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He did a three-sixty in the driveway, taking in May’s little kingdom. The house sat on its own square of lush green in a flat suburban subdivision, the yard barely shaded by half a dozen young trees. It was a nothing kind of neighborhood in a place he never would have thought worth visiting.
But it was May’s place. May’s house. May’s mother and sister inside, waiting for him to come back so they could decide what they thought about him.
He’d planned to be gone already.
Here he was, jogging back toward the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A few hours later, with grocery bags under each arm, Ben followed the women into the spacious, bright kitchen of the house May grew up in. It was a comfortable two-story, part of a hilly subdivision overlooking Lake Michigan.
The three women unpacked, and Ben tried to stay out of the way.
“What’s next?” May asked when they were done.
“You two girls go work on the table decorations. Allie’s got everything ready on the back porch; carry the boxes inside and get to work. She’s been avoiding finishing those things for I don’t know how long. I’ll work on lunch. Ben, you can sit and read the paper, if you like. Or check in with your boss if you need to. I bet they’re missing you.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I can help.”
“Are you any use in the kitchen?”
“I know my way around.”
“All right. I’ll let you wash and chop a little if you promise not to wear yourself out. Do you want some more coffee? I have to drink coffee all day long, or I collapse in a heap. After my hernia surgery they told me to stay off the coffee for forty-eight hours, and I was a wreck. You remember, don’t you, May?”
“You wouldn’t get up off the couch. You kept s
aying, ‘Don’t look at me,’ like a soap opera character.”
“I wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes you were,” Allie said.
“Out of here, the both of you.” She made a shooing gesture with her hands. “I don’t want to see you again until all the centerpieces are done.”
May widened her eyes as she walked past him, and he widened his back.
This is crazy, hers said.
I know, his confirmed.
She was smiling a little as she disappeared from sight.
Nancy handed him a plastic-wrapped bundle of celery hearts. “You can start by washing these.”
Once Nancy had him working, she forgot to be a polite hostess and began issuing a steady stream of orders. She had him wash all the vegetables that would become part of lunch, then gave him a cutting board and a knife and put him to work chopping.
Her knives were awful, but he didn’t mind the work. May and Allie bustled through the kitchen five or six times as they carried craft supplies from the back porch to the living room. He caught stray bits of their conversation, mostly jokey insults. Nancy fielded three phone calls, reaching past him every time to snag the phone from the wall on the far side of the countertop. The third time she did it, he noticed the framed watercolor hanging to the right of the phone.
White space divided the paper into four small scenes, like a comic book page. A tiny dumpling-looking girl with a red cap sat at a toadstool table, sipping tea. In the next frame, she was getting into bed, but there was a lump beneath the covers. The third frame showed her discovering a mischievous kitten in her bed, and finally they sat together at the toadstool, each with her own tiny cup of tea.
It was whimsical and light, the colors bright. It didn’t match the rest of the decor, which could have come from an upscale home-decorating store at the mall—earth tones, carefully matched accent colors, collections of photographs with words like love and family and inspiration marching across the frames.
The next time May passed him, he asked, “Did you do this?”
She had her arms full of fake flowers, and she dropped a bunch of them on the floor when she turned to see what he meant. “What? Oh. Yeah. In high school.”
She bent over to gather the daisies.
