The First Kiss

by Grace Burrowes

  “Mom said I wasn’t allowed to call Grace, because it’s almost dinnertime. I didn’t call Grace.”

  “You called Merle?”

  Twyla’s frown became confused. “How did you guess?”

  Clever kid. “I guessed because I’m a lawyer. Maybe you’ll be one too.”

  “Heaven forefend.” That from Baba Yaga at the stove.

  “Oh, come on now,” James said. “Not all lawyers are weasels. Why did you call Merle, Twy, when you knew she was likely sitting down to dinner too?”

  Twy fiddled with a folded napkin. “Because I…forgot…book.”

  “Twyla Scholastica Waltham.” Vera propped both hands on her hips. “If you forgot your book at school, then what is the rule?”

  “I have to learn the consequences of my behavior,” Twyla muttered, but then she put her fists on her hips in an exact imitation of her mother’s posture. “But I didn’t forget my stupid book at school, and you never listen!”

  She bolted for the door, but James caught her by one wrist.

  “When people bellow at me like that,” he said, “I am less inclined to listen, and if raising your voice to your mother isn’t against a rule, in this house it will be from now on. What were you saying about your book?”

  James dropped her wrist, and to give the kid credit, she stood her ground.

  “I didn’t leave it at stupid school, I put it in my stupid backpack to take home, but started doing my homework while we waited for the bus. Grace wanted to see, and I started talking to Merle while Grace looked at my book, and Grace stuffed my book in her backpack by mistake just as the bus came, and it’s not her fault, but I don’t want to get in trouble either, because I didn’t leave my stupid, idiotic, moronic book at school.”

  Vera’s fists dropped from her hips and her expression became bewildered, which James considered an improvement over that god-awful thunderous frown.

  “Why didn’t you say so, Twy?” Vera asked.

  “Because”—Twyla screwed up her face in a sneer and pitched her voice higher—“I don’t want to hear any excuses, Twyla Scholastica Waltham. You’re too smart a girl to be so forgetful, Twyla. This is little-girl behavior, Twyla. That’s why.”

  Twyla’s lip quivered, and she turned into James’s side, a miserable little ball of overwhelmed righteous indignation. Vera’s expression shaded toward despairing, and James held out an arm to her.

  She’d been distant at lunch, probably still processing her discussion with Trent, which James knew from Vera’s recounting had been frustrating. As Vera leaned in against his other side, he put an arm around each female.

  “You’re both tired and hungry, and on edge about going home tomorrow. Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” Vera said, her hand straying over Twyla’s hair.

  Twyla nodded.

  “Then this is a misunderstanding, and can be easily fixed with a few apologies.”

  “Right again,” Vera said, crouching down. “I will try to listen more patiently, Twy. You haven’t forgotten a book in a long time, and I overreacted when you called Merle. I’m sorry.”

  Twyla shifted from a grip on James to twine her arms around her mother’s neck. “You never yell at me anymore. Why did you yell at me? It’s just a stupid book, and I only talked to Merle for three seconds.”

  “Holy shit!” James crossed the kitchen in two strides, not quickly enough to prevent a pot from boiling over. He lifted the sizzling, bubbling mess off the stove until the boiling slowed, and then turned down the burner.

  “You’re not supposed to cuss,” Twyla said, a ghost of a grin tracing her mouth.

  “Then I have something to apologize for too,” James said. “But let’s sit down to dinner before something else goes amiss.”

  Or James said more bad words.

  “You won’t get into your jeans first?” Twyla asked.

  “Not tonight. Tonight I’m hungry as a bear.” And James was damned if he’d leave these two alone unsupervised when he didn’t have to. Still, dinner was a subdued business, with Twyla yawning over her dessert and leaving the table for her bath without a word of protest.

  “You stay right there,” James said to Vera. “I’ll get the dishes, and you can tell me what a bad mother you think you are.”

  This earned him a wan smile.

  “You heard her. I never yell anymore. That means I used to yell, and now I don’t—as much.”

  James collected plates and cutlery into a stack and took it to the sink, then put a mug of water into the microwave. An Eeyore mug, in honor of the prevailing mood.

  “So we’ll analyze one tired, bad—and might I add, at the risk of provoking you to glowering—rattled moment to death?” he asked.

  “Rattled.” Vera’s very lack of fight concerned James more than burned dinner, raised voices, or missing schoolbooks. “I’m nervous about being in that house alone. I admit that.”

  The microwave dinged.

  “I can stay with you for a few nights,” James offered. “I’ll sleep on the damned couch if you’re worried what Twy will think.”

  Vera watched as James slapped a couple chamomile tea bags into the steaming mug and set it before her.

  “Are you being sweet, or getting cold feet, James?”

  He set the stack of dirty dishes in the dish tub and parked his frustrations somewhere out among the neighbor’s heifers. Vera was tired, rattled, and facing multiple challenges, but she did not have to face them all alone.

  Her bun was coming loose too. James braced his hands on either side of her, pushed her bun aside with his chin, and fastened his lips to her nape.

