“Stupidity,” he said. “I knocked over Angel’s picture and then knelt—”
“Angel?”
He just sighed. “It doesn’t mean anything. I was clumsy and the glass in the frame broke.”
“I’m clumsy sometimes, but I don’t skin my knees to fulfill a prophecy.”
“Trisha.” His voice was weary.
“He skinned your knees so we’d realize we love each other.”
“And I suppose it was his gum I stepped in.” His tone was skeptical. Resigned.
“It could have been,” she said. She was fighting for everything now. She couldn’t let him give in to realism. “If we can have love, we can have anything.”
“You think so?”
“Miss Stewart!” They turned to find Angie and Rulli were running over. They stopped on the edge of the playground.
“Are you okay?” Rulli asked, but Trisha couldn’t tell if he was asking her or Pat.
“I brought your shoe back,” Angie said to Pat.
“Thanks.” He took it with obvious gratitude and slipped it on.
“We’re fine,” Trisha told Rulli. “We’re both fine.”
“Then you’d better start making up,” Angie said, her hands on her hips and a definite threat suddenly in her voice. “We’re tired of all this goofing around.”
“Yeah,” Rulli agreed.
“You two are acting like a couple of jerky little kids who won’t play with each other.”
“Yeah,” Rulli said.
“If we hafta get along, then so do you.”
“Yeah.”
Pat turned to smile at Trisha as he gave her hand a squeeze. “We are,” he said softly, a slight question in his voice.
When she nodded, he let go of her hand and stooped down so that he was close to eye level with the kids.
“I’ve learned a lot from you guys,” he said. “I thought my life was a success and my brother’s was a failure. All because he never went to college, never had a job where he could wear a suit and buy a fancy watch. I was stupid.”
By some miracle, Angie held her tongue and Pat went on. “He had everything and I had nothing. He knew what was important all along. Love and trust and loyalty. I should have listened to him, instead of being so stubborn. Instead of being so afraid to love.”
Something in Angie’s face seemed to soften. She looked away for a quick moment, then back again. “I lied,” she whispered. “When I said he didn’t like you, I lied.”
“Did he talk about me at all?”
Trisha heard the hope in Pat’s voice and bit her lip to keep her own hopes from spilling out. Remember, Angie, she cried out. Make up something, anything. Just give him Angel back.
Angie shrugged. “I don’t remember him hardly at all.” Her voice was wobbly and tears glistened in the light from the security lamps by the building.
Trisha held her breath.
“I remember him carrying me on his shoulders when it was bedtime and how he’d tuck me in.” Angie’s voice died away. “That’s all, though.”
Trisha felt her eyes water and she turned away. Damn you, Angel, she cried out in her heart. Damn you for dying and not ever forgiving him. He wanted you to have the world, and maybe it was the wrong world, but you had to know it was all because he loved you.
“Well, it’s time to stop fooling around, Patrick Michael Stuart,” Pat said, his voice brisk as he stood up. “There’s a time to honor wishes and a time to ignore—”
“I ain’t foolin’ around,” Rulli snapped, suddenly glaring at them.
“Pat was just talking to himself,” Trisha said. She came up next to the boy and slipped her arm around his shoulders. “Sometimes people do that, especially when they’re serious about something.”
“I thought he was talking to me,” Rulli said. “That’s my name, too.”
“What?” Pat cried.
“Your name’s Rulli,” Trisha said, confused.
Rulli took a step closer to Angie, pulling away from Trisha, as if feeling under sudden assault. “Those are my middle names,” he said.
“He’s Rulli Patrick Michael Ingram,” Angie said.
“You were named after me,” Pat said. His voice was soft, almost a whisper. He knelt down in front of the kids, apparently oblivious to the snow. “You know what this means?”
“I get your car?” Rulli suggested.
Angie burst out laughing. “Good one, Rulli.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Pat just ignored the joke, pulling them both into his arms. “It means Angel isn’t mad at me anymore.”
“Huh?” Rulli was confused.
Pat only partially let them go as he stood up and pulled Trisha into the embrace. “I think it’s time we went home. I got a house that wants its treasure back.”
“Hey, great idea,” Angie cried, backing away slightly. “But maybe you and Pat should go inside the club first. You know. Warm up a little.”
Trisha frowned at the girl. “I’d rather warm up at Pat’s.”
