“Were you a navy SEAL or a ninja?” she said finally. It emerged a little more irritably than she’d intended.
“One doesn’t necessarily preclude the other. But I’m not at liberty to divulge.”
His eyes literally seemed to fill with lights when he was teasing.
And they were green.
“Wow Green,” she would call it. Because she was too tired for metaphors, and because she couldn’t imagine a better description.
She was staring again. She needed to say more words. “Um, thank you for your time today. And sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Any time, Ms. Harwood.”
“Hopefully there won’t be another time.” This emerged a little more adamantly than she’d intended.
To her astonishment, he looked faintly stricken for a split second.
“I mean . . .” She touched his arm gently, an instinct to take that expression from his face. “. . . I hope Annelise’s behavior or song choices won’t inspire more meetings.”
He glanced swiftly down at her hand, and she pulled it back swiftly.
It had felt a bit like touching a brick.
A brick covered in warm, smooth skin.
A fraught, interesting little silence ensued, and a breath-stealing sensation skittered up her spine.
“Well, she’s a live wire, Annelise,” he allowed diplomatically. “A real crackling little person. Very inventive. The recess game where they all pretended to be tomato worms, for instance, was her idea. Though she wasn’t one of the brawlers.”
Annelise’s Hummingbird troop had learned all about tomato hornworms during an agricultural excursion on Mac Coltrane’s property up at Devil’s Leap—and had decided to play Battle of the Tomato Worms at recess. Apparently the mock battle had become a real battle, and a few Hummingbirds had wound up in the principal’s office for kicking and pulling hair. Annelise may have thought up the game, but she hadn’t turned it into a riot. Like her beloved cat, Peace and Love, Annelise was kind of a pacifist. Probably because she didn’t have any siblings to brawl with. Though she wrestled like puppies with her Uncle Jesse when he was back in town, which wasn’t enough to suit any of the people who loved him. He was forever traveling on behalf of Redmond Worldwide.
“So what you’re saying is I can count on a few more visits to the principal’s office over the years,” she concluded.
The principal grinned. “Ah, we’ll just take it as it comes. She’s an awesome kid. A total delight. Her teachers love her. And it’s a privilege to watch her thrive and challenge herself academically and in the world.”
Eden was tempted to lean into these words like a flower leaned into the sun—what mother wouldn’t?—and yet she was perversely reluctant to be charmed. It was like the first time she’d put big-girl shoes on Annelise. Leesy had been astounded, as outraged as though she’d strapped anvils on her instead of little sneakers. And she’d refused to take even a single step forward without being tugged like a water-skier, howling.
Of course, now the girl was nuts for shoes.
But yeah. Principal Gabe probably said these kinds of things to all the moms. God only knew complimenting a kid was a foolproof ingratiating and disarming technique. She wondered if they taught that tactic in the SEALs.
For some reason, the word we’ll was echoing in her mind. Like something she wanted to hoard and take out to mentally caress later.
“You can call me Mr. Caldera, by the way,” he added. “‘Principal’ isn’t often used as an honorific.”
He was actually giving her shit! The nerve!
She liked it a lot. She all but loathed reverence.
“Wait—so what you’re telling me is it’s not like Your Excellency?” She furrowed her brow in mock confusion.
“I’ll happily answer to Your Excellency, if that’s what you prefer. It’s not like the shoe doesn’t fit. My friends—and maybe one or two, let’s say, overconfident others—call me Gabe. So feel free to call me any of those things.”
Interesting. She was pretty sure this was a subtle dig at Jan Pennington. But he’d said it with such humor and subtlety that she could take it any way she chose. A canny man, this Gabe Caldera.
She liked this, too, which was probably unworthy of her. And maybe this was also unworthy of him. But he was making it clear where his allegiances lay.
“Well, I’ll take my options under advisement,” she said.
“Great,” he said, smiling.
“Great,” she parroted brightly. For no reason. Unless it was because she hadn’t had a frivolous exchange with a hot man in ages and in the interim she’d become a dork.
Heat crept up the back of her neck.
“Great!” he echoed. Then looked startled and a little abashed, as if he couldn’t figure out why he’d said that.
Well, look at that. She’d infected the poor guy with her own dorkiness in mere seconds. And it was pretty difficult to imagine a circumstance in which he wouldn’t feel utterly in command.
