Moonlight in the Morning

  Jecca didn’t even defend herself by pointing out that she hadn’t been the one to close it.

  “You are in a very bad way,” Mr. Boswell said. “I have to clean up some paperwork, then I’ll be there to take you out to lunch. And Jecca?”

  “Yes?”

  “People don’t really die from a broken heart. It just feels like you will.”

  “I guess I’ll find out, won’t I?” she said and hung up.

  Mr. Boswell was true to his word. Thirty minutes later, there were three artists in the gallery, their arms full of what they’d done in the last weeks. And just as Mr. Boswell had said, they blamed Jecca for the gallery being closed.

  “You could have talked to Andrea,” they said. “At least tried to persuade her.”

  At first Jecca had explained that she’d wanted time to do her own work, but by the third accusation she gave up. She said, “That’s me. Selfish to t. S0emhe core. Now what do you have to show me?”

  At one, Mr. Boswell arrived with a young woman fresh out of college with a degree in fine arts. “She’s your Jecca, your perfect assistant,” Mr. Boswell said, then before she could reply, he escorted Jecca out the door.

  They had lunch at a tiny Italian place, and Mr. Boswell didn’t give Jecca a chance to think about what had happened in her life. He tried to entertain her with stories of Andrea and how she’d nearly driven her father insane since she left.

  But Jecca wasn’t in a laughing mood. She listened to the stories, but she surreptitiously checked her phone every few minutes. No messages.

  She went back to the gallery. She’d been told the young woman’s name was Della, but she didn’t ask more than that. They spent the afternoon going over paintings and small sculptures.

  “These are great!” Della said. “Who did these? They aren’t signed.”

  Della had opened Jecca’s art box and had removed the work she’d done in Edilean. Spread out on the floor were about thirty paintings and drawings of Tristan. In one he was holding Nell. In another one, he was looking up from a book, his eyes full of love. Jecca knew that he’d been looking at her.

  “Talk about gorgeous,” Della said. “Is he a professional model?”

  “No!” Jecca said sharply. “He’s a doctor and he—” She began to gather up the paintings. “These aren’t to be put on display.”

  “But those will sell. I’ll buy the one of him looking over a book. If a man looked at me like that I’d—” She broke off because Jecca was glaring at her. “Oh. Is he the ‘bad breakup’ Mr. Boswell mentioned?”

  Jecca didn’t reply, just put the paintings away. She wanted to sell, but right now she couldn’t bear to spend her days looking at Tristan.

  At five, Mr. Boswell sent a young man to take Jecca to look at apartments. She wasn’t surprised when he told her he was single. It looked like Mr. Boswell was trying to patch up Jecca’s heart with another man.

  She took the first apartment she saw. It was in a building owned by Mr. Preston, had a balcony, and windows with a view. It was the kind of apartment a New Yorker dreamed of, but Jecca hardly looked at it. It had a few pieces of furniture but no linens. The young man offered to go shopping with her and afterward have a late dinner, but she turned him down.

  She went out to buy sheets and towels, and when she got back she was too tired to put them on. She unfolded a sheet, stretched out on it, checked her phone—nothing—then went to sleep.

  In the morning when there were still no messages from Tristan, she felt a bit better. If he could cut her off so easily, so could she.

  She showered, put on her jeans, and went out to breakfast. On her way to work she stopped in a store and redressed herself more appropriately. As she left and saw her reflection in a window, she thought she looked more New York and less Edilean.

  There were two artists waiting for her at the or an to tgallery, their arms full of their work.

  “That’s good,” Della said. “I like it. Although I hope someone steps on his blue crayon.”

  She and Jecca were looking at a series of oils of landscapes. They were part modern, part Ashcan School, with a hint of Salvador Dali thrown in. What united them was what seemed to be a thousand shades of blue.

  “He read that Picasso had a Blue Period, so this guy wants his biographer to say the same thing about him,” Jecca said.

  “Or he watches Avatar six times a day,” Della said. “Besides, he has a bigger ego than that. It’s biographers plural.”

