Stealing Taffy

  “But you were right, I really do need a friend. And that’s a problem since … since … my wife has always held that place in my life.” Smathers looked out the diner window and blinked back tears.

  Tanyalee’s heart nearly melted. “It’s not too late to make things right, Mr. Smathers,” she said, reaching out to gently pat his hand.

  “I hope not. Truly, I do.” He turned to look at her, but his thoughts were obviously far away from the booth at Lenny’s.

  Tanyalee was worried this little man could shatter into a thousand tiny pieces of loneliness if she didn’t do something. She smiled kindly. “Please forgive me if this is too personal a question, Mr. Smathers, but did she give you a reason?”

  He chuckled sadly. “She did.” Smathers lowered his gaze, as if he were too ashamed to look at Tanyalee. “She told me she felt invisible, that I came home worn out and closed off and it seemed like I had nothing left to give her. She said she was tired of me not seeing her.”

  “Oh.” Tanyalee sat up straighter. “So there’s not another man?”

  He shook his head. “I asked her and she said no. She said she could never betray my trust like that.” He peeked up above the rim of his glasses. “She said she missed me.”

  “Fabulous!” Tanyalee said, smacking her hands on the tabletop. “This is completely doable, Mr. Smathers!”

  He frowned. “Doable?”

  “Yes! It’s fixable, is what I’m saying.” Tanyalee noticed the waitress eyeing them from behind the counter so she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can help you with this.”

  “You can?”

  “Of course! If she misses you, that means she still loves you and wants to be with you. Don’t you see? This is the best news a man could have! It puts the ball in your court—she’s giving you a chance to make things right. Right now, she’s waiting to see exactly what you’re going to do to get her back.”

  He cocked his head. “Go on.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At her sister’s.”

  “Does her sister like you?”

  Mr. Smathers broke out into a big smile. “Yes. She introduced us, actually. We’ve been friends for years.”

  “Then use that to your advantage. Call your sister-in-law and start with the truth. Tell her what a horse’s ass you’ve been and how you want to make it up to … what’s your wife’s name?”

  “Laureen.”

  “So come up with the perfect grand gesture to get Laureen back—and I’m sure you already know exactly what she’ll love—and then ask your sister-in-law to help you pull it off. But do it now. Don’t wait. Don’t let your wife sit, because the longer she sits wondering when you’re going to man up, the sadder and lonelier she’ll get and the deeper you dig the hole for yourself.”

  He frowned. “So I’m a horse’s ass in a hole?”

  “You most definitely are.”

  The two of them laughed. Tanyalee was surprised to see how much her probation officer’s laughter lifted her own spirits. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever helped someone feel better just by being a friend.

  “Tanyalee, I thank you.”

  She waved his comment away. “I didn’t do anything but help you clear your head. I know that sometimes we can get so wrapped up in our own stuff that we don’t see a way out.”

  Mr. Smathers nodded thoughtfully. “May I ask you something?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Have you had a chance to make amends to your sister since you’ve been home?”

  Tanyalee sighed, rolling her eyes. “No. Why do you ask?”

  Temple cocked his head and smiled. “You know how you said you’re cleaning up the messes of your past?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, from what you’ve told me about your family dynamic, I know that’s the biggest mess of them all. I just want to see you get over that hurdle. I truly want to see you turn your life around.”

  Tanyalee’s instinct was to resent the personal nature of that comment, but she caught herself. That reaction would be ridiculous, since she’d just dragged her probation officer to Lenny’s to talk about his private life. She found herself smiling. “Thank you, Mr. Smathers. I appreciate your concern for me.”

  He smiled back. “Call me Temple, please.”

  “All right.” Tanyalee fiddled with her coffee cup for a moment, staring down at her fingers. “Cheri will be getting back from her honeymoon soon. I’m nervous. No—I’m scared to death is more like it, because there’s so much I want to tell her, so much I need to ask forgiveness for. I hardly know where to start.”

