One Fine Day

That still was her favorite memory of her father.

“Where is he now?” Jason asked of Kyle Bailey. “I’ll go kick his butt right now.”

Laughing, Sara said. “Forget it. Last I heard, he was happily married with a houseful of kids. More power to him.”

“Did he marry Susie Kent?”

“No, she married a pro basketball player, got divorced two years later, married another jock, divorced him and decided to give marriage a rest for a while. I saw her at our tenth-year class reunion. She said she owned a boutique in San Francisco. Her divorce settlements had left her pretty wealthy, so she didn’t need to work but liked to stay busy.”

Jason chuckled. “You believed that?”

“The point is, she did,” Sara told him. “I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth or not, but I hoped that she was happy. She had this kind of desperate look in her eyes that made me wish for something good to happen to her. That was two years after Billy died, so I wasn’t in the best mental health myself.”

In the beginning of their relationship, Jason had tensed up whenever she mentioned Billy Minton, but now, after learning how good he had been to Sara he no longer felt uneasy listening to her talk about him. He was sure that if he had met Billy he would have liked him. He was glad that Sara had had a good marriage.

He’d known too many women who felt that they had been damaged by their marriages. He had represented some of them.

Thinking about Billy sometimes put Sara in a melancholy mood, though. In fact, he felt her slump against him now, a sure sign that a blue mood was building. He quickly changed the subject. “Guess who sends you his regards?”

She sat up straighter, her curiosity engaged. “Idris Elba?”

Now, that irked him. Elba was Sara’s favorite actor of the moment. No, not just her favorite actor. He was convinced that the British actor lived in her sexual fantasies.

He chuckled. “No, and if he called I wouldn’t give you the message. So quit hoping. No, your secret admirer is your former tormentor, Erik Sutherland. I saw him in the supermarket this afternoon.”

“What do you mean by secret admirer? I haven’t even seen him since I moved back.”

“He said you’d really blossomed. He called you pretty.”

“That makes my skin crawl. Where could he have seen me and I wasn’t aware of being seen by him?”

“That’s another mystery,” Jason said. “Anyway, he seems to regret his past behavior towards you and said that God was punishing him for it by allowing his own daughter, who happens to be a little overweight, to be picked on by kids at school.”

“I know Melissa,” Sara said sympathetically. “She’s a sweet girl. She’s grown attached to Frannie who thinks she’s a work of art in progress.”

“There’s another mystery,” Jason said. “Your friend, Frannie Anise. Doesn’t it strike you as unusual that when you left New York she quit her job and followed you to California? That’s not something most girlfriends would do, not even best friends.”

“Northern California is home for her, too. I told you, she grew up in San Francisco. Her parents still live there. It wasn’t such a stretch for her to move back here.”

“Are you sure she’s not in love with you?” Jason asked seriously.

“Frannie’s not gay.”

“I’ve never seen her with a guy.”

“You’ve got a suspicious mind.”

“It’s one of my many faults,” Jason admitted. “I wonder about those trips you take. I wonder about those women who work in the bookstore for short periods of time and then disappear as if they never existed. I’m wondering when the new woman, who I think is from South Africa, will disappear. I have questions that need answers, and you have all the answers and won’t give them to me. Excuse me if I’m suspicious.”

“I understand how you feel.”

“But you have no answers.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“That’s what I thought.” He made a noise with his tongue, a signal for Indigo to break into a canter. The big stallion seemed to have been waiting to stretch his strong legs and for the next twenty minutes he got a good workout while his riders clung to each other in silence.

Later, as they slowly rode into the yard, Jason said, “I’ll take care of Indigo. You can go on inside, I know you must be tired.”

“No, I’m not tired at all. I’d like to help.”

In the barn, after Jason had removed Indigo’s bit, stirrups and saddle, Sara gently wiped the sweat off him with a soft cloth used specifically for that purpose. Afterward, they took turns brushing him down.

Finished, Sara patted his strong neck. “Good night, handsome.”

They left him in his clean stall where he had fresh oats and water.

Silently, they walked to the house from the barn. The full moon illuminated their path. Even if there had been no moon tonight, there were security lights at the top corners of the back of the barn and at strategic points around the house.

Jason was in a pensive mood. Everything about Sara, lately, was a mystery. She seemed to delight in helping him rub down Indigo moments ago. Last year, she’d gone into the vineyards and helped with the harvest, working as hard as anyone else.

It was obvious that she knew what becoming a vintner’s wife would entail. It also appeared as if she would welcome that kind of life. Therefore it continued to puzzle him as to why she’d turned down his proposal. He was irritated with himself to still be dwelling on it, but he couldn’t help himself.

He would have to change his way of thinking. He was basically a future-focused person. The present concerned him only for its momentary pleasures. He looked at life as in constant flux, and unless you planned for the future, you would be caught unawares.

He didn’t like surprises. He knew that it was impossible to predict the future. But those who prepared for it were better equipped to cope with unpleasant surprises. In his future-focused mind he saw himself and Sara together. He had been seeing himself and Sara together ever since that night he had kissed her in the wine cellar during Erica and Joshua’s wedding reception here at the winery.

Once in the house, they went to separate bathrooms and freshened up before dinner.

They dined in the kitchen, talking and laughing about their day.

It was mid-October, the start of the rainy season, and Sara told him that several of the ladies who had come into the store that day had mentioned someone had told them that El Niño would cause severe climate upheavals this year. “We could have floods and maybe even a tsunami, they said.”

“You’re not listening to the rumor mill, are you?” Jason asked with a skeptical laugh. “Every year, somebody predicts the end of the world, and all we get here is a little rain from November to December. The same thing will happen this year. Nothing’s changed in this area in a long time. We’re blessed with a wonderful weather system.”

“Yeah, but what if they’re right this year? What would flooding do to the vines?”

“There would be destruction of Biblical proportions,” Jason joked.

“Okay, drop it,” Sara said, laughing softly. “I can see you think my patrons are a bunch of lunatics.”

“Just tell me this, was one of the doomsayers Mrs. McClarin?”

Sara nodded in the affirmative as she forked more of the delicious stewed chicken into her mouth. She narrowed her eyes at him. What could he have against dear sweet Mrs. McClarin? Mrs. Mac, as the kids had referred to her, had been her fourth-grade English teacher. She had retired twenty years ago but her mind was as sharp as ever.

“It was Mrs. McClarin who said she saw Big Foot eating out of the garbage can in her backyard last year. Pete Baumgartner told me about it.”

Pete was the local sheriff’s deputy.