Kennon cleared her throat. “In case you haven’t noticed, Doctor, she’s not alone. I’m here.”
“I’m assuming that you’ll be going home, or to your office, or wherever it is that you go to, soon,” he emphasized.
“Eventually.” Business was slow and if something came up, Nathan would either handle it, or call her. Either way, she was covered.
A smile began to curve the corners of Edna’s mouth. “It appears that I am in good hands, Doctor. Thank you for your concern, but I’m sure that I will be just fine.”
With a nod, and not wanting to get drawn into another conversation, Simon withdrew. His intention was to go up to his room. He had no plans beyond that. His days and nights were still comprised of a myriad of tiny, disjointed pieces, glittering, winking mosaics that made up patterns with no rhyme or reason.
But his intentions were abruptly arrested as he passed the kitchen once again. The strong aroma wafting from the large pot on the stove reminded him that he hadn’t eaten breakfast. Nor could he really remember if he’d had dinner the night before. He’d ordered out for the girls and Edna, but hadn’t eaten with them. Or alone, either.
His stomach reminded him that it did need tribute occasionally.
He supposed there was nothing to be lost by sampling a little of what that decorator with the smart mouth had made.
Pausing, he put a little of the soup into one of the remaining bowls. It amounted to barely more than a couple of large spoonfuls. He sipped a small spoonful. It was followed by a second. And then a third. By then he decided that he should have a proper serving.
No sense in wasting her efforts, he told himself just before he set the filled bowl down on the counter and dug in.
He didn’t hear her come into the kitchen, but he saw her reflection in the black oven door, which was just above the stove and at eye level. He braced himself for another assault of rhetoric.
But she didn’t cross to him. Instead, she quietly withdrew from the room, leaving him in peace to eat her soup.
Maybe the woman was intuitive after all.
But he doubted it.
Chapter Five
“Is she going to be coming back, Daddy?”
Madelyn’s questions came right on the heels of the quick greeting she’d given him when he picked her and her sister up from school that afternoon. She looked at him pointedly after she scrambled into the backseat and sat down beside Meghan.
“Is who coming back?” Simon asked absently as he helped Meghan fasten her seat belt and then tested it to make sure it had snapped into place.
“Kennon,” Meghan piped up. She smiled broadly as she gave the absent woman her seal of approval. “I like her, Daddy.”
He glanced at his younger daughter. Meghan was the warm and sunny one. She took after Nancy, while Madelyn was more like him. Cautious. At least, until today, he amended.
He laughed shortly, shaking his head. “You like everyone,” he told her.
“But Kennon’s nice,” Madelyn insisted. Her tone said that she usually agreed with her father, but in this one instance, Meghan was actually right. “So, is she?”
“Is she what?” Simon asked, getting back into the driver’s seat. He quickly strapped himself in, then started up the vehicle.
Madelyn sighed loudly. “Is she coming back?” she repeated her initial question. “Daddy, aren’t you paying attention?” she asked in exasperation.
Now she sounded like her mother, the few times that Nancy had lost her patience with him. Even Madelyn’s inflection was the same. He had to stop doing this, Simon silently lectured himself.
“Sorry,” he apologized, easing away from the curb and waiting for his turn to enter the flow of snail-paced traffic. “My mind was wandering.”
“Where did it go, Daddy?” Meghan asked. At six she was a walking mass of question marks. “I didn’t see it go. Is it really little?” she asked, trying to lean forward. The seat belt restrained her and she wriggled in her seat.
“No, stupid,” Madelyn said impatiently. “Daddy just means he was thinking of something else.”
Which led Meghan to another question. “What, Daddy? What were you thinking of?” the little girl asked him eagerly.
Madelyn joined forces with Meghan and added her voice to her sister’s. “Yeah, what, Daddy?”
He glanced over his shoulder at their inquisitive, lively little faces. God, he wished he could be that young again. That young and able to bounce back from anything.
He couldn’t tell them that he was thinking about their mother, couldn’t chance bringing them down because he was a stickler for the truth. So he lied. It was kinder all around that way.
“I was just thinking about what two little girls might want for dinner.”
“Us, Daddy? Are the two little girls us?” Meghan asked eagerly, her green eyes shining.
“Yes,” he replied. Finally out on the main thoroughfare, he glanced at Meghan in the rearview mirror. The flow of traffic picked up. “The two little girls are you and your sister.”
“You still didn’t answer my question, Daddy,” Madelyn reminded him.
Madelyn was like a bulldog when she got hold of something, he thought. She didn’t let loose until she had what she wanted. In this case, it was answers to her question. This time, he needed no prompting to recall the topic.
“You really liked this woman?”
It was Meghan who piped up first. “Oh, yes, Daddy. She smells good.”
“Not an unimportant quality,” he agreed, amused. The light turned yellow. Alone he would have sped through. But he had the girls with him, so he slowed down and waited. The light turned red a beat later. “Anything else?”
“She talked to us,” Meghan added brightly with enthusiasm.
“All right.” He had already gathered that. So far, he wasn’t sure he understood what the girls’ excitement about the woman was. At least, not on the junior level. Had they been teenage boys instead, he would have easily understood the attraction. Petite, she appeared to have a shapely form and her facial bone structure was such that a plastic surgeon would have wept with envy.
His powers of observation had obviously become more acute.
When had that happened?
Madelyn, his resident little wise woman, apparently had picked up on the fact that he didn’t fully understand what her sister was telling him.
“No, Daddy, she talked to us,” she emphasized. “Not at us, to us. She treats like us people. Like Edna does,” she added in an effort to make him understand what she meant.
And as he didn’t, Simon thought. He knew he was struggling and somewhat remiss in his job as a parent.
As their only parent.
This was tough going. It wasn’t that he didn’t love them—he did, but he just couldn’t show it, didn’t know how to show it or how to express it. Moreover, although they were his blood, he had trouble relating to them.
His own parents had been distant while he was growing up and thus he had no real clue how to talk to his own children, not in the way he felt that Madelyn meant.
That sort of communication had been up to his wife and Edna. They had