'Tis The Season: Under the Christmas TreeMidnight ConfessionsBackward Glance

by Robyn Carr

  Every time Jess called him out on a chore, he hung on her every word. Leigh never came into the conversation; it wasn’t as though he would have missed it. The few times he had done indoor jobs, he had scanned the place for pictures, and there was only an old one—Leigh in her twenties. The same picture that had been there when he cleaned Jess’s chimney, put up her new chandelier, unplugged the kitchen drain. It seemed to move around a lot, but there was never a new one. “Does she ski?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.

  “Leigh does many remarkable things, although athletically she isn’t accomplished. She’s kind of...uncoordinated. She hasn’t been out here for a long time. Well, two years ago last October, and then only for a couple of days. She prefers that I visit her, since she has so many obligations, and she has plenty of room. Los Angeles is a nice place to get a tan in winter. That’s about all I care to do there, anyway.”

  Los Angeles? It had been Los Altos when she was at Stanford University. But she had said there was a job at UCLA if she wanted it. He shook these thoughts from his mind. God, so long ago. She’d never looked back; what had she decided their relationship was? Dalliance? Panic attack? Mistake? He’d written her at her office, only to have letters returned. He’d called; a secretary took messages. Her home phone number in Los Altos, which had been difficult to find, was changed. Shovel ready, he mentally scanned those events while he dug, and dug hard.

  He plunked the tree into the hole and started pushing dirt in around it. “If she’s coming for a long visit, I’ll probably meet her,” he said. He thought about getting drunk later.

  “I’m practically forcing her to come. I’ve been trying to get her back here for a long, long time. Now the darnedest thing has come up. You just won’t believe it. It seems I’ve developed some kind of heart problem.” His eyes shot to her face; Jess was a breathtakingly robust sixty-year-old woman with the appearance of absolutely rude good health. Her hair had been thick gray for as long as he’d known her; her face was healthily tanned and only slightly wrinkled at the corners of her clear, intelligent blue eyes. Her cheeks were pink, her lips cherry red, and she looked smashing on skis. If it weren’t for her shock of silver hair, she could pass for forty, maybe forty-five. She shrugged off his look of concern. “Not unheard of at my age.”

  “That’s awful. What’s Doc doing about it?”

  “Heavens! Tom Meadows doesn’t even know,” she said, which instantly made John suspicious. Tom Meadows was seen with the widows often...with one or all of them. He must be some kind of late-in-life beau.

  “You’re not seeing Doc about this?” he asked. He had just assumed Doc was everyone’s Doc.

  “Well, now, Tom is a fine doctor, I’m sure, but he isn’t a cardiologist.”

  “I really hate to hear this, Jess. Please, be careful. Do as you’re told.”

  “Well, I’d rather it were something like a testy heart than all the things it could be. I’ve always been just a bit ticked off at Cal for the abrupt way he left us, but all things considered, if I could just nod off in the garden, I would rather do that than be sick. I feel all right, you see. I’ve just been diet-restricted as all hell. Can’t eat anything truly enjoyable. However, besides eliminating strenuous exercise like skiing, my lifestyle is unchanged. I do watch cholesterol much better now. I thought I had watched it before, but now I watch. And I take long walks.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Bad tickers are getting to be a regular thing, John,” she said philosophically. “They can check your cholesterol at the grocery store. Now that they know so much about hearts, seems no one just drops dead anymore—everyone is getting a bypass or something. The fact is, if I’m very conscientious I could live long enough to become a nuisance. On the other hand, I shouldn’t get hooked on any serial novels right now.”

  “Jess!”

  She laughed at him. A resounding, loud, hilarious laugh—typical. It made him flinch; he worried she might keel over. “You know, John, you could drop dead tomorrow, too. The only difference is that if I do, it won’t be completely unexpected. I want to get that girl home and straightened out. She needs a keeper, that one. Lord, raising her was a job for ten mothers. Come in and I’ll write you a check. You can have a glass of wine with the girls and me—it’s my medication.” For a moment he thought she had read his mind. The news that Leigh was coming had caused him to think he could use a glass—or ten. “It’s the only nice thing about a tricky heart—a glass in the afternoon, a glass in the evening.”

  “I have to pass on the wine,” he said. “But I’ll take the check.”

  He followed her up the stairs to the redwood deck surrounding her large home, then in the back door to the kitchen. There, as predicted, were the other women at the kitchen table. What they were doing today was unclear; nothing but writing paper and coffee cups covered the surface between them. They could be planning a cotillion or writing book reviews for the local paper. Once, when he’d seen them around a table with writing tablets and impetuously inquired about their current project, they had said they were writing their wills. He hadn’t asked since. “Hi, John,” he heard three more times.

  “Will you promise to drop by when Leigh and the boys are here?”

  “Boys?” His voice had gone an octave higher. He had to concentrate to keep the shock from showing all over his face. So, Leigh had achieved motherhood. That had been one of her chief desires, children. At the time he had been with her, having children had been low on his list of wants, but hearing she had sons caused a pang of envy. Was Jess going to insist she’d been talking about “the boys” all these years, too?

