It was a reaction Kate was still trying to decipher as she sat in a booth across from Maria at Kelley’s Bar. Abby had recovered quickly by saying that John hadn’t warned her what a “handsome little heartbreaker” Jimmy was but, to Kate’s ears, it didn’t quite ring true. Nor was there any chance to ask John about it in private before she left. She had lingered only long enough to see how her nephew was going to cope with the adventure of encountering the boisterous Shelby when John brought the dog downstairs.
“Told you they’d hit it off,” he had remarked in satisfaction, gently guiding Jimmy’s hand down the length of Shelby’s back and showing him how to scratch her behind the ears just the way she liked it. Though the German Shepherd could easily have knocked Jimmy down by virtue of her weight and canine energy, she seemed to sense that there was something special about him that called for patience.
“Are you paying any attention to what I just said?” Maria sharply cut into her thoughts.
“Sure,” Kate replied, thankful that she’d been tuned in just enough to catch that her friend had something exciting to tell her. “You said you had a surprise.”
“Guess.”
“Uh - Animal, vegetable or mineral?”
“Oh, definitely animal,” Maria replied, “with a potential for some very major mineral if I play my cards right.”
“You’re making it too easy. Tony proposed and he’s giving you a rock?”
Maria tossed back her head and laughed at her friend’s reply. “That is so second-grade. You can do better.”
“Afraid I can’t,” Kate confessed. “I’m not exactly focused lately.”
Maria decided to cut her some slack in light of all the things Kate had earlier divulged in order to bring her up to speed. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m quitting the factory. My last day’s two weeks from tomorrow.”
“What?”
“You should see the look on your face,” Maria teased. “You thought I’d be there forever or what?’
“No, it’s just that,” All right, truth be told, I did think you’d be there forever. “So what are you going to do?”
Maria excitedly explained that she’d applied for a secretarial job on a lark and got the call that she’d aced the interview. “I’m going to be in real estate at Martinez and Martinez!” she proudly announced.
Of all the career paths Kate might have imagined her high school chum pursuing, real estate probably wasn’t one of the ones that would first have sprung to mind. Especially considering that it called for a wardrobe beyond jeans and logo sweatshirts.
“The deal is,” Maria continued, “that I’m going to start answering phones and stuff and running searches of neighborhood listings so buyers and sellers can see how a certain house fares in the market compared to others.”
“I suppose that could be interesting,” Kate remarked, still distracted by thoughts of how Jimmy was doing at Sean and Abby’s and whether he was behaving.
“So, anyway, I’m in there on the morning of the interview and I’m leaving the office and this really cute guy named Charles walks in.” Maria giggled. “And I guess he thought I already worked there ‘cuz he said he was looking to buy a house for himself in Rumson and did I have any ideas.” Rumson, Maria reminded her, was the address of choice for musicians, movie stars and absolutely anybody who was anybody worth knowing. “You probably have to make six figures to even walk down the sidewalk,” she said. “Anyway, I must’ve made a hot impression ‘cuz they wanted me to start right away.”
“Tony must be really proud of you.”
“Yeah, but let me tell you more about this Charles guy who’s a stockbroker and he’s not married, and he wears these cute little glasses that make him look like a grown-up Harry Potter.”
The passage of years, Kate realized, clearly hadn’t dulled her ability to read Maria like a book and recognize where this breathless story was headed. She waited, however, until Maria had finished extolling the endless virtues of the perfect Mr. Charles Bailey, III to inquire what she and Tony were going to do to celebrate her new career.
“Well, you see the thing of it is,” Maria replied, “Tony and me, we’ve kinda been drifting apart.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“No, seriously,” Maria insisted. “Besides, weren’t you the one who told me Tony was way too young for me?”
“And, uh, this Charles person?”
“You wouldn’t believe all the things we have in common!”
“All this from just one conversation in an office doorway?”
“It was a meaningful conversation.”
“Meaningful enough that he already knows you’ve got him in your sights?”
Maria laughed. “You make me sound like a big-game huntress or something.”
“Let me rephrase it then,” Kate said. “Where does this leave Tony, a.k.a., the great love of your life?”
“Oh, come on, Kate. We’ve always known it wouldn’t last forever. Not like you and John. Speaking of which, are you guys gonna be needing a house? I could start looking at listings for you.”
Maria’s insistence that they get something to eat made it much later than Kate had intended when she finally returned to the Neal house. She walked around to the backyard and was surprised to see John by himself about to take some dishes inside. “Hey, what did you do with everybody?” she asked.
“Mom’s calling it an early night,” he replied. He was wearing a conspiratorial smile. “Come on in. I want to show you something.”
She followed him inside, through the kitchen, and then heeded his finger-to-lips instruction to be quiet before they went into the living room.
