“The Daddy School?”
The waiter arrived at their table, barrel-chested beneath his white butcher’s apron, and the sight of him helped to bring her back to reality. She ordered a swordfish steak and a cup of clam chowder, which Levi immediately amended, requesting a bowl of the soup for her and one for himself, along with a grilled salmon, and a banana for D.J. “I’d order some wine, but they don’t have a liquor license here,” he said, sounding apologetic.
She didn’t need wine. Her mind already felt fuzzy enough.
“So, what’s the Daddy School?” she asked.
“I have a client,” Levi explained. “He’s a newspaper columnist. James McCoy—maybe you’ve heard of him.”
“The guy who writes—what is it called? ‘Guy Stuff,’ right? That hilarious column about how idiotic men are?”
Levi grinned. “It’s a hilarious column about how superior men are,” he corrected her. “Anyway, Jamie lives in Arlington. His wife Allison is a nurse at Arlington Memorial Hospital. She and her best friend run a program for fathers, helping them to become better fathers.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I went to my first class on Monday,” he said. “I’m trying to learn how to do this better.”
She considered arguing that he was already doing an excellent job as a father. D.J. looked healthy and clean. His skin was clear and soft, his wispy hair untangled, his eyes bright and alert. For a child who had endured a terrible loss, he didn’t seem to be suffering. “Do you really need lessons in how to be a father?”
The sound Levi made was something midway between a laugh and a snort. “Are you kidding?”
“D.J.’s doing wonderfully.”
“Sure—now that he has you to give him a spoon to play with.”
A scowl tightened her brow as she tried to figure out what Levi was getting at. “You mean, he wasn’t happy and healthy until I gave him that spoon?”
“He’s healthy,” Levi conceded. “Maybe he’s happy, maybe even happy a lot of the time. But not like this. Look at him. He can’t take his eyes off you.”
Actually, D.J. didn’t seem to have any trouble taking his eyes off her in order to focus on the spoon, the tray, his fingers and everything else within his range of vision. But whenever he did peer at Corinne, something changed in his face. His smile grew deeper, fiercer. She’d thought she was ascribing her own unfathomable emotions to him—but maybe his emotions matched hers. Maybe he was as content in her company as she was in his.
She didn’t want to think about her own feelings, not when they left her so confused. So she turned the conversation back to Levi. “It seems to me you’re doing a lot of things right for him. You even figured out a way to work while he’s in your office. That’s an amazing feat for anyone—to work with a baby in the room.”
“I wasn’t exactly working full strength when he was in my office,” Levi reminded her. “Anyway, he’s got a nanny now. He stays home with her during the day. Things are returning to normal.” Levi reached for a piece of bread from the plastic basket the waiter had left on the table, then hesitated. “That’s not true. Things aren’t normal. They’ll never be normal again.”
“Yes they will,” Corinne argued, because he seemed to need assurance. “You just have to come up with a different definition of normal.”
Levi glanced at D.J., then helped himself to a thick slice of bread. He smeared some butter on it and took a bite. “This is the first time I’ve taken him to a restaurant.”
“He’s doing fine, so far.”
“Yeah.” Levi looked at him again, his gaze softening. “So far.”
Perhaps she was getting used to a new definition of normal, too. Sitting with him and D.J. at this unpretentious seafood restaurant felt normal to her. The rare times she dined out, she and Gerald usually would go to someplace dark and quiet and very New York-ish, with carpets muffling the waiters’ footsteps, diners muting their voices and nary a highchair in sight. But spreading an unfolded paper napkin across her knees and smiling as the waiter delivered two enormous bowls of chowder to their table seemed perfectly normal to her.
“Look at this!” she exclaimed as she stared warily at the bowl. “You could float an aircraft carrier in it.”
“Once you taste it, you’ll be glad I ordered the big size for you,” Levi predicted.
She tasted it—and was glad. “Ooh! It’s delicious.”
