by Rachel Lee
He felt despicable. He couldn’t imagine how he was going to explain it to the peanut when he got old enough to start asking.
“Well, kid,” he could hear himself saying, “I thought your mom was involved in drug dealing, so I made a pass at her....”
Yeah, right That was one for the movies.
He sighed and rolled onto his back, listening to the soft, happy sounds his son was making, and wondered why the world had gone all cockamamie on him.
He’d never meant to sleep with Rocky, but he had. He’d never wanted to be a father, but he was. He didn’t want to be attracted to Angela, but...
Oh, hell, he thought, closing his eyes. He couldn’t do anything about the past, but he sure as hell could keep himself from making another major mistake. No matter what he felt about Angela, he decided, he was going to keep it to himself.
He’d already made one mess. He damn well wasn’t going to make another.
The Daltons, Angela and Rafe played rummy that evening after dinner, gathered around the dining room table. Peanut, tuckered out from playing so hard that afternoon and apparently content after a bottle of Pedialyte, dozed in his carrier seat.
Angela was finding it difficult to concentrate on the game, because every time she looked up, Rafe’s gaze was on her. Every meeting of their eyes made something deep inside her quiver with recognition.
“You know,” Emma said after a particularly fun hand that had caused them all a lot of laughter, “it must have been like this before TV.”
“What do you mean?” Angela asked.
“What else did people do in the evenings? Talked to their neighbors, read, played cards. It’s like when you read a historical novel. You know. After dinner everyone retires to the salon to play cards or listen to someone play an instrument.”
“I’d skip the listening to someone play an instrument,” Gage said, shuffling the deck. They all laughed. “Well, I would,” he continued frankly. “Can you imagine how awful it must have been sometimes?”
“Worse yet,” Angela said, “imagine having to listen to someone like me sing. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
“But that’s not really the point,” Emma said. “Just think what we’ve lost because of television. People don’t socialize the way they used to when they had to entertain each other.”
“It’s true,” Gage agreed. “Like anything else, there are up and down sides, I suppose.”
“Well,” Emma continued, “I’ve lived here in this house all my life. I know all my neighbors. I can’t imagine what it must be like now for people who move into new neighborhoods and know no one. How can they ever meet if everyone’s inside watching the television?”
Rafe spoke. “They probably meet when they’re out doing yard work. Or buying dope from the corner dealer.”
That elicited another laugh from the group.
“Oh, all right,” said Emma, smiling. “I’ll stop.”
“I guess there are disadvantages to everything,” Angela said. “For every achievement we make, we seem to sacrifice something else.”
“That’s true,” Emma agreed. “I wasn’t complaining, just thinking about how nice it is to sit here like this talking and playing cards.”
“I imagine,” Rafe said, “that the great masses of humanity in the past didn’t have a whole lot of time left over to be wondering about how to entertain themselves in the evening.”
“Probably not,” Angela said. “Living hand-to-mouth on a sixty-hour work week would leave you exhausted.”
“Oh, stop,” Emma laughed. “All right, I was being ridiculously nostalgic for something that probably never existed.”
“Except for the privileged few,” Rafe said.
“Which means,” Angela remarked, “that we’re very lucky to be able to sit here and do this now.”
Rafe’s gaze caught hers, and she saw a smile in his eyes, a smile that left her feeling strangely light-headed.
Gage started dealing the cards. “Back to business, folks. Emma’s beating us all.”
Emma and Gage retired around ten, and Angela and Rafe were left with each other for company. Then the baby started fussing, and Rafe excused himself to take the child upstairs.
Angela felt inexplicably relieved. Wandering into the kitchen, she made herself a small snack as she had to every night. It was another hour before she could take her insulin, and time was suddenly heavy on her hands.
She’d never felt this way before when she visited Emma. They had always sat up until the wee hours, giggling and talking the way they had all those years ago in the college dormitory. But Gage’s presence changed that, and she felt bereft.
Which was ridiculous, she told herself bracingly. She couldn’t possibly be jealous because Emma had gotten married.
But she was. In her heart of hearts, she knew she was very jealous. It wasn’t just that Gage had taken part of her friend from her, it was that she was jealous of Emma’s happiness.
How unworthy. Emma deserved every bit of happiness she found, and Angela wished her well with her whole heart. But she couldn’t seem to shut up the little green-eyed monster that wanted the same thing for herself. The little green-eyed monster that said, “If she can have it, so should I.”
As with most of the women she knew, Angela had grown up with fairy-tale dreams about romance, marriage and family. Having those hopes dashed on the shoals of her diabetes apparently hadn’t made her any less wistful.
She knew that some women with diabetes were able to successfully have children, but her doctor felt she couldn’t. Even with the strict attempts she had made at controlling her disease when she became pregnant, she had still lost the child. And the dangers were just too great. Having her blood sugar go out of control during a pregnancy could result in serious deformity to the child, never mind what it might do to her.
