Just in Time Read online

  ALSO BY MARIE BOSTWICK

  THE COBBLED COURT QUILTS SERIES

  Apart at the Seams (Cobbled Court Quilts #6)

  Ties That Bind (Cobbled Court Quilts #5)

  Threading the Needle (Cobbled Court Quilts #4)

  A Thread So Thin (Cobbled Court Quilts #3)

  A Thread of Truth (Cobbled Court Quilts #2)

  A Single Thread (Cobbled Court Quilts #1)

  TOO MUCH, TEXAS NOVELS

  Between Heaven and Texas

  From Here to Home

  NOVELS

  On Wings of the Morning

  River’s Edge

  Fields of Gold

  The Second Sister

  The Promise Girls

  NOVELLAS

  “The Yellow Rose of Christmas” in Secret Santa

  “The Presents of Angels” in Snow Angels

  “A High-Kicking Christmas” in Comfort and Joy

  Just in Time

  MARIE BOSTWICK

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  With Many Thanks to . . .

  Prologue - Grace

  Chapter 1 - Grace

  Chapter 2 - Grace

  Chapter 3 - Monica

  Chapter 4 - Grace

  Chapter 5 - Nan

  Chapter 6 - Grace

  Chapter 7 - Grace

  Chapter 8 - Nan

  Chapter 9 - Grace

  Chapter 10 - Nan

  Chapter 11 - Monica

  Chapter 12 - Grace

  Chapter 13 - Grace

  Chapter 14 - Grace

  Chapter 15 - Nan

  Chapter 16 - Monica

  Chapter 17 - Grace

  Chapter 18 - Nan

  Chapter 19 - Grace

  Chapter 20 - Grace

  Chapter 21 - Grace

  Chapter 22 - Grace

  Chapter 23 - Grace

  Chapter 24 - Grace

  Chapter 25 - Monica

  Chapter 26 - Nan

  Chapter 27 - Grace

  Chapter 28 - Grace

  Chapter 29 - Nan

  Chapter 30 - Nan

  Chapter 31 - Grace

  Chapter 32 - Monica

  Chapter 33 - Grace

  Chapter 34 - Monica

  Chapter 35 - Grace

  Chapter 36 - Grace

  Chapter 37 - Monica

  Chapter 38 - Monica

  Chapter 39 - Grace

  Chapter 40 - Grace

  Chapter 41 - Nan

  Chapter 42 - Grace

  Two Years Later

  Chapter 43 - Monica

  Chapter 44 - Nan

  Chapter 45 - Grace

  JUST IN TIME

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  THE PROMISE GIRLS

  FROM HERE TO HOME

  THE SECOND SISTER

  BETWEEN HEAVEN AND TEXAS

  A THREAD OF TRUTH

  A THREAD SO THIN

  THREADING THE NEEDLE

  TIES THAT BIND

  APART AT THE SEAMS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Marie Bostwick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0924-0

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-0924-1

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: April 2018

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-0923-3

  For my sister, Donna,

  who has the tenacity of a terrier,

  the loyalty of a Lab,

  and the caring heart of a Cavalier

  With Many Thanks to . . .

  Martin Biro, my patient, thorough, book-loving editor, for working so hard to make the story perfect and, in turn, make me look smarter than I am.

  Liza Dawson, my extraordinary literary agent, sometime therapist, and friend, for courage when mine runs short and never letting me settle for less than my best.

  To Cathy Lamb, awesome author and great girlfriend, for staying up late and being so willing to take panicked phone calls from blocked wordsmiths.

  Donna Gomer, my creative and imaginative sister, for plot input and expertise in all things dogs that made this book more fun to read, and to write.

  Betty and John Walsh, my sister and brother-in-law, for first-round reading and copyediting, as well as cheerleading above and beyond the call of duty.

  Lisa Sundell Olsen, my Very Sparkly Assistant, for a willing heart, sunny attitude, and wicked good organizational skills.

  Amy Skinner, my creative and always on the ball publicist, for taking care of getting the word out so I can focus on getting the book done.

  Davyne Verstandig, my dear friend, for beautiful poetry that inspired some of the themes and scenes in this book.

  Faithful Readers, for making it possible for me to do what I love.

  Prologue

  Grace

  For a long time now, my conversations with Jamie have been imaginary. That doesn’t stop me from having them.

  When I first met Nan and Monica and told him about the bizarre circumstances of our connection, Jamie didn’t laugh, but he wanted to. I could tell from the way he worked to suppress his smile, and how his blue eyes somehow looked bluer under the disbelieving arc of his brows, the way they do when he thinks I’ve done something ridiculous but adorable.

  “Wait. Let me make sure I’m getting this right. Your support group is made up of support group dropouts?” he asked.

  Except he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.

