Asking for Trouble (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  But when she’d seen him next, almost a year later, when Alec had brought him home for Thanksgiving, he’d been more grown up, more remote than ever. And nothing had changed. Fifteen years later, and he was still spending his Christmas vacations gazing unsmilingly at her as if he were measuring her, and she wasn’t measuring up.

  Well, she was tired of it. Fifteen years was long enough to want a man who’d never want her back. She was going to get over Joe Hartman. This was the last Christmas she was going to spend fantasizing about him. She was done.

  Nothing Like a Necklace

  Joe opened his eyes the next morning and looked up at the old-fashioned, popcorn-textured white ceiling. Alec’s room, Christmas morning.

  Which started with church, because it always started with church.

  That first year, he’d tried to decline. “I’ll stay here, if that’s OK,” he said when the subject came up over Christmas Eve dinner. “I could do the breakfast dishes, any other kind of chores you have.” He knew how to make himself useful. That tended to make you more welcome, too.

  “If you stay in this house,” Mrs. Kincaid said, “you’re coming to church. You don’t have to believe. You don’t have to participate. But you have to come.”

  “I don’t . . .” he began, then stopped. “I didn’t bring church clothes.” He didn’t have church clothes. He had jeans, and he had T-shirts. He had his boots, and he had a pair of well-used tennis shoes. None of which would be right. He hadn’t been in too many churches, but he knew that much.

  Mrs. Kincaid paused in the act of dishing more meat sauce onto Gabe’s plate to look Joe over, a speculative gleam in her eye.

  “Oh, no,” Alec groaned. “Now you’ve given her a project.”

  She handed Gabe his plate, flapped the back of her hand at her elder son. “Hush up. And it doesn’t matter what you wear, Joe. That’s the point of church. It’s what’s on the inside that counts, isn’t it, Dave?”

  “More honored in the breach than the observance,” her husband said, “but that’s meant to be the idea.”

  “But if you’d be more comfortable,” Mrs. Kincaid said, “we’ll find one of Dave’s shirts for you to wear, because you’re about his height. That’s the only way we’ll get sleeves that’ll fit you.” She pushed her chair back and started to get up.

  “Hang on, now, honey,” Mr. Kincaid said, putting a hand on her arm. They sat together at one end of the table, not opposite each other like you’d expect in a TV sitcom family. “You can get Joe set up after dinner, but don’t you think you should finish eating first?”

  She laughed, sat down again, and picked up her fork. “I get impulsive,” she told Joe. “But as soon as we’re done here, we’ll find you a shirt. And don’t worry about the jeans,” she went on, forestalling his next, clearly futile objection. “Jeans are fine. You’ll be sitting down anyway. Nobody will see.”

  And that had been that. He’d done the breakfast dishes, all right, but after that, he’d gone to church, and he’d been going ever since, when he stayed with them. And doing the dishes, too. With Alyssa, which he could have done without. Being alone with her made him nervous, but Mrs. Kincaid had been clear on that, too.

  “I’d be some kind of hostess if I invited you and then made you do all my housework for me, wouldn’t I?” she’d said with a laugh the first time he’d offered. “But you can help Alyssa.”

  So that had become Joe’s chore on Kincaid holidays, which had given him the idea for the present he’d thought up for Susie this year, which he was pretty proud of. When it was his turn to distribute his gifts on this fifteenth Christmas afternoon, he handed her a long white envelope, then sat back and watched a little nervously while she opened it.

  “I know you’ve always said you didn’t need it,” he said as she unfolded a certificate for a year’s worth of weekly housekeeping service, “but I needed to give it, to both of you. To say—” He shrugged. “To say thanks.”

  It had occurred to him over that busy wedding weekend a month earlier, watching her move from one set of endless tasks to another, that the reason she’d always declined Alec’s offers of a housekeeper wasn’t that she enjoyed housework, because who did? In a flash of insight that had left him astonished that he hadn’t figured it out sooner, he’d realized that she hadn’t wanted to embarrass Dave by accepting something from her son that her husband couldn’t provide, that she didn’t want him to think that the life he’d given her wasn’t good enough. But if it came from Joe instead, he thought—he hoped—that it would be different.

