Signs Point to Yes

by Sandy Hall

  So Jane let herself in through the back door and was met by a shirtless Teo in the kitchen.

  If she were a different kind of girl, she would have let out a wolf whistle.

  For the record, she’d seen him without his shirt plenty of times in the past. He was the kind of guy who would mow the lawn without a shirt on or would whip it off while playing soccer with his friends. He was a lifeguard, for God’s sake, Jane told herself. She’d seen his naked torso on numerous occasions.

  But somehow, while he was sleep-mussed and standing in his own kitchen wearing only a pair of basketball shorts, it was a completely different story.

  She tried to calculate the last time she’d seen him without his shirt on and realized it was probably last summer. Jane would guess he’d done a lot of abs work during those long winter months, because she could basically count his six-pack.

  “You’re early!” Teo said, putting down his glass of orange juice and covering himself with a paper towel.

  Jane turned away to hide her laughter and the blush that was traveling up her entire body, only to walk directly into a kitchen chair.

  “Sorry,” Jane squeaked, apologizing to Teo and the chair she knocked over.

  “No, it’s cool. Just a little surprising,” Teo said, looking at the paper towel as though he wasn’t entirely sure how it had gotten in his hand. He put it down, then went into the laundry room and grabbed a sleeveless T-shirt, pulling it over his head as he reemerged.

  “Thanks. I obviously can’t handle the sight of boy nipples,” Jane said, blushing even more deeply and slapping her hand over her mouth. I shouldn’t even be allowed to speak, she thought.

  Teo’s eyes went wide, and he blushed as deeply as Jane had.

  She squeezed her eyes closed and balled her hands into fists.

  “What are you doing?”

  She carefully opened one eye so she wouldn’t totally lose her concentration. “I’m trying to sink through the kitchen floor.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.”

  “Any advice?”

  “I’ve never actually sunk through a floor before,” Teo said, but now he was smiling, and Jane could at least relax a little.

  Jane cleared her throat. “So, um…”

  “Teo,” an annoyingly familiar voice said from the basement stairs, “I thought you were bringing down Pop-Tarts.”

  Jane thanked all the gods she could think of that someone was about to rescue her from this embarrassing moment.

  Unfortunately, that someone was none other than Ravi Singh.

  He took one look at Jane, and then, making a production of ignoring her, he turned to Teo. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Ravi,” Jane said.

  “Oh, Jane, how lovely to see you,” Ravi said with the kind of fake grin usually reserved for creepy clowns in horror movies.

  Teo just stood there with his mouth open. He had backed himself into the doorway. Jane figured he wanted to be able to beat a hasty retreat if she and Ravi went nuclear on each other.

  “You want a Pop-Tart?” Ravi asked Teo, holding the box he had found in the pantry and offering one to him but not to Jane.

  Truth be told, Jane did want a Pop-Tart, but she certainly wasn’t going to ask Ravi for one as if she were some kind of peasant asking for a boon.

  “I need to get out of here,” Ravi told the room. “I have SAT prep this morning. I need to get my score up if I’m serious about applying to anywhere Ivy League.”

  Jane rolled her eyes and tried not to regurgitate her granola bar.

  “How did you do on the SATs?” Ravi pointedly asked Jane, stuffing half a Pop-Tart into his mouth.

  Lucky for Jane, he wasn’t the first person she’d had to dodge on this matter. “I did perfectly fine for where I want to go.”

  “And where do you want to go?” Ravi asked, gesturing with the other half of his Pop-Tart. “I think you’d be good with one of those HVAC repair programs, or maybe a gas station attendant.”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Mom. Maybe wherever you aren’t?”

  Teo snorted and Jane looked over at him, shocked. Ravi usually tossed insults at Jane, and Jane took them while Teo stood idly by, ignoring their back-and-forth.

  As Jane was about to go on, feeling bolstered by Teo’s seeming appreciation of her level of wit, all three of his sisters came spilling into the kitchen.

