More Than Neighbors

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “But Mom, it’s only eighth-grade math!” her son exclaimed.

  Gee, and she hadn’t already felt stupid enough.

  “Do you know how many years it’s been since I took this stuff?” she asked. “Things like percentages I use once in a while in real life. Geometry, never.”

  “Oh.”

  They both stared at the peculiar shape.

  “Maybe Gabe knows the answer,” he suggested.

  Because you had to know angles to shoot a Remington rifle?

  “’Cuz he has this cool gauge that measures angles!” Mark said with new enthusiasm. “So he must understand them, right?”

  “You have my blessing to ask.”

  “Yeah!” He grabbed the worksheet and stuffed it into the daypack that already sat on the table. “It’s time for me to go anyway.”

  “You’ve got the cookies?”

  “You saw me put them in the pack.”

  “Right.” Of course she had.

  Anxious mother that she was, she walked as far as the front porch and stayed there while he pedaled down the driveway, turned right on the road then up Gabe Tennert’s nicely paved driveway. When he disappeared from sight behind the house, she figured he’d made it safely. Watson, nose pressed to the screen door, whined miserably. He’d wanted to go, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t. Ciara shuddered at the thought of him in Gabe’s workshop.

  He almost escaped when she opened the door, but swift use of her foot allowed her to slide inside and latch the door. “Not a chance,” she told him and went upstairs. He followed, of course, while Daisy lay at the bottom, watching sadly. She could barely handle the couple of steps from the back porch to the yard; a whole flight was out of her capability. Watson, on the other hand, would want to go in Ciara’s workroom, where he could do as much damage as he would in Gabe’s. The damage wouldn’t be as expensive, but Ciara couldn’t afford it.

  She shut this door firmly in his face, too. He moaned but then subsided. As she plugged in her iron, she hoped her neighbor had a sweet tooth. Although she still found him alarming for reasons she hadn’t altogether figured out, ones that didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she also found him sexy, he’d so far been exceptionally nice to Mark. Oatmeal-raisin cookies were probably inadequate thanks, but she didn’t know what her next option would be.

  Did he cook, or was he the kind of single guy who lived on microwave meals? Maybe tonight she’d bake bread. Everyone liked homemade bread. And if he kept letting Mark go over, she could invite him to dinner one of these nights. That would be the nice thing to do, wouldn’t it?

  Steam puffed from her iron, and she gasped at the realization of how long she’d left it pressed on the delicate damask she was working on. Damn, had she burned it?

  No, she saw in relief, but that was pure luck. She had to concentrate. Why on earth was she worrying about what a man she didn’t even know liked to eat? Mark’s sixth-grade teacher had been a man, and she’d never once considered sending him home-baked cookies.

  Yes, but he’d been paid to teach her son. Nobody was paying the closemouthed, bearded guy next door to spend any time at all with Mark.

  She winced, wondering what he’d think when Mark whipped out the geometry worksheet.

  And then she wondered what Gabe Tennert would look like if he shaved off that beard.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “IT’S A HEXAGON,” Gabe said absently. “Six sides.”

  The boy’s forehead crinkled. “I thought it was a polygon.”

  “It’s that, too.” Gabe explained that a polygon was a closed shape that usually had straight sides. “A triangle is a polygon.”

  “Tri.” Mark’s face brightened as if it were lit from within, like his mother’s did. “Three.”

  “Right. Four sided is a...?”

  “Quadrangle.”

  “Five sides makes it a pentagon.”

  “Cool,” the boy decided. “So how do I figure out the sum of the angle measures in a hexagon?”

  “Do you know what the measures of the angles of a triangle add up to?”

  “A hundred and eighty degrees,” he said triumphantly.

  “Good.” Gabe got out a ruler and pencil and showed him how to divide the shape up into triangles, then watched as Mark divided it into four triangles. He was able to multiply 4 times 180 in his head and come up with the right answer, which Gabe thought was pretty good.

  “I don’t remember getting to geometry until high school,” he commented.

