A Hickey for Harriet & a Cradle for Caroline

by Nancy Warren

  “You coming to my surprise party?”

  Caro dropped the notebook in defeat. She’d heard most of Fanny’s anecdotes over the years anyway. And she felt no surprise that Fanny knew about her party. It was more of a mystery why Jon had thought he could keep a secret from the one-woman info booth for the goings-on in town.

  “I received an invitation,” Caro said carefully. In truth she hadn’t decided about going to the party. She was torn between wanting to be there for Fanny and not wanting to be anywhere near Jonathon.

  “Hmm.” Fanny picked up another already gleaming glass and polished it ruthlessly. “What am I going to do in a fancy restaurant with a bunch of stuffed shirts?”

  “You don’t fool me. You married a stuffed shirt.”

  “Gave birth to one, too. My eggs must have got too old. Don’t you wait until you’re middle-aged to have kids. Specially if Jon’s going to be the father. You’ve already got one stuffed-shirt gene.”

  Fanny didn’t know Caro’s egg carton had come up empty. She and Jon had tried to conceive for over a year with no luck. Fanny’s words were like bullets, piercing Caro’s sensitive skin. Maybe if she’d been able to get pregnant he wouldn’t have…No, that was ridiculous. She had a shelf full of self-help books at home that she’d practically memorized for occasions like this, when melancholy hovered. She sucked in a deep breath and reminded herself of her mantra.

  I will look forward to the future, not back at the past.

  She was taking charge of her own happiness.

  A woman on the brink of freedom and a new life.

  A woman who wanted to throw herself against her former mother-in-law’s wrinkled bosom and sob her heart out.

  JONATHON KUSHNER had a problem. Well, he had several problems, but the most pressing was how to organize an eightieth birthday bash for his mother when she never took a night off from work.

  Caro would know how to do the thing, if she were speaking to him. And that just brought up the most major of his problems.

  Caroline.

  “Morning, Mr. Kushner.” The cheery greeting of one of the summer interns from Pasqualie University’s journalism program interrupted his thoughts. He forced a pleasant smile to his face and answered automatically.

  Caroline, whom he’d loved deeply and faithfully for the five years of their marriage—whom he still loved in spite of everything—thought he was a philanderer. The idea that she could think so little of him, so little of their marriage, made him furious every time he thought of it. Since she’d stormed out on him and refused to listen to reason a month ago, he’d given her time to come to her senses, only to have her tell him she was going to house-sit for a few weeks for a friend while thinking about her “options.”

  Options were for the stock market, not a damned marriage, and if Caro was running away at the first hint on trouble, she wasn’t the woman he’d believed her to be.

  He strode to his office, trying to haul his mind back to business, back to the rising price of news-print, the national advertiser who was thinking of moving from newspaper to TV.

  When he passed her desk, his assistant, Lillian, handed him a bundle of messages. He flipped through them rapidly, automatically sorting them into call-back order and working out which calls could be palmed off onto other members of his staff.

  There was one from his mother, and that, naturally, went to the top of the pile.

  He dialed her home, where he knew she’d be this time of day. When he had her on the phone, he said, “Well? Did you find somebody you trust to tend bar so I can take you out for a quiet birthday dinner?”

  Jon already had the most expensive restaurant in town booked, the champagne ordered and an elegant sit-down menu chosen. Everybody who was anybody in Pasqualie would be there. He longed to get his mother off her feet for one night so she could be waited on instead of her doing the serving.

  “I haven’t had a chance to think about that, yet,” she said airily, and he heard his own teeth grind. Her birthday was a week away. How was it so difficult to get her to take one night off from slinging beer?

  “Mom, I’ll hire another bartender for the night,” he said with the strained patience of a man who’s said the same words a thousand times.

  A most unladylike snort answered him. “One person couldn’t do what I do. Specially not if it’s a man.”

  “Fifty bartenders then. I want to watch you sit down and enjoy yourself for once.”

