The rapport between us had been instant. We joked that it was the Maddie-Maggie thing, but the truth had to do with my not being one of her parents. Understandably, they saw her as a child to be sheltered from a cruel world. Had they known some of the things her schoolmates said, they would have gone to school officials to complain and embarrassed her to death. She knew I wouldn’t do that. So, while her mother either had a manicure or took a yoga class or walked into town to shop, she told me which girls excluded her and which did not, what they said, what they posted, and where. She told me which boys could look at her and which would not, and she shared her fear that the one she had a crush on would never see past the stain.
For me, it wasn’t about hiding splotches of red. Once I got to know Maddie, I barely saw them, which I freely told her. But she knew they were there, which was all that mattered. I showed her how to shade them, how to draw attention away from them by highlighting her eyes. I had done her makeup prior to a party or two. Today, she was having pictures taken for her middle-school yearbook. While we waited for her mother to pick her up, I brushed her hair, braided one side at the temple and clipped it several inches back, used a curling iron on the rest.
We were both pleased with ourselves by the time she left.
And there was Liam at Reception, chatting it up with Joyce, whose wave for me to join them was far too enthusiastic.
“Your brother,” she said, beaming. “I’m so glad he’s here.”
I was not. Right there, with Joyce as witness, Liam begged, positively begged me to help him pick clothes that he would pay for, he claimed, and how could I say no? I still didn’t want him working for Edward. But what I wanted seemed not to matter. Liam was here. He had driven here in his own car, newly towed back onto my road. And if he didn’t buy appropriately warm and weather-resistant clothes, he would catch his death of cold—which was totally a Mom thought. Anyone in his right mind knew that colds came from germs, not weather. But his clothes were wrong any way you looked at it. Advising him in this was the least I could do.
Not to mention that Joyce would have had my head if I refused.
So off we went, Liam and I, and naturally, with someone as needy as Liam, it didn’t stop at clothes. He wanted a tour of the town, and though I pointed out apartments for rent over the stores on Lincoln, he was more interested in the shops themselves. When I pointed out available rentals in a condo community near the town line, he was more interested in the two eateries there. When I pulled off the road onto the drive of a small inn that I knew rented rooms by the month and, in fact, had a VACANCY sign prominently displayed, he was totally clueless.
“Okay, so, what is the appeal here?” he asked. “Do they serve anything other than breakfast?”
My phone dinged then. Not knowing how to deal with his denseness, since the message I was trying to send seemed crystal clear to me, I read Edward’s text. Who is Nina Evans?
Town Manager, I replied and sent it off. I didn’t ask why he wanted to know. Encouraging him only invited more, and I wasn’t his wife—or his girlfriend, his facilitator, his interior designer—certainly wasn’t the only one in town with the names of wildlife exterminators.
I didn’t need a man in my life. Given the pain of the past, I sure didn’t want this one.
Well, I did. Physically. Now, then, always—picturing how Edward Cooper had looked earlier at the Spa—he was something to behold. I wasn’t sure what to do with that. But there it was.
“Jeez, who’s at the other end of that text?” my brother asked.
My head flew up. “No one. Why?”
“The look on your face…”
“What?”
“Guilty. No. Hungry.”
Says the chef who wants everyone hungry all the time, I might have said, misinterpreting the word just to get him off my back, but it wasn’t worth the effort. He couldn’t get into my phone. He couldn’t see who I was texting. For all he knew, I was dating someone. Let him chew on that a