Kisses And Kids (Congratulations Series #1)

by Andrea Edwards

  “And how long have you had this fascination with fire, Miss Stewart?”

  His teasing was unexpected, causing her to burst into laughter. He seemed like a friend suddenly, and her heart forgot its caution. The dark starry night and the campfire and light sparkling off the lake just beyond all wove a spell around her.

  “There’s something so magical here,” she said.

  “How can it be magic when you see how it’s being done?”

  Trisha turned toward him. She couldn’t really see him in the dark, but could feel his bewilderment. Poor guy. Was his life so predictable and concrete that he had no room for magic?

  “I guess I believe you never totally leave your childhood behind you,” she said.

  “I guess I believe you should always keep your feet planted firmly in the real world.”

  A lot of hardness lay behind his words. Or was it bitterness? She had a strong urge to soothe away his hurts and bring back the magic. “So you grew up on the west side.”

  “So what?”

  His voice held a challenge, a dare to find fault and, for a moment, she was taken aback. She didn’t believe that where a person was born or grew up had anything to do with his value as a human being, but he didn’t seem to be inviting a philosophical discussion.

  “So nothing,” she mumbled, angry at herself for backing down but angrier still that she’d thought he was mellowing. She’d seen him change his colors often enough to know he was as prickly as a cactus when anyone tried to get close.

  She turned to watch the fire, now burning very well. The flickering firelight created weird shadows that made things look spookier than they’d looked in the moonlight. Maybe that was the problem. This crazy light was just making things look different and she was having trouble distinguishing their shapes. Maybe she’d offended Pat by her statement.

  “I didn’t ask anything about you,” she said. “Your secretary mentioned it in passing.”

  Pat just grunted, but she took heart from the fact. If she was trespassing into private territory, he would have said something. She knew that much about him.

  “Maybe she thought you’d make a good role model for the kids,” Trisha said. “You know, someone who grew up with the same disadvantages they face, yet made something of himself.”

  “I think role models are vastly overrated.”

  His voice said he was getting distant, but she refused to let him retreat totally. “I disagree,” she said. “At least you could tell them how to succeed. They’d listen to you more than they would to me.”

  “The formula’s easy,” Pat said. “You have to leave the neighborhood and cut all ties to it.”

  “All ties?”

  “Every single damn one.” There was something so final, so clipped in his tone that she found no words would come.

  Her eyes strayed back to the campfire and the children around it. Some counselors had demonstrated an Indian dance and now the kids were joining in. Angie was one of the first ones up, leaving the others behind. Could she do the same as easily if she was leaving the neighborhood as Pat said?

  “What about family and friends?” Trisha asked, her eyes still on Angie dancing around the circle, getting farther and farther from Rulli and the others.

  “They’ll just hold you back.”

  That sounded so cold and calculating. Trisha didn’t know Pat very well—she’d be the first to admit it—but that was not the picture she’d formed of him. Obviously she’d been wrong. She forced herself to concentrate on the activities before them.

  “My father was an auto mechanic and my mom was a housewife. The four of us—I had a little brother about four years younger— lived over on the southwest side of the city. It was pretty much country back then.”

  A working-class, blue-collar family. Not rich by any means, but the father should have been able to provide adequately for them. More so than a lot of fathers could do in today’s economy.

  “My mother died when Matt was four.” Trisha heard him take a deep breath. “And things sort of went to hell for us after that.”

  Trisha had lost her father to divorce but she could see where losing a mother would be even harder. Women tended to hold a family together.

  “My father had to sell the house to cover medical expenses and we moved to a duplex over by Pulaski Park, not too far south of the club.”

  “Must have been rough.”

  Pat didn’t answer for a while. And when he did, there was pain in his voice. “Everybody hits a rough stretch of road now and again, but we could have made out all right.” He fell silent for a moment. “But Mom’s death hit my father really hard. I guess he wanted to hit back at something so he started hitting the bottle.”

