The Sugar House Read online

  So that’s what she wanted to know, Emmy thought, preoccupied. “He’s a nice man, Agnes. And no,” she admitted, wondering what she was forgetting to buy, “I don’t mind him being around.” She didn’t know if she should put on a pot of spaghetti sauce to simmer for dinner tomorrow night, or make something more elaborate like beef bourguignonne. Either one could simmer all day while they worked, but she wanted dinner to be something special.

  She decided on the beef, which meant she needed to get up earlier in the morning because preparation would take longer.

  She was barely getting any sleep now as it was.

  “Do you have fresh garlic?”

  “Only powdered.” Agnes wasn’t about to budge from her subject. “How long is he stayin’?”

  “Just a couple of days. He has to be on Hilton Head Monday morning. No, that’s Tuesday.” A thoughtful frown touched her brow as she tried to remember what he’d said about his schedule after she’d asked if he’d caught up with his work. He hadn’t, which was why he had a dinner meeting tonight that prevented him from leaving Boston any earlier. “Monday is Providence. He has projects in both places.”

  “Well, I must say,” Agnes replied, finally starting to ring up Bertie’s purchases since she’d reached the counter first, “it surely seems he went on to make somethin’ of himself. Of course, I sort of suspected that when he showed up here lookin’ like somethin’ out of an L.L. Bean catalogue,” she confided, putting prunes in Bertie’s drawstring market bag. “Never would have imagined it when his family left here.” Her tone dropped as she reached to ring up the loaf of freshly-squeezed bread. “All things considered, it seems I might have done a little misjudgin’ where he’s concerned.”

  The confession was cautious at best. It could take forever for old notions to give way to new in and around Maple Mountain. Considering that Agnes’s change of heart had taken place in only a couple of weeks, the admission had nearly come with the speed of light.

  If the woman beside Emmy were ever to change her mind, her exasperatingly critical attitude would keep anyone from ever knowing it.

  “Well, I still think it’s dreadful that he let the cat out of the bag about her father after all this time. I can only imagine how that had to make her feel,” she insisted to Agnes, totally overlooking how she might be making Emmy feel simply by bringing up the subject, much less talking as if she weren’t there. “If he is coming back to help, I imagine it’s because he feels guilty about having done that, right along with his father takin’ that property. I’d say that man definitely owes her.”

  Agnes had the grace to look guilty herself. No one would have known about Emmy’s father had she not mentioned what she’d overheard.

  “I imagine he does feel a little that way,” she agreed, adding the bread to the bag, ringing up the total. “If he didn’t, he’d have never come to give her that property back in the first place. But it’s possible he’s coming back now just because he’s a nice man,” she defended for Emmy. “Just like Emmy said.”

  Bertie was as tall as Agnes was not. Looking down the point of her nose, something she couldn’t help, given the foot difference in their heights, her mouth pursed.

  “I still say he owes her.”

  “I didn’t say he doesn’t.”

  “He doesn’t owe me anything,” Emmy insisted, wanting them both to stop. Agnes was arguing in her favor. So was Bertie, for that matter, hard as it was to grasp that at times. Yet it didn’t feel as if they were doing her any favor at all. “He’s coming back to help because he’s…a friend,” she quickly decided to call him. “He certainly doesn’t owe Charlie anything and he’s coming to help him, too.”

  “Of course, he is.”

  Supportive of her as always, Agnes offered a smile, then hit the total button on the old-fashioned cash register, its ping joining the chime of the bell as the door opened. The middle McNeff girl walked in carrying her mother’s grocery list.

  “So,” Agnes continued, while Emmy wiggled her fingers at the twelve-year-old and the girl smiled and wiggled back, “what are you fixing him for supper?”

  Losing interest in the direction of the conversation, Bertie picked up her bag and headed for the door. Anxious to be going herself, Emmy told Agnes she wasn’t sure yet and turned her attention to tracking down garlic powder, since she couldn’t remember just then if she had any at home and didn’t have time to come back.

  The thought that Jack owed her in some way had never entered her mind before. It had never occurred to her to blame him for word getting out about her father, either. Word that had finally proven itself to be true.

  She’d discovered that undeniable fact three nights ago when she’d been boiling alone and decided to try to find the spot where her dad might have stashed a bottle. While poking around the sugar house, searching out every conceivable nook and cranny, she’d found a loose floor plank that was nearly always covered with boxes. Under it had been a half-empty bottle of whisky, and the paper he’d signed giving up his right to Baby Girl Jones.

  She hadn’t been sure of what all she’d felt as she’d stared at the copy of her father’s scrawled signature. Just as she wasn’t sure what she felt now at the possibility that Jack might be coming back out of a sense of duty. She hated that Bertie had so thoughtlessly planted the idea that Agnes had unwittingly reinforced. Yet, the possibility that Jack’s reasons for returning were far different from hers for wanting him there took root like a weed in the spring and simply refused to die.

  Jack had no business leaving Boston that weekend. He’d either stayed late at the office or had business dinners every night for the past week. He hadn’t even been in town Tuesday and Wednesday. He’d spent that time in meetings in New York before he’d flown back Wednesday night in time to finish reviewing contracts for a meeting at seven the next morning.

