GOING CRAZY THINKING of Sarah across the hall, standing beneath the shower he remembered sharing with her all too well, John quickly changed into dry clothes, then went downstairs and started fires in both the great room and kitchen fireplaces. Although having a fireplace in the kitchen might seem like a design luxury these days, back when the house was built, before electricity had reached the coast, it had been used for heat and cooking.
He was about to check the fridge when she came downstairs, dressed in an oversize fog-gray, black and white color-blocked sweater that fell to midthigh, and a pair of charcoal-gray leggings with slouchy black socks. Her shoes were surprising neon-pink high-top Reeboks with multicolor-striped laces.
“Nice kicks,” he said.
She glanced down at her feet. “Thanks. They were admittedly a little wild for Japan, where people tend to dress more minimalistic, like New Englanders. But I bought them on sale while living in Oxford and didn’t want to spend the money to replace them.”
It had always been about money with her. She’d waited tables at the Big Dipper after school and weekends and worked on the line at the cannery in the summers. Even during college she’d held down two jobs, which made it even more difficult for John and her to get together, with him in Washington State and her all the way across the country in Massachusetts.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said. “They’re hot.”
She laughed. “Which is proof you’ve been too long without a woman.”
“Over two years,” he responded to what he knew she’d meant as a joke to deflect the compliment he’d paid her. “Not that I’m counting or anything.”
“Oh. Well.” He could see her doing the math in her head. Wondering if their night in Boston could’ve been his last with any woman. Which it had been, but he’d thought he’d ease into that revelation. “I’ll have to admit they always make me feel as if I should be doing aerobics,” she said.
John fought against imagining her in a leotard. Oh, yeah. It had been way too long if that could turn him on.
“You’d probably be good at it after all those years taking ballet from Madame Nikolayev.” He’d always thought she looked like a fairy in her little white shoes and tutus. He remembered her in sixth grade, when she’d been a snowflake in a very shortened version of The Nutcracker. Watching her twirl across that shined-to-a-gloss stage of the Olympic Theater, a spotlight highlighting her glittery white costume and brilliant hair, which had escaped the tidy bun at the back of her head, he’d felt as if he’d fallen off a cliff. A few years later, he’d realized it’d been the first unfolding of boyish lust, but it was also that moment, as their eyes met before she’d danced off the stage, that he’d fallen in love.
“A lot of girls wanted to be Laurie Partridge back then. I dreamed of joining the New York City Ballet and becoming a prima ballerina, dancing with Baryshnikov.”
“You’ve always had big dreams.”
“That was a nice one while it lasted.” Her smile was reminiscent, and, John thought, a little bittersweet. “I loved the costumes. I always felt like a princess.”
“You looked like one, too. Especially in that snowflake costume.”
She looked at him in surprise. “You remember that?”
“I told you. I remember everything.”
She colored a bit at that, but didn’t respond to his implied reminder of their last night together. “Well, unfortunately, as Madame pointed out, once I passed five foot four in seventh grade, I’d grown too tall for any company to ever take me.”
She’d cried, he remembered. He’d been out on the trail, recklessly looking for a bear that had been reported raiding garbage cans, when he’d found her sitting on a rock on the bank of the lake, sobbing into a tattered Kleenex. It was the first time he’d touched her; he’d put his arm around her and she’d turned her face against his chest, soaking his T-shirt with her tears.
Afterward, they’d watched a great blue heron dive into the lake, then fly back to its nest at Herons Landing with a rainbow trout for its chicks. Then he’d walked her home, separating two houses down so her parents wouldn’t spot them. Because although they’d always tolerated their childhood friendship, lately, for some reason he hadn’t been able to figure out, they’d openly disliked their daughter being with him.
By his sophomore year of high school, he realized that they were worried that he might be the guy to ruin their miracle princess’s life.
She hadn’t taken time to put on makeup or dry her hair, which now tumbled in wet coppery curls over her shoulders. Not that she needed makeup. Her skin, the color of top cream, was as smooth as a newborn baby’s.
He opened the fridge. “We’re in luck,” he said. “Mike left halibut, steaks and potatoes. With wine. And Boston cream pie for dessert.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“I may have offered a suggestion or two.” Hoping for a do-over, he’d decided to begin with the dinner they’d shared their last night together.
