Blood Red (8 page)

Reminding herself that it's for Jake's own good, she watches the rest of the game grimly and is relieved when he doesn't show up after all.

She's in bed when he gets home, pretending to be asleep.

Another lie, on the heels of the note she left for him on the kitchen counter:
Going shopping first thing in the a.m., probably won't be back till dinner.

Old habits . . .

Dammit.

But it'll be the last lie ever, she promises herself as her husband begins to snore peacefully beside her.

S
aturday dawns damp and dreary, perfect for staying in bed. That's where Jake and Mick are when Rowan leaves the house after too little sleep and too little coffee. Extra caffeine would only make her even more nervous, if that's possible.

In the large master bathroom—­which had been a sleeping porch before she and Jake renovated the house—­she dresses in jeans, boots, and a black turtleneck. After surveying her reflection, she pulls a gray cardigan over the turtleneck. No need to display her curves. Then she decides that the cardigan isn't flattering and swaps both sweaters for a blouse and blazer. Unbuttoning the top two buttons, she glimpses cleavage and hastily buttons both. Now she looks like a prim schoolmarm. She settles on just the top button open: casually comfortable.

The hair and makeup are just as befuddling. Letting it hang in loose blondish waves is potentially sexy, which she doesn't want, yet now that it's shoulder-­length, a pony­tail is too stubby and severe. Her lashes and thin lips tend to disappear without cosmetic enhancement, but the liner and lipstick she wears on a daily basis suddenly seem suggestive. She doesn't want him getting ideas.

Oh, come on.

He probably already
has
ideas, unless he really is the one who sent the package, in which case he's all but summoned her presence this morning. But if he's expecting a walk on the shady side of memory lane, he's in for an unpleasant surprise.

In the end, she skips the lipstick and eyeliner, goes with the ponytail, and turns her back on the mirror. Downstairs, she finds Doofus blissfully snoozing on the rug and has to shake him awake.

“You'd make a lousy watchdog, you know that?”

He wags his tail, apparently mistaking it as a compliment.

“I don't suppose you've seen my keys?” she adds, unsuccessfully searching the cluttered kitchen surfaces, a daily occurrence.

She lets the dog out into the yard and takes her medication on an empty stomach. To stave off the predictable tide of nausea—­evocative of morning-­sickness-­meets-­wretched-­hangover—­she belatedly gobbles a ­couple of saltines as she continues searching for her keys. After finding them in the pocket of last night's jacket, she coaxes Doofus back inside too soon even for his taste.

“Sorry, but I've got to run,” she explains, dumping some food into a bowl for him and convinced he's gazing reproachfully after her when she finally hurtles herself out the door.

The pavement is slick and shiny as she winds her way south along Highland Road, riding the brake in anticipation of joggers and deer. Tendrils of mist obscure portions of the highway she knows so well.

Growing up in Mundy's Landing, she longed for the day she could leave the village behind. But when it finally arrived, she found herself longing to go back home. It took her well over a decade to do that. After a year as a commuter student at Hadley, the only college willing to admit her, probably only because the admissions ­people were local and knew about her recently deceased mother, she transferred to her mother's alma mater, the University of Buffalo. Like Mom, she majored in education, not because she particularly wanted to become a teacher, but because it made her feel closer to her mother and it made her widowed father happy.

Weary of western New York winters, she went south to Virginia for her master's. But while she was back home over Christmas break, she met Asa Jacob Mundy IV, though no one ever called him that. He was just Jake. He was seven years older than Rowan, having graduated high school just ahead of her oldest brother, Mitch.

Like most graduates of Mundy's Landing High School during their era, Jake had gone away to college and stayed away. His father had died fairly young and his mother was still living in Mundy's Landing, but she's long since settled in Texas with Jake's older sister, Liza.

Jake hadn't strayed so far: he was working for an ad agency in New York City when Rowan met him.

They were married the June after she got her master's degree. She'd had her fill of steamy Southern summers and welcomed the chance to move North again. She found a teaching position in the New York suburbs and that's where they settled. Her father adored Jake—­not just because everyone likes Jake, but because he was a hometown boy, a Mundy.

Dad lived to walk Rowan down the aisle and hold her firstborn, but died while she was pregnant with her second. He never met the daughter Rowan named for her mother, or his own namesake, Mick; never got to see her come full circle back to Mundy's Landing.

Not a day goes by that she doesn't long for her parents or remember the promises she made to them both and struggled so hard to keep.

What would they think of her now?

They wouldn't be proud of me—­that's for damned sure.

Resisting the urge to feel sorry for herself, Rowan swallows over the lump in her throat and merges onto the thruway headed toward New York City, determined to make things right again.

The drive should take only two hours, but three and a half have passed before she's finally pulling into a parking garage in the West Fifties. It was pouring by the time she reached the northern suburbs, and steady traffic gave way to notorious holiday gridlock within the city limits.

She'd expected to have plenty of time to gather her emotions before meeting Rick, but she's got less than fifteen minutes to make her way to the Hell's Kitchen restaurant he'd suggested. She covers those blocks beneath a dripping umbrella, pausing on every corner to exchange texts with Jake, who's back home and filled with the usual questions about where to find things that have gone missing in the laundry room or kitchen. A phone call would be easier, but she knows there'll be no passing off the rumbles, honks, and shouts of urban street noise for a shopping mall.

She signs off with a quick “TTYL” when she arrives at the designated meeting spot.

It appears to be more of a no-­frills coffee shop than the upscale café she was for some reason anticipating. He suggested it, saying it was close to the West Side Highway and the PATH trains to Jersey, where he now lives . . . alone.

That his marriage to Vanessa didn't survive probably shouldn't surprise Rowan, but it does.

