That deadly grin of his—it should have been registered somewhere, like an assault weapon—crooked up the corner of his mouth. “Will she eat the curtains in your absence? Order pizza and smoke cigars? Log onto the Internet and cruise X-rated Web sites?”
Libby laughed. “No,” she said. Once, they’d been so close, she and Tate. She’d known his dog, Crockett, well enough to grieve almost as much over not seeing him anymore as she had over losing his master. It seemed odd, and somehow wrong, that Tate had never made Hildie’s acquaintance. “She’s a good dog. She’ll behave.”
“Then come in and have some birthday cake.”
Libby looked up at the front of that great house, and she remembered stolen afternoons in Tate’s bed, the summer after high school especially. Traveling further back in time, she recalled the night his parents came home early from a weekend trip and caught them swimming naked in the pool.
Mrs. McKettrick had calmly produced a bath sheet for Libby, bundled her into a pink terrycloth bathrobe, and driven her home with Libby, shivering, though the weather was hot and humid at the time.
Mr. McKettrick had ordered Tate to the study as she was leaving with Tate’s mom. “We’re going to have ourselves a talk, boy,” the rancher had said.
So much had changed since then.
Tate’s mom and dad were gone.
Her own father had long since died of cancer, after a lingering and painful decline.
Tate had married Cheryl, and they’d had twins together.
On the one hand, Libby really wanted to go inside and join the party.
On the other, she knew there would be too many other memories waiting to ambush her—mostly simple, ordinary ones, as it happened, like her and Tate doing their homework together, playing pool in the family room, watching movies and sharing bowls of popcorn. But it was the ordinary memories, she’d learned after losing her dad, that had the most power, the most poignancy.
With all her other problems, Libby figured she couldn’t handle so much poignancy just then.
“Not this time,” she said quietly, and shifted the Impala into Reverse.
“You need to get that exhaust fixed,” Tate told her. The smile was gone; his expression was serious. Moments before, she’d been convinced he’d only invited her inside to be polite, wanted to repay her in some small way for bringing the dogs to him on such short notice. Now she wondered if it actually mattered to him, that she accept his invitation. Was it possible that he was disappointed by her refusal?
She nodded. “It’s on the agenda. Good night, Tate.”
He looked down at the dogs, still frolicking around him as eagerly as if he’d stuffed raw T-bone steaks into each of his jeans pockets. “What are their names?”
“They don’t have any,” Libby said. “I call them ‘the dogs.’”
Tate chuckled. “That’s creative,” he replied. His body was half turned, as though the house and the people inside it were drawing him back, and she supposed they were. Garrett and Austin were both wild, in their different ways, but Tate had been born to be a family man, like his father. “You’re sure you won’t come in?”
“I’m sure.”
One of the big main doors opened, and the twins bounded out, dressed in identical pink cotton pajamas.
Libby’s heart lurched at the sight of them, and she put the Impala back in Park.
“Puppies!” they cried in unison, rushing forward.
Libby sat watching as the pups and the little girls immediately bonded, knowing all the while that she had to go.
“Happy birthday,” Tate told his daughters, with a tenderness Libby had never heard in his voice before. He glanced back at her, mouthed the word, “Thanks.”
Libby’s vision was blurred. She blinked rapidly and was about to suck it up, back out of that spectacular driveway and head on home, where she belonged, when suddenly one of the children, the one with glasses, ran to the side of her car and peered inside.
“Hi,” she said. “We have a castle. Would you like to see it?”
Libby looked up at the front of the house. “Not tonight, sweetheart, but thank you.”
“My name is Ava. You’re Libby Remington, aren’t you? You own the Perk Up Coffee Shop.”
Although Libby couldn’t recall actually meeting the girls, Blue River wasn’t a big place, and practically everybody knew everybody else. “Yes, I’m Libby. I hope you’re having a happy birthday.”
“We are,” the child said. “Uncle Garrett bought us our very own castle from Neiman-Marcus, and Uncle Austin sent us ponies. But Dad gave us what we really wanted—puppies!”