  “My school did it in eighth grade. Except, if you were ahead, you did the eighth-grade stuff in seventh. Then if you were pretty good, you could skip Algebra 1 and take geometry as a freshman.”

  “Gotcha.” Gabe nodded. “You okay with the next problem?”

  They talked about a couple more, after which he put the worksheet away but pulled out a lidded plastic container. “Mom made cookies. She thought you’d like some.”

  Gabe’s fingers were peeling the lid back before his brain gave the order. “What kind—” He inhaled. “Raisin oatmeal. My favorite.”

  “Really? I thought she should make chocolate chip. That’s my favorite. But she says these are better for us.”

  “I like chocolate chip, too,” Gabe admitted. “I wouldn’t turn them down. But these are great.” He took a bite and closed his eyes to better savor the burst of flavor. “Really great,” he mumbled a minute later.

  He gobbled two before he remembered he shouldn’t waste the time eating when he was supposed to be—teaching, he guessed. He turned his mind back to his woodworking class and said, “I want you to do some measuring, and then you can experiment with the saw.”

  Having seen how clumsy Mark was, Gabe did a lot of talking about safety precautions but was still a little unnerved when they got to the stage of practicing first with a handsaw, then a jigsaw and finally a circular saw. Interestingly, he found that the boy was both careful and precise. His focus was as intense as Gabe’s was when he worked. Gabe began to relax. They talked about the options for corner joints and decided that for Mark’s first effort, they’d go for a rabbet joint, good-looking and relatively simple.

  He did some marking, chose clamps for his scrap lumber and practiced cuts with various saws. They talked about woods, and Gabe explained what his next stage was for the three separate cabinetry jobs he had going. Mark eventually decided to use cherry for his box; he liked the rich color of a darker stain better than the look of light woods. Truthfully, Gabe did, too, although he especially liked being able to use contrast.

  It felt companionable putting sandwiches together with the kid again, with the bonus today that they both ate a couple more cookies. Gabe carefully put the top back on the container. Ciara had sent a couple dozen. That would keep him in cookies for...well, that depended on how greedy he allowed himself to be, didn’t it?

  He evaded the boy’s hints that he’d like to learn to ride, too—half the day was already shot—but he did allow Mark to feed a couple of carrots to the horses again before he sent him home.

  Gabe pretended he was just giving himself a minute to decompress when he stood outside watching the boy pedal home, but he knew better. He felt some sense of responsibility. The road didn’t have much of a shoulder. It wasn’t ideal for bike riding.

  He was disconcerted to find he was smiling when he walked back into his workshop.

  * * *

  “THAT DOESN’T SMELL very good.”

  Ciara turned to see that Mark had appeared in the kitchen.

  “Shut the door,” she said hastily—too late.

  Watson burst into the kitchen, leaping to put his paws on her chest, his wet tongue catching her chin before she could take evasive maneuvers. She had to fend him off with an elbow. “Mark!”

  Eventually, he propelled the reluctant dog out of the kitchen and latched the swinging door. Ciara hoped the young dog would learn enough manners soon so that they didn’t have to exile him from any room where they were cooking or
eating, but for now, she was grateful for the door. In their previous house, she wouldn’t have had any way to keep Watson from putting his paws on the dinner table and snatching food off Mark’s plate.

  Above the whine that penetrated the closed door, she said, “This is a new recipe. There’s nothing in it you shouldn’t like.” She carried the casserole dish to the table and set it on a hot pad. “Try it.”

  “I don’t like it when foods are all mixed together,” he said disconsolately.

  “You like raisin-oatmeal cookies. Flour, sugar, oatmeal, raisins and several other ingredients, all mixed together.”

  “That’s different.” He sighed loudly and plopped down in his place.

  “You like spaghetti,” she pointed out.

  “It’s not new!” he burst out.

  Ciara only laughed. “Try this casserole. It may surprise you.”

  She poured them both milk, dished up the peas she’d chosen because they were a favorite of his and sat down herself. She watched as he used the serving spoon to transfer a minuscule amount of the cheesy hamburger bake onto his plate, but said nothing.

