Coming Home to Greenleigh

Chapter 3

3

Only the fact of a mere twenty dollars left in the grocery jar and the scary pile of bills on her desk could have persuaded Elisabeth to sit down with Shawn Waterstone for any reason.

She couldn’t believe what was happening to her. It was all she could do not to just pick up her briefcase and leave, but Shawn stood between her and the door, preventing any kind of dignified exit. It had taken her a lot of courage to come to this decision at all, and she had been tempted half a dozen times during her walk to the Lawson & Lawson offices to just cut and run, but she’d stuck it out. If she pushed past Shawn and fled, she’d be wasting all that anguish, all that effort.

Shawn looked great. She had to admit it to herself. He even looked like he had a tan, a suggestion of a summer on Cape Cod, his ash-blond hair cut briskly in almost a crew cut to frame the angular lines of his face. Eyes somewhere between gray and hazel and brown glared down at her from way above her own five feet, two inches.

She had no idea what he was doing here in Greenleigh, here at Lawson & Lawson. Was he visiting? No, that couldn’t be right. He must work here. But why? He’d been so eager to get the hell out of Greenleigh—so eager, in fact, that he’d argued her into going with him. She had nothing going for her in Greenleigh, he’d said. If she’d just leave Greenleigh, he would take her to New York with him and she could do anything she wanted. She could finish that college degree that was taking her so long to pay for, credit by credit. She could study something interesting, like English or art history, instead of the practical accounting and finance that her mother had pestered her into studying. He could take care of her, and they would be happy.

But when the appointed time came, she’d been watching the old grandfather clock in the front hall, watching the hands tick past, watching her opportunity go by. She could hear her mother coughing upstairs, she could see the bills on the kitchen table, her father’s name still on them, the pay stubs from her job and the empty jar of grocery money, and she knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

And she knew she should have told Shawn this, but she couldn’t explain why she wasn’t able to do what was clearly the smart thing to do. Who kept living with their mother at the age of twenty-two? Who turned away an offer of help that was based in love and trust? What kind of person did that?

This kind of person, she thought miserably. I’m that person.

And now look at me. She almost laughed. It’s like I’ve come full circle. I can’t run away from it, and poor Shawn can’t run away from me.

She looked up at Shawn and decided to feel sorry for him. He was about to have the most uncomfortable business meeting of his lifetime. She could see his discomfort, and none of this was his fault, unless it lay in his desire to fix other people’s problems.

“Ricky Senior didn’t tell me what this was about,” he was saying. “Can I do something for you?”

“I’m not sure,” Elisabeth said. She took a deep breath. “Last year, Mr. Murray said that—” She stopped. Could she say it?

She would have to.

She started again. “Mr. Murray said that if I ever needed help, I shouldn’t hesitate to talk to him. I didn’t actually think I would need the help, but I think I do.”

Another pause. Shawn was visibly perplexed. He leaned back in his chair and motioned for her to go on.

“I need work,” she said, finally.

“Work,” Shawn said. He frowned in confusion. “You wanted to ask Ricky Senior for work?”

“Yes,” Elisabeth said. “I didn’t want to ask. But—I need another source of income.” Her voice was hoarse, so she cleared her throat. “It’s been difficult. Trying to keep that house going.”

At that moment, she saw Shawn’s expression change, and she wished she hadn’t.

The house. Even though she’d never told him why she couldn’t go with him to New York, why she couldn’t leave Greenleigh, he had to know that her attachment to the Burnham home was at the bottom of it. The house represented everything that the Burnhams had ever worked for, stood for, and been trapped by. To let it go was unthinkable.

It had meant more to her than Shawn did, was the unspoken accusation.

“I’m sure there’s enough work around here for an army of assistants,” Shawn said. A cool mask had replaced his initial expression of confusion. “But I’ve only just started working here. I don’t know why Ricky Senior thought I would know anything about hiring you.”

“I’ll do whatever you need to have done.” Elisabeth brought out a notepad from her briefcase, a cheap ballpoint pen clipped neatly to the spiral binding. “Athena Diner,” the lettering on the pen read. Elisabeth saw Shawn’s gaze drop to the pen for a moment, then go back to her face. Embarrassed, she unhooked the pen from the notebook.

“Maybe you should be talking to his admin assistant,” Shawn said. “That’s where all the temp clerical help would be—” He stopped, something registering on his face.

Elisabeth had looked up from her notebook. Temp clerical help? She tried to tamp down the little bubble of fury that began to rise in her belly, in her chest. She knew she couldn’t blame him. When he’d left Greenleigh, she was a library clerk. She was working her painful way through a bachelor’s degree in accounting. There was no reason why he would think that she had changed.

But she was angry. She’d worked so hard to get that degree, and then she’d worked doubly hard to get through law school. She was short, she was plain, she was ordinary—she knew all of this—but she resented it when people assumed she had no education and skills, just because she was a mousy little thing in a flowery dress. Like when those big insurance companies kicked her clients around because they were poor and barely literate, unable to comprehend the fine print on their policies. It made her mad.

She took a deep breath. She was desperate. She needed the work. She’d done the math, looked at the number of hours she had available in a week, and at the bills she had to pay. If he wanted to give her secretarial work, she would take it. At least it was in a law firm, and maybe they would eventually give her something else to do, something that matched her experience and abilities.

“I’ll do whatever you need to have done,” she repeated. She realized that she had been nervously clicking her pen, so she put it down. “But I’m actually a lawyer. I’ve been in solo practice here in Greenleigh for a few years. I’m just having a hard time right now.”

