Marissa giggled, her nose wrinkling and her eyes crinkling up. “You and your lists.”
“Don’t poke fun. They work.”
“So let’s get started, then. Go bang on some doors. Anything is better than being holed up in this dump.” Marissa exploded off the bed and started a search for her shoes. A loud dull thunk resounded from the bed’s wooden toe-kick. “Ow! I stubbed my toe!”
“What? Is it—” Kimberly forced herself to stay calm. “Are you hurt?” She tried to ask this casually, as if she was a normal mom with a normal kid.
“Yes, I’m hurt! It hurts really bad—” Marissa hopped on one leg back to the bed, where she examined her toe. Kimberly could see no sign of injury.
The bruise would come later. And it would tell the story.
“Relax, Mom. It’s okay. Nobody ever died from a stubbed toe, it just hurts. Normal kid hurt, okay? No need to get all worked up. Why do they put that under there anyway?”
“To make it easier to clean up—if it’s blocked off, nobody can put anything under the bed,” Kimberly told her. She rose. “I don’t know if we can find anyone—”
“You mean, like a body? That would be creepy, wouldn’t it? Finding a body under the bed?” She shuddered dramatically.
Kimberly succumbed to the temptation of a heavenward gaze and shook her head. “I think they had in mind something more like dust bunnies or an absentminded eleven-year-old’s flip-flops. Like I was saying, it’s almost five o’clock, so I’m not sure what we can get accomplished today. Are you ready for some dinner somewhere?”
“I so can’t believe I’m asking this.” Marissa shook her head in doleful disbelief. “And if you put this on Facebook, I will deny it to my dying day. But can we go somewhere that’s not fast food? I miss real food. I miss you making me eat my vegetables. Can we go somewhere with some broccoli or something so that I can eat it and gag, and then enjoy a hamburger again?”
Marissa’s crooked little grin warmed Kimberly.
“Sure. Open that drawer there and hand me the phone book—”
But her request was interrupted by a knock on the door. They exchanged glances. Marissa held up her hands and in playful mock seriousness pronounced, “I didn’t do nothin’.”
Kimberly stepped to the door and stared through the peephole.
Daniel.
With shaking fingers, she unbolted the security lock and swung the door wide to allow the fire chief entry. “Daniel! I—I honestly wasn’t expecting you. Uh, come in!”
He didn’t budge from the threshold. Instead, he rested one hand on the doorjamb and shuffled a work-boot-clad foot before he said, “Actually...I just came by to— Uh, I was wondering. Would you two care for some supper?”
Kimberly was gobsmacked by the invitation. Was this his way of gearing up to tell them who Marissa’s birth mother was? Her thoughts were so weighed down with a blur of questions and pulsating hope that she couldn’t even give him an answer.
“Is it fast food?” Marissa blurted into the silence.
Regret etched his features. His rangy frame began turning away, as if they’d said no. “Uh, no. I wasn’t thinking of something quick. Sorry, I guess I didn’t consider what a kid might like to eat. I’ll leave you two to your—”
“I’m in!” Marissa bounced off the bed, the total antithesis of the pensive child she’d been a few minutes before. “Mom? You need your purse?”
FOR THE FIRST few minutes in the truck, silence reigned. Yes, Daniel had switched off the radio as it blared a staticky sports talk show when they’d driven out of the parking lot, but after that, he didn’t offer much in the way of small talk.
The way he drove, his strong hands lightly gripping the steering wheel at precisely ten o’clock and two o’clock, his eyes flicking between the rearview mirror and the road ahead, the speedometer never straying above the posted speed limit, didn’t encourage Kimberly to attempt any conversation.
Marissa, she noted wryly, didn’t break the silence, either, despite her enthusiastic acceptance of Daniel’s invitation. Something about wheels turning on a vehicle signaled her to slap her earbuds in and listen to whatever was on her iPod. And as soon as she had slid into the crew cab seat of Daniel’s pristine truck, she’d done just that.
So Kimberly occupied herself with absorbing the sights. The town was small by Atlanta standards, but it was busy. The four-lane they were on, while not exactly choked with traffic, still held a good number of impatient five-o’clock drivers.
She watched as they passed by a host of fast-food joints and several casual dining choices—a steak house, a buffet-style restaurant, a Mexican place, something that looked like a mom-and-pop Italian pizzeria. Strip malls gave way to the downtown, its buildings showing signs of a recent facelift and heavy on planters filled with bright annuals, stores with colorful awnings and sidewalks with strips of deep redbrick.
When Daniel passed up the two downtown restaurants shoehorned among jewelry stores, boutiques and a bakery, something niggled in the back of her mind.
That something went to full-alert status as he made a turn onto a familiar-looking highway heading out of town.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
It took him a minute to respond, almost as if he didn’t register what she’d asked at first. “Oh! Didn’t I say? Sorry. Out to the farm. Is that okay? We’re having supper out there, and I thought...since it was Marissa...”
A peek over her shoulder netted Kimberly a quick averted glance from Marissa, but not before she had seen a flash of telltale curiosity. So. Marissa had been listening in on the conversation despite the earbuds.
Kimberly swiveled a bit in her seat to face Daniel. “Your mom won’t mind? We don’t want to intrude—”
He took a hand off the steering wheel, waved it to dismiss her concern. “No, Ma was all for it. And so was everybody else.”
“Everybody else?” Exactly what was she walking into? Kimberly didn’t mind standing up in front of thirty students to hammer the intricacies of English grammar into their heads, but she’d never been great at social gatherings.
She’d been a shy child who’d grown into a shy teenager, much to the disappointment of her social extrovert of a mother. Between working an unending series of low-paying jobs as a waitress or bartender and blowing off steam with her current group of party-hardy friends, her mother had pretty much left Kimberly to her own devices.
Daniel seemed to thaw a bit. His eyes, that amazing sky blue, crinkled at the corners, his mouth curved up and his whole demeanor lightened. “I gotta warn you, it’s a brood of us. Ma had six of us, three boys and three girls, and so the house is always rocking. I hope you don’t mind kids, because there’s probably a half dozen around all the time.”
“Yours?” Was he married? She realized she was disappointed—and that she’d already checked out his ringless third finger without even being aware she had.
“Oh, no. My sisters’ kids—let’s see, there’s Taylor and Sean and the twins, and Cassandra, and—”
He kept reeling off names, and every additional one made her palms grow even damper. This sounded more like a family reunion than supper—and it turned her stomach into the headquarters for a butterfly convention.
Those butterflies were in mad midflutter when Daniel turned onto