First Time, Forever, page 4
Mac couldn’t resist the game. “I love you more than a toad loves its warts.”
And suddenly the anger melted from his face, and he was just her sweet little boy again. And he said, “Did you make me spaghetti for supper?”
“Just for you.” Why did that sound like a lie?
He smiled. “I love you more than a pizza loves pepperoni.”
It seemed to Evan that all of life really turned on a hair. He glanced in the back seat, where Jesse was fast asleep in his car seat. A little puddle of drool was forming on the tiny Western shirt Jesse had spotted at the Outpost several days ago. It had been on a mannequin, and Jesse had stood in front of it, silent, his eyes large with wanting. It had broken Evan’s heart that he didn’t ask. He’d bought it for him anyway. Now he was having trouble getting the shirt off his son long enough to put it in the washer.
He looked back at the long ribbon of road and thought, a choice made here, a split second there, and everything changes.
He’d met Dee at a rodeo, she a top-rated barrel racer in sequins and tight jeans, he a not so highly rated bull rider with quite a bit more nerve than talent. She had short blond curly hair and huge brown eyes, and a tiny china doll figure that belied the power she showed on a horse. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. She was also the only woman he’d ever met who could match him drink for drink, who could party all night and go all day. Maybe he should have taken that as a danger sign, but he hadn’t.
Now, he wondered sometimes, if he’d gone to a different rodeo that day, or stayed at home, or had a flat tire, or taken a wrong turn, maybe he would have never met Dee. Maybe that little life in the back seat would have never happened.
All of life turned on these split-second decisions that a man had no hope of recognizing at the time he made them.
And here he was again.
His life turning on a hair.
If he hadn’t been in town yesterday, his life wouldn’t be intertwining with hers, with Kathleen Miles. If Mac had snapped off a different antenna, everything would be, well, different.
He wouldn’t be driving home to his empty house, thinking about the smell that had been wafting out her open porch door. Something mouthwatering. Italian. And thinking about that U-haul out front, still as full as it had been yesterday.
“Evan, don’t even think about turning this truck around,” he ordered himself.
Just as firmly he told himself he was not thinking of Kathleen Miles romantically. Not at all. He was a man who had learned his lessons about romance. What had she said?
Oh, yeah. Romance was distinctly upsetting. Apparently she had learned her lessons, too.
So, why, if he had learned his lessons, had he been absolutely compelled to ask her if she’d been asked out? He knew she would have been. Those guys that had lined up three-deep at the café window yesterday would have lost no time in getting over to the Outpost to check her out today.
Her response to them was none of his business. None. Still, there was no denying he felt happy that they had all struck out with her.
Not, he thought darkly, that Sookie Peters was going to take no for an answer. Kathleen was too beautiful. Sookie would be back over at the Outpost tomorrow, probably with a little bouquet of flowers, and lots of sweet talk. Kathleen didn’t date? That wouldn’t be a problem for Sookie. He’d think of a way for it not to be a date.
In fact, Sookie probably wouldn’t wait until tomorrow. He was probably at her place right now, unloading that U-haul, and getting himself invited in for a homemade dinner. That wouldn’t be a date, would it? No, sir, that would just be being neighborly.
Dinner. Evan tried to think what he had at home that would qualify and hit all four food groups at the same time. Frozen pizza. Canned stew. Before Jesse he would have thought a food group was the fries next to the burger on his plate. But that lady lawyer in Swift Current had told him, when Dee’s parents had been acting as if they were going to challenge him over guardianship, that he would have to be really aware of things like that. Nutrition. Child psychology.
He suddenly felt achingly lonely and overwhelmed.
“Don’t you dare turn the truck around,” he said to himself. “You can’t just show up at a woman’s house at dinnertime, hoping she’ll feed you.”
In exchange for unloading her U-haul, the other voice said indignantly.
The kind of thing a white knight might do, except a real knight wouldn’t expect dinner.
