Cabin Fever

by Marilyn Pappano

  “I’ll get it,” Micahlyn sang out and hopped across to the wall phone. “H’lo? Hi, Grandma.”

  Nolie rolled her eyes. Either Marlene or Obie, or both, had called Micahlyn every night this week. They didn’t talk long, and they never asked to speak to Nolie, but still it bothered her. Of course, she couldn’t forbid them to call—what harm was in it? And no matter what Chase thought, she couldn’t tell them to back off or sic her lawyer on them, regardless of how nice Alex was. She just wished they would let her and Micahlyn have their own lives.

  The thought made her feel guilty, because she knew how much the Harpers had loved Jeff and how much they loved his only child. And feeling guilty made her hungry for something much more comforting than a boneless, skinless grilled chicken breast, plain boiled potatoes, and green peas. Something like the cherry pecan vanilla ice cream she’d polished off Saturday night after the unsatisfying end to her last conversation with Chase. Or the refrigerated cinnamon rolls she’d eaten for breakfast Sunday morning, the French silk pie she’d had with lunch at Harry’s, or the super-duper nachos she’d fixed for dinner that night, all in preparation for her diet on Monday.

  Man, she’d really love to have some nachos right now, heavy on the cheese and sour cream, with a baklava chaser.

  Micahlyn stretched the phone cord through the doorway and across the living room to the couch. Five years old, and she liked to take her phone calls in private. Nolie couldn’t help but wonder what she was going to be like at fifteen.

  By the time Micahlyn hung up, Nolie had dinner on the table. She waited until they’d each had a chance to eat a bit before asking, “What did Grandma have to say?”

  “Oh, not much,” Micahlyn replied airily. “We talked about Maria Diane.” That was her new, too-expensive doll. “Grandma’s making some clothes for her. And we talked about the play toys Grandpa built for me.”

  “Did she say anything to you about coming to visit?”

  “Just that then I could play on the new toys. And be sure to bring Maria Diane.” Micahlyn speared a piece of chicken and ate it, then sighed. “I sure do like fried chicken better ’n this.”

  Who didn’t? “We can have fried chicken once in a while. Just not every week.”

  “Grandma says you’re tryin’ to get skinny so you can get a boyfriend.”

  Nolie’s face flushed. Hadn’t the thought of being more attractive to males entered her mind—even helped cement her decision to diet again? Even so, she had no compunction about lying. “Your grandma’s wrong. I want to lose weight so I can be healthier.”

  “You can walk all the way up the hill without goin’ like this.” Micahlyn panted heavily. “Are you hopin’ if you get skinny, he’ll kiss you?”

  “Who?”

  “Him.” This time she jerked her head toward Chase’s cabin. “Grandma says you’re gonna replace my daddy with him.”

  Nolie’s temper flared, and her hunger disappeared at the same time her craving for something sweet and comforting kicked into high gear. She laid her fork down. “Listen to me, Micahlyn. Your grandmother had no right to say that. I loved your daddy, and no one can ever take his place. But . . . he’s gone. He’s been gone a long time. Someday I might get married again, but not right now.”

  “Huh. Grandma says—”

  “Let’s not talk about Grandma anymore tonight, okay?” Though Nolie had every intention of talking to Grandma the very instant Micahlyn got into her bath.

  Though her appetite was gone, Nolie ate the rest of her dinner—or she would regret it later—and even enjoyed the fresh berries with Cool Whip Lite they dished up for dessert. As soon as she could possibly justify it, she hustled Micahlyn upstairs and into the tub, then returned to the kitchen phone to call Whiskey Creek.

  After five rings with no answer, she disconnected, then immediately dialed back. This time she gave it ten rings before hanging up. Seething, she stalked across the living room, outside, and onto the first porch step, where she clenched her fists, tilted her head back, and gave a satisfying shriek.

  “Primal therapy?” asked a low, dry voice behind her, and she shrieked again, whirling around to find Chase standing in the shadows next to the door.

  “What are you doing skulking around on my porch?”

