Flirting With Pete: A Novel

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Yes, but now that you’ve given your sermon on forgiveness and invited him back to the church, he has you and the flock. Doesn’t he?”

  *

  Pete brought back two jumbo cups of coffee and a dozen doughnuts. “I have a sweet tooth,” he confessed and proceeded to consume three doughnuts to each one of hers. Jenny might have worried, if his body hadn’t been so firm. But she was hungry, too, and there was no mystery why. In no time, the whole dozen doughnuts were gone.

  He sat on the rear legs of his chair and patted his belly. “That was good. I don’t feel one bit guilty.”

  Neither did Jenny. But the issue of guilt was a land mine. It lay just below the surface, unseen by the naked eye but ready to explode. “If you did feel guilty, what would you do?”

  “Chop wood. Run a couple miles. Back home? Mend fences. By the time my stomach was growling again, the guilt would be gone.”

  “What about other kinds of guilt? Like about your family.”

  “I can’t turn the clock back and change what I did or didn’t do. All I can do is go on.”

  “Have you forgiven yourself then?”

  “That would mean what I did was okay, which it wasn’t. But I can move on and learn from mistakes and be different.”

  “Moving on for you means going back to your family. By being different now you can make up for things you did then. I can’t. So what do I do with the guilt?”

  “What guilt?”

  “Guilt. Doing things. Not doing things.” She was skirting that land mine, but coming ever closer. “Don’t I owe it to Darden to stay?”

  “Do you want to stay?”

  “No! No! But Darden went to prison for me.”

  “He went for killing your mother.”

  “But he did it for me.” She wanted to say more, wanted it so badly she could almost taste the words. But a tiny part of her swallowed them back down, afraid still.

  “Jenny?”

  She looked away.

  The front legs of his chair hit the floor seconds before he took her chin and turned her face to his. “I love you, Jenny.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know enough.”

  “What if you don’t? What if there are things—”

  “— that would curdle my blood?”

  “I’m serious, Pete.”

  “So am I. I love you.” He pressed his chest. “Right here, where it isn’t necessarily rational but where it feels as real as anything else in this world— right here something clenches each time I look at you. Like you’re the key. Like you can help me make things right. Okay, it sounds weird. A week ago I didn’t know who you were, and maybe, just maybe, if I’d been a day earlier or a day later riding through Little Falls, we wouldn’t have met. But I don’t believe that. I think we’d have met one way or another. I love you.” He made a show of thumping his chest.

  Which was how she loved him, she realized, and she knew then that she had to tell him more. Maybe not everything. But certainly more.

  So she took his hand and led him upstairs, through her bedroom closet, up the ladder, into the attic. Way at the back under the eaves was a box of newspaper clippings. They covered her mother’s death, her father’s arrest for the crime, and his trial.

  Pete carried the box to the back window and sat down to read.

  Jenny crouched in a shadowed front corner and watched him lift out one article after another. She knew each by heart, she had read them so many times, knew just what he was reading when, and read along in her mind. She waited for a look or a sound to show he was as revolted as she was. Her breath came in harsh gasps from the place deep inside where the past festered, and all the while she pressed the same spot on her chest that he had pressed on his, felt the tightening there, the fear, the hope.

  Finally he folded the last article, slid the box back under the eaves, and came toward her, and her fear rose and rose and rose. But his face held neither revulsion nor hate. His expression was sad, but tender. It was a miracle, she knew, but the love that she so desperately needed to see was still there.

  Settling onto his knees, he pulled her between them. He buried his face in her hair and took the same kind of long, grieving breaths she had just taken. After a bit he sat back on his heels. He kissed her hands, held them to his heart, and said nothing, which was really what Jenny needed most. It was her time to talk. Things that she had locked away so many years ago started spilling out.

