Coming to a Crossroads Read online

  In the beginning, he had been rather dazzled by her beauty, which was considerable. But just like the old adage went, beauty was only skin deep, and, he had come to the conclusion, what Catherine had just beneath the surface was pretty damn ugly. Just before the end came, he had given up waiting for her to change, because after all, Catherine didn’t think there was anything wrong with her. In her eyes he was the deficient one. She had called him an unimaginative boor and a hopeless stick-in-the-mud more than once.

  When she called him that the day he had told her that he was going to work at the free clinic, that had been the last straw. Horrified and incensed, Catherine told him that he had to choose—it was either working at the clinic, like a fool, or remaining engaged to her. When he told her he chose the clinic, Catherine stared at him as if he had lost his mind. And then she had, presumably, gone through all the stages of mourning at lightning speed: shock, disbelief, horror and then fury. A great deal of fury.

  Ethan felt as if he nearly got whiplash watching her go through all of them.

  “Well, then, forgive me for saying it,” he heard Liz telling him, bringing him back to the present, “but you need to upgrade the class of people you interact with. You don’t seem to know any very nice ones.”

  “No forgiveness necessary,” Ethan assured her with a laugh. “You are right on-target, at least about someone I know. Listen, to get back to the reason I called. I was wondering if I could thank you some way for being so nice and dropping off my journal. I mean, you could have had some disembodied voice from your local office call me over the phone to tell me where I could go in order to pick up my journal.”

  “I just eliminated a step,” Liz said, making it sound as if it had been no big deal on her part and that she hadn’t had to find the time to squeeze in the errand between jobs. “This just seemed easier than asking someone at the local office to notify you. And you don’t need to thank me. Just think of it as a good deed that you can pass on if you should ever have the opportunity to do so.”

  So, she was one of those, he thought. Someone who thought in terms of good deeds. Something else that set her apart from Catherine, he couldn’t help thinking.

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” he replied. “But in the meantime, how about I buy you a cup of coffee at this little restaurant I know? It serves great coffee, and the word hasn’t been invented yet to describe the pastries they serve there. They’re baked on the premises—”

  “By a little old lady who gets up every morning before dawn to fill the order,” Liz guessed, tongue-in-cheek. It was in keeping with the rest of his description, she thought.

  “You peeked,” he accused, doing his best not to laugh.

  “Well, I figured that you only wanted the best,” she answered, playing along.

  His smile deepened as he thought of the woman on the other end of the call. “Actually,” Ethan told her, “that’s true.”

  Why such a very common, playful answer should generate a warm shiver and send it shimmying up and down her spine like that left Liz totally mystified. But that didn’t change the fact that it did. Liz pressed her lips together, determined not to overanalyze her reaction.

  “All right,” Liz agreed. “Where and when—and keep in mind that between my schedule and the one you told me you had, this just might take some elaborate coordination on both our parts.”

  Elaborate or not, he was determined to make this happen. “Well, fortunately, I’ve got one of my friends volunteering at the clinic tomorrow, so I can probably manage any time after nine thirty. How about you?” he asked.

  There was a pause on the other end, and he heard the sound of papers being shuffled. She hadn’t been kidding about her schedule, he thought. He found himself crossing his fingers.

  “Ethan?” he finally heard her say after a long beat.

  “Yes?”

  “My last class is over at eleven, and I don’t have to be anywhere for about ninety minutes after that. Give me the restaurant’s address, and I’ll meet you there,” she told him.

  Yes!

  Trying not to sound as if there was a small, cheering chorus in his head, Ethan gave her the address of the Sunny Day Café.

  Chapter Eight

  The café was steadily growing more crowded.

  Liz looked at her watch and wondered for the second time in the space of ten minutes whether she had somehow gotten her destination wrong. But she sincerely doubted that there were two restaurants called Sunny Day Café within the city of Bedford. It wasn’t as if the place was part of a chain.

  That left time as the only variable in this little equation.

  She could have sworn she and Ethan had agreed to meet here at eleven thirty. It was past eleven thirty. It was now twenty minutes after twelve. With more people entering the café every few minutes, it was only a matter of time before some couple would ask if she would mind moving to the counter so that they could use her table. That was one of the reasons she was currently on her second cup of coffee, which she was now diligently nursing as well as daintily nibbling on her second piece of pastry. The first one had disappeared into her mouth in a flash because it had turned out to be even more wonderful than she had been led to expect from Ethan’s initial description of the baked goods.

  Resisting the temptation to look at her watch again, Liz decided to give Ethan another ten, no, nine more minutes, she amended. Nine more minutes would make it a full hour that she had been nesting here.

  As far as she was concerned, giving a man an extra hour to show up for a coffee date that he had been the one to schedule in the first place was being more than reasonable on her part.

  Besides, today was supposed to be the day that she would grab more shifts driving for Chariot. That would start in half an hour from now.

  Or at least it was supposed to, she thought, looking at the door again. Waiting for Ethan to show up was going to make her late—if she let it.