She was tempted to touch him again, a gesture to take away his discomfiture. She thought better of it, given that her cells were still on vibrate from the last time she’d touched him.
But the image of him plucking that kid from danger flashed into her head again and . . . some gut instinct made her want to rescue him.
He rescued both of them. “I thought for a moment you were tempted to deck Jan with your handbag.”
Add mind reader to his résumé, she thought.
She gave a short laugh. “You know, I do understand her concerns. I mean, I probably wouldn’t love it much either if I heard my daughter belting that song out of the blue. I probably would have gone about addressing the issue differently, however.”
“What would you have done?” He sounded genuinely curious.
“I wouldn’t have gone straight to Your Excellency, let’s put it that way. I’m good at handling things on my own.”
“Of course,” he said easily, after a little pause. “No question. I can see that.”
“But that doesn’t mean I can’t wield this like nunchucks in a pinch.” She gestured with her plumply full handbag.
“Good to know, in case we ever find ourselves on the same side in a street fight.”
“Or in the produce section at the Hellcat Canyon grocery store on coupon day. Same difference,” she added.
“The two of us in our rubber-soled shoes would be nimble as hell. We could totally take those gals from Heavenly Shores Mobile Estates.”
She laughed, delighted. Damn it all, anyway. Like sunlight, true charm always found its way in through any little fissures and chinks and structural weaknesses.
And on the heels of the laughter, she didn’t like the reminder that she had any weaknesses. She needed to be a fortress of competence for Annelise’s sake.
“You know, I thought you subdued Jan pretty well with your own weapons,” she said thoughtfully.
After a little silence during which they stared at each other.
“My weapons?”
“Yeah, you know . . . this bit.”
She flung her arms high in an imitation of his long, leisurely, chest-expanding, woman-mesmerizing stretch.
And then crossed them behind her head.
She held his amazed gaze the entire time.
She hiked a brow. A silent way of saying, I’m onto you, Gabe Caldera.
Then she pivoted, turning her back on his expression of wonderment and dazzled appreciation, and took off at a brisk walk down the hall, with one final wicked flash of blue eyes over her shoulder and a casual flick of her hair.
“Hey, Avalon . . .”
“Mmm?” Avalon was perched on one of the lushly upholstered little wheeled chairs pushed up against the round antique oak table where Eden held little conferences with demanding brides-to-be. She’d decided she could hang out for a few more minutes. But then Eden’s flower shop was such a pleasant little cocoon that guests always seemed to want to linger: the high walls were painted a soft shade of dusty rose; the window sheers floated like pretty ecru ghosts when a breeze wafted in; it always smelled wonderful. Annelise was upstairs in their apartment, supposedly getting her homework underway.
Eden was leaning over the counter of her shop scrolling through phone orders. Behind her and along the wall, tall thriving plants—as well as vivid, enticing blooms in buckets and vases inside the windowed fridge—waited for new homes, eager to soothe or lighten someone’s heart. She was having a pretty great week, sales wise. She could give her assistant, Danny, more hours, if he wanted, and Danny, who was nineteen and hands down the most enthusiastic person she’d ever met, basically Tigger in Chuck Taylors, would totally want them.
“Okay, I don’t want you to make a big deal of this . . .” she began.
Avalon levered her head up alertly. “Did that mole on your butt finally go funny?”
Siblings knew way too much about each other.
“No. I think . . . I think Principal Caldera might, um . . . like me.”
Wow.
She felt exactly the way she had when she’d been caught passing a note to Timmy Cohen in her first-grade class that included two check boxes. Do you like me? Yes or No.
Avalon went still. “Like you, like you?”
“Yeah.”
Avalon’s face slowly illuminated with a sort of mischievous glee.
So help her, if Avalon teased her right now, Eden would roll her right out the door on that chair and out into Main Street traffic.
“Okay, let’s hear the supporting evidence,” Avalon said carefully. Wisely.
A strummed A minor came through the vents. Leesy was upstairs playing her guitar and probably admiring herself in the mirror while she did it. She’d do just about anything to postpone the math homework.
Eden would be up in a second to put a stop to that.
“Today after the meeting when I talked to him alone he got a little . . . not stammery, per se, but kind of . . . when we were talking. I think . . . I think he was flirting.”
