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“Let’s get you all settled in,” Nancy said to Meg and Daniel. “Trey’s staying for dinner tonight, so we’ll have some time to get to know each other ahead of our busy weekend.”
Sadie watched Daniel and Meg walk up the path through Nancy’s spectacular front garden. Her own parents’ garden was equally impressive—Sadie’s mom and dad had taken turns presiding over the Cordova Garden Club, and Kincaid Nurseries was the club’s number-one sponsor. As next-door neighbors, the two families were a match made in heaven.
Sadie turned away before she could watch Meg and Daniel walk into the house. Shutting her out.
One weekend. I can survive one weekend.
THERE WASN’T QUITE a full complement of Beechams around the seventies glass-topped table in Sadie’s parents’ dining room that night. Sadie’s older brother Jesse, his wife, Diane, and eight-year-old twins, Hannah and Holly, came to dinner, along with her sister, Merrilee, three years younger than Sadie, and her husband, Ben, and infant son, Matthew.
But Sadie’s younger brother, Brett, and his wife, Louisa, had stayed away. Two of their three preschoolers were recovering from chicken pox and today was officially the last day of their contagion. They’d be at tomorrow night’s barbecue. Kyle, her oldest and only un-attached sibling, had breezed in, claiming he had to rush off to see his latest girlfriend, but he was still sprawled in his seat opposite Sadie. Her brothers and sister had all remained in Cordova.
“It’s like Grand Central Station around here,” Gerry Beecham, Sadie’s dad, said. “Wives, husbands, kids… and to think you and I worried we might have an empty nest, Mary-Beth.”
Mary-Beth blew him a kiss from the far end of the table.
“It’s a shame we don’t have you here more often, Sadie, love,” Gerry continued.
Sadie’s bungalow in uptown Memphis was just over half an hour away. Her parents acted as if she lived on the other side of the country.
“Sadie was never going to stay a Cordova girl,” her mother said fondly.
You made sure of that. Sadie quashed a flare of resentment. Sending her to a boarding school for gifted children at age ten, after her elementary-school principal had her IQ tested, had not been an act of rejection. Her parents had been proud but overwhelmed by the prospect of “raising a genius to fulfill her potential,” as the principal put it. They’d sent her away for her own good.
She speared three beans with her fork. “I really don’t live that far away,” she muttered, knowing she was wasting her time.
Going to college at Princeton had widened the distance between her and her family, and now it seemed her default setting was “away.” Even when she was right here.
She tried to concentrate on the conversations rippling around her—the dramas of the PTA, a new cupcake recipe, a camping trip to the Smokies planned for later in the summer. But her family always considered her “above” such mundane topics, so no one asked her opinion or shared their cupcake tips. Not that she would have known what to do with them.
Sadie’s mind wandered next door. She wondered how Daniel was getting along with Nancy. Fabulously, of course. He was the kind of guy every mother dreamed her daughter would bring home.
“Sadie?” Her father said.
She jolted back to the present, and realized everyone was looking at her. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.” She thought back. Hadn’t Merrillee been complaining about her cupcakes not rising?
“Did you wait too long before putting them in the oven?” she asked her sister. “If the baking powder released its carbon dioxide gas too soon—” She broke off. “Hey, I wonder what percentage of global warming is caused by bakers forgetting to put their cakes in the oven.” She chuckled…and realized everyone else was staring at her, baffled.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t hilarious. But Daniel would have got it. Would have laughed.
Sadie blinked, hard.
“I was asking when we’ll get to see that garden of yours, love,” her father said.
“Uh…it’s not quite there yet.” Sadie didn’t like to admit to the atrocious state of her garden—the love of everything botanical was one thing she shared with her parents, who between them had four green thumbs and sixteen green fingers. All of her siblings had inherited both the talent and the enthusiasm.
Shame the gene pool hadn’t had one green digit to spare for Sadie. When she’d bought the bungalow two years ago, she’d had visions of creating a lush, peaceful, enticing landscape.
Her failure was a constant frustration, all the more aggravating because it didn’t make sense. As a seed biologist, she knew the theory of plants inside and out. She had the passion, too—a beautiful garden could bring tears to her eyes, and she loved getting her hands dirty. But her attempts to actually grow anything seemed doomed to failure.
