The Sugar House Read online

  “I like what I do,” he said, going for the simple version of what consumed his life. “But, no,” he added, his tone dropping as he considered what he hadn’t for so long, “that didn’t specifically start out as my goal.” He hesitated. “My goal was what pushed me in the beginning, though.”

  She suddenly looked as confused as she did curious. “What was it?”

  It was the very thing she didn’t want to talk about. “Honestly?” he asked.

  His glance swept her face, the sudden uncertainty in her gray eyes, the delicate quality of her features. He had a hard time picturing her as the child she’d been. The changes about her were too distracting, in a totally, nonchildlike sort of way. But the faded image of her holding her distraught father’s hand had yet to disappear.

  Rising to carry his mug to the stove, he suspected the interest she showed, however, was about to disappear completely.

  “It had to do with what happened between our fathers,” he said, and as sure as traffic tie-ups in midtown Manhattan, her curiosity died.

  He poured himself more coffee, then walked over with the pot to where she’d stayed just inside the doorway clinging to hers.

  “You asked,” he reminded her, topping off her mug.

  “I can’t imagine how that had anything to do with the way you pushed yourself.”

  “It had everything to do with it.”

  He set the pot back on the crackling woodstove, set the potholder on the electric range near it. “I remember the last time I came here before we left,” he told her, because that singular event seemed responsible for everything from his career to his being stuck with her now. “You were on your front porch with your dad, looking at me as if you thought I could somehow change what was going on.

  “There was nothing I could do,” he admitted, wondering if she even remembered what had haunted him off and on for years. “And I hated that I couldn’t make things different.” For her dad. And for her. “But when I left, I promised myself a career that was as far as I could get from running a crane in a quarry.” And later, he thought, of running a crane loading boxes on a dock, as his father had done after they’d moved. “I didn’t want to worry about hanging on to every penny I had. I wanted to have enough that if a friend got himself into trouble and needed help, I could give him what he needed and not worry about whether I ever got it back.”

  From behind him came the muffled snap of the fire and the low drone of the radio. For a long, uncertain moment, those were the only sounds to penetrate the sudden stillness as Emmy stared at the totally unpredictable man towering six feet away.

  She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it had never occurred to her that his life had been fundamentally affected, too, by what his father had done. It would never have occurred to her, either, that she could be so touched by what he had just admitted, whether she’d wanted to hear it or not.

  She just didn’t know which affected her more at the moment: his motivation to never be in a position where money mattered more than friendship or the fact that he remembered the last time he’d seen her. She wouldn’t have thought he’d remembered her at all.

  “I remember that day,” she said, when remembering wasn’t something she would have thought she’d care to do. “You’d come to give dad something.”

  “His truck keys,” he reminded her.

  “And you’d told him you were sorry.”

  Her father had wanted her to stay inside, she remembered. But she’d known their caller was Jack and she’d hurried out anyway. She had no sooner reached her father’s side, though, than he’d grabbed her hand as if to keep her silent. Or maybe as if to safeguard her somehow.

  She’d wanted to talk to Jack herself. She wanted to ask him why his dad had made hers so sad. Or maybe she’d wanted to know why he no longer wanted to be their friend. She wasn’t sure now. Not after so long. But after her dad had said he was sorry, too, Jack had just looked at her, then turned around and walked away.

  And decided never to be so powerless again.

  She thought it ironic that she’d never imagined he could feel such a way. She’d seen him almost as a man back then. But he’d only been seventeen, and clearly going through his own torment because of Ed Travers.

  In the years since, Jack had just managed to move a whole lot farther from his past than she had hers.

  “I think my father would have liked your goal,” she finally, quietly, admitted. She didn’t want to talk of that time anymore, didn’t want to think anymore of how horribly powerless she had felt herself. “I should let you get back to your breakfast.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured. Looking as if a weight had just been lifted from his shoulders, or maybe just looking anxious to get back to what was cooling on the table, he gave her a small smile. “It’s great, by the way. Thanks.”

  She’d barely told him he was welcome before Jack nodded toward the little office that might well save his sanity.

  “And thanks for letting me switch the fax to your backup battery.”

  From the way she murmured, “No problem,” Jack had the feeling he could have wired the fax any way he wanted so long as it would keep him occupied somewhere other than where she was. Yet, even as she disappeared into the dim light beyond the stairway, she hadn’t retreated from him as he’d thought she might at mention of their fathers. If he sensed anything in her at all, it was that maybe, just maybe, she was letting a little of her wariness about him…go.

  In the few minutes it took Emmy to start a fire in the living room fireplace and sweep up the bits of bark from the hearth, Jack had finished his breakfast, stacked his dishes neatly by the sink and was on the phone in her little office alcove pacing as far as the cord would allow while giving his assistant her fax number. The woman must have entered the number even as they spoke. Emmy heard the beep that announced his fax coming in on her second line as she focused on the tasks of setting on a pot of soup for supper and washing up the dishes. The oil furnace didn’t work because the fan that pushed the air needed electricity to run. But her water heater was propane, so hot water, they had.

