Spring Fever (8 page)

He was stretched out on the chaise next to hers, on the dock, his head propped up on one elbow, staring at her when she woke up.

Her sunburned cheeks flushed a deeper pink. “What are you looking at?”

“You,” Mason said. He leaned across and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Where have you been all my life, Annajane Hudgens?”

She blushed even deeper. “I’ve been right here. Pokey and I have been best friends since we were five. And I bet I’ve spent more nights at Cherry Hill these past five years than you have. You’re the one who’s never been around.”

“That’s about to change,” Mason vowed. “Starting today.” And for the next six weeks, they’d been inseparable. Knowing her mother’s low opinon of the Baylesses, they deliberately kept their families in the dark about their relationship. Mason could never understand why Annajane wanted to keep him a secret. “Your mom doesn’t even know me,” he’d protested. “How do you know she wouldn’t like me?”

“If your last name wasn’t Bayless, she’d probably love you,” Annajane finally admitted. “But Mama’s funny. She’s got some kind of bug up her rear about your family. She never has admitted she likes Pokey, even though we’ve been best friends our whole lives. Mama thinks your mother’s stuck-up, that she looks down on anybody who doesn’t belong to the country club.”

“Well hell, she’s right about that,” Mason said with a laugh. “Mama is a big snob. But that doesn’t make me one.”

In the end, though, they both came to enjoy the illicit nature of the romance. Only Pokey was in on the secret. She’d meet Mason at the lake, or stay late after work, and they’d head over to Southern Pines for dinner and a movie. And on the last summer weekend before she had to go back to school at State, she fabricated a story about an all-day shopping trip to Charlotte with Pokey.

Instead, she and Mason snuck out to the lake house, where she gladly gave up her virginity on a creaky army-surplus cot.

The following Monday, Annajane went off to Raleigh for her sophomore year at NC State and Mason went off to grad school. It would be two years before she would see Mason Bayless again.

Her first few weeks back at school, Annajane told herself Mason hadn’t called or e-mailed because he was busy with classes. Getting a master’s in finance was no joke, she knew. The weeks stretched out, and he still didn’t call or e-mail, and she was too proud to call him. She went home at Thanksgiving, but Mason didn’t. When Christmas rolled around, she was sure she’d see him. The Baylesses made a big deal of Christmas, with a huge open house on Christmas Eve and an elaborate family dinner. But Mason, Pokey told her, had been invited to spend the holiday with a classmate, at his family’s vacation home in Cuernavaca.

When Christmas morning came and went without so much as an e-mail from him, Annajane tore the card off the antique sterling silver cufflinks she’d bought for Mason and instead gave them to her stepfather, Leonard, who only wore short-sleeved dress shirts.

Stung by being so unceremoniously dumped, Annajane returned to school and threw herself into classwork and a rigorous social life. She dated with a vengeance, told herself she was in love with a cute but slightly dim-witted guy in her marketing class, slept with him once, and then swore off men who used more hair products than she did.

She found herself deliberately staying away from Passcoe, instead spending holidays with classmates, even taking a part-time job as nanny for one of her professor’s bratty nine-year-old twins, so that she’d have an excuse to stay in Raleigh year-round instead of going home—and facing the possibility of seeing Mason riding around town in that shiny red car with a new girlfriend.

The summer before her senior year, she got an internship with a New York advertising agency and shared a roach-infested six-hundred-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn with two other girls from NC State. Annajane had herself a very large summer; got invited to house parties at the shore, and dated another intern, Nouri, who introduced her to Pakistani food and who promptly fell in love with her and begged her to transfer to Columbia and move in with him.

Instead, Annajane returned to Raleigh in late September, with highlighted blond hair, a discreet butterfly tattoo on her right hip, and a tiny silver nose ring, which she quickly discarded after the shock value wore off.

Somehow, she managed to avoid seeing Mason Bayless for nearly two years. Right up until the day Pokey got married. But that was another story.

7

True to his word, Max Kaufman was standing at the emergency room entryway when the ambulance pulled up the ramp at Passcoe Memorial Hospital. In his late fifties, with a close-shaven shock of graying hair and large, soulful brown eyes, Dr. Kaufman was already dressed in rumpled green surgical scrubs.

