Just One Day (6 page)

“And—that was to run a diner?”

He shook his head and got up to walk to the kitchen. “No, that was to build things.” He opened the fridge quickly and pulled two waters out before closing it back to keep the cold in. “I got on a construction crew after the boat, building tract homes.” He laughed sarcastically as he sat back down and handed me a bottle. “Once my dad realized I enjoyed it, he decided I should go back to school for architecture.”

“Oh, wow.”

“I couldn’t just do that. It was always about the higher education with him. In order for me to succeed in his eyes, I needed a degree in something.”

“So I’m guessing you didn’t go,” I said, swigging down the cold water.

He did an eyebrow gesture that said no. “He’s still waiting.”

I laughed. “And the diner?”

The light in his eyes went out. I was enjoying the camaraderie so much, I wanted to put it back.

“That was my wife’s idea.” His face went completely void of expression. As he went somewhere inside himself and I played with my water bottle lid, I tried to figure out what to say.

“I heard about—um—that you lost your wife,” I said, wincing a little as his head jerked toward me. “Sorry.”

“What?” he asked, his tone curt. “How would you know that?”

His complete change of demeanor threw me. “I’m—sorry I mentioned it. Jarvis just told—”

“Jarvis,” he said, enunciating slowly, leaning forward. It was more like a question and I was left to wonder if I’d remembered the name wrong.

“The old man?” I thumbed toward the downstairs area. “Isn’t that his name?”

Jesse looked at me with an odd expression, something I couldn’t read and didn’t even know if I was supposed to try. “Jarvis told you about my wife?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

I raised my eyebrows, so bewildered. “This morning? At breakfast?” I flopped the pillow back at him. “And at the time, it wasn’t about you, at least not to me. I didn’t know you were the owner of the diner that he was talking about. Why the third degree?”

He looked away and shook his head. “Nothing.”

“He just likes to talk, I think,” I said, assuming that maybe Jesse didn’t appreciate Jarvis putting his business out to strangers. “He told May that he misses his boat.”

Jesse’s eyes shot back to me again, and he ran both hands over his hair as if they just needed something to do. “What else?”

I shook my head. “Why?”

He looked at me, hard, as if deciding on something, then gave a little head shake and appeared to switch gears. “Jarvis and his wife, May, were who I bought the diner from,” he said finally. “They’re good people.”

“Oh, seriously?” I said. “Wow, they didn’t say anything about owning it. He started talking about that boat, and just—”

“Kept talking,” Jesse finished, his face and voice softening. “Yeah, he loved that old boat. It’s been probably six years since he sold it to me, and he never stopped fussing over it. Making sure I kept up the maintenance and updated my tags.” He laced his fingers and stared at them. “Whether I was using it or not. He just couldn’t handle it anymore and didn’t want to see it go to waste.”

“My dad used to judge people by their boats,” I said.

His expression went thoughtful like he was recalling a memory. “I told my son something like that once. That a boat is an extension of the man driving it. Doesn’t have to be big or flashy, just solid and made of integrity.” He sighed with the memory, his eyes lost in it. “I taught him how to drive it, dock and launch, even how to fish in it long before it was mine. Jarvis used to bring us out, then let me borrow it when Jamie got bigger and it didn’t fit three comfortably anymore.”

I liked how his face transformed when he spoke of his son.

“So how old is Jamie now?”

Jesse took a deep breath and let a couple of blinks pass. “He’s nineteen.”

“Off to college somewhere?” I asked, sensing something wasn’t right.

He shook his head and got up again, tossing his empty bottle onto the nearby chair. “He lives in Austin with my in-laws.”

I frowned and waited for the explanation, but he looked antsy, like a pacing cat.

“Did you have a falling-out?” I asked finally.

He turned and met my eyes, startling me with the pain that shot out from his. “You could say that,” he said quietly. “He thinks I killed his mother.”

Chapter Six

Okay then.

