Kate had often heard the saying that time was rarely kind to high school quarterbacks once they got past the regimen of daily drills and high school exercises. As she composed herself from the shock of seeing one of them standing at that very moment on her mother’s porch, she resisted the urge of blurting out a “Wow.” The passage of fourteen years had made John Neal even more rugged looking and tan than she last remembered him. His dimples likewise reminding her of all those wistful times she had mentally compared him to Robert Redford.
It was his offhand comment about cake though, that made her hesitate between the spontaneity of throwing her arms around his neck or simply smiling politely and asking him how he had been. Within the space of a nanosecond, the memories of their last bittersweet encounter on this very porch came hurtling back and she could feel an unbidden heat start to steal into her fair complexion.
“So, how have you been?” she heard herself ask in a voice that mistakenly suggested she had just whiffed a shot of helium.
If he noticed the definitive octave spike at all, he was too much of a gentleman to comment on it. “Doing great,” he said. “How ‘bout yourself?”
You haven’t seen me in fourteen years, she thought in dismay, and that’s the best you can come up with?
“Uh, fine,” she replied, annoyed even as she said it that her reply was no more scintillating or inspired than his question. A sudden sense of inadequacy swept over her and she realized she needed a prop to deflect his attention. “You remember my mom,” she blurted out, physically pulling Lydia into his immediate radar screen.
The warmth of John’s smile echoed in his voice. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Toscano,” he said.
Lydia turned to Kate, her thin face registering total cluelessness.
Oh great, said the little voice in Kate’s head. How do you work ‘John Neal’ into a sentence without making it obvious? She tried to force her confused emotions into some semblance of order, but the result was less than stellar. “You know, Mom, I was just saying to myself the other day, ‘I wonder whatever happened to John Neal’ and, lo-and-behold, here he is.” Lo-and-behold? Where did that come from?
She felt Lydia perceptibly stiffen as the older woman quickly returned her attention to him.
“Sean’s younger boy?” she asked with an underscore of disapproval.
“Actually, the middle one,” he politely corrected her. He tilted his head in Kate’s direction. “Jeremy was still in eighth grade when the two of us were graduating.”
Kate flashed briefly on the memory of a tow-headed kid—a smaller version of John except for the hair color—who clearly adored both of his older siblings but especially always tried to tag along with John whenever he went with friends to the Boardwalk.
Funny, she thought, that Mom doesn’t remember that.
She opened her mouth to ask whether Jeremy had grown up to be the heartbreaker she always predicted he’d be but was cut short by a surprising suggestion from her mother.
“You know, it’s really much too expensive for the two of you to be taking a cab. I’ll just run upstairs and grab my purse.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“It won’t take me but a second.” Lydia turned to John, lifting her chin in a somewhat defiant manner that wordlessly communicated he was being dismissed from her presence.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mom. The cab’s already here.” Kate hoped her face wasn’t turning as red as it felt in reaction to her mother picking this particular moment to provoke an unfathomable scene of contention.
Lydia’s back had now gone ramrod straight. “Well, are you sure you haven’t left anything behind?” she pressed. “You know how many times I had to keep picking up after the boy.”
Unsubtle a ploy as it was to get Kate back inside the house and tell her goodness-knows-what, Kate opted to ignore it. “If you find anything, just mail it to me in Vegas,” she said. She turned back her cuff to make a point of checking her watch, even though she knew she had allowed plenty of time to get to the airport. “Wow, how did it get to be so late?”
If she had been hoping for John to rescue her with a convenient comment about traffic being bad at that hour of the morning or that his meter was running, it was soon apparent that he wasn’t going to accommodate her. Apparently, misinterpreting Lydia’s discomfiture as a message she simply didn’t want him to witness a mushy motherly goodbye, he amicably volunteered that he wasn’t in that big a hurry. “I’ll just go wait in the cab with your son,” he told Kate.
My son? How could he think that I was—
Dumbfounded by such a casual assumption, she couldn’t rally fast enough to correct his mistake before he returned to his seat behind the wheel of the cab. My son? All right, so maybe they hadn’t seen each other for fourteen years, but Avalon Bay wasn’t that big a community. Hadn’t any of the resident gossipmongers dropped her name into a conversation at least once in a while? Wouldn’t he already have known that she was doing well for herself in Vegas and that she hadn’t married?
She suddenly realized that Lydia hadn’t spoken up on her behalf either. The fact that her mother relished any opportunity to set other people straight, including total strangers, made the omission even more glaring.
“You know I don’t think I like the idea of you getting in a car with him,” Lydia was now murmuring to her in a dark whisper. “Maybe we should call someone else.”
The corner of Kate’s mouth twisted with exasperation as she turned to look at her. “What am I? Thirteen? Honestly, Mom, you’re going completely nuts on me. What’s wrong with John driving us to the airport?”
Lydia shrugged. “I’m just saying that you know how people in this town like to talk about things.”
“Yes, I’m sure they’ve got their high-powered binoculars trained on us even as we speak. Listen, I have no idea what this is about, but I’ve really got to get going.” She moved in for one last hug but extricating herself from her mother’s clinging grasp proved to be not as easy or graceful a maneuver.
“He is just a cab driver,” Lydia remarked as if her daughter were on the verge of abandoning all sense of modesty and passionately throw herself at the waiting feet of her former high school swain.