“I haven’t had much time for gardening, I’ve been so busy at work.” She switched to a topic she could tackle with a hundred percent confidence, before the questions got too probing. “We’re looking at developing new strains of wheat with a higher protein content.”
She started on a layman’s description of the project. Five minutes later she was pleasantly surprised to realize she still had her family’s attention. Usually eyes were starting to glaze over by now. “Anyway—” she gave a little laugh, unnerved by their rapt expressions “—I’m loving it.”
“It sounds great,” Merrillee said encouragingly.
“Right over my head, sis.” Jesse swished his hand above his spiky haircut to demonstrate. “I wish I had your brains.”
“Your life sounds super fulfilling, Sadie.” Diane, Jesse’s wife, smiled kindly.
“Uh…thanks.” How odd. That sounded like the sort of comment you made when you were— Wait a minute!
The reason everyone was listening with such interest to wheat-protein statistics wasn’t that they’d developed a sudden interest in crop biology. Sadie would bet a million bucks that her mom had told them she had a boyfriend, and then told them they’d broken up.
They felt sorry for her!
Her cheeks grew hot. “I’m really, really happy with the way things are right now,” she said emphatically. It would have been true, too, if she hadn’t made the mistake of falling in love with Daniel.
“Of course you are, dear,” her mom said. A chorus of overearnest agreement ran around the table.
“It’s just, balance is important,” Kyle said. “I’m not saying you need to get married—” his shudder made everyone laugh “—but there’s more to life than work.”
Her oldest brother was a firefighter, as well as a serial dater. Sadie’s other siblings also had careers they loved. Jesse had a graphic-design business, Brett was a town planner, Merrillee had trained as a nurse. All smart, busy people. But somehow more…multidimensional than Sadie. They’d managed to stay connected to one another.
Sadie drew in a deep breath, inhaling the scent of summer shrubs wafting through the open window. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t connected. It didn’t matter that her lack of a boyfriend emphasized the differences between her and her family. If they truly understood how important her work was—not just to her, but to the planet…
One look at their concerned faces said she’d be wasting her breath. That was what she loved about Daniel—he did understand. She sneaked a glance at the gold carriage clock on the sideboard, the one First Cordova Bank had presented to her father after forty years’ service. It was stuck on three-thirty—surely it must be ten o’clock by now. She made a show of yawning and stretching. “I’m beat. I think I’ll go to bed.”
Merrillee looked at her watch. “At ten past eight?”
“Can’t handle the pace, city girl?” Jesse teased.
Rats.
She resisted the urge to point out that, since annexation, Cordova was part of the city. “I’ve been putting in some long hours at the lab.” She excused herself as she pushed her chair back. “By the way, Merrillee, you have baby spit on your shoulder.”
Okay, so that was petty.
“Would you like some cod-liver oil to help you sleep, honey?” her mom asked. Mary-Beth believed cod-liver oil solved every conceivable problem. Sadie had once tried to explain that despite its high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, it wasn’t a cure-all, and in fact its high vitamin A content made it nutritionally risky, but her mom didn’t want to know.
Sadie turned down the offer, along with the predictable next offer—a cup of hot cocoa—and hurried upstairs. As she left the room, Merrillee was dabbing with her napkin at the ever-present stain on her shoulder.
Safe in her old bedroom with the door closed, Sadie donned her pajamas—red tank and plaid cotton pants—in case anyone wanted proof she was tired.
Her bedroom window looked onto Meg’s. As kids, they’d held up signs to each other, illuminated by flashlight when necessary. After Sadie left for boarding school, their nighttime communications were limited to vacation periods, but they’d continued nonetheless. When Sadie and Meg graduated to cell phones, they’d sat in the chair they each had by the window, feet propped on the sill, so they could see each other as they whispered conversations after lights-out.
They’d been closer than sisters.
Now Meg’s curtains were closed. Surely she and Daniel hadn’t gone upstairs already? And surely Nancy wouldn’t put them in the same room? Sadie’s stomach twisted.
She hadn’t asked Meg if she and Daniel were sleeping together yet. Meg’s job often took her away overnight, so Sadie was unsure if her friend’s absences were due to that, or to staying at Daniel’s. Normally they talked about everything—at least, Meg shared all the details of her more exciting life. This time, Sadie hadn’t asked and Meg hadn’t told.
Trey’s truck was still parked out front. Behind it was a faded red Buick LeSabre.