“Take these rascals inside and give them some water,” Tate told his daughters. He lingered, while the “rascals” followed the twins into the house without so much as a backward glance at Libby.
Libby’s throat tightened, partly because this was goodbye for her and the dogs, partly because of the little girls’ obvious joy and partly for reasons she could not have identified to save her life.
“I actually bought them a croquet set,” Tate confessed.
Libby frowned. In the old days, she and Julie and Paige had played a lot of backyard croquet with their dad, and she cherished the recollection. She’d been proud that when other daddies were on the golf course with their friends and business associates, hers had chosen to spend the time with her and her sisters. “What’s wrong with that?”
He sighed, stood with his arms folded, his head tilted back. He’d always loved looking at the stars, said that was why he’d never be happy in a big city. “Nothing,” he admitted. “But I kind of lost my head after the castle and the ponies were delivered. Call it male ego.”
“You’re not going to change your mind about the dogs, are you?” Libby asked, worried all over again.
Tate gripped the edge of her open window and bent to look in at her. His face was mere inches from hers, and for one terrible, wonderful, wildly confusing moment, she thought he was going to kiss her.
He didn’t, though.
“I’m not going to change my mind, Lib,” he said. “The mutts will have a home as long as I do.”
“You wouldn’t send them to town to live with your wife?”
“Ex-wife,” Tate said. “No, Cheryl’s not a dog person. Like the ponies, they’ll live right here on the Silver Spur for the duration.”
“Okay,” Libby said, now almost desperate to be gone.
And oddly, equally desperate to stay.
Tate straightened, smiled down at her. Half turned again, toward the house. Toward his daughters and the dogs that were already loved and would soon be named, toward his brother Garrett and Esperanza, the housekeeper.
But then he turned back.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to have dinner with me some night?” he asked, sounding as shy as he had that long-ago day when he’d asked her to the junior prom. “Soon?”
CHAPTER THREE
“I CAN’T PAY YOU,” Libby warned, the next morning, when her sister Julie showed up at the shop, all set to bake scones and chocolate-chip cookies, her four-year-old son Calvin in tow. Clad in swim trunks and flip-flops, with a plastic ring around his waist, Libby’s favorite—and only—nephew had clearly made up his mind to take advantage of the first body of water to present itself.
He adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses, with the chunk of none-too-clean tape holding the bridge together, and climbed onto one of three stools lining the short counter.
Libby ruffled his hair. “Hey, buddy,” she said. “Want an orange smoothie?”
“No, thanks,” Calvin replied glumly.
Julie, twenty-nine, with long, naturally auburn hair that fell to the middle of her back in spiral curls—also natural—and a figure that would do any exercise maven proud, wore jeans and a royal blue long-sleeved T-shirt. Thus her hazel eyes, which tended to reflect whatever color she was wearing that day, were the pure azure of a clear spring sky. She grinned at Libby and headed for the tiny kitchen in the back of the shop.
“You could take my week troubleshooting with Marva,” she sang. “Instead of paying me wages, I mean.”
“Not a chance,” Libby said, but the refusal was rhetorical, and Julie knew that as well as she did. The three sisters rotated, week by week, taking responsibility for their mother, which meant visiting regularly, settling the problems Marva invariably caused with neighbors and hunting her down when she decided to take off on one of her hikes into the countryside and got lost. Marva was always up to something.
“Mom doesn’t have anything better to do anyway,” Calvin confided solemnly. He was precocious for his age, and he’d already been reading for a year. Julie, a high school English and drama teacher, was off for the summer, and her usual fill-in job at the insurance agency had fallen through for some unspecified reason. “You might as well let her make scones.”
Libby chuckled and couldn’t resist planting a smacking kiss on Calvin’s cheek. “The community pool is closed for maintenance this week,” she reminded him. “So what’s with the trunks and the plastic inner tube?”
