It Began with a Crush

Chapter Two

“A loaner car?” Mary Jane said blankly.

She was still digesting the news that her mangy, neglected kitten of a car had a lot more wrong with it than just a splinter in its paw, and wouldn’t be ready until Friday.

“Yes, Dad has a nice little compact, very similar to yours, that he lends to long-term clients if their car is going to be in the shop for a while,” Joe Capelli said, in the voice that had been too deep and gruff and husky for singing “Mari-i-i-aa!” in West Side Story.

“Well, yes. I do need it.” It was impossible to manage the resort in summer without a car. She was constantly running small errands such as picking up new pool chemicals or buying fresh groceries for the restaurant if their regular delivery orders had fallen short. Last week, she’d had to drive a guest to the hospital emergency room.

“Can I drop it over to you in twenty minutes or so, then,” Joe said, “and you can drop me back home? Is that possible? It works out really well for me if you can.”

“You’re still living over on North Street?” She had no idea where she’d dredged up this detail from the past, but somehow it was there.

If he was surprised, it didn’t show. “That’s right, with my dad.”

“No problem, then.” She was mentally sorting through the staffing implications as she spoke. If Lee hadn’t already left to drive up to Jay, where she and her fiancé, Mac, were renting a house, Lee might have stayed on until Mary Jane was back with the loaner car, but her absence wasn’t a major issue. Nickie could staff the office, and Piri would be happy to put in another hour or two in the restaurant kitchen, as she wanted all the work she could get. “So twenty minutes, you said?”

“Give or take.”

“Great! You know where we are?”

She began to give directions, but he cut in with a quick, “No, it’s fine, I know it,” and then he was as good as his word, shooting into a parking space in front of the resort office about nineteen minutes after they’d ended the call. The little red car looked way too small for him, as he uncurled himself from the driver’s seat, but it would be perfect for Mary Jane. Small, zippy, fuel-efficient.

Nickie was already on the phone in the office, answering a guest’s question about extra towels, so Mary Jane hurried out and Joe handed her the keys. He’d taken off the grease-stained overalls and was wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and a T-shirt almost the same as the other one, except a paler blue in color.

And cleaner.

Definitely cleaner.

More worn, too, maybe. Through the fabric, she could glimpse the darker patch where he had hair on his chest.

He’d scrubbed his hands and arms and neck and face, she could tell, because his hairline still looked a little damp and she could smell the clean, floral scent of soap. There was even a streak of it on his neck, just below his ear. She had a ridiculous urge to grab a tissue and wipe it off.

“Oh, you can drive till we get to your place, if you want,” she said to him. She tried to hand the keys back, but he wouldn’t take them.

“Best if you get some practice while I’m still with you, in case it drives a little different than yours.”

“Okay, that makes sense, but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

Famous last words.

On the passenger side, he seemed even more crowded than he’d been at the wheel, and he had the seat pushed right back. She was distracted by his beautifully sculpted bulk, by the fact that he didn’t bother with small talk and by the mental shopping list she was currently creating because the fridge in her apartment above the office didn’t have much in it right now. She just hadn’t had time to think about grocery shopping the past few days.

Lee was down here working at Spruce Bay only four days a week, which was already too many hours for a pregnant fiancée to be apart from her husband-to-be. Lee and Mac had a small wedding planned for late July, then she would be finishing up at the end of the Labor Day weekend in early September, ready for the birth. Mary Jane was thinking of suggesting that she stop before then.

I could hire on someone who wants six or seven days a week.

As a couple, Lee and Mac seemed incredibly happy together, but their relationship had gone from zero to sixty in about fourteen seconds, if you wanted to stick to the automotive theme. She’d gotten pregnant so early into their involvement, they’d had a lot to deal with and sort out in the months since, and they still had decisions to make about where they would settle, long-term. Mary Jane had berated herself more than once for feeling impatient about it.

Decide, already, so I know where I stand with running the resort.

Okay, no, it’s not fair of me to think that way. It’s not about me. It’s about them.

But sometimes she had the unhappy feeling that nothing was ever about her...

“Here,” Joe Capelli suddenly said.

“What? Oh, sorry.” She’d been barreling down North Street, forgetting that she should be slowing down for him to point out his house. Now she had to brake too hard, and with a garage mechanic sitting beside her, she was self-conscious about her less-than-exemplary driving. “Which one?”