  “I’m not skulking. I don’t even know how. I was about to knock, and I saw you were on the phone, so I waited, and then you stomped out and screamed.”

  She let her expression settle into a pout. “I didn’t stomp. I walked heavily.”

  “Well, forgive me for not being up on the subtle nuances between stomping and walking heavily.” After a moment, he asked, “Bad news?”

  “No. The miracles of modern technology.” With a deep sigh, she moved to lean against the porch railing, her arms folded over her chest. “I was trying to call my mother-in-law, to tell her she was way out of line in her most recent conversation with my child. Of course, Marlene and Obie have Caller ID, so they knew it was me calling. They wouldn’t answer, and they even turned off the answering machine so the damn phone just rang and rang.”

  Chase simply stood there next to the door, where little of the light spilling out reached him. She couldn’t make out his expression, but she could actually feel the quietness radiating from him. “What? No advice?”

  “When you’re in the advice-giving business, you learn to save your breath with people who don’t want to follow it.”

  “Gee, you’re a great help.” She stomped—er, walked heavily—to the first rocker and plopped into it. More calmly, she said, “It’s not that I don’t want to follow it. It’s just that . . .”

  “You were raised the way most girls are—to be the peacemaker, to get along, to respect your elders and not make waves.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you can’t stand up for yourself when the situation warrants it.”

  “Yes, it does. I’m a big weenie when it comes to confrontation.”

  That rare, stiff laughter she’d heard once before came from the shadows. “You don’t have any trouble confronting me. You’ve bullied me since you moved in here.”

  “I have not—! Well . . . maybe . . . a little bit. But you have to admit, you needed bullying.”

  “I don’t have to admit anything.”

  He moved past her and sat in the second rocker, where light spilling through the window allowed her to see the right side of his face. His jaw was heavily stubbled with beard, as if he hadn’t bothered to shave that morning, which gave him a wickedly disreputable look. If it wasn’t too much to state the obvious, he looked exactly like the sort of man mothers warned their daughters about—or, in her case, mothers-in-law.

  “What did your mother-in-law say to your daughter that was so out of line?” he asked.

  Nolie set her chair rocking. There was no way she could tell him that Marlene thought she was on a manhunt and he was the intended victim. Instead, she shrugged. “Just more of her plan to keep things stirred up. She’s manipulating my child, and trying to manipulate me, and I don’t like it.”

  “Trying?” he repeated dryly, but that was all he said.

  After making a face at him, she returned to his earlier comment. “So you were in the advice-giving business back in Boston. Certainly not as an advice columnist like Dear Abby. Let’s see . . . were you a minister?”

  “I haven’t set foot in church in sixteen years, and I’m none too eager to do so again, lest God strike me down for my sins.”

  “Okay. A psychologist?”

  “I don’t care about the workings of anyone’s mind but my own.”

  “Counselor?”

  “Don’t care to mess with whiny people who can’t handle their own problems.”

  “Hmm. Doctor?”

  “The sight of blood makes me queasy.”

  “Cop?”

  He snorted derisively.

  “Matchmaker?”

  Another snort. “Only if my life had become hell on earth.”

&nb
sp; Who else made a practice of giving advice? Overbearing parents, nosy friends, bartenders, accountants, consultants, lawyers— “Were you a lawyer?” She wasn’t sure why she’d chosen that one out of the last three. He just didn’t seem nerdy enough to be an accountant, but too edgy to be a consultant.

  He sat motionless, one half of his face illuminated, the other half in shadow. His expression gave away nothing, but the tension that held him so still said a lot. She waited a moment, barely breathing, then softly asked again, “Are you a lawyer?”

  For a time he looked as if he’d turned to stone. Gradually, though, as though he’d reached a decision, the stiffness drained from him, and he leaned back in the rocker and propped his booted feet on the porch railing. “I used to be.”

