tables?”
“Yes,” I said, felt my heart go back to its regular, businesslike rhythm. “Palm trees, gardenia bushes at the edges, centerpieces . . .” I stopped as he walked across the space, ran his hand over the cedar posts in the center of the room.
“Great acoustics in here. This will work out perfect. That’s all I needed to see.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said. He walked toward me and pointed to the grandfather clock in the far corner. “You have half an hour. Would you do me a huge favor?”
I nodded.
“Will you show me around town? I hate to admit I don’t know how to get around anymore . . . but I’d love to see it.”
“It’s not that complicated.” I pulled my file close to my chest. “Palmetto Pointe hasn’t changed all that much. Main Street down the middle, numbered streets off to the sides. Bay Street running along the water. Come on, Jack, you can’t be that confused.” I suppressed a grin.
“Okay, now who’s the smart ass?” He tapped my nose. “Come on, I just want to see it again—with you. Please.”
I rolled my eyes and said, “Yes,” with a rising spirit of laughter hiding just below my chest.
Words poured out of my mouth faster than the engine beneath Jack’s truck hood as we drove down every street in town. I told him who lived where now, who’d married, who’d divorced. I explained which buildings had been torn down and which ones had been renovated.
“So,” he said, turning a corner onto Bay Street. “How is the family taking it that the youngest is getting married?”
“Everyone loves Peyton . . . they’re thrilled. They think it’s the perfect . . .” I paused. “They’re happy about it.”
He nodded, stared straight ahead through the windshield. “What do you think?”
“The same, of course.”
“Of course,” he said.
We drove past the elementary school, then he stopped in the parking lot of Palmetto Pointe Middle School, got out of the car.
I followed him to the playground. “What are you doing?”
“I remember,” he said.
“Remember what?”
He looked at me, and the old pain I last saw that summer morning he left returned to his face; he was fourteen, broken in spirit. “That morning.”
“You’d forgotten?” I touched his cheek, jerked my hand away.
“Yes. At first on purpose, then even when I tried to remember, I couldn’t. All I could see was the truck, and then you on the ground. Now I remember it all: Dad hitting you, Mom waking us and telling us to take anything we loved, throwing things in boxes, filling what we could into the back of a truck in the middle of the night, knowing we’d never see the house or our other stuff or your family again—ever.”
My tears rose, but words did not. I wrapped my arms around Jack, buried my face against his chest and listened to his torn breath.
He released me, sat on a swing. “I don’t need sympathy, Kara. I just remembered, that’s all.”
I swallowed hard and wiped furiously at my face. “I wasn’t giving sympathy, just empathy. It was terrible for everyone.”
“No, it wasn’t. No one gave a shit that we were gone. One less problem in Palmetto Pointe.”
“I gave a shit,” I said, and sat on the swing next to him. “Doesn’t that count?”
He pushed his feet against the ground to lift his swing into the air. He pushed higher and higher until he was flying so high I thought the swing would wrap itself around the pole and flip him over.
Then he stopped, planted his feet firmly on the ground. “That you cared was all that counted.”
He stood and walked toward the parking lot, then stopped, looked at me, and waved his hand toward the middle school. “You know, this is probably as far as we’d have gone—even if I stayed. This is as far as we’d have gone.”
I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “You mean you wouldn’t have gone to high school? Damn, Jack, you were the best athlete in the school. You would’ve been the star in everything by tenth grade.”
“No, I mean us. We wouldn’t have made it past middle school. Too different, you know? All the things you would’ve wanted, the life I couldn’t have given you.”
My shoulders slumped. “Why am I taking this as an insult?”
“Don’t. I’m a different kind of man than the kind you’ve chosen to spend your life with.”
“And what kind of man are you, Jack?”
“A wandering soul who doesn’t care how old the house is, who used