Wait for Me

by Mary Kay McComas

  “You do all this by phone or do people come to you?”

  “Both. We do a lot by phone, but they come in too.”

  The band was interrupted to announce the beginning of the auction, and they continued to talk as they followed the flow of people into the next room.

  “Frustrating work,” he observed.

  “Good work, when it works.”

  “Is that how you got connected with St. Augustine’s, then? Through your work at the clinic?”

  “No. Whatever I can do for St. Augustine’s is purely personal.”

  “Don’t you ever get depressed?” he asked, knowing that he would.

  “Sure I do. But it doesn’t do anybody any good to stay that way, now does it?”

  No, he supposed it didn’t do any good. But to work with the sick and indigent day after day; to live in a rundown apartment building; to have grown up not knowing her real parents... Holly Loftin was a woman unlike any he’d known before. An endless fountain of unselfish giving and concern.

  She was beautiful, smart, educated. There were people who would do anything in the world for her. Yet there didn’t seem to be anything she wanted for herself—except Phil Rosenthal’s painting.

  “That does it,” she exclaimed, when she was outbid once again. “I’m scratching Mrs. Vochec off the guest list.”

  “The same woman from last year bought Phil’s painting?”

  “No. She brought her sister-in-law along this year, and she got it.”

  With the main event over, waiters were beginning to clean up the debris, and they were preparing to leave.

  “Why didn’t you let me raise the bid? I would have been happy to buy—”

  “I don’t want you to buy me things, Oliver. It isn’t necessary.”

  “I know, but I want to.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. I’d rather have...” she hesitated.

  “What?” He waited with eager anticipation.

  “I’d rather have a walk in the park, Sunday afternoon,” she said. She wanted him to give her things that money couldn’t buy. A hug. A kiss. And when she was tired, a shoulder to lean on.

  “You got it.” He stopped. “Which park?”

  “Uh, the one at Lake Merritt. We’ll feed the ducks. I work, so it’ll have to be about four o’clock. Is that okay?”

  “Sure. What if it rains?”

  “All the better.”

  Oliver drove her back to her apartment. She was full of excitement over the success of St. Augustine’s Annual Costume Party and Amateur Art Auction—but she wasn’t full of herself.

  “I’m so pleased for them. They all worked so hard on it,” she said, and while he was still musing on her humility, she added, “I can make it from here, Oliver. You don’t need to walk up all those stairs. I’ll be fine. I’m really glad you came tonight.”

  “So am I, and I’m walking you up to your door.” He was acutely conscious of her all-but-naked state of attire under her coat and could imagine that every pervert within a hundred miles had their antennae up and were aware of it as well. Letting her out at the curb would be analogous to throwing her to the wolves. He opened the car door, and the overhead light came on.

  “Oliver, we fought and made up tonight. We laughed and shared stories and talked about our lives. We’ve covered a lot of territory. But if you come up, I’m going to want you to come in and spend more time with me. You’ll want to kiss me and I’ll want to let you, and then one thing will lead to another and you’ll end up spending the night, and then we’ll wake up in the morning wondering if we might not have rushed it a bit and then we’ll both feel awkward, and then you might change your mind about the park on Sunday and it’ll rain and no one else will be there, and then the ducks’ll have to go hungry that day.”

  “How about just to the front door?” he asked straight-faced, his hand still on the door handle. “I won’t go in the building.”

  “You can watch me from here.”

  He ripped his head to one side and gauged the distance to the door.

  “It won’t be easy to kiss you from here.”

  “Then do it now,” she said with an eager smile, her eyes bright and beckoning.

  He closed the car door and all but rolled up his sleeves getting ready to kiss her. While she waited patiently, the strangest thing happened. He developed temporary amnesia or something. He couldn’t remember which way to tilt his head or where to put his hands.

  He adjusted his weight to free the tail of his jacket, put one arm over the back of the seat, and looped the other loosely around her waist.