Sighing, recognizing all life turned on a hair, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it, Evan Atkins slowed, stopped and turned his truck around.
He told himself that she looked like the kind of woman who might know a thing or two about potty-training.
Chapter Three
“Oh,” Mac said, through the screen. “It’s you. Auntie Kathy, Colonel Klink is here. And he brought Mr. Stinky Pants with him. Is Mr. Stinky Pants alive?”
“Yeah, he’s just sleeping.” Evan could feel his son’s warm breath against his shoulder.
“Hi,” Evan said, when she appeared at the door. Did she look pleased to see him? Even after that introduction?
“I’m sorry,” she said, tossing an annoyed look back at Mac. She had a tea towel over her shoulder, and her hair was falling out of her ponytail and curling around her face. “Where does he come up with this stuff?”
The smells coming out that door were even more heavenly than before.
“Hogan’s Heroes,” Evan guessed. “Late night.” He knew all about late nights.
“Is this your son?” A good sign. Not, What are you doing back here?
“Jesse,” he said, “otherwise known as Mr. Stinky Pants.”
She smiled and came out the door and looked at Jesse’s sleeping face. She reached out and touched a blond curl.
“He’s gorgeous,” she said, her voice rich with tenderness, “He’s just like a little angel.”
A man could not be jealous of his three-year-old son. It was not permissible. Especially when he was not here about romance, heaven forbid. Simply being neighborly. Or a knight, however one wanted to look at it. Still, a man would probably go a long way to have a woman look at him with that kind of bone-melting sweetness.
“I was thinking if you had a place I could lay him down, I’d haul that stuff in from the trailer for you.”
“Oh,” she said, and blushed.
Who would think a woman that age could blush? He tried to figure out her age. Older than him. Mid-thirties, maybe. One of those women who aged with uncommon grace, her body full and ripe, her face kind, her dark eyes steady and serene. Why was it women thought they needed to be forever young when he found this so appealing?
Women liked him. That had been a fact of his life for as long as he could remember. But it always seemed to be a certain kind that was attracted to him—young, full of breathless giggles and chatter, dyed blond hair and shirts that showed off their belly buttons. Women who didn’t blush, and who seemed to like the word cool best out of the entire English language, who wore red, red lipstick and chewed gum. An evening with a woman like that left him feeling so empty and exhausted he’d pretty much given up on it. Especially now that Jesse was home.
But he could tell just by looking at her, just by looking at her eyes, that Kathleen Miles was a different sort of woman—one of those women who would truly keep getting better as she got older.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “Come in.”
She held open the door for him. Underlying the smell of garlic and butter and onions, he could smell lemon-scented cleaner and window shine. And her.
No Poison or White Shoulders or Shalimar, just her, clean and fresh and real.
Her house was still practically empty, but spotless now, the walls dirt free, the floor sparkling, no dust motes or spiderwebs anywhere, not even in the corners. Evan thought of how the floors in his house had become a little bit sticky, handprints multiplying on his walls.
Mac had disappeared, but Evan could hear loud music from behind a closed door. “Don’t go messin’ with a son-of-a…” A song he’d practically considered his theme song ten years ago. Kids were still listening to it? And watching Hogan’s Heroes? Maybe he and Mac had more in common than a two-story high pile of manure that had to be moved.
“In here,” she said.
He followed her into a bedroom that only yesterday had seemed cold and empty and a bit ugly. Today it had her mattress in the middle of the floor, all neatly made up in white eyelet, so feminine and pretty it made his mouth go dry.
“I don’t think I better put him on that.” He thought of the rumple of sheets and blankets on his bed at home. When was the last time he’d made a bed?
“It washes,” she said with a shrug.
In his house, “it washes” didn’t necessarily mean it got washed. It got put in one of those piles that he did his best to ignore until he or Jesse started running out of stuff to wear.
