Second Chance with the Rebel

Apparently he had honed sarcasm to an art.

“I’m sorry I insinuated I was Mama Freda.”

“Insinuated,” he said silkily. “So much more palat able than lying.”

“I had to get by the guard dog who answers your phone!”

“No, you didn’t. I got your messages.”

“Except the one about needing to speak to you personally?”

“Nothing to talk about.” His voice was chilly. “I’ve got all the information you gave. A Mother’s Day Gala in celebration of Mama Freda’s lifetime of good work. A combination of her eightieth birthday and Mother’s Day. Fund-raiser for all her good causes. She knows about the gala and the fund-raiser but has no idea it’s honoring her. Under no circumstances is she to find out.”

Lucy wondered if she should be pleased that he had obviously paid very close attention to the content of those messages.

Actually, the fund-raiser was for Lucy’s good cause, but Mama Freda was at the very heart of her dream.

At the worst point of her life, she had gone to Mama Freda, and those strong arms had folded around her.

“When your pain feels too great to bear, liebling, then you must stop thinking of yourself and think of another.”

Mama had carried the dream with Lucy, encouraging her, keeping the fire going when it had flickered to a tiny ember and nearly gone out.

Now, wasn’t it the loveliest of ironies that Mama was one of the ones who would benefit from her own advice?

“Second Sunday of May,” he said, his tone bored, dismissive, “black-tie dinner at the Lindstrom Beach Yacht Club.”

She heard disdain in his voice and guessed the reason. “Oh, so that’s the sticking point. I’ve already had a hundred people confirm, and I’m expecting a few more to trickle in over the next week. It’s the only place big enough to handle that kind of a crowd.”

“I remember when I wasn’t good enough to get a job busing tables there.”

“Get real. You never applied for a job busing tables at the yacht club.”

Even in his youth, Mac, in his secondhand jeans, one of a string of foster children who had found refuge at Mama’s, had carried himself like a king, bristling with pride and an ingrained sense of himself. He took offense at the slightest provocation.

And then hid it behind that charming smile.

“After graduation you had a job with the town, digging ditches for the new sewer system.”

“Not the most noble work, but honest,” he said. “And real.”

So, who are you to be telling me to get real? He didn’t say it, but he could have.

Noble or not, she could remember the ridged edges of the sleek muscles, how she had loved to touch him, feel his wiry strength underneath her fingertips.

He mistook her silence for judgment. “It runs in my family. My dad was a ditchdigger, too. They had a nickname for him. Digger Dan.”

She felt the shock of that. She had known Mac since he had come to live in the house next door. He was fourteen, a year older than she was. When their paths crossed, he had tormented and teased her, interpreting the fact she was always tongue-tied in his presence as an example of her family’s snobbery, rather than seeing it for what it was.

Intrigue. Awe. Temptation. She had never met anyone like Mac. Not before or since. Ruggedly independent. Bold. Unfettered by convention. Fearless. She remembered seeing him glide by her house, only fourteen, solo in a canoe heavily laden with camping gear.

She would see his campfire burning bright against the night on the other side of the lake. It was called the wild side of the lake because it was undeveloped crown land, thickly forested.

Sometimes Mac would spend the whole weekend over there. Alone.

She couldn’t even imagine that. Being alone over there with the bears.

The week she had won the spelling bee he had been kicked out of school for swearing.

She got a little Ford compact for her sixteenth birthday, while he bought an old convertible and stripped the engine in the driveway, then stood down her father when he complained. While she was painting her toenails, he was painstakingly building his own cedar-strip canoe in Mama’s yard.

But never once, even in that summer when she had loved him, right after her own graduation from high school, had Mac revealed a single detail about his life before he had arrived in foster care in Lindstrom Beach.

Was it the fact that he had so obviously risen above those roots that made him reveal that his father had been nicknamed Digger Dan? Or had he changed?

She squashed that thing inside her that felt ridiculously and horribly like hope by saying, proudly, “I don’t really care if you come to the gala or not.”

She told herself she was becoming hardened to rejection. All the people who really mattered to Mama—except him—had said they would come. But her own mother had said she would be in Africa on safari at that time and many people from Lucy’s “old” life, her highschool days, had not answered yet. Those who had, had answered no.

There was silence from Mac, and Lucy allowed herself pleasure that she had caught him off guard.

“And I am sorry about messing up your Mother’s Day.”

“What do you mean, my Mother’s Day?” His voice was guarded.

That had always been the problem with Mac. The insurmountable flaw. He wouldn’t let anyone touch the part of him that felt.

“I chose Mother’s Day because it was symbolic. Even though Mama Freda has never been a biological mother, she has been a mother to so many. She epitomizes what motherhood is.”

That was not the full truth. The full truth was that Lucy found Mother’s Day to be unbearably painful. And she was following Mama Freda’s own recipe for dealing with pain.

“I don’t care what Day you chose!”

“Yes, you do.”

“It’s all coming back now,” he said sardonically.

“Having a conversation with you is like crossing a minefield.”

“You feel as if Mother’s Day belongs to you and Mama Freda. And I’ve stolen it.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” he said, a chill in his voice warning her to stop, but she wasn’t going to. Lucy was getting to him and part of her liked it, because it had always been hard to get to Mac Hudson.

It might seem as if you were, but then that devil-may- care grin materialized, saying Gotcha, because I don’t really care.

“Every Mother’s Day,” she reminded him quietly, “you outdo yourself. A stretch limo picks her up. She flies somewhere to meet you. Last year Engelbert Humperdinck in concert in New York. She wore the corsage until it turned brown. She talked about it for days after. Where you took her. What you ate. Don’t tell me it’s not your day. And that you’re not annoyed that I chose it.”

“Whatever.”