“This one, on the right.”

“Oh, wow, it’s beautiful!”

“Thanks,” he drawled, and she realized that her frankly expressed surprise hadn’t been especially complimentary.

She’d driven past this house numerous times before, but hadn’t known it was the Capelli family’s place. It was a classic white two-story clapboard with dark green shutters, modest in size but impeccably maintained, with a wraparound veranda floored in hardwood, and a shady, grassy garden all around it. At this time of year, the flower beds were full of color and the trees were beautifully green. It was gorgeous.

Now she managed to slow just in time to turn into the driveway, which consisted of two long strips of brick paving with grass in between and on either side. Because she’d turned just a fraction too late and too crooked, Mary Jane missed the strips and drove onto the grass instead, and unfortunately the brick was at a slightly higher level, so when she tried to steer the wheels back onto the harder strips, she could hear the tires scraping before they bumped into place.

She was sweating at this point. Driving badly, after neglecting her own car. Making transparently snobbish assumptions about what his house would be like, when, if he remembered her from high school at all, he would have remembered that she’d never spoken to him or smiled at him and had glared at him or looked the other way with a frozen expression on her face whenever they chanced to meet. He would be in no doubt about what she’d thought of him then, and what she thought of him now.

“Thanks so much for the loan of the car,” she said. “Sorry I’m driving it so badly.”

“You’re doing fine.” More famous last words. “I’ll let you know when yours is ready. Here’s my card, though, in case you want to call and check on how it’s going.”

He didn’t seem keen to linger. Well, why would he be? A quick, “See you, then,” and he was out of the car and striding toward the house, his legs looking lean and fit and strong in those faded old jeans, and his butt lovingly sculpted by the soft weave of the—

Stop it, Mary Jane!

Before he reached the front porch, she reversed back down the drive and turned into the street, hoping he hadn’t noticed that she’d bumped one wheel down off the curb.

Or that she’d been looking at his backside.

Supermarket. What was that list, again? Butter, milk, bread, eggs, cheese, salad, maybe some pasta and a jar of sauce, or steak and vegetables for an Asian stir-fry. Did she have any rice? And Daisy had given her a list for the restaurant, too. She tried to remember the conversation.

“We’re out of...” Blank.

Think, Mary Jane! She hit the highway and sped up. Joe had been right. This car was so similar to hers, she really didn’t have to think too much about it.

So she thought about Daisy’s list instead, about Daisy ticking things off on her fingers. But the memory wouldn’t come. Cream and— There were two more things. Two items probably with a short shelf life, because they sometimes did tend to run out of those between regular deliveries from their suppliers. Cream and—

Not cheese. Not milk.

She took the exit and there was a red light ahead. It turned green and she thought, “Good, don’t have to stop,” but the car that was already stopped at the light took longer to get going than she expected. The driver was on his phone and hadn’t seen that the light was green, and when he did, he tried to shoot off too fast and stalled. The light turned orange, the driver gave up trying to get through and sat there. Before Mary Jane knew what was happening...

Crash! There came the sickening metallic crunching sound of Capelli Auto’s loaner car rear-ending the car in front so that it pushed several feet into the intersection. The light turned red, leaving both of them stranded, with horns sounding and drivers steering around them. Mary Jane was shaking like a leaf when she climbed out of the vehicle.

The whole front was badly crumpled. The man in the other car was furious, even though his vehicle appeared to have much less damage. Thank heaven neither of them seemed to be hurt. He wanted her contact details for the insurance, and in a shaky hand she wrote them down on a piece of paper in her purse that, if she’d been more organized today, could have had a shopping list on it and she might have avoided all this.

Because she knew it was totally her own fault.

She was distracted, and she was driving a car that might have been very similar to her own, but wasn’t exactly the same. She should have been more careful and alert. The brake pedal took a little longer to grab than it did on her own vehicle, and she should already have known that because she’d slammed her foot on it in front of Joe’s house.

People had stopped to help, and someone must have called the traffic police because she saw a vehicle with flashing lights pull up. The whole process seemed to take quite a long time, and when the officers directed her to move the car off the road, she couldn’t get it to start. They had to push it onto the verge.

“You’ll have to get it towed, and have someone come pick you up. Is there someone you can call?” an officer said.

“Yes, there is.”

Unfortunately.

