E
PILOGUE
Reece and I were married the next summer, in July, on the beach below my home, near the tide pools, at sunset.
My wedding dress was light blue, form-fitting, with a crisscross bodice that tied behind my neck and a long train that ruffled along the edges. I’d had yellow and red Scottish broom, foxglove, purple moth orchids, cherry blossoms, pink cyclamen, yellow witch hazel, all flowers grown in Scotland, painted—yes,
painted—
on the fabric of my dress by my father.
Later, the dress was featured in another magazine article. We have been bombarded with orders for the same dress ever since.
August and September wore dresses in an even lighter blue, with the same Scottish flowers. We wore red heels. I sewed the last stitch for good luck with March, September, August, and our parents watching. We did the MacKenzie hug and cheer afterward.
My bridal bouquet included all the flowers that were on my dress, but Reece had found two black butterfly shells, whole ones, and we’d stuck those in, too.
The reception was at a local bed-and-breakfast, with white tents and sparkling lights set up outside the Queen Anne home, the entire Clan MacKenzie present, the tables spread with our Scottish tartans. Estelle and Leoni attended and danced the night away. Morgan was my flower girl. She wore her NASA spacesuit. Instead of tossing rose petals, she spent hours making miniature space shuttles out of paper and flew those. She fit right in.
We celebrated our heroine Geraldine, we hiked early, boated, and enjoyed the spas, we had our bachelorette party under the moon in white dresses, and we had our rehearsal dinner where all of Reece’s family came. Reece’s family seemed to appreciate the wands and flower crowns. They loved the kilts and bagpipes.
I loved Reece. I loved him more than I thought it was possible to love anyone. I had been to his ranch and it was as compelling to me as the beach, only in a different way. The land undulates as the ocean does, only it’s in gold and green and the silence is profound.
The afternoon before our wedding, out on the beach, he took both my hands in his and said, “June, when I take those vows tomorrow, I mean them. In sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, forsaking all others, forever. I will always love you, there will not be a day in my life that I won’t. You are the other half of my heart, the other half of my life, my future. I love you more than I will ever be able to say.”
And I did what I seem to be doing best now: I cried. “I love you, too, Reece. And I’m so glad that sneaker wave knocked me over into your arms!”
For a wedding gift Reece gave me a diamond necklace in the shape of a butterfly and a quilt that he’d hired Leoni and Estelle to sew for me. All of mine and Reece’s relatives had donated a cotton shirt to be cut into squares for the quilt. I had an uncle who donated a shirt with dancing fish on it. Another had palm trees. There were flowers, stripes, birdhouses, champagne glasses, flip-flops, and birds. The quilt was a compilation of our families, of us. In the middle was the Clan MacKenzie tartan.
It was stunning, it was family, it was love.
“You’ve resewn your life, June, that’s why I wanted you to have the quilt.” He pointed to a square with a monarch butterfly on it. “That one is me. And this one”—he pointed at the purple and blue butterfly next to it—“that’s you.” He pointed to five squares with smaller butterflies. “Those are for the kids. But don’t feel limited by that number.” He gave me a smackeroo on the cheek. “We could have more.”
“That’s a lot of kids!” I sputtered out, happy.
“Sure is, June.” He kissed me thoroughly, without restraint, the passion flowing hot and heavy between us, no longer something we had to control and deny. Kissing Reece was kissing love. Eternal love. Forever love.
Later, we danced along the beach, into the waves, and when my family, and his family, saw us, they clambered down the stairs and we all danced together under the yellow-and-orange sunset, cranberry red slashes highlighting that golden orb, tartans flying.
Reece wrote a song about families later titled “The Wave Dancers.” A top country artist bought it. It was the number one country song for weeks.
Zero Things I’m Worried About
I am winning in online Scrabble. The other night I spelled these words: “dream,” “quest,” and “Botox.”
When I was done, I ate peppermint sticks with Reece.
Then we got naked.
SECOND CHANCE SWEETHEARTS
B
Y
H
OLLY
C
HAMBERLIN
As always, for Stephen.
And this time, also for Margaret.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to John Scognamiglio for giving me the
opportunity to write this piece. Thanks also to Kit
and Carrie for inspiration on a variety of matters.