  “Mitch and Ty, my grandsons,” she replied, digging into her purse for her checkbook. “You’d hit it off, I think. They’re absolute hellions. Unlike their mother, they’re quite athletic.” She wrote his name on the line. “I wouldn’t say Leigh is a bad mother. She adores them. But her mind wanders, and she’s frequently off in la-la land. She’s really no fun for little boys to play with. She’s too prissy. She’s the kind of woman who’s...brilliant, but without a lick of sense, you know?”

  He knew.

  “I think she has burnout,” Jess was saying as she wrote the check. “Pressures, deadlines, complications, work work work. Her housekeeper quit, leaving Leigh in charge, and Leigh’s a slob. My fault. With all she learned, she was too busy to straighten up. Gad. Leigh never takes time off unless she’s completely frazzled.”

  Like last time, he thought. “How old are your grandsons?” he asked.

  “Four,” she supplied, fishing her wallet out of her purse. “Twin boys.” She flipped open the picture section of her wallet. John didn’t audibly gasp, but his heart did flip around in panic. “I can’t believe I haven’t bragged about them, but maybe I just bore other people.”

  “She is an awful show-off about those boys,” Kate said.

  “We don’t exactly get sick of hearing about them,” Peg said, “but a change of subject once in a while wouldn’t hurt.”

  John looked at the pictures. One was blond and blue eyed, one dark. Interesting. Leigh was blond and blue eyed. He himself, it so happened, had very dark brown hair and brown eyes. He gulped. “They look older than four,” he tried a bit breathlessly, baiting her, his heart not only hammering, but racing. He hoped his voice didn’t sound terribly unnatural.

  “Oh, no, they just turned four.” He almost fainted. His eyes did a long blink. “End of January, I think... Yes, the twenty-eighth.”

  His eyes actually closed while he calculated, but he didn’t drum his fingers one at a time; he wasn’t the snap at math that Leigh was. At anything, for that matter. Seven months from the time he met her. An old pain shot through him and hurt slightly more. Oh, no. Oh, no. She had already achieved motherhood. And hadn’t known? She couldn’t have. She wouldn’t have gotten involved with him if she...

  “I wonder if I could im
pose on you to take them fishing or something? We have a fundamental absence of men here.”

  “Yeah. Sure,” he said, suddenly exhausted. His eyes began to blur, and he acknowledged the remarkable presence of threatening tears. God, how he had loved her. “Let me know if there’s anything more you need,” he said, pocketing the check, dying to get back to his truck. He usually loved hanging around with the women, but this time he couldn’t chance it. He could barely breathe. “And for God’s sake, take care of yourself, Jess.”

  “I do need a crew, beginning soon, to spruce up the place. I’m planning to have a very large party here in mid-June, and I want some extensive landscaping and building done. I’m going to wait for Leigh to get here—just a couple of days from now—and get her input before I start, since she’s going to live here for several months...though I do hope she stays on permanently now. You can do it, can’t you? Handle a big job?”

  “Permanently?” He nearly choked. “She’s coming to live here permanently?”

  She laughed, and the women joined her, stifling their chuckles. “Well, I admit I’m only calling it a long visit, but I fully intend to hang on to her this time. She loves Durango. No reason she can’t stay. It’s the perfect place to raise kids, and Leigh knows that.”

  “Sure,” he said weakly. Imagine having her around all the time, running into her at the grocery store, at the Jaycee’s Spring Art Fair...at the Steak House.

  “Will you be able to do the yard this spring, John?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Gotta run. Busy day. Lotta calls. Take it easy, ladies.”

  “Bye, John,” was said, times four.

  He let the back door slam shut, took the steps down from the deck two at a time and loped to his truck. At last he was alone. He waited a minute to start the engine. Leigh was burned-out and frazzled, he thought. That was what had been itching in her before, when he’d hoped it was him. It hadn’t been, obviously.

  * * *

  Jess saw him sitting in his truck in front of the house as she watched from the living-room window. Abby came up behind her and reached over her shoulder to pull back the curtain for a better look.

  “Don’t do that,” Jess whispered. “What if he sees us watching him.”

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Kate said. “He can’t hear us.”

  “So? What do you think?” Jess asked.

  “He just about fainted when you told him she had kids, but that doesn’t mean anything. How did he react when you said she was coming home?”

  “Oh, like he wanted to get in the hole he was digging.”

  “I don’t think you’ll know anything for sure until you see them together. Wouldn’t it be just as easy to come right out and ask her if she just happened to be in love with our favorite handyman about five years ago when she was here for the summer getting pregnant?”

  Jess scowled. “It’s just not that simple. She nearly had a nervous breakdown. I was worried about her survival. Now I’m worried about her future and the future of those little cuties. But don’t you think John would be good for them even if it’s not him?”

  “He’d be good for anyone.” Peg sighed. “Oh, to be forty years younger.”

  “Look at him. He’s just sitting there. He’s in shock. I’d say that’s a good sign,” Kate said. “Doesn’t that seem like a good sign?”

  “He’s in shock? That could be a bad sign,” said Abby.

  “Oh, to put a man in shock.” Peg sighed. “Just once more.”