Did Trey have a girlfriend over? The only person Sadie knew who’d driven a LeSabre that color was the minister at Cordova Colonial Presbyterian. His daughter had been in Meg’s class.
She couldn’t imagine Trey dating the minister’s daughter. And it probably wasn’t the same Buick.
But what if it was? And what if the reason Nancy had invited the minister over was that Meg and Daniel—
“Shut up,” Sadie ordered herself. “Meg’s never dated anyone longer than six weeks. This won’t be any different.”
She plunked herself into the chair and opened the novel she’d started reading last night—Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. She’d read it years ago, but she and Daniel had been debating Dostoevsky’s views on the evils of rationalism, and she wanted to refresh her memory.
She couldn’t settle…. After three pages she closed the book and fished her old bird-watching binoculars out of the depths of the closet. But she was at the wrong angle for next door’s dining-room window.
“Blast,” she muttered.
She had to know who was visiting.
Back to the closet, this time for the gray hooded jacket with the broken zipper she’d left behind on her last trip home. She pulled it on over her pajamas. If she got caught leaving the house by the back door she’d say she was stepping out to smell the flowers.
They would buy that.
As it turned out, her family was having a riotous good time discussing the twins’ eccentric social-studies teacher and Brett’s son’s grass allergy—Gerry didn’t believe in it, but he wouldn’t dare say that tomorrow night when Brett was here. No one noticed Sadie sneaking out.
Meg’s dad had built the backyard gate between the two houses so the two girls could visit without having to go near the road. It hadn’t been used in a while, judging by the creak of the hinges.
The Kincaids’ dining room was the downstairs front room on this side. Sadie skulked past the kitchen and bathroom…then started to worry that shortsighted Mr. Fargo across the street might phone the cops. She stopped acting suspiciously and walked boldly up to Nancy’s prize gardenia bush. She would snap off one of the white blossoms and use it as her excuse for loitering.
She chose a bloom and twisted. Nothing happened.
Sadie jiggled the stalk from side to side. Still nothing.
“Come off, you stupid damn flower.”
This plant had stems of steel.
Next time she came spying, she’d bring pruning shears.
At last the blossom broke off, losing a few petals as it came free. Sadie took a deep, relieved sniff of its heavy perfume. Armed with her alibi, she headed for the front corner of the house.
Like her mother’s, Nancy’s dining-room window was covered by a semisheer curtain. Sadie heard Nancy’s voice through the smaller, open window at the top. It sounded like… Had she just said church?
With a swift glance across the road to check that there was no sign of Mr. Fargo, Sadie crouched beneath the window. She dropped the gardenia and gripped the ledge. Slowly she raised her head.
Four pairs of feet rested beneath Nancy’s reproduction Louis XVI dining table. Through the mesh of the curtain Sadie distinguished Meg’s sandals and Daniel’s loafers—hooray, they weren’t in bed together. She risked rising a bit higher. Nancy’s black pumps and a pair of sneakers. Male or female?
“What the hell are you doing?” said a deep voice from behind her.
CHAPTER THREE
INSTINCT MADE SADIE duck down, then, as she came up again, she banged her head on the window ledge.
“Ow!”
“What’s going on?” Trey’s hand closed around her arm. He dragged her aside, mercifully out of view of the window.
Sadie rubbed hard at her head. “That hurt.”
“Why are you spying?”
She tugged herself free so she could chafe her arm where he’d gripped her. “Where did you come from?” she countered.
“I live here.”
“No, you don’t.” Sadie knew he had a house on the other side of Cordova. Five whole minutes away.
He sighed. “You’re still a know-it-all. Okay, my mother lives here and she considers it my home, even if I don’t.” He hooked his thumbs in his jeans and stared her down. “What are you doing?” he asked again.
Devoid of a rational answer, Sadie played for time. “You still didn’t tell me where you came from.”
“I was on the porch. I heard someone cussing out the plants.”
The flower she’d had so much trouble detaching. She bent and snatched it up. “I was in my room and I smelled this amazing scent, so I came down to pick a gardenia.”
He glanced at her parents’ house. “You did well smelling those with your bedroom window closed.”
“How do you know my window’s closed?”
He rolled his eyes. “Then after you got your flower…” he prompted.
“Then, Miss Marple, I heard an unfamiliar voice, so I thought I’d see who your mom had visiting.”
