Authors: Sandra Chastain
He wasn’t sure what he’d been thinking about, walking into town to apologize to a woman he barely knew for having done something to displease her. Something he was dead sure that she secretly welcomed. He’d never cared before.
When he was with Andrea, there was a warmth that made him more aware of the lonely life he’d lived. Andrea, in some bizarre way, was mixed up with all these conflicting thoughts of home and family, and that was making him crazy.
“Look, Chief Fleming, I am sincerely sorry if I
offended you last night and again this morning. But I’m not sorry that I kissed you.” He paused. “And I’m pretty sure that I’m going to do it again. So if you want to protect your reputation, we’d better get going.”
Andrea stared at him desperately for a moment, then started the engine and drove away, feeling the censuring gaze of the old men sitting on the bench in front of the drugstore boring like nails into the back of her head.
She drove too fast, wondering why this man seemed destined to ruin what had been a simple plan for her to assume her father’s duties. After one night in town, Sam Farley had managed to unsettle her to the extent that she was halfway to her own house before she realized that she’d turned the wrong way.
“Now look what you’ve made me do,” she complained.
“I think you’ll have to be a bit more specific. What exactly have I made you do? I haven’t said a word, and I haven’t touched you.”
“Mamie’s house is in the opposite direction.”
“Well,” he said with a smile, “I’m open to suggestions. What about a picnic under Lover’s Oak?” He didn’t know why he kept teasing her, making his interest in her so obvious. He was chasing her, a law officer, the picture of southern womanhood, complete with a town full of eyes watching every move he made.
Andrea frowned. “I don’t know how to play clever little games like you do, and I don’t want to learn. You said you wanted lunch. All right, Farley, I’ll feed you.”
“More chocolate-chip cookies?”
“No, I had something like arsenic in mind.”
“Good thinking, darlin’. Arsenic works slowly. We’ll have time to make my death a memorable demise. You could put it in the cookies.”
“No more cookies. Louise makes those cookies for Buck. They’re … friends.”
“I see—cookies and friendship. Is that considered an acceptable statement of intent?”
“No, I don’t think their friendship is public, yet. I didn’t know until he broke his leg and couldn’t drive.”
“So it is possible to be discreet in Arcadia, if a person really wants to.”
“Yes, I suppose,” she answered thoughtfully. She could have told him that she knew it was possible. She’d been so discreet once that not even Buck had known that she’d fallen in love with a man, another outsider like Sam.
By this time Andrea was approaching her house. In an absurd kind of way, Sam was right, about a lot of things. More and more often lately there were times when she wanted to shake the town up, to do something totally wild. Rebellion didn’t come easy, and it demanded too high a price. She pulled into her driveway and parked the patrol car beneath the pecan tree by the porch.
“As for those cookies,” Sam went on innocently, as though he had no idea of the crisis she’d just passed through, “you won’t believe this, Chief Fleming, but I’ve heard about Arcadia’s cookies since I was a boy. It may have taken a lot of years for me to get a chance to taste them, but it was worth the wait.”
Andrea knew he said ‘cookies,’ but from the dreamy tone of his voice, she knew that wasn’t what he meant. The cookies seem to be some kind of symbol to Sam. She just didn’t know yet what they stood for.
Sam was looking through the window with a faraway expression in his eyes, taking in her white clapboard house, the yard, the screened front porch. “You have a swing,” he murmured. “And a honeysuckle vine shading it, making it private. I should have known.” When he got out of the patrol car and started up on the porch, Andrea had no choice but to follow.
Andrea wished she could stifle the ever-present trembling of her nerve endings. Everything about Sam Farley kept her slightly off-key, and now his actions completely mystified her. He went onto the porch and sat down in her swing, then rocked forward and back almost reverently. She stopped beside it and looked down at him. He kept on swinging and smiling.
“You all right, cowboy?”
“I’m fine, Chief. Just thinking.” Except that he couldn’t organize his thoughts. Everywhere he turned he saw Andrea’s past, all safe and secure. He’d never understood his mother’s need to belong before. One place had always been as good as another to him.
Shaking off his preoccupation, Sam forced a smile. “So this is where you live.”
