Second Chance (12 page)

“I just thought maybe you came for him,” Mary mumbled. “Tying up loose ends.”

“What loose ends?” Elle asked. “What are you talking about?”

Mary waved her hand. “Nothing. I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth.”

“No,” Elle said. “You should have.” She opened the door wider and propped the screen door with her foot. “I think you’d better come inside.”

Five minutes later, they were perched on the sofa. Mary shifted nervously. Elle sat expectantly.

“It’s nothing,” Mary began. Her long hair was down and she played with a strand of it, curling it around her finger.

Elle remembered what Cash had said, his comment about taking Mary out when they were younger. “What do you know about me and Cash?”

“Not much,” Mary said. “I knew of you.”

Elle raised her eyebrows. “You did?”

“Not through Cash,” she said quickly. “Well, I mean, I kind of did. But that’s not the main way.”

She was confusing Elle.

“I moved here my sophomore year,” she said. “My dad retired—he was an insurance VP—and he bought a house here on the island. The house I’m living in now. The fall of ’99.”

The year Elle had left.

“Anyway, I got to know people pretty quickly.” She smiled. “Pretty easy to do in a small place, you know? Met your grandmother a few times. She was a nice woman. I was sorry I didn’t get to spend more time with her before she died.”

Elle nodded. She was sorry, too.

“She talked about you a lot,” Mary said, her voice soft. “Thought the world of you.”

Elle nodded again. She wasn’t sure she could trust her voice.

“I was looking forward to meeting you the following summer. I mean, I’d come from a town of forty-thousand people to an island of less than two thousand. It was a huge adjustment. Not many kids my age and they all seemed to have friends already, you know? She said that you knew what it was like to be on the fringe of the island kids, that you’d made a place for yourself, made it work every summer. She said you had plans to come back. That you and Cash
…” her voice trailed off.

Elle stiffened. “That me and Cash what?”

Mary shrugged. “That you were a couple. Had been a couple every summer for three years.”

Elle waited.

Mary tucked a leg underneath her. “Not anything serious, she said. Not until your last summer. The summer before I came.”

When Elle didn’t say anything, she continued. “That was the only time she mentioned it. So I just thought maybe you were here for that. For him.”

Elle nodded. What Mary said made sense but something wasn’t adding up.

“Why would you think there were loose ends?” she asked. It sounded like she’d gotten cursory information from her grandmother, nothing more.

Mary folded her hands in her lap and sighed. “Look, I have a big mouth. Sometimes I forget to close it. Like on the front porch.”

Elle felt a smile pull at her lips. She’d felt exactly the same way after several of her most recent conversations with Cash.

“So fast forward a few months,” Mary said. “My junior year. I was still having a hard time adjusting. Crossing over to the mainland for high school, trying to make friends. It was tough. I met Cash at a bonfire one night. He was friendly. Cute.” She glanced up quickly at Elle but her face remained impassive. “He asked me out.”

Elle felt the muscles in her stomach clench but she said nothing, just nodded.

“Not as a date,” Mary clarified. “I mean, it was, but it wasn’t. There was a movie we both wanted to see.
Gladiator
.”

This time the smile won out. Elle could imagine Cash dragging her to see that one. He’d always been fascinated with that time period, had wanted to go visit the ruins in Greece and Italy. Elle had dreamed right along with him.

“So we went,” Mary said. “And I’ll admit, I liked him. He was cute. Smart. Incredibly sweet.” She chuckled. “And the movie was horrifying. I spent half the movie with my face buried in his shoulder. Clutching his arm.”

Elle felt the jealousy flick at her. It should have been her in that movie theater with Cash. And even though she knew it had happened more than a decade ago and it shouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, it did.

“He drove me home after,” she said. “And…and I tried to kiss him goodnight.” Her cheeks flamed and she shifted on the couch. It clearly made her nervous, talking about it. “He dodged me. Was very sweet about it. Told me it wasn’t me. It was him. He was getting over a bad break-up. He was happy to be a friend but wasn’t ready to date, to get involved with anyone.”

She continued. “I was curious. Asked him who it was.” Mary looked up and her eyes bored into Elle. “He said it was you.”

TWENTY-TWO

Elle’s mind spun like a child’s toy top. She looked away from the woman sitting on the couch, the woman who'd just revealed a new piece of the puzzle that was her past.

“I tried to get him to talk about it,” Mary said. “But he wasn’t interested in that. Again. He was totally polite and it was impossible to be mad at him. I was the one who created the tension by misreading things. Or maybe just wanting to misread things.” She shook her head. “He was nicer to me than he needed to be.”

Elle took a breath, trying to steady herself. “So he didn’t say anything? About the…break-up?”

Mary thought for a moment. “I got out of the car and he tried to diffuse the whole thing with a little humor or whatever. I leaned in the window and I thanked him for being so nice to me, for trying to make me feel like less of an idiot. And I was trying to make fun of myself, too. I said I’d probably still be single when he was ready.” Her cheeks flushed again. “He just said he doubted that because it was going to be a long time for him.”

Elle sat there, paralyzed in thought. Break-up. Why did he think they’d broken up? They hadn’t even spoken. He’d never called her. Never written. At least as far as she’d ever known. It wasn’t a break-up as much as it was an abandonment. Why had he put it to Mary like that? And why did he think it would take him a long time to get over it when he was the one who’d stopped talking to
her
?

“I should go,” Mary said, standing and shaking Elle from her reverie. “I really didn’t mean to stay and take up your time.”

“No, it’s OK,” Elle said. “I sort of dragged you in here. Thank you. For telling me.”

