Granted: A Family for Baby

by Grace, Carol

  By eleven o’clock the crowd had thinned out. Will said something about the lull before the lunch storm and told her to take a break She knew she should eat something, but her stomach was churning with anxiety. And after looking at all that food, she wasn’t sure any of it appealed to her. When Tally came in with a big, encouraging smile on her face, Suzy poured herself a Coke from the fountain and joined her friend in a booth.

  “Tired?” Tally asked, drawing her eyebrows together in concern and giving her friend a worried look.

  “Tired? I’m so far beyond tired I can’t tell you. And it’s not even lunchtime. What have I done? I don’t know how to be a waitress.”

  “Of course not, it’s your first day. But you’ll learn.”

  “I wonder,” she said despondently, propping her chin in her hand.

  “Anyway, it’s temporary, remember? Just till you find Mr. Right.”

  “Honestly, Tally, if he came in today, I wouldn’t recognize him, and if I did, I wouldn’t have time to talk to him. And I’d probably give him the wrong order. Or spill coffee down his back at the very least.”

  “Suzy, this isn’t like you. Where’s the upbeat, fun-loving, cheerful—”

  “Stop, Tally. You’re making me sound like Pollyanna.” She glanced up. Her heart lurched. “Oh, no, here comes Brady.” She grabbed the menu and held it in front of her face.

  Tally turned her head toward the door. “I think I’d better go.”

  Suzy grabbed Tally’s arm. “No. You can’t. I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “I don’t know how you can avoid it. He’s heading this way.”

  “Don’t leave me alone with him. We had a run-in this morning in his office.”

  “Really, Suzy, I have to leave, Jed’s waiting for me at the feed and fuel. Good luck.” Tally got up and headed for the door while Suzy dropped the menu and pressed her palms against her temples and prayed that Brady wanted to avoid her as much as she wanted to avoid him. But her prayers were not answered. Seconds later he’d taken Tally’s place across the table from her.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, as if he hadn’t accused her of petty thievery only a few hours ago. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

  “I’m on my break and it’s going fine,” she said briskly.

  “I wish I could say the same.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just a fight in the bar.”

  “At ten in the morning?”

  “At 8:30 in the morning. One man’s in the hospital, the other in jail.”

  “Jail? We haven’t had anybody in jail for months.”

  “Damned nuisance. I came over to line up some food for him. Guess I’d better talk to Will about it.”

  “And I’d better get back to work. It was nice seeing you, Brady.”

  “Wait a minute. While I’m here, I’ll have the usual.”

  “I’m still on my break.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “This isn’t my table.”

  “Then I’ll move.”

  “No. I...I’m new and I...I make mistakes. You might not get what you want.”

  “I’m used to that,” he said dryly. “Where are your tables?”

  She sighed and slid out of the booth. Then pointed across the room. “Over there.”

  If she was nervous before he came in, she was completely unstrung trying to remember orders with Brady’s dark gaze fastened on her like epoxy cement. Wherever she went, behind the counter or to the coffee machine, whatever she did, scribbling orders or pouring orange juice, she felt his eyes boring holes in her. Causing her heart rate to accelerate, and her legs to turn to Jell-O.

  Just what a new waitress needed, to have her old boss visit her on her first day. To see her faculties diminished minute by minute. As if she had any to spare. She didn’t understand why no one came in to sit down with him. To distract him with idle chatter. But no one did. After a brief conversation with Will, Brady sat there with his eyes at half-mast, watching her from over his coffee cup.

  After waiting on everyone else in her section, Suzy finally wiped her damp palms on her apron and marched briskly to his table. “What’ll it be, sheriff,” she asked in her best waitress voice. “The usual?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s time for a change. Everyone else around here is making changes in their lives, maybe I should too. So bring me something different.”

  She took her pencil from behind her ear and pulled her order pad from the pocket of her apron. “What?” she asked.

