The Tramp (The Bound Chronicles #1) (18 page)

“Yes, I do,” Sam assured her, but motioning to the extensive display environment around them, added, “How long will it take to dismantle this?”

“I have a team to do that, darling. We’re just taking the major pieces in the truck. I’ll take you both home, after we drop everything off at the studio and I show you around. You game?”

At mention of how they would be getting home, the memory of rolling Popcorn sprang to mind, and Candy was relieved to have better transportation than the horses. She nodded eagerly, accepting for them both, “Yes, please.”

“I’m game,” Sam agreed.

The three of them packed the more expensive glass artwork and arranged the boxes in the bed of Rachel’s F-150, Sam and Candy exchanging secret smiles and quick kisses every time they passed each other. Though their afternoon had been unexpectedly cut short, Candy figured they would have more time together after Rachel dropped them in Buffalo Square. By the time the truck was ready to leave, the festival seemed to be dying down, the wail of cicadas picking up. Candy had already slapped several mosquitoes on her neck, and was glad to be getting clear of the thick woods and into the air-conditioned cab. She couldn’t wait to get Sam alone, maybe ask him to waltz her around in private somewhere.

Rachel had a way of bending plans to her own needs, however. When she heard that Sam lived far to the south of town, she decided that Candy should be deposited at her grandmother’s house in the valley, before she and Sam drove to the glass studio over the river, in Western Mountain. Candy wished she could change her mind and ask to be taken home (closer to Sam’s house), but—
drat
—she had already promised her cousin that she would spend the night at Grandma Catherine’s with her. On a map, the new transportation plan seemed logical beyond argument, her grandma’s upper-valley neighborhood the obvious first stop. Arguing would seem foolish. And desperate. Candy felt cheated and disappointed, though, as they drove down the state road from the festival.

“But Rachel, I wanted to see that new work you were talking about,” she tried.

“Oh, we’re having an open studio in a couple weeks, love—First Thursdays are starting up again now that autumn is almost upon us. You’ll see plenty of work then, mine and everyone else’s. It will be fabulous, don’t miss it.”

Candy felt lame disagreeing, and not even sure what she had wanted to happen at the end of the day, except for that she had wanted Sam. She listened to the glass-blower shoptalk, sullenly. She thought Sam felt the same, but watching him with Rachel, she had to wonder.

When they pulled onto Riverbend Road, Candy was picking at her nails, despondent, while Sam and Rachel chatted away on either side of her. Looking up to watch her grandma’s house approach, she saw her uncle Pat’s SUV and two other visiting cars in Grandma Catherine’s driveway. Beyond, there looked to be a party developing at the Robinson house. She caught her breath.
The bonfire’s smoking. Is he already here?

She offered abrupt good-byes, annoyed with Rachel and aware she had already lost Sam’s attention; he didn’t even register that there was a party starting right under his nose, couldn’t even smell the campfire. Something about that gave her evil pleasure, seeing him so absorbed in tech-speak with Rachel. She felt guilty when he leaned over for a familiar, boyfriendly peck on the lips, though.

He murmured, “See you, baby,” watching her lips as he slouched back onto his seat.

Her insides fluttered at the endearment.
Baby. Holy crap.
“I’ll call you later,” she said and delivered one last kiss.

chapter twenty-two

Rachel put the truck in gear. She was already driving towards the bridge, when Candy burst through her grandma’s door to get the scoop. “Grandma?” She dumped her bag on the floor and kicked off her sneakers, noting the already large accumulation of shoes by the front door.

“We’re in here,” several voices shouted at once from the direction of the living room; a deep masculine voice mixed with a young female one and her grandma’s familiar melodious greeting. She bounded into the room to find John and Reagan sitting on either side of Grandma Catherine, who held a large, leather-bound photo album on her lap. John pulled himself out of the snug sectional sofa and spread his arms out, white teeth shining from ear to ear.

