Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel Book 4)

by Alison Kent

  “I know all about your prices. And it is covered up.”

  “But you have been in prison,” Brooklyn said, bringing the conversation back to the spot where he’d dropped it.

  Kinda late to try and hide it. “County a few times. A two-year stretch in the state pen when I was twenty, but that’s all ancient history.”

  She didn’t ask about his crime. She simply said, “What’s on your ankle now?”

  Of course she’d want to know. “Just some abstract art.”

  She nodded toward his leg. “Show me. I want to see.”

  “Yeah,” Geezer added. “We want to see.”

  “You know, G, if you weren’t so damn good, I’d be taking my future business elsewhere,” Callum said, leaning down to hike up the leg of his jeans and unlace his boot. He pulled it off, rolled down his sock, and turned his leg, enabling Brooklyn to see the details of the wing that started near his arch in a sort of spiral, then uncoiled around his ankle and spread up his calf.

  The artist who’d done the cover-up had taken liberties with the concept, and loose feathers drifted down to hide the old barbed wire. The wing itself appeared to have been inked with a fine calligraphy pen; the lines were that sharp, that defined. Shadowing was done with stylized dots, giving the tat the look of a sketch. Originally it had all been black-and-white, but over the years he’d had colors added so it now matched the phoenix on his chest.

  “Mercury?” She lifted her gaze to meet his, hers appreciative, thoughtful. “Hermes?”

  “Take your pick,” he said, and shrugged. “I worked as a sort of messenger for a while. Got caught because I didn’t have wings.”

  She let that settle, the buzz of Geezer’s needle loud in the silence, until she asked, “Is that when you went to prison?”

  He nodded. Seemed as good a time as any to confess his sins. “Possession of a controlled substance. But not enough to cost me a lot of time.”

  She took him in, her gaze seeing through his bullshit. “Two years sounds like a lot of time to me.”

  “It’s better than twenty.” And it so easily could’ve been worse. He’d just dropped off a package he’d been certain contained enough coke to send him away for life. “And I wasn’t much more than a kid. A harsh way to learn the lessons that hadn’t stuck when my parents had tried to hammer them home.”

  “Are they stuck now?” she asked, then sucked in a sharp breath.

  Callum looked from Brooklyn to Geezer, but the older man was intent on his work. “Oh, yeah. I still make mistakes, but rarely of the stupid variety. Same with choices. I’m over the bad ones. Not saying I don’t ever make a wrong one, but I look before I leap.”

  “That’s good to know,” she said as Geezer blotted his work and sat back.

  Callum lifted his chin. “Can I see?”

  “Not yet. A couple more tweaks,” Geezer said, leaning forward one more time. Brooklyn closed her eyes and Callum waited the fifteen minutes or so until the other man gave a nod and turned her chair, offering her a hand mirror so she could check her reflection in the big mirror above the sink.

  Callum had known that she’d chosen a quote, and knowing Brooklyn and her love of books, he’d figured it was something literary. But Geezer had turned it into a work of art: the script, the feather and floral embellishments, the swirls of font.

  Know your own happiness.

  Want for nothing but patience—

  or give it a more fascinating name:

  Call it hope.

  “That’s some damn fine work, G. Really, really nice,” Callum said to the other man, then to Brooklyn, “I hate admitting that I don’t know who that is, but it fits you.”

  “It’s Jane Austen,” she said, still looking in the mirror at the reflection. “From Sense and Sensibility. Mrs. Dashwood is talking to Edward Ferrars. He loves one woman, but is bound by honor to another, and he’s in a melancholy humour, as Mrs. Dashwood puts it. She tells him ‘that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by every body at times . . . ’ ” She stopped, as if the same thoughts running through his head had made a synaptic leap into hers. “Anyway, I like the part about hope.”

