I grip Booker’s forearm. “Jeepers-creepers. At one time or another, I have seen every one of these sights. But I have never stood in one place and seen them all at once. I think this might be the most glorious sight I have ever witnessed!”
He smiles down at me and lightly rubs the pad of his thumb against the small dent in my chin, another action that takes me back. He used to do the same thing all the time; he’d seemed endlessly fascinated by my chin’s shallow cleft. Flooded with sudden memories, I find myself inching closer to him.
“Excuse me, Mr. Jameson,” the tea room hostess calls softly from the doorway, making me take a swift step back. I feel for a moment almost as though she caught us doing something we shouldn’t. But she merely smiles at us and says, “Your table is ready.”
She seats us a moment later. The instant she walks away Booker shoots me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Lena. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
I’m frankly delighted with the place and, planting my elbow on the table and my chin in my palm, I smile at him over the little vase hosting an artful single chrysanthemum. “I like it. The view can’t be beat and it’s very pretty, don’t you think?” The latter is hardly a serious question—it’s more like one of those whatchamacallit kinds where no answer is required. Because, please. The tearoom is beautifully appointed and it’s hardly as if I have been to so many elegant eateries I’m going to look for details to complain about.
“You are very pretty,” he says, his voice a low rumble that vibrates in a most interesting place deep inside of me. He lounges back in his chair with one elbow hooked round the top dowel of its ladder back.
“Aw, you.” I grin at him across the small table. “You know,” I add, studying him more closely, “you are more what I thought a sheik would be in the movies than Rudolph Valentino was. If you tell Dot, I will deny this with my dying breath. But Valentino seemed more grinning fool than a romantic hero.”
No, no, no, no, no! I did not just say that! Now Booker is going to think I think he’s a romantic hero. And okay, at the moment I kind of do. But danged if I want him knowing anything of the sort.
Too bad for me, though, since I am clearly too late. He shoots me a cocky smile and wags his eyebrows.
I’m valiantly ignoring him, when I remember his check for an orphanage in my purse. “Oh!” I snap upright. “I forgot all about this.” I dig through my purse and pull it out. “I’m so sorry. This came yesterday.” I explain how it arrived with the box of gowns from Frederick and Nelson.
“I wondered what the hell happened to that.” Booker looks up from studying the check. “I didn’t even remember writing it while I was waiting for you during the fittings until a couple days ago.” He shoots me a crooked smile. “Which isn’t too surprising considering how stunning you looked when you modeled the gowns.” Then he shrugs. “Drove every other thought out of my head.”
Pretending his flattery—and hot eyed gaze—aren’t turning my cheeks seven shades of red, I hand him the note from Alice even as I tell him what it says. Then I meet his gaze head on and raise my eyebrows. “So, how long have you been doling out generous checks to orphanages?” I lean forward, my discomfort forgotten. I have wondered about this since first laying eyes on the check Frederick and Nelson returned with my box of gowns.
Booker shrugs again. “I started donating to The Children’s Home once the lounge started turning a healthy profit.”
“Almost right away, in other words?” Face it, Booker seems to have a golden touch, but I doubt it’s because the sun follows him around just looking for an opportunity to shine down on his head. I think it stems from his tendency to consider every possibility before committing to an action. It simply makes sense to me that all his hard work would result in prompt success.
Not that I know the first thing about what it took for him to pilot the Twilight Room into the black. Or, heck, even if he actually has.
But I do know, by the big smile on his face, my assessment doesn’t offend him. And I simply have to smile back. I am also helpless to stop myself from gazing at the smile lines his grin fans out from the corners of his eyes, or admiring the whiteness of his teeth as they gleam in the room’s lighting.
His shoulder above the arm draped over the chair back hitches up, then as swiftly drops. “Pretty much.”
“What made you choose that particular charity?”
“Seriously, Lena?” A dark eyebrow quirks. “Why do you suppose?”
I blink. Then blink and blink again, for all the world as if I’ve developed a sudden tic. Squeezing my eyes shut, I immediately pop them wide open again, relieved when the action halts the stupid winky-eye activity. My voice comes out just a bit too high when I say, “Me? Because of me?”
“Yeah. You and the godawful Blood of Christ. I wanted my money to go toward making something better than that place .” Unhooking his arm from the chair back, he leans forward. “I hated the way the matron from hell ran the B of C. It was a disgrace.”
Then his face lights up as quickly as it clouded over. “You should see the Seattle Children’s Home, Lena. It’s over on Queen Anne Hill—I’ll take you there one of these days. It’s light and bright and everything I wished for you at the foundling home. Not that they don’t do some things the same. The girls learn to sew, for instance same as you did. The boys are taught a trade.
“One of the interesting differences in this place, though, is that not only orphans live at the home. They also take in kids of single fathers who work in the woods or mines or are out to sea for extended periods of time. And the women who work there smile at the children. They’re not all doom and gloom like Matron Stick Up Her—um. They smile,” he repeats emphatically.
