’Tis the Season

by Judith Arnold

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “IS THAT TURKEY big enough?” Gracie asked dubiously.

  Filomena checked the tag. Eleven and a half pounds. “It’s big enough,” she assured Gracie. “And it’s better to get a smaller turkey. The smaller ones taste better. They’re younger and juicier. Like you.”

  “I’m not juicy!” Gracie protested with a giggle.

  Filomena lowered the turkey into the shopping cart, then turned to see Billy approaching from one of the aisles, carrying four cans of cranberry sauce, one balanced atop another, his chin propped on the uppermost can to keep the stack from collapsing. “Four?” she blurted out. “How much are you guys planning to eat?”

  “Lots,” Gracie answered for both of them.

  Filomena had taken the kids to the supermarket Monday evening while Evan was at his Daddy School class. The outing would keep them occupied, and she didn’t want to wait until Wednesday to buy her Thanksgiving supplies, because the aisles would be jammed with frenzied last-minute shoppers then. Even Monday evening, the store was busier than normal.

  All right, so she’d buy four cans of cranberry sauce. Evan was going to pay for the groceries, anyway. He’d insisted on it, saying it was the least he could do once she’d insisted on cooking the meal. No way was she going to let him prepare it. If she did, they’d wind up with broiled turkey.

  She’d also insisted on hosting the meal. She had so many wonderful memories of Thanksgiving dinners at her parents’ old stone house. She used to come home from school for the holiday weekend, and her parents would be in Arlington along with friends of theirs, fascinating people—academic colleagues of her father’s, artistic, bohemian friends of her mother’s, one year the guide who’d accompanied them on a white-water expedition on the Snake River, another year a New Zealand couple they’d met in Sydney, Australia. Every bedroom would be occupied, and all the guests would mix and mingle. Filomena’s mother would serve a magnificent feast, her father would uncork his best wines, and they would all give thanks for the privilege and joy of being together.

  This year would be her last opportunity to have Thanksgiving in the house. She would use the heavy linen tablecloth and napkins her mother had stored in the sideboard, the elegant candlesticks, the china. Her meal wouldn’t be as grand as her mother’s used to be—she was nowhere near as talented in the kitchen—but at least she would be able to give thanks for a fine hearty meal shared with friends.

  Friends. She didn’t like using that word to refer to the Myers family. The children were her wards, and Evan…

  Damn it. He never should have kissed her. She never should have let him. Because ever since Saturday afternoon, she’d discovered she could no longer think of him as a friend, an employer, a dad.

  She thought of him only as a man. A tall, virile and unbearably male man. Just one kiss had been enough to obliterate the professional aspect of their relationship and the easy camaraderie of it. She still accepted his money for watching his children, and she still enjoyed his company, but…

  Oh, that kiss.

  It lingered in her body, dormant, but flaring up every now and then; it stirred a need so powerful it hurt. It throbbed in her memory like a life pulse; it visited her in her sleep. It made her want more than she could have. If Evan knew how irrationally she’d reacted to one little kiss, he probably wouldn’t let her near his kids anymore.

  “Okay, do we have everything?” she asked brightly, surveying the contents of the shopping cart. “Cans of pumpkin? Apples? Whole-wheat bread?”

  “I don’t like whole-wheat bread,” Gracie whined.

  “It’s for the stuffing. Trust me, you’ll love it. Butter? Garlic?”

  “I don’t like garlic,” Billy said.

  “You’ll hardly even notice it,” she promised. “I think that’s everything. Let’s go.”

  A half hour later, the groceries were wedged into her refrigerator and she and the kids were back at Evan’s house. He wasn’t yet home from his Daddy School class, so she organized Billy to read a chapter of Freddy the Detective and filled the tub in the upstairs bathroom with warm water for Gracie’s bath.

  Filomena had never given a child a bath before. But she assured herself that if she could hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up again, she could probably handle giving Gracie a bath—especially since Gracie was so willing to offer guidance. “Don’t make it too hot,” she warned. “And don’t make it too cold, or I’ll get goose bubbles.”

