Meg and Jo

by Virginia Kantra

  Her back hurt. I should leave her alone. Let it go.

  “The December payment is due next week,” I said. “Anita was concerned because they hadn’t gotten payment for November.”

  My mother looked at Dad. “Ash?”

  He brushed crumbs from his fingers. Patted her hand. “Don’t upset yourself, Abby.” He glanced at me. “Don’t you upset her, either.”

  His words stung. “I’m only trying to help.”

  “By meddling in our personal financial affairs?”

  I inhaled. “There’s not enough money in the account,” I said carefully. “I thought Mom should know.”

  You should know. Why didn’t you say something? I wanted to ask. Why didn’t you do something?

  But I didn’t. We girls didn’t question our father. Our mother taught us that. “Don’t worry your father,” she’d said when he was deployed. “Don’t bother your father,” she’d said when he holed himself up in his office for hours at a time while we watched TV with the volume turned down low. “Your father is working,” she’d explained every time he missed a concert or a track meet or a play performance.

  We accepted that the Reverend Ashton March answered only to a Higher Power.

  But now she was struggling to sit up. She looked at my father. “How much did you withdraw?”

  “Abby . . .” He pulled back his hand, folding his long fingers together. “This is hardly the time or place for this discussion.”

  “Then, when? If I weren’t sick, you’d never talk to me at all.” She sounded like Granny.

  My mouth jarred open. I’d never heard my mother use that tone with my father before. Never heard her breathe a word of criticism.

  “I had expenses,” my father said.

  “Household expenses,” my mother said. “Farm expenses.”

  He drew himself up. “Critical commitments. There are others in need, especially at this time of year, men and women who have sacrificed everything for their country. My obligation to them doesn’t go away simply because you have a temporary setback.”

  “We can’t keep funding the ministry if it means losing the farm,” my mother said. “Our home.”

  “What setback?” I asked.

  “Your family’s home,” my father said to my mother. “Your parents never made me feel particularly welcome there. I never understood your decision to go back.”

  “After you went into the army, after you gave up your living and the parsonage without consulting me, where were we supposed to live?”

  “You could have moved to Oak Hill.”

  “I’m not taking charity from your aunt.”

  “On base, then. The Lord always provides a way for those who do His work. But you had to do things your way.”

  This was awful. “What setback?” I repeated.

  My father spared me a glance. “Your mother can’t do her rehab.” He made it sound like that was her fault. “Without some improvement, they’ll have to move her to a nursing home. So the doctors have decided—and we concur—that she needs surgery.”

  “Oh, Momma, no. What kind of surgery?”

  “I’ll be fine,” my mother said. As if I had to be protected from too much information, like Daisy or DJ. Or Dad. “A couple of my vertebrae are compressed a little, that’s all. So Dr. Chatworth is going to go in and stabilize things.”

  “Deteriorated from the infection,” my father said. As if he were punishing me for coming into my mother’s room, worrying her about money. That was okay. He couldn’t blame me more than I blamed myself. “They have to remove the infected bone and put some kind of a cage in her spine.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. A prayer, not a curse. “When?”

  My mother made a face, twisting position in bed. I couldn’t tell if she were struggling to get comfortable or avoiding my question.

  “As soon as they can schedule the surgery with the hospital,” my father said.

  I swallowed. “I’ll call the girls.”

  My mother’s head moved back and forth against her pillow. No.

  “Momma . . . They might want to be here.”

  “No,” she said. “No fuss. They have their own lives. I don’t want them coming home for me.”

  I looked at my father, hoping for reinforcements.

  “That’s up to your mother,” he said. Leaving the decision, the responsibility, to her, the way he left everything else.

  “They still should know,” I argued.

  “After the surgery,” my mother declared. “You can tell them then. When you can say I’m better.”

  Unless she wasn’t. What would I say then?

  “Amy put off her trip already,” Momma said. “And Beth . . . This show is her big chance.”

  “Dad?”

  “You heard your mother,” my father said. “Dealing with all you girls is too much. She needs to concentrate on getting better. Then everything will be fine.”

  Was he kidding? But he genuinely believed that, because that’s what our mother had always let him believe. As long as he wasn’t inconvenienced, everything was fine. He saw her inability to take care of him as her weakness, not his.

  “It’s in the doctors’ hands now. And the Lord’s. What could your sisters do?”

  They could be here, I thought. We could be here for one another.

  I swallowed hard and bent to kiss my mother. “Whatever you want, Momma.”

  Because what else could I say?

  All my life I’d watched her care for my father. Care for us all, providing, managing, keeping everything running smoothly. “The woman makes the marriage,” my mother told me on my wedding day. But she couldn’t do it alone. It was easy to blame my father for not doing more to help.

  Maybe she’d never asked.

  Well.

  I got in my car and closed my eyes for a second. The smells of apple juice, pee, and Things Under Seats wrapped around me. Maybe I’d let John take the car to get cleaned, after all.

  John. If I were in the hospital, my husband wouldn’t be patting my hand, telling me how the Lord would provide, that was for sure. He’d get to work, making sure we were taken care of.