“Yeah—us, too. Right, Rulli?” She nudged her brother sharply.
“Uh, yeah,” he said.
“But we got some stuff to do before we leave and—” She was backing away faster now, dragging Rulli with her and getting farther ahead of them.
“Angie.” Pat’s voice stopped her dead in her tracks. “What’s going on?”
The girl shuffled back slowly. “You sorta don’t got any air in a couple of your tires.”
“I what?”
“How do you know that?” Trisha asked.
“I’m not sure,” Rulli said. “Maybe ‘cause we let a little too much out.”
“You what?”
“We had to,” Rulli said. “We thought you were never gonna stop fighting and didn’t want Pat to leave too fast.”
“It was my idea,” Angie said.
“Why am I not surprised?” Pat said dryly. “So how about if you call for a tow truck?”
“That’s what I was gonna do,” Angie cried and, pulling Rulli with her, raced for the club’s front door.
Pat just sighed and slipped his arm around Trisha’s shoulders. “Why do I see the ability to control my life disintegrating before my eyes?”
“Happy anticipation?” Trisha guessed. The snow was still lightly falling, but it seemed as warm as springtime here in his arms.
He tightened his hold. “You know I’ll never survive on my own. I’m horribly outnumbered.”
“Two against one,” Trisha said.
“Angie counts as more than one. It’s ten against one.”
“Poor baby.”
He turned so that both his arms surrounded her. “I was thinking we could form a partnership. An alliance of sorts,” he said.
“An alliance?”
“Sure, it’ll be us against the kids, but to fool them you’ll go by the name Mom and I’ll be known as Dad.”
Her heart tingled as she snuggled deeper into his arms. “How’s that going to fool them?”
“They’ll never know that I consider myself the luckiest guy in the world.” He paused. “So what do you say?”
“Do I have a choice?” she said with a laugh and laid her head against his chest. “If I don’t agree, I could get stuck in gum and stay out here until I freeze. We’ve got a powerful angel watching over us.”
His eyes were serious, though, when he gazed down at her. “We can fight him if we need to. We need to both want this.”
She just laughed and tightened her own hold on him. “No problem. With or without an angel watching over us, it sounds like heaven to me.”
Epilogue
“Congratulations, sweetie,” a big old woman cooed just before she swooped down and caught Angie in a crushing hug. She gave her a big, sloppy wet kiss on the cheek before moving off.
“Yuck,” Angie cried and tried to rub the kiss off of her.
“Angie!” a voice warned her.
Angie just glared. She and Rulli and Mom and Dad were standing outs
ide this big room filled with people and four dorks playing dinky music. Mom said the four of them were a receiving line. And they were supposed to welcome people who came in and show them where they would be eating.
Jeez, how dumb. They were giving these people a free meal and then they had to show them where to go? Anybody walking in the front door could see the room with all the tables and chairs.
“Angie,” Mom said. “Ladies don’t wipe off kisses.”
Boy, Angie thought. Falling in love sure changed a person. When Mom was Trisha, she used to be real cool. Now all she could talk about was this “how a lady behaves” junk. Angie knew that she sure as heck was never falling in love.
“I’m getting tired of this,” Angie said.
“I told you everything about today,” Mom said. “Including the fact that you’d have to wear a long dress. And you still agreed to be in the wedding party. Remember?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“She did, Angie,” Rulli said. “She told us how it would all come out.”
“Thank you, Rulli,” Mom said.
Angie rolled her eyes. Rulli was really getting to be a mama’s boy.
“I didn’t know all these old women were going to hug me,” Angie said. “You never told me about that.”
“I’m sorry. Please accept my humble apologies.”
Angie knew Mom wasn’t sorry. Her cheeks were all rosy, her eyes all bright and she was as perky as some stupid little squirrel in a tree.
“That perfume they wear really stinks,” Angie said. “It makes my mouth taste all bad.”
“You know what perfume’s made of?” Rulli said. “Whale poo.”
“Do what I do, Angie,” Dad said. “Take a deep breath just before they kiss. Then after the kiss, let it all out. You hardly smell any of it that way.”
“Okay, Dad,” Angie replied. “I’ll try that.”
Angie ignored Mom and her rolling eyeballs as she traded smiles with Dad. He was turning out to be okay.