  There was a pause and he hoped she was figuring out whom he could hire to replace her for one single evening. “You haven’t asked me what I want for a birthday present.”

  That’s because he’d already bought her a cruise. She was in her golden years, she should be relaxing more. But he’d play along. “What do you want for your birthday, Mom?”

  “Why don’t you come down to the Roadhouse this afternoon and we’ll talk about it. Take a late lunch and drop by when I’m not so busy.”

  He checked his calendar. “How’s two-thirty sound.”

  “Make it two.”

  He sighed. He might be a busy executive and she might be a golden-ager, but she still called the shots. And he loved her so much he let her. “All right. See you at two.”

  He checked furtively to make sure no one was approaching the open door of his office and eased open his top drawer. He slid out a file marked Correspondence and stared down at the picture of Caro, the one he used to proudly display on his desk that he now had to sneak glances at, as though she were a banned substance.

  Which she should be given the way his heart rate spiked and memories spun like dreams, simply from staring at a photograph of her cool, beautiful face.

  He narrowed his eyes. If she thought this crazy situation was going to continue very much longer, she was vastly mistaken. She’d found him in a horribly compromising position, he’d give her that. And somebody other than him had blabbed the story all over town, which hadn’t helped. Caro was entitled to her pique. He could have withstood yelling, tears, tantrums, even a whack over the head with a frying pan. But he’d never believed she’d simply walk out on him. He knew the last few months had been the worst of their marriage, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t work through it.

  Almost a month had passed since that fateful day and he’d waited long enough for her to come to her senses. He was going to have to take matters into his own hands. Tonight he’d start plotting a strategy—which was as good a way as any to while away another empty evening in his all too empty home. He’d tried to make Caro stay in the house, but she’d refused it with the same contempt she’d refused to listen to his side of the story.

  Now he hated that house. It had too many empty rooms for the kids he and Caro had hoped to have. The picture of a butternut cradle she’d clipped out of some designer baby magazine was still hanging on the fridge and he hadn’t had the heart to take it down.

  Besides, he wasn’t nearly finished with Caroline.

  Having decided to take a more active role in bringing one stubborn woman to her senses, he was able to turn his thoughts to business.

  He worked straight through to early afternoon and managed to make it to the Roadhouse by ten after two.

  He pushed through the doors, took two strides into the dim bar and stopped, feeling as if somebody had swung a baseball bat into his solar plexus.

  Caro was there, straight and elegant atop a bar stool, with the graceful posture that had once helped sell everything from tanning lotion to designer clothes. Her long legs were crossed, showing a hint of shapely thigh, her blond hair smooth and gleaming, her back a graceful curve. She’d always been model-slender, but the thought flashed through his mind that she’d lost weight in the past few weeks. She seemed a little bony.

  They’d always had a kind of sixth sense around each other, their sex sense they called it back when they were speaking to each other. She hadn’t turned around, but she knew he’d just walked in. He could tell from the way her shoulders tightened imperceptibly and her finger
s clenched the pen she was holding, writing something on a steno pad.

  Her tension told him that bumping into each other was as much of a surprise to Caro as it was to him.

  “Mother, don’t try to play matchmaker.” He couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice as he stalked up to the bar.

  2

  “WELL, WHO STOMPED on your petunias?” asked his mother—at least Jonathon assumed that woman with the scarlet hair was his elderly parent.

  He advanced on her with a glare.

  She glanced from him to Caro and back again. “Gotta get something from the back.” She scuttled behind the swinging door into the kitchen so fast she left a jet stream behind her.

  Caro turned to face him. “Hello, Jonathon,” she said in that cool, sexy voice of hers with just a hint of huskiness that always reminded him of lava flows beneath an ice field.

  He knew her secrets. He knew that beneath her cool, refined exterior she was a woman of passion. She almost got away with appearing unaffected by his presence, except for the slight pinching of her lips.