  The pain of parting from friends. How about the pain of parting from someone whose friendship had become so much more? The idea of Brooklyn walking out of his life—

  “Hope’s a good thing to have,” Geezer said, taking the mirror and bandaging up Brooklyn’s shoulder while explaining how to care for the tat.

  Callum supposed the other man was right, that hope was a good thing, and since it was all he was going to be left with . . . hope that Brooklyn wouldn’t leave, or if she did that she wouldn’t stay gone. That she would realize how good they were together and give life in Hope Springs a second chance. That this connection between them was strong enough to get him through the pain of parting . . .

  “You ready?” she asked. She’d settled up with Geezer and was working her arms into her hoodie.

  Callum helped her pull up the side that covered the bandaged area, then pushed open the door and followed her outside. “We probably should’ve brought the truck instead of the bike.”

  “Why? Because of me? I’m fine.”

  “You sure? You want to get a coffee or something before we head back?”

  “Coffee, no. Taco?” She nodded. “Pain makes me hungry.”

  He laughed at that, glancing down one side of the street then the other. “Feel like walking? We can grab a bite on the corner there.”

  The bite they grabbed ended up being more than just a taco. They added beans and rice and enchiladas and guacamole to the mix and feasted on the best Tex-Mex he’d had in a while. Then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any. Usually by the time he and Addy sat down to dinner, it was a rotisserie chicken and mashed potatoes made fresh in the grocery store’s deli, if not something from someone else’s kitchen.

  He really did need to do a better job of cooking at home. He did manage to shun fast food; not hard to do in Hope Springs since he had to go out of his way to hit one of the joints. Most of the time it was Malina’s Diner, or now that Two Owls Café stayed open till six, he was able to grab several servings of their casseroles to go, and have food for a couple of days. He did rely too much on Fat Mike’s Pies, and there was a new burger joint downtown he wanted to try. He’d have to see if Brooklyn wanted to go.

  Opening his mouth to bite into his taco, he met her smiling gaze. “What?” he asked, before his teeth cracked through the shell.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Just wondering where you’d gone.”

  “Thinking that I should probably hire a cook. Or look into one of those places that delivers precooked meals made out of fresh ingredients. I’m terrible when it comes to feeding Addy at the end of the day. We eat breakfast for dinner way too often,” he said, thinking of the Olaf pancakes he’d made Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago.

  “What about feeding yourself?”

  “I eat, too.”

  “No, I mean, of course you want to think about what Addy’s eating, but don’t forget to think about yourself, too.”

  That had him smiling. “Are you worried about me, Ms. Harvey?”

  “Not that you can’t take care of yourself, but that you aren’t. And that you won’t.”

  Spoken just like a teacher. “You mean now? Or after you’re gone? When I don’t have you here to remind me?”

  “You’ll have your mother,” she said, breaking into a laugh when he glared at her across the table.

  “Thanks for that.”

  “She feeds you, doesn’t she?”

  He reached for his beer. “Spaghetti with guilt sauce. Pot roast with passive-aggressive gravy. Snark pie for dessert.”

  Brooklyn frowned as she reached for her beer. “Is your relationship with her really that bad?”

  “If she weren’t my mother, and if Addy weren’t her granddaughter, let’s just say we’d have no reason to cross
paths. And I’m pretty sure my father would feel exactly the same. I’m wondering if Addy joining the after-school program is going to make a difference in their relationship. Not that I’d mind.”

  And wow, did that make him sound like a piece-of-crap son, but the truth was the truth. He and his mother did not see eye to eye about anything—they never would—and he hated seeing his father miserable.

  “My mother died two years before my father,” Brooklyn said out of the blue. “He never stopped mourning her. He never gave her up. He never let her go. He was still holding on when he passed,” she added, her focus on her food, her frown telling.

  “Is that why you’re going to Cinque Terre?” he asked after a very long moment of turning over her words and thinking about the husband she’d lost. “Because you’re like your father?”

  “Artie told me not to.”

  “Not to go to Cinque Terre?”