They walked to the front door.

“And thank you again for the brownies,” Elle said. “That was very nice of you.”

“The least I could do,” Mary said. She opened the door and stepped out on the porch. She let it close and smiled through the screen. “I hope the rest of your summer goes well.”

Elle watched her descend the stairs and disappear down the sidewalk.

She stood at the door for a few moments, replaying the conversation in her head. None of it made sense. Well, some of it had. The fact that Mary liked Cash when they were kids. That absolutely made sense. He'd been just as gorgeous and sweet and funny then as he was now.

But the rest of it?

Not so much.

Elle walked back toward the kitchen and picked up her phone from the table. She stared at it for a moment. She hadn’t missed a call or a text or an email.

But she was wondering if she should make one.

She walked out to the back deck. The breeze blew cool from the water, the ocean shrouded by low-lying clouds. She could hear voices on the sand but they were faceless in the dark. She was tired of being in the other kind of dark and tired of waiting for an explanation.

She punched Cash’s number into the phone and let it ring.

And cringed when his voicemail spoke to her.

“Call me,” she said into the phone. “The second you get this.”

She ended the call and shook her head, frustrated, angry, confused.

She was putting too much energy into this. It didn’t really matter anyway, did it? Whatever happened, whatever
‘break-up’ there was, had happened years before. It was in the past. She was ready to go forward. She didn’t need to revisit the past. It was the reason she’d called Connie in the first place, ready to take the position back in Wisconsin. She didn’t need anything to fracture her determination to move forward.

“This fast enough?” Cash said behind her.

She swung around, surprised. “What?”

He held up his phone. “I was on the other line and parking outside. I figured I’d just answer in person.”

She swallowed. “Oh.”

He shoved his phone back in his pocket and looked at her. “Where’s the fire?”

“What?”

“You were measuring time in terms of seconds.” He smiled. “Figured it was important.”

She looked down at her feet, suddenly unsure. “Oh.” 

All of her determination from earlier dissipated. What was she going to tell him? What had she planned to ask? Was she really prepared to replay the conversation she’d just had with Mary?

He watched her, a puzzled expression on his face, and waited.

“I was just wondering when you were coming by,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “Since you said you’d be picking up the estimates.”

She shook her head, disgusted with herself. Where was the resolve that had flooded her only minutes before? But she knew where it was. Like a wave crashing to shore, it had receded, pulled away by the uncertainty that always seemed to flare within her.

Cash glanced at his watch. “Yeah, sorry it’s so late. I got held up with something. Did you get all of them?”

She nodded. “They’re in the kitchen.”

Elle turned to go back into the house and Cash followed her. She stopped at the counter and gathered the scraps of paper, making a pile.

“I should probably give you my mother’s phone number,” she said. She rummaged in one of the drawers, looking for a pen. There wasn’t a single one. “Hang on a sec.”

She went to her grandmother’s bedroom to grab one from the desk. When she stepped back into the hallway she saw Cash, his eyes scanning the mess she’d made in the living room.

“Pretty sure I shouldn’t have started this,” she said, motioning to the half-stripped walls.

“Why not?” he asked. “Whoever buys this place would take it down, anyway. Might as well be you, you know? Build some more value into the home.”

She nodded. “I know. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it.”

He eyed the clumps of paper on the floor. “You made some decent progress.”

She didn’t feel like it. In fact, all she felt was guilty that she’d started it in the first place. “I guess.”

“A couple hours,” Cash said.

“A couple of hours and what?”

He picked up the putty knife she’d left on the floor. “A couple of hours to finish this.”

“No,” she started to protest but he cut her off.

“Look, if I’m going to be overseeing the remodeling here, I might as well start now.” He scraped at the wet wallpaper. “Well, are you helping or just watching?”

Elle fought back a smile. She picked up the sponge and wiped the wall, letting the water soak into the paper. He was impossible. And he’d completely diffused the emotions she’d felt just moments earlier. She knew exactly how Mary must have felt the night of their date so many years earlier. Her embarrassment had probably melted away just as easily as Elle’s frustration just did.

They worked quietly for a few minutes, Elle sponging and Cash scraping. She tried not to think about the conversation with Mary from earlier, tried to put it out of her mind. It was useless to bring it up. She's resolved to stop living in the past, hadn't she? Forward progress. She needed to concentrate on forward progress, not time traveling back to the past.

“Any word on the job?” Cash asked.

She dipped the sponge in the bucket on the floor. The water was lukewarm and cloudy, colored by discarded wallpaper paste and bits of paper. “No. Not yet.”

“Is it still on the table?”

“Yes,” she said. At least she thought it was, had convinced herself that the only reason she hadn’t heard from Connie was because her message had been construed as an acceptance of the position.

“When do you leave?”

“Soon,” Elle said. “Probably by the weekend.”

He just nodded and continued working on the wall. She stole a glance at him. His fingers were coated with flecks of paper and wallpaper paste. If someone had told her two weeks ago that she’d be standing in a house, doing something as domestic as stripping wallpaper with Cash Brady, she would have laughed in their face. Or cussed them out.

He wiped his brow. “I’m thirsty. Mind if I grab a drink?”

“Help yourself,” she said. “I don’t have any beer.”

He chuckled. “Not looking to get drunk.” He disappeared into the kitchen and returned a minute later, a tumbler filled with water in his hands.

He sat down on the couch. “See?” he said, motioning around the room with his free hand. “We’ve gotten half the wall done in less than a half hour.”

“Yeah,” Elle said. “But we have three more walls to go
…”