It Began with a Crush

“He must be getting pretty old for lying around under cars.”

“It wasn’t Mr. Capelli. It was his son. Joe.”

“Joe. Wow!” Lee said. “I thought he was in Hollywood, being a movie star.”

“You remember that? You were two years behind us in school.”

“The whole school knew about Joe Capelli’s plans. I think everyone believed in them, too.”

“Really?” Mary Jane infused a watery amount of skepticism into her voice for appearance’s sake, and yet she had believed in his plans just as much as everyone else. Had believed in them utterly, to the point where she looked for his face on TV or in movies for years afterward, and even once thought she’d spotted him on screen, playing a gangster’s henchman who died under dramatic movie gunfire without speaking a line.

“Don’t you remember him in West Side Story?” Lee said. “Every girl in the audience was practically moaning out loud.”

“Not me.”

“Well, you weren’t the moaning type. I never understood why he hadn’t gotten the lead role.”

“Because he couldn’t sing in the right range,” Mary Jane answered. “He’s a baritone, not a tenor.”

“You do remember.”

“But you’re right, I wasn’t the moaning type,” Mary Jane hastened to emphasize. “I couldn’t stand him.”

“He did think he was God’s gift to womankind, I seem to remember. Bit of a joke where he’s ended up, compared to what he planned.”

“Not a joke. And not the end, either. He’s only thirty-five.”

“Now you’re defending him.”

“Because I’m sure he must know what everyone is thinking,” Mary Jane retorted. “He was a bit of a jerk, maybe, a bit arrogant and cocky, but he doesn’t deserve that. He wasn’t a bad person, just...”

“Way too much ego. Isn’t that almost the definition of jerk? You mean he doesn’t deserve people thinking that being back in his father’s garage is a far cry from what he expected?”

“From what we all expected.”

“I know what you mean. When some people say, ‘I’m gonna be a star!’ you roll your eyes, but with him...”

“We were rolling our eyes for other reasons,” Mary Jane agreed.

“The arrogance.”

“Exactly. I never doubted he’d make it big.”

Just as she’d never doubted her own future—no grand ambitions, in her case, just the usual one—the triple play of decent marriage, beautiful and welcoming home, healthy kids. Enough of a win in the lottery of life for anyone, she’d always considered.

So far, she’d scored just one out of the three.

A few minutes later, Lee turned into the driveway that led to Spruce Bay Resort and Mary Jane thought she could hardly ask for a more beautiful place to live, surrounded by pristine white snow in winter and glorious views of mountain and forest and lake in spring, summer and fall.

And yet she would have exchanged it in a heartbeat for a two-bedroom apartment over a dingy little store if it meant she got the decent marriage and healthy kids instead.

It was embarrassing. Painfully embarrassing. Way more embarrassing than Joe Capelli working in his dad’s old-fashioned garage.

Incredibly embarrassing that she wanted something so outwardly ordinary and conventional and yet still it hadn’t happened.

Embarrassing...and painful...and horrible...that she could feel the bitterness kicking in. She had to try so hard, sometimes, not to mind that both her younger sisters were now happily in love, married or engaged, with babies on the way.

She had a secret little chart tucked away in her head, and mentally awarded herself a gold star for every day she went without feeling jealous, or saying something pointed and mean, or wallowing in regret.

And even though the mental chart had quite a few gold stars on it, she hated that it existed in the first place, and no matter how much she’d disliked...well, tried to dislike...“Cap” Capelli in high school, she understood so well what he’d meant when he’d said with that wry drawl and quirked mouth, “Life’s a funny thing.”

* * *

Mary Jane Cherry was one of those women who looked way better at thirty-five than she’d looked at eighteen, Joe decided.

In high school, she’d had frequent skin breakouts and an orthodontic plate and puppy fat, and her hair had been an indifferent brownish color, worn too long. Now she had it cut to shoulder-length in bouncy layers with professional blond highlights, her skin was smooth, dewy and well cared for and the puppy fat had turned into a kind of ripeness that looked warm and inviting, along with the soft creases at the corners of her eyes and the smile lines around her mouth.

It was a little disturbing that he remembered her so well, but then, he’d made an extensive study of girls in high school. If he went to a reunion—which, to be clear, he had no intention of ever doing—it would probably turn out that he remembered them all.

Joe listened to Mary Jane’s car engine, heard “the noise” and knew she should have brought it in for a checkup about five hundred miles ago. He did some further exploration and diagnosis, and came up with at least three major repairs that the car needed right now.

Mary Jane was lucky it had held up this far, and hadn’t left her stranded somewhere with smoke billowing from the engine. He would need to order parts from the distributor, and when they arrived he’d need to pull apart the whole engine to put them in. It was Tuesday today. She wasn’t getting the car back before Friday at the earliest.

He did a grease and oil change on another car, and then a wheel alignment and a tire rotation on a third, knowing that both clients would be back soon to pick up their vehicles. The bad-news phone call to Mary Jane would have to wait.

Which was a pity, because it gave him more time to think about her.

How well she’d held up in the looks and youthfulness department. How surprised he was that she was still here. She’d been intelligent, articulate, hard-working, always earned good grades. He somehow would have expected her to have moved away, in search of wider horizons.

In high school, the girls had been divided into two groups—the ones who thought he was gorgeous and had wild crushes on him, and the ones who thought he was gorgeous and couldn’t stand him.

Naturally, Mary Jane was in the second group, and naturally, he had been all about the girls in the first.

He’d dated—hell, he couldn’t remember—at least five or six of them. The prettiest and wildest and most popular, because those were the ones you could get the farthest with, and were the ones that made the other guys look at you with envy and respect, cementing your position as the coolest kid in school.

Looking back, he could see how much he’d been riding for a fall. Sometimes, he wanted to reach back in time and slap his teenage self upside the head. Hard. He could also see that if just a few things had gone differently, the fall might never have happened.

Because he’d come so close.

Seriously close.

Even now, he might easily have been starring in some long-running TV crime show, or choosing between movie scripts that had Oscar potential written into every line. As he’d said to Mary Jane, life was a funny thing.

There had been a major series of audition callbacks where he’d ended up in the running, along with just one other guy, for the lead role in a crime drama series, and the other guy—now a household name—had gotten the gig. There had been one gorgeous female smile that he’d caught in a crowded diner and had followed up on instead of letting it slide.

Just those two events, and his whole life had gone off on a completely different track from the one he’d envisaged.

He couldn’t let himself think about it, because on the one hand, he’d fallen so far short, but on the other, there were two things about his life now that were so incredibly precious he couldn’t imagine himself without them.