  He leaned back in his chair, his gaze roaming lazily over her uniform and apron down her opaque support hose to her sensible waitress shoes. “I don’t know. Surprise me.”

  She frowned. “We don’t do surprises,” she said, tapping her pencil.

  “Why not?”

  “Look, Brady,” she said with a nervous glance over her shoulder, “I have three other tables to wait on. What if I had to surprise everybody? That’s not my job. My job is to take orders. Now what’s yours?”

  He grabbed her hand. “Come back to work for me.”

  She pulled her hand away. “That’s not what I meant.”

  He scowled. “All right, bring me the usual.”

  Automatically she wrote eggs over easy, hash browns and whole wheat toast. When she went to the kitchen to post the order, Will told her not to spend so much time with one customer.

  She felt the heat rise up her neck and flood her face. As if she wanted to spend time arguing with Brady.

  “I thought the customer was always right,” she said, blowing a wisp of hair off her forehead.

  “They are,” Will said, “but you’ve got fifteen customers. I realize you and the sheriff are old friends, but...”

  “Old friends? Hardly,” she sputtered. “I used to work for him, that’s all.”

  “Well, try to keep your social life separate from your work life.”

  “My social life?” As if she had one.

  “Yes. Confine your conversations to the menu and the weather.”

  “I’d be glad to. Maybe you should put up a sign so the customers know the rules, too.” So they wouldn’t ask the waitress to “surprise them.”

  “You know, Suzy,” Will said with a long-suffering sigh, “I never understood why you’d leave your job to come and work here. If for any reason you think you’re not suited to waitress work...”

  Suzy bit her lip. He wouldn’t fire her, would he? Not before she’d met one single eligible man? “There’s no reason,” she assured him. “No reason at all. But it’s my first day. I’m still learning.” As she spoke, the cook shoved a Western omelet with a side order of pancakes across the warming shelf. With a surge of relief, Suzy grabbed it and hastily headed for the dining room.

  If only she knew who’d ordered it. It took her many embarrassing minutes to find out.

  It was with an overwhelming rush of relief she watched Brady finish his breakfast, pay the cashier and walk out of the diner. The feeling was marred only by the fact that the lunch crowd was streaming in and the discovery that Brady had left her a five-dollar tip. She seethed with anger. If she’d noticed, if she hadn’t been re-adding up a bill she’d miscalculated, she would have thrown it in his face. The nerve of him treating her like a...a...a waitress.

  She’d no more stuffed the money into her pocket when Will asked her if she’d take the prisoner’s lunch to him.

  “But what about my tables?” she protested. As much as she dreaded taking lunch orders, she dreaded seeing Brady even more.

  “I’ve assigned Celia to your tables. Just until you get back. It shouldn’t take you longer than twenty minutes. Just leave the tray with Brady. I don’t want my waitresses serving inmates.” He handed her a tray covered with plastic wrap and held the front door open for her.

  She set the tray on the passenger seat and drove the three blocks to Brady’s office. He met her at the door.

  “I knew you couldn’t stay away,” he said with a gl
eam in his eyes.

  “I’m here because I was sent, and you know it. When I worked here you’d send me over to get the food. I don’t know why you couldn’t...oh, never mind.” She held the tray out, but he kept his arms at his sides.

  “I couldn’t because I’m alone here, and I have no one to send.”

  “That’s your fault. All you have to do is hire someone.”

  “Easy for you to say. I have no time to interview anyone. I spend all my time looking for things only you know where to find. How’s it going to help me to hire someone? That’ll make two of us looking for something we can’t find.”

  She set the tray on his desk. “If you hire somebody I’ll come back and train her. Show her where everything is.”

  “You will? I might just take you up on that.”

  “Yes, now what is it you can’t find?”

  He threw his hands in the air. “Fax paper, the phone number for the DA’s office, the prisoner’s blanket, the—”

  “The fax paper is on the top shelf in the supply cabinet. I don’t have time to look for the phone number now, but maybe later.”

