Autumn's Child

Book 3: Standing Tall

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Women's Fiction; Fall & winter reads

Synopsis

FALLING FOR YOU Former pro-snowboarder Ben Healy has always sensed when to call it quits. He knew when to give up Olympic dreams and settle for lucrative sponsorship deals. He knew when his competition days were ending. And with Colleen Ridge, he knew that something so good couldn’t possibly last. Rather than wait until Colleen realized she deserved better, he pushed her away. Only now, thanks to her grandmother’s finagling, they’re back in the same town. Four years should be long enough to forget someone. But the summer she and Ben spent together is imprinted in Colleen’s soul. While sorting out her grandmother’s estate, Colleen confronts shocking truths about her past. Ben is right by her side, determined to help. And loving him again could be another collision with heartache, or the best mistake Colleen ever made…

Release date: November 12, 2019

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 234

Sample

Chapter 1

Mrs. Norton W. Ridge IV could name every bride in town who had given birth to a “premature” baby seven months after the wedding. She never forgot who had fallen in arrears on their country club dues. And the young man who had come to tee off in baggy cargo shorts…wouldn’t his grandfather be rolling in his grave right now, just rolling? Mrs. Ridge, the former Miss Eleanor Alexandria Burchell, was a good old-fashioned Southern…ah…difficult woman with exacting standards and an unforgiving spirit.

“Why are people so afraid of her?” a granddaughter’s boyfriend had asked.

“She’s lonely,” the granddaughter had answered, trying to explain what she wasn’t willing to say, that her grandmother was a sharp-tongued, rich old lady who had chosen being powerful over being loved.

Mrs. Ridge had spent her married life in Carlsville, Georgia, a once well-mannered town north of Atlanta. Like many small towns in the South, Carlsville had faded. The young people moved to Atlanta. The country club first opened its restaurant to non-members, then the golf course, and finally had to shut its doors altogether. Miss Dessy’s Shop for Ladies closed. The Ridges were the only one of the old families who had held on to their money. Eleanor Ridge had accepted the impoverishment of her town, the declining affluence of her friends, and her own aging with matriarchal grace. Wasn’t decay the natural course of things in the South?

What Mrs. Ridge had proved unable to endure was the reverse, the sudden improvement in the town’s economy. A massive pork-processing plant had gone up on the grounds of the country club, running two shifts a day, providing many, many jobs. New people came to town; new stores opened; all the rental properties were taken. There was money in town. Homeowners were getting ahead of their own bills by leasing out rooms in their basements. The high school football team had new uniforms; the public library had money to buy new books.

But it wasn’t elegant money. The country club was not reopening; Miss Dessy’s Shop for Ladies remained shuttered.

The new people were immigrants, speaking languages that Mrs. Ridge did not understand. The new grocery store stocked foods she had never seen. She could not pronounce the names of the people serving on the school board and the town council. The town had suited her when it was fading, when the paint on the white porches weathered and peeled, when the wisteria vines grew thick and heavy and the honeysuckle toppled the fences.

But the rusty cars with loud mufflers, the plywood skateboard ramps, the Catholics renting space in the Baptist church for their ever-growing Sunday school offended her. Her friends were moving to the city to live with their grown children, but Mrs. Ridge had more resources and options than they did. She announced that she would start living year-round at her summer home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She was still invited to bridge luncheons up there. The historic inn in the nearby village still had white tablecloths in the dining room, and its parking valet always retrieved her car first even if other people were waiting in line. Up there she was still treated as she expected to be.

Her daughter and her older son had objected to the expense involved. The house would have to be winterized, a first-floor bath installed. Mrs. Ridge had replied that she was not accountable to them for how she spent her money. They had fretted about how many valuables she would be leaving in the vacant Georgia house. She responded by taking everything with her. Two interstate moving vans carried boxes of china figurines and chests of sterling silver flatware. Rugs were rolled and swaddled in plastic. Artwork was boxed in custom-built wood crates. Less than half of this would ever get unpacked.

Her lawyers, Timothy Healy and his son Ryan, had wanted to do an inventory of those valuables while they were being packed. Mrs. Ridge’s will had a years-old, pages-long attachment listing individual family heirlooms. The Healys wanted to be sure that the items on the list could be matched up with the actual possessions. Mrs. Healy announced that that was nonsense. Surely everything was still there—why would anyone in the family have ever sold anything?—and as for knowing what was what, who couldn’t tell a Dresden Rose fruit bowl from a Les Cinq Fleurs vegetable dish?

