Oh, sweet heaven. Oh, dear sweet merciful heaven—what in the name of all that was holy was she going to do now?
"I…I…" Four hundred thousand words in the English language, and not a single one that made any sense. On a soft, but exquisitely frustrated cry, she hotfooted it around to the back of the house.
* * *
"So what you're sayin' is—" Cal interrupted himself to take a long swallow of his Bud "—you scared her off. For crying out loud, Hank—you ever hear of the concept of subtle?"
Hank signaled to the bartender for another round, shoring up his resistance to the thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Between the roar of conversation and the throbbing jukebox, a person could hardly hear himself think in here. Just as well, he supposed. After the fiasco with Jenna over the Fourth—thank you, Ryan—Hank figured it was time to get a second opinion. Not that he needed advice, exactly. Just a sounding board. A sounding board who actually knew something about women this time. Lots of 'em.
Hank's invitation had clearly surprised his little brother. And pleased him, too, Hank suspected. Lord Almighty—at this rate, the three of 'em were gonna be cozier than the Cartwright brothers.
He frowned at his beer, convinced he could hear his mother's sigh of relief.
"I don't do subtle, Cal," he finally said.
"Then maybe you should think about starting."
"I thought women liked men to be upfront with them? Let 'em know where things stood?"
Cal chuckled. "That only works if things are standing the way they want 'em to. Which leads me to ask where you've been for the past twenty years, that you're so clueless now. Word is you used to have to fight 'em off with sticks."
Hank swiveled around on the stool to face into the room, propping his elbows up on the bar. "That's just it. Before Michelle, I don't recall having this much trouble. It's true—women always came on to me."
With a grin, Cal tilted his bottle to his lips. "Braggart."
"Just stating a fact."
"Uh-huh. And with Michelle?"
"Totally different ballgame. It was just this immediate, mutual thing, you know? None of this dancin' around each other, each one tryin' to figure out what the other one wanted. Or expected." He took a swig of his beer. "It was…easy, for lack of a better word."
"And Jenna's not?"
"Hell, no."
A bosomy blonde of indeterminate age wedged herself between them to order a drink, giving first Cal, then Hank, the eye. Neither of them took the bait, even when she jiggled it about six inches in front of their noses. Her drink appeared; pouting, she grabbed it and sashayed back into the crowd.
"Looks like you could've had that one without too much effort," Cal said.
"Yeah, well, there's easy, and then there's desperate."
Cal focused on the side of Hank's face for a second. "You realize you've never talked to me about Michelle before?"
"Not just to you. To anybody."
"That's good, then, isn't it? That you're talking about her? Hey—" Cal prodded him in the arm, snatching up his beer. "Pool table's free."
"Aw, hell, Cal—I haven't shot a game in probably ten years."
"Good. Means I'll beat the pants off you." Cal threw a ten on the bar before Hank could protest and slid off the stool, he and Hank easily dissuading the pair of skinny punks sniffing around the table from even thinking about it. Cal made a great show of choosing the right cue stick. "What were we talkin' about? Oh, yeah. Michelle."
Leaning heavily on his own stick as he watched his brother rack the balls, Hank shook his head. "Not Michelle. Jenna."
Cal carefully lifted the rack, shot a look at Hank. "Okay. First thing you gotta ask yourself is, what do you want out of this?"
"And if my answer is…I'm not sure yet?"
"Then you're in deep you-know-what. Kinda hard to formulate a plan without a specific goal in mind." Cal nodded toward the balls. "You go first."
Suppressing a groan, Hank set down the cue ball, took position, and let 'er rip. Balls went every which way, but none of them landed in any pockets. Except the damn cue ball.
"Don't you dare laugh," he growled at his brother, who was clearly enjoying the hell out of this. "I told you it'd been a while."
Chuckling, Cal chalked his stick, then plucked the cue ball from the pocket. "Stripes," he called, then prowled the perimeter of the table, squinting and cocking his head from time to time, before finally choosing his angle of attack. Crack! The 9 ball went sailing neatly into the far corner pocket. "See, you gotta weigh your options, decide what you wanna do, then line up your shot. Nine times out of ten—" the 12 vanished into a pocket "—you'll get what you're aiming for."
