Nothing Personal (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  “Let me guess,” Alec said. “A white picket fence.”

  “That’s what I want,” she said happily. “And then a dog.”

  He had to roll his eyes at that, he couldn’t help it. All they needed was the two-point-five kids, and they’d be all set.

  “Want to come up for the weekend, late April maybe, soon as the ground warms up enough, and give me a hand with that?” Gabe asked. “Put some of those new skills to use, keep you from getting soft now that you’re pounding a keyboard all day instead of swinging an axe. You aren’t as good at it as I am, of course.” He leaned back against the wall with a satisfied sigh. “But I can supervise.”

  Alec snorted. “I’m at least as good at it as you are. We’ll have a fence-off. Bet you twenty bucks I’m faster.”

  “It also has to not fall down,” Gabe pointed out helpfully. “But I’ll take that bet. Mira can judge.”

  Another snort. “Oh, yeah. Because she’s impartial.”

  She was laughing, her eyes dancing. “You realize what just happened, don’t you?” she asked Alec.

  “What? My brother just questioned my manhood?”

  “Your brother just conned you into building half of my white picket fence. And you’re supposed to be the smooth one.”

  He didn’t answer that, because the door had opened again, and there was Desiree, in the same soft, snug shirt and jeans she’d worn yesterday, her hair falling in the ringlets he loved. And he was grinning like a fool.

  “This is getting to be a bad habit,” she said ruefully. “Second day I’ve slept in. Good morning, everybody.”

  “Two days isn’t a habit,” Alec said. “Sit. How’s your grandma doing?”

  “Good,” she said as she sat. “Going home today like they thought, so that’s good.”

  He got up and fixed her coffee, sat down again next to her. Saw Gabe taking it all in, exchanging a glance with Mira. Well, obvious to his twin wasn’t the same as obvious to the world.

  Mira finished her own coffee and stood. “I’d love to hang around with you guys, but I need to get ready for work. Don’t want to be late.”

  “Yeah,” Alec agreed. “You’ve got a pretty harsh boss, I hear. I imagine the consequences are dire.”

  “You don’t want to know,” she agreed solemnly.

  “How’s that working out?” Alec asked his brother when Mira had left the room. “Mira runs Gabe’s office,” he explained to Rae. “Since they moved up here.”

  “Since she figured out that we should move up here,” Gabe corrected. “And the answer is, terrific. Marketing, administration, dealing with insurance companies, the works. We’ve got a couple other people in there, but she’s the one making it all happen. Runs the whole practice for my partner and me. Marry an efficient woman, that’s my advice, and my brilliant life plan too.”

  “Too bad we never thought of putting that in our personal ads,” Alec agreed. “Could have got everything working out for us a whole lot sooner.”

  Rae laughed at that. “You guys never used a personal ad in your lives.”

  “I know what mine would have said, though,” Alec told her.

  “What?”

  He smiled. “Tell you later.”

  Gabe pushed himself away from the table. “I’ve got to get ready too. Glad Alec brought you by, Desiree. Stay as long as you like, and come back anytime.”

  “Let’s go for breakfast, a walk by the river,” Alec urged, turning away from the front door with Rae fifteen minutes later after saying a quick goodbye to Gabe and Mira. “Unless you want to cook, or to chance it with me. But I’m warning you, I’m not too good.”

  “Remember? Me neither. I’m sure I should be whipping you up Eggs Benedict or something, convincing you that I’m your Dream Woman, but I’m afraid it’d be more like your worst nightmare.”

  He laughed. “No mastery of the culinary arts required, as long as you aren’t judging me on that score either. So,” he made a motion towards the door, “eat? Walk?”

  “It’s like you’re talking to your dog,” she protested. “They both sound good, but we should really get back.”

  “It isn’t even eight yet. Consider yourself still kidnapped, because I’m not nearly ready to let you go.”

  He had to grab her, then, didn’t he? He had a point to make, after all.