I found myself transfixed once again by a gaze I couldn’t turn from. His eyes dared me to question, and begged me not to. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I did have a sudden fleeting regret that no one knew where I was.

Somehow, even not knowing the man he became over the last two decades, I knew it wasn’t as it sounded. The fierce pain and rawness I saw in his face told me it was something else. Something deeply rooted and inherently private.

I didn’t have a chance to say anything, because the sound of ice pecking the windows spurred him into action.

“Hail,” he muttered, shoving nearby sneakers onto his bare feet. “Great.”

I envisioned Brad’s car being deckled as well as drowned, and groaned. “What do we need to do?”

“Right now—go check the windows and the water level, and here—” He opened a closet and pulled out another small cooler. “Can you go fill this one with ice to keep up here? Don’t know how long this’ll go on.”

“Yeah,” I said, grabbing the cooler and following him down. For the moment I figured the activity was a valid distraction from the conversation.

The view when we reached the bottom was pretty dismal. Even through the sandy glass, the sight of hail pummeling the new parking lot lake was rather intimidating. Especially the inconsistent directions it was doing it in. It appeared to come from every direction at once, taking my breath away every time the full wrath of it would slam into the predominantly glass front.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. Looking for Brad’s car made my heart sink, as waves lapped at the diner’s porch.

“Don’t look,” he said softly from behind me, as if reading my mind. “There’s nothing we can do to change it, come on.” He pointed out the ice machine. “Close it back as quickly as you can.”

There wasn’t much ice left in it.

I looked at the hail swirling and bouncing against the sidewalk. “What if we grab some of that?”

He stopped, mid-reach toward a closet door, and turned to see what I was pointing at. “Are you serious?”

“It hasn’t made any more ice, and that’s free,” I said, fiddling with the locks till they surrendered. I pushed the door open with my back and shoved the cooler through the gap. I turned my face away as I held on to it. Actually, I’d planned on letting it sit there without me, but I quickly realized it would blow away.

It filled in minutes, and I pulled it back, holding it up as the door banged back into place. Jesse laughed and walked up to me, taking the cooler from my hand.

“Well, aren’t you innovative?” he said, wiping the rainwater from my face with his fingers. The touch was electric, and our eyes met. In that one second, we were back on a lakeshore and no time had passed. Something pulled at me, drawing me closer, but the earlier dark moment clouded his expression.

His eyebrows twitched as he blinked and looked away, blowing out a breath. He turned and set the cooler on the counter on his way back to the closet, leaving me to flex my hands and mentally kick myself.
Brad, Brad, Brad . . .

I watched him unlock and pull open the closet at the end of the bar and disappear into it. One by one, sandbags were tossed out with solid thuds. My God, he was such a Boy Scout. I walked over to hoist one of them up and heard a chuckle behind me as I grunted and wobbled in place.

“Stay with it there, Fremont, I don’t want to have to rescue you again.”

Seriously? I craned my neck around to glare at him, but at least the playfulness was back. For now.

“Where do you want these?” I asked.

“Along the front,” he said with the strain of lugging two at once. “Pile extra around the door.”

We heaved, grunted, and shoved bags till they were all in place. All twenty-one of them. I counted.

“Jesus, what possessed you to fill all these?” I panted, plopping down in a booth far away from the windows. They were scaring me.

“My low land,” he said, leaning against the bar to catch his breath. “Gotta do what it takes to take care of what I have. Guess that’s why law didn’t do it for me,” he said with a shrug. “Legal documents and putting on a show in the courtroom isn’t who I am.” He held up his hands. “I work for what I have.”

I stood up to peer out at the porch, now flush with the ice-chummed water. “Sure hope they work.”

The big clock over the bar mocked me, showing me with its battery-operated superiority that I only had sixteen hours left. God, every time I thought I had it settled in my mind—every time I made peace with the thought of going home to Brad and starting our life together—something weird escalated with Jesse. And things weren’t supposed to escalate with Jesse! There wasn’t supposed to
be
a Jesse.

“Shit,” I muttered to myself. Or what I thought was to myself.

