My Favorite Mistake Read online

  But the grand tour began and ended with the back office, because I went Leona Helmsley as soon as I saw it.

  I stood at the office door and tried to pick my jaw up off the floor. “Skye Geary, what the hell were you thinking?”

  She peered over my shoulder. “Um, what do you mean?”

  The back office looked like the aftermath of pledge week. I could barely discern a desk under a rainforest’s worth of fashion magazines and, inexplicably, The AKC Guide to Choosing a Dog. Pastel hair clips littered the thin beige carpet, and the white walls were plastered with pictures of Hollywood heartthrobs.

  I gaped at a brooding Colin Farrell and tried to absorb the magnitude of this disaster. “Hell. We should file for Chapter Eleven right now and save ourselves the angst.”

  She clutched at my shoulders. “How can you say that?”

  “Look at this place. It’s like Britney Spears’s tour bus. Clearly, I just wasted three days driving out here.”

  She took a step back and turned both of her palms toward me. “It’s not that bad. I know where everything is, I promise. I have a system—”

  “And what’s with the Tiger Beat collage?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and stuck her bottom lip out. “Bob let me decorate however I wanted.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the doorframe. “Well, there’s a new sheriff in town, honey.”

  She bowed her head, then blinked out at me, lost and forlorn.

  I wasn’t buying it. “I mean it. We have to get our act together. Now. Go get me a trash bag, please.”

  Her head snapped back up. “What for?”

  “I’m assuming that there are invoices and profit and loss statements under all this crap?”

  “Well, yeah, but…”

  I jostled past her and stormed into the barroom, where I rummaged around until I found a lone green Hefty bag next to the garbage can. “Aha!”

  My sister stayed hot on my heels as I charged back into the office.

  “Faithie, please, no! I’m begging you! Give me half an hour to clean this up myself. Give me ten minutes!”

  I kept going. “Skye. We have thirty days as of last week. Time is of the essence. Your ten minutes are up.”

  I ripped into Russell Crowe. She howled.

  “Trust me,” I said, balling up Orlando Bloom and Hugh Jackman along with sticky bits of tape. “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

  My sister stayed in the doorway and wailed pitifully as I tossed her “system” into the trash bag.

  “That’s my favorite—”

  “We’re throwing it out!”

  “I haven’t even read that issue—”

  “Out!”

  “Not the nail polish!”

  “Out!”

  And so it went until the desktop was visible. I was sweaty and exasperated by the time I had unearthed the creditor bills and the payroll information, but Skye seemed near tears, so I gave her a consolatory pat on the back.

  “Trust me, sweetie. The new system will be much better. Now, where’s your computer?”

  Her big blue eyes watered. “We don’t have one. We just use an account ledger.”

  “Naturally. It’s only the twenty-first century. All right, then, where’s the ledger?”

  “One of the desk drawers?” she guessed.

  I sighed. “What about the receipts?”

  “The floor safe. I think.”

  After a moment of silent hysteria, I smiled gently at my sister and said, “Okay. Go open the bar. I’ll be back here figuring out how this place runs.”

  “Are you sure I can’t help?”

  “The best way to help is to make sure we’re doing lots of business,” I said. “Go open the bar. And, hey—remember what I said before? About talking to Flynn?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She tossed her hair. “I’m not a total idiot, you know. I’ll bust in here as soon as he walks through the door. I promise.”

  “Thank you. Oh, and what’s the combination to the floor safe?”

  She slapped the comb—now full of the hair she had ruthlessly yanked out of my scalp—down on the desktop. “Nine-oh, two, one-oh.”

  But of course.

  Whatever the combination to the floor safe was, it wasn’t 90210. It took me a good five minutes to determine this, five minutes trapped under the desk on all fours, sweating and cursing while my head thudded against the overhanging wood and my knees chafed raw against the cheap, scratchy carpet.

  I thought about the girlish fantasies on parade throughout Skye’s home—charm bracelets, pastels, clean-cut Hollywood heartthrobs. What would life be like for her baby? With a mother who was still waiting for life to turn into a fairy tale and a father who would forever be chasing the newest pretty face? After about a second’s worth of deliberation, I decided that the kid would be better off having no father than a father like my own—restless, smothered by his children’s very existence.

  I was giving the alleged lock combination one last shot when I heard the slow, deep male voice in the bar.

  I jerked my head up against the desk and smacked the shit out of the top of my skull.

  My thigh muscles were burning, my head was smarting, but I froze where I was and strained with every pore in my body to detect activity from the barroom. Was that him?

  Poking my head out from under the desk, I closed my eyes and turned my right ear toward the door. Which facial muscle should I tense in order to improve hearing acuity?

  And then I heard solid, steady footsteps heading down the hall, heading toward me.

  “Relax, Skye. I got it. I’m all over it. I’ll be in the back room if you need me.”

  Oh my God. It was him. I knew Flynn’s voice when I heard it.

  This was it. The big reunion.

  I remained in my catcher’s squat under the desk, mouth open and mind reeling, searching for the best way to handle this. It felt like the tide was coming in, fast and freezing, and a single coherent thought crystallized in my head:

  I was so not ready for this.

