Love Finds You in Hershey, Pennsylvania (29 page)

Sadie watched as the crowd melted around Jasper, shifting like the parting of the Red Sea to let him through. She felt hot tears well up in her eyes with frustration, sadness, and triumph—though what she’d accomplished she did not know.

Wounded to her very core, she acted on the first impulse that overtook her, walking quickly to Jones and Smith’s nearby table. The two old biddies had watched the entire scene with a malicious sort of glee on their hawklike faces. But at Sadie’s expression, they drew back, not daring to interfere, as she scooped up the remains of their award-winning Reese’s peanut butter cup pie filled with mascarpone cheese…and lobbed a large handful at Jasper’s retreating head.

Though she had never possessed much skill at softball, no one could have thrown a more perfect pitch. The pie smacked Jasper square on the back of his scruffy blond head, and the crowd let out another gasp.

He paused and stood there for a long moment. Inwardly, in the deepest part of her soul, Sadie begged for him to turn around.
Laugh
, she silently begged.
Look at me and laugh.

But the moment passed, and Jasper kept walking. He never turned around to face her.

Sadie felt the tears begin to rise.

Great.

Humiliated by the presence of so many onlookers, Sadie mustered every ounce of will she possessed to staunch the flood of tears threatening to overwhelm her. What a horrible, rotten day. It was enough to make her crawl into bed and lock the door for the next three weeks. But she didn’t let any of this frustration show as she turned, head held high, to gather her things and go in search of Mac and Kylie.

The crowd stared at each of her actions with mute fascination, seeming to wonder just what she would do next.

Now she knew how the prairie dogs at Hershey’s ZooAmerica felt: the object of a crowd’s absorption.

She wiped her fingers on a paper towel, cringing at the stickiness but deciding to wash them later. Right now she didn’t care to do anything except make her escape from this horrible scene.

The crowd parted much more hesitantly for her than they had for Jasper. It was as if they were reluctant to let this last part of their entertainment escape. She forced her way around several people, her tears building to an anguished fury inside her, when suddenly someone stepped in front and began nudging people out of the way. Through the blur of tears she refused to let slip, she could make out the tall, dark figure of Dmitri Velichko, forcing people aside to help her cut a path to the door.

She didn’t think, after throwing the pie at Jasper, that her humiliation could run any deeper. But the sight of the man she had sworn as her archenemy, the one who had defeated her in her own town at her own game, stepping in with such chivalry made her feel as though she had touched an all-new type of low. Her mouth filled with a sour sort of taste, but she could not focus on anything beyond getting away from the stares of the crowd.

Dmitri reached the door one step ahead of her and held it open. She slipped through without so much as a glance at his face, too disgraced to even offer him a thank-you.

The chatter outside was a welcome relief to the silence she had caused inside. Laughter and shouts served to veil her embarrassment and blanket her in a blessed cloak of anonymity.

But the feeling didn’t last long.

Apparently, word had spread even faster than she had thought possible, and several of the festival’s outdoor participants had clearly heard about the incident that had taken place just minutes earlier. As she walked through the venues, searching for Mac and Kylie, more than one couple turned aside to whisper, giving Sadie furtive glances. She clenched her jaw and forced her chin into the air. They couldn’t begin to understand what she’d been through today.

Despite her proud demeanor, she nearly sank to the ground in relief when she spotted Mac and Kylie by the cotton candy stand. Kylie’s face was smeared with a sticky palette of pink and blue, and for once, Sadie didn’t much care how much dye and sugar her daughter had consumed.

The look on Mac’s face as she strolled up told her he’d already heard—from whom she couldn’t guess—about her very public confrontation with Jasper. He went to her without a word and awkwardly patted her shoulder. His stilted movements only exasperated her further—not that she had expected him to offer a fatherly embrace or anything.

Come to think of it, she’d probably have pushed him away even if he had.

“Time to go, Kylie,” she announced, mortified at the way her words trembled.