  He stared down at his plate. “Dad said he’d call tonight. Do you think he already did and we didn’t hear it?”

  Familiar tension felt like wires strung through her body being pulled tight. “I think I’d have heard the phone, but you can check voice mail. After dinner,” she added, reading his mind even before he started to jump to his feet.

  “But Mom—”

  She took a bite to give herself a minute. “It’s only six-thirty. If he said this evening, it’ll probably be later anyway.”

  Mark hunched his shoulders and stabbed at his peas. Several went skittering off his plate. “He’ll forget. He always forgets.”

  He was right. Jeff did always forget. She wished he wouldn’t make promises at all, however casual. He knew how literal Mark was. In his world view, if you said you were going to do something, you did it.

  “Your dad is pretty busy these days,” she said gently. New wife, new baby, promotion at work. Out with the old.

  No, not fair—the new family and promotion at work had absolutely nothing to do with his disengagement from his first son. That happened as soon as he began to suspect Mark wasn’t a chip off the old block. The son he had once described as a “retard” was her fault, he had declared. Jeff was unimpressed with the reality that Mark scored at 95 percent or above on most standardized tests given in school.

  “You know what I mean,” he’d growled.

  Yes, she did. He meant Mark wasn’t a swaggering, sports-crazy, rough-and-tough boy’s boy. Instead, he was thoughtful, given to intense interests— none of which his father shared—and, at least so far, spectacularly unathletic. Ciara could not understand how any of that made Mark unlovable to a parent.

  “How’d things go with Mr. Tennert today?” she asked in an attempt to divert him.

  It worked. His face brightened. “He said to call him Gabe, you know.”

  “Right.” She was trying to stick to Mr. Tennert, who sounded like a neighbor, versus Gabe, who was a sexy guy she found herself thinking about way more often than was healthy.

  “It was good.” He chattered on, explaining how today they’d worked on finding the missing angles in triangles and quadrilaterals.

  At one point she leveled a look at his plate, and he took a tiny bite then a larger one before he continued his enthusiastic recitation about complementary, supplementary, vertical and adjacent angles. Ciara pinned an interested smile on her face and tuned him out.

  “He remembers everything about geometry,” Mark concluded with satisfaction. “That’s good, because I think it’s cool.”

  Panic briefly raised its head. What if Gabe Tennert lost interest in helping Mark with his math?

  I can research anything, she reminded herself. I am perfectly capable of staying ahead of a seventh grader.

  It was humiliating to know she wasn’t buying her own pep talk.

  Gabe had also had Mark sawing assorted pieces of scrap lumber. He’d done some miter cuts today, and Gabe had shown him how to mark intended cuts so as not to make a mistake.

  “Mark them.” Her son cackled. “Get it?”

  She produced a chuckle.

  This was Thursday. She hadn’t encountered their neighbor since their Saturday morning confrontation over Watson chasing his horses. Having seen the bone-deep reluctance on his face, she’d honestly been surprised when he’d let Mark come down to his workshop later that same morning. She was even more surprised that he had scheduled appointments thereafter, meaning Mark had disappeared for up to two hours to the neighbor’s both Tuesday and today.

  She was trying to keep her distance, but had expressed her gratitude by sending a loaf of freshly baked bread with Mark on Tuesday and a Bundt cake today. Mark had reported an enthusiastic reception for both the cookies and the bread. She asked now about the cake.

  “He said you don’t have to send stuff every time.”

  “Oh.” Ciara was disconcerted to feel let down. “Does he not like desserts?”

  “He had, like, a humongous piece of cake while he helped me with my math.” Lines appeared between Mark’s eyebrows. “So I don’t know why he said that.”

  Her spirits rose. “He was probably being polite.”

  He stared at her. “Why is it polite to say he doesn’t want your food if he really likes it?”