  Any nanosecond now, that door was going to burst open, Patrick Flynn was going to stride through, and he was going to look at me and see that I was just as big a mess as I was when I left him. If not bigger. And I was going to look at him and see—well, I didn’t know what I would see. I was about to stare down the consequences of my past choices.

  So I stopped peeking out from beneath the desk and did what any rational woman would do: I ducked back under and burrowed deep into the corner between the floor safe and the wall.

  The door swung open.

  The view was very limited from my shadowy enclave, but I saw two scuffed brown hiking boots and several inches of clean blue denim appear through the open doorway.

  And then I heard humming. He was humming…he was humming the Mission: Impossible theme?

  The boots started toward the desk and I shrank back against the cool plaster of the wall, squeezing my eyes shut, hoping that this would somehow help to make me invisible.

  The humming stopped.

  And then I heard the hollow click of plastic against wood, directly over my head.

  Oh, shit. The comb. Skye had left the comb full of my red hair sitting there on the desk. He sucked his breath in. I was afraid to let mine out.

  The silence stretched out into ice ages.

  “Faith?” He said this word in the same low, quiet tone he’d been humming with, but I heard it. I turned my face up toward the raw, unfinished planks of wood under the desktop.

  “Yes?” I whispered back.

  The boots took two giant steps back toward the door.

  “Faith?” His voice sounded louder and startled and not very pleased.

  “Yeah?” I called back, trying to sound nonchalant.

  There ensued another very long pause. I attempted to wriggle out from under the desk while holding down the hem of my skirt and finally managed, with no dignity whatsoever, to crawl out. My cheeks flu
shed as I stood up, brushed off my bare knees and prepared to reckon with the man I’d run away from ten years ago.

  Flynn filled the doorway with his wide shoulders and tall, lanky frame. The watery fluorescent light cast the contours of his face into sharp, shadowed angles, but I could see the boy I’d left behind in this dark, handsome man. I could see him in those hooded sepia eyes and the thick brown hair. I could see him in the curl of that mouth and the long, straight planes of those cheeks.

  He looked unbelievably pissed off.

  He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. His posture was relaxed, but his voice was edgy when he spoke. “What’s going on here, Geary?”

  I wiped my palms on my skirt and tried to disguise the fact that my hands were trembling.

  “I can explain,” I said. “Skye gave me the wrong combination to the safe, you see, and—”

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  “What?”

  He cleared his throat. “I said—”

  “I heard you. They heard you in Duluth.” I looked into his eyes and tried to find a trace of the safe, sweet boy I’d known. I got nothing but flinty Clint Eastwood hostility.

  “Then get going.”

  “You call me, in Italy, and beg me to come out here and now you’re telling me to get lost?”

  “I would hardly call that begging.” He stared at the wall behind me. “And you show up, in my bar, unannounced and uninvited. What do you want me to say?”

  “Skye invited me,” I sputtered. “And it’s not your bar. And what ever happened to good manners?”

  “I’d say we gave up on good manners a long time ago.” He smiled tightly and shook his head. “I told you to help with Skye’s personal life, not her business problems. This bar is my responsibility, and I can’t have you in here. Especially if you’re trying to crack my safe.”

  “It’s not just your responsibility.” I took an involuntary step back and my skirt brushed against the desktop. The smooth, cool wood pressed into the backs of my thighs. When had he become so surly and brutish?

  “Really.” He took another step toward me. His shoulders blocked my view of the door. The only escape route.

  “That’s right.” I crossed my arms over my chest, mirroring his defensive posture. “It is our bar and our safe. Skye obviously neglected to mention this, but I’m a co-owner of this bar, too. So one third of this safe I’m cracking is legally mine.”

  Another step toward me. His face didn’t betray any shock or surprise, but I could see a small muscle flexing in his jaw. And as he approached, I recognized the familiar scent—part sun-dried laundry, part lawn clippings, unmistakably Flynn.

  “Well, do me a favor then and stay out of our office,” he said. “I have a lot of work to do and I don’t need this”—he gestured to the air crackling with tension between us—“getting in the way.”

  There was a charged, angry silence as we sized each other up.

  The faint clink of glasses drifted in from the barroom. Finally, I couldn’t stand to think about all the things we weren’t saying.

  “Skye’s safe combination isn’t working,” I blurted out.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets. “That’s because I changed it.”

  I softened my tone. “Look. Flynn.” He flinched slightly when I spoke his name aloud. “Let’s start over. I’m here to help.”

  “I don’t want to start over. And I don’t need any help.”

  “Oookay.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Well, then, I need your help. How’s that?”

  “Faith Geary admits she needs help?” He raised his eyebrows. “Should I be getting ready for the apocalypse?”

  I put my hand on my hip. “Cease and desist, Flynn. I know you’re mad, but we have to make peace.”

  “I’m not mad, and I have a lot of work to do.”

  “You’re not mad?” I raised my eyebrows.

  He shook his head and folded his arms. “Nope.”

  “Really? Because you seem a little angry.”

  “And yet I’m not.” He lowered his voice each time I upped the volume.