There but for the grace of God, she thinks, pausing in front of the door to silence her phone. Then, taking a deep breath, she steps inside the restaurant.

She recognizes Rick Walker immediately, sitting alone in a booth with his back to the door. There's something strikingly familiar about the poised, pensive posture: elbows propped on the table, raised cup clutched in both hands, head bent.

Either he's got her right where he wants her, or he's in for one hell of a nasty surprise.

“Table for one?” a waitress asks, and she shakes her head and points toward Rick.

“I'm joining someone.”

The woman waves her on, but Rowan hesitates, unwilling to approach him. She reminds herself that she's anonymous here; no one is watching her, judging her. But it isn't easy to push aside the guilt and trepidation.

At last, she walks over to the table and steels herself for the confrontation whose script has been running through in her head all night.

“Rick?” Her voice works. So far, so good.

He looks up, lights up with a grin that crinkles the corners of his eyes just as she remembers. He sets down the mug—­tea, she sees, noting the string dangling over the edge. He always chose tea over coffee.

“I'm surprised you don't,” he said once, soon after they met.

“Why?”

“Because you grew up in an Irish household.”

“So you assume we drank tea?”

“You didn't?”

“Sure we did. And whiskey, too, and we ate corned beef and cabbage every night and wore kilts and danced jigs . . .”

“And hid pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?”

“Exactly,” she agreed with a laugh.

Snippets of that lighthearted exchange float into her head as he gets up to embrace her like a long-­lost friend.

“Rowan. It's so good to see you. I almost didn't recognize you without your hair.”

“I still have hair.” He does, too, but it's thinning.

“I meant your long red hair. But you look great. Sit down.”

She'd been worried until this moment that she'd take one look at him and become infatuated all over again. But that isn't the case, and it's not just because he's a middle-­aged man now. His looks were never the draw in the first place. It was more that Rick understood her—­or rather, she perceived that he understood her—­far better than Jake did at the time.

Unlike her husband, he knew his way around the kitchen and the supermarket; the playground and the pediatrician's office; the preschool parking lot and—­perhaps most important—­the circle of moms. Neither of them could relate to the designer stroller–pushing crowd that populated their suburb. Rowan and Rick seemed to be the only two parents on the playground who hadn't grown up in Westchester, didn't come from money, and didn't have doting parents willing to write fat checks and babysit the grandkids. Nor had they swapped demanding corporate careers to spend days at home with their toddlers. They used to laughingly speculate that some of those moms managed their kids the way they used to manage their corporate minions.

Jake would never have grasped the humor in imagining a brisk memo delivered to a sandbox with a cc to a crib, bearing the subject line “Potty Training Objectives” or “Naptime Agenda.”

Rick got it. He got her.

She used to wonder whether she'd married the wrong man.

Now I'm positive I didn't
, she thinks as she sinks into the booth, missing Jake already. What a difference fourteen years—­a lifetime—­has made. She'd give anything to be at home where she belongs, instead of here with Rick, exhuming memories.

The place feels familiar. They sometimes took the kids out for lunch after preschool pickup, to a diner just like this one. Maybe that's why he chose it.

Yes, and one of his boys—­or was it Braden?—­was going through a stage when he'd eat nothing but simple white carbs. Bagels, cereal, buttered pasta . . .

Funny that she doesn't remember whether it was his son or her own, but she clearly remembers sitting across from Rick in a corner booth crammed with kids and crumbs, talking endlessly about parenting challenges she might have discussed with the other moms if they weren't so cliquey, or with her own mom if she were still alive.

When she'd become a mother a decade after losing her own, Rowan was surprised to find herself grieving the loss all over again and feeling lonelier than she had in years. Then Rick came along, and he was interested in her day-­to-­day existence because he shared it. He actually cared about potty training technique and transitioning away from naps and training wheels . . .

When she discussed those things with Jake, he always seemed to be either disinterested or oppositional. “Why do you bother asking me for my opinion if you don't want to listen to what I have to say?” he'd ask.

“I didn't ask for your opinion. You offered it.”

“They're my kids, too.”

“I know. But it's fine. I'm the one who's with them most of the time, so I'll deal with it.”

And she would—­often with plenty of helpful input from Rick Walker.

And yes, she did think he was good-­looking back then. Not conventionally tall, dark, and handsome like Jake. But Rick had warm brown eyes and a quick grin and was hilariously funny, and so sweet and caring with his kids—­and with her kids, and with her. He was always complimenting her on her laugh, her parenting skills, her hair—­especially her hair.

“I've always had a thing for redheads . . .”

The comment hadn't seemed particularly inappropriate at the time. She'd been too caught up in her infatuation, wondering what it would be like to kiss him, and then one day . . .

She knew.

How exhilarating to realize he'd been longing for the same forbidden connection all those times they were together. How satisfying to indulge blatant desire after all those years of keeping her emotions and behavior in check.

And how utterly foolish, and selfish, and sinful, and terrifying.

They size each other up across the table.

What's supposed to come next?

An accusation, she believes. But the words she'd rehearsed refuse to form on her lips, so she busies herself shrugging out of her coat and arranging her paper napkin on her lap. Meanwhile, he starts to talk. And talk. He doesn't sound anxious, but maybe he is, because he won't shut up and give her a moment to gather her thoughts and her nerve.

He's telling her how happy he is that she wanted to get together, asking her how things are, how everyone has been.

“Jake? The kids? Are they grown up now? They must be.”

“My older two are in college. The youngest is still at home with us.”

“That's Mickey. You gave him your maiden name, Carmichael, as a first name, and you used to call him Mickey, like they called your dad.”

“We still do, only now it's shortened to Mick,” she tells him, unnerved. Does he just happen to remember those details? Or did he find them somewhere online?

He must remember. Her father's nickname wouldn't have been officially documented in any public record or forum.