“Yes. You’d better come inside, where it’s cooler. The sun’s straight overhead now, and you’ll get overheated.”
“I’m used to the outdoor heat. I’m a carpenter,
remember? Some of the places I’ve worked got to a hundred degrees in the shade. But I’d rather be inside with you. I like the indoor kind of heat too.” His eyes sparkled as he rose lazily and followed her inside.
Andrea looked at him blankly for a moment. He was doing it again, wrapping her in some kind of visual electric blanket fueled by the current in his eyes. She turned around, walked inside, and picked up the phone. “Agnes, ring the station for me.”
“I thought you were at the station, Andy,” Agnes said in surprise.
“No, I … came home for lunch.”
There was a click and a ring, and … “Police station. Buck here.”
“Buck. Thought I’d better let you know where I am.”
“Good idea, since I was told by at least two people that you left with Sam Farley.” His displeasure changed into concern. “You okay?”
“Sure. I’m at the house if you need me.”
“Now, just a minute …”
“Bye, Buck. I won’t be long.” Andrea hung up quickly.
Sam was wandering, curious, around the living room. “You leave your windows wide open,” he remarked. “Incredible.”
He liked Andrea Fleming’s house. It was warm and happy. The furnishings were an odd assortment of comfortably mismatched pieces. The inside walls were tongue-and-grove pine, stained a soft, creamy white. The hardwood floors were polished and covered with an assortment of braided rugs of soft greens and pinks and browns. The
fireplace was large with a marble inset and a carved-wood mantelpiece, holding a tall windup clock with a sun and a moon on its face.
In one corner was an upright piano with an arrangement of family pictures on top. He wandered over and examined them. There was one of Andrea at about eight, with a bicycle and a skinned elbow. A high school photograph showed her wearing a basketball uniform, holding a trophy. She was a woman even then, with breasts that strained against the front of her jersey, and firm long legs.
“Do you live alone?” he asked curiously as he caught sight of a man’s hat on the back of the kitchen door.
“Of course not. I thought you knew. I live with Buck.”
He arched one brow at her in surprise. “You still live at home, with Daddy?”
“Of course, where else would I live?” Andrea’s answer was one of curiosity, not defense.
“I see. Well, that must be an awful strain on the governor, having to pass muster every time he sees you. Why do you call him Buck?”
He was making her feel uncomfortable about living at home, something that had always been normal to her. What did he think she wanted to do that she couldn’t? She closed off that train of thought. What she wanted to do was something she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about.
“Everybody in Arcadia calls my father Buck, and I grew up doing the same thing.”
She turned and walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, switching on the small window
air conditioner. She wasn’t leaving Sam. She was walking away from … any need for discretion.
Sam followed.
“I guess I ticked him off this morning with my answers to his questions,” Sam commented. “But I didn’t know he was your dad. And I’m not exactly comfortable with a man carrying a gun. I’m sorry.” He pulled up a stool and sat down at the counter, watching Andrea work.
“He’ll survive.”
“I know. It’s me I’m worried about.”
From the refrigerator Andrea took a head of lettuce and tore it into small pieces, filling two small wooden bowls. She added a scoop of chicken salad to the lettuce and placed a fan of wheat crackers around the small plate beneath the bowl. Then she went back to the refrigerator for an ice tray and a quart jar of tea. She filled the glasses with ice and tea. A ceiling fan circulated the cooling air, but a sheen of perspiration glistened on her forehead.
Sam’s statement that it was he that he was worried about still hung in the silence. “You?” she finally said. “I can’t imagine anything worrying you. You’re a man who lives his life on the edge. I couldn’t do that—without falling over.”
“You think that I don’t? Well, you’re wrong. I’ve done that, and I climbed back out again and moved on. It’s the challenge that keeps life interesting, darlin’ ”
“Maybe, but I couldn’t take the constant battle. I don’t put disaster behind me that easily.”
“Maybe I don’t either anymore.”
“Maybe we both need to change our image,”
Andrea said unsteadily. “I hope you don’t mind having a salad for lunch,” she said, carrying the dishes to a shaded porch off the kitchen. “It’s too hot for anything heavy.”
