college, he’d fallen hard and fast for Allie the first time she’d visited Zack. Within a day, Fred had shaved off his incipient goatee, torn down his Cindy Crawford posters and started dogging Allie like a Springer Spaniel. At the moment, Zack was too lazily distracted to point that out.
“Man, your radar must be off,” Fred complained. “Trust me, Zack. You don’t want this one—she wears baggy clothes, Birkenstocks and Mr. Magoo glasses. She’s not in your league.” Absently, he stroked his belly. “Hell, I don’t think her type even has a league.”
“Outside of softball, neither do I.” Were they talking about the same woman? They had to be. Instead of being put off, Zack felt…privileged. As if Cathy Timmerman’s beauty was his alone.
“Yeah, sure,” scoffed Fred. “Like Laurel Barnard isn’t in a class by herself. Talk about high maintenance!”
Laurel. Zack gritted his teeth until his jaw bulged.
“Yup.” Fred nudged his pal in the ribs. “Laurel. She’s still mad at you.”
“I assumed as much.”
“I heard she said that if you ever showed your face in town again, she was gonna sic her daddy on you. Planned to sue you big time—public humiliation, alienation of affection, something like that. She’s out to recoup the cost of the, uh, wedding.” Fred glanced sidelong at Zack. “I’d be worried if I was you. Laurel’s got a hidden nasty streak.”
Not entirely hidden. “Hmm. Guess I’ll start rounding up character witnesses.”
Fred leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Steer clear, is all I’m saying.”
“What about Julia? Does she hate me, too?”
“With her, who knows? Jule doesn’t run off at the mouth like the rest of ’em.”
Zack expelled a huge breath.
Fred’s shoulders hunched. “Gotta be strange for you, being the whipping boy instead of the hero.”
“The whipping boy?”
“Women take weddings mighty seriously. And vanishing grooms—” He whistled, slowly wagging his head from side to side.
In Zack’s note to Laurel, he’d offered to pay for half of the cost of the cancelled wedding; he’d even provided Adam’s temporary address. She’d never responded. A matter of hurt pride, he’d assumed, and possibly even remorse for her part in the fiasco.
He shoved the matter to the back of his mind, leaving it for a personal confrontation with Laurel that was coming as surely as the next Quimby garage sale. “Stuff that,” he told Fred. “I’d rather talk about my new neighbor.”
“Why her? You can’t be that hard up.”
“What do you mean? She’s…” Zack waved his hands in the air.
Fred scratched his scalp vigorously, making the yellow mop of hair slide back and forth. “We are talking about Cathy Timmerman, the woman who’s renting Allie’s family’s house?”
“None other.” Zack’s face felt warm, and not because of the sun. There had to be a dopey look on it, too, judging by his friend’s baffled expression.
“This is weird,” said Fred.
“Very.”
“Something’s not right.”
Oh, but it is, Zack thought. Very right.
He’d bet what was left of his good reputation on it.
ZACK TOOK his time reintroducing himself to Quimby. After leaving Fred, he stopped for a cold drink at the Burger Bucket drive-in and flirted very mildly with the waitress, who, despite several tattoos and piercings, looked no more than nineteen. She stood at the counter, smoking, trying to maintain her cool while whispering to the fry girl. Zack looked away, smiling at a squalling toddler in the next car until he recognized the child’s mother, Liz Somebody from high school, who gaped at him with her mouth open. After the first moment of shock, she recovered enough to shoot him an impressively nasty evil eye.
He drove away, remembering that Liz had been one of Laurel’s bridesmaids. And that there were six of them.
Enough for a posse.
Next he went to the lake. In another week the water would be warm enough for pleasant swimming, but even now there were several hardy bathers. Pale, fleshy bodies lined the sand like walruses basking in the sun. Little kids dashed in and out of the shallows, squealing and splashing, the lifeguard poised to take flight from his peeling white throne.
Zack parked and sat on the hood of his car. The water and sky were complementary shades of blue, drenched with so much sunlight his eyes began to water and he had to fish a pair of shades from his pocket. He smelled pine resin, warm tar. Hot sand. The medicinal odor of sunscreen and the indefinable dank, marshy tang of lake water.
Memories came in a flood. He’d been the lifeguard at Mirror Lake for four summers, from ages sixteen to twenty. An uncomplicated time. He remembered the slow roasting hours of midday, the usual teenage horseplay with his swim team buddies, the day Julia Knox had pranced across the sand in braids and a yellow bikini and he’d decided that she was the girl for him.
Zack grimaced. His life would have stayed uncomplicated if only they’d married. For a time, he’d thought that eventually they would…until Julia had come to him at the start of their junior year of college and confessed that she loved someone else. The worst part of it had been that he wasn’t devastated by the news, not really. He and Julia…they’d never truly sparked. Not in the crackling, fiery way that burned hot enough to last a lifetime.
Zack stood up. Enough wallowing. Someone looked over and waved at him from a beach towel as he slammed the car door. He didn’t stop. Gravel spit beneath the back wheels of the Jag as he peeled out of the parking lot like a hot-rodder.
He pulled together a bagful of groceries at the little mom-and-pop convenience store at the crossroads. Mom was too myopic to see beyond her nose. Pop looked at Zack with a vague recognition; Zack was gone before it jelled.
The sun had dropped significantly lower in the sky by the time he returned home, its beams slanting through the green lacy screen of the willows. The grass looked like a velvet carpet. The buds on the rhododendron were on the verge of opening, but for now the pink petals were still tightly furled.
Turning into the drive, he almost clipped the mailbox. Several wan tulips lost their drooping heads beneath the left front wheel as he stepped hard on the brake and the car shuddered to an abrupt halt.
Cathy Timmerman was home.
He climbed from the Jag in a daze.
She was washing her car. In bare feet and denim cutoffs. With a sleeveless white T-shirt knotted below her breasts. Above a triangle of smooth abdomen, her pointed nipples pressed against the damp, clinging fabric. A thick, shiny ponytail bobbed at the back of her head when she stood abruptly with a sponge in one hand and a hose in the other, its spray wetting her cement driveway and the grass and then the tips of his athletic shoes as she slowly turned his way.
