The Happiness Pact. Liz Flaherty
makeup before they left the airport.
“Of course I know that. I’ve read Gone with the Wind at least once a year ever since seventh grade. But I figure this is the closest I’m going to come to Tara in this lifetime.” She knelt to look at the crocuses peering out from between the tulips. The flowers were the same as the ones that grew at home, but Tennessee was well ahead of Indiana on the color scale. “It’s so nice to be here. I’m ready for a glimpse of spring, aren’t you?”
More than a glimpse, she realized. The depression that was nipping at her heels was becoming frightening. She needed light, lots of light, and February in the Midwest offered very little. Spring tossed other demons in her path, but at least she got to fight them with sunshine in her arsenal.
“I think the long winter is easier for me because I travel so much.” Tucker’s eyes were darker than usual, and he wasn’t smiling. “What’s wrong, Lib?”
Am I trying too hard? “Nothing.” She kept her voice bright. “Except I’m hungry. You picked me up at zero dark thirty this morning and all I’ve had since the drive-through are those crackers on the plane, which I lost while we were landing in Detroit. I never knew Detroit was on the way to Nashville, did you?”
“You learn new geography every time you fly.” He helped her straighten, then went on in a truly appalling Humphrey Bogart voice, “Stick with me, sweetheart, and you’ll be throwing up all over the world.”
She laughed, elbowing him, and didn’t draw away when he pulled her in close and kept his arm around her as they went to the on-site restaurant for some lunch.
“Where do we go from here?” she asked after they’d ordered and she’d consumed a small pot of tea.
“Downtown.”
They walked for miles, stopping to listen politely to every fresh-air musician they passed and leave generous tips in open guitar cases. They rode a tourist bus all over town, ending at the Grand Ole Opry.
“This was the only place my parents ever went on vacation,” she remembered. “They never took us, but every couple of years, they’d hire someone to help with the milking and come down for a few days. Going to the Hermitage, walking around downtown and listening to the heart’s echoes in the Ryman just now—it felt as if I was with my mom. She loved it here. It was where she grew up, and even though she didn’t have any family other than us, she still felt at home here. Dad brought her down when she was sick. He always thought the trip shortened her life, but even if it did, it gave her joy she wouldn’t have found anywhere else.”
Libby didn’t know how many years it had been since she’d wept. The losses were things she kept buried in a safe place. Arlie and Holly’s mother had once called that place a pocket behind her heart, because grief wasn’t measured by tears. Libby remembered feeling so relieved when Gianna said that, because maybe it meant the girl who’d stood dry-eyed at her parents’ funerals wasn’t broken after all.
She didn’t cry tonight, either, sitting beside Tucker in the Grand Ole Opry watching some of the same artists her mother had loved in addition to ones Libby listened to. But her heart ached to a depth she’d forgotten existed. It was good to feel something other than numbness, she supposed, but she hadn’t thought feeling this much would be as heavy as it was. Not after all this time.
Tucker laughed beside her, drawing her attention to the performer on stage. He’d been around since her mother’s time. Oh, her mother used to say, he’s a case, he is. He grew up on the same mountain as I did, only a little deeper in the hollers.
And there he was, at least a decade older than Crystal Worth would have been, still singing the songs she’d sung as she cleaned the redbrick farmhouse where Jesse still lived and helped with the milking. Libby wondered if her mother had ever sat in this row when she came to the Opry. Maybe in this very seat.
“Dad used to say—” Libby spoke before she knew the words were coming, and they stuck in her throat. She had to clear it before going on, leaning to speak into Tucker’s good ear under cover of the music. “He used to say Mom should have sung at the Opry, that her voice deserved a bigger audience.”
Tucker took her hand. “He was probably right. Remember when all the churches had Bible school together in the clubhouse at the lake? Your mom always led the singing and she’d get us to sing, too, no matter how bad we were. I still know all the words to ‘Deep and Wide.’”
Libby chuckled, the weight of old grief lifting a little. “Father Doherty said we created whitecaps on the lake when we sang. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.”
Tucker laughed, leaning his head back. She looked at the line of his throat above the sweater he wore and thought how handsome he was. How much she appreciated him holding her hand. And how good that felt.
Something in the pool of too-intense emotions she was feeling right then warned her that maybe it felt a little too good. It was like sitting where her mother had been, listening to the songs her mother had heard—it was pleasure to the point of pain.
“NO KIDS?” INSIDE the town house in Sawyer where Meredith lived, Tucker looked around and raised his eyebrows. There were no toys in the small living area, no TV noise in the background, no sounds of sibling joy or its noisy opposite. “How did that happen?”
Meredith smiled, although her eyes looked shadowed. “Their dad got an unexpected long weekend and asked if he could have them. He picked them up from school and is taking them for pizza and the movies and then to spend two nights in a motel with an indoor pool. They told me I wasn’t any fun anymore and Daddy was.” The shadow came perilously close to being tears, and she turned away abruptly.
Charlie had played that con-the-parents game with Jack, telling his father that Uncle Tucker was the fun brother. Jack had called Tucker and asked if Charlie could come and live with him because being a dad wasn’t fun anymore. Tucker yelled, “No way!” over the phone, and they all ended up laughing.
He didn’t think Meredith would see the humor in the story, so he didn’t tell it. “Let’s go do something,” he suggested instead, hooking her arm with a gentle hand and turning her back toward him. “Hey.” He thumbed the tears from her cheeks. “They’ll be home in a few days, Mer, and he’s a good dad. It’s not like he’s going to abscond with them.”
“Oh, I know.” She leaned against him, and he held her, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. Her spiky hair felt odd against his lips. Not hard, exactly, but not soft and warm like Libby’s, either. Meredith was taller than average, too. When they’d gone to a wine-tasting party, she’d worn skinny high heels and they’d been eye to eye. He’d liked that. She’d been fun to dance with. She was fun to be with, for that matter. She liked football, made really good potato soup that went well with the crusty bread he bought from the Amish bakery and had nice kids. He was attracted to her.
And yet.
It was the and yet that got him. It was okay that he wasn’t falling in love—other than Jack and Arlie and a few friends here and there, he’d never really observed being in love as all that healthy a part of a relationship. Plus, he and Meredith had only been seeing each other for a short while. He liked her more than anyone he’d dated in a very long time. He enjoyed the kids—he’d even taken Zack with him to play basketball with Jack and Charlie at the elementary school on open gym night. They’d played for an hour, working on Charlie’s jump shot and teaching Zack how to do layups. Afterward, Tucker sat quietly with Zack at the ice cream counter in the Silver Moon and heard between the lines of the eight-year-old’s conversation how much he missed his dad.
“I know he’s a good dad. It was husbanding he failed at.” Meredith shrugged, the movement slight against Tucker. “What would you like to do? We’ve already seen both the movies at the theater.”
“You want to go roller-skating?”
“What?”