Kate pressed her lips together, flummoxed that what should have been welcomed as a sign of Jimmy’s cognitive progress was abruptly overridden by her discomfort that John Neal had once more slipped into their lives without an invitation.
“Well, speak of the devil!” Maria exclaimed as he strolled toward them, thumbs casually hooked into the pockets of his jeans.
His first greeting was to Jimmy who shouted John’s name twice more and smacked the red and white plastic tablecloth with both palms. As Kate turned to tell her young charge to settle down, she was surprised to hear John ask her if everything was all right.
“I guess he’s just excited to be out in a new place,” she murmured, trying not to make eye contact and allow herself to succumb to his steady blue gaze.
“I meant with you,” he said.
“Uh…sure. Why?” Her mind raced over their last conversation, trying to remember what she might have conveyed to him to suggest that maybe she wasn’t all right.
John shrugged. “Just kinda strange that your mom called,” he replied.
Kate’s mouth dropped open. “What? My mother called?”
His warm smile melted into concern. “You didn’t know she was looking for you?”
Even them leaving the house in a huff about Brad, Kate thought, wouldn’t have prompted her mother to assume she’d run straight to John. Or would she? Kate threw the ball back into his court by asking what, exactly, Lydia had said to him.
“Actually,” he said, “she called my mom to see if you were at the house. I only heard it secondhand.”
“Am I the only one who thinks this sounds totally weird?” Maria cut in, perceptibly annoyed that neither of them was counting her in on their cryptic conversation. She now wiggled her unmanicured index finger back and forth between them. “Is something goin’ on between you two guys?”
I’m obviously the last to know if there is, Kate thought. Aloud she voiced mild skepticism. “Maybe she dialed the number by accident. Or maybe your mom just got the name wrong.”
“Or maybe,” John countered, “everybody got everything right and your mom was calling to remind you that you were supposed to be somewhere.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she thought you had a date?”
“Who’s your date with?” Maria asked.
Kate bristled at the realization he had to have driven by the house, seen Brad’s car, and jumped to an stupid and irrational conclusion. “Since when is my personal life everybody else’s business?” she shot back. It was intended more for Maria than John but it was the latter who responded.
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” he said, putting his hands up in mock surrender. “I was just worried something happened. I was wrong.”
Jimmy giggled.
“So why don’t you park your butt and join us?” Maria invited him before asking Kate what time her date was supposed to get there. “Or are you meeting Mr. Mystery somewhere else?”
“I don’t have a date,” Kate corrected her, conscious of the heat stealing into her face and neck. “I’m just here with Jimmy.”
Maria seized her friend’s reply as a chance to reiterate her invitation for John to stay and catch up on old times.
He shook his head. “I’ve got someone waiting for me out in the truck.”
Probably her, Kate assumed, cringing at the prospect of an introduction to the dark-haired beauty who wanted to bear his future children.
Maria’s eyes widened. “Oh really?” she mischievously responded. “And who would that be?”
“My dad,” he answered. “We’ve just picked up a pizza.”
The glance Maria exchanged with Kate conveyed that she wasn’t buying his excuse for even a nanosecond.
“Well then, we shouldn’t keep you,” Kate said. The declaration was out of her mouth before she realized how much it sounded as if she were dismissing him from her sight. Your Queen has spoken. Be gone!
“No,” he agreed with her comment. “I suppose not.” He waved to Jimmy. “Catch ya later, J.”
His leave was pre-empted by Antonio who promptly enveloped him in an Italian bear hug. “Justa like ol’ times, eh?” the portly proprietor exclaimed, vocally recounting his remembrance of when John and Kate used to come there after school and hold hands until the candles in the Chianti bottles had dribbled into blobby, alien-looking stubs.
That his voice was loud enough to carry across the room made several of the nearest diners turn their heads and smile. Though minor, it was a level of attention that made Kate want to sink beneath the floorboards. “Why you two not a-holdin’ hands now?” he now joked, oblivious to the tension that hovered over the table like a rusty ax. “That Kate, she’s one smart cannoli, eh?”
Kate’s chest tightened and she bit her lip in an attempt to put her mind on something other than her remembrance of their early days of dating. Before she could fumble her way into a reply to Antonio’s question, it was John who bluntly set the record straight.
“Water under the bridge,” he said. “We both grew up and moved on.”
Abby wanted to know how Sean had enjoyed the drive.
“Seemed to do okay,” John said, commenting that his father had balanced the pizza on his lap and clutched the stack of napkins with his good hand the whole ride home.
“And didn’t even try to sneak a bite of pizza in the car?” Abby teased, kissing her husband’s forehead. “Who are you, Handsome, and what have you done with my husband?”
John waited until she had settled his father back in front of the TV to tell her that he’d run into Kate and Jimmy.
“And everything was okay? No need to file a Missing Persons report?”
“Guess not,” he replied. “In fact, she seemed kinda upset that I even asked her about it.”
“Oh?”
