He shrugged with a smile.
"You did! You did!" I swatted him.
"Yeah. But now I've got a thing for raven-haired beauties." He played with a strand of my hair.
"Mmm... sweet talker."
"And to get back to your question, I haven't always worked for Chase. But I do some legal work for him from time-to-time, and then he uses me for my muscle every so often, too. I can always use the extra cash. I've got a fifteen-year-old headed for college before long."
Before that statement even registered, he hopped to his feet. "This is a good song. Do you want to dance?"
"Sure."
As I worked my way out of the booth, Alex said, "I don't think Mrs. Garrett had a first name."
"Edna," Tucker and I said at the same time.
"Oh, yeah," they both answered as we walked away.
Foreigner's "Urgent" was playing, which seemed pretty apropos after our earlier entanglement in the car, and Tucker started getting into it.
"Most guys have to have five or six shots before they get out on the dance floor," I yelled, competing with the speaker system.
"I like to dance. Although, it's been about fifteen years. Unless you count dancing with my Great Aunt Millie at my cousin's wedding."
I shook my head with a laugh. "Definitely not."
Kyle and Sam entered, and I waved at them. She seemed happy.
But soon, I had eyes only for my dance partner. To my surprise and delight, Tucker was an awesome dancer. Chippendale-level awesome. He sang as he danced, which he was pretty good at, too, and I found myself getting into it with him. The horn rose, and Lou Gramm wailed along with it. Tucker bent low and came up with his leg between mine He reached a hand around my back as I straddled him. I put both of my hands on his shoulders to better sync my movements with his. He leaned his forehead against mine, his hair falling into his eyes, and I laughed. I couldn't remember the last time I had so much fun. Letting loose, I leaned backward, allowing my hair to fall behind me and trusting in that large hand behind my back. A whoop went up from the table.
We were winded when we returned to the group, and I, for one, was turned on.
"Dude, you give guys like me—who have no moves on the dance floor at all—a bad name."
"That's okay, baby," Sam crooned. "It's your moves elsewhere I'm concerned about."
Everybody "oohed," and Sam kissed him. They were both practically glowing. Had I seen the day when Samantha Neaman finally fell for somebody? We sat, and Max went into a rather lengthy, and heavily embellished, retelling of my trip with Sam to St. Louis for a Maroon Five concert.
"Okay, we didn't try to bribe the guard with sloppy-joes," I corrected.
"Absolutely not. We wouldn't have wasted any of our government meat on her. Right, girlfriend?" Sam laughed and put up her hand for a high-five.
"Right. We simply told her Adam Levine gets a bit cranky if he doesn't get his sloppy joes."
"Did you really?" Kyle asked, naively.
"Dude. You should have seen these two when I found them sneaking around backstage," Tucker interjected. "I had to practically hog-tie Dani and carry her out over my shoulder."
"Bullshit," I protested.
"Okay," Alex goaded. "What about that time you guys met Paulie downtown at the Ultra?" She was referring to one of our favorite bar owners.
"What?" Sam began. "You mean the night Angie—our drunk friend—" she explained for Kyle and Tucker, "stamped on my foot and nearly punctured it, not to mention practically ruining my cheetah-print heels." She stuck her foot on the table for illustration.
Kyle grabbed the bottom of her shoe. "Ooh! Poor baby."
"Or are these leopard-print? I'm never sure."
"Cheetah!" the three of us girls screamed, having heard the debate before.
"That reminds me of the 'Great Swatch Debate of 2008.'" Max moaned.
"Okay, okay," I said a little too loudly. "Kyle, what do you call those strips of paper with different color paint you bring home from a paint store? You know, to see if you like them?"
The table was quiet, and all eyes were on Kyle. "A... swatch?" he answered tentatively. Sam hooted and high-fived him.
"No. No. No." I smacked my hand on the table. "What does he know? He's a foreigner. Tucker." His eyes had fear in them. It was obvious that a lot was riding on his answer. "When I use the word 'swatch'," I said slowly, "what do you think of? Take your time. Shh. Shh. No prompting from the other side of the table." I waved my hand in their direction to silence them.
