Love in Bloom (22 page)

“Maybe Isabella and I ought to run into Manhattan tomorrow and do some shopping.”

“Or you could go with Kenneth and me on Tuesday,” Lily suggested timidly.

“Sure. Or you could go with us and meet Kenneth there,” Tate said, smiling. “No reason for Kenneth to tag along on a shopping expedition if he doesn’t have to.”

“Right,” Lily agreed, flashing a wide smile. She ducked her head, and Tate laughed, for no other reason than he felt like it. She laughed, too, and they finished the drive in comfortable silence.

“I’ll call Kenneth and explain things to him,” Tate told her.

“I’ll work it out with Sherie. She doesn’t normally close up the shop, but I’m sure she can manage it.”

“Maybe we can make a day of it then,” Tate said, “since we’re going all that way.”

He watched her big blue eyes go soft behind the lenses of her glasses. “That sounds wonderful.”

“I’ve been meaning to drive Isabella by my alma mater. This would be a good opportunity to do that. I may not be a lawyer, but I do have a degree in animal husbandry, you know.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t.”

“Now you do. I hope you’re suitably impressed.”

She laughed. “I am.”

“Good.”

“Just one thing,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Bring your old suit coat with you. Maybe it can be let out.”

“Okay. Worth a try.”

Meanwhile he’d be praying that he wasn’t making a gargantuan mistake, that Lily would ultimately see things his way. Otherwise shopping might be the only future they’d ever have.

Chapter Fourteen

S
he would not jump to conclusions. All her life Lily had formed crushes on unattainable men, usually from afar. Few had even known of her regard; one or two had. The latter had either chosen to ignore her or—in one particularly humiliating case—to laugh at her, treating her short-lived regard like a cross between his due and a joke. In this case Tate had made it plain that he didn’t want to marry again or have more children. Given her history and his, she would be more than merely stupid to get her hopes up.

Besides, if Tate was going to change his mind and marry again, Bygones was filled with more likely candidates than her. Lily ran into them everywhere she went on Monday: tall, curvy Melissa Sweeney with her long red hair and bright green eyes; blue-eyed, brunette Allison True, a local girl returning home to Bygones; Whitney Leigh—Tate liked girls who wore glasses, after all—even Sherie, who smiled so brightly these days that she lit up any room she entered. Tate was bound to have noticed, or soon would, all the young women at church who had cast such admiring glances at him last Sunday.

Oh, Tate had kissed her, true, but when had Lily Farnsworth ever been any man’s likeliest prospect?

Still, she looked forward to Tuesday with almost painful anticipation. Lily had dated. Of course, she had dated. She had been asked out to the odd dinner, movie, party, concert…A few times she had even dated the same man repeatedly. Sadly, none of those men had really interested her—or she them. They had each stopped calling; she hadn’t minded.

This wasn’t even a date, and yet she couldn’t have looked forward to it more. She was going to spend a whole day with Tate and Isabella. Beyond that, she dared not contemplate.

She dressed with care, pairing skinny black jeans with a long sleeveless top of cool blue lace. To this she had added skimpy yellow flats and a long wide yellow scarf that could double as a shawl in the evening. She had twisted two long strands of hair at each of her temples and caught them loosely at her nape with a small gold clip. Silver earrings and a number of silver and gold bangles on her right wrist completed her ensemble.

Despite a busy morning Lily couldn’t help watching the clock. Even as she discussed and took orders for a wedding anniversary, two birthdays, a college acceptance, a mortgage pay-off and a club luncheon, Lily kept an eye out for Tate. When he finally arrived, however, he took her by surprise, slipping in with Isabella as a customer left, so that she didn’t hear the bell herald their arrival.

“You look great.”

The sound of his voice made her jump, turn and laugh.

“Thank you.”

Isabella beamed at her across the counter, her carroty hair tamed into two thick braids that lay flat against her head. “Daddy says I can buy a new top on account of the hem’s coming down on my old one.”

“Is that so?” Lily replied, feigning ignorance. She shouldn’t be so happy, but she couldn’t help it.

“Are you ready to go?”

“I can’t leave until Sherie gets here.”

“Oh. We’ll walk down to the pet store then and exchange a duplicate gift.”

