Special Delivery

by Abby Tyler

  He’d never seen her like this.

  She wore a green dress that made her blue eyes come alive. Her hair was down, falling over her shoulders, partially swept back by a green band. She wore strappy sandals, and her toes were painted a vivid pink.

  She was beautiful. More beautiful than he had known until now. All those days in proper clothes to help with a baby. He’d never asked her on a date. He hadn’t known how. She was the nanny. Spending time at his house was what they did.

  He could see he’d been wrong not to ask. She wasn’t just a nanny, a helper. She was a woman.

  He swallowed, his hand gripping the mug until his fingers felt on fire and he had to let go.

  She turned her cup in tiny circles, her gaze darting back and forth between him and the steaming tea. “I got your flowers,” she said.

  His voice was practically a stammer. “You did? Topher said he would deliver them.”

  She settled in her seat at that, as if she’d had a question about where they’d come from and he’d settled it. “They were quite extraordinary.”

  “Did they have the weird waffle cone flowers and the spiky orange thing? I had no idea what he was picking out.” He sounded like an idiot.

  She smiled. “Calla lilies and Bird of Paradise. They are lovely. Expensive.”

  Were they? He hadn’t even looked at the receipt. “As long as you liked them.”

  “I’ve never had anything like them.”

  Jack ventured a sip from his cup and burned his tongue. He plunked the cup back down so quickly it sloshed on the table.

  Louisa glanced at the spill then looked away.

  “So I’m here,” she said.

  “So you are.”

  Her lips were pressed tightly together. What was going on with her?

  “Did you need something from me?” he asked.

  Betty jumped between them. “Cake,” she said, setting a plate between them. “To share. Isn’t that nice?” She placed a fork by each of their cups.

  “Thank you, Betty,” Louisa said, but she didn’t pick up a fork.

  Neither did he. Something was strange here. Why had she come, all dressed up? She seemed to expect something from him.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  He watched as her face hardened. “So was this a joke to you then?” she asked, her voice cracking at the end. “A way to get back at me for the football after all this time?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Or is it because I called your parents?” Her chin lifted. “I stand by that. And it wasn’t a prank. It was the right thing to do.”

  His anger flared. “No, the right thing to do would have been to talk to me about it first.”

  “Like that went so well the other times I tried!”

  “You can’t make a family play nice,” he said. “We have problems. Big ones. But they’re ours to solve.”

  “Oh, like you were solving anything by sending them to Florida.” Louisa’s eyes were wide and bright with anger. “Don’t think we don’t know what you were doing, buying them that condo. You were getting rid of them instead of working things out.”

  “There is nothing to work out. My father is a menace to my life, and my mother was complicit by staying with him.”

  “He needs help. Like your sister needs help. You and your mother are strong.”

  “None of this is your affair. So stay the hell out of it.”

  He was about to stand up and leave, but Louisa beat him to it.

  “Eat your cake,” she said. “I hope you choke on it.” She threw a folded piece of paper onto the table and snatched up her purse. She practically ran from the tea shop.

  Silence fell in her wake. The shop was empty save for him. Where had Betty gone? He guessed he should be grateful that no one had witnessed that blowup first-hand.

  He picked up the paper she’d tossed. Maybe it had an answer in it.

  He read it, anger flashing through him at what Topher had done.

  But then his eyes shifted back to one of the lines.

  * * *

  If, however, your feelings for me were not strictly professional, and you enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed yours, please meet me…

  * * *

  This had been a setup. The broken lock. The forced break for tea.

  The meddling Town Square gossips had tried to shove them back together.

  And Louisa had come.

  * * *

  If, however, your feelings for me were not strictly professional…

  * * *

  She cared about him. If he’d stopped to think about it for one minute, let the anger drain out and really use his head, he would have known this.

  He remembered her surprise when he’d kissed her that first time in the nursery. How she’d accepted him, stern, stiff, professional him.

  She’d taken him at face value, saved him, put up with his less-than-stellar behavior. Made his house a home. Gone to prison with him.

  Her feelings were definitely not professional.

  He could still picture her as she sat down in that beautiful green dress, her hair glossy and her eyes shining. For once, she thought, they were going to meet as equals. Man and woman. He saw it now.

  She’d brought her hope to this very table.

  And he’d smashed it.

  She’d never asked for anything. Not a nice dinner. Not a gift. Not any of the things usual couples gave each other or did together.

  He’d never realized he should do more. They had been content. She’d been content. With him.

  So that was the missing part of love.

  The contentment. Like the dresser and the crib. You chose them because you could picture them in your life. They made you happy. She’d told him that.

  She had pictured him in her life. She’d been happy with him.

  He understood it now.

  He would fix this.

  He would.

  He was not his father, caught up only in himself.

  His father had never been content. And so, maybe he had never loved.

  Jack would be different. He’d found contentment. And he could see Louisa in his life.

