The First Kiss

by Grace Burrowes

  “There are only death screams,” Twyla said, her expression suggesting she was trying to be helpful. “And stuff explodes all over the place. It’s cool.”

  “Thanks, Twy,” Darren called as Twyla headed for the stairs.

  Vera opened a drawer, wanting to move beyond the subject of the video game. “Your key and one for Katie.”

  Darren slipped them into his pocket. “I won’t tell Dad we have them.” He glanced around the kitchen, everywhere but at James, who was serving himself a rather large brownie. “The restraining order expires soon.”

  “Not for weeks,” Vera replied, “and when it does expire, I still won’t want anything to do with him.” That needed to be said, and believed. Trent Knightley’s best divorce advice had been practical rather than legal: No mixed messages.

  “You could just, like, bury the hatchet, though, couldn’t you?” Darren asked.

  James had become diplomatically fascinated with his brownie, but simply having him in the room gave Vera a bit of vicarious fortitude.

  “Darren, I understand you need the people in your family to get along, but I can’t trust your father, and I doubt that will change for a long time. Your father and I can be civil, if he’s willing to make that much of an effort, but he’s not too happy with me either.”

  She spoke gently, well aware Darren would feel self-conscious about James’s presence.

  “I don’t like or trust him either,” Darren said, patting the keys in his breast pocket. “The feeling is mutual.”

  “Raising your parents is hard. Ask Twy.”

  “Ask me what?” Twyla came bumping down the stairs on her backside again, a disc case in her hand.

  “How hard it is to be a kid,” Darren said. “A little kid, with homework every night, no driver’s license, and only a mom to call your family.”

  James paused in the act of slicing a second, smaller brownie from the pan, the first having apparently already met its fate.

  Darren had meant to tease, but like a lot of older brothers, he could tease too damned hard.

  “You’re my family too,” Twyla said, chin jutting. “Mom says, Katie too, and even old Donal and Tina, sorta.”

  Now James, to all appearances, was focused on the intricate art of spooning vanilla ice cream onto his second brownie.

  “What Mom says, Twyla believes,” Darren retorted. “I’ll be on my way, and thanks for the brownies, Vera.”

  He gave an awkward bob, something that might turn into a hug or a pat on the arm in parting when he had more self-confidence. Vera moved in and gave him a one-armed hug.

  “Drive carefully, Darren. I mean that. It would matter to me and to Twy if you ended up wrapped around a telephone pole.”

  “It would matter to Dad’s insurance premiums.” He gave James a two-fingered salute and departed through the garage door.

  “I told him he should show you the game first,” Twyla said, taking a stool beside James at the island. “He said he’s my older brother, and I’m not supposed to tattle on him.” She picked a crumb from the brownie pan. “Is that right?”

  James—who had two older brothers of his own—tucked into his brownie with as much focus as if he were a professional brownie taste tester.

  “Darren’s not quite right,” Vera said. “If he’s asking you to break a rule, then you have to wonder if he’s trying to keep himself out of trouble at your expense.”

  “Like when he had his friends buy that vodka for Tina?”

  Vera took the third stool at the island, while James nibbled microscopic bites of his brownie.

  “Tina is a recovering alcoholic.” Explaining this situation to Twyla was an ongoing process. “She isn’t supposed to have any alcohol, because it’s a bad habit for her. She can’t stop when she starts drinking. Buying alcohol for her, like when she asked Darren to, wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Because she gets drunk,” Twyla said, looking pleased to be able to finish the syllogism. “Then she does dangerous things, like drive, and she could kill people and run over dogs and kill herself and smash up the car.”

  “Right. Asking Darren to find her something to drink was like Darren asking you to break the video game rule. It got everybody in trouble.”

  “Contributing?” James asked quietly, and Vera knew exactly what the full question was: Was Tina charged with and convicted of contributing to the condition of a minor, and was Darren adjudicated a delinquent for procuring the alcohol?

  Vera helped herself to one of the yellow napkins stacked in the middle of the island, and started folding it into an owl.

  The owl was the symbol of wisdom, also a little spooky.

  “Darren is as shrewd as his father,” Vera said. “He had an older friend make the run, so he himself was never in possession of the booze.” This was really a great deal more family business than she wanted to share with James.

  With anybody. She and Twyla were due for a talk on the topic of family privacy—a private talk.

  “What was your punishment for exploring the woods without permission, Twy?” James asked, relieving Vera of the need to change the subject.

  “Mom is thinking about it,” Twyla said, but she didn’t stop there. “Sometimes when she thinks about it, she forgets, and I don’t get a punishment.”

  She grinned, but James didn’t return her smile. Vera watched with a flare of parental satisfaction as Twyla realized she hadn’t entertained their guest with her flippancy.

  “Never hold an opinion sub curia,” James said. “Trent recalls that as the best advice he heard when he was courted for a judgeship. You decide the case when it’s fresh in your mind and get rid of it. Everybody gets closure that way and can either live with your decision or get busy appealing it.”

  “What’s peeling it?” Twyla asked.

  “Appealing the decision,” James said. “Going over the judge’s head to ask for a reconsideration.”

