The Invitation Read online

  So she had flown to Chandler, and Pete had driven her car, pulling a trailer full of all the necessities of their life—that is, mechanics’ tools and engine parts. Neither she nor Pete owned any furniture or much clothing to speak of.

  She had no idea what she’d find in the renovated ghost town of Eternity. She was prepared for run-down houses with the wind whipping through the boards—she and Charley, when they were down on their luck, had certainly lived in such places—but what she’d found was beautiful. Mr. Montgomery had renovated the town’s hotel for her and it was, quite simply, lovely. The lobby had been freshly covered with cream-colored wallpaper splashed with pink roses. All of the oak woodwork had recently been varnished. Brand-new telephone wires had been strung from Chandler into Eternity so she’d have a telephone. A beautiful bathroom of pink marble had been installed on the first floor. Everything was clean and welcoming.

  The town livery stables had been turned into an enormous hangar with overhead doors so they could work on the planes in bad weather. The parsonage—Charley would have laughed at that—had been made over for Pete. The blacksmith’s shop had been converted into a machine shop with tools so new and fine they almost brought tears to Pete’s rheumy eyes.

  Outside, Mr. Montgomery had built Jackie the best runway she’d ever seen; no expense had been spared. And in the fields behind the town were three wrecked planes that could be cannibalized for repair parts.

  Never in her life had Jackie felt so welcome as she did in this town. She was close enough to Chandler so as not to feel isolated but far enough away to have privacy. She knew that she had come home.

  She also knew there had to be a catch, so when she went to Mr. Montgomery to negotiate a salary, she was prepared for a fight. She could almost hear Charley telling her, “Stick to your guns, kid. Don’t let him cheat you. Set the highest price you can think of and bargain from there.” By the time she saw Mr. Montgomery, whom she’d known all her life, her hands were sweating. She wanted the pretty little ghost town so badly that she thought she’d pay him to let her live there.

  Thirty minutes later she walked out in a daze. Mr. Montgomery had offered her three times what she had been planning to ask him for, and he’d given her a bonus for signing a two-year contract. She’d be able to buy furniture. She’d be able to buy things that would belong to her!

  Now, a year later, she was serving tea in the living room of her pretty house.

  “What in the world is wrong with you?” Terri Pelman asked her friend as Jackie entered her living room, a tray of tea things in her hands. Over the last year she’d spent every cent she’d earned on making her house beautiful: fat upholstered chairs, a deep couch covered in mossy green and rose, a needlepoint rug, a mahogany desk, antiques everywhere.

  “Nothing is wrong with me,” Jackie said, setting the tray containing a lovely teapot and cups down on the table in front of the sofa. No one who’d ever known Jackie would have guessed how she hungered for pretty things. With Charley she’d always lived from hand to mouth; Charley believed that possessions weighed a person down. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “You can’t lie to me, Jacqueline O’Neill. I’m not the press whom you can bamboozle. I’ve known you all your life, and something is definitely going on.”

  Smiling, Jackie sat down on a chair slipcovered in a cotton print of flowers and paisley ferns. As she sipped her tea, she looked at her friend. They were the same age, both thirty-eight, but no one would have guessed it from looking at them. After they’d graduated from high school, Jackie had taken off to spend her life in every corner of the world, but Terri had married her boyfriend the day after graduation. She had produced three children within as many years, kids who were now big, hulking boys of nineteen, eighteen, and seventeen. With each child Terri had gained weight and had never lost it, and somewhere along the way she had decided she was old. When Jackie chided her for not taking care of herself, Terri would say, “The kids and Ralph only care what I put on the table, not what I’m wearing when I do it. I could look like Harlow and they wouldn’t notice.”

  “Come on, tell me,” Terri urged; then, her eyes widening, she gasped. “You’ve met a man! That’s it, isn’t it? We women are such fools. Even marriage can’t cure us of falling in love, and if marriage can’t cure a person, nothing can. So what’s he like? Where did you meet him?”

  Jackie wanted to tell Terri about William, but she didn’t want to look like a fool. What if William hadn’t been as affected by their night together as she had? What if he thought it was an ordinary encounter? Maybe he’d forgotten about her by now, forgotten about their partnership. Charley would have. Charley often got drunk and met people and made them feel he was their best friend. He made plans to do things together, got them enthusiastic, but twenty-four hours later, when the people sought him out, ready to act on the plans, he could hardly remember them. Of course it was left to Jackie to smooth ruffled feathers and get Charley off the hook once again.

  “Actually, it isn’t a man,” Jackie lied as smoothly as she could. “Well, it is, but not in the way you mean. You remember when my plane went down a couple of nights ago?”

  Terri shook her head in disbelief. After being in an airplane crash, anyone else would have been in a hospital getting medical care and flowers, but Jackie was absolutely nonchalant about the mishap. She spoke of her plane crashing the way one might speak of going to the beauty parlor. “Yes, I remember,” Terri said, marveling at her friend’s bravery.

  “There was a man there and—”

  “What? You met a man in the middle of nowhere? What’s his name? Where does he come from? Did he try anything?”

  Jackie laughed. When they were in high school, she and Terri had barely known each other. Terri had had a normal family while Jackie’s had been strange and eccentric. It was after Jackie left Chandler that they got to know each other. When they were both twenty years old, Terri had sent Jackie a letter of congratulations on winning her first race, saying that she understood Jackie’s life because her own life was quite exciting as well. On the day Jackie had won the race, Terri’s son had caught a wasp in his mouth, where it managed to sting his tongue before he swallowed it, her husband had dropped a crate on his foot and would be out of work for a month, and she had found out she was pregnant with her third child. “Now all I need is a plague of locusts and my life will be complete,” she’d written. “Please tell me about your boring life; I need something to counteract the thrill and exhilaration of mine.”

  The letter had appealed to Jackie. She had received a lot of letters from people who had known her in the past, but many of those letters made her feel guilty, since the writers usually said that they doubted if she remembered them now that she was so famous. It was as though they thought that winning a race that was reported in the newspapers had instantly wiped out her memory. Or that every celebrity she met replaced an “insignificant” person from her past.

  Happily, Jackie had written Terri all about the race, about the people she had met, about what it was like to soar high above the crowd at air shows. At first, she wrote of the applause, but as the years passed, she began to write of the defeats and the heartaches. She wrote of people whom she’d seen die in fiery crashes, of men and women who passed in and out of her life. She wrote of Charley and how sometimes his irresponsibility nearly drove her mad. She told Terri that she envied her her quiet, peaceful life, envied her her husband, who was always there for her, who was interested in their home and the kids.

  Terri tried never to let on to Jackie how much their correspondence meant to her. The letters they exchanged were, at times, the best part of Terri’s life. She used all her creativity to make her letters to Jackie interesting and fun and, above all, light. It was wonderful to have a glamorous and exciting woman like Jackie write to her with such intimacy and such trust. Jackie began to see Terri as wise beyond her years, someone who had had a chance to go off and see the world, but who had wisely decided to stay at home and settle