Annoyed that the men seemed in no hurry to conclude their spiel, Evan rose from his chair. “I’m going to have to let her join us. My secretary can’t watch her—she’s leaving for the day.” Heather, motivated by that yearend bonus, would probably have been willing to stay an extra fifteen minutes to keep Gracie safely occupied in another room, but Evan thought having Gracie join him in the conference room might accomplish what his hint hadn’t: bringing the proceedings to a swift end. Before Jennifer could halt him, he moved around the table, opened the door and peered down the hall. “Gracie? We’re in here.”
His daughter popped out of Heather’s office and skipped over to him. Her unbuttoned jacket flapped open and her lunch box clattered as the empty thermos rolled around inside it. Her cheeks were pink from the chilly evening air, and her eyes sparkled. She looked, if not spunky, at least a bit more energetic than she had yesterday.
“Hi, Daddy.”
He hunkered down and spread his arms so she could race into them. Hugging her, he whispered, “I’m stuck in a meeting. Wanna keep me company?”
“Okay.”
He straightened up, reached for her hand and led her into the conference room. She gazed around, her tawny hair tousled, her hazel eyes wary. Stuart was spared a hesitant smile—she recognized him because he usually gave her candy when he saw her, and today was no exception. After digging in his pocket, he pulled out a breath mint. Gracie sprinted around the table and took it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sugar,” he said, chucking her chin. She hated when anyone did that—chucked her chin, pinched her cheek, scruffed her hair—but since he’d just given her a candy, she didn’t complain.
Evan resumed his seat and Gracie climbed into his lap. She slammed her lunch box down on the table with a loud clunk, then turned her attention to the Georgians.
They seemed nonplussed by her presence. They stared at her. She stared back. After a moment, they looked away, defeated. Evan’s chest swelled with pride at the thought that his young daughter could derail these two gasbags with little more than her dimple-cute face and laser-sharp gaze.
“Well,” one of them finally said, “I believe we’ve covered everything of importance. Do you have any questions?”
“None at all,” Evan said brightly, restraining himself from boosting Gracie into the air and hooting triumphantly. “I appreciate your having traveled all this way to discuss your product. I’ll want to read the literature you brought with you before we make any decisions.”
Next to him, Jennifer bristled but smiled. “I think we’re all very impressed with Pep Insoles,” she said, shooting Evan a lethal look and then regaining her smile for the reps. “We’ll be getting back to you very soon.”
“Within the next few weeks,” Evan quickly told them, overruling her. They’d made him sweat out this marathon presentation. He’d let them sweat out his decision about whether his chain of stores was going to carry Pep Insoles.
Gracie slid down from Evan’s knees, yanked her lunch box off the table and said, “That was a good meeting, Daddy. I liked it a lot.”
“I’m glad you did,” he said, then winked at Jennifer, who glowered at him and mouthed, I want to talk to you. He nodded, then circled the table to shake the reps’ hands and feign his utter delight at their having traveled all the way to Arlington, Connecticut, to consume several precious hours of his life. Then he walked out of the conference room with Gracie, abandoning Stuart and Jennifer to perform the closing courtesies.
“We can’t leave quite yet,” he warned Gracie as they headed toward his office. “Jennifer wants to talk to me.”
“I don’t like her,” Gracie said.
“She works very hard, and she’s good for the business.”
“Yeah, but she’s a grouch. She never smiles. I like Heather.”
Evan decided not to inform his daughter that Heather hated children. “Was it fun having her pick you up?” he asked.
Gracie trooped into his office ahead of him. “Yeah. Molly said you need to pick me up on time. It’s something you have to work on, she said. We did puppets today. We made them out of socks. Mine came out good, but I left it in school.”
“Great.” As she jabbered on, Evan watched her for signs that she was incubating some sort of ailment. Her color seemed healthy, though, and her energy level high. “Were you tired in school today?”
“Nope.”
“Did you nap?”
“Nope.”