  Temple cleared his throat. “Do you miss her?”

  She looked up. The question took her by surprise, and it made her feel uncomfortable. “Well, as odd as this may sound, I don’t know Cheri well enough to miss her. We’ve never been close, even as children. All we ever did was fight—Mama used to say our personalities were like oil and water.”

  “I see.”

  “And after our parents died and we went to live with Aunt Viv, it only got worse. I hated Cheri. She hated me. Our lives were turned upside down and we were both scared to death. Nothing made sense. And instead of turning to each other for comfort, we turned on each other. It was a catfight.”

  Temple frowned behind his glasses. “And it never got any better as you got older?”

  Tanyalee couldn’t answer, because suddenly, something was making sense in a way it never had before, not even at Sedona Sunset. Decades had passed for Cheri and Tanyalee, but in their hearts, they were still the angry, terrified little girls they’d always been. And now, it seemed as if too much time had passed and too much hurt had been inflicted to ever bridge the gap.

  She took a sip from her cup and collected herself. “I think Cheri and I are stuck, Temple. I think the catfight is all we’ve ever known. So I suppose what I miss is having a sister at all. Honestly, I have no idea what that would feel like.”

  Temple added a quick dash of cream and stirred, his brow wrinkling in concentration. “Is she still talking to you?”

  “Yes. I guess. I mean, she hasn’t told me she never wants to speak to me again.” She hasn’t exactly reached out to me, either. “We talked briefly at her wedding. She seemed pleasant enough—surprised to see me, but not angry that I was there.”

  Temple smiled. “This sounds doable, then,” he said.

  Tanyalee laughed.

  “But as a friend of mine once told me, you can’t afford to put it off. The longer you wait, the deeper the hole.”

  She sighed. “Touché, Temple. Touché.”

  * * *

  If Dante had been in New York, the way God intended, he wouldn’t be wandering aimlessly through nearly empty streets like Andy Griffith, his hands in his pockets, looking at a surreal twilight sky, wondering if the weatherman was right and it really might rain. All this in an attempt to keep his mind off a woman.

  So many things were wrong with his current reality that he hardly knew where to begin. First off, the silence. No matter what time he was out and about in Brooklyn, there were people around, along with plenty of comforting background noise like sirens, car horns, and thumping music coming from windows—normal noise. Compared to home, Asheville suffered from an eerie body-snatcher kind of quiet, like he was the only human being left alive on the planet. In Brooklyn, he noticed the weather only during one of the city’s blizzards, tropical storms, or during the occasional brutal heat wave. Otherwise, who the hell cared?

  But the worst part was that he’d never had to ponder the sky in order to stop thinking about some woman. Up until that very moment, he’d excelled at forgetting women. Forgetting women had been one of his God-given talents. In fact, every woman he’d ever been with had accused him of not thinking enough about her.

  And then came Tanyalee Marie Newberry.

  Dante sighed loudly, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He’d run six miles that morning before work, which helped keep his mind
off Pink Taffy at least for a while. Then he’d lifted weights during lunch, which helped, too. He’d grabbed a bite to eat after work at a sports bar, while watching ESPN on the big-screen TV, which provided some distraction. Then he’d driven all the way to Hickory to attend an AA meeting where she would not be, and managed to stay focused. But now here he was again, itching to call her. Wanting to hear her laugh. Needing to inhale her skin and touch her hair. Going crazy because he couldn’t look into the clear-blue ocean of her eyes or hear the melody of her accent. And he had the whole night in front of him, another night in his sterile little apartment with nothing but his own restlessness for company.

  A little more than twenty-four hours had passed since he’d backed out of Vivienne Newberry’s driveway, Taffy waving good-bye from the front porch. Though he’d managed not to call her in the meantime, he felt his resolve weakening with each passing minute. Not knowing what else to do, Dante pulled his phone from his pocket and hit speed dial. It was picked up almost immediately.

