Souvenir by Therese Fowler Page B

lack of guilt she felt for having encouraged Clay’s attentions. Putting them aside and simply filling herself with nature’s sensual buffet. A warm spring night. Sweetly scented flowers. Damp soil. The smell of wild mint and freshly mowed grass.
    The grass brought her back, for a moment, to something Brian said earlier. She’d told him about the stillbirth, and he was, of course, sympathetic. “Jesus, Meg, how awful for them,” he said. But then he added, “I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but do you think Lang will still do our lawn?”
    Ever practical.
    A mockingbird, apparently confused about the hour, began its litany of calls someplace off on the east side of their property, a three-acre estate in a community of similar ones. Meg turned in the direction of the sound, as if it was possible to see the bird at three AM. She saw the silhouettes of towering pines and oaks and magnolias and wondered if maybe the bird, too, was trying to shake off a bad day: some offense by its mate, or a wound inflicted by too zealous a flight. She thought maybe
she
ought to sing too, despite the hour; singing worked for Savannah. It worked, she supposed, for Carson.
    She drew her bare legs up and wrapped her arms around them—both arms behaving just the way they should, go figure. Resting her chin on her knees, she let herself be distracted by thoughts of Carson and the news that he was about to be married.
    Probably she should just satisfy her curiosity and go read the details—maybe even plan to send them a gift. Whoever Valerie Haas was, she would have to be very impressive, considering how long Carson had been single, and how eligible he was.
    Probably she should get the details about his wedding and his bride so that she wouldn’t be distracted any further, so that she could close that chapter of her life—hadn’t it been open for far too long as it was?
    Carson, married. In love—a
good
thing, even if the thought of it gave her a pang of possessiveness that hurt. Even if imagining him permanently joined to anyone else brought pain like a sharp stone being pressed into her heart.

Thirteen
    M EG TOOK ONE OF THE NOTEBOOK DIARIES WITH HER TO WORK M ONDAY, reading it in her office during her lunch break.

    December 5, 1987
    Carolyn and I were talking about the kids today, over to the co-op. Carson’s thinking of buying Meggie a ring for Christmas. He hasn’t told Meggie. Nothing could be more natural than the two of them married. Caro thinks he means to have an April wedding, since Meggie loves springtime. To be purely honest, the timing couldn’t be better for her moving in with Carson, because if things keep up like they are, we’ll lose the whole farm by May.

    But of course it hadn’t gone like that. It was Brian who proposed—in a sense—two weeks before Christmas, a time when she couldn’t fail to see the romance in his gesture.
    He hadn’t been her supervisor for several months, but she saw him often. Back in early fall he’d told her that the reason he’d moved himself out of front-end management and into Investments was because he hoped to date her. He wasn’t pushy about it, and he assured her that her job was in no way affected by her firm refusals to do anything more than have a platonic lunch with him now and then. She never let him pay.
    This lunch, though, was unlike any that had come before.
    They went to Margot’s, a café she couldn’t afford to eat at on her own, by way, he said, of a “Christmas bonus—my treat.” The place was done up for the holidays, with swags of fresh holly and twinkling white lights and deep red velvet ribbon hanging above every doorway. Brian sat across from her at an intimate, white-draped table and told her he had an outrageous proposition. Would she just listen and promise to give it some thought?
    “Meg,” he said, “I heard something impressive a while back, one Friday when you weren’t at the Trough. I usually don’t listen much to gossip, but—well,