"Well... when I think of 'swatch,' I think of... fabric?"
"Exactly!" I screamed, pounding my hand again on the table. I grabbed his face and gave him a huge kiss. "And those paint things...?"
"Are called... chips."
"Give the man a prize." Loud arguing went up from the other side of the table.
"Is this what it's always like in the kitchen?" Tucker asked Max.
"All the time. Dani will even call her dad or her brother in the middle of the day, long distance, to get them to weigh in on some stupid debate they come up with."
The mention of my dad hit me like a set of brass knuckles. The pleasant buzz I'd had blew away, and I fell out of the conversation.
Dan Fogelberg's "Longer" started. "Let's dance."
"Ooh. This has got to be the world's sappiest song," Alex commented.
Tucker leaned in, putting a hand to his mouth as if whispering, but loud enough so everyone could hear, "Yeah, but it lets me get close to Dani again." He led me away from the table.
"The man's got a point," Kyle said, rising and offering Sam his hand. The two hit the dance floor behind us.
"Like you could have gotten a piece of tissue paper between them before," Maxine muttered. I turned back to give her a faux glare.
Tucker pulled me in and held me close. I relaxed in his arms, swaying to the music. "You okay?" he whispered in my ear.
"Yeah," I responded quietly.
"Thinking about your dad?"
I lifted my head from his chest. "How'd you know?"
"I had a hunch. I don't think Max even realized she said it."
I laid my head back on his chest. "I know." After a pause I added. "Killed a good buzz, though."
He chuckled, his chest shaking gently. "How about I get us a bottle of wine to-go, and we find somewhere to be alone?"
"You can do that?"
"I have a way with waitresses."
"I bet you do. I'll order the wine." We stayed until the song ended, and The Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" came on.
"Great song. Top twenty-five. But you can't dance to it," Tucker commented.
"I need to run to the restroom real quick."
"You go, I'll get the wine," Tucker offered. I observed him skeptically, but I really needed to go, so I left him to handle the waitress.
When I came back to the table, Tucker sat with his arms spread across the top of the seat, and I slid in beside him. Seconds later, the waitress brought a bottle of wine and two glasses over and Tucker signed for them.
"We're going to go... take a walk," I announced to the group.
"It was very nice meeting you ladies," Tucker said, shaking Max and Alex's hands. "Kyle." This time there was a genuine smile for the referee. The two men bonded through their shared experience as the outsiders in our group. "And good seeing you again, Sam."
"I think Sam and I will probably 'take a walk' in a few minutes, too," Kyle mentioned, raising his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
Tucker grinned. "Nice night for it."
Chapter 26
Tucker
As the laughter and music faded behind the double glass doors, we entered the courtyard outside. I was right. It was a beautiful night. A trillion stars shone in the sky, and a light breeze blew through the Ponderosa pines along the edge of the property. They whispered to us about all the promise the evening still held. I managed to grasp the bottle of wine and glasses in one hand, and we walked along together. We didn't sp
eak right away. No more than a comment on how nice it was after being in the stuffy confines of the bar. It wasn't one of those awkward silences you might anticipate on a first date. Rather, it was a kind of peaceful silence as we enjoyed being alone together.
"It's strange..." Dani said staring ahead, "having fun like this, when..."
"Your dad just died," I finished for her. She nodded. "Do you want to tell me about him?"
So she talked, and we walked, and I naturally headed in the direction of my room. At some point it dawned on me I couldn't exactly take her to my room; she might think I was trying to seduce her. Which I was, but slowly. So when we got to the room, I walked past it to the end of the corridor where I first spotted her as I looked down on the tennis court that morning. That's when I got an idea. The roof.
I kicked off my shoes and set the bottle of wine and glasses carefully on one of the wide, flat concrete posts on either end of the wrought iron barrier that kept people from doing a header onto the sidewalk below.
