by Amy Vastine
However, he’d made her mad and the withering look she tossed across the front seat of her car embarrassed and irritated him. He might have deserved it, but that didn’t make him like it any better.
“Classrooms don’t come fully equipped. I use the Velcro to make picture schedules so they know what they’re doing next on that particular day. Rubber tubing goes around chair legs so children can kick the chairs without hurting themselves or the chairs or driving everyone else crazy.” Jenny signaled and turned onto the highway that led toward Crawfordsville. “As to what Nana wants with your precious Pap, I might ask you the same question in reverse. Does he think she’s rich? Because she’s not.”
“Neither is he, in case that’s what she’s hoping for.” That wasn’t quite true. Travis’s eclectic resume included a stint at flipping houses—on a lake that became very popular and exclusive enough that Zeke’s grandparents hadn’t wanted to live there anymore. The venture had left them very well off.
“She doesn’t need rich. She has her family.”
“So does Pap.”
They drove in awkward and angry silence for a few miles. He liked the way Jenny drove, with both hands on the wheel and her eyes constantly moving. When a siren blared far enough away that he’d barely heard it, she pulled onto the shoulder immediately and waited. He wished everyone would do that.
He cleared his throat. “Shall we start over?”
“Start what over?” She frowned, not looking at him.
He extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Zeke McNeil. I’m a firefighter in Chicago. I ride my bike about a hundred miles a week. I’m thirty-two, I like movies and I like to read. My favorite food is hot dogs from vendors the tourists haven’t discovered yet. I have one brother, Seth, who’s two years older than me and a much nicer, smarter guy. Our parents died twenty years ago and we went to live with Gran and Pap. We owe them everything, which makes my attitude toward your grandmother borderline inexcusable. Gran would have me by the ear for that.”
She looked at him then, and her smile lit up her entire face.
The expression took his breath away.
She slipped her hand into his. It was small, with short fingernails that seemed to have primary colors of paint not only on but under them. “I’m Jenny Boyle. Schoolteacher. Twenty-nine. I like to read, but movies put me to sleep. I’m an only child. I’m allergic to peanuts. Maybe I haven’t been fair to your grandfather, either. It’s hard to trust a man who’s as handsome as he is and looks at my grandmother like she hung the moon.” She looked thoughtful. “However, since Nana probably did hang the moon, maybe I should make allowances.”
The emergency vehicles hurtled past, the noise of the sirens creating a weird vacuum in the small car. “Do you feel like you should be going with them?” she asked.
“No.” Although he had to force himself to breathe deeply.
“I always pray when I hear sirens,” she admitted, signaling to return to the road.
He squeezed the hand he still held. “Me, too.”
They got his keys from his grandfather’s house—which had gained a feeling of feminine presence since Zeke had been there last—then stopped to exchange Jenny’s luggage on the way back to Turkey Run.
She lived in a cute little garage apartment behind her grandmother’s brick house in a cute little town. “Geeze Louisa May.” Zeke repeated one of the oaths his grandfather had recently taken up. He stood on her cute little lawn and looked around. “This town should be named Adorable or something instead of Crockett.”
“Bite your tongue. Developers don’t know about us yet.” She led the way up the stairs to her apartment and opened her door. “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since a Lean Cuisine at lunch that got interrupted when a student threw up on me. I could defrost some vegetable soup really fast.”
“You cook?” Zeke did—that had come along with being a firefighter—but most of the single women he knew didn’t. They either didn’t have time or didn’t know how or just didn’t want to. He didn’t fault them for any of that. But sometimes the idea of a home-cooked meal held appeal.
“I like to. Nana taught me. I bake, too. My mom taught me that, because Nana’s baking isn’t something the family likes to talk about.” She waved him to a seat at the kitchen island that comprised the apartment’s only dining area. “You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
The scene they set reminded him painfully of when he was a kid. He and Seth would do their homework at the kitchen table while their mother cooked dinner. Dad would drink beer and peel potatoes and say things that made his wife blush and say, “Little pitchers have big ears.”
