Enright Family Collection (100 page)

CeCe met her at the door, her new puppy, Elvis, at her heels. “Come on in. Watch she doesn’t trip you.”

“Hi, Elvis.” Zoey handed the pie box to CeCe and lifted the pup with both hands. Elvis covered Zoey’s face enthusiastically with sloppy puppy kisses. “If she’s a she, why is her name Elvis?”

“Well, there were only four pups that survived the litter. And the hands on the ranch had already named them John, Paul, George, and Elvis. Unfortunately, only John and George were males.”

“Tell me again what kind of dog she is?”

“She is what we call a ’barn dog’ back home. A mix of
whatever was in the barn when her momma came into heat.” CeCe grinned. “Elvis’s mom was a Labrador retriever, and we think her daddy might have been a visiting weimaraner, but we’re not sure. And watch her, Zoey, she will lick the freckles right off your face,” CeCe warned her. “I’m not having much trouble housebreaking her, but teaching her not to lick is near impossible.”

“I kind of like it, to tell you the truth”—Zoey smiled wryly—“since it’s the most action I’ll see for three more weeks.”

CeCe frowned. “I thought it was supposed to be every other weekend.”

“It was. It is. But there’s a big meeting in Germany that’s supposed to determine whether or not certain types of somethings in the engines can be bigger than a bread box,” she shrugged. “Ben told me about it, but all I really heard was ’three weeks.’”

“How’s it working out?”

“It’s great and it’s horrible.” Zoey settled into a wooden chair in CeCe’s small kitchen, noting that only a few more, if any, of CeCe’s packing boxes had been emptied. “It’s great when we’re together and murder when we’re not.”

“You’re really in love.” CeCe sighed.

“Totally. Terminally.” Zoey nodded.

“How long do you think you will be able to keep this up?”

“For as long as we have to. Ben is the love of my life, CeCe. The absolute love of my life. If this is the most I can have of him, I’ll just have to take it.”

“If you had to choose—”

“Between Ben and my job?” Zoey answered without hesitation. “There’d be no decision to make, not really, if I could only have one. I couldn’t lose him now, I just couldn’t. But I’ve found so much of myself through what I do, that I worry about who I would be without it. Would I be the same person he fell in love with?” She shook her head. “I don’t think I would be, and I’m afraid
to take that chance. But I do know that I’ll fight to keep him. Even if it’s myself I have to fight.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” CeCe handed her a tall green glass of iced tea. “Let’s hope it doesn’t become an either/or situation.”

“Let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about something fun. Tell me all about your vacation back home.”

“It was so great, Zoey. I got to spend a whole day with my mom, just the two of us. I can’t remember the last time we had that much time alone together. Oh, and I went on an overnight camp out in the hills. . . .” CeCe’s eyes took on the sheen of a highly glazed doughnut, a fact that Zoey did not fail to recognize.

“Oh? I think that’s the part I’d like to hear more about.”

“Oh.” CeCe shrugged it off noncommittally. “It was just with my brother, and a few of his friends. Just for a few days, up to the lake.”

“The skating cowboy.” Zoey tapped a finger on the table. “He was there, wasn’t he?”

“Oh. Well, he is a friend of Trevor’s.” CeCe blushed and turned back to the sink, where she was rinsing bay scallops for their dinner.

“Well?”

“Well. . .” CeCe nodded, as if giving great thought to her response. “It was an interesting few days.”

“Interesting?” Zoey raised an eyebrow. “A few days? You went camping with the cowboy for a few days and you call it
interesting?
Were there any other women on this little camping trip?”

“My sister Liza. She’s the baby of the family. She came home at the last minute and she wanted to come along.”

“So what did you and . . . what is his name?”

“Dalt.”

“Dalt.” Zoey tested it aloud. “Nice. What did you and Dalt do for those few days?”

“Oh, it was so great.” CeCe’s eyes began to sparkle.

“We went swimming every morning and we hiked. We went backpacking into the hills and sat on rocks overlooking the canyon and watched the baby bald eagles learn to fly. It was breathtaking.”

“Oh, I can see that it would have been.” Zoey tried not to grin.