  “Who would I go to?”

  “God,” Vera interjected, giving up on her origami owl, which had come out looking like ET. “If you don’t like something I decide, your only other recourse is to ask God to override me.”

  Twyla looked confused, but from the smile on James’s face, Vera suspected she’d given the right answer.

  “What do you think your punishment should be, Twy?” he asked.

  Vera was half off her stool, but she sat back down to hear the answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if your mom sneaked out on you? Didn’t tell you where she was going, didn’t let you know you were home alone, didn’t tell you when she’d be back? What if she disappeared to some place you’d have a lot of trouble finding her? Some place not quite safe?”

  Twyla’s face became a mask of consternation. “Would you do that, Mom?”

  “I haven’t yet. I can’t imagine I’d do it on purpose, either.” Not when James described such behavior in terms of abandonment and danger.

  “I was bad,” Twyla said slowly, as if realizing the magnitude of her transgression for the first time.

  “What you did was bad.” James settled a large hand on the child’s neck and shook her gently. “You made a mistake, Twy.” He finished the gesture by running a hand over her crown.

  His observation held expectation, though, and Twyla picked up on it.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m really, really sorry, but we’ve never explored the woods, and I didn’t know about the bears and snakes, and you do your exercises forever.”

  “We’ve talked about my exercises. They’re like brushing your teeth or taking a shower. I have to do them, Twy.” The finger exercises comforted Vera too, the way meditation lowered stress levels and quieted the mind.

  “But forever?” Twyla asked.

  James shot Vera a glance, one asking permission to participate in the discussion. What a novel and l
ovely experience, to not be so alone in the wilds of the parental woods. She gave a small nod and started over with another napkin, aiming for a swan this time.

  “We’re talking about two different problems, Twy,” James said. “The first is how you can apologize for breaking a no-wandering-off rule and worrying your mom. The second is what to do about you feeling bored and alone when your mom does her exercises.”

  James’s words lit the proverbial lightbulb for Vera: when she sat down at her piano, for Twyla, that was the same feeling as if her mother went off into the woods, leaving Twyla alone and uncertain.

  Vera smoothed the center crease of her unfinished swan. “I get pretty focused when I do my exercises. They aren’t boring to me.”

  “They are to me,” Twyla said with a wealth of long-suffering. “I sit in school all day, and that’s boring too.”

  “What about a list?” James asked Twyla. “Could you do your homework, or your chores, or take your shower, or otherwise get something you don’t like to do out of the way while your mom is busy?”

  “I’d rather make brownies.”

  “You have homework almost every weekend, Twy,” Vera pointed out, folding the napkin into a tail and a neck. “We always end up arguing about it Sunday night.” As the mom, Vera ought to have found a solution to that problem by now too.

  “We don’t always argue,” Twyla retorted.

  “Do you have homework this weekend?” James asked—when Vera would have taken the bickering bait.

  “I do, and Mom is right. She usually has to remind me to do it, starting after lunch on Sunday.”

  James tossed his spoon into his empty bowl. “Maybe you want to make your mother a proposal?”

  “What’s that?” Twyla asked.

  “You come up with how you want to solve the problem you’ve created. You apologized, and that’s a start, but it’s only words. What you did wrong was deeds.”

  Even a child could understand justice when it was put that simply. So could a mom.

  “I can do extra chores,” Twyla said. “Mom hates to do laundry, but I’m good at folding and putting away the clothes. I usually only do the socks, though.”

  The swan was turning out half decently, but then swans were easy—also the symbol of love, grace, and harmony.

  “My nieces do the socks too,” James said, “but they’re only seven. They probably can’t manage the big stuff like towels and bathrobes.”

  “I can,” Twyla said. She went silent, leaning into James.

  Vera set the swan down before Twyla and took James’s bowl to the sink, a shameless though perhaps not quite obvious bid for space.

  Maybe having a lawyer around sometimes wasn’t entirely a bad idea. For a change, she and Twyla hadn’t simply talked at each other—screeched at each other. They’d shared some real insights.

  “I think I’ll go do my homework,” Twyla said, getting off her stool. She gave Vera a curious glance, then trotted up the stairs.

  “Is that what you do for your clients?” Vera asked, running water into the bowl in the sink. “You sit them down and make them listen to each other?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Vera hadn’t heard James’s stool scrape back, so she was surprised when his arms came around her.

  “James Knightley, what are you doing?”

  His chin parked on her crown, and he drew her against his chest. “The kid scared the living peedywaddles out of you.”

  Yes, she had. “I don’t even know what peedywaddles are.”

  Vera knew this embrace took her in the opposite direction of independent self-sufficiency, made two giant steps backward from maintaining intended boundaries, and was a direct contradiction of at least two speeches about not getting involved.

  She turned to face James, wrapped her arms around his middle, and rested her forehead against his throat.

  James wore that delicious fragrance, masculinity in the high desert, and his hand stroked slowly down her back.

  “Darren smelled funny to me,” she said, making no move to draw away. How long had it been since a man had held her like this, without expectations and maneuvers up his sleeve?