  “That shouldn’t sound so . . .” she sighed when he came up for air.

  “So what?” He gave her another long kiss, pulled her in just a bit closer with a hand under that gorgeous ass. Got a little distracted, sent his hand down the center seam of her jeans, and then kept it there, because that was where it belonged.

  “So . . . sexy.” It was another sigh, and she was moving under his hand, and he decided that what he really needed to do was take her back to check out those flannel sheets again.

  So he did. Which made it quite a bit later by the time they actually got their breakfast.

  “It’s really OK with Gabe for you just to take his truck like this?” she asked when he’d climbed in next to her after they’d restored themselves at the Chuck Wagon Café. Pancakes. He loved pancakes, and he wasn’t about to figure out how to make them. Even if he’d geared himself up to do eggs, pancakes would have been out. So there he was. Restaurants.

  “Of course it is.” He turned the fan up, shivered at the blast, wished it didn’t take so long for this monster to warm up. No new snow, but it was cold. Good thing there’d been plenty of warm clothes to borrow for this walk, because he really didn’t want to take Rae back to the City yet.

  “What if he needs it, though?”

  “Then he’ll call me, won’t he? Or take my car.”

  “They didn’t need it to get to work, obviously. Is it that close? Or do they have another car?”

  He laughed at that, turned onto the main road toward the river. “The office is exactly two blocks from the house. They both went native on that show. They walk to work together, walk to the grocery store together, walk to the gym together and work out. They belong to the damn Rotary Club together, go to meetings and demonstrate Civic Responsibility. It’s actually a little nauseating.” At least it had always seemed that way before.

  He made the left turn onto the river road. Perfectly clear, and the parking lot for the path probably would be too. He hadn’t needed to take the truck at all.

  The thought had barely crossed his mind before he was taking another corner, in amongst the pines now, and feeling the wheels sliding right out from under him.

  Black ice, he registered as he steered into the skid, fought to keep the car under control, pressed down with a desperate foot and felt the antilock brakes engaging. A brief screech, one final fishtail, and they were clear.

  “Huhh.” He let out the breath he’d been holding in a relieved sigh. “That was a little too close. Thank God nobody was coming in the opposite direction.”

  “Stop the car.”

  The words came out strangled. He looked over in surprise, saw her face, white and rigid, her knuckles gleaming against the black handle of the armrest.

  “Stop,” she croaked again. “Please.”

  They had arrived at the entrance to the park, he realized with relief. He slowed even more, took a cautious left into the lot. Pulled into the first space he saw.

  She was pulling at the door handle, frantic, before they’d even come to a complete stop. He popped the lock for her, saying, “Desiree, wait.” But she didn’t stop to listen.

  By the time he made it out of the car, around to her side, she was leaning over the hood, her arms wrapped around herself. Not crying this time, but shaking violently. Silently, which scared him even more.

  “Baby, no. It’s all right. It’s OK. We’re fine.” This was the second time, he thought desperately, and once again, he had no earthly clue what to do, so he did the only thing he could think of. Pulled her into his arms, turned her around, leaned against the car himself, and held her. Stroked his hand over her hair and murmured nonsense to her while
she shook, and the tears came at last.

  “Sorry,” she finally got out, sagging against him. “I know . . .” She gave a little laugh. “Big overreaction. Is there a . . .” She swiped at her face. “A tissue box in the car, maybe?”

  He let go of her with reluctance, did some searching. “More paper towels,” he apologized, handing them to her.

  “We have a pattern going.” She still sounded much too shaky, but more like herself again.

  “There’s a bench down there by the river,” he offered. “Want to go sit with me for a few minutes?” He reached into the car again, handed her a knit hat, pulled on his own. “As long as we don’t freeze our . . . ears off.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sitting would be good.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said when they’d got there. The wood was cold beneath them, and he wished he’d thought to bring a blanket or something from the car, but he didn’t want to go back and get it, leave her alone.