  “It’s not even that much work anymore,” Susie said. “Not with just Dave and me.”

  “Seems to me that everybody should get to retire sometime,” Joe said. “And the lady I found to do it, she’s a single mom. She needs the work.”

  That did the trick, just as he’d planned. “Well,” she said, putting the certificate carefully back into her envelope, “I’d better not say no, then, had I?” She got up, came over and bent to give him a kiss on the cheek. “I think I should just say thank you, sweetheart. That was very thoughtful of you. Very sweet.”

  He could feel a lump forming in his throat, to his horror. Luckily, Dixie came to his rescue.

  “I said you’d be a catch,” she pronounced, “and dang if I wasn’t right, wouldn’t you say, Desiree? Don’t you think some girl’s going to get mighty lucky one of these days?”

  “Rae’s not going to agree with you,” Joe said, the vulnerable moment past. “She doesn’t think I’m good with women.”

  “Hmm. Maybe slow to warm up,” Rae said. “You’re all right once you get there.” She smiled at her business partner. “I’ve got no complaints these days.”

  “And I think you’re just fine,” Susie said. She reached to adjust the shoulder of the gray sweater she’d knitted him, along with the ones she’d made for her sons. “I messed up on this seam. You need to give it back to me later today, and I’ll redo it.”

  She’d always given him clothes, ever since that first year. He hadn’t expected anything, had felt awkward enough sitting around the Christmas tree with the family, still in his borrowed shirt. But when Susie had handed out her presents, two squashy packages had landed in his lap.

  “Because you need a Tall size. Those things you have are too short,” Susie had explained when he’d ripped the tissue paper open to reveal a pair of new Hanes T-shirts, one each in navy blue and gray. He’d have felt embarrassed about that, like a charity case, especially when he’d opened his other package and found three pairs of socks, except that she’d just given her sons the same things.

  “Just be glad she didn’t give you underwear,” Alec said with a grin. “It’s been known to happen. Nothing like wearing boxers picked out by your mother.”

  “If women didn’t buy underwear for men,” Susie retorted, “half the men in America would wear them until they couldn’t tell which ones were the leg holes. I have to sneak in and throw out Dave’s old things while he’s not looking.”

  “Because they’re not comfortable until they’re broken in,” Dave protested. “And who’s going to see them? A little hole or two never hurt anything.”

  “I see them,” Susie answered. “I’m not having my husband walk around with holes in his socks, looking like he has a wife who doesn’t care enough about him to notice. And you can just live with it.”

  She was still giving Joe shirts. This year, she’d upgraded to sweaters, though Susie wasn’t a very good knitter, he thought privately. The shoulders were pretty funky. But he’d put on his new gray sweater with pleasure all the same, because she’d made it for him.

  Alec and Rae’s presents were the last, at Alec’s insistence. He’d started with gifts for his father, his brother, and Joe. Joe got an atomic clock with a weather station, which he appreciated. You always needed to know the weather. Alec gave regular things, practical things, the same kinds of things Joe gave him.

  Christmas presents for men seemed kind of stupid to him anyway
. If he or Alec needed something, why not just go ahead and buy it, and know they were getting exactly what they wanted? What was the point of buying the other guy something, having to guess what he might like—because there wasn’t anything Alec actually needed that Joe could buy him, or vice versa—and wrapping it up in pretty paper?

  But the Kincaids always gave presents, so Joe did it too. He’d done a wool stadium blanket in the green-and-red Kincaid tartan for both Alec and Gabe this year, which he’d thought had been all right. A blanket was useful, at least. That was his idea of a present.

  He’d veered a bit from the norm with Dave’s gift, though: Sacramento Kings season tickets. They had a lousy record, but Dave was loyal, and he’d been pleased, Joe could tell. So Joe had been happy he’d had the thought.

  Women were different, of course. Women liked presents, and it had always seemed to Joe that the more useless the present was, the better they liked it. Well, they liked to feel special, and he had no problem with that.