I hide my amusement at Booker’s attempted cover-up. But, please. Like I don’t know exactly what he meant to say! Clasping my hands in my lap, I hear myself admit, “I always had the strongest urge to stop at the local orphanage in the different towns where I had my singing gigs. I thought I could offer some music lessons, or, I don’t know, maybe help organize a choir for the kids who were interested.” I have never told a soul that. Not even Will.
“But you never did?”
“No. I just couldn’t.” To my horror, my chin quivers. I draw a deep breath and hold it one second...two seconds...three, until I regain my composure. My chin tilts up as I admit for the first time the true reason I could never bring myself to do the thing I truly longed to do. “I know far too well what it feels like to have people come into my life, only to leave me just when I drop my guard and start to count on them. And at this point in my career, coming and going is the nature of my work. I follow the gigs, and when you’re trying to move up the ladder in this business that means going from town to increasingly larger towns.” I sit straighter in my seat.
Because there it is, what I have never actually acknowledged to myself.
Yet Booker doesn’t seem the least surprised. He gives me a brisk nod, as if to say atta girl!
Darned if it doesn’t renew my strength without a word being spoken. Solemnly, I peer up into his handsome face. “I couldn’t bear to get other kids all excited about singing, only to walk out on them just when they’ve placed their trust in me.”
I brace my forehead in my palm a moment. Then I raise my head to look at Booker and softly slap my hand down on the tabletop. “I could not do that to them.”
“Okay, I can see that.” He slides his hand across the table until his fingertips barely graze mine. His touch is soft as a breeze, yet I feel it like a lightning bolt sizzling through every nerve in my body.
I’m so discombobulated I have to concentrate to make sense of his individual words when he says, “I recall you once telling me how hard it was when the older kids in the orphanage who’d befriended you moved on.”
Then his words sink in and I sit straighter in my seat. “Oh, my gosh, you remember that?”
“Of course.” Booker looks at me as if I’d asked a ridiculous question. “I rememb
er damn near every conversation you and I have ever had.”
And just like that, I feel the final dregs of my ill-will, the last of my hard-held grudge against Booker, evaporate like fine drizzle on hot rocks. I have been so darn angry since coming face to face with him again and didn’t even realize until this minute how much it has worn me out. But now, all that energy-sucking ire is simply...gone.
Leaving me awash in the most amazing, peaceful feeling.
28
susan andersen
That’s the berries!
BOOKER
Hearing Henry proclaim “Lo-La Baker!” in that deep, rich radio announcer voice he uses to great effect, I look up from the office ledger I dragged out to the lounge. I have been sitting here at my usual table, ice melting in a largely untouched bourbon as I try to find the entry that’s been preventing Leo and me from reconciling the books this week. And I’m doing this by fucking candlelight, of all the idiotic ideas, because I don’t want to miss Lena’s entrance.
Turns out, it is worth every bit of discomfort, because as she rises up through the floor and the audience goes wild, I forget the slight thumping in my left temple from an aggravating case of eye strain, forget the annoyingly elusive forty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents we’re off, the amount of which rings a familiarity bell in the back of my mind without giving me the first clue as to why. Staring at Lena, I finally pick up my watered-down drink and knock back half of it in one large gulp to sooth a throat abruptly gone drier than dust.
She is wearing “my” dress as I secretly think of it. The final selection Alice, the seamstress at Frederick’s, brought out for her to try on the day we went in for her gown fittings. This is the curve hugging black and tan gown that clings to Lena’s body like a lover.
I shift in my seat. Shit. Those are the last terms I need to be thinking in.
When Lena leans into the mic and sings, “It. Had to be. Yoooou,” in a sultry alto, however, I almost forget the gown and the body it showcases. “It had to be yooou.”
The words, sung with searing emotion, arrow through my soul, every damn syllable branding Lena’s imprint over yet another inch of me. It’s always been her. It always will be. We were fated, mated, from the moment she kissed my minor ‘owie’ better outside our hometown hardware store.
It had to be you, indeed.
This is a new addition to her lineup. I approved its addition to her first set with Henry, but have never actually heard Lena sing the song. And, damn, have I missed out! She has turned it into a torch song far different from Isham Jone’s original, fast paced rendition. And I feel like she’s singing straight to me when she goes on in that throaty voice:
Might never be cross, or try to be boss.
But they wouldn’t do.
And God help us all. I want to whisk her away now, this minute. Drag her back to my place. I want—
I blow out a frustrated breath. Something I can’t have; that’s what I want. At least not right this minute. Catching John’s attention over at the bar he’s manning, I signal for a fresh drink.
I love this speakeasy more than just about anything else in my life. My reverence is due, in no small part, to the fact that I turned a fairly run down space into the elegant lounge I had dreamed about for years. And I did it all by myself.
Okay, not entirely by myself. The minute I contacted Leo about coming to work for me, he left his hometown in Ohio and moved out here to help me make my dream a thriving operation. But I did it with neither my father’s help nor his money.
Consequently, I doesn’t bother me I spend the lion’s share of my time here and have little social life outside of the Twilight Room. Tonight, though, I’m grateful it’s Saturday and we’ll be closing early. I keep half expecting that any minute now Lena will come tell me she talked to Dot and Clara and they insist she stay with them. Which ought to make me happy for her.