  The enormity of his admission wasn’t lost on Nolie. With nothing more than that small detail and his first name, she could learn an awful lot about him. Chase wasn’t unheard of as a first name, but it wasn’t common, either. How many lawyers named Chase could the state of Massachusetts have? From that, she could get his last name, and with that, she could find out about his marriage and divorce, why he’d left Boston, why he said he used to be a lawyer, and why he wasn’t anymore.

  More important, she could find out who his parents were.

  All it would take was a little time on the Internet, maybe a phone call or two, and she could uncover most, if not all, of his secrets.

  And he would never trust her with anything ever again.

  “I bet you were a very good lawyer,” she said at last.

  “I was. I could reason, argue, lie, and manipulate with the best of them. I went into court with clients who’d confessed to every last detail of their crimes and got them acquitted in spite of themselves. I was damn good . . . but not good enough.”

  Nolie was about to ask what had happened when she remembered his comment that she bullied him. Instead, she reworded the question. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  The look he gave her was disbelieving. “No. Why would I?”

  “Hey, you’re the one who volunteered one of his secrets. I didn’t want to appear rude by not following up on it.” That earned her a flicker of a smile that made her smile, too. “Have you eaten?”

  “I’m not destitute. You don’t have to feed me.”

  “I know that. So . . . have you eaten?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I had Hamburger Helper. I used to live on that stuff in la—” He hesitated, then must have remembered he’d already spilled the beans. “In law school.”

  Clomping steps sounded inside the house, then Micahlyn called out, “Mama, where are you?”

  “Out here, babe.”

  The screen door banged, then Micahlyn joined her, clomping because she was wearing a pair of Nolie’s sandals along with one of Nolie’s T-shirts to double as a nightgown. “I took my bath and I’m all ready for bed except—” Seeing Chase, she abruptly broke off, sidled closer to Nolie, then climbed into her lap and offered a brush. “Comb my hair, please.”

  Her long red hair was dripping water. Nolie dried it on the excess shirt fabric, then began gently tugging the brush through her hair. Ignoring the jerks and yanks Nolie was doing her best to avoid, Micahlyn fixed her gaze on Chase. “You’re not the bogeyman.” Her tone was accusing, as if he’d laid claim to the title himself instead of having it bestowed upon him by none other than her.

  “No, I’m not,” Chase agreed.

  “You don’t even look anything like him.” She sighed. “You’re just a man.”

  Not just a man, Nolie thought. A wickedly handsome man. A competent, capable, wounded man. A man who had almost kissed her, whom she couldn’t help but fantasize about his really kissing her.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Chase said. “If it would make you feel any better, I can snarl at you from time to time.”

  Micahlyn’s response was prim, with her mouth held in that prissy way she’d learned from Marlene. “That’s okay. You’re not green and slimy, and you don’t live in a cave and eat little kids for dinner. It wouldn’t be the same.” That quickly she changed the subject. “Mama, can I cut my hair?”

  “No, you may not.”

  “But why not? Gracie’s got short hair. And Chrissy. And Brandi and Caitlyn.”

  “But your hair is so pretty. You don’t really want—” Chase cleared his throat rather loudly, and Nolie broke off to glance at him. His expression, what she could see of it, was totally innocent. But that was okay, because in that brief silence, she’d heard the sentence finished in her head in a dozen different ways, all in the same voice. You don’t really want to stay all alone in this trailer with the baby, Nolie. You don’t really want to bother yourself with housework or cooking. You don’t really want to spend all day at a job you don’t need and away from Micahlyn. You don’t really want the burden of that old feed store in New York.

  Lord knew, she didn’t really want to sound like Marlene. And who was she to decide how long Micahlyn’s hair should be? She kept hers barely to her shoulders, because anything longer than that was a hassle. It was hot and sticky in the summer, blew wildly in the wind, and tangled at the drop of a pin. And if it was a hassle for her, it was probably just as much a hassle for her daughter.

  “If you really want it cut, I’ll find someone to do it, okay?”

  “Okay. Tomorrow, please.” Micahlyn slid to the floor. “I’m goin’ to bed now. Come tuck me.”

