by Toni Blake
Walter tried to feel happy as he checked the lasagna in the oven, but it wasn’t working. He should probably at least feel nervous, or guilty for using Judy’s recipe to feed another woman—but none of that was happening, either. He couldn’t stop thinking about Jenny.
She’d looked so broken. He’d known she’d be upset, but he hadn’t imagined she would take it quite that hard.
Still, it was best, wasn’t it? No matter how he looked at it, Mick Brody wasn’t the kind of guy his daughter should be with. And it’d been bad enough when he’d thought it was just a summer fling, but when he’d started getting the idea that Brody wasn’t going to leave town, even after the death of his brother, he’d felt a call to action, like he had to do something to protect her, once and for all.
Just then, he heard a car in the driveway—kind of a loud one. He walked down the hall into the foyer and glanced out to see Anita getting out of…well, an old, piece-of-crap Dodge, one that apparently needed a muffler. He couldn’t help letting it remind him that he’d…oh, Lordamercy—he’d begun to pursue a relationship with this woman, and it could damage the way people saw him.
It was a shame, because if people gave her a chance, if they looked beyond the beat-up car in the driveway and the tight tops she wore, he thought they’d have no choice but to like her. She wore another one tonight—this one tan with gold flecks in it that glittered as she moved up his walk and made his groin contract.
And then Walter drew in his breath as his own thought slapped him in the face. Was he a hypocrite? Was it possible? Could Mick Brody be like Anita? Could there somehow be more to him than Walter could see?
Naw—couldn’t be. It was just like he’d told Anita—most people didn’t change. And he’d seen nothing in his brief meeting with Mick Brody that had impressed him.
Anita—she was…a rare breed. Rare enough that he was willing to take a chance here and hope people knew him well enough to trust his opinion and not judge her too quickly. But Mick Brody—nope, he was nothing that special.
He opened the door as she stepped up on the front stoop. “Anita—hello. You find the place okay?”
She smiled, nodded. “You give good directions. Must be the policeman in you.”
“You, uh, look real nice. Come on in.”
“Thanks,” she said, confident as ever. “You look nice, too.” He’d worn a blue polo shirt and pleated khaki pants in an attempt to hide his expanding gut.
Walter showed Anita to the kitchen, and at first it was awkward, especially when she said, “Whatever’s cooking smells good,” and he stupidly said, “My wife’s lasagna. I mean, late wife,” and suffered the first stabs of guilt of the evening.
But then things got better. Because it seemed nothing much phased Anita. She’d simply replied, “She was a lucky lady,” then quickly busied herself putting together the salad fixings he’d laid out while he sliced a loaf of Italian bread. That was another reason he liked her so much—no matter how nervous he got, she didn’t seem to notice, and it put him right back at ease.
It was after they sat down to dinner that Anita asked him how Jenny was. “The last time we talked, you two were at odds. I hope that’s gotten better now.”
And Walter discovered he could barely swallow the bite of bread he’d just taken. He hadn’t expected Jenny to come up—he’d resolved that he wouldn’t bring her up tonight, because he didn’t want to ruin the evening with how upset he was about her. “Afraid the truth is,” he finally answered, “things are a lot worse. I sorta…talked to that fella she was seein’ and…well, I told him to leave town.”
“Walter, no,” Anita said, sounding truly disappointed. It embarrassed him a little—apparently, when it came to this, Anita wasn’t going to put him at ease.
“Now, I know I was buttin’ in where I probably shouldn’t have, but the boy left, and I’m glad. Only…now I don’t know if Jenny’ll ever forgive me. She said she was in love with him. I found her in her pajamas in the middle of the day. I’ve never seen her like this before, even after her divorce back in the spring. But I only did what I thought was right. The boy…well, the truth is, he’s a criminal.” He decided to go ahead and tell Anita that—mainly because it seemed like a good defense.
