Free The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon Page A

“Wish I could stay longer but I’ve got to pick my boys up. Coulter has a game this afternoon.”
    When Jason is a few feet from the table, he pauses and looks back at Micah. Taking in every detail. The way an art lover would admire a recently rediscovered Rembrandt.
    Then Jason is strolling away, sending Micah a jaunty wave, a lighthearted good-bye. Completely free of nostalgia. Or reluctance.
    And the pain is devastating.
    It wasn’t that Micah came here wanting to rob Jason of whatever bliss he has found. It’s that she had needed the reassurance of knowing he’d missed her, and felt his life was diminished, just a fraction, because she hadn’t been in it.
    While she’s watching him walk away, Micah is experiencing a jealous sort of mourning. She’s not wishing Jason any harm. She’s simply wishing he could have proved to her that she was important. That she had been loved. That she had mattered.
    ***
    On the way to the airport Micah is at first numb. Then disappointed. And finally, in an unexpected way, relieved.
    She discovers the relief when her driver, a black man with a shaved head and flawlessly manicured fingernails, glances up at the rearview mirror and says: “Your time in Kansas—business or pleasure?”
    Micah is recalling fleeting images of the haggard MS patient in the blue, slip-covered chair: and Jason, happy and smiling in the crowded coffee shop. “I was here on business,” she says.
    “You get everything done you came to do?”
    Micah, looking out at the horizon, is talking more to herself than to the driver, when she replies: “I came here to see a man I used to know…to say things I thought were important.”
    “Did you get the chance to say those things to him?”
    “Not really,” Micah murmurs. “They turned out to be irrelevant.”
    The driver puts his full concentration on the road. He does it with a kind of courtliness, as if trying to give Micah some privacy.
    And Micah, continuing to gaze toward the flat line of the horizon, is realizing that the only item of importance she communicated during her trip to Kansas was the secret she confided to the stranger on Pine Street.
    The admission made in that splinter of time just before Jason’s phone call came, asking why she wasn’t on Pane Street.
    The single sentence that explained what her evil was—the heartsick confession in which Micah said: “I killed someone.”

AnnaLee
    Glen Cove, Long Island ~ 1986
    Heartsick.
    This isn’t the emotion a woman should experience while she’s watching her husband coming across the terrace of their home carrying a single, long-stemmed white rose—a rose obviously intended as a gift for her.
    But heartsick is exactly what AnnaLee is feeling.
    It’s a little before three in the afternoon on a Wednesday and here Jack is with a flower in his hand and a vague, endearingly shy smile on his face when he should be at the office, adding to his billable hours. Focused on climbing the ladder at the law firm and on making money. Money he and AnnaLee desperately need in order to keep a roof over their heads.
    AnnaLee, in faded overalls and an old straw hat, has been scrubbing the accumulated muck out of the reflecting pool at the edge of the garden. Now as she’s stripping off the wet, heavy gloves she’s been wearing, she’s noticing that Jack is dropping the white rose onto the arm of a weathered Adirondack chair, and veering away from her.
    He’s striding toward the other end of the terrace, saying: “Bella! There’s my beautiful Bella!” Bella is the pet name they call their child. It started as Tinkerbelle, became Belle, then somehow evolved into Bella. It had its beginnings on the day of their baby’s birth—when an awed AnnaLee had said that their little girl looked like a tiny, magical fairy.
    Now Jack is lifting Bella from the quilt that’s spread out on the lawn, the spot where Bella has been napping and playing for most of the afternoon. He’s swooping her through the air,