  Exhaling, I opened my eyes and called Carl Stewart to ask about that job.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jo

  I’m starving,” I declared on Monday morning.

  Eric’s eyes crinkled.

  “What?” I said. “We must have burned up, like, a million calories.”

  His lips curved. “Indeed.”

  I punched his arm. “From the run.”

  After a warm-up jog along the High Line, we’d descended the stairs at 18th Street. Energized by the cold and the city’s pulse, we ran, past graffiti-decorated Dumpsters and storefronts, through the crowd of office workers and artists bundled in scarves and boots, around parents pushing strollers. Four miles, five, our feet hitting the cobblestones, our breath making puffs of fog in the air. I was glowing inside and out.

  In my kitchen, I stretched, trying not to hit Eric with my elbow, sensitive to the twinge of underused muscles. “I’m not used to all this activity.”

  Eric lowered his water bottle. “I pushed you too fast.”

  Yes. No. I pulled out my hair elastic and put it back in again. Was he talking about the run?

  He hadn’t pushed me. I was the one who got physical, right? Determined to move on with my life, confident of my ability to set the pace. Go, me. But now . . .

  “I’ve never had a guy spend the night in my apartment before,” I blurted. “Not all night.” Except for Trey. Another twinge. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

  A hint of a smile. “I am not that complicated.”

  “But you’re here.” In my space. Even when I’d lived with Ashmeeta, our different schedules meant I had plenty of alone time.
r />   The amusement faded from his eyes. “You want me to go.”

  I had always been comfortable alone. Curled up with a book, holed up in my attic room. I flushed. “No.”

  “Ah.” He regarded me for a moment before he took me in his arms. He held me for a long time, until my muscles slowly relaxed, until our breaths matched, in and out, the way they did when we ran. He was so big. Maybe I was a little worried he would take over, the way Trey tried to do. That he would fill my thoughts, my space, until there wasn’t any room for me anymore. “Jo.” The sound of my name rumbled through me. “Maybe you stop overthinking things, yeah?”

  Stop looking for something to go wrong. Stop looking for a way out. “I don’t know how,” I mumbled into his chest.

  “Be in the moment.” He stroked my back, my hair. “Be.”

  My body softened, molding to his. He was already half-aroused. I was, too. “I’ll try.”

  His large hands cupped my head as he tipped my face back. Smiled into my eyes. “I will cook for you.”

  “What?” I blurted as he released me.

  “I will cook. Breakfast.” He maneuvered around me to open my fridge. “You don’t have food.”

  I couldn’t afford to buy a bunch of groceries. Which is why I always ate the family meal. “There’s leftover Chinese.” I spied a carton, lurking on a shelf. “And eggs.”

  “Eggs will work.” He took them out. Taking charge, the way he did at the restaurant.

  I folded my arms, watching as he cracked the eggs into a bowl. All the eggs, enough to feed us both.

  “What are you making? An omelet?” The standard test for every beginning cook.

  He shook his head, reaching for a pan, already at home in my kitchen. “You have no cheese. No herbs.”

  “I think there’s a jar of parsley flakes around somewhere,” I said.

  He shot me an appalled look before he realized I was joking. “Funny girl.”

  I grinned. He moved with such deliberation, in full possession of himself, in command of his surroundings. I snuck a glance at his big hands, his calm face as he whipped the eggs to a creamy yellow froth. He swirled a knob of butter in the pan, calling attention to his thick wrists, the play of muscle under his pushed-up sleeves. He scrambled eggs like he was plating an entrée for dinner service, like he made love, with intense focus and attention to detail. Very hot.

  Too bad I couldn’t record him. A video tutorial of Chef Eric Bhaer demonstrating scrambled eggs would get a ton of hits. #sexycookingman

  I pushed away from the counter. “I’ll make toast.”

  He nodded absently, adjusting the heat of my crappy electric burner. “Bitte.”

  It was like in the restaurant, me working around him, playing prep cook. Only . . . different. I nudged him with my hip to get to the toaster. He patted my bottom, shifting out of my way. I was embarrassed by how much I liked it, that light, affectionate slap.

  “No snotty comments about the bread?” I asked.

  Eric’s lips quirked. “When Alec was five, he wanted peanut butter and jelly on plain white bread every damn day for lunch. With the crusts cut off. You cannot scare me with your bread.”

  Aw. “That’s adorable.” I was pretty sure my father couldn’t name any of my favorite childhood foods. “You packed your son’s lunch?”

  “Certainly not,” Eric said, squashing that little fantasy. “He was five. Old enough to pack his own lunch.”

  I cocked my head. “But you trimmed the crusts.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  He expelled his breath. “I bought cookie cutters,” he admitted. “So he could do it himself. Stegosaurus, brontosaurus . . . He liked dinosaurs.”

  A piece of my heart melted. Having seen how he dealt with the misfits in his kitchen—his tolerance and support for his makeshift family—it was easy to imagine him teaching a curly-haired five-year-old to cut sandwiches into dinosaur shapes.

  “You must miss them,” I said. “Your sons.”

  “Yes.” One word.

  “Do they ever visit?” I said.

  “Not often. It is difficult to find time.”

  “Right.” I knew what it was like to have a father whose work took precedence over everything else.

