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“No, it’s fine.” She would take all the detail he wanted to give her. She would listen with all her heart.
Not good. Very, very bad.
She waited to see if he would say more, and when he didn’t, her disappointment was yet another danger signal on a rapidly lengthening list. She wanted to know everything about him, and she wanted to hear it from him, in his dark, husk-and-syrup voice, and that was scary.
Crushy. Desperate. Something to beat herself up over, not to embrace.
They emerged from the tree-lined Spruce Bay entrance drive and reached the parking area in front of the office, where he halted, leaving the engine idling. “Thank you so much for everything today,” she told him, deliberately formal. “For the car, and coming to pick me up, and then dinner. If I can arrange the pony thing, it still won’t be nearly enough.”
“Fuggedaboutit,” he said, like a character in a mafia movie, and not for the first time she found herself wondering why he’d never succeeded as an actor, the way he’d once been so sure he would. He had the looks, the voice and more charisma than any woman could possibly want.
“I’ll call you about the pony thing as soon as I have some information,” she said.
“Great.”
“Right. Bye, then.”
She was so determined not to linger in the car that she scrambled out of it with embarrassing haste, and he drove off at once, with just one final wave. After he’d disappeared back into the trees, she stood there for too long, feeling dreamy and unsettled and full of longing and absolutely, completely furious with herself.
The furious part was pretty familiar, and she knew how to handle it. When your thoughts kept steering onto a track that you didn’t want, you just had to keep busy enough that they went away purely through being crowded out of existence.
She bustled through the office door and found Nickie fiddling with her manicure and talking on her phone, slouched back in the swivel chair with her knees drawn up and bumping the desk. “She wants to? Are you serious?” she was saying in teenager shriek.
So, not talking to a guest, then.
When she saw Mary Jane, she quickly ended the call and smartened up her body language, as if she thought she was about to get yelled at. It was almost more annoying than if she’d kept on talking to her friend, because it gave the impression that she considered Mary Jane to be a dragon of a boss.
“Busy?” Mary Jane asked lightly.
“Cabin 12 flooded their bathroom, and Room 4 couldn’t get their air-conditioning to turn on.”
“That’s probably because the air-conditioning couldn’t work out if it was supposed to be blowing hot air or cold,” Mary Jane drawled. The new reverse-cycle appliances installed during the re-fit could do both. Even though it was a little chilly out now, the cabins had been warmed by the sun most of the day. They should have been cozy but not too hot, and certainly not too cold.
“I know, right?” Nickie rolled her eyes and smiled, and Mary Jane didn’t feel like such a dragon anymore. “I actually had to ask them what they wanted it for, heating or cooling, because the room felt like the perfect temperature to me.”
“So you got it going?”
“We set it at seventy-five degrees and it decided to do some heating. When we get some real summer, they’ll probably want it set at sixty-two. Do you want me to clock off now?”
“Just stay for another five minutes while I run over to the restaurant and see how they’re doing over there. But unless there’s been a disaster you should be fine to go after that.”
“Thanks.” She smiled and looked at the time on her phone. “What time tomorrow?”
“Let’s say noon?”
The office phone rang at that moment and Nickie picked it up. “Spruce Bay Resort. This is Nickie speaking. How may I help you?”
Mary Jane went over to check in with Daisy, but service was winding down over there, and everything had gone smoothly. Daisy insisted she wasn’t required. With a team of staff who knew what they were doing, by this time, the restaurant ran almost independent of the rest of the resort. “Take a break, Mary Jane.”
“How about you?” Mary Jane suggested. “Don’t you want to get home to your husband? Put your feet up?”
Daisy dragged some steam-misted blond hair away from her pink cheeks. “I’m good. I’ll be out of here in half an hour.”
“Don’t know where you get your energy.”
Daisy grinned. “I’m told I should enjoy it while it lasts, because once the third trimester kicks in I’ll never ever have it again in my whole entire life.”
“Ooh, who have you been talking to?”
“A very wise woman in the waiting room at the doctor, who’s pregnant with number five.”
“Wow.” Mary Jane ignored the stupid pang of envy and regret that kicked at her stomach the way Daisy’s unborn baby would soon start kicking at hers.
That was going to be me. Expert mom; big, beautiful family; devoted and thoughtful parenting.