And it did seem to catch her attention. “Oh. Well, bad crimes?” she asked, tearing a bite of bread off the slice in her hand.
Walter replied, “Aren’t any crimes bad?”
But across the table from him, Anita simply shrugged. “In my mind, everything’s relative. If he’s an ax murderer, yeah, get him away from her. But if he’s got a speeding ticket or two, well…you see what I’m saying.”
Walter thought for a moment on how to phrase this next part, then let down his defenses a little. “I can’t really go into what he did, but the thing is—I’m not sure what I think about it. Jenny believed in her heart that it wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t see it that way.” He shook his head a little, pondering it. “Only maybe that was the lawman in me—maybe I was narrow-minded, being too much an officer of the law and not enough of a…person.”
Suddenly, Anita’s eyes looked a little glassy, and awfully sad. Walter didn’t know what to make of it. Lord, how had he upset her?
And when she spoke, her voice came out lower than usual. “Can I tell you a story, Walter?”
“Um, sure, of course.”
“Well,” she said, still sounding unlike her normal self—stiffer, and less confident, “I’m only going to talk about this once because I don’t like thinking of it. But…once upon a time, I had myself a little child.”
Walter was stunned. Anita hadn’t seemed like the maternal type. “Oh,” he murmured.
She swallowed visibly, then went on. “And that child’s daddy was the spawn of the devil himself, I swear it. But the law said I had to let my child go with him even when I knew it wasn’t safe. It was the hardest thing I ever did, and the worst thing I ever did. He took my child and he ran, Walter. That was twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen either one of them since.”
Walter’s jaw dropped.
“I spend every night wondering where my child is, if he’s healthy, if he’s happy, if he’s had any sort of decent life. I pray for him every night, too, although I don’t know if God listens to prayers from a woman like me. And if I had it to do over again, you best believe I would have broken the law. I would have broken it a hundred times if it kept my child safe. So I’m just saying that…sometimes there are good reasons to break laws. Sometimes it’s not all black-and-white.”
Walter didn’t know what to do, what to say. So he set down his bread and reached across the table and covered Anita’s hand with his. “I’m real sorry about that, Anita. That’s…well, just about one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. And…I reckon you’re right—I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d been the one to run.”
And then, just when Walter didn’t know if he’d said the right thing, or how on earth a man could console a mother on the loss of a child—Anita bounced back to her normal self and said, “Well, enough about that. I just…wanted to try to make you look at things from your Jenny’s point of view a little bit, and from the view of this boy of hers.”
He nodded—he got the point. He might not like it, but he got it.
“Now, let’s talk about this lasagna,” she said, more cheerful. “When you invited me over, I had no idea I’d be getting a gourmet meal. What’s in it that makes it so tasty?”
Walter answered her as best he could, but her words stuck in his mind. Jenny had said the same thing about the world not always being black-and-white. But Anita’s story dug down deep inside him. Even as they went on eating, chatting, he couldn’t shake thinking about it. No wonder she was so strong—she’d had to be, for a long time now.
Was he wrong? About Mick Brody?
Seemed everywhere he turned, people said he was. First Jenny, now Anita.
But he tried to put it out of his mind so he could enjoy the rest of his evening—even if it kept
gnawing at him beneath the surface. He’d invited Anita over for dinner—he wanted to be decent company.
By the time they finished eating, it had gotten dark out, so Walter suggested stepping onto his back deck. “My Jenny is an astronomer,” he said, leaning his head back to peer up into a clear night sky—but this time he left out the next comment that came to mind, that Judy had enjoyed stargazing as well. “So I know a lot more about the stars than I would if she hadn’t pretty much forced me to look through her telescope and learn all about them back when she was a girl.”
“Do you have one?” Anita asked. “A telescope? I’ve never looked through one before.”
“’Fraid I don’t,” he said, sorry to have sparked her interest in something only to disappoint her. “But I’m sure we could borrow Jenny’s some night if you like—once I figure out how to make her less mad at me, that is.”
