“‘And of this place, I might have been mistress.’”
The affectation in her voice surely meant this was a quote, but he couldn’t place it. Then she patted the book, saying, “Read it.”
And he promised her he would.
Don’t wink—a flutter of one eye may cause a tear in the other.
ANTI-FLIRT CLUB RULE #5
SHE’D HALFWAY HOPED TO CONTINUE THE KISS in the taxi ride back to the train station, but since Max had given his last three dollars to the mover for the chair, they’d been at the mercy of that same man for a ride. Once the final portable property of her childhood home had been loaded within the wooden slats of the truck, Monica was handed up into the cab while Max sat in the back, feet dangling over the side. Then it was a mad dash to catch the four o’clock, grabbing the only two seats together—right across from a fat, irascible woman and her sullen, drool-crusted child. Thankfully, Max gave up his attempts to engage either of them in travel banter. Even better, the child whined incessantly about needing to go to the lavatory and the mother finally acquiesced, leaving Max and Monica in peace.
“Alone at last,” Max said, touching his forehead to hers.
“Maybe he’ll lock himself in there.”
“He? Are you sure? I thought it was a girl.”
“Sorry road for her if it is,” Monica said.
Then he kissed her. Nothing like before, when her feet pooled in her shoes and her head sizzled like frost on a furnace. But sweet and soft, somehow making everything and everybody else on the train disappear behind a curtain of touch and taste.
He pulled away, looking satisfied but not smug, and said, “I hope I’m not causing you to violate the vows of Anti-Flirt Week.”
“That depends. Are you teasing me?”
He shook his head. Slowly. “Are you?”
She held her head steady and answered, truthfully, “I don’t think so.”
Her answer brought a decidedly less satisfied look to his face, and he blinked precisely five times.
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Well, I don’t know, exactly. Who knows anything exactly?”
He just kept looking at her and blinking, making her wish she could disappear during that tiny space of time when his eyes were closed and reappear again, as sure of her feelings as he apparently was of his.
Monica stretched up, hoping for another kiss, but the woman and child had returned, the latter unceremoniously stomping on her foot. Whatever question, answer, and conversation had been left unspoken would have to wait until they could get away from their gloomy audience.
She ran her fingers listlessly over the lid of the box containing her childhood stories, then lifted it and shuffled through the pages themselves. Leaning against Max’s shoulder, she offered one up as a little light reading material. Perfect for the train.
“Is there a monkey in it?”
She knew he meant no harm by the question, and she found her own defensiveness surprising.
“No monkey. Just a girl.” She scanned a few lines, though simply seeing the paper was enough to bring the words back in full detail. “She makes sashes out of butterfly wings for the women in her town to wear when they march in the suffrage parade. But then all the women fly away. What do you think Freud would make of that?”
“I like monkeys better.” This from the child sitting across from her.
Monica lifted one eyebrow, sending the child to melt against its mother’s arm.
“How old were you when you wrote that?” Max asked, either intrigued or amused.
“Seven? Eight? Before the war, when getting the vote was my mother’s passion of the day.”
He held out a hand. “May I?”
All of a sudden, those pages filled with her juvenile, practiced script seemed to be spun from her very soul, and to simply hand them over, a betrayal of the child who wrote them.
“You have enough to read right now,” she said, nodding her head toward the book in his lap. “Pride and Prejudice, remember?”
“I liked Emma better.” This from the child’s mother, who was not so easily intimidated by Monica’s raised brow.
So they rode in silence, with unfinished kisses and conversations and stories between them.
They lit from the train at Union Station amid a throng of travelers. The sound of a thousand voices filled the space between the marble floors and columned walls. The last of the day’s sunlight poured through the windows in the vaulted ceiling. With silent complicity they joined their fellow travelers, funneling their way toward the exit gates.
“I think I have enough for us to ride a streetcar,” Monica said, digging in her purse as she walked. “Why don’t you come back to my place for supper?” She tried to think of anything that would give her more time with him. She’d broken some sort of spell on the train and felt close to begging for a chance to make it right again. “Tuesday night, probably beef stew. Mrs. Kinship makes it with pearl onions.”
“I don’t think so,” he said after seeming to weigh a world’s worth of options. “When I left the office this morning, I had no idea I’d be gone all day. Not that it wasn’t a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.”
“Then come with me.” She clutched his sleeve. “If not to my house, anywhere. You must be hungry too. I’m starved. How about Chinese? There’s a great place just a couple of blocks—”
“Stop,” he said, but gently, with his fingers touched against her face.
“What did I do?” She felt the first sting of tears, and they clogged her throat so, she feared she wouldn’t be heard over the din of the crowd. “What did I say? I feel like I ruined something, but I don’t know what, or how.” She felt herself escalating to hysteria, and were they anywhere else but Union Station, they might have accrued the attention of some passersby.