  “Goose bumps?”

  “Yeah. This is good,” Gracie said, dipping her hand into the water accumulating in the tub. “Don’t make it too high or I’ll dround. And I need my toys…” She gathered a plastic sailboat and a plastic frog from the ledge of the tub. “And my washcloth…” She unhooked it from a bar attached to the wall and tossed it into the water. “That’s it, Fil. That’s enough water.” Without a moment’s modesty, she peeled off her clothes, struggling only a little with her pullover shirt. “My nightgown is in my bedroom, prob’ly somewhere on my bed, okay? You better go get it, ’cause I’ll need it when I come out.” She climbed into the tub and sat with a gentle splash.

  Filomena hoped it was all right to leave the child alone in the tub for the time it took to fetch the nightgown. She raced down the hall, located the garment under the wrinkled blanket on Gracie’s unmade bed and raced back to the bathroom, to find Gracie propelling her boat contentedly through the water. “Daddy gives me the best shampoos,” she announced. “You have to do it without getting any shampoo in my eyes.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Filomena promised, shoving up the sleeves of her sweater and kneeling on the hard tile floor next to the tub.

  “You can talk to me, too.”

  Filomena lifted the bottle of baby shampoo from the side of the tub. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you talk to your dad about when he’s shampooing your hair?”

  “We talk about whether he should get married,” Gracie said. “I can’t decide whether he should marry a princess or a jock—because you know, he loves sports. Sports is his job.”

  “Are those his only two choices?” Filomena asked, grinning despite the fact that the subject of Evan’s love life was a dangerous one for her to explore with his talkative daughter. “A princess or a jock?”

  “Well, he said he wasn’t going to marry Heather. She’s very pretty, but I guess that doesn’t matter to him.”

  Filomena considered steering the conversation in a different direction. That would be the wise thing to do. But she wasn’t feeling wise. And she was feeling remarkably at home in his house, bathing his daughter. So she said, “Maybe he doesn’t want to be married.”

  “I think he does. He was married before, you know. To my mommy.”

  “Well, maybe…” Again she contemplated changing the subject. Again her curiosity overruled her conscience. “Maybe after getting a divorce, he decided it would be better not to get married again.”

  “I don’t know,” Gracie said matter-of-factly. “My mommy liked sports a lot. I don’t know much about her, but I know she liked sports, or athletes, or something. Daddy doesn’t talk about her much. I think she made him mad because she left him.”

  “I can’t believe anyone would leave your father,” Filomena murmured, fishing Gracie’s washcloth out of the tub and wringing the excess water from it. “He’s a very nice man.”

  “’Cept when he gets angry.”

  “What does he do when he gets angry?” Filomena wondered whether he’d been abusive to his ex-wife. She couldn’t imagine it, but she supposed it was possible.

  “He says we’re in trouble,” Gracie told her. “Sometimes he grounds us. Once he caught us jumping up and down on Billy’s bed and he got really mad because he said we could have hurt ourselves. He yelled at us a lot that time. He always gets mad when we do something that might hurt us.”

  “Like climbing out a window,” Filomena reminded her.
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  “Yeah. He was really mad about that. He told us we did a stupid thing. I was afraid he was going to cry, but he didn’t. Daddies aren’t supposed to cry. But I think if he was allowed to, he would have cried that time.”

  Far from abusive, he sounded like the sweetest, most devoted father in the world. “He gets mad because he loves you,” Filomena said in his defense. “I think if you got hurt, it would break his heart.”

  Gracie peered up at her, looking surprised and pleased by this explanation. “Maybe that’s why he never gets soap in my eyes. Because he knows that stings. You can use that cup to wet my hair—that’s how he does it,” she said, pointing to a plastic cup on the rim of the tub.

  Filomena carefully shampooed Gracie’s hair, doing her best to keep the lather from touching the little girl’s forehead, let alone dripping near her eyes. Gracie babbled about princesses and haunted castles and how the best castles had water all around them and funny ridges along their roofs, and Filomena thought about Evan, about his gentleness and concern, his capacity for love—and about the woman who had walked away from him. Why? Why would anyone leave a family and a home like this one?