  Sure enough, it was the women’s turn for Alec’s gifts now, and Alyssa and Mira were exclaiming as they opened their gifts, lifted the lids of identical flat black velvet boxes, and each drew out a pendant hung from a gold chain. They weren’t identical, but they were the same basic idea: one single, large, lustrous pearl, nestled in a curving disc of gold that looked like some sort of shell, or a leaf. Something delicate and pretty, anyway.

  “Thank you,” Mira breathed. “It’s so beautiful.” She held it up for Gabe to see, and he turned a rueful gaze on his brother.

  “Rae said it would be all right to give your wife jewelry,” Alec said, clearly reading his twin’s mind. “Don’t blame me. I asked her. I checked.”

  “Are you kidding?” Mira said happily. “I’m not giving this back. Oh, he means it might hurt your feelings.” She turned to Gabe with a bit of a stricken look, but Joe noticed that she was clutching her necklace pretty tightly all the same.

  “Never mind.” Gabe was already taking it from her, fastening the clasp behind her neck, and her hand went up to stroke the smooth surfaces as if she couldn’t help herself. “You just consider it a fringe benefit of being married to me. We’ll leave it at that.”

  “Oh, guys. Wow.” Alyssa had her own necklace on. She jumped up and went to the big mirror over the cabinet next to the front door to check out her reflection. “It’s gorgeous, and I can wear it with anything. Where did you find them, Rae?”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it. That was your brother all the way. That’s from Tahiti, via Paris. He didn’t even show me until after he’d done it, after he’d come back from his mysterious errand. I thought maybe he was buying me a pony, but,” she sighed, “turns out not.”

  “Mmm,” Alec said, smiling at her. “I may have got you something too. We’ll get to that. But meanwhile . . . I’ve got a couple more things under here.” He crouched beside the tree, fished out two slightly larger flat packages wrapped in shimmering paper that had an opalescent quality all its own. He handed one to his mother, one to Rae’s grandmother. “A variation on the theme.”

  Both women made a fuss, of course, the same fuss they’d made over everything they’d received that day. Women couldn’t just open a present and look at it and say thanks. They had to make a whole production out of it.

  “What beautiful paper, isn’t it, Dixie?” Susie slid a fingernail under the tape, folded the wrapping paper and set it aside carefully.

  “It sure is,” Dixie agreed. “That’s fancy.”

  “If I’d known you were going to be so easily pleased,” Alec complained, “I’d just have given you the box. Come on, open them.”

  They were already there. “Oh, my,” Susie said helplessly. “Oh, my. Alec.”

  Two simple, perfect strands of pearls, their luster core-deep, were held up by two sets of hands, turned in the light.

  “Honey,” Dixie said to Rae, fumbling with the clasp until Alec came over and opened it, settled the strand around her wrinkled neck, and fastened it for her, “I think you caught yourself a live one.”

  “I think I did,” Rae laughed.

  “The ladies at church aren’t going to know what hit them,” Dixie said happily, reaching for her reading glasses in her purse, then lifting the necklace to take a better look. “These are real pearls, aren’t they?”

  “That’s what the man said,” Alec told her with a smile. “Got to decorate my favorite ladies.”

  “Sibling wars won yet again, by a mile,” Alyssa sighed. “I’d complain that you cheated, Alec, but you might take my necklace away.”

  “Oh, honey,” her mother hastened to assure her, “I loved your present too. I don’t need anything more at all to be happy today. You all know that. I have everything a woman could want.”

  “And now your mother’s crying,” Dave said in resignation. He put an arm around his wife, but he was looking misty-eyed too, Joe noticed. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen Dave Kincaid cry, either. He didn’t actually sob, not that Joe had seen, but he definitely teared up from time to time, and it didn’t even seem to bother him.

  “Got one more here. You want your present now?” Alec asked his wife. “Or later, when we’re alone?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Alyssa said. “After all this, you think we’re going to miss out on the chance to watch her open it? I can only imagine what it is. Probably Queen Elizabeth’s spare tiara or something.”

  “She wouldn’t sell it to me. I had to go for something else.” Alec handed the package to Rae, and this one wasn’t small at all.