“Uh-huh.” His gaze flicked over her pj top, which unfortunately had shrunk in the wash. It was too tight across the front and the gap between top and pants bared an inch or so of midriff. “Hmm,” he said.
As if she hadn’t heard enough of hmm. Which she now understood didn’t mean wow.
“I’m going home,” she said crossly. “Good night.”
The gleam in his eyes reminded her of the few times he’d paid her enough attention to bait her back in their teens. Mostly they’d ignored each other—the jock and the science geek had nothing in common.
She took a step away, then turned. “So who is visiting your mom?”
“None of your business. Though you’d be very interested,” he taunted.
It really was the minister, here to talk about weddings.
“Sadie? You okay? You’ve gone white.”
“Huh?” She blinked.
Trey cursed. He grabbed her hand and led her around the front of the house, where he pushed her down onto the porch swing. “I always thought it was a good thing your parents sent you to genius school—it stopped you turning out like Meg’s scatterbrained friends,” he said. “But you grew up a hell of a weird woman.”
Just what Sadie needed—another reminder she didn’t fit in. And she didn’t believe that backhanded compliment, since he’d dated several of Meg’s “scatterbrained” friends.
“Just tell me who’s visiting your mom.” Her voice wobbled. I’m losing my grip. She grasped the edge of the swing seat as if it was an extension of her sanity.
“I would have thought you’d recognize that LeSabre.”
She held her breath, waiting for the ax to fall.
His knee nudged the swing, setting it rocking. “The minister’s car, remember?”
“The minister is visiting your mom?” It came out high-pitched.
“Not him, his wife.” He left the railing to sit next to her, disrupting the swing’s motion.
Sadie planted her feet on the porch, stilling the swing. “The minister’s wife is visiting with your mom.”
“That’s what I said.” He rubbed his chin. “For a girl who got the highest SATs I know of and won a full scholarship to Princeton from the Outstanding Tennesseans Foundation, you’re kinda slow.”
“I just took a blow to the head.” She scowled and rubbed the sore spot where she’d collided with the window.
He grinned, and it made him look like the quarterback again.
“So why is the minister’s wife here?” she asked.
“Mom’s paying her to do the flowers for the lunch on Sunday. There’s a list of jobs a mile long for the likes of you and me, so Mom thought she’d need the help.”
Nancy had been an active member of the community her whole life, and her sixtieth birthday was a two-day event—the Saturday-night barbecue for “family,” which included the Beechams, and a lunch for her wide circle of friends, as well as family, on Sunday.
Two events where Sadie would have to watch Meg and Daniel canoodling, and fool everyone into believing she didn’t care. “It’s great we can all celebrate Nancy’s birthday with her,” she said, reminding herself of the one positive in all of this.
Trey sobered. He scuffed the porch with his shoe. “Yeah.”
Five years ago his mother had suffered a stroke. Fairly severe, but she’d recovered faster than the doctors expected, with only a barely discernible limp and a slight slowness of speech to show for it.
Sadie cleared her throat. “What do you think of Daniel?”
“Nice guy, far as I could tell.”
“He’s not Meg’s usual type, though, is he?” She twisted to face Trey. He was sitting closer than she realized, and she ended up looking right at his lips. Which made her think about Daniel and that kiss…
He grimaced. “Sadie, I think I know the real reason you were skulking around tonight.”
She pressed her hand to her mouth, but not fast enough to prevent a mortified cry escaping.
“I have to tell you—” he drew back and the swing creaked “—there’s no point.”
She closed her eyes. Please, make him stop.
“I know you got dumped recently….”
Her eyes flew open. Her mom had told the whole world about her supposed breakup?
“But—” Trey spread his hands in a gesture of regret “—I’m not interested.”
It took a second for his words to pierce her humiliation. “You think I was spying on you? That I like you?”
She couldn’t decide if she was relieved he hadn’t guessed the truth or outraged at his inflated opinion of his own charms.
He shrugged. “I find it hard to believe this trespassing incident is about your curiosity over who visits my mom. I figure you’re looking for a distraction from your broken heart.”
“Did my mother really say I got dumped?” she demanded.