  Ciara told herself it was just the age, or maybe being dense about the games people played in the name of civility was a boy thing. She explained why people said, “Oh, you didn’t have to,” when that wasn’t really what they meant at all. Mark appeared to be listening earnestly, but his expression never cleared.

  Her suspicion was confirmed when he said finally, “People are weird.”

  Well, yes, they were, but Mark nonetheless had to learn the art of telling polite lies. Right now, if he’d been required to take a standardized test on this particular art, Ciara was afraid he’d score somewhere in the first percentile. He always said what he was thinking.

  It seemed like every time she took the phone after he’d spoken to his dad, the first words out of Jeff’s mouth were, “For God’s sake, do you know what he just said to me?”

  Um...the truth?

  It was surprising how often the truth came out sounding awfully rude.

  “When are you going back to Gabe’s?”

  “Saturday. Tomorrow he’s going to a house to make measurements for cabinets. I wanted to go with him, but Gabe says I can’t ’cuz it’s going to take him most of the day and he knows I have to do schoolwork.”

  “I don’t suppose he often builds cabinets for houses in Goodwater,” she said thoughtfully. She wondered if anyone in this small town could afford him.

  “This house is at someplace called Medical Lake. Gabe says it’s called that ’cuz people used to think the lake water cured them of all kinds of diseases.”

  In her initial search, she’d browsed houses online in Medical Lake. As in much of Eastern Washington, real-estate prices were staggeringly low compared to the Seattle area.

  “There’s sort of a castle in Medical Lake,” she told him. “It was built by an English lord.”

  “Can we go see it?” Mark asked eagerly. “Maybe we could go with Gabe.”

  She shook her head. “In the first place, he hasn’t invited us. Plus, I think I remember reading the castle has been turned into an apartment house, and there isn’t much to see anymore.”

  “You mean, you can rent an apartment in a castle?”

  Mark had enjoyed touring Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, British Columbia, almost as much as he’d liked the natural-history displays in the Provincial Museum there. Craigdarroch, built in the late 1880s, was no more a real castle than the one in Medical Lake—which had probably been built in roughly the same decade, come to think of it.

  “I wish he’d let me go with him,” Mark said, sounding sad.

  Ciara took a deep breath. “Ma
ybe we should invite Gabe to dinner tomorrow night. Or Saturday, if he’ll be back too late tomorrow.”

  “Can we?” He pushed back his chair and jumped to his feet. “Can I call him? Right now?”

  She hoped this wasn’t a huge mistake. She was torn between discouraging Mark from forming any deep attachment to a man who might lose interest in him any day—and, okay, keeping her own distance for personal reasons—and bribing said man to keep providing something Mark obviously needed desperately.

  Something his father would never give him.

  “I think this is one invitation that should come from me,” she said firmly. “He needs to know it comes from me.”

  “Then will you call him right now?”

  “After dinner. Sit,” she ordered.

  He sat. From then on, all he talked about was how cool it would be, having Gabe here. He bet Gabe could show him how to make Watson sit. ’Cuz he knew all about animals. Had he told her...?

  Oh, Lord. What if Gabe Tennert politely declined her invitation? Mark would be heartbroken.

  The phone rang. Once more, Mark erupted from his seat.

  “I bet that’s Dad!”

  He returned a moment later with her cell phone, his expression downcast. “It’s that man who came out here about the floors.”

  She accepted the phone, saying brightly, “It’s still early,” even though she knew damn well Jeff wouldn’t call.

  What was she thinking, letting Mark get attached to a man whose only connection to them was a property line?

  Even as she greeted the local contractor who was ready to offer a bid on refinishing floors, all she could think about was their next-door neighbor’s slow, deep voice and a face not quite as expressionless as she suspected he wanted it to be.

  * * *

  CIARA DID LET him call his grandparents that evening, and took a turn talking to them herself. Dad said hello, there was a Mariner game on and gave the phone to Mom, who laughed.

  “He started watching so he could sound intelligent when clients commented on games or players or whatever, and now he won’t miss a game. Bridget, too.”

  “Bridget?” Ciara repeated. That, she’d have to see to believe.