He’d felt like a total idiot driving back to Capparelli’s. In truth, a part of him hoped Kate wouldn’t still be there. If she saw him walk back in, she’d probably deem him some kind of a stalker. If he walked back in, though, and she was happily sitting across the table from someone else.
He pushed the idea aside, conscious that he could still be as bothered by her presence as he was by her absence. Up until seeing her again the day he had driven her and Jimmy to the airport, he hadn’t paid a lot of thought to being lonely during the past fourteen years. Lonely was different from being alone, from making a conscientious decision to do everything on his own terms and in his own time. What was this power she held to mess with his sense of objectivity and to make something as simple as silence, usually such a welcome refuge, feel as suffocating as the inside of a tomb?
He circled Capparelli’s twice without stopping. Why was it, he thought, patrolling the dark streets of NYC, knowing bad guys were lurking around every corner, was easier to deal with than the agonizing uncertainty of whether Kate Toscano was sitting inside eating a pizza?
To his relief, the one person who hadn’t seen him the first time was just stepping outside for a smoke as John pulled into an empty parking space on the street.
“Tony!” he called out.
“Hey, man!” Little Tony greeted him. “What’s up?”
“Supposed to hook up with a friend,” John lied, hoping he sounded indifferently casual. ”
“You mean Kate?” Tony interrupted.
If he said ‘yes’ and she was still there, it would look weird if he didn’t go in. “Just a guy I work with,” he lied. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he forgot.” He bit his tongue to keep from asking why Tony had assumed he was meeting Kate.
“Oh,” a puzzled Tony responded. “Maria says your old girlfriend was here.”
Was, not is. That could mean anything. Strange, he also thought, that Maria hadn’t told him he’d been there, too. “Small world, I guess.”
The front door of Capparelli’s opened at that moment and the world as he knew it shrank even further.
“Forget something?” Maria asked when she saw him standing there like a dolt.
“Cheese,” he said. “Extra cheese.”
If the packets of grated Parmesan riding on the dashboard of his truck had human voices, John was pretty sure they’d be giggling at him. All right, so maybe it hadn’t been one of his smarter moves.
“You came all the way back just for cheap cheese?” Maria teased him. “Sure, you did.”
He had only made it worse by saying it was the kind his father liked. It wasn’t exactly a lie, just a carefully framed omission of the real reason that had brought him back.
“And he didn’t notice this when he was with you?” she quizzed with an inexplicable wink.
“Your ol’ man was with you?” the clueless Tony chimed in. “How’s he doing?”
It was a longer conversation than he’d cared to spend, made longer by Maria’s immature insistence on asking him some of the same questions twice. Almost, he thought, as if to trip him up. Goodness knows what kind of stupid rumors would be spun by daybreak if she gave full vent to her hyperactive imagination. The best he could hope for was that none of them wafted in Kate’s direction and made her think he was either a jerk or an apologetic fugitive.
The addition of unexpected rain to the mix did little to restore his spirits, especially since he’d just washed the truck that afternoon. “Story of my life,” he muttered as he’d pulled away from the curb. The triggered memory of it having also rained like the dickens the day Kate left for Amherst convinced him all the more that the universe was still trying to pound him with a message his heart hadn’t wanted to hear the first time.
The rain began to fall harder.
Not until he made a third pass by the Exxon did he realize that he was orbiting in aimless circles again, a subconscious delaying tactic to keep from going home and being asked questions he didn’t want to answer. Nor did he want to drive by the Toscano’s again, still not convinced that Kate’s plans for the evening didn’t include the very last person he felt like seeing right now.
“I don’t have a date,” she’d said. “I’m just here with Jimmy.”
He kept replaying the words in his head and remembering how emphatic she’d been about it. That Kate Toscano had never been one to lie, especially not to him, should have been a quiet reassurance instead of the noisy mental ping-pong game that was starting to make his head hurt.
One thing for certain, he wasn’t going to accomplish anything if he kept driving around until he ran out of gas. Just as he was approaching the intersection, a woman and a small child on the other side of her stepped off the curb and he hit the brakes and his horn in plenty of time to warn them that they weren’t in a crosswalk.
“Kate!” he gasped in shock, stealing a quick look in the rear-view mirror before he threw the gearshift into “park” and jumped out of the truck and into the rain to run over to them. “Are you all right?” It was no wonder, of course, that he hadn’t recognized her from a distance, her face previously obscured by an upraised arm and a red and white tent of cardboard.
