She punched him playfully in the belly. “Watch it,” she teased. Then, settling back, she added, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad I’m here, too.”
“When do you want to go house shopping?”
These sudden shifts in conversation served to continually remind Jeremy that his life had suddenly undergone a drastic change. “Excuse me?”
“House shopping. We’re going to have to buy a house, you know.”
“I thought we were going to live here.”
“Here? This place is tiny. Where would you have your office?”
“In the spare bedroom,” he said. “There’s plenty of room.”
“And the baby? Where’s she going to sleep?”
Oh yeah, the baby. Amazing that he forgot about that for a second there.
“Do you have anything in mind?”
“I think I’d like something on the water, if that’s okay.”
“Water sounds nice.”
Her face took on an almost dreamy expression as she continued. “And someplace with a big wraparound porch. Someplace homey, with spacious rooms and windows that let the sun shine in. And a tin roof. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the rain coming down on a tin roof. It’s the most romantic sound in the world.”
“I can live with romantic sounds.”
She furrowed her brow, considering his responses. “You’re being awfully easy about this.”
“You’re forgetting that I’ve lived in an apartment for the last fifteen years. We worry about different things, like whether the elevator works.”
“As I recall, the one in your building didn’t.”
“Which should tell you that I’m not picky.”
She smiled. “Well, we can’t go this week. I’m sure I have a mountain of paperwork at the library, and it’ll take a while to catch up. But maybe by the weekend we can go looking.”
“Sounds good.”
“What are you going to be doing while I’m working?”
“I’ll probably pick the petals off flowers while I pine away for you.”
“Seriously.”
“Oh, you know. I’ll try to get settled and get into some sort of schedule. Set up the computer and printer, see if I can get some sort of high-speed access so I can research the Internet. I like to be at least four or five columns ahead so that if a good story comes up, I have the time to work it. It also keeps my editor sleeping easier.”
She was quiet as she thought about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to get high-speed access out at Greenleaf. They don’t even have cable out there.”
“Who’s talking about Greenleaf? I figure I’ll just have it hooked up here.”
“Then you might as well use the library. I mean, since you’ll be staying at Greenleaf.”
“Who says I’m staying at Greenleaf?”
She slid out from beneath his arm and faced him. “Where else would you stay?”
“I thought I’d just stay here.”
“With me?” she asked.
“Of course with you,” he said, as if the answer were obvious.
“But we’re not married yet.”
“So?”
“I know it’s old-fashioned, but down here couples don’t live together before they’re married. Folks around town would frown on that. They would assume we’re sleeping together.”
He stared at her, not bothering to hide his confusion. “But we are sleeping together. You’re pregnant, remember?”
She smiled. “I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t make much sense, and if I had my way, you’d stay. And I know that people will eventually find out that I’m pregnant, but the crazy thing is that folks down here understand that people make mistakes. They’re perfectly willing to forgive mistakes, but it still doesn’t mean we should live together. They’ll talk behind our backs, they’ll gossip, and it’ll take folks a long time to forget that we ‘lived in sin.’ And for years, that’s just how they’ll describe us.” She shook her head before reaching for his hand. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you do this for me?”
Leaning back, he remembered what it was like at Greenleaf: a decrepit series of shacks set in the middle of a swamp known for water moccasins; Jed, the scary, nonspeaking proprietor; the mounted animals that decorated every room. Greenleaf. Good God.
“Yeah,” he said, “okay. But . . . Greenleaf?”
“Where else is there? I mean, if you want, there’s a shed behind Doris’s place, and I think it’s got a bathroom, but it’s not as nice as Greenleaf.”
He swallowed, thinking about it. “Jed scares me,” he admitted.
“I know he does,” she said. “He told me that when I made the reservations, but he promised me that he’ll be better now that you’re townsfolk. And the good news is that because you’ll be staying for a while, he won’t charge you the regular rate. You’re getting a discount.”
“Lucky me,” Jeremy forced out.
She traced his forearm with her finger. “I’ll make it up to you. For instance, if you’re discreet, you can visit me at my place anytime. And I’ll even cook you dinner.”
“Discreet?”
She nodded. “That means you should probably not leave your car parked out front, or if you do, you should probably leave before the sun’s up so no one sees.”
“Why does it suddenly feel like I’m sixteen years old and sneaking behind my parents’ back?”
“Because that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing. Except these people are not as understanding as parents. They’re much worse.”
“Then why are we living here?”
“Because you love me,” she said.
Four
Over the course of the next month, Jeremy began adapting to his life in Boone Creek. In New York City, the first signs of spring began in April, but they started weeks earlier in Boone Creek, right around the beginning of March. Buds began forming on trees, cold mornings gradually gave way to cool ones, and on days when it wasn’t raining, the mild afternoon temperatures required nothing more than a long-sleeved shirt. Lawns, brown over the winter as the centipede grass lay dormant, began the slow, almost imperceptible turn toward emerald green, reaching their full color just as the dogwoods and azaleas blossomed. The air was scented with perfume and pine and salted mist, and blue skies broken only by the occasional breath of cloud stretched across the horizon. By the time the ides of March came and went, the town itself seemed brighter and more vivid; it was as if his memory of how the place looked in winter had been nothing but a gloomy dream.
His furnishings, which had finally arrived, were being stored in the shed behind Doris’s, and there were moments while staying at Greenleaf when he wondered whether he would have been better off staying with his furniture. Not that he hadn’t adapted to life with Jed as his only neighbor; Jed had yet to say a single word to him, but he was pretty good at taking the occasional message. They were hard to read and sometimes smeared with . . . something—embalming fluid, maybe, or whatever else he used to stuff the critters—but whatever it was helped the notes stick directly to the door, and neither Jed nor Jeremy cared about the syrupy stain left in the aftermath.