  Yes. Yes. It was coming back to him, he thought in a wash of relief as he moved in for the kill. He felt her breath on his lips, they parted. His eyes began to close. He brushed her lips, she turned her head. He planted a big one on her cheek.

  Playful and quick, she came around to return his peck and sat back grinning.

  “Good night, Oliver.”

  “Good night, Holly,” he said, working hard not to smile back. This wasn’t the sort of behavior he wanted to encourage.

  She wouldn’t have gotten out of the car if she hadn’t heard the amusement in his voice. As it was, she walked to her door reaffirming her belief that he wanted more from her than what he could get from at least two hundred other women in the Bay Area.

  Her phone rang ten minutes later.

  “It’s three A.M....that makes it the next morning, and I don’t feel the least bit awkward about spending the night with you,” he said, the line crackling a bit.

  “Good,” she said, laughing, checking the window to see if he was still parked in front of her building. “Where are you?”

  “Halfway across the bridge. But I can turn around and come back if you want me to.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Oliver. It’s not nice to tempt a lady.”

  “Who says I’m nice?”

  “I do. I’ll see you Sunday afternoon.”

  There was a brief silence. “Good night, Holly. I had a good time.”

  “Me too. Good night, Oliver.”

  He was nice. And gentle and sweet and tolerant—tolerant as hell, if the tension he felt was anywhere near what she was feeling.

  Five

  TENSION WASN’T EXACTLY WHAT Oliver was feeling. Tension was what you felt during a business merger. Tension came when the shares were down before a stockholders’ meeting. Tension didn’t keep him awake all night or make his food taste like a mouthful of dust. Tension didn’t keep him reaching for the phone or blur the words in his magazines. It didn’t make him restless and it didn’t cause him to stare off into space like a zombie.

  Holly wasn’t making him tense, she was making him crazy.

  “Have you ever heard of a place called St. Augustine’s?” he asked his aunt the next day over a light lunch. “It’s a convalescent home. In Oakland?”

  They shared the Carey House estate as a matter of convenience. To try to dislodge his aunt would have been very inconvenient for Oliver—strenuous, aggravating, and more trouble than he cared to undertake. Besides, he knew little or nothing about the running of a large household, though he often suspected that it could pretty much run itself. The place was too big to live in alone anyway. And to hide away or avoid a bash for the cause of the week, he could always use the apartment downtown.

  It was a greater convenience to Elizabeth Carey George, however, to live in her childhood home and not have to explain to anyone why her husband’s lack of good investments and surplus of expensive mistresses had left her with little more than another fine old San Francisco name to attach to her own, and a heart full of bitterness.

  All in all, it was a fairly amicable arrangement.

  “It doesn’t ring a bell, dear,” she said, looking up from the promotional material she was reviewing for her newest crusade—to save the South American limpkin that would soon see extinction with the destruction of the rain forest. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious. What about the Joey Paulson Clini
c?”

  “Paulson. Paulson. There’s something familiar about the name, but I might be thinking of the Palm Beach Paulsons. I heard last night that Barry’s been cheating on her with some showgirl he met in Vegas. Can you imagine it? And Tiffany is a Brooks, and you know how they stick together. He’ll be lucky to get out of that marriage with a spare shirt.”

  “He should be grateful for that,” he said, a woman-lover himself but not without a certain amount of restraint and decorum. He liked to think of himself as a man of principle and self-control. Women were a matter of self-discipline, and he had little respect for a man who had none.

  “What is this sudden interest in Oakland, dear? I understand the land values aren’t worth investing in, and they say...”

  “No, it’s not about business. I... I was talking to Phil Rosenthal last night, and he thought there might be a couple of places over there that could use some help from the foundation.”

  “The Carey Foundation, as you well know, is overextended as it is. I’m firmly committed to asking the trustees to reevaluate several of our grants at the next meeting. We can’t possibly take on anyone new at this time.”

