His Most Important Win

He’d noticed too, the cars parked at Claudia Campano’s roadside stand. Not surprising that on a beautiful Sunday afternoon folks would be stopping for fresh produce. He hadn’t seen Rosalie. Bryce made up his mind to stop at the stand on his way back down Fox Hollow Road and say hello to Mrs. Campano.

“What do you want to do?” the agent said, breaking into his thoughts. “I’d love to draw up a contract on this house.” She gave him a brilliant smile. “I think it would be perfect for our town’s new football coach.”

“I’ll need to arrange inspections first,” he said. “Check for termites. Check the roof, plumbing and electrical.”

“Of course. But we can make the contract contingent on the inspections coming in satisfactorily.” She tapped a pen on the top of her portfolio. “You don’t want to lose this place by not having your name on the dotted line.”

He smiled. “How many offers have you had on this property since it was listed last year?” he said.

She shrugged. “Admittedly it’s been a slow market.”

Bryce was going to own this house. He felt it in the jangle of excited nerves in the pit of his stomach. “It’s listed at ninety thousand?”

“That’s right.”

“Write up an offer at twenty percent under that price. We’ll see what happens.”

She held out her hand. “Meet me in my office in a half hour. I’ll get the paperwork started.”

Rosalie joined her son and her mother at the produce stand midafternoon on Sunday. “When are your friends picking you up to go to the park?” she asked Danny.

He checked his watch. “They should be here any minute. I need to get my gear. Are you staying to help Grandma?”

“Yes. You go on.”

“Thanks.” He pointed to an insufficient number of small baskets of tomatoes sitting in a bin. “You need to restock. I was just getting ready to do that.”

“Sure. Looks like it’s been a good day.”

He agreed, said goodbye to Claudia and jogged away just as a Honda Civic pulled into the drive and followed him toward the house. Rosalie waved to Danny’s friend at the wheel. She took a stack of miniature bushel baskets from under the bin and started to fill them with tomatoes from a large crate. Her attention was diverted when a black pickup with sparkling chrome accessories braked in front of the stand. She immediately noticed a front bumper license plate in black and gold that said Texas Tech University, and a moment later, Bryce Benton got out of the driver’s seat.

He started to walk to Rosalie but stopped when Claudia hooted so loud a customer spilled a bag of peaches. “Bryce Benton! Oh, my stars. Get over here.”

Bryce strode around the back of the stand and gave Claudia a hug. When she finally let him loose, she placed the flat of her hand over her heart and stared up into his face. “You have gotten even better looking, if that’s possible.”

Rosalie hurried to the front to help the customer retrieve her peaches. As she worked, she couldn’t help thinking that her mother’s reaction to seeing Bryce was amazing, and not in a good way. For a time, both women, and Rosalie’s father as well, had nurtured bad feelings against Bryce every bit as strong as the ones Rosalie still seemed to cling to.

Numb with grief at the sudden, tragic death of their son, Rosalie’s parents had sought comfort in the only way they knew how—by blaming the young man whose show-off antics had resulted in the accident which took the life of his best friend. Looking back, Rosalie realized that the anger and bitterness against Bryce, rightly or wrongly, had probably been the glue that had held the Campano family together through the weeks and months of mourning.

And then Danny came along and their lives progressed according to a new purpose and pace. Rosalie continued to cry every night for her brother. Enzo Campano buried his grief so deep that Rosalie often wondered if he allowed himself to think about Ricky at all. And Claudia threw her efforts and mothering skills into making a home for her grandson.

Unlike her daughter and her husband, at some point, she’d let go of the anguish and resentment. At least she said she had. But had she ever really forgiven Bryce? Since the Campanos didn’t talk much about the incident, Rosalie had always wondered. Today, however, almost sixteen years after her son’s death, Claudia tried to convince her daughter in this grandiose gesture of welcoming Bryce home that she had.

“You’re the talk of the town, Bryce,” Claudia said. He grinned in a seemingly modest way and chatted quietly with her.

Rosalie rang up the customer’s order. When the lady got in her car and drove away, Bryce walked over. “So how’s business, Rosalie?” he said.

“It’s okay.”

The Honda sped past with Danny in the backseat. The driver honked his horn and turned onto Fox Hollow Road.

Bryce stared at the car for a moment and then snapped his fingers. “That’s right. You have a kid, don’t you? My mother told me you went to college, met a guy and had a baby.”

“That’s right.”

“A boy?”

“Yes.”

“And you moved back home with Claudia?”

“Right again.”

The car rounded a curve and disappeared. Rosalie hoped that would be the end of the conversation. Nope.

“Is your son in high school yet?” Bryce asked.