“Don’t even say it,” she warned as the faint beginnings of a smile played at the corner of his mouth. In annoyance, she began to flick off the soggy particles from her blouse, unaware of the larger ones that were defiantly clinging to her hair.
“Say what?” he feigned innocence so as not to embarrass her even further. “I’m just glad you’re both okay.”
Jimmy, his face wet and grinning, was having the time of his life trying to cup a handful of raindrops without spilling any.
“I look stupid!” she angrily sputtered. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
It was a challenge worthy of triggering his sarcastic wit but John resisted. The downpour, he thought, emphasized even more than usual her natural beauty and fresh radiance. It also made her appear something unusual. For the first time since he knew her, she looked vulnerable. He wanted to be her rescuer, to hear her say that she needed him, that he alone could give her something she couldn’t get from anyone else in the universe: a quiet haven of simplicity in a world she was always so intent on making far too complex.
At the moment, however, that scenario didn’t seem terribly likely. A sense of awkwardness was engulfing both of them; John because he was distracted, and Kate because she was well aware of it and not particularly pleased. She challenged him a second time about whether he was going to laugh at her appearance.
“Wet cardboard’s not a look for everyone,” he replied, “but the bigger question’s whether you need a lift home.”
“We’re soaking wet!” she snapped at him.
John hesitated, unsure of whether she meant it as mind-numbingly obvious that they needed a ride or that she didn’t want to get his seats all soppy.
“Yeah well, I’m pretty much getting there myself,” he pointed out as he raked a hand through his wet hair. “So, you want a ride or not?”
Before she could answer, a sheriff’s patrol car rounded the corner.
It would be a long twenty minutes before anyone went anywhere.
“The least you can do,” Kate insisted as he pulled into the driveway, “is let me pay the ticket.”
John wouldn’t hear of it.
“I’m the one who was causing a hazard,” he reminded her. In his panic and haste to jump out of the truck and rush to their aid, putting on his emergency lights had slipped his mind.
“But I’m the one who stepped into a non-crosswalk,” she argued. “Why didn’t he write me up, too?”
“Obviously,” John countered, “he’d already made his quota today for ticketing beautiful women with cute kids.”
If his unabashed compliment registered at all with her, she wasn’t letting so much as a blush betray her. Instead, she put forth a compromise of letting her pay half. “It’s only fair,” she informed him, tossing her wet head in a way that could either be construed as snooty or just an attempt to maintain dignity.
He looked at her as he shifted his body and propped his right elbow on top of the seatback. “Why is winning an argument always so important to you?” he asked.
She shot back that he was the one being stubborn. “As always,” she added. “And what’s with your arguing about who should drive us home after he gave you a ticket? He was a cop for Christ’s sakes!” She glanced down and noticed that Jimmy had grabbed one of the cellophane packets of Parmesan cheese and was earnestly trying to figure out how to open it.
John nodded. “A cop in a cop car. No telling who his last ride might have been.”
“Y’ know, you’re starting to sound freakishly like my mother.”
“Speaking of whom,” He tilted his head toward the front window where Lydia was peering out at them at that moment. “Besides,” he facetiously continued, “can you imagine how people in this town would talk if you came home in the back of a patrol car on a dark and stormy night?”
She smirked. “So you’re saying you were just looking out for me?” She succeeded in prying the packet of cheese out of Jimmy’s fingers and tossed it back on the dashboard with the others.
“To quote someone I know from Amherst, ‘As always’.”
Her green eyes flashed in a familiar display of impatience. “Look, I appreciate you coming along when you did.”
“But what?”
“What do you mean?”
‘It sounded,” he remarked, “as if you were about to tack something onto the end of that.”
“No, not really. Just thanks, that’s all.”
She was reaching for the door handle, a signal that he probably couldn’t delay her leaving any longer.
“Well, it’s not the first time that you’ve let me rescue you,” he pointed out. It was the sort of hopeful statement, he realized, that stopped just short of being a question seeking affirmation. He watched the play of emotions of her face, conscious of the instinctive flutter of distance that his reminiscence about their past always seemed to keep conjuring whenever they were together. Independent woman that she was, he was already braced for her to issue a snappy argument that logistical coincidence didn’t really count.
Unexpectedly, she returned his smile, imbuing him with a sense of numbed comfort that his comment had seemingly met with an accord. He now caught himself hoping she’d lean forward and tell him it wouldn’t be the last time his services as a knight in shining armor would be needed.
Instead, she only wished him a nice evening.