“Have you been anywhere else?” he asked. “Have you done much traveling?”
The answer was no, and the rest of the trip was taken up with places she dreamed of seeing and the places he’d already seen.
The rain drizzled as they ambled through the children’s park and the picnic area and stood on the banks of the lake watching a few die-hard sailors braving the wind and waves. Their conversation bounced from hither to thither, but nowhere near yawn. They laughed and teased and fed whole wheat bread from his brown paper bag to the squawking mallards and a few wayward Canadian honkers.
“I wasn’t sure if they’d prefer white or dark bread. So I brought both,” he explained.
“Let’s keep ’em healthy and feed them the dark. What are you going to do with the other loaf?”
He shrugged. He hadn’t thought about it. Throw it away? Leave it on a bench for someone else to feed to the ducks?
“Can I have it?”
“Sure,” he said, handing her the bag, concern biting at his mind. Couldn’t she afford food?
“The Paulson Clinic thanks you,” she said with a gracious smile. “Even leftover duck food is a welcome sight.”
Suddenly he was feeling too fat, too well fed.
“I wish it were a truckload of bread.”
“So do I.”
The best part of the afternoon, however, were the long, contented moments of silence. Whole segments of time when being male or female, rich or poor, blue blood or foster child didn’t matter. Precious pieces of time when it was enough to simply be and be together.
It was during one such moment when Holly chanced to glance at Oliver. She liked looking at him. He was certainly handsome, but it was his confidence and quiet intelligence that appealed to her most. It made her feel safe.
There wasn’t a woman alive, or a man for that matter, who didn’t want to feel that the person they were with was capable of protecting them, of taking care of them, of caring for them. Being the captain of one’s own ship was frightening and lonely sometimes. A safe harbor and solid land were always a comforting sight. Oliver was a comforting sight.
He was feeling safe and comfortable, too, she noted. It made her happy and sad at once to see that he felt free to be himself in her presence, that he didn’t think he needed to be constantly in good cheer for her. But it was a shame to see that he had that isolated and lonely look on his face again, the one he got when his guard was down; when he didn’t think anyone would notice; when he didn’t think anyone would care.
“What was he like?” she asked softly.
He chuckled and shook his head. When he looked at her, his expression had changed to one of futile acceptance.
“He was a good man,” he said, not bothering to pretend that he didn’t know who she was asking about. Obviously, she’d been diddling with his thoughts again. “Born in the wrong century, but a good man.”
“What was he like?” she asked again.
“He wrote poetry,” he said, sounding almost as if he didn’t approve of it. He turned and walked slowly along the shore, away from the ducks and geese. “He wore a bow tie every day for as long as I knew him, and he never once raised his voice to me.”
Holly’s brows rose. At first she thought these were strange things to recall about a loved one. Stranger still, that Oliver didn’t sound as if they were cherished memories. But then she remembered Marie’s husband, Roberto, and smiled. He always wore long-sleeved white shirts and rolled the cuffs up to his elbows. And when he spoke, his voice could be heard in every corner of the big old house on Chambrey Street.
“What sort of poetry did he write?” she asked, thinking it a good place to start. Oliver needed to talk about his father. It didn’t really matter about what, he simply needed to get started.
“Crap mostly,” he said, surprising her. “Stuff about loyalty and truth and loving a son and springtime and fulfilling your own destiny.”
“Oliver?” she broke in, unable to connect the hostility in his voice with the grief in his eyes.
“I hated that stuff,” he went on. “I used to think he was the biggest wimp that ever walked the earth. A sissy. And he was old. Close to fifty when I was born. I used to think it was because he was so weird that no woman would marry him before he met my mother, and that she had been duped, tricked somehow into having his child. Later I was a little more cynical about it. I figured that it probably took him fifty years to figure out how to get it up.”
His mouth closed on his bitterness, forming a slim, angry line. He stopped and looked out over the lake. She watched his chest heave with heated emotions. He was silent for a few minutes. She wasn’t sure of what to say or do and took her cue from him. Finally his lids lowered over his eyes, as if blocking out some terrible scene, and then he looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there.
“He wasn’t around much when I was young. He was there but not around. He was like this kindly old gentleman who lived with us. Gentle, quiet, off in a world of his own. I didn’t know what he did all day when he went off to the office. I didn’t know what he did all evening in his study. He never offered to share his life with me, and I didn’t care enough to ask.” He started walking again. “My uncle Max turned up at a pivotal time in my life. I was almost eight and my mother had recently died and... I guess I was sort of lost.” He looked down at his shoes. “Soft things and nice smells always make me think of her, but I don’t really remember much about her,” he said as an aside. “Anyway, Max George had married Elizabeth a few years earlier, and when I might have turned to the kindly old gentleman who was my father for comfort and companionship, Max showed up. He and Elizabeth moved in with us. Johanna came, too, but she was away at school most of the time. At the time, I thought they came to live with us because my father didn’t want to have to take care of me, but I later found out it was because they were broke and had nowhere else to go. And it never occurred to me that I could have been sent away to school like Johanna if my father had wanted me out of his hair.”
