by Peggy Jaeger
“They’re working on my tux now and said it would be ready in about an hour. Can you do the same for the pants so we can take both home with us?” Lucas asked.
He was told it was no problem. While Robert went to change, Lucas went to pay.
Once we were all done, Robert asked again about getting something to eat. “There’s a food court here,” he said. “We could grab something fast.”
“I don’t feel like fast food,” Lucas told him.
Robert went into hangry-teen mood again. I was all set to say it didn’t matter to me where we ate, but Lucas rolled over me.
“I don’t think you’re gonna die from hunger if we skip the food court and go someplace where we can sit down for a bit,” Lucas said, “and eat something a little more nutritious than chicken nuggets. Besides, Maureen did us a big favor by coming to help and offering her advice, so I’d like to treat her to someplace nicer than a fast-food taco stand.”
I started to say it wasn’t necessary, but Lucas shot me his penetrating glare, and I bit back the words.
“Agreed?” he asked, turning back to his son, when I kept silent.
The boy’s mood changed on a dime. He shot me a quick look, perked up a bit, and nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Sorry.”
“Come on, then. Let’s go look for a sit-down place,” Lucas said.
For a late afternoon on a Thursday, the mall was packed, and we were forced to bob and weave between the crowds until we found a nice family-style restaurant. A smiling maître d’ escorted us to a table, gave us menus, and told us our server would be with us shortly.
As it happened, I sat between father and son, Lucas on my right, Robert across from him on my left.
“I’m starving,” Robert mumbled when he opened his menu.
I bumped his shoulder with my own. “You’re always starving,” I said, with a smile. “Just like your father. A walking appetite.”
“What does Fiona always say?” Lucas asked. “Apples and trees?”
I laughed. “That, and a million other things that hit it right on the head.”
After our middle-aged waitress arrived and took our orders, Lucas leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table.
“Thank you again for coming and helping us out,” he said. “I haven’t worn a tux since prom.” He chuckled. “The cut and the price have changed dramatically since then, that’s for sure.”
Robert snorted at his father’s words, then flushed scarlet.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
He lifted his head, glanced once at this father and then me, then dipped his chin again. “Nothing.”
“Oh, I think it was something.” I snuck a side eye at Lucas and grinned. “You’re trying to imagine your father at prom, aren’t you, and can’t quite picture it, can you, Bobby-Boy?”
Little grin lines popped up on his cheeks as he tried not to smile back.
“I’ll have you know I looked pretty damn good at my senior prom,” Lucas said, mild pique slipping through his tone. “I was even voted Prom King.”
“Dad.” Robert shook his head. “That’s so lame.”
I was barely able to keep my laugh at bay. “Chief of Police Lucas Alexander at eighteen. You should have seen him, Robert. Decked out in a blue velvet tux with a frilly baby-blue shirt and bow tie, his long hair slicked back like he jumped off a 1950s teen idol magazine, a pint of dime store cologne wafting from him.”
I lost the small thread of control I still had when Robert burst out laughing.
Lucas’s feeble “Hey!” of indignation made us laugh harder.
Our drinks arrived and while the waitress handed them out, Robert and I tried to control ourselves.
We did a pretty poor job of it.
“You didn’t really wear a velvet tux, did you?” Robert asked his father.
“I think I can hunt up Cathy’s prom pictures as proof. Colleen probably has them in the family albums at the house. I’ll ask her tomorrow.”
“Yes, I did, Robert, and you should know I rocked it. Why do you think the whole class voted me king?”
“Because everyone felt sorry for you, showing up in a velvet tux?”
Robert had taken a sip through his straw and, at my words, laughed so hard he choked, then spit out his soda when it went up his nose, the moisture raining down all over the table.
Unfortunately, this only made me laugh harder. I don’t know who Lucas gave the more stern warning glare to: his son or me.
“What did Mom wear?” Robert asked when he finally composed himself.
Lucas winced.