“I’m on to you, John Mannion.” She pointed a finger at him. “You’re planning to ply me with wine and dinner, then seduce me.”
“Only if you want to be seduced.” He hadn’t been totally honest that day two years ago when he’d blown everything up. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. “Which will it be? Fish or steak?”
“Don’t hold your breath about the seduction,” she said. Which wasn’t exactly saying no. “I haven’t had a steak for ages,” she said. “Years, really. I couldn’t afford it while at Oxford. And of course, although it’s starting to show up on menus, it’s rare and expensive in Japan.”
“Steak it is. I’ll start up the grill.”
“You’ll get wet.”
“It’s Washington,” he reminded her. “And real men grill.”
She laughed, as he’d meant her to.
“Besides, the deck’s covered. I’d offer you veggies, but Mike seems to have failed on that count.” He opened the cupboard next to the range. “But we do have some Froot Loops.”
“Which don’t have any fruit in them. And aren’t eaten by anyone over the age of six,” she countered.
“Which just shows you haven’t ever eaten breakfast with my brother,” John said. “He once used them to make a portrait of Toucan Sam that got him an A in Mrs. Kenyon’s fourth-grade art class. He did have to paint the beak before adding the glued-on stripes from crushed pieces, because Froot Loops didn’t have a black color.”
Her laughter was as bright as starlight on the water. “I doubt he’s ever met a woman he can’t win over.”
“Without even having to try,” John agreed.
He remembered a time back when he’d been in high school and Mike still in middle school. They’d been roasting s’mores while camping out, and Mike had asked John if he was serious about having Sarah for his girlfriend. Because if not, he was going to make a move. John had stopped that idea in its tracks, but had given his kid brother credit for having the balls at thirteen to even consider going after a high school girl.
He took a corkscrew from a drawer and opened a dark green bottle. “Why don’t you sit down and have some wine while I fix dinner?”
“When did you learn to cook?”
“Remember my senior year at UW, when I moved into that apartment with the other three guys?”
“Of course.”
“Well, it didn’t take long to get sick of take-out Chinese, pizza and KFC. So, I got myself a couple books, watched reruns of The Galloping Gourmet and picked up enough to feed myself and the other guys, who chipped in for groceries. They also paid extra for me to cook dinner for their dates, which they could then heat up and pretend to have made themselves.” Extra money that had gone to that last Boston trip.
“Seduction dinners,” she guessed.
“Not for me, because you weren’t there. But I was told that more than a few women who visited considered men who cook sexy.”
“I never learned how to cook,” she admitted. “Whenever I went into the kitchen to help Mom and Grandma Ida, I was told they had things under control, and I should go study.”
“That was your real job,” he remembered as he poured two glasses of ruby cabernet and handed her one. “More than the ones at the Big Dipper or the cannery. Being the first Harper to go to college was a big deal.” And had, he’d always felt, put way too much pressure on those slender shoulders.
“While I can’t cook, I’m great at setting the table,” she said. “And I feel like a new woman after that shower.”
“I’ve always liked the woman you were. And still are,” he said truthfully. He waited for her to remind him yet again of that day. But apparently she’d decided not to ruin the easy mood they’d fallen into.
“I love this house,” Sarah said, deciding the time had come to change the subject.
“A Harper built it.” He reminded her what she already knew.
Not her branch of the family, but they’d gone to school with Ben Harper, whose father had taken over Harper Construction from his father, who’d taken it over from his, and back through the generations to the town’s early days. In fact, the gray stone Honeymoon Harbor city hall featured a bronze plaque on the cornerstone bearing two names: the builder, Nathaniel Harper, and the mayor, Ronan Mannion.
“Yet more proof that the so-called feud is ridiculous.” He repeated what he’d told her so many times over the years. “We Mannions have never supported it.”
“That’s because you’re rich.”
He laughed at that. “Rich is relative. I’ll bet I was the only guy in the Parker House wearing a suit from JCPenney.”
“I couldn’t even afford to buy an outfit to fake my way in,” she countered. “I borrowed that pink dress from a girl whose father did something important on Wall Street.”
“Lucky I didn’t rip it off you, then. I’d probably still be paying it off.” He took the steaks out, unwrapping them from the white butcher paper.
