JEREMIAH TRIED REALLY HARD not to seem like some kind of hovering parent, but in the end he just gave up and sat on the porch, waiting for Lucy and Aaron to come back from Beauregard.
The game was a big deal—Aaron’s team was up against their rival, and he felt really shitty that he couldn’t be there. He liked being at the games, Ben and Casey sitting beside him while they watched Aaron carve up the ice. It was one of the few times he felt like they were really a family.
Perhaps it was time to change some things around the ranch. Hire a full-time housekeeper—he’d been reluctant up until now, largely because Cynthia was helping out and he didn’t want another woman in the house making the boys upset. But he was missing too much of the important stuff, worrying about garbage and laundry.
But laced with his nerves and excitement to hear about Aaron’s game was the fact that Lucy was going to be here. He hadn’t seen her since Saturday night, but he’d been thinking about her nearly every other minute since then with a nearly fatiguing mixture of shame and excitement.
Honestly, it was like he was sixteen and he had the hots for the senior cheerleader. He’d put away his anxiety about growing too attached to her. She was leaving—it wasn’t even a question. If he could just keep that in mind, then they could have all the fun and trouble they wanted.
Finally headlights speared through the bruised twilight and he stood, the rocking chair banging into the backs of his knees.
“They’re back!” he yelled through the open screen door.
“Does that mean we can eat?” Casey asked.
The car stopped in front of the house and he stepped down off the porch just as the passenger door was thrown open.
“Well?” Jeremiah asked.
Aaron’s face said it all. He gleamed in victory. “We won, four to three in overtime.”
“Thatta boy!” he cried, pulling Aaron into his arms for a quick hard hug.
“He was great,” Lucy said, and he turned, meeting her eyes over the roof of her car.
“You watched?” he asked, stunned at the thought.
“Of course!” She smiled at Aaron, who blushed. “It was a great game. Aaron was the star.”
“Really?”
“Scored the winning goal,” Aaron said, trying to be cool about it.
Oh, kid, Jeremiah thought, you kill me. You really do.
“Well,” Jeremiah said, beaming at Aaron, messing up his hair. “This calls for a celebration.”
“I thought Casey ate all Grandma’s cake—”
“No. I was thinking pizza. In town.”
From inside the house Casey whooped and Aaron pulled his hockey bag from where it had been crammed in the Civic’s trunk.
“Sound good?” Jeremiah asked.
“Sounds great! You coming?” Aaron asked Lucy, his eyes alight.
“Ahhhh…” She glanced over at Jeremiah as if she, too, was aware of how every decision somehow changed the scales in their life.
It’s just fun, Stone. Just some simple fun.
“Please,” Jeremiah said. “It would be great to have you.”
She drummed her fingers against the roof of the car, her bracelets and rings making a tinkling music. “Okay.”
“Cool,” Aaron crowed, and walked off, leaving him in the twilight with Lucy.
“I haven’t been to the arcade in twenty years,” she said.
“It’s where I take all my dates.”
Her eyebrows popped. “Is this a date?”
“Hell, yes. Meat lover’s pizza and three half-size chaperones? This is top-shelf dating, Lucy. You better prepare yourself for some serious romance.”
“Oh, I’m prepared.” She tucked one leg back into the car, still watching him over the hood with her glittering eyes. “I’ll meet you there.”
* * *
WHEN LUCY CONSIDERED having a fun affair with Jeremiah Stone the Pizza World and Arcade had not been a part of her vision. She sat at a table, waiting for Jeremiah and the boys, surrounded by neon lights and the bleeps and buzzers of video games.
Pizza World had not changed one iota since her youth. Maybe the games had been updated, but the booths, the red candles, the pictures of the town’s early days—still the same. For some reason, that made her inexplicably happy. The whole world changed faster than she could get ahold of, but right here, it was the same. There was comfort in that. Comfort in knowing who she was here. Instead of trying to change to fit the world she lived in, she didn’t have to do anything to fit in here.
She just was.
It had been five long years since she just was. Since she wasn’t compelled to be more, to more people. The lights flickered and beeped around her and she thought of a wide, thick-collar necklace. Amber stones set in gold. The colors of California dust. She jerked, the Coke in her hand sloshing over her fingers. Before she even realized what she was doing she reached for her purse and the notebook she kept there, but then she remembered—there was no notebook.
That belonged to a different life.
She was so thrown by the inspiration, the creative thought, that she didn’t notice Jeremiah standing in front of her.
“Hey,” he said, “you all right?”
“Fine.” It took her a moment but finally she shook her head and smiled up at him. “Where are the boys?”
“I gave them each a roll of quarters and they scattered to the winds.” His long lean body draped over the chair across from her. So elegant and controlled, graceful even. His body was sculpted by work and life and he wore his power so easily. Her fingers twitched, her body purred.
He was gorgeous.
The teenage girl who’d brought her the Coke came back, blushing and tucking her hair behind her ears.
“Hey there,” Jeremiah said, grinning at the girl. “We’re gonna need a pitcher of Coke and two pizzas. Large.” He glanced sideways at Lucy. “You don’t want anything crazy on your pizza, do you?”