  “Will you be back with the dinner?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I hope not. I’m not working dinner. I’m off at five today. If I have time, I’ll drop by for a minute. Make a list of stuff you can’t find.”

  He nodded. “Thanks, Suzy.” He took her hands in his and gave her a look that melted her heart the way the sun melted the snows of the Sierra Nevada. She felt herself pulled in two directions. She almost told him she’d made a terrible mistake in quitting, but she couldn’t. The worst mistake she could make was to give up her new job before she’d hardly started.

  “I’m sorry if I gave you a bad time in the diner,” he said. “Seeing you there was a shock. I never really believed you’d do it, go to work for somebody else. It hurts.”

  Suzy swallowed hard. Brady must have apologized in the past. She just couldn’t remember when or how or to whom. “It’s okay. Just don’t sit at my tables anymore, because I got into trouble for spending too much time with you.”

  “Too much time? You were taking my order. Of all the nerve. If it wasn’t the only diner in town, I’d—”

  “Yes, well, I’d better get back. It’s lunch time.” She was back in her car before she realized she’d forgotten to fling the five-dollar bill in his face. She’d also forgotten to ask about the missing picture.

  She got through lunch and reset the tables for dinner, then, with a sigh of relief, she left the diner. Despite her well-cushioned shoes with the arch support, her feet hurt and her head throbbed with the effort she’d made to get the orders straight.

  Despite her discomfort and her eagerness to pick up Travis and go home, she went back to Brady’s office to try to find the things he needed. She owed him that much. But there was something else. She was flattered that he missed her. She was almost glad he couldn’t cope on his own. She knew deep down he’d always appreciated her; it wasn’t until she told him she was leaving that he’d told her so. Or almost told her so.

  She walked up the steps to the gray building and glanced in the window next to the door. She expected to see Brady tearing through his drawers, ripping open file folders in frustration. Or at the very least, he’d have his head buried on his desk in despair. But instead he saw Brady leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, interviewing, no ogling the woman sitting in the chair opposite his desk.

  Suzy didn’t think she knew her. All she could see was that she had long blond hair cascading over a dark blue suit jacket. She couldn’t see her face. But by the look on Brady’s face she wasn’t the sixty-five-year-old retired schoolteacher Suzy had envisioned for the job. She was some glamorous young woman who probably couldn’t type twenty words a minute.

  Suzy stood at the window for a long moment, watched the woman lean forward and place a piece of paper on his desk, which had to be her résumé, She saw Brady glance only briefly at the paper, then look up and smile at her as if she’d just offered him the secret to eternal youth. Suzy decided instantly against going in. She had no desire to have her worst fears confirmed. To find she’d been replaced by a gorgeous woman eager to work for the best-looking man in town. To take over her job. Her job? It was not her job anymore.

  She turned on her heel and left the office for the third time that day. The third and last time. Because she wasn’t coming back. Let him muddle through. Let him hire Miss Nevada if he wanted to. She didn’t care. Not much.

  Chapter Eight

  A few days went by, then a week. Every day Will sent somebody different from the diner to bring the prisoner his meals. He never sent Suzy. And Suzy never dropped by the way she’d promised. Brady hired a new assistant, an attractive young woman with long blond hair who was a recent Harmony High graduate. She quit after three days. Before he’d had a chance to take Suzy up on her offer to train her.

  “I thought it would be exciting, working in the sheriffs office,” she said, “solving crimes and all that, but it’s not. It’s all paperwork and filing. I’d rather be a waitress in the diner. At least there you get to see your friends.”

  Brady felt like banging his head against the wall. What was it about the diner? If his last visit there was any indication, a waitress didn’t have time for her friends. At least Suzy had no time for him. But he didn’t tell the woman that. He just let her go.