  “Alec,” she complained. “I gave you a scarf.”

  “And I love my scarf,” he assured her. “It’s a great scarf.”

  “I have a really bad feeling,” she said, her fingers poised to open the package, “that this isn’t a scarf.”

  “Open it,” Alyssa said.

  “Save that pretty paper,” Susie urged, and Alec dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

  “Mom,” he said. “I’ll buy you a package of special paper. I’ll buy you two packages of special paper. Desiree does not have to save the paper.”

  But Rae hadn’t even heard, it was clear. She had the box open, and was sitting staring at what was inside.

  “Let’s see,” Dixie urged.

  Still wordless, she turned the deep blue velvet case around and held it up. And Joe could see why she hadn’t said anything.

  It was a necklace. More pearls. Two rows of smaller spheres at the top fastened with a diamond clasp, gathered by three triangular panels at each side, their surface made up of more diamonds and each panel larger than the one above, finally falling into three graduated rows of pearls below. And by the time it got to the largest, the ones at the bottom, they were pretty damn spectacular.

  “Oh,” Susie breathed, and that was about all there was to say about that.

  “I’d say you did good,” Gabe told his brother, and Joe had to agree.

  “Alec,” Desiree said. “You didn’t buy this at a store.”

  “Let’s just say I called ahead.” He took the thing carefully out of its case and put it around her neck. “Merry Christmas.” He gave her a kiss. “You’re beautiful. Thanks for marrying me.”

  And that made Susie cry again, joining Mira, but then, Mira had cried about five times already that day. Joe guessed that pregnancy really did make women emotional, because he didn’t remember her crying this much the year before. She’d cried at Alec and Rae’s wedding, but everybody’d done that, everybody except him.

  Of course, Rae had to stand up and take her turn looking in the mirror. “I am seriously overdressed for this event,” she said. She was wearing camel-colored slacks and a brown sweater, and the pearls stood out against the knit fabric as if they were lit from within. “We’re going to have to get opera tickets or something, Alec.”

  “No, we’re not,” he said. “I hate opera. I’ll take you out to dinner someplace really nice, how’s that?”
/>   “It had better be someplace really nice,” she said, fingering the rows of pearls.

  “I can probably manage that. How about coming over and giving me another kiss? Don’t I get a thank-you?”

  “You get a thank-you,” she assured him. “You just needed to let me look first.” And he did get it.

  And, Joe thought, he’d got it wrong again, or rather, he hadn’t dared to get it right. He’d thought hard, as he thought every year, about what to get Alyssa. He’d wanted to give her jewelry, because he knew as well as Alec did that that was what you bought a beautiful woman. He wasn’t the most romantic guy, but even he knew that. Jewelry was the best, when it was appropriate. Which it wasn’t.

  But seeing the look on Alyssa’s face as she admired Rae’s necklace, he wished he’d forgotten about what was appropriate and done it. He hadn’t made quite as much from their partnership as Alec had—the CEO always got the most, that was the way it worked—but he wasn’t too far off. So, yeah, he could have bought Alyssa just about any necklace in the world. If it had been right. Which it wasn’t.

  So he’d given her a box instead. Well, not just a box. A carefully prepared case of emergency supplies for her car, because he’d seen her car, and at some point, she was going to need emergency supplies. He knew she wouldn’t have the right things in there, so he’d given them to her. A complete tool kit, flares, a red signal flag for her antenna, a big Maglite flashlight and a smaller one, extra batteries, a wind-up flashlight/radio combination in case the batteries didn’t work, a first aid kit, a compact sleeping bag in case she broke down someplace cold. Everything he could think of, and he’d had the case specially made to hold it all, with dividers, so she could find things fast in an emergency.

  It had been too big to put under the tree. He’d had to go back into Alec’s bedroom for it, when it was time.

  “You’re clearly thinking I’m going to break down at any moment,” she’d protested when she’d gone through it all.

  “Anyone can have an accident,” he’d said. “Anyone can have an emergency. I just thought it was better if you were prepared. Because do you have that stuff?”