But now Casey didn’t feel right talking about her happiness when Olivia looked so forlorn. And she had an idea that her daughter-in-law, Hildy, was behind it. Why in the world was Olivia living in the same house as that rude young woman? Maybe she could find out by starting at the beginning. “Were you madly in love with your late husband?”
Olivia let out a loud laugh. “No, I wasn’t.”
“Oh,” Casey said.
“Turn here. I shouldn’t have said that. I did come to love him, but when I married him I didn’t love him at all.”
Before them were half a dozen cherry trees, some of them dead, all of them in desperate need of pruning. There wasn’t much fruit, but there was some. Casey turned off the engine. “I’ll get what I can while you tell me the story.”
Olivia seemed to consider that for a moment. “All right,” she said as she got out of the truck.
They walked through tall weeds and trees with broken branches, to one that was laden with ripe cherries. The sun was shining, and everything was glistening from the morning rain.
“It was 1972, and emotionally I was in a very bad place. I had recently been told that I couldn’t have children.”
Casey gave a gasp.
“It’s okay,” Olivia said. “It was a long time ago.” She took a deep breath. “My Broadway career had failed and I was at home in Summer Hill, living with my parents. I loved them, but they were older and they hated any noise. You ever play the Rolling Stones at whisper level? It loses a lot.”
Casey laughed.
“I got a job as the bookkeeper at Trumbull Appliances. The owner was a man named Alan, and he was in a mess. For one thing, his wife had died in childbirth and left him with an infant son.”
“Oh,” Casey said. “And there you were with baby lust.”
“It was eating up my soul,” Olivia said. “My childless future made me want to lie down in the road and let trucks run over me. Anyway, there was Alan with this motherless baby and a thoroughly incompetent, lazy live-in housekeeper who pestered him all day with her complaints.”
“Perfect for you to step in,” Casey said.
“At the time I thought so. Besides Alan’s domestic problems, the store was failing. He’d inherited the place from his father, who had been a great salesman, but Alan took after his quiet-tempered mother. By the time I got there, he had only two employees and they did very little work.”
Olivia began to fill a stainless mixing bowl with cherries.
“For three whole months I stood back and watched as things fell apart, but then one day Alan was at his desk, eating a bologna sandwich and pulling strands of the housekeeper’s long dark hair out of it, when she brought the baby in. She handed him to Alan, said she had a headache, and left. He had a desk piled high with papers, the phone was ringing, and he looked like he was going to cry.”
Olivia took a breath. “I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t ask permission, I just took over. I put the baby on his desk and changed him, all while telling Alan what to do. I’m afraid I was very bossy. ‘Answer the phone.’ ‘Tell them you can deliver it by Tuesday.’ ‘Call the newspaper to repeat last week’s ad, but say that this Saturday you’re having a one-day fifteen-percent-off-everything sale.’?”
“It sounds like you’d thought about it.” Casey put a full bucket of cherries in the truck.
“I had. From the first day, I’d watched and thought about what I would do if the business were mine. Anyway, six months later Alan and I were married, and twenty-plus years after that we owned five appliance stores that did very well.”
“And you came to love him?”
“Yes, I did. But not…” She smiled. “Not in that way of young love, the kind where you rip each other’s clothes off at first sig
ht.”
Casey smiled at the clothes-ripping image. It’s where she and Tate were. If he weren’t with the trainer, she would be with him now. As it was, she was planning a special dinner for the two of them to share. She made herself stop thinking about Tate. “I don’t mean to pry, but why do you now live in your stepson’s house? Did the stores fail?”
Olivia took a while before answering. “Alan willed the stores to his son, but I had our house and a good retirement plan, so I would be quite comfortable.”
Casey’s eyes widened. “Are you saying that your husband left the businesses that you had helped to build entirely to his son?”
“Yes, he did.”
Olivia looked away, but Casey saw a flash of pain go across her face. She had saved Alan Trumbull’s business, yet he’d left everything to his son. “His” being the key word. “What happened?”
“Kevin was always like his father, even in that he married a woman who was stronger than he was.”