Enticed by Amy Malone Page A

cheating husband) it had been an easy decision to sell her half and tell him good riddance. He’d wanted a fight when she’d first had the papers delivere d to him, going so far as to demand the house, car - even the dogs - in exchange for his signature. But she happily gave it all up. She’d wanted a new start, anyway.
    Looking at her partial r eflection in the bus window, Alana realized she looked good for her age - even if she had gained a pound or two since last her aunt had seen her. Since last Mark had seen her.
    Looking into the distance, over at th e setting sun, she felt the town center and familiar, thick forests wait to greet her.
    “Next stop, Amberville,” said the bus driver, hardly sparing a glance for the half-awake passengers.
    Alana reached into the baggage cubby-hole above her seat, grabbed her bag, and plopped back into soft blue bus cushions. She was nervous about being back in the small town, like someone going to meet an old friend they hadn’t seen in a long time.
     
    Mark Thompson looked around the nearly empty bar, head in hand. He laughed at himself, shaking his head, but stopped when he caught the bartender looking at him worriedly.
    He was acting pathetic right now, and knew it. Weak. Vulnerable. It was just the sort of thing he hated seeing in others, especially men. Yet here he was, slouched over a poorly made cocktail in a shitty bar in the middle of nowhere.
    Mark looked around at his sorry surroundings and smirked inwardly. A cocktail waitress attended to the one or two patrons actually sitting at the tables. Her cutoff jean shorts looked like they had seen better days. She did too, for that matter. A juke box with a twitching light bulb played a list of Elvis songs, and a snaggletooth patron at the other end of the bar sang along brokenly between long swigs of his cheap beer. Look at where you are, Mark. My, oh my, how the mighty have fallen.
    Still, this was where it’d all started. He’d grown up here. His roots were here. His only surviving family, his grandfather, had died years ago, but there was still something that tied him to the place. And so, when his life had gone down the toilet, he’d come back almost reflexively - even after having not visited in a year. It was like going back to the beginning, to just the moment when the seeds of his ambition had been planted.
    It’d started with those summers, years ago.
    When Mark was smaller, before high school, his largest ambitions were to catch the legendary lagoon creature that was said to haunt the nearby lake (though it was, indeed, a lake and not a lagoon) and to stroll into Barry’s (the tavern/bar where he now sat) and play a song onstage.
    Mark’s grandfather had been a kind but simple man, encouraging Mark to keep his grades up but not really pushing him for much else. Mark didn’t really remember his parents - they’d died in a skiing accident when he was seven. His grandfather never talked about it, and Mark never felt able to ask.
    The most he’d ever heard his grandfather say about them was when he’d gotten into Harvard, deciding to leave over going to the local college. With sad but wistful eyes, his grandfather said: “There’s no helping it, my boy. You are just like your father.” Mark’s grandfather died on the third semester of college.
    It had been a devastating, but not the reason he’d come back. For that, he realized he needed to go back further. Back to those summers with the sweet girl from down the road. Alana had been her name.
    Mark remembered Alana as being gorgeous, fun to be around, and slightly goofy. He’d had a crush on her from the moment she had gone biking past his grandfather’s driveway in hot pants and a windbreaker on a cool spring morning late in May.
    Every morning of that summer, he’d wait on the front porch for the girl on the bike. And every morning Alana went speeding by.  After  days of this, Mark finally got the courage to wave to her as she sped down the