style="font-size:15px;"> “I’m here for the summer—I just took a partial leave from my office. We’ll see what happens after that.” His voice was deliberately—and not all that convincingly—casual. He shrugged and fell into step beside her when she started walking again, more disturbed than she wanted to admit by the impression that something was wrong.
“Did you have a fire, too?” She met his gaze for just an instant, long enough to reestablish the connection that never seemed to entirely break, then looked away. If she didn’t watch where she was going, she was going to end up in Tierney’s Creek yet, and she didn’t have any clean clothes to put on if she did. “An internal one, maybe?”
He was silent long enough she thought she might have overstepped the bounds of questions old girlfriends could ask.
“Sometimes,” he said finally, “what you dream of isn’t what you wanted after all. Sometimes you mistake other people’s dreams for your own.”
Kate didn’t know, because none of her dreams had come true. If anyone else had had dreams for her, they probably hadn’t come true, either. Her parents, who had run the gamut from being hippies in college to becoming startlingly conservative schoolteachers to selling their house and taking off for Tennessee in a motor home, had never visited their own ambitions on their daughters.
She wasn’t unhappy with her life or the choices she’d made, exactly, but none of the things she’d written about in her adolescent diaries had come to pass. There were no young Bens or little Kates running around; she’d never passed meds at a hospital or comforted patients in her doctor-husband’s office; she’d never even slept in a dorm or gone to any of the parties her sister and Joann Demotte had talked about. The only talents she was sure she had involved answering the phone and making copies. Oh, and coffee. They’d miss her coffee back at Schuyler and Lund.
“I discovered,” he said, “that I had a bigger ego than I was comfortable with, something which wouldn’t have surprised my basketball coaches, but shocked the heck out of me. I began to feel a sense of—” He stopped, seeming to struggle with what came next.
“Entitlement?” she suggested, having worked with lawyers who’d been overendowed with that particular shortcoming.
“Yeah, I think so.” His tone became self-mocking. “Like I shouldn’t have to answer the phone in the middle of the night anymore and seriously ill patients really could take two aspirin and call me in the morning. It no longer bothered me that as part of a large practice, I seldom got to know the patients. After all, I was helping them, wasn’t I? And the other partners in the practice—man, they are good. It’s not as though patients needed me specifically.”
“But?” she said, stepping out and around a tree root and greatly enjoying it when he bumped into her once again.
He steadied her and kept an arm looped over her shoulders when they walked on. “But I don’t have time to ski or ride my bike or read the newspaper or even play basketball at the Y. I haven’t read a book from start to finish since I read Green Eggs and Ham to my brother’s kids at Christmastime.”
“Well, Ben, you’re busy. People are nowadays. They just are. Look at Penny and Dan. She caters all the time, he works twelve-hour shifts at the police department plus officiating at high school football and basketball games.”
“Yeah, and they still take care of their kids and however many they’re fostering at any given moment. Plus, he makes time to ride or go skiing every time I come back to town. I know they’re busier than I am, but they still make a life. I just make lots of money.”
Kate thought of the state of her bank account and her employment status. Although making money had never been at the top of her list of things that made her happy, she wished she’d been able to save more of what she had made.
“The first thing I thought of,” he said quietly, “when I heard about your fire, was that I’d send a check. We grew up together, shared more than I’ve probably shared with anyone in my life, including the woman I married, and that was all I could think, was that I’d send you a check.”
“I’d have understood,” she said, just as quietly, but she was hurt by the very notion of it. This was a man who knew every secret she’d ever had and had never told any of them. He’d made the three-hour drive from Boston to Fionnegan when she and Tark Bridger broke up just to make sure she was all right. “It wouldn’t look good,” he’d explained, “if you’d killed yourself with me being a doctor and all.” She’d laughed so hard she’d cried, and he’d held her close and hard, then gotten back in his car and driven back to Boston in time to work a night shift in the emergency room.
No, she wouldn’t have understood. Not at all. She’d have torn up the check.
“You’d have torn it up,” he said, echoing her thoughts so exactly she laughed out loud. “So if we end this walk by schlepping through the vacant lot behind the tavern, will you let me buy you lunch?”
“I could be talked into it.”
Of course, that was nothing new. He’d always been able to talk her into anything.
Oh, come on, Katy. You can do this hill with one hand tied behind your back.
We’ll be back before your folks wake up.
We’re going to get married, anyway, right?
It’s only beer. It’s not like really drinking.
Oh, come on, Katy...
* * *
MCGUFFEY’S TAVERN HAD sat at the corner of Main Street and Creamery Road—and Tim McGuffey had stood behind the bar—for as long as Kate could remember. Maeve, Ben’s mother, ran the kitchen with an iron hand, and between the two of them, they’d reared two doctors, a priest and a college professor. Every kid in town who’d ever needed lunch money to get through the week had earned it by washing glasses at McGuffey’s.
Old habits die hard. As soon as she finished her potato soup and corned beef sandwich, Kate moved to the triple sinks behind the bar.
“Take a break, Pop, and go wheedle potato soup out of Ma,” suggested Ben. “Kate and I’ll earn our keep while you eat.” He reached for an apron and tied it around her waist.
“Think I will, at that.” Tim, elegant as always in his crisp white shirt and black vest, kissed Kate’s cheek as he passed. “There’s a lass. We’re sorry about your house, but you’re better off without that blighted job.”
She flashed him a smile, taking startled and concerned note of his grayish complexion, the dark circles under his twinkling Irish eyes. No, you can’t be old. “Thanks, Tim.”
For a while, she did feel like she was better off. Brushing hips and elbows with Ben behind the bar was like old times, only with slightly matured hormones. Calling greetings to patrons was a lot more fun than saying in a hushed and professional voice, “Good morning. Schuyler and Lund. How may I direct your call?”
“You still carry a good tray of glasses,” said Ben, catching her as she took empties back to the bar. He lifted the tray from her hands and set it on the nearest table. “Can you still dance, too?” And with no accompaniment other than clapping and shouting customers, he whirled her away between
