The downward line of the Z left the furriest part. The tape came away easily, though John jerked a few times at the sudden sharp sting of hair being yanked from his flesh. The bottom horizontal bar only crossed a thin line of hair a few inches above his navel.
Liz shook her head as her eyes surveyed the damage.
As much as he’d have liked her to carry on, he put his hand on hers and gently made her stop.
“I think I can handle this last bit myself.” With a swift pull, he tore off the remaining tape. Tears sprang from his eyes and the denuded skin burned red, but the silver tape was gone. Rolling it up into a ball, he threw it into the wastebasket where it hit the morning’s paper and bounced away.
“Aw, hell.” He bent to retrieve it and tossed it directly into the can.
Liz looked ready to bolt. Without giving her any warning, John pulled her into his arms and lowered his lips to place a swift peck on hers. But what started out as a brief thank you turned into something more as he felt the soft contact and tasted the sweetness that was Liz.
So he tried for more. He ran the tip of his tongue against the seam of her mouth. Coaxing. Tempting. But she did not open for him.
She wasn’t ready.
He did feel the tremble run through her body as he pulled her against him, squeezed, then set her away.
“Thanks.”
Liz rocked a little on her heels. Her expression showed just a little shock, maybe, but not anger, which he half expected. More like deer-in-the-headlights.
“Yeah,” she croaked, her voice just a whisper as she turned and left the room. He wondered whether she could possibly walk any faster without setting fire to the wooden floor.
The kid came back upstairs with a bottle of salad oil in her hand.
“Flo said to use this to get the adhesive gunk off.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Flo? She let you call her by her first name?”
Carly stopped in her tracks. “Yeah, I kept calling her Mrs. Zanetti and she said it was all right to call her by her name. I still feel a little funny about it, on account of her being so old and all, but she wants it that way.”
He shrugged. “If she said to call her Flo, call her Flo. What about the ferocious Ms. Atwater. What do you call her?”
“Liz.”
Carly looked at him, her head cocked to one side.
Women. They were meant to mother.
Rushing into her room, Liz shut the door quietly and stood with her back against it, letting the dark wood hold her up against the onslaught of feelings coursing through her body.
That insufferable man!
The nerve of him!
What did he think she was?
Easy?
Anger raged through her, swirling around in her stomach, tingling and taunting her as she pictured him, smug, so sure of himself with his chest sticking out. That hard, flat belly. That intent gaze directly into her eyes. His skin burning under her hand. For one brief moment, she’d actually enjoyed the way it felt against her palm.
Then the jerk had kissed her.
He’d taken what he wanted. No thought about whether she wanted his lips pressed against hers, invading her personal space. Taking. Taking from her.
Keith’s image supplanted John’s. Keith. The one who had taken the most from her. The one who had almost taken every single shred of her and flushed it down the toilet.
Old anger displaced the new as she relived every pain and heartache and humiliation suffered at her ex-husband’s hand. She shook so hard she moved away from the door so her grandmother wouldn’t hear the racket and wonder what was wrong.
Who was she really mad at?
The guy upstairs who didn’t know anything about her at all? Or the man who had ruined everything she’d ever thought she wanted and needed?
This was a new start, in a place she loved and where she was loved back. So, the guy upstairs was a jerk. A good-looking jerk, but a jerk all the same. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t wondered what it would be like to . . . oh, no. Stop it right there. So he’d kissed her. He hadn’t torn out her heart and she knew she’d never let him get close enough to do so.
No one would.
John rubbed at the sticky outline of the tape on his chest, wincing at the hairless parts. He didn’t want to look at the damage. He had work to do. He had to do something for Carly, get her someplace better. School. The kid liked school. How could he manage that? It didn’t take him long to come up with an answer.
Picking up the phone, he punched in numbers he never realized he’d memorized.
Chapter 7
Dank’s Tavern had been named not for its atmosphere, but its former owner twice removed. On a back street in the gray industrial part of Asbury Park, it made money by being open early and closing late, thereby catching shift workers and night owls and every oddball with money for a beer. No frills in this place, just knotty pine paneling on the walls with enough accumulated dust and grease to have aged them into near-respectability as fine antiques. Almost.
But it was seedy and dark and John liked it that way.
Beer signs from the past fifty or so years hung haphazardly from thumb tacks. Assorted Christmas decorations gathered grit in irregular festoons around the beer ads, lending the joint a look of extreme fatigue rather than former gaiety. The only thing that redeemed the place, in John’s estimation, was the shiny brass foot rail that ran the length of the original chestnut-wood bar. That and the fact that no one asked anything about anyone as long as they kept drinking money out in the open.
The yeasty smell of beer permeated the air.
Dim lights cast a crusted amber haze over the bar itself, while the booths lining the opposite wall were dark and obscure. John made his way past the bartender, a former heavyweight boxer who wore his flattened nose and misshapen ear unselfconsciously, and signaled “the usual.”
“Comin’ up,” Jake said. He slapped a clean glass under the club soda spigot, added a twist and pushed the finished soft drink toward John with a look of disdain on his permanently bruised lips.
