“Bet you can’t wait to get home,” he said, and she looked up from her gloves at the tightness in his voice. His eyes weren’t sparkling with amusement now.
Why? Because she was talking about Los Angeles? Because she’d mentioned going home? She’d made it very clear she didn’t even want to come back to New Hampshire to see him, never mind stay.
“I can’t leave until I’ve asked all my questions,” she pointed out, purposely keeping her tone on the playful side. “I don’t give up that easy.”
“Neither do I.” She wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that and she didn’t have the guts to ask.
Terry was stuck. She’d ducked into Mike and Lisa’s pop-up camper to drop off some clothes belonging to Joey and Danny Lisa had left in the dryer behind the bathhouse, and almost as soon as she closed the door behind her, Mike and Lisa had returned to the side.
Arguing.Indecision had kept her quiet just long enough so making her presence known would be awkward and embarrassing, and now she had to sit on the cushioned bench until her brother and his wife wrapped it up.
“Michael, all I said was that I could use a little help picking up after the boys before you go anywhere.”
“No, you had to get snide and tell everybody it must be nice to be me and be able to run around with the guys while my wife did all the work.”
Terry sighed and very, very slowly, so as not to make the camper shift, she leaned over and rested her head on the end of the bunk. Hopefully somebody else would show up and break up the spat soon, because this was an issue without resolution. She should know. She and Evan had fought that fight more than once when Stephanie was a baby, and they’d only had one kid.
“I wasn’t lying, was I?”
“If you’re so goddamned unhappy about the kids leaving their stuff laying around, why the hell do you keep talking about having another one?”
Oh crap. Now she could listen to her sister-in-law feed her husband more bullshit pie about wanting a baby girl. If only she’d spoken up as soon as she’d heard their voices, she could be long gone.
“I don’t even know why I bring up babies, since making them actually requires having sex once in a while.”
Oh, ouch. Terry tried to tune them out by thinking about something else. Anything else.
After she put the boys’ laundry away, she’d planned to take a walk up to the cabin. Now that everybody had made good use of the showers, she wanted to see if Keri was over being pissed enough yet, or if she was going to have to walk on eggshells when Joe was around, too. Way too much conflict for a vacation.
Apparently Mike agreed. “I didn’t come all the way up here to spend two weeks fighting with you, Lisa. And I’m sorry about the sex thing, but every time I think about it lately, I think about starting all over again with another baby.”
“Forget it. I don’t want to fight, either. I have to go get laundry out of the dryer. Go…hang out with Kevin or something.”
“Do you need help carrying the laundry down?”
Say yes, Terry thought. She knew it was Mike’s way of trying to ease the tension between them. It was an olive branch, puny though it was.
“No, I’ve got it.”
“Okay. Well…I’ll be back in a while, then.”
Terry lifted her head and peeked out, able to watch them both walk away. When they were out of sight, she hopped out of the pop-up and went back to her RV. She needed a drink before she went and scoped out the drama situation at the cabin.
Stephanie was stretched out on the couch, watching a movie Terry knew she’d already seen at least a dozen times. She didn’t even look up when the door opened.
“We didn’t come up here to sit around and watch TV, Steph. It’s not raining and it’s not cold, so you should be outside.”
“Doing what?”
Good question. “Go for a walk or something. Go see what the—”
“Boys are doing? No thanks.”
Terry sighed and resisted the urge to beat her head against the door jamb. The rules were pretty clear—the television was supposed to be off unless it was raining or after dark if it was too chilly to play on the playground.
But what, exactly, was there to do on the playground? Swing? She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was entering those in-between years when she was too old to play with the kids, but not old enough to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting in a chair doing absolutely nothing.
Last year, she’d run with the boys, playing dodgeball and tetherball, hunting for frogs by the pond and exploring the woods. But now, whether it was her age or her gender or her general attitude about life, she was keeping herself separate. Fight it or let it go?
“I’m going to walk up and see Uncle Joe. You wanna go?”
“Not really. You’re just going to be mean to Keri, anyway.”
“That’s not fair. If it had been anybody but me who did it to anybody but Keri, everybody would have thought it was hilarious. But because I did it to her, everybody assumes I was being a b…mean.”
“Are you and Dad getting divorced?”
“Steph.” Conversational whiplash. And how much family crap did one woman have to deal with in a day? “We’ve been separated three months. You’re old enough to figure out that probably means we’re going to talk about divorce.”
“When?”
“Probably when we get back. There’s no sense in putting it off much longer.”
The combination of little girl tears in eyes that looked just like Evan’s was like a punch to Terry’s gut. She went to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, then popped a couple of aspirin while she was thinking of it. The way the day was going, a stress headache was almost inevitable. Might as well deal with the tightness in her neck and shoulders before the pain hit.
“I know I’m breaking the rules, Mom, but I don’t really wanna hang out with anybody right now.”
It was the plea for understanding in her daughter’s voice—free of any teenage attitude—that broke her. So what if she spent the day watching TV? She was on vacation, too, and it’s not like the rest of the family was exactly a barrel of laughs at the moment.
