John Riley's Girl

It was cute. Much more like something she might have ordinarily picked out. She wavered a moment, sending a doubtful glance over the periwinkle blue. Maybe she was being silly to think she could pull off a dress like that. But she didn’t want cute today.

“I’ll think about it, Joanne,” she said, taking the pink outfit and draping it across the chair beside her.

“You do that. And let me know if I can help with anything else,” she said, heading for the register where a short, white-haired lady was waiting to pay for a scarf.

She glanced toward the window again. Cleeve had stopped at the gas station across the street. He was talking to Leroy Jones, who’d been running the gas station as far back as her memory went. Cleeve’s back was to her, and she noticed he had nice wide shoulders. He had changed little, if any, since their high-school days. On the outside, anyway. Why was it that guys like Cleeve always ended up with women like Macy?

But then if anybody understood putting up with the faults of a spouse, Racine did. There was always tomorrow, and it was sometimes easier to convince yourself it would get better by then than it was to walk away.

A long time ago, Racine had been more than a little smitten with Cleeve and had almost gotten up the nerve to flirt with him the summer before their senior year at a picnic out at Carson Lake. But she’d lost her courage, and looking back on it now, she knew he wouldn’t have given her a second glance. Guys like Cleeve had been way out of her league then. And were now.

She sent a glance back out the window where he was still talking with Leroy and then held the dress up to the mirror again. Was she really asking for anything so extraordinary? Just a good man who maybe saw something a little bit special in her? She’d once had some pretty lofty dreams. But her wants in life had gotten a lot simpler. And if she’d learned one thing in all those years since they’d left high school, it was that there was no point in wasting time wanting things you could never have.

THE SIGN WAS the same. Rolling Hills Farm. The Rileys. Since 1918. Hand-carved on dark cherry wood and mounted on one of two matching brick columns that marked the entrance to one of the prettiest pieces of land Olivia had ever seen. It hadn’t changed. The name fit the farm. Two hundred acres or so of virtually flat pastures surrounded by a background of rolling hillsides that amounted to a sum total of a little over a thousand acres, if she remembered correctly.

She had arrived in Summerville late that afternoon after the four-hour drive from D.C., then checked into Lavender House, the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying for the weekend. Michael was driving down Saturday morning. She’d tried to talk him out of it since he had a couple of work commitments that prevented him from coming before then.

“You cannot go to a fifteen-year reunion without a date!” he had insisted. “Not done. Unacceptable.”

She’d given in, finally. Now, she wished he’d come with her today. The message from Lori waiting at the front desk had nearly made her repack her car and head back up the interstate.

Of all places, why did the thing have to be moved to John’s farm? Of all places!

She’d tried calling Lori several times, only to get her answering machine. Not surprising. As the main organizer of the reunion, she’d no doubt left hours before.

Olivia had succumbed to a long shower and set about calming the flock of internal butterflies making her nearly lightheaded. There was a single question reverberating in her head: How could she possibly go out to Rolling Hills?

His wife would be there. And children. What about children?

Of course, he would have children. Maybe even teenagers.

Heavens, they were old enough for that.

The possibility peeled back a few layers of indifference beneath which lay a reserve of pain left untapped for years on end. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of it. But somehow, here, with the imminent possibility of seeing them—at his home—the prospect cut deep.

But then she’d come here looking for closure, hadn’t she? Here was her chance. Had she really thought anything about it would be easy?

She was certain John hadn’t given her a second’s extra thought, but had gone on with his life, living it the way people do.

On that note, she had gotten dressed and left the bed-and-breakfast before she could change her mind, pointing her car down roads she remembered as if she’d driven them yesterday. Rationalizing the entire way that John probably hadn’t even aged well, had gained forty pounds, or lost hair. In all reality, she wouldn’t even recognize him.

Outside of storybooks, wasn’t that the way real life usually worked?

