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He automatically began turning the screw into the cork. “In all fairness,” he said gruffly, “I should warn you that Claire and I haven’t sat down for a meal together in a month or more. She’s bound to make an excuse tonight.”
For an apparently gentle, pleasant woman, Grace had a steely core. “She can try.”
With a pop, the cork came out. David poured two glasses, held his up, and said, “To a very brave woman.”
She lifted hers in turn. “Courage is in the eye of the beholder.”
They both swallowed.
David leaned one hip against the cabinet and watched her run water into a big pot for the pasta.
“I want you to know that I’m grateful to you for trying this,” he said abruptly.
She clapped a lid on the pot. “All I’m doing is giving your daughter a safe place to stay while you two work out your problems.”
He took another gulp of wine. “I have a bad feeling that you’re underestimating our problems. We don’t have father-daughter tension. Claire hates my guts.”
Her eyes were drenched with compassion. “And loves you, too.”
His laugh hurt. “Sure she does. So much so, she’d rather hitch a ride across three states than stay with me.”
“Thirteen-year-olds don’t think anything bad can happen to them.”
He wasn’t so sure about that. Claire knew that divorce happened, that mothers became drunks, that fathers disappeared from their daughters’ lives.
“Maybe. Just remember,” David said, “if you have trouble with her, you’re not stuck with her.”
“If she doesn’t keep her word, you’ll be the first to know.” She gave him an odd, crooked smile. “Now, would you go yell up the stairs? Tell the girls dinner is ready.”
She made it sound so easy, so casual. Bemused by the idea of being able to call, “Dinner’s ready,” and have his daughter come running in good humor, David went to the foot of the stairs and braced himself for the customary rejection.
“Claire? Linnet? Time for dinner.”
“Okay!” Linnet’s voice floated cheerfully down from above.
David didn’t wait. The less obvious his presence was to Claire, the better.
Back in the kitchen, he discovered Grace had the phone tucked between her shoulder and ear as she took a strainer out of the cupboard and set it in the sink.
“Mom, Claire is a very nice girl.” There was a pause as she lifted the huge steaming pan of pasta to the sink and dumped the spaghetti into the strainer. “No, she won’t be here forever.” Seeing David, she rolled her eyes although her tone was very patient. “Mom, I really can’t talk right now. Claire’s father is here to see his daughter, and I’m putting dinner on the table.”
He mouthed, “Can I help?”
Covering the receiver, she whispered, “Will you put this on the table? Are they coming?”
“Linnet answered me,” he said noncommittally.
“Oh, good. Here.” Grace handed him a heaping bowl of sauce. Then, into the receiver, she said, “No, I wasn’t talking to you, Mom. Listen, I’ll call tomorrow. Say hi to Dad, okay?” She listened for another minute, repeated goodbye and set down the phone, shaking her head. “Maybe we forever feel like teenagers in the presence of our parents.” Her gusty sigh told him she did not look forward to speaking to her mother again. “Oh, well. Okay, here’s the spaghetti.” She handed him this bowl in turn, although clearly she was murmuring to herself now. He could all but see her ticking items off on her fingers. “The garlic bread is on the table and all I have to do is dish up the green beans.”
“Smells good.”
So did she. Close to her, he caught a whiff of an elusive, flowery scent. His gaze lingered on the slender, elegant line of her neck, on tiny wisps of hair against the cream of her skin.
Thank heavens, she didn’t seem to notice his momentary reverie…oh, hell, call a spade a spade—what he’d felt was yet another spark of sexual awareness that was, to put it mildly, highly inconvenient. For crying out loud, this situation was complicated enough without her becoming self-conscious around him, or him having to stonewall yet another emotion. As it was, he couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t developed an ulcer.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Grace suggested, smiling at him. “Pick any place.”
The talking-to he’d just given himself didn’t keep him from noticing how pretty that smile made a face he’d labeled plain.
His daughter’s timing was, as always, impeccable. She chose that moment to slouch into the dining room, Linnet at her heels. She had a gift for killing any good mood of his.
“Oh, girls.” Grace bustled from the kitchen. “I hope you’re hungry. I made tons. Sit, sit!”
“Hello, Claire,” David said quietly.
She rolled her eyes and dropped into a chair.