“What?”

I shook my head, looking back outside, but he wasn’t distracted with tasks anymore and zeroed in. “No, something. What’s up?”

“Just listening to the time tick by,” I said, not turning around, and hugging my arms across me. “Why is that clock so infernally loud?”

I heard the rumble of his laugh get closer as he slid into the seat across from me. “I hate to break it to you, Fremont, but you aren’t getting anywhere else today.”

I took a deep breath and scooped my hair back. It was still damp. He was right. This was the day Brad gave me. It wasn’t going to get better.

“I know. Just thinking about the other end.”

Jesse frowned. “Other end of what?”

“This day,” I said. I watched a tree by the road get stripped by the angry sharp ice, and I closed my eyes when I imagined the car. I may not have a choice to make, after all. Once Brad found out I’d taken off without a note and destroyed his car, he may take the offer off the table. The wind seemed louder than before, or maybe that was the roar of impending doom.

“So, what’s on the other end?” he asked, his tone soft enough to bring me back to him.

The old look in his eyes made my stomach tingle for a second. It was warm and familiar, like old friends or lovers would have. But how could it feel that familiar after so much time?

“A note with a yes or no.”

* * *

Jesse leaned forward, knowledge already visibly washing over him. He asked anyway.

“What’s the question?”

I bit at my bottom lip and traced a scratch on the wooden table. “Oh, you know the one,” I said, focusing on the long mark. “Involves jewelry.”

He picked up my left hand by the ring finger. “I don’t see any jewelry.”

I stared at my hand in his. “Yeah, that would be the quandary.”

“So, what’s the problem?” Jesse asked, leaning over to make me look at him.

“I don’t know,” I said, sliding my hand back from his and rubbing my eyes. “On paper, it all makes sense, just—” I shook my head. I didn’t know where else to go with it.

“People aren’t paper,” he said. “Marriage is hard. You should at least start excited about it.”

I laughed and ran my fingers along the back of the hand he’d held. It was still warm there from the contact. “I know. And I’ve been down that road. I guess I never really saw myself doing it again.”

“Are you in love with the guy?”

Coming from him, those words made my mouth go dry, and he seemed to know that because he shook his head.

“Take our history out of it, Fremont. Close your eyes so you aren’t looking at me.” I studied his expression for a moment longer and then did what he said. I closed my eyes. “Now,” he continued. “Do you love him?”

The quiet wasn’t really quiet with the violence of the storm swirling around us, but to me it was deafening. I clinched my eyes shut tighter and forced Jesse’s image away and Brad’s face to mind. His smile and laugh and quirky ways that were mostly funny. His easy way of getting me to calm down when I was angry or see his way of thinking. Damn it, I wanted to say I was in love with him, why was it so hard? Why did it feel more like habit than love?

I felt a hand on mine again, and my eyes popped open.

“How long have you been together?” he said.

“Two years.”

A look somewhere between disbelief and pity crossed his features, and he sat back in the booth.

“I knew I loved you in one day,” he said, his voice low. He said it so easy, my skin lit up like a million little candles. He broke eye contact, looking out at the storm. “Say what you want about that, Andie, you knew it, too.”

My head spun with a thousand questions. Questions that took my voice so I couldn’t ask them. How could we have been so sure in just one day, when here I was running in circles after two years?

“It was the same with my wife,” he said, still staring unseeing out the window. “I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her after a week.”

My questions about us would wait. I blinked back the unexpected burn behind my eyes, irritated at the emotion this man I barely knew could pull from me.

“Tell me about her.”

The words sounded foreign coming from my mouth since his blatant confession still rang in my ears. It was on long loop, repeating over and over in my head. He took a deep breath and let it out, looking like I’d just asked him to run naked down the highway. He closed his eyes.

“It’s not something I talk about,” he said under his breath.

I leaned forward in the seat. “Well, today’s a new day.”