She had arrived at the lake in late December and quickly realized that the ladies she had played bridge with weren’t there. They were summer residents, just as she used to be. She had no one to lunch with, no one to complain about, no one to bully. By March, out of isolation she would never admit to, she announced to the Healys that she was agreeable to an inventory. But no, they couldn’t hire someone local. How could she be expected to have a stranger in the house? They needed to send someone she knew, someone she could sit down to dinner with.

She had spent more than eighty years making sure that she got her way. She wasn’t going to stop now.

* * * *

Of Mrs. Ridge’s three children and six grandchildren, only one, her younger son’s daughter Colleen, had any sympathy for her.

“Try to understand,” Colleen said to the two friends she had invited to spend spring break with her at her grandmother’s lake house. “She will criticize you for violating rules of etiquette that you never knew existed, but it will make her happy.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Colleen’s fellow-teacher Amanda said from the front seat of the car. “I’m from Missouri. We have character, not manners.”

Amanda’s boyfriend, Jason, was driving. “You two teach in a private school.” Jason worked in the fund-raising office of the University of Virginia. “What can be worse than private school parents?”

“My grandmother can be.”

“And we teach in a parochial school,” Amanda corrected. “Our families are nice. At least most of them.”

* * * *

Ben Healy looked out his window on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Ridge had assigned him a room at the front of the house, and he could see the driveway that curved down to the fortress of spruce, white birch, and aspen trees that protected the property from the stares of passing motorists. He would be able to see the car drive up.

This was some kind of crap-ass joke.

Ben had been a professional snowboarder. He had had a great run, he and his two closest friends training together as kids, sharing a chalet at a resort in Oregon as adults. But he was realistic enough to know when his competition days were ending. Having always been analytical and interested in details and systems, and being one of the few snowboarders with a college degree, he had done a “boot camp” in software engineering and was now working on a master’s degree in cyber-security.

The program was mostly online; he had a lot of flexibility about timing and location. The faculty did take a spring break, so he decided to take a week off as well. He had offered to go down to Georgia and help out for a week. He had assumed that he would be cleaning out the garage or something, but his mom had said that her garage was clean. His dad and brother said that if he truly wanted to help, he could supervise the inventory of an elderly client’s valuables. She wanted someone from the family to come. Ben said that he could do that.

Oh, and she was now living in her summer place in southwestern Virginia.

That was okay. Ben had nothing against southwestern Virginia.

And the client was Mrs. Ridge.

Mrs. Ridge was a piece of work, but if they needed him, he would go.

Then his father said, “And there’s no reason to think that Colleen would be there.”

Wait. What? “Why would Colleen be there?”

“I just said that there was no reason that she would be.”

“Yes, but you said it. If there really was no reason to think she would be there, if she were in the Peace Corps or manning a mission to Mars, you wouldn’t have said anything at all.”

“She lives in Charlottesville. She teaches French at a high school there.”

Charlottesville was about ninety minutes from Mrs. Ridge’s new home. There were suddenly all kinds of reasons why she might be there.

Snowboarders need to be fearless; it helps if they are insanely so. Apparently leaving the pro circuit had robbed Ben of his manly courage. He checked Charlottesville’s public school calendar. Their spring break was a week after Mrs. Ridge was commanding his presence. If Colleen was coming, it would be after he had left. Mrs. Ridge probably wanted to spread out her visitors.

He had been greeted at the door by an elegant woman who introduced herself as Leilah; she was Mrs. Ridge’s “house manager.” Ben had no idea what a house manager did. He had never heard of such a job. Mrs. Ridge was resting, Leilah said. She would show Ben to his room. She waved him toward the wide front staircase, but didn’t offer to take his suitcase. Apparently house managers weren’t footmen.

“We’re expecting the other houseguests to arrive shortly,” she said as they reached the landing. “Mrs. Ridge’s granddaughter is bringing two friends with her.”

Granddaughter? Ben forced himself to take a breath. There were two granddaughters, weren’t there? Colleen had a female cousin. Ben couldn’t remember her name. Maybe it was her.

No, it wasn’t her, whatever her name was. Colleen was the only one of her generation who paid Mrs. Ridge any attention. But what about the school calendar? Spring break wasn’t supposed to start until a week from Monday.