Grace cleared her throat meaningfully.
Claire stirred, shot him a resentful look and mumbled reluctantly, “Hi.” And I wish it was goodbye, her tone seemed to say.
He was too surprised by getting a semi-civil response to take offense.
“Well…” Grace smiled at them all from her place at one end of the table. “Linnet, why don’t you start the pasta? Claire, would you like garlic bread?”
David’s sense of unreality grew as the meal progressed. An outsider would guess this to be a family—Mom, Pop and kids. Grace, with help from her daughter, maintained a cheerful stream of chatter that disguised Claire’s sullenness and David’s monosyllabic responses to his hostess’s occasional questions. He had the queasy feeling that he was delicately balanced over a deadly precipice.
Claire had come to the table. She was keeping her head bent, but she was eating. She even laughed once at something her friend said. She wasn’t refusing to break bread with her father. She wasn’t shooting him dagger looks. She was following Grace Blanchet’s first rule of basic civility.
It stung, of course, to know that she was trying this hard only because she was so desperate to stay here, to not have to go home with him.
But she was trying.
And David knew damn well it would take only the smallest misstep on his part to fuel one of her explosions. So he couldn’t make that misstep. Unfortunately, his care made him a lousy guest. Not by glance or tone did Grace acknowledge that this meal was anything but a pleasure.
The girls were done and looking restless when she said, as casually as when she asked him to summon their daughters to dinner, “David, Linnet’s thinking about trying out for the middle school play on Wednesday. Claire is considering the idea, too. At the very least, she wants to stay and watch the audition. Unfortunately, I have a meeting that might run until almost six. PTA board. We’re planning the autumn dance and carnival. I hate to have the girls hanging around waiting too long. Any chance you could pick them up?”
“A play?” He couldn’t help sounding startled. Claire? On stage? And taking direction from someone in a position of authority?
“I told you he’d be busy,” Claire said, not looking at him.
“No. Of course I can pick them up.” He ventured a toe in the waters, speaking directly to his daughter. “I just didn’t realize you were interested in theater, Claire.”
She slouched lower in the chair and twirled her hair on her finger. “I don’t know if I am.”
Grace was looking at him with obvious appeal. Persuade her, those extraordinary eyes begged. Be a father.
What a joke. If he said a single damned word in favor of the idea, Claire would…
Whoa.
He gave his idea a lightning assessment and deemed it sound.
“It would mean a lot of reading and memorization.” He sipped his wine, shrugged. “And it’s no fun to try out and not get a part.”
Claire’s eyes flashed at him. “That figures! You’re so sure I wouldn’t!”
“I didn’t say that,” he argued mildly. “What’s the play?”
“Much Ado About Nothing,” Linnet contributed, her anxiety about the new-sprung tension evident in the way she hastened to fill the silence. “You know. Shakespeare.”
Grace made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh, buried in her napkin.
“I know that one,” David said, straight-faced. “Beatrice and Benedick. The wimpy Hero and the jerk…what’s his name?”
“Claudio,” Linnet supplied. She frowned. “You think Hero is a wimp?”
He saw the error of his ways. Hero was undoubtedly her dream part, and with reason: she was no Beatrice. “Actually,” he said hastily, “she is probably a realistic product of her time and class. She didn’t have much choice but to marry the man her father chose.” Not an idea Claire would embrace, he realized belatedly, and not a good idea as a topic at this dinner table. Turning to her, he asked, “Which part were you thinking about?”
Her chin shot up. “Beatrice.”
She had the fire, in a preteen sort of way. He found that he badly wanted her to go out on a limb and try for this.
He nodded, managing to make his expression subtly doubtful.
Fury on her face, Claire said to Grace, “I am going to try out.”
“Oh, good.” She smiled warmly. “Darn. I wish I could see the audition. Except Linnet would be embarrassed if her mom was there. For which I don’t blame her. Listen, do you want me to be an audience tonight when you practice?”
“Yeah, cool,” they said almost in tandem.
“Then I’ll clean the kitchen if you two want to go take your showers and get ready for school.”
Silverware clattered and chairs scraped on the wood floor as they raced for the door. David watched them go, then braced himself yet again. He hated this feeling, as though he was a high school kid in trouble waiting outside the principal’s office. He resented the fact that this woman, a stranger, was able to sit in judgment of him.
