She had never been happier to see anyone in her life. Nor could she stop repeating her gratitude as John loaded their bags into the back of the cab.
“Threw me for a loop, too,” John good-naturedly confessed. “Did you miss us that much you just couldn’t stay away?”
“Still trying to get things settled after all that’s happened,” she replied, not wanting to admit she was homeless.
Did you miss us that much you just couldn’t stay away?
She knew that he probably meant “us” in a generic sense and yet it nonetheless made her blush that she was so transparent in her delight to be rescued from the advances of the annoying Brad. She knew he preferred Bradley now, but to her, he would always be just Brad, the same old jerk from high school. In truth, she had nearly thrown both arms around his neck like a giddy schoolgirl. Wouldn’t that have torqued Brad, she thought in wicked amusement. Instead, she had kept her spontaneity in check and pretended as if John Neal’s arrival at that moment was perfectly normal. The harder part, of course, was resisting the urge not to turn around as they walked away. Brad’s jaw, she was pretty sure, was hanging down to his knees.
That John remembered Jimmy’s name earned him extra points in her book, too. All right, so it really hadn’t been that long since the one and only time he met her nephew, but his friendliness and affection toward Jimmy were so genuine that it made her heart melt. For the briefest instant as the three of them walked to the cab, Kate caught herself fantasizing that this was what happy families looked like. She noticed several people smiling at them as well and, as an extension of her mini-daydream, wondered whether they were thinking that Jimmy looked more like John or like her. Silly, of course, being the child of neither one but it didn’t escape her observation that he looked more like a Neal than the despicable loser whose name was on his birth certificate.
Next to her in the backseat, Jimmy was happily singing a made-up song in which “Dawg”, the only distinguishable sound, was every third word.
“What’s he singing about?” John wanted to know.
Kate explained that he had seen a dog in a lady’s purse at the airport.
“He likes dogs, huh?” John asked.
“Well, he’s never really had one,” Kate replied. “I think it just got his attention because it was something different.”
In the rear-view mirror, John was smiling. “He’d probably like Shelby,” he told her.
“Shelby?”
“Our German Shepherd,” he answered. “Very sweet, really great with kids. Sort of a bed-hog, though. All things considered, I guess it’s our fault for encouraging her.”
She didn’t miss the fact that he said the word “our”. Twice. Nor the disclosure that Shelby liked being around children. John’s children. John and a mysterious someone who clearly wasn’t her, and never would be.
“So, you haven’t told me yet what brought you back,” he reminded her. “Or am I being too nosey?”
Where to begin, where to begin.
“Things didn’t quite work out the way that I’d hoped,” she vaguely replied. Without question, the understatement of the year. “Jimmy and I decided to come back for awhile to…uh, regroup.”
“Well, you couldn’t have picked a better time of year,” he said.
She smiled. Most anyone who had grown up on Avalon Bay would probably vote summer to be their favorite season. It came with a long stretch of shoreline where kids could shovel to their hearts’ content, sunbathers could bask and flirt, and dreamers could entertain lazy thoughts about buying a boat and blissfully sailing off into the deep blue sea.
She glanced over at Jimmy and wondered if he and her sister had ever built sandcastles like the ones she remembered from their childhood. She added it to her mental list of things she wanted to show him, steadfast in her belief that no matter how vexatious their current situation it wasn’t going to interfere with creating happy memories for him.
John was now asking her how long this latest visit was going to be.
“Well, we’ll be staying at my mom’s until…” Until what? Until it drives her crazy and she throws us out? She stumbled over the rest of her reply and felt completely stupid about it. “What I meant to say,” she said, “is that we’ve got some things we need to work out and coming back here for a little while. I guess it’s sort of a stopgap ‘til I know where we are.” No points for brilliance there, she chided herself, wishing she could just unload the whole story on his broad shoulders and then soak it with her tears of frustration.
John nodded thoughtfully. “You’re lucky that you and your mom are so close,” he remarked.
Huh? Of all the adjectives that might have described their relationship, Kate wouldn’t have thought that “close” was even close to nailing it. She resisted the urge to correct him, knowing that it would only complicate any further explanation of what they were doing there. Instead, she mentioned that Lydia hadn’t spent much time with her grandson since his birth and that summer would give the three of them a nice chance to spend time together outdoors.
“You oughta take him to see Lucy if you get a chance,” he recommended.
“Lucy?”
John laughed at her puzzled response. “I can’t believe you could forget something as big as an elephant.”
Kate’s anxious mood suddenly turned buoyant in her remembrance of a senior year field trip to Atlantic City that—thanks to John and some of his enterprising buddies—ended in an unexpected detour to Margate, home of the world’s largest wooden elephant. “She’s still there?” she said in surprise. An icon at the South Jersey shore, Lucy’s odd presence on the sea-swept dunes at the turn of the 19 century had probably made more than one sailor swear off rum.
John assured her that after over a century of popularity, she wasn’t likely to be leaving her coastal post any time soon.
Given Jimmy’s earlier reaction to a tiny dog in a sparkly purse, Kate couldn’t begin to fathom what her nephew would think of a colorful pachyderm with stairs and cubbyholes that people could climb around in and take silly pictures.
“And, of course, you’ll have to take him digging for buried treasure, too,” John continued, winking at her in the rear-view mirror.
Local legends abounded that the region’s outer islands had been a frequent hiding place for cutthroat pirates and other illegal privateers. The marriage of reality and romance when it came to swashbuckling adventures and mutinous ghosts persisted in the 21st century. Kate could remember that even around a place as tame as Avalon Bay she had often encountered no small number of tourists enthusiastically toting metal detectors.