“They use huge clams,” he pointed out. “And other things no one else puts in chowder. Leeks, all sorts of herbs, and milk instead of cream so it doesn’t get all sludgy.”
“And the potatoes aren’t mushy.”
“Mmm.” Levi was too busy devouring a spoonful to speak.
“Ba-baa! Lee-lee!” D.J. clinked his spoon on the tray, evidently delighted that they were enjoying their soup.
She consumed nearly half the bowl without a pause. It was too good to stop eating, too good to talk through. But after a while she realized that scooping chowder into her mouth without speaking to Levi was rude. “So, this Daddy School,” she said. “Is it in a classroom?”
“A community room at the Y,” he said. “It meets once a week.”
“And it’s specifically for men raising babies alone?”
“No—some of the students are married. My lawyer is. He’s the one who first mentioned it to me. I think you were at my office when he did, weren’t you?”
She remembered with a nod. That last morning, when they’d hammered out a new contract, she’d been afraid he was going to try to intimidate her by having his attorney present.
Instead, he’d intimidated her with a kiss.
Remembering that kiss caused the warmth inside her to grow, and her cheeks tingled as heat spread upward into a blush. The kiss Levi had given her had been tame, dry and close-lipped—and perhaps manipulative. Yet it had left a permanent impression on her, a palpable nick in her soul.
Ridiculous that she could have responded so strongly to it then, that she could respond so strongly to a memory of it now. Maybe she ought to be leery of Levi. She didn’t like the idea that she could be so moved by a staid little kiss.
She desired Levi. It struck her with the same astonishing impact as her first taste of the chowder had: she wanted him. No use denying it. No use pretending he hadn’t gotten to her.
She wasn’t particularly adept at relationships. She didn’t trust them. She’d witnessed far too many bad ones in her formative years, growing up in her parents’ various households. Perhaps if her father had taken Daddy School classes, he would have skipped a few of his marriages, aware that all those step-mothers he’d kept foisting on Corinne had undermined her confidence in love and marriage. And her mother, constantly moving her from home to home, from one family to the next…
Corinne assumed that some people managed to relate to the opposite sex successfully, but she’d never seen much evidence of it and no one had ever taught her how it was done. That was why she’d planned her life so carefully: the MBA, the career, the smart investments, the ability to go it alone. The determination not to believe in something that likely would never exist for her.
Well, she wasn’t going to fall in love with Levi—or with his cute little nephew, who had taken to gnawing on the spoon again. What she felt when she recalled Levi’s kiss, when she fell under the power of his riveting brown eyes, was physical attraction, pure and simple. Love had nothing to do with it.
“Actually,” he was saying, “Murphy started taking Daddy School lessons when he was divorced and suddenly found himself with custody of his twins. They’re a bit older—around nine years old now, I think. But he found the classes useful, even after he remarried.”
“So it isn’t just about how to change diapers?”
“I figured out diapers on my own,” Levi boasted, then paused as the waiter arrived with their entrees—and a banana on a plate for D.J. Ignoring his salmon, Levi peeled the banana and used his knife to cut it into thin disks. “Diapers are easy, a
nd any man who claims he can’t do them is lying because he doesn’t want to deal with the messy part of it. Other things are a little more complicated. Like food. I wouldn’t have known which foods D.J. could handle if I hadn’t learned it in class.” He set the plate in front of D.J., who let out a joyous chirp.
“Why did you wind up with D.J.?” she asked.
“My sister wanted it that way.”
“Why?” She smiled hesitantly. “Did she know you were going to take to it so well? Were you always a nurturing sort of guy?”
“I’m not a nurturing sort of guy,” Levi said, then sighed and turned to D.J., who had started pounding on the plate with the spoon. Levi pried the spoon from D.J.’s clenched hand, and the baby shouted in protest. While his mouth was open, Levi poked a piece of banana between his lips. The sweetness of the fruit distracted him enough to make him forget about the spoon.
If that wasn’t a nurturing thing to do, Corinne didn’t know the meaning of nurturing.
