by Julia London
“I hope so,” Kyra said. She pushed the car door open and climbed out. “Thanks, Deenie.”
“You’re welcome. Giving you a ride was the least I could do after the Phil thing. I didn’t want to say it in front of Megan and risk a volcano, but I know this other guy—”
“No!” Kyra laughed. “I’m good, Deenie. I swear it.”
Deenie shrugged. “Just trying to help a sister out. Okay, call me if you need a ride tomorrow. Now I’m going to go hunt Phil down and lecture him about judging single mothers. I’m doing it for Megan.” She wiggled her fingers at Kyra and backed out of the drive.
Kyra juggled her bags and the pizza and started up the steps of the porch. Just as she reached the landing, Mrs. Miller stepped out of the cottage, her utilitarian shoulder bag and her lunch box slung over her arm.
“Hi,” Kyra said. She smiled. Mrs. Miller did not return her smile. “Everything okay today?” she asked as she put the pizza on a folding chair before unloading her book bag from her shoulder.
“The usual,” Mrs. Miller said.
Kyra looked around her. The usual was Ruby bouncing out of her room or the cottage to greet her. “Where’s Ruby?”
Mrs. Miller stuck her hand out for her money. “Next door.”
Next door? That couldn’t be good. Kyra reached into her backpack. “With Dax?”
“Whatever his name is,” Mrs. Miller said. “And that dog.”
“Uh-oh,” Kyra said as she pulled out a wad of bills. “Is there something I should know? Why is she over there?”
“He said it was okay,” Mrs. Miller said stiffly and inched her hand a little closer to Kyra.
Kyra counted out thirty dollars and handed her the money. Mrs. Miller snatched her hand back quickly and stuck the money into her purse, adjusted her lunch bag, and stepped around Kyra. “Righty-oh, have a good evening,” she said and moved carefully down the porch steps. “You need to get that TV fixed!” she said on her way to her truck.
Kyra groaned. She needed to do a lot of things, and that TV was not high on the priority list.
She watched Mrs. Miller back out of the drive, then looked across the lawn to Number Two. There was no sign of Ruby or Dax. She hoped he wasn’t holding her daughter hostage for something she’d done, because Kyra was tapped out—she didn’t have any ransom money. She dragged her fingers through her hair and steeled herself. She left her things on the porch and jogged down the steps and across the lawn to Dax’s cottage.
The dog was barking from somewhere inside before she even made it up the steps. The door swung open and Ruby peered out from behind the screen door through her blue glasses. She was wearing pink shorts that were much too small for her and a pajama top with a unicorn galloping across a field of flowers. Her hair was in two pigtails that were tied in a big knot on top of her head.
“Hi, Mommy!”
“What did you do to your hair, pumpkin?”
“Dax said it was in the way.”
Oh no. “Of what?”
Ruby shrugged and stuck her finger in a tiny tear in the screen. “He was painting something, I think.”
Kyra pushed Ruby’s finger out of the tear in the screen. She was almost afraid to ask what had happened that had forced him to pile Ruby’s hair on top of her head and bring her into his house to begin with. “Where is Mr. Bishop?” she asked as Otto crowded in beside Ruby at the screen door. A thought suddenly occurred to Kyra. “Oh shit. He’s here, right? You’re not . . . you’re not in his house without him, are you? Because I know you wouldn’t do that, Ruby.”
“You said a bad word,” Ruby declared.
“I’m right here,” Dax said and appeared behind Ruby, wiping his hands on his T-shirt. A form-fitting T-shirt, Kyra certainly couldn’t help noticing, and one that was covered in sawdust and curious black marks that looked almost as if he’d been run over.
“Ah . . . hi,” she said, feeling suddenly sheepish. Why did the man have to be so damned good-looking? “Okay, let me have it. What’d she do?”
“That lady didn’t tell you?” he asked and leaned over Ruby to open the screen door. The dog bolted outside, and Ruby would have, too, but Dax caught her with a hand to her shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said and pulled her back. “Come in,” he said to Kyra.
“When you say lady, do you mean Mrs. Miller? Because she didn’t say anything,” Kyra said. “Why, what happened?”
