I replayed it over and over through the end of the night. While I clasped hands and exchanged cheek kisses with my happy guests, I thought of Peter. Scurrying away as soon as he heard the wordengagement.
"Lickety-Split, huh?" my mother says, her thoughts going to the same place as mine.Penn Bellamy.
Worry sinks into the wrinkles around her eyes. She knows. She remembers the love I had for the boy who lived there.
"Well, the old Bellamy place had to be dealt with some time." Mom sits back in her chair, and I'm grateful she's taking the conversation away from my personal history. "Might as well be a looker. Do you think he'll wear tight jeans?"
"Mom!" Playfully, I tap her upper arm.
"What?" she challenges. "I'm not dead yet."
The wind leaves my sails. Judging by the stricken expressions on Vivienne and Kathleen, everyone else's sails are hanging limply as well.
Mom shrugs. "Just a little bit of maudlin humor."
I force a laugh. Because if I don't laugh, I'll cry.
My mother has stage four uterine cancer. With her options exhausted, she has resigned herself to her fate. The pain medicine she's on keeps her comfortable, and our job is to make her happy. My dad does his best for her, but she hates him fussing over her, and he still has the farm to run anyway. The tasks and responsibilities keep him busy, not to mention the extra hours he's putting in at Spot.
She has an in-home caregiver now,the very best money can buy, according to Duke.
He would know, because he's the one footing the bill. It's hard to say what possessed him to offer me such an arrangement. Was it the fact our families have been intertwined for decades, trading status as friend and foe? Or was it me, and the fact Duke and I have never been at odds with one another? Maybe it was how we grew up laughing at the ancient antics in our families' past, never feeling like we had to carry a revenge torch. Duke and I always had an easy friendship, born from understanding what it's like to grow up in a locally famous family, shouldering the inherent pressure that comes with an infamous last name.
On the outside, Duke and I together make perfect sense.
But the truth I will never utter to a soul is that we are not marrying for love.
Duke will pay for my mother's end of life care for however long we are blessed with her presence, but the real gift is giving her the opportunity to watch her only child walk down the aisle in the wedding dress she once wore. In return, I will provide Duke with a wife of status (gag me) to mollify Duke's despotic father.
There you have it.
The real reason I am marrying Duke Hampton.
And the flavor of the cake I eat during the charade?
I really don't care.
Chapter 7
Daisy
What I am doing is very, verystupid, I'll admit. But you know how sometimes something is really dumb and you do it anyway because you just can't help yourself? You need an answer, even if you don't dare to hope you'll receive one definitively. Even a hint, the tiniest morsel, would be enough to subsist on.
After helping my mother into her house, where her in-home nurse, Bonnie, awaited her, I loaded Kathleen's car with everything she'd brought out to the St. James farm. Vivi left to go start food prep for dinner service at Dama Oliva, the upscale but still attainable restaurant she owns in town.
With my dad busy caring for the horses, and my mother napping, I decided it wouldn't hurt to swing by Lickety-Split.
That's how I got to where I am now, winding through town in the opposite direction of the home I live in by myself, slipping past the recently-built neighborhood of houses with their trimmed yards and HOAs. Leaving behind Pour Me with its neon sign lit and the wordsdive barscrawled underneath. I pass the Rowdy Mermaid hair salon, and Lunker, the bait and tackle shop with the secret entrance for the moody underground speakeasy, King's Ransom. Locals are under strict orders tonever, ever share the location of that door, not even if the tourist offers sexual favors in exchange. Oddly specific rule, but it exists because things gotdrunk and disorderlya couple years ago at Pour Me when some tourists tried to convince Crazy Cliff the information was worth a blowie. Personally, I think if someone wanted to get into a secret speakeasy enough to contemplate performing that act on a fifty-something man who refuses to wear matching shoes and gave himself the nickname he now goes by, she should've been given directions. Sans blowie.
I leave the most populated part of town, and with it goes my grasp on the present. I am firmly in the past, sitting in the passenger seat of my father's brand-new Lincoln and bumping over the road to Penn's house while he tells me to be nothing more than friends with a boy like Penn.Sympathy is important, but don't mistake it for attraction.
I was twelve, flat-chested and certain boys were mostly disgusting. Except for Penn. He was the exception to every rule, though I couldn’t have articulated why. I knew I liked the way he laughed, and how he’d scrunch one eye and look up when he was thinking, but was that enough to set him apart from all others? It must have been something else, something undefinable.
I readily told my dadOk, because I couldn't fathom being attracted to any boy. Not in the way I knew he was talking about. Penn climbed in the back seat when my dad pulled up and honked. Polite and talkative, he held up his end of the conversation about Arizona's newest sports franchise, the Diamondbacks. I cared for baseball almost as much as I cared for the idea of wrestling a rattlesnake, but I was happy to sit there listening to their back-and-forth. Penn was going to spend the day at our thoroughbred farm, helping my dad and his employees. It was a trial run, to see if he'd be a good fit and able to work for the farm all summer. I was just happy to get to seePenn all day, until my dad crushed my spirit by informing me that I was to leave him alone while he was working.
I was crafty though, and when Penn went to work for my dad that summer I came up with ways to see him. Mostly they involved me needing help with something, like repairing the tire swing, or setting up a raised garden bed. My favorite was asking him to help me reach a pitcher on a high shelf. He knew what I was doing. He always knew, and that was sort of the fun in it. My dad caught on, telling me to knock it off. So I got craftier, making sure to call Penn in from his work when my dad was too busy to notice. Penn, smirking the whole time, would wait for me to make my request, then respond with the same three words:Anything for you.
If I heard that phrase tomorrow, I'd drop dead. Well, maybe notdead. But I'd hit the deck for sure.
