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Looking at him was the last thing she wanted to do. But what choice did she have? She cleared her throat as discreetly as possible, then met his gaze. “Just tired, is all,” she said, but the cant of his eyebrows told her he didn’t buy it for a minute.
“That stain, though …”
She tried a smile, anything to remove the sudden wariness in his features. “Hey, you hear a kid cry, you don’t even think about getting dirty, you just want to make it all better.”
He watched her for a long, hard moment, during which she could practically see the gears shifting in his thought. “You follow your instincts, in other words.”
“Well, yes, I suppose—”
“So why do you think your partners elected you to do the footwork?”
Nothing like a conversational right turn to obliterate self-pity. Dana blinked, then said, “I have no idea, actually. In fact, I tried to get out of it.”
“Because?”
She sighed, wadding her napkin into a ball. “Let’s just say decision making’s not my strong suit. Which I’m sure comes as no surprise.”
“And yet …” C.J. leaned forward, shoving his empty glass to one side so he could clasp his hands together, his eyes holding her fast. “Cass tells me you’re not only a financial whiz, but have a real flair for decorating kids’ rooms, as well.”
Another blush stole up her neck. “Well, yes, I suppose, but—”
“She also said if anyone could find Great Expectations’ next home, it would be you, because you wouldn’t make a decision until you were absolutely positive it was the right decision.”
He reached across the table, briefly touching her wrist. His fingers were cool, a little rough. And suddenly squarely back in front of him, leaving a mild, buzzing sensation in their place.
“Trust your instincts, Miss Malone. The same way you trust your instincts about how to handle children. It’s a gift. Be … be grateful for it. So …”
His posture shifted with his train of thought, giving her a chance to anticipate the next right turn. “Now I have a better idea of what to show you next time.” He shrugged. “No big deal.”
No big deal, her fanny. Never in all her born days had she met a man who could put her so much at ease and keep her so off-kilter at the same time.
“So,” C.J. said, “what day looks good for you to take another stab at this?”
Dana sucked on her empty spoon for a moment, squinting slightly at those lovely, keep-your-distance eyes. The spoon clanged against the inside of the glass when she dropped it in. She looked up, pasted on a smile.
“How’s Friday look?”
Grateful for an excuse to look away from that far too trenchant gaze, C.J. scrolled through his Palm Pilot, then nodded. “First thing in the morning looks good. Say … nine?”
“Perfect,” she said, then stood. “Is there a restroom here? I hope.”
“In back. Not ritzy, but it works.”
“That’s all I ask,” she said, then headed toward the back of the diner. No less than a half-dozen male heads turned to watch her progress.
“Hey, C.J.! How’s it goin’?”
With a smile for Felix, the diner’s owner, C.J. picked up the check the bulky man had dropped in front of him. “Oh, fine. This heat’s a killer, though.”
A chuckle rumbled from underneath Felix’s heavy, salt-and-pepper mustache. “I’m surprised you haven’t already melted, my friend. Maria’s already smacked me twice for staring!” He leaned close enough for C.J. to smell twenty years’ worth of sopapillas on his white apron. “These women who think we want them skinny, they got it all wrong, no? Give me a woman I’m not afraid is going to break, anytime.”
C.J. swallowed a smile. Felix’s wife certainly fit the bill there. He handed a ten to the grinning proprietor, told him to keep the change, then stood as Dana emerged from the restroom … and a vaguely familiar female voice said, “C.J.? What on earth are you doing here?” right behind him.
He turned to find himself face-to-face with an artfully streaked blonde in one of those short, shapeless dresses and a tennis visor, flanked on either side by miniature versions of herself, twin girls who could have been anywhere between three and seven.
He thought back. Five, he decided, had to be the cut-off.
“I thought that was you when I came in,” the woman said, perfect teeth flashing, the ends of her straight, gleaming hair skimming her shoulders. “We don’t live far, the girls love the milkshakes here.” The grin widened. “My goodness, it’s been way too long. How are you? You look terrific!”
“Um, you, too.” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Dana’s approach, her raised eyebrows. “Well, well,” C.J. said, glancing at the little girls. “You’ve certainly been busy, haven’t you …?”
“Oh. Hello.” The blonde offered Dana a cool smile, and C.J. thought, I’m dead.
“Dana Malone, this is …”
“Cybill Sparks,” she mercifully supplied, assessing Dana as only a female who feels her territory threatened can. Never mind that he hadn’t even seen the woman—with whom he’d had a brief (and not particularly sweet, as he recalled) affair—in years. Or that she’d clearly moved on.
A weird blend of protectiveness and irritation spiked through C.J., even as Dana, her smile as gracious as Cybill’s was frozen, said, “C.J.’s my Realtor. We were just scouting out properties for my store.”
Which was apparently sufficient to silence Cybill’s Incoming Threat alarm. “Oh? What do you sell?” she asked, her smile more natural again. “Not women’s clothing, I presume?”