  “Think he’s chosen the spot for the library that will be erected in his honor?” Jecca asked, and Della laughed.

  Jecca stood back and looked at the paintings. In the weeks that she’d been back from Edilean, she’d worked hard to put her emotions in the background. She hadn’t been fully successful, but she was beginning to recover.

  In those weeks she hadn’t heard from anyone except Kim—and she had refused to even mention Tristan.

  “I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” Kim said.

  “I know,” Jecca replied, “but you deserve to say it.”

  “No, I don’t. I wish . . .” She didn’t say what she wished. Instead, the two women talked about work. They made a silent pact to keep their conversation away from men.

  It hurt Jecca that Mrs. Wingate and Lucy didn’t seem to want anything to do with her. She’d thought they were becoming friends, but it looked like she had only been a tenant.

  Lucy was the worst. On their single phone call, she’d acted like Jecca was an enemy trying to get information from her. Jecca didn’t call her again, and after three e-mails that Lucy answered in a cool, reserved way, she stopped those too.

  When Jecca called Mrs. Wingate, she was charming. But there was no laughter over pole dancing, no information about the playhouse, and no talk at all about Tristan or Nell, or anyone Jecca had met in Edilean.

  Those calls also stopped.

  But the most hurt, the very deepest, was her father. For two weeks Jecca had been so angry at him that the only thing she wanted to hear from him was an abject apology. Groveling. Begging for her to forgive him.

  But there was nothing, not a message of any kind, and certainly no apology. As time passed, in spite of her resolve, Jecca began to soften toward her father.

  At the end of three silent weeks, one Sunday afternoon, Jecca called the house in New Jersey. To her horror, Sheila answered. Jecca almost hung up.

  “He’s not here,” Sheila said, “and he won’t be—”

  Joey snatched the phone away from his wife. “Hey, Jec, ol’ girl, how’s New w didnYork?”

  “The same as always. Where is Dad?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “So when are you coming to visit us? The kids miss you. And I got some rototillers that need cleaning.”

  “Joey, stop avoiding me and tell me where Dad is.”

  “I, uh . . . Jecca, he asked me not to tell you about him.”

  She was shocked. “He did what?”

  “Look,” Joey said, “he’ll call you later, okay? Don’t worry about anything. He’s not mad at you anymore. I gotta go. Come see us. Or look online. We put up new pictures of what we did to the store. ’Bye, little sister.”

  “’Bye, Bulldog,” she said, but her brother had already hung up.

  Jecca stood there for a few minutes, unable to think clearly. Her father was no longer angry at her?! She was the one who had a right to be furious. He was the one who’d overstepped the boundaries of . . .

  Who was she kidding? When it came to his children—especially his daughter—Joe Layton’s interference knew no bounds.

  By the fourth week, Jecca was beginning to recover. If the people of Edilean wanted nothing to do with her, she wouldn’t bother them. She quit calling them, quit trying to keep in contact with them. Instead, she turned her attention fully on the work of getting the gallery going again. She put on a champagne party and invited some of Mr. Preston’s richest friends. It was a great success.

&nb
sp; Della said, “If you’d hang your own paintings you’d be selling them too.”

  “There are some things more important than selling your art,” Jecca said.

  Since Della had her own work and desperately wanted to hang it, she didn’t understand what Jecca meant.

  Jecca knew that Della was her just a few months ago. When she’d gone to Edilean all she’d wanted was to create paintings that sold. Now she . . . The truth was that she no longer seemed to know what she wanted.

  She missed Tristan and Nell and her father and Mrs. Wingate and Lucy—and that little town that had only one stop light. But they didn’t seem to have given her as much as a second thought.

  It was on the day starting the sixth week that Jecca had left Edilean when her doorbell rang. “Maintenance!” yelled a male voice from the other side of the heavy door.

  Jecca was eating a bagel and just about to leave for work. She didn’t know what maintenance was needed in the apartment, but then the building codes were always changing. She opened the door with one hand and grabbed her briefcase with the other.

