Nerd in Shining Armor

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  Fortunately, before Granny Neville left for the airport, she’d given Annabelle her most prized possession, a pair of Jockey shorts with E. Presley written with a laundry marker right on the label. Those Jockeys had paid for three coach tickets to Honolulu and money to get started in a new location.

  But the plane flight to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience of Annabelle’s life. She never expected to get on a plane again and didn’t want her children on one, either. Now here was Genevieve with a chance at a real good catch, apparently, and there had to be a plane involved.

  “Mama, Nick flies all the time. He’s a good pilot.” Genevieve spread out her fingers on the worn pine table. “I think French this time, don’t you? It’s more natural looking and it’ll go with whatever I’m wearing.”

  Annabelle was about to ask what she was wearing, exactly, when Lincoln came in from playing basketball and opened the freezer to take out a red, white, and blue Popsicle. He’d begged Annabelle to buy the Popsicles because they matched his hair, which he’d dyed for the summer in colors that he said suited all the summer holidays—Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day.

  Working in a beauty salon, Annabelle had seen all kinds of strange hair colors, so she hadn’t been as upset as most mothers might have been. And to tell the truth, when Lincoln wanted matching Popsicles, he’d made her laugh because it proved he was still a kid at heart. Besides, hair was minor. What Genevieve was planning, this flight to Maui, was major.

  Lincoln bit into his Popsicle and talked with his mouth full. “Hey, Gen, what I want to know is if you’re gonna have, like, sex with this dude, since you’re staying overnight with him.”

  “Lincoln!” Annabelle scolded.

  “That is none of your business,” Genevieve said.

  “She’s right, Lincoln,” Annabelle said. “Go back to the park and play basketball some more.”

  “No way! This is the most awesome thing that’s happened around here in, like, months! Maybe ever! You know Chad, the guy whose dad sells cars? He sold Nick Brogan a Z3.”

  “I have no idea what that is,” Annabelle said. “And I don’t give a care, either.”

  “A convertible,” Genevieve said.

  “Not just a convertible,” Lincoln said. “A Beemer!”

  Annabelle tried to make sense of what her son was saying. “You mean like on Star Trek, where they’re always beaming people up and down?”

  Lincoln seemed to find this very funny. “A Beemer is a BMW, Mom,” he said when he stopped laughing long enough to get the words out.

  She was used to having him crack up at things she said, so she ignored his know-it-all grin. “Oh. I’ve heard of BMW cars.” She sort of wished he’d call her Mama, like Genevieve did, but that wouldn’t sound right in front of his friends. Genevieve, being older when they’d left Tennessee, hadn’t been able to break herself of saying Mama. Annabelle found that comforting.

  “Well, this is a roadster, Mom, and it’s really cool and really expensive. That loser Gen used to date drove a Yugo, so she’s definitely trading up with this guy. And as her little brother, I have a vested interest in this project.” Red Popsicle juice dribbled over his fist and dripped on the floor.

  Annabelle glared at him and fought the urge to make him the target for all her fears about rich men who drove Beemers and flew planes. “You’re dripping all over the floor. Take that Popsicle outside.”

  “Okay, but ignoring your kids makes them do drugs. There’s ads about it and everything.” He sauntered out the kitchen door.

  With a sigh, Annabelle stood and walked over to the kitchen cupboard where she kept her at-home manicure supplies. She was barefoot, as was Genevieve. Thank goodness such a thing wasn’t frowned on in Hawaii, because after all those years of going barefoot in the Hollow, neither Annabelle nor Genevieve could tolerate shoes except when required, like on the job and in church.

  Opening the cupboard, she took down the polish remover and her crystal soaking bowl full of Lincoln’s old marbles. Lincoln might wonder about what would happen tomorrow night, but Annabelle knew good and well Genevieve planned to have sex with this Nick person. Her daughter wasn’t a virgin, probably hadn’t been a virgin when they’d left Tennessee. Clyde Loudermilk would have seen to that. Virginity wasn’t really the issue.

  She studied her array of polishes sitting neatly on the shelf. “French, did you say?”

