Lightning Storm

by Anne McAllister

  ‘Five years?’ she echoed. Was that possible? ‘You’ve lived in the apartment five years?’ No one lived on The Strand for five years! People picked up and moved every three months.

  ‘Mmmm.’ His glance was mocking, as though he’d guessed what she was thinking and it amused him. ‘Everyone has to live somewhere,’ he said lightly.

  ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘But what?’ He was leading her past rows of cars and she was speculating on which one was his. The blue Corvette? The Porsche? When she had known him he had driven a flashy red MG.

  ‘It—it just surprised me, that’s all,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘Most people don’t stay in that part of Manhattan Beach so long.’

  ‘You’re right, they don’t. It’s a nice place to be when you’re single though,’ he told her, then deftly unlocked the camper door on a brown, late model pick-up truck and tossed her suitcase inside. ‘This is it,’ he said unnecessarily.

  Torey stared. A brown, non-descript pick-up camper? J.B.?

  ‘Not grand enough?’ His eyes mocked her again.

  ‘Of course it’s grand enough. I drove a Chevy on the farm. I’m just surprised.’ She laughed reflectively. ‘I seem to be saying that a lot.’

  ‘You do,’ Jake agreed. ‘Too many preconceived notions maybe?’ He raised a dark eyebrow as he helped her into the truck and then shut the door with a bang, not giving her a chance to reply. What did he mean, preconceived notions, anyway? All her ‘notions’—especially about him—were soundly based on fact. And experience. A few surprises weren’t going to change that. They just made her more wary, that was all.

  She glanced at him surreptitiously, seeing the sun glint off his wristwatch, tracing the chest-hugging T-shirt, and noting the way his jeans moved like a second skin when he depressed the clutch to shift gears. She shook her head, half in amusement, half in wonder. Imagine sitting next to J.B. in a pick-up truck driving down Sepulveda Boulevard! The girl she had been would have swooned at the thought. It was a blessing she was a woman. She looked away, feigning interest in a fancy, new high-rise office tower. It was a blessing she had become Paul Cooper’s wife.

  ‘Been here before, have you?’ Jake asked, glancing over at her.

  ‘Mmmm. Years ago.’

  ‘Changed much?’

  ‘Yes.’ She knew he meant the area, but she couldn’t help thinking that that wasn’t all that had changed. She wasn’t the child she had been then. Was he the same man? In looks at least he wasn’t noticeably different—older, of course, his features more sharply honed, harsher perhaps. Hard living? she wondered. Too much partying, too many women, too many years spent running around? She looked at his hand resting on the window edge, the dark hairs ruffled by the wind. He wore no rings. And he had said that Manhattan was great if you were single. Did that mean he had escaped the ‘noose’ that he had once, jokingly, called marriage? Most likely. She couldn’t imagine who would have been able to settle him down.

  ‘Addie will be glad to see you.’

  Torey smiled. ‘Yes. It’s been several years since she was back in Illinois.’

  ‘You should’ve come out here.’

  ‘It would have been lovely,’ she said wistfully. ‘But in the summer we—we were farming, and in the winter, well—the money just wasn’t there. We needed all we had just to keep things going.’ She didn’t know why she was explaining such things to him. J.B. wasn’t the sort who had been ‘into responsibility’ much, as he would have said then. The fancy-free existence he prized wasn’t the sort that she had shared with Paul. It was the very thing Jake had scorned about her in fact. ‘Anyway,’ she said flatly, ‘I’m here now.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ Jake said softly, not looking at her.

  Torey looked at him sharply.

  ‘Addie talks about you all a lot,’ he went on. ‘I moved into her apartment shortly after you and Paul were married.’ He grinned slightly. ‘You were a lovely bride. I saw all the pictures.’

  Torey wanted to sink through the floor. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No. Not right away of course. Actually not until—until after Paul’s accident. It must have been awful for you.’

  ‘It was.’ She didn’t want to talk about Paul now. Not with Jake. It would be like trying to blend two totally unrelated times in her life. She had never talked about J.B. to Paul. What would there have been to say, really? And she couldn’t talk to this man—this stranger—about her husband.

