Trying Patience & A Not-So-Perfect Past
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Carla Neggers
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CHAPTER ONE
“Patience Madrid, you’re becoming a hermit just like Uncle Isaiah.”
Taking no offense at Tilly’s comment, Patience stretched out on her ratty couch. Contrary to her sister’s opinion, she lived comfortably in her two-room log cabin that was situated on a quiet, crystal lake in the southern Adirondack Mountains. Patience pictured her sister on the phone in her elegant condo overlooking Central Park. From her tone, Patience could guess her older sister was already exasperated with her. “The answer is still no.”
“Oh, come on, do me a favor. A couple weeks in the city will do you good.”
Tilly was nothing if not stubborn. Patience said calmly, “I hate the city.”
“You’re just saying that to annoy me. You know, Patience, pretty soon you won’t know how to talk to anybody but that confounded dog of yours.”
“‘Confounded’? That must be city talk. Back in the old days, you’d at least have said damned dog.”
Tilly sniffed. “That was before Terrence.”
Indeed. Scholarships to Smith and Yale and ten years working on Wall Street hadn’t changed her sister, but marriage to Terrence Terwilliger and life on Central Park West certainly had. She even called herself Matilda these days. Said Tilly Terwilliger sounded ridiculous. Patience thought it was impossible to avoid sounding ridiculous with Terwilliger as a last name, but that wasn’t her problem: she wasn’t married to Terrence.
Her sister resumed her argument. “Apollo and Aphrodite are lovely cats.”
“I hope they didn’t hear you. I’ve never met a Persian that likes to be called something as ordinary as a cat. Especially your two. Me, I like a good mouser.”
Tilly sighed in a ladylike manner. Ladylike sighs were one of the oddities that life among the Terwilligers had taught her. Right now her older sister would be perched on a white chaise longue, dressed delicately in a white satin robe, fingernails and toenails painted. She’d be wearing makeup, expertly applied, and have her hair up, neat and sophisticated. Patience—four inches taller than Tilly, bigger boned, leaner—had on her black trail pants and white fleece pullover she’d worn on her evening trek around the lake with her dog, Jake.
Tilly had said daffodils were blooming in New York City. They weren’t blooming in the mountains—the ice was barely melted off the lake.
“You haven’t been to New York in ages.” The Terwilliger influence hadn’t managed to break Tilly’s spirit when it came to a fight. “Think of all the fun you could have. I could set up an appointment for you with my hairdresser—”
“For what?”
“For that mop of yours, that’s what.”
Patience grinned. Matilda Terwilliger was sounding more like the old Tilly Madrid. Even before Terrence, she’d threatened to make an appointment with her hotshot New York hairdresser to tackle her younger sister’s long, wild, frizzy red hair. At two hundred dollars a cut, Patience preferred to stick to trimming her own hair with their late Uncle Isaiah’s old barber scissors. Tilly said it looked like it.
“Okay, okay, you win.” Tilly sounded frustrated, which she probably was. “Forget I even asked. If you don’t want to look after Apollo and Aphrodite for me, I won’t make you. I can take a hint.”
Patience hadn’t been hinting—she’d been out-and-out refusing to cat-sit for her sister.
She sat up, suddenly hearing the wind howling on the lake. It was a familiar sound, sometimes comforting, sometimes downright eerie. Right now it made her feel peculiarly alone. Had her sister’s words gotten to her?
“What would I do with Jake?” she asked.
“Jake?”
As if she didn’t know. “My dog, Tilly. Can I bring him?”
“No!” Tilly sounded as if she’d nearly choked. “Patience, no, you can’t even think about bringing that animal to New York. Our neighbors…” She trailed off, leaving Patience to imagine what the neighbors would think. Obviously nothing good. “Jake wouldn’t be happy here. He wouldn’t fit in.”
Patience looked down at Jake. Apparently unaware of his enormous size, he’d squirmed as far as he could under the old-fashioned kitchen woodstove. She didn’t know why he didn’t burn up. And he looked foolish, which wasn’t difficult with his looks. He was a scraggly mutt of no particular charm or beauty. As near as she could figure, he was part black Lab, part German shepherd, with maybe a touch of rottweiler. He’d wandered out to the cabin last spring—a scrawny, parasite-infested, lovable, abandoned puppy. His most endearing trait was a love of canoeing equal to Patience’s own. He’d even learned, if the hard way, not to leap out in the middle of the lake. After a few near drownings, he’d managed to cure himself of that particular bit of idiocy. The dog wasn’t smart.
