Love, Suburban Style (36 page)

Funny, Sam thinks, that she signed it so formally, with her last name. As if there could be any other Meg in his life.

Strange, too, that she wants him to meet her in the auditorium at school. Why not here? Or at her place?

Privacy, he realizes. And she’s right about nobody else being in the auditorium at that hour on a Saturday. Even on weekday mornings when school is in session, nobody ever uses that room until afternoon assemblies. It’s always been that way.

Sam carefully folds the papers together again and slips them back into the envelope, then glances at the clock.

It’s past seven now. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed. There’s no way he isn’t going to show.

Meg knocks on Cosette’s door.

No response.

She knocks louder.

Still no response.

She opens the door and sticks her head in. Sure enough, her daughter is still in bed, the covers pulled over her head.

“Cosette?” she calls, wishing she didn’t have to wake her. She had a late night, and it was full of ups and downs.

There was a cast party after the show at Evan Stein’s house. Ben was there, of course, and so was Meryl. They spent a lot of time together—furtively, though, as if they were both aware of Cosette’s feelings. She, however, alternated between glowering at them and flirting with Evan, who’s cute and funny and artistic. Not a bad way to get over Ben, Meg wanted to point out to her daughter—but that would surely send her running in the opposite direction.

“What do you want?” Cosette grumbles, as Meg shakes her a little.

“Have you seen my tote bag?”

“Huh?”

“My tote bag. I remember sticking it into the car after the show, but I can’t find it anywhere.”

“It’s probably still in the car.”

“It’s not. I checked. And I could swear I remember carrying it into the house when we got home from the party.”

“That was the middle of the night. You were probably half-asleep. You must have stuck it somewhere and forgotten.”

“I’ve looked everywhere.”

“Well, I don’t know where it is.” Cosette pulls the covers over her head again.

Meg is stumped.

She must have left it at school, then.

But I distinctly remember bringing it into the house.

She does, because she was thinking she wanted to open that letter she had written to Sam all those years ago.

Then, too exhausted even to see straight, she decided it could wait until morning. She hung the bag on her bedpost and went to sleep.

The letter was the first thing she went for this morning when she rolled out of bed. Now it—and the bag it was in—are nowhere to be found.

“I’m going over to the school to look for it,” she tells Cosette, who mumbles a muffled reply.

Outside, she hurries down the front steps toward the car, her mind on the zillion things she has to do today.

She’s giving two voice lessons later this morning, then Cosette has a soccer game, then the show…

“Meg! That was great, last night!”

She looks up to see Katie waving at her from the steps of Sam’s house next door.

“I’m glad you liked it,” she calls back. “Ben did a good job, didn’t he?”

“He did. C’m’ere, I have to show you something.”

Meg crosses the lawn hurriedly, glad Sam’s car isn’t in the driveway. At least she won’t run the risk of seeing him unexpectedly.

“What is it?” she asks Katie, who’s got an open book on her lap. Rover is curled up at her side.

“It’s a scrapbook, see? I’ve been keeping it for years. I just put the program from the show in it, and I’m going to cut out the write-up that’s going to be in the paper about it and put that in, too.”

“That’s great, Katie. Maybe when you’re older you’ll want to be in a musical.”

“Maybe just a play. I’m not a good singer. That was my mom’s thing. And Ben’s. I have Dad’s voice.” She makes a face.

Meg can’t help but laugh.

“I’m serious. When I was little and we used to go Christmas caroling, Ben said he and Mom used to try and sing really loud to drown us out. Want to see a picture?” She quickly flips the album pages backward, then settles on a page back at the beginning and tilts it for Meg to see.

She finds herself looking at a group shot of people bundled in coats and scarves, standing against a snowy backdrop. Scanning the smiling, cold-nipped faces, she picks out a much younger Sam with an adorable little girl in his arms…

“Is that you?” she asks Katie.

“That’s me. And here’s Ben, and here’s my mom.” She points.

Meg leans in to get a better look… and gasps in shock.

She recognizes Ben’s little-boy face. She’d know it anywhere.