He didn’t believe her, but that was all right. He lifted his briefcase onto his desk and snapped open the latch. “Did you eat your whole lunch?” he asked.
“Nope. I gave my cookies to Sarah. I didn’t want them.”
Gracie didn’t want her cookies? He took that as an ominous sign.
Jennifer appeared in his doorway, the picture of impeccable professionalism in a tailored suit, shiny stockings and those deadly leather pumps. “What is wrong with you?” she asked crossly, her angular face twisted into a frown.
Gracie’s appraisal of Jennifer echoed inside his head, making him smile. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Those people have an excellent new product.”
“Those people are insufferably boring.”
“Who cares? They’re offering us exclusive rights to sell Pep Insoles in southern New England—”
“And we’ll probably accept their offer,” Evan said. “But I’ve got to read all their documents first. And I’ll bet the documents will tell me everything that matters. I didn’t need these guys schlepping all the way up here to put on their dog-and-pony show for us. If they had to do it, they should have finished by four o’clock, as promised.”
“They talk slowly,” Jennifer explained.
“I noticed.”
“Don’t be such a grouch,” Gracie added. Evan wasn’t sure whether she was addressing him or Jennifer. He supposed they were both pretty grouchy at the moment.
“I don’t want to discuss Pep Insoles until we’ve got the Tank Moody promo set up,” he said.
“It’s set up,” Jennifer assured him. “Almost.”
“‘Almost’ doesn’t count. I don’t want anything left to chance, okay? Our last big promo using a professional athlete was a disaster.”
Jennifer sighed sympathetically. “This one will go fine. Tank Moody is a gentleman.”
Evan shuddered. “Those guys—” he gestured in the direction of the conference room “—were gentlemen, and spending an afternoon with them was torture. I’ve got to go. We’ll do the Tank stuff tomorrow.”
“Fine.” She handed Evan a thick binder with the Pep Insoles logo on the cover. “You can read this tonight.”
Right, he thought. I’m going to ignore my kids and read 150 pages of statistics on shinsplints and hurdlers. But he only smiled at Jennifer and stuffed the binder into his briefcase. “Okay, Gracie. Let’s boogie.”
THEY PICKED UP Billy at his friend Scott’s house on their way home. Scott’s mother had taken Billy to her place after the boys’ Cub Scout meeting. She’d come through for Evan more than once this past fall. He was going to have to get her a nice Christmas present. A bottle of well-aged port. And something from the store—a paddleball set or a volleyball net, something the family would enjoy.
Billy was in a subdued mood. “How was Cub Scouts?” Evan asked, glancing at his son in the rearview mirror.
“It was okay.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“How was school?”
“Boring. We had a sub.”
Evan could take a hint. He abandoned all attempts at conversation as he steered around the corner, down the block and up the driveway to his garage.
In the years since Debbie had left, he’d established an effective evening routine. Dinner menus were simple. Evan was a pitifully uncreative cook, but that worked out well because the kids were pitifully unadventurous eaters. They’d eat broiled anything, and he knew how to broil everything. So while they
cleaned out their lunch boxes, set the table and emptied a package of salad fixings into a bowl, Evan arranged in a pan what he was going to broil, then broiled it. Yesterday he’d broiled salmon. Tonight it was chicken. Tomorrow it would be lamb chops and the day after, flank steak. If a person was systematic, he could get the job done.
Evan had spent pretty much his entire life mastering that lesson. He’d never been a genius—he had gotten through college on a soccer and baseball scholarship—but he’d wound up earning good grades because he’d figured out systems for studying. It was his flair for systematizing inventory as a summer employee at the Champion Sports store in his hometown of New Haven that had won the attention of the then owner of the two-outlet chain. He’d offered Evan a full-time management job right out of college, and since Evan was engaged to Debbie, he’d grabbed the opportunity.