“Maybe your sister knew you better than you know yourself,” she said.
Clearly unconvinced, he wiped his fingers on his napkin and dug into his salmon.
“What was her name?” Corinne was surprised by her own nosiness—but she really wanted to know. She wanted to know everything about how Levi had wound up with D.J., how D.J. had wound up with Levi, how these two men had combined to captivate her.
“Ruth.”
“Tell me about her.”
He studied Corinne, his eyes dark and penetrating. His gaze seemed to grip her, to hold her tight. “What do you want to know?” he finally asked.
“Anything you want to tell me.”
He accepted her answer with a nod. “She was my baby sister. Six years younger than me. She and I were kind of the family oddballs. The black sheep.” He speared a chunk of fish and ate it, then responded to D.J.’s panicked wail by lifting another piece of banana to the baby’s mouth. Corinne took the opportunity to taste her swordfish. It wasn’t quite as miraculous as the chowder, but it came close.
“My parents felt the world was a dangerous and corrupting place,” Levi continued once D.J. had settled down and pinched his tiny fingers around the circle of banana. “They wanted to isolate us from it. We were all home-schooled. We had no television set and very few toys and books. I used to bike to the library sometimes. I was afraid to bring the books home—I figured my parents would take them away, and probably take away my bike, too. So I stayed there and read for hours. I never told anyone what I was doing—but when Ruth was about eight, she followed me on her bike. I was afraid she’d rat on me, but she didn’t. She found a book and started reading, too.”
Corinne had little difficulty picturing Levi nurturing his young sister’s mind. Whether or not he realized it, he was a remarkably nurturing man.
“Ruth and I were both artistic. My parents viewed art as frivolous. They didn’t want us wasting our time with drawing and coloring pictures, so we had to sneak that, too. We’d sketch on scrap paper. We’d scribble on toilet paper. Since Ruth was the youngest, all her clothes were hand-me-downs, and once she outgrew them they’d be too worn out to pass along to anyone else, so she’d cut them up and sew them into outfits for her dolls. She loved fabrics. My mother did lots of sewing, and she taught Ruth how to quilt. When she wanted to learn weaving, my parents thought maybe that meant she was going to settle down and be a good girl, mastering the domestic arts, so they sent her to a friend of theirs who had a loom. She taught Ruth—but the stuff Ruth wanted to weave was bright, with pictures and images in it.” He ate a bit, reminiscing. “When she was seventeen, she ran away from home.”
“Where were you then?”
“By then, I’d finished college.” He sighed. “Going to college had been almost impossible, too. I found out about how to apply to college from the librarian. I wasn’t able to take all the college placement tests, but I applied to a bunch of colleges with her help, and I got accepted to Penn State on a scholarship. My parents refused to let me go. I threatened to report them to Social Services if they stood in my way.” Another deep sigh. “By that time I was as tall as I am now. And full of anger. I think I must have scared them, because they told me they’d pray for my soul and they let me go.”
Corinne was stunned. His story sounded like something out of Dickens, not the sort of thing that was supposed to happen to people of her generation, here in the United States. She’d gone to college with the blessings of her parents—and all her step-parents. She’d already decided she would never get married, never depend on a husband to support her, and she’d known she wouldn’t be able to support herself adequately without a college degree. Her parents, the whole army of them, were fully behind her. Two of her step-fathers contributed some money toward her tuition so she wouldn’t have to sign too many loans.
But to have gotten a college education without any support—worse, to do it with parents who had actively fought against it—must have been so much harder. Levi had to have been incredibly strong and motivated to have achieved so much in spite of his parents. Mixed in with her attraction to him was enormous respect for what he’d accomplished.
“So when you decided to devote yourself to designing houses with lots of light,” she said as comprehension dawned, “it had to do with more than just the darkness of the house you grew up in.”
“It had to do with the darkness of my home,” he said. “I grew up in darkness, in so many ways. All my siblings did, but Ruth was the only one besides me who was desperate to get out into the light.”
“And she did?”
