The Debutante's Second Chance

Halfway up the front stairs, he said, “I’ll take it.”

Eli, following him, stopped. “You wouldn’t like to know how much it is?”

He shrugged. “Are you going to screw me?”

“No.”

Micah gave him a sideways grin. “Then, no, I don’t need to know right now. When can I move in?”

“Tomorrow.”

He met Eli’s outstretched hand with his own. “Tomorrow? For all you know, I’m a con man looking for a respectable place to launder money.”

Eli’s smile was enigmatic. “I was on the football field with you. I know better. Landis, you going to take care of this?”

Micah had forgotten she was there, so enthralled had he been by the house. He looked down at where she stood, his gaze meeting hers in mute apology. But she was laughing, and her eyes were sparkling.

How could he, for even one minute, have forgotten her presence?

“Couldn’t you two at least talk this out a little more so I will have earned my commission?”

Eli looked at his watch. “I don’t have time. I have to make sure the madding crowd over there doesn’t dismantle the dining room, and then I have to make myself look properly preacherly before the evening service. Call me in the morning, Micah, and we’ll finish this over breakfast.”

He wrung Micah’s hand again, sketched a wave to Landy as he passed her, and was gone.

“Preacherly?” said Micah.

“Eli’s the minister at the Methodist Church.”

“A minister?” But it fit, Micah realized after a moment—Eli was one of the good guys.

His attention shifted back to Landy. “You never did have anything to eat,” he said suddenly. “Let me buy you dinner.”

Chapter Two

Window Over the Sink, Taft Tribune: April is such a beautiful month. Things start getting green again and there’s hope everywhere and baseball fields ring with the sounds of joy.

But you have to watch for storms in April, have to listen to tornado warnings and watches and open your basement door and keep a bottle of water and a first-aid kit down there in case something bad happens. Sometimes the price we pay for spring is a heavy one.

The fact that she wanted to have dinner with Micah surprised Landy. She hadn’t shared a meal alone with a man since the last time with Blake. Her husband had skimmed his meat across the table like a pebble on a pond and she’d said, “I’m sorry,” even though there had been nothing wrong with the pork chop—everything was wrong with the marriage, where terror and abuse had places at the dinner table.

She hesitated, lost in memory, and was brought back to the present by Micah’s questioning gaze. “All right,” she said, “but come to my house. My cooking is the best example of mediocrity you’ll find this side of a fast-food place. But I have some chili I can heat up that’ll be perfect for a rainy night like this. We can get there in two minutes on the Walk.” And it was safe. Nothing could happen to her there in a house where Blake had never been, where pain had never lived.

Micah nodded, a smile coming into his eyes. She locked the St. John house and handed him the key, and he pocketed it without comment. She realized that houses didn’t mean the same thing to men that they did to women. Men seemed to see them as investments, mere buildings to keep them out of the rain, while women saw them as safe havens, warmth against the cold and extensions of themselves. They wanted the decor to reflect their personalities and be welcoming; men wanted it to be cheap and not show dirt.

“What are your plans for the paper?” she asked. “It’s become so political in recent years. Are you going to keep it that way?”

“No.”

He took her arm, and she knew he’d noticed her limp. People always did.

“Remember when we were kids?” he asked. “The news was mostly local. Weddings, funerals, fiftieth anniversary parties. The columnists, even the political ones, wrote from the slant of living in a little river town. Kind of like the towns Tom Bodett and Garrison Keillor write about.”

“I remember. Everyone in town took the paper then.”

“Right. And if a paper boy or girl forgot to deliver it, the editor took a copy out to the subscriber the same night and gave him the next week free.”

They were at her back steps now, and she tried not to lean on his arm as they walked up. Her leg wasn’t more painful when she climbed stairs, but lifting her foot repeatedly was awkward and tiring.

“Is that what you’re going to do? Bring that back?” Keep him talking and he won’t ask you why you limp.

“I’m going to try to,” he corrected her. “It was that kind of newspaper that made me want to be a journalist.”

She led the way into the kitchen of her house, tossing her coat over the back of a chair to dry. “Let me take your coat.”