To his surprise, the lady next to him responded by locking her arm through his. “That’d be nice.” And despite himself, he even found himself thinking maybe they could canoe over to that spot across the lake Jenny claimed was so good for stargazing. Or…maybe they could just go to the meadow at Betty and Ed’s place. Maybe Betty and Ed would like Anita. Once they got past her tight clothes.
“Of course, there’s plenty to look at in the sky even without a telescope,” he told her. Then he gazed upward in the black expanse above and spotted a constellation he’d always liked, one that was, in fact, too large to study through a telescope and had to be viewed with the naked eye. He pointed it out—although they both had to lean around the branches of a sprawling maple tree to get a good view. “See that real bright star just below that longest branch? If you follow it down, you see another, and farther down”—he drew a line with one finger—“another. Now look out to the sides of the center star, and you’re lookin’ at the Northern Cross.”
Next to him, Anita’s eyes widened, her mouth dropping open in delight. “Oh—I see it! And my—it’s so big. A big cross right up in the sky.”
Then he showed her a couple of other major points of interest that could be seen in the summer sky with the naked eye as well, a little surprised he still remembered them: the Great Square of Pegasus, and then the Teapot—and he pointed out how that particular part of the Milky Way made it appear steam was coming from the Teapot’s spout, pleased when she seemed transfixed by it.
“My, my, a man who knows about the stars,” Anita said when he was done, turning to peer up at his face. “That’s downright romantic, Officer Tolliver.”
“It is?” he asked, his stomach twisting a little, in a good way.
Then she squeezed his hand and raised on her toes to give him a kiss, right on the mouth. It was a small kiss, but an incredible kiss—it was the first kiss Walter had gotten from a woman in nearly twenty years.
“That was…real nice,” he told her. “Nicest thing to happen to me in a while.”
She winked up at him in the dark. “Play your cards right, Officer, and there might be more where that came from.”
A few days after Mick’s departure, Jenny pulled herself together.
Specifically, she got up, got dressed, and called Stan Goodman on the phone to accept the offer to teach at Destiny High. Since school started in less than two weeks, she met with him and Principal Turley that very afternoon to fill out forms and work out her class schedule, which included Advanced Placement Science, Introduction to Physics, and her favorite, Introduction to Astronomy. She came home excited that Mr. Turley seemed so pleased with her curriculum ideas—he felt that the elective classes were going to make DHS much more competitive with science programs in other, larger schools.
After leaving the Board of Education, she stopped at Destiny Properties and told Sue Ann the news. Sue Ann had looked like she might climb up on top of her desk and dance until Jenny grabbed her arm and said, “Relax already. It isn’t that big a deal.”
“Not that big a deal?” Sue Ann said. “It’s a humongous deal! It means our summer of hanging out together again will now also be at least an autumn, winter, and spring of hanging out, too. And it must mean that you’re, well, bouncing back…from Mick,” she added in a whisper so her co-workers wouldn’t hear.
Jenny kept her voice low. “Um, bouncing back—no. I’m still miserable, thanks. But I need to get back in the land of the living. And despite myself, I have enjoyed being home in Destiny. Somewhere along the way, I guess I realized I actually like it here.”
Sue Ann shrugged, looking sorry to hear that Jenny was, indeed, still suffering. “Well, I’ll take what I can get,” she said. “And if you need me to, I’ll cancel my plans with Jeff this weekend and hang out with you instead.”
“You’d cancel a carefully planned sex marathon for me?” Jenny asked, truly touched.
“Are you kidding? Of course I would. Sex comes and goes, but a best friend is forever.”
Jenny smiled softly, the most she could manage right now. “Well, lucky for you, I’m going to be knee-deep in lesson plans this weekend, so you can still break out the lingerie. But let’s organize a swimming day next week, one afternoon when you’re off work, so you can tell me all about it.”