  “But we can take on some stupid birds in South America?” he asked, vexed that when he’d finally found a worthy cause of his own, the funds in the foundation he’d been managing most of his adult life were already allocated elsewhere.

  “Don’t be silly, dear, you know as well as I do that we can’t use the foundation money on anything but people-related concerns. You don’t remember grandfather Edgar, of course, but he was adamant on the point. I think it had something to do with the time the dogcatcher came through and picked up three of his dogs and put them to sleep before he could bail them out. He was furious about that for years.”

  “So how are you supporting your birds?”

  “Oh, this is another group entirely, dear. I’m helping Marsha Levenson with this one, you know how she is...”

  She went on to tell him in detail, but he only half listened. Hell, he didn’t need a damned foundation to support the Paulson Clinic. He could do it himself. If they had more money, they could pay better wages and Holly could move to a nicer neighborhood... unless they spent the money on food and medical care.

  He was beginning to see that there was more to being charitable than simply writing a check.

  While Oliver had inherited the greater portion of his wealth, Holly had to work for hers. And while most of the Carey legacy was tied up in banking, Holly hated banks with a passion.

  Stopping for the mail she’d forgotten to pick up the day before, she pulled another overdrawn notice from her mailbox—her third in a week—and fought a sick, smothering feeling as she climbed the stairs to her apartment.

  Money. Why was it always money?

  She put the key in the lock and smiled as she recalled the art auction and the way she had kept raising Lena Vochec’s bid and glancing at her with a too-sweet smile to get her to top it. It was a good thing Lena hated to lose. It would have been terribly embarrassing to have to admit to several hundred people that her savings account was in even worse shape than her checking account. It had no shape at all, in fact.

  Well, she’d been bluffing people like Lena Vochec for years. Loan officers. Bank officials. Foundation directors. And she was good at it. No sense giving up something she excelled at just because it was a little dishonest, she thought, tossing the overdrawn notice into a drawer with the others.

  It was only money, after all, and there was no point in letting it get to her, when she’d be walking in the park with an eat-’em-alive hunk of a man in less than an hour. She smiled. It had started to rain already.

  Weekends were long anyway. People who were out looking for work during the week brought all their problems to the clinic on Saturday—and stood in line till Sunday, it seemed. But this had been an especially long two days for her.

  Oliver had been on her mind like a brain tumor. The sound of his laughter, the sudden catch in his voice, the tiny crescent-shaped scar on the back of his hand...

  There was a knock at her door.

  “You know, you’re pretty creepy yourself,” she said, pulling the door open without checking to see who it was first, knowing as well as she knew her own face that he’d be standing there. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were?” He was pleased. Well, more than pleased. He wanted to rip her clothes off and bury himself so deep inside her that parts of him would never know daylight again.

  “I was wondering if you’d bring an umbrella.”

  “Oh. No. I didn’t even think about it,” he said, at a loss. “I guess I should have. We can stop someplace and buy one.”

  “Absolutely not. Why go to the park when you know it’s going to rain, just to stand under an umbrella?”

  Why go at all? he wanted to know, but didn’t ask. He’d been so eager to see her, he’d arrived thirty minutes early. Another first. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

  They teetered in the doorway, wanting to kiss hello, wondering if they should shake hands, deciding it might be best to delay any physical contact.

  “Come in and sit for a minute,” she said. “I want to change clothes.”

  Why? he wondered. She’d be soaked to the bone in five minutes.

  Her apartment seemed to have shrunk since his last visit. He could spit from one end to the other. It was wallpapered, had freshly painted trim, and was neat and cheery, but it gave “efficiency apartment” new meaning. She could cook breakfast, brush her teeth, and make the bed in three easy steps. And why hadn’t he noticed before that there was no bedroom, he speculated, pondering the couch, trusting it would fold out into a bed. A one-room apartment with a kitchen and bath. Oakland wasn’t any different than any other town. There were places to live, and then there were places to live... but this wasn’t one of them.