* * *

The girls were in the bath when the phone rang. Joe left them alone long enough to grab it, heading back with it toward the bathroom before he’d even figured out who was calling. Even now that they were seven, he never liked leaving them in the bath too long without supervision, and usually found a task to do in his adjacent bedroom while they were in there—laundry folding or internet banking on his laptop.

“Joe?” The voice was female and very wobbly, the reception not that clear, and for one horrible moment he thought it was the girls’ mother. That was the only way he ever thought of her, now. Factual. Practical. The woman who’d given them life, but nothing more. Nothing good, anyhow.

It wasn’t her.

“Joe, it’s Mary Jane Cherry.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve— Something terrible has happened. I’m so sorry. I’ve crashed the car.”

“You’ve—”

“Rear-ended someone. It’s all crumpled in front and it won’t start, and it’s going to be towed, and I thought you might want it towed back to the garage, and that you might have a towing company you could recommend.” She sounded very, very shaken, and undeserving of his immediate inner rage.

You are kidding me! This is the last thing I need.

“Wait, are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I think. Shaken. The police have cited me and I know it was my fault.”

“Don’t worry. It’s insured.”

“Yes, I was sure it would be, but still, I am so, so sorry. I’ll cover your deductible, obviously.”

“Don’t worry about that now.” He swallowed his anger, told himself that this was going to be way more of a pain in the butt for her than for him, and that these things happened to the best of people on a bad day. “Let me give you the name of a towing company, and yes, have them bring it back to the garage. Do you have a ride home?”

“N-no, I don’t.” Now she sounded close to tears, but two seconds later she’d brisked herself up, with an effort he could hear over the phone line. “But I’ll get a cab, so that’s fine.”

“I’ll come pick you up.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to see the car.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Tell me where you are.”

She told him and he didn’t need to write it down. Pretty easy. He used that supermarket all the time, and knew the traffic lights you went through off of the interstate, just before you got there.

“Five minutes,” he promised.

“Thank you so much!”

“Girls, time to get out,” he said, when he’d ended the call.

They protested, of course. They were swimming their plastic ponies in there. Apparently there were these newly invented magical creatures called water ponies that could jump like flying fish. As a result, an astonishingly large percentage of the bathwater was now pooling on the bathroom floor.

“No, you really have to come out,” he insisted, using the voice they knew meant business. “This minute.”

Dad was snoozing on the couch downstairs, and Joe wasn’t going to disturb him to ask him to supervise a bath that had already gone on quite long enough. The girls had wrinkled fingers and toes, and the water was tepid at best.

He wrapped Holly and Maddie in their towels and sent them off to their room to put on their pj’s while he let the water out and attempted to use a towel to soak up the spills. He might have done better with a mop and a bucket. In their doorway, he told them, “I have to go rescue someone from a fender bender.”

“What’s a fender bender?” they wanted to know at once.

“A car crash where the cars are damaged but no one’s hurt. But she’s a little upset, so I can’t keep her waiting. You had those potato smiles so you can’t be hungry—”

“We are!”

“Well, you can wait, anyhow. I’ll be as quick as I can. You play in here and don’t disturb Grandad, okay? Unless it’s an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?”

“Fire or bleeding. And don’t you dare do anything to make either of those things happen!”

Shoot, should he wake Dad up? He was spooky and overprotective about this stuff and he knew it—knew the reasons for it, too. He was trying to let go a little, trying to tell himself that they didn’t get themselves into trouble nearly as often as it seemed. They were seven, and bright, and good, mostly...and in no danger. The impulsiveness and lack of any sense of risk had gotten a lot better, the past year or so. And if they screamed for any reason, Dad would wake up. He was sixty-five, not eighty-five, and he was just a little tired.

“Tell Grandad where I’ve gone, okay, and that I’ll be back soon.”

“But you said not to wake him up.”

“Tell him if he wakes up.”

Why did these simple conversations always take so long, and involve all these left-field questions he hadn’t expected? After a little more back and forth, he got himself out of the house and across to the old-fashioned detached wooden garage, with its wooden doors.

No remote-control opener for this old friend. It contained his minivan, still warm from a day spent sitting in the sun in parking lots at the lake, mini golf and the ice cream parlor, while Dad’s pickup was parked in the yard, relegated to the open air. Dad had insisted on that, claiming that the minivan was the more important vehicle, since it was the one that mostly transported the girls. Joe wasn’t going to argue with that.

