Danny hadn’t arrived by the time Cate slid into her place at one end of the committee table in the town library’s reception and circulation-desk area on Monday evening. The folding chairs several of the men on the committee had set out in rows were filling up fast. Before long it would be standing room only. But then, she’d expected the meeting to be packed. The future of Beckwith Tool and Die would affect a lot of lives and pocket-books.
Thank goodness Dad’s too upset and angry to show his face, she congratulated herself. If he came, I wouldn’t be able to exchange a word with Danny, let alone accompany him to Ryersville after the meeting. Afraid her father would change his mind and show up for the sole purpose of embarrassing her and making trouble for the man he hated, she kept glancing nervously at the double glass doors that led to the street. To her relief, Jack McDonough didn’t appear.
Neither did Danny. It was beginning to look as if he might be late.
Cate smiled when Brenda walked in, waved at her and took a seat. She didn’t expect her mother-in-law to attend the meeting. Beverly Anderson had phoned around suppertime to say that Russ was suffering from a bad cold and she thought it best to stay at home with him.
Though Cate knew most of the people who were arriving and nodded hello to some of them as they took their seats, all her real attention was focused on waiting for the dark-haired man who’d disappeared from her life seventeen years earlier. He might break his word to me, but he wouldn’t stand up the whole town, she reassured herself. He must be delayed for a good reason. Maybe it was pouring rain in Chicago and he couldn’t take off in a timely fashion. Or his meeting lasted longer than expected. She imagined him dashing out of the ground-floor lobby of some tall, concrete-and-glass building and hailing a cab to the city’s small, lakefront airport, urging the driver to “step on it” in the crush of rush-hour traffic.
Her newly acquired ability to visualize Danny in the setting where he lived and worked instead of trying to picture him in a vacuum was a luxury she’d never expected to possess. Each detail was precious. She’d spent the weekend and whatever quiet time she could snatch during her busy day of teaching English literature to indifferent teenagers wondering what his apartment was like. Or if he had a house in the suburbs. Trying to envision him in his office setting. With friends. At sporting events. Kicking back in one of his favorite hangouts.
She hoped they could leave together after the meeting without attracting too much attention. Of course, a handful of people were bound to stay on, hoping to put in a good word for themselves or the plant, emphasize its potential for growth and plead for its importance to the small Ohio town where Danny had grown up. They were bound to notice if she stayed, too, and then left with him. Somebody would resurrect the story of their teenage romance, and the inevitable gossip about them would spread, if it hadn’t already.
Yet she didn’t want to drive her own car to Ryersville and meet him there. For once, in almost two decades of missing him, she wanted to be a passenger while he drove, his “date,” in a sense, even if their relationship had to be fleeting.
Despite their limited interaction since his return to Beckwith—a brief phone conversation and a few ill-advised seconds spent pressed to the side of her house in each other’s arms—she’d fallen hard for him again. And she didn’t know what to do about it. Reason and her very real concern for the other people she cared about argued that renewing her relationship with him would never work.
Unfortunately, the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. Now that they’d made contact, she couldn’t bear to lose him again. Yet that was exactly what would happen, she guessed, once he’d resolved the Beckwith Tool and Die situation.
I can’t leave with him, in the unlikely event he asks me to, she thought. Keeping the secret of Brian’s parentage from him would mean living a lie. Yet she couldn’t tell him the truth without hurting the other people she loved. The trauma Brian would suffer if he found out Larry Anderson hadn’t been his real father was too painful to contemplate. She doubted he’d ever recover from it. Or find it in his heart to forgive her for her deception.
Another, more frivolous part of her wanted to impress Danny with how good she looked. Accordingly, she’d dressed up for the meeting. Though its cut was modest, the plum wool-jersey dress she’d worn to school that day clung lightly to her body, calling attention to its slender-but-shapely curves. Her favorite pearl necklace, a gift from Larry on their tenth anniversary, gleamed around her neck.
As the time for the meeting to begin drew closer, the remaining seats filled up. A dozen or so latecomers had taken up standing positions in the back and along the sides of the reception area. Finally, after several glances at the old-fashioned clock above the circulation desk, Beckwith’s mayor, Bud Harvey, who’d agreed to serve as committee chairman, called it to order.
“I want to thank everyone for coming,” he began in his somewhat plodding but friendly way. “We were hoping to have Mr. Daniel Finn, of Mercator Engineering, here to answer your questions about the future of Beckwith Tool and Die. Apparently, he’s been detained. I’m sure he’ll be with us momentarily. Maybe in the meantime we could spend a few minutes going over the various points we want to raise…”
Just then, one of the library’s double glass doors opened to admit another straggler. Danny walked in behind him. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket, indigo shirt and soft-looking tan chino trousers. He appeared somewhat tired, as if he’d had a long day. Cate could feel the color rise in her cheeks as their eyes met.
“Ah, Mr. Finn…glad you could make it,” Bud Harvey greeted him.
Danny smiled. “Sorry to be late. We ran into some fairly strong headwinds flying out of Chicago.…
Seconds later everyone was talking at once. Characterized by strong, if suppressed, emotions from the time its participants had settled in to wait, the meeting degenerated into chaos before Cate could catch the rest of what Danny was saying. As if with one accord, everyone got to their feet and pushed toward the back of the room. Their voices raised to a pitch that made it difficult to hear anything, they surrounded him, demanding information and posing a barrage of worried questions. Though Bud Harvey pounded his gavel repeatedly in an effort to restore order and recall them to their seats, he was unsuccessful. Clearly disgusted by the way the meeting had been hijacked, he gaveled the formal session to a close.
For his part Danny set about answering the questions that were thrust at him from every side. The way things are going, it’ll take several hours for him to satisfy everyone who wants to talk to him, Cate realized. I can’t hang around on the pretext that I might be needed later. It isn’t going to be that kind of meeting. Getting to her feet, she put on her coat and picked up her purse.
Her hope that Danny wouldn’t notice her departure was quickly dashed. “Wait for me,” he mouthed as she edged past the crowd of people surrounding him.
So this is how a butterfly feels when it’s caught in a net, she thought. “If I can,” she responded in like manner, inclining her head toward the building’s exterior.
A moment later she was outside, alone and unobserved in the cool night air. From her vantage point on the library steps, she could see Danny through the panes of the glass doors, doing his best to answer the barrage of questions he was receiving. Quite a few of the people who were pressuring him for answers and, above all, reassurance, were people he’d known as a teenager. Like her father, some of them had looked down on him, criticized his grandmother and his uncle as misfits. Now he held their futures in the palm of his hand. They were arguing, begging and pleading with him to keep the plant open for the sake of their town and their familiar way of life, their families and their livelihoods.
Mesmerized, she assessed his friendly, noncommittal way of responding to them. He’s probably telling them he hasn’t studied the situation adequately to give them any hard-and-fast answers, she thought. And I’m sure that’s the literal truth. Still, though she hated the way some of them had treated him in the past, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. It hurt having