’Tis the Season

by Judith Arnold

  “Because we only had three pairs of hands. Two,” he corrected himself. Gracie had fallen asleep when they’d been getting ready to leave. Evan had managed to rouse her so she could walk out to the car herself, but he hadn’t trusted her to carry any of the food. “Come on, Fil. Turkey and the fixings, pumpkin pie and a few more minutes with my little monsters. You said you weren’t sick of them yet.”

  “All right,” she said, relenting, her eyes scooting past him as if she didn’t want him to read her thoughts. Not that he’d ever had any talent when it came to reading a woman’s thoughts. For all he knew, the only reason Filomena had agreed to have dinner with him was so she could spend more time with Gracie and Billy.

  And if that was her reason, Evan would accept it. Call it a foul tip. He might not have made it to first base yet, but he was still at the plate, still alive.

  “Get the pie,” he murmured. “I’ll get the kids.”

  “PATTY? IT’S FIL,” she said. The clock on the night table beside her bed read ten, not too late to be calling her closest friend down in New York—especially since the last two times she’d phoned, earlier in the day, Patty hadn’t been home.

  “Fil! I got your messages, but when I called back, you didn’t answer.”

  “I’ve been busy, in and out. And I haven’t got an answering machine here.”

  “How are you doing, babe? I feel so bad for you, up there in the sticks all by yourself.”

  Filomena was hardly all by herself. And that was either a blessing or a profound problem. “I’m okay,” she reassured her friend. “How are things in the city?”

  “Noisy. Dirty. The usual. Carlos broke up with Julia, and they’re both moping, acting very put-upon. It’s tedious.”

  “This is the third time they’ve broken up,” Filomena remarked.

  “Like I said. Tedious.”

  “Which one are we getting custody of this time?”

  “Carlos, I think. Julia’s being bitchy. He left a couple of CDs at her place, and she’s refusing to give them back.”

  “Why?”

  “She says he owes her for the Blue Man Group ticket she bought for him.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. All right, we’ll take custody of him.”

  “Until they make up again,” Patty reminded her.

  Filomena smiled and sank back against the pillows. She’d removed her boots, and her socks were as red as her sweater, making her feet feel warm and cheery. Catching up on the city gossip didn’t cheer her quite as much. It reminded her of who she was.

  Not an Arlington resident. Not a baby-sitter. Not a woman who had just spent yet another evening with Evan, pretending he didn’t have the most alluring eyes she’d ever seen, pretending the planes and angles of his face didn’t fascinate her, pretending his height, his lean proportions, the length of his legs and the breadth of his shoulders didn’t bludgeon her with an almost painful awareness of how masculine he was.

  “So, is everything all right with you, Fil?”

  “Um…yeah, of course,” she said, her voice sounding strangely raspy.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Listen, Patty—” she swallowed and forced more strength into her tone “—I want to throw a party for New Year’s Eve. You can all take the train up. There’s a commuter line directly into Arlington. And I’ve got six bedrooms here. I could put everyone up overnight. It’ll be kind of a farewell to the house before I sell it. What do you think?”

  “Wait a minute,” Patty said. “You’re asking me, would I rather risk life and limb in Times Square with a million piss-drunk idiots screaming their heads off while they watch the ball drop, or take the train with a bunch of friends to your country villa for the night? I’ve got to think long and hard about this.” She didn’t think long or hard. “Fabulous! You’ll invite Carlos and not Julia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Who else? Danny and Liz?”

  “Sure.”

  “Kumiko?”

  “Of course. I’ve got beds, and maybe a few people could bring sleeping bags, just in case.”

  “It sounds great, Fil.” Patty hesitated. “What’s going on?”

  Filomena laughed. “What do you mean, what’s going on? I’m planning a party.”

  “Something’s going on. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Hear what?” She was still smiling, but wariness mixed with her amusement.

  “You don’t sound…I don’t know. Troubled.”

  “I don’t sound troubled? What does that mean? Am I supposed to be troubled?”

