He nodded as if he understood—which was an improvement over other times they’d had similar conversations about her responsibilities to her mother.
But after a sip of his wine and his second cracker he said, “The trouble is I just don’t think Estelle can stay in this house on her own anymore.”
“If the pills reverse her thyroid—”
“Even then. You heard what she said in the restaurant—”
“I think all of Chicago heard what she said in the restaurant.”
“She has to have other living arrangements,” he finished.
“Obviously she won’t move to L.A. with me,” Ally said wryly.
“Which leaves us with assisted living,” he concluded. “Somewhere where she could be mainly on her own but without any upkeep and with at least a daily visit from staff to look in on her, make sure she’s okay and taking her pills.”
Again he was being logical, reasonable, matter-of-fact.
Ally waited for him to add something that criticized her for not providing that care of her mother. But it never came. Instead, after another cracker and more wine, he said, “I can go with you to check places out. Since I work so much with the elderly, I know the best—and worst—places out there.”
“You’d do that?” she asked before she realized the words were going to come out, unable to keep the surprise from her voice.
“Sure. I want to see your mother in the best possible situation for her.”
“Thank you,” she said, appreciating what he was offering as well as the fact that he no longer seemed to be passing judgment.
“No problem,” he answered. Then, as if he knew she’d been expecting flack from him, he added, “That’s been my goal all along.”
“I should get working on this as soon as possible,” Ally said, both because it was true and to see if that provoked anything contrary from him.
But all he said was, “I’m free tomorrow afternoon. Bubby could probably come to stay with your mom—I think it’s better if we go alone, figure out what’s the best place and then present the idea to Estelle when we can lay out all the positives for her.”
Ally nodded, once more pleasantly surprised by his agreeableness to all of this. But she decided not to rock the boat by pushing it any further than she had. Instead, as she sipped her wine and looked at him in the dim glow of the light, she couldn’t help wondering about him and doing some pushing in another direction.
“How did you get so involved with geriatrics that you know the best living facilities?” she asked. “I remember you said Bubby put you to work at the senior center, but you said that she did that because you have so much to do with the elderly anyway—how did it happen that you have so much to do with them in the first place?”
Jake shrugged. “Working with seniors fills a void for me.”
“You said before that you don’t have any family—is that the void? Did you lose your own parents and replace them with your seniors?”
“Not exactly. I lost my parents when I was three, so I really almost never had a family,” he said very solemnly.
“Your parents passed away when you were only a child?”
“They were killed in a convenience-store robbery.”
“Oh, Jake, I’m so sorry. But…you didn’t have any family to take care of you?” she ventured, hoping she was misunderstanding.
“Not a soul. No grandparents, no siblings, and both my parents were only children, so no aunts or uncles. Nothing.”
“Oh,” she said, stunned and working to adjust her vision of him because this was so much different than anything she’d imagined. “So you were…”
“Thrown into the system.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“It means that the first thing that was tried was to find adoptive parents. But most people want newborns and a three-year-old is not a newborn.”
“It’s not much more than a baby, though,” she said, her heart wrenching at the idea of a child so small, so defenseless, being unwanted.
“That may be, but it still meant I wasn’t a great candidate for adoption. So the only other option was to put me into foster care, where I was until I became a teenager. Then I was in several group homes until I was eighteen.”
“Were you in one foster home until the group homes?”
“Oh, no,” he said as if it had been far from that—and not a happy situation. “I can’t even tell you how many foster homes I was in. I’d be with one family for a while—long enough to get settled in and start hoping it would be where I was for good—and then something would happen. The foster parents would decide they didn’t want to be a foster family anymore, or there would be a work transfer, or they’d have a new baby of their own, or you name it—I was moved for just about any reason you can think of and then some. Foster homes aren’t permanent arrangements—that’s why adoption would have been better. As it was, the longest I stayed anywhere was a year.”
Ally ached at the image of him as a little boy, never knowing the warmth of family.
Of course, she’d had family, and it had been far from perfect.
“Did you form any attachments?”
Jake shook his head. “I learned early not to count on anybody being in my life forever. Social workers changed, foster families changed, schools changed—definitely no fixtures.”
“And you went from foster homes to group homes? I’m not even sure I know what group homes are.”
“The ones I was in were suburban houses that Social Services owned. Eight to ten kids around the same age lived in them at any given time. We had round-the-clock adult supervision, but the staff didn’t live in, they just did eight-hour shifts then handed off to the next person—like at a nursing home or a jail—”
“Was it like a jail or a nursing home?”
“A little of both actually,” he said with a laugh, even though it didn’t seem funny to Ally.
“Group homes get a mix of kids,” he explained. “A lot of conduct-disorder kids, some who have just come out of detention facilities or rehab, and some who had to be removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect. But along with housing, it’s important to teach those same kids the skills to get them out on their own when the state cuts them loose at eighteen.”
“So you were there for all those reasons.”