  “Not to be like my father. Not to mourn him. Not to stop living my life if he lost his. And I knew what he meant because it’s exactly what I saw my father do.”

  “Do you think that’s what you’ve done?”

  “I don’t know.” Frustrated, she shoved her hands into her hair and pushed it away from her face. “Sometimes it feel like it. I’m still living in the house we bought together. And until I started going through all the rooms, I still had most of his things. I’ve accepted his death. I accepted it long ago. How could I not? I wake up every day without him. That’s one thing my father was never able to do—come to terms with my mother being gone.”

  “Then what’s wrong?” he asked, wondering if she wasn’t ready to make the break after all.

  “I feel like somewhere along the line I lost me,” she said, scooping up a bite of guacamole with a chip. “Or maybe I never knew me. I left grad school and became Artie’s wife and a teacher.”

  Hmm. “Did you teach because you wanted to? You said your parents were educators, right?”

  “They were. But I love teaching. I might have chosen a different path if I hadn’t grown up under their influence, but I don’t regret a moment of my career.”

  That was good to hear. “Why did you choose to teach kindergarten?”

  “Because of Addy,” she said, sipping from her longneck. “Obviously not Addy specifically, but because of the questions kids that age ask, how excited they are to learn. How hungry they are to learn. I love being a part of that. Showing them what it’s like to discover answers to their questions, and giving them the tools to do so.”

  “Makes sense you’d want to keep doing it. In Italy,” he said, so damn glad this woman was teaching his daughter.

  “You’d keep making chocolate if you moved.”

  “Yeah—”

  “And I’m not sure I will teach. Bianca and I have talked about it, but I don’t yet know if her program will be a fit.”

  Did that mean she might not stay? “Did you ever think about moving? After he died? From Hope Springs?”

  “Not until last summer after talking to Bianca. I love it here. Artie and I had been married a year when we came here from Austin, but since he stayed in Austin so much of the time . . .” She scraped her rice toward her beans and concentrated on mixing the two. “Hope Springs has been my home more than it was ever his, but I still picture him mowing the lawn behind me while I’m pulling weeds from the flower bed. Or hear him singing in the shower when I first wake up. His voice was this big baritone. I loved lying in bed and listening to him.”

  Callum frowned down at his plate, breaking off a chip in his beans. “Sounds to me like you have a ghost.”

  “If I believed in ghosts, I’d say you’re right.”

  “Then selling the house is probably the right thing. You say it’s yours more than it ever was his, but if you can’t be here without him being here, too . . .” He shrugged. “It’s not my place to say, but that pretty much sounds like a given.”

  “Or further proof that I really am in a rut.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Doing the same thing over and over again?”

  “I think it’s called a routine,” he said, finishing off his food. “Work. School and church and family, or whatever a person does.”

  “Going to work. Going home. Reading books and watching movies?”

  “Why not? If that’s what makes you happy and gets you through.”

  “I want to travel again.”

  “Then travel,” he said, wanting to punch himself, but adding, “Instead of staying in Vernazza to teach, fly to Madrid, or Vienna, or Prague. Soak in the culture, gorge on the food, drink wine until you can’t stomach another drop, absorb the atmosphere, and then come home.”

  She’d been looking at him while he talked, and she continued to hold his gaze when he was done. Her eyes grew misty, and she blinked, then asked, “Is that what you want? For me to come home?”

  He couldn’t say it. Not tonight. Not when she was on the verge of tears. Not when she had her husband on her mind. “How about I take you home?”

  The ride took forty-five minutes, and as he guided the Harley into her neighborhood, he wished again they’d taken his truck. No doubt every single one of her neighbors could hear his bike, and were he to glance at their houses, he imagined he’d see curtains fluttering, porch lights flickering on, doors being cracked open to satisfy the curiosity of those inside.