  “I have been wanting to get my mouth on some part of you since I walked in that door. I am not getting cold feet, Vera Waltham. You are upset and out of sorts. If you want the bed to yourself tonight, I understand, but you don’t have to pick a fight to get a little privacy. Thank Jesus, I am not eighteen years old and a walking erection.”

  She chuckled at this description, and then she laid her cheek against his biceps.

  “Can I make up my mind about this offer to sleep on the couch when I’m actually in the house?”

  “You may, and if you decide to fly solo, I’m only a phone call away. Drink your tea, and when Twy is done with her bath, why don’t you run one for yourself? I can read her a story or play I Spy, or whatever the secret ritual is.”

  From the look on Vera’s face, James had offered her the crown jewels or the keys to Grace’s cloud pasture.

  “Twy sometimes reads to herself, but mostly it’s just nighty-night and lights out,” Vera said

  “I can manage that.” James finished up the dishes, aware of Vera behind him at the table, sipping her tea and staring out the window at nothing. She hadn’t settled in her mind whatever had transpired with Trent, that much James could figure out, but something else was bothering her.

  “You OK?” he asked as he put the last dish in the drain rack. “I don’t know when I’ve ever seen you so quiet, Vera.”

  “Just thinking. I’ll go check on Twy.”

  She passed him her mug and left him alone in the kitchen.

  Thinking about what? About the spat with Twy, about returning to a house where she didn’t feel safe, about the restraining order expiring—she’d laid that one on him at lunch—or about something musical?

  For all James was falling in love with her, he didn’t know her as well as he—

  Falling in love?

  Was it falling in love when he was happy to smell even a burning dinner because she made it? Was it falling in love when he spent the entire workday watching the clock just so he could be home doing dishes in the same room as his lady? Was it falling in love when he offered to sleep on the damned couch?

  When he didn’t want to let her go, not even to her own house one and a half farms away?
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br />   The door to the fridge now sported three drawings, two by Twy, one by Grace, of unicorns and cows. The autumn cookie tin had somehow migrated from the top of Vera’s fridge to his own, and a magnet in the shape of a gold eighth note held one corner of the drawings. James had shared a hot meal with Vera and Twy for the last three nights, and Twyla’s zoo collage lunch pail sat open on the counter.

  Yes, it was falling in love. If, after eight years, it turned James’s house into a home, then what he felt for Vera Waltham couldn’t be anything other than falling in love.

  * * *

  Vera came downstairs after a truly wonderful bath to find James at the piano, his fingers coaxing a soft, sonorous version of Brahms’s lullaby from the keys.

  “Did Twy ask you for that?”

  He nodded as he brought the piece to a sighing, twinkling close.

  “We missed your last lesson, James,” she said, taking the place beside him.

  “We’ll make it up.” He slid an arm around her waist. “Twy was out like a light, but we called Hannah and made sure the errant book will be at school tomorrow too.”

  “Good thought.” A thought Vera should have had, a practical thought aimed at solving the child’s problem, not just yelling at the girl.

  “Stop that,” James said, jostling Vera gently. “The best mothers have bad days.”

  “You’re not a mom.” Though the protest was weak, and she laid her head on his broad and sturdy shoulder.

  “I had a mom. I am coming to realize she was a good mom, for the most part, but she didn’t plan on the loss of my father, and couldn’t find her bearings after he died.”

  The comment caught Vera’s notice, because James seldom brought up his past. For all he wandered Inskip’s farm almost daily, he’d never discussed his own boyhood on a farm, never explained why he chose law over agriculture.

  “Your mother never considered remarrying?” Vera asked.

  “She never looked at another man, and loving that way—” James closed the cover over the keys. “I haven’t been serious about a lady because I could not see past what happened to Mom when Dad died.”

  That had the ring of insight—of recent insight. “What happened?”

  He touched the place where the cover could be locked over the keys, except most piano owners lost the key to the mechanism. Vera’s was in her wallet and had been for years.

  “Mom held it together for a while,” James said, “but she was white-knuckle widowing, pretending to function when anybody was looking. Widows are warned to watch the drinking, but alcohol got the better of her, and she never did shake it.”

  “Where were your brothers?” Where was anybody—neighbors, church, friends, extended family—who ought to have stepped in?

  “Gone, off to college, then to law school. I’m younger. I was the one left at home.”

  “Mac said something about this.” Vera laced her fingers with James’s when she wanted instead to play him something comforting, soothing, and healing. “How bad was it?”

  He stared at their joined hands.

  “Worse than Mac or Trent know. They assume she’d genteelly fall off the wagon every few months, at the holidays, on their anniversary, around the time of Dad’s death, but she drank every day too. There were all manner of anniversaries Trent and Mac couldn’t see.”

  And James probably remarked each one, still. “Such as?”

  “When the peepers start singing in the spring. The first frost, planting, when the corn comes down in the fall, when the corn tassels midsummer, the first haying, the first calf, the first crocus, the last cutting of hay, the first robin in spring. The entire agricultural year was a reminder of her loss, and I wasn’t—”

  He used his free hand to trace the gleaming curves of the piano’s empty music stand. “You sure you want to hear this?”

  “I want to hear this. It’s part of your music, James, and I want to hear it.” Part of why he was so naturally attentive, competent, and sad.