  “He must have loved your mother a great deal.”

  Pat was looking beyond her, off toward the lake. “It started with a few drinks on the weekends. Then he began to lose his weekends as it took longer and longer to sober up.” He took a deep breath. “Somewhere along the way, the days all merged into one big weekend.”

  “How did you and your brother get along?” Trisha asked. “Did you have any other relatives in the area?”

  “Just my mother’s mother,” Pat replied. “But she and my father didn’t get along all that well when Mom was alive. Once he started drinking, there was nothing between them but anger.”

  She felt his pain and hurt and bitterness at life. “It must have been hard,” she said, seeing the inadequacy of her words, but not knowing what else to say.

  The kids had finished with the Indian dance and were now singing. Their voices all mingled to form such a strong statement of hope and promise that Trisha had to blink back tears. Surely these kids had a chance to succeed without the pain that was haunting Pat.

  “We did okay.” Pat’s voice had grown husky. “We did odd jobs for people. And if things got really bad, we’d sneak over to my grandmother’s. She’d feed us, get us new clothes when we needed them.”

  And when did they cut all ties? “I take it you two eventually left your father.”

  Pat was silent for a long time. The bonfire ceremony was winding down. The evening was just about over for the kids, and for her.

  “I left,” Pat finally said. His voice was almost a whisper. “I left at the end of my junior year in high school and went to live with my grandmother.”

  “And Matt stayed with your father?”

  “Matt.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Everyone called him Angel. He had such soft features and the biggest, most innocent-looking eyes you’d ever seen. He took after my mother.”

  Trisha thought of the boys at the club. “That kind of nickname could be hard on a boy.”

  “Yeah.” Pat drawled the word, dragging it out. “It worked both ways. With adults he could get away with things. They didn’t believe that anyone who looked so innocent could do anything bad. But with boys his own age, he found himself needing to work extra hard to prove himself.”

  “So his bad habits grew because he was getting away with stuff. At the same time, he was getting into a lot of fights.” Trisha paused. A kid didn’t keep on fighting unless he survived the last one. “And he got pretty good at it. Practice makes perfect, you know.”

  Pat laughed. “He always said he was going to be the world boxing champion and make a lot of money.” He fell silent again.

  The night no longer seemed filled with magic, but with secrets. Painful, awful secrets that lurked in the shadows ready to consume a person. Trisha wanted to touch Pat, hold his hand. But there seemed to be a force field around him, pushing her away, warning her to keep her distance.

  “I’m not sure how much he really stayed with my father after I left,” Pat said. “By the time he was twelve, his family was on the street, and once the streets get a kid, he’s gone. There’s nothing anyone can do to get him back. I kept trying, though.”

  Trisha let the silence ease the raw pain in the air. The fire was burning low, but the kids were still sitting around it and sin
ging soft, slow songs, like “Red River Valley” and “Kum-Ba-Ya.”

  She took a deep breath and looked up to see the stars dancing high above her head. They always made her own hurts seem so insignificant, but she was unable to let their magic close to her tonight. Pat’s anguish was too real and too near.

  “Just didn’t try hard enough, I guess.” His words came slow, like molasses in January. “Certainly not good enough.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Buried next to our parents.” He got to his feet, obviously done talking, and stretched as if he could shed the past like a sweater no longer needed.

  Trisha got up also, not knowing what to say. Nothing was probably what the situation called for, but she felt his pain was so raw, his guilt so deep that he needed some sort of soothing. Not that she could give it, though, she thought, knowing her own scars from her father’s abandonment were barely healed. She knew no words could make that kind of hurt go away.

  “Party’s over,” Pat said.

  Trisha looked below them. The children were milling about, looking for their counselors.

  “We’d better get our tribe together before the bears get them,” Pat said.

  “Right.” But there were worse things than bears lurking around these woods tonight.

  Chapter Four

  “Hey, Pat,” Rulli called out.