He’d set to work systematizing the store’s operations. “By turning over inventory three days quicker, we’ll make five percent more profit,” he’d explained, and then showed his boss how to do it. “If we track what’s selling in each store, we can inventory different products in different stores. We’re selling more hockey gear in Arlington than in New Haven. More beach stuff in New Haven. We shouldn’t be stocking the identical inventory in both stores.” When his boss suffered a massive heart attack and had to retire, he’d named Evan his successor.
That was nine years ago. Now Champion had seven outlets in Connecticut, two in Rhode Island and one in New Bedford, Massachusetts. No one—least of all Evan—would have predicted that he’d wind up such a success, running a mini-empire by the time he was thirty-one. No one—least of all Evan—would also have predicted that he’d fail so spectacularly in his marriage. He’d thought he’d worked out a system for that, too: listen to Debbie when she wanted to talk, nod when agreement was called for, never complain about the trivial stuff, tune her out when she nagged, make sure she came when they had sex, assure her he loved her…
It hadn’t been enough. Somehow the system had let him down.
Maybe all his systems were letting him down. Molly Saunders-Russo, who ran the Children’s Garden, seemed to think he was falling short. Had she actually told Gracie that her father needed to work on meeting his responsibilities? Just because he’d been held hostage by those two bozos from Atlanta and couldn’t pick his daughter up from her school by closing time…
Glancing over at her, he noticed the sparkle was gone from her eyes. She’d adopted her brother’s listlessness. Evan decided to try another conversation as he zapped the potatoes in the microwave. “So, what did you do at Scott’s house?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You know what, Billy?” Evan grinned. “I don’t believe you.”
Billy scooped forks and knives from the silverware drawer. “We played Nintendo.”
“The whole time?
Billy rolled his eyes. He was Evan’s boy, through and through. He had the same sandy-colored hair, the same gray eyes and brown lashes, the same lazy style of shrugging, the same contemptuous manner of rolling his eyes. “We told each other ghost stories,” Billy said as he distributed the silverware around the table.
Gracie winced. “Billy!” she whined.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Evan asked. “You don’t like ghosts?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, although her voice trembled.
Evan tried to figure out why she seemed so agitated. She was generally fearless, a fact that filled Evan with both pride and terror. Gracie was the sort of kid who would jump off the high board at the YMCA pool if someone dared her to. She had no fears concerning spiders or nasty dogs or monsters under the bed. Surely she didn’t believe in ghosts.
Well, that was what she’d just said, wasn’t it?
So why was she so pale?
Billy started talking about a film the substitute teacher had shown his class, and Evan’s chance to question Gracie slipped away. They ate their broiled chicken, discussing the nuances and subtleties of assorted Disney cartoons, and Gracie relaxed. By the end of the meal, she was jabbering about how she’d much rather be Mulan than Ariel, because Ariel wanted to kiss the prince and kissing was gross.
After dinner, Billy did a page in his spelling workbook while Evan read Gracie Green Eggs and Ham. He’d read it to her so many times she had it memorized, and she recited it along with him. Then he got her into a bath. As he washed her hair, he thought about what Molly had said earlier: that he should think about hiring a nanny or an au pair. Was it all right that he—a male adult—was giving his daughter a bath? At what point would this turn from a simple parental chore into something dangerous?
She was his daughter, and she wasn’t old enough to wash her own hair yet. Did he have to hire a baby-sitter to wash her hair for her?
Everything he knew about being a father he’d learned on the job. Debbie hadn’t taught him much, and Gracie had been only two years old when Debbie had run off. His parents had suggested that he move back to New Haven so they could help, but fortunately he hadn’t, because a year later his father was downsized out of his job and wound up taking a consulting position in Washington, D.C. So Evan had learned how to give his daughter a bath all by himself.
She was only four. He probably wasn’t traumatizing her by bathing her. But in another year…Could he teach her how to wash her own hair by then?
“Do you think we ought to hire a nanny?” he asked as he helped her out of the tub and wrapped her in a towel.
“A nanny? That’s a grandma. Courtney calls her grandma Nanny. Stephen said a nanny was a goat. He and Courtney had a big fight.”