Grace said not a word until the thunder on the stairs was followed by a slammed door upstairs. Then she grinned. “Well done.”
Some of the tension in his neck eased. “I expected you to chew me out.”
“It’s hardly my place.” She laughed. “Well, maybe I would, in my bossy way. But I could tell what you were doing. You won’t get away with it very many times. She’ll start to catch on.”
David grimaced. “I just hope she actually gets a part. If not Beatrice, at least the maid who plays foot-sie with the scumbag. What’s his name. Don John.” He got back to the point. “Her ego is delicate right now, to put it mildly.”
“Mmm,” she agreed. “I hope they both get parts. They’re getting along great right now, and we don’t need any jealousy to interfere.”
Another horrifying possibility.
Slowly he said, “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“Heavens, no!” Grace stood. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I’ll just clear the table and—”
“I’ll help.”
Against her protests, he gathered dishes and even insisted on rinsing them and loading the dishwasher while she put leftovers in the refrigerator and got out cream and sugar for the coffee.
There seemed to be no polite way to excuse himself although he guessed she was no more excited about a further tête-à-tête than he was.
He felt raw in her presence. She knew more about him than anyone but his closest friend. Not many people knew even the basic facts: that his ex-wife was an alcoholic, that he’d sloughed off responsibility for his daughter, that she’d come to live with him because she was in trouble at school. Never mind that she had run away three times.
But this woman had seen how desperate Claire was to escape him, how pathetic he was as a parent and had been, presumably, as a husband. She had a clear gaze that seemed to see right through what few pretenses he still possessed to wear as protection. She must despise him, but unless she wanted to be saddled with Claire permanently, it was smart of her to encourage his effort to build some kind of decent relationship with his daughter.
He gave a soft grunt of rueful amusement. No, Grace Blanchet would not want his sulky daughter permanently.
In the interest of speeding up this obligatory social interlude, he took a gulp of his coffee.
Grace sat back down at her place at the table. “Tell me, what do you do for a living?” she asked, her gaze inquiring, interested, all that a good hostess’s should be.
“Didn’t Claire tell you?”
“She said you’re a businessman.” Enunciating the one word with a hint of distaste, Grace suggested the sneer his daughter had worn when she spoke it.
“I’m a vice president with International Parcel Service. We focus primarily on quick service for businesses, versus the birthday gift to Tulsa.”
She nodded. “The law firm where I work uses IPS.”
“I’m in charge of day-to-day operations as well as some long-term planning. If an airplane is grounded in Boston because of ice, it’s my problem.”
“That sounds stressful.”
“I like problem solving. I don’t find the job stressful in the sense that it’s affecting my blood pressure.” He made a sound. “If I’m getting high blood pressure, it’s this thing with Claire doing it to me.”
“Do you work really long hours?” She sounded tentative.
He realized with a start of irritation that she was, in a sense, interviewing him. He was being judged again. The counselor had asked him the same question. Was he supposed to quit his job? Claire was a teenager! It wasn’t as if he was leaving a two-year-old in day care fourteen hours a day.
“Sometimes,” he said tersely. After a moment, he decided reluctantly that she deserved better. Shrugging, he expanded. “Long days—and sometimes nights—goes with the territory. On the other hand, when the weather is good, the pilots aren’t threatening a strike, and we haven’t committed some PR faux pas, my schedule isn’t too bad. When a crisis threatens, sometimes whether I can get home for dinner or not is out of my hands. That’s a drawback when you’re a single parent.”
Grace made a face. “No kidding. I may be the only parent of a teenager in this town who can’t wait until her kid gets a driver’s license.”
Claire behind the wheel…he shuddered.
Almost apologetically, she said, “Linnet has common sense. Knock on wood. It’s always scary, I imagine, but she’s not the kind to drink and drive or speed.”
He could live without hearing about the perfect kid. The way Claire was going, by the time she was sixteen, she’d have her eyebrows and nose pierced, be pregnant by a nineteen-year-old boyfriend who played drums in band, and be a high school dropout.
Unless this woman, Saint Grace, could pull Claire’s bacon out of the fire.
He did hate having to be grateful.