  “We never got along, my mother and me. We looked just alike— except she was twenty years older— but even when I was just born, with little bits of hair, I looked like her. She was MaryBeth June Clyde, and I was MaryBeth Jennifer Clyde. It was my father’s idea to name us the same. She told me that. He was trying to make her happy, only it didn’t work, it couldn’t work, because I wasn’t Ethan. He was born two years before me, but he died before his first birthday. She wanted me to take his place, but I couldn’t, so she hated me, and she hated my father.”

  “Why him?”

  “Because he betrayed Ethan by loving me.” Jenny shuddered. “Sick, sick, sick.”

  “Your mother?”

  “The whole thing!” Jenny felt Pete’s heartbeat traveling up her arm. It was calming, soothing, accepting. It gave her the strength to return to that awful time. “She hated me because he paid attention to me and not to Ethan, but Ethan was dead, only she wouldn’t admit it, and when Darden couldn’t take her yelling about it anymore, he turned to me, which made her madder.”

  “You were a pawn.”

  “They all said that, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Lawyers, social service workers, police. They said it wasn’t my fault, and they kept apologizing, but they weren’t the ones being asked all the questions. They weren’t the ones trying to keep the answers straight. I had to tell them everything over and over.”

  “Want to do it one last time?”

  She did. For Pete. He hadn’t run out, but was still there, saying he loved her, crouched whisper-close, holding her hand, keeping her calm, and it felt good, so good to talk after such a long, hard silence, to share for the very first time, a little weight taken from her chest with each word she spoke.

  “My mother was mad at me because I forgot to pick up her pills on the way home from school. They were sleeping pills. She couldn’t get through the night without them. I said I’d go back into town, but she said she needed them now, and that I was stupid and selfish, and that I was a witch and had Darden under some kind of spell. She started hitting me.”

  “With the walking stick.”

  Jenny moaned and nodded. Yes, with the walking stick.

  “What did you do?”

  She rubbed her palm against his chest. Even calm, even stronger than she had ever been, even relieved to be speaking at last, the remembering was hard. Her body was all rubber and shakes. But Pete’s heart was beating that steady tattoo, and his hands held understanding. Suddenly it was like he had opened a door and a force on the other side was sucking the words from her mouth.

  “I backed up and tried to protect myself, but there wasn’t much protecting you could do with a stick like that. She tripped me when I tried to run, and then I was on the floor and couldn’t go anywhere but against the wall. She just kept yelling and whacking me with that thing, and one part of me knew I deserved it—”

  “You didn’t deserve it.”

  Jenny swallowed. “I wasn’t what she wanted.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “But I made it worse.”

  “How?”

  “By letting my father love me.”

  “Letting him? You were a child, Jenny. Children need love. If they don’t get it from one parent, they seek it from another. Where was he while she was beating you that day?”

  “At work. By the time he got home there was blood all over the place. He got scared.”

  “So he took the walking stick and hit her. One blow, the papers said.”

  Jen
ny remembered the sound of it and winced. She remembered the sight of it, the smell of it, and swallowed down a rising bile. “When people are desperate, when they think they’re going to die and then they’re afraid they won’t, they do things they wouldn’t be able to do other times.”

  “So now he’s coming home.”

  She nodded.

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  She nodded again.

  “Then why are you still here?”

  Her eyes begged him to understand this, too. “Because he did it for me. Don’t you see? He did it so I could be free. Only I’m not. He told me to wait here for him and keep the house going until he got out. So this is my jail. I can’t leave because I owe him, and I need to be punished—”

  “For letting him? No, Jenny.”

  Explain, she cried. Tell him everything. He loves you. He won’t leave.

  But she couldn’t. Not yet. The risk was too great. “And anyway, where would I go? What place is safe? The only things you ever see in the news are bombings and shootings and rape. I’ve lived here all my life. I don’t know anyone anywhere else, and even if I did, I don’t have enough money to live alone, and there’s no way I’m going to be finding another job now that Miriam is closing Neat Eats. I’m pathetic!”