“Do you think anyone’s ever found anything of real value?” she mused out loud.
John contemplated her question a moment. “I guess it all depends on what they label as valuable.”
As the cab drew up to Lydia’s house, a delivery truck from Connor’s Florist was just pulling away from the curb.
“Looks like someone got flowers,” John observed. “Is it your mom’s birthday or something?”
Kate shook her head. “Not ‘til October.”
“Maybe she got them for you as a welcome home, then.”
She didn’t think that that was a likely scenario, either, especially given her mother’s cool reception to the idea that she and Jimmy would be staying with her at all. “Probably just for a neighbor who’s not home from work yet,” she decided. As John turned off the ignition, she turned to Jimmy. “Hey, sweetie, recognize this place? It’s Grandma’s house, remember? Can you say ‘Grandma’?”
Jimmy, however, was more interested in pointing at a plump squirrel that had just run across the driveway and up the nearest tree.
“So, what do I owe you for the ride?” she leaned forward to ask John, raising a playful finger in warning as she added, “And don’t tell me it’s free.”
“Let’s get your bags out of the trunk first and then we’ll settle up.”
He was already out of the driver’s seat and opening her door.
“I’m paying for that ticket you got, too,” she insisted but John wouldn’t hear of it.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “Really.”
“We’ll see,” she replied, trying to figure out how she could slip him the money without him realizing it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said as he lifted the first bag out of the trunk. “It’s not going to work.”
“Ah, so now you’re a mind-reader?”
“Nope.” He grinned. “Long memory.”
It took her a few seconds for his comment’s significance to register. And when it did, she realized that pressing the matter any further might court the same threat to his pride that it had when they were still in high school. Instead, she opened the other door to the backseat and told Jimmy it was time to get out. Jimmy responded by sliding over to the opposite side and defiantly folding his arms.
“Come on, honey,” she said. “We’re going to see Grandma now.”
She reached in and held out her hand but it only seemed to make him squirm closer to the left door.
“Do you want to get out on that side instead?’ she asked. “Okay, we can do that.”
She walked around the back of the cab but a giggling Jimmy had scrambled back to the right by the time she got there. She heard John chuckle under his breath.
“I suppose you could do better?” she challenged him.
A mischievous look came into his eyes. “I don’t know. Does he like to have piggyback rides?”
“Piggyback rides?” In the first place, she wasn’t sure that Jimmy even knew what a piggyback ride was. In the second place, which she voiced out loud to John, “Isn’t he kind of big for that?”
“Oh, I seem to recall a certain high schooler who made me carry her down the boardwalk just because she threw a shoe.”
Kate felt an instant electric sparkle at his casual reminiscence. “’Threw a shoe’?” she mimicked him. “You make it sound like I’m a horse!” She reminded him it had only been a broken sandal she got from running from ride to ride on the pier at Wildwood.
“So technically it was my fault?” John teased.
“If the shoe fits…”
“Maybe we should show him how it’s done,” John’s voice abruptly cut into her thoughts. He turned around and leaned over. “Hop on.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open in astonishment at his invitation. “Are you completely crazy?” she said, acutely conscious of his athletic physique and how the rich outlines of his shoulders strained against the fabric in the crouched position he had assumed.
“Certifiably. Come on,” he urged her. “If he doesn’t get out of the car, I’ll just have to take him home with me.”
She took a quick glance around, certain that their silly spontaneity would have everyone on the street looking out their windows.
With a nasal twang, John started to sing the chorus of “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy”. Loudly.
“Oh, all right, fine,” she acquiesced, “but only up to the porch and only if you stop singing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
As she straddled his lower back and put her arms around his neck, the warmth of his strong hands radiated through her jeans where he grabbed hold of the back of her thighs. She felt her heart skip in response as he lifted her off the ground, her last vestiges of common sense and decorum skittering off into the bushes that lined either side of the driveway.
John was laughing. Kate was laughing, too, and for a second she completely forgot that it was Jimmy they were supposed to be putting on a show for.
“Is this what you call being a responsible role model?” Lydia’s voice rang out from the porch. Neither of them had noticed the precise moment she emerged from the house to witness their juvenile behavior. Nor, they now discovered, had either of them looked back to see that Jimmy had hopped out of the taxi on his own and was intently watching a crow pecking away at the grass.
“So much for performance art,” John mumbled under his breath. Kate suppressed a giggle as she ungracefully dismounted and smoothed the front of her shirt.
“Hi, Mom,” she said. “Can you believe who met us at the airport? Amazing odds, huh?”
“Odd,” Lydia unpleasantly remarked, “is certainly one word for it.” She looked out at Jimmy. “The boy’s not going to keep trampling all over my grass, is he?”
How did Cass and I ever survive childhood, Kate wondered.
“I’ll go get him,” John offered, and then bring the bags.”
In what seemed only a few strides, he closed the distance between himself and Jimmy and scooped the latter up into a wide swing that made the youngster squeal with delight and grin from ear to ear
“He has as little sense about how to handle children as you do,” Lydia cynically observed.
Through Kate’s eyes, though, a different story was very much in evidence. This is someone who loves kids and isn’t afraid to show it, she thought.
Lydia waited until John was within earshot to announce that Kate had just received a spectacular bouquet of roses.
“Who’d be sending me flowers?” Kate asked. “Nobody even knows I’m here.”
“Obviously Bradley Leister does,” her mother replied, adding a snide postscript that Kate knew was entirely for John’s benefit. “He’s such a successful young man, don’t you think?”