  “I just don’t know if this is going to work,” Jess mused, watching the truck just sit there.

  “Logically, I don’t think anyone can be tricked into getting married,” Kate said.

  “Of course they can’t,” Jess said. “I wouldn’t even attempt that. I thought I’d just trick them into being together again. If they still care for each other, they’ll do the getting married part themselves.”

  “They didn’t before.”

  “Well...things were different then.”

  “Not as different as things are now,” Kate said.

  Two

  John couldn’t move. He would drive away in a minute, but not until his breathing began to smooth out and his heart quit leaping around.

  Five years ago—just about the first of June, when everything was gloriously green, when Durango, Colorado, was as fresh and alive as a new baby—he had met her. Leigh, twenty-seven, long limbed, intelligent, monied, home to see her mother for a long visit. She had filed for divorce after a year-long separation from her husband. It was uncontested, mutually desired and would be no-muss, no-fuss, simple and quick. A mere formality, said Leigh, since she and her estranged husband had always been more student and teacher than husband and wife.

  John had seen her in the Steak House, sitting alone at the bar, having a glass of white wine. She looked like one of a million long-legged beauties who visited Durango, except it was June. Most of the female visitors possessed of such blatantly powerful and photogenic looks made their appearance during ski season. Durango was a veritable smorgasbord of feminine delight. He introduced himself with nothing in mind but killing time with a knockout woman. That was when he found out she was Jess’s daughter. He had done some repair and landscaping work for Jess Wainscott. So he had a couple of beers while Leigh mostly just twirled the stem of her wineglass in her fingers. They shared chitchat, and John began to tumble into incredible love. Then and there.

  Her soon-to-be-ex-husband was a molecular biologist at Stanford University, a genetic engineer. She had met him when she was very young and doing some research for an advanced degree. She married him and began to work on his research projects with him, for him. John had thought she meant she had been his secretary. Although some members of his family were impressively educated, he didn’t hang out with scientists.

  Every time Max Brackon got a new project and new budget, Leigh explained, he hired his wife. Now she was home for a rest; she intended to change her lifestyle. A great deal was missing from her life.

  So he asked her out.

  “On a date? Should I be dating?” she asked.

  “It’s okay during a legal separation,” he told her, as if he knew. All he really knew was a need to be with her.

  “I need to be socialized,” she said. “With Max, you see, I was isolated and I haven’t—yes,” she finally said. He told her to meet him Friday night for a drink, same time, same place. “Do you think I should tell my mother?” she asked him.

  “Well, sure...I guess. Why not? Or you could always tell her you’ve joined the Sierra Club because you’ve begun to love the environment.” He’d been kidding. Sort of. Even though he didn’t know much about Leigh, he wasn’t sure Jess would approve of her dating the handyman.

  Affairs probably always started that way, he thought now. A little bit by accident. He had expected her to change her mind, but she hadn’t. They started by exchanging details of their failed relationships—John had had a serious relationship when he was twenty-one. He had met a San Francisco girl while he was in the navy and brought her to Durango to live with him. That put a few gray hairs on his mother’s head. But it didn’t last long. She didn’t like small-town life and had really wanted to be a rock star, even though she couldn’t sing or play an instrument. She left him a note; it didn’t take him all that long to get over her. He expected he might catch her on MTV one of these days, wearing underwear for a costume and belting out some deranged sonnet...off tune. Since then, he admitted unself-consciously, he dated women who were just in town on vacation.

  Commitment, said John, was not his bag.

  Leigh had married a very successful, well-known stimulating older man. A scientist. A genius. She had been too young, she knew, and he had been too old. But her circumstances had been somewhat unusual—she didn’t immediately explain how—and she had married her teacher
, a father figure. “Did you know,” she had asked John, “that my father did medical research? Biochemistry. Mom and Dad moved here to attempt retirement, although my dad just couldn’t seem to slow down. My dad was pretty famous.”

  That had no impact on John; he didn’t peruse any scientific journals. He hadn’t attended one day of college and had no desire to get any smarter.

  Now, Leigh had said, she realized her mistake. She wanted children and friends, for example, and her husband didn’t feel so inclined at his age. His work was as demanding as any unruly child, and he really couldn’t keep up a social life. In fact, Leigh’s husband was not terrifically interested in having a wife. Assistant, protégé, student—yes. Wife? The only kind of wife he could conceive of was one with goals like his, schedules like his, and who would not distract him from his research, which was his first wife. He was too busy for marriage, really. He was married to his job.

  Even when they had separated, drifted apart, Max still called her to come to the lab to do this or that for him; he couldn’t count on anyone else the way he could count on her. She had finally filed divorce papers and come to Durango because, “He seems as disinterested in our divorce as he was in our marriage. It’s as if he hasn’t noticed. At least if I’m here with my mother he can’t call me to come in to the lab.”

  How anyone could take Leigh for granted was beyond John. He was already so shaken with adoration by their first date he believed he was in love. Well, maybe not love. But boy, he was in something. He almost had to sit on his hands at the bar to keep from fondling her. He knew he was going to love the way her skin felt, smelled, tasted.