Mason checked his watch. “I’ll give her ten minutes, and if she’s not back by then, she’s on her own.”
Fifteen minutes later, he and Annajane were riding down the highway, listening to the radio and singing along at the top of their lungs. An hour later, they were headed for the lake house, which was nothing more than a run-down caretaker’s cottage perched at the edge of the spring-fed lake they called Hideaway, on the Bayless estate. Pokey was nowhere to be found. But Annajane showered and changed into a bathing suit, and pretty soon they were cooling off in the lake, floating in a couple of old inner tubes Mason retrieved from the boathouse. Mason had been right about Annajane’s legs. They were spectacular. And the rest of her wasn’t bad either.
But the thing that did him in were her eyes. Those solemn, amazing green eyes. When she looked up at him through those lowered dark lashes, when she laughed, when she was surprised, or, later, as she dozed on a lounge chair, he couldn’t quit thinking about those eyes.
He was stretched out on the chaise next to hers, on the dock, his head propped up on one elbow, staring at her when she woke up.
Her sunburned cheeks flushed a deeper pink. “What are you looking at?”
“You,” Mason said. He leaned across and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Where have you been all my life, Annajane Hudgens?”
She blushed even deeper. “I’ve been right here. Pokey and I have been best friends since we were five. And I bet I’ve spent more nights at Cherry Hill these past five years than you have. You’re the one who’s never been around.”
“That’s about to change,” Mason vowed. “Starting today.” And for the next six weeks, they’d been inseparable. Knowing her mother’s low opinon of the Baylesses, they deliberately kept their families in the dark about their relationship. Mason could never understand why Annajane wanted to keep him a secret. “Your mom doesn’t even know me,” he’d protested. “How do you know she wouldn’t like me?”
“If your last name wasn’t Bayless, she’d probably love you,” Annajane finally admitted. “But Mama’s funny. She’s got some kind of bug up her rear about your family. She never has admitted she likes Pokey, even though we’ve been best friends our whole lives. Mama thinks your mother’s stuck-up, that she looks down on anybody who doesn’t belong to the country club.”
“Well hell, she’s right about that,” Mason said with a laugh. “Mama is a big snob. But that doesn’t make me one.”
In the end, though, they both came to enjoy the illicit nature of the romance. Only Pokey was in on the secret. She’d meet Mason at the lake, or stay late after work, and they’d head over to Southern Pines for dinner and a movie. And on the last summer weekend before she had to go back to school at State, she fabricated a story about an all-day shopping trip to Charlotte with Pokey.
Instead, she and Mason snuck out to the lake house, where she gladly gave up her virginity on a creaky army-surplus cot.
The following Monday, Annajane went off to Raleigh for her sophomore year at NC State and Mason went off to grad school. It would be two years before she would see Mason Bayless again.
Her first few weeks back at school, Annajane told herself Mason hadn’t called or e-mailed because he was busy with classes. Getting a master’s in finance was no joke, she knew. The weeks stretched out, and he still didn’t call or e-mail, and she was too proud to call him. She went home at Thanksgiving, but Mason didn’t. When Christmas rolled around, she was sure she’d see him. The Baylesses made a big deal of Christmas, with a huge open house on Christmas Eve and an elaborate family dinner. But Mason, Pokey told her, had been invited to spend the holiday with a classmate, at his family’s vacation home in Cuernavaca.
When Christmas morning came and went without so much as an e-mail from him, Annajane tore the card off the antique sterling silver cufflinks she’d bought for Mason and instead gave them to her stepfather, Leonard, who only wore short-sleeved dress shirts.
Stung by being so unceremoniously dumped, Annajane returned to school and threw herself into classwork and a rigorous social life. She dated with a vengeance, told herself she was in love with a cute but slightly dim-witted guy in her marketing class, slept with him once, and then swore off men who used more hair products than she did.
She found herself deliberately staying away from Passcoe, instead spending holidays with classmates, even taking a part-time job as nanny for one of her professor’s bratty nine-year-old twins, so that she’d have an excuse to stay in Raleigh year-round instead of going home—and facing the possibility of seeing Mason riding around town in that shiny red car with a new girlfriend.
The summer before her senior year, she got an internship with a New York advertising agency and shared a roach-infested six-hundred-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn with two other girls from NC State. Annajane had herself a very large summer; got invited to house parties at the shore, and dated another intern, Nouri, who introduced her to Pakistani food and who promptly fell in love with her and begged her to transfer to Columbia and move in with him.
Instead, Annajane returned to Raleigh in late September, with highlighted blond hair, a discreet butterfly tattoo on her right hip, and a tiny silver nose ring, which she quickly discarded after the shock value wore off.
Somehow, she managed to avoid seeing Mason Bayless for nearly two years. Right up until the day Pokey got married. But that was another story.
7
True to his word, Max Kaufman was standing at the emergency room entryway when the ambulance pulled up the ramp at Passcoe Memorial Hospital. In his late fifties, with a close-shaven shock of graying hair and large, soulful brown eyes, Dr. Kaufman was already dressed in rumpled green surgical scrubs.
After Sophie had been moved to a gurney and brought inside, Dr. Kaufman nodded a brisk greeting to Mason and Annajane, and then was all business, feeling the listless child’s forehead and gently probing her abdomen.
Sophie cried feebly at his touch. “It’s okay, sugar,” Mason said, clutching her hand. “Dr. Max is going to make you feel better.” He leaned down, smoothed her hair from her face, and kissed both cheeks.
“We’re going to take this little lady back and get her blood drawn right away, do a CT scan, and make her comfortable, but from what you’ve told me, I suspect it is her appendix, in which case, we’ll just get that bugger out of there,” Dr. Kaufman said. He nodded at the nurse hovering at his elbow, and she began to wheel Sophie away.
“Well, Miss Sophie,” they heard the nurse say. “My name is Molly. And I’ve got a little girl just your age at home, and her name is Sophie, too. What do you think about that? I sure do love that pretty pink dress you’re wearing. Did you have a birthday party today?”
“No,” Sophie said. “We were getting my daddy married, but then I throwed up.”
Dr. Kaufman chuckled, looking from Mason to Annajane, raising one bushy eyebrow at the groom’s vomit-spattered tuxedo and his ex-wife’s ruined dress. “Everybody good now? Fine. Fill out the paperwork, get yourself some of our world-famous crappy coffee, and I should be able to let you know something about the surgery in a few minutes.”
“Is this really necessary?” Mason asked anxiously.
“What, an appendix?” Dr. Kaufman said, irritably. “Mason, nobody really needs an appendix, as far as we know. It’s not terribly common for a five-year-old to have appendicitis, but it’s not a rarity either. That said, if she does have a hot appendix, we need to remove it, or things will get really ugly really fast. So you need to let me go find out, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and disappeared behind the swinging door to the examining rooms.