  He went in to the diner every day, and every day Suzy had no time for him. Even if he happened to sit at one of her tables, she just took his order, brought his food—or someone else’s food—and hustled off to another table. That was it. No small talk. No talk at all. He wanted to ask why she hadn’t come by that day, but he didn’t get a chance.

  He had other things to ask her, too, like had she found Mr. Right yet, but he was waiting for the right moment. When the right moment would come in the ever-crowded diner, he didn’t know. Each day he lingered a little longer over his coffee, striking up a conversation with somebody or other, ordering a second and sometimes a third cup of coffee.

  “Hey, Brady,” Roger Murphy, one of his deputies, said, sliding into the booth next to him one night after dinner. “Isn’t that Suzy waiting on tables over there?”

  “Is it? I didn’t notice.”

  Roger punched Brady in the arm and guffawed loudly. “She quit or what?”

  “She quit,” Brady said.

  “Why?”

  “Guess she was looking for...some excitement.” He’d be damned if he’d spread the word that Suzy was looking for a husband. “Since the election it’s been pretty quiet around the office.”

  “Thought you had a prisoner.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t make much noise.”

  “So, you looking for somebody to take her place?”

  “No.” He wouldn’t admit that he’d interviewed three or four more women after the first one had quit, but that he couldn’t picture any one of them sitting in Suzy’s chair, putting up their own pictures on her wall and bothering him with a lot of questions. He’d found the prisoner blanket, the phone numbers, and now he realized he really didn’t need any old assistant.

  He needed Suzy. He needed her smile in the mornings, the sound of her laughter and the sight of her sexy little body waltzing through his office on her way to the coffee machine. No, if he couldn’t have Suzy, he wouldn’t have anybody.

  That didn’t mean he didn’t watch her every movement as she delivered her dinners in the diner, or study her face as she scribbled the orders. It meant that he had to ball his hands into fists to keep from patting her firm little butt the one time she’d leaned over his table to fill his empty cup. How he’d wanted to untie that apron, sweep her up in his arms and carry her the three blocks back to the office where she belonged. Did she ever regret leaving him? Did she realize what a terrible mistake she’d made?

  The little worry lines between her eyebrows told him she did. But the way she straightened her slender shoulders when she caught
his eye, and the way she tilted her stubborn chin when she caught him looking at her across the crowded tables, told him she’d never admit it. Not to him, anyway.

  By prolonging the conversation with Roger and ordering a piece of pie, Brady was able to hang around the diner until closing time. There was no way Suzy could avoid him now unless she went out the back door. But she didn’t. She’d changed into blue jeans and a black sweater, and she was walking out the front door.

  Brady threw some money on the table, grabbed his hat and caught up with her just outside the door.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” he asked.

  She looked startled to see him, as if she didn’t know he’d been in the diner. While he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, she’d been oblivious to his presence. That’s how much he meant to her.

  She quickly recovered her composure. “No thanks, I have my car,” she said.

  “Then maybe you can give me a ride.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. I want to talk to you.”

  She didn’t say anything, but she gave him a look that said she didn’t want to talk to him. He didn’t know why. He followed her to her car and opened the door for her, then got in on the passenger side before she could leave without him.

  She started the motor. “What about?”

  “About everything. The office, the work, your job, your prospects.”

  “I don’t have any prospects. Not yet. It’s too soon. So don’t say ‘I told you so.’ ”

  “I would never say that,” he said. But he had told her so. He felt a flicker of hope. If she didn’t find anyone, maybe, just maybe, she’d come back.

  “What about you?” she asked with a sideways glance in his direction as she drove down the street. “How are things at the office? Did you find someone to take my place?”

  “No,” he said shortly.

  “Then who...then how...?” She stopped abruptly, not wanting to admit she’d spied on him when he was interviewing the blonde.

  “Who will I hire to take your place? Nobody. How will I get along? I don’t know.”

  “You got along fine before I came, you’ll get along fine now that I’m gone,” she said, pulling up in front of her house. “This is as far as I go.”