  “Well, Fil, you traveled up there to mourn for your mother and close up your old family manse. Now, I’m not saying there’s a right way and a wrong way to mourn. I’m just saying you sound happier than I would have expected, under the circumstances.”

  “You’re criticizing me for sounding happy.” Filomena laughed again.

  “No. I’m being nosy. What’s going on?”

  “I’ve made some friends up here,” Filomena told her, choosing her words carefully.

  “Okay.” Patty sounded as if she knew Filomena had more to tell her. “Some friends.”

  “Some friends,” Filomena repeated. “You know what friends are, don’t you?”

  “What’s his name?” Patty asked.

  Filomena sighed and decided not to bother trying to conceal anything from Patty. There was nothing to conceal, after all. “Evan,” she said. “He’s a divorced father of two. He runs a chain of sporting-goods stores. We have nothing in common.”

  “Are you in love or what?”

  “No, I’m not in love! I just said we had nothing in common.”

  “And I’m saying you sound happy.”

  “Because he’s a nice friend.”

  “A nice friend.” Patty snorted. Filomena had to admit it was an absurdly bland description, especially when applied to Evan. “Is he sexy?”

  “Yes. But nothing’s going on.” She sighed again, feeling a lot less happy than Patty seemed to think she sounded. “Nothing can go on. For one thing, as I said, we’ve got nothing in common. For another thing, I’m leaving in January.”

  “So, have you slept with him yet?”

  “Patty!” She closed her eyes and groaned, aware that her friend was teasing her, but also aware that the teasing cut a little too close to her heart. She still hadn’t recovered from the sensation of Evan’s fingers in her hair, and all he’d been doing was plucking a pine needle out of it. A simple bit of grooming assistance, probably less meaningful to him than brushing his daughter’s hair out after a shampoo, and yet it had left Filomena weak and soft inside, yearning.

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell Patty she was actually working for him—as a baby-sitter, no less. That was about as unromantic a situation as possible. Admitting that their relationship was held together by money and children would prompt Patty to lecture her on how truly foolish and dim-witted and wrong thinking about Evan as anything other than a friend was.

  Filomena didn’t need Patty to lecture her. She knew it was wrong. That was why she was trying to resist her attraction to him, trying to pretend that having him pull a pine needle out of her hair hadn’t been the most erotic experience she’d had in ages.

  “I haven’t slept with him,” she told Patty. “I have no intention of sleeping with him. That’s just not going to happen, so you can stop asking.”

  “Will you invite him to the New Year’s Eve party?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. If you behave yourself and treat me with respect.”

  “Great. I want to meet him.” Patty chuckled. “A divorced father who sells sporting goods. That’s so suburban, Fil. I didn’t know suburban guys could be sexy.”

  Filomena hadn’t known that, either. Actually, she’d never thought about it one way or the other. She hadn’t been looking for a sexy guy, urban or rural or anything in between.

  She certainly hadn’t been looking for Evan.

  She finished her conversation with Patty and h
ung up the phone, then settled deep into the pillows propped against her headboard. Closing her eyes, she pictured her crowded, sunless efficiency apartment near the Columbia University campus. She imagined the constant drone of traffic outside her dingy window, the people swarming Upper Broadway at one in the morning, the combative wit and the tumultuous lives of her friends.

  It all seemed so far away.

  She’d missed that excitement, the clamor and intrigue and the soap-opera melodramas of her pals when she’d first arrived in Arlington. But lately, the only noise that mattered was the high-pitched chatter of Gracie babbling about hair clips and candy, marriage and magic, and the more solid, responsible discussions Billy engaged in, his eyes as dazzling as his father’s. The only traffic she thought about was the rush-hour buildup on Dudley Road as she drove to the Children’s Garden Preschool to pick up Gracie. The only friend she seemed to need was Evan.

  Once again, she recalled his fingers twining through her hair, and something clenched inside her, dark and lush.

  She’d grown attached to him only because she was emotionally vulnerable. He’d caught her at a bad time. She’d been bereft over the death of her mother, so she’d turned to him.

