Small Town Cinderella. Caron Todd

don’t you come in and meet my mother?”

      They walked side-by-side up the driveway. She caught a glimpse of the cat peering from behind an oak. The animals were behaving as if they had never seen a visitor. ‘Never’ was stretching it, but she hadn’t introduced anyone to Julia for a very long time. She wondered if it would be a good idea to prepare Matthew and, if so, how much to say.

      “Maybe I should mention…my mother isn’t comfortable with new people. Right now I think all her sociability has been used up by my cousin’s wedding. Don’t worry if she ignores you. It isn’t personal.”

      “Is there anything I can do, or not do, to help her feel more at ease?”

      Emily shook her head, but said, “It helps if you don’t stare at her.” She touched his arm. “Thank you.”

      “For?”

      “For asking.” She led the way up the cement steps and pulled open the door to the kitchen. Her mother waited by the stove, standing almost at attention. She shifted when they came in, then stilled, her body more rigid than before.

      “This is Matthew, Mom. Daniel’s nephew. Matthew, my mother, Julia Moore.”

      Julia’s eyes flashed his way, then settled on a patch of air near him. Her voice loud from nervousness, she said, “You look like Daniel.”

      “If that’s so, I’m lucky. Uncle Daniel is considered the height of Rutherford evolution.”

      Julia smiled at the wall.

      She likes him, Emily thought, then quickly told herself there was no need to be pleased.

      It was even hotter in the kitchen than it was outside. “I’m sorry to disappear, but I really need to get out of these work clothes. Mom, could you fix us all something to drink?” She turned to Matthew. “There’s lemonade or iced tea. I picked up some beer, but it might not be very cold yet.”

      “Lemonade sounds great.”

      Emily left the two of them getting in each other’s way beside the fridge and nipped into the bathroom for a quick wash. There she came face-to-face with her reflection.

      Oh, no. She’d greeted him like this? Stood beside his car chatting and feeling like a hostess, like this?

      Not all her hair had frizzed into an auburn puffball. Sweat flattened some of it to her forehead. Her chin was smeared with icing sugar where she’d scratched a mosquito bite, and raspberry juice and flecks of meringue dotted her dress. And she had thought he wasn’t polite.

      At this stage, brushing would only make matters worse. She flattened the puffy sides of her hair and fastened it behind her ears with bobby pins, then scrubbed her face and neck and dabbed concealer on the bite. There. All the way from grubby to almost clean in less than a minute.

      Matthew and her mother were still in the kitchen. Emily sprinted up the stairs to her room, leaned against the door to make sure it clicked shut, then pulled off her dress and threw it on the bed. She stood in her underwear with a feeling she’d never had before, a complete and blank-headed uncertainty about her clothes. She’d never understood how women could frantically claim they had nothing to wear. Now she did. She had nothing to wear for a home-cooked meal with Matthew Rutherford.

      She took a flashlight from her desk and went into the closet. It was tucked under the eaves, large but unlit, like a cave. The ceiling sloped steeply so that dresses and slacks fit at one end, blouses in the middle, and nothing but pairs of shoes at the other end.

      The jackets, skirts and slacks she wore to work would be too hot and too businesslike, her jeans and shorts too casual. Her supply of flowered, plaid or paisley sundresses, comfortable and cool to wear over coordinating T-shirts, were as shapeless as sacks. Why hadn’t she noticed that before?

      One of the dresses was a solid blue, almost the color of gentians. She tried it without a shirt underneath. It looked dressier that way, but still casual and summery. She buckled on low-heeled sandals—the only pair that had never seen garden soil—and hurried back downstairs.

      WHILE MS. ROBB made herself presentable and her mother behaved as if he didn’t exist, Matthew took a good look around the kitchen. There was nothing worth noting. It wasn’t impoverished, or up-to-date, or luxurious.

      As far as he’d been able to tell that went for all the properties owned by the Robbs. The relatives who had just got married—the children’s author and the computer whiz pumpkin grower—were giving the original homestead a new lease on life, but it had obviously been moldering away as you’d expect of a house over a hundred years old.

      He wandered into the living room, an action that got Mrs. Moore’s attention. Was there something she didn’t want him to see?

      Ah, the books.

      He went to the shelves for a closer look. They were mostly hardcover, some very old and a bit bedraggled—first editions? He could feel Mrs. Moore behind him, emanating silent protest.

      “Treasure Island.” He pulled it from its place and opened it to check the copyright date. Reprinted 1931. Probably not valuable—he didn’t know enough about that to be sure. “I must have read this three times when I was a kid.” He smiled over his shoulder. “You, too?”

      “I haven’t read it.” Her voice and posture were stiff.

      “You should. You won’t be able to put it down.”

      “One day.” She almost snatched it from him, then examined it carefully, checking for injury. He moved along and chose another book, small, with a faded, wine-colored cover. This time she rescued it before he got it open.

      He turned at a sound on the stairs. There was Ms. Robb, clean and tidy and unduly alert, looking quickly from him to her mother and back. He got it. Don’t touch the books.

      “This could be a lending library.” He smiled, trying to put them both at ease. “You two must own a copy of every book in the world.”

      “It’s my mother’s collection. She’s getting there.”

      “I don’t want every book. Just the main ones.”

      “The main ones?” he asked.

      “The ones that changed things.”

      “How do you decide?”

      She slipped the books he’d handled back into place, making sure they were lined up with the others, then left the room without another word.

      He raised his eyebrows at her daughter. “Don’t touch?”

      “It isn’t the end of the world if you do.”

      But it was. The mother seemed every bit as obsessive as he’d been told. The daughter, an anxious caregiver. He felt a moment of sympathy, but got rid of it. Objectivity was going to be difficult. He needed time to get used to how gentle she seemed, how soft.

      “You must have chosen that dress to go with your eyes.”

      The comment startled her. It startled him, too.

      “I chose it because of the sale tag.”

      “A lucky chance, then.”

      His voice was acting on its own, sounding almost intimate. He went to the kitchen, expecting physical distance to bring emotional distance with it. “Can I help with dinner?”

      She followed, bustling around, and loaded him with serving dishes to carry outside. Every couple of minutes she threw him puzzled glances, and he found himself wanting to tell her that everything would be all right.

      BY THE TIME they sat under the maple trees, Julia on one side of the picnic table, Matthew on the other and Emily on the very end of her mother’s side in an attempt to sit beside both, or neither, she was upset with herself for judging him so quickly the day before. After all, he had just finished a long, hot drive, and some kind of problem in his family had brought him here.

      He