“It’s fine,” Jessie said. Her voice sounded high and tight, however, and Zach got the feeling things were anything but fine.
“Girls, clearly, Za—er, Mister Zach is busy, so we should leave him to it . . . um . . . them, rather, okay, let’s go,” Jessie said.
When Maddie looked like she would resist, Jessie bent down and scooped her up into her arms, propping her on one hip as she strode to the door. Gracie tucked Chaos back into her coat and followed.
Zach jumped up from the couch and hurried to open the door for Jessie. She didn’t make eye contact with him as she passed; instead she stared behind him out into the yard.
“Thanks again,” she said.
“No problem,” he said.
Before Jessie could leave, Maddie pitched herself backwards until her little fist caught Zach’s chambray shirt, using it like an anchor to keep her mother from leaving. Zach had to scramble to keep from losing his shirt.
When he stepped closer, Maddie looped her little arms around his neck and squeezed him tight. Her cheek was soft against his and the scratchy wool hat she wore rubbed against his temple.
“Thanks for saving Chaos,” she said. She pulled back to look him straight in the eye. “You’re our hero.”
Zach lifted his eyebrows at the high praise. Then he reached up and tweaked her nose. “Thanks, Maddie, that’s sweet of you to say. I’m always here if you need me.”
Maddie’s big blue eyes scrutinized his left eye and then the right as if trying to determine if he was telling her the truth. She puckered her lips and nodded. With a final soft pat on his shoulder, she let her mother carry her out of the house.
Gracie glanced up at him from beneath the edge of her hat as if she wanted to say something or do something but she wasn’t sure what. Zach smiled at her.
“Take care of Chaos, okay?” he said.
She nodded her head in tight little jerks, still looking like she wanted to speak but couldn’t find the words.
“Here,” Zach said. He held up his fist and Gracie’s eyes went wide in surprise. “Give me bones.”
“W-what?” she stammered.
“Fist bump,” he said.
“Oh!” She lifted up a closed fist and tapped it against his.
Zach tipped his head to the side, considering. “That’s kind of lame and the exploding-fist thing is so five years ago. Huh. What can we add to it to make this high five just ours?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She glanced down as if the answer might lie on the floor. “Maybe we could tap elbows after we tap fists?”
“I like it!” Zach said with a grin and a nod. “We’ll hit elbows and then bring it home with another fist bump. Let’s do this.”
He held up his knuckles, Gracie banged fists with him, then they both bent their elbows and tapped them together, and then they knocked their fists together again. When Gracie met his eyes afterwards, hers were shining and the small smile she’d worn before had morphed into a big old grin.
“See ya, Zach,” she said. She bounced down the stairs, holding one arm across her middle to keep Chaos steady.
“See ya, Gracie,” he said.
Jessie waited at the bottom of the steps and when Gracie fell in beside her, she put her free arm around her and the three of them cut across the side yard and back to their house. Zach felt a small pang of regret in his chest. He had the feeling of a missed opportunity. He doubted he’d be seeing much of Jessie or her girls again and he was surprised to find the thought bothered him.
“Zach, my body hair is growing every moment I linger,” Marla said. “Wanna help a girl out with a razor?”
Zach stepped back inside and closed the door. He turned to face his kitchen, where Desiree was brewing a pot of coffee while Savannah toasted a bagel.
“Marls, we’ve talked about your boundary issues,” Zach said. He gave her the hairy eyeball. Since he had five younger sisters there wasn’t much that fazed him about girl talk. In fact, his field marketers all seemed to think of him as the big brother they could say anything to. On the one hand, he liked that they trusted him, but on the other, there were some things he could live without knowing—for example, Marla’s body hair issues.
“I thought that was when I was working the field,” she said. “You know, not to share with customers when I’m feeling a tad crampy.”
“Yeah, and now you can add hairy to that list,” he said.
“Fine.” She rolled her eyes and said, “Now can I have a razor?”
“Look under the sink in the guest bathroom cupboard,” he said. “I think my sister left some girl stuff in there.”
“Thanks, Zach, you’re a peach,” Marla said. She spun on her heel and jogged up the staircase.
Zach went back to the coffee table and picked up the leftover cups of cocoa. He noticed that Maddie had finished hers, but Gracie’s was only half gone. He passed Savannah on his way to the sink.
“Cute kids,” she said. She was giving him a sidelong glance.
“I suppose,” he said with a casual shrug.
Such a liar. Those two little sprites were freaking adorable, but he knew better than to gush over a kid in front of a woman. It made them think he was good father material—he wasn’t—and then they started to either try and reel him in or hook him up with a friend who was looking for a baby daddy. No thank you.
As the older brother to two households of sisters—Zach’s parents had divorced when he was a baby and they each went on to remarry and have all daughters, two for his dad and three for his mom, although she insisted it wasn’t a competition—Zach was good on babies and toddlers and kids in general, really, totally good. Besides, the one woman he had thought he’d marry and have kids with had dumped him to marry someone else. So, there was that.
“What’s the matter, Zach?” Desiree asked. “Don’t you like kids?”