Dax glanced at Ruby. So did Kyra. “Ruby?”
“Come in, come in,” Dax said.
Kyra reluctantly stepped across the threshold. This was not going to be good, she could feel it. He still had his hand on Ruby’s shoulder. Kyra just hoped it wasn’t a superexpensive fix. “Look, whatever she did, I will pay for it, and she won’t bother you—”
“She fell into the lake.”
Kyra’s breath froze in her throat. That didn’t make sense—how could that have even happened? She’d obviously heard him wrong. “What?”
“She was chasing butterflies,” Dax said.
“Not butterflies. Dragonflies,” Ruby corrected him.
“Dragonflies,” Dax conceded.
A million questions flitted through Kyra’s brain at warp speed, but she couldn’t voice them—she had no breath. Her heart wasn’t even beating. She was being assailed by a horrible image of Ruby floating facedown in that lake.
“There was no one around,” Dax said. “She was out there alone, unsupervised—”
“But how did she . . . did she cry?” Kyra asked, nearly choking. “Did she scream?”
“Otto was with her. He barked an alarm and I saw her.”
“Oh my God,” Kyra said. She pressed a hand to her belly. She felt sick. She felt faint. Ruby was not a good swimmer. She usually splashed around the shallow ends of pools. “Oh my God,” she said again.
“Don’t . . . it was very shallow where she fell—hey, hey, are you all right?”
Kyra hadn’t even realized she was sinking until Dax caught her and pulled her back up to her feet, steadying her with a hand on her waist. “Do you need to sit down?”
“No,” she said, although she was nodding. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God.” What kind of mother was she? She’d gone for cheap day care and had put her daughter’s life in danger. She knew Mrs. Miller wasn’t watching Ruby very closely, and yet she’d kept her. It made her sick. “It’s my fault,” she wheezed, still unable to fully catch her breath.
“Yours?” Dax scoffed as he helped her onto a leather armchair. “It’s not your fault, Kyra. It’s that woman’s fault. She was asleep in front of the television.”
“No, no, it’s mine,” she said and looked at Ruby, who appeared completely at ease. She reached for her, catching her by the arm and pulling her into an embrace, wanting to both strangle her for going down to the lake after being told a thousand times not to, and never let her go again.
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Dax said. “She’s fine, she’s all right. And she’s never going down to that lake again without an adult, isn’t that right, Coconut?”
“That’s right,” Ruby said, her eyes blinking up at Kyra through her glasses. “I promise.”
“Oh, Ruby,” Kyra said and buried her face in her daughter’s neck. “Ruby, Ruby—I don’t know what to do with you. But I don’t know what I’d do without you, do you know that?”
“You’re pushing all the air out of me, Mommy,” Ruby said into Kyra’s shoulder.
Kyra reluctantly let her go. She ran her hand roughly over Ruby’s head and around the big knot of hair, then looked up at Dax. “Thank you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. There was no way to convey her gratitude.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Don’t mention it? You saved my daughter, my car, gave me a ride to work . . . God, this is embarrassing,” she exclaimed as she enumerated all that he’d done in the last twenty-four hours. She raked her fingers through her hair, wanting to assure him she wasn’t the burden she appeared to be but at a loss to believe it he
rself. She found her feet and stood up. “I need you to know that I’m really not this kind of neighbor. I mean, obviously I have been exactly this kind of neighbor, but it’s a fluke—really.”
He smiled a little. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away from that.”
“I’ve just had a string of really bad luck.”
“Mommy, look at Otto’s bow.”
Kyra turned away from Dax’s gray eyes. The dog was standing at the screen door, wearing an enormous cloth bow around his neck. She wondered how she’d missed that before.
“Dax made it from one of his shirts,” Ruby said and opened the screen door like she lived in Number Two, and frankly, Kyra wouldn’t be surprised if Dax casually mentioned that Ruby had been spending an awful lot of time here.
The dog sauntered inside, presented his head for petting by Ruby, then flopped down with a burp and began to lick his paws.
“I’m not supposed to use the take measure.”