He’d also settled into a routine of sorts. Lexie had been right—there wasn’t the slightest possibility of high-speed Internet access at Greenleaf, but he’d jerry-rigged a way to dial in to retrieve e-mail and do slow-motion searches, during which time he might wait five minutes for a page to load. On a positive note, the glacial pace of the connection gave him reason to head to the library most days. Sometimes he and Lexie would visit in her office, other times they’d head to lunch, but after an hour or so together, she’d say something like “You know I’d love to visit with you all day, but I do have to get some work done.” He’d take the hint and head back to one of the computer terminals, where he’d pretty much taken up residence for his research. His agent, Nate, had been calling him repeatedly, leaving messages and wondering aloud whether Jeremy had any great ideas for a future story, “since the television deal isn’t dead yet!” Like most agents, Nate was an optimist above all. Jeremy seldom had an answer other than that Nate would be the first to know. Jeremy hadn’t come up with a story, nor had he written even a column, since he’d been down south. With so much going on, it was easy to be distracted.
Or so he tried to convince himself. The fact was he’d had a couple of ideas, but nothing had come of them. Whenever he sat down to write, it was as if his brain turned to mush and his fingers became arthritic. He’d write a sentence or two, spend fifteen to twenty minutes evaluating his work, and then finally delete it. He spent entire days writing and deleting, with nothing to show at the end. Sometimes he wondered why the keyboard suddenly seemed to hate him, but he shrugged it off, knowing he had more important things on his mind.
Like Lexie. And the wedding. And the baby. And, of course, the bachelor party. Alvin had been trying to finalize the date since Jeremy had left, but that depended on the parks department. Despite Lexie’s endless reminders on the subject, Jeremy hadn’t been able to get through to anyone who might be able to help. In the end, he’d finally told Alvin to schedule the bachelor party for the last weekend in April, figuring the sooner the better, and Alvin hung up with an excited cackle and a promise to make it a night he wouldn’t forget.
It wouldn’t take much. As much as he was . . . getting used to Boone Creek, it wasn’t New York, and he realized he missed the place. Granted, he’d known it would be a major adjustment before he agreed to move down here, but he was still amazed by the utter lack of things to do. In New York, he’d been able to leave his apartment, walk two blocks in either direction, and find a slew of movies to see, everything from the latest action-adventure flick to something arty and French. Boone Creek didn’t even have a theater, and the nearest one—in Washington—had only three screens, one of which seemed perennially to show the latest cartoon offering from Disney. In New York, there was always a new restaurant to try and food that suited whatever mood he might be in, from Vietnamese to Italian to Greek to Ethiopian; in Boone Creek, dinner out was either cardboard pizza or home cooking at Ned’s Diner, a place where everything was fried and so much oil floated in the air that you had to wipe your forehead with a napkin before leaving. He’d actually overheard folks at the counter talking about the best way to filter bacon grease for maximum flavor and how much fatback—whatever that was—to add to collard greens before topping the whole mess with butter. Leave it to southerners to figure out a way to make eating vegetables unhealthy.
He supposed he was being unkind, but without places to eat or movies to see, what were young couples supposed to do? Even if you wanted to go for a pleasant walk through town, you could walk only a few minutes in any direction before having to turn around. Lexie, of course, found nothing unusual about any of this and seemed perfectly content to sit on the porch after work, sipping sweet tea or lemonade and waving at the occasional neighbor who was strolling around the block. Or, if nature was cooperating and it happened to be storming, another sizzling night of entertainment might entail sitting on the porch and watching for lightning. Lest he be disappointed by the whole idea of porch sitting, Lexie further assured him that “in the summer, you’ll see so many fireflies, you’ll be reminded of Christmas.”
“I can hardly wait,” Jeremy replied, sighing.
On the plus side, in the last few weeks Jeremy finally achieved a milestone: the purchase of his very first car. Call it a male thing, but as soon as he realized that he’d be moving to Boone Creek, that was one of the experiences he was most looking forward to. He hadn’t saved and invested all these years for nothing. He’d been lucky enough to buy Yahoo! and AOL—after writing an article about the future of the Internet—and had ridden those stocks to the top before cashing out part of his portfolio when he moved to Boone Creek, and he visualized every moment of his purchase—from perusing various automobile magazines and walking the lot to sitting behind the wheel and inhaling the famed “new-car smell.” There were countless times that he’d actually regretted living in New York, simply because owning a car in the city was largely superfluous. He couldn’t wait to crawl into a sporty two-door coupé or convertible and take it for a test drive along the quiet county roads. On the morning he and Lexie were supposed to head to the lot, he couldn’t stop grinning at the fantasy of slipping behind the wheel of his dream car.
What he hadn’t quite expected was Lexie’s response when he ogled the sporty two-door convertible and ran his finger along its sleek curves. “What do you think?” he asked.
He knew that she, too, couldn’t resist.
She stared at the car, confused. “Where would we put the baby seat?”
“We can use your car for that,” he said. “This is a car for the two of us. For quick trips to the beach or to the mountains, for weekends in Washington, D.C.”
“I don’t think my car’s going to last that much longer, so don’t you think we’d be better off getting something for the whole family?”
“Like what?”
“How about a minivan?”
He blinked. “No way. Not a chance. I didn’t wait thirty-seven years for a minivan.”
“How about a nice sedan?”
“A sedan? My dad drives a sedan. I’m too young to buy a sedan.”
“An SUV? They’re sporty and sharp. And you can take them into the mountains.”