  Jack had hung up from that call, placed another and had just scanned the open surface of her desk and bookshelves when he turned with his hands on his hips.

  “I’ll dry those,” he told her, noticing what she’d left draining by the sink, and turned back to her bookshelves. “I’m expecting another ten pages, and the fax is about out of paper. Do you have any more?”

  “You don’t need to dry dishes,” she insisted back, and headed for one of the doors beneath her computer desk. Pulling out a ream of paper, she rose to load sheets into the fax’s tray.

  “I hardly use this anymore,” she said, explaining why she hadn’t noticed its tray was nearly empty. “Mostly I send and receive what I need online.”

  “For your sugaring operation,” he concluded.

  “And the B and B. The computers make running both businesses easier.” He would certainly understand the advantages of such technology, she thought, also certain that what he relied on was far more sophisticated that what served her well enough.

  “It actually makes the B and B possible,” she admitted, sliding the guide back into place. “I get a lot of repeat guests, but most of my new bookings come from my Web site or the site for an innkeepers and bed-and-breakfast association. We have a tendency to take a little longer with progress around here, but there’s no escaping some aspects of the twenty-first century.”

  Prepared to return to her task so he could return to his, she stepped back and saw the green light blink on that indicated the rest of his fax was coming. “There you go.”

  “Thanks,” Jack murmured, frowning.

  “What?” she asked, thinking he needed something else.

  “How long has the house been a B and B?”

  She’d thought for certain his only concern just then would be his work. “About eleven years,” she replied as that illusion slipped.

  “Agnes said you�
��d turned down your scholarship to stay and help your mom run it.” His glanced narrowed as he did a little mental math. “But eleven years ago, you’d only have been what? Sixteen?”

  “I was fifteen when we starting converting it. It took about a year to get the bathrooms in upstairs and the rooms ready.” Letting the scholarship remark go, she took a step back, trying as she did to move away from the past that had just sneaked up on her again. “I’ve had more bookings since I redecorated the rooms five years ago,” she said, sticking to what felt safe, afraid that wasn’t what he was after. “The common rooms, too. It’s amazing what you can do with paint and a little fabric.”

  And a lot of reading, research and elbow grease, Jack thought, remembering what she’d told him about her interest in restorations. On top of the filing cabinet, a stack of Architectural Digest and decorating magazines shared space with books on Colonial and Early-American architecture. On the counter out in her mudroom were drawers from a chest she was apparently in the process of refinishing.

  The money she hadn’t put into the sugaring operation had all been spent on her home and increasing her profits there. He didn’t know what she made sugaring, but depending on what she charged for a room and figuring a full house during the fall color season alone, the enterprise might easily bring in five to ten thousand dollars a year.

  “So that’s how your parents made up the difference.”

  “The difference?”

  “In income,” he explained. “I’d always wondered how your dad made up for the lost revenue after what happened.”

  She could let it go, Emmy told herself. She could go find something else to do and leave him to believe whatever he wanted so she wouldn’t have to open doors she’d much rather leave closed. Heaven knew she didn’t want to wander through any more than she already had. But Jack was proving himself to be a decent man, and it wouldn’t be very decent of her to not allow him the truth. The simplified version, anyway.

  “We didn’t start taking in guests until after he died, Jack. Dad made up for the lost income from sugaring by taking on more odd jobs around the county.” Her father had always taken on a few jobs in the summer, as much to help out a neighbor as to earn money for extras like an occasional vacation to the shore. But after he’d lost part of his land, the odd jobs became full-time and the extras had disappeared. “Once he was gone,” she quickly concluded, “so was what he earned as a handyman. That’s when mom started the B and B.”

  For several seconds Jack simply considered her. Or maybe what he considered was whether or not she would retreat from his question the way she had in the sugar house. “What happened to him, Emmy?”

  She had intended to touch only on the surface. State the facts and let the details go. But it wasn’t that simple. Not with him. He had asked last night what his father had been accused of beyond what he obviously knew, and now she saw that he deserved to know that, too.

  “He started drinking after he lost that property,” she told him, remembering how some people had said they could hardly blame him for that. Mostly she remembered how melancholy and distant her dad would become when he wasn’t sober. “He knew the roads around here as well as he knew his own land. He knew how slick they could get when there was ice about and how easy it was to lose control. But he’d had too much to drink the afternoon an ice storm blew in and he got in the truck, anyway. He went off the road out by Sawyer’s Creek bridge, and his truck hit a tree.”

  Crossing her arms over the faintly sick sensation the memory brought, she focused on the page slowly coming through the machine beside her. “Some people think he’d been so depressed since your dad sold that parcel that he did it on purpose.”

  From the corner of her eye, she’d caught the motion of Jack’s hand as he’d lifted it to the back of his neck. Now he’d gone still.

  His disbelief actually seemed to vibrate in the narrow space between them. “They think it was deliberate?”

