The Sugar Queen

  “I know.”

  The mail was heavy Monday. It usually was at the first of the week. It meant Adam was later getting to the Cirrinis’ neighborhood. Until now, he’d never paid much attention to the fact that he saw Josey almost every day, that she always seemed to know when he was coming up her walk. He looked up at the immaculate Victorian as he approached, thinking once again that it stuck out among the other houses like a big blue toe. No curtains moved. What did she do in that house all day?

  The front door opened as he walked up the steps, and she appeared like a spirit in a black dress. She didn’t have on the red sweater. That, at least, was a relief. But the scent of peppermint swirled around her and reached out to him as he got nearer. Damn, she smelled good. She always made him smile and remember things he hadn’t thought of in ages—Christmases, hot chocolate with his family, schnapps at lodge bars. He made it to the top step and stopped.

  “Hi, Adam,” she said as she walked up to him.

  “Josey,” he said cautiously, handing her the mail.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He wondered if he’d done something to lead her on. A smile could be interpreted the wrong way. His smile faded. Then he didn’t know what else to do but turn and walk away.

  She looked confused as he left. She watched him cross the street before going back into her house.

  He walked into the Fergusons’ yard, feeling like a prick. Hell, he didn’t want to hurt her. But he didn’t want what she wanted…whatever that was. What did she want?

  Mrs. Ferguson, a stout woman of about sixty, was hand-trimming the grass bordering her driveway with a pair of cuticle scissors. She was bundled in a fuzzy wool cardigan buttoned to her neck, and she wore a pair of pink gloves with the fingers cut out. Mrs. Ferguson was a nitpicker. Her husband spent a lot of time at his club, which was really a cigar shop downtown, to get away from her. It had taken Adam nearly a year to get her mail delivery exactly how she liked it. Flats together, folded and secured with a rubber band. Letters always separate. The two things placed in the mailbox side by side, never stacked.

  “Hello, Mrs. Ferguson,” he said as he opened her box and put the mail in.

  “Nice to see you, Adam,” she said. “That happens every day, you know.”

  He stopped and reached into his bag for the mail for the next couple of houses. “I’m sorry, what?” he asked absently.

  “Josey. She watches you walk across the street every day.”

  Adam looked up.

  “She’s a nice girl.” Mrs. Ferguson lifted herself to her feet with a grunt. “It’s too bad no one sees it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You aren’t from here. You don’t know the reputation Josey earned when she was a child.”

  “What sort of reputation?”

  “That girl was the meanest, rudest, most unhappy child I’ve ever known. She could pitch the loudest fits when she didn’t get what she wanted, so loud I could hear her from inside my house. I think she broke just about everything her mother ever owned. And she threw tantrums in public just as often. Ask anyone if you don’t believe me. Every store owner in town has a story, and a bill. She used to steal candy. Her father was the only one who could control her, but he was hardly ever around. Her mother had her hands full. That’s why Margaret never sent Josey to school. She hired tutors to teach her at home.”

  “Josey?” Adam said incredulously.

  “I know. If I hadn’t seen it for myself on many occasions, I’d find it hard to believe too. She grew up to be so pleasant. But she looks sad, don’t you think? She reminds me of Rapunzel. You know, like in the fairy tale. The only time she leaves that house is to take her mother to her few social activities, or to run errands for her.”

  No, Adam thought. That’s not the only time she leaves.

  He turned to look at her house, more curious than he wanted to be.

  Rapunzel had been sneaking out of the castle.

  5

  Lemon Drops

  After leaving the letters with her mother, Josey hurried up to her bedroom and went to her window. Adam was still in the Fergusons’ yard. With a gasp, she took a step back when he suddenly turned to look at her house.

  Adam was acting strangely and she had a bad feeling this had something to do with Friday night. They had a system, a routine, every day very much the same. She’d obviously startled him by stepping outside of that. While there was a part of her that relished the thought of Adam seeing her in a different way, she was mostly terrified of losing what she already had with him. She went to her closet and opened the door.

  “Don’t give me any more advice,” she said.

  Della Lee was reading through one of the old notebooks from her box. She was still dressed in most, if not all, of her clothing. Her hair was in a bun today, precariously held in place by her tiara. She looked up and said, “What?”

  “I said, don’t give me any more advice. Stop trying to help me. I don’t particularly like the way your plan is working out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Adam is acting funny,” she said. “If you hadn’t encouraged me to go out Friday night, I never would have seen him at the festival and…and freaked him out.”

  “Did you touch him inappropriately? I never told you to do that.”

  “Of course I didn’t touch him inappropriately!”

  Della Lee closed the notebook she was reading, then she scratched her forehead. She was getting a little more pale every day, her skin becoming this glowing sort of white transparency. Maybe she’d gotten sick from swimming in the river at this time of year. Well, it served her right. Who goes swimming in the Green Cove River in November? “Then how exactly did you freak him out?”

  “By showing up outside of this,” Josey waved her arm, indicating her room, “in makeup and my hair down.”

  “Oh my God, you mean he found out you’re a woman? What if this gets out? What will you do when people start treating you like an adult instead of a ten-year-old?”