She hung his raincoat in the laundry room and returned to find him standing at the cold fireplace in the kitchen. “Light a fire if you’d like,” she suggested. “I know it’s not that cold, but the chill from the rain gets into your bones.” Especially ones that have been broken. She longed to swallow some aspirin to ease the ache in her leg, but didn’t want to invite comment.

He knelt before the fireplace, laying a fire carefully. “Was this kitchen like this when you moved in?”

“Pretty much, though I refinished the old floor and put up wallpaper everywhere. Sam down at the paint store goes into ecstasy when he sees me coming. I’m pretty sure I’m putting his oldest daughter through medical school.” She turned a burner on low under a pot of chili and went to the windows that overlooked the river, turning the wands that closed the blinds. “Do you want to see the rest of the house?” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice.

“Sure.” He straightened and looked around. “I’d like for the St. John house to feel like this one. Cozy, I guess, but not lacy or fussy.”

She grinned at him. “The lace and fuss are upstairs. Come on.”

Micah was a perfect house tourist; he liked everything, even the rose-strewn wallpaper in her bedroom and bathroom.

“Did you have a decorator?” he asked.

“I did it myself,” she said. “Well, me and Sam and Jessie and everyone I hired to do the things I was afraid I’d screw up.”

They sat at the kitchen table with their dinner. “Blake had a designer do Grandmother’s house when we moved into it,” she said, “and it was beautiful, but Jessie said it felt like a hotel she couldn’t afford to stay in.”

Landy watched Micah covertly while they ate, putting bits and pieces of what she saw into the safe place where she kept good memories.

He was tall and broad-shouldered like her husband had been, but had maintained his muscled build in a way that Blake had not. Micah’s dark brown hair was well cut, but not particularly neat, looking as though he combed it with his fingers throughout the day. He squinted sometimes, and she pictured his lean face with reading glasses sliding down his nose. His eyes were the same gray as the pewter pitcher on the mantel, fringed by thick lashes. His smile was wide and lovely, and came seldom. His hand, when he’d held her arm, had been strong but not bruising. She didn’t think Micah Walker had a need to convey power; it was there in his quiet presence.

Without in the least meaning to, Landy sighed.

Across the fat candles that flickered between them, Micah caught and held her gaze. “What happened?” he asked, and she knew he wasn’t asking her about the sigh.

She hesitated. He was a reporter, she reminded herself. He was like those people who had dogged her every step for days, had been at the hospital, the mortuary, in the courtroom and camped in the front and back yards of Grandmother’s house. They had held microphones in her face and shouted questions at her. They had created an obstacle course that a woman on crutches could scarcely navigate.

But the one time she had fallen, when, blinded by tears, she had tripped over someone’s thick black cord, one of the reporters had stuffed her recorder into her pocket and come to Landy’s aid. She had helped her up the steps and into the house, speaking quietly in her ear. The voice had been low, but the words had included the term “predatory sons of bitches” and Landy had laughed in spite of everything. The young woman helped her to a seat and then left her alone, and when Landy got up and peered outside through a lifted corner of a curtain, there had been no one left in her yard.

She’d always wanted to thank the reporter for rescuing her, but had never seen her again in the hordes who had followed her until someone else’s drama took news media precedence over hers.

“You were the debutante,” said Micah. “Your life was supposed to be charmed.” His voice was soft, gentle, the kind of voice that could lull you into thinking you were safe. Could, if the time was right, talk you into bed naked before you knew your bra was unfastened.

“I never knew what I did,” she said, “to make you think I was like that. I went to the same school, church, Kmart that everyone else did, but I couldn’t ever be just everyone else. To you, anyway.”

“I know,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I divided the world into those who had and those who didn’t. You had, which made you worthy of my contempt. At the time, I imagine I thought your family even hired people to go to the bathroom for you.”

The self-directed sarcasm startled a laugh from her. “Not quite,” she said, “but speaking of bathrooms, would you excuse me?”

In the pretty little powder room under the stairs, she swallowed three extra-strength pain relievers and willed them to work. The ache in her leg had become a raging fire, with little arrows of flame shooting and swirling all the way from her hip to her ankle.