  He would make this right.

  It couldn’t be a small thing. He couldn’t just call her and ask her to dinner. She would say no, and he would deserve it.

  He would have to go big.

  As big as he dared.

  Chapter 21

  Louisa was not pleased whatsoever to have gotten roped into attending a pep squad event at the high school. But she had no excuses left not to do it.

  She hadn’t had time for Eagle Pride when her parents were ill. She hadn’t attended a football game in twenty years, other than maybe a reunion somewhere in her thirties. She’d missed all the others for one reason or another.

  The current pep squad sponsor was Melody Hopkins, one of the math teachers. She was young, less than thirty, for sure, and full of Applebottom spirit even though she was a transplant.

  “Okay, you lovely Eagle fans, here are your squad cards,” she called out. Her hair swung as she surveyed her assembled crew in the gym’s top bleacher seats. “Remember to turn them only on your pattern command!”

  These were new. The cards were blue on one side and red on the other. The pep squad sat in a precise formation so that when Melody signaled, they would hold them up with the correct color facing up to form a word or an image. An eagle’s head. AHS. One of the arrangements read WIN. As if that happened in Applebottom very often.

  Actually, she’d heard the team was better now. Whatever. All Louisa knew was that she had to sit through a pep rally in the very place that made her the most uncomfortable.

  She had some temp work under her belt, but she wasn’t looking forward to more. She’d been at one place for two days answering phones at the front desk. It had been a lot to juggle, greeting people, notifying one of the accountants they had a client while still answering all the lines and routi
ng those calls.

  She’d bungled quite a few of the messages, and half the time, whoever got the wrong call would reroute it themselves.

  When that ended, she’d been sent to be a receptionist at a floor cleaning company. It was a dark, messy place, with only the owner and the crews coming in and out. The chemicals had given her a bracing headache so she hadn’t gone back. The next one only lasted three days. Turned out they’d already filled the position and only needed her to cover until the real receptionist arrived.

  They hadn’t had anything suitable for her for a few days now. She hoped they hadn’t already given up.

  And that led her to the pep rally. She hadn’t planned to attend, but Sadie Cole, the high school secretary, had insisted. The squad didn’t have enough people to properly make the eagle’s head with the cards, and she needed to do her part.

  So she’d come.

  The band was approaching the gym. She could hear the drums banging. Students began to filter in. They must run the pep rallies the same way now as twenty years ago, with the band parading through the halls to alert teachers to release the students. In the end, the entire student body would walk together through the campus, loud and raucous and cheering.

  She smiled despite herself. Those were fun memories. As the band marched into the space, they started playing the fight song, and the cheerleaders tumbled onto the floor. She discovered she was actually glad she came, standing with her card pressed to her chest, freeing her hands to clap.

  Melody blew the first whistle, holding up her finger for one. Louisa checked the cheat sheet on the corner of her card. Red side. She lifted it up.

  The cheerleaders led a chant as the band finished the song and filed into their seats in the bleachers. The football team came out, and Louisa thought that was odd. It was baseball season. But then, she didn’t remember pep rallies for baseball.

  Melody signaled for card two, and Louisa flipped to blue. A cheer went up for the eagle’s head. This was kind of fun. She sort of wished they’d done this back when she was on pep squad. At least she could do it now.

  Only when Carter McBride, the football coach, and two broad-shouldered students in jerseys moved to the middle of the court did Louisa realize what was happening.

  The passing of the football captain’s ball.

  Oh no. That wasn’t possible.

  But of course, that’s what this would be. It was May, the end of the school year. All the student leaders would be turning over, the seniors graduating to make way for the next round.

  Melody motioned for the pep squad to sit down. The current members were mixed in with the graduates who’d come back to help. It was about half and half.

  Melody cupped her hands. “All former squad leaders to the floor!”

  No way. Louisa wouldn’t go. It was too much to go down to the very place where she’d humiliated Jack twenty years ago. His rejection last week was still too raw. She sat firmly on her bench.

  But one of her former classmates, Cassandra Leeds, grabbed her arm. “Come on!” she said, pulling on her arm. “We need you!”

  Shoot. Louisa never was able to resist being needed.

  Maybe it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Jack was there and they would re-enact his humiliation with the greased football.

  She followed Cassandra down the steps. Coach McBride was talking on the microphone. “Today Jamal Brown will pass the ball to Timothy McGovern,” he said. “Everybody make some noise for your new Applebottom Eagle football captain!”

  Louisa watched with her breath held as the football sailed from one teen boy to the other. The new captain caught it easily and lifted it up with one hand. The gym vibrated with screams and cheers and the banging of drums.

  This was what she had taken away from Jack. This moment. It only came once in a lifetime, and then only for those chosen as team captain.

  No wonder he’d resented her. But he’d gotten past it. During their time together with Ella, they had recovered from what she’d done all those years ago.

