“And now you know,” I whispered. There was venom in my voice.
“No!” Sarah fell back a little. “No, you don’t understand—”
“I suppose I can expect your husband to make a house call,” I said through gritted teeth. “Maybe he’ll suggest some couple’s counseling. Or maybe I’m not praying hard enough.”
“That’s not it at all …” Sarah looked genuinely devastated, but I was too incensed to care.
“It’s none of your business,” I said.
“Rachel,” Sarah’s voice broke, “I really am sorry. I’m just trying to be your friend. I didn’t mean to—”
But I never got to hear what Sarah didn’t mean, because at that exact moment the coffee machine screeched to a stop and we were bathed in an almost eerie silence. We stood there for a few seconds, just staring at each other, and then I hiked up my purse on my shoulder and turned to go.
“I just remembered something I have to do,” I said.
“Please don’t go,” Sarah said quietly. I could almost hear her fumbling for something more to say. “Your coffee …”
“You drink it,” I said. “I’m not thirsty.”
When I told Max what had happened at the coffee shop, he was less than sympathetic. “Sounds to me like she’s just trying to look out for you.”
“She’s prying!” I spat. “It’s none of her business.”
“It is if she’s your friend. Is she your friend?”
I had to think about that. Keeping friends had never been my strong suit, but if anyone was a friend to me, it was definitely Sarah. We had been in the same Bible study for four years straight, and she had shown me nothing but kindness. Of course, we weren’t the sort to spend time at each other’s houses, and we never got together with our families, but then, I couldn’t exactly parade my marriage around like that. Cyrus and I usually went our separate ways, and when my presence was required at a social function I played the part of his demure escort admirably. I knew my place. But none of that negated the fact that Sarah made me smile. That I looked forward to seeing her, and that she knew more about me than most of the people in my hometown.
“Yes,” I finally said with a hint of resignation. “Sarah is a friend.”
“Then it’s her responsibility to look after you. It’s in the fine print: Friends should always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere.” Max smoothed a chocolate-colored tweed and began the slow process of pinning the jacket pattern to the fabric.
I pursed my lips. “You’ve got the quote wrong. I believe it begins with: ‘Love is patient, love is kind … Love should always protect.’”
“Sure it does. But I didn’t get the passage wrong. Sarah is trying to be a friend—she’s trying to love you.”
“She ambushed me,” I muttered. And yet, my anger was slipping through my fingers. How could I be upset when my chest was filled with warmth at the unexpected thought that Sarah might not only consider me a friend, she might actually love me?
“I’ll agree that her technique could use some work, but it’s obvious she cares a lot about you. She brought you the book, she covered for you with Cyrus, and now she’s trying to reach out to you.” Max refused to meet my gaze, but I could tell that he was very pleased with Sarah’s tenacity. “You’ve got yourself a good friend there.”
I exhaled slowly. “I had myself a good friend.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I basically yelled at her in front of a dozen people. I can’t imagine she took that very well.”
Max laughed. “Sweetie, we didn’t talk for twelve years. Twelve years. And Elena and I never stopped loving you for even a second of it. A true friendship can withstand a lot. From what I’ve heard, I believe that Sarah is a true friend.”
“Sarah Kempers?” Lily asked, coming through the door to the back room. She was wearing a green turtleneck sweater that set off her eyes, and her strawberry hair hung in wind-tousled ringlets around her flushed cheeks. I couldn’t help but marvel at her as she came around the table and gave Max a one-armed hug. She turned back to me. “You mean the pastor’s wife, right? I like her.”
“I do, too,” I sighed. “I just hope I haven’t scared her away.”
“How did you scare her away?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, giving my attention to the work before me. “How was school today?”
Lily wagged her finger. “Don’t change the subject. You’re going to tell me everything, remember?”
“Not everything.” I laughed. “Do you tell me everything?”
A whisper of a smile breezed across Lily’s lips. “Fine.” She pulled up a stool next to the sewing table and perched on the very end, leaning her cheek into her cupped hand. “Why don’t you tell me about how you survived all those years without Mr. Wever.”
“Oh.” Max shook his head. “That’s a sad, sad story.”
“Mom’s not going to keep the sad stories from me anymore, are you, Mom?” Lily looked to me for affirmation and I gave a curt nod, hoping that Max would realize that my newfound honesty with my daughter still came with boundaries. He gave me an almost imperceptible wink.
“Well,” he said. “If that’s the case, I suppose I should start by telling you that it was very, very hard to live without your mother for so long.”
Lily looked skeptical. “How did you do it? Everton is a pretty small town.”
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Max said. “Or so they say. In our case, Elena and I invented a lot of excuses. If we pulled into the grocery store parking lot and noticed your mom’s car there, we suddenly remembered that we had to stop by the bank or the post office before we got groceries. Or if we saw her across the park, we would have an irrepressible urge to walk in the opposite direction.”
“You did that?” I asked, shocked.
Max straightened up and looked me square in the face. “What choice did we have, Rachel? Cyrus helped us understand the gravity of the situation very early on.”
Lily’s eyes darted between us. “What do you mean?”