They sat in comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace, their coffee on a cloth-covered round table between them. Landy stretched her jeans-clad legs out straight, propping her feet on the ottoman the chairs shared, and Micah saw a spasm of pain cross her face. The expression cleared immediately, however, to be replaced with a Mona Lisa smile he recognized as a mask.

“It’s pretty much a classic story,” she said. “Blake started hitting me in high school, stopped while we were in college, and started up again before we’d been married three months. We’d go to counseling, it would get better, then he’d drink and it would happen again. It became such a cycle I was almost able to mark it on a calendar.”

She spoke without expression, though the color in the cheek he could see was hectic and her hands had that look about them again. That tension that made her grip her coffee cup and raise it to her lips in a studied motion.

“Why?” He had to force the word out.

“Why what? Why did an intelligent woman stay with an abusive husband? I told you it was a classic story—my reasons are just as classic. He didn’t mean to, I deserved it, it won’t happen again, I can’t manage on my own because I don’t know how. You’ve probably heard them all before.”

He nodded slightly, his jaw hurting from being clamped so tightly. This shouldn’t have happened to her. It shouldn’t happen to anyone, but especially her. She’s fragile, small, a debutante, for God’s sake.

“Finally, five years ago, we got divorced. It was very civilized, as divorces go. I kept Grandmother’s house and Blake married his secretary and went to a law firm in Indianapolis. It was more prestigious than his father’s firm. Also less accepting of his lax professional standards. He was back with his father within a year.”

She rose, straightening slowly, and limped to the coffeepot, bringing it back and refilling their cups. When she returned to her seat, she gave a small gasp and grasped her leg. “Charley horse,” she said, with a hitching little laugh.

He nodded, knowing she lied. He wanted to offer to rub the pain from her leg, but sensed the gesture wouldn’t be welcome.

“Blake’s new wife came to my house late one night two and a half years ago. It was storming to beat the band and she asked for shelter. I remember thinking how much smarter she was than I’d been, getting away earlier instead of waiting for him to change. Blake arrived within the hour.”

Micah wanted to tell her to stop. The fact that his jaw hurt and her leg hurt and the fire needed another log were all good reasons for her to stop, weren’t they?

She set down her cup, and he saw that the hand with the chewed fingernails and bumpy knuckles trembled the way it had that afternoon in the church basement. He took it in his and held it, not saying anything.

“She and I were at the top of the stairs when he let himself in—I’d never changed the locks, since the divorce was so civilized. What an idiot I was.” She shuddered, and her fingers tightened around his. “But it was different this time, because Blake had a gun. I’d felt so powerful, so alive, after we were divorced that apparently I thought I could stop bullets, because I stepped in front of his wife. But he wasn’t interested in me and tried to push me out of the way. I grabbed his arm—can you believe that? The man had a gun and I grabbed his arm. I knocked him off balance and when he went down the stairs, he took me with him.”

She swallowed hard, and her eyes were dark and sad, glimmering with unshed tears. “The gun went off, just like in the movies. God, what a horrendous noise that makes. I had blood all over me and I was hurt, so I thought I’d been shot, but when I turned my head, he was lying there and not moving. He died on the way to the hospital.”

“Did his wife tell a different story?”

“No, but Lucas didn’t believe either one of us.” She rubbed her leg with her free hand, not looking at him. “I kept remembering how much I’d loved Blake, how much fun he could be when he wanted to. I thought of how he insisted I learn to use a gun correctly to keep me safe. It’s easy to blame yourself when the other person is dead.”

“What happened then?”

“Lucas lost the case, I sold Grandmother’s house to the church and life went on. On the surface, at least. Underneath—” she hesitated and drew her hand from his “—underneath, I think my life ended when Blake’s did.”

He gestured toward her leg. “Is that a leftover from the fall down the stairs?”

She nodded. “It was broken in three places. The surgeon wants to operate again, but I keep putting it off.”

Micah lifted his hand to her face, cupping her cheek and stroking a tear from her lashes with his thumb. “I think maybe your life’s broken, like your leg was, but not over. Some healing takes a long time.”

She nodded. “But some things never heal at all.”