  He now had eight more minutes, Liz thought.

  Her countdown was down to four minutes when the café door opened and Ethan finally came in, looking, she had to admit, as if he had just run the last few miles from the clinic on foot.

  Right. She was imagining things, Liz told herself. But he did look as if he had already put in a full eight-hour day.

  Seeing Ethan looking around the small café like a misguided puppy desperately trying to find his way instantly tugged at Liz’s heart. All the semi-angry thoughts that had been forming in her mind for that last forty-five minutes just evaporated.

  Liz held her hand up in the air, waving her fingers to catch his attention.

  The look of relief she saw on his face the second he spotted her waving at him was gratifying to witness, Liz thought. She forgave him for being late without even having to hear his excuse. She instinctively knew that whatever had kept him away hadn’t been of Ethan’s own choosing.

  “I am so sorry,” Ethan apologized in a semiwhisper the second he was close enough to her to speak. He slid into the chair opposite Liz’s at the small table for two. “There was an emergency at the exact same time I was about to walk out the door to meet you.” He knew that had to sound lame, but it was the truth.

  She was just happy that he had finally shown up and that she wasn’t being stood up.

  “That’s how emergencies like to do it,” she said, nodding her head. “At the most inopportune times. I think that’s what they based that old saying on—the one about the best-laid plans of mice and men. It goes for doctors, too,” she told him, doing her best to keep a straight face.

  He was relieved and drained at the same time. While he hadn’t actually run the distance, he felt as if he had, all the while upbraiding himself that he had left her number on the desk in his tiny office. He’d had no way to reach her, and he was afraid that she wouldn’t still be waiting here once he finally made it to the café.

  Tryin
g to sound as if he wasn’t breathless, he asked, “Have you been waiting long?”

  “Not anymore,” she told him, her eyes sparkling. She didn’t want to go over that ground. As far as she was concerned, that was in the past and she was all about moving forward. “So, was it a big emergency or a little emergency?” Liz asked, genuinely curious.

  “A man’s heart stopped, but I got it going again.” The man had actually fallen at his feet just as he was about to leave. But in his estimation, that sounded far too melodramatic. He hadn’t told her about the man’s heart attack so that he could be seen in any sort of favorable light—he just wanted Liz to understand he hadn’t been late because he had just arbitrarily lost track of time. He had been detained by unfortunate circumstances beyond his control.

  “So, definitely a big emergency,” Liz concluded, clearly impressed by the matter-of-fact way Ethan had answered her question. Were these kinds of emergencies just everyday occurrences for him so that he made it sound as if this was the norm? She hoped not, because then it would mean that his soul had gotten numb. “And then what?” she asked.

  “And then the paramedics took him to the hospital,” he told her. He looked over toward the counter, noting that there was what appeared to be a cross section of humanity, tall, short, well-groomed and motley looking as well queuing up in front of it. The only thing this collection of people had in common was that they all wanted to place their orders. “Don’t worry, the man is in good hands.”

  “If you ask me, he was in good hands when he came to the clinic to see you,” Liz said, her eyes on his. She pushed her still half-filled cup toward him. She could tell he was getting ready to get in line. “Look, in the interest of time, would you like to share my coffee and pastry with me?” she offered.

  Ethan was sincerely tempted for a number of reasons, but ultimately, in his mind, sharing her coffee and pastry somehow seemed excessively cheap. “No, I’ll just go up and get my own,” he told her, beginning to push his chair back and get up.

  “If you do,” she pointed out, “you’re going to spend most of the time I have left standing in line, waiting to be served.” Liz nodded down at her coffee and pastry. “It would be a lot easier just to share mine. I promise that except for an occasional allergy attack if I’m within close proximity to strawberries, I’m in the pink of health.”

  “Strawberries?” he questioned as he sat down in his chair again. She was right, he thought. He didn’t want to waste what little time they had left together by standing in a line.

  “So I’m told,” Liz answered. “My mother maintains that I broke out in hives from strawberries when I was a little girl. Of course, it wasn’t because I actually ate the strawberries, but because my cousin Alex decided I was too pale. In what his mother, my late Aunt Betsy, called an ‘inspired’ moment, he smeared strawberry jam all over my arms and legs.” She rolled her eyes. “Talk about sticky...”

  “How old were you at the time?” Ethan asked, stunned by the vivid image that description created in his mind’s eye.

  “I was three. Alex was four.” Ethan found her smile incredibly infectious as she went on to confide, “Our mothers never left us alone after that.”

  “I wouldn’t have, either,” Ethan agreed, then went on to honestly add, “I don’t know if your cousin was being exceptionally creative or was just really troubled.” Shaking his head, Ethan broke off what amounted to the tiniest sliver of the pastry that was sitting on the plate between them and then popped it into his mouth.

  “Take more,” Liz urged. “That’s what my mother said about Alex years later when she referred to the incident. Personally, I think Alex was just a frustrated artist who used whatever he had available to him.” She paused to take a small sip of what was now their joint cup of coffee. “He’s off somewhere in Europe these days, ‘expressing’ himself, to use my mother’s terminology.”

