SETH BANGED THE PROUDLY shining lion’s head, wondering how often Melissa polished him, and when she found the time. She was one remarkable woman. He couldn’t believe his luck.
They were into their third month of the new babysitting arrangement, and so far, things were going so well that his stomach had almost stopped eating away at itself.
The twins were happier than they’d been since their mother had died. They were doing better at school, acting more like little girls than hellions—most of the time.
Even their room was marginally tidier. He’d caught them making their beds without being reminded on one memorable occasion.
Melissa was making her mortgage payments. Her daycare included another child around Alice’s age, who was usually gone when he came to pick up the twins, and she seemed fairly busy with the landscaping. Thank God. He would not have wanted to foreclose on this woman’s house. Of course, she was treading perilously close to the financial edge, but she knew it and she was doing everything she could to make things work. He admired her.
It wasn’t Melissa who opened the door, as he’d expected, but Jessie, looking both important and mysterious. Always a bad combination in his experience.
“Hi, Dad.” She opened the door wider, and he stepped into the hall. It was the first time anyone but Melissa had opened the door to him. His stomach clenched.
“Hi, Red. Where’s Mrs. Theisen?”
“She’s on the phone. She’s been on for ages.”
His stomach sank. How long had the twins been unsupervised? “Oh. And what have you been doing?”
Jessie swept her gaze in all directions like a cartoon spy before whispering, “We’re having a secret meeting.”
“What about?” Secrets, in his experience, usually turned out to be unpleasant surprises for parents.
His daughter put her finger to her lips and motioned him upstairs.
He relaxed a bit, knowing she wouldn’t invite him to join the secret unless it was something she thought he would approve of. Which narrowed the possibilities from life-threatening to merely dangerous. Until he remembered the time the girls had invited him to watch their play, Mary Poppins, with his golf umbrella as the featured prop. Laura was practically out of their bedroom window, preparing to jump, when he’d lunged across the room and grabbed her ankles. Melissa’s second-floor windows were even higher than his. He increased his pace to a run, heading toward the sound of children’s voices hissing in exaggerated whispers.
With a sigh of relief, he saw nobody was on the roof or doing anything more death defying than hanging their heads over the bed. They looked a little red in the face, the row of four all regarding him upside down.
“Hi,” he said.
“Shh!” they all hissed fiercely.
“This is a secret meeting, Dad. You gotta promise not to tell Melissa,” Laura ordered him.
“Why are you all upside-down?”
“It’s our secret signal.”
“Well, I’m happy to join the meeting, but I can’t do it upside-down.”
“Well, since you are kind of old…if you promise not to tell, I guess it would be okay,” Laura decided.
“I can’t promise not to tell unless you give me a hint what this is about.”
“Dad, you’re so lame,” his oldest informed him. “It’s Melissa’s birthday on Friday, and we’re planning her surprise party.”
A wave of relief rolled over him, as well as pride that they were planning something nice for Melissa. “I guess I can keep that secret. What do you have planned so far?”
“Spray streamers that come in a can.” Laura held up a hand and stuck one finger in the air. Without the extra hand to give her balance her head tilted alarmingly, but she didn’t seem to notice any discomfort.
“They spray out like a bunch of different-colored worms all over the place,” Matthew added.
Seth imagined how thrilled Melissa would be when she found her pristine house covered in canned confetti, and he shuddered.
“We’re all pitching in some allowance and buying chips and pop and stuff,” Laura stuck another finger in the air. “Can you drive us to the store on Thursday night?”
“Sure.”
“And me and Jessie are going to bake a cake.” When she jutted her upside-down chin at him in her usual defiant mode, she nearly toppled over and had to stick her other hand on the ground to rebalance.
Visions of bicarb brownies and a barfing birthday girl danced through Seth’s head. The twins had come so far since the brownie disaster, but he sure as hell didn’t trust their baking skills yet. “How ’bout I buy the cake?” he tried.
In unison Laura, Jessie, and Alice, who’d managed to get herself upside-down alongside the others, shook their heads. His stomach started to burn.
A cake.
They wanted to bake a cake, and they had no mother to help them. And yet he could read in their sparkling, upturned eyes how important this was. “Tell you what,” he heard himself say. “We’ll make it together.”
Yips of joy greeted his announcement. “No mixes, Dad. She never uses them. It has to be from scratch.”
Hell, how hard could baking a cake be, anyway? He had a shelf full of cookbooks. And he could always call Janice if things got too scary.
“And you have to get Melissa out of the house so we can decorate and stuff,” Laura said.
If they really thought a three-year-old could keep a secret, he wasn’t going to spoil the fun. “How am I going to get her out of the house with you guys all here?” he wanted to know. “And who’s going to look after you?”
“Auntie Janice could watch us. And, um, you could tell Melissa you want her to go with you to the parent-teacher interview.” Was it his imagination, or had his daughter’s face just gone an even deeper red?
He rubbed his stomach. “What parent-teacher interview?”
“There’s a note in my backpack,” Laura mumbled.
“What have you been doing now?” He felt his good mood crash like the stock market on Black Monday.