Kate reiterated that she’d call from the Las Vegas airport as soon as their plane landed. Still baffled by the concerned look on her mother’s face, she asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
“Well, there is one more thing…” Lydia cryptically replied. She cast a fleeting but wary look at the cab before continuing. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go asking any questions about his brother.”
“Sorry to hold you up,” Kate apologized as she slid into the back seat. “Mom has a hard time with goodbyes.”
John’s eyes briefly met hers in the rear-view mirror. “No problem. Big Man here and I had fun talking.”
Big Man? Talking? She glanced over at Jimmy who was now in a studied concentration of the mechanics of powered windows.
“Actually, I was doing most of the talking. He was just listening.” John turned the key in the ignition. “He’s kind of a quiet little guy, isn’t he?”
Kate hesitated a moment between whether she should tell him that Jimmy was autistic or that he was just playing The Quiet Game for a handful of the promised Fruit Loops. First things first, of course, and that was to explain the relationship.
“Jimmy’s my sister’s little boy,” she said. “Cassy. She was a couple of years behind us in school.” As the words left her mouth, Kate remembered that her sister had skipped a grade when she was in elementary school and thus, been in the same class as John’s brother, Jeremy. All of which made her mother’s mind-slip about the Neal brothers’ hierarchy that much more peculiar.
John nodded in recognition. “Oh yeah, right. So, how’s she doing these days? You guys just back to the ol’ stomping grounds for a visit, or what?”
Whether it was her uneasiness at speaking the truth out loud or Jimmy being in close enough proximity to hear it, Kate stalled with a reply by pretending to clear her throat.
“You okay back there?” he asked in concern. “I’ve got a water bottle if you need it.”
“No, no,” she declined. “It comes and goes. Just allergies.” She hoped a change of subject would make him forget his question. It didn’t.
“So, I heard she hooked up with a musician or something,” he continued. “How’s that working out?”
Safe enough ground for the time being, she thought, though it was disconcerting he hadn’t heard anything about her sister’s memorial service when it was so recent. “Oh, you know Cassy,” she forced herself to cheerfully reply. “Always living for the moment.” She paused. “They broke up when Jimmy was only two.”
“When was that?”
“A little over three years ago.” Inwardly, she still seethed whenever she recalled the ugly reason that Luke had given as justification for his bailing on his marriage to Cassy and his responsibilities as a father.
John nodded sympathetically at Kate’s disclosure that the break-up had left her little sister a single mom. “Always rough when you’ve got kids in the picture. I don’t know how they do it.”
Was he speaking from personal experience? She tried to remember if she had seen a flash of gold on his left ring finger, but everything had happened on the porch too quickly for her to even notice. Not that you should notice, the little voice in her head chided. If he had cared where you’ve been for the past decade, he could easily have—
“So, you like being an aunt?” he said, cutting into her thoughts.
“Huh?”
“An aunt,” he repeated. “I bet that’s a lot of fun.”
“It…uh…has its moments.”
At that moment, of course, she was too distracted by her self-initiated charade of verbal dodge ball about Cassy to come up with any examples if he asked her. She glanced over at her young nephew, his head animatedly bobbing along to the rhythm of a happy song that only he could hear. Maybe it’s a blessing he’s the way he is, she thought, trying to equate her bewildering feelings of parental loss as a teenager and feeling grateful that Jimmy was much too young, and much too detached, to fully comprehend that his life was never going to be quite the same again.
John was now chuckling as if enjoying a private joke. “I remember how my Aunt Patty used to say that being an aunt beat motherhood any day of the week, probably because she’d load us up with sugar, spoil us rotten, and then drop us off and go home to a Whiskey Sour on the rocks.”
Kate smiled, wistfully reminded of what a close-knit family the Neal’s were. “Maybe I should ask her for some pointers next time I’m out,” she said.
“Only if it’s by séance.”
It took a second for the meaning of his response to register. “Oh, John, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize—“
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “She went pretty fast and without much pain. Just the way she would have wanted it.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “I guess we should all be so lucky when our number’s up.”
Okay, so if you were waiting for an opportune segue, she told herself. Still, the words couldn’t come. Maybe they don’t have to. What were the odds of their paths crossing again, anyway? Whatever was going on with her family wasn’t really any of his concern. She could just play along, get on a plane home, and that would be the end of it.
John said, “So that’s nice of you to be giving your sis a break. How long do you get to keep him?”
The cold knot that had formed in her stomach ever since this conversation began refused to untie itself. She measured her words carefully, trying to discipline her voice to maintain control. “Cassy was…in an accident,” she murmured. Even without looking, she knew that John’s attention had instantly shot up to the rear-view mirror. “She…uh…didn’t…”
The sentence went unfinished, but its tragic significance had not been lost on him.
He was suddenly pulling the cab over to the shoulder, getting out and opening the back door. A muscle quivered at his jaw as he extended his hand to her, his blue eyes gently imploring her to step out. He started to say something as she emerged from the back seat but as if propelled by an unseen force, she gave him no chance to, burying her burning face against his broad chest and surrendering to the feelings of helplessness she had held inside ever since she first heard the news of Cassy’s death.
Within the safe but transitory refuge of his muscular arms, she allowed herself to be tenderly rocked back and forth, only vaguely aware that he was whispering her name over and over as one hand compassionately stroked the nape of her neck.
And in that fragile moment by the side of the road, Kate was overcome with a wave of déjà vu remembrance that it was not the first time in her life John Neal had tried his valiant best to hold her world together as it slipped away.