She lowered her voice on the word flirting. She felt raw and patently ridiculous. She’d always been the loftily wise older sister, the one who made sound decisions and thoroughly studied for every test and never overdid anything, rather unlike Avalon, who was legendary for overshooting marks.
Then of course, Eden, the wild card, had gotten mysteriously knocked up ten years ago. Which trumped even that time Avalon had tried to jump her bike over Whiskey Creek.
“Are you sure he didn’t get stammery because your second shirt button came undone again, like that one time you accidentally flashed Jeffrey the UPS guy when he came into your shop? I mean, your boobs aren’t very big, but a boob is a boob as far as men are concerned.”
Eden sighed. “Why do I even talk to you?”
“Because I’m your best option for adult conversation at the moment.”
“I guess it all depends on how you define ‘adult,’” Eden returned placidly. “But I was wearing this.” She gestured at her pale pink cardigan. “Polo, cardigan, jeans.”
“Hardly a Nicki Minaj–caliber outfit, but who knows what floats his boat. But that’s a great color on you. Makes you look kind of ethereal and Nicole Kidman-y.”
“Wow. Thanks. Gosh.” Eden was genuinely touched.
“Which is a lot to ask of a color. So.”
Eden snorted.
But Avalon was staring at her as if she was piecing a puzzle together. “But I think you know it’s a great color on you . . .” Avalon said slowly. “Which is why you wore it. I bet you subconsciously wanted to make Principal Gabe stammery,” she pronounced with the triumph of Columbo announcing the killer. “Or you hoped you would.”
That right there was why she talked to Avalon, who knew her better than she knew herself.
Damned if she was going to admit it, though. Not even to herself.
It might not even be true.
She was too tired to stop to think about the nuances of those kinds of things, anyway.
“Pshaw,” was what she said.
“Did you just say pshaw, Grandma?”
“I thought it was due for a revival.”
Like her libido.
“I’m saying you like him, like him, too.”
Eden shrugged. “I don’t know him well enough to like him, like him. I never thought of him at all beyond the fact that he’s the principal of Annelise’s school. I don’t have time to have subconscious thoughts about anyone.”
Even as she said that, though, something about it felt like a lie. Which forced her to acknowledge that, thanks to that hallway rescue she kept revisiting like a favorite song, awareness of Gabe Caldera had been a constant low hum in her life for a while now.
“He’s just . . . easy on the eyes, that’s all,” she concluded with insincere offhandedness.
“Were you flirting?”
“I’m not sure. It kind of felt like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the Tin Man has lockjaw and Dorothy has to oil him. You could practically hear the creaking sounds as I attempted it.”
“Did you flick your hair?”
“Why?”
“You always flick your hair when you’re flirting.”
Huh. She hadn’t known this.
“You know,” Eden said slowly, “I’m sure it’s possible he flirts with everyone. If ever a guy knew how to use his physical charm to manage a situation . . .”
Gabe Caldera was built like a wall, maybe. And he’d felt like a wall when she’d touched his arm. She could probably hook her hands over his uplifted forearm and do pull-ups.
But that fleeting stricken expression when she’d said she hoped never to be in his office again . . . she knew instinctively that he was not, precisely, a wall.
Which reminded her: nascent lust was one thing. It was all well and good to bask in attention.
Being responsible for yet another human’s feelings was another thing altogether.
While Avalon had always been a heart-on-her-sleeve kind of girl, Eden was a cards-close-to-her-chest sort. Good with a feisty, sexy comeback and the occasional come hither stare, but a little cool, a little hard to get, a little hard to know. She sometimes thought it was because Avalon had a fools-rush-in tendency—in the family’s emotional balance sheet, someone had to offset the excess. Eden had always understood her own appeal, and she’d closely guarded her heart and nether regions even eons ago when she was dating up a storm; the few hearts she’d broken had never haunted her conscience long.
But now, secretly, she was appalled to have broken any. Since Annelise was born, her emotions seemed permanently more tenderized, more porous and pliant. Another human’s feelings were a sacred trust. She did not gamble with them anymore, not hers, not anyone else’s.
Besides, who had time to gamble?
“Is he that kind of guy?” Avalon asked. “The flirts-with-everyone type?”
Eden mulled. “I dunno. He seems like a pretty straight shooter. Flirting with everyone would be a risky game for a principal.”
