Dress Me in Wildflowers (7 page)

“I had to work late on a case or I wouldn’t have missed it.”

Why did he care one way or the other? He’d certainly not been scrambling to lap up her every word fifteen years ago. More like burning rubber to get away from her.

“Oh.” She was just too damned exhausted to make small talk while pretending Drew had never rejected her profession of love. She took her Coke and turned back toward the table she’d shared with Tammie all evening. She uttered a “Good to see you” without much feeling and drifted away from the man who was once the boy she’d thought hung the moon, the stars and every bright, shining planet in the night sky.

As she walked toward the table, she hated how she regressed in age with each step. She knew he was watching her, and by the time she sat down, she felt sixteen and lonely again. Lonely and fighting self pity because every crush she’d ever experienced had not been reciprocated. When she’d fallen for Drew Murphy, she’d felt it was more than a crush. The irrefutable evidence in her teenage mind had been that even though other crushes had come and gone, what she’d felt for Drew had been so much more. The yearning, the ache, the endless tears she’d shed.

That stupid letter she’d written to him laying her feelings bare.

With the benefit of more than a decade of adulthood behind her, she saw those intense feelings for what they were — raging hormones. Even so, that old loneliness settled in her chest.

She turned her attention to Tammie. “So, have they announced Knoxville’s Best Baker for this year?” Tammie had won the honor bestowed by the readers of the Knoxville newspaper three years running.

Tammie stared at her. “You do know who that was, don’t you?”

“Who, Drew? Yeah. He’s still recognizable, unlike some of our former classmates.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“What, Drew being here?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. It was a long time ago. We were kids, I was a stupid one.”

Farrin tried to ignore the thickness of the words she spoke, the bitterness they left on her tongue. She hadn’t thought about Drew or Janie in years, but only a few hours of exposure to Oak Valley and she felt herself reliving all those old, raw feelings.

“Not stupid, just normal.”

“Whatever. Like I said, it was forever ago. I prefer to focus on the here and now. Like how Sweet Everythings is doing.”

Farrin exhaled a silent sigh of relief when Tammie let the topic of the past die and turned her comments to how she’d been thinking about expanding, perhaps opening a second location for the bakery she’d started six months out of college on a five-hundred-dollar loan and the strength of her double business and food science majors from UT. In those early days, Tammie had done nothing but keep herself up to her elbows in flour and sugar. She’d baked standard wedding and birthday cakes to fund her experimentation with new recipes. And the experiments had paid off. Now she was known throughout Knoxville as the woman with the magic touch with cakes and cookies.

“Do you still have dreams about recipes?” Farrin asked.

“Dreams?” Kurt asked.

“Yeah, this girl used to wake up in the middle of the night after having a dream about some new way to combine ingredients to come up with a cake recipe or some to-die-for frosting. I’d wake up at two or three in the morning and she’d have her little desk lamp on scribbling down thoughts on index cards.”

Kurt looked at Tammie. “You never told me that.”

“I’d forgotten about it.”

“So you don’t dream about life-size cookies anymore?”

“Oh, I still have cooking dreams, but I’m usually too tired to get up. Sometimes I remember them the next morning, sometimes I don’t.”

“Well, I’m glad you got up when you had that one about the strawberry cream cheese pound cake.”

“Me, too,” Kurt said with a light in his eyes and the hint of a laugh in his words. “Hey, why don’t you dream me a solution to getting our past-due clients to actually pay us.”

Tammie gave him a playful swat on the arm. “The day I start dreaming about people who buy shingles and tin roofing, you can just lock me up because I’ve lost my mind.”

Farrin thought Kurt’s job at a large roofing supply manufacturer sounded dreadfully boring, but she’d never say that to his face. He seemed to enjoy his job and had always appeared to be in a good mood during college and during the few times she’d seen him since then. And he was never outwardly stressed, so maybe she ought to envy him instead.

Tammie was in the middle of a story about how she was searching various neighborhoods in Knoxville’s suburbs for her second store location when Farrin sensed someone step up next to her. Tammie stopped speaking mid-sentence.

“Hey, Drew,” Marcus said. “When did you get here?”

“A few minutes ago.”

Farrin resisted the urge to move over one seat to the vacant chair beside her to put some distance between her and Drew’s hulking form.

“Farrin, would you like to dance?”

Too little, too late, pal. “No, thank you.”

No one spoke into the ensuing silence, not until Keely pulled her arm from the back of her husband’s chair. “Well, I’ll dance. Greg here refuses to get off his butt, so I’m in need of a partner.”

Keely hopped to her feet, grabbed Drew by the arm and dragged him toward the dance floor where yet another late ‘80s hair band ballad had couples dancing and remembering.

Once everyone at the table had fallen back into conversation, Tammie leaned toward Farrin. “Why didn’t you dance with Drew?”

Farrin met Tammie’s gaze, wondering how the girl who’d once threatened to rip out Drew Murphy’s eyes could ask that question. “Why should I?”

“You said you were over him.”

“I am. And if I’m over him, why in the world would I want to spend time with him?”

“He actually turned out to be a nice guy.”

“Well, hooray for him.”

“He looked really interested.”

“That would be a few years too late, wouldn’t it?”

“Better late than never?” Tammie scrunched her eyebrows and gave a little shrug.

“Not really. Listen, I’m tired. I’ve been working a lot lately and not getting enough sleep. I don’t suppose Oak Valley has gone really big time and gotten a taxi service, has it?”

“No, not sure a cabbie could make much of a living when it’s exactly one point seven miles from one side of town to the other.” Tammie pulled her purse from the back of her chair. “I’m pretty tired, too. I’ve been up since five. We can go.”