  “Jane, Jane, Jane!” they all said at the same, each of them trying to tell her something different.

  Buck walked in then, too, and patted Teo on the back.

  “You’re looking good this morning,” Buck said to Teo, squeezing his biceps on one arm. “Did you start using heavier weights, like I suggested?”

  Jane would have died on the spot, but Teo seemed to take his stepfather’s words in stride, even if he curled in on himself a bit, crossing his arms and stepping away from Buck.

  Jane would have liked to stay and listen to the rest of the exchange because, damn, she should be getting exercise tips from Teo, and maybe Buck, too, if he was the genius behind Teo’s new body. Unfortunately, the girls were all desperate to take her to the basement and show her various toys.

  “Mom said we had to wait for the boys to wake up,” Keegan explained, taking Jane’s hand and walking down the carpeted stairs. “We wanted to wake them up, but she wouldn’t let us.”

  The large basement had two separate areas, one with a TV and a sectional couch, where the floor was piled high with blankets and pillows from the sleepover. Beyond that, an area in the back was sectioned off with shelving that held all the girls’ toys, including a kitchen set that Jane would have gone wild for as a kid.

  The girls got deep into playing almost immediately, and Jane joined in. She tried to focus their play on the kitchen area, because, really, it was beautiful, but they seemed to want to play a game that, from what Jane could gather, was essentially My Little Pony DMV. There was a pony behind a couple of blocks in a pile, and the other ponies would step up and ask questions about insurance coverage.

  They didn’t even really want Jane to play, because every time she picked up one of the figures, they would tell her that now Applejack (or whoever) had to go to the end of the line because Jane had made her lose her spot.

  Connie came down to say good-bye to the girls.

  She tsked at the mess that the boys had left in the basement and told Jane not to clean it up for them. “They’re big boys. They can handle it.”

  It hadn’t even crossed Jane’s mind to clean it up.

  Connie asked Jane to come back upstairs so they could go through the regular schedule.

  Today would be easy because the girls only had swim class at eleven. “I tried to keep it light to start with so you could get used to the routine and get to know the girls a little bit better,” Connie said.

  “Thanks,” Jane said, trying to peek around to see if muscle-man Teo was still lurking.

  “Do you feel okay about driving the minivan?”

  “Yes.”

  “And make sure the girls are all strapped into their seats before you drive. Sometimes they like to pretend they buckled themselves in, and then they climb into the front seat and scare the bejesus out of me.”

  “That sounds terrifying.”

  Connie nodded and smiled. “If you need anything, text or e-mail me. Even when I’m in class, I can usually get back to people that way. But the girls are really self-sufficient. Try to be at least within earshot of them, but you don’t need to be on top of them all the time.”

  Jane nodded. She could handle that.

  “Feel free to bring along a book or a magazine or summer homework or anything,” Connie said. “I know you’re giving up a lot of time to be here, so I don’t want you to feel like you have to watch them every second.”

  Jane smiled because that was very good news. She had totally planned to watch them every second.

  “And if you’re hungry, take whatever you want from the fridge or the cabinets. Let
me know if there’s anything you like that we don’t have. Especially lunch-wise, since you’ll need to feed yourself and the girls every day.”

  Connie must have caught Jane’s scared look. “It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. Sandwiches, fruit. Rory doesn’t eat bread. She’s not allergic or anything—she just doesn’t eat it—so I make her cheese roll-ups or crackers with peanut butter.”

  Connie finished packing her bag and let out a deep sigh. “All right. I’ll see you around five!” she said.

  Jane went back down to the basement and kept an eye on the time, but it seemed to be moving in the wrong direction when the girls decided they wanted to play hide-and-seek. They would hide and Jane would have to find them. And according to the girls, all games of hide-and-seek had to be started from the living room.

  Jane threw open the basement door at the top of the stairs and felt it crash into someone.

  “Ah!” Teo’s voice came from behind the door.

  The girls slipped around Jane and out of the basement while Teo stood there rubbing his exposed toes in his flip-flops.

