school every day. She’d missed him so much the first couple of months that she would drive out at recess time just to look at him on the playground. Of course, she never let him know this. He’d gotten a very early case of I’m-not-a-baby-anymore-Mama, so she tried hard not to dote on him.
He climbed into the Tahoe now with a grin on his face just about half as wide as he was tall.
Annie smiled at him. “Excited?”
Tommy nodded. “Did you get the stuff?”
She reached over, gave him a kiss on the head. “Yep. Bought Patterson’s out of every cap gun and feather headdress they had.”
“All right!” Tommy shot a fist in the air.
Annie grinned. She couldn’t help it. Her child’s happiness was to her a gift in itself. She’d always felt the need to be careful of spoiling him. He was an only child; it would have been easy to do. But so far she’d seen no evidence of that, his joy at some of life’s simple good things still pure in the way she remembered feeling as a little girl. And yes, she couldn’t deny her own sense of needing to make up for the hurt J.D. had caused him.
She braked at the end of the circle, waved a couple of school buses past, then pulled out onto Hickory Street and handed Tommy a carton of his favorite fruit juice.
“Thanks, Mama,” he said and took a long gulp. “Will Aunt Clarice be there tonight?”
“Later,” Annie said. “She called this afternoon and said she had to run up to Lexington to cover a story.”
Tommy nodded. “Do you think it’ll be there when we get home?”
“What’s that, doodlebug?”
“My present from Daddy.”
Annie’s grip tightened on the wheel. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I bet it will,” Tommy said, hope in his voice. “What do you think it’ll be?”
“A new glove maybe?” Annie played the game while pure fury churned inside her. Tommy had checked the mailbox every afternoon for the past week. Nothing J.D. had ever done—and he’d done a lot of things during their marriage—had infuriated her the way his cavalier treatment of their son’s feelings did. She was long past over his betrayal of her, had planted a sign that read GOOD RIDDANCE! in her heart’s front yard and was even glad now to be on her own. It had taken some time to admit it, but she’d spent most of her marriage to J.D. weighed down by the feeling that he was just waiting for something better to come along. That she would do until then.
Something better had—at least in his eyes. And she was over that. Really, she was. But at moments like this, when she could hear the hurt in her son’s voice, see it in the visible struggle on his face, she wished for the power—even if it was just for one day—to make J.D. feel the same kind of pain he was causing their son.
CHAPTER SIX
HE SHOULD HAVE CALLED first. What if she wasn’t home? What if she had company? A date?
This was a bad idea, Jack. One of your recent worst.
True, he was anxious to talk to her. True, he did have something for Tommy.
But both could be accomplished later, after he’d called first.
Just as he was negotiating a U-turn, the sign for her road popped up on the left. Apple Tree Lane. Just as Essie had described in the directions she’d given him a short while ago.
So he was here. Might as well see if she was at home.
Jack wasn’t sure what kind of house he’d expected Annie to live in, but it wasn’t the one he found at the end of the gravel road deep in the heart of Langor County. He’d had her figured for a city girl, and yet the big white farmhouse said differently. The house was old, the kind with character that couldn’t be built into a new house. Green shutters bracketed the windows. Flower boxes beneath each one held profusions of red geraniums, refusing to give in to fall. A porch ran the width of the house, terra-cotta flowerpots holding what looked like a collection of cooking herbs.
Jack followed the circular driveway and parked his car beneath a tall old maple tree. He got out, his feet leading him up the flagstone sidewalk to the front door, where he stopped in midknock. Sounded as if somebody was having a party in there. He threw a glance back at the driveway. Annie’s car was the only other one here.
His