It wouldn’t have been every woman’s ambition or choice, but it had been hers, and it hadn’t happened.
Heading back toward the office after saying good-night to Daisy, she remembered the early days with Alex, twelve years ago, when she’d begun thinking about marriage. She’d been twenty-two years old when they got together, and twenty-three when she’d decided that he was The One.
She had thought that he would propose pretty soon—the relationship had felt serious to her, important and good and what she was looking for—and she would be married at twenty-four. Maybe wait a couple of years, then have a baby at twenty-six or twenty-seven. She would easily fit in six by the time she was in her late thirties. Six seemed like a good number, enough to fill an eight-seater minivan.
She’d seen herself as a mix of earth mother and soccer mom, the kind of mother that other women looked at with respect, with the kind of kids who were happy and well adjusted and passionate about the things they loved.
She’d thought that she would cook and bake, grow her own vegetables, make her home beautiful with hand-crafted pieces and lovingly restored antiques, take her kids to music lessons and sports, read to them every night. She’d seen wife, mother and homemaker as an important and interesting career that would absorb and fulfill and challenge her at every turn.
“I don’t know how you do it with that many!” everyone would have said. And she would have had some wise, earthy reply. “You just have to stay organized and keep your sense of humor.” Or, “I picked the right father for them. That was at least half of it.”
But of course Alex hadn’t been the right father. He hadn’t been the right anything.
He hadn’t proposed on schedule, and eventually she was the one who’d brought it up. “Alex, do you see us getting married anytime soon?”
He’d told her there was no hurry. Weren’t they happy the way they were? They had plenty of time, why not live a little before they got serious? And then he’d distracted her with shared travel plans for a trip to Cancún, which she’d interpreted as a sign of commitment.
A year later, when she’d turned twenty-six and had at one point a few years earlier thought she might already have been a mom by then, she’d tried again. What about kids? Did he want kids?
When the time was right, he’d told her. There was no hurry, was there? She had another seven or eight years before she had to start worrying about her biological clock, right? Why settle down now, when they were having so much fun?
Yes, but she would never be able to fit in six kids if she didn’t have the first of them until she was in her mid-thirties! It just wouldn’t work!
Of course she hadn’t shared this objection with Alex. She didn’t want to scare him off with talk of a big family. Maybe they didn’t need to have six, she’d decided. Four would do. Or even three, if he really felt strongly about it.
More time had passed. She was approaching thirty and they still weren’t formally engaged. Sometimes she’d wondered if he loved her at all, because he would get distant and distracted, but if she challenged him on it and they fought, he would draw her back in with a romantic gesture and an apology. Flowers, jewelry—he’d been very good at all those easy gestures.
But then a month away from her thirtieth birthday, they’d had a huge fight and before it could get to the gesture-and-apology phase, she’d hit him with a point-blank question. Were they getting married, or not?
Not.
She could still remember the words he’d used.
“Let’s be honest. It’s never really been headed in that direction, has it?” he’d said, all friendly and matter-of-fact about it, acting as if they’d always both been on the same page and she’d never thought it was a serious relationship, either. As if they’d never discussed it, or children, before. But they had! He’d fobbed her off, let her think a whole lot of things that weren’t true.
Lied to her.
She’d been so shocked. She’d told him it was over—had thrown the announcement in his face like a bucket of icy water, and then she’d waited for him to come crawling back. Waited six weeks, before she’d realized it wasn’t going to happen.
Less than a year later—and maybe this was the thing that had hurt the worst—she heard that he’d married someone else. She could so easily have gone stalkerish at that point, obsessively looking for evidence that Alex and his new bride had begun seeing each other while he was still involved with Mary Jane herself.
But she hadn’t done that, and this gave her some pride. She hadn’t done anything wrongheaded at all.
Once she’d known the relationship was really over, she’d been very firm with herself about moving on. She traveled twice every year, when Spruce Bay was closed for its off-season breaks. She kept herself fit and active, well-read and well-informed. She looked after her body and her mind. She worked to make Spruce Bay the best place it could be. She kept up her friendships, and a good relationship with her sisters and mother and father, now retired in South Carolina. She lived her life as fully as she could, even though it was totally different from the life she’d wanted and planned.
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