He laid his son down on her bed, hoping the shirt that Jesse had had on for three days wouldn’t leave any smudges on the pristine white of her bedspread. He noticed she had hung a white sheet over the window, and tied it back with a bow. It lifted with the breeze, and fluttered and made him think, irrationally, of things exotic and mysterious and feminine. How could those two small changes to the room make it feel so different than it had felt yesterday?
“I’ll get your bed frame set up,” he said. “You shouldn’t be sleeping on the floor.”
“I know,” she said. “The mice will be running over my face.”
He decided not to tell her the plus side of living in rattlesnake country. They did keep the rodent population under control.
“Would you like something to eat first? It’s almost ready.”
“Well,” he hesitated, “if you insist.”
She didn’t even look suspicious! He followed her into the kitchen. It, too, hadn’t had much done to it, though it sparkled with cleanliness. He thought if he moved every stick of furniture in his kitchen outside onto the lawn he could do this, too. Just bring in a garden hose and spray down the whole kitchen—blast the jam off the floor, the spots off the countertops, the grime off the stove, the fingerprints off the fridge. A good project for summertime, when the cattle were less work.
He looked out the window. Sookie Peters drove by, spotted his truck and kept going. He and Sookie had duked it out in Grade Eleven. Over Betty Sue McDonald. He hadn’t had to reestablish dominance since then.
Betty Sue had been real pretty. Smith, now. She and her husband lived in Swift Current. The last time he’d seen her he’d noticed how her prettiness was fading, petals falling off a rose.
No doubt about it. Kathleen Miles had a hardier kind of beauty, growing more lustrous, rather than fading, like those flowers that look their best in the autumn. Probably not one single person in her high school would have recognized that for what it was.
“Was that an old red truck driving by?” she asked from the stove.
“Hmm.” Was she expecting Sookie?
“It’s driven by here about half a dozen times. Do you think I should call the police?”
“Call the police?” he asked. “On Sookie?” Come to think of it, it might be kind of fun.
“On who?”
“Sookie Peters. He was probably one of the guys in the Outpost today trying to get your phone number.”
“Oh! I thought it was some sort of weirdo. Maybe watching Mac.”
It was tempting to brand Sookie as a weirdo, but the white knight, stronger now because he was going to do a good deed and move her furniture for her, gave him a little prod. “Kathleen, I know those kind of weirdos don’t generally hang out signs, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have any in Hopkins Gulch. You are one big city woman, aren’t you?”
“I am. I grew up in Vancouver. Can you imagine? This is the first time I’ve been away.”
She tested her spaghetti sauce, then held out the spoon to him.
It was a ridiculous thing to find sexy. Ridiculous. But when he put his lips on the spoon where hers had been he felt weak with pleasure.
Because of the spaghetti sauce, he told himself. “That’s pretty good,” he told her, an understatement. But if he said what he felt, orgasmic, she’d for sure think he was weirder than Sookie.
“More garlic?” she asked him.
“You can never have too much garlic.” She had a little speck of sauce on the corner of her lip. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it.
“Could you look through those boxes and see if you can find me a colander?” she asked, turning back to her sauce.
“Like with months on it?”
She laughed. “Handy in the kitchen, Mr. Atkins?”
“Pathetic, Miss Miles.”
“A colander. Mine’s red plastic. With holes in it. For draining spaghetti.”
“Oh, that kind of calendar.” He opened a box and looked through it, keeping one eye on her. He shouldn’t have come back here. Really. What did he have for a spine, anyway? One of those noodles?
A woman like that could make life complicated without half trying.
But only, he reminded himself, if the romance part developed, the distinctly upsetting stuff. And that didn’t have to happen. No, sir. He was going to eat spaghetti, and unload boxes, and then get the hell out of here and never come back. Except to pick up Mac in the morning. And again the morning after that. And again the morning after that.
Life had already turned. You couldn’t make it turn back.
He found the colander. “Defective,” he told her. “It’s missing November.”