Dani's forehead scrunched as she watched. "What are you doing?"
"Finding a place for us to be alone." I boosted myself onto the post. When I stood, the roof came to about my waist. I moved the wine and glasses onto the shingles. I held out my hand to help Dani. "Coming?"
Wordlessly, she wrestled her boots off, and I helped her up, but when she glanced below on the other side, she clung to me. "This is crazy."
"We'll be okay. This is plenty wide. Just don't look down."
"O-oh. I don't think it was such a good idea for two people who have been throwing back shots to decide to balance themselves two stories up on a post."
I maneuvered carefully so I was on the outside of her, and she would feel safer. "Hop on the roof there, and then we can sit and you'll feel better."
She immediately did as I asked and crawled into the middle to sit. She exhaled.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes," she said sheepishly. "I'm a little terrified of heights."
"Oh, Dani. You should have said something."
"No, that's okay. I tackled two of my greatest fears today, public speaking, and heights." She surveyed the area. "I hope there aren't any snakes up here." She shivered and I examined her, concerned. "I'm fine now," she reassured me. "Come over here closer." I was already practically on top of her, so she had to be joking. She laughed shakily.
After her first glass of wine, she calmed considerably. She talked at length about the kind of man her dad was, and I listened to each of the family stories. They made me laugh, and I imagined her as a little girl and thought in turn about Zoe. I wondered if she looked up to me the way Dani admired her father.
"Your dad seems like quite a guy."
"He was." Her voice was soft. "That's why it's weird. It's like the world should have stopped turning when he died, and I shouldn't be going to hockey games or... kissing you."
I considered this, rubbing my thumb over the back of her hand. "Do you think your dad would have liked me?"
She didn't hesitate. "I think he would have loved you."
"So... maybe he wouldn't have had such a hard time with you kissing me."
She cracked a smile. "He would have loved the waitress, too. But I don't think he would have liked me kissing her."
"You know what I mean. He would have wanted you to be happy."
"I know." She bent her head, scraping her feet back and forth on the shingles. "Let's talk about something else."
"Okay." I took a drink of my wine. "How did you become a lunch lady?"
"When Tabitha went to school, I volunteered in the cafeteria. And then one day Max asked me if I wouldn't rather be doing what I was doing for pay. She thought I was a hard worker and would get along well with the others, and so she offered me a job."
"Who's Tabitha?"
She hesitated a second. "She's my daughter."
A daughter? Her gaze searched my face, probably looking for a negative reaction. "How old is she?"
"Five."
I smiled. "That's a nice age. What does she look like? Does she look like you?"
Her arms were wrapped around her legs. She seemed to relax her grip as she spoke. "Not exactly. She has curly, blond hair. But she has my eyes."
"A looker, like her mom." She blushed, making me want to kiss her again. "You never mentioned how Darren died."
She clammed up, staring at the shingles beneath our feet. The wind played with her hair. "I don't talk about it much."
"Too painful?"
She nodded. I sensed there was more to the story, but I didn't want to push her. I played with her fingers. "Can I ask how you met?"
"We... worked together. He was the principal at the school where I taught." She had a funny little smile on her face as she thought about it. I knew it was Darren's smile, the smile she reserved only for him. I felt a stab of pain, but swallowed it.
"Scandalous."
"It was." She took a sip of her wine. She twisted onto her side, lying back on one elbow. "Tell me about you, Tucker. You have a daughter, too?"
"You knew?"
"You mentioned her before, when you were talking about working for Chase and saving for her college education. She's fifteen, you said?"
"Yep. Fifteen." I had given away my deep dark secrets without even thinking about it.
"Does she look like you?"
I thought about that. "I don't know. I guess so. She doesn't look like Gina."
"Gina?"
"My ex-wife, late wife, I guess." I'd heard a few years ago she was found stabbed to death in a crack house, something Gina didn't deserve.
"I'm sorry."