Olivia parked her car near the farm’s entrance sign, got out, quickly hit the remote security alarm out of habit, and set off up the asphalt road. No backing out now. She had never imagined walking up this driveway again. The years rolled back now like the curtain at a Saturday afternoon matinee, and she saw herself getting off a Greyhound bus on a cold January afternoon, her too-thin wool coat inadequate protection against the wind cutting into her skin. She’d walked the four miles from the bus station out to Rolling Hills, her heart sticking in her throat every time she heard a car coming, terrified one of them might be her father.

The impetus propelling her down that long road to John’s house had been some comic-Cinderella notion that he could fix what was broken inside her. But any hope of that had collapsed beneath the reality of John’s front door being answered by someone with smooth, beautiful skin, dark liquid hair. Someone who called herself John’s wife. “He and his father have gone to a horse show this weekend up in Culpepper,” she’d said, the words clear to Olivia’s disbelieving ears. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“No,” she had said. “No.”

“Can I tell him who stopped by?”

“Just Olivia,” she said. “Just tell him Olivia.”

Fifteen years, and here she was again, forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other and just walk. Don’t think. Just walk.

Three hundred and ninety-eight steps—she counted every one of them—and she was at the top of the driveway. Four white tents had transformed the front yard of the house. Cars were parked on both sides of the road. There were people everywhere, under the tents, leaning against the board fence, sitting beneath a couple of huge old maple trees.

She stopped at the edge of the yard and drew in a deep breath.

A sign-in table was positioned at the entrance. Banners in school colors of red and white hung above. Lanford County High—Class Reunion! Welcome!

And on a smaller banner below: We’re Only as Old as We Think We Are!

Olivia smiled, swept back on a sudden recollection of the time John had run for class president, and she and Lori had covered the halls with posters declaring him the only choice. They’d spent a weekend at Lori’s house coming up with all sorts of clever campaign slogans, some original, some not so. John and Cleeve had come by at regular intervals, bringing them ice-cream cones from the local Dairy Queen, and John would steal Olivia away for a few minutes, pulling her out behind the old sycamore tree in Lori’s parents’ backyard and hauling her into his arms for the kind of kiss that made her forget all about their campaign efforts.

“Oh, my gosh, that’s Olivia Ashford!”

Two women shot across the grass like arrows from a bow, welcoming smiles on their faces.

“My goodness, I can’t believe you’re here!” the one in front said. “Nobody thought you would actually come.”

Olivia smiled back, studying their faces for a moment before recognition hit her. “Casey. Sarah,” she said. “How are you?”

Casey had ridden Olivia’s school bus, Sarah had been in her homeroom.

They all hugged, then stood back to take a look at one another.

“Great. And no need to ask you that,” Sarah said.

“We are so proud of you,” Casey added. “Wow. You look so different in real life. Less serious, I mean. Who would ever have thought that you…I mean anyone from Summerville would end up on television every morning?”

Olivia smiled and steered the conversation away from herself. “So tell me what you’re doing. Are you living in Summerville?”

“Yep,” Sarah said. “Never left. I have three children, Casey has four.”

“You never married, did you?” Casey asked.

“No, I never did.”

“Well, with all the excitement in your life, who needs marriage and children?”

Olivia smiled again as the two women moved ahead in line. Their words settled over her with the implication that, despite all the opportunities her career had afforded her, she was the one who had missed out on something major.

“Olivia!”

The familiar voice sent relief flooding through her. She turned around to find Lori cutting her way through the crowd.

“Lori!” Olivia held out her hands to her old friend. Lori took them, and they stepped into a warm hug that lasted for several long moments. Olivia’s eyes grew moist; she had not expected the lump of emotion now wedged in her chest, preventing further words.

“Gosh, it’s so good to see you,” Lori said, when they’d stepped back to get a good look at one another.

Olivia swallowed. “You look wonderful. You’ve hardly changed at all,” she said, wishing she hadn’t waited so long for this particular reunion. Seeing Lori made all the years fall away. Just like that.

“Hah, compared to you, I don’t think so.”

“No, I mean it. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“A few wrinkles here and there. But we’re supposed to call those character lines, aren’t we?”