The memory of that night, the most perfect of her life, was so deeply embedded in Sarah’s mind that she was certain that if she lived to be as old as her great-grandfather, she’d still remember every moment. Such as how his eyes had blazed like blue flames when she’d come out of the marble bathroom in her borrowed dress, feeling like a real-life Cinderella. And how his dark hands were such a contrast to the snowy white cuffs of a dress shirt so new it still had the package folds.
And how could she ever forget him stealing her breath away in the empty elevator after dinner, pushing her against the wall, slipping his hand beneath the borrowed dress to find her already wet and ready. At the time, feeling more reckless than she had before or since, Sarah might have risked letting him take her right then and there.
“I read those books,” he said.
“What books?” She looked up from getting the plates down from the glass-fronted cabinets.
“Those ones you were always talking about.”
And wasn’t that a surprise? Having grown up in the same town, having loved him, made love with him and carried on a secret romance for years, Sarah had believed she knew everything about John Mannion. Apparently she’d been wrong. “You read Jane Austen?”
He shrugged. “There’s no TV in Nepal. The nights can be long. Reading killed the time.”
“But why Austen?” She would’ve guessed he’d have read about Nepal for his work and Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker or Tom Clancy, who’d recently burst onto the scene. “Which ones?”
“As for why, because I wanted to know more about you. You always talked about Austen like she was your best friend. I thought that maybe by reading them, I’d discover more about you.”
“We’ve known each other all our lives. I doubt that there’s anything we don’t know. Well, other than the past two years,” she allowed.
“Which we can catch up on over dinner,” he said. “I didn’t have much room in my luggage for books, so I couldn’t take them all. But I did fit in Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Which, by the way, could’ve just as easily been titled Second Chances.”
Could that pointed look he slanted her suggest she consider giving him a second chance? The way Anne Elliot had Captain Wentworth?
“Persuasion was published after Austen’s death.”
“Yeah. I read that in the foreword. But it didn’t take a lit scholar to tell that it was written by an intelligent woman who’d grown older and perhaps had realized that sometimes mistakes we make when we’re young can have long-term, possibly forever consequences.”
“I’m impressed at your insight.” It also had her wondering if he were talking about their own situation. She’d had her life and career planned. Looking back, she hadn’t quite figured out how they’d work things out with him taking over his father’s bank as Mannions had been doing forever. But she’d believed that love would surely have found a way. And how naive had that been?
“I may be a business/ag guy, but we had a big home library I spent a lot of years working my way through. I’ve also read Tolstoy, and for the record, Anna Karenina is a better book than War and Peace.”
Having never made it through the latter, Sarah was in no position to question that judgment. She did wonder how they could have spent all those years together and never talked about her second love—books. Perhaps because she was so caught up in the romanticism of their situation, she’d followed the “girl rules” and mostly guided the conversation to what she thought to be John’s interests. Like sports, which she’d had to study up on, but given that he’d played basketball in both high school and college, and followed the Seattle SuperSonics and Seahawks, she’d assumed it was a topic he’d mostly want to talk about.
“Tolstoy was one of the first non-Japanese authors allowed in the country after it opened its ports again to foreigners in the late 1800s,” she said.
“Really?” He paused from rubbing two fat brown potatoes with olive oil and sprinkling them with coarse salt. Apparently he wasn’t kidding about having taught himself to cook. “I would have thought reading about rebellion, even one in Russia, would have been a problem for their imperial rulers.”
“There were many Japanese back then who appreciated the social and existential ideas. Others probably wanted to read them to get a sense of how the outside world thought. It’s hard to modernize a country kept in physical or ideological isolation.”
“Huh. Good point.” He put the potatoes in the oven, set the timer and began quartering some small brown mushrooms. Watching him wielding the knife with such skill backed up his suggestion that some women found a man cooking to be sexy. Because she was turning out to definitely be in that camp.
“Anyway,” he said, “getting back to Austen, I gave the paperbacks to the English teacher at the school. There’s still resistance to girls learning, but she was very persuasive at getting parents to send their daughters to school. So the books proved very popular. Though I suspect if any of the men had bothered to read them and decided Elizabeth Bennet might prove a role model, they could’ve been banned.”
“You said the Nepalese are modest, which makes sense, given their religions. But there’s no sex in Austen. And other than Willoughby kissing a lock of Marianne’s hair or Mr. Knightley almost kissing Emma’s hand, lovers never even kiss in any of the books.”
