Coming Home to Greenleigh

Chapter 29 b (finally!)

I am going to show her the best damn time ever, he thought. I want her to know what I wanted to give her.

Then five seconds later, a panicked: Oh, my God. What the hell am I doing?

For all of his cynical, confident New York patina, he was just a Greenleigh boy underneath it all. He had no idea what he was doing. He'd never really tried to interest a girl before.

He'd lived in New York City for eight years. Eight long, tortured years. He'd worked himself into the ground, sometimes sleeping at his desk and using the gym on the fourteenth floor to shower and change into the extra shirt he kept bundled in a drawer. It was always somewhat wrinkled but could be made to work under a suit jacket.

He'd made partner in record time. He'd been through a dozen of the young female attorneys before they all figured out that he was a waste of their time, because he was still stuck on someone back home.

"Someone in his law school class," they said.

"Someone really smart. She edited the law review."

"Someone really successful. She was an appellate court clerk."

"She left him and went to L.A."

"She went to London."

"She went to Buenos Aires."

"I saw her picture," one woman said. "It's on the lamp stand in his office."

For awhile, there was an inexplicable traffic jam in the hallway outside his office as people knocked on his door and wandered in and out, bearing coffee and bagels, trying to get a look at the framed law school photo on his lamp stand.

Shawn wasn't sentimental. He was a doer, not a dreamer. He had some high school photos of himself and Elisabeth, some snapshots that various people had grabbed of the two of them during his college years, when he'd come home during every vacation in order to see her. Some shots of the two of them during a hike they'd done the summer before that. But he hadn't brought any with him when he moved to New York, because he'd thought she would be with him. Photos were for memories. He'd left them all at home, and when she'd abandoned him, he hadn't bothered to look at them ever again. They were in a pile somewhere and for all he knew maybe the housekeeper had thrown them out.

Ironically, the photo on his lamp stand in the office had been a gift from one of the classmates in the picture. She'd sent it to him care of the law firm, so he put it on the lamp stand and forgot about it.

Life was all about work. When he wasn't working he was wining and dining clients, going to the opera with clients, and learning to golf with clients.

Shawn hated golf. It was boring and barely qualified as a sport, as far as he was concerned. But for some reason, old guys always liked him and wanted to "teach" him things, so he went along when he was invited and obligingly listened to them wax on about the "old days." He found it easy to get along with them. He could tune out and respond automatically, just as he did when he was with his dad. He was an indifferent golfer, which made his clients happy, because they were always better than he was.

He wasn't tempted to reach out to Elisabeth. He knew why she hadn't shown up, and he felt like an idiot that he'd even thought she would choose him over that disaster of a house and shrew of a mother. It was all good. He would move on. And he had moved on. Life had treated him well. And when his dad's heart condition had forced him to reconsider his fast-track New York existence, he wasn't too worried about digging back into all that old stuff. He should have been worried—he knew that now.

Of course Beth hadn't left Greenleigh. That part wasn't a surprise. That she had grown, changed, and was running her own life—that was a surprise. And she was even dearer to him than before, because she'd retained her sweet nature even in the face of obstacles that would have made most people cynical and hard.