  “You must live to cook,” Eric had said.

  He slid me a look. “You and your father . . . You are close?”

  “Yes. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot. Because he was deployed.” I watched Eric fold eggs gently from the cooked edges to the center of the pan. “But this one time, in high school, I had this cross-country meet? And he was waiting for me at the finish line.” I flushed, embarrassed by the wave of remembered emotion. I’d cried. “Total surprise. I wasn’t expecting him until the next day. It was a moment. Like something on YouTube.”

  “Bryan is on the football team. Soccer,” Eric corrected himself. “He has a tournament over the holidays, yeah? And Alec has play practice. The boys cannot come to me. So . . .” Eric shrugged his big shoulders. “I go to North Carolina.”

  I was oddly breathless. “When?”

  “Christmas.” He concentrated on the eggs. “Denise invited me to spend the holiday with them.”

  Denise? His ex-wife. Oh.

  Oh. Whatever stupid fantasies I might have entertained about seeing Eric at Christmas, introducing him to my family, died a swift, embarrassing death. Not that I was jealous or anything, but . . . Fine. I was totally jealous.

  “That’s very . . . civilized.”

  “We are parents, yeah? It is best for the boys if we get along.”

  I nodded. That didn’t sound like he was still hung up on his ex. But what did I know?

  He slid the eggs from the pan, yellow as sunshine, soft as a cloud. The kitchen smelled like toast, like coming downstairs to breakfast on the first day of school with a new book bag full of sharpened pencils and the air rich with coffee and promise.

  I slipped my phone from my pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Eric asked.

  I tapped the screen. Perfect. “Taking a picture.”

  He gave me a look of controlled patience.

  “What?”

  “Jo. Every night we work to get dishes to the tables on time. Everything on the plate à point, the right texture, the proper temperature. And then some idiot pulls out his phone to take a picture and the food gets cold while they frame their fucking shot to impress their friends.”

  I grinned. “You sound like my mother.” Except my mother never dropped the f-bomb in her life.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Eat, before your eggs get cold,” I explained.

  His smile broke. When he smiled like that, with his whole face, I felt warm all over.

  Encouraged, I continued. “Anyway, isn’t that why you became a chef? To impress people with your cooking?”

  “To impress you. I cooked for you. The point of making food is to feed people, yeah? The ones you care about.”

  My cheeks got hot. Meaning . . . He cared about me? Well, me, and everybody who ever ate in his restaurant. Let’s not get carried away here.

  We sat down to eat at my alcove desk table. I stuck a fork into the eggs. They melted on my tongue, the promise of butter, a whisper of salt, the taste of home.

  “Oh,” I said, a soft note of discovery.

  Another smile. He looked pleased. Like my opinion mattered. “Wait until I cook you dinner.”

  “You cook dinner all the time.” It was the highlight of the day, when he cooked for the staff. Most of us couldn’t afford to eat his food otherwise. I ran bread over my plate, wiping up the last smear of silky goodness. Wait. “You mean, like, here? Tonight?”

  “I thought we would go to my place.” He watched me carefully. “Unless you would rather go out.”

  As if spending the d
ay together, the night together, was a foregone conclusion. I swallowed. With Trey, I’d learned to always be on my guard, holding tight to my definition of who I was and what I wanted, constantly braced against the moment he would lunge ahead, dragging me with him.

  But Eric . . .

  “You’re doing it again,” I said. Giving me choices. Options. “I don’t always need to be in control, you know. What you want matters, too.”

  “I know what I want.” His gaze met mine, making my insides shimmy. “I don’t know how you feel.”

  “I jumped you at the door. I’m pretty sure that was a clue.”

  A glint of a smile. “And I’m grateful.”

  “Amy—my sister Amy?—says men don’t like aggressive women.”

  “You are passionate.”

  I flushed. “Blunt.”

  “Honest.”

  I squirmed, trying not to glance in the direction of my laptop. I hadn’t been all that honest. “You only say that because you don’t have to live with my big mouth.”

  “You speak your mind. That’s a good thing. Otherwise nobody pays attention until everything goes to shit.”

  “Speaking from experience?” Momma taught us girls not to ask personal questions. But I wasn’t simply curious. I . . . cared.

  He shrugged. “I was a bastard husband. Typical chef, working all the time.”

  So his hours sucked. Like my father’s. But despite Eric’s devotion to his work, his ambition, his passion, I didn’t see him as uncaring. Or self-absorbed.

  “It’s not like you were cheating on her,” I said. “Unless . . . Oh. Um. Sorry.”

  Eric gave me that look, the one that said I amused him.

  I bumbled on. “It’s just that Trey—my friend—says given the chance, the majority of men would sleep with the majority of women. Of course, he’s . . .” A horndog. “He’s hardly a relationship expert. He doesn’t know you at all. Obviously you wouldn’t cheat on your wife.”

  Eric smiled wryly. “Only with the restaurant.”

  “You were a chef when she married you, though, right? You didn’t change.”

  “Maybe I should have. She deserved better from me. I should have paid more attention. I should have been there for her.” His eyes met mine. “I won’t make that mistake again.”