Olivia laughed. “I guess so.”

“Obviously you got my message?”

She nodded, hoping her expression said, “No big deal.”

“Were you all right with coming out here?” Lori asked with a hopeful squint.

Olivia drew in a breath. “I guess I should ask if it’s all right that I’m here,” she said, trying to keep the words light.

“Of course it is,” Lori said, squeezing her arm while something that looked a lot like apprehension flitted across her face. “Come on, let’s find a quiet spot where we can talk. We have so much to catch up on. It really is great to see you.”

They were headed to the side of the yard when a frantic voice from one of the tents called out, “Lori, could you come up here? We’ve got another problem with this darn drink machine!”

Lori sighed. “Don’t they know we have fifteen years worth of stuff to catch up on?”

“You go ahead,” Olivia said. “We’ve got the whole weekend. Just look for me when you’re done.”

Lori smiled and hugged her again. “Don’t go far,” she said.

JOHN HAD NEVER been good in crowds. Especially big ones. With almost three hundred people milling about his front yard, he found himself wishing Sunday would hurry up and get here so the whole thing would be over.

The caterer had set up camp near one of the pasture fences, now putting the finishing touches on the barbecue he’d been cooking since mid-morning. If it tasted as good as it smelled, he’d be a hit. A couple of mares had been glued to that section of fence for the past few hours, patiently waiting for the next round of sugar cubes the man had been slipping them on and off all day.

Opposite the barbecue was a DJ playing current top forty, the music persistent, but still enough in the background that conversation was possible. John spotted Cleeve joking with Amy Bussey and Sharon Moore who were working the front table and pinning badges with senior pictures to jacket lapels and dresses.

Cleeve glanced up, and John waved him over. He wound his way through the crowd, a white Stetson on his head, his yellow shirt and Wranglers freshly pressed. He was tall and lean with long legs that made him a natural in the cutting-horse competitions he made time to attend in the summers with John. He had the kind of face that would never look its age. Women called him boyish. It made Cleeve madder than a hornet, but as the years ticked by, he was starting to believe John’s admonishment that it wasn’t such a bad tag to have hung on you.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to stand over here in the shadows all night,” Cleeve said, giving him a shoulder joust and then an elbow jab to the ribs.

“Giving it serious consideration.”

“What? You mind beating women off with a stick?”

John gave him a sideways look and rolled his eyes.

“Even as we speak, plots are being hatched in the ladies’ room as to correcting your bachelor status,” Cleeve said with a grin.

“Widower status.”

Cleeve instantly sobered. “Ah, hell, John, that was damn callous of me. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” John said, letting out a long sigh. “Don’t pay any attention to my bark. I’m not fit company for being out in public.”

“Have to say, I was kind of surprised to see you down here already. Figured I’d have to come up there and reel you out of the house.”

“Sophia took care of it for you.”

“That’s my girl,” Cleeve said, his smile back.

John shook his head and gave Cleeve a once-over. “Aren’t you lookin’ spiffy tonight? I hardly recognized you without the cow manure on your shirt.”

“Figured I might as well show some of these gals what they missed out on.”

“Since you dated half the class, I guess you better get started.”

To Cleeve, this was compliment, not insult. He laughed.

“So where’s the one you married?” John asked.

Cleeve’s smile faded. “Visiting her sister.”

At the look in his friend’s eyes, John was sorry he’d brought it up. “Then I guess you’ll have to dance with some of these other gals, huh?”

“Guess I will,” Cleeve agreed, but with less pluck than before.

“Hey, guys.” Lori Peters stepped up and gave them both a hug.

John leaned back and gave her a long look. She had on a blue cotton sundress that picked up the color of her eyes and did nice things for her fair skin. “You look great,” he said.

Cleeve gave her a low wolf-whistle. “I’ll second.”

“You two are just used to seeing me with four kids climbing all over me,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the sign-in table where people were still filing in.

“I liked that look on you,” Cleeve said.