  Josey snorted. “Like that’s going to happen.”

  “Right,” Della Lee said. “You’ll actually have to stop acting like a ten-year-old first.”

  Josey frowned, then reached over to the false wall in the closet and slid it back. She took out a bag of white chocolate and peanut butter popcorn and a packet of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls.

  Della Lee leaned away while she did this, then sat back up. “This is what I’m talking about. This closet took a lot of planning. It looks like years went into it. This closet is the fantasy of every shy, chubby kid in America.”

  Josey went to her desk and sat. “Every shy, chubby kid in America fantasizes about having a middle-aged woman living in her closet? I didn’t know that.”

  “I am not middle-aged,” Della Lee said. “I’m just saying if you spent half the time that went into this closet fixing what’s outside of it, maybe your mailman wouldn’t look at you like an alien every time he sees you in public.”

  “You’re pointing things out to me like I don’t know what’s wrong,” Josey said, ripping open the popcorn bag. “I know what’s wrong, so stop assuming that I want to change. I’m fine with the way things are.”

  “You’re dying with the way things are,” Della Lee said harshly, causing Josey to lower the handful of popcorn she was about to put in her mouth. “You’re going to lose yourself in this, Josey. It’s going to happen if you don’t change. I know. I lost myself trying to find happiness in things that didn’t love me back.”

  Josey hesitated, looking at the popcorn in her hand, before giving in and eating it. It was always easier after that. She chewed and swallowed. There. “I hate to break this to you, but I don’t think you’re the best person to be giving advice on relationships,” she said, feeling better. “I’m not listening to you anymore.”

  “Oh, but I am the best person,” she insisted. “You have to understand the wrong way to have a relationship to be able to do it right. I??
?m a bona fide expert in the wrong way.”

  Josey turned in her seat to face the closet. “Okay, you can give me one last piece of advice. One. Then you give this a rest. Make it good.”

  “One last piece of advice. Oh, the pressure.” Della Lee thought about it a moment, then she said, “Julian and I met at a bar. I was there with some girls from the Eat and Run. I was sort of seeing someone, one of my customers from the diner, so I wasn’t really looking. No, that’s not true. I always looked. That was wrong thing number one. When I saw Julian, my breath literally left my body. He walked over to me and I felt like I was going to die, sort of shivery and light-headed. But when he finally reached me, everything was fine. I let him take my heart before we even left the bar. Wrong thing number two. And, Jesus, we had the best sex of my life that night! He moved in two days later. Wrong thing number three.” She smiled ruefully. “Julian is in his element in a bar. He moves so slowly, you don’t realize how good he is. He’s like a spider. You don’t know you’re trapped until it’s too late. But that’s why we were so good together, or so bad. Julian had never met another spider until he met me.”

  Josey waited for something more, but Della Lee had that satisfied look of someone who had made her point. “Let me get this straight,” Josey said. “The one thing you want to leave me with, your last significant piece of advice to me is, basically, don’t fall in love with Julian.”

  Della Lee shrugged. “Well, I wish someone had said it to me.”

  Chloe remembered the story Jake had told her about his first year away at school when he was a boy. He fell in love with a skinny stray cat that would skulk around the dining hall during meals. Every day, Jake would offer it sausage or egg from breakfast and pepperoni or hamburger from lunch. Every day, it ran away from him. But Jake didn’t give up. Even when he had the stomach flu, he snuck out of the infirmary to try to feed it. He was not going to let it down. He would watch it from classroom windows. He even made up a poem about it that he sent home to his mother in a letter. Three months later, the little cat was finally hungry enough to trust him. It never occurred to Jake that the cat wouldn’t eventually come to him. Look at what he offered, after all.

  All weekend, alone in the apartment, Chloe would catch herself almost calling for Jake when something funny was on the television, or when she was doing a crossword puzzle and had a question. It finally occurred to her Sunday evening that this was probably what Jake intended. He knows you want your space, Adam had said. Space enough for her to see how much she needed him. She was that cat, just sitting there getting hungrier and hungrier. She was doing exactly what he wanted her to do, confident that she was going to come to him eventually.

  Look at what he offered, after all.

  Chloe knew some people from Jake’s office went for after-work drinks at Jiggery’s, the pub on the square across from the courthouse. Jake wouldn’t be there Monday because it was his dinner night at his parents’ house, so she made plans to be at the pub that night. She wanted Jake’s coworkers to see her. She wanted it to get back to Jake that she was happily out on her own, thank you very much. And maybe, just maybe, she could get some information from his coworkers. She desperately wanted to know about the woman who had caused all this trouble. Who was at the office party three months ago, she would say casually, you know, the Beasley case celebration?

  After work on Monday, she went home and changed clothes and carefully applied her makeup. She wanted to look good, but she didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard. It took a while to find the balance. A few hours later she walked into Jiggery’s, feeling excited and proactive. She stood just inside the door and looked around…and slowly realized she didn’t see anyone she knew. She’d spent so much time getting ready that she’d gotten there too late. Her shoulders dropped as she went to the bar and ordered a lemon drop.