“Zoey, you haven’t lived until you’ve wakened at dawn to watch the sun come up over the Montana hills, to start the day with a cold dip in a mountain lake and head back to camp to make pancakes with the wild blueberries you’ve picked along the way.”

Zoey watched her friend’s face fill with wonder, then asked, quietly, “What are you doing here, if all that is waiting for you back there?”

CeCe thought it over, then replied, “The same thing you’re doing here, when Ben is on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s a question of where you are, but it’s not necessarily a matter of where you’ll stay.”

“Does that mean you won’t be renewing your contract when it comes up next year?” Zoey asked softly.

“There’s a good chance that I won’t.”

“Is it because of Dalt?”

“It’s because of me,” CeCe said simply. “Yes, I admit that it’s a consideration, knowing that he is there. I’ll never get to know him better, never get to explore those possibilities from here. But it really has more to do with me, Zoe. I am a child of the hills. I miss my family, and I miss Montana. It’s where I belong, Dalton or no Dalton.”

“That’s why you still haven’t unpacked.”

“There’s nothing in those boxes I need on a temporary basis,” CeCe acknowledged. “Every bit as much as you need to stay, I think I need to go home.”

“I can’t even think about what it would be like without you there, at the HMP. You’re my best friend, CeCe.”

“I always will be. If you can maintain a long-distance romance with Ben, you and I shouldn’t have much of a problem holding our friendship together.”

Zoey sipped at her drink thoughtfully, hoping that she would, indeed, be able to do both.

*  *  *

“Ben, I said it’s after seven. Are you coming to dinner?” Tony Chapman stood in the doorway of Ben Pierce’s office and waved the newspaper he held in his hand to get his friend’s attention.

“What?” Ben frowned. “Oh. Dinner. No, no thanks. I’ll grab something on the way home.”

“Not much of a life you’re living these days, mate,” Tony observed.

“Well, I’m not here to socialize,” Ben told him. “I’m here to work.”

“All work and no play, all that,” Tony chided.

“I play when I go home.” Ben grinned.

“And you work your tail off while you’re here. Not much of a balance, old friend. You’re bound to tire of it soon.” Tony said. “It worries me.”

“Why ‘worry’?”

“Because we both know what you’re doing.” “What’s that?”

“You’re working nearly around the clock so that when you go back to the States, you can go with a clear conscience and you don’t have to feel that you’re taking advantage of our friendship when you leave for four days at a time. And it’s okay. I don’t mind, Ben. If I had someone like your Zoey, I’d be doing the same thing. But it worries me that all you do these days is work.”

“I want to pull my own weight.”

“I know you do. And you are. More than you need to.” “I don’t want to let you down, Tony.”

“You never have, Ben. You never could.” Tony took a small breath, then added, “If you left tomorrow, I’d still consider you my best friend.”

“Why did you say that?” Ben frowned. “I’ve never said a word about leaving.”

“No, no, you’re right. You haven’t.” Tony’s voice softened. “But there’s something in your eyes, when you
come back from a weekend away. You’re totally in love with her.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you miss her terribly.”

“Terribly,” Ben agreed.

“Maybe you should think about bringing her over here.”

“I’ve asked her. She won’t come.”

“Well, then, I guess it’s up to you to solve that little dilemma, isn’t it?” Tony smiled a half smile and swung himself through the door. “As for me, I’ve dinner waiting at Greta’s.”

“Why’d you ask me to join you, if you were going to her apartment?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t come.” Tony saluted his friend as he left the room. “You never do.”

Well he’s right about that.
Ben nodded as he shuffled through the latest stack of design specifications that the engineers had dropped off that afternoon. Dinner out or dinner in, alone or with friends, it was all pretty much the same to him these days. The only time he felt alive was when he was back home with Zoey, in her little house on Skeeters Pond Road. The rest of the time, he could be anywhere. Since the last time he’d been home, he’d traveled to Paris to interview test drivers and he’d gone to Spa-Francorchamps for the running of the Belgian Grand Prix. He’d been to Monza for the Italian race and to Nurburgring for the Luxembourg circuit. In two weeks he’d travel to Japan to watch the race at Suzuka. More and more, he was beginning to suspect one thing. There was a world of difference between
racing
—strapping into one of those sleek, incessantly whining cars and driving as if your life depended on it, because in so many ways, once the race started, it did—and
watching.