He winced. “Uh, I heard it from Mom. Maybe she just said it was a breakup. The point is, Sadie, even if you weren’t my sister’s best friend, practically family, I’d never date—”
“—a geek like me,” she finished. It wasn’t just her own family who insisted on making her feel like an outsider. She stood up. “You’ve been in Cordova too long, Trey. Out in the big wide world, people don’t get hung up on labels that—”
“Whoa.” His eyes glinted as he looked up at her. “I was going to say I’d never date someone on the rebound.”
“Oh. Right.” Time to put an end to this discussion before she laid out all her insecurities for his scrutiny. Sadie took a step backward, and her ankle bumped the iron swing stand, hard.
“Ouch!” She reached down to rub her ankle, exposing more of her midriff to Trey. Which he would probably interpret as an attempt at seduction. “You don’t have to worry about my interest in you,” she said. “Like the male worker ant, it doesn’t exist.”
“What?” He stood, and as she was barefoot, he had more inches on her than she remembered.
“All worker ants are female,” she explained.
“Is this your convoluted way of saying you weren’t spying on me?”
“Exactly,” she said, relieved.
His brow relaxed and he chuckled. “You might need to simplify things if you want to be understood by the folks around here, Ms. Sadie.” His deep voice lengthened to a country drawl.
She rolled her eyes. “This discussion is unproductive—”
“Like the male worker ant,” he suggested helpfully.
“—so I’m leaving.” She hobbled across the porch on her sore foot. “Good night, Trey.”
He dropped back onto the swing. “I don’t know about good,” he reflected, “but you sure made it more interesting.”
“Glad one of us enjoyed it,” Sadie muttered.
IT HAD BEEN A sweltering day, and now with Gerry Beecham’s famous gin-and-juniper-marinated pork chops sizzling on the grill alongside a mustard-coated beef fillet and a ton of hot dogs for the kids, Saturday night in the Beechams’ backyard was hot as fire.
Trey flipped the hot dogs Gerry had asked him to keep an eye on; only Gerry himself felt qualified to prod the chops or the fillet. Everyone had worked hard today—dividing along strict gender lines into cooks and cleaners, or handymen—to get ready for tomorrow’s lunch. Now they were enjoying a well-earned evening of relaxation.
Trey rubbed the back of his neck. The heat was bringing him out in hives. Or maybe it wasn’t the heat, maybe it was all this togetherness. He was trying to spend less time with his family, not more. He was happy to celebrate his mom’s birthday, but this kind of gathering—full of married couples talking about their kids and their camping vacations and their SUVs—was the worst.
His gaze tracked his mom, talking to her cousin and Mary-Beth, then his flighty sister, standing next to sturdy Dr. Daniel. In Meg’s case, a dose of suburbia would be a good thing. An excellent thing.
Trey didn’t need to look farther to know exactly where Sadie was, which he found slightly disconcerting. She was his kid sister’s sensible best friend, part of the wallpaper of his life—and like wallpaper, he generally didn’t notice her.
But this weekend…something was off about Sadie. She wasn’t herself. Different enough that he couldn’t ignore her. Which was how he knew she’d spent the past fifteen minutes jiggling her baby nephew on one hip while explaining plant reproduction to a bunch of kids, using Mary-Beth’s prize-winning Golden Spangles camellia for demonstration.
“And when the bee carries the pollen from one plant to another,” she concluded triumphantly as Trey listened, “that’s when you get pretty flowers.”
One of her nieces, about five years old—he couldn’t remember her name—put up her hand.
“Do you have a question about vegetative reproduction, Caitlyn?” Sadie asked, pleased. “I admit, I did skip a few steps, honey.”
“What kind of flowers do princesses like best?” Caitlyn asked.
Sadie blinked. “Princesses…uh, princesses aren’t my area of expertise, honey.”
Trey felt his shoulders relax. That was more like the Sadie he knew. She’d never been one of the girlie-girls, which was doubtless why that radiant smile she’d bestowed on him when she arrived yesterday had spooked him. The Sadie he knew was down-to-earth, calm, aloof. Wallpaper.
Meg called to her. As Sadie handed the baby to Merrilee and went to join his sister and Daniel, Trey was too aware of her figure in her white capris and yellow tank.
It felt as if someone had redecorated.
He flipped a hot dog and it burst out of its skin, startling him. Trey took a step back from the spitting fat. So Sadie Beecham had grown some curves that he’d only just got around to noticing. Big deal. Trey was over Cordova women, just as he was over everything else about his life here.