  ‘It isn’t much farther now, is it?’ she asked. They were turning down a wide, eucalyptus-lined street heading west again, and Torey thought she saw some familiar sights. She hoped so anyway. She needed to get out of this truck. She was tired and she wanted to see her grandmother. But mostly she wanted to get rid of Jake Brosnan.

  ‘Almost there. Pier’s right over the next hill.’

  Manhattan Beach had changed and yet it hadn’t over the past seven years. Many buildings were new, but trendy boutiques and beach apparel shops still proliferated; different girls wore the same miniscule Hawaiian print bikinis; and sand-encrusted young men with zinc oxide-coated noses carried the same surfboards down the hills. The same, but different. Like Jake Brosnan, perhaps?

  ‘Tired?’ Jake asked.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘You have a rest then, and later I’ll take you to visit Addie.’

  Torey stared. ‘What? Visit Addie where?’

  ‘The nursing home,’ Jake said as if she was the one confused. And she was.

  ‘She’s not home?’

  ‘Not ‘til you get there,’ Jake said. ‘Doctors’ orders. I volunteered to keep an eye on her, but it wasn’t good enough. They had to have you.’ He grinned. ‘I hope you’re worth your fancy degree.’

  Torey looked at him, baffled.

  ‘You do have a degree in physiotherapy?’

  ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘Well, that’s what they’re waiting for. None of the rest of us mortals are any good apparently. At least I wasn’t. And no other physiotherapist was good enough for Addie but you. She told the doctor that.’ He grinned, obviously remembering a scene between her feisty grandmother and the doctor. ‘Anyhow, now that you’re here, she gets to come home tomorrow.’ He zipped down an alley and swung the truck into a garage. ‘Come on,’ he said, hopping out and fetching her suitcase, leaving Torey to follow him through the gate and into the tiny, bricked-over back yard she remembered so well. Some of the same rusty, old toy trucks were in the sand box. Along with a new Fisher-Price steam roller and dump truck. Trust Gran to continue to provide toys for the neighbourhood, Torey thought. Jake stepped over a frisbee and unlocked the back door.

  ‘You remember Maynard, don’t you?’ he asked her, and she saw the old Irish Setter lying under the table, thumping his tail for all he was worth.

  ‘Of course.’ Torey felt a wave of nostalgia wash over her as she bent to scratch Maynard’s ears. How many times had she sat on those very same back steps and mooned over J.B., her face pressed against the red of Maynard’s glossy coat? She stood up again to see that Jake had disappeared with her suitcase.

  ‘I put it in the back bedroom,’ he told her, wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans and then glancing at his watch.

  ‘Can I—can. I offer you a glass of ice water?’ Torey fumbled, feeling totally inadequate as a hostess. He knew his way around her grandmother’s house better than she did!

  ‘Thanks, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to run. Get some rest now. I stocked the refrigerator and cupboards if you get hungry. I’ll pick you up about three-thirty, okay?’

  ‘Sure, that’s fine,’ she said, wishing she could find some reason to object. A whole day of Jake Brosnan was not exactly what she had in mind. ‘If Gran’s car works, I could drive myself,’ she said lamely.

  ‘Sure,’ Jake scoffed good-naturedly. ‘And Addie’d have my head on a plate. No thanks. Scott and I will pick you up.’

  Torey smiled at that. At least they wouldn’t be alone.
She was glad that Gran had such nice young neighbours that they would take the time to visit her. ‘Who’s Scott?’ She asked as Jake went down the back steps.

  He looked back over his shoulder, the sun catching the angles of his face. ‘My son,’ he said. ‘Scott’s my son.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Your son?’ she echoed, but he had already turned and was striding across the yard with the easy, graceful movements she had carried in her mind’s eye for the past seven years. He pounded up the stairs to his apartment over the garage, and she heard a faint off-key whistling before the door shut behind him.

  So Jake Brosnan had a son. A miniature of himself no doubt. He would have made a devilish child—the grooved cheeks mere dimples in a boy, the straight teeth now, once a gap-toothed grin. Jake as a child—it didn’t bear thinking about. She shut Gran’s kitchen door and began poking through the cupboards to find herself a snack. Jake was right, the cupboards were well-stocked. Peanut butter, jam, canned goods, freshly baked wholewheat bread, apparently brought from the bakery. Jake had certainly been thorough. Damn. She didn’t want to think about him. She made herself a sandwich and poured a glass of milk, taking both out into the living room where she could sit in Gran’s rocking chair and look out the bay window across the minute front yard and down to. the broad sidewalk called The Strand which bordered on the vast expanse of sandy beach.