“Come here,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders in a now-familiar protective way and ushering her to one of the wooden benches near the entrance. He sat her down and moved in close, blocking out everything—the ticket booths, the clock, the hawkers of peanuts and magazines. Only Max, with a blur of activity behind him.
“Something happened back there at that house,” he said with exaggerated authority.
“No kidding,” she said, confused by his adamant tone. “I was there, remember?” She leaned in, ready for it to happen again.
“Stop.” Again, this time more forceful. “It’s something I think I’ve wanted for a long time. With you, and maybe even before you.”
“Before me?”
“There’s never been a woman that I thought—that . . . I loved. And I’m in love with you, Monica. I think I have been since the day I met you. That first morning, at the funeral, when you called me Griffin.”
Her mind followed him back to that moment, unable to recall anything other than nervous amusement at her own cleverness.
“And there were times—moments—when I thought you felt the same. Somewhat the same. So this afternoon, when you kissed me, when you let me kiss you . . .” He paused, bemused by his own declaration, looking to the passing commuters as if they would tell him all he needed to hear. “But here you are, not exactly leaping at the chance to say you’re in love with me too.”
“Oh, Max.” No man had ever declared love for her. Not in a setting like this, anyway. Not with daylight and witnesses, speaking from a clear and sober mind. “How could I be?”
He sat a little straighter, a little farther away. “So how could you—what made you let me kiss you like that?”
She shrugged and clutched her stories. “Playing house?”
It was exactly the wrong thing to say, flirtatious and cruel in the face of his sincerity. He physically recoiled from her, and she wished she could reel her words back in and bring him back with them.
“Max—”
“Of course. What did I expect?”
Now it was her turn to draw back. “That was cruel.”
“I’m sorry.”
I
t was an apology delivered with pity, not just for his remark but for the reputation that prompted it. She silently sent it back.
Max opted to go to the Capitol Chatter offices rather than to his home, hoping a few matters of business would distract him from the afternoon. He arrived to find only Zelda, with a neatly typed list of the girls who had come for the receptionist position. Barely perceptible tick marks spoke of Zelda’s personal opinion, and there were few who passed her muster.
“Everything is fine with Miss Monica?” she asked with her specific blend of maternal austerity.
“All’s well,” he replied, making no attempt to convince her. He told of their visit to the bank, of Monica’s inheritance and the discovery under the floorboard, forging on regardless of the tug at his conscience that he may be betraying her confidence. He hadn’t seen anything in this city as dependable as Zelda Ovenoff’s ability to keep a secret.
“And I am thinking there is something else,” Zelda said, “though it is not my place to know, maybe.”
They were sitting at the large conference table, drinking coffee and picking at the last of the Danish from earlier in the day.
“I kissed her,” he said, trying hard not to relive the experience in Mrs. Ovenoff’s presence.
“Oh, how wonderful.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt a little embarrassed, like he’d just been awarded a prize he didn’t deserve.
“Maybe,” he said. “I mean, yes, wonderful, but then, after, I think I might have chased her away.”
“Nonsense. Who would run from a man like you?”
“A woman like Monica, apparently.”
Zelda tucked a soft finger under his chin and forced him to look up. “Tell me this. Do you love her?”
“I think so, and that’s the problem.”
“How, a problem?”
“Because she doesn’t love me.”
“And what makes you say this?”
“Because she told me.”
“Ah.” She released him and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup but didn’t raise it for a drink. “You think because she cannot say her feelings, she must not have them.”
“That’s not it.” But of course it was.
“Not once, in all of our time together, did Edward Moore tell me he loved me. But I know he did. It is one thing to say and quite another to do.”
“I’m just beginning to think she’s not the right girl for me.”
“And that is just the important word. Girl. She may be twenty years old, but she is, in so many ways, still a child.”
And in so many ways a woman.
“Maybe I’m the childish one,” he said. “I should know better.”
“Love knows nothing but moment to moment. Be honest and true in each one, and expect nothing more from her.”
“Is that how it was with you and Uncle Edward?”
She closed her eyes for a moment before responding. “Yes. And we had our measure of happiness.”
He didn’t believe her and said so. “If you loved each other and you were both alone, why didn’t you—?”
“Marry? It is sometimes more complicated. Edward had been alone for so long. A bachelor. And I think he was set in his ways. Not willing, I think, to give up those quiet moments of his life.”
“But did you ever ask him?”
She looked shocked. “To marry me?”
“Not exactly, but hint. That you wanted more.”
“My life, all I have wanted was my own home, with my own man. Always I lived on the edge of somebody else’s family. And here I had this little bit. I was afraid if I asked for more, I would lose what little I had. It had to be enough for me.”
“So, regrets?”
“We were patient with each other. Like the Good Book says. Love is patient. And love is kind. That’s what we were to each other. We didn’t know he had so little time. Maybe we should have. We were old. Not so old, but not young like you two.”
The weight of her wisdom wrapped around him, anchored by God’s Word. Patience. Kindness. Both thrown away on that train-station bench.