She bent down and kissed Steph’s forehead. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’m going to head up to the cabin for a while, okay?”
“Okay. Be nice to Keri, though.”
Terry ignored that last bit and stepped outside, only to run into Lisa. “Hey. Whatcha up to?”
“Did you grab the laundry out of the dryer?”
“Yeah, a while ago.” She felt bad making it sound like a longer while than it really was. “It looked like Joey and Danny’s, so I stuck it in the pop-up.”
“Oh, thanks. I thought I was going crazy. Then I was afraid somebody took it, but I can’t imagine anybody who’d want underwear my boys wore, freshly washed or not.”
“I’m heading up to the cabin. Wanna take a walk?”
“I think I’ve had enough of Kowalski men right now. Where’s Steph?”
“She’s watching a movie. She’s not feeling very sociable today, so I’m letting it slide. Everything okay?” she asked, even though she knew it wasn’t.
“Sure,” Lisa replied in a very fake voice with a very fake smile. “I think I’m going to get my book and sit in the shade for a while. Pop’s got the boys fishing at the pond, so I might have a few minutes of peace.”
“I’ll be back in a while, then, and we can start figuring out supper.”
“Sounds good. Oh, and be nice to Keri, okay?”
Jeez, what was with people today?
Keri was stretched out on Joe’s bed, watching him tap away on his laptop. She was trying to leave him alone—she’d even spent a few minutes working herself—but boredom was setting in.
The short-lived attempt at working had only served to depress her. Every time she looked at the questions and answers so far and tried to work them into a compelling—or at least mildly interesting—article, it became increasingly obvious the hard-hitting journalist inside of her w
as enjoying the vacation aspect of the assignment, while the fluff-writer she’d once been was the only part of her showing up for work.Wouldn’t it be a kick in the ass to go through the Kowalski version of Hell Week times two, only to end up turning in a puff piece that got her fired anyway?
“What happened to Kevin?” she asked when she couldn’t stand the silence anymore. Even though she couldn’t use the information in her article, maybe she could fake her muse into thinking they were actually working. “To make him leave the police department, I mean.”
Joe clicked, presumably on the save button and turned to look at her. “You know Kev. Perfect guy to run a sports bar, don’t you think?”
He was hiding something. Something big if her gut was right and it almost always was. “Off the record, Joe. Besides the fact I agreed to your stupid rules, you know me well enough to know I’d never deliberately hurt your family.”
“People change a lot in twenty years, babe.”
“Bullshit. You never would have let me come here if you didn’t trust me to respect their privacy.”
He grinned at her, his dimples flashing. “Got me there.”
“It’s just natural curiosity about the people I’m hanging out with. Nothing more sinister than that. And I haven’t said anything to Terry about her husband, even when she was being bitchy, have I?”
“Fine, but if you even look at him with pity in your eyes, he’ll know I told you. And he never even told me the whole story. I’ve got a friend who works for the Boston PD and he filled me in on a lot of it.”
“Jesus, Joe, do you want me to sign a confidentiality agreement?”
“Okay, fine. Kevin worked his ass off for the department, but never got ahead. Always got the shitty shifts in bad neighborhoods. He forgot something one day and stopped at home. Found out his captain had been banging his wife for God knows how long. Kev beat the holy fuck out of him.”
“Oh my God,” Keri breathed. “Did they arrest him?”
“The captain’s married to the daughter of a political heavy-hitter, so he was publicity shy, to say the least. Kevin left the department and filed for divorce. That was the end of it.”
“Poor guy.”
“No sympathy! I mean it, Keri. Just leave it alone.”
They heard the footsteps on the porch before the knock on the door, and Keri sighed and flopped back on the pillow. Knowing his family, her boredom—otherwise known as peace and quiet—was about to come to an end.
“It’s open,” Joe called, and Keri rolled her eyes when Terry entered. “Hey, sis.”
“Hey. Not much happening, so I thought I’d wander over and see what’s going on. You working?”
“A little bit,” he said, causing Keri to feel a pang of guilt.
He’d be getting a lot more work done if she’d gone wandering for something else to do rather than asking nosy questions about his family. But what was she supposed to do? She didn’t fish—even the catch and release kind—and, the last time she’d walked to the bathroom, she hadn’t seen Stephanie anywhere so hanging with her was out. Lisa had been in the big RV with Mary, and she certainly wasn’t about to seek out Terry. Though it seemed Terry had found her anyway.
“Sorry about the whole roosting thing,” Terry said to her. “It was just too good a shot to pass on.”
Since it had turned out Terry’s laundry was a lot more horrific than Keri’s at the end of the day, she could afford to be magnanimous. “Looking back, it was actually kind of funny, even though Joe won’t teach me how to do that.”
The other woman smiled. “Hold your front brake and punch it.”
“He won’t tell me which one is the front brake.”
Joe cleared his throat. “Not surprising, since I ride behind you.”
“Well, I’m going to go visit Ma for a few minutes,” Terry said, her hand on the door. “I just wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings.”