  “Funny how?”

  Vera could feel James’s voice resonate in his chest when he spoke. In the dark, that voice would—

  She stepped back, and James let her go.

  “He smelled like pipe smoke and burned lawn clippings when he first got here,” she said, turning back to the sink to wash out the bowl. Or something.

  James grabbed a towel and dried the bowl when she’d put it in the drain rack. “Like pot?”

  “What?”

  “Marijuana smells sweet and grassy. He probably lit up a joint on the way here.”

  “Pot?” Vera hissed, keeping her voice down with ingrained parental discipline. “You think he’s doing drugs?”

  “I got a faint whiff of it too, but I wouldn’t condemn him on that evidence alone.”

  She returned to washing brownie dishes while James went on drying.

  “What do I do?” she asked as the water swirled down the drain a few minutes later. “Darren is not of age and he’s driving. He could mess up his whole life, and for what? To catch a buzz?”

  James hung the towel on the handle of the oven. “Didn’t you ever rebel, Vera? Didn’t you ever take a risk to feel big and bad and all grown-up?”

  “No,” she said. She’d felt big and bad if she skipped practice—also really guilty. “Pot is serious. Very serious.”

  “It’s serious only if he gets caught,” James said, wringing out a rag and starting on the counters. “A little experimentation is not the end of the world, but you mentioned that his mom is an alcoholic. That might put a different complexion on the matter. In any case, it isn’t your problem to solve.”

  “Blessed St. Mary.” Vera subsided onto a stool. “He’s genetically set up for addiction.” Donal would not know how to deal with this either, and for all his faults, Donal loved that boy.

  “We don’t know about his genetics. You’ve never mentioned his father having any sort of problems with drugs or alcohol.”

  Watching James methodically wipe down the counters was soothing, or maybe Vera reacted to the calm in his voice. She set the yellow swan in the middle of the island, though it looked lonely there.

  “Donal has all sorts of quirks,” she said. “He has rigid routines and pet peeves, and I can almost understand why Tina took to drinking.”

  Vera had never admitted that to another soul, not even her lawyer.

  “Nobody compels an alcoholic to drink, and this is not a happy topic,” James said, rinsing out the rag and draping it over the faucet. “While we’re dwelling on the negative, and Twy is occupied upstairs, let’s take a look at that garage door.”

  “Of course.” This was why he’d come over. Not to mediate with her and Twy, not to diagnose Darren’s inchoate addiction, not to hear a lot of miserable family history.

  Not to hug her.

  Vera grabbed a jacket from a peg near the door, only to find it taken from her grasp and obligingly held for her. When she’d slipped her arms into the sleeves, James gave her shoulders a pat and shrugged into his own jacket.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her by the hand. “It will be dark before we’ve solved the problems of the universe, and my new neighbor apparently hasn’t invested in any motion sensors or outdoor lights.”

  His neighbor. Vera had never had a neighbor who’d taken her by the hand or held her.

  “You think I should invest in all that?” She let James lead her into the garage, not really wanting to be in the space by herself.

  “No. I do not. You’ll have all manner of wild game setting off the motion sensors, unless you calibrate them for movement at shoulder height and above. The motion sensors will turn on the lights, but they’ll also
alert your intruder to the fact that he’s been spotted—assuming you wake up, go to the window, and recognize him.”

  “But they’ll scare him off.” Or scare her off, or them off.

  James opened the service door and stepped through to view it from the outside.

  “Not good, Vera. Somebody used something sharp and mean to try to hack the hell out of your door. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it inside.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t hear anything.” Had she practiced through this? “Maybe I wasn’t here when this happened, which is a much more comforting prospect than that I slept through this.”

  James used a cell phone to take several pictures. “Have you touched it? We can have the doorknob dusted for prints.”

  “I haven’t touched it lately.” Only by coincidence, not because she’d thought that clearly. “I hate this.”

  James rose and wrapped his arms around her. The contrast between his warmth and the chilly winter air had Vera burrowing closer, though a small voice in her mind ranted about boundaries and self-sufficiency.

  “Hugs don’t fix anything,” she said.

  “They make me feel better. Call the sheriff’s office, and I’ll give a statement corroborating that the door was undamaged as of my last visit here. They’ll recognize the Knightley name, if nothing else, because Mac is the bane of their prosecutorial existence and the best outfielder on the bar association’s softball team.”

  “I don’t want to impose.” Vera didn’t want to cling either, but she stayed right where she was.

  James was quiet, letting her impose to the tune of a long, solid embrace.

  “James?”

  “Honey?”

  “This isn’t why I asked you over.”

  “Of course it isn’t.”

  Was he mocking her?

  His lips, warm and soft, came down onto hers. Vera was so surprised she went still, letting out a sigh that sounded suspiciously of pleasure.

  His kiss held worlds of patience and a slow, sweet, savoring quality that made everything else fall away—the brisk winter air, Vera’s worry, the clamorings of rational thought. James parted his mouth, and Vera scented chocolate on a warm puff of his breath. A chocolate kiss, and for once not wrapped in foil.