Lily checked the clock on the wall. “Won’t be long.”

Sherie came in less than ten minutes later, and Tate returned with Isabella not long after that. Lily grabbed her handbag, gave last-minute instructions to Sherie and led the way out of the store.

As soon as they reached the truck, Isabella presented her with a piece of paper.

“I almost forgot!”

It was another coloring, this time of a rosebush with pink roses. She had drawn butterflies on it.

“How lovely. Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Lily remarked as Tate handed her into the front seat of the truck. “After seeing all those childhood mementos on your mother’s kitchen walls, I got to wondering where you keep Isabella’s.”

“I have a special place for them.”

Lily waited for him to walk around and get inside. “It’s just that my mother had a very organized system. She always displayed our artwork and awards on her desk at work for two weeks. Then it went into a special box. At the end of every year, she sat down with my sister and me to choose two special pieces for each of us to go into a keepsake book. Of course, if it didn’t fit in the book, it wasn’t saved, but now Mom has a very nice, orderly, year-by-year record of our childhood.”

“Oh? That sounds…organized. At least it doesn’t take over the whole house that way.” Tate started up the truck. “Dad says that there was a time when my sister’s and my junk completely took over his and Mom’s place. You know how it is, though. Stuff falls apart and gets lost. Only the most tangible things seem to remain. Those don’t seem like the kind of things that usually fit into a book.”

He eased the truck out into traffic and drove toward Granary Road.

“No,” Lily said, “they’re not.”

“The keepsake book is a good idea, though, for all those colorings and certificates and such. As for the other things, I guess I’ll keep hanging them on my bedroom wall.”

“So that’s where you keep them,” Lily said.

“Mmm-hmm. After I cleared out Eve’s things, it always looked kind of bare, so when Isabella started presenting me with her artwork, I used it to fill the empty places, and one thing led to another.” He shrugged, turning onto Granary and heading south. “Now it’s one of my favorite rooms in the house.”

“I got almost one whole wall covered,” Isabella put in from the backseat. “That leaves three more. I’m saving one in case I get a baby sister someday.”

“Isabella!” Tate scolded. “We’ve talked about that.”

“I know, Daddy.”

“There aren’t going to be any baby sisters.”

“But, Da-a-ad.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

Isabella said nothing more, and neither did Lily. She imagined that they were both equally disappointed by Tate’s attitude.

* * *

“What do you think?” Tate rolled his shoulders inside the sleek black suit coat.

Lily smoothed her fine hands over his back. “Sleeve length is good. Fits well in the shoulders, but it needs taking in at the waist.”

“We can handle that,” the salesclerk assured them, producing a thin piece of chalk. A small, dapper man of middle years, he quickly marked up the suit, including the hem on the pants.

“The thing is,” Tate told the man as he worked, “we need it done by close of business today. Also, I have another suit coat that needs letting out, if possible.” Lily produced the gray jacket and showed the clerk where it needed attention.

The salesclerk checked his wristwatch. “Give us until 9:00 p.m.”

“All right.”

“Perhaps you’d like to take a look at our dress shirts and silk ties, as well. We have a two-for-one sale going on.”

“Won’t hurt to look,” Tate said, winking at Lily on his way to the dressing room to change back into his jeans. He was actually enjoying this. Lily’s eye for color and style had already influenced his choices more than she might realize. She’d passed right over the lighter summer colors and gone straight to the “classics.”

“Listen,” she’d said, “if you’re only going to have one good suit, it has to be a black suit. You can wear a black suit anywhere. Dress it up, dress it down, wear it with a vest, wear it without a vest, tie, no tie, collared shirt, T-shirt, any color, white… Everything else has limitations. With black, your options are unlimited.”

She’d apparently forgotten to mention that black looked expensive. That part he’d figured out for himself. When he came out, having handed off the suit to the clerk, she and Isabella had already picked out several shirts and ties for him to look at. The clerk brought over a sports jacket that would work with blue, gray and black. A Western style, it fit nicely without alteration. Tate bought the lot. While the clerk boxed and bagged and scribbled on his sales pad, Lily pulled Tate aside.

“I can’t believe you’re buying so much. Are you sure about this?”

“Why not?”