He opened his eyes and looked hard into mine. In that moment, I was in awe. He was about to dump his most private painful shit out on that table to me. All because I’d crossed his path again mere hours earlier. How did we affect each other like that? Brad was never a friend like that. It took me two months to admit how much I was missing Lanie when she first left. And he never asked.

“Her name was Beth,” he said finally. So much silence followed that statement, I thought he was done. But then he sat back and then forward again, and I could see the inner struggle. “She was working in a little diner in Corpus, and me and the guys from the shrimp boat would go there a couple times a week.”

“And you won her over with your smile?” I said, lightening the mood.

A laugh rumbled from his throat. “Huh. No, not quite. I was pretty cocky back then and my methods fell flat.” He smiled at the memory. “I said something smart-ass to her one night and she dumped a whole tray of food in my lap and walked away.”

“Wow,” I said. “Interesting play.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I was hooked.” He toyed with a coaster on the table. “We got married four months later.” He locked eyes with me. “I just knew.”

I nodded, knowing what he was getting at. Lots of things seemed to be getting at that. But then his eyes went darker than dark, and he shut them again.

“Four years ago, I was out fishing late by myself. Jamie didn’t feel like going, so I went alone. No big deal, did that all the time.” He gripped the coaster tighter. “Fish were hitting after dark so I stayed out a little longer. Didn’t realize my phone had died.”

He stopped and slid out of the booth, striding around the bar to the big fridge. He grabbed two beers and came back.

He twisted the top off his bottle and took down half of it before he continued. “When I got home—” He stopped. “No—before I got home, I smelled it. It permeated the inside of my truck before I even knew it was my house.”

Goose bumps covered my body, and tears sprang to my eyes as the haunted look on his face gave me the images.

“Lights were flashing everywhere,” he said, his voice going on autopilot as he recited the memories into his beer bottle. “The heat, the noise, the air was acrid. Flames were still—” His voice faltered, and he blinked hard to keep control. “It was so hot, it hurt to breathe. Everything—everything crackled. They had some of it out, but parts were still burning. Trees were on fire. The home I built with my own hands was nothing but sticks.”

I felt the hot tears travel down my cheeks, but I didn’t move to wipe them away.

“It was like a bad dream. I only remember running in slow motion, yelling at people who couldn’t seem to hear me,” he whispered. “There were so many uniforms and men running back and forth to get where they needed to be and all I wanted was to find my family.” He nodded. “And I did.”

Jesse’s whole face tightened, and I feared he’d crush that bottle with his bare hand.

“Jamie came at me out of nowhere, hitting me like a bulldozer, hoarse and screaming at me,” he said. “He was nearly my height already, even at fifteen, and strong. He nearly took me down. At first, I was just so relieved to see him. He was covered in ash and his hair was singed, and I just grabbed him and held on. But he fought me like a man, and I couldn’t understand what he was yelling about.” Jesse slugged down the remainder of his beer and dug his palms into his eyes.

“I asked him where his mother was, and he just started pounding me with his fists, screaming and gagging on smoke.” He took a deep breath. “I finally got a grip on him and heard him cuss me. He screamed at me,
“Damn you, Dad!
I couldn’t get her out, where were you?”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“I remember running to the house, calling her name,” he said. “Somebody stopped me. Told me she was already in the ambulance.”

“Alive?” I asked, knowing the end result but hoping he got some time.

“No,” he said, angry tears falling. “She was dead. Asphyxiation by smoke, they said. The fire spread too fast. According to Jamie, they made to the stairs and then she collapsed. He tried to carry her but then the stairs started giving way so he got out and called
me
,” he said through his teeth. “Called 911. Kept trying to get back in, but—evidently he couldn’t get back to her.”

“Jesse, I’m so sorry,” I said, touching his hand. He met my eyes at the sound of his first name, and looked surprised at my tears. He reached up and brushed one away, then frowned at his fingers as if they’d betrayed him again.

“Jamie blames me for her death, and I can’t fault him for that. I should have been there. He shouldn’t have had to take that on by himself.”