  Imagination has served me well, always. But it has its limitations. Or maybe we do. I do. Either way, there comes a point when you want something more concrete, a record and a response, a declaration of fact, or what you believe the facts to be. I realize there’s no narrator as unreliable as one who tells his own story. But who else have we got?

  Carl Sagan, the American cosmologist, once said, “We are made of star-stuff.” I’ve always liked that quote. Jamie did too. It’s such a pretty notion.

  But as I sit here, perched on top of this rock in this treeless and windswept spot that isn’t really close to the top of the world but feels like it could be, my lungs working to glean enough oxygen for existence, and look out across the vista of gray, and green, and granite to a spot on the horizon that might be the end of the world or the beginning, I understand in a way I never have before the limits of imagination. And everything else.

  Only a thin sliver of sunlight has disappeared beneath the horizon, just a small and succulent slice from the bottom of the melon, but already its absence has brought a chill to the air. Soon this day will end. Night will resume its rightful place and purpose, giving rest to the earth, revealing the stars.

  They will be beautiful this high up, so far from the lights of the city, the influence and evidence of civilization. It’s strange, don’t you think, that the only way for humans to truly see the stars is at a remove from the rest of humanity? That signifies something, I think. But at the moment I’m not exactly sure what. I’m cold and getting colder, consumed by the knowledge that the stars, while brea
thtakingly beautiful, are silent. They shine brightly but do not speak.

  We are star-stuff. But more, I think.

  We are what we’ve done, and said, and thought, and ignored. We are who we have loved and championed. Who we have failed and forgotten, and who we have forgiven. We are what we have believed, and what we have refused to believe.

  We are star-stuff. But more. We are words and action, moment and place, doubts and faith. And story.

  This is mine. I’d like to tell Jamie. I can’t. So I’m telling you.

  I’m telling myself.

  Chapter 1

  Grace

  One night after work, just a few months after I moved to Portland, I went into the bistro near my office for a bite to eat. I was sitting at the bar because it felt less conspicuous. The bartender and I struck up a conversation and a few minutes into it, he handed me a flyer for a grief support group. Apparently, he kept it and a supply of similarly helpful publications stowed next to the highball glasses. Bartenders and social workers have a lot in common, he said.

  I’ve never been a joiner. The idea of sharing my problems with a roomful of strangers made my pulse race and my hands feel clammy. But I knew I couldn’t go on like I had been. I mean, if a bartender can peg your problems after one glass of crummy house chardonnay and ten minutes of awkward conversation, so can everybody else. And maybe I wouldn’t have to talk. Maybe I could just listen. It couldn’t hurt to try, right?

  But when I got to the community center, I knew it wasn’t going to work. The members of the group were all women, all widows. Definitely not a club I was interested in joining. And apart from two people, including a woman with frizzy brown hair that kept falling into her eyes and who kept twitching and fidgeting in her seat, as if she was having a hard time sitting still, seventy was a fond but distant memory in the minds of the other participants. The room was filled by the sounds of sniffling, and the odor of White Diamonds perfume was so strong it almost made my eyes water.

  The other woman I couldn’t help but notice was older but somehow not, the kind of woman who seems comfortable with her age and herself at any age. Her shoulder-length hair was a halo of curls around her head, a sandy blond color interspersed with threads of silver white. Her eyes were big and brown, and her gaze was very direct. Something about that made me feel like she saw things other people missed. Her clothes intrigued me too. I’ve always appreciated people who have a unique sense of style. I’d seen her blue and white skirt on sale recently, but I was pretty sure that her denim jacket, embroidered with birds and flowers, was done by hand. The fact that she’d paired it with red sneakers made me think she had a good sense of humor and didn’t take herself too seriously.

  She seemed to be with the group, smiling warmly at many of the white-haired women, but not of it. She quietly made the rounds with her dog, a tail-thumping golden retriever who rested her muzzle in the laps of weeping participants, gazing intently until they started to stroke her silky head, smile wetly, and calm down, at which point she would move on to a new, more distraught participant.

  Still, there was a lot of crying going on and it made me uncomfortable. During the bathroom break, I got up and quietly left. I was standing in the parking lot, about to unlock my car, when I heard a voice.

  “Sneaking off?”

  The woman with the frizzy hair was leaning against the hood of the red PT Cruiser parked next to me. Even though she was wearing a pair of thick-heeled clogs, shoes designed for comfort rather than fashion, she stood only a couple of inches over five feet. But somehow she seemed taller, partly because of her voice—big and brassy—but also because of her face. She had one of the most expressive faces I’d ever seen; every thought or opinion she had was telegraphed through her eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, and especially her eyebrows, dark brown and bristling, capable of moving in ways I’d never seen eyebrows move before. I remember thinking that in the days of silent films, she’d have been a star.

  She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse.

  “It’s not the right group for me,” I said, answering her question.

  She didn’t say anything, just lit her cigarette and stared at me.

  “I’m not a widow,” I explained.