There were so many other things she could say. She could tell him that she’d inherited the money for law school when her mother died—she discovered her mother’s hidden nest egg that she’d inherited from her own family decades back, which made complete sense. Her mother had to have been raiding that fund for years and years, because there couldn’t have been enough money from the Burnhams alone to keep the house going. She could tell him that she’d tried to get a job at some of the lower-tier firms in town, but that no one wanted a general practitioner who wasn’t going to bring lucrative clients into the practice with her. She could tell him that she was sometimes flooded with business but that her clients often couldn’t pay her, and that the local natural foods store sent groceries every week because they were paying off a legal bill from the previous year.

She could tell him that her beloved leather briefcase was her grandfather’s, and that Judge Burnham had presided in the old white frame courthouse for over fifty years. But wait, he already knew that. Of course. When you almost marry someone, he knew all of these sorts of things. He just didn’t know who she’d become in his absence.

And what I’ve become, she thought, is broke and a failure.

She began again. “I’m sorry I didn’t make myself clear. But it’s probably a waste to have me doing clerical work. I can do a lot more.”

“If you don’t mind working at a paralegal’s wage, we have all the research work you could want,” Shawn said. “I’m sorry that I misunderstood. And we could probably get you on some cases, it’s just that it would depend on the individual attorney—”

“I understand,” Elisabeth said.

“—and as long as there isn’t any conflict of interest, of course. You’ll have to check with the attorneys in charge of the projects to make sure you aren’t representing anyone at odds with our clients.”

“Yes, obviously,” Elisabeth said, a little tersely.

“I’m sorry, I had to make that clear,” Shawn said. His voice had turned chilly, professional. He was looking distracted, as if his mind were drifting elsewhere.

No, no, thought Elisabeth. Come back, Shawn. I’m not done with this horrible conversation.

“I have something else I need to ask,” she said. She paused, then said in a rush, “I need to ask for an advance. I’m afraid that things have—things have gotten that bad.”

Shawn’s gaze snapped back, and his eyes, which had been glazing over, sharpened. For a moment, he looked at her, almost as if he were trying to figure her out. Then he nodded. “All right. Come in later this afternoon. I’ll leave a contract with the receptionist, and a check. You can sign the contract when you pick up the check.”

“Thank you.” Elisabeth rose. Shawn stood up automatically, but his attention was on his phone, which he had pulled out of his pocket. He appeared to be scrolling rapidly through a text chat.

At the door, she stopped for a moment to put on her coat, and turned just in time to see Shawn turn to watch her go. She felt herself flush, just as she saw him avert his eyes. So he hadn’t wanted her to know that he was watching her.

“Shawn,” she said, then in a rush, “Shawn, why did you come home?”

“My father needed me,” he said.

She nodded, twisted the handle, and walked out without another word.

Once outside, Elisabeth felt the resolve that had kept her back up and the tears down dissolve. She felt the blood rush into her face as she recalled the humiliation of having to ask Shawn Waterstone, of all people, for a job. And the humiliation of the moment where he revealed what he thought of her abilities—that she was never going to be anything more than that library clerk he’d once known.

She wondered if her knees would buckle under her. She stopped outside the entrance, steadied herself with one hand against the sun-warmed brick of Lawson & Lawson. She gasped, choking on a painful knot of tears in her throat. She couldn’t stay there—it was a busy entrance and she might run into someone she knew—so she hurried blindly down the street toward home.

She went to sit on a bench in the shaded garden of the old Congregational church, not knowing where else to go in a town so small that she had practically walked the entire length of the downtown merely by walking from home to the offices of Lawson & Lawson. The branches of an ancient black walnut tree dwarfed the tiny courtyard, and it was cold here despite the beautiful warm fall day. The stone of the bench seeped right through her coat and into her bones. The blue sky above seemed to be overlooking another planet entirely.

How on earth had she ended up in this situation?

It was clear that she should have gone with him to New York. If she had, this wouldn’t be happening. What could be worse than having to beg Shawn Waterstone for a job? If she had planned it herself, she could not imagine a more devastating turn of events. Obviously, she’d never forgotten him. She’d loved him so much, the only source of sunshine in her colorless life in those days. They’d fallen in love during the summers when he’d come back to Greenleigh from college and borrow stacks of books from the library where she worked as a clerk. He would chat with her as she shelved books, ask her out for coffee and take her out for drives.

She’d often teased him, asking him to tell her why he’d fallen in love with her, because she couldn’t believe it. He was handsome, smart, and had so many exciting things to look forward to. She was so ordinary, just a Greenleigh girl from an old Greenleigh family. He told her that he loved her patient goodness and dedication to doing the right thing, and that she reminded him of all the good things about home.

Once he’d said to her that he loved her because his mother loved her, and he always trusted his mother. She hadn’t known what to make of that, because she was fairly certain that her own mother did not love her, at least not in that all-encompassing, uncomplicated way. Of course, she couldn’t say that, but she often felt he knew it as well as she did.

She’d grown close to his mother, and when the leukemia took her, the hole in her life was vast, and she wasn’t sure it could ever be fixed. Certainly, she knew that Shawn would never be the same again. For a long time, he didn’t say much, and she didn’t ask him to. There were a lot of silent dates that summer.

But he’d changed irreversibly. He couldn’t bear to be in Greenleigh anymore, which she found mystifying. His mother had loved Greenleigh, so why wouldn’t he stay in Greenleigh? But he was done with small town living, he’d said. Done, and ready to move on. And he argued that it was bad for her, too. They would get out of Greenleigh and that would fix everything that was wrong and bring the light back into their lives.

Unspoken was his opinion that her mother and the old house were bad for her. Elisabeth knew it was true, and she listened eagerly at first. But when the time came to actually leave, she found herself unable to get out the door. It wasn’t her head that wouldn’t get in the game. It was her body. It just wouldn’t go.

He had been right all along. I just couldn’t do it, she thought. And now he’ll get to see how right he was to leave Greenleigh, and how mistaken I was to have not gone with him.