Shelby looked up from her spot on the floor and thumped her tail but she, too, obeyed John’s signal for silence. Across the room, the TV was on but the two who had been watching it on the couch were sound asleep, Sean Neal with his head tilted back on the top cushion and his good arm draped protectively around the small bundle nestled next to him.
“Looks like somebody was worried for nothing,” John softly whispered.
Her mood was suddenly buoyant again, warmed by the sight of the two figures on the couch and wishing she had been there to watch it all unfold. The questions tumbled out of her as soon as she and John were back outside beneath the stars.
“Dad was a little confused at first when I brought him down,” John explained. “Kept wanting to call him ‘Germy.’”
The name jogged something in Kate’s memory. ”Same thing you used to call your brother when you thought he was being a pest.”
John nodded thoughtfully in reminiscence. “Yeah, Mom noticed it, too.”
It was as good a time as any to ask him why Abby had reacted the way she did when she first saw him.
“Well, she’s not going to come out and say anything,” John candidly replied, “but I know she thought the same thing I did when I first saw him.”
“You mean that he sorta looks like you?’
“More so that he looks like Jeremy. Not that you can blame her, I guess. When you lose someone you love, it takes a long time, if ever, for even the smallest reminders of them to fade away.” In the weeks and months following his younger brother’s death, he related that his mom often found herself running up to strangers who looked like Jeremy from the back.
Kate suddenly felt guilty that as innocent an act as introducing her to her nephew had triggered such tragic memories. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” she murmured.
“What are you talking about? It was a great idea. Besides,” he said, warmly cupping her face in his hands, “you two are a package deal as far as I’m concerned. I’d like him to spend as much time here as he wants.”
“Sure you know what you’re getting into?”
His hands slipped down her arms, bringing her closer. “Oh, I bet I’ve pretty much got it figured out.”
Gazing into his eyes sent the universe giddily spinning around her. “I may need some time to think about that, Mr. Neal,” she coyly replied, though in truth she knew it was exactly what she wanted as well. A family. A husband. A future.
“So tell me what I missed tonight,” she said after a moment, enjoying the contentment of being held and feeling as if they truly had all the time in the world.
“Well, he was a little shy right after you left but then he started picking things up and taking them over to Dad’s lap. And when it came time to eat, it’s the funniest thing but he wanted to be right there next to him.” Both of his parents, he went on, seemed to enjoy all the boundless energy he had. “And, of course, he and Shelby are best buds now.”
“Just like you said they’d be.”
He shrugged. “When I’m right, I’m right. Oh, and by the way, I’m going to build him his own treehouse.”
“A treehouse? Do you think that’s wise?” A momentary shudder coursed through her body at the thought of Jimmy losing his balance and falling out.
John assured her there’d be nothing about it to put him in danger. “Did I forget to mention it’s only going to be six inches off the ground?”
Kate laughed. “Okay, but why a treehouse?”
“Why not?” From what he’d been reading recently about autism, John explained that special needs children liked having cozy cubbies where they could watch the world and not feel threatened.
“He does seem to like hiding under the kitchen table a lot,” she recalled. “Of course, now I’m jealous I never had one when I was his age.”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to make yours my next project.”
A fallen oak on one of John’s biggest clients’ home precluded seeing one another again before dinner on Sunday. Though Kate tried to rationalize that it would give her time to go through more of Cassy’s belongings as well as to pick her mother’s brain for potential newspaper stories, she’d have been lying to herself to say she didn’t miss him. Sunday, she decided, just couldn’t come fast enough.
An email from Dee reminded her that she hadn’t filled her in yet on what was going on and she made herself a glass of lemonade before sitting down to answer it. Funny, Kate reflected, that the last time they’d talked was when, in Lydia’s words, Dee had pulled the rug out from under her. I’ll have to tell her that it actually turned into a flying carpet.
Dee, of course, was nothing less than ecstatic that she’d found a new job so soon. As for Kate’s news about getting back together with John, her former boss didn’t seem all that surprised. “I wish I’d bet money on it, girlfriend,” she wrote, punctuating it with a trail of smiley faces.
She noted with amusement Dee’s postscript that a few celebrities had told her to tell Kate ‘hello’.
I’m definitely not in Oz anymore. Kate couldn’t help but smile and be thankful for the quirky road that had brought her back home where she belonged.
The doorbell rang a few minutes after five while Kate was still in a tank top, a pair of yellow capris, and barefoot.
What might have been initial panic that John was nearly an hour early was quickly replaced by excitement. With Lydia upstairs helping Jimmy with his bath so he’d be clean and presentable for company, the promise of time alone, however brief, with the man she loved caused Kate to enthusiastically fly to the front door and fling it open.
Except that it wasn’t John.
“So I hear you’ve got my kid,” Luke said, drawing a long drag on his cigarette before flippantly dropping it on the porch and grinding it out with the pointed toe of his snakeskin boot.