Vague. Vague. Keep your answers vague. Divert attention away from Danny. “Starts this year,” she said, returning to the task of packing tomato boxes. Bryce didn’t take the hint and move away, so she looked up at him, swallowed an involuntary sigh, and said, “You’re surrounded by fruits and vegetables at your house, Bryce, so you’re obviously not here to shop.”

He smiled. “Not today.”

“Then …?”

He leaned a hip against the stand. “Campanos does business with Benton Farms, and I’m grateful for your years of support. Would you believe it’s customer appreciation day?”

Right. She rearranged tomatoes to fit more boxes in the bin. “Not unless this magnanimous event just started today.”

“As a matter of fact, it did.”

She huffed. “And exactly how many Benton customers have you visited so far to show your appreciation?”

The grin broadened. “You’re the first.”

She frowned at him and continued working, though on some deeper emotional level she was aware of his every move. “As you can see, I’m busy. If you want to go appreciate someone else, feel free.”

“I stopped by for another reason, too,” he said.

“And that would be?”

He stood straight and looked down the road. “You and I are going to be neighbors.”

Her hand stilled. She clutched her fists at her sides. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m about to become a home owner. I put a bid in for a place down the road, about halfway between your house and the old gristmill.”

Her mind scrambled to come up with a location. Houses were separated by acres of land on Fox Hollow Road. There were no close neighbors in the traditional sense. The only property she knew of that was for sale was the old Harbin place. Surely he didn’t mean the homestead that was less than a mile away.

“I just left the Harbin property,” he said. “I’ve made an offer.”

She could only stare, reining in her first impulse to shout at him that he had no right. That she didn’t want him living so near. That she didn’t need to be thinking about him driving past her house every day, invading the space in her heart that once had been filled with him. Instead, after a few moments she found her voice. “That place has been vacant for quite a while.”

“I know. It needs some work. Have you ever driven back there to see the house?”

She had once or twice, when she was a kid. But she couldn’t tell him right now what the house even looked like. “My dad knew old Mr. Clive,” she said. “And he sometimes drove produce out to Wyatt Harbin when he was in town. I don’t remember much about the place. The people who stayed there kept to themselves.”

Light animated Bryce’s eyes. “It’s a great place, Rosalie. Got real potential. I can’t wait to start fixing it up.”

It wasn’t enough that she was going to work with Bryce at the high school. Now they were going to be neighbors. In a spread-out, rural community the size of Whistler Creek, why hadn’t he found a house miles away on one of the other country roads?

She realized he was talking and forced herself to tune in.

“… a done deal yet. The family will have to accept the offer….” He stopped, stared at her. “But I really want that house, Rosalie. I’ll start to feel more like a part of the community once I’ve moved in.” He waited for a reaction from her and when he didn’t get one he said, “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

At the risk of choking she said, “Congratulations, Bryce.” She almost said, Once again you’ll get everything you want, but instead said the words she knew her eavesdropping mother would be waiting for. “I hope you’re happy in the new place.”

He smiled. “Since we’ll be living so close, maybe you’ll bring me a cup of sugar if I need to borrow it.”

That was the last straw. In spite of Claudia’s listening to every word, Rosalie said, “Look around you, Bryce. Nothing but fields and barns and open space. This isn’t Wisteria Lane for heaven’s sake. We don’t meet in the mornings for coffee and in the afternoons for margaritas.”

She spared a glance in her mother’s direction and immediately felt the sting of her heated gaze. Well, sorry, Ma.

“I’m kind of disappointed to hear that, Rosalie,” Bryce said. “I was hoping we could put the past behind us.”

Rosalie let out a long breath and with it, some of the anger trapped in her chest. “Bryce, I hope you become the best football coach this town has ever known. And I hope you get as much out of this job as you can. I really do. But as far as you and I are concerned, the past will always be an issue. It won’t go away. It shaped us, made us who we are.” And I won’t let your coming back to town change the woman I’ve become now. I can’t.

He crossed his arms over his chest and gave her an intense stare. “Rosalie, Ricky was the best friend I ever had,” he said so only she could hear. “You were the second-best until one day you became so much more. I can’t forget that. I don’t want to forget it.”

“Then you’ll have to live with it any way you can. That’s what I’ve had to do.”

He started to say something but stopped when two cars pulled into the lot. Excited passengers spilled out of the doors and headed to the stand. Bryce gave her one last look, filled with sadness and longing. “I’ll see you around, Rosie-girl,” he said, calling her by a former pet name. “But it’s all just a damn shame.”

“That we can agree on,” she said.

He said goodbye to Claudia, got in his truck and drove off. And Rosalie began greeting customers. Anything to avoid the censure in her mother’s eyes and an old longing that was trying to squeeze its way into her heart.

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