“What’s making him come earlier?” Tris asked, his bad mood gone. Reede was one of the few unmarried friends he had left.
“Jecca.”
Tris had to suppress a groan. Not that “thing” she’d mentioned again. “What does that mean?”
“I told him Jecca was here, and he said he’d be on the next flight out. He and his last girlfriend broke up a couple of months ago, so when I told him about Jecca being here, he couldn’t wait to see her. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if my brother and my best friend did get together?”
“I didn’t know they knew each other until you mentioned it the other day.” When Tris had asked Jecca about him, he got the idea that there was nothing between her and Reede. As far as Tris could tell, it was all a figment of Kim’s very active imagination. Wishful thinking. But now she was saying that Reede was coming home early just to see Jecca.
“Oh yeah,” Kim said. “The first time Jecca visited was right after our first year in college, and she had the major hots for my brother. But that was when that idiot Laura Chawnley had just dumped him, and he didn’t even notice Jecca. He told me he was running around stark naked in front of her and wasn’t even aware of it.”
The waitress came to get their orders, and that gave Tris time to calm down. After the waitress left, he said, “What do you mean that Reede was naked?”
Laughing, Kim told the story of Jecca and Reede in the pool at Florida Point and how she dove in after him. “A couple of years ago I asked Reede what happened—I wanted to hear his side—and he said he was so upset about Laura that he didn’t know what he was doing. You know what else he told me?”
“What?” Tris asked.
“That day he was thinking that he might like to end his misery, and that if he didn’t come up from the bottom of the pool it would be all right.”
“So Jecca saved his life.”
“I think maybe she did,” Kim said. “And I think Reede wants to thank her. I’m going to do everythin [ dowidtg I can to get them together.”
“Didn’t you tell me that Jecca doesn’t want to live in Edilean?”
“Neither does Reede. I’m afraid the world has a hold on him. Jecca would make the perfect wife for him.”
“Wife?!” Tris said with more vehemence than he meant to expose. “Since when did you go from meeting to marriage?”
“It’s just that Reede and Jecca are so perfect for each other,” she said as their food was put on the table. “Her profession of painting is mobile, so she could go anywhere with him.”
“I thought she worked in an art gallery. That isn’t very mobile.”
“What’s with you and your negativity today?” Kim asked.
“My arm, and I want Reede to be happy. How can this Jecca do that for him? How can she travel if she has a full-time job in New York?”
Kim hesitated. “Jecca . . .”
“She what?”
“Don’t tell her I told you this, okay?”
“You know that I hold a lot of secrets in this town.”
“I do know that,” Kim said softly. “Jecca’s paintings haven’t sold. They’re great, they’re fabulous. I’ve never seen any better, but she’s sold only a few of them. And her work in that gallery—she has a rotten boss—takes up so much of her time that she doesn’t get to do much of her own work.”
“She has the whole summer here to paint,” Tris said.
“I hope so. But then I also wish Jecca would quit her awful job, travel with my brother, and paint. Can’t you imagine what she’d do in Africa? Or Brazil? Reede’s been there twice.”
Tris looked down at his plate of food. He’d eaten little, and it was getting cold. Jecca wouldn’t want to give up a life like that to live in itty-bitty Edilean. Give up the chance to paint Masai warriors to record the local Scottish fair? Not quite.
On the other hand, he wasn’t going to let fairness stand in his way. “What’s your friend Jecca like as a person?”
“Creative. She loves to make things, from decorating cakes to sewing her own clothes to painting a room. She said she’s looking forward to the party.”
“What party?”