  He turned a bit on the bench so he could look at her. “Maybe I was going too fast. I wasn’t thinking about the possibility of black ice. With everything that’s happened to you this weekend, I guess that was the last straw, huh?”

  “It’s not that,” she said, her gaze fixed on the icy water flowing over tumbled boulders, the snow-covered banks. “Or maybe it was that, who knows. I’m sure it didn’t help. You were driving fine. Not your fault. But I was in a car accident when I was little. The swerving and the screeching . . . they pulled me right back there. I’m the one who should apologize. You didn’t bargain for all my childhood traumas this weekend.”

  He ignored that. “The back seat,” he guessed.

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “The back seat. It was . . .” She swallowed. “When my mom died.”

  “Was she driving?”

  She shook her head, her eyes still on the river. “No. My dad. They’d been having an argument, I think. At least, he was mad. But then,” she said with a bitter little laugh, “he was usually mad.”

  “I’m just saying, maybe you could ask him for another chance.” Her mom’s voice sounded small and scared, and Desiree twisted her hands together between her legs, pressed her elbows into her sides.

  “I just told you.” It was the Bad Voice, the really loud one, and she shrank a little further into the door. “He’s been out to get me from Day One. He wrote me up for every little thing he could. And the second he found something he could use, some stupid rule that everybody breaks anyway, bam.”

  Her father’s fist hit the steering wheel with a thunk. The car went sideways, and her dad said a bad word, and there was a screechy sound.

  “Chris. Slow down. Please.” That was her mom. Desiree could see the side of her head, but she couldn’t see what she looked like, because it was all dark. She wished her mom would look back at her. They’d been supposed to go see Santa Claus at the mall tonight. And then her mom was going to take her to get ice cream, even though it was cold outside, but that was OK, because it was a Special Occasion, and it was a Girl’s Night Out.

  They were supposed to go right from day care, but then they had to go a different way, because her dad had called to get picked up, and they had gone to his work instead, even though he usually didn’t come home until she was in bed. And now he was driving, and he was mad. And Desiree wanted to ask about Santa Claus, but she didn’t.

  “Did he say you could file for unemployment?” That was her mom again, and her voice was quiet, and scared.

  “Do you think I sat around and talked to him about unemployment? Should I have said, ‘Oh, excuse me. Could you pretty please toss me a bone so my wife won’t be on my fucking back when I get home tonight?’”

  “Shh,” her mother hissed. “Desiree.”

  “Do you think you could be just a little bit supportive?” Her dad’s voice sounded mean. “Maybe take my side for once? One time? Is that too much to ask?”

  “I just said . . .” Her mom’s voice was wrong, wiggly, and Desiree knew that meant that she was going to cry, and she pressed her fingernails into her palms and bit her lip to keep from crying herself.

  “I just wondered, are you going to be able to get unemployment,” her mom said. “Because if you can’t, we’ll have to move again. We can’t pay the rent on my tips. Not past January. Even if you watch Desiree until you get another job, so we don’t have to pay for day care.”

  “Excuse me for not thinking it through, while I was sitting there getting fucking fired. But I’ll tell you what. Since you have to have all the details, I’ll show you the letter. And then you decide for yourself if there’s likely to be unemployment.”

  Her dad’s hand came out of the front, groping toward Desiree’s leg. She shrank against the seat again, pulled her legs to the side. She could see his head now, because he was leaning over. His hand was grabbing all around, and then it took hold of a piece of paper that was lying on the floor.

  And then the car was going the wrong way. They were going sideways, and there was the screechy sound again, and somebody was screaming. Her mom. Her mom was screaming. And then there was a really big bang, and Desiree felt the seatbelt yanking tight around her, and she hit her head hard against the window.

  And it hurt, and she wanted her mom. But her mom didn’t come.

  And after a long time, some people were shining lights inside the car, and they talked and talked, and then they took her out and put her on a bed thing and put the bed in a place like a room, but it wasn’t a room, because it was a truck. And her mom still didn’t come.