“Well, also because when I hit puberty I became a kind of rebel without a cause and got into some trouble that ended my foster-care days.”
“You—Mr. Make-Sure-I-Do-What’s-Right—got into trouble?” she said, finding it hard to believe of him.
“I did,” he said, again with a laugh. “I went through a what-the-hell phase.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, what the hell difference did it make if I went to school? Or swiped cigarettes and booze from my foster parents’ store to sell myself? Or what the hell difference did it make if I drove without a license? That kind of what-the-hell phase that got me kicked out of foster care and thrown into juvie for three months, after which I was put into group homes as one of the conduct-disorder kids.”
She would never have guessed this of him. “How did you turn all that around and end up being a doctor?”
“I came into contact with a lot of kids worse off than I was. Kids who couldn’t get through school. Who couldn’t cope. Kids with—”
“More serious emotional and mental problems,” Ally finished for him, remembering his telling her that he’d grown up around a lot of people like that.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“But that was before you were in therapy yourself?”
“Actually, some of the therapy was in the group homes—everybody was required to go through counseling sessions. Plus, as a conduct-disorder kid I had to have outside therapy, too. The sessions at the group homes with the other kids was where I discovered I was good at reasoning with my peers, at problem solving, at helping them work through things, but it was the outside therapy that made me start to think about
doing it as a job.”
“So helping kids you lived with was what turned you around?”
“It did. I started school again, went to summer classes to make up what I’d missed so I could graduate on time. Then I worked my way through college and survived on student loans to go to med school. And here I am.”
Ally was impressed. “But given what that ambition came from, I would have thought you’d end up working with kids, not with their grandparents.”
“I work with all age groups. But I do particularly like the give-and-take with the older people who I didn’t get a chance to have in my life growing up. When I’m with them it’s like being surrounded by a whole bunch of grandparents now.”
“Some of them nice and some of them surly,” Ally remarked, thinking again about their dinner.
Jake laughed. “Yeah, but I enjoy the surly ones, too.”
“I hope you’re right. But after tonight I just don’t know…” Ally said with a sigh. “And speaking of grumps, do you think I’ll have to hypnotize Mother to move her to assisted living?”
He laughed again. “We might save that as a backup plan.”
Ally hated to think what sort of scene she’d be in for and it made her feel very weary again. Weary enough to show it by grumbling and collapsing forward for dramatic effect. But her forehead landed on Jake’s knee, and it was only after she got there that she realized that it was probably inappropriate.
Wine, little to eat, stress and fatigue—she knew that’s what had gotten her there without having thought it through in advance. But now that that’s where she was, she recognized that she’d gotten herself into something she shouldn’t have.
Except that before she could sit up again, he began to gently massage the back of her neck.
“Let’s just find a place first and then deal with telling Estelle,” he advised, but in a tone that was as quiet and intimate as his touch as he worked her bare nape with a gentle but firm caress.
“At least now I know not to talk to her about it in a public place,” Ally joked, her own voice an octave lower.
Jake laughed yet again, a sound that came from deeper in his chest this time, a sexy sort of rumble that let her know she wasn’t the only one of them being affected.
Too affected, maybe, because things were beginning to roil in her that didn’t belong, that shouldn’t be happening in this relationship that had no future.
And yet when she did make herself sit up again, Jake’s hand went with her, remaining cupped around the back of her neck, not letting her go too far away.
In fact, she ended up with her face only inches from his.
He was looking into her eyes, searching them as if he could see beneath the surface, and in that instant everything else fell away except the simple attraction that Ally felt for him. The same attraction that she knew instinctively he felt for her.
And that was when he tilted his head and leaned forward to kiss her.
Ever since the night before, she’d done a lot more thinking about what kissing Jake might be like—not that she’d wanted to know firsthand or even understood why she’d thought so much about it. But in thinking so much about it she’d told herself that he wouldn’t be any good at it. That a kiss from him would likely be by the book, stiff, succinct.
It was nothing like that. Oh, could the man kiss! His breath was warm against her cheek, his lips were parted the perfect amount, he knew how to move, how to engage, how to dominate just enough to draw her in and persuade her to kiss him in return.
And she did. It was a kiss too good not to enjoy, not to give back so it would go on a while longer, so she could have the full taste of lips that were firm and soft at the same time, the full mingling of his wine-sweet breath with hers, the full feeling of connecting with Jake Fox…
But then his mouth was gone and his hand slipped away.
“I should go,” he said.
Because he’d kissed her? Or just because he should go?
“I suppose so,” Ally agreed. What else was she going to do, invite him upstairs in an impulsive reaction to a simple kiss that had had more than a simple impact on her?
And even if that completely uncalled-for thought occurred to her, there was no way she was going to do it. That would have been inappropriate!
Jake handed her the wineglass and stood. “I’ll call Bubby and then check with you after I find out if she can come over and sit with your mom,” he was saying into Ally’s confusion of thoughts and feelings and the lingering sensation of his mouth on hers.
