Pepper ducked her head, mainlined the cereal.
All he could think was that he was way, way over his head. He’d chosen the holiday away so they wouldn’t be so constantly reminded of their mom. But nothing ever seemed simple with the twins. It wasn’t just their mom they’d lost. But a woman in their lives. A grownup female’s influence.
He could buy fifty ice cream makers and he still couldn’t come through the way they needed sometimes. Bedspreads? How was he supposed to make getting a bedspread—a color coordinated bedspread—something he could do with his daughters?
He could probably do it.
Hell, he could probably volunteer for a root canal, if it was something good for his girls.
But hell’s bells. Sometimes talking with them was like translating a language from New Guinea.
He needed help.
Chapter Five
Years ago, Rosemary had discovered that one of the best places to hide out was a darkroom—figuratively and literally. She wasn’t thinking about Whit when she turned out the lights. Or her ex. Or Christmas. Or anything else but her work.
The photograph slowly clarifying in the tray was never going to make National Geographic quality, but that couldn’t be helped. She remembered taking it; she’d been deep in the woods, on her stomach, in a pouring rain last summer when she spotted the orchid.
From the far room, she heard the landline ring. She ignored it. She couldn’t answer either her cell phone or the lodge’s landline when she was in the darkroom. Months before, she’d rigged up an answering device in the darkroom so she could catch messages, but there was no way she could reply without risking the work.
Muddy-browns gradually cleared. Background greens gradually sharpened. Raindrops on the camera lens hurt the picture—but still, there she was. A tiny pale yellowish flower, with an even tinier white lip.
The species was the small whorled pogonia—a treasure because she was probably the rarest orchid in the eastern U.S. Finding her had been sheer, wonderful luck. The word orchid came from the Greek orchis, which meant testicle, not that Rosemary mentioned that particularly often in public. The point, though, was that particular shape was a key to identifying species that had orchid characteristics. Like this bitsy whorled pogonia...
The speaker in the corner of the wall registered the answering machine going on, then a hang up.
She returned to developing her baby. Some people called the plant “little five-fingers.” If she hadn’t found it flowering in late June, likely she’d never have spotted it ever. She wasn’t that pretty, but she was so unique, and these days, so close to complete extinction.
The telephone rang again. She ignored it again.
Analyzing the testicle shape as the photograph developed to its clearest potential, was not, perhaps, the best way to keep her mind on serious subjects. Not that she was particularly interested in testicles. Or that she ever spent time thinking about testicles, for that matter.
But they were, after all, boy parts. And analyzing boy parts inevitably made her think of the human kind—not that she’d ever wasted daydreaming hours wondering about men’s apparatus. Or that she’d ever spent time thinking about an individual man’s apparatus, either.
But Whit, she couldn’t help but remember, had expressed an inordinate amount of enthusiasm, pressed against her. That moment kept ripping through her consciousness. Feeling his arousal. The sudden thrill, the sudden sense of danger sending blood shooting up and down her pulse.
And there was his voice on the answering system. “I hung up a moment ago, Rosemary. It’s me, Whit. I figured you’re busy if you can’t answer, and that’s all right. Just need to leave a message. Here’s the thing.”
He cleared his throat.
Then cleared his throat again.
She lifted the soaking photo from the tray, hung it up with clothespins, tried not to breathe. When he said nothing else, she wasn’t certain if he’d hung up or if she couldn’t hear him—or if something else was wrong.
But he finally spoke again. “Okay, here’s the truth. I’m in trouble. I wasn’t going to call you this quickly after yesterday. I was afraid I may have overstepped some boundaries. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. But this is different. I’m not kidding about being in trouble. Terrible trouble.”
Again, he cleared his throat.
“It’s the girls. It’s about trying to have a Christmas and my goofing it all up. And somehow it’s become about comforters or bedspreads or color coordinating or something like that. The twins...I’m used to them double-teaming me. But when they both completely confuse me, I just plain don’t know how to dig my way out.”
She couldn’t answer the phone, still couldn’t leave the darkroom, but the first smile came on strong, then a chuckle.
“I guess this is about shopping. Look. I won’t do anything, won’t say anything, won’t touch even your hand, nothing. This is nothing about...that. But I’d pay you. A mortgage on your real house? A ruby or emerald or something? If you’d please go to Greenville with us tomorrow. I guess we could go to Traveler’s Rest, but the girls seem to think we need to shop where there are more choices. Please. Please, Rosemary. I’m groveling. I’m desperate. I’m scared out of my skull. I can do teenage bras if and when I have to. But I can’t color coordinate. I don’t even get what that means. Please don’t make me do this alone.”
She wasn’t sure whether he severed the call or her answering machine quit recording. Either way, he was off the line—and she let out a burst of a laugh.
Maybe if she could quit thinking of him as a lover, she could just enjoy what he had to offer. A friend. A caring dad with two daughters alone on a special holiday. Someone to have fun with. Someone to help him with the girls.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have the free time...or didn’t enjoy them all.