After Sophie had been moved to a gurney and brought inside, Dr. Kaufman nodded a brisk greeting to Mason and Annajane, and then was all business, feeling the listless child’s forehead and gently probing her abdomen.

Sophie cried feebly at his touch. “It’s okay, sugar,” Mason said, clutching her hand. “Dr. Max is going to make you feel better.” He leaned down, smoothed her hair from her face, and kissed both cheeks.

“We’re going to take this little lady back and get her blood drawn right away, do a CT scan, and make her comfortable, but from what you’ve told me, I suspect it is her appendix, in which case, we’ll just get that bugger out of there,” Dr. Kaufman said. He nodded at the nurse hovering at his elbow, and she began to wheel Sophie away.

“Well, Miss Sophie,” they heard the nurse say. “My name is Molly. And I’ve got a little girl just your age at home, and her name is Sophie, too. What do you think about that? I sure do love that pretty pink dress you’re wearing. Did you have a birthday party today?”

“No,” Sophie said. “We were getting my daddy married, but then I throwed up.”

Dr. Kaufman chuckled, looking from Mason to Annajane, raising one bushy eyebrow at the groom’s vomit-spattered tuxedo and his ex-wife’s ruined dress. “Everybody good now? Fine. Fill out the paperwork, get yourself some of our world-famous crappy coffee, and I should be able to let you know something about the surgery in a few minutes.”

“Is this really necessary?” Mason asked anxiously.

“What, an appendix?” Dr. Kaufman said, irritably. “Mason, nobody really needs an appendix, as far as we know. It’s not terribly common for a five-year-old to have appendicitis, but it’s not a rarity either. That said, if she does have a hot appendix, we need to remove it, or things will get really ugly really fast. So you need to let me go find out, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and disappeared behind the swinging door to the examining rooms.

“Thank you,” Annajane called after him.

“Prick,” Mason muttered. He turned without a word and went to the intake desk to start filling out the paperwork.

Annajane found herself alone in the emergency room waiting area, a cheerless room with beige linoleum floors, beige painted walls, and a row of army-green straight-backed leatherette chairs that faced a wall-mounted television showing a video of proper hand-washing techniques. The only other entertainment option in the room was a beige metal magazine rack holding a handful of well-thumbed copies of
Highlights for Children
and
Modern Maturity
.

Choosing
Modern Maturity
only because all the brain-teaser puzzles in
Highlights
had already been worked, she was idly scanning an article about prostate health when Mason returned, slumping into a chair once removed from her own. He sighed loudly and buried his head in his hands.

Annajane looked at the clock. “It’s barely been fifteen minutes,” she pointed out.

He didn’t respond.

“She’s a perfectly healthy little girl,” Annajane added. “And Dr. Kaufman really does know what he’s doing.”

“I know that,” Mason said, his voice muffled. “It’s just … this place.” He raised his head. His voice was strained and full of despair. “This place. You know?”

“I do know,” Annajane said softly. She hesitated, but after a moment, she reached over and squeezed his upper arm. His hand found hers, and he patted it briefly before letting go. They both knew this room all too well.

A little over five years ago, she’d rushed into this same emergency room and found Mason sitting in almost the same place, slumped over, despondent, waiting for news from this same doctor, Max Kaufman. Only that time, the patient had been Mason’s father, Glenn, and the news, when it did come, had been devastating.

Funny. That day was the beginning of the end of their marriage.

*   *   *

There had been other fights. Annajane wouldn’t have called them fights, really. Quarrels, or tiffs, if anybody ever really used that word.

They’d been married less than two years, when the little fissures in their happiness began to appear.

Mason and Annajane were living in the caretaker’s cottage at the lake. It was only a temporary address, Mason assured her, a rent-free solution until they saved enough money for a down payment on a house of their own.

The cottage had been abandoned for years. As children, she and Pokey had appropriated it for a playhouse, furnishing it with cast-off furniture from the big house, a wobbly kitchen table, a pair of rickety wooden chairs, and an army cot for campouts. They played at cooking with a battered saucepan, once nearly burning the place down after attempting to heat up a can of SpaghettiOs on Davis’s Boy Scout camp stove.