“Nah, I love kids but only if I get to give them back at the end of the visit,” he said. “Anything more than an afternoon and I start to get hives.”
Savannah shook her head at him but Desiree laughed.
“You’d better watch it, Zach,” Desiree said. “The guy who thinks he doesn’t want kids usually turns out to be the greatest dad and ends up having a six-pack.”
“Six-pack? Of kids?” Zach felt queasy. “Not in this lifetime.”
Savanah tipped her head to the side and studied him. “You sure? Because I can totally see that.”
“No!” Zach shook his head, sending his shaggy blonde hair in all directions. “No, you can’t. Nuh-uh. No way. No how.”
“He’s adorable when he’s panicking.” Desiree snickered.
A knock sounded on his front door and Zach all but ran to answer it. Anything to get away from the girls and their teasing, which was not funny.
He didn’t bother to check to see who was there. At the moment, he would have embraced an encyclopedia salesman and invited him in for a beer. He pulled the door open wide to find Jessie standing there.
She was alone, looking past his shoulder in an obvious effort not to make eye contact. Zach took advantage of the moment to appreciate that angle of her cheekbones, the firm line of her jaw, the fullness of her upper lip, and the length of her dark eyelashes. She was cute—not like puppy cute, more like wrap-herself-around-a-guy’s-heart-and-hold-fast-until-he-couldn’t-remember-what-life-was-like-before-she-was-in-it cute. In other words, she was deadly with a capital “D.”
“Hi,” he said. His voice came out high and tight. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice and added, “Everything all right? Are the girls okay? And Chaos?”
“Yes, absolutely, everyone is fine.” She nodded and the pom-pom on her hat bobbed. “But Maddie lost one of her mittens. We checked outside, but we didn’t find it. I wouldn’t have come back and bothered you, but she’s a little obsessive about her mittens matching, which wo
uld make you think she’d be better at keeping track of them, but we seem to have started a collection of right-hand mittens. No lefts.”
Jessie was babbling. Her discomfort at having to come back to his house screamingly apparent as she continued to talk to some far point over his shoulder.
“I know I should get her those clips you can use to attach a kid’s mittens to the end of their jacket, but I keep forgetting. I swear it’s like a mental problem. I mean one pair of those and I could stop buying mittens every other day—”
“Let’s go look,” Zach said. “What did the mitten look like?”
“It was pink, I think,” she said.
Zach’s lips lifted at her unintentional rhyme.
“Sorry,” she said. “I have read entirely too much Dr. Seuss to the girls.”
“Don’t be, Seuss is the man,” Zach said. He moved aside and waved her into the house. “Let’s check the living room.”
As they entered the house, Zach noticed that both Desiree and Savannah had disappeared back upstairs. He wondered if it was a coincidence but suspected not.
Jessica searched the floor around the coffee table while Zach checked the couch. He moved a throw pillow, she lifted up the newspapers, but there was no pink mitten to be found.
Jessie stood and scanned the room. She plopped her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. Zach glanced away, knowing that if he kept staring at her lips he was going to think things he should not be thinking about his neighbor.
“Well, I guess she dropped it in the snow somewhere.” Jessie sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to wait for spring when the snow melts, which is when we’ll likely find the five other missing mittens.”
Zach was about to agree with her when he caught a movement in the corner of his eye.
“Rufus!” he scolded. “What do you have there?”
Rufus had not gotten up to greet Jessie, which was suspicious because Rufus took his job as greeter to everyone who came inside the house very seriously. And now he was curled up, facing into the couch with his back to Zach and Jessie, and the poof of his pompadour hairdo was bobbing ever so slightly.
“Rufus, I’m talking to you,” Zach said.
Rufus’s poof of a tail wagged. Zach glanced at Jessie and put a finger over his lips, then he crept up behind the dog and snatched what Rufus had been gently gnawing on. It was the mangled remains of a pink mitten.
“Rufus, that was incredibly rude of you,” Zach said.
Rufus glanced over his shoulder at them and then lowered his nose into the couch as if he was ashamed of himself.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Zach said. “You can’t soften me up with the sad eyes. I am not going to feel any sympathy for you when you willfully chewed up a perfectly good mitten.”
Rufus heaved a sad sigh and his gaze shifted to Jessie as if she might be a more sympathetic person.
“Oh, Rufus,” Jessie said.
He wagged his tail and she tipped her head and gave him a close-lipped smile.
“Now don’t give in to him or he’ll be impossible,” Zach said. His words were completely wasted on Jessie as she crouched down in front of the dog.
She held the back of her hand in front of his nose and Rufus gave it a sniff and then a lick. Then he wagged even harder, suspecting that he was being forgiven.
“There’s a good boy,” she said. “You didn’t mean to chew the mitten, did you? No, you didn’t. Who’s a handsome boy? Is it you? Yes, it is. Good dog, Rufus.”
Sensing he’d won her over completely, Rufus rolled onto his back with his legs in the air, giving Jessie his belly for a tummy rub. She obliged, all the while keeping up her chatter.
“Who’s a good dog? Who’s a handsome fella? There’s a good boy.”