Calvin’s eyes were a pale, crystalline blue, like those of his long-gone father, a man Julie had met while she was student teaching in Galveston, after college. As close as she and Julie were, Libby knew very little about Gordon Pruett, except that he’d owned a fishing boat and was a lot better at going away than coming back. He’d stayed around long enough to pass his unique eye color on to his son and name him Calvin, for his favorite uncle, but soon enough he’d felt compelled to move on.
Gordon didn’t visit, but he wasn’t completely worthless. He remembered birthdays, mailed his son a box of awkwardly wrapped presents every Christmas, and sent Julie a few hundred dollars in child support each month.
Most of the time, the checks even cleared the bank.
Calvin pushed his everyday glasses up his nose—he had better ones for important occasions. “I know the pool is closed for maintenance, Aunt Libby,” he said, “but the kid next door to us—Justin?—well, his mom and dad bought him a swimming pool, the kind you blow up with a bicycle pump. His dad filled it with a garden hose this morning, but Justin’s mom said we can’t swim until the sun heats the water up. I just want to be ready.”
Julie chuckled as she came out of the kitchen. She’d already managed to get flour all over the front of her fresh apron. “Hey, Mark Spitz,” she said to her son, “how about going next door for a five-pound bag of sugar? Give you a nickel for your trouble.”
Almsted’s, probably one of the last surviving mom-and-pop grocery stores in that part of Texas, was something of a local institution, as much a museum as a place of business.
“You can’t buy anything for a nickel,” Calvin scoffed, but he climbed down from the stool and held out one palm, reporting for duty.
Libby gave him a few dollars from the till to pay for the sugar, and Calvin marched himself out onto the sidewalk, headed next door.
Julie immediately stationed herself at a side window, in order to keep an eye on him. No child had ever gone missing from Blue River, but a person couldn’t be too careful.
“We’ve already got plenty of sugar,” Libby said.
“I know,” Julie answered, watching as her son went into Almsted’s, with its peeling, green-painted wooden screen door. “I have something to tell you, and I don’t want Calvin to hear.”
Libby, busy getting ready for the Monday-morning latte rush, went still. “Is something wrong?”
“Gordon e-mailed me,” Julie said, still keeping her careful vigil. “He’s married and he and his wife pass through town often, on the way to visit his parents in Tulsa, and now Gordon and the little woman want to stop by sometime soon, and get acquainted with Calvin.”
“That sounds harmless,” Libby observed, though she felt a prickle of uneasiness at the news.
“I don’t like it,” Julie replied firmly. She smiled, which meant Calvin had reappeared, lugging the bag of sugar, and stepped back so he wouldn’t see her. “What if Gordon decides to be an actual, step-up father, now that he’s married?”
“Julie, he is Calvin’s father—”
Julie made a throat-slashing motion with one hand, and Calvin struggled through the front door, might have been squashed by it if he hadn’t been wearing the miniature inner tube with the goggle-eyed frog-head on the front.
“Here,” he said, holding the bag out to his mother. “Where’s my nickel?”
Julie paid up, casting a warning glance in Libby’s direction as she did so. There was to be no more talk of Gordon Pruett’s impending visit while Calvin was around.
“I’m bored,” Calvin soon announced. “I want to go to playschool over at the community center.”
“You should have thought of that when you insisted on wearing swimming trunks and the floaty thing with the frog-head,” Julie responded lightly, heading back toward the kitchen with the unnecessary bag of sugar. “You’re not dressed for playschool, kiddo.”
“There’s a dress code?” Libby asked. She generally took Calvin’s side when there was a difference of opinion.
“No,” Julie conceded brightly, “but I’d be willing to bet nobody else is wearing a bathing suit.”
Two secretaries came in then, for their double nonfat lattes, following by Jubal Tabor, a lineman for the power company. In his midforties, with a receding hairline and a needy personality, Jubal always ordered the Rocket, a high-caffeine concoction with ginseng and a lot of sugar. Said it got him through the morning.
“Expectin’ a flood, kid?” he asked Calvin, who was back on his stool, shoulders hunched, frog-head slightly askew.
Calvin rolled his eyes.
Hiding a smile, Libby served the secretaries’ drinks, took their money and thanked them.
