What would his life look like now if that fateful day had never happened?
Would he have stayed in Rayburn County? Married a sweet Southern girl who made sun tea and wore daisy-print dresses? Would he have coached football? Taught his kids how to bait a hook and change a tire?
Would his life have been simple? Clean?
Would he still know how to cry at funerals?
He flicked a covert glance across the island as Lura continued to love on the cat, trying to reconcile the girl he’d known, the skinny one with the braces and the knee socks, with the tall, curvy woman who reminded him of Lynda Carter back in her Wonder Woman days.
Only this version has red hair, expensive clothes, and flew halfway across the country to tell us how we can “borrow” ten million dollars from the United States’ central bank, he thought with a reluctant grin.
His grin faded when an image of Lura dressed in a red Lycra bustier and solid gold cuffs bloomed to life in his mind’s eye and riled up a part of his body that had no business being riled up.
Peanut yowled his affront when Lura stopped petting him and straightened to turn back to Graham.
Afraid he might get caught staring at her like a starving man stares at a buffet, Graham busied himself by peeling off a slice of roast beef and tossing it into the corner. The old tom scampered after the meat as fast as his furry, fat legs would take him.
When Graham turned back to Lura, he found her expression thoughtful. Searching.
Searchin’ for what? he wondered.
For the cocky jock he’d been back when she knew him? For the boy who’d gone from homecoming hero to self-imposed isolation once his mother died? For the changes all the years since had wrought?
In the end, she didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask him the question sparkling in her eyes. She simply went back to playing with the ends of her hair and silently watching him finish the sandwich preparations.
He plated her sandwich and slid it her way before wrapping his fingers around his own.
“Thanks.” She nodded. Then, she added in a voice as soft as cotton, “I’m sorry about what happened to your mom. I wanted to tell you that then. But you were you, and I was…well…me, and I didn’t have the courage.”
He stopped with the sandwich halfway to his mouth. It would taste like cardboard now. So he set it back on his plate.
“Happened to a lot of folks,” he rasped through a tight throat. “Too many folks ’round those parts, especially back then.”
“The commonality of it doesn’t make your loss any less.”
He didn’t want to talk about his loss. He didn’t want to think about it, even all these years later. He swerved onto the off-ramp she’d offered. “What do ya mean ’cause I was me and you were you?”
She gave him a look like the answer was obvious and he was just fishing for compliments. “You were the big-deal senior football star. I was the derpy freshman cheerleader who hadn’t figured out how to use her mile-long legs. Jenna Albright used to say I looked like a giraffe trying to sip from a pond whenever I did a toe-touch.”
He remembered the girl who’d been chased by the boys on the football team, but who’d seemed to him, even back then, to be small-minded and mean-spirited. “Jenna Albright was a chinless snob with a bad bleach job.”
Lura bit the inside of her cheek. “Still has the bad bleach job. But now she has weak chins. Plural.”
He chuckled. “Got big, did she?”
“If she were an inch taller, she’d be round.” Lura’s eyes twinkled with vengeful delight before she caught herself and shook her head. “Wow. That was mean. I take it back.”
“She called you a giraffe,” he countered with an indifferent shrug. “I think ya got a right to return fire. And just so ya know, you were never derpy. I may have been the senior football star, but you were the mayor’s daughter. If you’d talked to me back then, I would’ve tripped all over my tongue ’cause you’d deigned to lower yourself to the likes of little ol’ me.”
He expected her reply to be light and flippant. It was neither.
“You were never little, Graham. Not in stature. Not in spirit. What happened to your mother didn’t diminish you in anyone’s eyes.”
Damnit! That feeling was back. That regret mixed with nostalgia that came with too many what-ifs and if-onlys.
He changed the subject again. “So, tell me how ya came up with this brilliant plan of yours?”
She wrinkled her nose—habit, clearly—and he distracted himself from being too charmed by the move by taking a bite of his sandwich.