Kylie protested, “But, Mommy, Kylie hasn’t gone to the petting zoo yet!”

Sadie was in no mood to placate her daughter. “
Now
, Kylie.”

Kylie looked from Sadie to Mac. He shook his head at her and, with a weary sigh, Kylie left the cotton candy stand and led the way to the parking lot.

“What about Jasper?” she asked as they exited the festival and stepped onto asphalt.

Sadie opened her mouth to answer her and discovered she had no words. She didn’t know about Jasper, so she didn’t know what to tell Kylie.

“Jasper had to go home early,” Mac filled in for her.

Kylie frowned, but whatever five-year-old logic she was mustering, she kept it to herself.

On the ride home, she chattered on to Sadie about everything she had done that day—the friends she had met up with, the animals she had seen, the way her Sunday school teacher had fallen off the pony at the pony rides… But nothing lifted Sadie’s mood, and Kylie’s childlike intuition seemed to sense that something was very wrong. She finally fell silent, and by the time Mac’s pickup pulled into the driveway of their home, the three of them had spent an agonizing eight minutes in complete silence.

As Mac turned the key in the ignition, he turned to look at Sadie.

“You shouldn’t be too hard on him,” Mac softly said, eyeing his daughter with a sad expression in his brown eyes.

Sadie’s jaw clenched, but she didn’t say anything. Mac paused before saying, “He tried to tell you about it several times. But you were so caught up in the dessert competition, you never heard what he was saying.”

“I would have listened to something like that,” Sadie stated, her tone brittle.

Mac frowned. “No, Sadie girl…you wouldn’t have. He’d been scared for weeks to tell you.”

Sadie shook her head. “No, see, that’s the problem. If he was
scared
, it was most likely because he’d gotten cold feet and didn’t know how to break that to me.”

Mac shook his head sadly. “He was scared of
this
. This is what he was afraid of—that you’d see it all in the wrong light and then decide to punish him for it.”

Sadie suddenly realized her daughter was listening. “Kylie, go wait for me on the front porch.”

Kylie hesitated. “Kylie can wait here,” she responded softly.

“
Go
, Kylie.
Now
.”

Sadie helped her out of the truck and Kylie retreated to the front porch.

Once Kylie was out of earshot, Sadie turned to Mac angrily. “I don’t appreciate your arguing with me in front of my daughter, and I certainly don’t like you bringing up punishment in front of her. I’m her mother, therefore it’s necessary for me to discipline her at times, and I certainly don’t need that authority undermined.”

Before she could forge ahead, Mac surprised her by saying, “You’re right about that. I’m sorry.”

She paused, her thoughts broken, and muttered a brief “Thank you” before starting again. “Secondly, Jasper’s and my relationship isn’t any of your business, and
if
Jasper had a problem with me—
IF
he did,” she emphasized a second time, “then he should have brought it to
my
attention, not yours.”

Mac threw her a second time by nodding. “I agree with you.”

She heaved a breath. Okay, it should have felt like she was winning this argument…so why did she feel like such a loser?

It suddenly seemed as though everyone was trying to make her feel bad—Jasper, Dmitri Velichko and now her so-called father on top of it. Were they manipulating her guilt; was that it? She grew indignant at the thought and stiffened her spine as she spoke once more.

“Everyone seems to want to blame
me
for Jasper’s mistakes. But the fact of the matter is, I didn’t do anything wrong. If Jasper wanted to go to Colorado, he should have told me sooner so I didn’t have to hear it from his soon-to-be-former-employer.”

“He tried,” Mac defended again, “but you never allowed him the opportunity. You have to admit, Sadie girl, you’ve been rather… preoccupied…these last few weeks.”

“If you think you can live my life, you’re welcome to it,” she snapped, the weeks of pressure and strain releasing in a rush of words. “I buried my husband and my mother in less than three years’ time, I lost a career in television and publishing, I started another career by building a restaurant from the ground up, and all the while, I’ve been single-handedly raising my daughter. And oh, let’s see, how much love and support have I had from my father over the past twenty-nine years? Well, I think we know the answer to that,” she responded to her own question with more than a touch of bitterness.