  “Hopefully he’s not still using some woman’s limbs as his extended canvas,” Ethan said, watching Liz’s face to see if he had perhaps overstepped some unseen boundary. It was all right for her to say that about her cousin, but she might feel protective about that same cousin.

  “No, as far as I know, he’s using canvas now to immortalize his vision.”

  Ethan nodded. “Good to hear.” His attention shifted to the coffee he had just sipped. “You take your coffee the way I do. Black, no cream, no sugar.”

  “No nonsense,” she added with a smile. “I don’t drink coffee for taste, I use it for fuel to keep going.”

  “So do I,” he commented. It seemed that the more he learned about her, the more he found that they had in common. He supposed it was silly to find that oddly comforting, but he did. When she laughed softly, he found himself captivated by the sound. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking that if everyone felt the way we did, all those trendy coffee shops that are sprouting all over the country would probably wind up going out of business.”

  Ethan shook his head. “Something else would take its place. A new type of snack food or some mind-blowing new fad would catch on instead.” She had a way of appearing to listen intently to whatever he had to say, as if she was hanging on every word. It made a person feel as if they were the center of the universe, he thought. “People like having a variety of choices,” he concluded, finding he was having difficulty hanging on to his thought. He kept getting lost in Liz’s smile.

  She was nodding at what he had just said. “Like all those cable channels.”

  He grinned. “Yes, like that.” He found that she was so incredibly easy to talk to—and he was really unwilling to have this small time they were sharing together end. He searched for a way to continue it. “My grandmother once told me that when she was a little girl, there were only three main channels to watch. Not only that, but they would all sign off just after midnight.”

  Liz tried to understand what he was telling her. “You mean that there was nothing to watch on the TV monitor at that time?”

  “Literally,” he told her. “Except I think they called it a TV set at the time, not a monitor.”

  “Three stations, you said?” she repeated, rolling that concept over in her mind. “That would make a remote control almost useless.”

  His mouth curved. “There weren’t any.”

  Her eyebrows drew together as she tried to understand what he was telling her. “There wasn’t any what?” she asked.

  “Remote controls,” he repeated, clarifying what he meant.

  That seemed really hard for her to believe. “Then how did they change the channels?” she asked.

  “They got up and did it manually,” he answered seriously.

  Liz blinked and cocked her head, trying to envision doing that. “I don’t—”

  He didn’t want Liz feeling dumb, so he quickly explained, “From what my grandmother told me, there was a dial on the television set. You got up and turned it each time you wanted to switch channels. It clicked when you turned it—although sometimes there was snow in between the channels.”

  “Snow?” she asked, confused.

  “That’s an explanation for another time,” he told her, waving the word away.

  She paused for a moment, trying to envision doing what he had just told her. “I guess that was how they got their exercise.”

  Ethan inclined his head. “Well, I don’t know about the adults, but according to what my grandmother used to tell me, mothers would make their kids go outside and play games. Physical games,” he emphasized. “According to Nana, kids didn’t sit around in front of the TV, eating snacks and getting fat. They ran around playing games like tag, or handball, or they ran races. She said she and her friends came up with all sorts of active games to play in their heads to entertain themselves.”

  Listening to him, Liz smiled. “Sounds like fun, actually.”

  “Actually,” he said, pi
cking up the word she had just ended on, “according to Nana, they were a lot of fun. She was quite proud of the fact that she was as thin as she was all her life.” He smiled fondly as he recalled something else. “Nana also went out of her way to make sure I stayed active and not attached to my computer games.”

  “She sounds like a really terrific lady,” Liz told him.

  “She was.” Ethan thought of the older woman who, although loving, always spoke her mind. She had died before he had gotten engaged to Catherine, and for the first time, he was glad she had. He looked at Liz. “I think she would have liked you.”

  “That’s a really lovely thing to say,” she told him, touched. “And on that note,” she began say, taking a deep breath as she began to gather up her things.

  “You have to go,” Ethan guessed. It wasn’t exactly a stretch, given that she was picking up her things.

  Liz flashed an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid I have to get to my job at Chariot.”

  To her surprise, Ethan took out his wallet. Opening it, he grabbed a ten and placed the bill on the table.

  A little confused, Liz raised her eyes to his. “Um, what’s that?”

  “It’s a ten,” he answered simply.

  “I know what it is, but why did you just put it on the table?” she asked. “I already paid for the coffee and pastry, which would make that—” she nodded at the ten-dollar bill “—an exceedingly large tip.”

  “I said I wanted to take you out for coffee and a pastry in order to say thank you for returning my journal,” he reminded her. “That implies paying for said coffee and pastry. Since you already paid the tab, I’m paying you,” he concluded.

  She shook her head. “I’m not a stickler for details,” she told him. “Why don’t we just say that you paid me back with your company and we’ll call it even?”