Garden Spells (10 page)

“Ever thought of having kids?” he asked.

“No,” she answered, still staring.

“Never?”

She took her mind off his mouth and thought about it. “Not until you just asked me.”

He took another bite, then pointed to his plate with his fork. “This is wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as well as I have since I met you.”

Maybe it just took a few minutes to kick in. “Next you’re going to tell me I remind you of your mother. I expect more creativity from you. Eat.”

“No, you’re nothing like my mother. Her free spirit doesn’t include anything to do with the kitchen.” She raised her brows at this bit of information. He smiled at her and took another bite. “Go on, you know you want to ask.”

She hesitated a moment, then gave in and asked. “How was she a free spirit?”

“They’re potters, my parents. I grew up in an artists’ colony in Connecticut. You didn’t want to wear clothes? You didn’t have to. You didn’t want to wash the dishes? You broke them and made some more. Do a little pot and sleep with your best friend’s husband. It was all okay. It wasn’t for me, though. I can’t help my artistic nature, but security and routine mean more to me than they do to my parents. I just wish I was better at it.”

You’re looking at an expert
, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud. He would probably like that about her.

Two more bites and he’d cleaned his plate.

She looked at him expectantly. “Did you like it? How do you feel?”

He met her eyes, and she almost fell off her stool from the force of his desire. It was like a hard gust of autumn wind that blew fallen leaves around so fast they could cut you. Desire was dangerous to thin-skinned people. “Like I want to ask you on a date.”

Claire sighed and her shoulders dropped. “Damn.”

“There’s music on the quad at Orion every Saturday night in the summer. Come with me this Saturday.”

“No, I’ll be busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Making you another casserole.”

Sydney’s third day at work was the third day she went without a single walk-in wanting her to cut their hair, and not a single regular White Door patron wanting her to do their shampoo when their own stylist was running behind.

And that was the high point.

At lunchtime, since she didn’t have anything else to do and she had already eaten the olive sandwich and sweet-potato chips Claire had packed for her, Sydney offered to fetch the other stylists’ lunches. They were a nice bunch, and they were encouraging and kept telling Sydney it would get better. But that didn’t extend to sharing their clients. Sydney had to find some way to get how good she was out there, to start bringing people in.

At the Coffee House and at the Brown Bag Café, Sydney chatted up the workers and offered them discounts if they wanted to come to the White Door and let Sydney cut their hair. None seemed too enthusiastic, but it was a start. She walked back to the salon and put the bags of lunches in the break room, then she placed the lattes and iced coffees at the stations where some stylists were still working.

The last station she went to was Terri’s. Sydney smiled and put her soy latte on the counter.

“Thanks, Sydney,” Terri said, elbow deep in highlighting her client’s blond hair.

The client’s head shot up, and Sydney saw that it was Ariel Clark.

Despite her initial desire to demand an apology for what Ariel had put her and Claire through that Saturday night, Sydney held her tongue and walked away without a word. She wanted to salvage what was left of her day.

Ariel Clark, however, had other ideas.

Later, Sydney was sweeping around a station at the other end of the salon when Ariel walked up to her. Emma looked a lot like her mother, the same ice-blond hair, the same blue eyes, the same confident swagger. Even back when Sydney and Emma were friends, Ariel had always been standoffish toward Sydney. When Sydney spent nights at the Clark house, Ariel had always been polite, but there was something about her that made Sydney feel like being there was charity, not acceptance.

When Ariel didn’t move from the only spot left to sweep, Sydney finally stopped.

She managed a polite smile, even though she was choking the broom handle. If she was going to make a success out of this venture, she couldn’t whack White Door clients over the head with a broom, no matter how much they deserved it. “Hello, Mrs. Clark. How are you? I saw you at the party. I’m sorry we didn’t get to say hello.”

“Understandable, sugar. You were working. It would have been inappropriate.” Her eyes slid down the broom to the sad pile of hair Sydney had swept up. “You’re working here, I gather.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t actually…cut hair, do you?” she asked, as if appalled by the thought. A fine beginning, Sydney thought, if everyone in town who knew her was going to react to the news this way.

