Gator’s Garage.
One glimpse of the blue building, fronted by a hand-painted sign fashioned out of an old tractor-trailer tire, and Meri was fifteen again and getting her first clumsy kiss from Jack Barlow—and a year later, going through her first clumsy breakup. She remembered the smell of the motor oil, the dark spreading stain of it in the center of the garage floor, and most of all, Jack’s blue eyes, sad and serious, as he told her they were over. That he wanted more than a beauty-queen girlfriend, he wanted someone grounded, real. The words had stung and stayed with her long after he’d shipped out for the Middle East a week later. She’d headed in the opposite direction, to the Miss Teen America beauty pageant, and vowed to forget Jack Barlow ever existed.
A horn honked. Meri jerked her attention back to the road, and a moment later, Gator’s Garage was behind her. She took a right on Maple, a left on Elm, then turned again on Cherrystone and faced the house she had left in her rearview mirror five years ago.
It sat at the end of the cul-de-sac like a presiding queen, two stories of white clapboard with porches that stretched from end to end on both stories. The driveway flared out in pale bricks, laid before the Civil War and still flanked by twin willows draped with Spanish moss. It could have been 1840 instead of the twenty-first century, and in some areas of life inside that house, the world still ran as if Abraham Lincoln reigned in the White House.
The Toyota coughed again, jerked like an asthmatic, then sputtered to a stop in front of the house. Great.
Meri let out a long breath, but it did little to ease the tension in her neck, the tight band between her shoulders. With the car engine quiet and dead now, the North Carolina heat began to bake her in place.
The urge to turn around, to flee, to avoid what was coming, surged through her. Instead, she pulled out the keys and clasped them in her hand. The hard metal indented her palm with a dose of reality. She wasn’t running back to New York, not today, maybe not for a long while.
She had good reason to be here, one frail eighty-four-year-old reason. Grandpa Ray trumped everything else going on in her life.
Meri’s mother came out onto the front porch and crossed her arms over her chest. Meri could have spotted the look of disapproval and disappointment on Anna Lee Prescott’s face from the space station. She knew that look, knew it far too well.
Still, the masochistic hope that things might have changed rose in her chest and burned for a brief second. No, given the look on her mother’s face, there was little chance Anna Lee had done a one-eighty in the last five years. The best Meri could hope for was a forty-five-degree turn in the direction of common sense.
Meri ran a quick comb through her wind-blown hair, then headed up the sloping driveway and down the brick path leading to the front porch. Beside her, the manicured lawn unfurled like a lush green carpet, flanked by precisely pruned rosebushes and strategically placed annuals. A wooden swing hung from a long thick oak tree branch, drifting slightly in the breeze. It could have all been a spread in a magazine—and had been, twice, in Southern Living and Architectural Digest.
Her three-inch heel caught in the space between the pavers and Meri cursed her footwear choice. For hundreds of miles, she’d told herself she no longer cared what her mother thought.
Yeah, right. If that was so, then why had she exchanged her flip-flops for designer heels that pinched her toes and made her calves ache? Why had she spent twenty minutes smoothing the frizz out of her hair in the bathroom at a roadside truck stop?
Did I really think wearing heels and straightening my hair would make this easier?
Yeah, she had. Way to go, lying to herself.
When Meri reached the first porch step, an automatic smile curved across her face, as if she were stepping onto a stage instead of into her childhood home. All that practice had been good for something, it seemed. She could still prance around in high heels and look happier than a bird in the sky. “Hi, Momma.”
“Why, as I live and breathe,” Anna Lee said, emerging from the door frame to grasp Meri’s hand with both of her own. “My prodigal daughter has returned.”
Meri leaned in and pressed a kiss to her mother’s cheek. She caught the faint scent of floral perfume, mingled with the oversweet fragrance of hair spray and the mild notes of the powder dusting her flawless makeup. Everything about Anna Lee was as manicured and perfect as the lawn. Tawny hair sprayed into a submissive bob, white cotton shirt and navy shorts pressed into straight lines, and subdued, pristine makeup.
Anna Lee drew back and cupped Meri’s cheeks in her soft palms. “You look so worn-out, honey. Are you sleeping well? Eating right?” Her thumb skipped over the scar and she averted her eyes, as if pretending she hadn’t seen the red line would make the whole horrible thing disappear. “Why don’t you come in, splash some cold water on your face and get a little makeup on? You’ll feel right as rain.”
Irritation bubbled inside Meri, but she widened her smile and kept her lips together so she wouldn’t say something she’d regret. “It was a long drive, Momma. That’s all.”
Anna Lee’s thumb traced a light touch over the scar running down the left side of Meri’s face. “Is it...?”
Meri captured her mother’s hand and drew it down. “I’m fine, Momma. Really.”
Her mother looked as though she wanted to disagree, but instead she nodded and pasted on a mirror smile to Meri’s. “Let’s get out of this heat. I swear, I’m about ready to melt into a puddle, just stepping onto the veranda.”
Anna Lee drew out the syllables in true Southern belle tones, whispers tacked on the end of her consonants. Meri always had liked the way her mother talked, in a sort of hushed song that drew people in, captivated them.
And had captivated two husbands, both deceased now, God bless their souls, leaving Anna Lee a very wealthy woman. She had returned to her Prescott roots, the more respected name of her first husband, as if the second husband had never existed, a mistake she had erased.
Although Jeremy Prescott had come from the other side of town, he’d shed his past as if shaking mud off his boots and managed to put himself through school and make millions in investment banking before a heart attack took him down at the age of fifty. Meri had never understood why her father hadn’t wanted to be like his simple, homespun family—the very people Meri loved the most. Grandpa Ray was one of the most real people Meri had ever known, living in his cabin by the lake, a planet away from the son and daughter-in-law who had made their life in this over-manicured mansion.
Meri let her mother hustle her in and down the polished hall, because it was easier than trying to stop the tidal wave of Anna Lee. They took a left and entered the rarely used formal sitting room, where cushions held their shape and dust motes held their breath.
In five seconds, Meri realized why her mother had led her here. The room glistened with gold and silver, shining on glass shelves mounted against two walls. A rainbow of ribbons hung from a custom-made display rack, while a thousand rhinestones sparkled their way through the rows and rows of crowns.
Meri sat on the stiff white love seat, its curved lion’s feet pairing alongside her nude pumps. Her mother perched on the rose-colored armchair across the room, divided from her daughter by an oval mahogany coffee table and an Aubusson carpet that had cost more than a small car. The antique grandfather clock in the corner ticked away the moments with a beat of heavy, unspoken expectations.
Meri shifted in her seat. God, it was like being in a mausoleum. “Momma, wouldn’t we be more comfortable on the back porch?”
Her mother waved off that suggestion. “There are men out there.”
She said the word men as if referring to a plague of locusts. Anna Lee never had liked to be around those who performed manual labor. Maybe