A moment passed. “No, a children’s store. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” Dana grinned for the twins, who had ducked behind their mother’s legs and were both smiling up at her with wide blue eyes. “Great Expectations?”
“Ohmigod, yes! I love that store! We’re in there all the time! With four sets of grandparents, the girls get far more clothes than they could ever wear. It’s so great having someplace to unload them. Especially since I can make a few bucks on the deal.” She laughed. “Although don’t tell any of the grands!”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Dana muttered, but Cybill’s attention had already slithered back to C. J. Her hand landed on his arm, her expression downright rapacious. “I’ve been meaning to call you for, gosh, ages.”
“To let me know you were married?” C.J. said lightly.
“No, silly, to let you know I’m divorced! My number’s the same, so give me a call sometime.” Another tooth flash. “With all those grandparents, it’s no trouble at all finding a sitter on short notice! Nice to meet you,” she tossed dismissively in Dana’s direction, then steered the children toward the counter.
Dana waited until they’d gotten outside to laugh.
“What’s so damned funny?” C.J. grumbled.
“You had no idea who she was, did you?”
“Of course I knew who she was,” he said, giving his lungs a second to adjust to the breath-sucking heat. “It was just her name that temporarily escaped me.”
“That is seriously pathetic.”
“Not nearly as pathetic as the way she threw herself at me,” he muttered.
“True. For a moment there I thought she was going to unhinge her jaws and swallow you whole. I take it she’s an old girlfriend?” she asked over his grunt.
“She’d like to think so. But I swear, the kids aren’t mine.”
She chuckled again, a sound he realized he enjoyed. Very much. He stole a glance at her profile as they walked to the car, thinking what a bundle of contradictions she was—self-deprecating one minute, completely comfortable with teasing him the next. About another woman’s putting the moves on him, no less.
He literally shook his head to clear it.
“So what happened?” Dana said as they got to the car and C.J. beeped it unlocked.
“Nothing, in the long run. Much to her chagrin.”
Once in the car, they clicked their seat belts in place almost simultaneously. “So tell me …” Dana briefly checked her makeup in the visor mirror, then turned to him, amusement glittering in her eyes. “Do women launch themselves at you on a regular basis?”
C.J. wasn’t sure which startled him more—the question itself or the ingenuousness underpinning it. He met Dana’s curious, open gaze and thought, There’s something different about this one, even as he said, “You do realize there’s no way I can answer that and keep either my dignity or your respect intact?”
“My … respect?”
He twisted the key in the ignition, backed out of the lot. “A Realtor who doesn’t have his clients’ respect isn’t going to get very far.”
“I see.” She faced front again, severing what he realized had been a gossamer-thin thread of connection, leaving him feeling both annoyed and relieved, which made no sense whatsoever. “Thanks,” she said, her voice definitely a shade darker than moments before. “For the soda, I mean. I needed that. And I promise not to be such a worrywart on Friday.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he said lightly, wondering why her soft laugh in response sent a chill marching up his spine.
In combat boots.
Sometime later, Dana let herself into her parents’ Northeast Heights home, breathing in the pomander of swamp-cooled air, that night’s fried chicken and a brief whiff of fresh roses, at once comforting and disquieting in its immutability. Her pull here tonight was equally comforting, equally disquieting. Tonight, she needed home, even though, paradoxically, this was the one place guaranteed to remind her of those areas of her life currently running on empty.
She found her father first, molded to a leather recliner in the family room, a can of diet soda clutched in one thick-fingered hand, the baseball game on the movie-theater-sized TV screen reflected in his glasses.
“Hey, Daddy. Whatcha up to?”
Gene Malone jerked up his head and grinned, his thinning hair fanned out behind his head like a limp peacock’s tail.
“Hey, there, baby!” he said over the announcer’s mellow drone. “What brings you around?”
Her father, a Sandia Labs retiree, was rounder, and balder, than he used to be, but the humor simmering behind his pea-soup-colored eyes was the same as always. Dana bent over to kiss his forehead, then crackled onto the plastic-armored sofa beside the chair, staring at the TV. “Nothing much. Just hadn’t seen y’all in a bit.” Trying to keep from frowning, she studied his face. “How’re you feeling?”
“Never better.” A heart “episode” the year before had scared the willies out of them; unfortunately, she strongly suspected he wasn’t following his diet and exercise regimen as scrupulously as he should. Especially when he said, “You know, this eating more chicken and fish routine really seems to be helping. I haven’t felt this good in ages.”
Uh-huh. Somehow, she didn’t think fried chicken was what the doctor had in mind. “Glad to hear it, Daddy. Where’s Mama?”
“In the den, sewing. Leastways, that’s what she said she was gonna do.” The leather squeaked when he shifted. “You know Trish called?”
This was news. “No. When?”
“Day or so ago, I don’t remember.”
“She say where she was?”
“Have no idea. You’ll have to ask your mother.”