“Oh my god—John!” Candy took in his new physique before crashing into him. She couldn’t help blushing against his chest; she had rarely seen him in the last few years, during such a rapid growth stage for adolescent boys, and it was hard to keep up with the changes via photographs. A single glance showed her that John had grown attractive in a way she hadn’t noticed before. Over six feet tall, he was still slender, yet much more filled-out in his shoulders and chest. Manly. The cute cleft chin that he’d had since he was little was more defined, his jaw line more angled.

He squeezed her tight and raised her up off the floor with a comic growl, and the strangeness that had been lingering between them for years was gone in an instant. “Hey, Candy-cane. It’s good to see you.”

“Jaw-breaker.” She knitted her brows and rubbed his velvety blonde head, bleached against his summer tan. “Your hair is so short—where’s the curls?”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, the timber in his voice hinting at genuine concern. He knew how much she always loved to boing his curls; they were a novelty, since her own hair was as straight as a board. “I have to keep it short while I’m life-guarding or it’ll turn green.”

“Well, grow it out.”

“I will,” he promised.

“So, what are you guys looking at?” Her grandma had the photo album opened to a page where Candy had just gotten a pair of purple terrycloth training pants, her favorite Christmas gift that year.

Reagan quoted the famous song Candy had sung, while dancing around waving the present in the air, “Purple panties, purple panties.” It had become something of a family anthem for Candy.

“You were so thrilled to have something a little less boyish. All those older brothers, who can blame you, sweet thing?” Grandma Catherine recalled, gazing at her granddaughter with kind eyes. “Fit for a princess.”

Who could be embarrassed, after the thousandth re-telling? Candy indulged them with her next scripted line, “Purple was just my favorite color, is all.”

“Your Aunt Maeve had to dye those purple—nobody could find real purple panties.”

“Oh, there they are in action.” Reagan pointed out a photo on the opposite page in which Candy stood with her feet planted on a makeshift first base, holding a huge baseball bat over her shoulders. She had a lop-sided, gamine grin plastered on her proud face, still baby-fat. She wasn’t wearing anything but the panties and a ponytail pulled through an oversized Bobcatts cap. “Yeah, you were a real princess, Candy.”

“Alright then, let’s find some Reagan gems.” Candy knew just where to start.

They flipped through the album, trading jibes and telling old stories, welcoming Reagan’s little sister Carol and then the eldest, Ursula. Ursula’s baby slept in a sling around her shoulder, not waking even at Carol’s periodic shrill of dismay. She was still too young to accept embarrassing jokes, Candy knew, but still her reaction was a little ridiculous. She glanced at John, guessing she wasn’t the only girl in the room to have noticed he’d become so good-looking.

After finishing the first album, they grabbed another. Then another. “Oh look, there’s John—that must have been when you started staying summers here. Oh my god, the Boy Scouts uniform.”

“Yep. There I am. Look at all those badges,” he laughed, a deep rumble in his chest.

Reagan tittered, “Candy was so impressed with those.”

“What? No I wasn’t.”

“Oh come on, Candy,” Ursula said, lowering her voice when the baby started to squirm. “That’s all you could talk about the next school year—how unfair it is that the Boy Scouts don’t accept girls.”

John regarded her, wonderment in his expression. “I didn’t know that.”

Candy shrugged, suddenly feeling examined. Then, in blessed distraction, Uncle Pat burst onto the scene, insisting that everyone get their butts outside to eat. “The fire’s a-blazin’ next door, grab a hotdog on the way outside.”

“Dad, where’d you put my fiddle?”

“Eat first, Carol; then playtime,” Uncle Pat admonished, trying to sound tough.

Grandma Catherine eyed the baby, “I’ll take Micah, sweetie.”

“Awesome, I’m starving.” Ursula plunked the baby into her grandma’s waiting arms. “I’m sorry, Gramma—he needs a change.”

“I think I can handle it, honey. You get some food in you, before he wakes up starving himself and howling for Mama again.” She set the baby over her shoulder, shushing and bouncing when he mewled in dissent of the transfer.