Lori smiled, but it was a noticeably weak attempt. “John, I need to talk to you about something.”

“You run the well dry? Somebody steal my best cow?”

“Not exactly,” she said, her teeth catching the edge of her lower lip.

Cleeve tipped his Stetson back. “Want me to va-moose?”

“You might as well hear it, too,” Lori said, throwing another uneasy glance over her shoulder. “I should have told you this earlier, this morning when I called, but I chickened out, and I know it was wrong—”

John’s gaze followed hers to the edge of the yard, and the rest of whatever Lori was saying was lost to him. The plastic cup in his hand slid from his fingers and dropped to the ground, iced tea splattering his jeans and Lori’s bare legs.

Cleeve put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it? You look like you just saw a ghost.” And then, “Holy smoke.”

John went numb. He felt like a teenage boy again, spotting for the first time the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on, hit with an immediate blood-heating attraction that fills a boy with the absolute certainty that she is the one, and imbues in him the instant inability to speak in front of her.

His first uncensored thought? Cleeve was right.

She had turned out to be one beautiful woman.

Her hair was still long, shoulder-length and blond. His fingertips instantly ached with remembrance of it.

She was leaner than she’d been then, the bone structure in her face clearly defined with angles and hollows. Her lips were the same though, a shapely, full mouth that made his own throb with sudden memory.

But one difference was apparent. She no longer looked like the small-town girl he’d dated and loved. She looked, instead, like a woman who had made it in the world—clothes, posture, the whole picture.

“What is she doing here?” He tried to inject thunder in his voice and heard his own failure. He sounded like he’d just had the breath knocked out of him.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you.” Clearly, Lori had no idea how to handle this. She looked as if she thought he might strangle her. “I should have told you this morning,” she said, “but I was afraid you’d say no to letting us move the reunion out here if I did.”

“And you would have been right!” The anger hit him full blast then. There was thunder in his voice now. And plenty of it. “Damn it all to hell, Lori. She can’t stay. She cannot stay,” he said, unable to bring himself to say her name because to do so would drive a knife right through the heart of the fury that was the only thing keeping his knees from buckling. “Go tell her. Now.”

Lori shot him a look that somehow managed to convey both panic and absolute horror. “John! I can’t possibly do that. You’re blowing this out of all proportion.”

“Now wait a dadblame minute,” Cleeve began, reason in his voice. “She’s no different from anybody else here who was in our class.”

“She is different,” John said, hearing the steel in his own words. “Either tell her, now, Lori, or the whole weekend is off.”

“For Pete’s sake, John,” Cleeve said, “that was all a long time ago.”

“Not long enough.”

“You don’t have to talk to her!” Lori said, hands splayed in appeal. “I’ll make sure you’re never within fifty yards of one another. We can’t just ask her to leave.”

“Nobody’s askin’ you to throw down the welcome mat for her,” Cleeve tossed out, tipping back his hat, “but you can’t kick her out.”

They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. “She isn’t welcome here! And if you won’t tell her, I’ll tell her myself.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Unwelcome Mat

THE LAST THING Olivia wanted was to be the center of attention. She wanted to blend in, just walk around and say hello to people she hadn’t seen in nearly half a lifetime. But she had only moved a few steps past the front table since she’d arrived. There were so many people she hadn’t thought about in ages, and yet remembered as if they’d seen each other only yesterday. Tommy Radcliffe, whom she’d sat beside in ninth-grade science class and shared homework notes with. Sarah Martin from eleventh-grade P.E., the only girl to consistently beat her at the six-hundred-yard dash. Noah Dumfrey who had ridden her school bus and whom she still hadn’t forgiven for putting chewing gum in her hair in eighth grade. “I can’t believe I actually did that to someone who’s now on TV every morning!” he’d said upon seeing her, reeling her in for a hug against his now well-cushioned chest.

Most people simply looked like adult versions of the children they had once been—some heavier, some thinner, some with gray hair, some with no hair at all. But they all looked at her differently now, with awe on their faces, as if they could no longer see the Olivia Ashford they’d known in the woman she was now.