  “I’m so sorry!” Jane said. “I thought you’d already left for work.”

  “It’s cool. It’s not a big deal. I didn’t need those particular toes,” he said. “Crap, I never cleaned up the basement, did I?”

  Jane shook her head, and Teo glanced at the time on his phone.

  “It’s cool,” Jane said. “I’ll clean it up. It’s the least I can do, since I just hobbled you. The girls will help. Right, girls?”

  They looked blankly at Jane.

  “Don’t you want to help Teo out?” she asked them.

  They looked at her, and then at Teo, and then at one another before they started dancing around and yelling, “Yes! We love to help!”

  “Yeah, we’ll take care of it for you. After we play hide-and-seek.”

  Teo grinned and squeezed her shoulder. “Good luck with hide-and-seek, and I totally owe you one. Thanks.”

  Jane smiled as she stood in the living room with her eyes closed and counted to fifty, as the girls had instructed her. If Teo was going to be a nice guy this summer, it would definitely help balance out the pain of Ravi.

  When Jane got to fifty, she yelled, “Ready or not, here I come!”

  Checking upstairs first seemed like a good idea, since she hadn’t heard the door to the basement open.

  Buck had done a lot of work on the house over the years, putting on an addition and reconfiguring the layout. It was like a completely different home. Jane was met with a long hallway of closed doors when she got upstairs, and she tried to listen for giggles, but there was complete, eerie silence.

  Maybe the girls hadn’t gone upstairs; maybe they went outside to hide, even though Jane had told them outside was off-limits. Or maybe they had left completely and were on their way to Acapulco, for all Jane knew.

  She tried to imagine breaking the news to Connie and Buck that somehow she had lost all three children while playing hide-and-seek on her first day. After the court trial, there would be a made-for-TV movie about the girls: Hide-and-Seek Gone Horribly Wrong: The Story of the Buchanan Sisters.

  After prowling the hallway, listening for any sound of the girls behind the closed doors, she decided she needed to be more systematic in her approach. She would open each door and check under the beds and in the closets. After that she would check the basement.

  The first door she opened was obviously the twins’ room. Two beds to check under and just a tiny closet. Next was Connie and Buck’s room. She scanned it fast because it felt totally wrong to be in there. Unfortunately, they had a rather large walk-in closet that required extra effort.

  After that there was the bathroom, where she looked behind the shower curtain and then in the linen closet. Unless the girls had climbed onto a shelf and perfectly replaced all the folded towels and sheets in front of them, she could definitely cross off the linen closet with one quick look.

  The next room was Teo’s. She really didn’t want to be in Teo’s room, but she had to check for the girls, because now she was getting a little nervous.

  She bumped her hip on his computer desk, and the screen came alive. She didn’t mean to look at the search bar, but her eye was drawn to it.

  How to find your biological father, it said.

  Jane gasped and put her hand over her mouth. This was not information that she should be privy to. Immediately she x-ed out the window, and a second one was open behind it. Consuela Garcia and Jose Rodriguez, the search said in that window. She closed that one, too, and backed out of the room, shutting the door and fleeing back downstairs, trying not to think about what she’d just seen.

  The girls were all sitting at the kitchen table, eating grapes.

  “You didn’t come find us,” Keegan said.

  “I was looking for you everywhere upstairs,” Jane explained, taking a grape for herself and sitting across from the girls.

  “We were in the basement.”

  “I thought for sure you would have hidden under a bed or in a closet.”

  Rory looked terrified. “That’s where the monsters live.”

  Jane laughed. “Good to know,” she said. “How did you get downstairs without the door making any noise as you opened and closed it?”

  “You have to do it really slow,” Keegan said.

  “Also good to know,” Jane said as she focused on the kids, determined to forget that she had ever been in Teo’s room.

  Chapter 5

  Barely ten minutes into his shift, Teo had a sinking feeling in his gut like he forgot to turn off the stove. But it was worse than potentially setting the house on fire, because he was pretty sure that what he’d forgotten to do was clear his search history. He paced around the pool, trying to remember exactly how the morning had played out.