  “Some did. I imagine some still do.” That was the talk that had always hurt the most. Refusing to dwell on that thought, she forced certainty into her voice. “I can’t believe he would do that. He loved Mom and me too much.”

  The page fell into the receiving tray. With the rhythmic drone of the print cartridge passing across paper, she watched another inch its way out.

  Jack barely noticed the pages accumulating in front of Emmy. Feeling sucker punched, he couldn’t have cared less about what had seemed so important only minutes ago. He had reasons to challenge what Emmy believed about her dad. Good reasons. But it was what she had just implied about his own father that left him staring, speechless, at the side of her head.

  She had just told him that his father had been blamed, however indirectly, for causing her father’s death.

  She had also just allowed a glimpse of what life for her must have been like during the three years before her father had slid into that tree. She would have only been fifteen when that had happened.

  It was no wonder she’d been so anxious about the sleet yesterday.

  Speaking quietly, because something about Emmy demanded calm just then, he made himself keep digging. “What about your mom? What happened to her?”

  “She died three years later. Dad had been her life,” she confided, still watching the machine, her thoughts seeming farther away. “Mom didn’t seem to really care about much of anything after he was gone.” She lifted one shoulder in a shrug that seemed to say, Not even me, only to quickly ease beyond that part of her past.

  “She seemed better once Dora talked her into converting the house,” she continued, referring to the woman who owned the community’s only diner. “We sold what we could to finance the changes we had to make. Most of Dad’s power tools and his hunting guns. Chaps,” she said, speaking of her horse. “But Mom was always coming down with a cold or the flu,” she explained, saying nothing about what the loss of her beloved mare had meant to her. “That’s why I turned down the scholarship and stayed here. I knew she’d never be able to keep the place up for guests and handle the sugaring operation on her own.” She reached toward the machine as it beeped. “The winter she caught pneumonia, she just didn’t seem to have the energy to fight it.”

  Jack remembered Cara Larkin. She’d been a slender woman, much like her daughter. The difference being that Emmy, though she looked fragile, had an undeniable strength about her. Mentally. Physically. She would bend, but she wouldn’t break. At least not without a fight. She possessed a quiet manner, but she was far from meek. By comparison Mrs. Larkin had merely been frail and far more docile.

  As Emmy picked up the pages of the report he needed to review, methodically putting them in order, he couldn’t help but think that Cara Larkin had undoubtedly relied far more heavily on her daughter than Emmy was admitting, then left her to cope on her own.

  A quiet, unexpected anger surged silently through his veins. Anger at the locals for placing blame where it didn’t belong. Anger at her mother for not fighting to get well for her daughter. Anger at her father for compromising his family. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Cara’s pining away had been blamed on his father, too. So that meant his father had been held responsible in some way for the demise of both her parents. And for leaving Emmy alone.

  He couldn’t help how people chose to point fingers. If there was one finger pointing out, there were three pointing back. Yet people seldom checked for skeletons in their own closet when they were busy building a case against someone they didn’t like. What mattered most at that moment was the lovely young woman handing him his document.

  Beneath his anger, he couldn’t believe how sorry he felt for what she’d experienced, for what she’d lost. But he had the feeling that pity was the last thing Emmy would want from anyone.

  He took the pages she held, set them next to her mouse pad with its bright yellow sunflowers. The quiet tones of her voice had remained matter-of-fact, and she’d kept much of what she felt about all that had happened locked away. With that same
reserve in place, she now seemed to brace herself against whatever sympathy—or defense—he might feel compelled to offer.

  “Do you have any other family?”

  He watched her glance up, caution filling her eyes. “None that I really know. Dad was an only child, and he inherited this place after his parents died. That was before I was born. Mom has a sister in Ohio and her parents moved there after they sold their farm.”

  “When was that?”

  She shrugged. “At least twenty years ago. They don’t travel much, and I have a hard time getting away from here. I send them syrup, though.” A faint smile moved through the caution. “They say they always look forward to getting it.”

  He still couldn’t get past the thought that her mom had had to sell her horse.

  “You know,” he said, thinking it no wonder she hadn’t wanted to talk about her parents or why he’d come there. That property couldn’t possibly mean anything good to her. “I don’t know too many people who would have stayed here and taken on what you have. I don’t know anyone who would have wanted to.”

  The expected defense wasn’t there. Since he hadn’t burdened her with sympathy, either, a hint of her caution faded.

  “It’s my home. My security,” she admitted, her shrug almost self-conscious this time. “It’s all I have.”

  “But what about what you want?”

  “I told you before, I have everything I want.”

  “What about a family? A husband to help you out here. Children.”

  The look she shot him held infinite patience. “This is Maple Mountain. The only eligible men around here are either eighteen or eighty.”

  He would have asked why she didn’t sell everything and go where she could meet some eligible men, then. Make another life for herself. An easier life. One where she could pursue the dream that had once been denied her and go to school. But the ring of the phone cut between them, relieving her of any further intrusion into what she undoubtedly felt was none of his concern, and sparing him asking what he suspected he already knew, anyway.