“Whoowee.” An old guy held the outside door open for a gray-haired woman. Then he came in, stomping his feet and rubbing his hands together. “It is bitter out there.”
“Sure is, Ben,” Dad said. “I heard we’re setting a record today. Coldest day in the past fifty years.”
“You could have waited until it got warmer,” the old man said. “If not June, at least March or April.”
“Oh, no, dear,” the gray-haired woman said. “You never put off a wedding. Not if you got yourself a hot prospect. Right, Trisha?”
“What cold?” Mom asked, pretending to be really dumb. Angie was absolutely positive that she’d never fall in love. “I don’t feel any cold.”
Everyone laughed; then the woman looked down at her and Rulli. Angie took a deep breath and scrunched up her face.
“You look very nice in your beautiful dress,” the woman said.
Angie wished the woman would kiss her quick because she was about to burst.
“Angie’s got a slip on under it,” Rulli said. “But Mom said she didn’t have to wear a bra ‘cause she’s not big enough yet.”
Angie’s breath escaped in a burst as she gave Rulli her best triple-dagger, mean-dude look. He quieted down quick enough but the grown-ups all laughed as if he’d told a joke.
“Well, there’s no need to rush anything, honey.” The woman mussed Rulli’s hair a little. “And you look very handsome in your suit.”
Angie considered telling everybody that her brother was wearing long socks with his suit but no jockstrap, ‘cause he wasn’t big enough yet, but Mom was giving her one of those “cool it” looks. She was starting to see problems with having a mother who knew so much about kids.
“Well, I guess we should be going in,” the man said.
“You’re sitting at table seven,” Angie said.
“Angie,” Mom said, her voice carrying a firm warning.
The man and woman looked puzzled. “The caterer has decided that seven is our lucky number,” Dad explained. “He put it on all the tables.”
“Oh?” The woman laughed. “What does it stand for? Number of children, possibly?”
“It doesn’t stand for anything,” Dad said, looking all red and embarrassed. “Just go in and grab a drink. The dinner will start soon.”
The older couple walked into the dining room, where everyone was talking at the same time like kids on the playground. Dad put his arm around Mom.
“We’re not having seven,” he said.
“That’s a joint decision,” she said.
They kissed so long, their spit musta got all mixed up, and Angie just had to look away, totally grossed out. Dad was looking all goggle-eyed, like when Mom gave him that old gold watch last night. They’d found it when she, Rulli and Mom were fixing up the attic for a playroom. Mom said it was Dad’s grandfather’s watch and really special. More proof Mom was losing it. The watch didn’t tell the date, couldn’t be a stopwatch and you couldn’t put it in the water. That was special?
“All right,” Dad said, trying to act as if he were in charge. “Let’s eat.”
“Can I have a hot dog?” Angie whined.
“Now don’t start that,” Mom said. “We’re having the same meal you had when we were up here last week. And you said you really liked it.”
“I know.” Angie cranked up her whine. “But we’ve been eating all kinds of new stuff lately. Can’t I just have a plain hot dog, please?”
Rulli started to open his mouth but Angie stepped on his foot. With the long dress covering her legs, Mom couldn’t see what she did.
“Please,” Angie whined.
Then Dad squatted down in front of her. “How about after the dinner we stop in at the Ice Cream Shoppe? You can have a banana split.”
“Honey,” Mom protested. “We have to change and go right to the airport.”
“Grandma can take us,” Angie said. They were staying with Mom’s mother and the cats at her old apartment.
“Yeah, right,” Dad said. “She won’t mind.”
Mom sighed kind of loud as Dad stood up and took her arm. “I’m really getting the hang of this father thing.”
“You’re doing wonderfully,” Mom said.
“Hey, Angie,” Rulli said. “I thought you really liked this food.”
“Ix-nay, ulli-Ray. Ix-nay.” Angie looked at her parents murmuring to each other and figured they hadn’t heard what had spilled out of Rulli’s big mouth.
“Oh,” Rulli said. “I get it. You really wanted ice cream later.”
“Shut up, Rulli.”
“You’re good, Angie.”
“Somebody’s got to be in charge around here. Might as well be me.”
* * * * *
ISBN: 978-1-4592-8821-8
Kisses and Kids
Copyright © 1995 by EAN Associates
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Kisses And Kids (Congratulations Series #1) Page 26