Chapter Three

Window Over the Sink, Taft Tribune: Don’t you just hate moving? On Susan’s personal list of favorites, it’s right up there with root canal and cleaning the mold out of the refrigerator. But there’s an upside to it. When you’re actually living in your new home, sleeping in your own bed, and spilling grape juice on your own new carpet, you get a different feeling from any other. You feel at home—there’s nothing any better than that. Sometimes, moving is a second, third, or last chance at a brave, wonderful new life.

Landy helped Micah move into the St. John house. She pushed furniture around after it was delivered, hung towels in the bathrooms and prepared supper for him and his father three nights running. She and Jessie stood on stepladders and measured for window treatments, then put the airy curtains up when they arrived.

On his first night in the house, Micah gave an impromptu dinner party and Eli, Jessie, Landy and Nancy Burnside came. They laughed, told stories, ate pizza and drank beer. When everyone went home, Micah kissed Nancy and Jessie on the cheek. Landy brought up the rear, and he didn’t kiss her at all, just gave her a long look. After that night, he hardly saw her at all.

She waved to him across the produce aisle at the grocery store, but by the time he carried his purchases through the checkout, her aged black Chevy was pulling out of the parking lot. He saw her on the River Walk most evenings at dusk, walking as fast as her hitching gait allowed. She and Eli were in and out of each other’s houses, too. Sometimes one of Eli’s numerous and sundry children accompanied her trek around the thumb, and the lapping river water would transmit the sound of her laughter to Micah as he sat on his back porch.

“I always liked that little girl,” his father said one evening, and Micah looked up to see the setting sun embracing Landy, turning her hair the color of orange marmalade and making his heart ache in a place he hadn’t known was there.

He thought then about asking her to go to dinner with him, maybe crossing the big bridge into Cincinnati to see a play, but later that night he saw Eli slip through the darkness to her house.

It was a good match—Eli and Landy. Micah told himself that, but then he sat silent and morose on the porch until he saw Eli go home.

The “Window Over the Sink” columns arrived in the mail every Friday, and he printed them in Saturday’s Trib. People liked them. “Been there, done that, bought the damn T-shirt,” they told him.

Plans for the newspaper were working out, coming together faster than he’d thought possible. Advertising and subscriptions were both on an upswing. The town clergymen took turns writing a short, inspirational piece every week. Mrs. Burnside did a rambling twenty inches or so on who was doing what. It was corny, she admitted, writing down when so-and-so’s daughter from Ithaca, New York, visited with her two young sons and spoiled cocker spaniel, but people liked reading it and she had a good time compiling it. Micah liked her writing—and her—so well he offered her the receptionist’s job and she took it, managing his newspaper office as efficiently as she had geometry class. Her coffee was good, too; his entire staff had threatened mutiny when, being the first one in the office one Monday morning, he made the coffee.

“This stuff,” said Joe Carter mildly, “gives sludge a bad name.” So Nancy made the coffee.

“Window Over the Sink” was the most popular of the columns, drawing the most reader comment. Everyone had his own idea of who Susan was, ranging from Jenny from the café to Micah’s father—an idea that horrified Ethan. Micah had even looked at the back of one of the newspaper’s checks that had been issued to Susan Billings, to see if her signature looked familiar. But the check was stamped with For Deposit Only and had been cashed without question at a local bank.

Micah considered for a while that the writer might be Landy. In the end, he didn’t think so, because she had no children and her high-school heartthrob was dead. Susan wrote with a lightness of spirit that had left Landy one night on the stairs of her grandmother’s house.

He didn’t really know what Landy did, though. She worked at the realty sometimes, but not often. She substitute-taught everything from kindergarten to senior English and occasionally waited tables during the lunch rush Down at Jenny’s. She volunteered everywhere, clerking for the blood drive, reading aloud at Wee Care Preschool, and delivering Meals on Wheels.

He saw her in church, in the same pew as Jessie Titus Browning with Jessie’s three children lined up between them. Sometimes, Landy wasn’t at the service, and he wondered where she was until one Sunday he went to the basement restroom and found her presiding over the nursery.

When he caught sight of her that Sunday, Micah stood in the door of the big room that housed the nursery, not noticing the cribs, the changing table or the miniature table and chairs. Not even really seeing the six or seven preschoolers milling around the room.