  Why hadn’t Vera seen that, when she herself had worn sadness like her favorite concert black outfit?

  “I loved my piano lessons,” James said. A lament in a handful of words. He’d loved his mother too, no doubt. “Somebody had to drive me to them, because farms are by nature isolated. By the time I was fifteen, Mom wasn’t sober enough to drive more days than not when I got home from school, and the deputies caught me driving myself one too many times. They understood—no charges were brought—but I was ashamed. If the authorities had gotten involved, then Mom’s situation would become common knowledge.”

  He turned off the lamp illuminating the music rack, and his grip on Vera’s hand became painfully tight.

  “I can see now I was only a kid,” James said. “At the time, I recall wondering: What would ever be enough for her? I wasn’t enough to keep her out of that bottle, the prettiest farm on earth wasn’t enough, pride wasn’t enough, good health, so many blessings, and still, she hurt and hurt and hurt.”

  And she’d hurt her youngest son.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Vera wrapped her arms around him, not knowing what else to say. Was this James’s way of explaining that he could never commit to one woman, or was it a confidence he’d share only if he were thinking of committing?

  He kissed her knuckles. “This is not a romantic tale.”

  A change of subject, then. Vera allowed James that dignity before she began weeping on behalf of his younger self.

  “It’s an honest tale, James, one worth acknowledging. We should be getting to bed, though.”

  “You want me to stick to my own bed? I can behave, Vera, if that’s your concern, but I’d just as soon… You’ll be back at your own house tomorrow, and the chance to spend…hell and damnation, this isn’t coming out right.”

  Yes, it was. It was coming out exactly right, though they needed one of those bad-words mason jars for each of their kitchens.

  “What are you trying to say, James?”

  “I’d like to share a bed with you, and I’m not out to pester you tonight. You’re tired, and tomorrow will be a challenge. I’ve moved some things at work around so I can take Twy to school and you can get your practicing done here, if you like, and I can stop by—”

  She put a finger to his lips. “Come up to bed, James. Please?”

  Vera had her doubts about James, about his feelings for her, his feelings for his own sister-in-law, his ability to sustain a long-term interest in a woman, given what he’d disclosed about his past.

  Those doubts seemed petty when James was spooned around her, drawing patterns of such tenderness on her back and shoulders that Vera almost put off moving back to her own house.

  An independent, self-sufficient woman could grow to love sleeping with James Knightley all too easily.

  She rose in the morning, feeling more confident of James for having spent the night together, and having thought some about his confessions. He’d shared a story with her Mac and Trent didn’t know, and that had to mean something.

  When she came downstairs, James was again seated at the piano, but Twyla was beside him, and they were both dressed for the day.

  “Your nose goes right here, at middle C,” James said. “If you look at where the manufacturer’s name is, that will be the C you’re looking for.”

  “This one?” Twyla depressed middle C.

  “Right, and we have a system for marking which finger to use on which note, because you only have a few fingers to work with, and there are many keys.”

  “How many?”

  “Eighty-eight on a standard modern piano.” He went on to explain how piano fingering symbols worked, and while Vera silently watched, he also matched notes to their places on the bass and the treble clefs.

  “I know this one,” Twyla chirped. “Every good boy does fine. E-G-B-D-F.”

  “
Yes, but this is my favorite: All cows eat grass because. A-C-E-G-B.”

  “You’re a farmer,” Twyla said, giggling. “I’m going to make up a different sentence for the left-hand spaces.”

  “You’re going to eat breakfast while you do,” James said, “or you’ll be too late to snag your book from Grace.”

  Twyla’s mouth formed into an O, and then her gaze fell on her mother. “Hi, Mom. James is teaching me how to play.”

  “Good morning.” Vera held out her arms to her daughter, and when Twy crossed the music room, Vera hugged her tightly. “Sounded like you’re making great progress, Twy.”

  “James said he didn’t start taking lessons until he was nine, and boys are slower than girls. I’m only eight.”

  “You’re also very smart,” Vera said around the lump in her throat. “You’ll be smarter if you eat breakfast before you take the world by storm.”

  “Great minds thinking alike,” James said. “Or great stomachs. Come on, Twy, and I’ll let you have a few of my chocolate chips.”

  The looming remove back to her house meant Vera didn’t taste her granola and strawberries. She was doing the dishes when she felt James’s arms come around her from behind.

  “I’m taking the prodigy to school,” he said. “You’ll be here when I get back?”

  Of course, she would. “Cavorting with Pischna.”

  “You know you don’t have to leave, Vera? Not today, not until you feel comfortable going back there?”

  And if she never wanted to leave? “I’ll do it today. Get it over with. Remind Twy where to get off the bus this afternoon.”

  “Right.” James kissed Vera’s cheek and stepped away. “You can leave those dishes and start practicing, if you’d rather.”

  How could she doubt James’s interest in her when he was so considerate? But then, he was always a gentleman, always responsible, always kind.

  Vera tried to focus on her technique when she had the house to herself, but the idea of playing the same exercises tomorrow under her own roof distracted her. Would the enhanced alarm system make her feel safer than James’s presence did?