Ben had never been much of a spectator.

He sighed and swung his chair around to face the open window behind him. On the other side of the building,
Tony had had a track built so that they could test their own engines right there where they built them. Even though it was well after hours, the sound of an engine’s whine rattled the windows. Someone else was working late.

Ben pushed his chair back and walked the short hallway to the small lobby, then out through the front door and around the building to the track. A small vehicle—more engine than body—sped around the dry track in a cloud of dust. After seven more laps, the test car coasted to the edge of the field and stopped and its driver hopped out. As the young man unstrapped his helmet, Ben recognized him as a test driver they had hired just several weeks before.

“How’s she feel?” Ben called.

“Like silk.” The young man called back. “Try her yourself.”

He walked to within ten feet of Ben before tossing him his helmet. Ben caught it with both hands, then stood staring at it for a long time. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, he’d have strapped on the helmet and slid behind the wheel in one motion, without a second thought, and taken flight. Now, he realized, he was debating whether or not even to drive, wondering what the consequences might be if his ankle got stubborn at the wrong moment. He twirled the helmet for a long moment, then popped it on his head. Tossing his sport jacket onto the nearest fence post, he slipped behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. That the engine purred was no exaggeration. Ben eased his right foot onto the accelerator and glided onto the track.

She was fast, she was easy.
Silk
had said it all. Loud, whiny, but definitely silky. Their engineers had done one hell of a job. Ben was lost in the sound and the speed, and lost count of how many times around the track he had taken her, until the engine began to sputter. Disconcerted at the sound of distress from their perfect machine, he tried to ease up on the gas pedal, but his foot
did not want to cooperate. Braking with his good left foot, he had to slide his right foot from the accelerator, exactly what he had feared. As the car slowed to a stop, he realized two things. The stutter coming from the engine was due to a lack of fuel, and the decision to retire had been a wise one.

He sat in the car long after he turned
off
the ignition. He looked up to see the young driver approaching him, a smile on his face.

“What’d I tell you?” He grinned.

“You didn’t exaggerate,” Ben called back.

“Nothing like it, is there?” The young man patted the side of the car.

“No.” Ben nodded slowly. “No, there isn’t. Nothing at all.”

Later that night Ben sat in the small sitting room in the suite he’d rented at an old inn about a half mile from the factory. The year was slipping into an early fall, just like last year. And it was hard not to remember that this time last year he had been preparing for the race that ended his career.

“Nothing like it, is there?”
the test driver had said. Nothing but
driving
is driving. Nothing but
racing
is racing. Not designing the cars, not building the cars, not owning the cars. There was no worthy substitute, he acknowledged. Everything else connected with the sport was, for him, just another form of spectating.

Then why,
he wondered,
was he here?

“A good question,” he said aloud to the empty room. “A
damned
good question.”

*  *  *

Zoey stood on the deck of her house and sniffed the air. Definitely a scent of fall there. Of course, she mused, all one had to do was look at her lawn to know that. The leaves had begun falling early, lining the paths of her still colorful garden with gold and russet droppings, but she just hadn’t been motivated to rake. On this Thursday morning in late October, she still lacked motivation, but
faced the unpleasant truth that the longer she put it off, the harder the job would be.

“Sort of looks like the yellow brick road,” she muttered as she hauled a rake out of the garage.

“What’s that?” Wally asked from the corner of the garage.

“I said, it looks like the yellow brick road.” She narrowed her eyes. “Where did you come from?”

He nodded toward the garden. “Just sitting on your bench watching the crows and wondering when you were going to get around to doing some raking.”

“Obviously today,” she told him archly.

“Glad to see it. Don’t want to smother your grass.” He sat himself down and took out his pipe.

“Smother my grass,” she mumbled.

“Doing a lot of talking to yourself these days, aren’t you, missy?”

“No more than usual.”

“Did a real nice job with your garden this year. I know that Addie must be pleased.”