  She was aware of his stare before she was aware of him. It was like feeling rain in the air before it falls. She found him on the other side of the bar, staring at her. He was beautiful, like he’d been carefully drawn with a charcoal pencil, every line perfect, every smudge deliberate. She was a little startled when he moved, to see that he was real. He picked up his drink and walked toward her.

  She watched him, feeling breathless, and she wasn’t sure why. “I don’t want to bother you,” he said when he reached her, his voice the melody to all her favorite songs, “and I swear I’m not trying to pick you up, but would you mind if I sit here? I’m meeting some friends and I can see the door better from this side.”

  She was finally able to take a deep breath. What was the matter with her? Why was she panicking? It wasn’t like she’d never been hit on before. She just wished someone Jake knew was here to see it. “Be my guest.”

  He took the stool beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, because she didn’t want to say that she felt like she’d lost her left arm. She didn’t want to say she was afraid that she couldn’t function on her own. So she stuck with I’m fine. That’s what she told Hank at the security gate, and everyone who called that weekend, and Jake’s father, who’d come to see her at the shop today. But he looked so much like Jake, with those strange, lovely light green eyes, that she had to stand so far away from him she was practically in the storeroom. “Why do you ask?”

  “The look on your face, for one. This book, for another.” He gestured toward the bar without taking his eyes off her.

  She finally looked away from him and found, next to her drink, a book titled A Girl’s Guide to Keeping Her Guy. It looked new, as all books that came to her did, but this one was dated. On the cover was a young woman circa the 1950s, wearing crinoline, high heels and a creaseless half-apron. She was serving coffee to a young man who was reading a newspaper in a living room by a fire. “Oh, that,” she said, as if taking a self-help book to a bar was the sanest thing in the world to do. She quickly turned the book over, hiding its cover.

  “Are you worried about keeping your guy?” he asked gently. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “It’s just…” Crap. Books had gone crazy. That was all there was to it. She wouldn’t be admitting this to a perfect stranger if it weren’t for them. “I found out last week that my boyfriend cheated on me.”

  “Damn,” he said. He looked away and lifted his beer mug to his lips. “Looks like we’re in the same boat. Last week my girlfriend took off without a word.”

  “Damn.”

  He smiled at that. “If you’re here, you must not be taking this book too seriously.”

  “If you’re here, you must not think your girlfriend is coming back.”

  “Hearts break. There’s nothing you can do except wait for them to heal. Alcohol helps. So does talking to someone about it.”

  That was all the prompting she needed. “I want to know who it was,” she confided, moving in closer to him. It was almost like a pull, like the way a man might pull a woman into an embrace, but he didn’t even have to touch her. “I want to know who he slept with. I can’t stop thinking about it. All I know is that she was at an office party three months ago and that’s when it happened. Some people from his workplace come here. I was going to ask around, but I got here too late.”

  He was nodding as she spoke, encouraging her. “The courthouse crowd?”

  “The DA’s office.”

  “How about this: I’ll keep my ear to the bar for you. See what I can find out.”

  His offer startled her, but at the same time she accepted it without question. He made her feel heady, like her thoughts weren’t straight, but it was almost a relief. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “And I’ve never seen you. I’m here most weekend nights. I just happened to be here tonight to meet some friends.” His eyes drifted over her shoulder. He grabbed his beer and slid off the stool. “And they just walked in. If you ever want to talk again, you know where to find me.”

  She turned on her stool as he moved past her. She’d known his hair w
as pulled back into a tail, but she didn’t realize how long it was until he turned his back on her. It was beautiful. She wanted to touch it. “Wait, what’s your name?”

  He smiled at her over his shoulder. He didn’t wink. He didn’t make it cheesy. “Julian.”

  Jake’s cell phone rang just as his mother served cocktails in the living room. It had been a long time since he’d had to have dinner at his parents’ house alone. Sitting there without Chloe, he felt like an exposed wound his mother wanted to bandage but his father kept poking. Jake was the only son of Kyle and Faith Yardley. His mother softened him like clay. She’d fought Jake’s father over sending Jake to boarding school, but Kyle Yardley wanted his son to have character and independence, and staying here with a mother who spoiled him mercilessly was not going to achieve that. Kyle Yardley withheld his approval because it was the way generations of green-eyed Yardley men had always shown love for their sons. You can do better. You’re capable of more.

  “Jake, you know I don’t like you to answer calls while you’re here. We don’t get to see you enough as it is,” his mother said in a mock scold.

  He set his drink down and took his cell out of his pocket. “It might be work.” In fact, he hoped it would be work. His parents knew that he and Chloe were having problems. Jake would feel a hell of a lot better if he didn’t have to discuss it with them to the clinking rhythm of silverware on their best china. It would be such a dignified thing, making his heart an acceptable dinner topic by turning it into polite conversation.

  He took the phone out to the porch. The night was blue-black and brittle, a perfect late-fall evening. His mother had already decorated for Thanksgiving with swags of leaves, artful displays of gourds and a wreath on the door she made every year from the bittersweet growing beside the guesthouse in back.

  He flipped open his phone and said, “Hello?”