“That’s funny. Dad called him a straight shooter, too. Chatted with him at Annelise’s soccer game. Said he was a guy’s guy.”
“Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before I started using Dad-isms.”
“You did inherit Dad’s ass.”
“Ha.”
Eden was tall and lean, like her dad of yore. Dad of present day now sported a significantly more pillowy torso, which made his bear hugs even more engulfing and excellent. Avalon was built more like her mom: short and curvy.
“Well, since you’ve been so busy, Eden, the first thing you should know is that sex has changed a lot in ten years. You may need to brush up.”
Eden glared at her. “I hope it has levels now, like Candy Crush. I’d totally ace it.”
“You can always fire up your Kindle and have it read instructions to you while he’s going at it.”
“Ha ha.”
But wait—could she?
Suddenly the very notion of her having sex after all this time seemed akin to those people leaping from wheelchairs at Lourdes. Glorious, sure, miraculous, sure, but the probability seemed awfully low.
The shop door jingled merrily, and they both lit up when Casey Carson walked in. She was the sunny, blond, Valkyrie-statured owner of the Truth and Beauty Salon across the street, the town expert on what women were paying to have done to their hair everywhere on their body, whether it was sleekly flattening it, streaking it in pastel shades, yanking it out by the roots, or pruning it into discreet shapes.
“Hey, Casey,” Avalon said slyly, “is vajazzling still a thing? Asking for a friend who’s thinking of getting back into the dating scene.”
Eden shot Avalon the kind of wrathful look that used to send Avalon running, squeaking in fear, when she was a kid.
Avalon appeared made of sterner stuff these days, more’s the pity.
“Only for the mistresses of kinky oligarchs.” Casey considered dedicated consumption of fashion magazines and gossip websites part of her job responsibilities. “I’ve only had one vajazzling client in the last six months. In uncertain political climates people tend to stick with the classics. A nice wedge.” She made it sound like brie. “Who wants to know?”
Eden gave Avalon the hairy eyeball, daring her to say anything.
“It just came up in casual conversation,” Avalon wisely chose to say.
And yet Eden was absurdly relieved to know her nether regions were still au courant.
“Glad I could help!” Casey said cheerily. “See you at the Chamber of Commerce mixer this week, Eden?”
“Natch.”
“And oh—don’t forget that Jan Pennington needs to know what your raffle entry is by the end of the week. She just called to remind me.”
Eden sighed. “I think of nothing else.”
Casey laughed, and a few seconds later jingled on out, the delighted bearer of a tall arrangement featuring blue thistles and calla lilies and a big waterfall spray of greenery, like something a Martian would set the table with on Martian Thanksgiving.
Eden turned to her sister. “What did I ever do to you?”
“Well, for one, you told me to name my Barbie ‘Toilette’ when I was eight because, and I quote, ‘it was a pretty French word.’”
Eden slowly smiled. “That was one of my better ones.”
Toilette had been passed on to Annelise (who rechristened her “Winter”) along with all the other off-brand Barbie-esque dolls she and Avalon had played with when they were kids (their parents had four kids and they weren’t rich), including the one she and Avalon called Scrotal Ken. Their brother Jude, a stickler for accuracy even at the age of ten, had taken umbrage at the smooth area between Ken’s legs and had drawn, in ink, an anatomically detailed penis and scrotum. He’d drawn a heart on him, too, complete with valves, and had just begun drawing a pancreas when her mom bolted into the room in response to Eden’s outraged shrieking and put a stop to it.
Eden had forgotten about Scrotal Ken until her mom excavated him from the attic and passed him on to Annelise. He was wearing pants when that happened. When Annelise inevitably decided to put different clothes on him, Eden used his confusing body art as a teaching moment: boys had different privates than girls, and that a penis on the Ken doll wasn’t dirty or bad or anything to get worked up about . . . but that her Ken doll probably ought to keep his pants on in mixed company (a good rule of thumb in life, in general), and private parts were private. And so forth.
“So what are you going to do about him?” Avalon said.
“Who?”
“You know exactly who I mean.”
Eden felt a twinge, breathless, delicious and scary, when she thought about “him.” An ancient sensation. She’d have to go back to her teenage years for the last time she’d felt that sort of thing.
“Oh, nothing. I’m too busy for anything like that. I hardly ever see him anyway, and then only in passing. Forget everything I just said. I was just . . . I guess I was just making conversation just now.”