Zelda’s hand was covering his again, this time warm from her coffee cup. “You have time. To wait, until each of you can fully be what the other needs. And right now there is time for you to make right whatever it is you think you have done wrong.”
“Right now? I don’t think she wants to talk to me.”
“She wants to. I know this more than anything.”
Zelda lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it before standing to gather her purse and coat and hat.
“I will see you in the morning, Mr. Moore. Good luck.”
He didn’t need luck; he needed grace. From God for his behavior, from Monica for his judgment. Left alone after Zelda’s departure, he laid his glasses on the table and buried his face in his hands.
“Father—” He barely had the word out of his mouth before an overwhelming longing for his parents washed away the rest of his prayer. They’d both been gone for years, and he’d made several life decisions without their counsel, but something about this, the deep-down desire to create a new family with this woman, made him feel so utterly alone. He looked up, pressed his knuckles to his lips, and thought about Zelda’s final, loving gesture. Here he’d been given the wisdom of a woman, spoken with the breath of a mother, and if he listened close enough, he would no doubt hear the words of his Father, too.
“Father, I love her.” Hadn’t he spoken these very words aloud just days before? I love her, and I desire her, and even if she loves me, I don’t know that she is what you want for me. And I’ve tried, always, to do what you would have me do. You’ve taken my mother and my father and my home and my past. I want her. Give her to me. Let her love me, and I promise she’ll love you, too.
Selfish, he knew, but how wrong could it be to care about a woman?
And yet he’d hurt her with a single careless comment. How vain had he been to think his love alone could save her? That his forgiveness mattered, when it was God’s forgiveness she should be seeking?
Combing through their conversations, he tried to remember a single time he’d made it clear to her how the grace of God could bring the peace she must be seeking. They shared the orphan’s plight, but Max had the constant presence of a heavenly Father to turn to. Did she? He was fairly certain she did not, and it tore at him with an urgency beyond his own reconciliation with her. God had taken her father, her mother, her home, and her memories too. And he, Max, had fallen so short in showing her how God’s love—not his own—could take the place of all she’d lost.
If nothing else, he had to make that right. He had to talk to her tonight.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
AUGUSTE RODIN
DUSK LURKED by the time she walked into the common parlor, given three line changes taking the streetcar home from the train station. Whether or how Max got home, she didn’t know. Forget him if he hadn’t learned to always keep a stash of nickels for the car. Big romantic gesture, buying that ratty old chair. Foolish, stupid if it kept him stranded. Even more if he thought it was going to get him permanently hitched to her. She knew her value; she had a lot of things given to her by a lot of great guys. And he was ready to spend nine dollars on a piece of trash.
Then again, there was that moment, there on the bench in the train station after her little joke, when he’d looked at her like she was the piece of trash. Since when did a kiss mean you were ready to fall in love? Because if she knew nothing else about Max Moore, she knew he wasn’t one to toss that word around lightly. What would he have done if she’d said it back, if she’d thrown her arms around him like Mary Pickford in a final scene? Would they be on a honeymoon before the week’s end? The thought was terrifying. Or at least it should be.
The parlor felt blessedly warm and welcoming the minute she walked in. Mr. Davenport had taken up residence in his favorite chair but had not yet begun playing his records. Instead, he sat reading a magazine and
looked up with an air of relief when she walked through the door.
“Evening, Mr. D.”
“Ah, what a welcome sight you are, young lady.”
“Really?” He’d never made her feel welcome a moment in her life.
“Perhaps now, if the telephone rings, you can take the call.”
As if on cue, the phone jangled, and at his stern direction, Monica lifted the earpiece from its cradle. “Hello?”
“There’s my Mousie.”
Charlie, and from the richness of his speech, he’d been drunk for a while.
“What are you calling me for?”
“I can’t . . . since seein’ you that night. Did you get my flowers?”
Monica glanced in at the dining room table where Mrs. Kinship had added some greenery to the meager bouquet, creating quite a pleasing centerpiece.
“Yeah. Five roses. What a Rockefeller.”
“Come have a drink with me.”
“No.”
“Come dance with me.”
“Good-bye, Charlie.”
She hung up the phone and took off her hat and coat, hanging both on empty wooden hooks in the entryway. The flat, narrow box of her stories sat deep in one of the pockets, and there it would stay for now. She was exhausted, and the sofa in front of the window loomed far more inviting than a trek to her room. The scent of Mrs. Kinship’s beef stew wafted from the kitchen, igniting her hunger. Twenty minutes until six meant so many minutes until supper. Until then she would collapse, her head on one of the embroidered pillows, her eyes closed, with Mr. Davenport reading aloud at her invitation.
Just as she sat, the phone jangled again. She and Mr. Davenport exchanged a commiserative look, and she dragged herself across the room to answer it, again.
“Mousie! Come dance with me.”
She could hear the music playing in the background, loud and lively. A familiar place to become lost. She should go. What else would be expected? Max’s words nibbled at her resolve, but not enough.
All for a Story Page 26