  But that was done. Their meeting at the tea shop had been a disaster. Afterward, Topher had stopped by and admitted that he wrote the memo. That Jack knew nothing about it.

  She didn’t know how mad she could really be about it. She’d pulled a million pranks in her lifetime. And probably some of them had really struck at people’s hearts. In fact, one year on Valentine’s Day, she’d sent at least ten anonymous Valentines to people she had judged to be stuck-up or mean.

  She had no idea what havoc she might’ve caused, not really.

  No, it was time for Louisa James to grow the heck up.

  Each of the Applebottom sports had their leaders come out and pass either a ball, pompoms, or a megaphone from one leader to the next. Then an entire group of student leaders and math-letes and newspaper and yearbook editors all got together in a clump and were congratulated and told to shake the hand of their successor.

  Some things never did change. Sports got spotlight moments. The real brains of the school got a cluster. All hail the almighty sports ball.

  She wasn’t sure why Cassandra had dragged her down here. Her clump of pep squad members wasn’t involved in the changeover.

  Coach McBride instructed the student leaders to head back to the bleachers, and the band fired up a song. The cheerleaders did a little routine, and then the coach returned, waving the pep squad people from the corner to the center of the gym.

  Louisa definitely didn’t recall doing this before. But then again, it had been years since she’d gone and her memory was shot.

  She headed toward the center of the gym, along with Cassandra and a few others. Louisa assumed they would simply stand there for a moment while Carter or Melody or somebody said a few generic words about the importance of the pep squad to the school spirit of Applebottom.

  And Carter did that, but then suddenly Louisa realized she was the only one still standing with him.

  What was going on?

  Then she saw Jack step out from the far corner of the gym.

  What was this?

  Louisa James was a hard-line prankster, a comedian of the first order. She liked to think that nothing really scared her. Generally, she could get as good as she gave. The few times people had attempted to prank her back, she had taken it in stride and congratulated them for their ingenuity or their execution. If it was warranted.

  But right now, she was quaking in her shoes. This was not a lighthearted joke. For a while there, Jack Stone had held her heart in his hands. Whatever he might do to her now, out of anger that she called his parents, or a sense of justice because of what she had done twenty-three years ago, would strip her bare.

  In front of a crowd.

  Like she had done him.

  She braced herself. When he got closer, she realized he was holding a football.

  And it was shiny.

  Was that the same football they had thrown twenty-three years ago?

  Maybe.

  Jack approached Carter on the opposite side.

  “Hey, Coach,” he said.

  Carter lifted his mic. “I have beside me the man hopefully only a few of you kids know, Police Officer Stone. If you are familiar with this man, see me in the principal’s office after the pep rally.”

  A nervous titter crossed the gym.

  “Officer Stone is here to honor the pep squad’s contribution to school spirit in our great city.”

  He waited out the smattering of applause.

  “As a symbol of the importance of the pep squad to the football team, our former team captain, Officer Stone, will throw a ceremonial football to one of our former pep squad leaders from the same era, Louisa James.

  Now she got it. This was revenge.

  Fair enough.

  She looked around Carter to stare at Jack. “Nice one,” she mouthed at him. She could not have set this up better herself. She wondered what he would’ve done if she hadn’t shown up. Knowing him, he would’ve thought of something else. Jack made
goals and achieved them, period.

  Jack took the microphone. “Probably none of you know this, since it was a little before you were even born, but twenty-three years ago Louisa put Vaseline on the football so that when I received it as the new captain of the football team, it hilariously shot out of my hands like a greased pig.”

  The gym broke out in light laughter.

  “I’m just giving you the heads up that this ball is more slippery than a stick of butter on a summer day. And we all get to watch Louisa James try to catch it.”

  “Well done,” Louisa said, although she didn’t think Jack could hear her over the noise.

  Jack backed up about ten steps, which she hoped she could handle. She wasn’t sure she could catch a football even if he was arm’s length away.

  Carter led her another ten steps to the other side. Dang it, she was totally out of range.

  This was going to be humiliating. But she’d earned it. Jack would get his payback.

  He lifted the ball in the air to a cheer from the crowd.

  But before he could even get the pass off, he bobbled it, and the ball slithered between his arms and hit the floor.

  Oh, no. It was going to happen to him again.

  At least a hundred cell phones lifted in the air to capture the moment.

  This was the sort of thing that could go viral. At least back when she’d pulled her joke on Jack, it was limited to the school yearbook.

  She dashed forward, falling on the ball. When her belly connected with the leather, the ball shot right out from beneath her, sending the gym into uproarious laughter.

  “I got it!” Jack said, scrambling along the floor after the ball.

  “No, I’ll get it,” she said, scurrying after him.

  Both of them clambered over each other, trying to get the ball. It really was as slick as a stick of melted butter. Louisa couldn’t remember trying to hold onto something so perfectly shaped to squeeze out of your arms as soon as you grabbed it.