"Courtin' a woman isn't the same as playing pool, dumbass."
Ready to make his next shot, Cal glanced up at Hank. "That what you want to do? Court her?"
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. "Hell, I don't know. Yeah. Maybe."
Cal made his shot, then straightened, his eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Why?"
"Yeah. Why? Because until you can answer that, there's no point in even pursuing the matter." He picked up his beer, took a swallow, set it back down. "For one thing, you sure you're over what happened? With Michelle?"
"Over it enough that I can't let this go."
"But not completely?"
Hank shook his head. "I'm not sure that'll ever happen."
"You think that's fair to her? Because if you go into this half-assed, it's liable to blow up in your face."
"And if half-assed is the best I can manage?"
"Then let's go back to my first question—why? Why her? Why now?"
Hank leaned against the low wall cordoning off the pool table from the rest of the bar, watching Cal sink ball after ball. "Because I find myself looking for reasons to be around her?" His mouth pulled into a tight grin. "Because I never know what's going to come out of that smart mouth of hers. Oh, hell, Cal…I don't know…" He let out a frustrated sigh, thinking there had to be more to it than that, but damned if he could figure out what. "I just like the way I feel when I'm with her, okay? I like who I am when I'm with her."
"And you're absolutely sure what you're feeling has nothing to do with her being Blair's aunt?"
Hank gave a dry laugh. "I'm not absolutely sure about anything. I just wish to hell I knew what I was doing. What's so funny?"
"Got news for you, buddy. When it comes to women, there's not a man alive who knows what he's doing. Either it clicks or it doesn't."
"So what you're saying is, it all boils down to sheer dumb luck?"
"That's about the size of it."
"And all that crap about goals and plans of action…?"
Cal shrugged, then sank his last ball. "Just a ploy to get you to figure out a thing or two on your own. You rack 'em this time."
With a frown, he did. "So…do I dare ask you what happened with Dawn over the Fourth?"
"Nope."
"Did something happen with Dawn?"
Cal thunked the cue ball onto the table, his refusal to look at Hank revealing a lot more than he'd probably like. "I thought we were talking about Jenna."
"Since the sum total of your advice seemed to be that I was on my own, I changed the subject."
"That's blackmail."
"Yep."
Cal acted like he was studying the balls real hard for a moment or two, then finally said, "Okay, take this for what it's worth, okay? If this is something you think you want, you're gonna have to play it cool. Maybe Jenna's still hurtin', too. But I also saw the way she kept looking at you at Ryan's the other day. My guess is she's as confused as you are. Maybe even more. You come on too strong, she's gonna bolt again. A vulnerable woman might be ripe for seduction, but the aftermath tends to get real messy."
"Spoken from experience, I take it?"
That got a humorless laugh. "Oh, yeah."
"Dawn?"
Cal glared at him.
"Okay, maybe you're right," Hank said. "But i
f I don't do anything, she'll go on back to D.C. and the whole thing'll be dead in the water."
"I didn't say do nothing, blockhead. Since Blair's your kid, you've already got a built-in reason to be around Jenna, right? So just do stuff together, let things take their own course. Come out with 'em to my place, take 'em to dinner or into Claremore for a movie. In fact, you know what? Maybe the best thing is go through Blair. You know, suggest to her y'all go out to dinner, then let her pass it along to Jenna?"
Hank smirked. "The woman's not stupid, Cal. And neither is my daughter."
His brother shrugged, unaffected. "Either Jenna's gonna fall for you or she's not. Ultimately, the deciding move has to be hers. But if you don't put yourself in the position for her to make that move…" Another shrug, then a nod toward the table. "Speaking of next moves…let's see if you can actually get something other than the cue ball into the pockets this time, huh?"
