She still wore her auburn hair long. It was in a messy ponytail today, making her look more like eighteen than the twenty-seven he knew she was. Blue eyes darted everywhere but at him.
This was more awkward than he’d ever imagined it would be.
Not that he’d imagined walking into a candy store and running into Louisa. For years he’d imagined running into her at home in Lyonsville, Georgia, but he never had. Finally he’d simply decided she wasn’t coming back. But that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about her.
And now here she was.
“So, how are you?” What he wanted to ask was, How could you? But he didn’t.
“Fine. Fine. And yourself?”
“Fine.”
So polite. After all they’d shared, they were reduced to pleasant, little, meaningless social nothings.
Silence hung in the room, thick and painful.
Louisa finally broke it by asking, “So what brings you to Erie?”
“I took a job in the E.R. at the hospital. It was a great offer. Plus, you can walk outside and see the bay.”
He wanted to ask if she remembered all the times they’d talked about Lake Erie, about living on its shores, about buying a sailboat and going out every evening to watch the sunset.
He wanted to ask, but he didn’t. Too much time had passed, and childhood dreams were long since put away.
“So, you did it, then. You’re a doctor,” she said. “I’m not surprised. I always knew you could, I just wasn’t sure if your parents would let you. And you’re working in an emergency room. I know your dad wanted something more in keeping with the family image. A surgeon or some other impressive specialty.”
“I didn’t let my father live my life back in school, and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.” He left the underlying accusation that it was about the only thing that hadn’t changed.
Louisa might look like the girl he’d known so long ago, but she wasn’t who he’d thought she was back then, and he was sure she was even less like his imagined first love now.
“And you?” he asked. “Did you study marketing or advertising like you planned?”
“No. Things—” She stopped short.
Joe wondered what she’d been about to say.
“Well,” she continued, “my plans changed. I came to work in Erie. I opened The Chocolate Bar last year. It’s all mine. At least with the bank’s help it is.”
“When I came here, I never expected to find you here. After—” He forced himself to cut off any recriminations. “Well, it just never occurred to me you’d have come here. Actually, this was the last place I thought I’d find you.”
“You were wrong,” she said with a small shrug of her shoulders.
“What made you look for a job in Erie?”
Erie, Pennsylvania.
When they were in high school back in Lyonsville, they’d sworn they wanted to leave town. They wanted to move someplace where no one knew who the Clancys or the Delacamps were. They wanted to go someplace where they could be anonymous, where no one knew their family histories three or more generations back.
They wanted a chance to be just Joe and Louisa.
Joe remember that day when, as a joke, they’d thrown a dart at a map. It had landed on Lake Erie, just beyond the Erie shoreline.
We’ll move to Erie when I graduate, Louisa had said, laughing.
All these years later, he could still hear the sound of her laughter.
Despite the hardships in her life—her father had been the town drunk before he died and had left Louisa and her mother impoverished—she’d always been laughing. A quiet, joy-filled sound that had made his heart constrict even as it had made her blue eyes light up.
There was no laughter in those eyes today. Just wariness as she answered, “It’s just that I always thought I’d live here. I’d spent such a long time dreaming about a Great Lake, about a place where I could just be me, not ‘Clancy’s kid’—you know how they used to say it with that mixture of scorn and pity in their voices. I just wanted to leave that behind.”
When she’d left that behind, she’d left him behind, as well. Joe didn’t understand it then, and he didn’t now, but he was too proud to ask her why.
Why she’d left him when he would have followed her anywhere.
“I drove here on a whim. I drove to the foot of the dock. It wasn’t as touristy then as it is now. But I stood there, and could look at the peninsula across the bay, and I knew this was home, just like I’d always dreamed it would be.”
“That’s how I felt, too,” he said. “I’d been working at the hospital in Lyonsville, but wanted to do something different. A friend told me he knew someone who was on staff at a hospital that needed an E.R. doctor. When I checked it out and found it was in Erie, well, I knew it was the job for me, so here I am.”
“Welcome to Erie.” She glanced at a door toward the back of the shop, then at her watch. “But as much as I’ve enjoyed catching up, it’s time for me to close.”
“I came in to buy something for the nurses and aides in the E.R. Everyone’s been so great helping me settle in, and I wanted to thank them.”
“Fine, but we need to make it quick. What did you have in mind?”
She was looking at the back of the room again.
Joe looked, as well, but all he could see was a door framed by shelves, loaded with little trinkety sorts of items.
“Do you have any suggestions?” he asked.
“Would you like an assortment of chocolates? That way you’re bound to have something everyone will like in the mix.”
“Fine. Give me…what do you think? Five pounds?”
“Well, that would ensure that everyone got their share and then some.”
“Great. Five pounds, then.”
He watched as Louisa ducked behind the big glass case. She plucked handfuls of chocolate from this pile, then from that, filling up a huge box.
Five pounds of chocolate was an awful lot of chocolate. Not only could he treat the staff, but all the patients, as well.
“So this is all yours?” he asked, needing to fill up the silence.
“Like I said, it’s mine and the bank’s. I bought out my old boss’s equipment when he decided to get out of the candy business.”
She smiled when she mentioned her old boss. Joe felt a spurt of something hot. What was it?
No way could it be jealousy. He and Louisa hadn’t seen each other in almost a decade. They had no claims on the other. He had no cause to be jealous.
“The lease was up on his store,” she continued, “so I moved everything here. Perry Square is perfect. There are so many businesses down here, and there’s been such a surge in tourism that The Chocolate Bar has done well its first year.”
“I’m happy for you.” He paused, looking for something else to say. “Do you ever go home?”
“No. With Mama dying six months after I left…well after that, there was nothing holding me there.”
“I heard about your mother. I was sorry.”
“Me, too. She’d have loved—” Louisa stopped short and stared at him a moment, then gave a little shake of her head “—to see me succeed. She always told me I could do anything I set my mind to.”