And while it was good to see so many familiar faces, hear so many still-recognizable voices, her gaze kept skipping across the crowd. She glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock, and she still hadn’t caught a glimpse of John. If she could just get that part over with, she could relax. Seeing him was inevitable, and the longer the wait drew out, the heavier her dread became.

She envisioned the two of them circling the crowd, weaving in and out until they finally ran head on into one another. Olivia could not picture him as he would look now. Couldn’t imagine how time would have changed him. She found herself studying the face of every man who walked by.

How would she know him?

And then, suddenly, she didn’t have to wonder anymore.

Because there he was. Cutting a path through the crowd with long strides, his mouth set in a grim, no-nonsense line.

Olivia froze, shut down inside. And then her heart took off in an out-of-control gallop that would have made her EKG reading look like a seismograph monitoring an L.A. earthquake.

Any semblance of poise she might have gained in her years as a professional broadcaster completely deserted her. She stood in front of him as vulnerable as if she were seventeen again and head over heels in love. She couldn’t smile. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

He didn’t look old.

He hadn’t gained forty pounds.

He had all his hair.

And she would have recognized him in a crowd of a thousand on the other side of the world.

To say he looked good would have been an understatement.

Living in Washington, D. C., Olivia had gotten used to men in suits. The professional man’s uniform: polished loafers, socks with crests on them, starched white shirts, hundred-dollar ties. Washington was full of men like that. That was the kind of man today’s women were supposed to find irresistible.

She never had.

And now she realized why.

Because she would forever be comparing them to John. But John Riley as a boy was quite different from John Riley as a man.

There was no questioning which one he was now.

His shoulders had gotten broader. He was more muscular, solid, strong. The changes were unsettling, maybe because that John, she knew. This one, she did not. And the reality of him, standing here in front of her, felt like a kaleidoscope of then and now.

“Olivia.”

At the sound of his voice, she jumped. Olivia. Not Liv as she had once been to him. The greeting was arctic-cold, his whole demeanor one of stiff politeness as if he’d just bumped into someone he had vaguely known in first grade, but wasn’t quite sure he remembered.

“Hello, John.” She folded her arms across her chest to hide her shaking hands. The urge to flee was nearly irresistible. All of a sudden, she felt like a country girl who’d never been farther than twenty-five miles outside Summerville, who had grown up in a four-room house and gotten her new clothes from the church’s Helping Hand closet.

“Mind if I ask what you’re doing here?” The question was clipped, his anger barely concealed.

Olivia’s stomach did a roller-coaster plummet at the recognition of it. She locked her knees and forced herself to return his scrutiny.

People were staring. She felt their curious gazes. Heard the whispers. She willed her voice toward something close to indifference when she said, “The same thing as everyone else in our class.”

“Everyone else is welcome here.”

The words snagged her like barbed wire, cutting through the skin and refusing to let go, their harshness in opposition to the boy she had once known, a boy whose eyes had looked at her as if she were every good thing he’d ever imagined. A flash of memory hit her. The two of them up on Lookout Mountain, lying on their backs in the bed of his old pickup, a quilt beneath them, staring up at the stars and holding hands. Her head was on his shoulder. Amazing that with all the time that had passed since then, she still remembered the depth of the security she’d felt there. I want us to have four children, Liv. At least four. That way they’ll never grow up lonely. Days like Christmas will be loud and out of control. I like out of control.

Had he really said words like that to her, this man with undiluted disapproval in his eyes?

It didn’t seem possible.

She hated herself, suddenly, for the inability to forget, as he so obviously had. There was no doubt that he had put away all the good memories and had no interest in revisiting any of them.

He stood, arms folded across his chest, waiting for her to respond.

Her lips moved although she had no idea what words they were going to form. “I have every right to be here at this reunion, John,” she said, keeping her voice low. “But this is your home, and I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable by coming here.”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” he said, the denial instant. “Surprised. I never imagined you’d have that much nerve.”