  “I’ve got to run,” she said to the man who was standing by the door. “You can—” She broke off because it was her father, and he was the way she knew him best, wearing a tool belt, a hammer at his hip.

  Had anyone askedd aecause i Jecca, she would have said she’d recovered very well from the breakup with Tristan. But the sight of her father showed her that she hadn’t recovered at all. In an instant she went from being a grown woman to a little girl.

  She dropped her half-eaten bagel and her briefcase to the floor, put her arms around her dad’s neck, and finally, at last, she started crying.

  Her dad, shorter than she was, but broader by half, kicked the door shut, picked his daughter up, and carried her to the couch.

  “He didn’t call me at all,” she was saying through her copious tears. “He made no effort to get me to stay.”

  Her dad handed her a wad of tissues from a box on the coffee table.

  Jecca kept talking. “I know it makes no sense that I wanted him to come after me—not that I did. If he’d shown up at the door I would have slammed it in his face. It was horrible of him to buy a studio for me. He knew I wasn’t staying. I told him that all along. But maybe I could have painted there. In Edilean, I mean. What I did there was the best work I’ve ever done. Maybe I could have kept doing it. Not next to the hardware store of course because you’d get me to run the cash register, but somewhere. You know what I’m doing now? Managing the whole damned gallery, that’s what. I spend days looking at other artists’ work and I haven’t picked up a brush in weeks. I could have done more actual artwork in Edilean, and maybe Tristan and I could have figured that out, but he made me so angry I couldn’t think. And you . . .” She couldn’t think of the betrayal by her father. “Tristan hates me, doesn’t he?”

  When her father was silent, she looked at him.

  “I think he’s mad about you,” he said. “But your Dr. Tristan left town not long after you did and nobody knows where he went. Livie thought he went up to the cabin, but I went up there and it was only that professor guy.”

  It took Jecca a moment to understand what he was saying. “Livie? You’ve seen Mrs. Wingate?”

  Joe nodded.

  Jecca sat back, blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and looked at her father. “Out with it,” she said. “What have you been up to and don’t skip a word.”

  Joe looked around the apartment, at the big glass windows. “Nice place. You got any more bagels? It’s a long drive up here.”

  “‘Up’ here? You came up from Edilean?” Jecca went to the kitchen to make breakfast for her father. He’d want bacon and eggs with his bagel, except that she didn’t have any bacon.

  He moved to take a seat on a stool on the other side of the counter. “You notice that today is exactly six weeks since you left in one of your huffs?”

  “I didn’t—” Jecca waved her hand. “I was very angry at both of you.”

  “Well, that boyfriend of yours was more than mad at me. How was I to know you wouldn’t like for me to open a store in that little town?”

  Turning, she narrowed her eyes at him.

  Joe gave a one-sided grin and a little guffaw. “Okay, so maybe I did know. That boyfriend of yours sure can keep a secret.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. I haven’t seen or heard from him in weeks.”

  “If you’re gonna start crying again I better get a roll of toilet paper.”

  “I’m not going to cry anymore,” Jecca said. “I want you to tell me what’s been going on. When you say Tristan can keep a secret, what do you mean?”

  “Didn’t tell you about buying the hardware store, did he? Did you see that building? When I get through with it, it’ll put Home Depot and Lowe’s out of business.”

  Jecca cracked three eggs into a skillet and listened to her father with everything she knew about him. He had a lot to tell her, but there was something else there. He was . . . What? Afraid? Was that the underlying emotion in his words? What in the world could possibly scare Joe Layton? When his wife died and left him with two young kids to raise, one of them a girl who was born with her own opinions, he hadn’t been afraid.

  “Dad,” Jecca said slowly, “why don’t you tell me what it is that you’re hiding?”

  He waited while she slid the eggs out of the skillet. Runny yolks, just the way he liked them.

  “I want to marry Lucy.”

  Jecca had expected anything in the world except that. “Lucy? Lucy Cooper? Lives at Mrs. Wingate’s house?”

  “That’s the one.”