* * *
"You put some of the pictures up," Blair said when she arrived at the house the next day. She dumped the soft-sided cooler in which Jenna'd been packing their lunches on the table by the front door, shucked off her sneakers and tramped barefoot across the living room to get a better look. She was in her usual outfit of sloppy T-shirt and shorts; the tiny blue earrings Hank had bought her sparkled in the bright morning light slashing through the still shadeless windows. He leaned against the door frame separating kitchen from living room, one hand slipped inside his pocket. His daughter turned to him, smiling, her braces outflashing the earrings. "Cool."
For the most part, they'd been getting on okay this past day or so, probably because he'd backed down about her going to April Gundersen's birthday party. But that'd only happened because he'd run into the two younger boys, Keith and Derek, when he'd been in town picking up supplies to build Mutt a dog run, and they'd gone into this whole song-and-dance about how Billy, their oldest brother, didn't even live with them anymore 'cause he was eighteen now and he was the one who always got them in trouble and since he moved out, they'd been clean. But what cinched it was when they said they knew Hank would tan their hides if anything happened to Blair, and April really, really wanted Blair to come to her party.
When he'd told her she could go, he thought she'd come close to hugging him, but apparently thought better of it. He'd been more than a little disappointed that she hadn't. But at least she seemed to be working toward accepting the situation, and him, and that was all that mattered, wasn't it?
Standing and staring at the pictures like that with her hands stuck in her back pockets, she reminded him a lot of how she'd looked the first time he saw her. Except not as pissed-off. God willing, she'd stay that way after what he had to say.
Hank'd decided Cal was probably right about his needing to take things slow with Jenna. But damned if he was gonna let slip through his fingers the best thing to happen to him in more than two years. All he had to do was figure out how to make those two things fit together.
Sure he could understand Jenna's being scared. Hell, he was, too. And it wasn't like he expected things to be all neatly tied up and figured out by the time she and Blair went back east. But dammit, he knew what it felt like to practically strangle on your own loneliness. And for the first time since Michelle's death, he was more concerned about somebody else's welfare than he was his own. From the minute he'd found out he was Blair's daddy, he'd made up his mind to somehow eliminate the distrust in his daughter's eyes. Now he was equally as determined to eliminate the sadness in Jenna's. And didn't that just turn everything he'd thought about what he wanted from life right on its head?
But there it was. However, that also meant he had some fast talking to do. Especially if Blair was still opposed to the idea of him and Jenna getting together.
She suddenly turned, tilting her head at him. "What?"
He pushed off the door frame and started toward the sofa, a peach-and-aqua Southwestern style number that was the only thing he could find that even remotely went with the walls. He kept telling himself it was growing on him. "Come here and sit down for a minute. I need to talk to you about something."
She didn't move. "It's about Jenna, isn't it?"
Hank jerked around, refusing to react to the beginnings of a mutinous expression. Or to his heart about to hammer right out of his chest. "How'd you know that?"
Her brows shot up. "You mean, you're not going to tell me I was only imagining the way you kept acting all cozy with Jenna on the Fourth?"
"No. I'm not," Hank said after a moment. "But there hasn't been anything to say before now. I swear," he added when she rolled her eyes. "Frankly, I'm not sure there's really anything to say now."
"So why are we having this conversation?"
Somehow, Hank managed to squelch his irritation, but only because if this was ever going to pan out, he needed Blair in his camp. "Because I thought you'd appreciate me being honest with you, that's why. I like your aunt, Blair. A lot. Wasn't something I expected, sure wasn't something I was lookin' for, so to be honest, I'm just as blown away as you probably are. Now you gonna come sit down with me and talk this out, or stand there and sulk for the rest of the day?"
Well, that popped out the Grump Face but good, boy. But at least she didn't run screaming from the room. In fact, she stomped over to the sofa, sinking onto it with another great sigh. Following her lead, Hank set his own butt down on the edge of the tan leather recliner he'd bought at the same time as the sofa.
"Okay. So you like my aunt," she said, making sure Hank caught the emphasis. "So what does this mean, exactly?"