  “You okay?”

  Dante exhaled, immensely relieved to hear his twin sister’s voice. “I’m okay, Daya. You got a minute?”

  “Of course. I’m headed into the physician’s lounge.”

  “Sorry to bug you at work.”

  “I’m on call, but things are blissfully slow at the moment, so shoot.”

  Dante didn’t always say so, but he was incredibly proud of Daya. She’d worked like a dog to get into med school, then graduated near the top of her class, snagging a psychiatry residency at Rush University in Chicago. She was on their faculty now, and loved teaching as much as working with patients. Dante respected no one’s opinion more.

  “I could use a little advice.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  Dante laughed, jogging across Spruce Street to a bench in Packs Square Park, where he took a seat. “I met her on an airplane.”

  “Oh. That seems pretty normal, historically speaking.”

  He propped an elbow on his knee and palmed his forehead. “Trust me when I tell you that nothing about this woman or this situation is normal.”

  “All right.” Dante could hear Daya pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Go on.”

  “I feel like I should be lying on a couch at this point.”

  She laughed, and the sound brought him right back to being a kid, when life had been clear-cut and everything still made sense. “I told you. Nobody lies prone on a couch anymore. And you’re not my patient—you’re my brother. But you’re stalling. What’s going on down there?”

  She was always so no-nonsense. “I’ll give you the abbreviated version, okay? And let me get through the whole thing before you diagnose me with some sort of disorder.”

  “I’ll try. Mind if I eat my sandwich while you talk?”

  “Not at all.” Dante took a breath. “So I was flying back from seeing you in Chicago, right? This chick was checking me out even before we got on the plane and then we end up sitting next to each other. She’s a real Southern-belle type, beyond beautiful and falling way short of honest. She has a couple drinks on the plane and gets real flirty—”

  “Stop.” Daya cleared her throat. “I have no interest in hearing about your mile-high adventure.”

  Dante straightened. “Hey. Nothing happened until we were at sea level, after our flight got diverted and we shared a hotel room near National Airport. But that’s just the beginning of this story.”

  “That’s usually the end.”

  “I realize that. Hence the phone call. Anyway, I wake up the next morning and she’s gone—walked out when I was sleeping! Can you believe that? I didn’t know her full name, but she left her charm bracelet and a note that said ‘something to remember me by.’”

  Daya nearly choked on her sandwich. “So she beat you at your own game,” she managed, coughing.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “I assumed she lived in Raleigh. I don’t know why, but I did, and that was a mistake. So I finished my stint at Quantico and go to my usual Asheville AA meeting and guess who’s there?”

  “Bracelet girl?”

  Dante laughed.

  “So did you talk to her after the meeting?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. I slouched down in the chair and hid while she started sharing about her … well … her issues. It was an open meeting, so she talked about her history of codependency, shoplifting, and her, well, her struggle with love addiction and how she had just met this hot guy on an airplane and couldn’t resist him.”

  “Hmm.”

  Dante noticed that Daya had just transitioned from sister to clinician, which wasn’t a good sign. “It gets weirder.”

  “I would expect nothing less.”

  “Right. So I follow her home after the meeting and trace her plates. You know how I told you about all the meth cases down here, right?”

  “Please don’t tell me she’s a meth dealer!”

  “What? Jesus, Daya! Do you think I’m a complete idiot?”

  “You asked me to delay my diagnosis.”

  Dante jumped up from the bench and walked. He was comforted to see several couples strolling with their dogs and some kids riding their bikes under the streetlights—apparently there were other humans still walking the earth. “It’s a small world down here, okay? Real small. And it turns out she lives in the town where I had my last undercover assignment.”

  “The one where the sheriff’s girlfriend got taken hostage and the bad guys killed each other off?”