  He hadn’t had a chance to unpack much of anything, much less take the time to make sure that all his possessions had arrived. To get to his bedroom, he literally wound his way through the maze of boxes and furniture that blocked the view of the bay. His assistant, bless her extremely efficient heart, had interviewed housekeepers for him, but he hadn’t even had time to talk to the three candidates on the list she’d handed him yesterday. He had, however, found the boxes containing his sheets and towels, so he’d been able to make his bed. He had no idea where his comforter was, however. Or the wardrobe containing the other half of his suits. At least the one he’d found had held some of his winter ones and his overcoats.

  He’d hit the ground running that morning, too. His alarm had gone off at three-thirty. He’d been showered, packed and out the door by four. It hadn’t been until he’d pulled through the Starbucks four blocks down from his new condo and hit the expressway that he switched gears from mentally going through how productive his dinner meeting had been last night to wondering if Emmy had been able to get more line. He knew she’d been running low when he’d left.

  He’d been thinking of that off and on all week. And of Emmy. Thoughts of her had crept constantly into his consciousness. But it was at night that those thoughts wreaked their worst havoc. The remembered feel of her ruined his sleep and filled him with a restless ache that had him abandoning the effort and burying himself in business journals until exhaustion took over and allowed the rest he craved.

  That fatigue was already draining away when he pulled into her plowed driveway a little after eight o’clock that morning. It was the last thing on his mind when she opened her back door to him and he saw her welcoming smile.

  Rudy greeted him first. His new-found friend seemed more interested in being out in the brilliant sunshine, however, than in sticking around for more than a cursory pet. With a bark and leap, he headed out to run a lap through the snow that looked to Jack as if it had melted considerably since he’d left.

  With Emmy waiting, he reached for the edge of the storm door she held for him. She was dressed for the sugar bush. Brown denims, beige turtleneck, heavy black-
and-brown-plaid shirt. It was her soft smile he noticed most, though, and the strain behind it.

  Assuming the strain came from working all day and half the night, he considered doing what he’d thought about every night since he’d left and pulling her into his arms. She stepped back before he could, though, and motioned him in.

  As if afraid he might miss something, Rudy bounded back, snow clinging to his paws, and shot past the doors before Jack could close them.

  “How did your meeting go last night?” he heard Emmy ask on their way into the kitchen.

  “It went great. We’re bringing the interior designer on board.” Leaving his jacket on its peg, he followed the sway of her high auburn ponytail. Her hair shone in the familiar room’s overhead lights, seeming to tease him with the appeal of its softness. “And the lighting people. The way things are moving, the project might even finish ahead of schedule.”

  His glance moved from her slender back to the room that seemed even brighter and cozier than he’d remembered. Something tantalizing was already simmering somewhere. Inside the oven, he guessed, since its light was on. Two thermoses sat on counter, apparently filled and ready to go.

  A thin sheet of paper lay by the refilled fruit bowl on the long pine parson’s table. He’d barely noticed it when its distinctive format snagged his attention and had him glancing at it again. He couldn’t see what it said from where he stood in the middle of the room, but he recognized it as a legal document. The sort filed with the courts.

  “Is Charlie coming this morning?” he asked.

  “Actually, he left for home a while ago. He came to help sugar last night, so he was up late,” she explained, wishing her defenses hadn’t made her move from him so quickly. She wanted so badly for him to hold her. Almost as badly as she wanted him to tell her that she was worrying for nothing, that he was there because he wanted to be. “He can either sugar or work in the bush during the day, but I’m afraid he’ll run himself down doing both.”

  Picking up the thermoses, she turned to put them in the backpack in the mudroom. Jack stood ten feet behind her.

  He was dressed much as he’d been before. The same heavy hiking boots, denims that looked a little newer than the last pair he’d worn and a thermal sweater, in a shade of blue this time, that did incredible things for his eyes.

  His focus wasn’t on her, though. He was frowning at the paper on the table.

  Realizing what had his attention, she eased the thermoses back onto the counter. She’d left the document there on purpose. She wasn’t totally sure why, but once the initial shock of having found it had worn off, one of her first thoughts had been to show it to him.

  “I found that in the sugar house.”

  With all the work to be done, she had thought she would share it with him after they returned that evening. Since it had his attention, and since she desperately wanted her ease back with him, she headed for it now.

  The onionskin paper had been folded twice and kept in the yellowing envelope now lying beneath it. The corners of both the envelope and the page were water stained and both had been damp when she’d found them. The type looked as if it might have faded, too. But that could have been because what she had was obviously a copy of the original. Still, the words were easy enough to read.

  The faint smell of must met her nostrils when she handed the sheet to him. He took it, his expression quizzical in the moments before he realized what the document was.

  With his dark head lowered, he scanned the few lines below the State of Vermont court heading, and the line below that read In the matter of the adoption of Baby Girl Jones. Releasing a quiet hiss of air, he looked to where she silently watched him.

  Thinking it no wonder she seemed a little uneasy, Jack set the paper back on the envelope.

