He’d eventually learned to handle such things tactfully. In spite of his parents’ dismay when he’d chosen engineering over law, Georgia Tech over Yale, he wasn’t a barbarian. At least he’d had the good manners not to come right out and admit to harboring a deep-seated aversion to pinstripes, brogans and button-down brains, a description that summed up those among his mother’s younger female colleagues who considered her a role model. Now a highly esteemed federal judge, Janet Hale Hitchcock had never, not even in her junior-partner days, been a hands-on type mother.
Once she’d given up trying to hand over control of her only son to one of her right-minded colleagues, her matchmaking efforts had ceased. Now it was only his married friends who were forever trying to pair him up. Hitch put it down to the theory that misery liked company. His method of dealing with it was both tactful and efficient. Smile politely and run like hell. Having spent his formative years under the thumbs of domineering parents, in a home that had all the warmth of a refrigerator truck, he wasn’t about to get caught in the marriage trap.
Mac’s call had caught him at a weak moment. He’d just come back from a memorial service for another old classmate, dead of heart failure at the age of thirty-three, a year younger than Mac.
Life was risky business.
After pouring himself a drink, Hitch had been wallowing in a rare moment of philosophical nostalgia when Mac MacCollum had called to tell him about his upcoming wedding and ask him to act as best man.
“No thanks, my friend. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m severely allergic to weddings.”
“Aw, come on, Hitch, you’re my closest pal. I couldn’t ask anyone else.”
The two men had gone through four years at Georgia Tech together, Hitch on a football scholarship as his parents, both Yale law school graduates, had refused to condone such heresy. The day after graduation Mac and Hitch had joined the army together. Mac had then tried on half a dozen careers, while Hitch went to Harvard for his MBA. Through it all they’d never lost contact, due mostly to Mac’s friendly persistence.
“You know, Mac,” Hitch had remarked, “whining was never one of your more attractive traits.”
“I’m not whining, man, I’m begging. Begging has more dignity than whining.”
“Do I know the lucky lady?”
“You remember Steffie Stephenson? Lives next door to our house?”
Hitch would never forget the many weekends during their college years he’d spent in the rambling, friendly, comfortable old house in a small North Carolina town. The MacCollums’ place, messy, noisy, filled with the aroma of Mama Mac’s good cooking, was as different from the house he’d grown up in as night from day.
He also remembered the Stephenson sisters next door, Stephanie and…was it Mary? Marnie? Something like that.
And hadn’t there been a third sister? He’d never actually met her, but he seemed to recall a red-haired kid scurrying around in the background.
“Yeah, I remember Steff,” he said, sipping the one drink a day he allowed himself. “Word of advice, Mac. Get out before it’s too late. Women need marriage. Men don’t. Don’t bother to question my logic—logic never was your strong suit—just take my word for it. Get out of Dodge.”
But Mac had talked him into it. Good old Mac, with his big ears, two left feet and ready grin. The guy could talk a dalmatian out of his spots. Hitch had hung up, having reluctantly agreed, and spent the next few minutes wondering how the devil Mac and Steff had ever got together. Unless she’d changed considerably since he’d last seen her, Stephanie Stephenson was a shallow little snob with a cover girl face and a one-cylinder brain.
Could she have finally wised up to the fact that Mac, for all he might act the clown, was a terrific guy? Or was it because, through a lot of hard work and some lucky breaks, he had parlayed the rundown ski resort he’d bought a few years ago into a thriving chain stretching all the way up into West Virginia?
Hitch polished off his drink, rose and stretched. He’d been working flat out for the past couple of years establishing his own business, JHH Designs, a small Richmond, Virginia, industrial design firm with a big future. He could use a break, and where better to take one than with the family who had treated him like one of their own?
That meant he’d be passing close to his parents’ place on the drive from Richmond to Mocksville. Might as well make an effort to mend a few fences. It had been nearly a year since he’d seen them, and that last scene had not been pleasant.
Maybe, he thought with bitter amusement, he could break the ice with a bit of gallows humor. Hey folks, whaddya think, if Mac’s marriage goes south the way most marriages seem to do these days, can the best man be nailed as an accessory after the fact?
Oh, yeah, that would really crack ’em up.
Both his parents were lawyers with strong control tendencies. The trait had caused problems from the time Hitch was old enough to leave small, sticky fingerprints on every polished surface in the somber old house.
His mother, a small woman with iron-gray hair worn in a knot at the back of her head, could get more mileage from a lifted eyebrow than most people could from a loaded gun. His paternal grandfather had been a Supreme Court judge. Most of his cousins were lawyers or judges. Hitch had been slated to follow the family calling, only he’d had ideas of his own.
Major hassle. There was still a lot of residual bitterness, but one thing he’d inherited from both sides of the family was a streak of stubbornness a mile wide. He’d never actually won an argument with either of his folks, but at least he’d learned to minimize the damage by biting his tongue and walking out.
Matter of fact, the driving force behind his present success might easily be his determination to prove something to his parents.
Talk about childish.
“Two things I’ll never be,” Cindy muttered as she carted a stack of bone china to the kitchen to be washed, “are a caterer or a professional wedding planner.”
She’d already broken the handle off one of the cups and had spent far too much valuable time on the phone to Greensboro to see if the china replacement center could match the pattern. Lucky for her it could.
Unlucky for her, it would cost her an arm and a leg, plus a drive to Greensboro at her own expense.
“Cindy, did you call the florist?”
“They’re coming tomorrow to go over final plans.”
“Cindy, is my dress back from the cleaner?”
“Be here in about an hour.”
“Cindy, for goodness sake, I told you to air out my luggage! It smells like mildew!”
“It was cloudy when I got up, so I thought I’d better wait. If it doesn’t clear up, I’ll open all your cases and put them up in my room—that’s always dry.” And hot as Hades, as the attic wasn’t air-conditioned.
The wedding was still days away, and already the guest rooms were filled with family here for the occasion, plus Steff’s two attendants, both former college classmates. Cindy had run her legs right down to the nub trying to get