For the public schools. He hadn’t thought about checking the private school calendars. She could be teaching at a private school or a parochial one. The Ridges in Georgia had been Episcopalian for generations, but Colleen and her brothers had been raised in Chicago as Catholics. She could be teaching in a Catholic school with a different schedule.

So she was coming. He was a big boy, wasn’t he? He could handle it. What was the big deal? They had had a summer fling four years ago. It hadn’t lasted. End of story.

Except no one else would let it end. Everyone had adored Colleen. And not just Seth and Nate, his two closest friends, but all their families too. His own family had known Colleen her whole life. Nate’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Forrest, had been employing her at their resort that summer, and they thought she was just as marvelous as Ben’s own family did. Seth’s family, the Streets, had never met her, so you might think that they wouldn’t have a strong opinion, but the three moms talked to each other way too much, and so the Streets also thought that Colleen was the torch on the top of the Statue of Liberty.

When you were with a woman like that, after a while you started to wonder what she was doing with you. Why would Colleen Ridge, even-tempered and generous, glowing and vibrant, gifted at languages, stick around with a guy like him?

He must be fooling her, he finally concluded. She must not realize that he wasn’t as good a snowboarder as Seth and Nate. He didn’t have Seth’s style or Nate’s muscle. He had as many medals as they did because he was consistent. On his own, he could earn bronze medal after bronze medal; silver and gold came only when someone else screwed up. He had made as much money as anyone, but only because the sponsors liked the way he looked in their clothes, not because little kids wanted to grow up and be Ben Healy. His green eyes and Irish cheekbones were more valuable than his McTwists.

Surely Colleen would dump him the minute she saw the real him.

So it had been easier to be a dick.

Once the summer was over and he was back on the pro circuit and she was on the East Coast, he had become the Disappearing Boyfriend from Hell. He would return her phone calls with a text. He would wait two days before answering her texts. He would discourage her from coming to events, saying that all the spectators would be drunk. He would answer all her questions with monosyllables, and when she would push, trying to recapture the magic of the summer, he would say even less. Then he would lie and say that everything was fine, that nothing had changed. Of course she had eventually broken up with him. He hadn’t given her much choice.

He cringed at the memory of how badly he had behaved. He tried not to think about that time. It wasn’t really Colleen he dreaded meeting, but the person he had been to her, the self-defeating, self-sabotaging moron.

* * * *

The house was a few miles south of the little village that had the lake’s only commercial establishments. Colleen sat forward, telling Jason to look for the third break in the dense wall of trees. Two stone pillars flanked a narrow drive. The pillars were not marked. One had a mailbox recessed into it, but there was no name, no address. If you haven’t been here before, the pillars seemed to say, why are you coming now?

The drive immediately made a sharp curve so that from the road no one could see any of the property. Beyond the curve the trees opened up to a narrow meadow of sweet clover and wildflowers, trout lilies that would bloom early and asters that would come late in the summer. Anchored by its stone foundation, the big, old house flowed across the earth. Sided with weathered cedar shingles, it was as welcoming and informal as a large house could be. Bay windows, deep recesses, and broad eaves etched out spaces for rocking chairs and wrought-iron gliders, and the narrow third-story dormers promised a world of cozy secrets.

The house had always been slightly seedy in a casual old-family way. Colleen remembered weeds sprouting in the gravel driveway, garden hoses left in a careless tangle, and broken canoe paddles abandoned by the side of the boathouse. The house was rooted in nature; the sloping grounds and the trees were a part of summer. Why would the ivy and periwinkle be confined to neatly edged beds?

That was how it should be, how it had always been. But it wasn’t like that now. Everything had changed. The property looked like something from a magazine. The railings and the trim around the windows, once an indeterminate light color, were a glossy ecru; the shutters were a perfectly chosen mossy green. The gravel had been bulldozed off the driveway and replaced with a fresh ribbon of silvery black asphalt. The bushes, previously a tangled mass along the stone foundation, were pruned and thickly mulched.

This was strange. Her grandmother couldn’t have ordered this. The shining paint and meticulous landscaping looked so nouveau-riche, so new money, and new money was yet another thing that Mrs. Norton W. Ridge IV did not approve of.