  She didn’t tell Alec all that, of course. Nobody wanted to hear all that. She just laid it out for him in a few bald sentences.

  “Holy . . . Wow,” he said blankly. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t. How would you?” She was embarrassed now. Oh, yeah. This was definitely the way to get a guy. Cry all over him, again and again. Yeah, she was sure men found that really attractive. No wonder she’d been single so long.

  She stood up abruptly. “My butt’s cold, and I’ll bet yours is too. Let’s walk, OK? Unless you want to get back.”

  “No, I want to walk.” He looked a little disconcerted, and no wonder. But he set off with her down the packed snow of the path, took her gloved hand in his own.

  “Not exactly what you had in mind,” she suggested. “For your romance. Not quite walking barefoot on the beach.”

  “Exactly what I had in mind,” he said firmly. “Being with you, that was the main part of the whole deal.”

  “Having me weep all over you,” she persisted.

  “Also fine by me.”

  She gave it up, walked beside him in silence for a few minutes.

  “What was your mom like?” he asked at last.

  It wasn’t the question she’d expected, and she struggled a little with the answer. “I don’t remember too much, mostly just images. Moments, feelings. She had curly red hair like me, and I remember that I thought it couldn’t be so bad to have red hair, even though the other kids said so, because she did, and she was pretty.”

  “And she used to sing to me,” she added after another minute. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from telling him. The residue of terror and tears, she supposed. And she’d laid herself so bare to him this weekend, there didn’t seem like much point in holding back now. “She had this rocking chair, and when I was sad, she’d put me on her lap, and wrap her arms around me, and rock, and sing me this silly song. After she died, I used to get in there by myself and rock, and sing the song, really softly, you know, so my dad wouldn’t hear. But it didn’t feel the same.”

  “No,” he said, his voice coming out gruff. “I can see that it wouldn’t.”

  “And I remember,” she said with a laugh, “I used to think she was so fancy, because she had a black skirt and a white blouse, and a little black bow tie on a piece of black elastic. She called it “my tuxedo,” and I don’t know how old I was before I figured out that it was her uniform. She was a waitress, you see, like m
y grandma and me. My dad and I would go there sometimes to get her after her shift, and she’d bring me hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, and a maraschino cherry. Just like on my grandma’s Jell-O salad.” She laughed again. “That’s probably why I still eat it, why I’ve never had the heart to tell her that I hate it.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s because you love your grandma.”

  “Yeah.” She blinked a few stubborn tears back again. “That too.”

  “But,” he said after a few more silent minutes, “you didn’t go live with your grandmother after that? You stayed with your dad? Well, I guess that made sense.”

  “It didn’t, not really,” she admitted, “once I was old enough to think about it. It wasn’t like he ever seemed all that crazy about me. He liked pretty girls, and I sure wasn’t that. Not a very attractive child at all, really. But it would have been a hardship for my grandparents to have me. They didn’t have any money either, though they had a place of their own.”

  “The mobile home.”

  “Yeah. So I wondered. I always thought,” and the tears were there again no matter how hard she tried, choking her up, “that they just didn’t want me quite enough. I went to Chico every summer for a couple weeks, though, during their vacation. I realize now that they saved it all up for when I’d come. Don’t you think that shows that you really love somebody? If you save all your vacation for them?”

  “I never thought about it,” he admitted. “I guess it does, though.”

  “That’s why I try to give my grandma nice vacations now,” she explained, “because she never had them, just took care of me. Too bad she only wants to go on the bus to Reno.” She laughed a little again, thinking about that. “But I do try.”

  “But you wondered,” he prompted.

  “Oh.” She sighed. “Yeah. Turns out it was pretty simple. Money. My mom’s Social Security. If my grandparents had been my guardians, if I’d even lived with them, been registered for school there, they’d have got the money. And my dad wasn’t the best at holding down a job.”