Out of some annoying, inherent, self-sacrificing kindness that came from growing up in the South, Farrin almost said she hated to cut short Tammie’s evening. But she couldn’t force the selfless words past her lips. She wanted to leave, and she wanted to leave now before the song ended and Tammie’s theory regarding Drew was tested. It wasn’t exactly running from the past, it was strategic avoidance of a situation she had no desire to confront. There was a difference, really. At least that’s what she told herself as she followed Tammie and Kurt toward the exit.

Farrin couldn’t banish the feeling that her past in the form of Drew was going to come running after her any minute. That was conceited, thinking she was so important that Drew would chase through a parking lot after her just for a dance. She shook her head and wondered if some sort of strange phenomena had ever occurred in Oak Valley — an asteroid strike, a visit by aliens, something along those lines — that would explain how she seemed to turn into a different person here, a younger, more insecure version she hadn’t been in years.

Well, this was the end of it. She was allowing these things to twist her mind and stomach. No longer. Already she was going through her to-do list for the next twenty-four hours. Work, sleep, speech, drive to airport, work on plane, take cab home, work some more. Hopefully, somewhere in all those segmented work sessions, her muse would deign to make an appearance. If she didn’t soon, Farrin was tempted to mentally fire her and put an ad in the Times. Wanted: one fabulously creative and prolific designer’s muse.

Farrin walked slower than Tammie and Kurt, but that was okay because she wasn’t in a talking mood. Plus, her heels were killing her feet. She wore heels all the time, but not these strappy little demons whose sole point of existence was to cause her to break both her ankles.

She scanned the lines of cars, everything from Buicks to Toyotas to Dodge Rams to minivans. One little Subaru wagon caught her eye. And then she saw the fall of white blond hair. Janie slumped half in, half out of her car. “Shit.”

“What is it?”

Farrin glanced at Tammie, who’d stopped and turned back toward her.

“Give me a minute, okay?”

“Did you forget something?”

Farrin shook her head. She looked back at Janie but still saw no movement. What if Janie had croaked right here in the parking lot? What a cap that would be to this less-than-stellar trip.

“Farrin?”

“Uh, no. Let me check on someone.”

As she neared Janie’s car, Farrin heard the click of Tammie’s heels and Kurt’s more solid footfalls behind her and waved for them to stay back without looking at them. They slowed but didn’t completely halt.

Farrin’s heart leapt into her throat when she reached the rear of Janie’s car. What if she really had died? She’d never seen a dead person before — outside of a funeral home that was. What did you do if you found a dead body?

She almost turned away and handed the task off to Kurt, but she pushed the disturbing images away. She opened her mouth to speak but started when Janie lifted her head, then yelped.

They stared at each other as the surprise ebbed away.

“Are you okay?” Farrin asked.

The sheen of sweat made Janie’s face shiny, but she rubbed her arms as if cold. Maybe Janie was coming down with the flu. And Farrin had breathed in all those germs. Great. She wondered if Janie would be the one who kept showing up in her life every few years just to make her miserable. Would she steal Farrin’s lover someday, turn her friends against her? Would Janie work at the hospital where Farrin ended up in her old age and mix up her meds, sending her to an early grave?

Janie licked her lips, which looked dry. “I’m a little sicker than I thought. I hoped if I rested for a bit, maybe the nausea would go away.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to stave off another wave. “No such luck.”

Farrin bit her tongue. She should really leave Janie to fend for herself, but damned if she didn’t look pitiful and totally spent. Her ashen face and watery eyes torpedoed the whole “paybacks are hell” attitude.

“Do you need someone to drive you home?” The people Farrin worked with could say whatever they wanted — she was too darn nice for her own good. Okay, so perhaps there was the tiniest bit of morbid curiosity about what kind of house Mommy and Daddy Carlisle had no doubt built for their precious, perfect daughter. She could live in a house as big as the county and it wouldn’t change the fact that it was still in Oak Valley.

Or was it? Honestly, Farrin had no idea where Janie lived, what her current last name was, if she had a family, if she worked. Not that it mattered.

“I hate to ask, but I think I do,” Janie said.

“I’ll see if someone can drive you home.”

Janie’s eyes darted to Kurt and Tammie standing several yards away. “Can you do it?”

“Why?”

“One person seeing me like this is bad enough.”

“Still more concerned with appearances than anything, I see.” Farrin’s compassion hardened.

“Please.”

The look of pleading wrapped in embarrassment in Janie’s eyes softened Farrin a little. She would have never thought it possible to forget who and what Janie was, even for a second. Fine, she’d earn herself some more cosmic kudos. She’d be out of here tomorrow and back to her normal existence, normal people, normal problems.

She turned and walked toward Tammie and Kurt. From the look on Tammie’s face, Farrin knew she’d identified Janie. “Before you say anything, yes I know who it is. But she’s really sick, and all I’m doing is being a Good Samaritan and driving her home.”

“You don’t have to be so snappy,” Tammie said, the hurt tone back in her voice again.

Damn it, why was everything she touched lately turning to crap?

“I’m sorry. This is awkward and I’m too tired to rehash old grievances.”

“Fine.” The word was clipped, cool.

“I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but can you follow me to her house?”

Farrin stared at Tammie, and gradually her friend’s eyes reflected more of the kind person she was underneath the hurt. The friend who had been her shield in high school.

“Kurt can drive her.”

Farrin almost sighed in relief. Evidently, Tammie wasn’t bone deep mad at her if she was still trying to protect her from Janie. “It’s okay. I’ll do it.”

Maybe Tammie had mellowed a bit with marriage and kids, but once upon a time she would have left Janie out in the parking lot alone even if she was puking her guts out and had turned three shades of green. All in defense of her best friend. And Farrin would never forget it.

As Farrin slid into the driver’s seat of Janie’s car, she felt as if she’d morphed into a confusing mixture of her past and present selves, each part vying to overtake the other.