as he always was. Jack was a big tipper—Mollie thought he left twice as much as the bar bill was.” Holly lifted a hand to forestall Gianna’s reproof. “I know, Mama. That comes down on the wrong side of snoopy, but there you go.”
“He always was a big tipper,” Arlie remembered. His grandmother had told him tipping was both unnecessary and a certain way to encourage “laborers” to work less and complain more, so he’d overcompensated for her parsimony. It was one of the things Arlie loved about him.
“I think we should invite them for Thanksgiving supper.” Gianna put another helping of chicken on Arlie’s plate even though she wasn’t finished with the first one. There was a reason she was consistently twenty pounds overweight, and Gianna Gallagher was it. “We always have dinner at St. Paul’s when we help with the community meal, but it would be kind of fun to have a supper party later in the day.” Pink washed her cheeks. “I thought I’d invite Max.”
Arlie exchanged an amused glance with Holly. Although Max Harrison, who was the high school principal, had been part of Gianna’s life for several years, she’d always kept the relationship private. The girls had been invited to dinner at her house when he was there a few times, but that was as far as it had gone. They still called him Mr. Harrison and had great difficulty drinking wine in his presence.
“That would be nice,” said Holly. “I’ll call Tuck. You can ask Jack, Arlie.”
“I won’t be seeing him.” Saying it sent regret skipping haphazardly across her thoughts. She laid down her fork. She was thirty-three years old, for heaven’s sake. She was a registered nurse-midwife who owned her own home and even her own lawn mower—which, admittedly, she’d been unable to start by herself since the day she brought it home from Sam’s Hardware. Regardless of that, she was in charge of her own destiny. “Well,” she said, “maybe.”
* * *
“I DID SOME looking around and found you one.” The owner of the only automobile dealership in Sawyer sounded excited over the phone. “It’s a great deal, Arlie. The business went under before the new-car smell was out of it. You won’t even have to paint over anything.”
“I’ll come in and look at it tomorrow,” she promised. “I’m waiting for deliveries today and can’t get away till everything’s here and arranged.” It was one of the Rent-A-Wife jobs she liked least, because there was too much sit-and-wait time involved, but it was her day off at the hospital and she didn’t want Gianna moving furniture and appliances.
Besides, the deliveries were for the Dower House and she liked being there. She’d cleaned it again after Penny Phillipy worked her magic and Jack repaired damaged wood trim and floorboards. The house smelled like fresh paint overlaid with lemon oil, paste wax and window cleaner. New carpet had been laid upstairs and area rugs had been put in place, ranging from room-size in the living room to a braided oval where the kitchen table and chairs would go.
Three boxes of books were open on the floor in the little library, and she and the puppy shelved them while they waited, although the puppy wasn’t much help. Arlie dusted the volumes as she went, grinning because it was obvious Jack still loved reading Westerns. His Louis L’Amour collection was shabby, falling open to favorite places in the same manner as her own beloved copies of Pride and Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables. The Zane Grey books her father had given him were even worse, the book-club bindings long worn off the edges of the covers, the gilt titles faded away from the spines.
She’d lost track of how many rainy-day dates they’d spent sitting on the floor of the used book store in Sawyer. Jack’s interest in carpentry had been born one Saturday when he helped the store’s owner unpack a crate of books on woodworking.
“That will drive your grandmother crazy,” Arlie had said when he purchased a stack of the almost-new volumes.
He’d shrugged. “She’ll never see them. As long as we show up for dinner and don’t wear jeans when she has company, she doesn’t care what we do.”
That was true. He and Tucker had spent as much time as they could in Ellen Curtis’s little yellow rental house on the other side of the lake, but they’d lived in Llewellyn Hall with their grandparents and their father.
Jack still had the carpentry books, though they were much the worse for wear. Arlie placed them at eye level on the shelf.
The puppy, named Walter Mittens because his feet were all white but called Wally because Holly kept referring to him as “Holly’s little Wally,” wore himself out running to the front door every time he heard a noise. Since it was late autumn and the wind was blowing the last of the leaves from the sycamores, oaks and maples on the grounds of Llewellyn Hall, he heard many noises.
Arlie arranged the new living room furniture while the deliveryman assembled the beds in the master suite and the bedroom that would be Charlie’s. It was telling that Jack bought everything new for the Dower House. Even lamps and tables came from a store in Kokomo. She hadn’t asked him about it—she knew without him saying so that he wanted no part of the Llewellyn legacy.
The new furnishings were comfortable and warm. The couch and chairs were upholstered in pewter gray and navy, with sudden startling flashes of dark red lending vibrancy to the setting. The tables were walnut, with rounded corners and scooped drawer pulls. The dining table and its six chairs, she noted with a snort of laughter, exactly matched the ones she had at the Toe.
Although the appliances had worked, he’d replaced them all. The old ones had been transferred directly to the house Habitat for Humanity was refurbishing in Sawyer.
She wondered, although she didn’t want to, how long he intended to stay. If Llewellyn’s Lures or the Hall sold right away, this would all be a waste.
She’d just finished making the beds and was following Wally down the stairs when the puppy hurled himself down the last three steps and at the front door, yelping wildly.
“You know,” she said mildly, bending to pick him up, “if you’re going to be a yapper, we need to talk about it. Hasn’t Caruso convinced