nodded. “I know that, Becky. I have faith in my ability to support myself, to make friends, to live a good life. I’m just not sure I’m destined for love and marriage.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course you are.”
Meg decided there was little point in arguing. Becky would believe what she wanted to believe, and Meg knew what she knew. After so many years of frightening men away with her physical strength and dexterity, she’d attracted a man who’d walked away less than two weeks before the wedding.
“Well,” she said, taking a last look at herself in the mirror. She did look far more confident than she felt. “This week isn’t about love and marriage, anyway. It’s about making myself appealing enough to Amos Pike that he’ll come away with me. Then, I suppose if I have to keep him locked in a room until the toy show, I can do that.”
“You won’t have to,” Becky said, walking her to the door. “Trust me. And don’t worry about the center. I’ll just keep dreaming about it awhile longer.”
* * *
AMOS FOLLOWED the brightly lit streetlights down Main Street in Lightning Creek, Wyoming, population fifteen hundred and something, and looked around him in disbelief. Time had stopped. That was the only possible explanation. Everything he remembered was still here—the general store on the east side of the street, Ellie’s Dress Shop, Western Savings and Loan, the post office.
Across the street was Reilly’s Feed Store, Twyla’s Tease ‘n’ Tweeze—wait. The beauty shop might have been called something else back then, but it had been there. The Main Street Grill. The aroma of barbecue drifted out to him and he had to stop and breathe in a deep gulp of it.
It was twenty-five years ago. He was nine years old.
He felt a little shudder deep inside him that recalled that time even more sharply than the old familiar storefronts. It had been dark then, too, and he’d been driven into Lightning Creek by Barbara, his caseworker.
Barbara had already been working with him a year when she’d brought him to Lost Springs Ranch for Boys, a few miles out of town. She’d been kind and done her best to be supportive, but she hadn’t known what to do with him after a year of moving him from one grandmother to another, from aunt to aunt.
She’d pulled the car over right about where he stood now. He could remember staring at the floodlit statue of Wyoming’s famous cowboy on a bucking bronco that dominated the town’s center.
“Amos, please try to hear me this time,” she’d said. “You have to start helping yourself now. I know what happened to your mom and dad was a terrible tragedy, and it’s not something you can get over quickly—even a smart, strong boy like you. But you have to make a start. You have to decide you want to go on. You can’t keep running away and doing things that you know will get you hurt. That radio tower thing, Amos, was crazy! If you had fallen, they wouldn’t have found enough of you to bury. Now, I know that sounds harsh, but it’s time you...”
He could probably remember the rest of it if he put his mind to it, but he had finally found his footing here after a few rough months, and what had gone before was put away somewhere inside him with the memories of the parents he’d loved so much and had wanted so desperately to join.
It was surprising—and also humbling—to discover that despite all his hard work and success, he could still feel the loneliness that had swamped the little boy he’d been.
He pushed his way into the café, needing coffee. The square room was quietly lit to take advantage of the stone fireplace on one side. Booths lined the walls and tables and chairs were grouped in the center.
A score of tempting aromas mingled with that of barbecue, filling the air with a welcoming familiarity. Red meat had been considered a man-builder when Amos had been a boy, and the Lost Springs residents had eaten well.
When he’d been a young teenager, he and Bill Bartell, another resident of the ranch, would ride their bikes to town to spend the money they’d earned chopping wood for old Mr. Ferris, whose property had bordered the ranch. They would never miss treating themselves to a burger, fries and Coke at the café. While they ate, they would boast about their dreams for the future.
“I’m going to be a country-western star with babes following me everywhere I go,” Bill would say.
Amos had envied Bill’s single-mindedness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Amos would say. “Be an architect, maybe. Something like that. And I’m gonna get rich. Yeah. Really rich.”
Like Bill’s dreams of stage-door babes, Amos had been sure that success in business would mean the company of women. And as a fifteen-year-old boy with raging hormones, he’d been convinced that would make up for being alone in the world. He just needed women.
The court had emancipated him at seventeen so that he could go east to college on a scholarship. He’d earned his degree in psychology with a minor in engineering—an odd combination of interests that had served him well when he turned his fascination with toys into a business.
In the years since then, he’d made friends, money and love to a number of women, but the heart of him still felt disconnected from the rest of the world. Set apart. Lonely.
The sound of country-western music and the buzz of conversation punctuated by loud laughter brought him back to the moment. He headed for the counter when he heard a voice call out from behind him.
“Pike?”
He turned to find a tall man in jeans and a Western shirt standing by a table in the middle of the room, a cautious grin on his face.
“You are Amos Pike?” the man asked. Everyone was staring at him, women particularly.
It took Amos a minute to connect the tall, broad-shouldered man with an air of celebrity to Bill Bartell, the childhood friend with whom he’d shared hamburgers and dreams of the future.
Laughing, Amos changed direction and walked into his old friend’s back-slapping embrace.
“Hell!” Bill exclaimed, taking a step back to admire Amos’s well-cut suit. “You did get rich, judging by the look of you.”
“And you got famous. I saw your duet with Alan Jackson in the video for Farm Aid. I suppose you do have babes following you everywhere.”
They sat down on opposite sides of the table. For the first time Amos noticed another man seated at a right angle to him.
“Well, Amos,” the man said, his aristocratic features elusively familiar. “Cutter Brown. You and I had kitchen detail together one month, remember? We were fencing with the brooms and managed to break all the juice glasses.”
Amos laughed again, remembering the incident clearly. “We were grounded for a week.”
“Yeah. As I remember it, we spent most of the time under the big table in the laundry room playing Lego.”
Amos remembered that. The smells of detergent and fabric softener had made it an unusually sweet-smelling construction site. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m a developer,” Cutter replied with a dry glance in Bill’s direction. “Not the babe-magnet job our buddy has. I know you’re the ultimate toy maker. I read
