Nothing Personal (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  “Naw.” Mr. Sanderson reached for the cane beside the door, grabbed a 49ers cap from the hanging rack and settled it over his scant white hair. “No need to spend good money on that. I’ll go on with you, get it myself.”

  “They got a little loopy, did they?” he asked when he’d lowered his skinny behind in its tan slacks into the big car, pulled his cane in after him, and Alec had shut the door and got in on his side.

  “Yes, sir,” Alec said with a reminiscent smile, pulling out of the mobile home park and onto the main road. “They sure did.”

  “Well, you know, women need to have their fling now and then to be happy,” the old man said with a chuckle. “You should see them on Pinochle Night. When it’s at our place, I go on over to Stuart Grainger’s and watch TV, ’cause those girls get loud.”

  Alec laughed. “Not too hard to imagine at all. They sure seemed to be having a good time today.”

  “Yup. They’ll have enjoyed that, ’specially having Desiree take them out on the town. Desiree, now, she’s got a special spot in everybody’s heart. Always been a good girl, and she still is. She does our taxes every year, did you know that?”

  “She does?” Alec asked, since Mr. Sanderson seemed to be expecting an answer.

  “Yup. Ours, and Iris Chang’s, and her grandma’s too. Started out with Dixie’s when she was, oh, ’bout sixteen. Dixie was all set to go to H&R Block like usual, but Desiree looked it up on that computer, figured it out. Smart as a whip, that girl. Dixie bragged on her, of course. We wasn’t too sure, but Dixie got her check right enough, and Desiree said, now that she’d done it for her grandma, she might as well do ours too. Course, we tell her she doesn’t have to bother, now that she’s got that big job and all, but she does it just the same.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Alec said when the other man paused again.

  “Yup. Always been smart like that. And hard-working? Phew,” the old man said with a wave of one scrawny brown arm in its baggy white short-sleeved shirt. “Now, Dixie’s a hard-working woman, don’t get me wrong, but Desiree? You never saw her without some big book, full of math or what-not. That’s when she wasn’t working all the hours God sent to pay for that college. Hasn’t forgot her roots, either. Visits, calls, and I know she sends up a check every month. Do anything for her grandma.”

  “Now, woman like that,” he went on, as Alec had another light turn yellow on him, pulled to a stop, “woman who’s had the kind of hard time she has, too, she deserves good things. I’m sure you got a big house to go along with this fancy car, and you ride around in limousines, drink champagne and what-not, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about fur coats and diamond rings. I’m talking about a man to treat her the way she deserves, be good to her. Appreciate her the way a man should appreciate a good woman.”

  “Yes, sir,” Alec said, putting his foot thankfully on the gas again. “You’re right.”

  “I heard you was hanging around her,” Mr. Sanderson said. “Now, I’m not saying your mama and daddy didn’t raise you right. We’re Lutheran ourselves, but everyone knows Reverend Kincaid’s a good man. But who knows what kind of ideas you’ve gotten into, down there in San Francisco. Maybe you’re thinking, just ’cause Desiree doesn’t have a daddy who cares about her, you can go on and mess with her, break her heart. But she’s got plenty of people who think the world of her, and I’m telling you here and now, you treat that little girl right.”

  Alec had a vision of a posse of senior citizens, chasing him down and beating him to death with their walkers if he screwed up.

  “Yes, sir,” he said again. “I will.”

  “And I’m sure you’re thinking,” the other man went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “if you needed a lecture from some old man, you’d go on home and get it from your own grandpa. But young people today, they seem all mixed up to me. The girls think they got to run after the boys somehow, try to get them interested. They don’t realize we was born interested. They’d do better to let us know they’d be doing us a favor by even noticing us, but they got it all backwards, maybe ’cause they don’t have daddies at home, I don’t know.”

  “Well, don’t worry,” Alec said, turning into the Olive Garden parking lot with a prayer of thanksgiving. “Desiree’s got that down. In fact,” he couldn’t help saying, “maybe you want to have this conversation with her, about not messing with my heart.”