  She clomped back inside, the screen door slamming behind her, and up the stairs. Nolie looked at Chase. “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You didn’t have to.” With a sigh, she pushed herself to her feet. “I must go tuck the child and read her a story. Will you be here when I finish?”

  “No.” He stood up, too. “I should go home.”

  They walked together, Nolie stopping at the door, Chase on the top step. She opened the screen door, then let it close again. “For the record . . . I won’t do any snooping with the information you gave me tonight.”

  He approached her, his steps slow and measured. When he came close, she leaned back against the door frame just because it was there, not because she needed its support. He didn’t stop until nothing more than a whisper of caution separated them. Even so, she could feel the heat and strength of his body, and it made her hot and weak.

  He leaned so near that his features blurred and every breath she took smelled of him, clean and sexy and dangerous and male. Her eyes automatically closed, and in self-defense she resorted to soft, shallow breaths. His mouth brushed hers—just a touch, not a kiss—as it moved lightly to her ear. “For the record,” he murmured, his voice tickling, his lips grazing her earlobe, “I know.”

  Then he walked away.

  BACK IN THE DAYS BEFORE CHASE’S DIVORCE, FRIDAY night had been dinner-out night. Of course, he and Fiona had eaten dinner out almost every other night as well, but Friday nights were reserved for her favorite restaurants—the fanciest, the most expensive.

  In the Harper house, Friday night was hot-dog night. He couldn’t imagine two more different ways to spend an evening. Dinner out had meant a suit for him and dressing to kill for Fiona, multiple courses, a long evening, and dropping a few hundred bucks or more. Neither Nolie nor Micahlyn cared what he wore for hot dogs, there was nothing else on the menu but chips and salsa and fresh berries for dessert, and the damage, which he didn’t even have to pay, couldn’t have been more than ten dollars.

  And there was no question which one he preferred. This time he’d learned how to light the grill, then set everything on the table while Nolie cooked the hot dogs. He was standing between two chairs at the table, a hand on the back of each, and waiting for her to join them when Micahlyn, her hair newly cut, pointed to the chair across from her with a tortilla chip. “That’s your place, and this one’s Mama’s.”

  His place. How long had it been since he’d had a place at anyone’s table? In anyone’s ho
me? He wouldn’t be welcome in his own parents’ house, or his sister’s, or any one of Fiona’s, but he had a place of his own in Nolie’s house. That felt better than he had any right to expect.

  Nolie set a platter of plump, grilled wieners on the table, then slid into her seat. Chase sat, too, and Micahlyn mumbled a quick blessing with a mouthful of chips.

  “How was day care?” Nolie asked as she passed around the wieners, then buns.

  “Fine. I made a scul—a scup—a statue today. I get to bring it home tomorrow. It’s really good.”

  “I bet it is, sweetie.” Nolie glanced at him. “And how was your day?”

  He blinked at the unexpected inclusion. “I got tired of lying on the couch watching TV so I went out and laid in the hammock and watched the clouds.”

  “You need a job.”

  “I like being a bum.”

  “Your mind is going to molder away until you don’t do anything, don’t know anything, and don’t remember anything.”

  He smiled smugly. “Sweet oblivion.”

  “Uh-huh. I take it you’re not interested in prac”—she glanced at Micahlyn—“in returning to your previous profession.”

  It would be a little difficult when he’d been disbarred, which he couldn’t tell her without telling her why. Would she believe him when he said he wasn’t guilty? Jeez, it was such a cliche. Every man in prison pleaded innocence at one time or another, and in general, the ones who weren’t lying were untruthful.

  But would he return to practicing law if he could? Two years ago, probably even two months ago, his answer would have been an automatic yes. He liked the challenges. It was the only thing he did well, the only thing he’d ever wanted to do. But now . . .

  “I’m not interested in any profession at the moment.” Deliberately he changed the subject. “You lose your appetite?” The other time he’d shared hot dogs with them, she’d loaded hers with so many extras—sauerkraut, chili, onions, and cheese—that she’d had to eat it with a fork. Tonight the wiener looked lonely in its bun with nothing but mustard and a few onions.