Hometown Cinderella

They’d each settled on a doughnut and Eden chose to ignore the on one condition portion of what her sister had said as she took a bite of hers.

“How are the folks?” she asked after savoring the sweet fried cake.

“Same as always—good,” Eve answered. “They told me to say hi and for you to get to Billings to see them as soon as you can.”

“I will. And how is the Reverend?” They’d never called their grandfather—who had been Northbridge’s reverend until his retirement a few years earlier—anything else. He wasn’t a cuddly kind of man and had never invited anything but formality. From anyone, as far as Eden could tell.

“The Reverend’s the same, too. The man will die the way he’s lived—with a stick up his butt.”

Eden laughed at her sister’s bluntness. “Why was he seeing his lawyer and a doctor?”

“You know the Reverend—no explanations and I certainly wasn’t allowed in on either appointment. I was lucky to get a thanks for taking him everywhere he needed to go.”

“Do you think the renewed interest in the bank robbery and Celeste was why he wanted to talk to the lawyer?”

Eve shrugged elaborately as she sipped her coffee and chose a second doughnut.

“And maybe he’s stressed-out about it and that’s why he’s having his headaches again,” Eden continued to postulate.

“Hard to say. I can’t believe he isn’t stressed-out by having all this old stuff brought up again. You know that stiff-upper-lip-never-talk-about-it thing he does has to be hiding what he really feels. And having his wife run off with a bank robber? That had to have been the worst, the most humiliating thing that ever happened in his life. But of course he’s acting as if he’s above it all.” Eve took a bite of her doughnut and then said, “He says hello, too, by the way. And that he’s looking forward to seeing you again after so long.”

Eden wrinkled her nose. It wasn’t that she disliked her grandfather, but he wasn’t her favorite person, either. She certainly hadn’t been sorry that of all her family, he’d never visited her in Hawaii.

“Yeah, I think you might be in for it,” Eve said, interpreting Eden’s nose wrinkle. “The Reverend doesn’t seem particularly happy that you’ve agreed to do the age progression on Celeste. He said he doesn’t see the point in pursuing what’s long past and important to no one,” Eve finished, mimicking their grandfather’s stiff speech pattern.

“It’s important to a whole lot of authorities,” Eden said. “Important enough that if I didn’t do it they’d get someone else to.”

“I’m just warning you.” Eve brushed crumbs off her hands.

“I guess it’s good to go in knowing what I’ll have coming but it doesn’t make me want to see him more.”

Eve took a turn ignoring what Eden had said and changed the subject. “Now for my one condition as payment for my help. I want you to be my plus-one at Luke Walker’s wedding tonight.”

“Your love life is in sorry shape if I have to be your plus-one,” Eden said with a laugh.

“There’s no question that my love life is in sorry shape. But I want you to be my plus-one. I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to jump right into things again here. See some people, get reacquainted. The Walkers would have invited you themselves if they had known you would be here.”

“Why are they having a wedding on a Tuesday night?”

“The minister they wanted to perform the ceremony is an old friend of the bride and this was the only time he could get here.”

“But still, I have this whole house to put together,” Eden demurred.

“We’ll work all day and then stop, get pretty and go to the wedding. I’m not letting you hibernate. You’ve been doing that since Alika died and now you’re here and starting over and you need to do it right. Faith is coming in next week and I swear that I’m going to get you both going again if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

“Like a couple of stalled engines?” Eden asked, laughing again.

“Like a couple of cars that have been up on blocks. It was good that Faith spent all that time with you in Hawaii after her divorce but I know you both just used it to hide out from life together. Faith doesn’t know what to do with herself and you’ve thrown yourself into work since Alika died. But things have to change and now’s the time for it.”

“And you think that starts with my going to a wedding tonight.”

“It’s as good a place as any. So I RSVP’d for me and my plus-one and you’re it.”

Eve was right that Eden had thrown herself into work as a kind of protective shell to get through the last awful year and she had made up her mind to put some effort into coming out of that shell when she’d decided to move back to Northbridge. Eve was probably also right that tonight, at a wedding, was as good a place as any to start.

“Okay,” she said as if she were conceding reluctantly when, in fact, she wasn’t. “But we’d better get a whole lot of stuff done today to make up for losing tonight.”

“We will,” Eve assured. “I told you, I’m all yours.”

But neither of them was in enough of a hurry to leave the coffee they were still drinking.

Eve’s attention did seem to turn to the job at hand, though, when she glanced around at the mess. “The house is okay?” she said.

Eve had done Eden’s house hunting for her and served as her proxy at the closing.

“It’s just the way I remembered it. Unfortunately I never had occasion to find out where the circuit box is when I babysat here for the Dundees,” Eden said, going on to tell her sister about the blackout of the previous evening.

“And speaking of Cam Pratt,” Eden said when she’d finished with the entire story. “You didn’t tell me he lived next door.”

“Why? Does it matter?”

Eden couldn’t very well say it did when Eve didn’t know what had gone on with Cam years ago, so she said, “No, it just might have been nice to know. The Realtor led me to believe my neighbors would be people named Poppazitto.”

“They own the place but Cam lives there and is probably going to buy it.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Eve finished her coffee and took the cup to the trash bag in the corner. “Cam’s a good guy,” she said along the way. “He helped you last night, didn’t he?”

“Uh-huh,” Eden said noncommittally, thinking that he’d helped her out of a whole lot of rest the night before. She hadn’t been able to stop the image of him from haunting her each time she’d closed her eyes and for some reason it had made her too restless to fall asleep.

“I’ll bet he was surprised to see how you’d changed from when you used to tutor him,” Eve said, laughing at the thought.

“He didn’t seem to be.”

“How could he not have been? You’re so different you don’t look like the same person—that’s another reason I want you to go tonight, I want to be there when everyone sees you now.”

“Very few thirty-one-year-old people look exactly like they did when they were sixteen. Even Cam has changed,” Eden said, picturing him again in her mind and once more judging the changes to be improvements.

She didn’t have any idea what alerted her sister to her thoughts, but apparently something did because Eve’s eyebrows rose. “Do you have a little thing for Cam?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I don’t,” Eden said, hoping it came out as even-toned as she’d wanted it to so she didn’t raise any more suspicions in her sister’s mind.

But whether it had or not, Eve was still not convinced. “Did you have a secret crush on him when you tutored him?” she said as if she’d just hit on a surprise of her own. “He was the big man on campus, as I recall. And you were the mousy kid who should have been a sophomore rather than a senior, who got to be all alone with him to teach him… What was it?”

“Physics,” Eden said, rolling her eyes at the fiction her sister was weaving. “And no, I absolutely didn’t have a crush on him, secret or not. I didn’t even like him.”

“Then maybe you just like him now,” Eve said, switching gears.