  “French,” Genevieve repeated. “Mama, I know you’re scared about this, but it’s the chance I’ve been waiting for. I’ve had my eye on Nick ever since I started working at Rainbow Systems, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it. You see, he’s an orphan and had some terrible times growing up. He needs somebody so much, and I plan to be the one. I expect to marry him.”

  “Marry?” Annabelle dropped the soaking bowl, which shattered on the kitchen floor. Marbles rolled everywhere.

  “Mama, your soaking bowl!” Genevieve leaped to her feet and started picking up the marbles.

  “Watch your bare feet with that glass!” Annabelle gazed at the broken glass on the floor and knew it was a bad sign. Very bad. Of course the bowl wasn’t really crystal, only cut glass. Genevieve had bought it for fifty cents at the Goodwill Store for Annabelle’s twenty-first birthday. To think that at twenty-one she’d had a daughter in first grade, a daughter who’d sold the tiny creatures she whittled until she had enough to buy that bowl.

  And now this girl had her eye on a man who could give her real crystal and a fairy-tale life of fancy cars and clothes and jewels, just like in the movies. Annabelle should be thrilled for her, but the bad feeling wouldn’t go away. “Don’t fly in a plane with this man, Genevieve.” Annabelle started picking up fragments of glass. “It’s a mistake.”

  “Oh, Mama.” On her knees searching for marbles, Genevieve paused and glanced up at her. “It’s not a mistake. Listen, I know how you feel about planes, but what happened to Granny Neville doesn’t happen to very many people. Flying is safer than driving.”

  Annabelle knew that Genevieve wouldn’t all of a sudden listen to her and turn down this opportunity. Genevieve might still live at home, but that was so Annabelle could afford to stay in a nice neighborhood with a good school for Lincoln. The older Genevieve got, the more she treated Annabelle like an older sister instead of a mother. After all, they were only fifteen years apart. Genevieve would go on this trip whether Annabelle wanted her to or not.

  “Mama, he looks like Cary Grant.”

  “Does he?” Annabelle went to fetch the broom and the dustpan so they could clean up the tiny fragments. Meanwhile she tried to push aside her worries and think about Cary Grant flying Genevieve to Maui. That didn’t seem so bad.

  Maybe she wasn’t having her usual premonitions this time. Maybe it was only her backwoods Tennessee raising that made her suspicious of a man who took a company secretary over to Maui and kept her there overnight. He might look like Cary Grant, but it didn’t sound like a Cary Grant thing to do.

  Genevieve could get her heart broken, but people healed from a broken heart. Annabelle had found that out for herself twice over, once with Genevieve’s daddy and once with Lincoln’s.

  She moved a kitchen chair and started sweeping under the table where some stray slivers had flown. “You’re just saying he looks like Cary Grant to soften me up.”

  “No, he really does.” Genevieve stood and dropped the marbles into the mail basket on the counter. “Especially the way Cary Grant looked in Bringing Up Baby. You would just melt.”

  And she might, at that, Annabelle thought, being a sucker for the likes of Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Humphrey Bogart. Each one held a special place in her heart. And as for the women, she’d learned everything she knew about manners and fashion from watching Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Ingrid Bergman. She’d done her best to teach those things to Genevieve.

  Genevieve crouched down and held the dustpan while Annabelle swept the glass into it. “I’ll get you a ne
w soaking bowl,” Genevieve said. “A better one.”

  “I loved that one,” Annabelle said, and her throat tightened up. She swallowed the lump. She’d learned a long time ago that there was no point in crying over what couldn’t be changed. She swept the last of the glass into the dustpan Genevieve held. “But I’m sure I’ll love the new one you get me, too.”

  Genevieve stood and dumped the glass into the trash. “Maybe I’ll find something pretty while I’m on Maui.”

  Annabelle searched for a smile to give her daughter and finally managed to find one. “Yes, maybe you will.”

  Jackson stayed up late driving the Indy 500, and he finished a close third this time. As he’d learned in the past few years, there wasn’t much you couldn’t do with a computer, with the obvious exception of having sex. Maybe someday that would be perfected. He’d heard of some developments along those lines, but he had a hunch they were a long way from being as good as the real thing.