“You even had those sultry eyes back then, Candy,” Reagan said, halting in the act of closing an album. A picture of Candy had caught her attention. Candy leaned over and saw her nine-year-old face, gazing forlornly at one of her cousins, who was opening birthday presents during a party.

“Selkie eyes,” her grandma whispered over Micah’s shoulder.

Candy’s ears pricked at the description, “What do you mean?”

Reagan frowned at her. “You’ve never heard the legend of the selkies? My dad used to tell it at bedtime, it’s an old Irish folktale,”

“Come on, even I’ve heard of selkies,” said John. “The Secret of Roan Inish is one of my mom’s favorite movies.”

Candy looked from face to face. “Never heard of it. Come on, tell me the story.”

“Selkies are mythical creatures who are seals in the water, and humans on land.”

“And they’re beautiful, with deep black eyes.” John nudged her ribs.

“The story my dad always told was of a selkie woman who shed her seal skin to come ashore, because she had fallen in love with a human. She hid her skin, so that she could return to the sea after seeing him—my dad never said ‘making love’ but that’s the way I think of it now—but the man found the skin first and stole it, so that she would be forced to stay with him forever and be his wife. Apparently, selkies make great wives.”

“How cruel.”

“No, she was happy with him, and they had several children together, whom she loved very much. But she was often seen gazing longingly at the sea, kind of like you were gazing at those birthday presents.” Reagan held the album closer, so Candy could see it better. “Anyway, one day while their father was away, the children were playing in their toy boxes and costumes, and they found the seal skin. They showed it to their mother, thinking nothing of it. She took it and immediately returned to the sea, never to be seen again by her husband. Although, the father did see the children playing with a seal and splashing in the water by the seashore.”

“That’s the basic story in my mom’s movie, too.”

“Wow, that’s really sad,” said Candy. She wondered if her uncle thought of how young she and her brothers were when their own mother died, ‘never to be seen again.’ “Your dad told you that story when you were how old?”

“But, look your mom had selkie eyes, too.” Reagan flipped to an earlier page, which showed a picture of Candy’s mom, flashing those haunting eyes at the camera in a close-up. The word “impish” came to mind. “They say the children of a selkie sometimes carries the gene, and that’s why you have Irish folks with black hair and black eyes in a family of green-eyed red-heads.”

“Well, who had the eyes before my mom?” Candy asked, trying not to feel ruffled at Reagan’s light-hearted manner; she obviously didn’t understand the sudden importance for her cousin. But Candy couldn’t help but imagine that Uncle Pat had been thinking of his dead little sister, with her black selkie eyes, when he told his kids that story.

“Suzanna was the first in our family, as far as I know,” their grandma answered. Her sympathetic look said that she regretted having brought the melancholy story to Candy’s attention. “It’s just a story, sweetie.”

Candy watched her grandma disappear up the stairs. “Well, the dark eyes had to come from somewhere.”

“Oh, Candy.” Reagan snapped the album shut. “There aren’t really any selkies.”

“Of course not,” John interjected. “But, genetically speaking, there would have to be a precursor somewhere.”

Candy smiled at him. He understood.

“Yeah, in the mailman. Maybe that’s why Grandma doesn’t want to talk about it.” Reagan laughed, springing out of her seat and grabbing Candy’s hand to pull her up, too. “Come on, let’s eat.”

Candy let herself be towed along, looking back and making a crazy screaming face at John. “I’m gonna find those eyes.”

“I have no doubt,” he said. “When your mind is set...” He went to give her a teasing slap on the rump, but apparently realizing that would be inappropriate, turned it into a brotherly pat on the back.

Candy felt her cheeks flush and she shook her head at him, “You weirdo.”

“Too bad you missed the festival today, John.” Reagan’s voice echoed as she entered the kitchen. “It was awesome; you should’ve seen
the waltz
. Candy was dancing with—”

“Everyone. And Reagan was in the buck dancing competition and kicked butt,” Candy broke in, cutting Reagan off. She pinched the back of her arm in warning.

“Ow. What?”