He saw only Landy, standing with a baby on her hip. She swayed gently, crooning into the ear of the sobbing infant. Watching her, he remembered something his father had said once. “Equal rights or no, there’s nothing in the world any prettier than a woman with a baby in her arms.”

Pop had been right.

The woman looked up and saw him then, and smiled. “Good morning,” she said. “Here.”

Before he knew what was happening, she had plunked the weeping baby in his arms and was rummaging in a cupboard. “These kids are starving to death. They know they get treats down here, and Colby—he’s the one you’re holding—has kept me so busy I’m behind.”

“Okay.” Micah looked down at the wizened little face of the baby. “I’ll try not to drop you if you’ll quit crying, how does that sound?”

He stepped carefully between the toys that littered the carpeted floor and sat in a rocking chair, propping Colby up on his shoulder the way he’d seen countless women do. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? The baby smelled good, and Micah breathed deep.

Landy handed out disgusting-looking fruit things to the children and began pouring juice out of a can into paper cups. “Sing to him,” she suggested over her shoulder. “He likes it.”

“You think so, huh,” he grunted, but when Colby’s whimpers became sobs again, he began to sing “Yellow Submarine” in a low voice.

Pretty soon, Colby stopped crying, and by the time Micah had finished “Hey, Jude” and was halfway through “A Hard Day’s Night,” the other children were quiet, too. They sat cross-legged on the floor and listened.

“That’s classical music, my dad says,” commented Lindsey, Eli’s youngest. “My brother Max says it’s just old.”

The snort of laughter from the woman leaning against a changing table made Micah glad he’d come down the stairs, even though his hand was asleep and Colby’s diaper had sprung a definite leak.

“Would you have dinner with me tonight?” he asked, not caring that all the children heard him and Lindsey was probably going to report to her father that his friend Micah was asking Landy for a date.

Landy started, and her cheeks turned pink, but she was smiling again when she answered. “Sure, if you’ll sing ‘Twist and Shout.’ I always liked that.”

“It’s a date, Jess. What in the hell am I doing going on a date?” Clad in white cotton underwear, Landy paced between her closet and dressing table, so distracted that she didn’t even think about her leg.

“Driving yourself crazy, I’d say,” said Jessie, “and it’s about time.”

“He just looked so sweet, holding Colby and singing, I couldn’t say no. But Blake used to be sweet, too, and if I’d said no more often, he’d probably still be alive.”

“Landy—”

“It’s true. Don’t try and tell me it’s not.” Landy reached for the cup of tea that sat cooling on a table.

“Okay, I won’t. But maybe if I’d told somebody the first time he ever hit you—after you smiled at Micah and told him good game—Blake would still be alive. Maybe if his parents hadn’t blinded themselves to his violence, he’d still be alive. Maybe if the steps in your grandma’s house hadn’t been so steep, there wouldn’t have been time for the gun to go off and he’d still be alive.” Jessie’s normally soft brown eyes snapped. “You going to live the rest of your life on maybes?”

Landy got up, going back to her closet. “Maybe,” she said over her shoulder, and laughed when Jessie raised one finger in a universal gesture.

“Wear a dress.” Jessie poured more tea.

“Oh, Jess, I don’t think so.” Landy looked down at the scars left by the surgeries on her leg. “This doesn’t look too pretty.”

Their eyes met in the mirror. “You’re right. You’ve been hiding from who you are ever since Blake died,” said Jessie. “Why stop now?”

Stung, Landy reached far into the closet and withdrew a hanger.

It looked like a basic “little black dress” until the wearer moved and hints of plum shimmered in its depths. Darts and seams made it fit as though it had been tailored for her, even though she’d bought it off the clearance rack at the boutique beside Down at Jenny’s. She’d never worn it, but sometimes she would come into her room and try it on. She’d turn this way and that before the long mirror and imagine herself unscarred and free.

Maybe, just for tonight, that’s what she could be.

She slid her feet into strappy black cloth heels and fastened silver hoops in her ears, a silver chain around her throat that nestled inside the scooped neckline of the dress, and a row of delicate bracelets that slipped up and down her arm and captured light when they moved.