  “Not all of them. We think there was a middleman involved, and he might be associated with another operation we’ve got under surveillance.” Dante slowed his pace of walking and talking. “But there was a little girl, too. Her name is Fern, and she was the daughter of one of the meth cooks. I removed her from the property right before the raid went down. We think she might be able to ID the middleman.”

  “But what does this girl have to do with—”

  “Hold on. I’m getting there.”

  “Of course,” Daya said.

  “So I go to where the girl is staying and guess who opens the door?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Taffy. Taffy opens the door! She’s Fern’s volunteer mentor with an after-school program.”

  “Wait. Taffy is the love addict with the bracelet? Fern is the girl?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Her name is Tanyalee, but her nickname is Taffy.”

  Daya had no comment.

  “Still there?”

  “I am. So what happened with this Tanyalee Taffy person? How did she react to seeing you?”

  “It wasn’t pretty.”

  Daya sighed. “That’s understandable, Dante. If a woman wants to see you again after that kind of … sea-level encounter … she will make sure you don’t get away without her name and phone number.”

  “Yeah, I know how it works, Daya.”

  “And, if she’s even remotely committed to recovery, she knew she’d made a mistake with you and wanted to make sure she wasn’t tempted again. So what can I help you with? You said you needed advice.”

  “I do.” Dante spun around on the walking path, shocked by the words that were about to come out of his mouth. “I spent a lot of time with Tanyalee yesterday, getting to know her. I had dinner with her family. I can’t stop thinking about her. I want … I think I want to…”

  “I see.” Daya made a humming sound. “You have feelings for her.”

  “What? Hell, no!” He noticed one of the dog walkers glance his way nervously, and he nodded to her in apology.

  “Be honest with yourself, Dante.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You have feelings for her, Dante. And you’re wondering whether you should stop seeing her because of her emotional instability. As your sister, I don’t want to see you get involved with someone who isn’t capable of a healthy relationship. As a psychiatrist, I have my usual advice for you: back away from the crazy chicks
.”

  Dante stopped in his tracks, remembering what old Garland Newberry had said. “You need to watch your back, son. Watch your wallet. Watch your car keys. Watch your heart. That girl is what they call a man-eater.”

  “She’s complicated, I’ll admit it.” Dante stared up at the darkening sky. He felt a raindrop hit him right between the eyes. “But I think her heart is in the right place. I think underneath it all, she’s something special. None of us are perfect, but I think she has potential.”

  “Fair enough. So let me ask you this—what did she say when you admitted you heard everything she shared at the AA meeting?”

  Dante’s mind emptied. He gazed up at the sky.

  “Yikes,” Daya said.

  Dante heard the shrill sound of his sister’s beeper, and he knew their conversation had come to an end.

  “I gotta go,” Daya said.

  “I know. Thanks for listening.”

  “Wait.” He could tell by her breathing that Daya was hurrying down the hallway, heading to one of her “psych consults” as they were euphemistically called. “Please be honest with me, Dante. Are you so jacked up over this woman that you’re thinking of drinking?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Are you in touch with your sponsor?”

  “Yes. Every day.”

  “Does bracelet girl know you have a history of alcohol dependency?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s where you need to start, dear brother. Every woman deserves the truth. She needs to know you were present at that meeting and why.”

  “I know. I just haven’t had the opportunity to tell her, but I will the next time I see her.”

  “Good. I love you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Wait!”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you, too, Daya. Thank you for always being there.”

  She laughed. “Of course. Anything, anytime. You know that. Gotta run.”

  Dante shoved his phone into his pocket, realizing that he needed to run as well—it had started raining in earnest. The weatherman had been right.

  Chapter 12

  It was exactly 3:32 P.M. when Miss Woowooberry walked out of the Girls Club office, marched across the multipurpose room, and arrived at the table where Fern waited. Fern was sure of the time because she checked the cafeteria clock. She wasn’t taking any chances. She understood that she’d been sentenced to three hours with Tanyalee that day and that’s exactly what the chick would get, and not a minute more.