She just had to be careful about Whit. And she could do that.
Somehow she’d find a way to do that.
* * *
When Whit’s SUV showed up the next morning, Rosemary dashed out. She opened the door, took one look at the expression on the two girls’ faces and quickly glanced at Whit.
“Save me,” he mouthed.
She popped into the front seat, and opened a travel tote that was filled to bursting. “I brought catalogs,” she told Lilly and Pepper. “So each of you could look through them, give me some idea about what you like and don’t like.”
As she latched her seat belt, she added to Whit, “Could you give me a general price range?”
He looked at her with the same trapped expression. “Whatever they want?”
She rolled her eyes, turned to the girls. “Where did your mom usually shop for clothes? Things around the house? Shoes?”
Neither had a problem answering the question, but Pepper came through with the most detail. “Mom liked to go on a shopping trip a couple times of year. She’d go to Atlanta or Dallas or like that. She liked Neiman Marcus. And Saks. Places like that.”
She shot a startled look at Whit. She’d never envisioned his wife as being fancy and status-driven that way. “And those kinds of prices are okay with you?” she asked carefully.
“Is there something wrong?”
“No, not at all.” Except that he was an earthy guy who worked with his hands and loved diving into projects headfirst. And the girls were describing a mom who was a dry-clean-only type of formal lady. She turned back to the girls. “We don’t think we have any of those stores in Greenville, but there are still a ton of places to shop. In the meantime, I painted several rooms in the lodge when I moved there last June. Being me, I couldn’t make up my mind, so I collected somewhere around five million paint swatches. So...”
Paint swatches came from the bottomless travel tote and were distributed to the backseat.
“Y
ou don’t have to pick just one color. Pick, like, four or five. If you like blues, they don’t have to be all blue. But I want you to choose colors that...well, that make you happy. Colors that you’d like to wake up to every morning. And then...”
She turned halfway, to include Whit in the conversation. “Then, I had another idea. If no one likes it, no problem. But possibly you might want to put up composite board or peg board or cork or something like that for one wall. That way, they’d have a place where they could hang their favorite rock stars or pictures or phone numbers or whatever they wanted. But they could also take down stuff and put up new without damaging the walls.”
“Yeah! That’s an awesome idea,” Pepper said.
“I like it, too,” Lilly agreed. The girls looked at each other as if astonished they’d agreed on anything—at least that day.
When Lilly handed back her choice of paint sample cards, they were all in blues and greens. Rosemary pushed her into a little more brainstorming. “Okay, is there something that you’d like to do with these colors? Such as...well, blues and greens make me think of water. The sea. Or I can imagine patterns of blues and greens—in paisley? Dots? Stripes? Paint swirls?”
When it was Pepper’s turn, her choices were all violent oranges and reds. “Hmm, so you’re not thinking restful. You like pops of color, right? So, we might find a comforter with red on one side, orange on the other. Or a bedspread with those colors in a pattern. Or...we could do white walls, with massive circles of orange and red.... Or do one wall orange, one red, then have white rugs, a white spread...?”
“Yeah, yeah!” If Pepper wasn’t wearing a seat belt, she’d have been bouncing off the roof with excitement.
Rosemary felt Whit shoot her a sudden odd look—she wasn’t sure why. So far, the trip seemed to be going far more smoothly than she’d thought at first glance. The girls had started out looking so huffy with each other, but they’d warmed up almost right away. She’d felt...well, not like a playmate with the eleven-year-olds. But not like a mother. More like an aunt—an aunt who didn’t have to discipline or set rules or responsibilities. She could just...be with them. Be an adult female in their lives. Not intrude in any way that could hurt anyone.
She just had to be careful not to hurt Whit the same way.
She had no way to say anything private to him for quite a while. All roads were crowded with holiday traffic, and once they were inside the Greenville city limits, the congestion quadrupled.
Downtown Greenville, typically, was decorated within an inch of its life. Charity Santas rang bells at every corner. Lights sparkled in every doorway, on every tree; wreaths with red bows blessed every window. People hustled and bustled, frantic to get their last-minute shopping done. Whit likely found the last parking space in the county, and he’d barely locked the car before the girls cavorted ahead.
Rosemary stuck her hands in her pockets and snugged next to him—not hip-bumping close—but near enough so he could hear her.
“Okay, before I worry it to death—how much of an apology do I owe you?” she asked.
“Apology? For what?” He did a good job of looking confused.
“I can go overboard. I know it. The thing is, I spent so much time with my two brothers that when I finally get around female company...well, I just really love some plain old girl time.”
“You mean, like when the three of you were all talking at once and asking and answering questions at the same time?”
She grinned. “Yeah. Exactly that. And what a great definition for girl talk. But...honestly, I didn’t mean to get carried away. I know you didn’t want a commercial type of Christmas....”
“Are you kidding? Rosemary, I don’t care what kind of Christmas we have, as long as the girls do something that doesn’t make them sad. Besides, this whole business of redoing their bedrooms...I couldn’t be happier you’re doing this. For the past year, they stopped wearing the same clothes, stopped brushing their hair exactly the same way. I think it’s a good thing, that they want their own sense of identity. I just didn’t have a clue how to do the room thing. It just started coming up last year, around when their mom died.”