  She sat on the stool next to him. Watching him eat was very familiar and she marveled at how glad she was to see him. “But . . .” She couldn’t think what to say. That her father wanted to remarry was a lot to take in. Lucy—a woman Jecca already loved—was going to be her stepmother.

  “Uh . . .” she said. “Tell me about Lucy. I never could get anything out of her about her personal life, and Tristan doesn’t—I mean, he didn’t know.” She had to stop that or she’d be bawling again.

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “Lucy won’t tell me anything either.”

  “But you want to marry her?”

  “Yeah. I moved my job to where the woman I love is.” He locked his eyes onto hers.

  She knew he was criticizing, judging, chastising her, and especially telling her what he thought of her running away from Tristan. “Dad,” Jecca said, “you decided to open a new hardware store before you even met Lucy.”

  “Think so?” He pulled his cell phone out of the pouch at his side. His background photo was the one of Lucy that Jecca had sent him. SUNDAY AT THE WINGATE HOUSE, she’d written.

  Jecca had to admit that Lucy looked very good, and she thought of all that she’d told her father about her. Lucy could cook as well as sew. And then there was the pole dancing. Can’ng.mit that forget that. Yes, Jecca could see that her dad could fall in love with Lucy before he met her.

  “Where are you living now?” She hated hearing herself ask that. Her father had always lived in the same house, worked at the same store. It was disconcerting to think of him being anywhere else.

  “In Livie’s house.”

  “In my apartment?”

  “No, I’m in the one that was empty. Mostly, I stay with Lucy.” His eyes sparkled.

  “Don’t even think of elaborating on that,” Jecca said. She took a deep breath. “If you’re in Edilean, why haven’t you seen Tristan?”

  “I told you that he left.”

  “What do you mean that he left?”

  “A few days after you ran off, he left town. That other doctor boy, Roger—”

  “Reede.”

  “Yeah, him. Reede has been doing the doctoring for the town. Kim said he’s the one that broke your heart the first time you went to Edilean. You sure moped around when you got home.”

  “Reede didn’t break my heart, and anyway, I was just a kid.”

/>   “Not according to you back then. To hear you talk you were forty-five and a woman of the world.”

  Jecca opened her mouth to defend herself, but then she laughed. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Yeah?” He was cleaning his plate with his second bagel. “I’ve had a few thoughts about you too. You ready to come home?”

  Home, she thought. Did that now mean Edilean? Jecca couldn’t help but feel that if Tristan had really wanted her he would have, well . . . at least called her. But then, she was the one who ran away. She was the one who freaked out and fled.

  As always, her dad knew what she was thinking. “That boy gives up pretty easy, doesn’t he?”

  Jecca had to work to keep from bursting into tears again. “I deserved it,” she managed to say. “I’m the one who dumped him.”

  “Any man who let you get away without the fight of his life isn’t worth you.”

  “Oh, Dad,” she said, then she did begin crying again.

  Joe led her to the couch and handed her the last of the tissues from the box.

  “Before you flood the place, I have something to show you.” He reached into the tool belt he was still wearing—later she’d have to ask him how he got past security in the building—and pulled out a folded letter. It was dirty, worn, and wrinkled.

  “Had it awhile?” she asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “I would have come sooner, but that boy made me swear not to see you for six weeks. He said you needed time away from all of us so you could calm down.”

  “Tristan said that?”

  “Yeah. I talked to him a bit when I got to Edilean and he read me the riot act. I’ve never been told off so well in my life. I learned some new curse words from him.”

  “Tristan? Cursing? He’s so gentle and sweet.”

  “Not when he thought I’d played a trick on him that made you run away. I think some of those words were medical, but I understood him when he told me where I could put certain parts of the building.”

  “You did play a trick that made me run away,” Jecca said, her voice rising. “Because of you I—”

  “Why don’t you read that letter first and bawl me out later? The man that wrote it had a hard time finding you. I talked to him on the phone, and he said some woman named Savannah said you were a New York designer. Chambers tried New York, then New Jersey, and two addresses in Edilean before he found you—but by then you’d already skipped town.”