And Lance, the man she had been engaged to at the time, had made it very clear that he didn’t want a wife who couldn’t have children. Of course, she knew there were men who wouldn’t feel that way, but there was something else that held her back.
Her own mortality. She could die at any time, and she knew it. One skipped meal, one missed insulin shot, could kill her. Just because it hadn’t so far, didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. More than once, stress or misbehavior had landed her in the hospital. And then there was the inevitable effect of diabetes itself. Eventually, if you couldn’t keep your blood sugar down, it caused nerve damage. Blindness. Heart disease. Amputation.
How could she ask anyone else to face that with her? It just didn’t seem fair to her, and if there was one thing she had a strong measure of, it was fairness.
But that didn’t keep her from daydreaming wistfully, and since she’d met Rafe, those daydreams seemed to be back in full force. Why? She wasn’t at all sure she liked him. He wasn’t always very nice. But when he picked up his son, she saw a whole different side of him.
And that side was overriding all her other perceptions of him.
Sighing, she put together a plate of cheese and crackers, but not too many crackers, because she was taking slow-acting insulin for the night Maybe she would look over Emma’s bookshelves and find something to read. She needed to get away from her own thoughts.
But as if in answer to them, Rafe appeared. “The peanut is back asleep,” he announced. “For a couple of hours, anyway.”
“Is he still waking you up at night?”
“It’s beginning to stretch out a little, but yeah, usually he wants to eat and play around midnight, then again at three. But last night he actually made it from three o’clock until seven.”
She smiled, but she could tell it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “There’s hope, then.”
“Apparently so.”
“Do you want some cheese and crackers?”
“No, thanks. I’ll just get myself a glass of milk. Do you want one?”
“Yes, please.”
He joined her at the table, passing her a tall glass of milk.
“How’s the baby feeling?” she asked him.
“Seems to be just fine.” He shrugged one shoulder. “The doctor said it might just be an upset from all the traveling.”
“I guess they’re delicate little creatures.”
He smiled faintly. “Sometimes it’s scary how delicate and dependent they are. At first I was almost afraid to pick him up.”
“But they’re tougher than we think, too.”
“I suppose so. But I don’t want to try it out.”
She laughed. “I wouldn’t, either.” And for some reason she wasn’t feeling tired any longer, but wide-awake and energetic. “It must be hard to be a single parent.”
“I don’t know. I never tried it the other way.”
She wasn’t quite sure how to take that response. His face revealed so little, and she always got the feeling from him that somewhere inside him there was an icy-cold core that nothing touched. Looking into his dark eyes, she felt that she could get frostbite if she got too close.
Trying to find a way to ease the discomfort she was suddenly feeling, she said, “I’ve never tried it at all.”
“It wasn’t my plan.”
That at least seemed forthcoming, so she decided she must have misinterpreted his expression. He was, she decided, simply a stone face. Then she wondered why it mattered, and why she was bothering to make conversation with him, anyway. There were more constructive things to expend her energy on, such as figuring out what she was going to do now that she had quit her job and wasn’t going back into the loan business.
But she was amazingly reluctant to think about that. It wasn’t like her, she realized, to avoid thinking about an issue that important. Usually she worried such things to death. Now, for the first time in her life, she was simply drifting, refusing to think about tomorrow or even such important concerns as how she was going to feed herself when she got back home.
Burnout, she decided. It had to be burnout. After she had rested awhile here, she would get back her interest in life.
“Do you ever get burned-out?” she heard herself ask Rafe.
He’d settled back in his chair, sitting at an angle to the table with his legs crossed at the ankle, running his finger up and down the side of his glass. He looked up when she spoke, and she caught a flicker of something in his gaze that was neither hard nor cold. Where had he been? she wondered.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I get tired of things the way everybody does, but I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been burned-out.”
“I am. I’m so burned-out that I can’t even make myself think about what I’m going to do when I get back home.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. You wouldn’t be resting much if you were worrying.”
“That’s true.” She sighed and forced herself to eat another piece of cheese.
“What are you burned-out about?” he asked. “Your job? Your diabetes?”
“Both, I think.”
“That’s a lot of burnout.”
“No kidding.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Basically, it’s sixty percent of your life.”
“More like ninety.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Listen to me whine.”
“Nothing wrong with whining. I do it myself.”
“You? When do you whine?”
“I do most of mine on the job.” His smile deepened a shade, nearly reaching his eyes. “When I don’t like an assignment or a plan of operation.”
“That’s not whining, to complain about assignments and plans. I’m talking about not liking your life.”
He was silent a minute, looking at the glass of milk. When he spoke, he didn’t look at her. “I don’t particularly like mine, Angela.”
She had the feeling he was just coming to that realization himself, and she felt unexpectedly touched that he had shared that with her He struck her as a man who didn’t share much of himself with anyone. “What don’t you like?”
