Truly(32)

Then she’d come home and watched the video some more.

Every time, she felt a sympathetic, curling disappointment deep in her stomach. When Dan sank to his knee, May’s back was turned to the camera, so Allie couldn’t see her sister’s reaction as Dan said that the most important thing in his life was football. She couldn’t see what May had felt when she heard him say that she kept him grounded, helped him focus, made him a better player.

She could imagine it, though. May’s hurt. Her disappointment. Maybe even a fleeting anger, though anger and May weren’t well acquainted.

She just couldn’t imagine any expression on May’s face that would lead to her attacking Dan with a fork. It wasn’t May.

Dan’s proposal had sucked, but Dan was Dan. This was a guy who’d put green beans in his nose at the dinner table. True, Allie had egged him on, but even so. Green beans. In his nose. What had May expected, violins and roses?

Whatever she’d expected, she hadn’t gotten it, and Allie hated that. She hated that May almost never got what she hoped for, and she loved May for never letting it get her down. It was the most glorious thing about her sister—the way she always found some new source of hope.

Roscoe barked outside, a brief moment of disobedience as Matt left him at the curb, having clipped his leash to a signpost. Possibly-a-Reporter Guy sauntered into the coffee aisle and looked her over, then turned his attention to the herbal teas.

Allie scanned the coffee until she found the kind Matt liked. She heard him greet someone warmly near the front of the store.

Typical. They were hundreds of miles from home, but somehow Matt had found a friend.

She wandered back toward the meat counter to pick up cold cuts and cheese. Reporter Guy trailed behind her, feigning interest in the Entenmann’s coffee cakes.

Shit.

Allie kept her face turned away and tugged her hat down over her forehead. If he recognized her, would he follow her and Matt back to the cabin? Did he know May was supposed to be here soon?

She ordered pimiento loaf, salami, and Muenster cheese. Snatches of Matt’s conversation floated to her, interspersed with the grating sounds of the slicer.

“—surprised me, dude, that’s all—”

“—not sure. Sometime today, but—”

“—disappeared on me, and I kind of lost it, to tell you the truth. I hopped in a cab—”

“—have practice? There’s a game in a few days, right?”

“—Thursday. But I’m not supposed to be here. I think Coach is going to cut off my nuts. I just got her note, and I went straight to the airport. I actually made it up here last night, but then I didn’t know where to go.”

That was when she figured out who Matt was talking to. And started saying all the really bad swear words in her head.

“—find it?”

“They all look the same in the dark, dude, and May’s not answering her phone. I’m glad to see you, because—”

“Will there be anything else?”

Allie blinked. The man behind the counter was slapping a sticker on her plastic bag of salami, and Dan was here.

Dan was at the front of the store, talking to Matt.

She snuck a glance at the reporter. He was staring fixedly at her.

This was nuts. It was Labor Day weekend. On Labor Day weekend, the Fredericks family played cards, drank beer, and ate too much junk food at the lake, and Allie filled the annual drama quotient quite capably by herself.

When she was eight years old, she’d knocked out both her front teeth in a bizarre, impossible-to-replicate waterskiing mishap.

At eleven, she fell asleep with gum in her mouth and woke up with it stuck to her thighs and tangled in her hair.

At seventeen, she’d laid out in the sun all day covered in baby oil and somehow, despite distinctly overcast weather, managed to contract sun poisoning, after which she’d spent most of the weekend huddled in a dim room, shivering.

And now she was twenty-four, about to get married, and scared to death she was making a mistake. She’d spent three weeks telling herself to calm down, because she would have a chance to talk to May at the cabin. Every time she imagined how that might go down, she’d had to admit that it seemed likely she’d crown a lifetime’s Labor Day stupidities by jilting the one man in the world who loved her more than oxygen.

Instead, May had gone AWOL, and her NFL quarterback boyfriend had hauled ass to the North Woods to throw himself at her feet. And at least one reporter was here chasing the story.

Weird didn’t begin to describe it.

“Ma’am?”

“Sorry. What?”

“Anything else?” The butcher extended the assorted bags of sandwich stuff, and she rose to her tiptoes to take them.