Clean sweep, p.10
Clean Sweep, page 10
His melodic voice came out gentle, but this time with an unusual roll to it. It sent a shiver down the back of my arms, and I felt a moment of gratification that at least aging hadn’t taken away that response.
Everything changed in your forties—some of it for the good. But I missed the naiveté of youth sometimes. When you had a whole life of first’s ahead of you. First butterflies. First kiss. First boyfriend. First hickey. At forty-something, I’d done and felt most of it. I missed feeling uninhibited and naive about what came on the other side of emotions.
“You really want to know?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“But . . . why?”
He laughed. “Because I can almost competently coordinate my life and my teenage daughter’s life. Can’t fathom a powerhouse family like the Mercedy’s swooping in and expecting me to make it perfect. Not to mention four boys, a career, and a house. It’s fascinating to watch.”
When he stated it like that, it sounded far more flattering than it was.
“Well, it’s stressful, but it’s mostly about organization. Maverick is a teddy bear that’s secretly a hot mess, Bethany is pregnant so she doesn’t care about anything but sleeping and getting the baby out, and Serafina is just trying to keep Benjamin from imploding while around his family for so long. In the end, the bar isn’t set that high.”
Tanner laughed and the sound brought a reluctant smile to my face. Yeah, I could deal with more of that in my life, even if I’d spent all this time trying to pretend I didn’t care. I leaned against the house and peered out on my dead garden.
“I take it you don’t come from a big family?” I asked.
“Nah. One brother, younger than me. Celeste is my only daughter, and my parents died a couple years apart around ten years ago.”
“Lone man.”
“Not really.” He had a shrug in his voice. “I’ll always have Celeste, in some form.”
“Do you ever get tired of being the only parent? This crap isn’t easy. I mean, Ethan didn’t do a lot but once he was gone I realized his presence was more helpful than I thought. He at least took out the garbage, or got after the boys when they didn’t.”
The question slipped out of me before I could stop it, but I couldn’t say that I regretted it.
Ethan and I hadn’t been bastions of communication at any point in our marriage, but there had been connection in the mindless prattle of someone to talk at that I missed. I kept some of that from my boys. Blake didn’t need the burdens of his mother, and Ethan hadn’t, apparently, wanted my prattle anymore.
“I think you get used to it,” Tanner replied. “It just becomes the new normal.”
My brow furrowed. “I’ve only been divorced a year—almost two if you count when we started to talk about separating—and I’ve been fine with it so far. Even if I act dramatic about it. I wonder sometimes what this will feel like in five or ten years, though. If the quiet just becomes too much.”
“Depends on how quiet you let it get,” he said.
“Fair.”
“What about you?” he asked. “Siblings?”
“Three. I’m the oldest. My younger siblings all have similar versions of a family and a picket fence, just scattered across the country. My parents are both alive, happy in a retirement home near a golf course. I’m absolutely as ordinary as it comes.”
“That,” he said quickly, “doesn’t seem right at all. Ordinary is not a word I would have used to describe you.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not even a little.”
The last thing I wanted to do was fish for compliments, but he’d baited me there. How could I not press for details?
“I’m a previous stay-at-home-mom that divorced after twenty-five years of marriage. I manage a coffee shop to keep food on the table and I have four intelligent boys with varying levels of stupid they interact with on a daily basis. There’s not much less exciting than that.”
“Huh. That’s interesting,” he murmured, “because I see someone totally different.”
My mouth went dry, hungry to beg him for details. Desperate to know what could set me apart in this world that didn’t relate to my last twenty-five years of life.
Some shred of evidence that proved I hadn’t given my entire self over to marriage and babies and now had nothing left to hold up and say, this is me.
“Oh, sorry, Les. I gotta take a call. It’s another client coming in. Let’s resume this later, all right? We aren’t done.”
His casual nickname sent the butterflies back into a whirl.
Were we there now?
“Oh. Right. Sure. Later.”
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
The call ended. Stunned, I pushed the phone into my pocket and stared out into the night, utterly at a loss for what the jumbled emotions in my chest really meant. Amidst all the chaos lingered the most unexpected emotion of all.
Giddiness.
My pen tapped another furious staccato on my notebook the next day.
My left leg jumped up and down, and I felt like I’d had three cups too much coffee, although I hadn’t even finished my first.
Unable to stop myself, I replayed how the conversation with Tanner ended over and over again.
I see someone totally different.
I’ll call tomorrow.
“Hey, boss lady!” Dahlia called, breaking into my reverie. “You’re required out here.”
While my brain remained on a spreadsheet of orders for our food supply company, I stepped out of the office and into the shop. Starla stood there, a tentative smile on a pale face.
All other thoughts fled.
“Starla?”
She fidgeted with the strap of her purse as she smiled. “Good morning. I wanted to stop by to see if you’re busy?”
“Ah, no. Not at all.”
“Do you have a minute to talk?”
A bump of hope welled up in my stomach and I had to hold back my shout of yes please right now! There wasn’t a soul I wanted to talk to more than her, but I held onto my restraint.