He looked at her wryly. “Middle-of-the-night feedings?” But then he shook his head. “No, that’s not the problem. Not really. I haven’t been on the street since the kid was born. I guess it’s giving me too much time to think.”
“And that’s bad?”
He shrugged. “Keeping busy can be just a good way to avoid thinking.”
“I guess it can. Have you been avoiding thinking?”
“Apparently so.”
He didn’t volunteer any more than that, and she didn’t quite know how to ask.
“Or,” he said after a few moments, “maybe I’m just growing up. Having a kid will do that, I hear.”
“I imagine it would. I’ve never really had anybody to think about except myself.” Except for a brief time when she’d been engaged and pregnant and had made the mistake of making someone else the center of her life.
He flashed an unexpected smile. “I actually find myself doing adult things like worrying about my responsibilities. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve never thought of life in terms of responsibilities before. It was always something I just did. Next thing you know, I’ll be worrying about retirement.”
She felt a smile lift the corners of her own mouth. “Having kids will do that, too.”
“It’s sure making me feel old.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s hard to feel like a kid when you have a kid depending on you.”
Angela hesitated, then asked, “Do you think you have to be a kid to work undercover?”
He thought about it for a minute. “Maybe not for everybody, but for me, yes. I always felt like a kid playing a game.”
She noticed he put that in the past tense, and she wondered about it. “A dangerous game.”
“Oh, yeah. Very. Never bothered me before.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m thinking about it.”
She spoke uncertainly. “That might not be a good thing if you go back on the street. I mean...it might make you hesitaste....”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too. Oh, well.”
She wondered how he could dismiss it so easily. If she could see the dangers, surely he must be able to. “And what about this guy who’s looking for you and the baby? Are you worried about him?”
“A bit.”
“Well, he’ll never think to look for you all the way out here.”
“Probably not.”
But he would have to go home sometime. Angela heard the thought as surely as if he’d spoken it out loud. “It’s an awful mess.”
“It could be.” He rubbed his chin. “Mess or not, I’m not going to let them have Peanut. They may think that because they’re related it gives them a right, but I won’t have any kid of mine exposed to a bunch of criminals.”
“But this Manny might not be a criminal, you said.”
“Maybe not, but the rest of the Molinas sure as hell are. Even the kid’s grandmother, although to hear Manny tell it, the woman’s a saint.”
“Really?” The thought amazed Angela. She’d never linked the words grandmother and criminal in her mind before.
“Hell, yes,” Rafe said. “As far as we can tell, she’s in on the planning, and she’s the one who keeps up the South American contacts. It’s her relatives back in Colombia who are the other end of the drug pipeline. One of these days we’ll nail her just the way we nailed her son. And no kid of mine is going to be in the middle of that.”
“I can see why not.”
“I guess I’ll have to get a transfer.”
“Will you miss Miami?”
He snorted. “It’s just a place, one I’m not especially fond of.”
“I guess you don’t get to see much of the good parts.”
“Nope.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Is it?” His eyes were cold as they returned to her. “What difference does it really make? A place is a place. It’s what you make it. My job would probably make any place ugly.”
“That’s sad.”<
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“Somebody’s got to do it.”
She nodded, but wondered at his bitterness and cynicism. And his idealism. Somebody’s got to do it, said a lot about him. He was an odd mix of character traits, and she realized that he fascinated her. She’d never met anyone like him.
“But enough about me,” he said. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You said you’re suffering from burnout. Since you can’t get rid of your diabetes, what are you going to do about the rest of it?”
“I don’t know. It’s pathetic, but all I really know is banking. I can’t imagine what else I can do.”
“Can’t you do something at the bank besides be a loan officer?”
She shook her head. “That’s about as high as I’m going to go. Going any higher means getting into bank management And, frankly, there’s something of a glass ceiling and no openings anyway.”
“Try another bank. Unless it’s banking in general you’re burned-out on.”
“I honestly don’t know.” She crumbled a cracker into dust as she thought about it. “Besides, it all seems so pointless.”
“Pointless? What’s pointless?”
She waved a hand and said extravagantly, “Everything.” As soon as she said it, she was embarrassed. It was one thing to feel that way and another to say it out loud.
“Life, you mean?”
She nodded and looked down, biting her lip. It was awful to admit just how hopeless she was feeling, and she wished she’d never said it, especially to this man with the hard eyes.
“Why do you feel that way? Everybody goes through bad patches.”
“Well, I’ve been going through one since I was eight years old.” The words suddenly burst from her, and there was no calling them back. “I have a chronic, incurable disease that could kill me at any tune. If it doesn’t kill me right off, it’ll probably rot me away in little pieces.”
“Have you felt hopeless all along?”
“No...I...” She couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d bared her soul, and he was going to hand her logic? Jumping up, she fled from the room, determined to go to bed, wondering why she’d ever been stupid enough to admit what she was really feeling, hating herself for the weakness of feeling that way.