He wasn’t thirsty, but he knew that if he didn’t order something, someone would be watching to see why. His business did not deserve speculation by the residents.
The back booth, dim in the shadows, swallowed him up while he kept his eyes on the door. He raised the glass to his lips, wet them and slowly savored the detergent taste of the mixer in his mouth. After all these years since he’d given up drinking hard stuff, it still tasted like crap.
But it would serve to keep his throat wet, and with all the talking he had to do, he’d need it before this meeting was over.
The door opened, creating a small vacuum that dragged dead leaves and debris from the sidewalk into the bar room.
From the heavy tread, he knew his guest had arrived.
“Afternoon, Father.”
Mike, dressed in civvies, slid his glass of beer across the table and angled into the booth across from John.
“So what’s so secret you have to meet me here? If there’s something wrong, you could have come to the rectory.” Mike’s eyebrows were raised in that questioningly clueless way he had. John knew the man had a sharp mind but he could give the impression of empty-headedness when he wanted to.
John leaned back and toyed with the citrus peel.
“I don’t think you want to hear this within the confines of the church, Mike.”
All signs of good-natured affability fled from the priest’s face. “What?”
“Take a sip of your beer first.”
Mike raised the glass and took a long pull at it. “You’ve got me worried. Should I be worried?”
John shrugged and reached into his shirt pocket. “Depends.”
Mike took the photograph. His relief told as the deep line between his brows vanished. “Hey, I remember this! Summer of 1986—that house in Belmar. That was one heck of a summer, wasn’t it?”
John measured his words. “Yeah, it was. We had a good time, what I rem
ember of it. I slept through the days and I wasn’t around much at night. You were. You and the others had your nights free.”
Mike reminisced, “We must have been drunk the whole time we weren’t working the waves.”
John nodded. “So I heard. You beach bums used to entertain while I was at work quite a bit, too, didn’t you?”
Mike turned his full attention on John. “Yeah, I guess we did, pretty much. You know we did. You always used to complain about the beer cans.”
Leaning forward, John asked, “Do you remember those two blondes in the picture?”
“Sure. Tammy and Bonnie. No, Bunny. Something like that. Maybe Bambi and Bunny?” Mike’s face showed he had some fond memories of the young ladies, all right, until he slid back into priest mode. “Why . . . what’s going on, Johnny?
He couldn’t hold back the deep sigh; he didn’t even try. “Did you sleep with either of them, Mike?”
Mike jerked away, knocking his head on the back of the booth. “John. . . .” His voice held a mixture of surprise and suspicion. And his face showed a sorrow deeper than hell.
“Just answer me, Mike. Did you?”
His friend wiped his big hand across his face, as if by doing it, he could wipe away regrets.
“Is this why you wanted to meet me here?”
John sipped at his soda. “Would you talk to me about this in the rectory? The church, maybe?” He raked his eyes over his friend, searching for something, anything, that would remove the priest from Carly’s list.
Mike scrubbed the back of his neck, probably feeling the freedom from the collar, or wanting to hide safely behind it. John wouldn’t let go.
Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, Mike answered. “Yes.”
John lowered his voice to a faint murmur. “Which?” When Mike hesitated, he reached across the scarred table and gripped Mike’s wrist. “Dammit, Mike, which one?”
Looking up briefly, the priest then hung his head before answering.
“Both. I slept with both of them.”
He did the best for his client. For the kid, Carly.
After the shock wore off, Mike couldn’t do anything for her other than get her into school again. He had enough clout to go through the cracks and enroll her in Mary Immaculate of the Grotto a few towns inland without tuition, and the two men figured out how to get around all sorts of other roadblocks. For a priest, Mike turned out to have retained a smattering of the cunning he’d displayed in his youth. For a priest, he still knew his way around, but John determined that, for a priest, he’d make Carly a lousy father.
“Look, Mike. I’ve got this list. All the guys who were at the house in Belmar that summer are on it,” he said without raising his voice. “Even me. But I don’t even remember these women, and the kid doesn’t even know I have this photograph. She doesn’t know which woman was her mother. I don’t intend to show this to her until I find her father.”
Mike’s head was bowed. “I can’t be her father.”
John’s anger flared. “Listen here, by your own words, you very well could be. I’m not going to do anything about it until I’ve spoken to all the others.”
“And then what are you going to do?” Mike’s words came out heavy and with a hint of anger.
“The kid needs a father. Hell, she needs some kind of relative. If I can’t find a trace of her mother’s family, if I can’t find out her name for crying out loud, I have to find her old man. It’s one of us. That’s what the note says. Jesus, it’s one of us.”
The priest rubbed at his temples. “There are DNA tests now.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But maybe it won’t come that far. Maybe I can.”
“What, John? Get someone to admit to being her old man? That’s a slim chance. For all I know, we all slept with the kid’s mother. I remember those blondes. They went through the entire house, trading off, sleeping with anyone. Probably all of us.”