Sue Ann tilted her head, still speaking quietly. “You don’t mind hearing about marathon sex when you’re not having any?”
Jenny shrugged. “It’ll be just like when I was having great sex and you weren’t. I’ll live vicariously.”
What she’d told Sue Ann wasn’t just her way of letting her friend off the hook—she really would need to spend most of the next two weeks preparing for her classes and getting mentally ready to jump back into the Destiny community in a much more prominent way. Which would be a great distraction from her broken heart, something she sorely needed.
Because, just as she’d implied to Sue Ann, she wasn’t any less in love with Mick than she’d been a few days ago. In fact, her bones ached for him. Her skin longed for his touch. The only thing that had changed was that she’d quit moping around. She’d reminded herself that she hadn’t come home to Destiny looking for a man, or love, or sex—she’d come here to retreat and make some decisions. And now, finally, she’d just made a few. Move on with your life. Take this job where you can make a difference. Stay here where you have a few people who love you—at least for a while.
Of course, while her father counted as one of those people, she was still mad as hell at him, and she wasn’t sure she’d get over that anytime soon. Even though he came over that very evening with pork chops for the grill and a heartfelt apology.
“I had a dream about your mother last night,” he told her.
She sat at the picnic table on the patio, despite the persisting heat, and grudgingly listened to him. “Oh?” It didn’t surprise her—given the shrine, she suspected he dreamed about her mom all the time.
“In the dream, I was sitting on the glider on my front porch, and she walked right up and sat down beside me. And she said…that maybe we expected too much from you, put too many demands on you, and that it was hard to be perfect all the time. She said I had to let you find your own way. And it seemed…so real, like she was really there with me.”
That part actually took Jenny aback. Because she’d had dreams like that about her mother, too, dreams that seemed realer than real—but she hadn’t had one for a long time now. Yet the message that her mother had delivered in this dream to her dad was…well, enough to make her wonder if somehow it was real, if her mom had looked down from somewhere above and seen into her heart—and was trying to make her dad see now, too.
And just then, Jenny remembered that recent night when she’d been thinking about Mick, and love, and trying to convince herself she wasn’t in it, and how she’d heard her mother’s voice in her mind—and now, combined with her father’s dream, the very recollection sent a cold chill rippling down her spine despite the suffocating heat.
That was when her dad turned from the grill to face her, a big two-pronged fork in hand. “I know this doesn’t make u
p for what I did, Jennygirl, but I know I was wrong, and I truly am sorry for causing you so much hurt. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
Jenny considered the words slowly, truly absorbing them. Her father sounded more like the dad she knew and loved than he had in weeks, and she could feel his sincerity, could feel his yearning to get back to the closeness they usually shared.
Her reply came from the heart. “I accept your apology, Dad.” Then she took a deep breath and tried to say the rest. “And I’m trying to forgive you. But it might take a while. I know you can’t understand this, but Mick was…the most amazing thing to ever happen to me. Everything before him, even Terrence, just…paled in comparison to the way he made me feel. So, yeah, like you said, maybe he wasn’t the guy I thought if he left so easily, but on the other hand, you put him in an awful position, and he’d been under a tremendous strain all summer, and his brother just died a painful, horrible death, and Mick had to bury him with his own bare hands, so…I’m just not sure it’s fair to judge him by that one choice.”
“You’re right,” he said without missing a beat, shocking her. “And I wish like hell I could take that back, Jenny.”
“Me, too.”
Her dad looked even more troubled now and let out a sigh. “I reckon when you called me and said you’d taken the job and decided to stay, I thought it meant you were feeling better, and getting over him. But you’re not, are you?”
She shook her head. “Taking the job and feeling better are two different things. And as for getting over Mick, I’m honestly not sure that I…ever will.”
“Can I give you a hug?” he asked, looking nearly as glum as she felt.
“As long as you don’t let the pork chops burn.”