  “Huh.” The sharp little eyes took him in from beneath the brim of the ball cap. “You fall in love with that girl?”

  “Yes, sir,” Alec admitted, pulling up beside the old Taurus. “I sure have.”

  The old man shook his head slowly, chuckled a little.

  “Then, son,” he said, reaching for the door handle and shoving it open, “Lord help you.”

  “Your phone rang while you were gone,” his mother said a few hours later from her spot at the stove when Alec had pulled off his running shoes, wiped his face on his T-shirt, and come in through the laundry room after a very long run that had shaken some of the cobwebs from his mind.

  He went over and picked it up from the kitchen table, smiled, and pressed his thumb against the name.

  “Hey,” he said when she picked up. “Feeling better?”

  He heard the rueful laugh. “Yeah. I took an extremely long nap, and I have a bad feeling it’s going to be followed by an early bedtime.” She did sound sleepy. “I can’t believe I drank that much. And I’m pretty sure I remember that I left you to pay the bill. Let me know how much it was, and I’ll pay you back, and for the taxi too.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t. My pleasure. Getting five beautiful women the worse for wear? Are you kidding?”

  “Wait a sec,” he said, ignoring her protest. “My mom’s hissing something at me.” He held the phone against his chest, looked at his mother, and asked, “What?”

  “Lunch,” she said, gesturing furiously. “Tomorrow.”

  “I think my mom’s inviting you to lunch tomorrow,” he said, to the accompaniment of her emphatic nods. “You and your grandmother. And Lupe too,” he went on, correctly interpreting his mother’s circling hand.

  “Oh. Let me check.” She was gone a moment herself. “My grandma says yes, thank you, but Lupe goes to Spanish Mass, and she’s having lunch with friends afterwards, so it’s just us. And,” she said, and he heard the resignation in her voice, “my grandma says she’ll bring her Jell-O salad for dessert.”

  “Desiree,” he said sternly, “you really need to learn how to cook.”

  She laughed. “Hey. You want to see us, or what?”

  “I want to see you. And on that note, how’s that couch working out for you? That can’t be too comfortable. Want me to come get you tonight? You could sleep in Alyssa’s room.” He raised his eyebrows at his mother again, got her nod in return, and stepped back out into the laundry room, shut the door behind him. “And if I happen to wander in there during the night,” he said more quietly, “well, as long as you can keep it down, nobody has to know about that.”

  “Alec,” she said, and he could hear the giggle that he hoped was only partially the residue of the margaritas, “I wouldn’t dare. Not with your dad there. We’d be struck by lightning or something.”

  “Gabe and Mira sleep together when they’re here,” he pointed out. “And they’re not married.”

  “Yet,” she reminded him. “Engaged is different.”

  “Well, we’re engaged up here, remember? I told that nurse so and everything. That probably gives it the American Nursing Association seal of approval.”

  “No way,” she said again. “You can fool some of the people all of the time, or so I hear, but I have a feeling you can’t fool your dad any of the time. And you can’t fool me either. And besides,” she went on hastily as he was opening his mouth to say something, although he had no earthly clue what, “my grandma wants me here. But I’ll see you tomorrow at church, OK? And then lunch.”

  And he had to be content with that.

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nbsp; “She coming over tonight?” his mom asked, frying hamburger now, when he’d stepped back into the kitchen again.

  “No,” he said, setting his phone down on the counter and picking up the big knife from the cutting board, absently whacking the top off a green pepper. “She’s staying there.”

  His mother went back to her frying for a minute.

  “She thinks—” he said, then broke off.

  She looked at him inquiringly. He rocked the knife back and forth, made a couple slices in the wood. “She doesn’t think I’m serious about her.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You know, if you’re going to stand there and wreck my knife, why don’t you wash your hands and cut up those vegetables for me?”

  “Uh . . . OK. How?”

  “Onion first. Dice it. Little pieces,” she explained. “And then the rest. For the carrots, think quarter-inch coins. Everything else, half-inch cubes.”