  The room was almost exactly as she had remembered it, with heavy oak and mahogany furniture so far out of style to be coming back in with the young set, and a faded braid rug on the polished, hardwood floor. A sea of family pictures flooded every available surface. Small wonder Jake had seen her wedding pictures if he had been in this room! Gran might be a long way from the family, but they were never out of sight nor, apparently, out of mind.

  Setting her glass down, Torey crossed the room and took her wedding picture off Gran’s television set. She couldn’t even feel really sad looking at it despite knowing how things had turned out. It had been such a happy day, so bright, so sunny, so full of promise. Paul was grinning as though he had just pulled off the biggest coup of the century, and she—Torey looked at her younger self, at the girl with the long black hair and sparkling green eyes smiling up at her new husband—she looked as though she had come home at last.

  Sighing, Torey set the picture back on to the TV. Maybe we were too happy, she thought, not for the first time. Maybe it wasn’t meant to last. But, she reminded herself roughly, thinking that way was foolish. Marrying Paul for however long it lasted was the best thing that had ever happened to her. It had shown her what true love was all about, and it reinforced her notions about the shallowness of men like Jake Brosnan. Thank God her infatuation with him had been just that.

  Maynard ambled out and lay his head in her lap as she sat and rocked in the chair. She patted his head, loving the silky feel of his ears, and said, ‘Remember me, old pal?’

  Maynard’s tail thumped enthusiastically.

  Torey hugged him. ‘Good. You do. My favourite confidant—and most discreet one, too. You never repeated a thing I told you.’ She ruffled his fur. ‘Stand by, Maynard,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘You got me through Jake Brosnan once. You might have to do it again.’ It wasn’t something she wanted to think about, but it was there. The attraction, that is. Shallow and insubstantial though it might be, even after seven years she still felt it. Damn, again.

  Maynard’s tail waved like a flag in a stiff wind when he heard her say ‘Jake’ and Torey wrinkled her nose at him. ‘He’s your friend, I suppose,’ she said gruffly. ‘Gone over to the enemy, have you?’

  Maynard whined and flipped her hand back on to his head with his long nose, as if demanding that she keep stroking him. Torey shook her head. ‘Sorry, pup, naptime. Got to be on my toes for Gran.’ And for Jake Brosnan, she thought wryly, dumping her empty plate into the sink and going into the tiny back bedroom where she had slept that summer long ago. She drew back the chenille spread and undressed down to her slip, stretching out under the thin blanket and staring at the sprigs of lavender on the pale wallpaper by her head. She wanted to sleep or to remember Paul or, at the very least, to run through in her head the sort of physical therapy that she should begin with Gran. But she couldn’t think of a thing—but Jake. And his son. And, she mused, presumably a wife. Who had Jake married? Anyone she had known? He’d had no steady girl in those days. If ever a man could have been said to ‘play the field’, it was Jake. What sort of a husband had he become? Not one like Paul, she was certain. Was he even still married? He’d mentioned his son, but not his wife. But then, she’d hardly evinced any interest. And he’d never struck her as the type who would be saying first off, ‘You’ll have to meet my wife.’ The Jake she had known could just as easily have forgotten he had one. It was not difficult to assume that he hadn’t really changed. We’ll see, she thought. We’ll see this son and this wife. And she closed her eyes, consumed by curiosity and, perhaps, a touch of something else.

  ‘She’s still sleeping!’ The childish voice bellowed inches from her ear, and Torey snapped upright, blinking and disoriented. Solemn blue eyes beneath a fringe of flaxen hair regarded her curiously. ‘She’s not sleepin’ now, Dad,’ the boy yelled, never blinking once.