“Why special ed?” he asked.
She put the glass bowl of soup in the microwave to defrost and sliced cheese deftly on a board. “We watched The Miracle Worker on TV when I was in the fourth grade and I told my parents that’s what I wanted to do when I grew up. Not teach the deaf, per se, but special needs. My dad said I should reconsider that because I’d never make any money and my mom said, ‘Shut up, Lucas. She can be anything she wants to be.’ ” Jenny arranged crackers on a plate with the cheese and set it in front of him. “And I never wanted to be anything else.”
When the soup was hot, she served it in what looked like heirloom bowls and asked, “Why a firefighter?”
“Nine-eleven.”
“Oh.”
She didn’t question if he ever had second thoughts about his profession or if he ever got scared. She just nodded. She got it.
Something new settled warmly into Zeke’s soul.
CHAPTER THREE
When Jenny and Zeke had been seated beside a window in the Narrows, the inn’s cozy restaurant, at breakfast the next morning, he continued the conversation they’d started on their way down the stairs. “You don’t ride?” He sounded incredulous. “At all?”
“No. Well, I mean, I ride. To school if the weather’s good, or to the store if I’m just picking up something I need that will fit in the basket or my pocket, but I don’t ride. If it makes me sweat, I’m not doing it.” She thought putting it that way might not have been a very good idea, because Zeke made her sweat every time he looked at her. And it seemed like he’d been looking at her a lot. “I like to walk, though. I do a lot of that.”
He snorted. “In the adorable halls of Crockett Elementary School?”
She counted to ten. Twice. Then again. “No, I walk the railroad corridor trails. I’m going to hike a couple of the park trails this morning. They’re pretty and they’re not too difficult even for a hall-walker like me.” She smirked at him. Nana wasn’t down to breakfast yet to see her, so she wouldn’t get in trouble for being snarky.
“Knock yourself out.”
She ignored him, looking up to smile when Emma and Travis came into the inn’s dining room holding hands.
“Hi, Jen-Jen.” Emma kissed her cheek and then, surprisingly, Zeke’s, before sliding into the chair beside Jenny’s. “It’s nice to see you two getting along so well. Family means all the world to us.”
Jenny felt color wash over her cheeks. She had to try harder. Zeke McNeil was going to be her step-something-or-other as of 7:30 this evening. She might as well get used to the idea. “I know, Nana. Are you riding this morning?”
“No, you and I are going to do bride and bridesmaid things like nails and hair and margaritas. I broke down and called your parents, so I’ll need you to help calm your father down when they get here.” Emma chewed her bottom lip. “Maybe we should tell him you’re the one marrying Travis. Lucas will be so happy when he finds out it’s me that he won’t go over the edge.”
Jenny laughed, relieved she wasn’t going to have to break the news to her father. He still hadn’t accepted the fact that she was old enough to drive at night and live on her own.
“What do you think, Jenny?” Travis wore a smile, but it was a nervous one. “Do you think your dad will make things difficult? Do I need to sweep your Nana out of here before he arrives?”
&n
bsp; She looked at this sweet handsome man who made her grandmother happy. “You know, he’ll probably try, but he’s actually pretty powerless against Nana, Mom and me when we present a united front, so I wouldn’t give him a lot of thought.”
After breakfast, as they walked into the inn’s large common room to finalize plans for the morning, Zeke murmured to Jenny. “Was that the truth, what you told Pap about your dad?”
The sympathy in his voice made her eyes sting. “We’re going to make it the truth, one way or another. It wouldn’t be the first time Nana sent him to his room.”
He chuckled. “Makes me think of Gran. She never meant to spend her retirement years corralling two teenagers, and Pap was every bit as bad as we were. Sometimes she sent us all to our rooms.”
Jenny laughed. “She must have been terrific.”