  He’d been so humiliated by Buck’s mention of his workout regime that the second Ravi left for SAT prep, Teo ran upstairs to his room to do more dad searching, this time starting with something broader. Obviously, other people had searched for their biological fathers, and maybe Teo was trying too hard to reinvent the wheel.

  It wasn’t long before he’d looked at the clock and found that he was going to be late for work if he didn’t get his crap together. He’d left as quickly as humanly possible, and he really couldn’t remember if he’d closed out his search or not.

  He was so desperate for his mom or the girls not to see it that he almost considered calling Jane and asking her to close up the tabs for him. But then Jane would ask questions—questions Teo didn’t want to answer. He was starting to sweat just thinking about it. He ran a hand through his hair and tried to rationalize the situation.

  No one really went in his room all day. It could happen, though. But his computer would probably go to sleep after a while, and unless someone purposely woke it up, he would be fine. He didn’t think Keegan really had it in her to be that nosy, and the twins couldn’t read that well yet.

  The good news was that Jane and his sisters would arrive at the pool in mere minutes for swim class. Surely he would know right off the bat whether Jane had found out his secret. Or, worse, whether Keegan had fulfilled his nightmarish prophecy of reading his search results. Wouldn’t he?

  When Jane came through the pool gate, she waved at him and didn’t seem particularly fussed, or like she had learned his secret that morning. At least he hadn’t been looking at porn, he told himself. But he found little comfort in that thought.

  The pit in his stomach grew.

  Teo watched Jane walk over to the covered seating after having made sure the girls joined the right groups. Rory was still in a state of distress because she was in a lower group than Piper and Keegan were, but she needed to learn that swimming wasn’t something to fool around with.

  Jane sat down next to a girl Teo knew from school but wasn’t really friends with. Claudia Lee, that’s her name, he thought. Teo tried to read Jane’s lips as she was talking to Claudia. Not that he expected her t
o gossip with Claudia Lee about his personal dad-searching business, even if she had snooped on his computer, but still, he didn’t really know Jane all that well.

  He couldn’t figure out how Jane knew Claudia. Jane ran in a crowd of dorky, less smart girls. She was like a band geek who wasn’t in the band. Unless maybe she was in the band. Teo honestly wasn’t sure. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had talked to Jane at school, or even really noticed her there. Maybe when they’d ended up sitting next to each other at the drunk-driving assembly the year before.

  He really didn’t want Ravi’s crazy anti-Jane propaganda to get to him. While he and Ravi were playing video games last night, Ravi wouldn’t shut up about how terrible Jane was.

  “I swear to God, she is the stupidest girl I’ve ever met,” Ravi had said out of nowhere.

  “Who now?” Teo had asked, mostly to annoy Ravi. He’d known exactly who Ravi had been talking about, but he sort of got tired of listening to the same old, same old from him. Sometimes he liked to mix it up and ask all the wrong questions.

  “Jane Connelly. She’s dumb.”

  “How do you figure?” Teo asked.

  “‘Uh, really, Ravi,’” Ravi said in a voice that Teo assumed was supposed to be Jane’s. “‘I don’t get it. How do the ducks know where to cross?’”

  “She never asked that.”

  “Sure she did.”

  “It was probably meant to be a joke, but you have no sense of humor whatsoever.”

  “I swear she asked it in driver’s ed last year.”

  “So is this really how we’re celebrating the end of school?” Teo asked. “Sitting in my basement, bitching about Jane Connelly?”

  They had changed subjects after that, thank God, because Teo couldn’t handle much more of Ravi’s Jane-bashing.

  The thing was, there wasn’t anything wrong with Jane. And he actually had a newfound respect for her after this morning. Not only had she totally ignored how ridiculously embarrassing Buck was, but she’d also offered to clean up the mess in the basement. In his book, that made her a decent person.

  Maybe he should just talk to Jane, see if she acted like she knew his secret.