“Tape,” Dax muttered and glanced at Kyra. “She was going to tie it around his neck. That shirt was the only substitute I had.”
“Just how long has she been here?”
He shrugged. Glanced at the clock. “Since about eleven.”
Good God, it was even worse than she thought—Ruby had been at his house all day. “I’m . . . stunned.”
“I wasn’t going to leave her with that woman after the lake incident.”
“Dax . . . thank you. I’ll just add babysitting and the T-shirt to the long list of things I owe you.”
Dax looked down. He rubbed his nose and squinted toward the window. “It’s okay, Kyra. I like cars. And I like coconuts.”
“I’m not a coconut,” Ruby said, and began to hop up and down, exciting Otto.
“I don’t know how I’ll ever make it up to you,” Kyra said. “But look, I have the money for my car next door, and I also have a pizza.”
“Yay! I love pizza!” Ruby cheered.
“And I’ve got some beer,” Kyra added. “Can I at least feed you some pizza?”
“Come over, come over!” Ruby said excitedly. “I can show you my toys!”
Dax shook his head. “I don’t want to see your toys.”
Ruby kept jumping as if she hadn’t heard or didn’t care.
“Don’t you want some pizza?” Kyra asked.
He looked at her, considering the offer, his eyes settling on hers and making her feel a little glittery inside in spite of the nerves she was still feeling after hearing about Ruby’s fall into the lake.
“I promise not to ah . . . attack you, if you’re worried about that,” she said, shooting a sidelong glance to Ruby.
“Hmm,” he said.
“We’d love for you to come . . . but maybe you have a date?”
His gaze narrowed. “Just so happens it’s a rare night without a date,” he said. “So yeah, I want some pizza.”
Kyra was absurdly pleased and tried to suppress her giddy little smile of relief but failed. “Well, come on, then.”
The three of them trooped over to Number Three, Otto pausing to mark his territory every few feet, Kyra with her hand wrapped firmly around Ruby’s. But as they walked around the front of her car, Kyra suddenly stopped, holding her arms out so that Ruby and Dax couldn’t pass her. There, on the porch steps, was the pizza box. Upside down.
“What happened?” she cried.
“Did you, by chance, leave your pizza outside?” Dax asked.
“Yes!” Kyra said. “I put it on the chair, right there,” she said, pointing to the folding chair on her porch. Her bags were still there on the floor of the porch, next to the chair.
“Great,” Dax said. “I’ll be smelling that damn dog all night.”
Kyra jerked around to him. “You think Otto did this?”
“We’re not going to have pizza, Mommy?” Ruby asked in a whine.
Kyra had forty dollars left over from her tips today that she’d planned to put toward some new work shoes, but after what had happened today, she would gladly put off getting new shoes. “We’re having pizza,” she said. “I’ll order it.”
“I’ll order it,” Dax said. “It was my dog—”
“Like hell you will,” Kyra said.
“Mommy, you said another bad word.”
“I might say another one,” she muttered and marched up the porch steps, swiping up the pizza box as she went, and grabbed her purse to get her phone.
Five minutes later the pizza was ordered, Kyra had opened a couple of beers, and she was surreptitiously kicking toys and articles of clothing under her couch and behind a chair, privately vowing to start straightening the house every morning before work. While she quickly picked up, Ruby talked. And talked. And talked some more.
If Dax was put off by the toys strewn everywhere and Kyra’s homework stacked on the kitchen table, which she had to shove aside to make room for the pizza, he didn’t show it. He did, however, pick up a dried, blackened banana peel between finger and thumb, holding it away from him, and walked it to the trash, which, by some miracle, was not overflowing.
Kyra then darted into her room, and like a quick-change artist, she ditched her work clothes and pulled on a sundress. When she returned to the kitchen, Dax’s gaze meandered down the length of her and back up again, and Kyra’s thoughts went straight to the idea of his hand following the path of his eyes, and she turned around, pretending not to notice. “Any trouble with the car?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said and sipped.
“It’s running?”