“Yes, I do actually cut hair.”

“Don’t you need some sort of degree to do that, sugar?”

Her fingertips were going numb and turning white from gripping the broom handle so tightly. “Yes.”

“Hmm,” Ariel said. “So I hear you have a daughter. And who is her father?”

Sydney knew enough not to let Ariel see her vulnerable spots. Once some people knew how to hurt you, they would do it again and again. Sydney had a lot of experience with that. “No one you know.”

“Oh, I’m certain of that.”

“Anything else, Mrs. Clark?”

“My daughter is very happy. She makes her husband very happy.”

“She’s a Clark, after all,” Sydney said.

“Exactly. I don’t know what you hoped, coming back here. But you can’t have him.”

That’s what this was all about? “I know this is going to come as a surprise, but I didn’t come back to get him.”

“So you say. You Waverleys have your tricks. Don’t think I don’t know.” As she walked away, she flipped her cell phone out of her purse and started dialing. “Emma darling, I have the most delicious news,” she said.

Around five o’clock that afternoon, Sydney was going to give up for the day and leave. That’s when she saw a man in a nice gray suit at the reception desk, and she got a sinking feeling.

This day was never going to end.

Hunter John asked the receptionist something and she turned and pointed at Sydney.

He walked across the salon to her. She should have walked away to the break room, avoided him entirely, but memories kept her there. At twenty-eight, his sandy hair was thinning. A better cut would hide it. His hair was still beautiful and shiny, which meant he still had what he had when he was young, but he was losing it. He was turning into someone else.

“I heard you were working here,” Hunter John said when he reached her.

“Yes, I imagine you did.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You have lipstick on your neck.”

He rubbed his neck sheepishly. “Emma came to tell me at work.”

“So you took over your family’s business.”

“Yes.”

Matteson Enterprises was a group of mobile-home manufacturing plants about twenty minutes outside of Bascom. Sydney had worked as a receptionist in the front office the same summers Hunter John had interned there. They used to meet in his father’s office when he went to lunch, and they’d make out. Sometimes Emma would drive out when things were slow, and the three of them would sit on the stacks of lumber outside the warehouse and smoke.

What was his life like now? Did he really love Emma, or had she just gotten him with sex, as Clark women were wont to do? It was Emma, after all, who told Sydney how to give the perfect blow job. It was only years later that a man finally told Sydney she’d been doing it wrong. It suddenly occurred to Sydney that Emma had told her the wrong way to do it on purpose. Sydney had no idea Emma even liked Hunter John. And Hunter John had always said Emma was a little too high-strung for him. Sydney had never put the two together in her mind. But, then, she’d been oblivious to a lot of things back then.

“Can I have a seat?” Hunter John asked.

“Do you want me to cut your hair? I’m great at it.”

“No, I just don’t want it to look like I only stopped by to talk,” he said as he sat.

She rolled her eyes. “Heaven forbid.”

“I wanted to say a few things to you, to clear the air. It’s the right thing to do.” Hunter John always did the right thing. That’s what he’d been known for. The golden boy. The good son. “That night at the party, I didn’t know you’d be there. And neither did Emma. We were as surprised as you. Ariel hired Claire. No one knew you were working for her.”

“Don’t be naive, Hunter John. If Eliza Beaufort knew, everyone knew.”

Hunter John looked disappointed. “I’m sorry for the way it happened, but it was for the best. As you saw, I’m happily married now.”

“Good Lord,” Sydney said, “does everyone think I came back just for you?”

“Why
did
you come back, then?”

“Is this not my home, Hunter John? Is this not where I grew up?”

“Yes, but you never liked who you were here.”

“Neither did you.”

Hunter John sighed. Who was this person? She didn’t know him at all anymore. “I love my wife and kids. I have a great life, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I did love you once, Sydney. Breaking up with you was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

“So hard that you sought comfort in marrying Emma?”