She slid her hand between his arm and body. Instinctively he quickly took her fingers in his and held them tight.
“Max was a real character. He liked to watch football, baseball, horse racing, hockey, anything he could bet on. But I didn’t see any of the betting going on. All I saw was him taking the time to take me with him. I thought he was the best thing to come along since skateboards. He was loud and happy and he didn’t care how late he kept me out at night. Not like the old man. All he cared about was my getting my homework done and making sure Max got me home early so I’d get plenty of sleep. The few times he’d remember to show up at my soccer games or pick me up from football practice, I’d want to slither under the sod. He embarrassed me to death. The world’s oldest and most boring father, and he was all mine.”
“You were young, Oliver. All boys want Superman to be their dad,” she said, finally realizing that the contempt in his manner was not for his father but for himself.
“Max was Superman,” he told her. “He introduced me to the wild, wonderful world of women when I was fifteen. I’d look at him and then I’d look at me and then I’d look at my father and... I didn’t even try to hide my disgust for him after that,” he said, his shame heavy in his heart. “I was so blind.”
She couldn’t stand to watch him beating himself up for deeds long in the past.
“When did it all change?” she asked. “When did you fall in love with your father?”
Her wording jolted him. Technically, however, falling in love with his father and out of love with Max was pretty much what had happened. He smiled and sighed, his memory fast-forwarding to a more pleasant time.
“It started in my second year of college. I was prelaw at USC Berkeley. I could have stayed on campus, but I actually had more freedom staying at home. The old man had long since stopped trying to make any attempts at fathering me, and nobody else gave a damn what I did. I was out of control,” he said, having no trouble with the admission. “Fighti
ng, drinking, sleeping around. I had money and freedom and a will of my own. A dangerous combination for a kid as stupid as I was.”
“For any kid, I would think,” she said, amazed at how hard he was being on himself. Times had changed and turned out for the best, but Oliver hadn’t put any of it into perspective yet.
“I was accused of cheating on my finals,” he announced. It sounded an awful lot like he’d been accused of murder. “They could have accused me of just about anything else in those days, and I probably would have been guilty, but... I never could bring myself to cheat—not on girls, or tests, or anything else. And for the first time in a very long time, I was scared. I’d had minor run-ins with the law that hadn’t scared me that much.”
“They could have expelled you, ruined your career,” she said, fully understanding the implications.
“So what if they did?” He laughed. “If I never worked a day in my life, I’d have had plenty of money, and I knew it. And when the old man died, I’d have had more.”
“Then why did you care? What difference would it have made? You could have gone to fifty other schools that were just as good, graduated, and gone on to law school. Why was going to USC so important?”
“It wasn’t.”
“Then what was it?”
“I couldn’t get anyone to believe that I hadn’t cheated. No one believed me. No one believed in me. I was like this invisible thing that no one could see or hear or take seriously. No one cared.”
“Except your father.”
He nodded. “I went to Max first, of course. By then I’d discovered he wasn’t the superman I’d believed him to be. He was forever playing around behind Elizabeth’s back, and every loan shark in town had his private number. But he knew stuff. He could wiggle out of anything. I’d seen him do it a hundred times over.”
“What did he tell you to do?”
“He told me to lie. He told me to tell them I didn’t do it, that they couldn’t prove I did it, and if they expelled me, I’d sue.”
“But...”
“I know.” He laughed again. “I was innocent. I told him I was. But even he didn’t believe me.”
“So you went to your father.”
He shook his head. “What could he do? He was a wimp, remember?”
“What did you do?”
“I demanded a review board hearing. I was going to defend myself—but I didn’t stand a chance. There wasn’t a professor at that school who was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, or one I hadn’t insulted yet either, it seemed. There wasn’t even a glimmer of a second chance in the room when I walked in that day.”
“What happened?”
“I stated my case and they pretended to listen. They conferred for about half a second and came back to me with blood in the eyes. Then, just as they started to read me the riot act, the door in the back of the room opened. I’ll never forget it. Everyone turned to look and there was this little old man standing there, wearing a red bow tie and, holding in his hand this dumb hat he always wore. I thought I was going to sink through the floor. It even crossed my mind to pretend that I didn’t know who he was, but then he started talking, real soft the way he always did, so people had to stop breathing to hear what he was saying.”
He was lost in the recollection for a moment, then he smiled.
“He said he was ashamed to have to admit that I was his son, but nevertheless the fact was inescapable—that was the way he talked, like a Victorian throwback. He said that I had very little character, that I was irresponsible, spoiled, and selfish, but that, as was true of even the lowest of the lowly, I did have a redeeming quality.” He laughed heartily. “He had those profs sitting on the edge of their chairs, wondering what it was.”
“And...” she prompted, failing to see any humor.
