A Woman Like Annie. Inglath Cooper
Mrs. McCabe—”
“Annie.”
“Annie,” he inclined his head, “I appreciate your position. And I’m sorry that things have ended this way. My father’s company provided the people of this town with livelihoods for a lot of years. But he’s not here anymore. And Corbin Manufacturing was his vision, not mine.”
Annie’s heart sank. As explanations went, his sounded as if it had been forged in steel. The set look to his jaw told her that she didn’t have an icicle’s chance in Tahiti of turning this particular situation around. She suddenly felt tired and resigned and downright sad.
Some combination of those emotions must have been reflected in her face. He sighed and said, “Look, I appreciate the difficulty of your position, Annie. I hope you can do the same of mine.”
Annie toyed with a piece of lettuce at the edge of her bowl, avoiding his gaze. She looked up then and met it head on. “Actually, I can’t. You see, I know most of these people as individuals. I know Sam Crawford who works in your finishing department. He has a wife with MS and three children he’s somehow managing to raise while working and taking care of her. I know Milly Thomsen who works in the front office. She’s supporting herself and twin girls after her husband was killed in a logging accident last year. I see the individual tragedies that will happen in this town if that factory closes down, and no, I can’t accept the rightness of that. Not if there’s any way at all to avoid it.”
Tommy’s heels thunked against the lower panel of the booth. “I’m sleepy, Mama. Are you done talkin’ bizness?”
“I think we’re just about finished, Tommy,” Jack said, shifting his unreadable gaze from Annie to her son who was rubbing his eyes with the back of a fist.
Annie put an arm around Tommy’s shoulders, her heavy heart dropping a few more inches. “Thank you for listening. I only wish I could have said something to make you reconsider.”
She got up from the booth then, pulled her wallet from her purse and put a twenty on the table. “Let’s go home, Tommy.”
Tommy blinked with sleepy eyes and said, “You didn’t eat all your pancakes, Mr. Corbin.”
Jack got up and stood politely to the side. “No, I didn’t. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”
“Well, we’ll be going,” Annie said stiffly, taking Tommy’s hand.
“Good night,” Tommy said.
“Nice to meet you, Tommy.”
“Good night,” Annie said. She led her son back through the restaurant, the weight of failure heavy on her shoulders.
AFTER LEAVING WALKER’S, Jack followed South Main out of town, winding through the September night, leaving his window cracked to reacquaint himself with the smells of the country. Burning leaves in the front yard of what had once been the old Jefferson house. Corn silage at Saul’s Dairy.
He traveled the last two miles of the secondary road that led to Glenn Hall behind a seen-better-days Ford pickup with a missing taillight and a lopsided bumper, the right side of which nearly touched the pavement every time the driver tapped his brakes.
For once, Jack didn’t mind the pace. His regular life revolved around being in a hurry. Last-minute trips. Nearly-missed planes. A new city every week. He’d set his life up that way, and most of the time, it suited him just fine. Slowing down gave a man too much time to think, often enough about things that didn’t bear up under scrutiny. Like where he’d been instead of where he was going. That he couldn’t go back and erase tracks he’d already made. All he could do was point his feet in another direction next time out.
Jack hated letting people down, and it seemed as if lately he’d become an expert at it.
He’d certainly let Annie McCabe down tonight. And he felt like a heel.
Okay, so maybe it hadn’t been as easy as he’d expected it to be. Saying no to a woman with eyes the color of Swiss chocolate and a little boy at her side. It had been the most unconventional business meeting Jack had ever attended.
He didn’t know what he’d expected in Annie, maybe forty-five and frumpy. Nix that image. She was cute like a Meg Ryan where a first glance says, hmm, nice. Second glance, very nice.
She had the kind of mouth that got him distracted fast. Full lower lip which she worried with even, white teeth in between the arguments she’d been launching at him with fastball accuracy.
And she’d been married to J. D. McCabe. J.D. had been a couple years older than Jack. Jack had gone to a private school, so their paths rarely crossed. But he remembered J.D. as a guy with a laser-beam smile and more than his share of confidence. He wondered why the idea of Annie with him didn’t quite gel.
The truck in front of him slowed to a crawl, then angled right and rolled off down a gravel driveway, freeing up the road. Jack nudged the accelerator to the floor, suddenly anxious to knock out each of the obligations standing between him and tying up for good these last connections to Macon’s Point.
The Porsche raced up the next hill, rounded a curve, and there it was. Glenn Hall. The car’s headlights arced across two enormous fieldstone columns marking the entrance to the farm his father had left to Daphne Corbin, his second wife. Now Jack’s by default.
He stopped and got out to open the gate with the key his attorney had sent him. He swung the gate arms wide. A three-quarter moon backlit a white four-rail fence in need of paint. Standing beneath an old maple some twenty feet inside the pasture were two big Percheron horses gazing at him with open curiosity.
Jack ducked back inside the Porsche and found two pieces of peppermint candy in the glove compartment. He crossed the driveway to the fence. One of the horses nickered and ambled over.
“Hey, Sam,” Jack said, unwrapping the candy and giving it to him. “Still the brave one, I see.”
The other horse edged up beside them, not quite as courageous, but unwilling to be left out. “Hey, Ned, old boy.” Jack gave him the candy and rubbed his forehead. Both horses stood there, crunching their candy and sniffing Jack’s arm.
Just the sight of them cut off the air in his lungs, flooding him with vivid memories of his father. Hooking up the team on a Sunday afternoon, taking Jack and his mother for a wagon ride down the old country roads surrounding the farm. To most people, this side of Joshua Corbin had never meshed with the image of a CEO whose business provided a big percentage of the town’s jobs. But to Jack, it had. As a little boy, it was seeing his father drive those gigantic horses that had made his heart swell with pride, made him want to tell the world that was his father up there. He’d taught Jack a lot about life through those horses. How to care for things that depended on you. That a soft voice brought about the desire to please in a way a harsh hand never could.
They were old now. In their late twenties at least. There had been four at one time. He threw a glance across the pasture behind him. If the other two had been out there grazing, they would have made their way to the fence already. He was surprised any of them were still alive, more so that Daphne hadn’t sold them all long ago. He almost wished she had just so he didn’t have to.
Sam and Ned had spent their entire lives here. He’d find a good home for them, but that didn’t make him feel any better.
He gave them a last rub, got back in the car and followed the winding driveway to the house that sat on a slight rise some quarter mile away. From the outside, at least, nothing had changed. The house had been built from fieldstone. White wooden shutters bracketed each window. An enormous mahogany door marked the center entrance. Jack’s father had built it for his mother, the two of them using an old pickup on weekends to load up the rock for the house from the edges of the fields on the farm. It was she who should have lived here all these years. She who should have left it to him. Not Daphne.
He got out, leaving the couple of bags he’d brought with him in the back of the car.
Jack pulled