  She was rinsing the last of the suds from Gracie’s hair when she heard footsteps in the hall, too heavy to belong to Billy. She glanced over her shoulder in time to see Evan fill the doorway, his leather jacket unzipped to reveal a cotton sweater and a pair of jeans. He still carried the outdoor chill on his clothes, and it clashed with the humid warmth of the bathroom. “Hey, you didn’t have to give her a bath,” he said, remaining at the threshold.

  “Hi, Daddy!” Gracie chirped, her voice echoing off the hard surfaces of the room. “Fil’s doing a great job! She didn’t get any soap in my eyes!”

  “Great!” He gazed at Filomena, and she wanted to apologize for her presumptuousness in performing an evening ritual that rightly belonged to him. But his eyes were a hushed, sweet gray, and when he said “Thanks,” he sounded as if he truly meant it.

  Filomena could have stared into his eyes forever—and it might have taken her forever to figure out exactly what he was thanking her for. But she didn’t want to respond to him, or to think about the undercurrent that passed between them, dark and relentless. “Well,” she said briskly, turning from him, “this bath is hereby officially done.”

  “You gotta help me out so I don’t slip,” Gracie instructed her. “Daddy put these no-slip things on the tub, but you still have to help me out.”

  Filomena had thought perhaps Evan would take over and get his daughter out of the tub, but he only remained in the doorway, watching. She rose on her knees, cushioning them on the fluffy floor mat, and wrapped her arms around Gracie’s compact, slippery torso. She clung to Filomena’s forearms and hoisted one leg out of the tub, then the other, managing to splash only a quart or so of water on Filomena.

  “That’s my towel,” she said, pointing to one of the two bath towels hanging on the opposite wall. Before Filomena could grab it, Evan reached into the room, lifted it from the towel bar and handed it to her. His fingers brushed hers as he released the towel, and she was shocked by the surge of awareness she felt at that brief accidental contact.

  Turning from Evan, she wrapped the towel around Gracie and dried her off. Gracie was prattling about something—she wanted her daddy to brush her hair, because he never yanked at the snarls. But when Filomena looked back toward the door, Evan was gone.

  “Do you need help with your nightgown?” she asked Gracie.

  The little girl rolled her eyes. “Of course not. I’m not a baby!” She wriggled into the gown and pulled her wet hair through the neck hole. “Daddy, you brush my hair, okay?”

  Filomena looked toward the door again. Evan was back, minus his jacket and armed with a pale-blue hairbrush with long white bristles. “Sure, Gracie, I’ll brush it.” He caught Filomena’s eye as she hauled herself to her feet. “Thanks,” he said in almost a whisper.

  She sensed she was being dismissed, which was just as well. She needed to leave this house, to get away from the children she was growing way too fond of—and away from their father, who could stir too many emotions inside her with one glance, one smile, one simple word, one inadvertent stroke of his hand against hers. She definitely couldn’t stick around long enough to watch him brush his daughter’s hair. Honestly. A woman could fall in love with a man for no better reason than he didn’t yank at the snarls in his daughter’s wet tresses.

  The hallway seemed cold after the time she’d spent in the steamy bathroom. Her sweater, damp from where Gracie had splattered water on it, felt clammy against her midriff, and she plucked it away from her skin. Downstairs, she found Billy sprawled out on the floor of the den, lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his feet in the air and his chin resting against his fists. The television was off; he was reading.

  “Hey, Billy,” she called to him. “I’m leaving now.”

  He twisted around, then pushed himself up to sit. “This book is cool,” he said. “Can I hang on to it?”

  “Sure.”

  “I thought I wasn’t gonna like it. It’s so long. I don’t usually like chapter books, ’cause it takes forever to read them. But this is good.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I mean, the way the animals all have different personalities. It’s like they’re people, only they’re animals.”

  “Exactly.” Filomena grinned. That was the gist of her thesis—the use of animals in children’s literature as a metaphor for human society.