Instead, I gave her my warmest smile to set her at ease. She seemed so colorless and fragile, her skin almost onion-paper white against the backdrop of snow behind her. A thick coat and scarf wrapped her body, but she still looked cold to me.
“Anything for you. Have a seat.” I gestured toward my usual booth in the corner. “Want something to drink?”
“Herbal tea would be great, thanks.”
Dahlia held up a hand, “Got it. And your usual is coming.”
Starla and I sat across from each other while Dahlia bustled in the background, humming a Christmas song. Starla didn’t remove her coat as she settled into the seat with a sheepish expression.
“Landon doesn’t know I came here today. I’m not hiding it from him,” she quickly added, “Just . . . I think he’d want to be here and I wanted to talk to you alone.”
My brow rose in silent encouragement.
Starla let out a long breath. “I know how uncomfortable it must have been for you to hear that we were engaged after only dating for four weeks. I wish I could paint a better picture for you. Maybe tell you that we’d known each other for a year before we actually began to date, but that wouldn’t be true either.”
Her bottom lip blanched under her teeth as she paused, then regarded me through her eyelashes.
“We are a classic love-at-first-sight situation, if you believe that’s possible.”
I didn’t, but I wasn’t about to betray that to her. “How did you meet?” I asked instead.
Dahlia set a steaming cup of tea in front of Starla and a coffee with lots of cream and a dash of sugar in front of me. The steaming drinks filled the air between us, countering the cold waves of air from the nearby window. Starla hooked a hand around the cup and pulled it closer, but made no move to drink.
A soft expression stole across her face.
“At a party, actually. Not super romantic,” she said with a laugh, “but I guess the details don’t really matter. He caught my eye from across the room and . . . the feeling that my life had just irrevocably changed came over me. I can’t describe it.”
She chuckled, still a little breathless from the memory. I doubted she knew it, but she’d put a hand on her stomach.
Could she imagine the butterflies again?
“Sounds magical,” I said.
Starla nodded, but the whimsical expression faded.
“Yes. It really was. He came over, introduced himself, and we talked until the party ended around 1:00 in the morning. He walked me home. We stayed up talking until 6:00. I was late to work because I made him breakfast, and he was late to class because he stayed to eat, and we haven’t been separated ever since.”
“Of all my boys,” I said with what I hoped was a diplomatic tone, “he’s the one I never expected to do something like this. He’s not usually impetuous and is, despite all appearances, a careful decision maker. Max? Definitely something he would do. He’s a knot head sometimes. But Landon . . .”
I trailed away, not certain what I really meant to say. Starla had sobered, her long, pale lashes blinking.
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s not like Landon at all, which is why I wanted to talk to you about it today. Miss Hill, I love Landon. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life, even if we’ve only known each other for four weeks. I love him in a way that I never believed possible. I’m not a romantic girl. I live in a world of expectations, responsibilities, and reality. What we have is . . . special.”
Words fled at the gravity in her tone. I opened my mouth to speak, but didn’t know what to say. Part of me admired her gumption. She clearly wasn’t a weakling that hid behind my son, at least. She’d need a bit of power in that spine to deal with him all the time.
But did that mean I was willing to surrender my oldest to her?
Not yet.
“Why are you moving so fast?” I asked.
Her lips pressed together as she studied me, then quietly said, “Because it’s the right thing to do. For both of us. Yes, there is information we’re not telling you yet. But we will. I promise.
A dozen other questions flooded my mind. With them came the fear that it wasn’t my place to ask those questions anymore. Landon was twenty-three years old. The woman that he loved had come to seek me out and give me reassurance. He’d already found the most important woman in his life. That ceased to be me.
What could I possibly do or say to change it?
And should I?
Memories hovered on the edge of my mind-plunge. Ethan and I had a quick engagement, caught up in the whirl of romance and twitterpation. My mother had been uncharacteristically concerned. I’d seen it in her thin lips, her drawn eyes, her forced excitement as I extolled all of Ethan’s virtues. When the divorced had finalized, to her credit, she hadn’t breathed a word of I told you so to me.
Because she hadn’t told me so.
Whatever reservations my parents held, they hadn’t stated them, and I wondered if they felt caught in the same paradox as me.
Did I let Landon make this mistake on his own? Or did I warn them of my own path? Landon already knew what happened with his parents. Likely, he didn’t need reminders of the pain of divorce.
Besides, Starla and Landon weren’t Ethan and me.
Parenting, I’d always found, had been a delicate dance between what I wanted to say and what I should say. Staring at Starla made it clear that what I wanted and what I needed here wasn’t the same thing.
“Thank you, Starla.” I reached across the table to take her hand in mine. “I won’t pretend that I’m not concerned or hurt that Landon has been avoiding me, but I appreciate you coming here in person. I have concerns, yes. I’m not ready to let Landon go onto a path so similar to mine. But if he’s going to do this, I believe he has his best chance with someone like you.”
For a moment, I thought I saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes, but she blinked so quickly I couldn’t be sure. Her fingers squeezed mine.