“She was.” Wistfulness threaded through his voice. It made Jenny’s heart ache a little, but then he gave her a beaming smile. “So is Emma. Think she’ll let me call her Nana?”
Their gazes met and held. Jenny couldn’t have looked away if her life depended on it. Not that she wanted to. “Let you?” She had to clear her throat. “She’ll insist on it. But don’t get any ideas about being her favorite. That’s still my spot.”
The morning with her grandmother was fun. They drove to a nearby salon and got manicures and pedicures. While they still had cotton wrapped between their toes, one stylist manipulated Jenny’s hair into an intricate braid and another evened up Emma’s sometimes unfortunate attempts at trimming her own hair.
Everyone was so helpful that Emma invited them all to attend the ceremony at the inn that evening. And when they stopped for something to drink at a tearoom across the street from the salon, Emma doled out two more invitations. Make that four—the two women sitting at the table beside theirs paid for their pot of tea in celebration of the wedding, so Emma invited them, too.
“When your granddad and I got married,” she said as they walked to the car, “we went to the parsonage with his friend Harry and your aunt Alice and the pastor married us in his living room. We spent the night at the motel on the edge of Crockett—the one that’s not there anymore, thank you, Lord—and that was our honeymoon. We had a long and pretty happy marriage and I don’t have all that many regrets about it. But the truth is, Jen-Jen, I want it to be different this time, starting with a real wedding.”
Jenny got behind the wheel. “What about Travis?” she asked. “Isn’t he expecting just the four of us? Quiet? Conservative?” Like Grandpa. Like Nana’s whole life outside of pink highlights in her hair.
Emma snorted. “Two of the loveliest things about Travis are that he’s neither quiet nor conservative.”
At the inn, Jenny walked in with her grandmother. “What are your plans for the afternoon?”
“A short nap. We’ve already made arrangements for the room and the pastor. I’ve ordered the flowers and the cake.” Emma looked gleeful. “I want to be well rested.”
Jenny grinned at her grandmother. “I love you, Nana. I think I’m going to take a walk. I’ll be back in a few hours. Will you be okay?”
Her grandmother looked past her, her eyes softening. “I’ll be fine. You enjoy your walk.”
Jenny turned in time to see Travis and Zeke approach, still dressed for riding. Travis, his helmet in his hand, his longish gray hair sweaty around the edges, had eyes only for Emma.
Jenny’s heart melted. This is what Nana deserves, someone to look at her like that. When she met Zeke’s eyes, the softening sensation intensified. She thought, in spite of herself, that she’d love to have him look at her the way Travis did her grandmother.
“Want some company?” he asked when he’d heard her plans. “If you can wait for me to change, I’ll go with you.” He smiled. The melting continued. “Actually, I’m starved to death. Can we have lunch first? Pap and I passed a place on the road that looked great, but he wouldn’t stop.”
“Okay.” Jenny nodded agreement and took a seat at one of the tables in the common room to wait. She drew a notebook and pen out of her purse—she had a list to make, and as soon as they left the park and her phone came back to life, she needed to call her mother.
* * *
They rode to the restaurant in his Mustang. “It was Gran’s.” Zeke patted the vintage car’s dash. “She and Pap had matching ones, and when she died, he couldn’t face either of them anymore, so he gave them to Seth and me. We don’t drive them very often, but we still keep them. Before you ask, I admit that the reason I drove it here this weekend was to remind Pap of Gran and how much he loved her.” He flinched as he thought back to the conversation he and Pap had had on this morning’s ride. “He didn’t need reminding.”
Jenny turned to look at him, pulling her knee, clad in brown leggings, up on the seat.
She had really beautiful legs.
“I have an idea,” she said.
He listened all the way up to when he pulled in and parked at the restaurant. He turned to meet her eyes. “I love your hair.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but he couldn’t be sorry he had. He wanted to kiss her, too, and put his arm around her and tuck her head into his shoulder. But he wasn’t going to say that.Thinking about it was stupid enough.