  She now knew for certain about her father’s infidelity, and that her parents’ relationship wasn’t what she’d thought it to be. She also knew that somewhere out there she had a half sister her father had allowed to be put up for adoption.

  “Do you want to find her?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I mean, I’d like to,” she qualified, clearly vacillating, “but I don’t know what her situation is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she’s never been told she’s adopted.”

  “Then talk to the adoptive parents first,” he suggested, wondering at the selflessness of her mental struggle. She’d found family. Because she had no relatives to speak of, and knowing what the family she’d once had meant to her, he didn’t doubt for a minute that she would love to have that relationship. Yet, her concern was with not wanting to upset the other woman’s life.

  Probably, he figured, because she knew so well what personal upheaval was like herself.

  “Do you want me to help you locate them?”

  His offer drew the delicate arches of her eyebrows inward. “You’d do that?”

  He looked as if he couldn’t believe she’d asked such a thing. “Of course I would, Emmy. I have friends who are lawyers. I’ll talk to one of them when I get back.”

  “I can’t afford a lawyer.”

  “I can. Let me take care of this, okay? It’s the least I can do.”

  It took a moment, but as his claim echoed in her head, Emmy could feel her gratitude for his thoughtfulness slide straight to the uncertainty over his actions she simply couldn’t shake.

  Turning to the table, hating the doubts, she picked up the document to put it back in its envelope.

  “You don’t have to do anything for me, Jack,” she said, her tone surprisingly casual. “You’re doing more than enough coming back to help.” The paper crackled lightly. “You know you didn’t have to do that.”

  “And you know I couldn’t leave you with all that extra work,” he replied, touching her shoulder.

  Her glance slid to his. “Why not?”

  For a moment he looked as if he couldn’t believe she’d asked that, either. Apparently, he thought his reasoning should be obvious. “Because I know how hard it is for you to get help.”

  It wasn’t like her to confront. It wasn’t her nature to challenge. And the last thing she wanted to do was push him into a corner if the apprehension she felt was just her insecurity bracing her to lose someone else she’d cared about. But she’d fallen in love with him, and she badly needed to know that it wasn’t obligation he felt toward her most.

  “I mean why couldn’t you do it?”

  The little furrows between his eyes deepened an instant before his hand slipped away.

  “Is it because you feel you should?” she asked, when his only reply was hesitation. “Because of what happened between our fathers?”

  The furrows deepened. So did his silence.

  “I know you felt a sense of responsibility to come here the first time,” she told him, torn between wishing he’d tell her to be quiet and not allowing herself to back down. Now that the opportunity had presented itself, she also needed to let him know that any responsibility he felt truly wasn’t necessary. Burdening him with her little crises was the last thing she wanted to do.

  “And I know you feel bad about all that’s happened around here with my family. It took me a while, but I’m dealing okay with all that now.” She’d resigned herself to it all, anyway. “I just don’t want you to think you have to be here because you feel it’s your duty.”

  She glanced down at the yellowed envelope she held, slowly set it back on the table. “I have the feeling that’s why Dad stayed around. Because he’d felt obligated and guilty. And that he owed his wife and daughter.

  “The more I’ve thought about it,” she confided, needing him to know what else she’d realized, “the easier it’s been to see that his drinking was probably a way to numb himself to the mess he’d made of everything. I still believe his death was an accident.” She had to. Her father had loved her. He would never have left her on purpose. “But I think his drinking had impaired his judgment and that his problems had been more
on his mind than his driving when he’d slid off the road.”

  Crossing her arms beneath the little ache Jack’s silence put in her heart, she blinked at the unmoving wall of his chest. He’d been right. She had been protected. And she probably had only seen what she’d wanted to see. She’d tended to do that a lot over the years. “I imagine the reason I never heard them argue was because they never really talked,” she continued, refusing to wear those protective blinders any longer. “I’d just been too young and naive to notice that they’d been miserable.”

  She tipped her head, met the disturbing disquiet in his eyes.

  “I don’t want you to feel any of that where I’m concerned. A sense of duty, I mean. Or guilt,” she added, because it was looking more by the minute as if both were possibilities. “So I really hope that isn’t why you’re here.”

  And please tell me why you are. And where we’re going. Or if we’re going anywhere at all.

  The ache seemed to deepen a bit as he looked away.

  It grew deeper still when he opened his mouth, closed it again and planted his hands on his hips.

  Jack couldn’t look into her eyes and lie. There was no way he could deny the obligation or sense of responsibility he felt toward her. They had been there since the day he’d arrived. He couldn’t deny the protectiveness he felt toward her, either, or the physical desire he’d truly never felt for any other woman. He just had no idea which outweighed the other, or if that desire was only clouding his judgment where she was concerned.

  Considering that he should be in Providence at that very moment, going through the partially constructed facility he was meeting about on Monday, the latter was a distinct possibility.

  “I told you why I’m here,” he said quietly.

  He knew she wanted more than that. He also knew he was totally unprepared to answer the questions he could swear he saw in her beautiful gray eyes. He’d never considered what his return might mean to her. He’d thought only to help her get back into operation and get the other property into her name. Then he’d felt certain his need to be there for her would be satisfied, and his obligations there met.