  He got through the onion and watched her add it to her hamburger meat, then set to work on the rest. His decapitated pepper was a bit of struggle, but he figured it out eventually.

  “I don’t know how she feels,” he said when he’d started on the carrots. “I know how I feel, but I can’t tell what she wants.”

  “Are you having a good time?”

  “Of course we are.” He frowned at Susie’s back. “But it’s not enough just to have a good time. Not anymore.”

  “You’re afraid she doesn’t want a commitment.” She’d turned a little now, and he could see the smile.

  “Are you laughing at me?” he demanded with a flash of anger the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since she’d grounded him for sneaking out of his bedroom window, junior year. “It isn’t funny.”

  “Well, it is, a little,” his mother said calmly. “Don’t you imagine this is the conversation a whole lot of women have had with their mothers about you over the years?”

  “It can’t have felt this bad.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll bet it felt exactly this bad, at least for some of them.”

  “Well, then, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt anybody.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” Susie turned from her work, wrapped her arms around him, and gave him a hug. She fit right under his chin, and he kissed the top of her head, noticed that she was going gray, and had a flash of how Desiree must feel, a sudden rush of tenderness combined with the certain knowledge that one day, he was going to lose his mother. And realized in that moment that things had shifted forever. That he was an adult, and that at some point in the not-too-distant future, he would be a parent himself. That it was all on him now, and that he wanted it that way.

  “I know it’s hard,” his mother told him, stepping back again and turning to her soup, opening a carton and pouring in beef broth. “But if it’s meant to be, it’ll work out. You just keep on being patient, and keep on loving her. A good man who’s going to be there for you through thick and thin isn’t that easy to come by. You’re a good man, and Desiree’s a very intelligent young woman, and if you hang in there, she’s going to see that. But she’s got some pretty deep scars. Some old wounds. I don’t think trust comes easily for her.”

  “I know that’s why.” He was chopping red potatoes now, still grappling with the wave of emotion that had swept over him. “But I can make it better for her. I can make it right.”

  “Well,” she said, “if that’s how you feel, you just go on and love her, and if it’s meant to be, it’ll happen.”

  “You sound like Gabe.”

  She laughed at that. “Well, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. It worked out pretty well for him, didn’t it?” She gave him a playful nudge, smiled at him with the happy optimism he’d inherited from her.

  “And now that you’ve mangled my vegetables,” she said, taking his cutting board and beginning to scrape the contents into her soup pot, “go take a shower. Because, phew. You stink.”

  He glanced back at her as he left the room, and saw the smile still on her face. He could swear that she was singing.

  He pulled the sweat-soaked T-shirt over his head, tossed it onto the floor of his room as he passed it on his way to the bathroom, and wondered why everybody in the world thought that his suddenly, terrifyingly vulnerable heart was funny. Even his own mother.

  “So to recap, here’s how I’ve spent my weekend,” he said on the following evening. They were nearing the end of their long drive, the towers and cables of the Golden Gate Bridge glowing soft red against the black of the Bay beyond, flashing past the windows of the big Mercedes. “I’ve taken four old ladies to Olive Garden. I’ve listened to a lecture from a cranky old man about how I’m not good enough for you.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said at her look of surprise, “didn’t I tell you about that one? Yeah, that was another fun time. But that wasn’t all. I’ve gone to church. I’ve eaten more Jell-O salad. I’ve spent two nights in a single bed, aching to have a woman in there with me like I haven’t done since my crush on Elke Christensen. The head cheerleader,” he explained. “Elke was hot.”

  “You couldn’t get the head cheerleader?” she asked, and she was laughing. “I’m disappointed. My last illusion shattered.”

  “I was fifteen. Hadn’t grown into my full potential yet.”

  “Well, that’s a pretty good list,” she admitted. “I’d say you’ve been amazingly restrained and virtuous.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so too. So,” he asked as he took the turn onto Lombard, “don’t you think, after all that, I deserve some kinky sex?”

  He shot another look across at her, and she was still smiling. “Yes, I think you do,” she said, “and I think I do too. I was at Olive Garden too, remember.”

