“Brian has a job,” she continued. “Mom’s already mentioned that fact about fifty times. He’s working for a construction company.”
“You’re making too much of this.”
“I don’t think so,” Chrissie muttered. “What she’s really saying is that if I’d looked for a job like she wanted me to over spring break, I’d have one waiting for me now.” She could imagine the constant barrage of digs that lay in store for her. Her mother couldn’t bear the thought of Chrissie being idle all summer, so she’d threaten to line up babysitting jobs for her. Babysitting at almost twenty? In Chrissie’s opinion, that was cruel and unusual punishment.
“She seems to believe that finding temporary employment is easy. I suppose I could get a job at a fast-food place, but even those aren’t as available as they used to be. Besides, I don’t want to spend my summer asking someone if they want fries with that.”
“Well…” He clearly wasn’t interested in arguing with her.
“As a last resort, my dad will leap to the rescue and offer me a pity job.”
“A what?”
“He’ll bring me to his office and I’ll be reduced to doing menial tasks, for which he’ll pay me minimum wage.” She sighed. “It’s going to be a dreadful summer. I can tell.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jason countered absently.
Chrissie doubted he’d even heard her. His mind certainly wasn’t on her; that much was apparent. She looked at him and frowned, unsure what to think. Something had changed between them. She could feel it—had felt it from the moment he arrived. Jason had never been late before.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, then added, “Between us, I mean.”
He glanced at her and shrugged. “Sure. Why shouldn’t it be?”
Instinct said otherwise. “You drove Katie to the airport last night, didn’t you?”
“You know I did.”
Chrissie noticed that his hand tightened around the steering wheel. What had happened between him and Katie the night before? She didn’t mention how long he’d spent at the airport. Originally she was supposed to tag along, but Katie had a lot of stuff and it would’ve been a tight fit in a small car, so she’d stayed behind. That, apparently, had been a mistake.
Nothing had happened, she told herself. Chrissie couldn’t believe Jason would do that to her. Besides, Katie was one of her best friends. They planned on renting a house together in a few months. The last thing Katie would do was steal Jason away from her.
No, neither of them would betray her, Chrissie thought firmly.
The rest of the drive was completed in an uncomfortable silence.
Jason drove up to the curb at the airport and Chrissie climbed out as soon as he came to a stop. Without a word, Jason jumped out and opened the trunk, heaving her suitcase onto the ground.
“The summer will go fast,” he said with false cheerfulness. “You’ll be back here in no time.”
“Right,” she agreed with the same fake exuberance. “No time at all.”
Jason nodded. “I’ll call you soon.”
She nodded, too, and dragged her bag onto the sidewalk. “I guess I’d better get inside.”
“Have a great summer.”
She tried to smile. “You, too.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, but it fell short of just about every other kiss they’d exchanged. She was afraid she was losing Jason and it broke her heart.
CHAPTER
4
Susannah wasn’t looking forward to this trip back to Colville. The eastern Washington community was like small towns all over the country. Her eyes went immediately to the town clock, which featured a statue of a frontiersman, as she drove through the city center. Colville with its JCPenney store on Main Street was the big city to many of the smaller communities surrounding it. There was a traffic roundabout now, but while she was growing up, Colville had the only traffic light in Stevens County.
It was small-town America at its best.
And its worst.
The drive took seven hours with a brief lunch break. As Susannah rolled into the outskirts of town, her tension grew. She turned the music up louder, trying to lose herself in the insistent beat of the Rolling Stones. The first building she passed was the Burger King restaurant, which had closed its doors. It was probably the only franchise in the entire chain to go out of business. The bowling alley came next. The sign out front listed the special of the day as a breakfast of two eggs, toast and coffee for $2.99—up from the $1.99 of her childhood. That had been the special for as long as Susannah could remember.
She drove past Colville Mortuary, which had once been owned by her uncle Henry, who was long dead now. Susannah had grown up with hordes of cousins, none of whom had settled in the area. They, too, had no reason to stay in Colville.
As she continued down Main Street, she felt a growing sense of dread. Getting her mother into an assisted-living complex wasn’t a prospect she relished. This anxiety, however, resulted from more than the difficult task that awaited her. When Susannah left Colville for college, she’d never looked back. Oh, she’d returned any number of times over the years, but whenever she did, the familiar depression returned, too. Part of that had to do with her brother’s death; he was killed in a car accident the year she turned eighteen. She was in a French boarding school at the time, and her father’s phone call had come in the middle of the day. A call from America was sure to be bad news. And it was. It’d been the worst news of her life. Her brother, older by three years, had died in a crash on a notoriously bad curve just outside Colville.
Susannah’s world changed forever that day. If her brother’s death wasn’t devastating enough, her father had refused to fly her home for the funeral. She never forgave him for that. He’d been the one who insisted on shipping her off to France in the first place. Then, while she was so far from home, her whole life had collapsed. Susannah was never the same afterward. Her parents had never recovered, either.
It seemed to her that whatever happiness her parents had shared vanished after Doug died. Joy fled from their lives, leaving their marriage stark and empty. That was Susannah’s perception, although her mother had a different version of events, a version Susannah considered a case of denial. But then, how could Vivian have stayed with her husband if she’d been honest about her unhappiness—and his role in it?
When Susannah had returned from her year away, she could barely tolerate living in the same house. After she left for college, she didn’t even consider moving back.
Doug’s death wasn’t the only reminder she brought with her. She couldn’t come here and not think about Jake Presley—especially now that he’d invaded her dreams on a nightly basis. Any number of times over the years she’d wondered about him, but never more than in the last few months. The sweet tenderness of her first love had been ruined by her father, too.
Susannah wanted to believe that Jake was happy, a husband and father, and successful in whatever field he’d chosen. It’d taken her a long time to get over him—but she had. Or so she’d thought.
Shaking her head to clear her mind, Susannah slowed her car to the reduced thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. She passed Benny’s Motel and the Safeway store where her mother had shopped for fifty years. The four-block-square City Park was behind the motel. Farther down the street was Ole King Cole’s restaurant. Every year on Mother’s Day, that was where her father took her mother for dinner. Either there or Acorn’s.
Refusing to be ambushed by the past, Susannah forced herself to stare straight ahead. When she reached the end