  At least the real thing as near as he could remember it. Lately his fantasies about Genevieve Terrence had become sort of mixed up with his memories of having sex with Diana, his first love, and Cybil, his last love. He was aware that two sexual relationships, wasn’t a very respectable showing for a guy who was nearing thirty.

  But relationships were so damned complicated. With computers it was strictly WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, and he loved that. With women you could never tell. Like Genevieve—a perfect example. He’d thought she was way too classy to fall for Brogan’s Maui sleepover schtick. Genevieve had always reminded him of a movie star from the forties—Katharine Hepburn, maybe, or Lauren Bacall. His grandma loved those movies, and because he loved his grandma he’d watched a fair amount of them with her back in Nebraska.

  Genevieve even dressed a little like the women in those movies. The outfits she wore with the nipped-in waists and flared skirts that skimmed her knees made him want to take her dancing to the sounds of Benny Goodman or somebody like that. Of course he didn’t know how to dance, but if he did know how, that’s the kind of dancing he’d want to do with Genevieve.

  Per his usual lack of confidence, he hadn’t even asked her out for coffee. Every time he thought he’d worked up the courage, he’d walk into the office where she was typing away and she’d look so together that he’d lose his nerve. One look at her perfect fingernails, her perfect makeup, and her perfect hair, and he’d realize that she’d never want to go out with a guy with zero fashion sense.

  During that one humiliating conversation when she’d tried to give him some advice about his clothes, he’d started to tell her about his mild case of color-blindness. Then he’d figured that he didn’t want her to think of him as being handicapped in addition to being a nerd.

  He was a nerd. He couldn’t change that about himself and didn’t really want to. Being a nerd paid exceedingly well, besides being what he was best suited for. His two previous girlfriends had also been nerds, and he’d assumed he’d marry a nerd someday. But then he’d flown to Honolulu to interview for Rainbow Systems and had met Genevieve.

  She wasn’t the first pretty girl he’d ever seen in his life, obviously. He’d analyzed his strong attraction and decided it wasn’t totally based on her beauty, although she was beautiful. Something made her stand out from the crowd, and he’d driven himself crazy trying to figure out what that was. Whatever it was, he thought it had something to do with hidden depths. He couldn’t help believing that under that polished exterior of hers was a whole other thing going on.

  She was a puzzle, and he’d always been fascinated by puzzles.

  But apparently when it came to Brogan, there was no mystery. She was just like the other women who had leaped at the chance to go winging over to Maui and leap into a king-size bed in a suite with an ocean view. Jackson hadn’t thought much of Brogan from the beginning. Something about the guy was a little off. If Brogan had conducted the first interview instead of Matt Murphy, Jackson wouldn’t have considered Rainbow, even knowing he’d be working in the same building with the luscious Genevieve.

  By the time he met Brogan, he’d pretty much committed to Matt and started fantasizing about Genevieve. He’d figured with someone like her around, he could tolerate a guy like Brogan. Still, this most recent development made him wonder if he’d be able to tolerate the jerk after all.

  When Matt had proposed the trip and explained about Brogan taking Genevieve along, Jackson had nearly begged off. He’d almost been sick to his stomach in the middle of Matt’s office, to be honest.

  But then he’d had a weird thought—that if he went along, maybe he could be of some help to Genevieve if things went sour between her and Brogan. Okay, so he prayed they would go sour and he’d be around to pick up the pieces. Nobody could blame a guy for wanting to be a hero in the eyes of a woman like Genevieve.

  Chapter Two

  That night Genevieve used every go-to-sleep trick she knew. She sprinkled oil of lavender on the pillow and took deep breaths until she hyperventilated. Then she lay with her eyes closed and counted jugs of moonshine sitting in a row on her aunt Maizie’s back porch in the Hollow.

  She imagined the whole scene, with crickets chirping, mosquitoes whining, rockers squeaking, cigarette smoke catching the breeze, and the splat of chewing tobacco in the dirt. She pictured herself sitting on the swaybacked steps with a wedge of watermelon and having a seed-spitting contest with her cousins.