“Jake’s just an ordinary dog.”
“He is not an ordinary dog, even by country standards. By city standards—Patience, trust me. It would be a serious mistake to bring him.”
“He likes cats.”
Tilly was silent. She didn’t hiss or curse the way she would have before she’d married Terrence and his Terwilliger trust fund a year ago. She’d even stopped arguing politics. She and Patience and Uncle Isaiah and whatever other Madrids happened to be around used to argue politics all the time, even when they agreed. Now Tilly believed in avoiding subjects likely to cause fights among her guests. What was a party for?
“If I can’t bring Jake,” Patience went on, a stubborn woman herself, “I can’t come.”
“Patience…”
There was something in Tilly’s voice that hadn’t been there before. A tentativeness, even a note of un-Madridlike desperation. Patience got up and walked slowly across Uncle Isaiah’s old hand-braided rug to her woodstove, her main source of heat. “Tilly, is something wrong?”
“No, of course not. I mean—” She broke off, uncharacteristically inarticulate. “It’s just that I need to get away. I need to relax. And I can’t if I’m worried about the cats. You know they hate the kennel.”
“What does Terrence say?”
“He says they’re my cats,” Tilly answered, with a touch of the sharpness that had long been a Madrid trait. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to figure out that Terrence wasn’t as fond of Tilly’s cats as Tilly herself was.
“Til?”
“Please come.”
“Til, are you and Terrence on the outs?”
Not a sound from the New York end of the line.
“He is going on this trip with you, isn’t he?”
Tilly made a small, pained sound that wasn’t like her at all. She was always so confident, so optimistic. “He’s going on a trip, but not with me.”
Patience kept her initial response—which was unkind, to say the least—to herself. She could read between the lines. Still, she didn’t want Tilly to know she’d developed her own suspicions about Terrence Terwilliger III. The man had too much money and had lived in New York too long to be trusted.
“Business?” Patience asked, feigning innocent curiosity.
“He—Terrence needs to get away, too. We agreed to go off alone on—I don’t know what you’d call it—a personal retreat, I suppose. I’m going to Arizona, he’s going to Florida.”
“Ouch.”
Patience rummaged in the wood box, not prepared to counsel anyone—even her one and only sister—on matters of the heart. And at Tilly’s wedding last year, she’d vowed to mind her own business and stay out of her sister’s love life.
“We hope this will be a positive step in our relationship,” Tilly said, sounding as if she was quoting her husband, who tended to talk like that. “He would…well, Patience, you know how Terrence feels about your dog.”
The first time Terrence Terwilliger III had ventured out to her spot on the mountain lake, Jake had pinned him in his fancy white Jaguar. Jake did look mean and he had a ferocious bark, and although Patience tried to keep him groomed, some things were hopeless. Still, beyond deterrence, he was useless as a guard dog. She’d told Terrence that. “Ter,” she’d said, certain she was the only person who’d ever called him that, “Jake wouldn’t hurt anything, not even you.” He hadn’t been reassured. Her brother-in-law, Patience had come to realize, didn’t entirely trust her.
“He thinks Jake has fleas,” Tilly said.
“I’m insulted.”
“And worse.”
“I didn’t think Terrence was capable of imagining anything worse than fleas.”
“He is a bit of a stuffed shirt,” Tilly agreed.
“You sure he’ll let me tend your precious Persians? How does he know I won’t have them stuffed while you two are off on your separate ‘retreats’?”
“He knows you’re a soft touch for animals. It’s men you’d have stuffed.”
“Hey, we’re discussing your love life, not mine.”
“Not that there’s a whole lot to discuss,” Tilly commented, clearly unable to resist.
Patience wasn’t offended. Tilly actually was being kind: there wasn’t anything to discuss regarding Patience’s nonexistent love life, not since she’d broken up eighteen months ago with the geology professor whose idea of a romantic date was collecting rock samples from lake bottoms.
Her tone softened. “You really need to get away, don’t you, Til?”
“Yes, and Terrence does, too. We agreed to go off at the same time, to work separately on certain issues in our marriage so that we can better work on them together when we return to New York.”