  “I am. But it’s not the right group for me either.”

  She took a long draw, making the cigarette tip glow orange and puffing out her cheeks. It didn’t look like she was inhaling.

  “It’s a grief support group, which is fine. But I’m not feeling particularly grieved. Pissed off, but not grieved. You’d think that in the whole city of Portland, there’d be at least one support group for the pissed-off widows of cheating husbands. I mean, I can’t be the only one, right?”

  She blew out a long column of smoke and looked me up and down, eyebrows twitching and working, assessing me as if I were a dress she was thinking about trying on.

  “You’re not pissed off, are you?” She frowned. “No, you’re sad. Really sad. I’m sorry.”

  Portland is not like the small town in Minnesota where I grew up. It’s a city that takes pride in diversity and “keeping Portland weird,” so this was far from the first strange conversation I’d had since coming here. Two days before, a homeless woman who had recently taken up residence between two concrete planters a block from my apartment stopped me as I was getting into my car and asked, politely but with the same kind of grave intensity you might use to ask someone if they believed in life after death, if I had a Twinkie in my purse. A week before that, a man with pupils as big and shiny as black marbles, wearing a tattered blue beach towel draped around his shoulders, like the cape of a superhero who had escaped a methadone clinic, clutched my sleeve to ask if I was human or android.

  For a girl who grew up in rural Minnesota, those kinds of exchanges were unnerving, but I was starting to get used to them. But those people had been glassy-eyed, high as kites, and so they were easier to dismiss. This conversation was somehow more disturbing because the woman was both sober as a saint and weirdly insightful.

  She took another pull on her cigarette. This time she deliberately drew the smoke into her lungs. Instantly, her face turned red and she started hacking so hard her eyes watered.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t look okay. Should I pound her on the back? Call 911?

  “I hate these things,” she rasped after she finally quit coughing. “I’ve been trying to learn to smoke, but it just isn’t working out.”

  Really? Apart from addlebrained adolescents trying to impress their friends, who wants to take up smoking?

  “I know,” she sighed, rightly reading my expression. “But every day I wake up feeling like I want to punch somebody in the face. The Paxil my doctor prescribed made me gain weight. I thought cigarettes would be better.” She flicked the cigarette from her fingers and ground it out under her shoe. “This was a stupid idea.”

  As I stood there, trying to figure out if I should say something besides, “Well. Okay, then. Good night, Crazy Lady,” I heard the chirp of a keyless car remote. The taillights of an SUV in the next row flashed. The woman with the red sneakers and embroidered jacket was walking toward us, her dog, now leash-less, padded alongside her.

  “Smoke break? Or did you just have enough?” She thrust out her hand. “I’m Nan Wilja. This is Blixen.”

  The retriever thumped her tail against my fender and looked up as if to say hello, her tongue lolling out of her mouth.

  “Grace Saunders,” I said, taking her hand.

  The lady with the frizzy hair pushed it out of her eyes and reached down to scratch Blixen’s ear. “I’m Monica Romano.”

  “What were you two doing in there?” Nan asked. “Pilates meets in the same room on Tuesdays. I thought maybe you got the nights mixed up. Or you got lost.”

  “I saw a flyer pinned to the bulletin board at the drugstore and I thought, you know, maybe I’d give it a shot.” Monica ducked her head, looking a bit sheepish. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be. Maybe I
should try a drum circle?”

  “Hmmm,” Nan murmured, which is what I later learned she did when she disagreed but was trying to be supportive. Nan says “hmmm” a lot.

  “I heard you say something about being angry,” Nan said. “But not grieving?”

  “Not. At. All.” Monica fumbled with the flap on her purse, as if she was thinking about getting another cigarette. “My husband was killed in a boating accident eight months ago. His girlfriend was driving the boat.”

  “Ouch.” Nan winced. “I’d be mad too. And you?” She turned toward me. “Were you lost? Or did you show up on purpose?”

  “On purpose, I guess. But it’s not the group for me. I’m not a widow.”

  “But you are grieving.”

  The way Nan said it, as a statement instead of a question and so directly, caught me off guard, the same way that Monica’s comment about me being sad had done. What was it about this place? Were people in Portland just unusually perceptive? Or had my expression become unusually transparent?

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s complicated” is shorthand for “I don’t want to talk about this.” Most people get that and will either leave it there, change the subject, or remember they’re late for an appointment. Not Nan.

  “Hmmm. Grief comes in all kinds of forms, doesn’t it? Blixen and I have had quite a bit of experience there. She’s a therapy dog. We visit hospitals, nursing homes, that kind of thing.

  “I’m a widow. My husband was killed in a private plane crash twenty years ago. The facilitator called me because she’s worried that some of these women have been with her for years and aren’t making any progress. She thought Blixen might be able to comfort some of them.” She looked down at the dog, returning her adoring gaze.