She stood with him, one hand in her pocket, and took the first sip. “I have some questions. First, just to get it off my mind, why are you drowning the corn?”

“My mother said to.”

“Okay. If I thought of something, how do you know it’s something you’d want?”

“If I didn’t,” he said, picking up the conversation as if there had been no break, “I know how to say I don’t want that. I learned how to do that at an early age, with mixed results. But the odds are, if we’re talking about construction and design, whatever you thought of would work.”

“Next. Could I hurt you?”

“Cilla, you could rip my heart out in bloody pieces.”

She understood that, understood he could do the same to her. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing? Wasn’t that a miracle? “I couldn’t have done that to Steve, or him to me. As much as we loved each other. As much as we still do.”

“Cilla-”

“Wait. One more question. Did you ask me to carry the ring around with me because you hoped it would act as kryptonite, and weaken me over time until I agreed to marry you?”

He shifted his feet, took another drink of wine. “It might have been a factor.”

With a nod, she drew her hand out of her pocket, studied the ring sparkling on it. "Apparently, it works.”

His grin flashed, quicksilver delight. But when he moved to her, she slapped a hand on his chest. “Just hold on.”

“That was my plan.”

“Wait. Wait,” she said again, softly. “Everything I said before, it’s true. I’d made up my mind never to get married again. Why go through the process when the odds are so stacked for failure? I failed a lot. Some was my fault, some was just the way it was. Marriage seemed so unnecessary, so hard, so full of tangles that can never really be fully unknotted. It was easy with Steve. We were friends, and we’d always be friends. As much as I love him, it was never hard or scary. There wasn’t any risk, for either of us.”

Her throat filled, so much emotion rising up. But she wanted- needed-to get the rest out. “It’s not like that with you because we’re going to hurt each other along the way. If this screws up, we won’t be friends. If this screws up, I’ll hate you every day for the rest of my life.”

“I’ll hate you more.”

“Why is that absolutely the best thing you could’ve said? We’re not going to Vegas.”

“Okay, but I think we’re missing a real opportunity. How do you feel about backyard weddings?”

“I feel that’s what you had in mind all along.”

“You’re what I had in mind all along.”

She shook her head, then laid her hands on his cheeks. “I’d love a backyard wedding. I’d love to share this house with you. I don’t know how anything that scares me this much can make me so happy.”

He took her lips with his, soft, soft, spinning the kiss out in the perfumed air, with the sun streaming through the trees. “I believe in us.” He kissed her again, swayed with her. “You’re the one I can dance with.”

She laid her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes.

THE LITTLE FARM

1973

“I believed in love,” Janet said as she sat back on the white silk pillows on the lipstick-pink couch. “Why else would I have thrown myself into it so often? It never lasted, and my heart would break, or close. But I never stopped opening it again. Again and again. You know that. You’ve read all the books, heard all the stories, and the letters. You have the letters so you know I loved, right to the end.”

“It never made you happy. Not the kind that lasted.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Cilla sorted through photographs. “Here’s one taken the day you married Frankie Bennett. You’re so young, so happy. And it fell apart.”

“He wanted the star more than the woman. That was a lesson I had to learn. But he gave me Johnnie. My beautiful boy. Johnnie’s gone now. I lost my beautiful boy. It’s been a year, and still I wait for him to come home. Maybe this one will be a boy.”

She laid a hand on her belly, picked up a short glass, rattled the ice chilling the vodka.

“You shouldn’t drink while you’re pregnant.”

Janet jerked a shoulder, sipped. “They didn’t make such a to-do about it when I was. Besides, I’ll be dead soon anyway. What will you do with all those pictures?”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll pick the ones I like best, have them framed. I want pictures of you in the house. Especially pictures of you at the farm. You were happy here.”

“Some of my happiest moments, some of my most desolate. I gave Carlos-Chavez, my third husband-his walking papers right in this room. We had a vicious fight, almost passionate enough to have me consider taking him back. But I’d had enough. How he hated it here. ‘Janet,’ he’d say in that Spanish toreador’s voice that seduced me in the first place, ‘why must we camp out in the middle of nowhere? There isn’t a decent restaurant for miles.’ Carlos,” she added and lifted her glass, “he could make love like a king. But outside of bed, he bored me brainless. The problem there was we didn’t spend enough time outside of bed before I married him. Sex is no reason to get married.”

“Ford never bores me. He made me a goddess, and still when he looks at me, he sees me. Too many of them didn’t see you.”

“I stopped seeing me.”

“But in the letters, the letters you kept, he called you Trudy.”

“The last love, the last chance. I couldn’t know. Yet maybe some part of me did. Maybe I wanted to love and be loved by what I’d lost, or given up. For a little while, I could be Trudy again.” She stroked her fingers over one of the white pillows. “But that was a lie, too. I could never get her back, and he never saw her.”

“The last chance,” Cilla repeated with photos spread before her, and Janet on the bright pink couch. “Why was it the last? You lost your son, and that was horrible and tragic. But you had a daughter who needed you. You had a child inside you. You left your daughter, and that’s haunted her all her life-and I guess it’s haunted me too. You left her, and you ended the child when you ended yourself. Why?”

Janet sipped her drink. “If there’s one thing you can do for me, it would be to answer that question.”

“How?”

"You’ve got everything you need. It’s your dream, for God’s sake. Pay attention.”

TWENTY-NINE

Crazy. She had to be crazy hosting a party. She didn’t have any furniture, or dishes. She didn’t own a serving spoon. She was at least three weeks out from delivery on her stove and refrigerator. She didn’t own a goddamn rug. Her seating consisted of a single patio set, a couple of cheap plastic chairs and a collection of empty compound buckets. Her cooking tools were limited to a Weber grill, a hot plate and a microwave oven.

She had supplies, God knew. A million festive paper plates, napkins, plastic cups and forks and spoons, and enough food-which she didn’t know how to prepare-stuffed into Ford’s refrigerator to feed most of the county. But where were people supposed to eat?

“On the picnic tables my father, your father and Matt are bringing over,” Ford told her. “Come back to bed.”

“What if it rains?”

“Not calling for rain. There is a thirty-percent chance of hail and locusts, and a ten-percent chance of earthquakes. Cilla, it’s six in the morning.”

“I’m supposed to marinate the chicken.”

“Now?”

“No. I don’t know. I have to check my list. I wrote everything down. I said I’d make crab dip. I don’t know why I said that. I’ve never made crab dip. Why didn’t I just buy it? What am I trying to prove? And there’s the pasta salad.” She heard the lunacy in the rant, couldn’t stop. “I took that, too. Eating pasta salad through the years doesn’t mean you can make pasta salad. I’ve been to the doctor through the years. What’s next? Am I going to start doing elective surgery?”