This is in memory of my beloved Jack. He was
a very special and beautiful boy and will be
remembered forever with great love. Ma-mow!
C
HAPTER
1
Who so loves believes the impossible.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The August light had not yet faded from the sky when thirty-four-year-old Thea Foss began to settle in for the night. It was quiet, as it always seemed to be at this time of the evening at this time of the year; birds and nonpredatory wildlife had long gone to bed. An occasional firefly flitted past the windows; Thea remembered catching them when she was a child, though as an adult she thought the practice a bit cruel. Later on in the night, a wakeful listener might expect to hear the melancholy hoot of an owl.
Though it was too early in the year for a fire, the night air was becoming progressively cooler as the month wore on. Thea went into the small bedroom and pulled from a drawer a heavy cotton sweater she had worn since college. The neckline was slightly frayed and what once had been a deep orange was now a rather faded melon color, but the sweater was roomy and comfortable. As she pulled it over her head she caught a glimpse of herself in the old cracked mirror over the painted wood dresser. Basically, she liked what she saw.
She was of average height, about five feet four when she wasn’t slouching, which she tended to do when she was tired, just like her father. She had never been thin or fat, always what in an earlier day had been known as “pleasingly plump,” and not much concerned about being any other way. Her eyes were a very pale blue and her hair a sort of red-gold now, though when she was little it was what her mother had called strawberry blond. She had worn glasses since the age of nine, contacts since the age of twenty-four or so, but only on certain occasions when it was easier, like on a really rainy day when glasses would spatter and then steam up when you went into a store or got onto a bus, or on really sunny days, when switching from sunglasses to regular glasses again and again could be annoying. She had never been a beach bunny so her skin was virtually flawless, though vaguely freckled. If asked, Thea would describe herself as a person who didn’t stand out in a crowd, though, of course, a few people in her life would argue this. Like, for one, her mother, and, for another... . Well, he was long gone out of her life. Hugh Landry’s opinions, though once so important, no longer mattered to her.
Thea went back to the living room and surveyed her surroundings. She had moved into the apartment about two weeks earlier, committing to a two-month stay, with an extension to be mutually decided upon after six weeks. She had paid her landlady, a friendly woman named Alice Moore, in cash and in full, mostly in order to avoid Alice’s running a credit check. What Alice would find if she did might cause her to close the door against her new tenant.
The apartment was small and charming. It occupied the lower floor of a wood frame house built about thirty years earlier—Alice lived on the main floor—and opened out directly onto a small, rustic patio set with a tiny table, two narrow wooden chairs, and an old but serviceable grill Thea had no idea how to use. A birdfeeder was always occupied, sometimes by a marauding squirrel, but most often by a large variety of small and colorful birds. More feeders were attached to the back porch of the house, above Thea’s apartment. Twelve Oak Street was one of the most popular sites among the local avian community.
The house had a spacious sunroom on its east side and a large, open deck on its west side, as well as a sleeping loft above the main floor. It was surrounded by a field that was the home of strutting wild turkeys, grazing deer, and an abundance of plants and wildflowers, many of which Thea could not name. An ancient, low stonewall, erected by some long-dead farmer, cut across the field in a slightly wavering line, providing a sort of Roman road for the neighboring cats and other small, furry animals to traverse. Just beyond the field began a dense wood, now a wall of thick, green leaves atop the massive gray and brown trunks of oaks and maples and the thinner trunks of the occasional white birches.
It was a quiet and peaceful place, close to idyllic, especially for someone who had been through what Thea had recently been through. She was finally beginning to feel comfortable, just a bit, after a period of immense trial. A two-week sojourn in this cozy little apartment in a pretty little vacation town, among people who knew nothing about her except what she wanted them to know, which was virtually nothing, was beginning to work wonders on her nerves.
Thea made a cup of Lipton tea, always reliable and less expensive than the fancy brands that she enjoyed but couldn’t really afford, and began to scan the stacks of books that were piled on the floor against one wall. She had brought a large box of books with her from Massachusetts, and Alice had generously offered her full access to her own impressive library, some of which had overflowed into the lower apartment. Enticingly, Alice’s library included several volumes of a very early twentieth-century collection of the complete works of Honoré de Balzac, in French. It was a bit of a dream come true for Thea, at least for now. So many books and for once, for a while, so much time in which to read them!