“I’ll bet,” Evan said, rubbing the towel over Gracie’s wet hair. “What I meant wasn’t a grandmother, but someone who might come here and help out a little. For instance, she could give you your bath.”
“I like when you give me a bath. You never get soap in my eyes.”
He accepted the compliment with an earnest nod. “Or maybe this nanny could pick you up at the Children’s Garden if I got stuck in a meeting.”
“You could send Heather. I like her.” Gracie reached for her nightgown, a wrinkled heap of pink flannel on the lowered seat of the toilet. She squirmed into it, and when her head popped through the opening, she added, “I think you should marry her.”
“Marry Heather?” Evan sat on the floor, leaning against the tiled wall, and shoved his sleeves up above his elbows. Gracie often blurted out peculiar ideas. He still hadn’t figured out the way her mind worked, and he probably never would. “Why do you think I should marry Heather?”
“She’s so pretty.”
“It doesn’t really matter how pretty a woman is outside,” Evan pointed out. “What matters is if she’s pretty inside.”
“I bet Heather’s pretty inside. If she opened her mouth, you could look inside and see.”
He struggled not to laugh. “By pretty inside, I mean, if her thoughts and acts are pretty. If she’s a good, kind person. Some people are pretty on the outside and not the inside.” Debbie, for instance—but he didn’t say that. “Do you think I should get married?”
“Maybe you could find a princess or something and marry her,” Gracie suggested. “A princess who likes sports so she could buy lots of stuff at the store. And then maybe we could live in a castle. A big stone castle—” She cut herself off and handed Evan her towel. “Uh-uh. I don’t want to live in a castle,” she said, her expression pinched. “Brush my hair out, Daddy—and don’t pull, okay?”
“I never pull.” So she didn’t want to live in a castle, he thought, hauling himself to his feet. He hung her towel over the rack, reached for her hairbrush and carefully brushed the snarls out of her hair, easing the bristles through the damp locks without tugging. He’d assumed most little girls wanted to live in castles, but then, Gracie wasn’t like most little girls. “I don’t think I’d want to marry a princess, anyway,” he told her.
She relaxed. “You don’t have to get married, Daddy. B
ut if you do, you should probably marry Heather.”
“Thanks for the input.” He and Heather would kill each other in a day, he thought with a smile. Heather was a wonderful secretary, but she was not his idea of promising wife material.
Her hair smooth, Gracie brushed her teeth, then padded barefoot down the hall to bed. Evan tucked her in and turned off her bedside lamp. “I want my night-light,” she said.
That surprised him. She’d stopped asking him to leave on her night-light a year ago. But whatever had bothered her yesterday was still nibbling at her.
“Okay,” he said, clicking on the shell-shaped night-light. It gave the room a faint amber glow. “How’s that?”
“Good. I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too,” he murmured, returning to her bed to give her one last kiss. “Sleep tight.”
Leaving her door cracked open, he headed down the hall to the den. Billy was sprawled on the rug in front of the TV, watching a sitcom about extraordinarily attractive young singles. “Bedtime, pal,” Evan said, because it was easier than telling him to stop watching shows in which three-quarters of the jokes had to do with sex or other bodily functions. He reached for his briefcase, hauled out the binder of Pep Insoles information Jennifer had given him and gave Billy a firm look.
Slowly, grudgingly, Billy hoisted himself off the floor and stretched. He trudged toward the doorway, but Evan caught his shoulder and held him back. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Billy stared at the sofa.
“Because you can tell me anything, Billy. If anything’s bothering you, if there’s anything you want to ask me, that’s what I’m here for.”
Billy lifted his gaze to Evan. “Everything’s okay,” he said, sounding less certain than grateful. Everything wasn’t okay, but at least he seemed appreciative of his father’s attempt to reach him.
“When you want to talk, Billy, let me know.”
“It’s okay, Dad. Really.” He smiled, flashing a gap where one of his front teeth was missing. Evan released him, and he clomped down the hall, his feet too big for his body.
’Tis the Season Page 3