Zach held the soggy mitten, which was beginning to unravel. Watching Jessie with Rufus, it took everything he had not to throw himself down on the floor beside her with his belly in the air, demanding a rub. Okay, so maybe he was longing for some attention a little farther south than his belly. Feeling a light sweat break out on his body, he slapped himself with the soggy mitten in an effort to get ahold of himself.
Rufus, oblivious to Zach’s situation, craned his head so he could lick Jessie’s face while she dragged her hands through his thick hair. She laughed and Zach felt the sound punch him right in the chest. He wasn’t sure why but he suspected Jessie didn’t get to laugh with such abandon very often.
She wiped the slobber off her cheek and kissed the top of Rufus’s poofy head.
“All is forgiven, Rufus,” she said. Then she wagged a finger at him and said, “But no more mittens.”
It occurred to Zach that Maddie had executed the exact same mannerism when she was talking to Chaos on the roof. The resemblance between the two females was ridiculously charming and Zach was utterly disarmed.
“He’s going to be incorrigible now,” Zach said.
“With that hairdo, how could he not be?” Jessie asked.
She smiled at him and it was the first time she’d looked him right in the eye since she’d come back. Zach felt something shift in his chest. He glanced down at the mitten in his hand.
“Sorry about this,” he said. He held it out to her and she took it, tucking it into her pocket.
“It’s fine.” They stood awkwardly for a moment and she sidled toward the door and said, “I’d better go.”
“Sure . . . right,” he said.
He walked beside her to the door, reaching it first. He put his hand on the knob and paused. “Listen, about the girls upstairs—”
Jessie held up a hand in a stop motion. Her eyes were wide and she shook her head and said, “Not my business.”
“But—” He let go of the doorknob as he turned to face her. He wanted her to understand that the girls just worked for him that there was nothing weird about the situation, but Jessie wasn’t allowing it.
“No, really, what you do in your own home is your business,” she said. “No judgment here. Honest.”
She dove for the door and yanked it open. Before Zach could form the words to finish his explanation, she was stepping out into the cold.
“Jessie—” he began again but she was moving so fast he was pretty sure she was trying to outrun his words. When she broke into a light jog, he was sure of it.
“Thanks again for helping with Chaos,” she called over her shoulder. As she dashed across the yard, he could see both Maddie and Gracie peering out a window on the upper story of their house.
The two girls waved and Zach waved back, wondering if he’d ever see the two little sprites and their mom again. He told himself that it would be best for all of them if he didn’t, good boundaries making good neighbors and all that, and he tried really hard to believe it.
Chapter 4
“Zach, not to alarm you, but I think you have a stalker,” Carly DeCusati said. She was sitting at his kitchen counter, drinking a pint of Bluff Point Ale while her fiancé James Sinclair worked his culinary magic in Zach’s kitchen.
Rufus sat in the middle of the kitchen, watching James’s every move on the off chance a chunk of the dry salami James was slicing for his charcuterie went flying into the air. Zach could practically see Rufus willing the meat to sprout wings and fly into his mouth.
“Stalker?” Zach asked. He took a long sip of his own pint and filched a slice of spicy salami from James’s cutting board. “Not possible. You know I never bring anyone I might be romantically involved with back to my house.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s romance that this one is looking for,” Carly said. She was gazing past Zach into his living room.
Zach turned around to follow her line of sight. Just as he glanced at the window there was a flurry of movement. Two knit caps were just visible right before they disappeared beneath the windowsill.
“My mistake,” Carly said. “It appea
rs you have two stalkers.”
Zach turned back around and glanced at Rufus. The dog’s attention was solely on James. He wasn’t even blinking.
“Fine watchdog you are,” Zach said.
“I think he’s boring holes into my back,” James said. “Our dogs, Saul and Hot Wheels, do the same thing.”
“Yes, but they have our parrot, Ike, trained to help them out,” Carly said. “Turn your back for a second and Ike will swoop in and steal food for the dogs. It’s ridiculous.”
“Does he still drop F-bombs?” Zach asked. He rose from his seat and crossed the room toward the front door.
“Yes,” James said.
“Only when provoked,” Carly defended her bird.
“Uh-huh,” Zach said. “Someone went soft in the animal department.”
“I did not go soft,” Carly argued. “Besides, you can’t say anything. You’ve got Rufus.”
“I’m just fostering him until a better situation comes along or his family comes back from England.”
“That’s why you have portraits of you and the dog,” James said. “Because you’re planning to give him away.”
“That started when he was just a coworker. Ruf is like a bud who gets thrown out by his wife and needs a place to crash for a while,” Zach said. He saw two knit caps pop up just above the windowsill. “It’s not a permanent situation.”
“Why not?” Carly asked.
Zach held up a finger to indicate he needed a minute. Then he yanked open his front door and jumped outside.
“Gotcha!”
“Ah!” Both girls shrieked and fell back from the window, landing hard on their backsides.
Rufus, hearing the ruckus, came dashing to the door, barking in what sounded like a dog explosion.
“Oh, sure, now you come running,” Zach said. He frowned at the dog. “You don’t have me fooled. I know you knew who it was. I suppose now you want to go play in the snow with them.”
Every Dog Has His Day Page 3
