The Best of Us (Sullivan's Crossing #4)(5)

“Yeah, I heard all that. Do you tell everyone that and do they still take it off?” Rob asked.

“You just wouldn’t believe it,” she said.

After Rob and Finn left, Leigh helped Eleanor clean up the treatment room.

“I love Rob,” Eleanor said. “I think you should just marry him. He’s probably ready to remarry now.”

Leigh knew he was a single father, but little else. “Is he divorced?”

“Widowed,” Eleanor said. “The poor guy. He lost his wife when the boys were little. That’s when he came to Timberlake to open the pub. He said he needed a business with flexible hours so he could raise his sons. He’s a wonderful father. He must be the best catch in town.”

Leigh’s mouth hung open for a moment. She hadn’t shared any details of her personal life with Eleanor. She had lost her mother very young. Years later when she was still quite young, she was abandoned by her fiancé just a week before their wedding and it had felt so much like a death. She rarely dated. And she was not shopping around for a guy. He could find someone else to get his stains out.

When Leigh Culver was a little girl, her childhood was idyllic. She was a lovely child with blond ringlets, a bit of a tomboy with a risky curiosity and an outgoing nature. The Holliday family lived next door; they had three children and their middle child was Leigh’s age. Johnny and Leigh were best friends from the age of three. Inseparable. They had regular sleepovers until Dottie Holliday and Aunt Helen decided they were getting too old for that to be appropriate.

Leigh’s mother had moved in with Aunt Helen when she realized she was pregnant at the age of eighteen. It was so long ago that her mother had died, Leigh could barely remember her. But Helen remembered and reminded her of the details—it was a freak accident. She’d had a reaction to anesthesia during a routine appendectomy, went into heart failure and they couldn’t save her. From that moment on it was Helen and Leigh.

Leigh went to and from school with Johnny and the other Holliday kids. Sometimes she went to Helen’s classroom after school and worked on her homework assignments while Helen finished her work. They had a very nice routine for many years. And, over time, Johnny Holliday went from being a best buddy to a boyfriend and they dated all through high school.

Leigh and Johnny wanted to get married as soon as they graduated. Johnny wanted to go into the marines and take Leigh with him. Helen wanted Leigh to go to college, get an education. “Haven’t we learned anything?” she’d said. “You could find yourself the sole support of a family! I won’t make you wait too long, but we have to find a way for you to get an education.”

They compromised. Johnny enlisted in the army reserve. Leigh registered at the local university. She wanted to be a teacher like her aunt Helen. Biology caught her interest. She would get her degree and they would marry at the age of twenty-one.

For a couple of years, things rolled by without too much stress or trauma, even though, looking back on it, she could see that Johnny had a tendency to grow restless. Helen went off now and then to visit writing friends or attend conferences when school was not in session. Johnny worked in his father’s home furnishings store and was gone for occasional reserve weekends or training.

Then he deployed. After nine months in Kuwait he was on his way home. Their wedding was scheduled to take place a few weeks after he got home. But something had changed. Suddenly, he had doubts. He said he couldn’t do it. He said he was sorry, he just wasn’t ready. He wanted to see more of the world. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life working in his father’s store and living in the neighborhood he grew up in. And since he’d never even dated anyone else, how could he be sure she was the right woman for him? How could Leigh be sure, for that matter?

They argued and fought and then Johnny told her he was being transferred to an army reserve unit in California. He thought they should make a clean break and, maybe in a year or two, see if they still wanted to be together.

She begged him not to go. Crying, sobbing, feeling as if her heart was being ripped from her breast, she pleaded with him not to end their beautiful, perfect love match. The humiliation of begging just about did her in.

Helen was beside herself. “That self-centered little bastard! I think you dodged a bullet. That is not good husband material!” Helen pointed out that things weren’t as perfect as Leigh wanted them to be. That he’d been an imperfect boyfriend who flirted with other girls, went through spells of neediness that required a lot of special attention from her, that he was spoiled by his mother. Despite the fact that Helen liked Dottie Holliday and was grateful for her support while she raised Leigh alone, she was critical of Dottie’s blind eye where her middle son was concerned.

As for Johnny’s claim of having never dated another girl, Helen was not so sure. He hadn’t dated anyone Leigh knew about but Helen taught at the high school. She saw things and heard things. Helen thought Johnny was not as loyal as Leigh believed, but Leigh refused to believe that.

She grieved. Johnny wasn’t going to change his mind. He said it was best, they should both be sure. And they both needed to experience a little more of life. Though clearly he was not concentrating on what she needed, leaving Leigh and Helen to deal with calling off the wedding and returning gifts that had arrived early.

“You’re so young,” Helen said. “Someday you’ll see he didn’t deserve you.”