A stupid thing to say, but she rewarded him by laughing. She laughed again when they heard old Sookie’s truck grind by.
“Maybe you should call the police,” he said, taking the little sample of garlic bread she handed him. “Of course, he’ll most likely have given up and gone home by the time they get here.”
“Why? How long does it take them to get here?”
“Depends where they are, but they don’t have a station around here, anywhere. I guess it could take an hour or two.”
“An hour or two? What about emergencies?”
“What kind of emergency?” he asked. The garlic bread was perfect—crunchy on the edges, soggy with butter in the middle.
“Like a home invasion.”
He laughed out right. “I think we did have one of those…1995. Cal Peters got drunk and Mrs. Maude Butterfield found him on her chesterfield in the morning.”
“Cal Peters? Any relation to the Peters driving around and around my block?”
“Brothers.”
“Does Suckie drink? And wind up in strange houses?”
He decided not to correct her pronunciation. “He drinks some. I think he usually manages to make it to his own house, though.”
“I’m reassured,” she said, casting him a glance. “I’m serious. What do you do in case of an emergency. Like a house break-in?”
“A house break-in? Robbers?”
She nodded, serious.
He tried not to laugh again. “Half the houses in this town don’t have locks. The other half have a loaded shotgun behind the back door.”
“Loaded?”
Her eyes were huge, as if she thought she’d moved to a place where she was going to be in mortal danger all the time.
“Coyotes,” he said. “Skunks. Rattlesnakes. But no robbers. No robber in his right—”
“Rattlesnakes?” she breathed. “Are you serious?”
He was sorry he’d let that slip.
“What about that kind of emergency?” she demanded, her voice shaky. “When someone gets bitten by a snake kind of emergency?”
“That’s a pretty rare occurrence. Rattlesnakes are basically shy creatures that don’t like to be bothered.”
“But when somebody does bother one of them?” she persisted. “And it bites them? Then what?”
“I guess folks around here grow up knowing they’ve got to rely on themselves and their neighbors if things go wrong. And they get pretty good at it.”
“What about me? I grew up with 9–1-1! I’d be terrible in an emergency. Especially an emergency that involved a snake!”
“Kathleen, are you one of those people who has a tendency to worry? About things that never happen?”
She began to breathe again, smiled faintly. “How could you tell?”
“You got this little wrinkle, right here, between your eyes.” He put his forefinger to his own forehead.
She rubbed at her worry wrinkle self-consciously.
“In the unlikely event you have to deal with an emergency, your neighbors will help you out,” he told her.
“My neighbors? Like the Peters brothers?” She quit rubbing the worry spot and frowned at him.
What he wanted to say was, You can call me. Anytime. What are knights for, anyway? But he was half an hour away, a long, long way if there was a snake in the basement. “You got a nice old couple on your west side here. Retired farmers. Sandersons. And the Watsons.”
“Oh.”
“If it’s a medical emergency, like a snakebite, they bring in the helicopter. Med evac just like M.A.S.H.” More late-night programming. “Meanwhile, a little snake sense goes a long way.”
“Snake sense,” she repeated. She gave the worry wrinkle another little rub.
“Don’t be reaching into any dark corners in your basement, especially behind that old furnace.”
“My basement? My basement? The basement through that door right over there?”
“The noodles are boiling over,” he said gently.
She turned to them with a little cry of dismay, and he realized unless he wanted dinner ruined he better wrap up the snake talk.
“Nobody’s seen a rattler in town for a while.” He didn’t add that the last time one had been seen it was cuddled up right behind Maude’s furnace in her basement. Maybe Maude attracted varmints of various varieties.
Spaghetti was the world’s hardest food to eat with dignity, but it made it easier that she didn’t have a table set up yet. The weather was unusually hot, so they took their plates out on the porch and sat on the steps. He noticed she rolled her noodles up neatly against her spoon and popped them in her mouth.