  He took her face as he had done other times, only his hands and eyes were fierce now. “You aren’t pathetic.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “Pathetic and weak and guilty. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for me.”

  “You didn’t ask to be born. They made that decision, then they screwed up your life.”

  “Pathetic and weak and guilty.”

  Pete’s hands tightened. “Open your eyes, Jenny.”

  She couldn’t. She was afraid of what she would find.

  “Open them,” he said, but more gently this time, and his hands weren’t so much holding her face as cradling it, ten separate fingers saying that she was precious and fragile and was to be protected at all costs.

  She opened her eyes.

  “If you were either pathetic or weak, you’d never have survived the last six years. It hasn’t been easy. No one’s helped you out much.”

  “Dan checks up on me.”

  “Not his father?”

  “No. Just Dan. But that’s okay. I like him better.”

  “Does he ask you over for dinner? Does he drive you to the mall when you need clothes? Does he hold your hand when the nightmares come?”

  “Reverend Putty came by a lot.”

  “Past tense.”

  “Well, he still comes. Just not as often.”

  “And likely only when Dan asks him to, am I right? Okay, so there was Miriam. She hired you when no one else would, in return for which you worked your butt off. She didn’t lose on the deal, and P.S., she didn’t ask you to come with her to Seattle, did she. No, Jenny, you aren’t pathetic and weak, and as for guilt, guilt is relative. Taken out of context, most anything sounds bad. Look at the whole. You were only eighteen when your mother died. Only eighteen.”

  Jenny shuddered. “It’s like yesterday sometimes, I can see it so clearly, eyes open, eyes closed, night, day, no matter.”

  “That’s the legacy they left you. Has anyone ever apologized for that?”

  No one had. No one at all.

  “I didn’t think so,” Pete said. “Now, you want to tell me that after all that, you owe it to Darden to stay here with him for the rest of your life? Ask me, and you don’t even have to stay till he gets back!”

  She had argued that one with herself. “I think I should.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing. He wanted me to meet him at the prison gate. I said no. I couldn’t go there, not even one last time. But I said I’d be here, and if I’m not, well, God, I don’t know. It’ll be pretty bad anyway. He won’t want me to leave.”

  “Can he make you change your mind?”

  “I don’t want him to,” she wailed. “Nothing good can come of it, nothing good ever did, but he’s my father, he’s the only one I have so close.”

  “You have me now. That gives you a choice.”

  “I know, I know, I know.”

  “Still you’re torn.”

  “Well, if he’s changed, mellowed out, you know, it would be awful if I just said hello and goodbye. But he hasn’t changed,” she reminded herself and hardened. “I’ve seen him every month. He hasn’t changed one bit. And I can’t go back. I can’t pick up where we left off. I can’t. I won’t. He’s a disgusting man. He doesn’t care about anyone’s needs but his own. And he’s jealous, Pete. I don’t know what he’ll do when I tell him about you.”

  “Well then,” Pete said, straightening his shoulders, firming his jaw, looking ready to take Darden on and not the least bit worried, “that’s something to look forward to, I’d say.”

  *

  Jenny tried not to worry. That didn’t mean she didn’t check the refrigerator three times Monday afternoon to make sure Darden’s four six-packs of Sam Adams were there, or that she didn’t repeatedly check the bottles of antacid in the medicine chest against Darden’s list to make sure she had bought the right brand and strength, or that she didn’t unmake the bed with the silk sheets, jump in the middle, roll around, and then make it over— twice— to make it look like she’d been sleeping there all week.

  She still hadn’t cleaned out her mother’s things. She vowed to do it the next morning, no ifs, ands, or buts.

  For now, though, what she wanted most was to spend time with Pete, and that’s what she did. They stayed in the attic on their bed of pillows and quilts, sometimes naked, sometimes not, and they made love over and over. Jenny was good at it, actually. She knew positions Pete had never thought of. But he was a quick study. His body had a natural flow, fitting around her, responding to her, spurring her higher and higher. He had more stamina, had ten times more stamina than she had thought a man could have.

