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“Good idea.”
They got halfway through the pizza before calling it quits. Amanda topped off their wineglasses and curled back into the couch.
“Is it bad to want a tycoon?” Charity said after a moment, reaching for a faded, battered paperback, the book apparently well read, and much loved.
“I suppose it depends on why you want him.”
“I just want a man who will love me, but also, make things easier, not harder.” She stared down at the book on her lap, studying the cover of the novel. “Men not like Dad,” she added under her breath.
Mandy heard, though.
She lifted her head and looked at Charity, at the same moment Charity looked at her, and nothing else needed to be said because Amanda knew what Charity was thinking, just as Charity knew what Amanda was thinking.
“A man that can hold down a job, and not botch everything up because he can’t stay sober.” Charity’s voice was rough with emotion. “A man with pride and self-respect who wouldn’t dream of expecting his daughters to pay his bills because he’d rather drink than get sober.”
Amanda closed her eyes, holding her breath, hating the wash of pain.
“I’m so angry he did that to you,” Charity added quietly, fiercely. “I’m so mad that he nearly ruined everything for you.”
Only Charity knew Mandy had destroyed her own credit last year, trying to help her parents when they couldn’t pay their bills. Neither Charity nor Amanda had told Jenny, certain Jenny would feel obligated to rush in and help—again—and so Amanda decided she’d shoulder the responsibility this time, but it had cost her, dearly. If it wasn’t for Bette, Amanda wouldn’t have been able to close on her new salon.
“Dad has a problem,” Amanda said after a moment.
“And Mom doesn’t do anything about it.”
“Mom’s still afraid Dad might walk out.”
“Why? That makes me crazy, because where would he go? What would he do? Mom takes care of everything for him. They’re seriously dysfunctional.”
“This is why Jenny insisted we go to college.”
“And paid for our college.”
“She didn’t want us to end up without an education, or skills.”
“She didn’t want us to be Mom.”
Charity returned the pink paperback to the ottoman. “That’s sad.”
And it was, Amanda thought, leaning forward to begin stacking the books into four tidy piles. Their mom had once been beautiful. She’d told her girls that in high school she’d won a modeling competition hosted by a local photographer and was told she had a bright future ahead of her, if she was willing to move to New York.
Apparently she wasn’t, or couldn’t, because two years later she was nineteen and pregnant with Jenny.
“I don’t think we can look at it that way,” Amanda said after a moment. “I think we have to be grateful Jenny was so level-headed and practical. If it weren’t for her, neither of us would have gone to college. We wouldn’t have thought it was possible. We wouldn’t have thought anything was possible.”
“Maybe Jenny was the smart one. She didn’t read romances and she didn’t daydream, and she didn’t give in to fantasies about the way the world could be, and yet she still fell in love, and found her prince. He was from Marietta, too.”
Mandy pushed the four piles together, making them one large square. “Maybe we need to leave Marietta.”
“What?”
“I’m just beginning to think that we’re never going to escape the past, or the names people used to call us.”
“But that’s all in the past!”
“Is it? Then why does Tyler Justice think I’m trying to take advantage of Bette?”
“He doesn’t!”
“He does. He asked me if I knew her finances—”
“He didn’t!”
“He did. And he hasn’t put it in these exact words, but he seems to think I’m a manipulative gold digger—”
“If that’s true, I won’t want to be part of his fan club anymore. But are you sure he really thinks that, or are you possibly being a little sensitive?” Charity jumped from her seat onto the couch and wrapped her arms around her younger sister. “And I wouldn’t blame you for being sensitive because you’re as honest as they come, but he’s an outsider and he doesn’t know that.”
“If Bette hadn’t given me a loan, he’d respect my accomplishments,” she answered darkly.
“I’m sure he respects what you’ve done. How can he not? You’ve started your own business. You have all these truly fantastic ideas on how to expand it, and that takes guts, and vision. Jenny played it safe as a secretary, working for others. I’ve gone the same route. But you’re doing your own thing and it’s impressive, so don’t let anyone make you feel inferior.”
Charity’s advice and pep talk was exactly what Amanda needed, but later that night, as Amanda struggled to fall asleep, she heard a little voice asking why did she care so much about Tyler’s opinion in the first place?
Why should she care about what he thought?
The answer was so obvious, it annoyed her. She liked him, and not just a little, but the kind of attraction that made her feel fizzy and excited and a little breathless every time she was near him.
Just thinking about him now made her heart go faster.
Now if only he could see the best in her, not the worst.
The weekend arrived, bringing with it beautiful weather, the temperature positively balmy for Montana for the last weekend of February. Amanda attended the early morning service at St. James and then returned home and changed and paid a visit to the local mercantile to buy paint.
Home again, she gave the charming picket fence in front of her house a fresh coat of white paint, and since she had the fence done by noon, she tackled the house, giving it a lovely, fresh coat of paint, too, because wasn’t everything better when it was pink?
Charity, Sadie, and Tricia all joined her after lunch, and then Sadie’s husband, Rory, came over when he realized Sadie was on a tall ladder, trying to paint the second floor. Rory made a few calls and by midafternoon he had a half dozen cowboy friends showing up with paint brushes, an
d the entire house was completed by dinner.
While Amanda cleaned all the brushes, Charity called a to-go order into the Chinese restaurant for dinner for twelve, and Tricia went to pick up plastic cups and wine, and they all ate sitting on the front porch and in folding chairs in the lawn, as twilight turned to dusk and then the dark lavender blue of night. She turned on her porch lights and the fairy lights she strung in her trees year round, and returned to her folding chair, now bundled in a winter coat, she kept smiling at her pink house with the soft aqua front door.
It was outrageous, and rather shocking, but it was also fun, and it’d be beautiful come summer when all the lavender bushes bloomed.
Maybe this would be the year her climbing roses took off. And maybe she could find some clematis that would flower, too.
Maybe tough alpha men wouldn’t really hate a pink Barbie dream house.
Shifting in her folding chair, she lifted her plastic tumbler, and toasted her friends. “Thank you, everyone, for pitching in today. I really, really appreciate you. It wouldn’t have happened without you.”
“That might have been a good thing,” one of Rory’s cowboy friends teased from the back.
Charity made a face. “I love the pink house,” she said to Amanda, “and most of all, I love you.”
Amanda blew her sister a kiss and, tipping her head back, studied her house. She felt full of so many emotions, most good, but also a tiny bit wistful. Today was pretty much perfect. The only thing that could have made it better was having Tyler here, and seeing more of her world. She suspected, though, that if he was here, he wouldn’t have been supportive of the paint job, never mind being part of the painting party, and the painting party was what made her love Marietta so very much. Here, people helped people. Even when it meant turning a perfectly respectable white house rose.
Monday morning Tyler woke to a text from the CEO of TexTron. In a bid to placate an angry board, he’d made the difficult decision to sell the entire entertainment division. The entertainment division was likely to be broken up in the sale, with different arms of the division going to different buyers. The CEO had been approached a month ago with an offer from a company interested in acquiring Justice Games, offering a significant amount of money and the CEO planned on accepting the offer today, which meant that Tyler was free to move on to different things.
