herself. But still she hesitated, not quite able to take the next step and slip the pages into the envelope.
This risk frightened her. It hurt to admit it, but she was scared to death. It was no longer just a matter of telling an entertaining story from start to finish. It was her future on the line now, the future she had once blithely believed could take care of itself. If she failed now, she had no one to blame but herself.
She couldn't, as she had with so many of her other projects, claim that she'd discovered something that interested her more. Writing was it, win or lose, and somehow, though she knew it was foolish, the success or failure of her work was inevitably tied up with her success or failure with Nathan.
She crossed her fingers tight, eyes closed, and recited the first prayer that came into her head, though 'Now I lay me down to sleep' wasn't quite appropriate. This done, Jackie shoved the proposal into the bag. Clutching it to her chest, she ran downstairs.
'Mrs. Grange, I've got to go out for a few minutes. I won't be long.'
The housekeeper barely glanced up from her polishing. 'Take your time.'
It was done within fifteen minutes. Jackie stood in front of the post office, certain she'd just made the biggest mistake of her life. She should have gone over the first chapter again. A dozen glaring errors leaped into her mind, errors that seemed so obvious now that the manuscript was sealed and stamped and handed over to some post office clerk she didn't even know.
It occurred to her that there had been a wonderful angle she hadn't bothered to explore and that her characterization of the sheriff was much too weak. He should have chewed tobacco. That was the answer, the perfect answer. All she had to do was go in and stick a wad of tobacco in his mouth and the book would be a best-seller.
She took a step toward the door, stopped and took a step back. She was being ridiculous. Worse, if she didn't get ahold of herself, she was going to be sick. Weak-kneed, she sat on the curb and dropped her head into her hands. Sink or swim, the proposal was going to New York, and it was going today. It amazed her to remember that she'd once thought of celebrating with champagne when she had enough to ship off. She didn't feel like celebrating. She felt like crawling home and burying herself under the covers.
What if she was wrong? Why hadn't she ever considered the fact that she could be totally and completely wrong-about the book, about Nathan, about herself? Only a fool, only a stupid fool, left herself without any route to survival.
She'd poured her heart into that story, then sent it off to a relative stranger who would then have the authority to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down without any regard for her as a person. It was business.
She'd given her heart to Nathan. She'd held it out to him in both hands and all but forced him to take it. If he tried to give it back to her, no matter how gently he handled it, it would be cracked and bruised.
There were tears on her cheeks. Feeling them, Jackie let out a little huff of disgust and dragged the heels of her hands over them. What a pitiful sight. A grown woman sitting on a curb crying because things might not work out the way she wanted them to. She sniffled, then rose to her feet. Maybe they wouldn't work out and she'd have to deal with it. But in the meantime she was going to do her damnedest to win.
By noon, Jackie was sitting at the counter, elbows up, looking at Mrs. Grange's latest pictures of her grandchildren while they shared a pasta salad.
'These are great. This one here… Lawrence, right?'
'That's Lawrence. He's three. A pistol.'
Jackie studied the little towhead with the smear of what might have been peanut butter on his chin. 'Looks like a heartbreaker to me. Do you get to spend much time with them?'
'Oh, now and again. Don't seem enough, though, with grandkids. They grow up faster than your own. This one, Anne Marie, she favors me.' A big knuckled finger tapped a snapshot of a little girl in a frilly blue dress. 'Hard to believe now-' Mrs. Grange patted an ample hip '-but I was a good-looking woman a few years and a few pounds back.'
'You're still a good-looking woman, Mrs. Grange.' Jackie poured out more of the fruit drink she'd concocted. 'And you have a beautiful family.'
Because the compliment had been given easily, Mrs. Grange accepted it. 'Families, they make up for a lot. I was eighteen when I ran off to marry Clint. Oh, he was something to look at, let me tell you. Lean as a snake and twice as mean.' She chuckled, the way a woman could over an old and almost faded mistake. 'I was what you might call swept away.'
She took a bite of pasta as she looked back. It didn't occur to her that she was talking about private things to someone she hardly knew. Jackie made it easy to talk. 'Girls got no sense at that age, and I wasn't any different. Marry in haste, they say, but who listens?'
'People who say that probably haven't been lucky enough to have been swept away.''
Admiring Jackie's logic, Mrs. Grange smiled. 'That's true enough, and I can't say I regret it, even though at twenty-four I found myself in a crowded little apartment without a husband, without a penny, and with four little boys wanting their supper. Clinton had walked out on the lot of us, smooth as you please.'
'I'm sorry. It must have been awful for you.'
'I've had better moments.' She turned then, seeing Jackie looking at her not with polite interest but with eyes filled with sympathy and understanding. 'Sometimes we get what we ask for, Miss Jack, and I'd asked for Clint Grange, worthless snake that he was.'
'What did you do after he'd left?'
'I cried. Spent the night and the better part of a day at it. It felt mighty good, that self-pity, but my boys needed a mother, not some wet-eyed female pining after her man. So I took a look around, figured I'd made enough of a mess of things for a while and decided to fix what I could. That's when I started cleaning houses. Twenty-eight years later, I'm still cleaning them.' She looked around the tidy kitchen with a sense of simple satisfaction. 'My kids are grown up, and two of them have families of their own. I guess you might say Clint did me a favor, but I don't think I'd thank him if we happened to run into each other in the checkout line at the supermarket.'
Jackie understood the last of the sentiment, but not the beginning. If a man had left her high and dry with three children, hanging was too good for him. 'How do you figure he did you a favor?'
'If he'd stayed with me, I'd never have been the same kind of mother, the same kind of person. I guess you could say that some people change your life by coming into it, and others change it by going out.' Mrs. Grange smiled as she finished off her salad. 'Course, I don't suppose I'd shed any tears if I heard old Clinton was lying in a gutter somewheres begging for loose change.'
Jackie laughed and toasted her. 'I like you, Mrs. Grange.'
'I like you, too, Miss Jack. And I hope you find what you're looking for with Mr. Powell.' She rose then, but hesitated. She'd always been a good mother, but had never been lavish with praise. 'You're one of those people who change lives by coming in. You've done something nice for Mr. Powell.'
'I hope so. I love him a lot.' With a sigh, she stacked Mrs. Grange's snapshots. 'That's not always enough, is it?'
'It's better than a stick in the eye.' In her gruff way, she patted Jackie's shoulder, then went about her business.
Jackie thought that over, nodded, then walked upstairs, where she went to work with a vengeance.
Long after Mrs. Grange had gone home and afternoon had turned to evening, Nathan found her there. She was hunched over the machine, posture forgotten, her hair falling into her face and her bare feet hooked around the legs of the chair.
He watched her, more than a little intrigued. He'd never really seen her work before. Whenever he'd come up, she'd somehow sensed his approach and swung around in her chair the moment he'd entered.
Now her fingers would drum on the keys, then stop, drum again, then pause while she stared out of the window as if she'd gone into a trance. She'd begin to type again, frowning at the paper in front of her, then smiling, then muttering to herself.
He glanced over at the pile of pages to her right, unaware that the bulk of them were copies of what she'd mailed that morning. He had an uncomfortable feeling that she was more done than undone by this time. Then he cursed himself for being so selfish. What she was doing was important. He'd understood that since the night she'd spun part of the tale for him. It was wrong of him to wish it wouldn't move so quickly or so well, but he'd come to equate the end of her book with the end of their relationship. Yet he knew, even as he stood in the doorway and