“Crazy? Like what?”
“Like vegetables?”
“Tomatoes are madness, aren’t they?”
“The Stone men don’t want vegetables touching their meat.” She snorted, but he wasn’t kidding. He had said it with a straight face.
“Go for it. It’s your party.”
“Meat Lover’s,” he told the server. “Extra sausage, extra ground beef.”
“Oh, my Lord.” She sighed, heavily appalled. “Add a side salad,” she told the server. “Ranch dressing on the side.”
The server nodded and walked away, joining her comrades behind the register who all whispered behind their hands while staring at Jeremiah.
“I remember being here when I was twelve years old and even then the servers stared at you from the counter. Nothing has changed.”
“If you clap your hands they’ll scatter like birds,” he said, turning toward her, his back to his audience.
“You think?”
He lifted his hands, clapped once and the girls split in four different directions. She howled with laughter.
“You should see what they do to Aaron. They practically stalk him.”
“I can imagine.”
“The first time we came here and I saw how the girls looked at him I freaked out, turned back home and gave him the talk.”
“The talk?”
“Straight up birds and bees.”
“How did that go?”
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe because I’m his uncle and not his mom or dad, I don’t know. But he asked questions and I tried to be as honest as I could. Gave him a handful of condoms—”
“He’s eleven!”
“I know, but apparently kids are doing it in kindergarten these days!”
“Come on—”
“I’m barely exaggerating. He doesn’t look eleven and eleven-year-old girls don’t look eleven. And it’s not like I think he’s going to have sex tomorrow. I just…I just want him to be safe.” Jeremiah ran his hands through his hair, the black curls looping around his fingers like rin
gs.
“You’re a good man,” she whispered.
Don’t, she tried telling herself. Do not fall for this man and his doubt and worry and heartbreaker’s grin.
But she worried that in so many ways it was too late. It would be so easy to fall for him; she worried it was already done. She’d fallen and didn’t even realize it.
“Because I gave an eleven-year-old condoms?”
“You care for those boys.”
He carefully organized the cutlery into a tidy square in front of him, not looking at her. “Then why won’t Ben talk to me?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know how you feel.”
He leaned back and stared at her as if she’d suggested he take off his clothes and dance on the pinball game. “They know. Of course they know. I’m there, aren’t I?”
She’d touched a nerve. A terrible nerve. But she couldn’t back down. Her investment in this family was too great. “Maybe they need to hear you say it.”
He was blank-faced and it was obvious that the thought had never occurred to him. So well-intentioned but so lost, she couldn’t resist him. She reached over for his hand, rubbing her thumb over his knuckles until he twisted his hand around and clutched her fingers. His fingers slid between hers and she felt the ripple and tremble across her skin, like a stone thrown into still waters. She was disturbed, restless at his touch.
“My parents—” He cleared his throat. “My parents were really private people. Annie, too. Ben comes by it honestly, all this silent brooding. Words…important words don’t come easy for us.”
Carefully, not wanting to startle him, or stop him talking, but unable to resist, she reached up and touched the hair falling over his forehead. The silky curl twined around her fingers into a ring.
“You know, Annie didn’t even tell me she was sick until it was too late.” His pain was obvious, needles buried deep under his skin that were painful to pull out. “It’s not like I could have done anything, but…you know, I could have been there. Supported her and the kids. But that’s the way she was. It’s the way we all are.”
“Maybe the boys need something different?”
“What if I don’t know how to do that?” he asked.
“Then maybe you need to learn.”
He sighed deeply, as if sucking down all these thoughts, burying them back where they’d come from. Obliterating them as if they’d never been.
Don’t, she thought, you need to deal with this stuff.
But then he smiled and the moment was over.
“Thanks for coming out,” he said. “The boys appreciate it.”
“Yeah, I can tell.” She laughed, pointing to the empty seats.
“Well…I appreciate it.”
His knee pressed hers under the table and they were curved toward each other, two parts of a circle connected at knees and hands. The other night rushed back in sensory bites, the rough warmth of his hands on her stomach, the sound of his zipper in the quiet, his voice groaning “Baby” in her ear.
Her heartbeat pounded between her legs.
“My question,” Jeremiah asked, cocking his head, studying her, “is for a woman who has only dated three men, what were you doing flashing your breasts at Reese McKenna?”
She laughed, not breaking contact.
“It was the state championship, Jeremiah. I had to do my part.”
“How…how is it a woman like you is single?” He said it as if he were truly mystified and she preened under his compliment. She was quite a catch if she did say so herself.
“I’m driven. Or was.” She pulled her hands away. “Once it got to a certain point, no matter how hard I fell in love, it always felt like I had to make a choice. My career—my work—or marriage. I couldn’t be fully committed to both of them.” The flirtatious gleam in his eyes had vanished and her stomach dropped. “Too deep for you, Stone? You hyperventilating?”
“No, no…I was thinking I know exactly what you mean. With the boys. I could have a relationship, or I could be there for the boys. I can’t have both. I can’t be pulled in two directions.”
Funny, but when he said it she saw the ways in which that wasn’t totally true. How the right person, the right relationship, wouldn’t make him feel like he had to make a choice. The right relationship would feel like support. A team.