“Okay,” she said.
“And then we’ll do some assisted-living hunting.”
Ally nodded, coming back to earth a little more with the reminder of that.
But not all the way back to earth.
Because even as Jake said good-night, got up and left her sitting there on the bottom step, a part of Ally was still engulfed in that kiss.
That kiss—along with what she’d learned about him tonight—that had somehow shined an entirely new light on Jake and made her see him very differently.
That had made her see him as more than the guy who had bullied her into coming home, as more than her mother’s friend.
Suddenly she saw a great-looking, personable, intelligent, interesting man who she was enjoying getting to know. Who she was enjoying spending time with. Who she wanted to get to know even more.
And who she could have kissed until the sun came up…
Chapter Seven
“Mother? What are you doing?” Ally asked Estelle when she went into the house Sunday morning and found her mother looking through a ragged shoe box full of old photographs at the kitchen table.
“I couldn’t open the front door to get my paper—yesterday when I did that, you came running like the house was on fire. And I like to have something to look at while I drink my coffee, so I got out my pictures.”
While Ally had finished dressing she’d listened through the intercom and had heard Estelle up and about. But since Ally hadn’t heard anything alarming, she hadn’t rushed over this morning. She’d forgotten about her mother’s newspaper.
Rather than going out to get it off the front porch now, Ally was curious about the photographs, so she poured herself a cup of coffee and joined her mother at the table.
“I’ve never seen these,” she said, leaning to one side to look at the snapshot Estelle was staring at.
“It’s my special box,” Estelle said, sounding nostalgic.
Ally felt a bit…slighted. “Do you want to be alone?”
“It’s all right,” Estelle said amiably. Then she handed Ally the picture. It was a black-and-white photograph of a high-school-age Estelle in a cheerleader’s uniform. She was one of four girls who all wore the same uniform and were posed with megaphones.
“You were a cheerleader?”
“When I was a senior…” Estelle chuckled wryly. “A different kind of senior than they call me now.”
Ally laughed. “Did you cheer for Daddy?” She knew her parents had met in high school and married two weeks after they’d graduated but not anything more than that.
“Oh, no, your father didn’t play sports. I cheered for Cubby Grissom.”
“I heard Daddy mention that name, didn’t I?”
“Probably. They were best friends,” Estelle said, handing Ally two more photos to point out Cubby Grissom. In one of them he had his arms affectionately around the young Estelle.
After seeing that, Ally raised her eyebrows over her cup as she took a sip of her coffee. “You went out with Daddy’s best friend?”
“I had such a crush on Cubby!” Estelle confided. “And he was crazy about me. At Mitchie’s and my wedding, when we walked back up the aisle, Cubby was in the last church pew with big tears in his eyes because I was marrying Mitchie instead of him.”
“Mother!” Ally pretended to chastise. “I didn’t know you were a heartbreaker!”
“Only Cubby’s.”
It was rare that Ally had t
he opportunity to talk to Estelle as if they were friends, and she relished the moment.
“How did you end up marrying Daddy?” Ally asked as she was shown wedding pictures that hadn’t made it into the album.
“No one could believe it,” Estelle said. “Not even me. Not after the way Mitchie and I started out, that’s for sure. We fought and argued and at first I thought he was the biggest jackass…” Again Estelle said that with nostalgia in her voice, but now with humor, too. “I didn’t like him at all. He was just a friend of Cubby’s I had to put up with.”
Sort of like Jake, Ally thought. Initially he’d just been the jackass she’d argued with and hadn’t liked but had had to put up with because he was her mother’s friend…
“What did you argue about?” she asked Estelle.
“Oh, silly things—who we liked in school and who we didn’t. What teachers were good and which ones weren’t. Movies, music, books, just everything.”
“So how did you go from that to marrying him?” Not that Ally thought for a single second that she was going to go from a similar beginning with Jake to that. She was just curious.
“I don’t know…” Estelle said wistfully. “We were together a lot of the time because of Cubby and for some reason things just started to fall into place—we started to joke about how much we disagreed, he made me laugh…Something just sparked.”
Like Jake’s kiss last night…
“And then,” Estelle concluded, “I didn’t like Cubby anymore—well, I still liked him as a friend, but the crush just went away—and Mitchie and I ended up being like two halves of a whole.”
Which had always been what Ally had believed of her parents—that one without the other was incomplete. Something she couldn’t fathom ever being true of her.
Estelle took another picture from the old shoe box and grinned. “Niagara Falls—that’s where we went on our honeymoon. That was where we decided that we wanted to travel all we could. That that would be the kind of life we’d have together.”
“Really?” Ally said. Niagara Falls didn’t seem like such an exotic trip that it would inspire dreams of travel. Plus, this was the first she’d ever heard of her parents deciding that should be the goal of their married life. “I don’t remember you ever going anywhere,” she added.
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