  A low, helpless laugh escaped her. Yes, she mourned for her mother. But grief wasn’t what had made her turn to Evan. Loneliness wasn’t what attracted her to him.

  He’d asked her to have dinner with him and the kids because he thought it would be preferable to eating alone, but that wasn’t why she’d said yes. She’d had dinner with him and the kids because being with them—with him—was preferable to a whole lot of things. Being with Evan, basking in his enigmatic smile, observing his bony wrists when he rolled up his sleeves and the contours of his throat when he opened the collar button of his shirt, eyeing the lanky profile of his body and wondering what his chest would look like, what it would feel like, what it would taste like if she pressed her mouth to his skin…

  She was in trouble. Big trouble.

  Abruptly, she pushed away from the pillows, swung her legs over the side of the bed and crossed the room to her dresser. Her tarot cards sat in a neat stack, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, exactly where she’d left them after taking them away from Billy and Gracie last night. She carried the deck to her bed, sat cross-legged at the center of the mattress and shuffled the cards.

  She didn’t actually believe the tarot could predict the future, but she saw no harm in using the cards. If they helped a person to think something through, to clarify her wishes, to define her goals, why not?

  She pulled the queen of pentacles out to represent herself, then shuffled the rest of the deck, focusing on a question: What will happen between Evan and me? Then she dealt out the cards in a Celtic array.

  The card representing her current situation—the four of swords—stood for retreat and solitude. Well, that made sense. She’d come to Arlington to collect her wits and figure out how to live the rest of her life as an orphan. Crossing her—the fool. She grinned. The Fool indicated that she was facing a choice. She knew what that choice was. The cards were supposed to tell her how to make it—if she took any of this seriously.

  She truly didn’t—but she kept going. The cards said she was facing financial struggles—the reversed Ten of Pentacles warned of a lost inheritance. The reversed Ace of Wands predicted that some enterprise might not be realized. The sale of the house? Or her thesis, perhaps? Would she wind up not getting her doctorate, or getting it but not getting a job, not becoming a university scholar like her father?

  The Moon card made an appearance. It almost always did for her, although she wasn’t sure why. This time it appeared upside down as the final card, the one that supposedly answered her question. According to the cards, her answer was that she would find peace, at a cost. She’d be practical.

  The practical thing to do was to take care of Evan’s kids and let him pay her for her time—and to stop thinking about him as a desirable man. The practical path would carry her through New Year’s Day and straight to the office of a real-estate agent, who would list this house for sale. The practical solution would be to make her last month in Arlington a serene one, devoid of emotional entanglements and upheavals, and then to return to New York City.

  The Moon card was telling her to forget about Evan.

  She gathered the cards, rewrapped them in the square of blue silk and carried them to her dresser. After setting them down with an angry thump, she turned her back on them.

  She didn’t believe in that nonsense. She honestly didn’t.

  But this time, she suspected, the cards were telling her the truth.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ENTERING THE ROOM at the YMCA where the Daddy School met, Evan spotted a familiar face among the men pushing metal chairs into a circle at the center of the room. He grabbed a chair, carried it with him to the circle and unfolded it next to Dennis Murphy’s chair. “Murphy!” he greeted his lawyer and poker buddy. “What are you doing here?”

  “Catching a refresher course,” Murphy said with a grin. “When you talked about Daddy School last week at the game, it got me to thinking I could benefit from a booster shot.”

  “Really?” Evan unzipped his battered leather jacket, shrugged out of it and draped it over the back of the chair. “All this time you’ve been telling me you’re the perfect father.”

  “I am. Only a perfect father would know when it’s time for a booster shot.” He laughed as he settled into his chair. “The thing is, the kids have been way too wired lately,” he explained. “Pre-Christmas excitement, I think. When I tell them to take it down a notch, they drag Gail into it. She doesn’t want to play referee between them and me, and she doesn’t want to be put in a position of taking sides. So she told me to sit in on a few Daddy School classes and get some fine-tuning.”