  He got to her, all right. As much as she might try to pretend otherwise, he got to her.

  He almost asked whether she’d known he’d be here, but only a stupid man would think anything so preposterous given that she’d refused to see him since she’d left home. He was many things, but stupid wasn’t one. He didn’t cheat on his wife, either, but he seemed to be the only person in Pasqualie who believed that, with the possible exception of his mother.

  Caro certainly believed he was an adulterer, in spite of his pleas that she listen to reason. In spite of his love.

  He was awfully tempted to grab her by her slender shoulders and give her a good shake, but his mother would come charging out of the kitchen, five feet two inches of vengeful fury, and hit him over the head with a broom, so he stifled the impulse and pulled up a bar stool beside Caro’s.

  His wife immediately flipped her notebook closed and started to rise. “I think I’ve got everything I need,” she said.

  Without thinking, he placed his right hand atop her left, which felt foreign without his ring on her finger. “Stay,” he said.

  He felt her tremble, and then he watched, fascinated, as her fingers formed a claw. He felt as though he were in one of those science documentaries where the unwary narrator is attacked by the most placid-seeming animal.

  As he’d guessed, she wasn’t nearly as immune to his presence as she pretended. It wasn’t much to build his future hopes on, but, at the moment, it was all he had.

  “I can’t stay,” she said coldly.

  “My mother may be crazy enough to dip her head in fire-engine paint, but she loves you. That’s why she pulled this stunt. Can’t you at least spend five minutes in my company?”

  “For what purpose?”

  Ooh, she could really get to him. “We were married for five years. Maybe she thinks we have things to say to each other.”

  She had a way of staring at a man that made him feel as though his heart had been sliced out with a diamond blade. It was part of the arsenal she’d needed during her modeling days when she got hit on all the time, but she’d never used it on him until recently. If she hadn’t already cut out his heart by leaving him without so much as a good fight, it would really hurt. As it was, he was numb.

  “We have nothing to say to each other.”

  “I have plenty to say, but you’ve refused to listen. Not quite the same thing.”

  She rose with queenly grace and he stopped her once more, not by touching her this time but with a comment that was a stroke of inspiration. “I need help planning Mom’s birthday party. Could you at least spend a few minutes of your precious time on that? Or does the woman who treated you like a daughter mean nothing to you now that you’ve dumped the son?”

  Sitting at the bar with the smell of beer and peanuts in his nostrils, as though he didn’t have a score of urgent tasks back at the office, he watched her struggle with this request. He’d deliberately switched off his cell phone so he could argue with his mother in peace, little realizing it would also leave him free to argue with his wife in peace.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked him at last, resuming her perch on the stool beside him.

  What did he want her to do? He watched her lips move as she said those simple words and he had to bite back the urge to tell her he wanted her to move back in with him and stop being a fool.

  “I want you to convince her to leave the bar for one night on her birthday.” He glanced at the kitchen door, but he figured if his mother were eavesdropping, the neon glow from her hair would give her away.

  “Leave the bar.” Caro’s forehead crinkled. What was wrong with everybody? he wondered.

  “Of course, leave the bar. I’ve booked the whole of Le Beaumari for the evening. We’re having a sit-down dinner with champagne and all of the movers and shakers of Pasqualie will be there. But first I have to convince the woman who is celebrating her eightieth birthday that she can take a single night off work. You’d think I was asking her to do a striptease for a bunch of bikers. No, scratch that. She’d far rather do a striptease for bikers, if I know my mom, than take a night off.”

  It might have been a ridiculous thought. For all his mother’s bluster she was a pretty straight arrow, but it won the first smile he’d coaxed out of Caro since she’d walked out on him. “Why won’t she take the night off?”

  “She says there’s no one she can trust to watch the bar for her.”

  “I could do it. Do you think she’d trust me?”

  He forced himself not to grind his teeth, but it wasn’t easy. “You’re coming to the party.”