I answered for him. “He and your mom had broken up, so he took Shelly Bookerman, the biggest flirt in the class.” I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Shelly had a huge crush on your dad and had been after him for all of high school to pay attention to her. Followed him whenever he was in the halls, always tried to sit near him in the lunchroom. Went to all the football games, home and away, to cheer him on. She must have thought she’d died and gone to Heaven—the real one—when you finally asked her out,” I added, addressing Lucas.
“Dad.”
Lord, was there anything worse than hearing a teenager’s voice filled with censure? Or funnier?
Lucas hadn’t heard him. Or if he had, he chose to ignore it, his attention focused solely on me.
“First of all, how do you even know that? You were, what? Ten, when I was a senior?”
“Nine, and how do you think I know? Cathy, of course.”
“I can’t see her discussing me with you when you were a kid.”
“She didn’t, not exactly. But she and Danny did all the time. You were the topic of their couch conversation on more than one occasion.”
“And you, what? Just happened to overhear them?”
“To be truthful, it was more Eileen than me. She was a major eavesdropper, especially with anything Cathy-related. But she always shared what she overhead.”
I grinned and took a long pull of my water. “Your dating life was a wicked hot topic to twin nine-year-old girls living in a house of women. Daddy didn’t count because he was at work so much. You and Danny were the brothers we didn’t have but so desperately wanted.”
“Brothers?” The same tone he’d used in my dayroom laced the word. I couldn’t tell if he was amused, annoyed, or just trying to imagine what having bothersome little sisters would have been like. Either way, the heat blasting my way was incredibly arousing. I lifted a shoulder and took another sip of my drink in a feeble attempt to cool down my raging insides.
“So you and Mom fought even back then?” Robert asked, shifting Lucas’s attention.
A weary breath blew from between his lips. “We were kids, son. We didn’t have a lot of control over our emotions. Neither one of us had ever been away from Heaven, and we imagined the world revolved around each of us. You know your mom. She gets…upset. Easily, about stuff.”
“What did you do to make her so upset she broke up with you before prom?”
He shook his head. “In all honesty, I don’t even remember.”
“He enlisted,” I said, “just a few weeks before prom and graduation.”
His eyes narrowed at me. To the question in them, I explained, “Remember? Both you and Danny signed up on the same day. Cathy cried but realized it was what Danny wanted. What he’d always dreamed of. Nora”—I flicked a glance at Robert than back to his father—“didn’t.”
Lucas closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. To Robert he said, “She hated that I’d joined the army. Told me if I wanted to go halfway around the world just to get myself blown up she didn’t want to see me anymore. Since I’d already bought the tickets…” He lifted his shoulder.
“Shelly Bookerman swooped in.” I chuckled at the expression on Lucas’s face. It didn’t take someone attuned to the nuances of facial tics to know he was remembering how she’d followed him from homeroom the morning after the news spread about him and Nora. Cathy, via Eileen, had laughed with Danny
over how Shelly had been sympathetic about their parting of ways, and then said how much it would be a shame if Lucas went stag, or worse, not at all. Before he knew it, she’d invited herself to go along as his date.
“But you and Mom got back together eventually,” Robert said. “I mean, obviously. You must have realized how much you loved each other.”
I didn’t think Robert knew the real reason his parents had married, and I wasn’t about to elucidate him on the circumstances. It wasn’t my place, nor was it something I think Lucas realized I knew.
It had been Eileen, the master of snoopiness and font of overheard conversations, who’d told me, after listening to a phone call between Danny and Cathy. On home for a few weeks at Christmas one year, Lucas, Danny, and Cathy had gone bar hopping. Since this was Heaven, a town that only boasted three places you could actually call a bar, it hadn’t been unusual to run into several of their old friends.
Nora had been among them.
Whether alcohol-infused or simply one more time for old times’ sake before he shipped back out, Lucas and Nora had gone home to her apartment. Three months later, Lucas came back to town and the two of them were married at City Hall. Robert was born at the end of the summer.