She’d never seen it that way in her own life. And it felt as if someone had turned on a light in a room she’d never realized was pitch-black. Before she could make any kind of response, Ben came up to the table. “I need more quarters.”
“Hello to you, too,” Jeremiah said.
Ben glanced sideways at her. “Hey.” He turned back to Jeremiah. “Can I have more quarters?”
“I told you when we came in that roll was all you got.”
“That sucks.”
“Ben.” Jeremiah didn’t yell but his tone was stony. Implacable. She wondered what Jeremiah would do if he knew how Ben had been swearing at her the other day.
“Sorry,” Ben muttered, and slid down in the seat opposite her. His eyes on the edge of the table. Utterly and totally disengaged.
What will bring you back? she wondered.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask how things went last Friday,” Jeremiah said, stretching his arm out across the backs of the seats, his fingertips inches from Ben, as if he wanted to touch him but knew what the reception would be.
You should tell Jeremiah, she thought. Tell him the truth. That it was awful. That Ben wasn’t doing anything she’d asked. That she was failing, even at this. That things weren’t better, not like he thought. Not like he wanted.
But Jeremiah was looking at her, the creases between his eyes gone, the heavy weight of responsibility off his shoulders. He was relieved things seemed to be going well between her and Ben. She couldn’t burst that for him, not yet.
But after the things he’d told her, what happened between them, lying to him felt…utterly wrong. They could be the bad guy together, maybe. Share this load.
Telling him was the right thing to do.
Inwardly, she braced herself. “Jeremiah—”
“Fine.” Ben lifted his eyes and looked right at Lucy, as if daring her to contradict him. Daring her to tell the truth. “We worked in the garden and stuff.”
What is this kid doing? she wondered, trying to find his angle.
“Yeah?” Jeremiah asked, looking pleased.
The silence stretched and she found herself too intrigued and maybe too cowardly to set things right.
“Yeah,” Lucy agreed, and Ben grinned at her. “Things are going fine.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THROUGH THE KITCHEN WINDOW on Thursday morning, Sandra watched Mia and Carla, the latest applicant for housekeeper and nurse, approach Walter where he sat in the sun near the barn doors.
If you asked Sandra—and no one ever did—after Walter chased away the last two, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Carla looked mean. Looked like the kind of woman who overcooked meat and didn’t like kids. Might pinch her mother when she moved too slow.
Maybe that’s the kind of person Walter needs, she thought. Someone who wouldn’t care what he thought of them. Would only care about him as long as she was paid. Would let him sit out there and whittle all damn day. Turning big sticks into little sticks.
The interview was brief. Mia said something, smiling in that big way of hers that meant she was trying real hard to be pleasant when pleasant didn’t taste good.
Walter didn’t look up, but seemed to be saying something. Mia hung her head, defeat in every line of her body, and after a second Carla made a vulgar gesture, turned around and walked to her car.
Mia was saying something to Walter, who only shrugged, like some kind of spoiled, surly teenager. Mia threw up her hands and left, getting into her truck and driving away, kicking up dust. Walter looked up, watching Mia drive away, and then as if he knew she was watching him, he looked at the house. Right at her.
Like a schoolgirl caught pee
ping, she whirled and ducked out of the way. Ridiculous, she thought, her hand on her hammering heart. You are ridiculous.
Since the touch of his lips on her wrist, she’d been rattled around him. As if a layer of skin had been removed and every glance, every breeze, made her all too aware of her nerve endings.
Sixty-two years old and she felt like a girl.
She used to feel this way about A.J. before they got married. Every touch of his hand as he passed her the hymnal at church would send her into ecstatic contemplations. Fevered daydreams.
Before it all went cold.
Stupid, she told herself. It was a kiss. On her wrist. From a man she didn’t much like. Had she totally lost her mind? But it wasn’t just the kiss. Not totally. “I will fight,” he’d said in that detox-induced nightmare. And her spirit, wayward and sleeping since childhood, liked that.
I will fight.
And he was making good on that promise. He wasn’t going to be cared for and tended like a child. He made his own breakfast these days and forced her out of the kitchen when it was time to do the dinner dishes.
“You’ve done enough,” he’d said quietly last night, loading the dishwasher.
All these housekeepers coming to apply, he was chewing up and spitting out. And it was rude, but he was not going to be pushed around and she respected that. Liked that. Was…proud of him.
And what are you doing? she asked herself. Hiding like a girl scared of her shadow? What happened to your fight? Earlier this morning, she’d been thinking about A.J., lying in bed counting her lonely moments like a rosary.
With the kind of belligerence born of being thwarted and embarrassed, she threw some ham and cheese between two pieces of wheat bread and slapped it on a plate.
It’s not like she knew what she was angry about. Or what she wanted to fight for; she just knew she was angry. And that was enough to send her outside and across the parking area to stand in front of him, scattering stones with the heels of her boots.
He glanced up at her and his knife slipped.
“Damn,” he muttered, and lifted his thumb to his mouth.
“Did you cut yourself?” She put the sandwich down on the ground and reached for him but he shook his head.
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