  Pat looked up from the screen door he was patching to see the kid running toward him. They’d had an arts-and-crafts session after breakfast, but Pat had managed to get out of it, saying he wasn’t going to sleep another night with the mosquitoes zooming in and out of this hole. Not that he’d slept much, since he’d been mentally kicking himself all night.

  He wasn’t a person who talked about himself, especially about his past. But last night the damn moonlight and bonfire and Trisha sitting so close had turned his spine to mush. He’d said way, way too much. Stuff he’d never intended to tell anyone.

  And stuff he certainly shouldn’t have told Trisha—he could see that from the sympathy overflowing from her eyes this morning. She was too used to taking on the troubles of her kids; it was second nature to her. If you let a woman like that peek into your soul, the next thing you knew, she’d be trying to force the doors open. Doors that he’d closed years ago and was going to keep closed.

  “Pat.” Rulli pulled to a stop in front of him, puffing slightly from running. “How come you didn’t answer? I was calling you.”

  Pat went back to weaving the patch over the hole. “Answer for what?” he asked. “I could see you coming and you could see me.”

  “Friends always answer each other,” Rulli said.

  Pat took a deep breath and looked away. That was the trouble with these kids. They had a life full of people hitting on them, so the first person that was polite became their bosom buddy—a role he wasn’t qualified for. Angel could testify to that. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Rulli replied. “No problem.”

  Don’t be so ready to forgive, Pat wanted to shout, but kept his lips tight. He was mad at the world this morning—no, mad at himself. And he wasn’t going to take it out on anyone but himself.

  “Look what I made,” Rulli said, holding up a small brown square for Pat to see. It was a little wallet, made from two pieces of leather sewn together with a thin strip of plastic.

  “Nice. Real nice.”

  “I made it for you.”

  Pat looked into the kid’s shining eyes, framed by an eager expression, and felt his stomach go sour. Damn it. This wasn’t his thing. He didn’t know how to be close to kids. Sure as shooting, he’d say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing and end up hurting somebody. There was a reason why he was a loner.

  “Thanks, kid,” he said lamely.

  “I know you already got a wallet,” Rulli said. “But Douglas said you got a lota money, so you could always use another one.”

  Those eager, hopeful eyes ate at him until it hurt. “Douglas is full of it,” Pat said. “You shouldn’t be listening to him.”

  “Don’t you like your wallet?”

  Pat had to look away. “Yeah, I like it fine.” What the hell was he doing at this camp, anyway? He didn’t know what to say to Rulli. He didn’t know what to do that wouldn’t hurt everyone more in the long run.

  “Angie says it’s ugly.”

  Pat sighed. “Angie’s even more full of it than Douglas.”

  “Full of what?” Rulli asked.

  The kid was small but he had the personality of a terrier, worrying at things until they broke. Pat shook his head. “I mean, you shouldn’t always be listening to other people.”

  “Miss Stewart says I’m supposed to listen to my teachers.”

  “That’s okay,” Pat said. “Teachers are good. You listen to them.”

  Rulli blinked at him a few times. “I gotta listen to Angie. She says I do.”

  “Why? ‘Cause she’s a bossy know-it-all?”

  “‘Cause she’s my sister.”

  His sister? Yeah, he guessed he could see the resemblance in those wide innocent eyes, but being related to Angie? The poor kid. No wonder he was a mass of nerves and looking for a buddy. “What does she tell you to do?” Pat asked.

  Rulli tilted his head in thought, staring off into the trees. “Not to hang around with Buster Dooley ‘cause he sneaks smokes.” He paused, his lips twisting into a frown. “To study my spelling list harder.” The silence went a little longer this time. “Oh, and to take my snack as soon as I get home from school so nobody else eats it.”

  Pat’s stomach tightened. Maybe he’d been wrong about the little termagant. Though if he was, it was just proof that he shouldn’t be here. He was lousy with relationships. Lousy at judging people.