Sshh,
Candy mimed under her hand. She didn’t know why, but she wanted to keep that memory close. Cherish it for a while longer. She secreted a look at John, certain that he hadn’t missed the exchange; John never missed anything.

“Really? Did you place, Reagan?” He grabbed a paper plate and helped himself to heaping portions of potato salad, macaroni and cheese, baked beans and two hotdogs. He congratulated Reagan when she held up two fingers, for second place.

Seems to be letting it slide. For now.
Candy wondered when John would bring it up again. She had no doubt that he would.

“Are we grilling these over the fire?” he asked, feigning ignorance and innocence.

“Probably, I think the grill is still out of commission from Fourth of July, right Reagan?” She fixed her buns up with dill relish, onions, ketchup and mayonnaise, but left an empty space for a veggie dog. She smiled, thinking about what Sam would say of her faux-vegetarianism, as she searched for one in the fridge.

“What happened on the Fourth of July?”

“My dad was experimenting with a new recipe again,” said Reagan, rolling her eyes.

“I thought it was really good,” called Candy from deep within the fridge. Nobody else in the family ate veggie dogs; she usually brought them over herself and stocked them away, where they remained undisturbed by anyone but her.
Grandma better not have thrown away the last ones I bought.
Finally unearthing a package of Tofurkey in the back of a drawer, she tossed one onto her bun and followed Reagan and John outside.

Then she stopped short. “Simon?”

Candy shoved her plate at Reagan. Her cousin fumbled dangerously for a few seconds before John helped her steady the extra load, then finally took it from her once it was balanced. Candy, meanwhile, vaulted onto a backlit shadow of the young man who had been walking across the field between the McBride and Robinson houses. She knocked him down like a professional wrestler, demanding, “Why didn’t Dad tell me you were coming? Is that your new car? Is David with you?”

“I don’t know. Yes—pretty sweet, huh? And yes,” her brother answered her string of questions with a string of answers, his shoulders pinned to the ground and his little sister straddling his chest. He grabbed her waist and easily removed her. He got his feet back under him again and crouched down to offer her a ride. “I was just coming to get you, wondering what was taking y’all so goshdarn long.”

With Candy riding piggyback on Simon, drilling him about college and when he had to be back for the final year, the group finally reached the bonfire. The party had definitely already started. Uncle Pat was entrenched in a story with Candy’s dad, Simon’s twin brother David, Uncle Garrett, all of them sitting on folding chairs next to the beer cooler. Carol, who had probably inhaled dinner, was rehashing her performance at the festival for their pre-teenage cousin, Zoë, punctuating with her fiddle. Zoë was one year Carol’s junior, and she listened and nodded and congratulated, clutching her own preferred instrument, a classical guitar, at her side. Joshua and Alex, in their terrible two’s, were shrieking, giggling and crying intermittently. They raced dangerously close to the fire and then sprinted away into darkness, keeping Aunt Cammy on her toes. Ursula stopped wolfing her hotdog for a second to strongly suggest that her husband run after his own son, so she could eat in peace. Candy’s cousin, Peter, mired in the middle at the lost age of eight, sat at the edge of the fire looking bored and watching his hotdog turn black on its stick.

“Someone better give Peter something to do, before he starts burning live things,” Candy surmised aloud, then saw that John already had the same thought. He squatted next to Peter and asked him about the proper method for grilling hotdogs, then offered his uncooked dogs for inspection.

“Candy, hi.”

She turned to find John’s dad on his way down the front steps, lugging a heavy cooler behind him with one hand. She ran over to take the handle on the other side. “Hi, Mr. Robinson, let me help you.”

“Thanks. It’s good to see you, honey.” He straightened his back, his tailored khakis and neat polo unwrinkling like magic (so much like John, Candy had to stifle her smile), to carry the considerable load in a more dignified manner. James Robinson was not the kind of country macho who never accepted help from a little lady, and Candy loved that about him. “My sister’s kids might come out to the fire, if the soda is out here. As it is, Beth has them all inside playing board games, quarantined from everyone else. I don’t get it.”