“Nothing. That teacher’s so mean. She picks on me all the time. It’s because we don’t have a mom,” she said in a wheedling tone he didn’t believe for a second. “Please take Melissa with you on the interview. She can tell Mrs. Picky that we’re always good here.”
“Your teacher’s name is Mrs. Picard. Maybe she wouldn’t be so mean if you showed her some respect.”
“Well, anyhow, she wants to see you on Friday after school. If you take Melissa with you, we can decorate while you’re gone.”
“You’d better tell me about it, Laura, before I agree to any party. And you can do it right side up.”
With an angry grunt, Laura hauled herself up on the bed and glared at him. “Tracy Moore said Benny lip-synchs. She called him a cheater.”
Benny? She was championing a guy called Benny? “Benny who?”
Laura rolled her eyes around in her head. “Benny Samson. The Bravo Boy.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited, forcing his expression to remain calm. Every time he thought about those mini men from Glad, he mentally ground his teeth together. His daughters were ten. Ten. At ten, he’d been playing marbles, not thinking about the opposite sex. This whole boy thing was starting way too young.
He glanced over at their identical Raggedy-Ann hair and faces. If his girls had to start having preteen crushes, he could maybe handle it if they gushed over the latest James Bond, or one of the young Russian hockey players. Any normal, redblooded man. Anyone but those nauseating Bravo Boys. “Maybe he does lip-synch.”
“He does not! And that’s what I told Tracy, but she just kept going, ‘Benny is a cheater, Benny is a chea-eater.’”
“And for this, your teacher wants an interview?”
Silence.
“Laura?”
Silence.
“Jessie?”
More silence.
“Your teacher will only give me her version. You’d better tell me yourself what happened.”
“I might have called her stupid.” Laura’s breath started getting uneven.
He kept his mouth shut and waited, knowing from the way her lips were working that there was more to come.
“Then she told me she’s not allowed to play with us anymore ’cause her mom said that ever since our mom died we’ve turned into little m-monsters.” She choked on the last word and her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Red—”
“So I told Tracy I’d rather have no mother than a stupid bitch like hers.” With a sob she tore out of the room and a moment later he heard the bathroom door slam.
Jessie’s head hung down, and he could see she was fighting tears.
“Jess?”
“Everybody has a mom but us,” she mumbled to the floor. “Even the kids whose parents got divorced still get to see them both.”
He knew he should be outraged that his daughter had called a classmate’s mother names. But the thing was, he agreed with Laura’s assessment of Tracy Whatever’s mother. And he could think of a few other adjectives to add to stupid, like heartless, sanctimonious and freakin’ lucky to be alive.
With a sigh, he got up and wandered to the closed door of the bathroom. “Laura?”
“Go away.”
“Honey, I’m not mad at you. I’m glad your teacher wants to see me. I’ve got some things to say to her, as well.”
He heard some shuffling and a loud sniff on the other side of the door. “You’re not mad that I swore?”
Parenthood was a constant minefield, and he’d just stepped on a good one. “Of course, I’m mad that you swore. But I understand. Sometimes I swear, too, when I’m really mad.”
“Yeah. You say sh—”
“Okay, okay,” he interrupted. “I shouldn’t do it, either. Can you come out now?”
He heard water running, then it stopped and a moment later the door opened. Laura stared up at him with a mixture of belligerence and pleading.
Maybe he should give her a lecture, a grounding, force her to apologize. The hell with it. He opened his arms and she tumbled into them, squeezing him so hard he thought both their hearts would break.
“Seth? Are you up there?” Melissa’s voice floated from downstairs.
He whispered into the tangled red mass of Laura’s hair, “We’ll sort this out later, huh?”
She nodded and pulled away to scamper back to the others.
“Hi, Melissa.” He stood upright and ran lightly down the stairs to where she waited at the bottom, a look of suppressed excitement on her face.
He realized with a shock that she was beautiful with that hopeful glow highlighting her features. Every time he saw her, there seemed to be a line of worry marring her forehead. “I got here a few minutes ago, but you were on the phone.”
“Oh, sorry. My head’s in a whirl.”
He smiled at her. She looked years younger. It was easy to see what a knockout she’d been before her life had turned sour.
“Looks like you got some good news.”
She twirled like a princess at a ball. “I got the job of landscaping the display home in that new upscale subdivision down on Essex Street.”
“That’s great.” In the three months that she’d been looking after the girls, he and Melissa had become friends. She’d sent the baking to Jessie and Laura’s class for the Christmas party, and she and Seth had sat together at the annual winter concert, where all the kids but Alice had had a part.
He realized he’d come to look forward to picking up the girls, when he and Melissa would share a little of their day.
“Well, it is great. Because, if the people who buy into the subdivision like what I do, they’ll hire me, too, right? This could lead to a lot of work for me. I’ve even been toying with the idea of expanding my services to include doing the actual landscaping.” He followed her as she walked to the kitchen.
“That’s a pretty big job.”
“I know. And I’d need employees and things.”
“Capital.”
She grinned at him. “Good thing I am on such excellent terms with my local banker.”
“Have you thought about—”
“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t do anything until Alice is in school full-time. Right now, the design work is keeping me busy. It’s amazing how many people know people. Word gets around.”