“He told them that I was so greedy and self-serving that I always took whatever I wanted, that I didn’t know how to cheat because I’d never had to. And he knew for a fact that I never lied because I didn’t have enough self-respect to care what anyone thought of me. And, therefore—that’s what he said, “therefore”—I couldn’t have cheated on my exams because I wouldn’t bother to lie about it if I had. Then he proposed that they let me repeat the exam under close observation to prove that I knew the material.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, but I was so nervous, I wasn’t sure I’d remember any of it for the exam.”
“And did you talk to your father afterward?”
“I asked him why he did it, why he came to my defense.” He paused. “He said he did it for my mother. That what little goodness there was in me, was left there by her. And because he loved her, he would always love the goodness in me.”
“It doesn’t sound as if there was much there to love, Oliver.”
He chuckled. “There wasn’t. But after that I started seeing things differently. Not right away. But gradually. It bothered me that the only person in the world who believed in me, who believed there was at least one shred of good in me somewhere, was this shriveled-up old man who wrote poetry. It fascinated me. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what it was in him that made him believe in me after all I’d done to him.”
“And did you ever find out?”
“Oh, sure. But it took me another ten years.”
“Ten years?”
“When he retired eight years ago and moved to Palm Springs—for the drier climate—he turned everything over to me. I’d changed some by then.” He chuckled. “I was still a crazy kid inside, but I worked hard at controlling it. I thought I was as straight as a wall. I wanted to be. I wanted... not to disappoint the old man. I didn’t want him to know how wrong he was about me. But that didn’t happen overnight, and trustees and board members have very long memories, and, well, my father was going to be a hard act for anyone to follow.”
“They all liked him.”
He nodded. “I worked for him for a while when I got out of school and was humbled every time I rediscovered the fact that his quiet thoughtfulness extended far beyond his poetry to a very cunning business mind. He was a genius. Very clever. Made a ton of money for the company and the foundation and never took any credit for it. It... hurt when the board and the trustees refused my nomination. I knew I wouldn’t ever be able to fill his shoes, but I’d been trying to emulate him some—his honesty, his respect and genuine concern for other people... his kindness, gentleness...”
“But everyone still thought you were a spoiled brat,” she concluded.
“Pretty much.”
“So, what happened?”
“He called a meeting. I was conveniently out of town at the time, but I’ve heard that he reminded everyone that it was he who had made them all rich, and that doing so had been a mere by-product of his true intent. He was Adrian Carey and he was the boss. He hadn’t been working for them all those years, and if they couldn’t accept the son that he trusted and loved and had been building the company for as a legacy of that love, then he’d tear it apart and sell it piece by piece before he died, and they all knew there wouldn’t be a damned thing they could do to stop him. It was the first time anyone had ever heard him yell or swear.”
Holly had goose bumps racing up her arms. She wanted him to start over at the beginning and tell the story again.
“I went running down to Palm Springs for his advice a lot those first few years,” he remembered good-naturedly. “And he never failed me. Never had failed me, really. He’d always been there, he just... well, it just took me a long time to get to know him.”
“And now you miss him.”
“Like an arm or a leg. I feel as if there’s a big chunk of me missing.”
“If your father could see that the good in you was left by your mother, then what honesty and intelligence and gentleness and kindness you have was left by him. And as long as you are all those things, then he isn’t really gone, is he?” she asked, almost as if she were talking to herself. She was even more speculative when sh
e added, “Maybe that’s why people have children.”
They passed back into a companionable silence, comfortable in their own thoughts, content to share time and space.
The space Oliver was sharing, however, was somehow broader, augmented in a way that had him breathing more deeply and curbing an urge to stretch his muscles. He felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his chest, or a dark cloud that had settled in his heart had suddenly dissipated. He recalled many forgotten memories of his father with gladness and knew not a single pang of guilt or pain.
“Know what I feel like doing?” he asked abruptly.
“Buying ice cream?” she asked hopefully, her eyes fixed on the Double Dip Cafe across the street from the park. There was an ice cream Christmas tree, with all fifty-six flavors, painted on the window.
“I wish you’d stop that. It makes me nervous as hell.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
She grinned. “Can I help it if I was thinking how romantic it would be if you were to buy me an ice cream cone to eat in the rain a week before Christmas?”
“Most women wouldn’t be thinking that was romantic,” he grumbled. “They’d be thinking I was trying to freeze them to death. And, Ms. Knowitall, I was actually thinking I’d like to get in out of the rain. This isn’t my idea of a romantic date.”
“It isn’t?” She looked surprised. “Are you telling me that you don’t think kissing in the rain is romantic?”
“We aren’t kissing.”
“We could be.”
He stopped walking and turned to her, holding his breath.
“Could we be?”
She smiled and gave him an all-things-are-possible look.
Six
NO ONE WOULD HAVE guessed that he was trembling inside when he palmed her cheek in one big hand. No one would have guessed how often he’d relived their first kiss or how much he’d looked forward to the next. No one would have guessed that the drops of water he thumbed from her lips were as silky and warm as her skin or that her eyes could sparkle like gold dust. No one would have guessed that her hand could sear his skin through a coat and a sweater or how crippling it could be to watch her lips part in anticipation. No one would have guessed...
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