“Dad forbid me to see Max and Elena,” I told her. “He knew that they didn’t approve of our marriage, and he didn’t like that.”
Lily looked like she was about to say something, but she checked herself. “I guess we’ll get to that soon enough. But right now I think I want to start at the beginning.”
“You mean like: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’?” Max selected a red-handled scissors from the old coffee can that housed a handful of the tools of our trade. “You’d better get comfy—this is going to take a while.”
“Nah.” Lily reached for the scissors and pulled the fabric that Max had just pinned toward her. He had taught her to make straight, careful cuts and she had become an indispensable part of our suit-making process. “You don’t have to go back quite that far. I just want to know about my mom. What was she like when she was my age?”
The wrinkles around Max’s eye deepened as he grinned. “Well, now, that’s a fun topic. What was your mom like at your age…?”
“Mousy,” I said. “Mousy and quiet and knobby-kneed and ugly.”
Max regarded me with narrowed eyes. “She’s wrong,” he told Lily. “It’s true, your mother was quiet, but there was nothing mousy about her. She was sweet and artistic and lovely. Actually,” he rapped a knuckle lightly beneath Lily’s chin, “she looked just like you. The first time I saw you it was like I was twenty years younger and meeting your mother for the very first time.”
“Really?” Lily sounded hopeful. “You think I’ll grow into these teeth someday?”
“Undoubtedly.” Max laughed. “You’ll be every bit as beautiful as your mother.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said. “I know the truth.”
“I don’t think that you do.” Max tapped his nose for a moment, eyes far away as he thought. “Tell you what,” he said to Lily. “I’ll give you a gli
mpse into your mother’s world that I think will explain a lot.”
“I’d love that.” Lily nodded enthusiastically.
“Be careful, Max,” I warned. “Is it your story to tell?”
He looked affronted. “Absolutely. It’s the story of the first time I ever saw you.”
Max wasn’t the only one who remembered the first time we met. He and Elena moved into the house next door when I was in second grade, and though I can clearly recall the day, it never stood out in my mind as an important event. I was only eight years old, timid and uncertain of my place in the world, and I didn’t pay much attention to the elderly couple with a garage tailor shop. What did I know about men’s suits? My father rarely wore one. The closest thing he had to a suit was a sport coat with patches at the elbows and a collar that seemed unusually broad. He wore it on Sunday mornings, but every other day of the week he donned faded blue jeans and work shirts with frayed cuffs and stains that refused to come out.
But whether or not I treasured the advent of the Wever family in my life, it was an episode that apparently meant a lot to Max. He recounted it with obvious fondness, and as he blessed Lily with details that he unwrapped like small gifts, it hit me that my surrogate father loved me long before I ever even knew his name.
The day that Max and Elena moved in was a postcard-perfect Saturday in May. One of the things that sold them on the house was a half-moon formation of three Japanese cherry blossom trees in the front yard, their spindly branches drooping beneath the weight of pink blooms that sweetened the air of the entire neighborhood. As the Wevers moved in—with the help of a small church group—they considered the warm fragrance of flowers a profound grace: It seemed to soften the blow of moving to a new town at a stage in their life when they were supposed to be firmly planted, not uprooted.
However, before they had unpacked half of the moving truck, it became evident that the center cherry blossom tree was heavy-laden with more than just spring blooms. There were a pair of bare, pale feet poking from the bottom of the blushing canopy. Max said that he kept sneaking peeks at the ten small toes, the slender ankle that from time to time made an appearance.
As the final items were being lifted from the back of the moving truck, Max realized that whoever was attached to the pair of feet in the tree had been there for a very long time. True, he had been in and out of the house and couldn’t be entirely sure that the tree-climbing trespasser hadn’t shimmied down the trunk and disappeared for a quick snack or a bathroom break. But he felt confident asserting that the child who sat so still among the branches had spent the better part of two hours doing exactly that: sitting quietly in a tree. What sort of a child could do that?
He found out quickly enough. While Elena passed out glasses of cold lemonade, a woman emerged from the house next door. She was wearing a pair of fashionably ripped jeans and a tank top that slipped off her shoulder to reveal the black bra strap beneath. Max was about to call out a friendly hello when he realized that the woman seemed slightly unsteady on her feet. Unsteady, and angry.
“Rachel? Rachel!” The woman shouted from the front steps, angling her face one way and then another. “Rachel Anne, you come home this instant! I don’t know where you are but when I get a hold of you …”
Max battled his conscience as he tried to decide what to do. Should he alert his furious neighbor to the dangling toes in his tree? Or protect the little girl’s hiding place? It was obvious she didn’t want to be found.
But the woman on the steps of the house next door was clearly the child’s mother, and she had to be worried sick about her daughter. That was undoubtedly why she was yelling, why her face was rosy with the evidence of her fury.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Max told Elena. The entire moving crew was watching the woman with thinly veiled curiosity. “I think I know where her daughter is.”
“We all do,” Elena said, shaking her head a little. “I just pity the child when that woman finds out.”
