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“No, I don’t. I wish . . .” She didn’t say what she wished. Instead, the two women talked about work. They made a silent pact to keep their conversation away from men.
It hurt Jecca that Mrs. Wingate and Lucy didn’t seem to want anything to do with her. She’d thought they were becoming friends, but it looked like she had only been a tenant.
Lucy was the worst. On their single phone call, she’d acted like Jecca was an enemy trying to get information from her. Jecca didn’t call her again, and after three e-mails that Lucy answered in a cool, reserved way, she stopped those too.
When Jecca called Mrs. Wingate, she was charming. But there was no laughter over pole dancing, no information about the playhouse, and no talk at all about Tristan or Nell, or anyone Jecca had met in Edilean.
Those calls also stopped.
But the most hurt, the very deepest, was her father. For two weeks Jecca had been so angry at him that the only thing she wanted to hear from him was an abject apology. Groveling. Begging for her to forgive him.
But there was nothing, not a message of any kind, and certainly no apology. As time passed, in spite of her resolve, Jecca began to soften toward her father.
At the end of three silent weeks, one Sunday afternoon, Jecca called the house in New Jersey. To her horror, Sheila answered. Jecca almost hung up.
“He’s not here,” Sheila said, “and he won’t be—”
Joey snatched the phone away from his wife. “Hey, Jec, ol’ girl, how’s New w didnYork?”
“The same as always. Where is Dad?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“So when are you coming to visit us? The kids miss you. And I got some rototillers that need cleaning.”
“Joey, stop avoiding me and tell me where Dad is.”
“I, uh . . . Jecca, he asked me not to tell you about him.”
She was shocked. “He did what?”
“Look,” Joey said, “he’ll call you later, okay? Don’t worry about anything. He’s not mad at you anymore. I gotta go. Come see us. Or look online. We put up new pictures of what we did to the store. ’Bye, little sister.”
“’Bye, Bulldog,” she said, but her brother had already hung up.
Jecca stood there for a few minutes, unable to think clearly. Her father was no longer angry at her?! She was the one who had a right to be furious. He was the one who’d overstepped the boundaries of . . .
Who was she kidding? When it came to his children—especially his daughter—Joe Layton’s interference knew no bounds.
By the fourth week, Jecca was beginning to recover. If the people of Edilean wanted nothing to do with her, she wouldn’t bother them. She quit calling them, quit trying to keep in contact with them. Instead, she turned her attention fully on the work of getting the gallery going again. She put on a champagne party and invited some of Mr. Preston’s richest friends. It was a great success.
&nb
sp; Della said, “If you’d hang your own paintings you’d be selling them too.”
“There are some things more important than selling your art,” Jecca said.
Since Della had her own work and desperately wanted to hang it, she didn’t understand what Jecca meant.
Jecca knew that Della was her just a few months ago. When she’d gone to Edilean all she’d wanted was to create paintings that sold. Now she . . . The truth was that she no longer seemed to know what she wanted.
She missed Tristan and Nell and her father and Mrs. Wingate and Lucy—and that little town that had only one stop light. But they didn’t seem to have given her as much as a second thought.
It was on the day starting the sixth week that Jecca had left Edilean when her doorbell rang. “Maintenance!” yelled a male voice from the other side of the heavy door.
Jecca was eating a bagel and just about to leave for work. She didn’t know what maintenance was needed in the apartment, but then the building codes were always changing. She opened the door with one hand and grabbed her briefcase with the other.