He pushed the creaky old garage doors open, reversed the minivan out and climbed out of it again to go shut the doors because Dad had tools in there that were older than the Declaration of Independence and more precious to him than gold, so they couldn’t be left unprotected.

He’d already taken quite a bit longer than five minutes before he even got on the road.

Chapter Three

What if he didn’t come?

Joe had said, “Five minutes,” and because he’d been so accurate in his time estimate when he’d picked her up at Spruce Bay, Mary Jane had pinned herself completely on that five minutes and was getting very jittery about the fact that he wasn’t yet here.

It had been fifteen minutes at least since she’d spoken to him. The tow truck had come, loaded up the Capelli Auto car and gone again. The helpful witnesses had been interviewed and had left. The driver she’d crashed into, whose car had started on the first try, was long gone, and even the police officers had driven off now.

At least this was June, so it was still broad daylight even though it was now past six o’clock in the evening. But the sky had clouded over and there was a breeze, so it wasn’t that warm anymore. Goose bumps had risen on her bare arms and she was starting to shiver—whether it was just from cold or from delayed shock, as well, she wasn’t sure.

She felt like an abandoned waif, standing here on the verge while cars drove back and forth through the unlucky intersection, ignoring her. She had begun to think about calling a taxi after all—thank goodness she’d remembered to retrieve her purse from the car before it was towed, so she had money and her phone—when at last she saw a minivan slowing down as it came toward her, and when she peered at the driver she saw it was Joe.

Hang on, was it?

Yes, it really was—Joe Capelli, driving a maroon minivan, and a rather elderly looking one, at that. “Hop in, stranger,” he drawled at her, leaning across to open the passenger door. “Sorry I took longer than I said.”

“It’s f-fine. I couldn’t expect you just to drop everything.”

“Well, I did, but dropping everything can still take a while, at my place.”

“Oh, o-k-kay.” She should probably ask him what he meant by that, but she was struggling so hard not to show that she was shaking. Her head felt as if it had an iron band of pain around it, she hadn’t eaten since a pear and a banana for lunch at around noon and her empty stomach felt queasy from shock and cold and sheer misery.

“You’re freezing.” He quickly reached to switch the air-conditioning off and turn the heating on instead, while all she could do was nod. “I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. The car was warm from the sun, and I was warm from the house. Didn’t realize it had gotten so chilly out.”

“I’ll soon warm up.”

He didn’t mention dropping her home, and from the route he took, she realized he was going directly to the garage. Maybe she could grab a glass of water there, so she could swallow a couple of the painkillers she had in her purse. When this kind of a tension headache started, Mary Jane knew from experience that it would end badly if she couldn’t get those painkillers down pretty soon.

The tow truck was parked out front, the driver in the process of unloading the car. It looked terrible. Who would have thought a low-speed collision at a traffic light could have done so much damage?

“I’m so sorry,” Mary Jane said again, the headache making her queasier by the minute.

“The car’s at least eight years old. Please don’t worry about it.”

“Is there somewhere I can get a drink of water?”

“Watercooler in the office. You have a headache,” he correctly guessed.

“Yes.”

“Got pills?”

“Just need the water.”

“I’ll get it for you. Stay put.” He hopped out of the minivan and went to talk to the tow-truck driver, and she was feeling so bad by this time that she didn’t even look, just bent forward, then kept very still and tried to breathe slow and even—in through her nose, out through her mouth—focusing on a single object.

In this case, a pink plastic pony on the minivan’s gray-carpeted floor.

Joe Capelli was a family man.

Even in her shaken and fuzzy state, Mary Jane could work that out.

She felt even worse about what had happened, thinking of him arriving back late for his home-cooked meal after this unwanted errand, and disappointing his apron-clad wife and their no doubt adorable brood of brown-eyed children.

Not actually quite sure where the apron was coming from. She couldn’t imagine any wife of “Cap” Capelli’s ever wearing such a thing.

He came back with a plastic cup of water and she moved carefully to get the pills out of her purse. “Are you sure it’s not whiplash?” he said, after she’d swallowed the pills and the water.

“Tension headache,” she said. “I get them...when I’m tense.”

“Right.” He climbed back into the vehicle and she heard the tow truck pulling out into the street.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.