But she also recognizes the woman holding his hand, smiling into the camera.

It’s the same woman Meg saw in her bedroom in the middle of the night.

Sam sits anxiously on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling over, swinging back and forth.

It’s ten after eight. How long is he supposed to wait here for Meg?

The longer he waits, the more nervous he gets.

What is he going to do when she gets here? What is he going to say?

I’ll let her do the talking,
he decides, standing to pace the stage again.
After all, this was her idea.

Yeah, and you’re glad she came up with it.

If she hadn’t written that letter, spilling her true feelings to him…

Well, this silly charade probably would have gone on indefinitely.

But she made the bold first move to end it, and he’s grateful. Her feelings are out in the open, and his will be, too…

If she would just hurry up and get here.

Sam continues to pace, then sit and dangle, then pace again.

What if she doesn’t show up?

Of course she’ll show up. This was her idea.

Well, what if she changed her mind?

Finally, just when he’s reluctantly wondering if he should start thinking about leaving, the auditorium door swings open.

His breath catches in his throat. Meg stands framed in the doorway.

For a moment, it’s as if she doesn’t see him at all. She seems to be looking around for something. Then she steps into the room, letting the door close behind her, and starts down the aisle.

“Sam?” She stops short.

She’s surprised to see me,
he realizes.
She thought I wasn’t going to show. She thought I didn’t feel the same way.

He hurries up the aisle to where she stands, and before she can say another word, he takes her into his arms and kisses her.

When at last they break apart, Meg looks up at him in wonder… and shock.

“I love you,” he tells her in a rush, sensing her vulnerability, needing to know that her feelings are mutual.

“You… do?”

He nods ardently. “It scares the hell out of me to admit it, but it’s true. I love you.”

“Sam…” Her eyes are glistening with tears. “My God, I can’t believe you’re standing here saying this to me.”

“That’s how I felt when I read your letter.”

There’s a pause.

She looks confused. “My letter?”

“Somebody found it and gave it to me… you must have dropped it and thought you’d mailed it, or something…” He trails off, realizing she looks horrified.

“You read that letter?”

He nods slowly. “You did write it… didn’t you?”

“I definitely wrote it. But I never meant for you to see it.”

“I’m glad I did,” he says gently. “If I hadn’t—Anyway… you’re here. Just like you said you’d be. And so am I. Because I don’t want to just drop this and forget it. I want to give it a chance.”

“You… do?”

He nods. “Don’t you?”

She hesitates.

He holds his breath.

Looking into Sam’s eyes, Meg is torn. She should tell him the truth about the letter that somehow found its way into his hands.

And she will tell him. Someday.

But not right yet.

Nor will she tell him that they seem to have an otherworldly matchmaker.

Not now, maybe not ever.

Sam, after all, doesn’t believe in ghosts.

But Meg does. There isn’t a doubt in her mind that the spirit of his late wife has been hanging around her house, scaring people away so that Meg could move in, manipulating her destiny, and Sam’s. Meg will never question whether she has Sheryl’s blessing to love the man—and the children—she left behind.

She knows.

“Meg,” Sam says, his voice strained, “you’ve got to tell me if you still want to give us a chance.”

“Yes. I do.”

“So you meant what you said in the letter, then?”

She nods. “I guess I just… forgot for a minute there. But now I remember. And I meant every word of it.”

“Even the three most important ones?”

“Especially those.” She takes a deep breath. “I love you, Sam.”

“That’s four words.”

“I’ve never been very good at math.”

“That’s what you said about science.”

He’s right, I did say that,
she realizes, remembering that she said it the first day they met, back in August.

Remembering how the strange sound upstairs and the disembodied footsteps downstairs propelled them into each other’s arms that night.

Remembering that afterward, she promised herself she wouldn’t let him break her heart.

And now, here she is, in his arms, looking into his eyes.

“Butterflies,” she murmurs.

“What?”

She smiles. “Nothing. I was just thinking about butterflies… and bees.”

“Isn’t it birds and bees?”

“That, too,” she says with a laugh.

