It was Melissa’s turn to groan. “Bad pun,” she complained, but she was grateful—wildly and instantly so—and she wanted Ashley to know it. “You’re merely saving my life,” she said next.
“How hard can it be?” Ashley asked. “One small-town parade with—what?—fifteen floats, a high-school marching band, Veterans of Foreign Wars and the sheriff’s posse riding their horses?”
How hard can it be?
“Don’t tempt fate,” Melissa said. “Just because poor Ona has made it look easy all these years, that doesn’t mean it is.”
Ashley sighed. “Try to stay calm,” she said, but she still sounded buoyantly optimistic, and why wouldn’t she? Ashley was happy. Completely in love with her husband, Jack, and thoroughly loved in return. The mother of beautiful Katie and expecting a second child in six months or so. “And since when are you superstitious enough to worry about tempting fate?”
Maybe since always, Melissa thought.
In many ways, their childhoods hadn’t been easy—their mother had left home for good when she and Ashley were small, and their father had been killed in a freak accident while herding cattle on Stone Creek Ranch, struck by lightning.
After that, the four young O’Ballivans had been raised by their grandfather, Big John. While Big John had really stepped up, loving them with all his strong, kindly heart, of course there were issues. Weren’t there always issues?
Did anybody make it to adulthood unscathed? Melissa didn’t think so.
“Melissa?” Ashley said, when she’d been quiet too long.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Melissa insisted. She bit her lower lip, peering into her fridge now, finding nothing that appealed to her. “But what do you want me to do if the vice squad raids your house on grounds of lewd conduct?”
Ashley laughed.
It was a sound Melissa knew well, and loved.
As much a part of her as it was of her sister since, at some level, it sometimes seemed they were one and the same person.
“What do I want you to do?” Ashley teased. “Well, you could maybe loosen up a little. Sign up for the croquet team or something.”
“You are just too hilarious.”
“Melissa?”
“What?”
“Thanks for calling. I love you, I’ll see you in a few days and goodbye.”
Melissa made a face at the receiver and hung up.
Hunger finally drove her to get back to her car, drive to the supermarket, and invest in a salad from the deli department, a carton of low-fat yogurt for breakfast and the new issue of Vanity Fair.
She was on her way back to her car, shopping bag in hand, when she saw Andrea drive up. Spotting Melissa at the last moment, it seemed, the girl didn’t have time to hide her guilty expression.
Melissa smiled cordially and waited until her assistant got out of her old car, slung her purse strap over one shoulder, and nodded a shy “Hello.”
“Feeling better?” Melissa asked, keeping her voice sunny. “Cramps can be pretty terrible.”
Andrea’s taste in clothing was questionable, and so was her memory for watering plants and things like that, but she was basically honest, and Melissa knew she was intelligent, too. If Andrea ever learned to believe in herself, there would be no stopping her.
“I was faking,” the girl said miserably, her confession coming in a breathy little rush. “I didn’t really have cramps.”
“No kidding?” Melissa chimed.
Andrea didn’t catch the faint sarcasm in her boss’s tone. “I went to pick Byron up,” she said, looking down at the asphalt of the parking lot instead of directly at Melissa. “Byron Cahill, I mean.”
“I see,” Melissa said, though she was genuinely surprised. She’d had no clue that Andrea and Byron were friends.
With obvious effort, Andrea made herself meet Melissa’s eyes. Now, there was an obstinate set to the girl’s jaw as she waited for—what? Recriminations? A lecture? The verbal equivalent of a pink slip?
“Byron’s mother was pretty worried when he didn’t get off the bus this afternoon,” Melissa said, feeling weary again. “She thought something bad must have happened.”
Andrea nodded, and her shoulders dropped a little. “I know,” she said, small-voiced. “But everything’s all right now. I took Byron home, and his mom was there, and she’s making pizza. I just came up here to get some sodas and rent a couple of movies.” She had the good grace to blush. “Since it’s Friday night and everything.”
“And everything,” Melissa said lightly.
Andrea straightened her spine. “Are you going to fire me?”
“Probably not,” Melissa answered, thinking how ironic it was that Andrea, Velda and Byron would spend a chummy evening eating pizza and watching DVDs together, while she dined alone on a deli salad. “For future reference, though, if you have personal plans that will take you away from work, just say so. Unless there’s something pressing I need you to do, Andrea, I’ll be happy to give you time off.”
Andrea took that in, looking ashamed again. “It’s just that I thought you’d disapprove. Of Byron and me going together, I mean.”
Melissa looked around to make sure none of the local gossips were hovering nearby, with an ear cocked in their direction. “‘Going together’?” she repeated. “How could you and Byron be—‘going together’—when he’s been in jail for the better part of two years?”
“We were pen pals,” Andrea said. “I’d see Velda around town sometimes, and she’d tell me how lonesome Byron was, locked away like some kind of criminal—”
Melissa put up a hand. In a courtroom, she would have snapped out, “Objection!” In the supermarket parking lot, facing a young woman who’d had a drug-addicted mother and the very elderly Crockett sisters for her main female role models, she took a different tack.
“Hold it,” she said, very quietly. “Byron did get high, consume alcohol, then climb behind the wheel of a car and get into a terrible accident. And someone died in that accident, Andrea.”
Andrea’s eyes widened. She swallowed visibly and then nodded. “I was just telling you what Velda told me,” she said reasonably, softly. “I started writing to Byron, because I know what it’s like to feel all alone, and he wrote back. We got to be friends.” She paused, drew in a breath. “Byron understands how wrong it was, what he did, and so do I.”
Melissa closed her eyes for a moment, surprised to find that they were scalding with tears. “Yes,” she said. She was remembering Chavonne’s funeral, and the graveside service, and how the dead girl’s mother had let out a cry of such raw grief when the coffin was lowered into the ground that Melissa could still hear it, sometimes, in her nightmares.
Andrea stooped a little, peered at Melissa. Moved to touch her arm and then drew back. “Are—are you all right? You look sort of—I don’t know—pale or something.”
Melissa shook her head, not in answer but to indicate that she didn’t want to talk any more that night, and stepped around Andrea to get into the roadster.
It wasn’t until she’d set the grocery bag on the passenger seat, fumbled for her keys, started the engine and driven to the edge of the lot that she looked into her rearview mirror and saw that Andrea hadn’t moved.
She was still standing in exactly the same spot, staring down at the ground.