Colleen didn’t sneer at new money; as a foreign language teacher in an era of funding cuts, she was happy to have any money at all. What she didn’t like was change. So much had already changed in the last few years—her mother dying, her father remarrying, her brothers wanting to spend the holidays with their in-laws. The lake couldn’t change.

She had grown up outside Chicago, and during the school year they had all been so busy, Dad with his dental practice, Mother driving the boys to their sports and Colleen to her lessons. But every summer they had the two weeks at the lake. She would play in the water with her brothers, the three of them balancing themselves on the gunnels of the wood canoe, trying to jar the other ones off. As her brothers grew and she remained small, she would splash up to stand on Sean’s shoulders. Finn would count. On “two” Sean would bend his knees, on “three” he would jump; an instant later she, too, would jump, pulling herself into a tight tuck, seeing how many times she could somersault in the air before cannonballing into the water. They would play croquet on the lawn, the game having an Alice-in-Wonderland madness because of the sloping course. Sometimes their grandmother would play with them; her strokes were elegant, her strategy ruthless. At night everyone would gather around the library table to play games.

That was the lake. That was what happened at the lake. It couldn’t change.

A little red Prius was parked under the portico by the kitchen door. It belonged to Leilah, her grandmother’s one full-time employee. Her grandmother’s big Lincoln was angled into a space across from the front door. A nondescript car was next to the Lincoln. Colleen didn’t know who it belonged to. She suggested Jason park next to it.

She and Amanda got out of the car, never thinking to wait for Jason to come around and open their doors. For a moment, she saw a person in one of the front bedroom windows, but whoever it might be stepped away almost instantly. Amanda had seen the figure too, and English teacher that she was, started making comparisons to Jane Eyre and the first Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic.

“That’s not the attic. The attic is up there.” Colleen pointed to the dormer windows under the roofline. “My brothers and I sleep there.” Those rooms were small, having been designed for servants, but Colleen loved them. The cozy, oddly shaped spaces seemed quaint and endearing. She had spent her Christmas vacation here this year to help her grandmother settle in. Even though only the two of them had been in the house, Colleen had slept in the attic.

She had a key to the front door, but as soon as she saw how bright the brass lock was, she knew that her key wasn’t going to fit. Another change.

Wanting to be a dutiful granddaughter hadn’t been the only reason she had spent Christmas here. Her brothers were spending the holiday with their in-laws. Her father had been going to California with his new wife to see her son and his family. Of course she would have been welcome at either place, but she would have felt like a guest. She didn’t want to feel like a guest at Christmas. As difficult as her grandmother could be, coming to the lake had felt easier.

Colleen rang the doorbell. Leilah, the house manager, opened the door.

Slender, as tall as Amanda, with the lithe, grounded bearing of a yoga instructor, Leilah was dressed in a collarless shirt and soft trousers in a wheat-colored linen. Her hair was the same light golden brown color as Colleen’s, but without Colleen’s exuberant texture. Leilah’s hair was glisteningly smooth. Everything about her seemed refined and elegant. Colleen couldn’t imagine anyone, even her grandmother, calling Leilah a maid.

When Colleen had come in December, she had been fascinated by Leilah. She was like the elegant priestess who glided across the waiting room of an expensive spa, handing you a thick white robe, escorting you to the luxurious mysteries that awaited in the dimly lit, scented rooms.

But after a while Colleen had grown uneasy. Leilah was obviously well educated. Her vocabulary was precise; her sweaters were cashmere. Why would such a woman, seemingly in her mid-thirties, take a job that had low pay and little future? There were many possible reasons—she could be a poet or an artist; she could need a year of quiet after a difficult divorce. But whatever her story was, she was not sharing it with Colleen. Colleen’s first few questions—routine questions about where Leilah was from and the like—had been so deftly evaded that Colleen stopped asking.

In fact, as she began to introduce Leilah to Amanda and Jason, she realized that she didn’t even know the woman’s last name.

“Do come in,” Leilah said graciously. “I will show you to your rooms. Mrs. Ridge will meet you in the library for cocktails.”

“Is there someone else here?” Colleen asked, wondering about the rental car.

“Yes. Mrs. Ridge is undertaking an inventory of her family heirlooms. One of her lawyer’s sons has come to supervise.”

“Her lawyer from Georgia? Mr. Healy?”

“I believe so. One of his sons.”

