The Winners Circle Page 19

  “I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said.

  “I guessed it was you.” He’d heard the uncertainty in her voice. It wasn’t all that different than the first time they’d made love. He gave her credit. She had guts to go through with a risky plan.

  She stretched her legs and crossed her ankles, but she didn’t appear entirely comfortable. He recognized the tension in her feet—an exaggerated arch in her foot. He wondered if he’d caused it to appear. He’d frozen at the sight of her. What was his body language saying? His hands were jammed in his pockets. His knees felt shaky. He wanted to move, but in which direction?

  “I thought of writing a letter,” she said.

  “You sent a telegram.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What would the letter say?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “All of it. You knew better.” She looked down and batted her eyes. She was embarrassed, but it was real emotion, like the last time they’d met. It was wonderful to see. “When did you get so much smarter than me?”

  “From a lifetime of watching you.”

  “What did you see?”

  “You’re asking me now?”

  “I bet you saw a woman running from herself.”

  “Yeah, I saw that, but you wound up running from the parts I liked the best.” He heard himself fashion confessions when he’d come to only listen to hers, but another part of him knew that he wouldn’t have been able to speak so frankly just one year ago. “And did it work? Did you get away from yourself?”

  “Like you said, just the best parts.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “You said it. You tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.”

  Even now, he wasn’t comfortable with her speaking like this. In his old-fashioned sense of men and women, he wanted to be loved by the best, and if he held any chance of grabbing what he thought Chelsea was offering, he wasn’t going to knock the girl down further. “I wasn’t totally honest either. I’ve been angry with you for a while.”

  She nodded. “How did we end up like this?”

  “I can give you a million, no, thirty-two million reasons.”

  She pursed her lips. “But you’ve changed too.”

  He took off his sunglasses and tucked them in his shirt pocket. “It’s still me.”

  “You’re different.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re everything I always thought you’d be.”

  He read her apology in between the lines. She’d never be any good at it. She was the type who’d rather thrust herself into a solution to fix things, and she was doing this now.

  The sky was filled with puffy white clouds, like the smoky remnants of fireworks blasts. Jerry watched them drift past. All he ever wanted to do was make her happy. “It’s amazing what a change of clothes will do for a man.”

  The dimple pooled in her cheek. She smoothed her skirt with her hands. “I tried to explain myself over the phone.”

  “You didn’t explain much.”

  “See what I mean? I’ve wanted to call you for months, even before Haskell and I split up, but you made it hard.”

  “There you go mentioning Melvin’s name.” He hated that she’d slept with Cogdon. That was a hurdle to jump, but he squelched those feelings. He’d have to work them out. In truth, he’d slept with more strange women than she did men in their time apart, and whatever it was that she saw when she peered at him, she’d returned for more. She’d come home.

  “You’ve developed a sharp sense of humor,” she said.

  “You have to laugh at us millionaires.”

  She looked away, verging on tears. “You must hate me.”

  “For some reason, you hated yourself even more.” He saw her ashamed. It never occurred to him that she understood she was wrong for a long time. Chelsea was always right. She never screwed up. At least, that’s how events usually passed between them.

  Jerry saw the moment where he should stay or go. It was as if a line formed in the grass: step over it or retreat. The choice might be hard for some men weakened by vanity or pride, but he knew what he’d do. It was the easiest step he’d taken in the last two years. He sat beside her, confident he had nothing to lose. “Are you paying attention to me now?”

  Her ice blue eyes came back to him. She was opened up, irresistible. The big decisions belonged to him. Things would never be the same. They’d be better, hopefully stronger. Some people went to therapy to reach this point. Hell, he’d done that and almost gotten killed.

  He noticed a bottle of wine and two glasses in the ice bucket. “You were pretty sure of yourself.”

  “I didn’t know if … I wanted to be …” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I don’t know what I want to say.”

  He liked that she wasn’t so certain. He poured the wine and gazed at the sky. The clouds drifted slower than time.

  She brought the glass to her sculpted lips. That was the hardest part of her to reconcile. “I hope we don’t get in trouble for this.”

  “Hey, I’ve been arrested here before. It’s no big deal.”

  “No, really.”

  “Don’t worry. I think we’ve been in enough trouble to last a lifetime.” He threw an arm over her waist and pulled her close, kissing her for all time in broad daylight. There was no way on this planet that he was letting her make the first move, and she was not a woman who was about to argue.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hopewell, Heaven

  Jerry stabbed his pitchfork into a pile of horse manure behind Taddler’s main barn. Chelsea was at the farmhouse, nibbling on crackers and sipping Chamomile tea. She didn’t keep much down in the first trimester. Tom baked up old family specialties in the huge baker’s oven at the carriage house, but nothing settled her stomach.

  The crisp fall weather was on Jerry like a fast whip cracking across his bare arms, and the manure stunk to high heaven. He savored the hard labor, even though the college kids he’d hired did most of it. He felt time slipping through his fingers, but in a good way. He’d learned to ride horseback. He helped one of the mare’s bare a foal at the first sight of dawn. It made him think of his own child in Chelsea’s belly. Dreams are brief and immediate. You better grab them before they vanish into thin air.

  And the past—the past is nothing you can settle in the present. There are only hateful words for that, like spite, bitterness, and vengeance. Jerry wasn’t much for that sort of dirty work. He and Chelsea vowed to never discuss their time apart. They called it the lost years and folded it up on the shelf, like a photo album that never gets taken down to view.

  Jerry released his pitchfork and turned his face to the sun. It burned through his eyelids, fiery yellow, then bright white. He didn’t have to dream about Chelsea any longer. That was the best part of making her real again, yet sometimes when he looked at her, he saw a wrinkle in her upper lip, so small no one else would notice. That was the nature of their relationship. You can’t make everything perfect. He knew, because together they were damn close to it.

  Christopher Klim worked on observation and exploration satellites for the space program, until departing for the private sector to develop leading-edge communications technologies. He now teaches and mentors emerging writers. He is the senior editor of Writers Notes Magazine and primary architect of the website www.WritersNotes.com. In his lectures, writings, and workshops, this award-winning storyteller entertains with contemporary tales that extend the American experience while transcending the ordi-nary. His novels Jesus Lives in Trenton and Everything Burns have won critical acclaim, and his manual on the writing craft, Write to Publish: Essentials for the Modern Fiction & Memoir Market is preferred among writers. He’s also written the praised children’s novel Firecracker Jones Is On The Case. He lives in New Jersey.

  www.ChristopherKlim.com