“Uh, no. A salad is fine.” She was right about the heat, but Sam didn’t think either a salad or the air conditioner would cool off either of them. He followed her and sat down at a small table covered with a checked cloth. “Tell me about yourself, Chief. How’d you get to be the head honcho?”
“Buck broke his leg in a wreck, chasing a speeder. I was appointed to the job as an economy measure. I’m already on the payroll.”
“How come the police car wasn’t wrecked?”
“Buck was driving our Bronco—on his day off.”
“And you,” Sam finally asked. “What do you do when you aren’t being a police officer?”
“Nothing exciting, I’m afraid. I run city hall, collect water bills, pay bills, whatever needs doing. I’m just a simple country girl.”
“I doubt there’s anything simple about you, Chief.”
They ate quietly for a time. Only the movement of a determined bumble bee buzzing around the flower beds beyond the porch broke the stillness.
“What about you, Sam? How’d you get to be a carpenter?”
“I learned woodworking in school. That’s what they do to the tough guys, put them in shop classes. Funny thing, I found out I liked it. On a construction site it isn’t who you are that counts, it’s how good you do the job.”
He reached out and brushed a cracker crumb
from her upper lip. His unexpected touch was electric, and Andrea knew he heard her gasp.
“In Arcadia,” she admitted, “it’s who you are
and
what you do. We may not always approve, but if you’re one of ours, we care.”
“I don’t think my mother believed that.”
Andrea didn’t know how to answer him. “I’m sorry, Sam. I don’t know what happened there. None of us understand.”
“I do. She had me, and they threw her out. She spent the rest of her life wishing for this place. I never understood why it was so important to her.”
“I think,” Andrea said slowly, “that it’s because our roots nourish us, become an anchor when the storms come. Maybe your mother needed that.”
“An anchor in the storm. I’ll have to remember that. I’ve never been around people who accepted your weaknesses. In fact—” he hesitated for a long moment, “I’m not sure I believe they exist.”
“Believe it, Sam. People in Arcadia care about each other in a way that outsiders don’t understand.”
“ ‘Outsiders’? My mother was an insider, and she didn’t belong either.”
Andrea began to stack the dishes. David had been an outsider too. She didn’t know why he kept coming to mind. He was part of her past, a part that was finished long ago.
“I have to get back to work,” she said with a sigh.
“Ah, shucks,” Sam teased, sorry that he’d said something to draw her back to the present. “Must we? Couldn’t you take the afternoon off? We could go fishing?”
“Afternoon off? Absolutely not!” Andrea protested as she went back into the kitchen. “Sam, you have to understand that you just can’t come in here and expect me to …”
“To what?” He ambled after her, closing the distance between them. “Why do you move away from me whenever I start to get close?”
“I …” She could almost
hear
the sound of her heart thudding against the wall of her chest. She
couldn’t think when he was so close. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even bring up a picture of the past she’d sworn to learn from. “I don’t know how to deal with somebody like you, Sam. You’re a stranger here. And I don’t know how to … to be discreet.”
“You’re right. That’s me, a stranger everywhere. Maybe Arcadia and this”—he looked around the tiny kitchen—“is the closest thing to a real home I’ll ever know.”
“I’m sorry, Sam. I think you’re confusing your dream of Arcadia with affection for me. Just let me be your friend.”
“ ‘Friend’? Secret lovers I’ve had, but secret friends who can’t even have lunch together? That’s something new. How do friends act when one of them wants to kiss the other?” He watched her take a quick breath and lick her lip nervously.
“They don’t. It’s friends or nothing, Sam. I think I’ll just leave these dishes until later. Buck will be climbing the wall if I don’t get back.”
“Okay.” Sam let out a long breath. Buck wasn’t the only one climbing the wall. “What do
just
friends do around here that’s legal?” He picked up his tea glass and rinsed it in the sink.
“Well, they go to church socials, or to the lake, or roller-skating.” Andrea wiped the kitchen counter and switched off the air conditioner and the overhead fan. She led the way back to the patrol car, pausing only to pull the screen door closed.
“Oh, Stormy, can’t you just see me at a church social? Gabriel would blow his horn, and the walls would fall down.”
Andrea stopped by the car and looked at Sam’s
bitter expression. “Gabriel might blow his horn, Sam, but our walls are strong.”