  Torey’s brows drew together in a frown. This was Scott? Of course there was no question about it. Why else would he be standing at her bedside announcing her sleeping habits to his invisible father? But a miniature Jake he was not. Obviously he took after his mother. His hair, already blond, was bleached almost white by the sun, and his nose, she imagined, must wear a perpetual sunburn while his father only tanned. At least, she thought, Scott had blue eyes, though they were the warm blue of a Caribbean lagoon, not the arctic blue of Jake’s. He was clearly older than her three-year-old niece, Tracy, and when he opened his mouth to speak she saw a bottom tooth missing. At least she had guessed something right.

  ‘You must be Scott,’ she said, brushing stray tendrils of hair out of her eyes.

  ‘Yep. Come on, get up so’s we can go see Addie.’ He looked at her beseechingly.

  Torey swung her legs off the bed and stood up. ‘Okay. Scoot on out of here now and tell your father I’ll be ready in a few minutes.’

  ‘She’ll be ready in a few minutes,’ Scott hollered, not budging from her side.

  ‘Not with your help, fella,’ Jake said, materialising in the doorway and regarding Torey’s dishevelment and state of undress with a lazy grin. ‘Sorry if he woke you,’ he told her, but he was grinning as if he had engineered the whole thing. Torey gave him a sour look.

  ‘We’ll just wait in the living room,’ Jake said, but his eyes were undressing her faster than she could pull herself together.

  ‘Do that,’ Torey said in a clipped tone, and moved towards him, herding Scott in front of her, shutting the door on their backs with a loud click. Damn him, anyway. She could feel her cheeks burning as she remembered his expression, and she made a face at the closed door before she hurriedly opened her suitcase, rooting through it for a hair brush and some clean white jeans and a blue chambray shirt, made for Paul, which she hastily donned. She knotted the tails on the shirt leaving a discreet amount of tanned midriff visible. Let him look at that, she thought angrily. No doubt he would. The interest he had shown in her with that look made Vince Liebfried and Harlan Nelson seem blind by comparison. She snorted and banged the suitcase shut. So much for escaping the masculine eye!

  It would take too long to re-plait her hair neatly, so she pulled it back at the nape of her neck and tied a navy silk scarf around it, leaving the thick wavy tresses to cascade loosely down her back. It was no wonder he hadn’t recognised her. Seven years ago her hair hadn’t been any longer than Scott’s—a feathery, pixie cut that she had begun to grow out as soon as she had returned home. She applied a coating of coral lip gloss and regarded herself solemnly for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and went out to face Jake Brosnan and his most surprising son.

  Jake wa
s standing with his back to her, staring out the window at the beach when she entered the living room. It was Scott, who had been idly plunking out Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater on the piano, who said, ‘Super, you’re ready. C’mon, Dad. Let’s go.’ He bounced off the piano bench and hurtled out the door, letting the screen bang shut behind him.

  ‘A ball of energy, isn’t he?’ Torey said, watching him depart.

  Jake’s mouth quirked in a grin. ‘And how.’

  ‘He must be about five?’ Torey speculated as she followed Scott down the steps while Jake locked the door.

  ‘He’ll be six in August,’ Jake replied. ‘On Addie’s birthday.’

  Torey smiled. ‘She must love that—sharing a birthday.’ It was exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to her grandmother.

  Jake nodded. ‘They both do. It’s a mutual admiration society.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s an incredible old lady. Sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without her,’ he added almost to himself.

  Torey looked at him curiously, having a surprising amount of difficulty thinking of Jake Brosnan as a father. It didn’t fit with what she thought she remembered of him. But there was no doubt about it—the blond dynamo in the car was calling, ‘Hurry up, Dad! C’mon! Addie’ll have a cow if we aren’t there soon.’

  ‘A cow, is it?’ Jake grinned. ‘A lady the size of Addie? A kitten more likely, sport,’ he said to his son. ‘Shove over so Victoria can get in.’

  ‘Torey,’ Torey corrected. ‘Only Gran ever calls me Victoria.’

  ‘Torey then.’ Jake seemed to savour the name on his lips, and gave her a smile that would have melted her seven years ago. It caused her knees to quake even now.

  ‘Can I sit by the window?’ Scott asked, looking from his father to Torey.

  Jake shrugged. ‘It’s up to Torey.’

  Thanks, Torey thought drily. Just what she wanted—even greater proximity to Jake Brosnan. But how could you say no to a face like Scott’s? ‘Sure,’ she said, and was rewarded by a toothless grin.