“None,” Keri assured her, and it was mostly true. She couldn’t resist one last shot, though. “Joe said to think of it as a welcome to the family kind of christening.”
The lemon-sucking face ruined the fake smile Terry offered up before going out the door and letting it slam behind her.
Joe laughed. “You said that just to piss her off.”
“I was going for mildly annoyed, but pissed works just as well.”
When he stood and stretched, reaching up over his head and twisting his back, Keri looked away. The correlation between the hot flashes and Joe’s muscles flexing was too coincidental to ignore and she was going to have to do a better job of not subjecting herself to the visual torture if she was going to make it through the time she had left without throwing herself at him.
“Mike and Kevin were talking about going for a ride in a while,” he said. “You know, like just the guys. Would you be okay with that?”
“What’s it costing you—or us—this time?”
When he lifted the hem of his T-shirt and scratched his stomach, she turned her attention to the urgent matter of freeing the bedspread of any trace of fuzz. “Whaddya mean?”
“The last time you went out alone with your brothers, I almost got drowned in the pool and then got to go on a dinner date with your nephews. A dinner date involving pizza sauce and hot fudge, I might add.”
“They were on their very best behavior,” he pointed out.
Rather than admit she’d actually enjoyed that outing, she forged on. “Oh, and let’s not leave out the s’mores. I’ve had a lot of gunk put in my hair over years of salon treatments, but never marshmallow.”
He leaned his shoulder against the bunk bed frame and crossed his arms. “I wouldn’t mind revisiting the hot fudge. Without the kids this time.”
Damn him. She could feel the heat radiating across her face and neck, which meant he could see it. Well, two could play at that game. “With extra whipped cream?”
Score! She didn’t miss the subtle little dance meant to ease the pressure on a growing erection trapped by zipped denim.
“You’re killin’ me, babe.”
“And we’re barely halfway there.”
Chapter Ten
The next day, Terry found herself battling an overwhelming urge to talk to Keri about Evan. It annoyed the hell out of her because a truce did not a BFF—as her daughter called them—make. And even though the truce had more or less survived the mud incident intact, why the need to confide in a woman she wasn’t sure she even liked?
She supposed there was a logical reason for it. It would be nice to have somebody to talk to who wasn’t family. They’d been supportive, but they held back a little because Evan had been family a long time. Her brothers considered him a friend, and they were all keenly aware that, no matter what, he was Steph’s father forever.There was also the matter of them pulling their punches with her. Though they meant well, the other Kowalskis were more concerned about her feelings than with helping her see the issues in a clearer light. Good chance somebody who didn’t like her very much would be a little more honest.
But confide in Keri Daniels?
As luck would have it, a mere hour after deciding against sharing her personal life with her former best friend, she found herself alone with her.
It was hot, so Mike and Lisa had taken the kids, including Steph, to the pool. Joe was writing and Kevin had gone riding with a group of guys who’d arrived with a tent for the weekend. And her parents were in their RV, pretending to watch TV with their eyes closed.
By the time everybody had gone their separate ways and the clutter was cleared away, she and Keri were the only ones left.
“Did you ever get married?” she asked before she could change her mind or the other woman could come up with a good excuse to disappear.
Keri looked startled by the question, but she dropped into a camp chair. “No. I’ve been focused on my career, I guess.”
Terry lit a firestarter and threw a couple of logs in the pit before pulling her own chair close. It was a little warm for
a daytime fire, but it gave them both something to look at. “I went the other way and focused a little too much on my family, I guess.”
“Is that what he said when he left?”
At least she got where Terry was heading with the conversation and didn’t make her spell it out. “I was too busy mother-henning him to death to be fun and spontaneous.”
Keri didn’t make any sympathetic poor you noises or cluck her tongue. She snorted. “Unless you guys skipped the dating and engagement phases and went right for the ‘til death do us part, he can’t claim he didn’t know what he was in for. You were born a mother hen.”
“I was not.”
“Remember the time you locked my Barbie in your bathroom so she couldn’t leave Malibu Ken for G.I. Joe?”
“G.I. Joe was too violent for her. And I never would have relented if Pop hadn’t had tacos for dinner.”
“Or the time you held up our entire class on the way to the playground because my shoe was untied.”
“You were clumsy and if you tripped, you were going to take us all down like dominoes.”
Keri threw back her head and laughed, and Terry surprised herself by joining in. It felt good.
“Or the battle of the Christmas nutcrackers,” Keri gasped between peals of laughter.
That had been extreme, even for her, Terry had to admit. Her mother had a staggering collection of wooden nutcracking soldiers she displayed all over the family room during the holiday season. If there was open shelf space on Thanksgiving Day, there was a nutcracker in it before the leftover turkey was gone. One year Terry got it into her head they should be arranged in a parade around the room by height. Soldiers were an orderly bunch, after all.
So had begun a two-week long battle between seven-year-old Terry and her mother. Terry would line them up. Ma would mess them up. Even the threat of being on Santa’s naughty list couldn’t sway Terry in her determination to keep the soldier nutcrackers in order.
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