Patience couldn’t imagine. During her thirty-two years, she’d had a few of what could be referred to as relationships and she’d always preferred to hash things out up close and personal, right then and there, while she was still piping hot. Which was maybe why her sister had just accused her of being a hermit and there wasn’t currently—nor was there likely soon to be—a man of any romantic import in her life.
“So, you’ll come?” Tilly asked, not quite pleading. She still had her Madrid pride.
Lifting the grate on her woodstove, Patience shoved a chunk of wood onto the dying fire. She had to be out of her mind. During her last visit to New York, she’d developed a sinus infection from the polluted air. And a cabdriver had screamed at her, when she’d blithely opened her door into oncoming traffic, “Lady, if you want to get yourself killed, not on my meter, okay?” She didn’t like New York. She liked her lakeside cabin in the Adirondacks where it was just her and Jake and the occasional stray critter. Give her a lost moose any day over a bunch of dirty pigeons in Central Park. Not to mention the Terrence Terwilligers of the Big Apple.
But she heard herself say, if without enthusiasm, “Yeah, I’ll come.”
“I’ll arrange for a plane ticket—”
“Nope. I’ll drive.”
Tilly hesitated. “Patience…”
“Don’t start on my Jeep next. You want your kitty-cats looked after by family, family is what you get.”
* * *
Little things had conspired against Jake Putnam Farr, and instead of climbing tall peaks in a warm climate, he found himself standing in an apartment covered with drop cloths and plaster dust. Men in coveralls moved busily around him. Electric tools buzzed and whined. The unfortunate thing was, the chaos was Jake’s apartment. He’d occupied the spacious co-op apartment in a corner building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for the past decade, but only recently had he let an architect friend talk him into knocking down a wall or two and generally sprucing the place up. “We’ll retain the twenties ambience,” Franco had said. He could have said turn-of-the-century flavor and Jake would have believed him for all the attention he paid to such things. In fact, he’d planned to be out of town for the duration of the renovations. But if Jake thought he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, his friend Terrence Terwilliger looked distinctly out of his element amidst the chaos.
“I’m sorry your trip fell through,” Terrence said.
“Me, too. March isn’t one of New York’s finer months.”
A carpenter, carrying a sloshing bucket of some sort of white glop, pushed past Terrence with an irritable grunt. A fat, oozing gob of the stuff just missed splattering onto the knife-creased leg of Terrence’s custom-tailored suit. “What’re you going to do?” asked Terrence. “Obviously you can’t stay here.”
Jake shrugged. “I suppose I’ll just have to roll out my sleeping bag and camp out on the living room floor—provided there is one. Franco said he’d have made allowances if he’d known I’d be around.”
“I’m sure,” Terrence said dubiously. He was a man unaccustomed to making do with anything more onerous than a double instead of a king-size bed. At thirty-seven, he was whip-lean, tall, fair, and good-looking in a boyish way—he had dimples women tended to think were adorable. In short, he was the exact opposite of the kind of man people expected would be Jake Putnam Farr’s best friend. Jake himself wasn’t fair and he wasn’t that tall—a couple of inches under six feet—and nobody had ever called him adorable.
“What about Westchester?” Terrence suggested.
Jake’s parents resided in Westchester. So did his older brother and sister. He shook his head. “I’d rather hang a hammock from the rafters. I still haven’t re-covered from Christmas. Mother had an open house and invited every fair-haired damsel within miles. Father grilled me on whether my mountain-climbing was distracting me from business. Lisa introduced me to all her single and divorced friends and kept thrusting babies onto my lap, presumably to show me what I was missing by not being a father. I still haven’t managed to get the spit-up stains out of my favorite sweater. And Jeffrey offered to hunt up debutantes young enough to be my daughter.”
Terrence laughed. “Serves you right for remaining one of New York’s most eligible bachelors. They just want to see you happy and settled—”
“I am happy and settled.” A change of subject was in order. “When are you and Matilda leaving on your trip?”
“Tomorrow evening at some ungodly hour. Matilda prefers to travel late in the day. In fact, she suggested that if you want to stay at our place you’re perfectly welcome. I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
“It’s nice of you to offer, but if I have to cat-sit—”
“Oh, no. Matilda’s arranged for the cats to be boarded in the country while we’re out of town.”