“We married so soon because she got pregnant. Emma and I just grew close after you left. Complete serendipity.”

Sydney had to laugh. “You’re being naive again, Hunter John.”

She could tell he didn’t like hearing that. “She is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He was saying that because he gave up Sydney his life was great.
She
didn’t like hearing that. “Did you go to Notre Dame? Did you travel around Europe like you wanted to?”

“No. Those are old dreams.”

“Seems to me you gave up a lot of dreams.”

“I’m a Matteson. I had to do what’s best for my name.”

“And I’m a Waverley, so I get to curse you for it.”

He gave a little start, like she meant it, and it gave Sydney a curious sensation of power. But then Hunter John smiled. “Come on, you hate being a Waverley.”

“You should go,” Sydney said. Hunter John stood and reached for his wallet. “And don’t you dare leave money for a pretend haircut.”

“I’m sorry, Sydney. I can’t help who I am. Obviously, neither can you.”

As he walked away, she thought what a sad thing it was to say about herself, that she’d only ever loved one man. And that man had to be
that
man, one who had from the beginning relegated her to a youthful indiscretion, when she thought it would be forever.

She wished she really did know a curse.

“I was getting worried,” Claire said when Sydney came into the kitchen that evening. “Bay’s upstairs.”

Sydney opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of water. “I stayed late.”

“How was your day?”

“It was fine.” She walked over to the sink where Claire was rinsing a bowl of blueberries. “So, what are you making? Something to take to Tyler again?”

“Yes.”

Sydney picked up the bouquet of blue flowers laying on the counter by the sink and put them to her nose. “What are these?”

“Bachelor’s buttons. I’m going to sprinkle the blueberry tarts with their petals.”

“And what do they mean?”

“Bachelor’s buttons make people see sharper, helpful for finding things like misplaced keys and hidden agendas,” Claire said easily. The power came so naturally to her.

“So you’re trying to make Tyler realize you’re not what he’s looking for?”

Claire smiled slightly. “No comment.”

Sydney watched Claire work for a while. “I wonder why I didn’t inherit it,” she said absently.

“Inherit what?”

“That mysterious Waverley sensibility you and Evanelle have. Grandma had it too. Did Mom?”

Claire turned off the spigot and reached for a hand towel to dry her hands. “It was hard to tell. She hated the garden, I remember that much. She wouldn’t go near it.”

“I don’t mind the garden, but I guess I’m more like Mom than anyone in the family.” Sydney grabbed a few blueberries and popped them in her mouth. “I don’t have a special thing like Mom, and Mom moved back here so you had a stable place to live and go to school, just like I did for Bay.”

“Mom didn’t move back because of me,” Claire said, as if surprised Sydney thought that. “She moved back so you could be born here.”

“She left when I was six,” Sydney said as she went to the open door to the sunroom porch and looked out. “If it weren’t for those photographs of Mom Grandma gave me, I wouldn’t even remember what she looked like. If I meant something to her, she wouldn’t have left.”

“What did you do with those photos?” Claire asked. “I’d forgotten about them.”

One moment Sydney was tilting her head and taking a deep breath of the herbs drying on the porch, the next moment she was blown out the door, transported on the wind back to Seattle. She landed in the living room of the town house, staring at the couch. She walked to it and lifted one side. There under the couch was an envelope marked
Mom
. It had been so long since she’d felt like looking at the photos that she’d forgotten they were there. These were photos of Lorelei’s life on the road, a life Sydney had tried to emulate for so long. She took the envelope and leafed through the stack of photos, and she found one that made her head want to explode with fear. There was her mother, maybe eighteen years old, standing in front of the Alamo. She was smiling and holding a handmade sign that read
No More Bascom! North Carolina Stinks!
When Sydney was a teenager, she thought it was the funniest thing. But what if David found the envelope? What if he figured it out? She heard him at the front door. She put the envelope back under the couch quickly. He was coming in. He was going to find her there.