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “What’s the combination to the damn safe?”

  “Ninety-nine, thirty, nine.”

  “How am I supposed to remember that?”

  “Jersey numbers. Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Gordie Howe.”

  “Of course. The holy trinity of the Church of Hockey.” I rolled my eyes. “Getting out of Minnesota was the best decision I ever made.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t say that.” Flynn looked at me with a hint of the sly, wicked humor I remembered. “Not marrying me was the best decision you ever made.”

  And with that, he turned and left me with the leaden weight of his words in the pit of my stomach.

  So I did what I always do. I ran.

  My feet took off for the orange exit sign down the hall. As I crashed through to the damp falling dusk, I could hear Skye shouting, “Faith? Flynn?! Oh, damn it!”

  I caught up with myself in the car and clenched the keys so tightly I cut my palm. The first evening stars winked down as I started the engine and peeled out onto Main Street.

  I headed for the highway. For the road that would take me back to California. But when my headlights illuminated the road sign reading PILLERTON, 3 MILES, I realized that not only was I going the wrong way, but I had been driving for fifteen minutes with absolutely no recollection of the journey.

  The only thing I could think about was the sharp chill in Flynn’s eyes. If the man who’d once loved me more than anyone else in my life could look at me like that, what did that say about me?

  I pulled into the first parking lot I saw. Once I turned the headlights off, it was just me and the vast open spaces spreading into the gray horizon.

  I yanked the keys out of the ignition and flung them to the floor. And then I folded my arms on the steering wheel and cried.

  I cried until my mouth was briny with salt and my anguish succumbed to exhaustion. I cried for all my failed attempts at love and for the people I’d let down. I cried for the capsized childhood that still haunted my hometown and for Skye’s unborn baby, who would surface from the womb into a life sentence of capital K chaos. I cried because I’d barely slept in three days.

  And that was how I ended up taking a nap in the Kmart parking lot in Pillerton, Minnesota.

  A tinny ringing sliced through my sleep, and I jerked back to consciousness with a gasp. My right hand groped for the snooze button, but there did not seem to be one handy.

  In fact, I seemed to be sitting up, staring over the hood of my car, in a parking lot flooded with insanely bright halogen lights under the night sky.

  The tapping persisted, and I turned my head to the left to discover a ferocious neck cramp and a round, smooth-faced woman striking the window of my car with her keys.

  “Oh, good.” Her voice filtered through the glass. “I was hoping you weren’t dead.”

  I stared at her as the events of the last few hours came rushing back. “Dead” would actually be an improvement on my current state.

  I rubbed my eyes and rolled down the window a crack. “No, I’m not dead.”

  She nodded and shifted her hold on the baby on her hip. The infant, roly-poly in pink overalls, regarded me with drool-laced censure. “Good to know. We don’t get too many corpses turning up at Kmart around here, but”—she shrugged—“there’s a first time for everything.”

  Upon further inspection, I could discern part of a second child’s head behind her dress. An unruly black cowlick popped out from behind her long denim skirt.

  “Are you all right?” The woman still appeared concerned.

  That voice. I closed my eyes and did a quick flip through the mental Rolodex. She seemed so familiar. I turned back to her and took in the curly chestnut hair, the huge amber eyes, and the authoritative, no-nonsense posture.

  “Leah?”

  Her face lit up and she smiled, cocking
her head as she searched my face for clues.

  “Leah Metter?” This was unbelievable.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to place—wait…Faith?”

  I mustered a shaky smile. “Yeah.”

  “I’d recognize that red hair of yours anywhere!” she shrieked. The baby remained unimpressed.

  I scrambled out of the car and we hugged, lurching around the parking lot in a crazy, awkward dance.

  “Oh my God, Leah Metter! I can’t believe it’s you!” I tried to reconcile the Leah standing in front of me with the Leah I remembered from childhood.

  “I know. It’s actually Leah Goldberg now.” She flashed the simple gold band encircling her left ring finger. “I’ve changed a lot since high school.”

  This was the understatement of the century. Leah Metter had been our regular babysitter through elementary school and junior high, and I’d always regarded her with a shy sort of awe. The only Jewish girl in a county high school of four hundred students, she was the type of self-assured free spirit who wore Birkenstocks before they were faddish and listened to the Ramones instead of Garth Brooks. After graduation, she’d gone off to UC Berkeley, and I had always assumed she’d progressed to international espionage or radical third-world revolutions.

  Never once had I imagined that she would come back to Minnesota, acquire a husband and two children, start wearing silver hair pins with conservative Talbots outfits, and find me napping in total disgrace in a Volkswagen outside the Kmart.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” She pried the baby’s fingers from their death grip on my hair.

  “Here in Minnesota or here in my car?” I stalled.

  “Both.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story. Basically, I’m here to help out my sister.”

  “Skye?” She said this in the disapproving tone of voice you might use to mention “mink coats” or “tabloids.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, I heard that Bob ran off with some hussy from Faribault. What a jackass.” The baby stated to fuss, and Leah bounced the infant in her arms. “Look, it’s almost seven, and I have to feed these two ASAP. Have you eaten yet?”