“It’s almost as if…”
Abby glanced over her shoulder as she pulled down a couple of dinner plates from the cupboard. “Almost as if what?”
“I don’t know. Like she couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.” On the short drive home, he’d replayed every word she said and every nuance she hadn’t said and still couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere between the tree-planting and the pizza encounter Kate Toscano had made up her mind to suddenly hate his guts.
“Maybe you just caught her at a bad time,” Abby softly suggested.
John quickly countered that the death of Kate’s sister and having to live with Lydia would constitute a bad time on any level.
“Well then maybe she was just trying to avoid an awkward moment.”
“An awkward moment for whom?” John asked, averse to mention how much the sight of Brad’s car had rankled him.
“Maybe she was expecting someone,” Abby matter of factly replied. “A date.”
“Not from what she said. It was just her and Jimmy and her friend the motor-mouth.”
“Well, this may come as a bolt out of the blue,” Abby continued, “but women don’t always say exactly what they mean.” She smiled as if enjoying a private joke. “Of course, for that matter, neither do most men.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she either didn’t want to hurt your feelings or…”
“Or what?” John pounced on the bait.
“Maybe she was hoping you’d call her bluff.”
“Kate and I are history, Mom. There’s no bluff to be called.”
Abby wasn’t convinced. “So, I suppose that’s why her name doesn’t keep coming up in conversations?”
“Coincidence.”
“Of course it is, dear. Whatever you say.”
John smirked. “Why are you trying to play matchmaker?”
Abby laughed and maintained that some matches were beyond her control.
“Didn’t seem to stop you from trying to set me up with Gabrielle.”
“Can I help it if her mother and I thought it would give her something new to think about?”
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way,” he replied.
Abby suddenly scowled. “Did you remember to tell them to give us parmesan cheese packets?”
“Didn’t have to. They know it by heart.”
“Well, somebody was asleep at the switch and left ‘em out,” she observed. “Looks like you’ll have to go back.”
“Why’s it such a big deal? We’ve got plenty of cheese in the fridge.”
He started to move toward the refrigerator to prove his point but she blocked his path. “You know you’re going to agonize about it all night.”
“The cheese?’
“Wondering if she was trying to tell you something instead of coming out and telling you. If she’s there with someone else, then you’ll know it’s time to move on.”
“And if she’s not?”
Abby smiled. “Then have a nice evening and it’ll be all the more pizza for your dad ‘n’ me.”
“I don’t buy it,” Maria opined. “He’s trying to have his cake and eat it, too.”
Why, Kate wondered, was everyone suddenly referring to her as a dessert? Out loud, she heard herself defend John’s character. “He wouldn’t have any reason to lie about his father waiting for him.”
Maria shrugged. “He doesn’t have any reason to hide his new girlfriend, either. As he said, you guys are water under the bridge.”
Water under the bridge. That’s what had stung the most even though she knew it was the truth. “You know I think we’ll just take our pizza to go,” she announced.
Which was why, for the second time in one day, she was now sitting on the boardwalk with Otis Redding lyrics playing in her head. Sitting next to her with a messy mouthful of pizza and his legs happily swinging in contentment was Jimmy, clearly oblivious to everything. Oblivious even to the first sprinkles of rain.
“Come on, Jimmy,” she urged him. “Let’s finish this up and get home.”
Home. The last place she wanted to be at this moment. With a rising sense of dread, she wondered whether Brad was still there. It would be just like her mother, Kate thought, to have invited him to stay for dinner and spend the whole time making plans for her future.
The patter of the rain began to pick up its pace and Kate reached over to close the pizza box. With a squeal, Jimmy flung out his arm, dislodging the three remaining pieces inside and sending them flying into the sand below. Only quick thinking on Kate’s part kept the box itself from becoming airborne.
“Okay, I guess we’re all finished,” she said. A lone seagull had already noticed the arrival of a free meal and, indifferent to Mother Nature’s change of mood, was hopping over to investigate.
The rain began to fall harder. Jimmy laughed and gleefully held both hands upward as if to entreat the sky to send down even more.
At least the pizza box could serve as a makeshift umbrella, Kate rationalized. She reached for Jimmy’s hand. “Stay close to me,” she instructed, hoping that if they scurried fast enough they’d be able to make it back to the house before the storm escalated.
By the time she glimpsed the welcome sight of a bus shelter, their respective clothes were soaked and the pizza box was getting dangerously soggy. The covered bench, she noted in dismay, was also currently occupied by two unkempt men whom she guessed had a lot of familiarity with availing themselves of free public refuge.
“Just a little farther,” she told Jimmy in her cheeriest voice. Jimmy, however, was in no need of her plucky cheerleading and seemed to thrive on this unrehearsed new adventure.
As she distractedly stepped off the curb, a screech of brakes and the blast of a horn sounded. Startled, Kate looked over just as the pizza box collapsed and deposited wet cardboard shrapnel down the front of her blouse.
The anger she felt toward herself for nearly jeopardizing both of them was quickly displaced by something a hundred times worse.
The driver was John.