And yes, she and Mason had snuck away to the caretaker’s house for stolen hours in the first few months after they’d started dating.

At first, Annajane had been enchanted with the quaint honeymoon cottage, with its deeply pitched slate roof, leaded-glass windows looking out onto the lake, and stacked stone fireplace.

But living there was a different matter. The kitchen’s warped wooden cabinets didn’t close, the refrigerator barely cooled, and that adorable roof had a spot that leaked—directly over their bed. It was drafty in the winter and hot in the summertime, and damp and mildew from the lake seemed to creep in year-round. Also, there were mice. There was no washer or dryer, which meant they had to either troop into town to the coin Laundromat or drag their basket of dirty clothes up to the big house, like a couple of college students.

All that Annajane might have cheerfully accepted. She hadn’t grown up in a mansion, as Mason had. Her family’s two-bedroom brick ranch had one window air-conditioning unit—in Ruth and Leonard’s bedroom—and just one bathroom. The real problem with the cottage was its location—directly in the looming shadow of Sallie Bayless, a constant presence in their lives, who was prone to dropping over uninvited to offer Annajane unsolicited advice on everything from housekeeping: “Annajane dear, you really must use lemon oil every week on Mason’s grandmother’s walnut dresser, to keep the wood from drying out”; to cooking, “Annajane dear, we never, ever use dark meat in chicken salad”; to marriage itself, “Annajane dear, no man wants to see his wife in the morning before she’s fixed her hair and her makeup—and his breakfast.”

Her mother-in-law never came right out and criticized the new bride in front of Mason. That wasn’t Sallie’s style, but the slow drip-drip-drip of her constant nitpicking had the effect of sand in Annajane’s newlywed sheets.

Annajane knew it was no good trying to extricate their life from Mason’s family, or his family’s business. They were too tightly woven together now.

And it was all Pokey’s fault.

She’d shown up, unannounced, at Annajane’s studio apartment in Raleigh, on a freezing weeknight in February.

“Guess what?” she’d demanded, as soon as she’d stepped into the room. “I’m pregnant!” And next came, “You’re gonna be my maid of honor. And I won’t take no for an answer.”

Pokey had been in no hurry to finish college. She’d declared herself on the six-year plan, until she met Pete Riggs at a fraternity party in Chapel Hill. He was from a wealthy Charleston family who owned a chain of fine furniture stores. He was tall and redheaded and had earned a full four-year golf scholarship to Wake Forest. Fun-loving Pokey called Annajane that night, dead serious, to announce that she’d met her future husband. And as always, what Pokey wanted, Pokey got.

Before Annajane knew it, she was being dragged to bridal boutiques for fittings and, yes, back to Passcoe, for a seemingly endless round of brunches, teas, dinners, and showers.

Mason was a no-show for all of the prenuptial hoopla. He was working as a regional manager for Dr Pepper, in Memphis, with his father’s blessing, to gain experience outside his own family’s business. He was, Pokey confided, being a major pill about the whole thing. “Mason doesn’t approve of Pete, and he doesn’t approve of me getting married and dropping out just a semester short of graduation, and he most definitely doesn’t approve of me having a baby. He threatened to put a beat-down on Pete for knocking me up, until I admitted I actually got myself knocked up on purpose. But if you ever tell that to Sallie, I’ll never speak to you again,” Pokey said.

“Too bad,” Annajane had murmured, trying to sound unconcerned about Mason’s opinions. She was desperate to see him again, and desperate to pretend he’d never entered her life. It wasn’t until she had to walk up the aisle on his arm, the day of Pokey’s wedding, that Annajane allowed herself to remember how she felt when Mason Bayless touched her. It wasn’t Mason, she told herself, it was just spring fever.

Still, she tried to avoid him at the reception, dancing with every man in the room who was under the age of seventy and hiding out on the veranda of the country club, behind a huge potted palm, between dances.

That’s where he found her, leaning against the veranda railing, sipping a glass of lukewarm champagne toward the end of the evening.

“Shoes hurt that bad?” he’d asked, gesturing toward the high-heeled silver slingback sandals she’d slipped out of.

“They’re killing me,” Annajane said, taking a large sip of champagne, hoping he wouldn’t notice her suddenly flushed face in the darkness.