Meanwhile, Julie made sure she stayed in the kitchen. Jubal asked her to the movies nearly every time their paths crossed, and even now he was standing on tiptoe trying to catch a glimpse of her while the espresso for his Rocket steamed out of the steel spigot.
“He’s not so bad,” Libby had said once, when Julie had sent Jubal away with another carefully worded rejection.
“Julie and Jubal?” her sister had said, her eyes green that day because she was wearing a mint-colored blouse. “Our names alone are reason enough to steer clear—we’d sound like second cousins to the Bobbsey twins. Besides, he’s too old for me, he wears white socks and he always calls Calvin ‘kid.’”
The admittedly comical ring of their names, Jubal’s age and the white socks might have been overlooked, in Libby’s opinion, but the gruff way he said “kid” whenever he spoke to Calvin bugged her, too. So she’d stopped reminding her sister that there was a shortage of marriageable men in Blue River.
“Scones aren’t ready yet?” Jubal asked, casting a disapproving eye toward the virtually empty plastic bakery display case beside the cash register. “Out at Starbucks, they’ve always got scones.”
Libby refrained from pointing out to Jubal that he never bought scones anyway, no matter how good the selection was, and set his drink on the counter. “You been cheating on me, Jubal?” she teased. “Buying your jet fuel from the competition?”
Jubal looked at her and blinked once, hard, as though he’d never seen her before. “You want to go to the movies with me tonight?” he asked.
Calvin made a rude sound, which Jubal either missed or pretended not to hear.
“I’m sorry,” Libby said, with a note of kind regret in her voice. “I promised Tate McKettrick I’d have dinner with him.”
Julie dropped something in the kitchen, causing a great clatter, and out of the corner of her eye, Libby saw Calvin watching her with renewed interest. Since he’d been born long after the breakup, he couldn’t have registered the implications of his aunt’s statement, but that well-known surname had a cachet all its own.
Even among four-year-olds, it seemed.
“Well,” Jubal groused, “far be it from me to compete with a McKettrick.”
Libby merely
smiled. “Thanks for the business, Jubal,” she told him. “You have yourself a good day, now.”
Jubal paid up, took his Rocket and left.
The instant his utility van pulled away from the curb, Julie peeked out of the kitchen. “Did I hear you say you’re going to dinner with Tate?” she asked.
Libby tried to act casual. “He asked me last night. I said maybe.”
“That isn’t what you told Mr. Tabor,” Calvin piped up. “You lied.”
“I didn’t lie,” Libby lied. First, she’d driven her car without the emissions repair, single-handedly destroying the environment, to hear her conscience tell it, and now this. She was setting a really bad example for her nephew.
“Yes, you did,” Calvin insisted.
“Sometimes,” Julie said carefully, resting a hand on Calvin’s small, bare shoulder, “we say things that aren’t precisely true so we don’t hurt other people’s feelings.”
Calvin held his ground. “If it’s not the truth, then it’s a lie. That’s what you always tell me, Mom.”
Libby sighed. “If Tate asks me out again,” she told Calvin, “I’ll say yes. That way, I won’t have fibbed to anybody.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t say ‘yes’ in the first place,” Julie marveled. “Elisabeth Remington, are you crazy?”
Libby cleared her throat, slanted a glance in Calvin’s direction to remind her sister that the conversation would have to wait.
“Can I go to playschool if I put on clothes?” Calvin asked, looking so woeful that Julie mussed his hair and ducked out of her floury apron.
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s run home so you can change.” She turned to Libby. “I put the first batch of scones in the oven a couple of minutes ago,” she added. “When you hear the timer ding, take them out.”
“Are you coming back?” Libby asked, as equally invested in a “no” as she was in a “yes.” Once she and her sister were alone again, between customers, Julie would grill her about Tate. If Julie didn’t return, the first batch of scones would sell out in a heartbeat, as always, and there wouldn’t be any more for the rest of the day, because Libby always burned everything she baked, no matter how careful she was.
McKettricks of Texas: Tate Page 5