He cocked his head to one side and gave her a look that suggested he was slightly insulted by the question. “Army, remember? You’re all set for transportation.” He put down his beer. “Look, Kyra, it’s none of my business . . . but I think you ought to get rid of your babysitter and go with someone new.”
Well, of course she should, and she was definitely going to explore a better option. But she didn’t want to explain to Dax how stuck she was between the proverbial rock and hard place with child care. She had a little less than two months before school started, and then she wouldn’t need child care. “You’re one hundred percent right,” she said and left it at that, because Ruby had appeared with a selection of Barbie dolls that she periodically tortured and mutilated.
She spread them out on the kitchen table.
“I hope you don’t think I’m going to play dolls,” Dax said. “I’m a boy.”
“Boys play with dolls,” Ruby said.
“No, they don’t.”
“Yes, they do,” she said, giggling. “You can have Starlight,” Ruby suggested, pushing a Barbie whose hair had been brushed into a wild array of synthetic fiber, then chopped unevenly the day Ruby got hold of scissors. Starlight had also lost most of her clothes.
“Starlight,” Dax said, sounding a little appalled. “What is she, a dancer?”
Kyra shot him a look, but Ruby said, “She’s a teacher.”
Dax pushed Starlight back to Ruby. “Looks like she’s enjoying her summer vacation.”
Ruby agreed that she was, and that she was going swimming today. She picked up Pinkie, who Kyra knew had a rough backstory. “Ruby, sweetie, put your dolls in your room now. We’re going to eat pizza soon,” Kyra said.
“Pizza!” Ruby exclaimed as if this was the first she was hearing of it. She gathered her dolls, dropping one, then another, then all of them when she reached to pick up the first dropped doll.
Dax sighed wearily, then squatted down and picked up the dolls and arranged them in Ruby’s arms so she could carry them.
He was so patient with Ruby. He was so kind to her. Kyra was touched.
When Ruby ran out of the kitchen, Dax picked up his beer, noticed Kyra looking at him, and said, “What’s that look?”
“I think you like her,” Kyra said.
“Do not,” he said and drank more beer. “Where’s the pizza?”
She smiled and picked up her wallet. “I think I hear him now.” She walked out to
meet the delivery guy.
They sat around her small kitchen table, eating pizza, watching Ruby pile her toppings onto the side of her plate, then pull the cheese off her slice. She did more talking than eating in spite of Kyra’s best efforts to get her to be quiet and eat. But Ruby’s exuberance was very hard to tame. It was as if they’d never had company . . .
Oh, right. They rarely had company.
Ruby was eager to explain to Dax that she was going to be in first grade, and that Taleesha, her friend, who had three ponytails, would be in first grade, too. But maybe not in her class. She had not yet learned geography would keep Taleesha from attending her school in East Beach. “That’s how they do it in first grade,” Ruby explained.
“I know how it works,” Dax said and helped himself to another slice.
“Have you ever been in first grade?” Ruby asked, seemingly impressed by this.
“Nope. Just heard about it.” Dax took a bite.
Kyra laughed. She was enjoying this evening, which in some ways was a bit astounding. She hadn’t expected this from Supergrump, but the way Dax treated Ruby filled her heart with happiness—those two had clearly connected on some level. Kyra was beginning to think that maybe the three of them could be friends after all. She didn’t mind that—she imagined an easy friendship between neighbors. Friday nights they’d share a beer and pizza. Maybe Sunday she’d be out washing her car and he’d come over to chat. Ruby could play with the dog, and they could watch the sunset. Something normal like that.
Kyra liked the idea of normal.
When the pizza had been devoured, mostly by Dax, it was time for Ruby to go to bed. If Ruby’s own mother had had her fill of the constant chatter, she could imagine that Dax was more than done with it.
Kyra helped Ruby put on some clean pajamas, then set her up with some coloring books and her favorite stuffed animals. “I didn’t brush my teeth,” Ruby said.
“I know. I’ll be back. But right now, I need you to stay here while I talk to Mr. Bishop.”
Ruby looked at her coloring book. She began to flutter her fingers, sort of tapping them together, as if she couldn’t decide which color to start with.
“Ruby? Did you hear me? Stay in your room.”