“It’s not that I’m not supportive of the idea, because I am, but I don’t want you getting any more strung out financially than you can help.” He frowned, hating that he had to bring their business connection into her kitchen. “The thing is, you don’t have much of a cushion if anything goes wrong.”
She slumped into one of her torture chamber chairs, and he reluctantly sat opposite. Her fingers tapped the wavy glass of the table. “I know. Believe me, I know. It keeps me awake at night.”
“This is a pretty big house for three people, Melissa,” he said gently.
She rubbed at her forehead. He’d noticed she always did that when she was stressed. “Do you think I grew up with this? Scaling down is the story of my life.” She glanced around the kitchen as though for the first time. “I grew up in a crummy old run-down house that seemed like a palace once we got thrown out. I was seven, and that was the first time we scaled down.”
“Melissa, I…” What? What could he say to make any of this easier?
“It was always somebody else’s fault when my dad lost a job. His drinking had nothing to do with it.”
He suddenly pictured Melissa as a little girl, a little girl who looked a lot like Alice, living in squalor, and his belly squirmed.
“We played the same scene over and over. He’d get fired, then hang around home drinking. Mom worked as a cashier and waitress to keep food on the table. She always made excuses for him. It was because of his war injuries, she used to tell me.”
“What war?” He calculated swiftly. “Vietnam?”
She shook her head and the overhead light reflected gold in her hair. “He did a short stint in the military, but got thrown out after a drunken brawl. His real war was against anyone who told him what to do.”
“Like a boss, for instance?” Seth was getting a strong mental picture of Melissa’s father, and he didn’t like what he saw.
“Yep. After a while we didn’t move for jobs anymore, we just moved to cheaper places. I don’t think I ever did more than a single year at any one school.”
Her index finger traced patterns idly on the glass. Seth fought the urge to take her restless hands in his.
“By the time I was a high-school sophomore, my mom came into a little money from an aunt who’d died, and she bought the trailer we were living in. My dad’s still in it. It’s an awful place, in a derelict trailer park across the highway from Big Bull Auto Wrecking. But, by some quirk of fate, the high school I got bussed to was pretty good. That’s where I met Stephen.”
He didn’t want to talk about Stephen. He didn’t really want to talk about her past, either. For some reason, it made him feel guilty. But it explained so much about this mania she had about keeping her house. “How did you get to be a nurse?”
“I won a scholarship. Lived in a dorm and swore I’d never go back to that trailer park. I married Stephen the year I graduated. Mom was so happy the day I got married, but when we moved into this place, I thought she’d burst with pride. I’m glad she passed away before Stephen left me.”
Seth put a tentative hand out and touched her shoulder. Such slender shoulders for such a heavy burden. “I’m sorry, Melissa.”
“Well, I inherited a lot of things from my mom. The work ethic, the love of cooking and bad taste in men. Stephen took out a million-dollar life insurance policy right after Matthew was born. He said if anything happened to him, he wanted to know his family was looked after. How could anyone change so much? How could he do this to us?”
There was no answer. How could any man desert a woman as special as Melissa? He sure as hell wouldn’t.
“Not all men are bad, you know.”
“I know.” She sighed and leaned back. How did she do that without armor? “My friend Pam up the street? She’s never lost the extra pounds from her last child. Her husband tells her not to diet. He likes her exactly the way she is. Imagine.” She rose and went to the oven to check on something that smelled amazing. As he watched her in the kitchen, he noted one of the cupboard doors hanging askew. She liked things so neat and organized that he knew that must be driving her nuts.
He got up and followed her, moving the door back and forth. “Looks like you need a new hinge.”
She sighed. “Among other things. I wish I was handy.”
“What other things?”
She was bent over an oval baking dish, turning chicken pieces that were in some kind of Italian tomato sauce.
“I’ve got cracks in some of the walls from when the house settled. The upstairs bathroom faucet leaks. One of the boards on the back veranda seems soft.” She shrugged. “Little things I need to figure out how to fix. Dumb things.”
“Was Stephen handy?”
She gave a snort of laughter. “Not remotely. But when he was around, we could afford to hire people.”
He took another look at the hinge. “I think I could fix that.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Thus proving that you are a better man than Stephen?”
“You already know I’m a better man than Stephen,” he said evenly. He’d never been violent, but he was aware of a strong impulse to pound the long-gone and unlamented Stephen Theisen.
“Yes,” she said, turning away quickly. “I do. You’re one of the good guys, too.”
He stared at her back, so straight and elegant. He was aware of an urge to kiss the junction of her shoulder and neck where the skin looked so soft he almost knew how it would feel under his lips—warm and silky.
“Have you even dated anyone since he left?”
Her hands stilled. “No.” She bent to replace the casserole and when her head was practically inside the oven she asked, “You?”
“Two dates. One very bad blind date and one awkward dinner party where I was paired with a single woman I’ve known socially for a while.”
“Oh.” Did she sound relieved that he wasn’t dating?
Was he relieved that she wasn’t?
Something was definitely between them, some spark of attraction that they both pretty much ignored.
Maybe it was time to stop ignoring it.