Eden let the word anyway slip out on a yawn, just for that extra frisson of faux nonchalance.
She resumed sorting and filing the day’s flower orders and idly reviewed the little messages that went with them—“Happy Birthday,” “I’m sorry,” “Congratulations on the promotion!” with great satisfaction. She loved being part of everyone’s happy occasions as much as she loved prospering. She paused when she came to one that said simply, “You. Me. Forever.”
Normally those words would have slipped right past her awareness like so much scenery on the highway, nothing more than part of the bookkeeping that kept the shop running. This time they snagged in a teeny little pothole.
A pothole lasered there, if she had to hazard a guess, by the charm of Gabe Caldera.
Forever. She didn’t use that word much. Days, even weeks seemed to go by in a seeming eyeblink, and if the notion of a husband so much as flitted into her mind, it met the same fate as any flies that managed to find their way into the Misty Cat Tavern, slaughtered by the fan blades of her schedule. Her life had a sort of ceaseless momentum. They were good, she and Leesy.
And sleeping with a guy like Annelise’s father was meant to be like skydiving or walking around topless at Burning Man—something one did once, for the experience, a memory to sock away and whip out when she wanted to shock her grandchildren. He’d been gentle but intense, intelligent enough to startle even her brainiac self a couple of times, and full of the misty philosophical bullshit that had passed for wisdom back in college and had once been her catnip, and which she now viewed with great suspicion. They’d spent about three hours in soulful conversation and one hour boinking.
He was long gone by the time that pink plus sign showed up on the stick. And she did, out of a sense of moral obligation, try to get word to him. But she’d never heard back.
Which was actually more than fine with her. Because instead of turning her life into a shambles, that pink plus sign was shockingly sobering. And she realized instantly that while he might not be the last person on earth she’d choose to father any of her children, he certainly wasn’t anywhere near the first, either. And as time went on and the more real Annelise became to her, the less real he became.
Until it was often easy to forget he’d ever existed at all.
Turning up suddenly pregnant was uproar enough in her family and the town at large, without telling anyone who the father was. She’d never regretted her decision to keep it a secret. Her priority was Leesy’s happiness, and part of that was making sure she grew up in peace and safety.
She’d explained the dad thing this way to Annelise when she was six: “Leesy, you know how there are lots of different kinds of flowers in the shop? And some flowers have a lot of petals, and other flowers have just a few, and some are just kind of floppy, like poppies, but they’re all pretty and they’re all exactly perfect in their own way? That’s how families are. Some have dads, some don’t. Some families have one dad, some have two dads—you know, like Matt and Darius at Canyon Collectibles? Some don’t have a dad, but they have cousins and uncles and things. Families are made up of different parts, but no kind of family is better than another kind.”
“So a family is like a bouquet?”
“Yes. That’s exactly right.”
“And sometimes you can all of a sudden add a new flower to your bouquet, like Rosemary at the Angel’s Nest, when the foster girl lived with her.”
When Annelise said things like this—blindsiding in their depth and sweetness and innocent soulfulness—Eden’s reflex was to turn to someone and say, Do you see how freaking cool she is? Fresh deliveries of love and awe arrived pretty much daily in nearly unsustainable quantities. It seemed as though someone else ought to bear witness to the wondrous evolution of Annelise Harwood, to be a mutual memory archivist.
“Boys must be the stinkiest flowers,” Annelise had added thoughtfully. “They’re . . . collieflowers!”
She was really funny, too.
When had the need to share become an ache?
You. Me. Forever.
She smacked that order slip on the counter a little too abruptly. She suddenly realized that it had been quiet for a long time.
She looked up.
Avalon was frowning at her.
“Have you been frowning at me this entire time?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Avalon said. After a moment. Apparently after reviewing the options for things she could have said, Avalon had opted to be sensitive.
And this was almost worse, because when Avalon decided to be delicate, it meant she considered Eden’s feelings raw and unwieldy and unpredictable indeed. Which only made Eden realize that from the perspective of men, her game, such as it was, did feel sort of wobbly from disuse. Practically atrophied.
“Well, I better get going,” Avalon finally said. “Come on up to Devil’s Leap when you get a chance. I think our donkey is arriving today!”
And with those enticing words and a wave of her hand, Avalon jingled out the door.