  “So it isn’t really like they’re magic or anything. I mean, in some books, talking animals are magical. But here it’s more like they’re just people or something.”

  “That’s right.” Her smile expanded. She was proud of Billy for having made the distinction, and pleased that she could share a book she adored with someone who seemed likely to adore it just as much.

  “You sure you don’t mind if I borrow it for a little while?”

  “Not at all. I’ve got another copy back at home.” She heard voices drifting down the stairs, Gracie’s and Evan’s, and she felt a sudden urgency about leaving. She needed to get out before she saw Evan again, before she thought about him brushing Gracie’s hair, or painting the back porch, or kissing her, or being so upset by his children’s dangerous behavior that he’d nearly cried. In another day or two, Filomena hoped she’d feel more comfortable around him. But if those few minutes when he’d stood in the bathroom doorway—if that one second when his fingers had grazed her hand—were an indication, she lacked any perspective when it came to him.

  She exited into the kitchen to get her jacket and purse. Shrugging her arms through the sleeves, she returned to the den to say goodbye to Billy. Not quick enough. Evan strode into the room from the stairs, saw her in her jacket and stopped. “You’re leaving?”

  “I think I’m done here.”

  He didn’t look as tense as she felt. In fact, he seemed tired but relaxed, his shoes off, his hair endearingly tousled and his smile both sheepish and hopeful. “I owe you some money,” he said.

  She ought to let him pay her. It would help to remind her of the nature of their relationship. But he was far too appealing to her right now, in his faded jeans and wool socks, his hands in his pockets and one shoulder cocked. “There’s no rush,” she said, referring to the payment.

  “Are you sure?” He approached her, digging his wallet out of his hip pocket. “Gracie told me you spent a fortune on the groceries.”

  “I didn’t spend a fortune,” she assured him, realizing she didn’t want that reminder, that reality check, the concrete evidence that she was working for him. “Really, Evan, it can wait.”

  If he heard tension in her voice, he ignored it. He took her arm and steered her out of the den, down the hall to the front door. At the door, he pulled her to a halt, but his hand remained on her arm, his fingers arching around her elbow. “I wanted to thank you again. You didn’t have to give Gracie a bath.”

  “We
ll…it seemed like a good idea,” she said vaguely. She couldn’t tell him she’d wanted to give Gracie a bath because it made her feel that much more like a part of this household.

  “I worry sometimes,” he confessed, his gaze locked onto her. “She’s a girl, and I’m a man, and I worry that maybe I shouldn’t be there when she’s in the tub.”

  “You’re her father,” Filomena assured him.

  “I know, but…” He sighed. “I worry, Fil. I worry that I’m not doing things right.”

  She recalled where he’d just spent his evening. “Did you learn anything useful in the Daddy School?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It was good. I’ll definitely go back. But…” He sighed again and released her arm. “I appreciate your giving Gracie a bath, that’s all.”

  “It was my pleasure,” she said honestly.

  “Even though she dumped a ton of water on you?” He ran his fingertips across a damp spot on her sweater. She should have closed her jacket. She should have escaped before he could corner her in the confines of the entry hall. She should have been able to accept his touch without going all tingly and soft inside. “I could run your sweater through the dryer if you want to wait a few minutes.”

  “No. Really, it’s fine.” She was already feeling too close to his family. To have her sweater spend five minutes in his drier would be much too intimate.

  He seemed on the verge of saying something, then changed his mind and dropped back a step. “One of the things the teacher talked about was that fathers need to learn how to listen. So…I’m listening. Okay?”

  She frowned, unsure of what he was getting at.

  He smiled crookedly. “I’ll pay you the next time I see you. You want to leave. See? I’m listening.”

  She could have told him she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stay here, to hold Gracie in her lap and discuss Freddy the Detective with Billy and allow herself to admire Evan’s angular face, his tall, lean body, his humor, his devotion to his children. If he could listen to her heart, that would be the message he heard. But he could listen only to her words, and they were telling him she wanted to leave.