  And that was only the first of her discoveries. She learned how beautiful a man’s body could be, how gentle and giving, and that she could take from it for her own pleasure and become something more. She learned about sweet afterglows, one after another after another, and about the kind of self-confidence that let you look into a man’s eyes for hours without looking away. She learned that kisses could erase scars. She learned what it was to be loved so deeply and rightly that the dirt of the past was washed away and the future became a thing of promise.

  No matter that less than a day remained. No matter that there were short, sharp moments of terror when she thought of what might happen when Darden got home and started talking, and what Pete might do then. No matter that there was the guilt, still— always, the guilt.

  For the first time in the whole of her adult life, being with Pete, she was happy.

  *

  Midday Tuesday, Jenny set off for town. She wore her usual sweatshirt, sneakers, and jeans, but left her baseball cap home. She was tired of hiding. Her hair was curling up, but it was clean and shiny, a beacon to her mood, which was one of high courage and hope even in spite of the morning’s phone calls.

  Three times Darden had tried. Three times she had blocked her ears to the ring of the phone. Oh, she knew it was him. No doubt about that. No one else ever called. But she didn’t want to hear his voice. Besides, there was nothing he had to say that couldn’t wait.

  So now she walked toward the center of town, tall and strong, moving like a woman on a mission. Jenny Clyde was ready to fly. She wanted Little Falls to know it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Boston

  It had been Jordan, of course. Nobody else would be wandering around her house in the middle of the night. He caught her arms to steady her and glanced at what she carried.

  “I was visiting with Angus,” she explained. “While I was in there, I picked up some things to read.” She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask. He actually didn’t say a word, just took her hand and led her back to bed. They did
n’t make love this time, but simply lay in each other’s arms until they fell back to sleep— and it was what Casey needed. If she had left Connie’s room feeling alarm on Jenny’s behalf, it was soothed by Jordan’s presence. Like the garden he had made, he exuded calm. Selfishly, knowing that time was short, she took all the calm he offered. Sure enough, he was up at dawn’s first light to go home.

  She stayed in bed a few minutes longer to enjoy his lingering scent. As the warmth of his body faded from the sheets, though, she grew restless. When her thoughts reached the churning point, she bolted up. She showered, made coffee, and carried a mug down the stairs.

  This morning, Ruth’s paintings gave her pause. Seascapes all, they captured the effect of the sun hitting waves in one, a fishing dock in another, a small island in the third. Casey looked from one work to the next. Each conveyed confidence. More, they all conveyed hope, which was what she clung to as she went on through the office and out the French doors.

  The garden’s silence was broken only by the sweet calls of the birds that came and went from the feeder. Boston was still groggy this Thursday morning. The sun had barely emerged from the harbor to the east.

  Sipping her coffee, Casey wandered along the garden path. When she knelt to study Jordan’s impatiens, their upturned little faces studied her back. Standing, she wandered among the white flowers, around the patch of pinks, over to the blues. Jordan had reeled off their names, but she had no idea now which went with what.

  No. That wasn’t so. Looking closely, she could identify a few. She saw bluebells among the blues, and lilies among the whites. Among the pinks, there was bleeding heart; no mistaking their shape.

  Bluebells, lilies, and bleeding heart. She felt quite proud of herself. Jordan hadn’t mentioned any of these. They were words from her childhood, names to go with shapes. She wasn’t Caroline’s daughter for nothing.

  Fragrance? Well, that was something else. She couldn’t identify the separate scents, but the combined bouquet was sweet, indeed.

  Carrying the sweetness with her, she climbed up a tier to the azaleas, which had opened enough to show small apricot-colored flowers. The rhododendrons, too, were more open than they’d been the day before. Their flowers were larger and, she could see now, white.