Tim and Marianne Healy had four sons, and the oldest, Ryan, was a lawyer in practice with his father. He would be the one who was here. That was fine. She knew Ryan; she liked him. It would be strange because he and Ben looked a lot alike, but she could handle that. No problem.

At the top of the stairs, Leilah turned right. The stairs to the attic were to the left. Colleen supposed that made sense. She wouldn’t be putting Jason and Amanda up in the attic. Once they got settled, Colleen could find the back stairs on her own.

The doorway to one of the second floor bedrooms opened. Sunlight spilled into the hallway. A man stepped out, the sunlight behind him, outlining his shape, obscuring his features.

Yes, Ryan was built like Ben…and like Colleen’s own brothers, their birth families, and all her mother’s relatives. Their shoulders were sturdy, their torsos long and lean, and they didn’t have much extension in his forearms and thighs. All these people were Irish-American with the build of people who had, for generations, trudged up and down Ireland’s green hills.

“Amanda, Jason,” Leilah was saying, “I’d like you to meet our other guest, Ben Healy.”

What? What? This was supposed to be Ryan, the older brother, the lawyer.

But Leilah had said Ben. Colleen didn’t know where to look. She couldn’t look at him.

The floorboards creaked; someone was stepping forward to shake someone’s hand. Words, accents, Maryland, central Missouri, north Georgia, and then “…how nice to see you again…”

Was that her? Had she spoken? Of course. She was poised; she was polite, and the tip of her tongue was still touching the roof of her mouth just behind her teeth, the “n” from “again.”

Nice…Had she really said that it was nice to see him again? It wasn’t nice at all, it was…She didn’t know what it was.

She had to look at him. She couldn’t resist—his hair dark and auburn-tinged, thick and rumpled; his lower lip full and soft; his eyes deeply set beneath dark eyebrows, all that wild Irish beauty. Ben.

Nice…oh, no, it was something quite different than nice.

It had started so randomly four years ago. He had happened to look at a list of Norwegian interpreters, a list that was lying on a desk in the office of the Endless Snow resort. Hey, I know that girl. I played with her brothers when we were kids. He lived with two other guys in a chalet on the grounds of the resort. Hire her. She’ll be fun to have around. So she had gone to Oregon for the summer to interpret for two Norwegian snowboard coaches.

Oh, the memories—the sun sparkling off the ice-frosted snow, the orange-red flames in the depths of a stone fireplace, chalet windows bright in the soft twilight. Ben had tried to teach her to snowboard. She fell. And fell again. Her laughter had been light and clear, his deep and throaty while he reached his hand down to help her back up.

She had known that she was more sure about the two of them than he had been, but she had assumed that it was that Irish-Catholic worldview that if anything could go wrong, it would. She had been confident that he would get beyond that.

He hadn’t. You never knew how much I loved you. I told you and told you. You never believed it.

Leilah was gesturing her into one of the lakeside rooms, saying that she hoped Colleen had everything she needed. The door closed. Colleen found herself sitting on the bed, staring at her suitcase, a quilted duffel, its fabric tumbling with sweetheart roses and blossoming peonies.

I loved you, but I hated myself.

She knew what the books said. She had read them, struggling to understand what had happened between them.

It had turned into a distancer-pursuer relationship, the books said. She was the pursuer, begging him to call her more, talk to her more. That wasn’t who she was. She was a confident, competent person. She knew that she was physically appealing, that she was smart with a gifted ear for languages. She was helpful; she was kind. People liked her.

But waiting two days for him to answer the simplest text had made her needy and desperate. She couldn’t bear to think about how pathetic she must have seemed back then. So now Ben wasn’t simply an ex-boyfriend. That she could have handled. He was the ex-boyfriend who had turned her into a person whom she could not respect.

She heard a sound, a little rap. It was a knock on the French door that led to the balcony overlooking the lake. What was she doing in this room? This had been her parents’ room.

The knock came again. She could see Amanda through the glass, waiting for Colleen to open the door. Colleen got up. She might not be able to open the door. It used to stick. Her father would have to jerk hard on it, and then it would pop open, sometimes making him almost lose his balance. She might have to ask Amanda to push from the outside. Besides teaching English, Amanda coached the girls’ field hockey and lacrosse teams. She was tall and strong.

But there was no need for Amanda’s muscle. This time the door glided open, soundlessly and easily.

“This is fun,” . . .