Willowleaf Lane

She sighed, increasing her pace. She wouldn’t ask for lasagna. She was stronger than the craving. She only had to remember how hard she had worked the past eighteen months to reshape her life. No matter how provoking her day might be, she couldn’t go back to old habits, the well-traveled pathways in her brain that would inevitably lead her to a destination she no longer wanted.

Instead, she had a chicken breast at home in the refrigerator, soaking in her favorite low-fat marinade of lemon juice, tarragon and a splash of olive oil. As soon as she finished a few errands, she would throw it on the grill along with some vegetables and be far better off.

She pushed open the door and the familiar rich scents surged through her bloodstream like a solid jolt of high-octane caffeine.

“Hey, girl.” Della Pine, who had been waitressing at the Center of Hope as long as Charlotte could remember, greeted her with a wide smile on her wrinkled cheeks. She tottered toward Charlotte in the painfully high heels she always wore, even when she had to spend all day on her feet.

Despite the extra inches, the woman still barely reached Charlotte’s chin, except for her hair, which towered over both of them in all its teased glory.

Charlotte leaned in and kissed the waitress’s cheek, smiling at the familiar olfactory concoction of hair spray, cold cream and lavender powder.

The café was busy, as usual, hopping with the dinner rush. The clientele was generally a healthy mix of tourists and locals. She recognized a few of the latter and raised a hand in greeting.

“Is Pop around?” she asked when Della grabbed a couple menus off the counter by the door for a pair who had come in after Charlotte.

Della jerked her head toward the back. “Check the office. We had some trouble with one of the beef suppliers. Last I checked, he was still trying to iron it out.”

“Thanks.”

She headed toward the office, fighting through the temptation to stop and order a few things off the menu on her way.

Chicken-fried steak, maybe, with a big side of garlic mashed potatoes.

Pop was wonderful at running the Center of Hope Café. Over the years, she had learned more from watching him than any of her business classes in college. She had learned by example how to be a responsible, caring employer, how to be kind to customers and workers alike, how to treat everyone with dignity and respect.

And he cooked one heck of a pork chop.

She sighed as she walked into the office, tucked in behind the kitchen.

This place was as familiar to her as her own childhood on Winterberry Road.

Heaven knows, she had spent enough time here when she was a kid. Even before her mother died, she had loved coming to Center of Hope, hanging out at a table and doing homework while she listened to the sounds of life around her.

During the hard, ugly two years Margaret Caine fought cancer, coming to the diner had been an escape from the fear, from the pain and sickness that seemed to seep through the walls of their home like black mold.

She had avoided that toxic sludge as much as possible. Her mother mostly wanted to sleep anyway, and Charlotte had hated being there. Maybe she should have tried harder to help but that was a heavy burden for a young girl. She had felt like she was coping alone, for the most part.

By then, her only sibling still home had been her next oldest brother, Dylan. At sixteen, he had been too busy with friends and sports and school to offer much help.

She couldn’t deny she had found undeniable comfort in coming to the café after school to do her schoolwork, where Pop would invariably give her a nice chocolate milk shake and a slice of pizza.

Was it any wonder she weighed nearly a hundred eighty pounds by seventh grade?

She paused outside the office door, reminding herself sharply that she was doing her best to become something else. Though she still craved the pizza, the milk shake, she could have her father’s love without it.

She pushed open the door and smiled at the familiar voice uttering a few tasteful swear words at the telephone he had just returned to the cradle.

Her father was still good-looking in a distinguished way, with a shock of thick white hair and the blue, blue eyes she had inherited. His features were tanned and weathered from all the time he spent out in the garden he tended zealously.

“Problem?”

He looked up as she came in and she wanted to smile at the way his eyes always lit up at the sight of her.

“If it isn’t my darling girl, come to see her old da.” Though he had left the green hills of Galway behind when he was a boy of six, sometimes the brogue slipped through anyway.

“Hi, Pop.”

She hugged him from behind, smelling Old Spice and a hint of garlic.

“And how was your day, my dear?”

She thought of that strange encounter in her store a few hours earlier and the wild chaos of her thoughts ever since.

“Interesting. Did you know Spencer Gregory was back in Hope’s Crossing?”

Dermot swiveled around in his office chair and folded weathered hands over his still-lean belly. “Well, now, you know, I did hear something to that effect. About a dozen customers had to tell me they saw him around town.”

She could only imagine how the café must have buzzed with the news. People would be talking about this for some time to come.

“Well, nobody had the courtesy to warn me. I just about fell over when he walked in. I still can’t believe it. How can he return to town like nothing’s happened? Does he expect us to just throw out the red carpet like this town has always done for him?”

“Now, Charley...”

She perched on the edge of the desk. “I’m serious. He gives Hope’s Crossing a bad name. I can’t believe people can’t see that. Now he’s back and he’s going to dredge everything up all over again.”

“I think you’re exaggerating a wee bit.” Dermot gave her a chiding sort of look, the same one he used to wear when she didn’t finish her orange juice in the morning or when she chose to stay home and study instead of go to social activities at school. “A man shouldn’t have to pay the rest of his life because of a few poor decisions.”

“Poor decisions? I’d call it more than that. He was a drug dealer! He ran a steroid and prescription drug ring out of the team locker room.”

“The charges against him were dropped, remember?”

“Because of a technicality in the evidence. He’s never once denied it.”

She didn’t want to admit to her father that she had followed coverage of the case religiously, though she had a feeling Dermot might already know. He seemed to have uncanny insight when it came to her, as much as she might try to be obscure and mysterious.

Spencer’s situation was one of those fall-from-grace scandals the media seemed to relish voraciously. He had been a much-admired sports celebrity with a huge paycheck and a slew of endorsements—a kid from nowhere with fierce talent and extraordinary good looks who had made it big early in the game and continued to produce stunning wins for the Pioneers for the next decade.

She couldn’t lie to herself. She had also followed Spence’s career with the same interest as she did the scandal later. Despite past betrayals, she had celebrated his success, happy for him that he had attained every goal he set out for himself as a driven, angry teen. His nickname, Smokin’ Hot Gregory—Smoke—referred not just to his stunning good looks but also his wicked fastball that had once been clocked at over a hundred miles an hour.

Then three years ago, everything changed. In one horrible game against the Oakland Athletics, he suffered what turned out to be a career-ending injury. Months later, after he had tried to come back, she had caught the press conference when he admitted to a problem with prescription drugs following his injury and that he had gone into rehab for it.

With other Pioneers fans, she had celebrated when he returned to the program as a pitching coach—and then, like the rest of Hope’s Crossing, she had felt personally betrayed when accusations were leveled against him. Someone had been supplying prescription drugs and steroids to his teammates and the evidence against Spence was overwhelming, including a large shipment found in his vehicle parked in the team lot.

Then, in another stunning development, the judge threw out the charges just days before he was supposed to go to trial. Not that the court of public opinion shifted its vote so readily.

While Spence never went to prison, he lost his career, his endorsements, his reputation—and when his stunning former supermodel of a wife was found floating facedown in their pool the very afternoon the charges were dropped, most people blamed him for that, too.

Through it all, Dermot had only seen the good. It was a particularly exasperating failing of her father’s, particularly in Spence’s case.