Tribute

to get these lily pads and cattails under control.”
    “It’s on the list. Brian said maybe we’ll do some yellow flags.”
    “That would be a nice choice. You could plant a willow over there. It’d make a pretty feature, weeping over the water.”
    She scribbled. “I thought a stone bench maybe, somewhere to sit.” Remembering, she looked up at him. “So, is this where you kissed Ford Sawyer’s mother?”
    His mouth dropped open in surprise, and, to Cilla’s delight, a flush rose up into his cheeks. He chuckled, and began to walk again. “Now how’d you hear about that?”
    “I have my sources.”
    “I have mine. I hear you kissed Penny Sawyer’s son out in the front yard.”
    “Buddy.”
    “Not directly, but he’d be the root of it.”
    “It’s a little weird.”
    “A little bit,” Gavin agreed.
    “You haven’t answered the question.”
    “I guess I’ll confess I did kiss Penny Quint—which she was in those days—more than a few times, and some of those times here. We went steady for a number of months in high school. Before she broke my heart.”
    He smiled when he said it, and had Cilla smiling in return. “High school is hell.”
    “It sure can be. The heartbreaking took place here, too, as it happens. And back there, near the pond. Penny and I had a fight—God knows about what—and we broke up. I admit to having been torn between wooing her back and making a play for your mother.”
    “You dog.”
    “Most boys are dogs at eighteen. Then I saw Penny, near the pond, kissing Johnnie.” He sighed, even now, remembering. “That was a blow. My girl—or I still half thought of her as my girl—and one of my friends. It broke the code.”
    “Friends don’t move in on exes,” Cilla said. “It’s still the code.”
    “Johnnie and I had words about it. Then and there, and Penny gave me a piece of her mind. About that time, your mother came along. She’s always been drawn to drama. I went off with her, soothed my heart and ego. That was the last time Johnnie and I spoke. The last words we spoke to each other were hard ones. I’ve always regretted that.”
    There was no smile now, and in its place, Cilla saw old grief. “He died two days later. And so did another of my friends, and Jimmy Hennessy was paralyzed. I was supposed to go with them that night.”
    “I didn’t know that.” Something squeezed inside her. “I’ve never heard that.”
    “I was supposed to be in that car, but Penny kissed Johnnie, Johnnie and I had hard words. And I didn’t go.”
    “God.” A shudder snaked down Cilla’s spine. “I owe Ford’s mother quite a bit.”
    “I went off to college the next fall, like I planned—then a couple of years in, I dropped out, went off to Hollywood. Got myself a contract. I think it was, at least in part, because I was another kind of reminder of her brother, her mother, that had your mother giving me another look. She was too young when the look turned serious. We both were. We got engaged secretly, broke up publicly. Back and forth, back and forth for years. Then we eloped.
    “We had you hardly a year later.” He draped his arm around Cilla’s shoulders. “We did our best. I know it wasn’t very good, but we did our best.”
    “It’s hard, knowing so much of what happened, what was done, was rooted in death at worst, on mistakes at best.”
    “You were never a mistake.”
    She didn’t respond. How could she? She’d been called one often enough. “You were still in college when Janet died?”
    “I’d finished my first year.”
    “Did you hear anything about a man, someone out here, she was involved with?”
    “There was constant speculation, constant gossip about Janet and men. I don’t recall anything out of the ordinary, or any talk of someone from here. Why?”
    “I found letters, Dad. I found letters written to her from a lover. They’re postmarked from here, or a lot of them are. She hid them. The last one, bitter, after he’d broken off the affair, was mailed only ten days before her death.”
    They’d walked back to the house, stood now at the edge of the back veranda. “I think she came back here to see him, to confront him. She was desperately unhappy, if even half of the accounts from the time are true. And I think she was in love with this man, this married man she’d had a passionate, tumultuous affair with for over a year before it cooled.”
    “You think he was local? What was his name?”
    “He didn’t sign them by