Telling your teenaged son you’d done the honorable thing by marrying the high school sweetheart you’d impregnated wasn’t something, I felt, suitable for dinner conversation.
Lucas must have agreed, because to answer his son, he said, “I always loved your mom. Even with all the craziness and breakups we went through. I always will, because we got you out of the bargain. You were the best thing to come of our being married.”
“Dad.” Robert hung his head again and shook it, his neck flushing.
“Whatever happened between your mom and me, Rob, happened. Just know how much I love you.”
I swallowed and concentrated on my soda glass when tears threatened. Luckily, our food arrived and conversation suspended while it did.
While I cut my burger in half, Robert remained silent and motionless, his hands resting on the table on either side of his plate. Nanny is the queen at changing the temperature in awkward and emotional moments by inserting a humorous quip or making a bizarre statement to jolt people out of the moment.
I channeled her when I said, “Let this be a cautionary tale, Bobby-Boy, against renting a blue velvet tux for your own prom. Basic black is the way to go every time. Women drool over a man in a black, well-cut tuxedo. Trust me on this.”
When Robert lifted his head, a smile so like his father’s whipping across his face, I sent up a silent thank-you to Nanny. One glance at Lucas and my own smile wobbled.
His eyes had narrowed and gone half closed again, his head tilted a hair to the left and his mouth—dear God, his mouth! The seductive and secretive smirk pulling at his lips was almost my undoing. I stopped cutting my burger, the knife dropping from my hand to the plate with a resounding clang. My right leg began to bob under the table, a nervous tic from childhood whenever I knew I was about to be scolded, rearing itself.
“What?” I asked him.
He blinked, once, slowly and purposefully, those tiny dimples at the corner of his mouth deepening as his smirk grew to a one-sided grin. “Nothing. Eat, before that gets cold.” He pointed at my plate with his knife.
The rest of the meal moved smoothly with Lucas asking his son about his plans for his junior year in high school and regaling us with funny tales about some of the strangest arrests he’d made in our little town. When the waitress brought his receipt back after he’d paid, she smiled, thanked him for the tip, and as we got up to leave, said, “It’s so nice to see teenagers still go out to eat with their parents.” She laughed and added, “Mine didn’t want to have anything to do with me and my hubby once they turned fourteen. You have a lovely family. Enjoy the rest of your night.”
One glance at Robert and I could tell by the way he hung his head again, his shoulders drooping, he hadn’t been happy with the declaration. I didn’t dare look at Lucas as we walked, single file, out of the restaurant. My mind was a jumble of thoughts, my body thrumming with emotions. I kept them to myself as we walked back to the rental store.
While both men went to try on their altered items one more time to ensure everything was to specifications, I ambled about the store, lost in my thoughts, imagining a life where Lucas and I were married and Robert was truly my son.
And imagining was all I was ever going to do about it, I knew. Lucas may have loved me like a good friend, but there was nothing romantic about our relationship and never would be. I’d resigned myself to it long ago.
Back in the car with the garment bags stowed in the back, the three of us were fairly silent on the drive home. Even though I wanted to make light of what the waitress had said, I was nervous bringing the subject up. I didn’t want to cause Robert and Lucas any embarrassment. I wasn’t a wife, nor a mother, and certainly neither to these two.
It was almost seven thirty when Lucas pulled into the inn’s circular driveway.
“Well, that was a productive afternoon,” I said as I unbuckled my belt and forced a smile.
“I’ll walk you in.” Lucas put the car in park.
“There’s no need. I’m a big girl. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”
Sometimes I forget how stubborn this man is.
“Sit tight,” he told his son. His long legs beat me to the front door, which he pushed open and held for me.
Even though it was still early, the inn was quiet. I made my way back to the empty kitchen to find a note on the table from Sarah informing me all had gone well during the afternoon.
“Well, that’s good. No catastrophes while I was away.”