She blushed, touching the braid that curved around the back of her head. “Thank you. I’m enjoying it. My kids would have it pulled out in no time if I wore it to school.”
For a few beats, they didn’t say anything. Except they did. Their gazes met and clung and they were holding hands without Zeke knowing how it had happened. He knew about wordless conversations—he’d seen Pap and Gran have them—but he’d never anticipated having any of his own. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he cleared his throat. “I think it’s great,” he said. “Your idea, I mean. How can I help?”
“You can—” She stopped, her expression foggy. He thought she was having as much trouble keeping her mind on the matters at hand as he was.
He certainly hoped she was. “You can make some phone calls, too, if your phone works here.”
“It does.” He’d called Seth with it when he and Pap had made a water stop on their ride. “You do realize we could be grounded until we’re in our forties for what we’re about to do.”
“I know.” She grinned at him. “Isn’t it cool?”
They made calls while they ate, laughing across the booth’s table as their plans progressed. Jenny’s notebook lay open between them and they added to her lists each time they hung up, his dark stick-figure writing contrasting with her rounded teacher-script.
He paid for their meal over her objections, then gestured for her to precede him when they left the café. As they went toward the car, he put his hand at her waist. She didn’t pull away.
When they got back to the inn, Jenny drew in a sharp, hissing breath. “Oh, boy.”
Zeke swung the Mustang into the space beside her car. “What?”
“My folks are here.” She got out of the car, her movements stilted.
He met her at the trunk. “You knew they were coming. They were already on the road when you talked to your mom.”
She grimaced. “Yeah, but I was hoping she’d find a way to leave Dad at a rest stop along the way.”
Zeke burst into laughter at the same time as she stumbled on her not-the-least-bit-sensible heels and fell sideways into his arms. He held her there, and she stayed, even after the laughter stopped. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.
“No.” But the answer was really only a breath, not a word.
“Me, either, but I think you can really like someone a lot within twenty-four hours.”
Her eyes, bright green in the late autumn sunlight, lit in response. “I think so, too.”
“Jennifer!”
She turned, though she didn’t move away. “Hi, Dad.”
A big guy, accompanied by a woman who looked uncannily like Jenny, walked toward them. From his tonsure haircut to the de
ep scowl on his face, Lucas Boyle looked like a bully. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, ignoring Zeke. “What have you and your grandmother cooked up? Even if she goes through with this so-called marriage, I’ll get it annulled. She’s obviously slipped over that edge of sanity she’s been courting ever since Dad died.”
“For heaven’s lake, Lucas, lighten up.” The pretty woman beside him sounded as strained as she looked. “Your mother’s the sanest one among us. You should be glad if she’s found happiness.” She turned her attention to Jenny. “I’m sorry, honey. I tried to calm him down, but—”
Lucas interrupted. “Don’t encourage her in this nonsense, Lorraine.” He grasped his wife’s arm in big fingers. She flinched, and Zeke moved forward, stepping in front of Jenny.
“How do you do, sir? I’m Zeke McNeil.” He extended his hand, hoping Boyle would just let go of Jenny’s mother and take it. “Travis is my grandfather. I know he’s anxious to meet both of you.”
Boyle’s handshake was bone-crushing, meant to intimidate. His eyes, startlingly like Emma’s, were dark, his expression unyielding. “I’m anxious to meet him, too, and to set him straight where my mother’s concerned.”
“Leave it alone, Dad.” Jenny stepped to her mother’s other side, forming an uncomfortable semicircle with the others. “Travis is a very nice man and Nana loves him.”
“Well, we’ll see about that.” But he sounded less surly. The look he gave his wife was apologetic. He frowned at Zeke. “What does your grandfather want?”
“Your mother.”
“And what do you want?”
Your daughter. “For Pap to be happy. Emma is the way.” Beside him, Jenny’s hands slipped into his, and he heard the message as clearly as if she’d spoken it.
We’re in this together.