Wondering, and not for the first time, how two people could live together for so long and talk to each other so little, she left her father to cheer on whoever and headed toward the smallest bedroom—the one that had been Trish’s for nearly eight years—which they generously referred to as a den. In a sleeveless blouse and cotton pants, Faye Malone sat with her back to the door, as comfortably padded as the futon beside her. As usual, she was keeping up a running conversation with the sewing machine while she worked, pins stuck in her mouth, tufts of touched-up-every-three weeks auburn hair sticking out at odd angles where she’d tugged at it while trying to figure something out.
Heaven knew, having Faye for a mother had never been exactly easy, and not only because of the woman’s habit of walking out on anyone who didn’t agree with her. Or her nearly obsessive protectiveness when it came to family. All her life, Dana had variously loved and feared the woman whose scowl had been known to set people to rethinking opinions held dear from the cradle. Tonight, however, Dana envied her mother her single-mindedness.
And her strength.
“What’s that you’re making, Mama?” she asked, once Faye had removed the pins from her mouth.
Her mother jumped and pivoted simultaneously. “Lord, honey, you gave me a start,” she said, laughing, dropping the pins into an old saucer by the machine. “This? Oh, um … just a little something for Louise at church.” She cleared her throat. “Her daughter’s havin’ her first baby next month.”
Dana sat on the end of the futon that had replaced the old iron daybed, fingering the edge of the tiny royal blue and scarlet quilt. The vent over the door blasted too-cool air at the back of her neck, making her shudder. “Pretty,” she managed, trying to keep her voice light, to ignore the tension vibrating between them. Not to mention the unmistakable wistfulness in her mother’s voice, that she’d never get to watch her daughter grow big with a grandbaby.
“So …” Eager to change the subject, Dana clasped her hands, banging them against her knee. “Daddy said Trish called?”
“Oh, yes!” Her mother pulled off her glasses, tucking them into her shirt pocket. “I would’ve mentioned it, except there didn’t seem to be much point.”
“So she didn’t tell you where she was, I take it?”
“Not a word.”
“She say she was coming back?”
Her mother shook her head. “Although she had that funny little hitch in her voice, like when she’d done something wrong and was afraid we’d get mad at her? To this day, I don’t know what my sister was thinking, marrying that … creep. Man wasn’t worth the price of the marriage license. And cost Marla her own daughter.”
An observation made many times over the past dozen years. Dana’s aunt’s second marriage, to a man the family fondly referred to as The Cockroach, had had a disastrous effect on her already troubled daughter. After Trish’s third attempt at running away, and since Dana had been more or less on her own by then, Dana’s parents had offered to let the teen come live with them in Albuquerque. And on the surface, especially after Aunt Marla’s death a few years back, Trish had certainly seemed to be getting her life on track. She’d settled down enough to finish high school, gotten through community college, and had finally landed that job at Turner Realty. She’d even talked about becoming an agent herself, one day.
But threaded through Trish’s marginal successes ran not only a string of rotten relationships with men, but a chronic resistance to letting either Dana or her parents get close enough to help her. Other than the occasional call during the past year to let them know she was still alive, she’d cut herself off from the only family she had.
Sad, but, since her cousin had consistently rebuffed Dana’s attempts at being chummy, none of her concern. If Trish was out there somewhere, miserable and alone, she had no one to blame but herself.
“She asked about you,” she heard her mother say.
Dana started. “Me? Why?”
“Beats me.” Mama threaded a needle and moved to the futon, where she preferred to do her hand sewing. “I thought it was odd, too.” She fell into the cushion with an oof. “Although she did ask how you were getting on since …”
Her mother caught herself, her lips puckered in concentration as she stared at her sewing.
At the beginning, Mama had meant well enough, Dana supposed, doing her level best to take Dana’s mind off her situation. Tonight, though, Dana realized she’d lost patience with pretending. And with herself for allowing the silence to go on as long at it had.
“Go on, finish your sentence. Since I had my operation.”
Faye smoothed the quilt with trembling hands. “I’m sorry, honey. It just sort of slipped out.”
Dana sighed. “It’s been more than a year, Mama. Way past time for us to still be sidestepping the subject, don’t you think?”
“I …I just don’t want to make you feel bad, baby.”
Stomach wobbling, Dana snuggled up against her mother, inhaling her mingled scent of soap and sunscreen and cooking.
“I know that,” she said softly, fingering the tiny quilt. “But ignoring things doesn’t change them. Not that I’m not okay, most of the time, but … but there are definitely days when I feel cheated, when I get so angry I want to break something. And if I can’t unload to my own mother about it, who can I tell?”
“Oh, honey.” Faye dropped her handiwork; Dana let herself be drawn into her mother’s arms, suddenly exhausted from the strain of putting on a brave face, day after day after day. Whether it had been holding Cass’s baby, or the toddler in the diner, or even the strange mixture of kindness and wariness in C.J.’s eyes that had brought on the sudden and profound melancholy, she had no idea. But today, this minute, all she could see were the holes in her life. And with that thought came a great, unstoppable torrent of long held-back tears.