“Just proves what I was saying yesterday. You can take some time for yourself now and then, and the walls won’t come tumbling down if you do.”
I rolled my eyes and moved away from him. Before I could get far, he wove a hand around my arm and pulled me back.
“What? What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Why do you always ask that?” The hint of irritation in his voice showed in the lines furrowing his forehead.
“You mean aside from the fact you’re scowling at me right now?”
His skin instantly smoothed, and a calming breath blew through his lips.
Holding my gaze, he took a step closer and dropped his hand.
“Nothing is wrong,” he said, each word emphasized. “I wanted to thank you again for coming with me today. I know you had to rearrange a bunch of stuff to do so.”
I shrugged and tried to take a step back. When Lucas was this close, I had a difficult time keeping my emotions from galloping across my face. But the magnetic pull of his eyes held me in place.
“And you can’t know how much I appreciate it. Or how much I appreciate what you’ve done for Robert. The kid is so different whenever he’s around you. Less moody, more talkative. Today was the most I’ve heard him laugh since he got here. And it’s because of you. You make him…feel happy.”
My heart skipped in my chest.
“He laughed so much because he was picturing you in a velvet tuxedo,” I said to mask my pleasure at his words. I grinned up at him and added, “I’m gonna call Colleen tomorrow to see if she can hunt up those pictures so I can show him.”
He squinted down at me, and my knees got all kinds of wobbly.
“You’re not the only one around here who remembers proms gone by, you know.”
“What does that mean?”
He took a step closer, and I swear my body temperature went up a good ten degrees from sharing his natural heat.
“I have a vivid memory of you at seventeen wearing an extremely revealing dress resembling a slip more than a prom gown.”
A flash of the dress in question crossed the front of my mind. “At least it wasn’t a velvet tuxedo.”
He ignored the jibe. “I’d stopped by the house to speak to your sister, and you came down the stairs, all ready to be picked up by your date.”
“Tick Jones.” So named because he was the most annoying boy in our class, and when anyone even so much as glanced at him, he stuck like glue, happy to have a friend. Even if they were a friend in his mind only. I’d agreed to go with him because he was the only boy who asked me. Eileen, of course, had gotten several requests.
Lucas nodded. “You were wearing a pale purple dress with the thinnest of straps and a slit up the side almost to your ass. I told Cathy I was surprised your father was letting you out of the house in it. You didn’t look anywhere near seventeen.”
I’d loved the dress the minute I saw it in a store in Concord. Eileen had as well.
“My sister was wearing the same dress, you know. Hers was pink. Did you complain about how inappropriate you thought hers was to Cathy, too?”
He shook his head. “I never even noticed your sister. All I could see was…you.”
His voice dropped on the last word, and a hot bullet of desire dropped along my insides.
He cocked his head and asked, “Did Jones ever tell you what I said to him before you all left?”
“Said? N-no. I didn’t even know you’d spoken to him.”
“You went upstairs to grab your bag or something you’d forgotten. I cornered Jones and told him I remembered what it was like being a seventeen-year-old boy on prom night. Sneaking liquor or beers around the back of the high school gym. Maybe passing around a little weed. Some guys even have certain expectations of how the evening is gonna end. The expense of the tux rental, the limo, the corsage. It puts ideas into their head that’s cause, maybe even justification, for some kind of…payback from their date.”
I knew exactly what kind of payback he was referring to.
“Oh, good Lord, tell me you didn’t.”
His eyes went to half-mast, his lips curling at the corners in a predatory smirk. “Oh, I did. And I added if he didn’t return you to your house on time for the curfew your parents set, looking and smelling exactly the way you had when you left with him, he was gonna answer to me come the morning.”
Why I wasn’t angry at this Neanderthal behavior surprised me because I should have been. Lucas had been almost twenty-six then, had already completed two tours in the army, married Nora, and Robert was on the way. He was miles ahead of the boys in my high school in world experience.