He’d said no thanks. It came clearly to him out of nowhere. John Preshin had said “no thanks” to the blonde he found waiting up for him one night after work. He’d watched the goings on and hadn’t liked it, but he’d said nothing. That was the point of being bachelors living down the shore. They’d all been in agreement there. Fresh out of college, they’d all wanted to get money fast and get laid even faster.
But he’d worked nights. By the time he’d gotten to the house, the sleeping arrangements had already been settled most of the time. His room was off limits to the others who all had their own rooms—the beauty of the big old house. And no one used it but him.
Except this one night when he’d come home dead on his feet and this blond babe was waiting for him, curled up on the sofa, wearing bikini underwear and a push-up bra. He’d gone straight to his room and crashed.
That night he remembered. He didn’t remember which one it was, but he knew he’d kept his dick in his pants that night. Were there other nights when he’d accepted her offer?
He couldn’t tell. He just couldn’t remember.
They left the tavern together.
“I want to meet her, John.”
Looking into the priest’s face, John saw nothing of Carly there, not like he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror. But that didn’t mean anything. Nothing at all. Heredity was a big crapshoot. The big Irishman . . . no, he wouldn’t even entertain the thought.
“Okay, tonight. Or we can walk into bingo tomorrow and introduce her to your parishioners.”
Mike’s face flashed the fury for which he had once been famous, then regained control. “That’s not quite what I had in mind. We could meet in my office tomorrow. We can tell her about Mary Immaculate and how great a school it is and how we’ve arranged for her to attend.”
John held in a snort. “Now, there’s a plan.”
Mike shook his head slowly, his fists at his side. “I can’t handle this, John.”
He almost wished he could numb the pain he felt with a couple shots of bourbon, but those days of hiding in a bottle were long gone. Mike was taking this very hard and the two of them went way back. The priesthood really did mean everything to the big guy.
When they separated at the corner, John touched Mike’s shoulder. “Maybe you won’t have to. I’ll see what I can do.”
Good thing he’d walked to Dank’s. The long run home would do him good.
After the luncheonette emptied out, it dawned on her that she’d been home for days and hadn’t seen the ocean.
Liz stretched out the kinks in her back after tossing her soiled apron into the laundry basket. The lure of the water proved too much. It called to her, summoning the very salt water in her own body. If she didn’t get down to the beach immediately, she’d explode. Or at least that’s how it felt to her now.
How could she have stayed away this long?
Though the sun was nearing the horizon, Liz tramped down the deserted street, head bowed against a freezing gust. Over on the right she glimpsed the Art Deco entry towers that may have once been the gateway to the boardwalk. Mere shadows of their former glory, they stood against the wind and sand. If she squinted, they looked pretty good.
Same went for the wrought iron gingerbread of the Victorian-styled carousel building. As long as she squinted, it looked fine. She imagined some pipe organ music tootling across the stretch of ruined beach road that she had yet to cross.
Maybe some day soon, the buildings would be restored. Wouldn’t that be lovely? Her thoughts wandered, passing through days gone by and the present. She had the entire lonely road to herself.
No. Not completely.
Off in the distance, beyond the Stone Pony, coming from the convention center building, some fool was out jogging.
A strong gust of wind buffeted her, making her turn her back to it, hoping her coat was thick enough to ward off the forty degree temperature. When she turned again, she saw that the jogger had made great progress with his long legs.
He approached the squat Stone Pony
building. Liz noted his dark hair, his leather jacket and—oh, good Christ in heaven, it was John Preshin.
Her first thought was to hide. Unfortunately, there weren’t any places nearby to offer more than cursory shelter. Even with her hood pulled up, if she could tell it was him at this range, he most certainly could tell the woman he was gaining on was her.
She hadn’t really spoken to him since the incident of the kiss. Just thinking about it made her lips tingle. Oh, no, she scolded herself. Do not venture there, Liz Atwater. Stay cool. He’s closing in....
He stopped, some fifty feet away from her. Bent over, face red, he fought for breath with his hands on his knees and a hacking cough.
Real panic forced her to run to him.
“Are you all right?” rushed out of her as she put her hand on his shoulder.
John gasped in a long drink of air.
“Yeah.” He panted like an old bulldog. “I’m okay.”
Liz shook her head. “You don’t look okay. You look like you’re ready to pass out.”
With a brave face she knew had to be forced, he straightened up and rocked a few times before standing still. “Been running for a couple miles. Good time for it. Nobody on the road.” He sucked in more air and the ruddiness of his cheeks dissipated.
Liz assessed his general condition with a quick up and down. “There’s never anybody on this road. But maybe you ought to walk around a little, cool down or whatever it is runners call it when they’ve had enough.” For emphasis, she raised her eyes to look directly into his. That little glint of mischief was there again.
“Good idea,” he wheezed, causing Liz to break into a smile.
“Well, I’m on my way home. See ya.” She turned and started back toward the luncheonette.
“Wait! Liz, wait up!” He flexed his legs and dogtrotted up to her. “It’s getting dark. This is no place to walk after the sun goes down.”
“Humph,” she grunted. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”
Glory Days Page 6