The difficulty, of course, was choosing a particular book to match her mood at a particular moment. Thea picked up a fairly recent biography of Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI. She had been extremely lucky to find it at a secondhand bookstore for a really affordable price. No doubt it would be fascinating reading—the reviews were good—but at that moment ...
Thea returned the biography to the box and chose instead something completely different, a Georgette Heyer detective novel, written in the late 1930s. She had read it before but found she never tired of Ms. Heyer’s plodding but brilliant detectives, overly suave young gentlemen, madcap young women, and hysterical middle-aged matrons. Plus, the period slang was lots of fun. She settled into an old and very comfortable armchair upholstered in chintz. You might not like chintz all that much, Thea reflected, looking down at the massive pink cabbage roses pictured against a faded mint green background, but it was hard not to feel somewhat cheered by its presence in a room. All I need now, she thought, to make this moment perfect, is a cat on my lap. But a cat would come soon enough, she vowed. There was a shelter not far from her parents’ house back in Massachusetts and—
Thea’s brief reverie was blasted by the ringing of her cell phone. She shot to her feet and, after a moment’s hesitation, stumbled over to the occasional table on which the phone sat, attached to its charger. Her heart was racing, as it always did when the phone rang. She peered down at the number displayed on the screen. It was a number she didn’t recognize. She still hadn’t touched the phone, as if by doing so she would unleash something bad or evil into the room.
The phone continued to ring. Her heart now began to pound uncomfortably hard. As far as she knew the only people who had this number were her parents and the people at the phone company. She let the call go to voice mail.
While only a moment before she had felt in a bit of an enchanted space, she now felt exposed. The large windows of the apartment’s living room were no longer access to a natural paradise but portals through which a human being with malevolent intent might peer, a thing far worse than a goblin or even a hungry black bear.
The call had registered in voice mail. Carefully, Thea pushed the appropriate key and with her eyes squished shut, her lips pressed together, she listened. At the first note of the cheery feminine voice, she walked back to the chair and dropped into it with relief. It was nothing but a prerecorded courtesy call from her bank—of course they would have the number!—something about a new savings program she might want to explore. She sank back with a deep and trembling sigh.
Nothing important. Nobody of significance. She was safe for now.
But it didn’t matter, Thea thought, pulling her sweater closer around her, her book forgotten, her cup of tea getting cold. It could have been Mark Marais. It could always, at any time, be Mark Marais.
C
HAPTER
2
Tuesday morning found Thea sitting in Alice’s kitchen, sipping very strong, very good coffee and eyeing a loaf of banana bread Alice was just taking out of the oven. Thea hadn’t planned to spend her morning with her landlady, but Alice had pretty much forced the issue, and the smell of the bread baking in the oven upstairs had only added to Alice’s argument. Besides, after that call the night before it had been a long time before Thea had managed to fall asleep, and when she finally had, her sleep had been restless, interrupted by anxious dreams. A big cup of good coffee might help hurtle her into the day ahead.
“We’ll just let that cool for a few minutes and then it’s every woman for herself.” Alice placed the warm bread on a trivet and brought it to the kitchen counter. She was dressed in a pair of faded jeans, a white Oxford shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and navy sneakers. She was a tall woman, about six feet, and broad in the shoulder and hip, though not overweight. Her hair was thick and silvery gray and came to her shoulder. This morning it was pulled into a neat ponytail. Thea wondered what color it had been originally but thought that to ask might be impertinent. Alice’s eyes were very bright blue and very keen. Her skin showed some damage, possibly caused by too many hours in the sun without a hat or long sleeves, but her smile was strong and overall, Thea found, Alice gave the impression of a woman much younger than her fifty-three years. Alice had told Thea her age on the day she had signed the lease. Thea still didn’t know why; her landlady’s personal information was of no concern to her. But some people seemed prone to sharing every little thing about themselves. Maybe Alice was one of those people.