"Exactly? I have no idea. Except that I'd like to spend more time with the two of you before you go back. So I can get to know both of you better."
"And then what?"
"Well, I suppose that's up to her, isn't it?"
"Do I get a say in it?"
"About how I feel about Jenna? No." At the anger that flashed in her eyes, he added, "Just what is your problem with this, anyway? You think I'm not good enough for her or what?"
Genuine surprise crossed her features. "No! It's just…"
"It's just what?"
"I don't know. I can't explain it."
"And how in tarnation am I supposed to fix whatever it is that's bugging you if you can't explain it?"
"I don't want you to fix anything. I just want…" Her mouth clamped shut; frowning, she shook her head, refusing to look at him. Hank let out a sigh of his own.
"Blair, honey, listen to me. It's been more'n three years since your uncle died. I think your aunt's real lonely. I know you love her, and want to look out for her, but that doesn't give you the right to decide who she does or does not keep company with. Or the right to impose some kind of limits on how much I care about her."
She tucked her feet up underneath her, winding a strand of hair around her index finger so tight Hank worried about her circulation. "Does Jenna feel the same way about you?"
Oh, Lord. Honesty was one thing, but no way was he discussing his and Jenna's mutual sexual attraction with his thirteen-year-old daughter. "I don't know. Although at the moment," he added with a rueful tug at his lips, "she doesn't seem real hot on the idea, if you wanna know the truth."
"That's because she loved Uncle Phil more than anything in the world, you know. There's no way you could compete with him!"
Hank felt his hand fist on his knee. "I'm not walking away from this simply because your aunt used to love somebody else. If she's not ready, that's fine. I'm prepared to deal with that. What I'm not prepared to do is give up without at least letting Jenna know what her options are—"
"She doesn't need options!" He saw tears well in Blair's eyes. "All she needs is to be left alone, for things to go back to being the way they were before—"
"That's not possible, Blair, and you know it—"
"—and she totally doesn't need somebody who's only going to hang around until he gets bored!"
A two-by-four upside the head would have had less impact.
"
What the hell are you talking about?"
She swiped at her cheek with the heel of her hand. "How long did you say you were with my mother? Two weeks?"
Hank inwardly swore, then said, "I also said she left me, if you recall."
"Yeah, but you also said—"
"I know what I said, Blair. And I know that wasn't what you wanted to hear. But I can't change what happened almost fourteen years ago, or who I was then. Besides, what happened between your mother and me has absolutely nothing to do with this. Believe me, I am not interested in something casual with your aunt. I mean, think about it—why would I risk ticking you off if I wasn't serious?"
"How should I know?" A tear escaped, lurching down her cheek. "I don't even know you!"
"Then you'll just have to take my word for it, won't you?"
She sniffed, suspicion radiating from her eyes. "Yeah, well, it sure would be convenient if we could be one happy family, wouldn't it?"
There was that damn word again. "How do you figure that? Seems to me no matter what happens, either somebody's life's gonna be uprooted or you and I have to spend most of the year apart. Trust me, me liking your aunt does not make things easier—"
"Would that bother you? Us being apart?"
Hank felt like he'd missed a turnoff somewhere. "What kind of a fool question is that? Of course it would bother me! Why would I want to lose you when I just found you?"
One shoulder bumped up to rub against her cheek. "I dunno, I just figured maybe you like, felt this responsibility for me and all because I was your daughter," she said, and a small, but significant, flashbulb went off, illuminating at least one tiny corner in his very dim brain.
"Oh, for the love of…" He scrubbed one hand across his mouth, then shook his head, his gaze never leaving hers. "You are, without a doubt, the most incredible thing that's ever happened to me. You scare me to death, and you confuse the hell out of me, but every single time I look at you, I think, Wow…this is my kid. My kid."
She sniffed again. "Then…you don't like Jenna more than me?"
"Ah, hell, sweetheart," Hank said, his heart cracking right in two. "C'mere."
Fathers and Other Strangers Page 19