  “She sounds like a good sister,” Pat said, then glanced at the wallet in his hand. “But she was wrong about this. It’s not ugly.”

  Rulli leaned in close, pointing to the leather pieces. “I tried to line up all the holes real good.”

  “You did a great job. Super. You should get a medal.”

  “Angie says we’re gonna get a whole buncha medals.”

  “Yeah, that’s—” Pat’s brain suddenly connected with Rulli’s words. “Medals for what?”

  “Oh, gosh.” Rulli grabbed his head with both hands. “I almost forgot. Miss Stewart told me I’m supposed to get you. She said you’re supposed to come because we’re gonna do some ‘lympics.”

  Pat remembered the schedule Trisha had shown him at breakfast. After arts and crafts, the camp Olympics were going to be held—egg-in-the-spoon relay races, three-legged races and a whole bunch of other nonsense. Not exactly his cup of tea, but worse, Trisha would be there, reeking of sympathy and good cheer.

  “Go back and tell Miss Stewart that I can’t play,” Pat said. “Tell her I got another couple of holes to fix.”

  “Oh, no. You gotta come, Pat. You just gotta. If you don’t, Angie’s gonna be really mad.” Rulli shook his head, his face more than a little concerned. “If we don’t go home with some ‘lympic medals, Angie says she’s gonna kick butt.”

  “Look, kid.” Pat put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and pulled Rulli in to him. “You can’t let Angie push you around, even if she is your sister.”

  “Douglas is afraid of her, too.”

  Pat had a sudden vision of Douglas hiding from Angie; then the figures blurred and became him hiding from Trisha. Was there a difference?

  “You have to act tough,” Pat said. “Otherwise everybody thinks you’re afraid.”

  That’s what he needed to do, Pat realized. He needed to show Trisha that last night’s talk was just that—talk. That he wasn’t afraid of the past. And he couldn’t do that by hiding away here. He had to be around her, but tough and in control.

  “Let me just finish this little piece,” Pat said and tucked in the end of the wire. “There. Now we can go.”

  Rulli looked only slightly less worried as they walked down the path. “We gotta win
some medals, Pat.”

  “Hey, we’re going to leave everybody in the dust. We’re not just going to win some medals, we’re going to win them all.”

  And that’s just what he’d do, Pat told himself. He’d forget about Trisha and the fact that she knew so much about him, and just get out there and win some races. He liked winning, whether it was a football game or a new contract for the city. It proved he was worth something, that he could do things better than someone else. It made him forget everything.

  He’d show Trisha he was someone to be envied, not pitied. He’d show her he didn’t need her sympathy or pity or anything, that he wasn’t some old softy who couldn’t handle a little bad luck in his past. He saw her up ahead, the kids gathered around her as they stood off to one side in a big open field.

  “I was getting worried about you,” she said when he and Rulli joined the group.

  He felt his chin go up just a fraction. He didn’t need her worrying about him. He didn’t need anybody. “Hey, we were just getting warmed up,” he said, trying for a teasing tone. “You know, ready to take our victory laps.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  Her eyes seemed to be trying to look deep inside him, to take another peek at his soul, but he just turned away slightly. “Hey, this is going to be great. I like races. I love competition.”

  She gave him a strange look, then turned to the kids. “You need to choose up partners for the three-legged race,” she told them. “But boys have to go with girls, and girls with boys.”

  “Are you going with Mr. Stuart?” Mary sang out, a knowing smile on her lips.

  Pat’s blood turned to ice at the thought of being that close to Trisha, of having his arm around her and hers around him. How long would he be able to stay tough? They’d probably barely start the race and he’d be spilling his guts about some other part of his past. He needed a partner that would concentrate on winning, not on him.

  “Nope,” he said quickly. “That wouldn’t be fair. Our legs are lots longer than yours and we’d win.” He glanced around at the kids. “Hey, where’s Angie?”

  “I let her go get our numbers,” Trisha said. “She likes responsibility.”