Everyday, Average Jones. Suzanne Brockmann
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had to get home, and she had to get home now.
She looked both ways, then ran the red light at the intersection of Route 119 and Hollow Road. But even then, she knew she wasn’t going to make that last mile and a half up Potter’s Field Road.
Melody pulled over to the side and lost her lunch on the shoulder of the road, about half a mile south of the Webers’ mailbox.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening anymore. She was supposed to be done with this part of it. The next few months were supposed to be filled with glowing skin and a renewed sense of peace, and yeah, okay, maybe an occasional backache or twinge of a sciatic nerve.
The morning sickness was supposed to have stopped four months ago. Morning sickness. Hah! She didn’t have morning sickness—she had every-single-moment-of-the-day sickness.
She pulled herself back into her car and, after only stalling twice, slowly drove the rest of the way home. When she got there, she almost didn’t pull into the driveway. She almost turned around and headed back toward town.
There was a Glenzen Bros. truck parked out in front of the house. And Harry Glenzen—one of the original Glenzen brothers’ great-great-grandsons—was there with Barney Kingman. Together the two men were affixing a large piece of plywood to the dining-room window. Or rather to the frame of what used to be the dining-room window.
Melody had to push her seat all the way back to maneuver her girth out from behind the steering wheel.
From inside the house, she could hear the unmistakable roar of the vacuum cleaner. Andy Marshall, she thought. Had to be. Brittany was going to be mad as a hornet.
“Hiya, Mel,” Harry called cheerfully. “How about this heat wave we’re having, huh? We’ve got a real Indian summer this year. If it keeps up, the kids’ll be able to go trick-or-treating without their jackets on.”
“Hey, Harry.” Melody tried not to sound unenthusiastic, but this heat was killing her. She’d suffered all the way through July and August and the first part of September. But it was October now, and October in New England was supposed to be filled with crisp autumn days. There was nothing about today that could be called even remotely crisp.
She dragged herself up the front steps of the enormous Victorian house both she and her sister had grown up in. Melody had moved back in after college, intending to live rent free for a year until she decided what she wanted to do with her life, where she wanted to go. But then her mom had met a man. A very nice man. A very nice, wealthy man. Before Melody could even blink, her mother had remarried, packed up her things and moved to Florida, leaving Mel to take care of the sale of the house.
It wasn’t long after that that Brittany filed for divorce. After years of marriage, she and her husband, Quentin, had called it quits and Britt moved in with Melody.
Melody never did get around to putting the house on the market. And Mom didn’t mind. She was happier than Melody had ever seen her, returning to the Northeast for a month each summer and inviting her two daughters down to Sarasota each winter.
They were just two sisters, living together. Melody could imagine them in their nineties, still living in the same house, the old Evans girls, still unmarried, eccentric as hell, the stuff of which town legends were made.
But soon there would be three of them living together in this big old house, breaking with that particular town spinsters tradition. The baby was due just in time for Christmas. Maybe by then the temperature would have finally dropped below eighty degrees.
Melody opened the front door. As she lugged her briefcase into the house, she heard the vacuum cleaner shut off.
“Mel, is that you?”
“It’s me.” Melody looked longingly toward the stairs that led to her bedroom. All she wanted to do was lie down. Instead, she took a deep breath and headed for the kitchen. “What happened?”
“Andy Marshall happened, that’s what happened,” Britt fumed, coming into the cheery yellow room through the door that connected to the dining room. “The little juvenile delinquent threw a baseball through the dining-room window. We have to special order the replacement glass because the damn thing’s not standard-sized. The little creep claimed the ball slipped out of his hand. He says it was an accident.”
Mel set her briefcase on the kitchen table and sank into one of the chairs. “Maybe it was.”
Britt gave her such a dark look, Melody had to laugh. “It’s not funny,” Brittany said. “Ever since the Romanellas took that kid in, it’s been chaos. Andy Marshall has a great big Behavior Problem, capital B, capital P.”
“Even kids with behavior problems have accidents,” Melody pointed out mildly, resting her forehead in the palm of her hand. God, she was tired.
Her sister’s eyes softened. “Oh, hell. Another bad day?”
Melody nodded. “The entire town is getting used to seeing my car pulled over to the side of the road. Nobody stops to see if I’m okay anymore. It’s just, ‘Oh, there’s Melody Evans hurling again.’ Honk, honk, ‘Hey, Mel!’ and then they’re gone. I feel like a victim of the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. One of these days, I’m going to be pulled to the side of the road in hard labor, giving birth to this baby, and no one’s going to stop to help me.”
Brittany took a glass down from the cabinet, filling it with a mixture of soda water and ginger ale. “Push those fluids. Replace what you’ve lost,” she said, Andy Marshall finally forgotten. “In this weather, your number-one goal should be to keep yourself from becoming dehydrated.”
Melody took the glass her sister was pressing on her. Her stomach was still rolling and queasy, so she only took a small sip before she set it down on the table. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change out of your nurse’s uniform before you forget you’re not at work any longer and try to give me a sponge bath or something?” she suggested.
Britt didn’t smile at her pitiful attempt at a joke. “Only if you promise to lie down and let me take care of dinner.” Melody’s sister had to be the only person in the world who could make an offer to cook dinner sound like a dire threat.
“I will,” Melody promised, pushing herself out of the chair. “And thank you. I just want to check the answering machine. I ordered the latest Robert B. Parker book from the library and Mrs. B. thought it might be back in today. I want to see if she called.” She started toward the den.
“My, my, you do have quite a wild and crazy lifestyle. Spending Friday night at home with a book again. Honestly, Mel, it’s something of a miracle that you managed to get pregnant in the first place.”
Mel pretended not to have heard that comment as she approached the answering machine. There were only two messages, but one of them was a long one. She sat down as the tape took forever to rewind.
…it’s something of a miracle that you managed to get pregnant in the first place…something of a miracle…
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, remembering the look in Harlan Jones’s eyes as she’d met him at the door to her hotel room.
Cleaned up and wearing a naval dress uniform, he’d looked like a stranger. His shoulders were broader than she remembered. He seemed taller and harder and thoroughly, impossibly, devastatingly handsome.
She’d felt geeky and plain, dressed in too conservative clothes from the American shop in the hotel. And at the same time, she felt underdressed. The store had had nothing in her bra size except for something in that old-fashioned, cross-your-heart, body-armor style her grandmother used to wear, so she’d opted to go without. Suddenly, the silky fabric of the dress felt much too thin.
At least her hair was blond again, but she’d cut it much too short in her attempt to disguise herself. It would take weeks before she looked like anything other than a punk-rock time traveler from the early 1980s.
“I ordered room service,” she’d told him shyly. “I hope