But, damn I don’t want her going anywhere except home with me! I’m pleased when I hear Henry announce last call without Lena stopping by to make my expectations a reality.
The swells and the flappers vacate the joint after the final number and I collect the money from John at the bar, then head back to my office as the lounge begins settling down. I am just coming to the backstage corridor to my office when I hear a sudden burst of excited laughter, then chatter from what sounds like every damn one of my employees. Shit. Did I forget someone’s birthday? I swear I didn’t see anyone’s name in today’s calendar entries.
Leo looks up from tidying his desk as I walk into the office, glancing at the ledger in my hand. “You find the problem?”
“No, but we’ll deal with it tomorrow. Go on home, Sarge.”
“Don’t mind if I do. I woke up way too early today, so it’s been a long one.” He blows out a breath. Grimaces. “Plus, I got another letter from Millie.”
Oh, hell. Millie is Leo’s faithless ex-wife, who wrote him a goddamn Dear John letter while we were fighting for our lives in the trenches. She has since decided she regrets the divorce and can’t seem to accept she broke the faith with Leo in a way impossible to repair.
Amid the dwindling sounds of employees chatting as they begin trickling out, Leo grabs his hat and coat. “See you tomorrow,” he says and heads for home, as well.
Minutes later, all goes quiet. I finish counting the take from the bar and put it in the safe. I’m beginning to think maybe Lena left with the Brasher sisters after all when there’s a light tap on my door and Lena’s voice softly calling my name.
I grin, then rein it in because I kind of fear my mouth is stretched so wide and my smile’s so loopy-relieved, I look like a damn idiot. “Come in.” I toss my mechanical pencil on the desk and lean back in my chair.
She sticks her head in the door and gives me a dazzling smile. Whoa, Nellie. I sit up.
“Hi,” she murmurs.
“Hi, yourself. Ready to go home?”
I could almost swear she shivers, but maybe not, because she says uncertainly, “I am, but can I ask a favor of you first?”
Something has her damn near vibrating and I push back from the desk to stand. “Sure. What do you need?”
“Oh, my gosh, you gotta see this,” she says breathlessly, stepping into the office. She thrusts something out at me.
I look down. It’s a—I’m not sure what, exactly, so I narrow my eyes and actually study it for a moment. It’s a wooden star encrusted with costume jewelry. I look at her helplessly. “It’s, uh—
“Beautiful, right? I know!” She beams up at me, her entire face aglow. “It’s for my dressing room door—see the little whatchamacallit on the back? Clara and Dot made it for me with the stage fellas’ help. Roger cut the star out of some leftover pine and Ernie sanded it smooth and stained it. And just about everyone working here brought in orphaned jewelry that’s no longer part of a big set. Those are called a parure, did you know that? I didn’t, but it’s fun to learn something new, isn’t it? Anyhow, they brought in stuff that’s no longer part of a parure or a set—I think a parure has to be more than two matching pieces—but stuff they hung onto in case the missing piece showed up. Isn’t that the way it usually goes? The lost piece usually isn’t found, so its mate sits forgotten in the bottom of whatever you use to keep your jewelry in.”
She shakes her head and waves a hand as if batting mosquito netting away from her face. “Sorry,” she says. “You might remember I tend to go off subject.” She points to a small crystal Art Deco piece. “So, this is the earring that was left when Sally lost its mate. This one and this one are from two different pairs of Henry’s cufflinks. The tie pin here is from Benson. It didn’t have a mate, of course—he just thought I would like it. Isn’t that the sweetest thing?” She flashes me her delighted smile again.
Then she points at a brooch in the middle of the star. “This was Elsie’s. One of the crystals fell out, so Dot cut off that part. Don’t ask me how, because that couldn’t have been easy. But she and Clara put so much work into this f
or me and I want you to hang it on my door, okay?”
This, I think. This woman standing in front of me, talking fast and barely drawing breath between words, is the Lena I remember in a nutshell. And she is still every bit as appreciative as she was back then.
During my time in France, I was often present in clubs when men presented their wives or mistresses with an expensive piece of jewelry. With the exception of the woman whose fella asked for her hand in marriage, I honest to God cannot remember any of the others displaying as much enthusiasm as Lena does for this gift from her friends. She is all but bouncing up and down with excitement over a star crafted from discarded and forgotten costume jewelry, disregarding its rag-tag origins and thrilled by the thoughtfulness of every single person who contributed to the gift.
As I reach out to take the star from her hands, I kind of wish someone had asked me to donate something. Checking the back of the decoration, I see Roger cut out a small notch and taped a screw next to it. All I have to do is put the screw in the door and its head will slip into the notch to hold it nice and flush against the door. “Let me get a screwdriver and we’ll get it mounted.”
Laughing exuberantly, she claps her hands. “Thank you!”
Ten minutes later, I step back from her door and glance over at Lena. “What do you think?”
Hugging clasped hands atop her lush breasts, she sighs. “It’s just perfect.”
It Had to be You Page 16