“Everything all right downstairs?” Alice asked, pouring more coffee from a glass French press pot.
“Oh, yes,” Thea said. “It’s a lovely apartment.” In spite, she added silently, of all those windows. What was I thinking when I agreed to move in? Oh, right. I wasn’t thinking, at least not clearly.
“It helps pay the mortgage,” Alice was saying. “Renting it out, I mean.”
“Oh.”
“And when I manage to get a tenant like you, someone nice and quiet, it makes it all the better. I think I told you that I work from home. Nothing worse than trying to write an article on shrinking coral reefs while some idiot’s blaring one of those oversouling singers under your feet.”
“Oversouling?” Thea questioned.
“Yeah, it’s when those pop singers who all sound alike give every word about twenty-three syllables. I read the term somewhere online, ‘oversouling.’ Give me Frank Sinatra any day.”
“Oh. But surely you interview the tenant first,” Thea said. “To make sure he—or she—is, you know, mature?”
“Of course. But I’ve been fooled. Not often, but it’s happened.”
Alice, deeming the banana bread was ready for consumption, cut several slices, and slid one onto the plate set before Thea. “There’s the butter, and that jam is boysenberry. I think. Some kind of berry other than straw. Never was a big fan.”
Thea smiled and reached for the butter. Really, in the light of day, sitting in a cozy kitchen, slathering butter on homemade banana bread, the fears and anxieties of the night before seemed almost silly. Almost.
“Let me guess,” Alice said suddenly. “You’re running away from a bad relationship.”
Thea almost choked. Had Alice been reading her mind? “How did you know?” she asked a bit warily.
“Why else does a young, single woman move to a small town where she knows nobody and rents an apartment from another single woman in a house on a dead-end road, miles from the center of town?”
Thea took another sip of her coffee. It really was very good. She probably owed her hostess some sort of an answer, if only in thanks for the breakfast.
“I was married,” she said finally, not meeting Alice’s eye. “It didn’t work out.”
Alice nodded briskly. “That’s too bad. I was married, too. Twice. Both husbands died before their time. A shame.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Thea said sincerely.
“Yeah. Me, too. They were good men and the relationships were good, too. If I’m at all lucky, and I seem not to be, I’ll meet another good man and marry him. I’m not that old. I don’t flatter myself, but I still look pretty appealing seen from a certain angle in a certain sort of dim light.”
“You would get married again,” Thea asked, “after being widowed twice? I don’t know, that seems so ... risky.”
“Sure, I’d get married again,” Alice said robustly. “The relationships didn’t suck, it was the husbands dying part that sucked.”
“But you’d be taking such a chance of being hurt again ...”
Alice shook her head and reached for another slice of banana bread. “Better than being alone for the next twenty or thirty years. Some people aren’t cut out for the solitary life. I’m one of them.”
“But you seem so ...”
“Self-sufficient? Reasonably happy? That doesn’t mean I’m not lonely.”
No, Thea thought, she supposed that it didn’t. “Well, I’ll never get married again,” she said emphatically. “Or move in with someone or even date someone seriously. I’m done with relationships. I’m just fine on my own. I always have been.”
“Then why did you get married in the first place?”
Was that question a challenge, Thea wondered, or was Alice simply curious? Either way, how to explain—and to a virtual stranger, at that—why she had married Mark Marais? It wasn’t something she could fully explain to herself.
“I made a mistake,” she said after a moment. It wasn’t a lie.
“Ah. Well, we all make mistakes on occasion, as I’ve admitted.”
Thea felt that she had revealed enough about her personal life for one morning. “Well,” she said, rising from her seat, “I should get going. Thanks for the coffee, Alice, and the breakfast. It was very good. I’m afraid I can’t make a decent cup of coffee at all, let alone bake.”
“You’re welcome,” Alice said. “Thanks for the chat. As I said, I’m not one for the solitary life. It helps to have someone around every once in a while. But don’t worry. I’m not going to interfere with your seclusion.”
Thea, already at the front door, turned back. “Oh. I wasn’t worried,” she said.
“Yes, you were.”
Thea smiled in spite of herself. “Maybe a little.”