  Holly, on the other hand, didn’t think of it as all that terrible a place. She knew most everyone in her building and was on saluting terms with several of the merchants and a few of the people across the street. She liked to call it a neighborhood with potential—for both harmony and discord.

  “I’m glad you came early,” she called from the bathroom. He rolled his eyes. She’d noticed. “I’ve been dying to ask if you really asked Clare Hilendorfer if her costume the other night was a bun in the oven?”

  He grimaced.

  “Well, she was standing there with those cooking mitt things on both hands and she did look pregnant. I didn’t see the little handle she was holding until it was too late.”

  “And by then she really was too hot to handle, huh?” she asked, stepping back into the room, grinning.

  “She was... upset. I apologized, but the damage was done.”

  “She almost laughed about it yesterday.”

  “You went to St. Augustine’s yesterday? I thought you had to work yesterday.”

  “I did go to work. The hospital’s on my way home, so I stop in to visit a lot. Thursdays I’m there all day. Are you ready to go?”

  The weather in Oakland was remarkably different from that of San Francisco in the summertime. Warmer, drier, no fog. In winter the differences were less noticeable—they were both a little cooler and wetter.

  Holly had put on a bulky knit sweater and blue jeans that reminded Oliver of the wallpaper in her apartment—old, clean, and stuck tight to the walls. She had one of those rear ends that were almost impossible not to reach out and smack.

  “Ow,” she cried, startled, rubbing her tush as she turned to him. “What was that for?”

  “It was a vote of understanding for Barry Paulson,” he said, looking straight ahead into the rain as he passed her on the sidewalk.

  “Who’s Barry Paulson?”

  “A man with two shirts and no self-control,” he answered cryptically, hoping that poor Barry was giving up everything he owned for a fanny as nice as Holly’s. He stepped to the curb to open the door of his car. “I have absolutely no respect for him.”
>
  She was frowning at him in confusion, then noticed the open door.

  “Oh, no. We’ll ruin your upholstery with our wet clothes. There’s a BART station two blocks down, and it’ll take us right to the park.”

  He looked up and down the street in both directions and saw plenty of other cars. But in their midst his late-model Lincoln looked like a shiny invitation to grand theft auto. Why hadn’t he brought his driver?

  “Okay,” he said with misgivings. He snatched a brown paper bag from the front seat. He locked the doors and set the alarm.

  Strange... When she sidled up to him, slipping her hand into his, he didn’t once look back at his car.

  “Isn’t this great?” she asked, tipping her face to the downpour. It was running down his raincoat in streamlets. His hair was plastered to his head, his face was wet, and he had to keep blinking to see. It was pretty great all right. But only because the raindrops sparkled in her eyelashes and lingered dewy-fresh on her skin, calling him to sip away every drop to quench his thirst. She pushed her dark hair up and away from her face. He wondered if he’d ever known anything as uniquely and naturally beautiful as Holly Loftin. “There’s nothing like a good rain to wash away your troubles,” she said.

  “Do you have troubles?”

  “Who, me?” she asked, thinking of her drawer full of bills and overdrawn bank slips. “Troubles are for people who think too much, but never think to change anything.”

  They talked about Oakland on the way to the park—after a small show of getting him his own transit pass.

  “After school I took some time off; there were...” she hesitated briefly “...some things I’d been wanting to do for a long time. I started looking around San Francisco, and then I got sidetracked to Oakland. I found someone here that I didn’t think I could leave. So I stayed. I got a job and a place to live and started a life here. And I like it. I like the town and I like the people. I’m comfortable here.”

  Only a fool would have assumed that there hadn’t been any other men in her life—and Oliver was no fool. He wasn’t even disappointed. But he felt a certain blackness in his heart for the person who’d had the power to make her give up her home and family to live in a strange town, alone, fending for herself.