“Still...”
“Still?”
“Well, I bumbled right into trouble—completely forgot to ask you ahead what you might want to budget for this, or how far you wanted me to go. When the girls mentioned Saks, I almost had a stroke.”
“Because?”
She lifted her shoulders. “My parents made good money, even what most people would call darned good money. We never wanted for anything. But my mom used to say that if you wanted sheets more expensive than Penney’s, you needed your head examined. We were a really busy family. Too busy to be dedicated consumers, I guess. But if your girls are used to shopping by brand, or by what’s an ‘awesome’ brand...I probably won’t know names like that.”
He stopped dead, which she didn’t realize until she glanced up and found him several steps behind her. He was staring at her so intently that she felt a flush—not outside, but inside—warm from her toes on up. “What?” she asked.
“Their mother was all about brands. Status. Appearance. Those things were important to her. I never put down Zoe in front of them, and never intend to. They loved her. She was devoted to them.” He hesitated, and just as he started to say something else, the girls abruptly turned around and galloped back to them.
They spotted the first store they wanted to shop in.
The shopping adventure only took three hours...really, they all wanted to continue a little longer, but Whit started looking glassy-eyed and a little bit shell-shocked. Weak pulse, gray, lack of ability to focus. Rosemary may not have chosen a medical profession, but she’d seen men walking in malls before. The symptoms of an impending panic attack were unmistakable.
“Can we go home now? Are we done?” he asked after the last purchase, which happened to be a quilt that Pepper fell for hook, line and sinker.
“I love it, I love it, I love it!” Pepper crowed. “It’s way better than a comforter or a bedspread. It’s all the colors I totally love—!”
“Can we drive home now?” Whit repeated, his voice the weakest of the four exchanging conversation.
She patted his hand, which couldn’t conceivably be construed as a sexual gesture. “You did very, very well.”
“Why isn’t shopping recognized as an Olympic sport? Like triathlons or steeplechasing? You know, the kind of sport where you go through intensive training before you have to compete. The kind where you have to have proven athletic abilities to even survive. You three could all bring home medals.” He added, “Could I lay down on the pavement now? I can’t make it another step.”
“You’re so funny, Dad.” Lilly crowded him with a massive hug on one side, Pepper on the other.
“Maybe the military could hire you three. The Marines are always looking for a few good men, but I suspect they’ve never met shoppers of your caliber.
“You could probably overthrow a country or two and still have energy left over.”
“You’d better sit in the back with us, Rosemary. Trust us. He won’t let up.” This was whispered loudly from Pepper.
“Isn’t there a medal of honor for surviving something like this?” Whit asked the world—as he dug out the key, unlocked and started heaping the packages in the back. “A purple heart. Or a bronze cross. Or maybe just a subtle D for Dad in neon lights. Or—”
Once the girls dissolved in giggles—and let loose with a few disgusted “Daaaad”s—he upped his pace.
“There must be some kind of training you females go through to build up your strength and endurance. And weight training. The tons in those packages in back is probably going to cost us extra mileage—assuming the tires can carry this much ballast. I’ll bet you all do run-in-place exercises. Push-ups. Treadmill...”
Before they hit the second stoplight, the girls fell asleep, still strapped in, but limp as puppies, covered with blankets and jackets and packages. Whit glanced in the rearview mirror, realized why the girls were suddenly so quiet and quit with the teasing.
A few minutes later, he said suddenly, “Rosemary...I should have thought. We weren’t far from the hospital complex in Greenville. If you’d wanted to stop to see your parents—”
She gave a wry chuckle. “Thanks, but not to worry. My chances of seeing them were probably around a zillion to one.”
“That bad?”
She heard the humor in his voice. “Probably worse,” she said, in the same humorous tone. “This is their home hospital. But they divide their time between here and Johns Hopkins—where they’re always on call. They’re both cardiac surgeons, but my mom specializes in small children. My dad works more with transplants, accident victims. Either way, when they’re doing surgery, they’re pretty much out of contact for five hours at a time or more. And if they’re catching a few minutes shut-eye, no one will wake them. Not for a silly reason like a family member calling.”
That silenced him, but not for long. “That was true, even when you were a child? That you couldn’t reach them?”
She turned her head. He was watching traffic, not looking at her, but there’d been concern in his voice. Sympathy. “I don’t think it hurt any of us, that our parents had important work...more important than thinking about us all the time. Besides, there were advantages to not having parents around much.”
“Like?”
“Like...the three of us grew up self-reliant. If no one was around for dinner, I’d make a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.”
He winced.
“Yeah, that’s what my brothers thought, too. Ice cream in cereal was another one of my specialties. Sometimes with chocolate topping. Sometimes not.”
“Chocolate topping. In the morning?”
Mackinnon 03 - The Bonus Mom Page 7