Then he kisses her, and she feels that familiar flutter.

Butterflies,
she thinks contentedly.
Definitely butterflies.

Epilogue

W
hose brilliant idea was an August wedding, anyway?” Geoffrey grumbles, wiping a stream of sweat from his brow.

“It was either this, or wait until Christmas, remember?” Meg tells him, picking up her bouquet. “Otherwise, Cosette and Ben wouldn’t be able to be here. And the weather is too iffy at that time of year.”

In a few days, her daughter will be starting her freshman year at Berkeley, a continent away. A few days after that, Sam’s son will be headed to Duke.

After their brief romantic fling when they first met, the two of them quickly morphed into a sibling relationship, as did Cosette and Katie.

One big happy family, Meg thinks whenever she looks at the three of them together—Cosette no longer an only child. No longer fatherless. Sam stepped as easily into the role as Meg’s ex stepped out of it, treating Cosette just as he does his own daughter.

“Listen,” Geoffrey says, still stuck on the weather, “I’ll take a blizzard over this heat and humidity any day.”

Okay, so it is a little warm here in the kitchen of Sam’s house—
my house, too, now,
Meg reminds herself.

Yesterday, she officially signed over the home next door—the old Duckworth place—to the Shaws, a young couple from the city. He’s a bond trader. She’s a corporate vice president—and pregnant. Someday, she’ll be a working mom, a stay-at-home mom—or a Fancy Mom who runs her children’s lives like she runs her company.

One thing is certain: the Shaws won’t be driven out of their new house by things that go bump in the night.

Meg’s last contact with the resident ghost was the morning her tote bag inexplicably disappeared, sending her back to the school on a fruitless search for it.

Of course, it was hanging on her bedpost at home when she got back, just where she could have sworn she’d left it. Just where she’d looked for it repeatedly.

But if she hadn’t had a reason to go back to the school, she wouldn’t have found Sam there, waiting to tell her that he loved her. If she hadn’t shown up, he probably would have assumed she had changed her mind, and left.

So it was fate.

Fate, Meg believes, helped along by something supernatural.

Katie is the only one who knows about that. She confessed one night not long after Meg and Sam got engaged that she had occasionally seen her mother sitting on her bed in the middle of the night, as if watching over her.

“Please don’t tell my dad, though. He might get upset, or he won’t believe me. Nobody does.”

“I do.” Meg told her then that she, too, had seen Katie’s mother.

“She was trying to tell you she wanted you and Dad to be together. That’s what I think.”

That’s what Meg thinks, too.

And here we are, on our wedding day.

“I just wish you had let me throw you a fancy wedding somewhere in the city,” says Geoffrey, newly wealthy thanks to his unexpected success as a regular in a sitcom that became a smash hit last fall. “Someplace
air-conditioned,
” he adds pointedly, mopping his brow.

“That’s sweet of you, but we wanted to get married right here at home, in the garden.” Meg glances at the backyard setting, beyond the blooming geraniums on the windowsill.

She spots Chita Rivera walking along a branch in the maple tree as if bent on getting a prime vantage point for the proceedings. Beneath the tree, Rover—dashingly dressed by his master in a black bow tie for the occasion—dozes in a patch of shade.

On the lawn, rows of white-draped chairs wait expectantly on either side of a grassy aisle. A flower-and-ivy-decked arch has been set up beneath the maple tree. The first guests have begun to arrive. There’s Olympia Flickinger, with Brad and Sophie, sailing into a prime seat in the front row. They’ve grown on Meg and while they’ll never be her closest friends, they’re an intrinsic part of the community—and her new life here.

Meg smiles, watching Sam’s brother Jack, the head usher, lean in to tell Olympia those seats are reserved for Meg’s parents.

Displaying her personal trademark blend of pique tempered by impeccable breeding, Olympia allows herself to be steered into the second row, where Jenny and Gary already have the seats closest to the aisle there. Amused, Meg watches Olympia attempt to convince them to move in and let her have the aisle.

To their credit, Jenny and Gary hold their ground, and the Flickingers move somewhat huffily on down the row.