“She lived with me for a while. I was in architecture school then, at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was just a kid. She sat in on some weaving courses at the school, and I tried to get her to enroll. But she wasn’t looking for a father or a mentor, and I guess that was what I was trying to be. She’d spent seventeen years listening to my father tell her what to do, and there I was, trying to get her to do what I thought she should do. She left and headed for California.” He smiled vaguely. “At least she didn’t hate me for it, the way she hated my father.”
“Did things work out for her in California?”
He nodded. “She struggled a lot, and once I became an associate at Arlington Architectural, I used to send her money to help her out. But she found a community of artisans and craftspeople there, and she was very happy. She wove beautiful stuff, blankets, wall hangings, articles of clothing she used to call wearable art. I have a wall hanging of hers I could show you, in my—” He caught himself and smiled sheepishly. “In my bedroom. If you’d like to see it.”
Corinne smiled, not yet prepared to visit his bedroom. The room’s fireplace probably wouldn’t do anything for her—she still thought a bedroom fireplace was a silly whimsy—but his sister’s wall hanging would touch her, she was sure.
“How old was she when D.J. was born?”
“She’d just turned twenty-seven. And five months later she was dead. It was such a fluky thing. She’d been in good health, strong and full of life…” A wave of sadness seemed to overtake him, and he said nothing for a long moment, just poked at his salmon with the tines of his fork. At last, he broke off a chunk and ate it. “She’d been sharing a house with a few other artisans in Mendocino,” he said. “That’s north of San Francisco, on the coast. Have you ever been there?”
Corinne shook her head.
“It’s beautiful country. I’d fly out and visit her every June, and the scenery was breathtaking. Anyway.” He ate a bit more. “These people she was living with told me that after D.J. was born, she’d written a will naming me as his guardian.”
“She really must have trusted you.”
“I don’t know why, but she did.” He glanced at D.J., who looked attentive even though he couldn’t possibly understand what Levi was saying.
“And you have no idea who his father is?”
He lifted another chunk of banana from the plate in front of D.J. “All she told me he was that
he was from the Los Angeles area. He worked for a film company. He’d been passing through and they’d had a fling. Oh, and he was handsome. She told me that.”
Corinne watched Levi nudge the soft piece of fruit between D.J.’s lips. D.J. had banana smeared on his cheeks and chin, and he gleefully gummed the piece Levi was feeding him. He clasped his hands around Levi’s; they looked glazed and sticky with banana, too.
Levi’s sister had been wise to trust Levi. Corinne would have trusted him, too, with her whole heart.
That thought shook her. She lowered her gaze to her plate. As tasty as the swordfish was, the chowder had filled her up so much she couldn’t come close to finishing her meal. When the waiter came to check on them, she leaned back and informed him she was done.
“You want me to wrap this for you?” the waiter asked.
If she were in New York, she would have said yes. She could have brought the leftovers home and heated them for dinner some other night. But in Arlington, what was she going to do with the extra food? She didn’t have a refrigerator in her room at the Arlington Inn.
“Wrap it,” Levi instructed the waiter. He must have read Corinne’s questioning look, because he added, “I can keep it in my refrigerator for you.”
And then what? Was she supposed to go to his house Sunday to pick the leftovers up before she left town?
She didn’t want to wait to go to his house until she was about to leave town. She wanted to go back there now—to spend more time with him and D.J., to see the artistry of his sister’s wall hanging, to experience his house through the eyes of someone who now understood why certain architectural concepts were so essential to Levi. To hold D.J. in her arms, maybe give him a bottle the way she had a week ago, even try her hand at changing his diaper, since Levi claimed it was easy. To cradle him and cuddle him and let him know how lucky he was that his mother had named Levi his guardian.
She had no particular interest in security, domestic stability, daddies and babies, home and hearth. She had as full a life as she could manage back in New York—a demanding job, a productive investment portfolio, a professional colleague who doubled as her closest friend. She didn’t need anything Levi Holt could possibly offer.
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