  “So you’re doing it because your wife pressured you into it.”

  “That about sums it up.” Murphy shrugged, obviously not perturbed by his wife’s pressure tactics. “Anyway, I was curious to see how you were doing.”

  “You could have waited till tomorrow night to see how I was doing,” Evan reminded him. Tomorrow was their poker night.

  “I meant, in the context of your kids. I was thinking about you over the Thanksgiving weekend, wondering how the holiday was treating you.”

  “We did fine,” Evan assured him, hoping his smile would deflect more questions. When he was paying Murphy five hundred dollars an hour to handle his or Champion’s business, he was pleased by Murphy’s tenacity. But when they were pals, sitting side by side in an evening class at the YMCA, he didn’t want to be interrogated.

  Unfortunately, Murphy was in an interrogating mood. “I would have invited you to have Thanksgiving dinner with us, but we had the whole gang—Gail’s sister Molly and her husband, my mother and Gail’s parents. It was a huge family bash. Practically unbearable.”

  “No problem. We had a great Thanksgiving.”

  “Just you and the kids?”

  Evan considered his answer and realized he had nothing to hide. “Fil was also there. Filomena.”

  “The baby-sitter?”

  “Well, she’s…” He paused, then decided what the hell. “She’s more than a baby-sitter at this point.”

  “Yeah?” Murphy looked intrigued. “It’s about time. It’s been, what? Two years since your divorce?”

  “You ought to know—your firm handled it.”

  “And we did an excellent job, too,” Murphy recollected. “You got the house, you got full, uncontested custody of the kids, you didn’t get hit with any alimony payments and you got to keep every penny of your assets.”

  “She didn’t want my assets. All she wanted was a superstar lover,” Evan reminded Murphy. Even though he didn’t miss Debbie at all, it hurt to remember why she’d left him—because he wasn’t exciting enough, charismatic enough. Good enough.

  Allison Winslow entered the room, giving him a convenient excuse to push aside that depressing thought.
The din of conversation melted away as she sauntered to the circle. “Boy,” she said with a chuckle. “Everyone falls silent when I enter. Should I be flattered?”

  The Daddy School students laughed, then waited patiently as she removed a colorful down parka, fluffed her curly red hair and smoothed her shirt into the waistband of her pristine white slacks. Her sneakers and her turtleneck were as white as her pants. She must have come to the YMCA straight from her nursing job at Arlington Memorial Hospital, Evan guessed.

  As hectic as his day had been, he was glad he’d been able to go home and have dinner with Billy and Gracie before attending the Daddy School. He’d broiled swordfish steaks and immersed himself in the glorious minutiae of his children’s lives: Gracie’s long-winded description of the snowflakes she and her classmates cut out of folded construction paper, Billy’s stellar performance playing a game of dodgeball in gym, Gracie’s desperate need for Silly Putty, Billy’s heartfelt longing for snow.

  How could Debbie have walked away from that? Evan wondered. Could a superstar lover really be worth sacrificing the joys and challenges of raising one’s children?

  Evidently, she’d thought so. And Evan thought she was an idiot for having made that choice.

  “This evening, I want to talk about the women in your children’s lives,” Allison announced, startling Evan—and apparently several of the other men in the room. They sat up straighter, shifted in their seats, eyed one another dubiously.

  “I know, this is the Daddy School,” she said. “But some of you have wives, some have ex-wives, some have girlfriends—or even mothers and neighbors who help out with your kids. This class is about improving your fathering skills, and one of the most important ways you can improve those skills is to improve the relationships between your children and the women who are central to their lives.”

  A couple of fathers grumbled. Evan guessed they were caught up in contentious child-sharing arrangements with ex-wives. In his case, his ex-wife was the exact opposite of central to his children’s lives. But there were still women essential to them. Not just their teachers, their friends’ mothers or their grandmother, but the woman who’d shown up at his front door five minutes before he’d had to leave for the YMCA.