Legend (Legend, Colorado 1)

After handing him one of the bread puddings she’d made that night, she told him about her idea for teaching classes to welfare recipients. When she’d finished, Gregory was silent for a long while.

“And where do you get funding for this project?” he asked quietly as he handed her his dirty utensils.

“Funding? I’m not thinking of doing something on a national scale. At least not yet. I was just thinking of something on a personal level. Just me, one afternoon a week. Free cooking lessons, not to rich housewives who want to learn the latest technique for making focaccia, but something for women who’d like to learn inexpensive, healthful ways to feed their families.”

“I see. And where would you hold these classes?”

“Here, at Onions. On Sunday or Mondays, when the restaurant is closed. There’s plenty of room and lots of equipment.”

“And what about ingredients? Who pays for them?”

Kady drew herself upright. “I would.”

Smiling at her as though she were a little girl, Gregory put his arm around her shoulders. “I think that is the noblest idea I’ve ever heard. However, I don’t think our insurance would allow strangers in here.”

“Everyone who comes in through the front door is a stranger,” she said, incredulous.

“I think we should talk about this later when you’re not so upset.”

Kady moved out from under his arm. “You don’t mean strangers, you mean thieves, don’t you? You think all poor people are thieves. You would have hated every person in Legend.”

It was the first time Kady had said the name aloud in the twentieth century, and hearing it seemed to release something inside her. Collapsing onto a stool, she put her head in her hands and began to cry.

When Gregory put his arms around her and held her, she clung to him. “Of course you can use the restaurant for whatever you want,” he said softly. “Kady, please, won’t you tell me what’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting strangely for a couple of weeks now.”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Suddenly my life seems to have no meaning or direction.”

“What’s caused you to say this? Has something happened that I don’t know about?”

How could she tell him that sometimes when she looked at him, a blue-eyed face grinned back at her? How could she explain what she didn’t understand herself?

When Kady said nothing, Gregory kissed her hair and said, “Why don’t you go home? You work too hard. Go home, spend a couple of days in bed watching TV. Do nothing for a while. Rest. Come back Tuesday and you’ll be a new person.”

Rest, she thought, that’s exactly what I need. “Yes,” she said to Gregory, then stood as he kissed both her cheeks. “I think I will go home.”

He helped her gather her things, then held the front door open for her, but he didn’t offer to walk her to her apartment, and he didn’t say he’d come by and check on her over the next couple of days. Kady thought, I should be grateful he’s not telling me I have to come back and cook Sunday dinner for him and his mother, but she stamped that thought down. All she needed was a little rest. A few days’ rest and she’d be fine.

Chapter 18

BUT KADY DIDN’T REST DURING THOSE TWO DAYS. WHEN SHE got back to her apartment, she seemed to be wide awake. Sometimes it felt as though being around Gregory and his mother drained the energy out of her.

Even though it was one in the morning, she decided to write recipes down. She’d write about the food she had experimented with in Legend.

She took a shower, got into her nightgown, and snuggled into bed, a clipboard on her knees, and began to write. But instead of writing recipes, she began writing the story of Legend, Colorado. She wrote down facts and dates, people’s names; she drew maps. Maybe if she wrote it all down, she could make sense of it.

But as the hours passed and the pages accumulated, she could see that there was no sense to be made of any of it. Had she been sent back just to give Cole a chance at an adult life? Or maybe it was to give him a chance to revenge the deaths of his family.

The sun came up, and she continued to write, but toward midmorning she fell asleep, and as always since she’d returned, she dreamed of the veiled man. It was exactly the same dream, not so much as a gesture in it had changed. He held out his hand to her in invitation, and try as she might, she could not reach his hand.

When Kady awoke, she was sobbing, and for the first time since she’d returned, she allowed herself to think of how much she missed the people of Legend. Not just Cole, but everyone. “They made me feel important,” she said aloud. “They made me feel useful and as though I was needed.”

She tried hard not to compare her life then to what it was now, but she realized that Gregory made her feel as though he were doing her a favor by marrying her. With a jolt that was almost sickening, Kady realized that before she had been to Legend, she had agreed with that idea. Before Legend, a hundred times a day she had asked herself why a gorgeous man like Gregory wanted to marry a fat frump like her. Sure, Kady knew she had a pretty face, but that was a cliché: “Such a pretty face . . . Too bad she doesn’t take more care with her figure.”

She spent the weekend in her apartment, thinking about how she used to feel, how she felt now, and trying to come up with a solution to her dilemma. Had she been in love with Cole? Was she in love with Gregory now?

And, most important, what did she want to do with her life? At one point she had been crystal clear in her lifetime goals. But somewhere around her thirtieth birthday she seemed to have changed and she’d started wanting a home and children. She began to think that there should be more to life than a kitchen.

By Tuesday afternoon she had come to no decisions, had reached no conclusions. She trudged off to Onions as though nothing had changed, but somewhere inside herself, she knew that everything had changed. It was just that Kady didn’t yet know how these internal changes were going to manifest themselves.