Blackberry Winter

“The reception is better if you’re outside,” Mrs. Jenkins said. She pointed out the nearest window. “There along the path that leads up to the gazebo is the best place.”

“I’ll be right back, Mother,” the younger woman said.

She went outside, and her mother walked back to the Queen Anne chair and sat down again. Meyer could hear a sudden burst of laughter from somewhere upstairs—the other guests or the help. The woman did, too. He could tell by the way she stopped midway in the reach for her teacup to listen, as if she found it upsetting somehow. She let the tea go and leaned back in the chair, passing her hand briefly over her eyes.

He toyed with the idea of saying something to her—just to see if she was all right—but he didn’t. If anything was the matter, it was none of his business. His business at the moment was the Lilac Hill fireplace. He went to get another armful of cedar logs.

The reception wasn’t any better outside. Loran walked farther up the steep hill, finally standing at the bottom of the gazebo steps before she tried again. This time, when she punched in the number, it went through.

She stood waiting in the cold wind for Kent to answer.

“Hello?” someone said finally. The voice wasn’t Kent’s. The voice wasn’t male.

“Don’t answer the phone!” Kent yelled in the background. “Damn it—!”

“It was ringing, silly,” the first voice said. “It might be impor—”

There was a sudden click and the line went dead. Loran stood staring at the phone in her hand. Her first impulse was to redial the number, but she stopped halfway through.

Her heart was pounding and her fingers trembled.

So.

She abruptly sat down on the steps of the gazebo, understanding now. She had been attributing Kent’s recent distraction to his trying to close a lucrative deal with the man whose first wife looked like her. Now, however, she could give it a more precise name.

Celia.

Celia was the newly divorced investments counselor at the banking firm where Kent worked, the smart, pretty, ambitious and self-assured one, who had come into Kent’s office without knocking one afternoon when Loran was there. The kind of woman Kent admired. A woman a lot like Loran herself, actually—except that she was annoyingly younger.

Damn it, Kent!

She didn’t feel like apologizing now. Already she knew how this would go. He would be oh, so offended that she would jump to such an unflattering conclusion about him and a woman he worked with, whether she’d answered the phone or not. He’d try to convince Loran that he was the wronged party, and, when that didn’t work, he’d tell her that Celia didn’t mean a thing, that it had just “happened.”

And Loran would show him that she was Maddie Kimball’s daughter after all. She would tell him to get the hell out of her house.

Her house.

She wondered suddenly if having had a father would have made a difference, whether she would have been better at maintaining meaningful relationships with men if someone like Andrew Kessler had been in her life, someone who would have carried her when she wanted to be carried and let her walk on her own when she didn’t.

Of course it would have, she thought immediately. How could it not? Even if she’d had a bad father, she would have been better able to tell the gold from the dross—and before the wrong person answered the phone.

She gave a wavering sigh and put the cell phone into her coat pocket, wiping furtively at the tears she suddenly realized were sliding down her cheek.

“Do you smoke?”

“What?” she said, startled. The man she’d seen in the house stood a short distance away from her.

“I asked you if you smoke.”

“No,” she said shortly.

“I was going to offer you a cigarette. I carry a pack around in case one of the guests needs one. You’d be surprised how often that comes up. Quitting tobacco just doesn’t take sometimes, especially if there’s a bump in the road. I’ve got this great aunt—Nelda, her name is. She thinks she’s quit dipping snuff. And she’s just fine as long as the sun shines on her back door. But you let the least little thing go wrong and she’s right back at it.” He paused long enough to make her glance at him. “So how about this instead?” he asked.

He stepped forward and held out a peppermint candy wrapped in cellophane, the kind that pizza restaurants gave out to customers, ostensibly to keep them happy and coming back to buy pizza again.

She stared at it as if she’d never seen one before.

“Go on,” he said. “You need it.”

“I don’t need it,” she said, getting to her feet. It put them at eye level, but she still felt at a disadvantage.

“You might feel better.”

“No, I won’t—and who are you?”

“The name is Meyer,” he said.

“As in Oscar?”

He smiled. He was older than she’d first thought, and he had dimples.

“Now, you know what? I may not look it, but I’ve been out of the hills enough times to actually get what you just said. That was pretty good, too—only I’m Meyer with an e, not an a. So…you don’t want the peppermint.”

“I don’t want the peppermint,” she said, feeling close to tears again.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to put it in my coat pocket. If you change your mind, I’ll give it to you. I’m just about always around here someplace—except when I’m to home.”

“And where is that?” she asked in spite of herself, even knowing that the quaint colloquialism was likely affected just for her benefit. “‘To home’?”

“It’s up there. See?” He pointed off into the distance—toward a hillside with a winding road going up it. “See where the sun is shining on that silver roof? That’s my place—except when I’m letting people rent it. I’ll show it to you sometime, if you want. Don’t worry. I don’t have any etchings,” he added in a whisper.

She smiled slightly without wanting to. “Well, that’s…good to know.”

“Got a couple of deer heads, though. They’re kind of scary if you’re not used to them. You do understand that nothing helps when you’re feeling down and misplaced like a good piece of peppermint.”

“You’ve felt down and misplaced enough to know, I take it.”

“Damn straight,” he said. “I’ve pretty much made a career of it.”

“And what career was that?”

“The United States Army. I’m telling you, if you don’t let the little things make you feel better, you’ll have a hell of a time getting through the big things.”

“If you think—”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. What I know is you look like you’re running on empty—and when that happens, a little hit of sugar can help. I used to carry these all the time when I was deployed—my aunt Nelda would send them to me, whether she could afford to or not. They’d help when you were so tired you thought you weren’t going to make it, and if your mouth was full of sand. I used to give them to the kids sometimes—they were scared of us, and maybe it helped. I don’t know. I liked to think even if they hated the taste of them, they could still appreciate the effort.”

She glanced at him, not certain if he meant some foreign child or if he meant her.