“If there had been any ‘inappropriate’—” he made air quotes with his fingers “—displays of affection between the characters, I wouldn’t have dared try to slip the books in. But all Austen’s heroines are women who can change over time, to grow into what they’re meant to be, and encourage their legion of readers to do the same. Which isn’t exactly the message Nepalese women are accustomed to reading.
“Angelina Salvadori, the teacher, and I tried to figure out how she could explain their behavior while not accidentally creating a feminist revolution and throwing their families and society into chaos. Which was the opposite of what we’d been sent there to do. But she and I privately talked about it a lot and decided that we’d also been sent there to open minds to new ideas, whether it was a better way to grow crops or to learn about the world outside their isolated mountain existence. So when she was discussing the books in her classroom setting, or when women or girls asked me how a man would feel about a woman who’d do such and such, we’d both try to couch our answers in a way that might help the questioner nudge her husband or father over a bit to the softer side of sexism, without causing family turmoil.”
“That’s interesting.” She’d love to do a paper on the topic. She also couldn’t help wondering exactly how close his relationship had been with Angelina Salvadori. A name that suggested a lush, curvy Italian goddess like Sophia Loren. Which was a direct contrast to her own lack of curves and Orphan Annie hair.
“Japan was mostly closed off under the shogun rule from the mid-1600s until the mid-1800s, when officials decided they needed to integrate more Western business ideas and foster creativity that had stalled since exiling foreigners.”
“Their dark ages.”
“Exactly. Austen was a hard sell because she’s such a nuanced writer and readers couldn’t understand or accept her thoughts on marriages, proposals and courtships, because it was so different from their own culture. Over time, some popular Japanese writers who admired her work began pointing out that her stories revolved on decision, using sense and logic, and finding happiness by keeping to one’s morals.”
“Which clicked,” he guessed.
“That helped.” Sarah couldn’t believe she was discussing all of this with him. The Girl Rules, she decided, had been very, very wrong. “At any rate, she really took off in the 1950s, when a prestigious publisher put out a translation as an educational novel and ‘the best social novel in the world.’ They also changed the dialogue to expressions more familiar to Japanese understanding that managed to maintain Austen’s witty spirit without changing the novel’s flow.”
“And now, thanks to you, she undoubtedly has a lot more Japanese readers,” he said. “Making publishers and booksellers very happy.”
“It also helped that more and more Japanese are forgoing the traditional arranged marriage to marry for love these days,” she said, trying to sound casual even as her heart swelled at the compliment. She’d heard that from colleagues, but had never expected to hear it from John.
How, she wondered now, had she expected to spend an entire marriage talking about sports and guy stuff? That also had her wondering what her parents talked about when they were alone. Surely more than her father’s fishing business and her mother’s need to get ahead.
Male-female relationships, as Jane Austen was always pointing out, could be very complicated.
“I’m afraid to ask, when we’re starting to get along so well, but what did you personally think of the books?”
“That Anne Elliot reminded me most of you. Which is why she was my favorite of Austen’s heroines.”
Sarah was surprised. Her own students usually preferred outspoken, wry Lizzie Bennet. While he viewed her as Austen’s malleable old-maid heroine? Though Anne did eventually end up with the man she’d been persuaded not to marry. Not unlike John and her situation. Not that they’d ended up together. But yet.
“The rain’s stopped,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “Want to take our wine outside while the potatoes roast and I grill the steaks?”
“I’d like that. Let me just run upstairs and get a jacket.” Spring nights could be cool once the sun went down. Not that they’d seen much sun today.
While he took the steaks out to the covered deck that overlooked the sea, she ran upstairs, retrieved a lightweight fleece jacket from her suitcase. She stopped in the bathroom, fluffed out her hair, which had nearly dried, rubbed some concealer beneath her eyes, brushed a bit of color on her cheeks and put on some light pinky-beige lipstick. She considered spritzing scent—Beautiful—which had been all the rage in Japan probably due to the commercials all centered around a bride looking, and of course smelling, beautiful on her wedding day.
Deciding she didn’t want John to get the idea that she was angling for a seduction or a wedding, Sarah put the small bottle she’d bought for her mother at the duty-free shop back in her bag. Then forced herself not to run back down the stairs.