“The thing is, Mac…”—she fought to control tears, determined that he would
not
see her cry at this low point—“you weren’t
there
before when I needed you…so what makes you think I even want you here now? And if Jasper doesn’t want to be here either, far be it from me to keep him in my self-indulged little world.”

She gripped the door handle and tugged at it with a sharp motion, sliding out of the pickup and grabbing her bag as she went.

“Sadie?” Mac called before she could slam the door. She wanted to slam it anyway, blocking out whatever else he had to say. But her curiosity—and a perverse sense of hope—wouldn’t let her. She paused.

“You haven’t been raising Kylie alone,” Mac pointed out. “Jasper’s been raising her too.”

This completely rational observation shattered her final wish for understanding. “She’s
my
daughter, Mac.
Mine
. And I think it would be better if you—and Jasper and whoever else wants to interfere in our lives—just left us alone from now on.”

And with that, she slammed the door with such force that the truck body swayed. She turned and stalked up to the porch, and her fingers trembled as she tried to fit the key in the lock. Kylie’s round, worried eyes on her didn’t help matters.

“Mommy?”

Sadie ignored her and fumbled desperately to get inside, away from the eyes of the world. The tears she’d been fighting for the last hour rose and blurred her vision, slowly seeping from her rapidly blinking eyes and falling onto her hands as she continued to struggle with the lock.

“Mommy?” Kylie’s voice held her own desperation as her tiny fingers clutched at Sadie’s blouse. “Mommy, are you okay?”

The heartfelt concern in that tiny question, spoken with such worry from her five-year-old’s heart, served to do what weeks of worry, stress, and strain hadn’t accomplished. Sadie sank to her knees as she heard Mac’s truck leave the driveway, wrapped Kylie’s little form in her arms, and held her for several minutes while she wept, as the key patiently waited in the lock.

The week that followed convinced Sadie that everything she’d been through thus far was only a test for the greater battle to come. Dmitri’s winning first prize at the Cocoa Cook-Off was local headline news for several days after the competition ended. Sadie tossed the papers into the recycle bin without reading them and even toyed with canceling her subscription. Kylie, bereft without Jasper to watch her, behaved abominably for their neighbor, Mrs. Snelling, who had offered babysitting services out of the goodness of her heart. But after four days of Kylie’s worse-than-usual antics, even Mrs. Snelling’s charity had reached the limits of its endurance. Sadie attempted to take Kylie with her to the restaurant one day, but after several Kylie-inspired mishaps in the kitchen, that proved to be a bad idea.

She could have called the local day care, but for a child who had never known anything except personal one-on-one attention, Sadie feared the day care might not be the ideal solution, and she loathed the thought of Kylie being permanently banned from there.

Without any other options, she once again begged Glynda to take on extra duties while she sorted out her personal life—a conversation filled with such humiliation and begging that Sadie feared she’d never reestablish her self-respect.

She didn’t have much time to worry over it, however, because Kylie-at-home was a full-time career in itself. Sadie found herself racing upstairs and downstairs, from one end of the house to the other, to keep Kylie entertained and out of trouble. Kylie seemed determined to wreak even more havoc than usual, probably out of her frustration in being denied to visit Jasper, although Sadie didn’t want to admit as much—to herself or anyone else.

So she tightened her emotional resolve, hid her face from the world, and worked to keep up the facade that although things were a bit rough, everything was business as usual. All the while, she was dying inside…wondering how she had ever thought she could manage without Jasper’s help and why she had ever told Mac to stay away. While her heart ached at these thoughts, her indignation rose to remind her that
Jasper
had chosen to abandon
her
, not the other way around. And besides, Mac had never been around much in the first place, so it wasn’t like there was a lot to miss on that score anyway.