“The man who got married in blue jeans and a tuxedo jacket has turned into a clotheshorse?”

“The boy,” he corrected gently. “I got married in the same getup that I wore to the senior prom, by the way.”

“The prom. Really?”

“It was what all the guys were wearing, not that there’s anything wrong with it. I expect I’ll be turning up at church in jeans and a sports coat before long. It’s just that I’m well past the senior prom now.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? I married right out of high school. Graduated at the end of May, married the third of August.”

“I knew you were young. I didn’t realize you were that young.”

“I didn’t turn eighteen until the following September, and I was just short of twenty when she died.”

Lily shook her head. “From prom to marriage in a matter of weeks. I can hardly imagine it.”

He smiled, whispering, “I’m trying to imagine what you wore to prom.” Turning her to the full-length mirror in the center of the department, he let his gaze roam over her. He’d never seen a woman as well put together as her. Granted, her style wasn’t the usual sort. Soft with unexpected twists, unique without being shocking, artistic but entirely approachable, that was Lily, beautiful Lily.

“I didn’t go,” she said, locking gazes with him in the mirror. “Why would I? None of my friends went. Who wants to stand around in the shadows watching the girls with dates dance?”

He spun her around to face him. “What do you mean, the girls with dates? You mean no one asked you to your prom?”

She looked at him over the rims of her glasses. “To the prom? Tate, no one asked me out in high school, period.”

He clapped a hand to the nape of his neck, loudly demanding, “What is wrong with the guys in Boston?” She rolled her eyes, and he couldn’t help it. He shook her. Just once. Not very hard. “Don’t do that!” he hissed. Of course, by then, everyone in the area was staring at them, including Isabella, who had been sitting on the floor making faces into a mirror for footwear.

He cleared his throat. “Stop selling yourself short.”

Lily became very interested in the center of his chest.

“I was awkward,” she said softly, “and
stupidly
shy and skinny, so skinny my parents thought I was anorexic. They took me to doctors. It was embarrassing.”

“You’re not anorexic or stupid.”

“I know. I was skinny, and I was painfully shy. As much as I hated it, law school was good for me. You can’t get through it without learning to speak in public.”

“I’m sure that’s so,” he told her, “but you’re still a better florist than you were a lawyer, and I’m glad because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t have come to Bygones.”

She smiled, and he turned to signal Isabella. “Let’s pay and go to the children’s department.”

He turned toward the checkout counter. “Maybe after we meet Kenneth and have dinner, we can find a movie to kill some time.” And he could put his arm around Lily without anyone noticing.

“That could be fun.”

And dangerous. This whole thing with Lily was dangerous and foolish. Why, he wondered, couldn’t he help himself?

* * *

They bought Isabella several new tops, a pair of jeans and a skirt. She declared it Christmas in July. Tate just said that he’d been putting off seeing to their wardrobes for too long. Lily wondered and said nothing, enjoying the whole exercise. They met Kenneth at the bank and completed the transaction concerning the van. Tate invited him to join them for dinner, but Kenneth declined, saying that he had to get back to Bygones and see to his mother and son.

After driving around town to take in the sights, they picked an appropriate movie and sat in a darkened theater, laughing at the 3-D antics of a cast of wisecracking animated animals. Lily was painfully conscious of the arm that Tate draped casually about her shoulders. Neither did the gesture escape Isabella’s keen gaze. Even while laughing uproariously, Isabella kept cutting her gaze at Tate’s hand, where it rested with such seeming innocence against Lily’s upper arm.

Lily couldn’t help wondering if Tate had changed his mind about marrying again. He certainly hadn’t changed it about having another child, and so far as Lily was concerned, the two went hand in hand. Sitting there next to him, she tried to tell herself that having her own baby wasn’t such a big deal, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. Why, she asked herself, did the one man who showed a genuine interest in her turn out to be the one man with whom she shouldn’t, couldn’t, let herself fall in love?

The movie ended, and they walked a yawning Isabella to the truck. Tate belted her into her booster, and it became obvious that she would soon be sleeping, so he left her and Lily sitting out in the parking lot while he rushed into the department store to pick up his tailoring. Isabella didn’t drop off immediately, however. She lasted long enough to embarrass Lily thoroughly.