  “I really don’t think—”

  “Not for me. For my mother. I notice you haven’t RSVP’d. I’m counting on you to be there.”

  She glared at him. “All right.”

  Caro tapped her pen on the cover of her steno pad. What was she doing with that thing anyway? Taking dictation for his mother? Hardly seemed likely. His mother wasn’t one for letting anyone do a task she could perform herself, and besides, Caro didn’t take dictation.

  Steno pads made great reporter’s notebooks, though.

  He jerked his head up and stared at her. Was she working on something for the paper? He snorted to himself. Oh, yeah. That was going to happen. She’d stopped helping with the fashion section on the Standard the minute she left him.

  Caro turned to him and took a resolute breath as though she’d made up her mind about something.

  “She doesn’t want that kind of party, Jon.”

  He was floored, not only by her statement, but by her use of his nickname. He hadn’t realized, among all the things he missed about her, that that was one of them. But it was the part of her statement that went before “Jon” that he had to deal with now. “What do you mean, she doesn’t want that kind of party?”

  “Fanny loves it here in the bar. This is where she’ll want to spend her birthday.”

  He knew Caro must have lost her mind to throw away their marriage. This just proved it. “You think she’d rather spend her eightieth birthday in a smoky bar slinging draft and dishing up nachos than in an elegant restaurant eating foie gras?” His voice rose and he dropped it before he could bellow his surprise into the kitchen.

  Caro sent him one of those pitying, men-are-sounevolved looks. “Your mother is not the foie gras type. You are.”

  “Are you saying I’m planning this party for myself?” He could barely believe how insulting she was being when he’d knocked himself out trying to give his mother something really special.

  “Yes.” The simple word, delivered with cool amusement made him want to act as childish and unevolved as she could possibly think him.

  “I think most thirty-two-year-old men would be a lot happier hanging out in a dive like this, slinging back longnecks and scarfing cheeseburgers than dressing in a tux snacking on smoked salmon and champagne.” He didn’t even like champagne. Of course, he h
ad made certain his favorite brand of single malt was stocked at Le Beaumari.

  “You’re not like most thirty-two-year-old men,” she said, her brows rising slightly.

  He groaned as the truth slapped him in the face. “I’m not, but my mother is.”

  How could he have failed to see the obvious? No wonder his mom had been so skittish about leaving the bar for a night. He dropped his head into his hands.

  “I blew it, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “You blew it.” It wasn’t fair. It simply wasn’t fair. No sooner did Jonathon act like the arrogant, faithless man she knew him to be, than he switched gears on her and revealed the nice guy she didn’t want to remember.

  It was tough to hold her pride together when he was around, to stop herself from dropping to the floor and hanging on to his ankles so he couldn’t be rid of her.

  Why did he have to keep looking at her with those dark blue eyes? Sending secret messages that were so hard to ignore?

  “I wanted to give her something special.”

  “And you will,” she assured him, determined to help him, not for his sake, but for his mother’s. Amazingly, Fanny had refused to take sides in the breakup. She’d promised Caro in her no-nonsense way, soon after she’d moved out of the home she and Jonathon had shared for half a decade, that she wouldn’t try to interfere. And, bless her, she never had.

  Until today.

  The outside door swung open and in ambled a couple of guys who looked to be finished an early shift on the road crew. They headed straight for a table and one sat. The second, stretching his back as though it ached, approached the bar and his brows rose when he saw there was no one behind it.

  Fanny didn’t reappear, though Caro knew she had a close circuit TV monitor in the kitchen. Presumably she was busy watching her favorite new soap opera—Caro and Jon—and had no intention of coming out front.

  Jonathon must have figured out his mother’s strategy for he glared toward the camera hanging from the ceiling above the bar, waited a minute, and glanced at the customer shifting from work boot to work boot. Jon muttered something under his breath and rose, raising a hinged portion of the bar and slipping behind.