I gazed out over the rooftops of the other buildings. The stars twinkled down like children eavesdropping on their parents after they'd been sent to bed. "We weren't... close, when she died. Ever, really," I added, more to myself than her. She didn't ask, but I could feel her gaze on me. I leaned back across from her. "I was eighteen, and drunk—although I'm not using that as an excuse, only offering an explanation. It was a sort of one-night-stand, though that wasn't my intention. I didn't see her again until she showed up six-months later, pregnant on my doorstep. I don't regret it, though, because it gave me Zoe. She and Scott are the light of my life."
"Scott?"
I sighed. "Yeah. He's a little harder to explain, I guess." I paused. "I tried to make things work between me and Gina, for Zoe's sake. But I didn't love Gina, and she was incapable of loving me. I don't mean that harshly. I don't think it was really Gina's fault. It was just how she was." I tried to explain. "I finally figured it out one day, when Zoe was a toddler, and we'd gone to the mall together. A man commented on how cute Zoe was. Gina seemed to know him. She introduced me, and the conversation ended soon after. I found out later the man was Gina's dad. He didn't know about me or Zoe and... it meant nothing to him. Nothing."
"Wow. That is weird."
"Spooky weird. But it helped me to understand that as hard as I tried, Gina was never going to love me or Zoe. She ran out on us on Zoe's first day of school, but found out she was pregnant again, with Scott. I would have wondered if he were mine or not, if he didn't look just like me. Gina and I lived together as man and wife, but we weren't... intimate, that often." I took another drink of my wine. "Funny, I've never really talked about any of this before. Outside of with my family, that is."
She sat up so quickly it startled me. "I want to tell you about how Darren died." She wrapped her arms around her legs again, even tighter this time.
I sat up, too. "Okay."
"I don't talk about it because—" She took a shuddering breath. "Once, when I told this guy about it, he... laughed. I can kind of understand," she added quickly. "If it didn't happen to you, it might sound funny. I guess."
What kind of asshole laughs when you tell them something like that? I took her hand. "I'm not going to laugh, Dani."
She stared at me with a sort of dazed expression, tears in her eyes, and then began. "It was the Fourth of July. We hadn't been marr
ied very long. We went to this small town near ours to watch fireworks. I don't know why we chose to do that, we'd never done it before. It must have been fate. We were sitting on this blanket..." She stared off, and I waited for her to continue. Her voice filled with emotion. "Some drunk—he was supposed to be in charge of the fireworks—but, he knocked over a cannon and it shot into the crowd. And he... ran off," she said, as if still amazed by it.
"There were explosions all around us and people screaming. Darren threw himself over me, but we were okay. But this little girl, she must have been about Tabitha's age, was hit and was screaming in terror and her poor mom..." she shook her head in horror, and my chest tightened. "She tried to comfort her."
She sobbed once and then struggled with the rest. "Darren peered at me... he knew, somehow. He told me he loved me, and looked at that little girl, and took off running toward the cannon. He reached it, and managed to right it, although he burned his hands. I sat, watching him. He headed back toward me, smiling, when one more explosion sent him sprawling. I don't know where it came from—the grass, some other cannon—but... When I got to him... He was in so much pain." She began to cry in earnest, and my heart felt like it was being ripped from my chest. "There were flames. I threw my blanket over him." She held out her shaky hands, and I could see the faint burn marks on them. She broke down, and I put my arms around her, trying to understand the pain she must have gone through. To watch the man she loved die right before her eyes... it was unfathomable. They'd gone to celebrate a holiday with hundreds of others, and it ended in disaster.
Through gasps of air, she continued. "The EMTs told me it wasn't the burns, it was the percussion. It sent his heart into a different rhythm, and then, it finally gave out. Five people were killed that night. One man trampled by the crowd as they tried to flee. The little girl next to us ended up with only minor burns."
"Oh, honey. I'm so sorry." I held her tight. "I'm so, so sorry."
She tilted her head and peered at me. "No. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have dumped this on you like this. I just felt like I wanted to tell you."
"I'm glad you did." I wiped the tears from her face. "Although I'm sorry it upset you."
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