He thought it strange that they were talking about peanut butter and groceries, when just this morning she’d been bedraggled and hunted and holding a bat on him. Tonight she seemed like any well-adjusted young woman performing the simple domestic duty of stocking her shelves.
Only they were his shelves. And neither one of them should forget that.
The timer rang and she closed the doors on a very orderly cupboard, picked up two kitchen towels to use as pot holders and pulled the casserole out of the oven. It smelled wonderful.
He poured water and coffee, and they sat across from each other at the table. For the first time since he’d walked in the door, he felt tension. He ignored it, sure it must be just his own reaction to having a strange woman in his home after a year of comfortable solitude.
“Where’s your family?” she asked companionably, passing him the basket of rolls. “Were you born in Boston?”
His family. He missed them, but he’d tried hard not to think about them since leaving home. He’d dealt with and accepted what had happened, but he couldn’t find his place in their circle anymore. It was easier to put them out of his mind.
“I was born in the Midwest,” he replied. “We still have a lot of family there. But my mother moved us to Boston when she married my stepfather.”
“I love Boston,” she said chattily as she buttered a roll. “I was born in Buffalo. We moved to Boston when my mother remarried after my father died.” She took a dainty bite of the roll. “But that didn’t work out and she married a third time, then a fourth. The last husband was a banker, an older man who seemed very steady and solid, but she got sick, and I guess that wasn’t what he’d planned for his golden years, so…” She made an awkward little movement with her hand. “He left, she died, and I…stayed in Boston.”
“How old were you?”
“Eighteen. Old enough to be on my own.”
He remembered himself at eighteen, mouthy and brash and confident in his mind and his body. Until he went to college and met better minds, stronger bodies, and felt all his confidence shrivel. He wondered if she’d had to take the few steps back that eventually brought maturity.
“At least, I thought I was,” she admitted after a moment, as though she’d read his mind. “Then I discovered how much parents do for you that you’re unaware of until you have to do it for yourself. And that supporting yourself has a million hidden expenses that keep you too broke to have lunch out, or meet your friends after work for a drink.” She sighed and gave him a frail smile. “And that being alone 24/7 is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life. To remedy that, I spent the year I was twenty-one on a determined search to find a soul mate. I went to a lot of parties, but was selective about whom I dated. But I still managed to get it wrong.
“I had narrowed my choices to two men I really liked. Turned out one was already engaged to a girl in California, and the other got arrested for insider trading.”
He had to smile. “Tough luck.”
She nodded with an answering grin. “True. So I gave up on the search, but I need company, noise, activity. I get so tired of the silence.”
“I came here to find silence,” he said. “After being a cop for twelve years, my head is full of noises I’d rather not hear again.” And after he’d been here for a while, he’d stopped hearing the crash in his head.
She studied him worriedly, and he stopped with a bite of casserole halfway to his mouth. “What?” he asked.
“Is it going to be hard for you to have me here? I mean, I know you invited me to be kind, but you’re beginning to regret it, aren’t you. I can see it in your face. When you walked in the door tonight, I could almost hear your thoughts. Oh, that’s right! She’s here. Well, I’ll have to make the best of it.”
Guilt made him defensive. She was absolutely right. “I thought nothing of the kind,” he denied, “so just relax.”
“I shouldn’t be here long at all.”
“I know that.”
“And I’ll work for my keep.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll try not to pollute your space—but I sing when I’m working, and sometimes I talk to myself, and I like to have the radio—”
“You’re making a lot of noise,” he interrupted, “promising not to make a lot of noise.”
She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “So you’re not the sweetheart you pretend to be, are you.”
Sweetheart? “I never pretended to be any—”
“No, I guess it’s not pretense,” she amended, leaning forward again to pick up her fork. “It just seems to come with the chromosome in some of you. You’re all concerned and protective, you offer reassurances in that voice every woman dreams of, then when we begin to believe it, you pull back. Or you’re on to other things.”
That assessment was so brutal, he didn’t know what to say.
“My mother fell for it three times,” she went on between bites, her manner curiously detached considering the intensity of the subject. “We could have gotten along when my father died if we’d leaned on each other, but she kept trying to find the magic he’d put into her life—and it just wasn’t there without him.”
He was beginning to see something here, a possible explanation for her softly spoken assault on the male character. “So…your life was probably difficult,” he guessed, “while she dragged you with her through three marriages and three stepfathers.”
She shrugged one shoulder, as though it didn’t matter. “The second marriage was nothing, really. He was a tennis pro who turned out to be a flake. He was never real enough for me to take seriously. It only lasted five months.”
“And the third one?”
“Almost a year. He drank too much.” She grew quiet.
“But the fourth marriage was different?” he guessed.
A line appeared between her eyebrows as she talked on, clearly lost in memories of her third stepfather.
“I was sixteen and beginning to feel lost because I knew my mother was. Hal was gray-haired and cheerful, and for a whole year things were perfect. They sailed and skied, and we took weekend trips to Buck’s County or the Poconos. He was easy to talk to and seemed to really care about us.” She took a few sips of coffee, leaned her forearms on the table and looked into his eyes. “Then he retired, my mother got sick, and it was clear from the beginning that it would be a long, debilitating illness. I got home from school, eager to share with him that I’d been accepted at Southern Massachusetts University, and he was gone. My mother said he’d told her that he’d worked hard all his life and looked forward to traveling and doing all the things there hadn’t been time for before.”
“That’s rotten,” he said, angry that a man could do that. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged again. “My mother could have lived a long time. I’d gladly have taken care of her, but she gave up. She couldn’t find what she’d had with Daddy, and it just didn’t occur to her that she had the ability to make her own life worth living.” She added bleakly, “Or that I was still there.”
Now he got the picture. She hadn’t just been young and alone, she’d been betrayed and abandoned—several times.
“And on the strength of the hour you spent with me this morning,” he said, “and the half hour tonight, you’re assuming that I’m the same?”
She