Recognizing the voice, Sue glanced up. “Joe! Hi.” She’d phoned him. Left a message. She hadn’t expected to see him, even though he’d been her best friend all through high school. The only best friend she’d ever had. But high school had been a long time ago.
Before she’d emasculated him.
Now he was mostly just her boss.
Besides, he’d never met Grandma.
“Your message said one o’clock. Is it over?”
“Yeah. There’s no graveside service since her ashes are to be stored with my grandfather’s in the family vault. Mom and Uncle Sam are having a meal catered at Grandma’s house in Twin Peaks, so we’re heading there next. Would you like to come?”
“I should get back to work. I only stopped because I was in the area.”
Bosses didn’t often stop by churches where employees’ family funerals were taking place.
Old friends did.
“It would really help to have you there,” Sue said, afraid her composure was going to desert her completely.
How in the hell was she going to be able to walk into the house her grandparents had had built back in 1946, and lived in for sixty-three years, without Grandma there?
There’d never been a gathering at the house without Grandma.
Hunched in his trendy, expensive trench coat, Joe stared at her for an uncomfortable moment. And then nodded.
“I can ride over with you, if you’d like,” Sue continued. “Since you don’t know where she lives.” And then, feeling another unexpected stab through her heart, she added, “Lived.”
He didn’t meet her eyes a second time, but his nod was enough. Joe knew her. He understood.
Right now, he was the only tie to sanity she had.
“THANK YOU FOR THIS.”
Glancing at her as they pulled onto Grand View Avenue—a street with eclectic and colorful million-dollar, postwar homes, a street known for its magnificent views of the city and not for it yards, which were almost nonexistent—Joe merely shrugged.
He’d changed so much from the open-hearted boy she’d known, Sue hardly recognized him these days.
“Seems strange, after all this time, for you to meet my folks.”
In her youth, she’d kept him hidden. He’d been her prize. The one part of her life that was solely hers. Until he’d wanted more than friendship. And while she’d been able to give him love, she’d backed out of sex.
Joe grunted. As he found a spot to park in the street just beyond Grandma’s house, he added, “I won’t be able to stay long.” He didn’t crack a smile.
She wasn’t responsible for his divorce. Nor could she get him more time with the daughter she knew he adored. Those hurts had come long after she’d done her little number on him.
“Last week when I called the office, Thea said that you were with your father.” People were going into Grandma’s house. Some Sue recognized. Some she didn’t. Heart pounding, she wasn’t ready to join them.
Joe didn’t comment. She studied him, his close-cropped black hair, his crooked nose and his linebacker body.
“Is he still in town?” She might not get another chance for personal conversation with him for a while. She cared about him.
Besides, Grandma wasn’t in that house at the base of the famous Twin Peaks, wasn’t welcoming her guests.
Joe shrugged.
“How long’s it been since you’d seen him?” During their
four years in high school she could only remember a brief visit from Joe’s fisherman father, who’d come down from Alaska for one of the holidays. The checks he was supposed to have sent to his mother, who was raising Joe, were only a little more frequent than his visits.