Terrence said “the” cats rather than “her” cats because of his discreet gentlemanly manner. But Jake knew damned well they were Matilda’s cats. He had caught Terrence angrily muttering to himself while he picked their long white hairs off his trousers. Terrence adored his wife, however, and had learned to tolerate her cats. Jake, who preferred his animals wild, couldn’t stand them.
“I know you’re not terribly fond of cats,” Terrence added.
“I hate cats,” Jake said.
“They’re not so bad once you get used to them.”
“Domesticated animals don’t appeal to me. I don’t even like dogs. The last animal I enjoyed up close was a trout I caught on the Batten Kill. I grilled him over an open fire.”
Terrence smiled. “Matilda says you’re all bark and no bite. But if you’d like to stay at our place, you won’t have to worry about the cats or animals of any kind. Look, Jake, it’s not just the renovations. You’re bored. A change of scenery would do you good.”
“Bored? Where the hell’d you get that idea?” But Jake already knew. “Matilda.”
Terrence neither confirmed nor denied.
“Well, she’s wrong. Just because I’ve advanced my business to the point where my people don’t need me breathing down their necks every day, just because I have time now to do the things I enjoy—like fly-fishing and mountain-climbing—doesn’t mean I’m bored.”
“So I’ve told her.”
A carpenter grumpily asked Jake to move aside so he could get by with his stepladder. “I could always pack up and go to a hotel,” Jake said, half to himself.
“What for?”
Terrence wasn’t one to part with a nickel if he didn’t have to. It was a trait that had annoyed every woman in his life until Matilda Madrid, whose attitude toward money was purely pragmatic. And who clearly loved her husband for who he was, not for what she could get out of him.
“To be honest, Jake,” Terrence went on, “you’d be doing us a favor if you stayed at our place. We haven’t been gone for more than a weekend at a time since we bought it, and we don’t have anyone to look after it. I believe our building’s quite secure, but I’d rather not find out the hard way. And since Matilda’s taken care of the cats, I think you’d enjoy yourself.”
The Terwilligers’ new apartment on Central Park West, Jake had to admit, was tough to resist. Spacious and beautifully decorated, with incredible views of the park and the city, it also managed to remain very livable. Matilda’s doing.
In contrast, Terrence had grown up on a Westchester estate that might have come out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. When he was growing up, kids used to say Buckingham Palace would seem informal to a Terwilliger. In comparison to Terrence’s family, Jake’s parents were paupers. But Matilda’s past remained something of a mystery. Terrence didn’t talk much about where he’d found Matilda, nor about her family and the ultraprivate wedding, which, rumor had it, had taken place on a mountain lake up north. Jake had been off scaling peaks in New Zealand at the time. He’d have flown back, but Terrence had urged him not to bother—he and Matilda wanted a quiet wedding. Jake could guess why. He’d heard—not from Terrence—that the Madrid family were an odd bunch. Supposedly there was an uncle who’d been a hermit and a sister who’d once brought home a wounded moose calf—or whatever the devil baby moose were called—with the idea of nursing the creature back to health. Jake took most of the talk with a grain of salt. There was no more normal or sweet a woman than Matilda Madrid Terwilliger.
The carpenter with the bucket of white glop came at them again and rather rudely suggested they remove themselves to the kitchen. Jake was persona non grata in his own apartment.
He relented to his friend’s offer.
Terrence beamed, digging out his house keys. “Terrific. I’ll inform the doormen. I know you’ll have a great time.”
Jake accepted the keys, then stopped his friend halfway to the foyer. “You and Matilda have a good trip.”
“Thank you. I’m sure we will.”
“You’ll leave phone numbers?”
“Of course.”
“Terrence…everything’s okay, isn’t it?”
“What?” He seemed surprised by the question. “We’re taking our first trip since our honeymoon—what could possibly be wrong?”
Jake had no answer. For a few weeks now, he’d sensed a preoccupation on Matilda’s part, a tension that hadn’t existed before. It could have been adjusting to life among the Terwilligers. Decorating their new apartment. Giving up her job on Wall Street, which, she insisted, had been totally her idea. Jake didn’t know. And he doubted Terrence would tell him. In their long friendship, they’d never intruded in each other’s romantic life. If Terrence wanted to talk about any problems he and Matilda were having, he would. But he never had before. One reason could be that Jake Putnam Farr, black sheep of his own family, wasn’t the best person to give advice about marriage. Jake considered himself a loner. He did his best work alone. He enjoyed mountain-climbing best when alone. And although he didn’t always sleep alone, he had always lived alone. He wasn’t about to let the potential troubles of the pretty red-haired wife of his best friend—a woman who liked cats—upset his life. If nothing else, Matilda’s troubles were none of his business.
