The Secret of You and Me - Melissa Lenhardt Page 0,44

ache, not exactly the frame of mind I wanted to be in when I spoke with my mother. The phone beeped twice. I picked up the receiver and punched the button.

“Mother.”

“I made lunch for you,” she said.

“You’re sweet, but I’ve brought my lunch to eat at my desk.”

“Nonsense. You’re the boss. You can take an hour away to eat lunch with your mother. Noon.”

I sighed. “Can’t we just do this over the phone?”

“Eat lunch? No, that would be impossible.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m sure I don’t.”

I lifted the photo. Nora smiled at the camera, and I looked down at her with an expression of such blatant adoration it stunned me the entire town hadn’t known I was desperately in love with my best friend. I remember wishing it wasn’t a ruse, and that Nora and I could walk into the gaudily decorated gym hand in hand, and dance together like any other couple. Instead, we went with Charlie and Joe, and in a strange, almost prophetic twist, Charlie and I were crowned king and queen. He’d given me a polite peck on the cheek, and we’d slow danced to the song you couldn’t get away from that year if you tried, Bryan Adams’s “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?”

I know, right? I caught Nora’s eye as she watched us from the crowd, trying not to laugh.

Now, it was almost commonplace for same-sex couples to attend prom together. Maybe not in Lynchfield, but then again maybe so. Logan and her friends saw no conflict between being a Christian and being accepting of others, though Lord knows the church tried to convince them otherwise. Rejection of the “other” was the central tenet of my mother’s brand of Christianity. I’d taught it in Sunday school myself and felt like a hypocrite the entire time. Jettisoning nearly forty years of indoctrination wasn’t easy. I wondered if a part of me would never accept who I was.

I turned the photo over. “You want to talk about Nora.”

“Who?”

I tossed my readers on the desk. My mother was determined to get her way and, like the coward I was, she always did. Turns out being outspoken isn’t the same as being a leader. Real strength is quiet and steady, not bombastic. Cowards are always the loudest people in the room. “I’ll see you at noon.”

In my attempt to embrace my life in Lynchfield I’d gone too far in the other direction. My quiet strength—let’s be real; it was long-suffering silence—had turned me into a shell of the girl I was. I would be thirty-six in two weeks, and I’d spent half of my life trying to forget the girl I was in the first half. Tried to fit into the mold everyone thought I belonged in, that I told myself I belonged in—conservative, Christian, straight. Nora hadn’t changed a bit, and seeing her, talking to her, being with her, I felt that forgotten girl trying to spread her wings, to push her way out of the grave I’d buried her in when I’d stared into the abyss and decided to live instead of diving headfirst into oblivion. Living was the one brave thing I’d done since Nora left.

I breezed through the Convention & Visitors’ Bureau reception area. Photos of Lynchfield and the surrounding area lined the exposed brick walls. A pressed tin ceiling and original wood floors made the room sound hollow. Sheila’s Tahitian coconut candle burned on her desk, making the room smell like tanning lotion and reminding me of summers by the pool with Nora.

Everything made me think of Nora.

“Apparently, I’m having lunch with my mother.”

The old woman smiled. She’d known my mother longer than I’d been alive. “Good thing she’s a good cook.”

“I’ve got Cooper’s in the fridge if you want it.”

“Oh, thanks, but take that home to Charlie, so you don’t have to cook.”

“Excellent idea, Sheila. Call me if anything comes up.”

I put on my sunglasses and pushed through the front door and out into the bright, blazing June day. I stood in the shade of the building’s gallery and surveyed my town. As a teenager, all I’d wanted to do was escape its stifling smallness. So, karma had made sure I became the Convention & Visitors’ Bureau president, whose job it was to entice people to visit and help the chamber of commerce lure businesses to relocate.

Like so many things I hadn’t planned to embrace, over time I had fallen in love with my job. Outsiders were moving in, and