  Instead of drifting off to sleep, she worked up a little case of homesickness, though she certainly never wanted to live in the Hollow again. But some things about it were nice for a kid, like almost never wearing shoes and fishing in the crick and catching lightning bugs in a jar. Hawaii had no lightning bugs.

  And the birds were all different here, too. Back home she’d been able to name most every bird around. When she’d arrived in Hawaii she’d had to start all over, pretty much. A couple she’d recognized, like the cardinal and the mockingbird, had been brought over from the mainland, according to a book she’d found. But no one had brought over a whippoorwill, and she missed that song.

  She didn’t miss Clyde Loudermilk, though. That boy had promised her that if she let him do it he’d treat her to the movies every Saturday for a year. She’d given away her virginity for an empty promise, it turned out. Clyde hadn’t had the money for a box of popcorn, let alone a whole movie, not even a matinee.

  Plus he hadn’t understood the first thing about pleasing a woman and he hadn’t worried about getting her pregnant, either. At the time she’d been willing to take a chance, on account of the movies, but now she shuddered to think that she could be raising Clyde Loudermilk’s kid right now because she’d lusted for a glimpse of Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, and Harrison Ford. She was no different from her mother—she’d just taken up with a different set of movie stars.

  Nick had that star quality, too. But thinking about Nick wasn’t going to help her sleep. Thinking about Nick would make her wonder if she’d remembered everything she wanted to take to Maui.

  Snapping on her bedside lamp, she sat up and reached for her glasses on the nightstand. During the day she wore contacts, but she kept a pair of glasses beside her bed for when she first got up in the morning. She threw back the sheet and climbed out of bed.

  Her suitcase sat on the floor beside her dressing table. She would have loved to take a different suitcase, but she hadn’t had time to buy one. She’d known all along she might run into this very problem, but she’d been afraid buying a new suitcase before she’d been asked to go on the trip would jinx her chances for sure.

  So she was stuck with the one she’d picked out eleven years ago when her mother had announced they were flying to Hawaii. She’d found it in the Goodwill Store, and it had been cheap, too. Now she understood why. Nobody carried hard-sided, round pink suitcases these days.

  Her mother had offered hers, but it wasn’t any better. It was also hard-sided, scuffed up, and an ugly shade of tan. Genevieve had decided hers was in better shape, eve
n if it was hopelessly out of style.

  She crouched down and lifted the lid to peer at her clothing choices. On top was the outfit she’d wear on the flight back, simple, tailored, and a flattering shade of green.

  Below that was her best bathing suit, just in case Nick suggested a swim. The next layer included the sexiest underwear she owned, which was blue, not black, unfortunately. And she had no seductive nightgown. Instead of taking a flowered cotton one that made her look like a sweet little virgin, she’d go with the blue bra and panties in bed.

  Beneath her underwear she’d packed her flip-flops and six condoms. After her experience with Clyde back in the Hollow, she wasn’t taking any chances with anybody. She expected Nick to bring his own, but in case he forgot, she would be prepared. Six was probably expecting too much of Nick, but she had no idea what sort of stamina he had.

  She couldn’t think of anything else to pack besides her makeup and her curling iron, which would go in last. Her stuff wouldn’t take up all the room in the suitcase, which meant it would rattle around in there and wrinkle her green outfit. Then she had an inspiration and went into the hall closet to get her South Park beach towel. Lincoln had given it to her for Christmas a couple of years ago. Maybe the towel would make Nick laugh.

  After tucking the towel in and closing the lid, she walked over to the windowsill and picked up her latest whittling project, an I’iwi bird. Maybe whittling would relax her.

  “I haven’t seen you this excited since the night before we left for Honolulu,” Annabelle said from the doorway.

  Genevieve glanced up and instantly felt guilty for rummaging in the hall closet for her beach towel. She knew full well that her mama heard every little noise that went on in this house. “I’m sorry for waking you up,” she said. “I’ll turn out the light and be quiet.”