  “You were. But at least you got drunk.”

  “Hey. Do you want kinky sex or not?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he assured her. “I want it.”

  And he got it. But not entirely the way he’d planned, though they got to the curtains, all right. He used them on her, and it was even better than he’d hoped. And then she used them on him, and that was pretty good too.

  “Guess I’ve had kinky sex now,” she sighed, knowing that her foolish smile was right out there for him to see.

  “Guess you have.” And he was looking just about as happy and satisfied as she felt, so it didn’t matter.

  “Not quite the same as doing you on the conference table,” she acknowledged, “but I gave it my best shot. And I think you enjoyed it, too.”

  She stayed where she was, kneeling astride him, just because it felt good up here. Bent down to give him a long kiss, felt his hands coming up to hold her waist, slide over her bare back, and loved it.

  “Aw.” He shrugged, grinned up at her. “I can take it or leave it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She moved to swing her leg over him, but he grabbed her thigh, held on.

  “Changed my mind,” he said. “I can only take it. Come on down here and kiss me again.”

  “So who needs it, huh?” she asked against his mouth.

  He sighed. “Yeah. That’d be me. Aw, hell, Desiree. Who am I kidding? Every single person I’ve talked to this weekend has figured it out, so I might as well say it. I’m crazy in love with you.”

  She sat back fast, and this time she did swing her leg over him, sat back on her knees beside him, busied herself smoothing out her hair. “Oh.” She couldn’t think of what else to say. “You are?”

  “I am,” and he was smiling at her now. “No doubt about it. I’m officially crazy.”

  “You . . .” She leaned down, grabbed her underwear from the floor by the bed where she’d dropped it. “Wow. You sure know how to make a woman feel good.”

  Just like that, the smile was gone. “You think I’m just talking? This is a big deal for me. I’ve never said that before.”

  Claudine’s words were right there. “I don’t think the words ‘I love you’ have ever crossed those luscious lips, not unless he was talking to his mother.” But she remembered what they’d be
en talking about when Claudine had said it, too.

  “And you’ve got me sweating now,” he pointed out. “Waiting to hear you say it back.”

  “I’m . . .” She hesitated, busied herself pulling on her underwear, felt a little better when she had it on. “I’m pretty sure I feel . . . that way.”

  “Pretty sure?” He pushed himself up to sit against the pillows. “That way?”

  She felt the panic closing in, shoved it back, did her best to be honest. “I love being with you. I miss you, the nights you’re not here. And, OK, I’ll say it. I’m crazy about you.”

  And even that was almost too much. She got up and found an undershirt in the dresser drawer, put it on. Didn’t look at him, but could feel his eyes on her.

  When she turned around again, he studied her face and sighed. “Well, this is awkward,” he said. “Not sure what to do here.”

  “What do you usually do when a woman says that to you?” she asked. “What happens next?”

  “Ouch.” She could see the wince. “Yeah. Well. Sometimes they leave, sometimes they stick around, I suppose thinking that I’ll say it back eventually. Which I never have, which I guess is my answer right there.” He was pulling on his own underwear now, his T-shirt too.

  “Alec.” He really looked hurt, and she couldn’t stand that, so she sat beside him on the bed. “I’m just . . . I can’t give my heart away like that. If I didn’t know you . . .” She stopped, looked down at the curve of her thigh, ran her hand through her curls, messing them up again. “I mean, if I didn’t know about you. If I hadn’t heard so much about you, and from so many people. If I hadn’t seen you in action on the show, the way you were with Chelsea. Talking to your brother, too, all the things you said.”

  “That was then,” he said, “and this is now. I’m different. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know if it was the show, or if it was seeing Gabe change. When you’re a twin . . . you do what your twin does. You feel what he feels, you change at the same time. It’s a hard thing to explain, but it’s real. Or maybe that had nothing to do with it, and it was just you. The one right woman, coming into my life at exactly the right time, when I could recognize her, when I was ready for her. I don’t know why it happened. All I know is, it’s here, and it’s real.”