  Brooklyn didn’t seem bothered at all when he pulled into her driveway and cut the bike’s engine. She handed him her helmet and allowed him to help her off with her hoodie; then she draped it over her arms and turned, waiting for him to go.

  “I’ll see you Monday then,” he said.

  “You will?” she asked, frowning.

  “In your official capacity as Ms. Harvey.”

  “Oh, right. Your first parent-teacher conference.” She grinned as she said it. “I kinda put Ms. Harvey away for the night.”

  “Are you going to need help putting her on come Monday? The shoulder and everything?”

  “I think I’ll be fine,” she said, though she winced as she flexed the newly inked skin.

  “If not, you’ve got my number,” he said, and she nodded, smiling, then waved and turned away. He waited until she was inside before starting his bike. Then he headed for his parents’, even though it was late and the Harley might wake them, because he wanted to see his girl.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Coming to Brooklyn’s classroom on official school business had Callum feeling uneasy. His last visit here, six weeks ago, had been all about fun. The idea of hearing about Addy’s progress, what he’d been doing wrong, how he could do better . . . though for all he knew he’d hear about what he was doing right. For some reason he’d conditioned himself to expect the worst.

  From day one he’d made sure Addy had a bedtime story every night. Even then he left books under her extra pillow when he tucked her in, and left her bedside lamp turned low. No harm he could see in her discovering the joy of reading herself to sleep. Whether or not she grew up to be a reader would be out of his hands, but he was planting the seed.

  They had fun with numbers, too. Money and measuring ingredients and telling time. He had no idea how much of what they worked on stuck, but why not let her count out her own carrot sticks for lunch? Or the columns in the spreadsheet on his screen while he worked with her in his lap? She’d only be young enough to want to do so another year at most, probably less.

  He did his best to answer all of her questions in ways she’d understand. It wasn’t always easy, and a lot of the time he would’ve preferred to change the subject. Who wanted to explain to a six-year-old what rape was?

  And, yeah. She’d wanted to know, having heard the word on her Grammy’s twenty-four-hour news station, even after he’d asked his mother repeatedly if she could turn off the sound and turn on the closed-captioning when Addy was in the same room. She’d said she would. She never did. And it didn’t matter now. Even if Addy
couldn’t hear the words, she could read them.

  “Are you ready?” Brooklyn asked.

  She was sitting at her desk, and he was sitting across from her, not in the Addy-sized chair he’d sat in for story hour, but in a chair designed to make him sit up and pay attention. It was hard plastic, unforgiving, bright red. He wondered if it was the chair Brooklyn used for time-outs.

  “Callum?”

  “That would be Mr. Drake,” he said, dragging one leg over the other and squaring his ankle at his knee. “Since this is us being professional and all.”

  But he didn’t want to be professional. He wanted to remember kissing her, to think about her fingers in the small of his back, her lower body pressed to his thigh. About her mouth on his, her tongue hungry and tasting of wine, her hair smelling like lemongrass and green tea.

  She rolled her eyes, pressed her lips tight to keep them from breaking into a grin, and frowned as she looked down at the papers in front of her. “Mr. Drake, then. I’d like to go over your daughter’s progress. We’ve got six weeks left in the school year, and we’ll be spending most of that time in review. These are the places I think Adrianne could use extra work . . .”

  Adrianne. Not Addy. Because . . . professional. He listened to what Brooklyn was saying, but found himself paying more attention to the tone of her voice than the words, and watching the movement of her lips while she talked. He’d always liked her mouth. She rarely wore bright lipstick. The only time he’d seen it was the night of the church carnival, when he’d first realized she had no trouble standing up to his mother.

  For that matter, she had no trouble standing up to him. She seemed to have the most trouble standing up to the ghost of her husband, but he’d told himself he wasn’t going to dwell on that; why should he, when it was up to her to solve that particular problem? Even if the problem felt like it was his, too. And it was, wasn’t it? He wasn’t going to be able to get what he wanted—Brooklyn in his life—until she solved it.