“Thank you. Can I make one selfish ask of you?”
“Of course.”
Our hands untangled as she reached into her purse and pulled out several papers folded in half longways. Her hands trembled a little as she opened them, then flipped them so I could see.
Lists cluttered the front and back of two pages. While I studied the words, she had a sip of tea. It took only a moment for me to comprehend what she’d just given me.
“A wedding list?” I asked.
“Landon and I are very busy with the end of semester finals and his new job and . . . a few other things.” She waved a vague hand and had another sip of tea. “We were wondering if you could help us pull the wedding together?”
Whether it was the warm drink, the coffee shop, or having spilled her thoughts, her cheeks had pinked up a little bit. When she had more color, her face flushed out in a lovely way. I had no difficulty seeing in her what Landon must see.
I studied her eager eyes for any sign of pity. Was she giving me something to do to help me get used to this? I found none. Instead, a sense of hope mixed with despair lived there.
Whatever they faced in their life that they weren’t disclosing, it certainly seemed real enough.
“Yes, of course.”
She tapped a finger at the top of the list, and I felt a thrill at her organization. A girl after my own heart. Maybe boys did marry different versions of their mother.
“Here are a few simple things I need help with,” she murmured. “It’s mostly coordinating, like what you said you were doing for a family reunion here. Calling a few places, that sort of thing. We aren’t going to have anything big. We just need to find a venue, an officiant, and invite Landon’s friends and family.”
“What about yours?”
“Ah . . . there won’t be any. Just me.”
My gaze darted to hers, but she kept hers studiously on the papers. “See this list? Landon wondered if we could have the ceremony here.” Starla gestured around us. “At the Frolicking Moose. I thought I’d ask if it was available.”
I skimmed the page, sliding past completed details like wedding dress and budget. Their total budget of $500 sent a wince and a giggle through me at the same time. Easy enough to fix. If she let me help with the planning, my credit card could also help with the expenses.
“Winter theme,” I murmured as I read the top of the second page. Underneath that were doubly-underlined words. Lots of snowflakes and glitter. I grinned.
“Snowflakes and glitter. Girl after my heart.”
Starla smiled unapologetically. I kept perusing past a list of bridal necessities—comfortable shoes, groom’s ring, and hairstyle picked—and into a detailed explanation of the generalities. Simple catering. Easy wedding cake design. My eyes skidded to a full stop on the date.
New Year’s.
I blinked.
What?
She’d tensed when I looked up at her, clearly anticipating what I’d just seen. “New Year’s?” I asked.
She rolled her lips, looking uneasy again. “Yes. We, ah, moved up the date from Valentine’s Day. It will work best with training for Landon’s new position and a few other things.”
The few other things is what had my curiosity. Whatever it was, those other things clearly drove the agenda here. She’d appeased some of my concerns, but new ones grew. While I had a greater trust in their inherent care for each other, I still couldn’t believe that they were making the right decision.
What drove them to such haste?
“Do you think it will be possible?” she asked. “Could we pull something like this off, or is it too late?
A note of concern filled her tone, and I found myself wanting to allay it.
“Yes, of course.”
“Would the Frolicking Moose be available?”
She glanced over her shoulder, past the counter where Dahlia filled a drive-through order, and into the doorway that led to the back room.
White twinkle lights, fake snow, and far too much Christmas glitter already decorated the back room now. Except for a Christmas tree in the corner, I’d insisted on avoiding Christmas decorations and keeping it solely winter themed to avoid decorating twice. Maverick had been resistant, but eventually saw my way.
It wasn’t difficult picturing a wedding there. Small, of course, but it looked like that’s what they wanted. With Landon having the only guests, I’d wager that all of Pineville would show up.
“It’s free then,” I said. “All of New Year’s day and evening. I’ll make sure to book it today.”
Starla sighed, like a burden of relief had been removed. “That’s wonderful to hear.”
I waved the papers. “You trust me to help you with this?”
She nodded firmly. “It would be most helpful if you take it over. Surprise us. You have in your hand the only decisions that I’d make and want in there, the rest can be yours. Maybe . . . consider the execution of this as a Christmas gift? I can write you a check for the money right now, if you’re willing.”
“Oh, no need.” I waved a hand. “The expenses are on me.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but I set her my sternest Mom-glare.
“No, neither of you are going to pay for this. You’re both college students that have a lot going on, and you want it small anyway. Ethan and I will cover the costs.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Thank you.”
I smiled. A limited carte blanche on a party of my own planning sounded divine. Planning my first son’s wedding?
The ultimate.
“Of course. I’m honored you asked and excited. I’ll get started on this right away.” I stacked the few pages together and folded them again. “Thank you for allowing me to help.”
Starla swallowed hard. “Thank you for helping and . . . for your patience. I hope this is the beginning of a wonderful relationship.”
Despite my reservations, I gave her my biggest smile.
“I have a feeling it will be.”
10
Tanner
When my phone rang in my pocket after finishing up yet another failed interview to replace Yessica, I glanced down to see Leslie’s name.