Max strode purposefully across the lawns, cutting through the trees almost directly beneath the spot where the girl was still crouched. Without moving his head he chanced a brief glance among the branches and spotted a huddled form against the trunk. She had pulled her legs up against her chest and her arms were wrapped tight around her knees. Max caught the impression of hair that matched the dawn and eyes like a summer sky. Limbs as skinny as the branches she clung to. Then he was past and had to turn his focus to the agitated stranger next door.
“Hi,” he said, extending his hand as he approached. “I’m your new neighbor. The name’s Max Wever.”
The woman looked him up and down, and it seemed she was unimpressed by what she saw. “I’m looking for my daughter,” she said, forgoing any manners or introductions. “Have you seen a little brat about this tall?” She held her hand up at chest height, then rethought her assessment and lowered it a bit.
The yes was on the tip of his tongue, and it almost spilled right out. But at the last second a breeze swirled between them and Max caught a whiff of something so sickly sweet it was nauseating. All at once he knew that the high color in the woman’s cheeks was not fear for her daughter’s well-being, it was the telltale rosacea of an alcoholic.
“You’re looking for your daughter?” Max repeated dumbly.
She glared at him. “I have to go to the grocery store,” the woman said slowly and loudly. She obviously thought he was hard of hearing. “I can’t exactly leave her home alone, can I?”
Max was alarmed at the thought of this woman driving. Especially with a child in the car. “Can’t it wait? Will your husband be home soon?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it can’t wait. And no, my husband won’t be home for another hour or so.”
“How old is your daughter?” Max asked.
“Eight.”
He could tell she was getting more and more agitated, and he was starting to dread the thought of the moment when the little girl’s hiding place would be discovered. Thinking fast he said, “Your daughter’s name is Rachel, right?”
She nodded.
“How about my wife and I keep an eye out for her? We can watch her while you’re gone.”
“I don’t even know you,” the woman said. But she smiled all the same. “You trustworthy?”
Max put a hand over his heart. “I’ll treat her like my own.”
“Fine.” The woman fluttered her fingers and turned to go. “When she turns up, you tell that little snot-nosed horror that she’s getting the spanking of her life when I get home. You tell her that.”
Max didn’t respond. He couldn’t. But the woman didn’t wait for an answer. He watched as she stumbled to the garage and got in her car. She backed out of the driveway without incident, but Max determined right then and there that the first thing he would do when she was out of sight was call the cops. His neighbor was obviously a menace.
On the way back to his own house, Max walked below the trees again. He wanted to say hello to Rachel, maybe to even coax her from her perch with the promise of lemonade. But when he found her between the branches, her eyes were squeezed shut tight. She looked like a wounded fairy in the tree with a twig stuck in her hair, a pixie of a thing with shallow wrinkles in her young forehead and the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders.
He wanted to reach up and pull her down. But he didn’t. The way that Rachel held herself told him that she wanted to be left alone.
CHAPTER 9
MITCH
December 24, 1:00 P.M.
The Christmas tree in the lobby of The Heritage Home is a fifteen-foot monstrosity. It took a team of four maintenance men an entire afternoon to set it up, and the better part of the following day was spent stringing lights and trimming the prickly evergreen. Mitch knows that he must have walked past it dozens of times, but as he wanders through the lobby on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, he is gripped by the desire to bask in the glow of a thousand points of light. The day is dark already, the sky heavy with snow
, and the tree in the center of the warm room radiates comfort. Mitch could use a little comfort.
The scent of pine is heavy in the air, and the tree seems to tremble in anticipation. In reality, the soft waver of the branches is the result of ceiling fans turned on low, but there is something magical about the tree all the same. Mitch stands before it, looking everywhere at once. Trying to take it in. After a minute he notices that there is a little placard in a gilded frame that hangs eye level at the very center: Many of the decorations you see are from our guests’ family trees.
When Mitch reads the simple rhyme, he studies the hodgepodge of ornaments with renewed interest. There are antique baubles of paper-thin blown glass. And hand-painted Santas with plumes of cottony beards. But the decorations that cause him to linger, the ones that make his heart stumble, are the homemade offerings. They’re by far the best—the paper stars with gobs of glitter and fat, gluey fingerprints, and foil garlands with uneven edges cut by child-safe scissors. Scattered across the sweeping boughs of the tree, there are even a few ornaments that boast pictures of children. Little boys with freckles on their noses and gap-toothed grins. And girls like fallen angels, their halos tipping to one side as they brush mud off skinned knees.
Mitch pores over each face, trying to discern if she is among them. Did she once labor over a papier-mâché manger for him? Did she smile as a Sunday school teacher snapped a Polaroid for the center of a finger-painted wreath? He can’t remember.
“Did you find yours?” Cooper asks from somewhere behind him.
Mitch absorbs the question with nothing more than a slight shake of his head.
“It’s one of the prettiest,” Cooper says. “At least, I think so.”
“Is it homemade?” Mitch wonders.
“Yes.” There is a smile in Cooper’s voice. “Let’s see if you can find it. It’s about as big as the palm of my hand, and it sparkles.”
It’s not much of a description, but something glitters at the edge of Mitch’s memory all the same. For just a second he can see it cradled in his hand, a gift that took his breath away. He scans the tree, his eyes skipping over ornaments in their haste to find the one that is his. The one that might lead him a step closer to her.