“Enjoy your stay,” Terrence said. “I’ll send you a postcard from Florida.”
“Have fun.”
Terrence smiled. “Oh, I will.”
“And give Matilda my best.”
But Terrence was already out the door.
A few minute later, so was Jake, when a man with a monstrous crowbar asked him if he planned to hang around all day. Central Park West would have to be an improvement, especially if Matilda had shuffled her Persians off to the country. He really didn’t care for cats.
* * *
Patience rose early on the morning she was to leave for New York—a very chilly, but beautifully clear, Saturday. She pulled on jeans, a turtleneck and the Norwegian wool sweater she’d had since college, jumped into a pair of mud boots, called her dog and headed down to the lake. It was a short walk from her cabin. She didn’t have anything that resembled a lawn: no Kentucky bluegrass, no trimmed shrubs, no neat perennial borders. What she had were evergreens and oaks and maples and lots of scraggly bushes most people would poison if they found them in their yards. She and her sister had inherited the cabin and thirty-acre parcel from their Uncle Isaiah. He’d used it as a hunting cabin before retiring there for the last years of his life, when he’d become something of a hermit. Patience had cleared out most of the junk he’d left behind, including a stuffed moose head. She wasn’t a hunter herself, but hadn’t gotten rid of the thing on account of any serious objection to the practice. She’d simply caught herself talking to the damned moose once too often.
Jake walked out with her to the end of the small dock, where the early morning fog still swirled over the quiet lake. There were four other cabins on its shores; hers was the only one that had been winterized. Town, such as it was, was a relatively easy six-mile drive. Her nearest year-round neighbor was a little more than two miles off. She couldn’t even guess how far it was to the nearest mall or department store.
The air smelled of pine and damp earth, and she took in deep lungfuls of it, knowing New York wouldn’t be as conducive to deep breathing.
“Well, Jake, what d’you think?” She wondered if talking to a dog was much better than talking to a stuffed moose head. At least Jake was alive. “I’m giving all this up for a couple of weeks in a fancy New York apartment with two fancy New York cats.”
Jake rolled onto his back, paws in the air. A friend down in Lake George had agreed to take him in her kennel. Jake had never stayed in a kennel before.
“You’ll be a good dog, won’t you, Jake?”
He flopped his legs back down onto the dock, coming perilously close to the edge as he rolled onto his side. He wasn’t much for water. Those few times he’d leaped from her canoe had been the result of his low IQ, not any desire for a swim. Occasionally Patience could get him in for a morning dip alongside her, but generally he preferred to bark at her from shore.
“You’d hate New York more than a kennel.”
But he’d never been to New York. Jake was a sociable dog. What if he liked it? He snapped lazily at something. Knowing Jake, Patience assumed it was just thin air. She’d brushed him for his trip to the kennel. He still looked scraggly and a lot meaner than he was. He just wasn’t a neat dog. But, no matter what Terrence Terwilliger III claimed, he didn’t have fleas, and it was no small task keeping a country dog free of parasites.
Terrence and Tilly had left on their separate vacations last night. In a rare concession, her sister had allowed that Apollo and Aphrodite would manage on their own for the night. “But get here as soon as you can tomorrow morning,” she’d said in a final, quick call to Patience. “And don’t bring that dog of yours!”
Of course, Tilly was at that very moment in Scottsdale, Arizona. She’d never know if Patience had snuck Jake into her apartment.
Jake laid his head on her foot. “If I took you to New York,” she said, “you’d behave yourself, wouldn’t you?”
He would. She knew he would. How much trouble could a dog like Jake get into?
She rousted him up and headed back to the cabin. To spiff him up for the ride to the city, she tied a red bandanna around his neck. If it lasted until the interstate, she’d be surprised. But he did look a bit less ferocious.
“Come on, Jake.”
He followed her outside and off the porch to her old Jeep, hopping automatically into the front seat beside her. The stupid dog did love to ride.
Patience patted him on the head. “You big ugly thing, you. Well, my friend, we’re off to the big city.”
